Fact-esque

God Embarrassed by Louisiana Gov's Gullibility

Brand new Louisiana Gov Bobby Jindal just signed a bill that will allow teachers to present ID (Intelligent Design) in Louisiana science classrooms.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State today warned Louisiana officials that lawsuits will result if the state’s new anti-evolution law is used to introduce religion into public school classrooms.

Gov. Bobby Jindal this week signed the legislation (SB 733), which allows teachers to use “supplemental materials” when discussing evolution. The measure was pushed by the Louisiana Family Forum and the Discovery Institute, two Religious Right groups that advocate creationist concepts, and is widely seen as an effort to water down instruction about evolution.

“I am very disappointed that Gov. Jindal signed this unwise and unnecessary measure,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director. “Louisiana has a long and unfortunate history of trying to substitute dogma for science in public school classrooms. Let me state clearly and upfront that any attempts to use this law to sneak religion into public schools through the back door will not be tolerated.”

Georgia's Cobb County tried that a couple of years ago by working through the state BOE but got roundly embarrassed by the response from the civilized world.

Thrrrrrpppp.

God wasn't happy either. S/he prefers not to have his/her options limited by humans more ignorant than tree stumps. "I mean," s/he's thinking, "who do they think they're kidding?"

Supporters of the bill, including the Discovery Institute and Sen. Ben Nevers, its primary sponsor, have insisted that the measure is not intended to promote religion.

Yeah, right.

PZ Myers is ignoring this, and maybe he's right. Louisiana embarrassing itself isn't exactly news and nobody exactly cares what they do. Still, I thought that their induction into the Fact-esque Science Hall of Shame ought to be announced and celebrated. Every once in a while Louisiana threatens to overturn its standing as the dumbest state in the nation, possibly the world, and we wanted to let everyone know that as of today that standing still...um...stands.

Congratulation Bobby Jindal! You've kept Louisiana on top again. (God is rolling his/her/its eyes but never mind. What does s/he/it know anyway? S/he/it, probably.)

War Against Iran: Prep Ramps Up

The covert war against Iran has been going on for some time under the radar. Bush's parting (?) gift to us: yet another oil war. Seymour Hersh - one of our few remaining actual real journalists - writes in an article in The New Yorker that Cheney's been trying to get it going for months and Congressional leaders in both parties have known all about it for a year.

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.

Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

***

Although some legislators were troubled by aspects of the Finding, and “there was a significant amount of high-level discussion” about it, according to the source familiar with it, the funding for the escalation was approved. In other words, some members of the Democratic leadership—Congress has been under Democratic control since the 2006 elections—were willing, in secret, to go along with the Administration in expanding covert activities directed at Iran, while the Party’s presumptive candidate for President, Barack Obama, has said that he favors direct talks and diplomacy.

The request for funding came in the same period in which the Administration was coming to terms with a National Intelligence Estimate, released in December, that concluded that Iran had halted its work on nuclear weapons in 2003.

As with Iraq, it doesn't matter that they know perfectly well Iran poses no nuclear threat. As with Iraq, this isn't about mushrooms clouds or Armageddon. It's about oil and naked power. It's about empire and energy. It's about ego and "manliness". IOW, it's about the real conservative values: bullying and greed.

We knew they were going to try to gin up a war against Iran before Buish left office. Why would they do that and leave Obama to prosecute it?

• They know he won't stop it.
• They have no intention of leaving office. Election? What election? It's been called on account of rain war.

And the Democrats knew all about it.

Obama Endorses NAFTA

After calling NAFTA "devastating" and "a big mistake" during the primary campaign, obedient DLC poster boy Barack Obama, now the candidate, is backing off such inflammatory language in order to assure the DLC's corporate masters that "Free Trade" will still be a Go under BO. In an interview with Fortune's Nina Easton, Obama apologizes for his "overheated and amplified" language. (Via email from David Sirota)

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? "Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don't exempt myself," he answered.

