Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Latest Newspaper Column


Here's the latest, somewhat different from a version I posted here as a blog post only. Not everyone seems to agree.

Of course it was a mistake. It’s the gentlest among many applicable words; but that simple question about invading Iraq flummoxes every Republican presidential candidate. Even with different framing, “knowing what we know now” versus the less hypothetical “was it a mistake,” they resort to nervous babbling. For obvious reasons. 
It’s not as if I don’t understand prospective uncertainty. Thinking a patient had appendicitis, for example, I’ve taken out some normal ones; and no matter what the preoperative evidence, it always made me feel bad. But having considered all possibilities, having done appropriate tests and interpreted them correctly, I’ve not felt that my decision was a mistake. (In the days before more accurate imaging, we were taught that if we didn’t have a 15% normal appendix rate, we weren’t operating enough, risking perforation.) 
Bad outcomes don’t always imply poor judgment or sloppy technique. In fact, a decision to operate is always one of glorified odds playing; individuals react unpredictably. Taking another’s life in my hands was never something I took lightly; I owed patients nothing less than gathering all relevant data, considering it honestly, with only the patients’ best interest in mind. Still, the possibility of complications was always present, and factored into every decision I made. 
So, yes, I understand gray zones, and the impossibility of perfection. Which means I understand that in every way, on every level, in real time and in hindsight, the Iraq invasion was a monumental blunder. Unlike the complications with which I dealt in my career, there may be no healing from it. 
When Marco Rubio said, in response to what passes for tough questioning on Fox “news,” that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein, he wasn’t asked to elaborate. Given the unending chaos in the region that has resulted, and Fox’s complicit pre-invasion cheerleading, it’s unsurprising. But that’s not the most central point. The real point is that even if he ceded presidential decisions to Dick Cheney, George Bush must have known the reasons he gave to justify the invasion were questionable. Because they’d been questioned! Mobile weapons labs. Yellowcake. Aluminum tubes. Reconstituted nuclear weapons program. Actual WMD. To every one of his claims there were coetaneous counterclaims from credible sources. And let’s remember: no matter what might have been believed, inspectors were there, finding nothing. Cheney/Bush dismissed their reports. This wasn’t intelligence “failure.” This was intelligence distortion. 
It’s hard to conjure a similar situation; but had I operated when tests were equivocal and experienced doctors had questioned my diagnosis, if I found nothing when I went in and if the patient got sick as hell as a result, I’d have spent the rest of my life in a courtroom. Not to mention in self-recrimination, a phenomenon conspicuously lacking in every one of the war’s original cheerleaders. 
Think about it: Every prediction that preceded the invasion turned out to be wrong. Pay for itself. Greeted as liberators. Shiites and Sunni living in perfect harmony. The war will last mere weeks; democracy will spread like honey on a crumpet. After rightly putting the number of troops required way higher than planners were claiming, Eric Shinseki was fired. Even if those claims were made in good faith, what does it say about Cheney and Bush that they chose such clueless advisors; not to mention the fact that they shut down those who disagreed? Calling the invasion a mistake is far too generous. “What we know now” was known then, but the facts didn’t square with their unstoppable and delusional plan, and were shoved aside. They must have figured the results would be so mission-accomplished flight-suit glorious that we’d excuse their falsehoods (tinyurl.com/lm5wqfl.) 
Maybe worst of all was the coordinated nonstop mushroom cloud of calculated scare tactics and deliberate divisiveness: you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists. This was cynical manipulation in the extreme. 
For the next eighteen months we’ll watch a parade of presidential pretenders dance and demur. Except for Lindsey Graham, who loves war more than (your) life itself. He just announced that to anyone who even thinks of joining ISIS he’ll send in a drone. (tinyurl.com/knrsq4e) As to how he plans to read thoughts, and where he’ll entomb the Constitution, we await enlightenment. Having learned nothing, here we go again.
[Image source]

Sikhing Truth



Call me a cynical asshole (you wouldn't be the first), but as nice as is the story of the young Sikh man in Australia who removed his turban to aid a bleeding boy hit by a car, I find the gushing over it a little puzzling. He did a good thing. He did what one would hope anyone would do, religious constraint or not. Maybe that's the point: acts of simple humanity -- maybe especially when religion is involved -- have become unexpected. So I also find it a little sad.

