While Italy's Economy Was Going Down The Toilet, Guess What Silvio Berlusconi Was Doing

Silvio and Ruby

Italy's 77 year old right-wing former Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, a flamboyently crooked billionaire, was finally kicked out of Parliament Wednesday. Ostensibly it was because he had been convicted for tax fraud. The Senate vote was 192-113 with 2 abstentions. He'll never face prison on the tax conviction but the loss of his Senate seat also means the loss of his immunity against prosecution for all sorts of other criminal activities he's been immersed in for decades. Probably the first one he'll have to face involves the charges of bribery in the sex scandals that have plagued his recent career. He has been bribing the then-underage stripper, Ruby, who he had hired for sex. The judges are calling the bribery "pollution of evidence." Already convicted in the case are a TV anchorman from one of his stations, a talent scout and his dental hygienist, all of whom were procuring underage girls for him to have sex with. The 2 males were also accused of "testing" the girls before presenting them to the Prime Minister. There were 32 young women called as material witnesses, 18 of whom are now thought to have perjured themselves after being paid off by Berlusconi.
Berlusconi is accused of paying 2,500 euros ($3,400) apiece each month to young models and TV showgirls to tone down their accounts of the sexually charged nature of his dinner parties.

Three Berlusconi associates were convicted earlier this year of pimping for him. Berlusconi wasn't a defendant in that trial, but he is appealing a seven-year sentence he received in June for paying for sex with Karima El Mahroug, a nightclub dancer who was 17 when she attended the parties.

In a document released on Friday explaining the pimping conviction, the judges detailed the bribery accusations and said they had forwarded them to prosecutors, who are now expected to open an investigation.

The judges said that after the homes of Berlusconi’s female party guests were searched during the prostitution probe, he called about a dozen of them to his Milan mansion in January 2011 for a conference and initiated their monthly payments.

In court, the judges said, the women gave “perfectly overlapping” evidence of “elegant” soirees, rather than the striptease sessions described by some other guests.

The judges said they noticed the female witnesses using the same phrases in their statements, and that when they were asked the exact meaning of words they had used, some women were unable to respond, suggesting they had been coached.

Berlusconi, 77, has acknowledged paying his female guests regular sums but has claimed it was compensation for their stalled show-business careers, which suffered from the poor publicity stemming from the "bunga bunga" trial.

And if the Tsar...

Very sweet and patient, but I was kind of gobsmacked by the denial that the president has "'made fun' of tea-baggers." Can he really be unaware that using that term is making fun of them ipso facto? Is he that innocent, or isolated?

Well, remember when David Axelrod had never heard of hippy-punching? And Eric Holder found out what waterboarding is in 2008? Remember when Obama came out attacking his own education policy as if it were some exoticially dreadful idea from the future, luckily too remote for us to really have to worry about it?
one thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching to the test. Because then you're not learning about the world; you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math. All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test. And that's not going to make education interesting to you.
They seem just about as cynical as they need to be when dealing with Iran, or Israel, and then if you turn around and look back they seem to have taken on this really touching sincerity. Honestly, it's hard for me to disbelieve it, if only because so much simple faith in people looks kind of like a handicap, something you'd frankly prefer your president not to have. What's up with that?
Teabag installation by Armén Rotch, via Inhabitat.

Resurrected from oblivion: a march for General Patton's Third Army


The U.S. Army Concert Band plays Gregorio A. Diaz's "Third Army March."

by Ken

There was a time a bunch of years ago when the New York Times was constantly finding stuff. What was it, a Bach manuscript? And, well, just all sorts of stuff, given credibility by the presence of a reporter from the Newspaper of Record.

I don't think we can accuse the Washington Post of belatedly trying to play catch-up. This is just kind of a happy story about the resurrection of a long-presumed-lost march written for the army of one of the U.S. military historic personages. And if you've listened to it, I think you'll agree that it's a highly engaging march. J. P. Sousa it's not, but then what is?

It's not quite a great historic moment, but I think it's kind of a neat story.
Toe-tapping Patton march is finally recorded, to the joy of composer’s son


Tom Diaz looks over some of the memorabilia from his father's time in the military.

By Michael E. Ruane, Published: November 29

As Tom Diaz sat in the Army band hall waiting to hear his late father’s music for the first time, he had a troubling thought: What if it’s lousy? What if the march his father wrote for Gen. George S. Patton Jr. during World War II was a stinker?

Diaz knew that his father, Gregorio A. Diaz, had written the “Third Army March” in 1945. But he’d never heard it. It hadn’t been played in ages. And his father had been dead for 24 years.

Now, as the Army concert band prepared to record it for the first time, Diaz braced himself.

Lt. Silas N. Huff, associate conductor, told the band that the son of the composer was present. The band applauded. Huff raised his baton. What followed was a rousing, jaunty, toe-tapping piece of superb march music.

“Yeah!” Diaz thought, as he listened, “It’s really good.”

The recording, one day this month at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Virginia, capped a story of an impoverished immigrant musician who joined the Army in 1924 and wound up becoming the band leader for one of most famous generals of World War II.

It brought back rich memories for his son.

“What a moment,” Tom Diaz, 73, of Northwest Washington, said. “Knowing everything I know about my father, having grown up as an Army brat . . . it’s almost a sense of unreality that this is actually happening.”

The recording also culminated a 15-month quest to restore the march to prominence by Lawrence A. Devron, the former Army musician who rediscovered it last year. He had found, to his dismay, that the modern incarnation of the Third Army, U.S. Army Central, uses the popular “Patton March,” from the 1970 film “Patton” for ceremonies, not the original.

No one there had ever heard of the march Diaz created over a half-century ago.

The story began in June 2012, when Devron, who works for the Army records management and declassification agency, was visiting Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, the main command post of U.S. Army Central.

During the visit, Devron was touring part of the installation with the command’s archivist, Kathy Olson, when he spotted a drum major’s mace and sash in a trophy case.

Devron, 67, of Springfield, Va., who had played French horn in the Army Band in the 1960s, was curious. He asked if he could take a closer look.

“When I looked in there . . . I saw this piece of manuscript,” he said. It was written on now-aging paper and was dated April 10, 1945.

“I looked at it real close, and it was the ‘Third Army March.’ ”

“That’s great!” he told Olson, who had assembled the items in the case. “I’ve never heard that piece.’”

“Neither have we,” she replied. “There’s no recording of it.”

“I said, ‘Well, what do you play . . . at Third Army ceremonies?’ ” Devron asked.

“The theme from the movie ‘Patton,’ ” Olson said.

Devron thought, “I got a mission.”

For the ‘big boss’

Warrant Officer Gregorio Diaz was 39 when he composed the march in April 1945 in Germany.
“Respectfully dedicated to Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. and the gallant officers and men of the Third U.S. Army,” he wrote on the title page of the condensed score.

The war in Europe was almost over, and Patton’s Third Army was famous for dashing across France, saving America forces at the Battle of the Bulge and pushing into the heart of Nazi Germany.

Patton, himself, had become a legend. Flamboyant, controversial and brilliant, he would say at war’s end that commanding the Third Army had been the highlight of his life.

