perfidy

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water again, it's really not. Katherine Harris:

ORLANDO, Aug. 25 -- Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) said this week that God did not intend for the United States to be a "nation of secular laws" and that the separation of church and state is a "lie we have been told" to keep religious people out of politics.

"If you're not electing Christians, then in essence you are going to legislate sin," Harris told interviewers from the Florida Baptist Witness, the weekly journal of the Florida Baptist State Convention. She cited abortion and same-sex marriage as examples of that sin.

Let's enumerate the cases:

• Harris just recently went bonkers
• Harris went bonkers a few years ago (possibly because of her election to Congress)
• Harris has been bonkers forever

That last one is particularly troubling, seeing as how this is the woman who was in charge of one of the most contested elections in history. Her current belief (and very possibly prior) is that secular laws just don't really apply. Did she believe this when she in charge of the Florida elections? Anyone care to pin the temporal tail of insanity on this particular donkey?

On a vastly more positive note, I've been quite pleased to see an example of rare cooperation that has appeared between Team Red and Team Blue out there in our greater internet. Seems that there's a Senator who's placed a "secret hold" on bipartisan legislation that would open up every federal grant and contract to a google-like search. Clearly nefarious forces wish this dead; and just as clearly it would be an enormously positive thing to have.

Red and Blue are often in violent disagreement about the problems to be solved and how to solve them, but they seem to be in substantial agreement about the need to be able to observe the problem. Talking Points Memo has a running tabulation of Senators that have denied that they're involved in the secret hold. I wonder if the real secret holder will admit it? He/she could be using this bill as a negotiation football, I suppose.

So yesterday I was all furious and angry, but not at her -- just at certain very bad people who shall remain nameless for the time being...but then today was a good day. Today I drove 600 miles, met my Mom to pick up a sparkle that's been in the family 120 years, watched the sun set and the moon rise at the same time, left the sunroof open 'cause Chemical Brothers sounded so cool, got 31.6 mpg driving around traffic at 75, and reflected on the 38 years I've screwed up; felt nothing but hope and good will towards the next 38, god willing.

It was a good day.

JUST. SHUT. UP. You pathetic piece of crap. Hey, aren't those aliens behind you!!! Everybody down!!! GAY ISLAMIC TERRORIST ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE GETTING MARRIED! RIGHT OVER THERE! ANYBODY? Anybody? anybody? any...?

Worst President in history, hands-down. 6 years in office, and not a single policy accomplishment. The President's low-fact diet is finally yielding...zero results. Brain liposuction may help.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/washington/04radio.html

I've been looking for this forever. Finally! Airline seat pitches, around the world. They oughta be showing this when you're buying your ticket on Expedia, or whatever.

We're still a few painful years away from the desperately overdue, gasping death whimpers of what will be considered the worst Presidency of modern history. The sheer breadth and depth of the incompetence just takes your breath away, you know? It's such a sad tale of empty bullshit promises, excuse-making, and desperate reliance on short-term memories.

• The people who created and fucked up the war in Iraq are the same people that created current tax policy
• The Iraq crowd told us energy privatization would result in a healthy market. As a recent WPost article makes clear, they couldn't have been more wrong -- every objective of these efforts has been a colossal failure. Well, except for the real objective -- to make money for their buddies in the Energy industry. A-1 success there!
• The Iraq crowd tells us that deficits don't matter. They tell us that debt doesn't matter. They certainly act like neither of these things exist.
• The Iraq crowd tells us global warming doesn't exist. Now they're telling us it doesn't matter.
• The Iraq crowd rammed the "prescription drug benefit" for seniors through Congress. Who wins? Drug companies, of course! Who loses? Everyone else. The kicker is the GOP-inserted clause preventing negotiation on prices. Exactly how the fuck did that get in there?
• The Iraq crowd "handled" Katrina with the same efficiency, effectiveness, and compassion that they give to other significant issues.
• In six short years, the Iraq crowd has managed to convince the majority of the people on the planet to hate America. Much more worrying is the fact that they've made excellent inroads on their long term project of convincing the rest of the planet to hate Americans. If you're like Bush and never bothered to leave the country prior to becoming its President, that doesn't even register as a problem. Especially when you're armed with "quitters are traitors" bumper stickers.
• They're not against minorities; they're for whites. See the difference?
• They're not against gays; they're for families. See the difference?
• They're not against foreigners; they're for America. See the difference?
• They're not against other religions; they're for Christianity. See the difference?
• But mostly, and above all else, they're for themselves. They're laughing at, and mocking, the rest of America for not doing the same. It's business as usual, baby.