***

Obama's tone stands in marked contrast to his primary campaign's anti-NAFTA fusillades. The pact creating a North American free-trade zone was President Bill Clinton's signature accomplishment; but NAFTA is also the bugaboo of union leaders, grassroots activists and Midwesterners who blame free trade for the factory closings they see in their hometowns.

It was all a lie. All of it. Obama played Edwards' populist card to win the nomination and now that he's got it he's doing exactly what I predicted he'd do: he's turning his back on us. From David's email:

I'd say this really shows the power of Big Money over Obama and the Democratic Party. Here you have a policy - NAFTA - that is among the most unpopular policies of the last generation, according to polls. Here you have a candidate who campaigned against it in the primary. And within weeks of getting the general election, here you have that same candidate running to Corporate America's magazine of record to reassure Wall Street about that same policy.

This change of policy - let's face it, that's what it is - was presaged by his hiring two weeks ago of Jason Furman, a Robert Rubin acolyte (Clinton's DLC economist and NAFTA booster), as his economic advisor. In other words, it was predictable.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., underscored his affinity with Democratic centrists this week when he tapped Jason Furman, who worked closely with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, to be his director of economic policy.

But the selection is now drawing criticism from some on the left who are wondering if the presumptive Democratic nominee will challenge corporate power and make good on his promise to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). 

"When people see someone like Barack Obama promise change and then see that same person make their first move the hiring of a Wall Street economic team, that’s what sows disengagement and cynicism in the public,” said David Sirota, a one-time backer of former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., who is the author of “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington."

Obama is a conservative Bush Dog, there's no other explanation for his actions the last few weeks since the nomination was no longer in doubt. A veteran of Illinois' cutthroat politics, he's also moving swiftly to take control of Howard Dean's rebel DNC. De-balling Dean will leave the field open for total DLC control of all the major elements of the Democratic party despite the fact that they represent a tiny minority of Democrats. Howard is still there but I suspect it's only a matter of time before Obama forces him to resign.

We wanted a JFK and we're getting an RMN/GWB. Read these articles only if your blood pressure is safely down.

FISA Fallout

"The fish rots from the head down."

The damn bill hasn't even passed yet (though it will) and already we got DC Police Chief Cathy Lanier acting like the Fourth Amendment is a thing of the past. (Via Feministe through Avedon Carol)

D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence.

Under an executive order expected to be announced today, police Chief Cathy L. Lanier will have the authority to designate “Neighborhood Safety Zones.” At least six officers will man cordons around those zones and demand identification from people coming in and out of them. Anyone who doesn’t live there, work there or have “legitimate reason” to be there will be sent away or face arrest, documents obtained by The Examiner show.

Lanier has been struggling to reverse D.C.’s spiraling crime rate but has been forced by public outcry to scale back several initiatives including her “All Hands on Deck” weekends and plans for warrantless, door-to-door searches for drugs and guns.

Under today’s proposal, the no-go zones will last up to 10 days, according to internal police documents. Front-line officers are already being signed up for training on running the blue curtains.

The reason you have restrictions on the police and don't want to take them off for "special circumstances" is because they will use whatever comes to hamnd that shortcuts standard procedures which police consider a waste of time. When the PATRIOT Act passed its provisions was supposed to apply only to terrorist investigations but the FBI immediately used the NSL portion of the bill against everybody from the Mafia to burglars.

The President of the United States has been caught ordering illegal searches and the opposition party exonerates him and his accomplices retroactively. So is anyone surprised that a DC Police Chief thinks the Fourth Amendment doesn't count any more?

We have allowed BushCo to make this country what it is and now we're going to have to live with the consequences.

Remedial America

After nearly 30 years of conservative rule (yes, I'm including the DLC-dominated Clinton years) it would seem that we, our politicians, and our press all need remedial citizenshi[p courses. A case in point is the ease with which our infotainment-centered press can be bamboozled by a few buzz words, viz:

The original pitch landed in the inbox with a whiff of medical authenticity overlaid with a snicker-inducing headline: “Toxic Ties to ‘New Shower Curtain Smell’ Evident, According to Latest Laboratory Testing.”