His men returned the affection. Gregorio Diaz, a diminutive man, referred to Patton as the “big boss.”

Diaz’s 61st Army Ground Forces Band had been chosen by Patton to serve as the Third Army’s official band.

“It wasn’t just some band,” Tom Diaz said. “Gen. Patton had a very high standard. He liked pomp and circumstance and music, and this was the band he wanted for his Army headquarters.”

It was an honor for Gregorio Diaz, who had been born in a poor village in the Canary Islands and left home when he was 12. He’d made his way to Mexico, crossed into the United States in 1924, and went right to Fort Bliss, Texas, where he enlisted in the 7th Cavalry’s band, his son said in an interview.

He apparently had learned clarinet and saxophone while playing in a youth band in his home village.

In the Army, he moved among several different bands in Colorado, Panama and Washington, becoming leader of the 61st Ground Forces band on June 7, 1944, the day after Allied forces landed in Normandy on D-Day, according to his military service record.

Gregorio Diaz finished the march less than a year later.

“He wanted to call it ‘The General Patton March,’ ” Tom Diaz said. “I think Gen. Patton thought that was, even for his ego, too much. So they called it the ‘Third Army March.’ ”

It’s a “pass in review” march that lasts for about three minutes, enough to allow a band to pass in front of a reviewing party. It’s a light, European-style march — more festive than martial.

There is a snapshot of Patton, in gleaming helmet and knee-high boots, purportedly listening to the march’s debut in Luxembourg. Another photo depicts Patton watching the band march by, with Gregorio Diaz in the forefront.

And Tom Diaz has a snapshot of his father talking to Patton, who is much taller, and another man. On the back is written, “Big Boss, his aide, and ‘me.’ ”

Sitting dormant

Lawrence Devron, who did not know Tom Diaz, was determined to find out more about the old march in the trophy case.

After the war, the Third Army became an administrative headquarters back in the United States and then was deactivated in the 1970s, Devron said. Olson, the archivist, said she suspected that its band was also deactivated then.

The march faded into obscurity. A U.S. Army Central spokesman said he did not know exactly why.

Devron, the son of a prominent Washington dance-band leader, said he was motivated, in part, by one of his old music teachers, who used to tell students, “Music is a dead art. You must make it live.”

He started contacting friends, music experts and Army band alumni. “I said, ‘What do you know about this? Nothing. Is there a recording? No,’ ” he said.

He got a copy of the condensed score via e-mail but said it’s difficult to extrapolate a full score from a condensed score. He asked the Army band to do some research, and the band located other parts in its library.

“The march has been played,” Devron said. “That’s never been the issue. The issue is it’s been dormant for all these years, and nobody [had] ever recorded it.”

Plus, it was historic. “How many guys have a chance to compose something” like that, he said. “The Schwarzkopf ceremonial march? Have you heard that?” he said. “The Colin Powell march?”

“It’s a rare thing that a guy can . . . dedicate a piece that the [general] has listened to and blessed,” he said.

He started lobbying the Army band to get the march recorded.

“Third Army does not need to be playing the ‘Patton’ theme only,” he said he argued. “That’s not its history.”

The band agreed, and the recording session was scheduled for 11 a.m. Nov. 6 in the band’s Brucker Hall.

Devron and Tom Diaz were both present. “I’ve been working on this for a year and three months,” Devron said. “I was delighted.”

As he sat listening to the music, Tom Diaz said he thought of his father — how he would listen to opera on the radio, how he loved the music of John Philip Sousa, and how he had showed up at the front door with a big duffel bag when the war was over.
#

If Henry Waxman Doesn't Stay On His Toes, Marianne Williamson Will Beat Him Next Year


I don't want to demonize Henry Waxman. As congressmen go, he's been a fairly decent one, for the most part, relatively progressive and-- except on issues relating to Israel and the Middle East-- pretty open-minded. The only time I remember really disagreeing with him, in fact, was when he backed Cheney's and Bush's horrific decision to attack Iraq without provocation. And he has been in Congress for 20 terms, about 39 years… long enough for anyone, way too long for most. But Waxman should realize when his time is up on his own and bow off the congressional stage gracefully. Demonization should have no role in that decision.

A few days ago, we saw that highly acclaimed author, Marianne Williamson had decided to challenge Waxman's reelection. She's running as an independent. And she has a real shot at beating him. I wish she were running next door against Blue Dog/New Dem Adam Schiff instead, a much worthier target. Schiff and Waxman share the Sunset Strip. Doheny Drive is the border between Schiff's 28th CD on the east side of the street and Waxman's 33rd on the west side of the street. Laurel Canyon Blvd. divides the two districts between Lookout Mountain Avenue and Mulholland Dr. Rosewood Avenue, a street just between Melrose and Beverly in West Hollywood is another border between the two districts, Schiff on the northern side of the street, Waxman on the southern side. Waxman has Cedars-Sinai but I think they share Macy's Men's Store in the Beverly Center. They also share deep reservations about Obama's decision to take the diplomatic route with Iran.

A few weeks go, Waxman was joining House Republican warmongers and extremists howling for more and tougher sanctions. “The Senate should act. We ought to pass these increased sanctions, and make sure that the Iranians don't think that they can charm their way out of this situation. Act now,” he barked. The White House asked the Senate to hold off to give the peace process so time to work.

Williamson is more in that camp. Like Waxman, she's also Jewish. I asked her how she felt about the agreement. "It's a tenuous first step," she told me yesterday, "and there are legitimate reasons for mistrust-- but if you don't plant a seed, then how you can ever expect a tree to grow and bear fruit?"

I have no doubt she could beat Schiff easily. And if Waxman doesn't treat her challenge as a serious threat, she'll beat him. Last year, running against mad dog billionaire Republican Bill Bloomfield (posing as an "independent"), Waxman had his closest call ever. He managed to beat Bloomfield 171,860 (54%) to 146,660 (46%). Consider that on the same ballot, Obama won the district over Romney 210,010 (61%) to 127,421 (37%). Bloomfield did a lot better than Romney and Waxman trailed Obama. If EMILY's List jumps into this race on behalf of Williamson, which would be a real stretch, Waxman might as well retire.

Under House Republicans The War On Poverty Has Morphed Into A War On The Poor


House Republicans may not have "the time" to vote on important measures with wide popular support like comprehensive immigration reform, ending workplace discrimination against the LGBT community (ENDA) or raising the minimum wage-- none of which Boehner will allow onto the 2013 schedule-- but they do have time to further attempt to steal the food out of the mouths of children by more chopping from the food stamp program. House Republicans look at the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas and what they see is another chance to pass a bill to accelerate their endless class warfare against working families going through hard times because of the GOP ideological economic agenda that wrecked the economy. Lobbyists are drooling at the thought of their big Farm Bill payoff.
The top leaders of the House-Senate farm bill have come close to a framework during several tense negotiating sessions in the past two weeks, raising hopes on K Street that legislation could squeak through Congress by the end of the year. The four negotiators spoke via conference call Tuesday and reported no new developments.

