cognitive dissident

It appears that the NSA’s telephone call database “is not complete.” USA Today has a follow-up to their earlier story. They add this mea culpa to the original revelation:

Based on its reporting after the May 11 article, USA TODAY has now concluded that while the NSA has built a massive domestic calls record database involving the domestic call records of telecommunications companies, the newspaper cannot confirm that BellSouth or Verizon contracted with the NSA to provide bulk calling records to that database.

We may never know the full extent of telco involvement with the NSA.

(Thanks to TPM for the tip.)

Posted by cognitivedissident at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

EconoCulture has a long interview with cartoonist Ted (Reagan in Hell) Rall. It reprints his controversial Pat Tillman cartoon—as well as his pieces critical of Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware—but doesn’t contain the infamous 2002 “Terror Widows” cartoon that prefigured Ann Coulter’s recent remarks by over four years.

I’m looking forward to his upcoming America Gone Wild! book, which will feature “a 35,000-word foreword detailing the hate mail, threats of death and dismemberment, client cancellations and the hypocritical behavior that originally inspired my "terror widows" cartoon.”

Posted by cognitivedissident at 3:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan’s widow, had a great piece in the Nov/Dec 2003 Skeptical Enquirer (reprinted here at FindArticles). If you missed it then, as I did, read it now. Druyan talks about “the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture,” and assigns the blame for this situation squarely on religion:

I think the roots of this antagonism to science run very deep. They're ancient. We see them in Genesis, this first story, this founding myth of ours, in which the first humans are doomed and cursed eternally for asking a question, for partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

She questions the conventional wisdom that Eden was a perfect place:

It's puzzling that Eden is synonymous with paradise when, if you think about it at all, it's more like a maximum-security prison with twenty-four hour surveillance. […] God places Adam and Eve in a place where there can be no love; only fear, and fear-based behavior, obedience. God threatens to kill Adam and Eve if they disobey his wishes. God tells them that the worst crime, a capital offense, is to ask a question; to partake of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. What kind of father is this?

She follows this up with an idea I had not previously read:

Perhaps Genesis should be read as an ironic story. Here's a god who does not give us the knowledge of good and evil. He knows we don't know right from wrong. Yet he tells us not to do something anyway. How can someone who doesn't know right from wrong be expected to do the right thing? By disobeying god, we escape from his totalitarian prison where you cannot ask any questions, where you must never question authority. We become our human selves.

After some Copernican cosmology, Druyan discusses “a corrupt treaty that resulted in a troubled peace” between religion and science:

The churches agreed to stop torturing and murdering scientists. The scientists pretended that knowledge of the universe has no spiritual implications. It's a catastrophic tragedy that science ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life and it's preciousness on this tiny world.

[…]

What I find disappointing about most religious beliefs is that they are a kind of statement of contempt for nature and reality. It's absurdly hubristic. It holds the myths of a few thousand years above nature's many billion-yeared journey. It says reality is inferior and less satisfying than the stories we make up.

She doesn’t dwell on the malicious myths of Sagan’s alleged “deathbed conversion,” instead preferring to talk about their life together:

Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous… […] I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful. [emphases added]

(Thanks to God Is for Suckers! for the tip.)

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Bush at is full of faux outrage over the New York Times article discussing the administration’s financial monitoring program:

The disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it does great harm to the United States of America.

The SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) monitoring has been public knowledge since December 2002, when a public report specifically mentioned SWIFT and noted that “The United States has begun to apply new monitoring techniques to spot and verify suspicious transactions.”

MediaMatters notes that the Bush administration has spoken about the financial monitoring program at least eight times, including this statement from Dubya himself on 24 September 2001:

We've established a foreign terrorist asset tracking center at the Department of the Treasury to identify and investigate the financial infrastructure of the international terrorist networks.

It will bring together representatives of the intelligence, law enforcement and financial regulatory agencies to accomplish two goals: to follow the money as a trail to the terrorists, to follow their money so we can find out where they are; and to freeze the money to disrupt their actions.

We're also working with the friends and allies throughout the world to share information. We're working closely with the United Nations, the EU and through the G-7/G-8 structure to limit the ability of terrorist organizations to take advantage of the international financial systems.

