Miserable Failure

Just thought I'd do my bit to cement public opinion...

Miserable Failure

Jon Stewart on Lebanon, CNN and 'The Pump'

Jon Stewart on Lebanon, CNN and 'The Pump'

Because it's "Icky"

The reason gay marriage is such a hot button issue is that, for gosh sakes, gay sex is icky.

Of course, I used to think the same about broccoli, sushi, chinese food, red wine and oral sex. But then I grew up.

But there are those who gosh darn it just DON'T want to even THINK about icky things. Lucky for them the Bible has some pretty harsh language to back up their beliefs and feelings, giving them the legitimacy of the word of 'God' to back up their intolerance and closed-mindedness. (Never mind the inherent hypocrisy of using this one part of Leviticus and ignoring the rest. That's a whole 'nother topic.)

For people like this the concept of banning gay sex is a dog they can hunt with. However, since even the religious right realizes that they can't pass laws regulating what consenting adults can do in the privacy of their own home, all they have to fall back on is to deny people who engage in such behavior any claim of legitimacy in the law. Thus the banning of gay marriage.

They love to couch it in terminology that is Rovian, Luntzian in it's seeming legalese. "Protection of Marriage," and "Protection of the Family." Hey, who wouldn't be against something like that? Except that this is not about protection, but about persecution, about discrimmination.

The legal aspect of marriage can and should be administered and enforced by government. The moral aspects of marriage should be solely up to the individuals concerned. Never the twain should meet. This is separation of Church and State and the most intimate, personal and powerful level. Who will you have in your bed? What will the two of you do there? And what the h**l should Focus on the Family, Bill Frist, Arlen Specter, Rick Santorum, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Congress or the Supreme Court have to do with *any* of it?

All because some people think it's icky.

Happiness Is...

As a programmer I often become embroiled in complex, sometimes passionate discussions about the best way to solve a problem. As a blogger and frequent contributor to online political forums, I frequently see others engaging in heated debate, complex rationalizations, scatological name-calling, etc. in an effort to reach consensus or (far more commonly) make their own point and stick a finger in the eye of the disagreeable other guy in the process.

Universally lost in this is the primordial question: Why do we do all this? A former co-worker of mine had the answer.

"I just wanna be happy."

Isn't this engraved into the very soul of our Constitution? The right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?" The Founders remembered that for all of our strugglings, whether they be technical, political, social, emotional or physical, we just want to be happy.

Now comes the results of a study that lists all countries in the world based on the happiness of their citizens. It's an eye-opener, to say the least., The study was published by the UK-based New Economics Foundation. The article describing it is here, courtesy of The Independent.

The kicker: those of us in the United States are no where near as happy as we should be. The island of Vanuatu scores highest with 68.2, while poor Zimbabwe is at the bottom of the list with 16.6. (Ouch.)

Here's the bottom of the list:

• Canada: 39.8
• Ireland: 39.4
• France: 36.4
• USA: 28.8
• Russia: 22.8
• Estonia: 22.7
• Ukraine: 22.2
• Dem. Rep. Congo: 20.7
• Burundi: 19.0
• Swaziland: 18.4
• Zimbabwe: 16.6

Damn. We're not that far from the bottom! Neither are other countries that we largely perceive to be similar to us, such as England and Canada.

I don't claim to know what we can do to increase our happiness as a nation. But as they say, "first you have to acknowledge you have a problem." Also, it's patently true that there's more to life than being happy. Many historical figures achieved greatness despite - or perhaps because of - great personal trials, difficulty and unhappiness.

Still, if we're so unhappy, the question must be asked: what are we doing wrong?

Global Warming - Rants and Reason

It's both amusing and frustrating to hear the hysterical right deny the fact of global warming and to rant and rail against doing anything about it.

If we act on the assumption that it's true, then we have to learn how to live our lives while putting less carbon dioxide into the air. This may mean some hard choices - research into and the adoption of alternative energy sources, using more public transit and/or smaller cars, more energy-efficient means of growing food, doing our work, etc. etc. This will require financial hardship in many cases. It is my opinion that big business should bear the brunt of these expenses, since they've been reaping the vast majority of profits from cheap, dirty energy these past 150 years.