So why Evil Twin Theory? Bush's Chief of Domestic Policy, Claude Allen, was arrested last week for a bizarre scheme involving fraudulent returns of goods to department stores. It turns out that Claude Allen has a twin with a questionable past. Could Allen's twin have been the one doing the crimes? Beats me. But it also turns out that the popular drug Ambien may have certain equally bizarre side effects, including sleepwalking and sleep-shoplifting, or something like that. So maybe all those long, exhausting nights of doing exactly what Rove and Cheney told him drove Allen to take an Ambien now and again, and he went on a sleep-fraud spree. Twenty-five times.

Is Bush on Ambien? Does he have an evil twin? Because I can't for the life of me figure out why, short of sheer stupidity and/or complete lack of interest, an honest reason for the continuous stream of fuckups the most pathetic administration in modern times has generated.

Way back when I asked a simple question: Find one moderately complex policy initiative of the Bush Administration that was proposed (with its predicted effects), that resulted in a success and the achievement of the desired goals. Just one, please.

I'll give you moral relativity: Evil equals the mass of your bullshit times the square of the pain you cause.

I've been mulling over a concept I'm labelling birthright, and I'll have more to say on it over the next week. It's the root of the current political dysfunction.

Remember, kids: Birthright trumps ethics.

[wik]I am feeling harsh today, so let me apologize in advance for feathers ruffled. Please keep in mind that my conservative compadres here have about as much in common with Bush as they do with Castro. Your party has been hijacked by cultural terrorists and vandals.

It's not Dubai, friends...this is one of remarkably rare times I'm with the President. The reason this deal should have gone through smoothly is that pissing off foreign investors is a very stupid thing for America to do, now. Somebody's obviously briefed Bush on this fact, and that somebody failed to find a way to convince Congress of the same thing. This is a political bungling of the highest order; the issue should never have been allowed on the public's radar. The public has responded in a highly predictable manner -- rampant xenophobia and plenty of water-cooler talk about what's "obvious", and that of course American control of things like ports is a good idea.

The problem is that the only reason the US economy and financial system hasn't crashed and burned is that foreigners have put trillions of dollars into buying parts of America. Some of the biggest buyers are the Chinese (circa $300 Billion a year) and Arab nations; we have our biggest trade deficits with nations and regions we consider to be "nasty", and we're dependent on them. The total foreign investment the country needs is on the order of $600 Billion a year, thanks to crackwhore-like management of the country's finances by the fundamentalists-in-charge. If that $600 Billion should start to dry up, you can expect a huge increase in interest rates, shortly followed by the financial meltdown of the US government, which is on an utterly unsustainable course. Ripping away significant foreign investment will cause a decline in the overall value of assets within the country, and generally retard growth heavily. Since crazy growth rates are the only mathematical means left of avoiding inbound financial catastrophe, it doesn't seem like good policy to me.

Congress just sent a message to foreign investors everywhere -- that they're not welcome, and that they can't own "key" infrastructure assets. The subtext is that anything they do can and is subject to forfeiture or control. Bills floating around congress defined "key assets" as anything from farms to ports to chemical companies. In short, much of America's manufacturing base can be classified as key, and a security asset.

Of course, America wouldn't be so vulnerable to this if (to repeat myself) the crackwhores weren't in charge of the roll of cash. And the people who put them there will never believe that there are any consequences to their actions until the hammer drops on them personally.

Three days afternoon being completely, utterly, totally accidentally shot by the Vice President after an innocent disagreement, Whittington dies from unrelated symptoms. White House doctors describe an untreatable case of "nervous stomach" as the primary cause of death. "That stomach just reached right up there into his throat, pulled his tongue down and choked him out", said White House Physician Ken Mehlman. "We don't know what Whit was thinking about, but something made that stomach nervous, and that's that."

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/007666.php

I couldn't help but notice that the EPA's pages on Global Warming haven't been updated since 2000. In fact, it's downright difficult to find a policy page or information page anywhere that gives the Bush adminstration's position on these issues. If you read the US government's pages, you'd come to the conclusion that little has changed in the last five years or so.

This is more "we just don't know" bullshit. I am struck by how similar this all is to debates over smoking. For today's youth it's hard to believe (and even silly) that twenty years ago the health effects of smoking were very much a matter of debate. Back then it didn't seem like smoking was good for you, but the hard-and-fast science on just how and why just never really seemed to emerge. We know now that a highly successful campaign by tobacco companies to distort the science coupled with tobacco-driven politics conspired to deprive the public of key information they should have been told, giving the industry a few more years of profitability at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.

That's just par-for-the-course for corporations in general. A vanishingly small number of companies will try to do the right thing, when the profitable thing is so appealing. We need regulation to protect ourselves against harmful actions conducted in self-interest by private and corporate entities; their cost and decision equations simply do not take into account the greater good. Unless forced to, they never will.

Six years have gone by and the EPA's position on climate change is identical -- we just don't know. What's written on those pages is very much the state of the art in GOP positioning on this issue. Proclaim as loudly as possible that there are too many unknowns to make a decision, and further study is necessary.