On the lighter side, it reminds me of W.C Fields, and his story of how he, as "Honest John," got his name.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Shining Sunlight On The Contrast


About a year after Congressional Rs voted down yet another jobs program for veterans, President Obama announces a pilot program for training veterans for employment in the solar power industry.
... The solar industry has long taken a leading role in hiring veterans, employing more service members than any other sector in the U.S. Building on this tradition, the SunShot Initiative’s Solar Instructor Training Network – which aims to train 50,000 new solar installers in total by 2020, some of who will be veterans – is partnering with up to three military bases to create a veterans solar job training pilot project this fall. 
The new training project will connect up to 30 motivated, tech-savvy military personnel at each base with SunShot-supported accredited solar training institutions. Ultimately, lessons learned from this first successful pilot will enable the Energy Department and military branches to expand solar training access to interested veterans, tapping into the Department’s nearly 400 solar training partner institutions nationwide...
Oh, no, no one supports our troops like elected Republicans and those who elect them. Other than, you know, supporting them.

It's yet another example of the difference between what the president and those who criticize him, are about. That the Foxolimbeckians can keep the lie going is simply amazing.

[Image source]

Liar, Or Stupid?


Nowadays it's pretty hard to know if R politicos are one or the other. But I sorta doubt that all of them are so clueless that they think they're telling the truth when they make obviously fallacious statements. The one common denominator, though, is that they must think voters are stupid. Given their (the politicians') connections to and reliance on Fox "news," it's a pretty good assumption. Because Fox is nothing if not a disseminator of Republican disinformation. (Bruce Bartlett, conservative and former economic advisor to Saint Ronnie, recently said that what comes from Fox "news" should be viewed as a press release from the RNC. It's their right, he said; but it shouldn't be considered credible news.)

Anyhow, on the subject of liar vs stupid, there's Jeb Bush, in reference to his brother:
...“I think he could have used the veto power, he didn’t have line item veto power, but he could have brought budget discipline to Washington, DC... Now, that seems kind of quaint right now given the fact that after he left, budget deficits and spending just went up astronomically.”  
It’s important to note that when it comes to the fiscal details, Jeb Bush is badly confused. After George W. Bush left office, budget deficits got smaller, not bigger, and federal spending has increased slower, not faster. The fact that Jeb Bush has the entire picture completely backwards is a little unsettling – these are supposed to be basic details that a credible national candidate understands...
It's hard to believe he doesn't "understand" the facts. What he understands is that his potential voters don't give a shit about what's true. If they did they wouldn't be watching Fox, and they wouldn't be electing demonstrable liars.

So I suppose "the smart one" deserves credit for understanding the depths to which American politics, and especially today's Republican party, have sunk, and playing it like that guitar in "Mad Max." To our everlasting (which might not be that long) shame, the Foxified will eat it up like soylent green. After all, they still love it when über-mendacious Donald Trump says shit like this.

[Image source

Monday, May 25, 2015

Completely True

Doonesbury


Doonesbury [source]

Memorial Day

Reposting, on this day, from last year:


(If that isn't a [presumably] unintentionally ironic sentiment, I don't know what is.)

At the risk of repeating myself, let me say yet again:

Our troops deserve all the recognition they can get. More than that, they deserve all the help they need when they return from our wars. More than kudos for "protecting our freedoms," they need the resources to heal from the devastation of the wars to which we choose to send them, for often obscure reasons. (And as Bernie Sanders recently said about the R senators who voted against funding for veterans' benefits, "If you can't afford to pay for your veterans, don't send them to war.")