Still my burning (sorry) question to you is: WHY ARE YOU SO AFRAID OF THIS?

It just seems to make sense to me. Let's try to live cleaner, more efficiently. Let's try to put less junk into the air. Whether or not global warming is a fact, why would this be a bad thing?

The level of anger and denial on this subject signals a profound fear. Of what, I'm not sure. Fear of losing your SUV? Fear of having to WALK, or TAKE A BUS? Fear of having to turn off your air conditioners? Fear of having to eat less meat and more vegetables? Fear of actually having to do what someone else TELLS you to for the betterment of all?

Why are you so tremendously afraid?

Regarding the idiots who say 'we only have 100 years of recorded temperatures, the earth is millions of years old, that's not enough data,' bear in mind there are scientifically valid ways of extrapolating the earth's temperature thousands of years into the past. To those who say 'there were no SUVs in the days of the dinosaurs,' my reponse is SO WHAT? The earth's climate has changed repeatedly in 65 million years. Tell me how good that was for the dinosaurs. Our interest as a species is to maintain the earth's temperature/climate/geography at the same level is has been during human history. This is the environment in which we came up, this is what we want to maintain. Dinosaurs have nothing to do with it.

In closing, let me refer you to WikiPedia's article on global warming:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

Here's the money quote:

"Only a small minority of scientists discount the role that humanity's actions have played in recent warming. However, the uncertainty is more significant regarding how much climate change should be expected in the future, and there is a hotly contested political and public debate over what, if anything, should be done to reduce or reverse future warming, and how to cope with the predicted consequences."

http://bimplebean.blogspot.com

Pride and Prejudice in the 21st Century

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of watching "Pride and Prejudice" on DVD. This is a wonderful film, beautifully acted, deliciously topical despite it's 18th century setting and breathtakingly photographed. (I had to resist the urge to yell "painting" during the opening shot of many a scene.)

However, the thought that stayed with me after the movie was the class system in England as depicted in the film. There are 'good' families with money and breeding, and 'bad' families who are poor or down on their luck. When contemplating marriage between such families, many characters in the film expressed horror and shock at the idea of one marrying "outside of one's station." (This was mostly evident in the rich families.) The core concept was that money equals goodness.

This must be a fundamental human impulse, for it is resurgent today in the United States. The message we're seeing from more and more media outlets is that those with money must be good, while those without are bad.

Our first impulse may be to recoil from such a statement. "We are the land of opportunity," you might protest. "We judge people on their merits, not their riches." While that may have been somewhat true in the past it is certainly under attack today by the right. But the policies of this government indicate the opposite.

Under the leadership of the Republican Party we see allowances made for the rich while the poor and middle class are ignored, willfully neglected or actively cheated. Tax cuts are rammed through which overwhelmingly favor the wealthy. The Estate Tax is under assault in a naked effort to help the wealthy keep more of their money in the family, in direct contradiction to the efforts of the founders to prevent just such an establishment of a moneyed or landed 'gentry.' No-bid contracts fatten the purses of conglomerates chummy with government officials, leading to fraud, waste and abuse while competition is bypassed and small business are ignored. Most egregiously, in the past week we have seen Congress both grant themselves a pay raise while shamefully voting down an increase in the national minimum wage.

On the part of the pundits and megaphones for the 'moral' right, we see plenty of fulminations against welfare mothers, Katrina victims, 9/11 victims and so on. No one wants 'their' taxes to go to pay for easing the problems of 'others.' It's an orgy of selfishness that belies their allegedly Christian faith.

The perverse presumption underlying all this is that if you're poor you deserve it; you're somehow in moral failure. If you're rich, it's because you're a good person, favored by God. Extending the absurdity further, if you're rich you need government help to stay rich and get richer. If you're poor the government must ensure you're not too much of a drain on the rich.