The climate science community has shifted from arguments about whether global warming is taking place to the clear and present danger of the tipping point, something long postulated in the literature. What they're trying to figure out is, is warming occurring so rapidly that we are approaching a point beyond which we will be unable to repair the damage, should we decide to do so?

This Administration's position on climate change is to do nothing and say nothing. Based on recent news reports it appears that the administration has engaged in an active policy of suppression to inhibit the release of any scientific data or conclusions that might support serious action vis-a-vis global warming. Only by suppressing official domestic science has this administration been able to delay the engagement of the public on this issue.

Ask yourself -- are you comfortable with the idea of Tom Delay, Bob Ney, Jack Abramoff, Randy Cunningham, Ralph Reed (and their pay-to-play, bought and pair for ilk) setting US policy on the environment? Because they already have. Responsible, honest leadership is needed -- leadership that doesn't simply "stay the course" no matter what inconvenient facts present themselves.

I've described the election of Bush in 2004 as a disaster -- a turning point from which devastating consequences in the future will result. In five short years he has created a financial disaster in the federal government it seems almost impossible to repair. Taxation policies have inarguably yielded great benefit for the wealthiest, but none of the promised effects have materialized -- indeed, average wages are down relative to inflation. Bush has destroyed the credibility of the US in the international community with his "tough guy" policies and utter lack of candor. You can argue that you believe he's done what needed to be done, but the rest of the world doesn't see it that way. He has squandered the reputation of the US military, pointlessly exposing to the rest of the world precisely what the US military can and cannot do, and how long it can sustain itself. He has engendered a culture of corruption in Washington that sets new records for dysfunction.

I can't help but think that the center and left in this country are fighting so many low-level battles that we're simply losing sight of what's really important. Global warming and climate change is important. We need to study the hell out of it and figure out the best path forward. Separation of powers is important. "It's not constitutional" is the only thing standing between freedom this country's citizens enjoy and a history replete with examples of dictatorial and executive control.

The task at hand: Discover some absolutes. Find a list of ten issues and develop simple decision points for them. Hell, find three issues just to get started.

It's not every day you read about a significant breakthrough in rocket propulsion -- in this case a fourfold improvement in the exit velocity of ions for an ion (electric) space drive. That's cool 'cause it's directly proportional -- a 4x increase in overall efficiency. This one's called the DS4G -- they have four "grids" that are used to accelerate the ions. I hereby patent the DS8G and the DS16G. You losers can have the other ones -- they're impossible (like 5 minute abs).

Check out the Aero-News Net story that I found on it; I suppose it'll show up elsewhere soon. But the fun doesn't end there!

Sometimes scientists take embarrassing pictures of themselves and put them on the web, and sometimes the universities pull those pages down before the public can see them. And then sometimes google caches them for us, and sometimes smirky tech dudes grab the page and save them to preserve the moments. Read the last week's test report from the DS4G team, and amuse yourself with images of science victories!

And seriously...congratulations to the technical team and the theory guys who make it all possible. Space is cool.

Christian Fundies remain entirely confident in their assertions that the world has only been around a few thousand years, that it was "intelligently designed" recently, and that the end of the whole darn thing is just around the next corner anyway. One of the unemployed corners of my mind started looking for an explanation that could just bring us all together, let us all get along.

God seems to have gone to an awful lot of trouble to convince us that the world is billions of years old. There's all that "evidence" around, like rocks that are zillions of years old, sharks, monkeys that play checkers (but can't read bibles), and space junk like stars and whatever. But what if there are two universes? The first one has been around forever, like science and mathematics and logic tell us. The second one, this one, is a photocopy Of the first one, made just a couple of thousand years ago. Presto! No confusing lack of unity. It's not intelligent design. It's intelligent photocopying.

Just praise God that He wasn't a little drunk on that day, wearing stretchy pants, and in the mood for a little juvenile hijinks. Oh wait. Maybe that does explain the moon. Huh.

I refuse to believe that I get $75 worth of "programming" on DirecTV each month. It's crap, I tell ya. Crap! So I get it into my head the past few days that I'm going to see what my alternatives are. I've noticed that the quality of shows on the "cable channels" has dropped, on a scale of 1 to 10 to around 1.5 or so. Getcher double-indian head collector's coin pressing here! I've also noticed that the only shows I enjoy watching are on the networks (stoopid shows like Surface and Invasion, which I like -- screw you).

It turns out that in the Washington DC area we're quite fortunate to be living in one of the best Newfangled Digital TV centers around. We get quite a long list of channels (and sub-channels) -- 2,4,5,7,9,11,13,20,43,45,50. Some of the channels are from Baltimore, but come in just fine. But how to get all this free digital goodness, given the need for the contained black magic of an ATSC tuner, which is not the same as your father's NTSC tuner?