I say this as a Vietnam veteran, bearer of a Purple Heart. There's nothing that galls me more (well, nowadays, I'm sure there is) than those who think sticking a ribbon on their car, a flag on their porch, an aphorism on their wall, discharges their duty. While voting, yet again, for those same politicians who agitate constantly for war and refuse constantly to pay for the obligations incurred.

More than that: whereas it's most certainly true that there have been wars (not lately) in which our freedom was at stake, it's also evident to me that in these times the most real threats to our freedom come from within. From those same self-described patriotic politicians who pass laws suppressing freedom of voting; who'd deny civil rights to broad swaths of our citizens because of their sexual preference or (non-Christian) religious beliefs. It comes from broadcasters who constantly lie about and demonize the duly elected (twice) president. Who deliberately suborn revolution. For ratings. It even comes from our current Supreme Court, who equates corporations with people, money with speech, tilling the soil for the seeds of oligarchy, already in full bloom.

I'm more worried about my freedom when I hear about the latest attempt to force religious doctrine into public schools, to remove the teachings of science, than I am from the next terrorist attack. Such an attack can cause pain and economic downturn. Today's Republican party, with its bamboozling of the religious right and Tea Party people, on the other hand, can put an end to democracy forever; and it's trying damn hard to do it.

I'm more worried about my freedom, to enjoy a meal in peace, anyway, from those who feel the need to parade around flashing their guns, forcing their way into the local coffee house, than I am from an al-Queda sniper. I'm worried about the threats of violence received by anyone who speaks up about it, asking even for the most minimal of restrictions. Likewise, I see people like Cliven Bundy, the tax-evading, government-handout-taking lawbreaker and those -- including constitution-loving-but-not-undertstanding Foxolimbeckians --  who rally to his defense as a far greater threat to America's survival than the next people plotting in a cave.

So, yes, our troops have done heroic things. And it's way past time to find a way to fund all of their needs, even if it means -- omigod! -- raising taxes. Which, sorry to say, it does. But it's also time to stop seeing our wars and those who fight them as the only measure of patriotism.

It's time to see a few bumper stickers exhorting support for those willing to take the heat from within our borders; to withstand the cries of traitorism from those Foxolimbeckians while standing up for the rights of all our citizens. Willing to point out, at personal risk, what freedom of speech, freedom of religion really mean. What democracy means, and what it entails.

There are lots of measures of patriotism and love of country. Fighting its wars is, absolutely, among them.* But in my view, it's far from alone on the list. Until we recognize that, our "freedoms" will remain under threat. From us.

And thanks for my service.
_________________________________
*Except, maybe, to the extent that many people joined the military more out of economic necessity than as a desire to fight in our wars. Necessity born of those same patriots who voted against every job stimulating measure since Barack Obama came into office. Gee. Lousy job situation: people forced to join up. Coincidence? Topic for another day?

[Image source]

Tom Tomorrow


Entire cartoon here.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other


Overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland has, by national referendum, overwhelmingly (62% yes!) approved same sex marriage. Not only that, when the results were in, this is what the leader of the "no" movement had to say:


Amazing. No threats, no predictions of end-times. Just simple recognition of the outcome of a fair election, and the implicit acknowledgment that that's how democracy works.

Can anyone imagine such a response to such a vote in the US?

[Image source]

Friday, May 22, 2015

Filibullshit



So Rand Paul makes a point of filibustering (for ten hours! -- where have ye gone, Jimmy Stewart?) the renewal of NSA spy legislation. And, surprise, surprise!, he fundraises off it. With a "filibuster starter pack." Geez, the guy isn't even pretending to be sincere. Or hiding his contempt for voters.