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal attempted to counter the inequities of wealth in this country, but those efforts were unable to take wing until the end of World War II, when our unprecedented economic might could be turned to the benefit of the consumer. In the decades that followed, the government granted college educations to military veterans, funded education, infrastructure established and raised the minimum wage repeatedly. The result was a huge expansion in the middle class and a rise in average wealth for US citizens. Most of the country benefited. It was a golden age.

But the trend since 2000 has been to punish the poor and reward the rich. Not only do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, we now have a shrinking middle class as well, most of them migrating downward, not upward. This can only lead to economic and social instability.

We find ourselves back in the 18th century, with the wealthy odiously dismissing the value, the needs, the very lives of those less fortunate, with those on the bottom rung of the economic ladder being thrown into the dumpster, 'where they belong.' This wealthy elite now runs the government and has been in a position to codify this vile set of values into tax policy and governmental operations.

This trend must be reversed. We must raise the minimum wage. We cannot continue to give tax breaks to the wealthy, certainly not at a time when we are running up record deficits and spending billions on military operations. In order to secure the future of this nation we must spend more on education, not less, and increase investment to shore up our crumbling infrastructure to ensure our continuing economic viability.

We cannot continue to treat the poor as a burden to be abandoned, an inconvenience to be bypassed or ignored. Otherwise we'll find ourselves back in the 18th century. No one wants to be the victim of this kind of 'pride and prejudice.'

Michelle Malkin: WRONG about Liberals

Regarding Michelle Malkin's article about Haditha. I wrote her, and here's what I said...

You make a number of statements that just can't be backed up.

"...there is this incontrovertible fact: There are countless numbers of anti-war zealots on the American Left rooting for failure."

How can you use the word 'fact' and 'countless' in the same sentence? Any poll numbers, hmm? Any one done a phone poll asking specifically "are you hoping America fails in Iraq?" I'd bet you a year's salary that the percentage of yes votes would be in the single digits. If you're going to accuse liberals of 'rooting for failure' you should do better than that, otherwise you're just throwing hate bombs.

"They believe the worst about the troops."

Again, bullshit. I served for six years in the Navy myself. I have utter respect for the hard work and sacrifices these men and women make. But when thrown into an unjust war, undersupplied, undermanned, disorganized and under constant terrorist attack, many are going to snap. I don't believe the worst about the troops, but I believe the worst about those who caused this war and who have utterly mismanaged it. It is at their feet that the massacre of Haditha will lay.

John Murtha served for years. He knows what it's like. Do you honestly think HE feels this way? He wants the truth. He doesn't like what he's seen so far. His experience leads him toward (but not to) certain conclusions. Are you just going to blow him off because you don't like what he says?

"They've blindly embraced frauds who've lied about their military service and lied about wartime atrocities. They've allied themselves with socialist kooks and coddled murderous dictators."

This sounds more like Bush, his father and Reagan, actually.

• Bush Jr. still seems unable to cough up the truth about his missing 11 months of National Guard service, nor is there any good explanation of how he managed to leapfrog past the hundreds of others waiting and hoping for such service to avoid Vietnam.
  
  
• Reagan and Bush Sr., along with Rumsfeld, are largely responsible for Saddam Hussein's ascendancy in the first place, and lovingly turned a blind eye when he gassed his own people.
  
  
• Don't get me started on how many murderous dictators our government has allied itself with in the years since 1945. And yet you carp about liberals doing this? Wake up.

"They are looking for any excuse to pull out, abandon military operations and reconstruction..."

I don't think liberals want to abandon Iraq. We broke it, so we own it. But the sad fact is that things are getting horribly worse there, not better, and that mismagement, corruption and ineptitude are undermining our efforts to build a democracy. The continuing insurgence is taking a horrible toll on the morale and psyche of our troops, not to mention government contractors. Reconstruction is impossible under such circumstances. We need someone to do better.

"...and impeach the president."