“Everyone is still working hard to bring this together, which is what you want to see,” said lobbyist Tom Sell of Combest and Sell, who as a staffer was instrumental in crafting the 2002 Farm Bill.

“I’m in the optimist camp,” said Chandler Goule of the National Farmers Union. “There is plenty of time to get this done. Every time there is a meeting, there has been progress.”

House Agriculture Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), Senate Agriculture Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), House Ranking Member Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Senate Ranking Member Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) failed to resolve their differences in a Monday conference call.

The biggest sticking points are cuts to food stamps, and work requirements in the House farm bill for recipients of that aid.

The House bill cuts $39 billion from food stamps, while the Senate's cuts $4 billion.

The White House is pushing to limit the food stamps cuts, and on Tuesday released a report that shows how many dependent families are on the program.

Food stamps were automatically cut by $11 billion on Nov. 1, when extra money provided under President Obama’s stimulus law expired.

Stabenow wants to count the $11 billion for the farm bill and is arguing against cuts that go beyond what is in the Senate bill. Republicans say that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) cannot credit the farm bill with that deficit savings since it already happened.

Reaching an agreement on food stamps is key to resolving the two main problems in the farm subsidy title. Bigger cuts to food stamps gives negotiators more wiggle room to deal on the farm subsidies and still get a sizeable deficit-cutting score that could win over fiscal hawks.

“There is a lot of work left to do,” said Dale Moore, executive director for public policy of American Farm Bureau. “They need to make the decisions at the top end of the decision tree and then the rest will fall into place.”

On commodities, the House farm bill calculates subsidies by relying more on actual planted acres than what farmers planted historically.

That can be said to more accurately reflect risk, but at the same time it can distort the market by encouraging more production. The House bill offers more generous subsidies but forces producers to chose between price supports and revenue-based margin insurance.

The rift on farm subsidies can be bridged more easily than the one on food stamps, as was evident when corn, soy and canola producers floated using a rolling average of recent planted acres.
The cuts that already began this month translate to 20 fewer meals per month for every child and every vet who is struggling to survive on food stamps. This conservative class war against the poor has got to stop. But it will only stop if voters want it to stop enough to refuse to vote for Republicans and refuse to vote for New Dems, Blue Dogs and other right-wing Democrats. And it isn't just religionist hypocrites like Stephen Fincher (R-TN) who are guilty. Democrats in Congress should refuse to vote for the Farm Bill if it includes any cuts to food stamps until unemployment gets to 3%. Only 15 Republicans, almost every one of them cowering in blue-leaning districts, crossed the aisle to vote with the Democrats against more draconian cuts. 217 Republicans voted for more draconian cuts. Almost all are Republicans the DCCC is running against. There are plenty of Republicans in blue-leaning districts who the DCCC isn't challenging and who all voted for the cuts.

Among those Republican class-war extremists who can be defeated but whom the DCCC gives immunity are Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, John Kline, Buck McKeon, Fred Upton, Mike Rogers, John Mica, Dave Reichert and, of course, Paul Ryan, who cynically insists he's fighting poverty even while he votes to cut food stamps. Paul Upton's and John Mica's constituents have been polled recently and in both cases, there is a clear willingness to end their careers and replace them with Democrats. But Steve Israel is protecting each of them and refuses to back either Paul Clements in Michigan or Nick Ruiz in Florida, their opponents.


Paul Clements told us that this class war jihad by Republican congressmen like Upton against working families is "deeply un-American. He voted for a bill that kicks 3.8 million people out of the food stamps program by 2014. Michigan still has 9% unemployment, many people have used up their unemployment benefits, and our food banks can’t keep up with demand. Many children in Fred Upton’s district already struggle with hunger. I wonder how much time Fred Upton has spent with children who don’t have enough to eat? We do not need more hunger in America. Mr. Upton, in America we can afford to feed our people."

Nick Ruiz is running against a worthless old hack, John Mica and he and Clements are on the same page. "In voting to cut food aid to citizens who need it most," asked Nick, "what exactly does John Mica hope to prove? That he's heartless? That he doesn't care about the health of citizens who are having difficulty providing basic nutritional food for themselves or their families? There's no greater sign of weakness and dishonor than to prey upon the weak or downtrodden: today John Mica has proven his worthlessness as a representative of all American families."

Help Blue America replace these class warriors like Upton and Mica, with leaders who want to solve the hunger crisis, not exacerbate it. You can find Paul Clements and Nick Ruiz here on our ActBlue page, as well as the other Blue America candidates, each of whom wants to deal equitably with families who have fallen on hard times.

WRITING COLUMNS LIKE THIS? BEATS WORKING.

So yesterday we got Dana Milbank's lazy column recommending a renewal of the draft, a day after we got an op-ed, also in The Washington Post, calling for an end to presidential term limits. No surprise, really -- it's a holiday week, there's not much news being made, so pundits are dredging up policy proposals that will never be enacted and therefore can always be relied on to fill up a column.

Milbank generates a fairly energetic level of self-righteousness, but he doesn't seem to be making much of an effort otherwise.
... As I make my rounds each day in the capital, chronicling our leaders' plentiful foibles, failings, screw-ups, inanities, outrages and overall dysfunction, I’m often asked if there’s anything that could clean up the mess.

My usual answer is a shrug and an admission that there's no silver bullet. There are many possibilities -- campaign spending limits, term limits, nonpartisan primaries, nonpartisan redistricting, a third party -- but most aren't politically or legally feasible, might not make much of a difference or, as with Harry Reid's rewriting of Senate rules, have the potential to make things even worse.
(If you want to be taken seriously when you're phoning it in this way, I suppose it helps, before you get to your main point, to throw a punch at a hippie, or at least at someone who qualifies as a hippie by Beltway standards.)
But one change, over time, could reverse the problems that have built up over the past few decades: We should mandate military service for all Americans, men and women alike, when they turn 18. The idea is radical, unlikely and impractical -- but it just might work.

There is no better explanation for what has gone wrong in Washington in recent years than the tabulation done every two years by the American Legion of how many members of Congress served in the military.

A Congressional Quarterly count of the current Congress finds that just 86 of the 435 members of the House are veterans, as are only 17 of 100 senators, which puts the overall rate at 19 percent. This is the lowest percentage of veterans in Congress since World War II, down from a high of 77 percent in 1977-78, according to the American Legion. For the past 21 years, the presidency has been occupied by men who didn't serve or, in the case of George W. Bush, served in a capacity designed to avoid combat.
Was Milbank nodding off in Philosophy 101 when his professor explained what a post hoc fallacy is? The number of people using rotary telephones is also at the lowest point in living memory -- and the condition of Congress is about as likely to be influenced by that societal change as it is to be influenced by the decline in military service among members of Congress.

Does military service really make a person more inclined to comity and cooperation and avoidance of partisan grandstanding? Forgive me if I have my doubts after looking at a list of House members who are veterans: why, there's Darrell Issa, along with Louie Gohmert, and Joe "You lie!" Wilson, and Paul Broun (y'know, the guy who said, "evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell"). In the Senate, well, you've got Lindsey Graham and John McCain. Need I go further?