Oh, man, it's gonna be a long year and a half.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

Trading Punches


I really don't know yet what to think about the trade deal known as TPP, which President Obama strongly supports and which the left wing of the Democratic party opposes. But this article is worth a read, as it addresses many of the talking points.
... Start with the widespread but absurd claim that the TPP is being negotiated “in secret.” The TPP will be public before the U.S. Congress votes to approve it, so our citizens will have legislative review of this agreement. The only constraint is that Congress will have to vote “take it or leave it” rather than offering amendments... 
...What about the claim that the deal violates international sovereignty by creating a separate judicial review procedure? Well, it appears that progressives have forgotten their historic support for the United Nations, or the international criminal court at The Hague, or a whole host of other cross-border agreements. If an international agreement is going to mean anything, it has to come with a dispute resolution mechanism that necessarily gets some authority delegated to an international body... 
...First of all, opening our markets to developing countries helps the world’s poorest people. ... Global inequality has gone down dramatically over the past several decades as trade agreements have brought prosperity to more poor regions. 
Second, as formerly poor nations become more prosperous through trade, their citizens choose to invest in goods that make the world a better place. Country after country, including the United States, enacted environmental improvements and labor safeguards as they became more prosperous...
I admire Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. The fact that they're both against the deal gives me pause. But I also believe that, even though he's not as far left as many would like, President Obama has been trustworthy in things I care about.

As the article suggests, there's a lot of money coming from somewhere in the effort to stop the agreement. I guess it'd be good to know from whom, and why. Meanwhile, I think if I ever get around to making up my mind, it'll need to wait until the deal is there for all to see.

[Image source]

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Combatant

I discovered this post from a few months back. For some reason I never published it. Now that Bill's back in the news, I guess it's as good a time as any.



     

Doesn't like getting called out, much, does he?

"My unit." The one in his hand, I guess. What a jerk.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Mistakes Were Made


I started writing this for my newspaper column right after Jeb's multiple choice fiasco. Since many others have chimed in, and since my next column isn't due for a while, I'm posting it here. It's already gonna look like I'm late to the party.

Of course it was a mistake. In truth, “mistake” is the gentlest among many applicable words, but that simple question about invading Iraq trips up every Republican presidential candidate. Even with different framing, “knowing what we know now” versus the less hypothetical “was it a mistake,” they resort to nonsensical babbling. For obvious reasons. 
It’s not as if I don’t understand prospective uncertainty. Thinking a patient had appendicitis, for example, I’ve taken out a couple of normal ones; and no matter what the preoperative evidence had been, including an unequivocal radiologic diagnosis, it always made me feel bad. But having considered all possibilities, having done appropriate tests and explained that there’s no set of data based on which it’s possible to be 100% certain, I’ve not felt that my decision was a mistake. (In the days before more accurate imaging, we were taught that if we didn’t have a 15% normal appendix rate, we weren’t operating enough, risking perforation.)  
In fact, no matter the operation in question, a decision to operate is always one of glorified odds-playing. Bad outcomes don’t always imply poor judgment or sloppy technique. But the act of taking another’s life in my hands was never something I took lightly; I owed my patients nothing less than gathering all the relevant data, interpreting it honestly and with only the patients’ best interest in mind. I was obliged to maintain my skills, and to be sure I knew the latest developments in research and technology. Still the possibility of complications was always present, and weighed heavily on every decision I made.

So, yes, I understand gray zones, and the impossibility of perfection. Which means I understand that in every way, on every level, in real time and in hindsight, the Iraq invasion was a mistake of monumental proportions, and, unlike the complications with which I dealt in my career, there may be no healing from it.
 