We don't need an 'excuse' to impeach the president. Bush invaded Iraq for reasons that turned out not to be even remotely true. He shortchanged the efforts in Afghanistan to do so. He still hasn't caught Bin Laden. No WMDs were found. The actions of Bush and his administration, which were at worst lies and at best incompetent bumbling, have led to the loss of thousands of American lives, tens (or hundreds) of thousands of Iraqi lives and have cost us BILLIONS of dollars. The eventual cost could end up near a TRILLION.

"They insist on giving suspected foreign terrorists more benefit of the doubt than our own men and women in uniform."

Not true. But they do insist on holding them to the highest standard of military conduct, regardless of the circumstances. Are you saying you don't?

We're Serial Meddlers.

I keep returning to the thought that we meddle too much in the affairs of other nations, usually with consequences that are disastrous in the end. Since WWII we've been undermining or overthrowing governments, installing puppet regimes, engaging in proxy wars and propping up dictators for financial reasons.

When has this EVER worked out to our long term gain? Oh sure, we got some short-term benefits, but the arrangements we set up always end up collapsing in the end. Chile, Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, El Salvador, Colombia, Panama, Grenada.... the list goes on and on.

The best thing we can do for international peace and security is to stop meddling. Stop robbing, burglarizing, invading, undermining, etc. etc. If someone in your neighborhood kept attacking you at night, trying to replace your head of household, hacking into your bank to steal your money, threatening you with weapons, putting sugar in your gas tank, etc. etc. wouldn't you DO something about it? That's the position the US has put itself in since 1945.

This attitude that we're better than anyone else is utterly inconsistent with this worldview that we're justified in doing whatever we deem necessary to protect ourselves, unilaterally promote our own interests and undermine our competitors.

Eisenhower was right.

We should be ashamed of this government.

O'Reilly Lies about Malmedy. Olbermann BLASTS him.

Bill O'Reilly lies about the WWII Malmedy massacre -- TWICE -- saying it was US servicemen who slaughtered unarmed Germans when in fact it was the other way around. He does so -- TWICE -- while debating General Wesley Clark, as if O'Reilly knew more about war than Clark.

Finally, and most obnoxiously, O'Reilly reads an email on his show, correcting him on the facts, and he does not issue a retraction or correction, nor does he even apologize for the slander he visits on those US servicemen who were slaughtered by the Nazis over sixty years ago.

The most egregious part of this is that O'Reilly uses this alleged slaughter of Germans by Americans to somehow say that Abu Ghraib is not that bad, or that Haditha is not an aberration.

The man is a vile piece of slime. In this video, Countdown's Keith Olberman rightly excoriates and eviscerates him. Video courtesy of YouTube.

You go, Keith.

This Video ROCKS

Great video on YouTube! Tell your friends.



Hi-res version at peacetakescourage.com/whoarewe.html

Goldberg Unfairly Blasts Gore. Duh.

Jonah Goldberg recently lambasted Al Gore in the LA Times, remarking how the left (including Arianna Huffington) are all aglow over the "new" Al Gore. (See "Same Al Gore, Different Day.") Goldberg's assertion that Gore somehow lied about a summer trip to France in that the timing of said trip conflicted with Gore's tales of working on the family farm.

ThinkProgress took Mr. Goldberg to task: Mr. Goldberg responded with a typical rant about how the liberal media were 'whining' about him.

Here is my letter to Mr. Goldberg...

---

Mr. Goldberg:

Regarding your article here...

Media mischaracterization of Al Gore is a well documented fact. Your efforts to bolster that misrepresentation by claiming he did not go to Cannes AND work on his family farm in the same summer are not only petty, they're wrong.

Yet when challenged on it, all you do is whine "I didn't say anything about me! Why are they making this about me?" It's not so much about you as it is about what you say, and what you do, as a journalist. You decided to pick a profoundly unimportant nit, and you got the facts wrong. In response to the 'challenge' you neither confirm or refute the facts in question!

Then you go on to refer to Gore's trip to France and say "don't you think it's really weird that this is what a fifteen year-old kid wanted to do with his summer?"