You've got a couple of options for high def TV. You can go with cable and get four or five locals in HD, paying about $80 a month, if you're lucky. You can go with DirecTV, pay $200 for your equipment and installation, then discover that what you're actually doing is getting the HD channels over the air. You can go with Dish and be in the same situation as DirecTV, although it's a bit cheaper overall. I'll also say that DirecTV really pissed me off two weeks ago. The new mpeg-4 compatible HD receivers arrived at Best Buy. These new receivers can use a 5-LNB dish to receive current and some future programming from DirecTV, which will include very shortly the local channels from this area in high def; they also have an ATSC OTA (digital over-the-air) tuner built-in. I picked one up for $200 and brought it home, then called DirecTV to inform them of the equipment change. The customer support person informed me that they couldn't activate the receiver unless I agreed to a 2-year commitment. Since I had just gone out and bought the receiver myself, I asked exactly what I was getting in return for the two year commitment. Dedicated phone person told me "Nothing!". That just didn't seem fair to me. I told her I was going to return the equipment and possibly cancel my service. "I'm sorry about that!" was her chirpy response. Ridiculous -- I've changed equipment before and not had a problem.

I guess I could have accepted the commitment. But you can also say "Screw the Man" to yourself, and see if there's a way to cut them out entirely. The catch, as always, is that your significant other really likes Tivo, and you'll die a terrible death if said "Now Playing" list goes missing.
Because of the waffling at the federal government level over the "broadcast flag" (which would make it illegal for an electronic device to make a copy of information that was so-flagged) there's been almost a complete lack of investment by companies in developing convergence hardware. Convergence in the media equipment realm is the notion that a single, fast general purpose computer can do it all -- it can play music, record television, show DVDs, interact with the internet...you name it. With the federal government repeatedly on the verge of declaring general computing to be illegal, companies don't spend money developing products that might be legislated out of existence.

Tivo is a kind of convergence box (lightweight), and there are others on the horizon. But your garden-variety (or slightly above garden-variety) PC has far more horsepower and far more capability than those consumer boxes do. Shouldn't it be able to do the job?

If you want Tivo-like capability for over-the-air without cable or satellite, your choices are minimal. Sony has an OTA tuner/hard drive recorder combination that sells for $500 for the base model. It can do the job. If you go the PC route, you can use a couple of different packages. The free Linux alternative is MythTV. I haven't set one up yet but I am going to give it a try. The limiter here is that very few TV tuner cards have Linux drivers. Apple has their new G5 system, where a media center TV function is built in. As far as I know it does not yet support HDTV. Microsoft has the Windows Media Center Edition, which as of the latest service packs supports HDTV. It's a somewhat expensive proposition to buy a media center PC at this time -- the cheapest you can get one is around $750. You'd need to add your own tuner card to that as well.

I ended up buying an ADS Technologies Instant HDTV PCI card and a Terk outdoor antenna. I had an older PC setup (AMD64, 200GB HD) that I wanted to start with. I could have gone the Linux route, but the capture card situation just didn't seem to be all that great. There are some significant financial advantages, though --

Linux -- free O/S, free TV software (MythTV), but you need to find the right capture card with Linux drivers, which is tough.

Windows -- XP Home ($90), decent software costs ($50 or so), good card and driver support. Total cost is about $300, assuming you already have decent hardware to run on. If you have hardware that has XP already, deduct that. I moved my XP installation to my new computer, so it was not available for the old one. You can run XP in trial mode for 30 days, though, which allows you to evaluate the quality of your eventual solution. If you like it, then buy the OS and you're good (one quick note -- an unauthenticated XP will not download certain patches. Use your activated XP machine to retrieve them, then copy them over to the test machine).

For Windows, the Instant HDTV comes with BeyondTV Express, a somewhat limited TV-watching program. BeyondTV offers an upgrade to their latest full version for $50. Alternatives include SageTV, which seemed to be a bit cruder and not speak HDTV quite as well. What I was surprised by was my discovery of Meedio -- a visual stunner that aims to be the true convergence app for PC hardware. Sadly, Meedio does not yet support the Instant HDTV card so I could not test its TV functionality. What I was amazed by was the clean UI, extensibility, and general polish of Meedio -- the way that Meedio looks, the way that you use it...it is very much what I thought a good convergence app ought to be like.

There are some instructions on the Meedio web site indicating how to configure an unsupported capture card, so I guess I'll try that next and see if Meedio does a good job with high def. If so, it'll probably be the best choice. I can't really say that I was looking forward to messing around with MythTV all that much. I can get an OEM Windows XP 2005 Media Center Edition for about $120 at a DIY shop around here, and I think it would be a good thing to have regardless.