There was a news conference, this release said, at New York University Medical Center. It was led by a doctor representing an obscure if official-sounding group that few people have heard of, the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. There were revelations about how shower curtains that are “routinely sold at multiple retail outlets” and can “release as many as 108 volatile chemicals into the air.”

Thus, the Toxic Shower Curtain Story was born.

ABCNews.com picked up on it, only to debunk it. With varying amounts of credulousness, other outlets ran with it as well, including U.S. News & World Report, The Daily News in New York, MSNBC.com and The Los Angeles Times. The gist of some of the coverage was that it was all a tempest in a bathtub, though other reports took the information at face value.

How do stories of this ilk get such bounce from major news organizations?

It's a good question. Basically, it's a scam.

“P.R. people want to invest time in things that are going to get picked up, so they try to put something to the ‘who cares?’ and ‘so what?’ test,” said Kate Robins, a longtime public relations consultant. “If you say something is first, most, fastest, tallest — that’s likely to get attention. If you can use the words like ‘money,’ ‘fat,’ ‘cancer’ or ‘sex,’ you’re likely to get some ink in the general audience media.”

David Seaman, a P.R. stunt planner and the author of a book to be published in October, “Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz,” is a proponent of “safe,” “easy” “secret,” “trick” and “breaking” because they suggest that something is new and fresh, he said.

Behind the buzz words,though, is the one nearly foolproof sales pitch: fear. Tell people there's something they should be afraid of and they'll gather round like moths to a flame. It didn't used to be like this. Fear has always been a powerful advertising strategy but there were others with just as strong a pull - hope, for instance. But selling hope these days is a long job. Selling fear after 30 years of conservative scare tactics is a piece o' cake.

Our press should be immune to this or at least resistant but in fact they get suckered like everybody else, not because they're stupid but because they're convinced that fear sells and that makes them gullible. When they aren't enabling stupidity because they believe it, they're selling it even though they don't. They are, in other words, easy targets for con artists and high-placed liars. Ask Joey Skaggs. He's been playing the press for over 40 years, scamming them relentlessly over and over and they still don't even know who he is.

We have to become less gullible, less vulnerable to cons and games and lies and tricks and deceit, because that is now the coin of the realm in the New Politics practiced by conservatives of both parties (assuming you're convinced we have two). Things have gotten so bad that University of Chicago School of Law Professor Geoffrey Stone thinks the president ought to have a "civil liberties adviser".

Presidents have a wide range of official advisers. There is a secretary of defense, a secretary of labor, a national security adviser, to name just a few. The next president should create a new executive branch position: a civil liberties adviser. Within the highest councils of every administration there should be a respected public official whose charge it is to defend our civil liberties against all comers.

Can you imagine that being necessary before Reagan? Yet we have now reached a point in our devolution under conservatives when the one thing Democrats and Republicans can agree on is that the Fourth Amendment ought to be gutted to protect us from nearly imaginary enemies who blew their wad on a single operation and haven't threatened us in 7 years. We are ready to give up what makes America unique because we fear something that barely exists. It's a little like the whole country has turned into The Mouse Hunt.

My gawd. We need a civil rights advisor in the White House? Things are that bad?

Yes they are and it's partly our fault for being lazy, proud of our "innocence" and and protective of our ignorance. If we don't do better than this, we'll get what we deserve. Maybe we already have.

Ten-Second Movie Review

WALL-E is way more subversive than all the glowing reviews are letting on. Five stars up!

The WaPo and the Centrist Court Myth

If you could see me now you might notice a blast of steam coming out of my ears like a cartoon spume. This shit gets to be too much.

For much of its term, the Supreme Court muted last year's noisy dissents, warmed to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s vision of narrow, incremental decisions and continued a slow but hardly steady move to the right.

That's the lead graf in Robert Barnes' WaPo story about how John McCain could swing the Court to the Right. In this formulation, Anthony Kennedy is a liberal because he sometimes doesn't agree with Fat Tony Scalia.