Uh, there's nothing weird about that at all. Some kids might want to visit England, or Ireland, or Russia, or I dunno, FRANCE. Your characterization of Gore's trip as 'weird' says a lot more about you than it does about him, and it ain't pretty.

This is not about you. It's about what you do, what you as a prominent journalist write and say. You pick a small, unimportant fact, then get it wrong in a deliberate attempt to propagate the fallacy of Gore as serial liar. You're contributing to the dumbing-down of the coverage of American political discourse by doing so. True, it may be a small bit of dung, but it's still dung, heaped on top of the huge pile that you and those like you have contributed to so copiously over the past few decades.

Al Gore isn't that different now than he was in 1999. It's just that the serial attacks on his veracity have waned since he left the limelight. Perhaps being off the campaign trail has let him loosen up, be more 'real' in public than he was as a campaigner. If that's the case we should not blame Gore but the rampant mischaracterization and -- yes, I'll say slander -- perpetrated upon him by the media, a mischaracterization and slander you seem all to willing to revisit and perpetrate.

Gore was right about global warming, right about Iraq, right about corruption, right about so many things that President Bush was / is wrong about. With all that going on, why do you focus on a summer in France forty years ago? You write for the LA Times, for god's sake. Can't you do better than that?

Ann Coulter Bashes Rohe. I bash Ann Coulter

Regarding Ann Coulter's screed on the Rohe speech:

To say that Rohe's speech did not take courage is ignorant. Sure, you may take some comfort that the masses agree with you. But in the end you're up there in front, in front of figures of authority, sticking your finger in their eye. It's hard, and it's scary.

Aside from Coulter's anile dismissal of Rohe's all-to-real fear, she also disses the student's real-life learning experience, somehow insinuating that a summer spent in Cuba makes her a Communist.

Another distinction Coulter fails to make is the difference between disagreeing with someone and hating them. Coulter claims that "Literally every person Rohe talked to the day before the ceremony opposed the war in Iraq and hated McCain with blind fury." The students may or may not have hated McCain 'with blind fury,' but their objections were with his policies, opinions and his track record. But in the dank recesses of Coulter's twisted mind to disagree with somone is to hate them. Thus she assumes that the spitefulness, ignorance and ugly hate she continutally exhibits in her writings and lectures also festers in the souls of those she opposes.

Oh, and more inane name-calling. "Illiterate speech." "Gutless to suck up to the audience." "Toadying." "Brown-Noser." "Spineless Suck ups." Thanks for elevating the discourse. This of course takes no courage on Coulter's part.

More fact checking: Rohe didn't "attack McCain's speech before he delivered it." It had been delivered several times before, like, oh, I dunno, a STUMP SPEECH, which, by the way, was another reason so many students protested. This wasn't some address to the students, it was just another campaign stop for McCain.

The closest Coulter comes to making a fair point is in contesting Rohe's statement that "we have nothing to fear from anyone on this living planet." True, there are people out there who want to kill us. Not, as the racist Coulter would have you believe, because of who we are, but because of what we've done. Perhaps if this nation had done things differently we wouldn't have so many peoples in the world hating us. An ounce of prevention -- in the form of treating other nations and peoples with fairness, respect and consideration -- is far preferable to the pound of dubious "cures" represented by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, NSA phone monitoring, etc. etc. that we find ourselves paying for now to the tune of a trillion dollars. Naive? Possibly. But it's the only solution that will really work in the long run.

In concluding, Coulter says "don't insult my intelligence by telling me they're brave." Once she starts showing some intelligence, then we can debate whether or not we are insulting it. In the meantime it's obvious to this writer that Coulter has forgotten what it's like to be brave. She makes her living by offending people with racist rants, slanderous utterances and outright defamatory lying. The more outrageous she is, the more money and attention she gets. Coulter has long lost that impulse that tells us to be kind and considerate to the feelings and opinions of others. Thus the kind of courage that Rohe displayed is utterly incomprehensible to Coulter.

Colbert "So Not Funny" says Washington Post

Dear Mr. Cohen:

I just read your editorial about Stephen Colbert's appearance at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. You said Colbert was 'not funny' and that he was 'rude.'