It’s telling that when Marco Rubio said, in response to what passes for “tough” questioning on Fox “news,” that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein, he wasn’t asked to enumerate the ways. Given the chaos in the region that has resulted, it’d have been clarifying. But that’s not even the most central point. The real point is that even if he ceded presidential decisions to Dick Cheney, George Bush had to have known the reasons he gave to justify the invasion were questionable. Mobile weapons labs. Yellowcake. Aluminum tubes. Reconstituted nuclear weapons program. Actual WMD.  
To every one of his claims there were, at the time, counterclaims from credible sources. And let’s remember inspectors were there, finding nothing. It’s hard to conjure a similar situation; but had I operated on someone when all the tests were equivocal and my diagnosis had been questioned to my face by experienced doctors, and if I didn’t find anything when I went in and if the patient got sick as hell as a result, I’d have spent the rest of my life in a courtroom. Not to mention in self-recrimination, a phenomenon lacking in every one of the war’s original cheerleaders. 
Think about it: Every prediction that preceded the invasion turned out to be wrong. Pay for itself. Greeted as liberators. Shiites and Sunni will kumbaya. The war will last a few weeks. Eric Shinseki was fired after rightly putting the number of troops required way higher than planners were claiming. Even if those claims were made in good faith, what does it say about Cheney and Bush that they chose such clueless advisors; not to mention the fact that they shut down those who disagreed? Clearly, to call the invasion a mistake is to be too mild. “What we know now” was, in fact, known then. It just didn’t comport with their unstoppable plan. I assume they figured the results would be so mission-accomplished flight-suit glorious, we’d excuse the falsehoods. 
For the next year and a half, we’ll be watching the parade of presidential pretenders threading the needle. Except for Lindsey Graham, who loves war more than (your) life itself. He’s just announced that if anyone even thinks of joining ISIS he’ll kill 'em with a drone. As to how he plans to read thoughts, who'll fly the drone, and where he’ll hide the Constitution, we await enlightenment.
  
[Image source]

Monday, May 18, 2015

I Wish



Sadly, the last panel has it wrong: in several states, Rs are doing everything they can to keep non-Rs from voting. Or, via gerrymandering, to make sure their votes don't count.

The Man Who Would Be Kinky


My man Charles P Pierce has the best name for Lindsey Graham: "Huckleberry J. Butchmeup" is what he calls him. He's about to launch a presidential campaign from under his bed, where he'd like us all to be. He's the guy who said we need to stop ISIS before they come over here and "kill us all." His will be a campaign based wholly on fear. Oh, and tossing the Constitution further than you could throw that aluminum foil on his head if you yanked it away and balled it up:
"If I'm President of the United States and you're thinkin' about joining al-Qaeda or ISIL — anybody thinkin' about that? — I'm not going to call a judge, I'm going to call a drone and we will kill you," Graham said at the Iowa Republican Party's annual Lincoln Day Dinner fundraiser.
Let's consider that for a minute, okay tough guy? You're gonna kill someone for a thought, before any action, right? And how, one might wonder, will you obtain those thoughts? And who's gonna operate the drone?

Huckleberry thinks you'll be impressed by his macho. He thinks you're so afraid that you'll do anything, allow anything, including thought policing and preemptive murder without the benefit of that silly "innocent until proven guilty" thing, to stay safe. Huckleberry wants to scare the shit out of you and then, he figures, he can be king.

Tell me again why we should give any of these people as much as a single vote.

[Regarding the cartoon: yes, he really said that.]

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Latest Newspaper Column


Here's my latest offering, as published today in the local newspaper:

I’m thinking of Baltimore and recalling these words: “While no one condones looting, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who have had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime. 
So said Donald Rumsfeld, explaining the lawlessness that followed bringing peace, freedom, and democracy to Iraq. From the picture that’s emerging, there are parallels: decades of anger, frustration, and loss of hope stemming from repressive and uncaring actions by government officials. 
My neighbor is an Everett cop, best neighbor ever. I know others, too, and they’re uncommonly good people. Working in emergency rooms and trauma centers, I’ve seen how dedicated and professional most police are, and what a dangerous job it is. I’ve seen the lowest of society’s low, criminals committing horrifying acts, addicts coming back and back again. I’ve come to know how easy it is to become cynical, how hard to avoid stereotyping whole categories of people based on the behavior of some. And yet, as important as relations between police and citizens are, they’re results, not the cause of the problem. 
Reactions to Baltimore, and Ferguson, and New York, and on and on, shatter along predictable lines: Overzealous militarization; they were asking for it. Lack of family; lack of opportunity. Racism is no more; racism is obvious. To discuss is to politicize. Too much money spent; not enough. Without doubt, though, African Americans in many big cities have ample reason to distrust the police; and police have cause to assume the worst when in ghettoized neighborhoods. Yet whereas it’s important to demand accountability on both sides, it’s also a pundit-ready distraction from the harder work of finding solutions. I’m no thaumaturge, nor have I the wisdom to dissect the complexities and failures of policy and of humanity that brought America to this place; even in retrospect, who can say what might have been different had other approaches been tried? 
But here we are, awash in failures, blame aplenty, and something needs to change. If it’s possible – and given our current political dysfunction, I’m doubtful – it might take generations to get there, and we don’t do “future” any more. Today’s teenagers and young adults, already through the cracks, are probably lost to us. And it’s likely impossible to repair, in time, the broken communities into which babies are now being born. But if there’s not time to rescue their neighborhoods, maybe we can still help those children, and the ones they’ll have in another generation, avoid poverty and crime. Were we to narrow our thoughts precisely to that, maybe we’d think past the usual ideological barricades. I may have no answers, but I’m pretty sure which ones are certain to fail: it’s those being advocated by the party currently in charge of legislation around the land. 
The problem is too many families without fathers, they say, yet they want tougher laws and more incarceration for petty crimes. It’s people unwilling to work, they claim, and people abusing food stamps and unemployment; so they cut those programs while refusing to fund job creation and skill centers; they’d eliminate the minimum wage, making work more futile, keeping economy-stimulating cash out of people’s pockets, while increasing dependence on social programs. It’s babies being born out of wedlock, they preach, while demanding failure-proven abstinence-only education, and legislating to prevent access to birth control and abortion. Yet for those kids whose mothers “choose life,” they reject paying for preschool, childcare, nutrition aid, and healthcare. In whatever direction solutions may lie, it can’t be this. This will beget more kids delivered into hopelessness, while blocking all avenues out. It’s only by thinking, specifically and non-ideologically, of the children being born right now into broken neighborhoods, not pointing fingers but seeking the best way to help them avoid repeating the cycle, that we can hope to end it. Some say liberals failed in Baltimore because they invested in housing and not in humans. It rings true. Now what? 
How sad that for something so important and obvious we still need to decide between spending on this or on unneeded weapons systems and tax giveaways to those who already have it made.
[Image source]

Has The Line Been Crossed, Finally?



I keep hoping, and I keep writing, and maybe it's even faintly possible, that there will come a line beyond which even the Foxified won't follow the craziness that's become today's Republican party. Lo, and behold: one of their more starry-eyed (she loved her some Mitt) pundits seems to have hit her limit
... Dr. Ben Carson joins Mike Huckabee in refusing to accept that Supreme Court decisions, on gay marriage for example, are binding. ... Huckabee has said much the same thing. And to boot he’s hawked “nutritional supplements” as a cure to diabetes. ... So he’s both a constitutional and dietary charlatan. Either one should disqualify him. 
Then there is Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who cynically chooses to pander to the conspiracy-mongers who turning a military exercise primarily in Texas into a secret plan to impose martial law. ...  
... In less obvious ways, some presidential hopefuls also play on the ignorance and fear of the public. How many times has Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) falsely suggested the National Security Agency is listening to the content of millions of phone calls? Before reversing himself, he also gave support to the anti-vaccine hooey. ... 
... It is only when they are repeatedly and consistently called out that pols will stop fanning the flames of paranoia and ignorance. ... And worse, it also debases our political culture, hampers serious debate and further erodes self-governance itself.
Good for her. Will it make a difference? Is hers a lonely voice among so-called "conservatives," or might it be a precursor to a suggestion of a sign of the beginning of the start of a hint of the possibility of the onset of the inception of the dawning of a great-if-shockingly-late awakening? Has the insanity finally become blatant enough that even the carefully, intentionally, and willingly blinded are beginning to see it? Heck, even Laura Ingraham, among the screamiest of the screamers, recently found Jeb Bush to be too hard to take.