There have been a few "weird" bits -- I had the system record "Surface" last night, and the encoding seemed to be messed up. I got an SD picture instead of SD -- considerably better than DirecTV's garbage, but far from HDTV. Each station's transmission is delivered in the MPEG-2 Transport Stream form, which can encode multiple channels of information. It can contain an SD program, an HD program, and additional channels (like weather). Part of what a TV app needs to do is select out the right subchannel and display that. The good news is that the raw data is still captured on my system, so I'll be able to experiment with it and find out if the HD content is really there, or if it's just plain missing!

I can't say that I'm ready to say "screw you" to the cable man just yet, but I'm getting close. I am hard pressed to name a channel other than SciFi that has any programming I am interested in -- and even there there's just one show (Battlestar Galactica, you nerd) that I actually want to watch.

Been listening to music, lately...and thought I'd share the list, because of the deep window this provides into my life.

• Feeder: Pushing the Senses -- What can I say? Yet another masterpiece from the best rock band hardly anybody in the US has heard of. You must go straight to Amazon and spend crazy money on finding their CDs.
• Let's Go: Let's Go -- Great straight-up melodic pop-rock. Handsome without the bitter metal.
• Fluke: Puppy -- You might know track 3 from the last Matrix movie (remember the big dance/orgy scene prior to the big battle?). The rest of the CD is great, pounding rhythms and melodies, and some of the best arpeggiated electronics I've heard in a while. Closes with the unexpectedly beautiful Blue Sky -- a kind of electronic/gospel hybrid.
• Coldplay: X&Y -- Yeah, me and everybody else. It's good enough to deserve it.
• Mercuy Rev: The Secret Migration -- I've known this band to be a critic's favorite for a while but never picked anything up. Good, melodic progressive, with Zero 7 overtones in places.
• Morel: Lucky Strike -- DC native (I think ;) Richard Morel creates another dark dance/pop thinker. Driving dance beats, brutal lyrics, Pink Noise (Deep Dish) production...there's much to like here. First listen makes you think it's just another dance record, but the unusually beautiful melodies hit you, and then the words hit you like a sledgehammer. Not for everyone, but it should be.
• Royksopp: The Undertanding -- Simply brilliant electronica from these Scandinavian geniuses. They forge through new territory with this release (as with their last), but the results never stop being musical and never stop being accessible.
• Orbital: Blue Album -- Orbital's last, so they say, and relatively satisfying. Can't say I'd give it top marks, but there are a couple of standouts that make the CD worth buying. In particular I love You Lot's sampled speech:

You, are becoming Gods. There's a new master of creation, and it's you! Unraveled DNA and at the same time youre cultivating bacteria strong enough to kill every living thing. Do you think you are ready for that much power. You lot ? You lot?! Cheeky b**tards. You're running around science like kids with guns, creating a new world, while you've got is stinking, but, hands up, hands up anyone who thinks you've got it right. Yea there's always one. I can see you. If you want the position of God then take the responsibility

Ms. Miers nomination has certainly stirred up the hornet's nest amongst the "conservative" rank and file. What we can glean from scant information about her centrist notions on affirmative action, RvW, and other "conservative" causes cause consternation or optimism, in accordance with the beholder's eye. Of course, there's that complete lack of any public record that really leaves us all pretty much scratching our heads.

The religious right just can't understand why their payoff isn't the nomination of a prominent judge who loudly agrees with (and even repeats!) their slogans. Someone who doesn't "legislate from the bench", whatever the hell that means -- I have yet to meet a GOP voter who can successfully articulate an instance of this with any level of specificity. What I mostly get is, "you know -- when they write laws and stuff". Yeah, like when? Where?

Most people just don't get what the Supreme Court does, most of the time. The Supreme Court serves as a check on the power of government. The constitution is the only law of this land that tells the government what it may and may not do. When the Supreme Court (or any other court) is interpreting the constitution, the primary reason it is done is to ensure that your freedoms remain intact, despite the "best intentions" of those in power.

Do you seriously want to dissolve the ability of the Supreme Court to enforce constitutional limits on government? That is a notion of stunning foolishness. Should we wait for a four-year election cycle and use our votes as the sole means of checking government power? One look at the democracy-destroying nature of gerrymandering should convince us all of the inefficacy of that.

What good is a constitution if there is no-one to enforce it? What good is a right to vote if the rules of the game are manipulated by a party immune to constitutional review? The only right to a vote you have is that guaranteed to you by the constitution. Enforcement of the constitution is the cornerstone of democracy.

But back to our Ms. Miers. Why Miers? Does Bush just, uh, like her or something? Does he like her more than Laura? Maybe so. Maybe he really was the "best governor ever!". We should see if she ever lived in Arkansas.

But maybe there's something more to this. The crowd currently in control of the White House (I hold out the possibility that Bush is a member) knows that the GOP is based on an unstable amalgam of a number of groups: The Religious Right, the Anti-Democrats, the Business-Firsters, the Establishment Preservationists, the Fuck-You-I'm-A-Winners, and the Xenophobes. What do they all have in common? Each of these has a single issue that overwhelms all other concerns for them. They are all single-issue voters, so if you tell them what they want to hear on their single issue, they'll vote for you even if you're completely screwing them over in every other way.