You said "speaking truth to power" is a tired phrase and that it's meaningless, that mocking Bush's shortcomings to his face will result in no consequences at all. Such a claim is either incredibly naive or willfully ignorant. When you're in the same room, even feet from The President Of The United States -- even this one -- you'd have to feel a sense of awe, of wonder, perhaps even fear? What about those tired phrases like "Leader of the Free World," "Commander-In-Chief" and the like. Heck, many people have trouble contradicting their own parents to their face. Here we're talking about the President. Regardless of the content of Colbert's presentation, to claim he neither needed nor displayed courage in this situation is simply untrue.

You said he "wasn't funny." Perhaps it wasn't the material, just the room. I heard one pundit say "reading the script was funnier." Some laughed. Others squirmed with discomfort, either vicariously on behalf of the president or because they felt Colbert's barbs hit them. The audience on the whole was slower and less lively than the audience of The Colbert Report; perhaps this can be ascribed to a larger room, one less familiar with Mr. Colbert, and dare I say a bit stodgier than his core audience? Jon Stewart suffered the same problem when he hosted the Oscars. Perhaps you needed your own copy of the script, or perhaps a laugh track to better appreciate the biting irony in Colbert's caustic faux-adulation of Bush.

Lastly, you said Colbert was 'rude.' I think that a virtue, not a vice, when a comedian is calling the president to task. You also called Colbert 'a bully.' Before you belabor Colbert's rude or bullying behavior, consider the President's. He's a bully who attacked a country that was no true threat to us, who engaged in name-calling ("Axis of Evil") with other countries. There's nothing more bullying than this doctrine of pre-emptive war.

I think it incredibly rude -- to say the least -- for this president to have caused the loss of thousands of American lives in Iraq, the tens or hundreds of thousands of lost Iraqi lives, the billions of dollars spent (much lost to corruption), the utter failure to save American lives in New Orleans, the illegal wiretapping of phone calls in America, the 750 signing statements declaring his intention to not follow Congress' laws when he considers it undesirable to do so, his undermining of scientific research that fails to support his fundamentalist Christian worldview, his rolling back of environmental laws, his evisceration of labor laws and his coddling of big business, especially in the energy sector, where today profits run wild at the expense of every American.

That, sir, is rude and bullying.

Tom Gilroy on "Bush's Trojan Christ"

More good stuff on HuffPo from Tom Gilroy here.

Colbert = Amazing!

In the immortal words of Cuzco the Emperor... "BOOM Baby!"

Stephen Colbert delivered a flaming bag of doo-doo to the president's doorstep -- as the president stood there with the door open! This has got to be the high point of political satire for the new millenium.

Yet there is very little in the major news outlets about it. Maybe that's because Colbert reserved another, only slightly smaller flaming bag for the media.

I'm sending you here to watch the three sections of the video:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
  

Then I'm sending you here to thank the man...

• Thank You Stephen Colbert

Most excellent!

Comments on "A Really Repellent Spectacle"

With all the blathering on about high gas prices, Thomas de Zengotita makes the point on Huffington Post that the really repellent spectacle is that THIS is what is getting Americans all up in a lather. Not Iraq, not Katrina, not the Thousand Points of Scandal emanating from the Second Bush Presidency.

Sad but true, there are no quick solutions to our energy situation; yet our elected representatives think they can present us with the appearance of one in the form of tax moratoriums (not enough and not addressing the real problem anyway) and $100 rebate checks that are laughably off-target and insulting to most. (What, they're going to BRIBE is back into complacency?)

The only short-term fix that makes any kind of sense is to repeal the obscene tax breaks given to oil companies. These were allegedly passed to 'encourage' the oil companies to search more and drill more. Aren't their record-high profits encouragement enough? Besides, they're OIL companies. Searching for and drilling for oil is their JOB. I could see the government giving tax incentives to those sectors of our economy that are both vital to our national interest and struggling economically, but the oil companies are anything but struggling.