Each case pitted the court's four consistent conservatives against its four slightly less consistent liberals, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy returning to his role of last term as the deciding vote.

WTF?? So Reagan appointee Kennedy has suddenly become a centrist? BULLSHIT!!

This Court isn't split between Left and Right, it's split between the moderate Right and ultra far Right. Roberts' vision has less to do with "incremental decisions" (like which ones, one is tempted to ask?) than it is with pushing the Court closer and closer to his ideological agenda. An agenda which see corporations as victims, the rich as downtrodden and oppressed, Free Speech as something for those who can afford to buy it, and the Constitution as a vague, occasionally annoying piece of paper that should probably never have been written because it interferes with presidential power (when the president is a right-wing ideologue like himself).

This media narrative is omnipresent and patently false unless the word "liberal" has lost all meaning and been crushed into a definition that means, roughly, "less autocratic than Attilla the Hun and squishier than Vlad the Impaler". It's actually an example of how far to the Right our media mavens have moved that Bald Tony could ever in a million years be described as a "liberal" without generating howls of derisive laughter. With the possible exception of Ginzburg, there isn't a single legitimate liberal sitting today. They vary on the chromatic political scale from Moderate Far Right to Bone Boffing Crazy Out Where the Buses Don't Run Far Right, with ButtBuds Fat Tony and Clarence the Spoiler so far gone they make 15th century village idiots look not just sane but like intellectual giants.

Fat Tony came to the bench with a completely undeserved reputation for brilliance and has spent these past years proving it. His decisions have been monumental exercises in sophistry and careless when not sloppy logic. His reasoning has been contradictory, confusing, and even nonsensical.

Then there's Roberts, who - as TMiss so pungently says - "lied his ass off all the way through his confirmation hearings" and in his decisions hasn't found a single corporate crime he can't excuse, defend, and support with legal mumbo jumbo so unrelated to precedent that his semantic contortions are as painful to read as an accident report.

And leave us not forget Alito who just this week (also via TMiss) reminded us all just how much govt, fairness, and law he's willing to sacrifice to level the campaign field for the rich while throwing everyone else under the bus.

If this Court was a bus, it would make only Right turns and run around in circles all the time.

Oh, wait....

It occurred to me last week that we were all pretty well shocked when the Court actually made a decision against corporate interests, so used have we gotten to them ignoring the precedent supposedly so important to conservatives in order to prop up anti-employee abuses. Yet the legally absurd, morally indefensible, and ethically challenged gun decision prompted no real surprise on anyone's part. We all pretty much expected it.

That's the SCOTUS of the Bush Years, not this fantasy of a lib/con split. The Bush Court is way out on a Right-hand limb while the country moves more and more to the Left. It seems the media is clutching that same branch.

Housing Bill May Pass But Not Help Much

With the DLC Bush Dogs joining the conscienceless Congressional GOP to make sure - in the words of arch-conservative stealth Rep Jim DeMint - all those "reckless lenders and borrowers" aren't "rewarded" for their infamy, the 2,000,000 homeowners the bill was supposed to help refinance their loans to prevent them losing their houses has been cut back so far that even as the problem grows, the number of people it can help is shrinking. A new study says it may aid as few as 300,000 - 15% of the original intent.

And Bush, along with his Democratic acolytes, wants more cuts.

When Congress started fashioning a sweeping rescue package for struggling homeowners earlier this year, 2.6 million loans were in trouble. But the problem has grown considerably in just six months and is continuing to worsen.

More than three million borrowers are in distress, and analysts are forecasting a couple of million more will fall behind on their payments in the coming year as home prices fall further and the economy weakens.

Those stark numbers not only illustrate the challenges for the lawmakers trying to provide some relief to their constituents but also hint at what the next administration will be facing after the election. While the proposed program would help some homeowners, analysts say it would touch only a small fraction of those in trouble — the Congressional Budget Office estimates it would be used by 400,000 borrowers — and would do little to bolster the housing market.