I’m using common terminology for the Religious Right, but perhaps you are somewhat mystified by my other GOP-voting categories.

I’ll cheerfully and hopefully place my GOP-voting Perfidy colleagues in the “Anti-Democrat” category. Anti-Democrats vote for the GOP because there’s only one thing they know for sure – as bad as the GOP and all that crooked crowd are, the Democrats are worse. Can’t argue with that – it’s a purely subjective take on the political situation, and they’ve got a right to it.

Business-Firsters want deregulation and low business taxes. They’re a very small group, but they have the money and use it to influence the political process. They want deregulation so they can screw over the public at large while avoiding any responsibility for doing so. They want low business taxes so they can make as much money as possible doing it. Long term, they want something even better than deregulation. They want de-de-regulation. That’s when the government says it’s completely legal for them to do what they want, and it’s illegal for their competitors to do the same thing.

Establishment Preservationists, besides being an ass-kicking name for a band, refers to those wealthy families and groups who believe that change is all fine and good right up until it place them or any of their possessions into any form of risk, or opens them up to any kind of competition. For example, civil rights are fine unless there’s too many brown people showing up in the neighborhood. That “changes” the nature of the establishment, and is thus UnAmerican. The most important example is that of preservation of social class – any changes that would jeopardize the social class (derived from economic status) of those currently at the top is an egregious, UnAmerican change. Can’t have those.

Ah, Fuck-You-I’m-A-Winners: Just like kids playing basketball on the playground, they are all utterly convinced that someday they’re going to be playing in the NBA, or on top of the world. And they’re going to do it by following a system: If they have the right attitude, and connect with the right people, they’ll get what they deserve! Of course, when their spiraling credit card debt hits them between the eyes, they whine about their taxes being too high. When they don’t find themselves “on top”, it’s someone else’s fault. They’re dreamers, and schemers, and playing fair isn’t even slightly on their minds. It’s about getting ahead, and about the competition. The GOP has a special pitch for these folks: They tell them they’re the smart guys, that they get it, and that those stupid liberals just don’t understand the fundamental natural laws, the kill-or-be-killed of it all. They tell them they’re on the team, and that’s all the Fuck-Yous need to hear. They’re a part of the winning team. Virtually all Fuck-Yous circle the drain for a while then end up down, out, and confused, but by that time they’ve voted for the GOP often enough that they become automatic Anti-Democrats.

Xenophobes are the special sub-breed that can’t stand the damn foreigners – they’re like Establishment Preservationists who don’t have money as an excuse. In spite of the fact that declining birthrates mean that structures like Social Security are going to be in trouble they figure that permanently shutting the doors to immigration is the solution to their problems. And screw tourism – we don’t need’em. When pressed they are unable to connect immigration to whatever is troubling them in their personal lives, but dammit, you have to hate somebody, and immigrants are the easiest of all targets.

And the Religious Right? They’re single issue people – abortion. They know that doesn’t play all that well so they’ve jumped on the “legislating from the bench” bullshit so they have at least one secular issue they can talk about. But since they don’t know what it means and can’t cite any examples of it, they’re back to what they really care about, which is abortion.

You may notice the unsurprising lack of the “fiscal conservative”. Fiscal conservatives are currently in hibernation. They find themselves largely in the Anti-Democrat category. If in the future the GOP once again establishes any minute form of credibility when it comes to financial issues, they will re-emerge. In the mean time, they are sliding further and further towards the Democrats. They might even vote for one, someday, or even in the next election. Damn, never thought that would happen.

No, really, I’m getting back to Miers this time – I swear. If you’re the political genius in charge of the GOP, you know that you need to find a way to keep this whole darn crazy thing together. If you gave the religious conservatives what they wanted (abortion), you run the risk of having them look at any other issue. And then you’re dealing with the population at large – a significant portion aren’t going to like what they see in the GOP.

So the very best chance the GOP crowd has to stay in power is to do precisely what George Bush always advocates – Stay The Course. Don’t solve the problems, or give anything to any part of the base that will truly satisfy that base. The cultural war must be continued, for that distraction provides the leverage necessary to win elections, while engaging in policies that harm those who vote for you. If you can’t prove you’re right, then for God’s sake, obscure the fact that you’re wrong.

Harriet Miers keeps the cultural war alive. She’s one skirmish in a larger war.

(I'm reposting this from a comment on Patton's post)

Please.

oil : 70 / 60 = 1.16
local gas price: $3.75 / $2.19 = 1.7

Did the wholesale price of gasoline just rise? We don’t have figures there. If the wholesale price rose by 70%, then the oil companies ARE gouging, because their piplines are full of $60 oil. If the wholesale price has stayed the same, then the stations are gouging the public, by 50% or more. Oh wait—almost all stations are owned by the oil companies. So that’s them again.