We need to apply long-term fixes, something the American public is sadly deficient at. Without sustained intelligent leadership (and yes, that means telling people what to DO) there will be no lasting solution to this problem.

We need one or more alternatives to fossil fuels, alternatives that *work.* Solar and wind, where feasible, to provide land-based power. Nuclear, if we can clean it up (man, wouldn't workable fusion be NICE?) along with better power storage technology to provide mobile energy for our transportation infrastructure.

We also need to reorganize where we are and who and what we move around. It's a pity we can't remake the geography of our cities and towns back to where it was in the 40s and 50s, before the mass exodus (exodii?) away from the cities and into suburban sprawl, but aside from the tremendous disruption such a change would entail there are now too many of us, and too many of us wanting to work in the city and live in the country.

We also don't all have to move around so much. Many jobs could be done from home, with an average computer, broadband access and VPN access to the corporate LAN. Those who say "you can't manage/work/communicate effectively this way" need to learn some new skills or adapt old ones. Email and telephones work well enough for most things, and teleconferencing can help with the rest. Even if people came into the office three days weekly instead of five it would help.

Regarding the goods we transport around the nation, more of it should be moved into the electronic realm for good. Didn't someone (Larry Ellison?) once say something like "why are we moving atoms around when we really only have to move electrons?") He was talking about software distribution, but nowadays and in the near future it could be so much more.

All of these are long-term shifts, socially seismic in nature, which will require a prolonged, focused and stubbornly determined effort on the part of our national leaders to implement. Instead of proclaiming a war "on" something (poverty, drugs, terrorism, insert adjective here) let's proclaim a war *for* something, a Manhattan Project for Energy.

It will take that kind of effort. Sadly, I don't see our government -- or our nation, for that matter -- rising to the task until we are sufficiently challenged. That challenge will come. The question is -- how bad will it get before we finally move off our backsides and get started? How many people will suffer and die along that road to necessity?

Tax Cuts Benefit The Wealthy. Who'dve Thought?

This just in from the "No Shit, Sherlock" department of the New York Times...

The first data to document the effect of President Bush's tax cuts for investment income show that they have significantly lowered the tax burden on the richest Americans, reducing taxes on incomes of more than $10 million by an average of about $500,000.

An analysis of Internal Revenue Service data by The New York Times found that the benefit of the lower taxes on investments was far more concentrated on the very wealthiest Americans than the benefits of Mr. Bush's two previous tax cuts: on wages and other noninvestment income.

Read the full article here. (Free Registration Required)

"If I were Bush?" Oh Geez.

I had a friend who responded to my previous post -- Time To Talk War Crimes, Indeed) -- with the rhetorical question, "what would you have done if you were Bush?" Here is my response...

---

Well, since you asked...

• If I were Bush I would NOT have attacked Iraq since there was no true proof they were a threat to us. (There were no WMDs. None. How could there have been proof?)
• If I were Bush I would not keep implying that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. They had nothing to do with it. That was all Osama, the Taliban and Afghanistan. In fact Saddam hated/distrusted Osama; didn't like the religious nut cases.
• If I were Bush I would not bomb hospitals.
• If I were Bush I would not permit torture or inhumane treatment in the prisons we run, in any way, shape or form, ever, and I would immediately fire and prosecute anyone who did. Anyone.
• If I were Bush I would not lie about wiretapping phone calls in this country. (Several months ago he reassured the press that a court order would be needed to do that; now we know they've done it in secret, bypassing a court set up for that very purpose.)
• If I were Bush I would not create a prison in the legal limbo that is Guantanamo so I could indefinitely hold detainees away from any legal recourse or protection, in violation of internationally recognized civil rights, just on a suspicion.
• If I were Bush I would not work so hard to create and perpetuate tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy while cutting services to the poor and undereducated.
• If I were Bush I would meet with the NAACP at least once a year, like every president before him.
• If I were Bush I would not clamp such a heavy hand of privacy over the entire government. The rate of documents that have been classified has increased dramatically since he took office, many of them formerly unclassified.
• If I were Bush I would not have let my Vice President write the country's energy policy only with input from big business leaders in the energy industry, shutting out any environmentalist input and keeping the minutes of the meetings secret.
• If I were Bush I wouldn't gut the EPA; I'd fund them better and tell them to get back to prosecuting polluters like they used to. I wouldn't create an initiative called "Clear Skies" that lets polluters pollute more. I wouldn't promote a program called "Healthy Forests" that lets big lumber log more trees in our national forests.
  
• If I were Bush I would not keep asking for "emergency funding" to pay for the Iraq war. I would roll it into the regular budget so everyone could see what it costs and so Congress could debate it.
• If I were Bush I would retool "No Child Left Behind" so it would help students actually pass those tests they're forced to take. Oh, and I'd fund it adequately too.

I could go on for a LONG time. (See 1000 Reasons.) This man is the worst president ever. Worse than Nixon. He's an international criminal. He's a liar. He's beholden to big business and his oil buddies in the Middle East. I oppose this man and just about everything he's done.

I also know the cost of freedom is not free. I'm ex-Navy. But how did attacking Iraq preserve, protect or defend our freedom?

It is NOT unpatriotic for me to say these things. In fact it is my patriotic duty to stand up and speak out. He is ruining this country. I love this country, but I am suspicious of this government and this president.

But in the end, in my previous e-mail it is not about what I said, but what I read. I encourage you to take the time to read about the attack on Falluja, or the article about how our policies in Iraq directly contradict the Nuremberg WWII war crimes trials. You'll see that our ship of state is being steered down a tragic road.

We're not supposed to be the bad guys, but now we are. Thanks to Bush.

Time to talk War Crimes, Indeed.

In "Time To Talk War Crimes", Robert Parry lays out a powerful argument for charging George Bush with war crimes.

In the Neuremberg trials after World War II, "...U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who represented the United States at the Nuremberg Tribunal, made clear that the intent was to establish a precedent against aggressive war." The idea was that it should be against international law to attack another country.

Yet that is just what America did in attacking Iraq. It was not in response to an attack; Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan did that. It was not to root out WMDs. None were found, none existed. Instead, we now hear of Condi Rice saying that Iraq was part of a culture that hated us. As if that were justification enough.

Add to that this article by Noam Chomsky, "Returning to the Scene of the Crime: War Crimes in Iraq", taken from his upcoming book. It describes the American attack on Fallujah in Iraq. The article details the U.S. bombing of hospitals, clearly a war crime, and the cordoning off of the city to prevent men aged 18-45 from leaving before the bombing starts. "The attack began with a bombing campaign intended to drive out all but the adult male population; men ages fifteen to forty-five who attempted to flee Falluja were turned back."

Is this not inhumane? Is this not the height of criminality?

Read these articles and weep.

---

Follow up: More on this topic in "If I were Bush? Oh Geez.."

We Need Debate, Not Derision

I came across an excellent post from Doug Dickerson in a guest column on The State...

"The partisan rhetoric coming from the liberal and conservative camps is part of a vital open debate in our republic. Yet when the rhetoric of extreme partisans from both sides goes unchecked, the message and the messenger are somehow perceived as being credible, and that is dangerous.

"When Harry Belafonte stands beside an evil dictator in Venezuela and calls President Bush the worst terrorist in the world, the rhetoric is a dangerous lightning bolt of destruction. When Pat Robertson says (even when he later apologizes for saying) that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s life-threatening stroke is judgment from God, that is destructive. When Howard Dean says that race plays a factor in who receives help after Hurricane Katrina and who doesn’t, that is destructive. When Cindy Sheehan attends a protest in Caracas and says of Hugo Chavez, “I admire him for his resolve against my country,” that is certainly destructive.

"No doubt, the debate in America has grown increasingly destructive and personal. Differences of opinion and politics are now personal attacks rather than honest debates. Simply watch any cable news evening talk show and listen for civility. It’s increasingly hard to find."

Read the full post here. Highly recommended.