“It’s not enough, even in the best of circumstances,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com. The number of people who will be helped “is going to be overwhelmed by the three million that are headed toward default.”

***

The White House, which initially threatened to veto the measure, has indicated that it is open to supporting the bill if certain provisions are removed.

(emphasis added)

It's not that they don't want to help these (disgusting) people, Jim explains before breaking down into a fit of coughing and retching while gasping, "FREE MARKET! FREE MARKET!"

Other proposals that have been floated in Washington include expanding the current plan to make it mandatory instead of voluntary for certain home loans; having the government buy loans outright from lenders; and providing some way and some incentives to let homeowners become renters in their own homes.

But not everyone supports government interventions. Some Republicans, like Senators Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Jim Bunning of Kentucky, say the proposal would use government subsidies to bail out reckless lenders and borrowers. They suggest that the housing market will correct itself more quickly if Congress does not intervene.

(emphasis added)

Funny. That's not what Jimmy the Celluloid Pimp was saying about bailing out Bear Stearns and JP Morgan and Lehmann Bros. Then it was a matter of LIFE AND DEATH TO SAVE THE ECONOMY!!! Only it didn't save the economy. They threw $$$30BIL$$$ at it and it didn't even save Bear Stearns. Funny how all the fine words and ideological fervor around "responsibility" somehow never applies to banks no matter how corrupt, crooked, or "reckless" but when poor folk get swindled by those same crooked banks, it's their own fault because they should have known better and they better go down into bankruptcy for the sake of protecting the FREE MARKET that was a non-concept 10 mins ago when the banks failed.

The hypocrisy here is so thick you'd need a chainsaw to cut through it. There's a couple of things they didn't consider, like:

The biggest impediment to helping homeowners is the weak economy. In addition to falling home prices and risky loans, homeowners are now confronting a tough job market. The unemployment rate has risen to 5.5 percent, up from 4.9 percent in January.

Mortgage rates have also been climbing. An estimated nine million homeowners owe more than their homes are worth and could find themselves with few options if they lose their jobs or if their mortgage bills rise substantially.

Yeah, well, it don't matter. If you ain't a member of the (country) club, you get squat no matter how bad you've been ripped off.

And once again, the Democrats are NO HELP.

How to Beat the Democrats If You're a Republican

Run to their left.

Politics is becoming very strange thanks to the stranglehold on the Democratic party held by the DLC's conservative Bush Dogs.

Running to the left of the Democrats, it's an interesting strategy and not one that would have occurred to me, but, since Montana was home to some of the prairie populists and to some of the New Deal progressives, I wouldn't entirely rule it out as a sign of things to come. After all, the endless culture war and anti-environmentalism that the Republicans have offered western states hasn't exactly brought us jobs, respect, and prosperity.

It Isn't Easy Living Here on Skullcrusher Mountain

I guess I'm a cockeyed optimist because I still can't believe that we live in a world, where Nixon has been vindicated by his remaining henchmen and the people we rely on to Do Something instead assure us that Capitulation is Victory.  Nixon!  I mean, really. 

I remember watching the resignation speech with my elated mother.  We had been through the Watergate hearings together and the speech was the series finale of the best reality show I think I'll ever see.   I remember my mom's reaction to the speech more than the speech itself.  As much as I got the idea that she considered Nixon's resignation to be something that should happen - justice and all that - her sheer enjoyment of the event gave me the idea that what we were watching was too good to be true.  Now, living in Bizarro World,  I understand why.  I guess there's something to eternal vigilance.  Who knew?   Anyway,  it's easier to shread the Constitution than it used to be but thanks to the intertubes, the vacuum is only partial and the FISA hits keep coming:

Listen to the second act of this This American Life episode to hear from reporter Lawrence Wright, who can "say definitively that he was targeted by the U.S. Government’s warrantless wiretappping program." 

Also the incomparable Fearguth points out that FISA backwards is "as if" and suggests that we should behave accordingly.

And, for old time's sake: