Prince Spaghetti is Perfect for an Anniversary Dinner

I can't believe it's only been a year since BushCo stole another election.  The damage these people can do in such short time is boggling.  Take a minute to remember what is becoming my favorite BushCo soundbite ever:

And it's one of the wonderful -- it's like earning capital.  You asked, do I feel free.  Let me put it to you this way:  I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.  It is my style.  That's what happened in the -- after the 2000 election, I earned some capital.  I've earned capital in this election -- and I'm going to spend it for what I told the people I'd spend it on, which is -- you've heard the agenda:  Social Security and tax reform, moving this economy forward, education, fighting and winning the war on terror.

It was so wonderful.  Someone really should have asked him then how he would know anything about earning capital.  The answer may have given them a hint of what the country was in store for. 

I'll be at the Street today, updating here as warranted.   Although, after reading Barbara O'Brien's post, which shows how Team BushCo is happily positioning the country to fill the torture gap left by the fall of the Soviet Union, I'm not sure I feel like posting anything at all.  Here's the very beginning:

They may not be much use in a hurricane and they’re a tad sloppy with intelligence, but when it comes to torture the Bush Administration will not be held back.

In today’s Washington Post Dana Priest writes that Porter Goss’s CIA is holding and “questioning” prisoners in secret prisons.

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

I like the part about the “Soviet-era compound.” Are we filling a niche vacated by the fall of the Soviet Union? And do we want to think real hard about what that niche might be?

I wonder how the torture policy would poll with the country.  I'm thinking the approval numbers wouldn't be as low as we'd like.

Comments

[DavidByron]

I guess it's supposed to be a rhetorical question but the "niche" being filled is Hitler's. As I understand it these torture techniques have their historical pedigree in Nazi Germany and after the war the US took up employing many of the unemployed torturers and so on and have been using and adding to those techniques, training death squads and so on, ever since.

[eRobin]

Foul! Foul! Godwin's Law. Fifteen yards.

The thing about the torture is that we've always done it. We've just never been so proud of it before. I think this is better because it forces the discussion into the open.

[DavidByron]

I think you have it right. Bush doesn't do anything much different but he does it more openly; more lazily. Instead of using the CIA and some local thugs for example, he gets US regulars to do the torturing.

Hey what do you think of this diary? It's an idea that pops up every now and then:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/11/2/10252/3703

I just think it's a wonderfully insightful diary into the mind of the author and their views of gender.

[eRobin]

It's satire and good satire at that. I'm too busy trying to encourage a general workers' strike to call attention to the healthcare crisis to think about talking people into a Lysistrata Option but it does sound like a good idea.

As for insight into views about gender, the original play was written by a man. The orignial fear of a black planet.

Best line of that dKos diary:

My boyfriend/husband and I are both progressives. Can't we just have sex anyway?

In a word: NO.

[DavidByron]

I don't think it is satire but I'm glad you think it is.

[eRobin]

It's obviously satire - it has "a modest proposal" in the title.

[DavidByron]

I think she's only kidding on the square (as she says in the 1st comment). The modest proposal thing is misused as noted by the second comment.

She's kidding because she knows she'd never get enough people to participate in practise, NOT because she realises it's a ridiculously sexist idea on any number of levels.

There are a lot of feminist women who genuinely convince themselves that all men are against abortion rights (even the "liberals") and all women must secretly be in favour of them. Sex war.

Btw, when's this strike for healthcare going on?

[eRobin]

Btw, when's this strike for healthcare going on?

It's not. I'd have a better chance with the Lysistrata Option.

[Helga Fremlin]

Thanks for pointing out that BushCo. stole the 2004 election as well Robin!

[DavidByron]

Hmm. This is a dKos diary that talks about microcredit and in part criticises the assumption that lending to women is at all beneficial, or more likely to see the debt paid off:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/11/2/181335/027

[Pepper]

Again, this is what we get with an MBA president. I tell ya, if I ever hear the letters MBA attached to an aspiring president, Dem or Repub, I'm running for the Canadian border!

[DavidByron]

This is interesting (via a diary at Huffington Post). Recent UN report shows that war is on the wane. Major wars are down by as much as 80%.

Is that good news or what?

http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs/2005/051017_Human_Security_Report.doc.htm

The full report is at:

www.humansecurityreport.info

[DavidByron]

Here's an interesting factoid from the report:

A 2003 estimate suggested that there were 639 million small arms and light weapons in circulation around the world — 238 to 276 million of them in the United States.

[eRobin]

Pepper: That's a good point. That people ever thought that fusing business and public interests would mean anything other than destroying public interests, amazes me. We need separation of Corporations and state as much as we need the restraining order against Church re: State.

Related: I used to dream about Canada. Then I found out that they're up to their eyeballs in the occupation of Haiti and the bloom left that rose. Now I'm back to country shopping for that perfect place.

[eRobin]

David: I saw that dKos diary. It does a good job pointing out some of the problems with microcredit - especially the problem that money designated for women isn't getting to the women. I'd like to see some data about microcredit's efficacy once that variable is controlled.

The other big problems he mentions - attempts to economically empower women leading to increased violence against them and to lower schooling rates for girl children - mean that those cultures are responding to being challenged fundamentally. It's going to be very difficult work for the women brave enough to do it.

[DavidByron]

I think what the microcredit diary pointed out is that your various factoids about microcredit were baseless. Nice to see you still have faith though.

Unlike your faith in poor old Canada the facts won't be sufficient to change your mind about feminist ideology.

Frankly the idea that you try to give money to one half of a marriage and tell them they have to under no circumstances ever let their spouse use it or spend it seems to be a recipie for marital strife. I mean could you come up with anything more stupid if you tried? Money is the thing most couples already argue about more than anything else. And how unrealistic is it that you'd expect that money lent to a familly will only be used by one memeber of that familly?

Is that how the finances work in your home Robin?

And wouldn't you call it deeply sexist if someone agreed to lend you two money on the condition that only your husband could spend it? You'd be up in arms if someone suggested anything that sexist in America (but it's good enough for foreigners). And if you agreed to that idiotic demand would you abide by it? Hell no.

The other big problems he mentions - attempts to economically empower women leading to increased violence against them and to lower schooling rates for girl children

He also mentioned the reverse can happen. In other words: there is no relationship.

So let's review: there's no evidence that the sexist act of lending money to only women has any good effect but you still support it. You support it even though it seems that you can't really give only to women anyway -- making the whole exercise little more than a ritual humiliation of the husband by neo-colonialists. You suspect that trying to give only to women leads to violence -- but you still want to do it.

By the way the UN security report mentions that not only are men ten times more likely to be the direct victims of war (counting both soldiers and civilians) than women, but men are also most likely to die of indirect effects such as desease and famine created by war. Quite the opposite of the picture always painted by feminists that "women are the real victims" of war.

[DavidByron]

Matt Taibbi on Lynndie England