If the best Congresses are those with the most veterans, then shouldn't 1977-78 have been the recent high-water mark of American self-government? Does anyone who lived through the 1970s seriously want to argue that that was the case? And, um, wasn't that just a few years after a clinical sociopath had to resign the presidency? Wasn't he a veteran?
It's no coincidence that this same period has seen the gradual collapse of our ability to govern ourselves: a loss of control over the nation's debt....
Our deficit is shrinking dramatically, Dana.
... legislative stalemate and a disabling partisanship. It's no coincidence, either, that Americans' approval of Congress has dropped to just 9 percent, the lowest since Gallup began asking the question 39 years ago....
See post hoc fallacy, above.
Because so few serving in politics have worn their country's uniform, they have collectively forgotten how to put country before party and self-interest. They have forgotten a "cause greater than self," and they have lost the knowledge of how to make compromises for the good of the country. Without a history of sacrifice and service, they've turned politics into war.
My problems with this theory are that I don't believe military service confers an aversion to selfishness that's lifelong (see McCain, John) and I don't believe that it confers a sense of exalted purpose in peacetime the way it does in war. In order to get the benefit Milbank expects, we not only have to draft all our young, we have to send large numbers of them to fight horrible, bloody, destructive wars.

And while we're trying to cook up a war that will infuse America with the right amount of national character, we're allegedly going to be drafting everyone from homeless kids to the children of our secular royalty. Anyone seriously believe that the youths of the Koch and Romney and Walton and Trump families will sacrifice the way the children of the ghettoes and hollers do? Anyone seriously believe there won't be escape clauses that allow the former not to serve at all?

And meanwhile, the right-wing media will continue fighting the class war in the usual right-wing way, by arguing that all the cushy spots are going to the children of Alec Baldwin and Rosie O'Donnell, or maybe to Malia and Sasha, while upstanding home-schooled Bible Belt Christians fare the worst. Sorry, the culture war won't simply disappear.

Oh, and, as Milbank notes:
The costs would be huge.
You think, Dana? And, um, how do you imagine we'd pay for this? Not with new taxes -- the wealthy and the GOP simply wouldn't hear of it.And so we'd pay for it with drastic cuts to programs needed by the poor and middle class. In that way, your brilliant scheme would be less leveling, not more.

Which gets to what I think is the real reason we have a terrible government: the fact that heartland whites from outer-ring suburbia and exurbia have been encouraged for decades not to believe that other Americans are really their fellow citizens. They vote for politicians who encourage the belief that we have two nations, ours being at war with theirs, both of us engaged in a zero-sum conflict. These politicians are financed by right-wing billionaires who really don't have any fellow feeling for the Other America.

Deal with that and maybe we'll have a better government.

Do Public Officials Ever Lie? Better Question: Do They Ever Tell The Truth?




Since taking over from Tim Sebastian in 2006, Stephen Sackur has been the anchor for the BBC's flagship news interview show, HARDtalk, which runs four times a week. I travel a lot, so I see it a lot. Sackur has a well-deserved reputation as the voice of Establishment Group Think propaganda and for asking questions and then aggressively interrupting his guests when they attempt to answer. He's one of television's most annoying little twits and I often wonder why credible figures ever agree to be interviewed by him. Last week, he interviewed Glenn Greenwald. I haven't been able to access the whole half hour back and forth, but above is a three-minutes excerpt that wound up on YouTube.

I could see by the tightening in Greenwald's face that he was about to explode at Sackur's mindless and sycophantic line of questioning. And Greenwald did not disappoint. Sackur started quoting patently false assertions from a batch of Military-Industrial Complex war criminals as "evidence" against whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Sackur pretends to be unable to comprehend that anyone in the upper echelons of the British Establishment could ever lie for any reason. Greenwald: "There is this thing called the Iraq War in which the U.S. and the U.K. governments persuaded their media outlets and their populations to support an aggressive attack on another country by making one false claim after the next, designed to scare the population into believing that there was a security threat that did not really exist, that they had to go to war to stop. What journalism is about," he tried explaining to the very-well paid state propagandist who plays the role of a journalist on television, "is based on the premise that when people like Mr. Robins and others who exercise power in the dark make these kinds of claims to justify their own power, they're often lying. They often tell things to the population that turns out to be untrue and the job of a journalist is not to investigate other journalists who are investigating those powerful officials; it's to try and be responsible when telling their viewers and readers what government officials are saying and then to access whether there's evidence for it. That's my role…"

By this time Sackur realized he and the Establishment he reveres were under attack and he was having none of it and started a series of interruptions to prevent Greenwald from completing his response to the questions. He went from attacking Ed Snowden's credibility to atticking his guest's credibility, begging the question of why he invited Greenwald onto the show (if not to discredit him on behalf of BBC viewers). He probably didn't count on how well Greenwald could hold his own-- and more.

"First of all," he began responding to Sackur's outburst, "I think the Iraq War in a pretty significant…" when Sackur burst in again, obviously intent on preventing him from answering. That's when Greenwald let him have it:
If you want to scream at me and make all kinds of filibustering remarks, I can just disconnect and you can do that, but if you want to ask me a question, you're going to give me time to actually answer it! The evidence that government officials lie is found in history with things like the Iraq War, when the U.S. and the U.K. destroyed a country of 26 million people based on lies they told over the course of two years to their population. And if you look at what happens in counties where there's constitutional guarantees of a free press, which I know doesn't include the U.K., but includes most western democracies, what you find us all sorts of people who have created those protections have done so based on their recognition that people in power, specifically national security officials, will routinely lie to their population. The evidence that I have is that 3 Democratic senators, just two weeks ago in the United States, who are on the Intelligence Committee and have access to classified information, came out and said that the claims of NSA officials and others that these programs have stopped terrorist plots is completely false, that there is no evidence for it.
I assume the three senators Greenwald was referring to were Ron Wyden (OR), Mark Udall (CO) and Martin Heinrich (NM), all moderate centrists. A few days ago they penned an explosive OpEd for the NY Times, End The N.S.A. Dragnet, Now. "The framers of the Constitution," the wrote, "declared that government officials had no power to seize the records of individual Americans without evidence of wrongdoing, and they embedded this principle in the Fourth Amendment. The bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records-- so-called metadata-- by the National Security Agency is, in our view, a clear case of a general warrant that violates the spirit of the framers’ intentions. This intrusive program was authorized under a secret legal process by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, so for years American citizens did not have the knowledge needed to challenge the infringement of their privacy rights.

"Our first priority is to keep Americans safe from the threat of terrorism. If government agencies identify a suspected terrorist, they should absolutely go to the relevant phone companies to get that person’s phone records. But this can be done without collecting the records of millions of law-abiding Americans. We recall Benjamin Franklin’s famous admonition that those who would give up essential liberty in the pursuit of temporary safety will lose both and deserve neither.

"The usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated. We have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security. In spite of our repeated requests, the N.S.A. has not provided evidence of any instance when the agency used this program to review phone records that could not have been obtained using a regular court order or emergency authorization.

"Congress needs to preserve the agencies’ ability to collect information that is actually necessary to guard against threats to our security. But it also needs to preserve the right of citizens to be free from unwarranted interference in their lives, which the framers understood was vital to American liberties."



This grotesque perversion of the Constitution was specifically designed by Dick Cheney and David Addington in a serious and still unpunished series of criminal endeavors while Bush was fast asleep at the wheel. Pulitzer Award-winning journalist Barton Gellman laid out the whole operation in his jaw-dropping Cheney exposé Angler. This comes from Gellman's website:
One untold story that Angler recounts at length is what happened behind the scenes of the Bush administration's internal rebellion over warrantless domestic surveillance. Top advisers say on the record that Cheney came close to destroying Bush's presidency. This episode takes up two full chapters of Angler. The Washington Post gives a taste of the narrative in a pair of condensed excerpts.

From part one of the excerpts

A burst of ferocity stunned the room into silence. No other word for it: The vice president's attorney was shouting.

"The president doesn't want this! You are not going to see the opinions. You are out… of … your... lane!"

Five government lawyers had gathered around a small conference table in the Justice Department Command Center. Four were expected. David S. Addington, counsel to Vice President Cheney, got wind of the meeting and invited himself.

If Addington smelled revolt, he was not far wrong. Unwelcome questions about warrantless domestic surveillance had begun to find their voice.

Cheney and his counsel would struggle for months to quash the legal insurgency. By the time President Bush became aware of it, his No. 2 had stoked dissent into flat-out rebellion. The president would face a dilemma, and the presidency itself a historic test. Cheney would come close to leading them off a cliff, man and office both.

On this second Monday in December 2003, Addington's targets were a pair of would-be auditors from the National Security Agency. He had displeasure to spare for their Justice Department hosts.

Perfect example, right here. A couple of NSA bureaucrats breeze in and ask for the most sensitive documents in the building. And Justice wants to tell them, Help yourselves? This was going to be a very short meeting.

Joel Brenner and Vito Potenza, the two men wilting under Addington's wrath, had driven 26 miles from Fort Meade, the NSA's eavesdropping headquarters in Maryland. They were conducting a review of their agency's two-year-old special surveillance operation. They already knew the really secret stuff: The NSA and other services had been unleashed to turn their machinery inward, collecting signals intelligence inside the United States. What the two men didn't know was why the Bush administration believed the program was legal.

It was an awkward question. Potenza, the NSA's acting general counsel, and Brenner, its inspector general, were supposed to be the ones who kept their agency on the straight and narrow. That's what Cheney and their boss, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, told doubters among the very few people who knew what was going on. Cheney, who chaired briefings for select members of Congress, said repeatedly that the NSA's top law and ethics officers-- career public servants-- approved and supervised the surveillance program.

That was not exactly true, not without one of those silent asterisks that secretly flip a sentence on its tail. Every 45 days, after Justice Department review, Bush renewed his military order for warrantless eavesdropping. Brenner and Potenza told Hayden that the agency was entitled to rely on those orders. The United States was at war with al-Qaeda, intelligence-gathering is inherent in war, and the Constitution appoints the president commander in chief.

But they had not been asked to give their own written assessments of the legality of domestic espionage. They based their answer in part on the attorney general's certification of the "form and legality" of the president's orders. Yet neither man had been allowed to see the program's codeword-classified legal analyses, which were prepared by John C. Yoo, Addington's close ally in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Now they wanted to read Yoo's opinions for themselves.

He was massive in his swivel chair, taut and still, potential energy amping up the menace. Addington's pugnacity was not an act. Nothing mattered more, as the vice president and his lawyer saw the world, than these new surveillance tools. Bush had made a decision. Debate could only blow the secret, slow down vital work, or call the president's constitutional prerogatives into question.

The NSA lawyers returned to their car empty-handed.

The command center of "the president's program," as Addington usually called it, was not in the White House. Its controlling documents, which gave strategic direction to the nation's largest spy agency, lived in a vault across an alley from the West Wing-- in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, on the east side of the second floor, where the vice president headquartered his staff.

The vault was in EEOB 268, Addington's office. Cheney's lawyer held the documents, physical and electronic, because he was the one who wrote them. New forms of domestic espionage were created and developed over time in presidential authorizations that Addington typed on a Tempest-shielded computer across from his desk.

It is unlikely that the history of U.S. intelligence includes another operation conceived and supervised by the office of the vice president. White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. had "no idea," he said, that the presidential orders were held in a vice presidential safe. An authoritative source said the staff secretariat, which kept a comprehensive inventory of presidential papers, classified and unclassified, possessed no record of these.

…Addington's behavior with the NSA auditors was "a wake-up call for me," Jack Goldsmith [chief of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel] said. Cheney and Addington, he came to believe, were gaming the system, using secrecy and intimidation to prevent potential dissenters from conducting an independent review.

"They were geniuses at this," Goldsmith said. "They could divide up all these problems in the bureaucracy, ask different people to decide things in their lanes, control the facts they gave them, and then put the answers together to get the result they want."

…Mike Hayden and Vito Potenza drove down from NSA headquarters after lunch on Feb. 19, 2004, to give Jim Comey his first briefing on the program. In the Justice Department's vault-like SCIF, a sensitive compartmented information facility, Hayden got Comey's attention fast.

"I'm so glad you're getting read in, because now I won't be alone at the table when John Kerry is elected president," the NSA director said.

The witness table, Hayden meant. Congressional hearing, investigation of some kind. Nothing good. Kerry had the Democratic nomination just about locked up and was leading Bush in national polls. Hardly anyone in the intelligence field believed the next administration would climb as far out on a legal limb as this one had.

"Hayden was all dog-and-pony, and this is probably what happened to those poor folks in Congress, too," Comey told his chief of staff after the briefing. "You think for a second, 'Wow, that's great,' and then if you try actually to explain it back to yourself, you don't get it. You scratch your head afterward and you think, 'What the hell did that guy just tell me?'"

The NSA chief insisted on limiting surveillance to e-mails, phone calls and faxes in which one party was overseas, deflecting arguments from Cheney and Addington that he could just as well collect communications inside the United States.

…By the end of February, Goldsmith and Philbin had reached their conclusion: Parts of the surveillance operation had no support in law. Comey was so disturbed that he drove to Langley one evening to compare notes with Scott W. Muller, the general counsel at the CIA. Muller "got it immediately," agreeing with the Goldsmith-Philbin analysis, Comey said.

"At the end of the day, I concluded something I didn't ever think I would conclude, and that is that Pat Philbin and Jack Goldsmith understood this activity much better than Michael Hayden did," he said.