Don’t pull out your “short bus” metaphor unless you pull out a calculator at the same time.

Yes, big oil is looting the nation. Per barrel shifts in oil prices have lengthy, delayed effects, not instantaneous market reactions down to the _pump_ level. Psychologically, the oil companies saw the opportunity and took it. They know they’ll have no reaction from this administration, and an innumerate citizenry will...do nothing.

I’ll agree with you on one point—price controls are not the answer here. Nationalizing some of this certainly is. I don’t have a problem with states (or the federal governmen) owning refining capacity and stations. Leave the private sector pirates in place; if they’re truly as “efficient” as claimed, then they’ll be just fine, and no government-run entity could possibly compete with them. They’ll earn their business the old-fashioned way, with lower prices and better service.

Yeah, right.

Hey, fuck it. Doesn’t affect me—it’s just those poor people who are going to have trouble paying the gas bills, getting to their increasingly shitty jobs, as the GOP chops the budget for public transportation into non-existence. 50% of the national guard’s equipment is over in Iraq, and unavailable for disaster relief.

Think about this: This is a much bigger disaster than 9/11. We have potentially (and quite probably at this point) thousands of people dead. We have a major city _destroyed_, mostly by inaction and incompetence at every level. The hurricane left the city generally intact!

And if you think this country has done a great job preparing for “terrorist attack”, exactly what would have happened differently if Al Qaeda had detonated explosives at the levees, instead of the hurricane?

Michael Brown, “director” of FEMA, said two days ago (on Thursday) that he was “unaware” that there were people in the Superdome. The fucking director of FEMA didn’t know that there were thousands of people there.

Michael Brown was Joe Allbaugh’s college roommate. GOP-activist Michael Brown’s prior experience was running the “Arabian Horse Alliance” or some silly bullshit like that. Some reports indicate Brown was “invited to resign” from that job amidst accusations of incompetence.

Brown’s FEMA placed Pat Robertson’s (yes, the same crazy-ass Robertson we know and love) “Operation Blessing” at the number two position on the cash giving list, before the Salvation Army, before just about everything else you’d recognize. Brown’s speeches have him complaining about the fact that he can’t be “spiritual” in public.

I know exactly what kind of “Republican” Michael Brown is, and there’s exactly _nothing_ conservative about this man. He is either a smart man who is a nasty fucker, or he is sufficiently stupid and egocentric so as not to have an understanding of his own deeply _lethal_ incompetence.

Patton, he is not like you. At the heart of it, I _respect_ the conservatism you represent. It’s a conservatism derived from realism, that wants restraint, that wants a government to do less, and give its citizens more freedom. That is a genuine and respectable goal, and when the country votes for it that’s fine with me.

This cabal of entitlement frat-buddies has hijacked the GOP, and this country desperately needs its real conservatives back. Please, please, find some...beg them to come back. There’s little elsewhere to turn.

Commenter Bram offered Roe v Wade as an example of judicial activism. Is it? I think it is not, and here's my reasoning.

Roe v Wade is a decision that is often discussed, but rarely read. I just went and read it, and I think you should too. There's a lot of historical ground that the decision covers. This is not a matter of "inventing" a right to abortion; nothing of the sort took place.

Very specific constitutional grounds were specified in Roe's appeal -- privacy and liberty. Roe did not argue she had a "right" to an abortion; she argued that she had the liberty to do as she pleased. Your liberty and privacy are guaranteed by the constitution, and as such preempt state law. So the question before the court was, can a state impose in liberty and privacy in this manner?

You gotta read the whole thing, but the thinking is something like this:

By no means did the court confer an arbitrary right to an abortion. Rather, the court struck a careful balance between personal liberty/privacy, guaranteed by the constitution, and states' interests. It drew the line at the boundary between religion and science.

I really don't want to provoke an abortion war, but I think it's worthwhile to note that the tenor of this decision follows the pattern I've noted: A difficult issue, subject to considerable subjective analysis, but still requiring a decision to be made. This is not a simple issue of states' rights. States may not make laws that violate the constitution, and Roe raised a serious and substantive constitutional challenge.

Maybe Buckethead doesn't like it when uncomfortable comparisons emerge.

Rather than pluck words, let's look at it.

The apology came a week after Durbin, the Senate minority whip, quoted from an FBI agent's report describing detainees at the Naval base in a U.S.-controlled portion of Cuba as being chained to the floor without food or water in extreme temperatures.

"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings," the senator said June 14.

If I read or heard about prisoners "chained to the floor without food or water in extreme temperatures" I too would assume that it referred to prisoners of some repressive regime.

If I read your comments correctly, you all are telling me that you would not make this assumption, and that you acknowledge such activities occurring in US prisons. You then neatly "cover your asses" with finger-wagging about how you don't approve of such measures, but comparing us to really bad guys just isn't fair.

