Monthly Archive

Two networks (NBC and The CW) are refusing to air the ad for the Dixie Chicks’ new documentary, "Shut Up and Sing". As Glenn Greenwald has noted:

The networks’ claim is that they prohibit controversial political advocacy ads because allowing such ads would bestow an unfair advantage in political debates to those with the financial resources to afford to purchase such advertising. But that is just ludicrous, since the networks are awash with all sorts of overtly political ads, corporate ads that convey implicit political values, and politically charged programming content. Worse, the targets of the rejected ads are typically the most empowered and well-financed groups in our country, and it is just laughable for the networks to claim that allowing ads critical of them will put them at an unfair disadvantage in political debates.

...The very idea that it is in the “public interest” to prohibit ads that criticize the Leader is ludicrous on its face. The President is constantly given free airtime to argue his views and propagandize on virtually every issue, and the networks endlessly offer forums for his followers and surrogates to defend him. And the networks’ argument is particularly absurd now, given that networks are awash with cash from offensive, obnoxious, and repugnant political ads of every kind.

Think Progress has the ad, and here is the trailer:
 

 
And for something completely different, Lewis Black explains religion. (Warning: Some language may be NSFW).
 

 
via Pharyngula

Garrison Keillor explains what kind of people now represent us in the halls of government:

The Senate also decided it’s up to the president to decide whether it’s OK to make these enemies stand naked in cold rooms for a couple days in blinding light and be beaten by interrogators. This is now purely a bureaucratic matter: The plenipotentiary stamps the file “enemy combatants” and throws the poor schnooks into prison and at his leisure he tries them by any sort of kangaroo court he wishes to assemble and they have no right to see the evidence against them, and there is no appeal. This was passed by 65 senators and will now be signed by Mr. Bush, put into effect, and in due course be thrown out by the courts.

It’s good that Barry Goldwater is dead because this would have killed him. Go back to the Senate of 1964 — Goldwater, Dirksen, Russell, McCarthy, Javits, Morse, Fulbright — and you won’t find more than 10 votes for it.

None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Idea. Mark their names. Any institution of higher learning that grants honorary degrees to these people forfeits its honor. Alexander, Allard, Allen, Bennett, Bond, Brownback, Bunning, Burns, Burr, Carper, Chambliss, Coburn, Cochran, Coleman, Collins, Cornyn, Craig, Crapo, DeMint, DeWine, Dole, Domenici, Ensign, Enzi, Frist, Graham, Grassley, Gregg, Hagel, Hatch, Hutchison, Inhofe, Isakson, Johnson, Kyl, Landrieu, Lautenberg, Lieberman, Lott, Lugar, Martinez, McCain, McConnell, Menendez, Murkowski, Nelson of Florida, Nelson of Nebraska, Pryor, Roberts, Rockefeller, Salazar, Santorum, Sessions, Shelby, Smith, Specter, Stabenow, Stevens, Sununu, Talent, Thomas, Thune, Vitter, Voinovich, Warner.

To paraphrase Sir Walter Scott: Mark their names and mark them well. For them, no minstrel raptures swell. High though their titles, proud their name, boundless their wealth as wish can claim, these wretched figures shall go down to the vile dust from whence they sprung, unwept, unhonored and unsung.

• The Library of Congress has created a September 11 Web Archive, preserving the content of over 30,000 selected Web sites from September 11, 2001 through December 1, 2001.

• Despite the best efforts of the Republicans to terrorize Americans into voting their way, the fact remains that the chances of dying in a terror attack are unterrifyingly tiny:

[D]espite the never-ending litany of warnings and endless stories of half-baked plots foiled, how likely are you, statistically speaking, to die from a terrorist attack?

Comparing official mortality data with the number of Americans who have been killed inside the United States by terrorism since the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma reveals that scores of threats are far more likely to kill an American than any terrorist—at least, statistically speaking.

In fact, your appendix is more likely to kill you than al-Qaida is.

• Can You Tell a Sunni From a Shiite? It seems that very few in the Bush Administration can. What does that tell us about those who purport to be protecting us from a terrifying enemy?

For the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

A “gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today, and what does each want?

...[S]o far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

• Bob Harris creates the ‘Sheer Damn Decency Index’, showing where countries around the world stand on the question of torture:

Not to pretend that moral arguments ever work, but also: torturing another human being is wrong. Period. If you’re a Christian, as the saying goes: what would Jesus do? I’m no expert, but my guess he probably would not hold a blowtorch to anyone’s genitals, no matter how many episodes of 24 you’ve seen. Either you believe your damn religion or you don’t.

I bring up the torture thing today because of this new BBC survey on attitudes toward torture in 25 countries around the world. About 27,000 people were asked if they (a) opposed all use of torture, (b) would consent to the use of torture “if it may gain information that saves innocent lives,” or© had no clue.

Given the vividly public position of experts in the field and the absolute unambiguity of every major religion on the topic, the question really amounts to little more than asking if you’re (a) well-informed, decent, and sane, (b) willing to compromise your morals on a false premise, or© unable to distinguish between the two.

The complete works of Charles Darwin are being placed online by the University of Cambridge. It will be much harder for creationists and other varieties of nutjob to misrepresent what Darwin wrote when all his work is freely available to anyone who cares to look for it.

Glenn Greenwald points out that Fox News is out-and-out lying to its viewers about the powers granted the President by the Military Commissions Act of 2006 [PDF text; S 3930 summary]:

What is “flatly false” is what Kondracke told Fox viewers about the Military Commissions Act. It is true that the Act creates military commissions and establishes rules for those commissions in the event that the President wants a certain detainee tried, convicted and punished (almost certainly execution). Not even the Bush-led U.S. will openly execute detainees without a finding that they are guilty of terrorism. The commissions exist so that the Executive branch can impose sentence (such as the death sentence) on detainees who are found guilty of engaging in terrorism (or some other war crime).

But there is no right for detainees to be tried before a commission, and there is no obligation for the President to bring any detainee before a military commission. If the President does not want to obtain a finding of guilt and impose punishment, he has no reason to bring them before a military commission. He can just keep them detained forever without any finding of guilt and without any punishment being imposed (just as many of the Guantanamo detainees, and even U.S. citizens, have been kept in cages for years with no finding of any kind of guilt).

...This is not some obscure mistake on Mort Kondracke’s part. As he himself pointed out, the power to detain people indefinitely with no process is one of the principal objections made by opponents of the bill. How can he—along with Brit Hume and Fred Barnes—not know that the bill provides the President precisely that power? Yet Kondrake told the Fox audience that the bill gives the President no such power, while Hume and Barnes sat there and never corrected it… That our so-called “journalists,” even on Fox, are looking into the camera and giving such emphatic, false assurances to millions of Americans about one of the most critical issues of our time explains a lot about our current political predicament.

Fox News is part of the right-wing noise machine — and that machine has never bothered with the inconvenience of sticking to the facts.

Gotta love it. Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson is back, making certain everyone knows just how little he knows about the Military Commissions Act of 2006 [PDF text; S 3930 summary].

So Bush signs the bill into law that will allow terrorists to be interrogated harshly…

Jay advertises his ignorance. The bill does much, much more than merely authorize “harsh” interrogation. The bill eliminates the right of habeas corpus for everyone, terrorist suspects and American citizens alike. Anyone that the President deems an ‘enemy combatant’ can be detained indefinitely and without charge.

However, the rest of the ACLU’s whining about “torture” such as shirt grabbing of terrorist scum to get critical info is more along the lines of the ACLU we know and love to hate.

And here’s the crux of the matter: Jay again confirms that he bases his views not on facts and reason, but on ignorance and hatred. Read the rest of this entry »

A right-wing blogger who goes by ‘Raven’ has noted my recent challenges to a number of her fellow wingers, and has decided to challenge me in turn. Of course, she doesn’t seem willing to challenge me on statements I have actually made. She prefers to pull her challenges out of thin air.

So be it. Let’s take Raven’s questions in turn:

“1) The Clinton Administration’s policies with North Korea have resulted in Monday’s attempted atomic blast by the Norks. Meathead, we would like to hear your defense of Clinton and company on this.”

This is, of course, an example of ‘begging the question’, a popular logical fallacy amongst Raven and her peers. (Raven’s gambit can also be described as the “but… but… but… but… Clinton!” tactic. It’s always amusing to see this dragged out, as it is a clear indication that the underlying viewpoint is not reality-based.) Note also that as of this writing, there is still considerable doubt concerning whether the explosion detected last week in North Korea was, in fact, the result of the detonation of a nuclear device, or if it was, whether that detonation was successful. Raven is, in fact, begging two questions here.

The view that Clinton’s policies are the sole cause of the alleged North Korean nuclear test is not borne out by the facts. Fred Kaplan’s article ‘Rolling Blunder’ clearly delineates the actions that the Clinton administration took, including a credible threat of military action against North Korea in the spring on 1994, and later that year, the signing of the Agreed Framework (PDF) with North Korea. That agreement resulted in North Korea’s fuel rods being locked away under UN supervision. North Korea broke the seals and began processing the fuel rods in 2003 — well into George W. Bush’s first term, and after Bush had waived the requirement under the Framework that North Korea allow inspectors to verify that the weapons-grade plutonium remain under lock and key, and after Bush announced that the US was formally withdrawing from the Agreed Framework. Read the rest of this entry »

Over at Daily Kos, Darksyde reminds us that Rod Serling’s words are as true today as they were when they were first aired on a clear March day forty-six years ago…

This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street, in the last calm and reflective moment before the monsters came… The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts… attitudes… prejudices. To be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.

You all remember Kat, right? She’s the nice Christian lady who wants to nuke all those Terrifying Brown People™. Well, she seems to think that just posting a bunch of quotes is enough to make her point. Unfortunately, there are a lot of quotes out there. As you can see in this mirror, I posted a couple of relevant quotes in her comments:

“The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else.” —Theodore Roosevelt

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”—Dwight D. Eisenhower

But even Presidents who disagree even slightly with Kat get deleted. She’s so terrified of any opposing opinions nowadays that she hits the Delete key without even thinking. The only way Kat can maintain her worldview, it seems, is to completely block out anything that isn’t in lockstep.

I can’t live in fear of the world like that. Kat, it seems, has cocooned herself in fear. I pity her.

The War of the Words is Paul H. Henry’s paean to “the 101st Fighting Keyboarders… the true heroes of the war in Iraq: the conservative bloggers, pundits, and commentators who’ve kept the home fires burning in the face of opposition from liberals and other traitors.” The deadpan delivery is absolutely priceless… and the snark is spot on.

(via Crooks and Liars)

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health recently announced a study [PDF] of the mortality rate among civilians in Iraq during the three years following the US invasion of that country. Its authors report that:

We estimate that as of July, 2006, there have been 654 965 (392 979–942 636) excess Iraqi deaths as a consequence of the war, which corresponds to 2·5% of the population in the study area.

Naturally, the winger screech monkeys of the blogosphere are having a mass hissy fit at the thought that anyone would believe that Our Sainted President’s favorite war of aggression could actually have caused the deaths of civilians. I’ve picked one of these folks, the self-anointed “Gateway Pundit”, and have sent him a few questions about the screed he published earlier today:

Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2006 19:10:01 -0400
From: “meatbrain@thinkingmeat.net” <meatbrain@thinkingmeat.net>
To: “Gateway Pundit”
Subject: Questions re: Lancet Study

Jim:

I noted with interest your post today regarding the Lancet study on the death rate in Iraq since the US invaded that country. Your statements give rise to several questions, and I would be interested to see your answers.

1) Have you read the actual study itself?

2) You refer to the study as “an obvious fraud”. Why? What specific fraudulent actions do you accuse the authors of the study of perpetrating?

3) Do you claim that the authors of the study made any specific methodological flaws? If so, what were those flaws?

4) You state in your post that:

“This latest Lancet Study released today claims that 555,000 Iraqis have died in the last two years since their last controversial study! That comes to around 770 violent Iraqi deaths each day on average!!!”

Did the Lancet study claim that all excess deaths were due to violent causes?

5) How does calling Gilbert Burnham a “useful idiot” constitute a scientifically valid criticism of the study?

6) How does calling the study “politics” constitute a scientifically valid criticism of the study?

7) Do you have any scientifically valid criticisms of the study, or do ad hominem and straw man attacks constitute the whole of your objections to the study?

8) Why have you published Gilbert Burnham’s email address, if not to encourage email harrassment?

Thank you for your time and consideration.
—mb

I’ll update this post, should Jim attempt to provide serious answers to these questions. Personally, I am not going to hold my breath — as noted previously, the last thing a right-wing screech monkey wants is to get into a fact-based discussion. In the meantime, here’s what’s being said about the study in other quarters:

• A Newer World: Right-Wing Bloggers Try to Debunk Lancet Study – and Fail
• Juan Cole: 655,000 Dead in Iraq since Bush Invasion
• Dymaxion World: A Young Bloggers Primer on Intellectual Honesty
• Deltoid: Flypaper for innumerates

• Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute exposes the use of the use of doublespeak in the ‘War on Terrorism’:

One of the central insights of George Orwell’s classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four concerned the manipulative use of language, which he called “newspeak” and “doublethink,” and which we now call “doublespeak” and “Orwellian.” Orwell was alarmed by government propaganda and the seemingly rampant use of euphemisms and halftruths— and he conveyed his discomfort with such tactics to generations of readers by using vivid examples in his novel. Despite our general awareness of the tactic, government officials routinely use doublespeak to expand, or at least maintain, their power.

The purpose of this paper is not to criticize any particular policy initiative. Reasonable people can honestly disagree about what needs to be done to combat the terrorists who are bent on killing Americans. However, a conscientious discussion of our policy options must begin with a clear understanding of what our government is actually doing and what it is really proposing to do next. The aim here is to enhance the understanding of both policymakers and the interested lay public by exposing doublespeak.

• Via Pharyngula, we learn that the Rev. Dr. has been doing research on the ‘denialist’:

I’ve been thinking about putting together a comprehensive description of “the denialist.” You know, the type of person that refuses to believe in facts when they are indisputable. Topics of denial include the holocaust, HIV causing AIDS, global warming/climate change, evolution, the necessity of animals in research, cigarettes causing cancer, embryonic stem cells aren’t as good as adult stem cells etc…

As far as I can tell though, no matter what their issue, the denialists share some typical features (some of the features are often cited as signs of bad science in situations like helping judges determine quality of expert testimony). I’ve identified 5 features which I think are most common to these types of argument and most generalizeable to the phenomenon of denialism: Conspiracy, Selectivity, The Fake Expert, Impossible Expectations, and Metaphor.

• Orcinus provides graphic evidence that Republican scare tactics have not changed in more than fifty years.

• Scientists and Engineers for America, or SEFORA, is a new advocacy group that aims to give scientific knowledge and understanding a lead role in political discourse:

The principal role of the science and technology community is to advance human understanding. But there are times when this is not enough. Scientists and engineers have a right, indeed an obligation, to enter the political debate when the nation’s leaders systematically ignore scientific evidence and analysis, put ideological interests ahead of scientific truths, suppress valid scientific evidence and harass and threaten scientists for speaking honestly about their research.

Productivity guru Merlin Mann boils it down:

1. Reduce noise – We all have innumerable inboxes, interruptions, and distractions that are part of work and life — you can’t change that. What you can do is get more hard-nosed about the elective diversions that you invite into your world. Cancel a subscription for a magazine you never read or sign off an annoying mailing list. Needles get easier to find when you aren’t constantly adding new hay to the stack.

2. Write things down – Ever find a piece of paper in your office with seven digits on it? You know it’s a phone number, but whose? Get ruthless about jotting down ephemeral information if you’ll need to recall it later. Remember that your brain is a creative organ with limitless creative possibilities — but it makes a really crummy whiteboard.

3. Focus on action – My favorite productivity book, “Getting Things Done” highlights how anything you want to do in life eventually comes down to intentional physical activity — even if it’s something as mundane as “take out trash” and “call Mom.” Learn the habit of planning your world around action verbs rather than fuzzy nouns. “Implement Strategy” is not a task; it’s a project. “Call Jim about strategy” is a very do-able “next action” that keeps the ball in motion.

4. Get out of your inbox – Many of us are habituated to living out of our email inbox, voicemail, and the other “in baskets” of our lives. Instead, try to set aside regular, periodic times when you trawl for the new content in your life — then get back to work! Inboxes are delivery systems, not workspaces. The real work is happening in your brain and practically every other place that’s not an inbox. Stop allowing yourself to be brow-beaten by the latest, loudest, or most dramatic item that’s landed in your world.

5. Get pickier – You are the sole person in your life who gets to decide where your time and attention can go. Take that responsibility seriously by not wasting time on junk. You know in your heart what’s really important to you — does the current direction of your time and attention reflect that? Is “kid hugging” time where it should be in proportion to “Blackberry checking” time? Be mindful at the highest level about where you focus your energy, and always strive not to squander it on undeserving activities.

I know I could stand to improve with respect to each and every one of these techniques. There are probably very few among us who could not.

A few weeks ago, I noted that Jay “rope + tree + ACLU lawyer = pinata” Stephenson has persisted in his habit of protecting himself and his like-minded contributors and commenters from pesky questions about factual support for their claims. One of those commenters, hereinafter referred to as Crybaby Clay, has taken issue with my characerization of his claims as being unsupported by fact. In the process, he proves that he not only does not have any facts to support his claims, but he also does not even understand why factual support for his claims is necessary.

To those of us capable of making rational, evidence-based arguments, this is puzzling. Why would anyone trying to make a convincing argument deliberately fail to provide facts to back up the claims he makes? One possible answer is that such people are simply incompetent at the task of constructing an argument. Read the rest of this entry »

In l’affaire Foley, the facts do not get much starker than this:

Let’s review the facts:

FACT: GOP staff, working for Republican Speaker Denny Hastert, warned the page class of 2001-2002 to stay away from Foley – five years ago.

FACT: Former chief of staff to GOP Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), Kirk Fordham, says he warned Hastert’s chief of staff of Foley’s behavior three years ago. Whether or not you believe Fordham, his testimony is consistent with the other facts showing that the Republicans knew about Foley’s behavior long before last week.

FACT: Both Reps. John Boehner, the Republican House Majority Leader, and Tom Reynolds both say they told Dennis Hastert personally about the Foley issue months ago. Hastert says Boehner is lying. So one of the two most powerful Republicans in the House is lying about an investigation into a child sex predator. That deserves a separate investigation right there.

FACT: Hastert’s staff was informed of the Foley emails a year ago, but Hastert would like us to believe his staff simply never told him that a member of Congress, a member of his leadership team, was under investigation for preying sexually on young children – children who Hastert was responsible for.

And finally, the Republicans would have us believe, yet again, that a 52 year old man sending emails to a 16 year old boy he doesn’t even know, and talking to that boy about how his 16 year old friend has a great body, is somehow simply “overly friendly.” That is absurd on its face.

There really is nothing that the Republicans will not say or do in their desperate attempts to retain power at all costs. The Republican leadership has not a single true conservative amongst them; they are now nothing more than thugs, liars, and cowards.

One doesn’t have to spend much time reading right-wing blogs to find blatant examples of ignorance and fantasy being substituted for actual thought.

On the ignorance front, we have this example from a blogger named Clay, who comments on a recent post at StopTheACLU:

But, where this piece loses me is when it tries to extend that right to prisoners of war being held outside the U.S., who aren’t even US citizens and it’s insinuation that somehow the Bush administration is undermining the American right of habeus corpus by denying it to those detainees at Gitmo.

Clay is proudly demonstrating his intense ignorance of the provisions of the recently-passed Miltary Commissions Act of 2006:. The act applies not only to “those detainees at Gitmo”, but to American citizens as well. Anyone who is declared an "enemy combatant" will lose the right to challenge his detention in a court of law — and this includes US citizens. As Glenn Greenwald has explained, this is not a hypothetical — the Bush administration has done exactly this in the case of Jose Padilla, a US citizen held for years in military detention. Read the rest of this entry »

Widdle Timmy High, Liar for Christ, has settled the question of whether it is legitimate to use torture against terrorist suspects. Torture is acceptable — even Godly — because Jesus approves of it.

Would Jesus condone torturing a terrorist who is trying his damndest to kill innocent people that God Himself charges our leader to protect? Yes.

Well, that settles it, then. Torture is a Christlike virtue. Widdle Timmy will soon be teaching his Sunday School class how to tie a good strappado, and the sermon this coming Sunday will be “Follow the Lord and learn peine forte et dure”.

I think Widdle Timmy has done this country a massive service. He has demonstrated, definitively, why holy-roller Christians like himself are utterly unqualified to hold any public office, or serve in any capacity in law enforcement. There is no law that Timmy respects — and if you look closely, you will see that that includes the laws of God.