On Thursday, March 4, Comey brought the findings to Ashcroft, conferring for an hour one-on-one. Three senior Justice Department officials said in interviews that Ashcroft gave his full backing. He was not going to sign the next presidential order-- due in one week, March 11-- unless the White House agreed to a list of required changes.
And today? The situation is not better… it's worse, as though Cheney were still completely in charge and unchecked. This week, Andrew Rosenthal wrote a major editorial for the NY Times, The N.SA. Dips Into Pornography. The NSA is now collecting data on what porn sites people access online. "On one level," wrote Rosenthal, "this is old news-- using embarrassing sexual information against enemies. Spy novels are replete with the fabled 'honey trap' in which a tempting woman is placed in the path of an intelligence target in the hope that he will succumb and be vulnerable to blackmail. The only progress we’ve made in our digital times is that no actual person need be involved anymore, just images on the web. On another level, it’s sort of hilarious to imagine a gang of techno spy nerds in a darkened room, poring over browser histories, hunting for dirty URL’s, which of course they don’t linger over."
But beyond the absurdity of it all, this is precisely the way that politically directed, clandestine surveillance goes off the rails-- by digging into personal behavior. Because all of these operations are conducted in secret, according to secret rules, the public has no way of knowing whether the targets are actually enemies of the state, or just individuals who have fallen out of the state’s favor.

In fact, according to the Huffington Post, “none of the six individuals targeted by the N.S.A. is accused in the document of being involved in terror plots.”

J. Edgar Hoover compiled secret dossiers on the sexual peccadillos and private misbehavior of those he labeled as enemies-- really dangerous people like Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, for example.

Government officials have repeatedly claimed that the National Security Agency’s collection of metadata is perfectly legal.  We should not worry about the N.S.A., according to President Obama, because there are safeguards in place to protect our constitutional rights. Agents would never, ever misuse that information to, say, check on where you’ve been web surfing.
One of the senators nodding and winking at the NSA shredding of the Constitution is Maine's make-believe moderate, Susan Collins (R). Luckily, an independent-minded grassroots progressive, Shenna Bellows, is running against her this cycle. Shenna, the former Executive Director of the Maine ACLU, has a very different perspective on the importance of the Constitution and the importance of legitimate privacy than Collins does. This morning she reiterated that "History demonstrates time and time again that government secrecy breeds abuse of power. The revelations about NSA spying show that yet again, the NSA is engaged in surveillance operations that clearly violate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. News that the NSA is monitoring the online pornography habits of "radicalizers" is eerily reminiscent of the FBI's surveillance of the private lives of leading political figures like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s. It's a waste of taxpayer dollars and an attack on civil liberties. Yet, Congress continues to abdicate its critical role in providing checks and balances on the Executive branch. The decision by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee to codify NSA spying authority and expand the Patriot Act demonstrates a dangerous disregard for our fundamental constitutional freedoms. It's time to rein in an out-of-control NSA and restore our constitutional freedoms. In a healthy democracy, the government doesn't spy on the private lives of its citizenry."

If you'd like to help Shenna replace Collins in the U.S. Senate, you can do that here on the Blue America Senate 2014 page.

UPDATE:

The BBC has now posted the entire Sackur-Greenwald video on YouTube. Kudos! Here is is:



Other People Have Horrible Taste But NOT ME

Harlan Ellison, Super Genius:

A holiday F.U. to NYC Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio from his friends in City Hall and especially at 1 Police Plaza


From inside the fortress of 1 Police Plaza, NYC's Imperial Counterrevolutionary Guard will have complete security and surveillance power over incoming Mayor de Blasio's police transition team, scheduled to be holed up in a now-unused trailer outside the building.

by Ken

There have been advantages to having a benevolent (at least in his own mind) billionaire as NYC's imperial mayor for 12 years, including his imperially ordained extra-legal third term. But if anyone needs a reminder of why, whatever happens next, we're better off once the little egomaniacal scumbag is pried out of City Hall, here's a heart-warming story about the anti-transition being planned by his egomaniacal-scumbag police commissioner.

I realize that the Little Emperor isn't mentioned at all in this article. But if by chance he has a problem with this (and I'm not at all sure that he does, since his only objection would have been from a public-relations standpoint, and since he's not running for anything in the foreseeable future, why would he care about that?), a single phone call would have put an end to it.

The Little Emperor has used the NYPD as his Imperial Counterrevolutionary Guard, and he and his Imperial Counterrevolutionary Guard commissioner take personally any suggestion that any of their policing has been not just unethical and antidemocratic but plainly illegal. As they plan their departure, they make it abundantly clear that their wildly outsized egos matter more than the well-being of the citizens of the city. So let me say this as graciously as possible: Say, boys, why don't you rot in hell?


Ray Kelly to Stash De Blasio NYPD Transition Team in Trailer

By Murray Weiss on November 29, 2013 9:43am

MANHATTAN — Call it the Transition Trailer.

Outgoing Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is planning to stick his successor and his transition team in an unused trailer outside police headquarters, sources said.

The trailer will offer the team limited, if any, access to the inside of the super-secure 14-story headquarters, with its lobby guarded by sentries and a bank of turnstiles that require special electronic swipe cards.

The team's coming-and-goings will require screening outside One Police Plaza by NYPD headquarters security, like other members of the public. In the past, transition teams have been afforded space in police headquarters.

And their movements will also be watched 'round-the-clock by NYPD surveillance cameras that can be viewed by Kelly himself on any of the dozens of television monitors in his office that have access to feeds from around the city, sources say.

The trailer simply creates a perception problem, especially for those who already question the way Kelly sometimes does business.

“You are talking about the next police commissioner and his people and you are putting him in a trailer in the back and outside the very place that they will be taking over," said a police official who respects Kelly. "It is very condescending . . . and I think the reason why is to even micro-manage his exit.”

"There is something negative about a new team being put in a trailer by the old team," a second official said. "A trailer has certain connotations, and none of them are good.”

And yet another observer quipped, “It’s worse than a corner office . . . on the corner.”

The trailer, which has been sitting unused outside Police Headquarters for three months, has a conference area, a coffee room and cubicles, and the interior resembles an NYPD command post vehicle.

Document sharing and scheduled meetings between officials will take place in the trailer, with limited exceptions, the sources say.

Since Election Day, there has been virtually no contact between Kelly, Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and any transition personnel.

The only public encounter between the police commissioner and the mayor-elect occurred after Kelly blasted him and the other mayoral candidates in a “Playboy” interview for turning their backs on him during their campaigns and criticizing his tactics.

De Blasio and Kelly later met, and the mayor-elect said the two ironed out their issues.

But the choice of a trailer for the police transition team will likely stir new friction regardless of the mayor’s pick to succeed Kelly.

‘You have to go through security checkpoints to get inside the Police Headquarters perimeter and pass through exterior zones to get to the trailer, and you are always monitored by the surveillance of cameras,” one official said. “And you can’t get into the building and through the turnstiles without the special entry cards, which none of them will have.

“If I were them, I would say, ‘We will find our own space, and you can come to us.’”

NYPD transition teams are generally comprised of personnel who are no longer part of the department, although one of the leading candidates to succeed Kelly is the current Chief of Department, Philip Banks.

Kelly said earlier this week that he has selected an undisclosed point person from his office to deal with the transition team. Sources say Kelly's choice is Assistant Chief Brian Burke, the longtime head of Kelly's personal security detail.

When asked earlier this week about whether the transition has started, Kelly chuckled.

“We have to talk to somebody,” he said, referring to the fact that no successor has been chosen.
#

Sunday Classics preview: "Sing a merry madrigal!"


Yet until the shadows fall
over one and over all,
sing a merry madrigal!

by Ken

I'm not going to identify tonight's madrigal tonight, but I also haven't attempted to conceal its identity. I mean, I could have identified Yum-Yum as "Lady 1" or "Bride" and Nanki-Poo as "Man 1" or "Bridegroom" and so on. Obviously those of you who know the music will know that there's a joke built into it, but for tonight I don't want to think about the joke; I just want to focus on the beauty of the piece.

Madrigal, "Brightly dawns our wedding day"

YUM-YUM: Brightly dawns our wedding day.
YUM-YUM, PITTI-SING, NANKI-POO, and PISH-TUSH [GO-TO]:

Joyous hour, we give thee greeting!
Whither, whither art thou fleeting?
Fickle moment, prithee stay!
Fickle moment, prithee stay!
PISH-TUSH [or GO-TO]: What though mortal joys be hollow?
PITTI-SING: Pleasures come, if sorrows follow:
YUM-YUM, PITTI-SING, NANKI-POO, and PISH-TUSH [GO-TO]:

Though the tocsin sound, ere long,
ding dong!
Ding dong!
Yet until the shadows fall
over one and over all,
YUM-YUM: Sing a merry madrigal!
YUM-YUM, PITTI-SING, NANKI-POO, and PISH-TUSH [GO-TO]:

Sing a merry madrigal,
sing a merry madrigal:
Fa la,
fa la la la la la la.

YUM-YUM: Let us dry the ready tear,
YUM-YUM, PITTI-SING, NANKI-POO, and PISH-TUSH [GO-TO]:
Though the hours are surely creeping,
little need for woeful weeping,
till the sad sundown is near,
till the sad sundown is near.
PISH-TUSH [or GO-TO]: All must sip the cup of sorrow --
PITTI-SING: I today, and thou tomorrow
YUM-YUM, PITTI-SING, NANKI-POO, and PISH-TUSH [GO-TO]:

This the close of ev'ry song,
ding dong!
Ding dong!
What though solemn shadows fall,
sooner, later, over all,
YUM-YUM: Sing a merry madrigal!
YUM-YUM, PITTI-SING, NANKI-POO, and PISH-TUSH [GO-TO]:
Sing a merry madrigal,
sing a merry madrigal:
Fa la,
fa la la la la la la.
[Ending in tears]

Jean Hindmarsh (s), Yum-Yum; Beryl Dixon (ms), Pitti-Sing; Thomas Round (t), Nanki-Poo; Owen Grundy (bs), Go-To; New Symphony Orchestra of London, Isidore Godfrey, cond. Decca, recorded October 1957

Elizabeth Harwood (s), Yum-Yum; Barbara Elsy (ms), Pitti-Sing; Edward Darling (t), Nanki-Poo; Ian Humphris (b), Pish-Tush; Westminster Symphony Orchestra, Alexander Faris, cond. EMI, recorded 1961

Valerie Masterson (s), Yum-Yum; Peggy Ann Jones (ms), Pitti-Sing; Colin Wright (t), Nanki-Poo; John Broad (bs), Go-To; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Royston Nash, cond. Decca, recorded Jan. 10-15, 1973

Marie McLaughlin (s), Yum-Yum; Anne Howells (ms), Pitti-Sing; Anthony Rolfe Johnson (t), Nanki-Poo; Nicholas Folwell (bs-b), Pish-Tush; Welsh National Opera Orchestra, Sir Charles Mackerras, cond. Telarc, recorded Sept. 2-4, 1991


IN THIS WEEK'S SUNDAY CLASSICS POST

We'll clear up any lingering mysteries about "Brightly dawns our wedding day" and hear another madrigal from the same source, more or less, and hear some other vocal ensembles from (again) the same source, more or less.
#

Cheap shots and dancing dog fur

Hobbitonomics
Came up while I was en route to New Jersey keeping up with the twittericity by intellectual phone and thus unable to answer the question according to my usual thoroughly documented standards—because I can do a lot of stuff with my new phone but have not yet mastered the art of cutting and pasting URLs.

Anyway I'm now pretty confident, thanks to an essay in the Superversive which touches briefly on the economics of the Shire (it is mostly an extremely detailed account of the [jump]
Looking for a representation of Smaug that would capture his Germanic wormishness, I didn't find anything, but this, by Kihea, is satisfyingly fleshy.

parallels between the early histories of the kingdom of Gondor in the Third Age and the Byzantine empire in our own corrupt world), that the Bagginses were basically members of a local squirearchy, living off the rents of their tenant farmers (alert readers will notice that the author uses "seems to have" three times in a single paragraph and is thus perhaps not quite as confident as we might wish):
The Shire seems to have been somewhat feudal itself at one stage. Not only was it divided into the four Farthings, it was further divided into the ‘folklands’ of the twelve principal Hobbit families, Took, Baggins, Oldbuck, and so forth. (The Oldbucks crossed the Brandywine into Buckland, and became known as the Brandybucks.) Much of the land seems to have belonged to the various branches or septs of those families, and farmed by tenants: Bilbo Baggins, as head of the Baggins family, seems to have got most of his income (pre-Smaug) in this way. The Thain of the Shire was originally an Oldbuck, but the office passed into the Took family; in The Lord of the Rings, Pippin Took was the son of the Thain, and later became Thain himself.
Bilbo was not as well off as the Old Took, but his ownership of the particularly luxurious smial or hobbit-hole of Bag End certainly made him one of the two or three most prominent citizens in his neighborhood, and his being a bachelor, with no family to provide for, made him all the better off—whence the envy of his cousin Otho Sackville-Baggins and Otho's unspeakable wife, the former Lobelia Bracegirdle.

This was of course before Bilbo's adventure made him almost inconceivably rich for a hobbit, with his share of the hoard he and his dwarf companions wrested from the dragon Smaug; one estimate puts it as worth at a minimum $8.6 billion in today's currency, and conceivably as much as a hundred times that. This raises thoughts of a kind of book club question: does Bilbo's fortune, darkly obtained from the east, echo the Victorian themes of imperial corruption in such novels as Vanity Fair (Jos Sedley's lakhs of rupees repatriated from India) and Jane Eyre (Mr. Rochester's slave-made Caribbean riches)? And if so what, if anything, would that mean?
Romeo Rancoco/Reuters.
Words of Wisdom
 Everybody's a critic
What do the Bible, "The Hunger Games" and "Fifty Shades of Grey" have in common? All three are works of fiction, according to the booksellers at Costco.

Pastor Caleb Kaltenbach made that shocking discovery last Friday as he was shopping for a present for his wife at a Costco in Simi Valley, Calif.

“All the Bibles were labeled as fiction,” the pastor told me. “It seemed bizarre to me.”
Photo by Caleb Kaltenbach via AP.
Kaltenbach is the lead pastor at Discovery Church, a non-denominational Christian congregation in southern California.

He thought there must be some sort of mistake so he scoured the shelf for other Bibles. Every copy was plastered with a sticker that read, “$14.99 Fiction.”....