We can hope. We must hope; because if it's not true, we're doomed as a country, and possibly as a species. Let's note, however, that Ms. Rubin didn't include climate change denial or the perserverating belief in trickle-down economics among her complaints. Until we start hearing that, too, from the right, it's just so much hot (oh, it's not really hot) air.


Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Who We Were, And Would Yet Be



This is a pretty chilling article-about-an-article about CIA torture in a "black site" in Thailand (except, of course, as George Bush told us back then, "The US doesn't torture.) And we may look forward to R candidates, lacking anything useful to offer on the home front (and when they're not ginning up resentment among Christians so that, per usual, they'll vote against their best interest) vying for the toughest of the tough-guy images, so that it may all start again.
... The CIA interrogators said that if Zubaydah died during questioning, his body would be cremated. And if he survived the ordeal, the interrogators wanted assurances that he would "remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life." ... 
I mean, if the guy doesn't have the good grace to die while we're torturing him, then we should stash him away for life, because we have rendered him nothing more than evidence. He's the knife the killer washes off in the sink, the gun the stick-up kid throws in the river, the witness that has to die because he saw too much or knows too much. Commit the crime. Bury the evidence. These are not original thinkers there, in our intelligence community.
... Marco Rubio's alleged comeback is attributed to his tough-guy stance on the jihad menace, which Rubio summed up last weekend by quoting an action movie at a wingnut rodeo in South Carolina. Make no mistake. When they talk about this, it's about putting our national conscience back in cold storage again and returning American foreign policy to the control of the people who run the black cells, who torture people until they are little more than evidence, and then hope to hell they die.
And we've just learned, if Seymour Hersh is to be believed in his latest, torture had nothing to do with obtaining the information that led to finding bin Laden. On the other hand, the facts that torture is ineffective, diminishes us and those who do it, and pollutes the possibility of trial, will in no way lessen the lust for it on the part of today's "conservative" party and its leadership. 

There's no end to the awfulness of these people, and no amount of evidence that will open their eyes nor the ones of those who vote them into office. That time, when people thought seriously about difficult issues, when facts were considered important and expertise admirable, is as long gone as Dick Cheney's original heart.

[Image source]

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Read It And Weep



This is the party that seeks total control of government. The one that not only denies climate change and would bar even mentioning the term, but would prevent further study of it. 

Last week, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, headed by Texas Republican Lamar Smith, approved a bill that would slash at least three hundred million dollars from NASA’s earth-science budget. 
... 
The vote brought howls of protest from NASA itself and from wider earth-science circles. The agency’s administrator, Charles Bolden, issued a statement saying that the bill “guts our Earth science program and threatens to set back generations worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate.” ... 
The vote on the NASA bill came just a week after the same House committee approved major funding cuts to the National Science Foundation’s geosciences program, as well as cuts to Department of Energy programs that support research into new energy sources. As Michael Hiltzik, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, noted, the committee is “living down to our worst expectations.”
... 
Cutting NASA and the N.S.F.’s climate-science budgets isn’t going to alter the basic realities of climate change. No one needs an advanced degree to understand this. Indeed, the idea that ignoring a problem isn’t going to make it go away is one that kids should grasp by the time they’re six or seven. ... 
“It’s hard to believe that in order to serve an ideological agenda, the majority is willing to slash the science that helps us have a better understanding of our home planet,” Representative Johnson wrote. Hard to believe, but, unfortunately, true.
It simply has to be, hasn't it, that there's a point beyond which even today's Foxified Republican voters won't go? Shouldn't it be that a majority of Americans would look at this political joke of a party and say, finally, enough idiocy is enough? Or has selfishness and denialism become the norm? Are we seeing the permanent end of rationality in a once-great country?

Sort of looks like it. Because people like this getting enough votes from anywhere to put them and keep them in office ought to be impossible in the US of all places, where advances in science that changed the world were once routine; where innovation and invention were synonymous with our name.

Really? Does made-up and perfectly packaged fear of the Muslim Kenyan Nazi Socialist Commie ISIS-controlled terrorist Christianity-outlawing America-hater and his illegitimate occupation of the White House explain the ease with which whole swaths of the county have been bamboozled into voting against their and their kids' future? If so, I suppose we deserve what we're getting.