All the guy said is that these are practices that Joe Average, who believes that we're the good guys, would attribute to some of the repressive regimes that are commonly known. That sounds pretty damn fair to me.

But you want to generalize the statement, and to achieve that generalization you invoke logic that can be used to stifle, eliminate, and declare treasonous any criticism. This has distressing parallels to the politics of the moment.

We have some very solid knowledge in history present on this blog.

If those regimes were the wrong ones to compare these particular actions to, please tell us the right ones. Which governments or regimes chained up prisoners, denied them food or water, and subjected them to extreme temperatures?

Or would you prefer that we simply engaged in comparison-free dialog, arguing all of this from relativist positions, without reference points?

This court decision is a major blow to the citizens of this country. I am compelled to point out that in the last six years American citizens have had the character of their relationship with the government changed radically:

1. Takings: Any local government can now hand your private property to another private owner if any excuse for redevelopment is avialable. This is a clear invitation for corruption, and will inevitably result in a major upswing of same.

2. Trial by Jury: The current administration has reserved for itself the right to detain and permanently imprison any citizen, without trial or justification, under the guise of "fighting terror".

Let's recap. Any property you own is yours strictly subject to the whims of the government. Your freedom itself is also an illusion in the "conservative" world of George W Bush; it currently has no force under the law if some arbitrary member of the administration decides otherwise.

So what private right is Bush for, exactly? Well, he's strongly in favor of allowing property owners to pollute the hell out of that property, regardless of the effect on others. Apparently there's some sort of principal at work in that case. I struggle to understand how environmental concerns are less of a "public use" than protecting the profits of developers, but there it is.

These two things are pretty damn fundamental, and I'd say the average citizen of this country figures they're his birthright. They are, of course. But we are in exceptional times, times in which corruption and greed flow like electricity through the body politic, taking the path of least resistance. This administration is indistinguishable from its insider supporters, and its policies, while lacking any verifiable correlation between promised and actual effect, have inevitably benefited those same insiders.

‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing'

I was distressed to read that Phillip Carter, author of the Intel Dump blog, received reactivation orders last Thursday. Phil's taken the news with characteristic class; well-wishers abound in the comments, hoping for the best for Phil.

What no-one seems to be saying, and Phil is obviously unable to say himself, is this: Is this payback? I don't know, but I'll say it, and I'll say that this administration and this military leadership will breath easier in the information vacuum his forced activation creates.

Phillip Carter has been one of the more outspoken critics of the military and of the government since leaving the active service. He's written clear and precise articles as an intelligent man who's been there and done it. He advocates the draft, and calls'em like he sees'em.

He advocates very effectively for positions that are highly inconvenient to the administration and to the military.

We all know that very large numbers of recently departed active service members are being reactivated as the military struggles to keep the necessary forces in place. Recruitment has suffered hugely; forcing the recently active to serve additional tours is very much the only option at this point.

The Washington Monthly has a running discussion on health care vouchers.

The real question here is, why are the insurance companies so terrified of competing with the government on an equal footing? Health care in Canada runs somewhere around 6 or 7% overhead -- almost all of every dollar goes straight into direct health care. Overhead in the US is several times higher than that.

I think it is entirely appropriate to have private insurance companies in the mix; it is equally important to have government supplying the service as well, subject to the same rules as the private sector. As a citizen, you can take your healthcare voucher to a government hospital or you can take it to a private hospital/insurance plan. If the private companies provide much better service, then that's where the dollars will go, and the government service shrinks accordingly. If the government service just delivers more for your dollar, then your dollars go there.

The fixation on competition in this country inexplicably excludes competition from government, and that competition would keep the private industries honest, as long as the government isn't allowed to cheat.

The oil change analogy is accurate here, too. These private medical organizations provide a service to society; they "change the oil". Why would we pass a law that makes it illegal for society to "change its own oil"? When the private companies can do it more cheaply and do a better job, then we take our money to them. But at a certain point, we might decide $100 for an oil change just isn't worth it, and we'll just do it ourselves, thank you very much.

Or a frog.

Remember kids -- don't stow away on a trans-atlantic flight. From ANN:

Apparent Stowaway Didn't Make It All The Way

It rained body parts in Long Island, NY, Tuesday, as the corpse of an apparent stowaway aboard a South African Airways flight from Dakar to JFK partially disintegrated when the crew lowered the plane's landing gear.

Some of the body parts crashed through the roof of a home in Floral Park.

Flight 203, an Airbus A340-600, landed at JFK on time at 0700 local. It was taxiing from Runway 22R when airport workers noticed part of a body hanging from the wheel well.

There were no apparent injuries in Floral Park, above which the Airbus lowered its gear, allowing parts of the body to fall to the ground.

The FAA is investigating. There's no word yet on the identification of the corpse.