I doubt they would label the Koran as fiction, Pastor Kaltenbach said. Heaven help us if they did. (Butthurt from Townhall)
Kind of illustrating how that imaginary Salafist at the Costco book rack (picking up a copy of Fifty Shades of Gray for the missus, no doubt) would react if he came across that Qur'an edition, Christianists leapt at the story, demanding a boycott of the evil liberal store. Because clearly this Shop of the Big Boxes with its notorious partisan leanings was mounting a covert conspiracy to make people believe that the stories told in the Bible are not literally true:
Steven Smith, of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, said the fiction label identifies the thinking of the labeler more than the content of the book.

“To label the Bible fiction is a practical front for an ideological foundation that assumes things spiritual are unreal,” he told me. “What is odd about this choice is the glut of books in the “religion and spirituality” sections in mainstream book stores. However, as large as “spirituality” sections are, there must not be any room for Christianity. Modern thinking on spirituality is too exclusive to allow for the Bible.” (Via Wonkette)
They refused to classify the Bible under "religion and spirituality" because they assume spiritual things are unreal so they labeled it fiction so...? You need to sit down for a second and breathe deeply, Dr. Smith. My own guess would be that nobody's ideology was involved at all. You need to start by asking whether the Costco classification and that of "mainstream book stores" are the same (I had no idea there was a standard for the latter). Did anybody check as to whether they had a "religion and spirituality" sticker at all, or what the exact repertory was? Could it have been classified under "self-help", for instance, or "business"?

The cream of the jest here is found in a diary by Thom Stark at Daily Kos: It turns out that Pastor Kaltenbach (a college friend of Stark's) is a real person in the fullest sense of the term, who tweeted that picture of the unexpectedly-labeled Bible not to unveil a huge atheist comspiracy but because he thought it was funny, which of course it is. (And who, though he is a theological conservative, is enough of a Christian to express admiration for Costco because of its decent treatment of workers.) But alas, the Daily Mail and Fox News haven't seen any point in reporting that part of the story.

Bad analogies department

Australian conservatives totally understand how it feels to be a lonely, imprisoned struggler for democracy in a vicious military dictatorship:
Department of fancy imagery

Famous novelist Wally Lamb displays the higher stylistics:
When she invited me to dinner at her place, I brought a bottle of the terrible wine a grad student could afford. I petted her hyperactive cocker spaniel, Mandy, who shed so profusely that dog fur danced wraithlike in the air between Christine and me as she cooked.
Houndwraith. By Heather L. Kidd, via cryptozoologist Dr. Karl Shuker. 

Even In Oklahoma They Can't Always Escape Reality-- The GOP War Against Contraception (And Sex)




Oklahoma state Rep. Doug Cox (R-OK) is the chairman of the Public Health and Social Services Committee. First elected in 2005, he's also a physician who graduated from the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine in 1978. If you think every Republican in Oklahoma is as radical and extreme as GOP sociopath James Lankford, you haven't met Doug Cox yet. Last February, Rep. Cox-- who, unlike lunatic freak Dr. Paul Broun, is the kind of doctor who actually does believe in science-- took on his party over a very extreme anti-abortion bill meant to eliminate the judicial bypass system for young victims of incest and violence seeking abortion care. He told his fellow legislators at that time that if "we keep passing stuff like this, they'll be done in back alleys with coat hangers, people… [Abortions] are done in clinics inspected by the Health Department under sterile, medical condition. This bill basically is trying to intimidate the providers who do those." He lost the argument.

Three months later he penned a letter to the editor to his local paper about the stepped-up Republican Party jihad against contraception. [If you skipped it,now's the time to watch the Rachel Maddow video above.] This is Rep. Cox's letter. Let me remind you, he's a Republican… in Oklahoma-- from the same town as James Lankford.
All of the new Oklahoma laws aimed at limiting abortion and contraception are great for the Republican family that lives in a gingerbread house with a two-car garage, two planned kids and a dog. In the real world, they are less than perfect.

As a practicing physician (who never has or will perform an abortion), I deal with the real world. In the real world, 15- and 16-year-olds get pregnant (sadly, 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds do also). In the real world, 62 percent of women ages 20 to 24 who give birth are unmarried. And in the world I work and live in, an unplanned pregnancy can throw up a real roadblock on a woman's path to escaping the shackles of poverty.

Yet I cannot convince my Republican colleagues that one of the best ways to eliminate abortions is to ensure access to contraception. A recent attempt by my fellow lawmakers to prevent Medicaid dollars from covering the “morning after” pill is a case in point. Denying access to this important contraceptive is a sure way to increase legal and back-alley abortions. Moreover, such a law would discriminate against low-income women who depend on Medicaid for their health care.

But wait, some lawmakers want to go even further and limit everyone's access to birth control by allowing pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for contraception.

What happened to the Republican Party that I joined? The party where conservative presidential candidate Barry Goldwater felt women should have the right to control their own destiny? The party where President Ronald Reagan said a poor person showing up in the emergency room deserved needed treatment regardless of ability to pay? What happened to the Republican Party that felt government should not overregulate people until (as we say in Oklahoma) “you have walked a mile in their moccasins”?

Is my thinking too clouded by my experiences in the real world? Experiences like having a preacher, in the privacy of an exam room say, “Doc, you have heard me preach against abortion but now my 15-year-old daughter is pregnant, where can I send her?” Or maybe it was that 17-year-old foreign exchange student who said, “I really made a mistake last night. Can you prescribe a morning-after pill for me? If I return to my home country pregnant, life as I know it will be over.”

What happened to the Republican Party that felt that the government has no business being in an exam room, standing between me and my patient? Where did the party go that felt some decisions in a woman's life should be made not by legislators and government, but rather by the women, her conscience, her doctor and her God?

Cox, R-Grove, has delivered more than 800 babies.
Republicans, even extreme right Oklahoma Republicans of the Lankford variety, aren't exactly the same as the patriarchs who want to bring back stoning as a mechanism for controlling women in Afghanistan. Not exactly… but almost. Sex is as threatening and frightening to them as it is to the primitive Afs. I bet they don't like people like Rachel Maddow-- or Doug Cox-- reminding them. The progressive Democrat running for the Oklahoma City seat Lankford is occupying now, Tom Guild, has similar motivations to Cox, even if they're from different parties. For one thing, Tom is not a big fan of government intrusion into people's private lives.
Representative Cox hits the nail squarely on the head. Today’s Republican Party pursues legislation that outlaws common forms of birth control. The inevitable fallout from this government intrusion into private matters greatly increases the demand for abortion following unplanned and preventable pregnancies. Today’s GOP has forgotten that their hero, Ronald Reagan, was famous for saying he wanted to get the government off of our backs. Big Brother is alive and well in today’s GOP.

Do we really want the police searching the sacred marital bedroom for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? Do we really want poor women to be denied the fundamental right to make their own personal health decisions? Do we need to destroy women’s economic opportunities because of admittedly regrettable decisions, where the rigid and unforgiving law strictly refuses any reasonable remedy? America doesn’t need a Taliban Party. What America needs is a responsible Republican Party that gets off of its condescending high horse and lives in the real world for a change, and gets the government off of American women’s backs, and out of America’s bedrooms.

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