But our children and grandchildren sure as hell don't.

[Image source]

Provocative

Monday, May 4, 2015

Gods' Will


[Image from somewhere on Facebook]

The Stinking Rose Of Texas


There is, it's well past undeniable, no bottom to the descent into insanity of todays Republican party:
...Rep. Matt Schaefer (R-Tyler) put forward an amendment that would make it illegal to terminate a pregnancy after 20 weeks, even if a fetus “has a severe and irreversible abnormality,” effectively forcing families with wanted, but unsustainable pregnancies to carry to term at the behest of the state and against the advice of their doctors or their own wishes. 
Schaefer said, during debate over his amendment, that suffering is “part of the human condition, since sin entered the world.”...
Yeah, that's it. Sin. Especially women. That'll teach 'em.

Happily...
Even some Republican lawmakers opposed Schaefer’s proposal, casting it as a cruel and unnecessary intrusion into the lives of grieving Texans.
But...
Schaefer’s amendment passed, briefly, before state Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer (D-San Antonio) filed a legislative point of order that prompted the bill’s sponsor to pull down the entire piece of legislation for review.
Texans, many of them anyway, are all about secession. What's taking them so long?

If they go, let's hope they take Kansas with them.
Public schoolteachers in Kansas could be jailed for teaching "harmful material," and university professors would be banned from signing op-ed letters with their titles when writing about public officials, if two new bills become law...
Truly, we are a nation of idiots.

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Saturday, May 2, 2015

Problem Solved



So in the "world's greatest deliberative body" there aren't the votes to pass a (meaningless) resolution that states the obvious:

WASHINGTON — The Senate rejected the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change, days after NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2014 the hottest year ever recorded on Earth. 
The Republican-controlled Senate defeated a measure Wednesday stating that climate change is real and that human activity significantly contributes to it. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, offered the measure as the Senate debated the Keystone XL pipeline, which would tap the carbon-intensive oil sands in the Canadian province of Alberta. 
The Senate voted 50-49 on the measure, which required 60 votes in order to pass.
“Only in the halls of Congress is this a controversial piece of legislation,” Schatz said. 
The chairman of the environment committee, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., is an enthusiastic denier of climate change, saying it is the “biggest hoax” perpetrated against mankind. 
“The hoax is there are some people so arrogant to think they are so powerful they can change the climate,” Inhofe said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “Man can’t change the climate.”...

If the resolution itself was meaningless, the implications of the vote on it aren't: 1) The United States is signing out of science. 2) The United States is electing idiots to run the country. 3) As long as Republicans control Congress, nothing much will be done to combat climate change, and 4) if they get the White House, it'll be nothing at all.

History, written by survivors of the human race or by aliens who've been waiting till the humans are gone, or by sea creatures or primates who evolve the small amount it'd take to be smarter than humans, will record with amazement what happened to what was -- yes, I agree it was -- the greatest and most innovative, the most brave and generous country that ever there was. When the world needed it the most, it checked out. When the problems humans had created had gotten so monumental that only hard and expensive solutions were available, the US said "We don't do hard, we don't do expensive. And, while we're at it, we don't do thoughtful and selfless concern for the next generation. We only do ignorance and conspiracy and rationalization for greed. We only do some perverse version of Jesus. And, ironically, we only do fk 'em."

And here's the thing: these guys always were and will always be idiots. It's obvious. So the blame and the shame go to those that, equally as selfish and unwilling to think beyond themselves, keep electing them. The teabaggers, the Foxified, the dittoheads, the paranoids, conspiracists, and the self-important religionists who use their religion to excuse hatred, bigotry, and ignorance in order to justify what amounts to no more than selfishness and fear of their own shadows.

To the extent that there's hope for a future, it depends on voters waking up. Given the well-financed, cynical, and highly effective efforts to keep them asleep, it seems pretty damned unlikely. Doesn't it?

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