Is this supposed to be an attempt on his part to keep the program secret?

Glenn Greenwald summarizes the administration’s real problem with the Times:

Prior to the "treasonous" Times articles, The Terrorists already knew that we were eavesdropping on their international calls and monitoring their banking transactions -- because that information was previously, and repeatedly, put into the public domain, often by the Bush administration and President Bush himself. What the Times revealed is the lack of oversight and checks on these intelligence-gathering activities, not the existence of the activities themselves, which were already well known. [emphasis added]

Since the NYT cannot be completely controlled they must be maligned for their failure to conform. MediaMatters lists the many instances of media mouthpieces doing the administration’s bidding, making their perpetual accusations of treason against anyone in the media who dares to criticize Dear Leader Bush. Over at Hughes for America, the indignation runs high:

Is this outrage really about the leaking and reporting of sensitive material? No, because, if it were, the administration and its supporters would be leading the charge against those who printed the Valerie Plame information. This isn't about that. It's about an administration's contempt for a press corps that sometimes pokes holes in its veil of secrecy. It's about the White House's efforts to turn the typically servile media into the official house organ of the Republican Party.

In another post, Greenwald—not a man given to baseless hyperbole—noted that:

After the unlimited outpouring of venomous attacks on the Times this weekend, I believe these attacks on our free press have become the country's most pressing political issue. […] A book could and ought to be written about the corrupt reasoning and truly unparalleled dangers characterizing this anti-media lynch mob. But for now, following are what I believe are the most noteworthy points:

(1) There is not a single sentence in the Times banking report that could even arguably "help the terrorists." […]

(2) The reason there is "no evidence of abuse" is precisely because the administration exercises these powers in total secrecy. […]

(3) The Founders unequivocally opted for excess disclosures by the media over excess government secrecy and restraints on the press. […]

(4) How can any rational person believe that the reporters and editors of The New York Times want to help terrorists attack the U.S.? [emphasis added]

Greenwald supports his assertions with facts, which is one of the things separating his analyses from those on the Right who specialize in unsupported smears and slander.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The latest Washington Monthly cover story, “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern,” is a great follow-up to the Lakoff piece on Bush’s incompetence. Alan Wolfe leads with an observation that the Bush administration “if not the worst in American history, will soon find itself in the final four.” After comparing the Busheviks to exiled Trotskyites, Wolfe notes [all emphases added] that:

The collapse of the Bush presidency, in other words, is not just due to Bush's incompetence (although his administration has been incompetent beyond belief). Nor is it a response to the president's principled lack of intellectual curiosity and pitbull refusal to admit mistakes (although those character flaws are certainly real enough). And the orgy of bribery and special-interest dispensation in Congress is not the result of Tom DeLay's ruthlessness, as impressive a bully as he was. This conservative presidency and Congress imploded, not despite their conservatism, but because of it.

[…]

Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction. Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding government for political gain, but always in ways that validate their disregard for the very thing they are expanding. The end result is not just bigger government, but more incompetent government. […] As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster.

Using the examples of FEMA, Medicare, and Iraq, Wolfe observes the GOP’s “ideological hostility toward government” leads inevitably to failure.

Bad government--indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government--is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.

A number of brilliant bons mots sparkle among the paragraphs of Wolfe’s polemic, which is well worth reading in its entirety.

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John at AmericaBlog has some updated details on the latest Supreme Court's Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision: the most reactionary court in our lifetimes has upheld the principles of the Geneva Conventions (specifically Common Article III) against the Bush administration’s demand to try detainees before military tribunals. (It also will likely mean that Bush’s torture regime is also unconstitutional.) The entire opinion is here (1347KB PDF).

Rule of law: 1
Bush: 0

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Anonymous Liberal mentions a revelation from Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine that hasn’t gotten much attention yet: bin Laden’s pre-election endorsement of Bush. (Of course, he didn’t come right out and say it, but that’s obviously what he intended.) The CIA noted that “bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection," and the acting director observed that "Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the president."

AL has several quotes from the mainstream conservative media, whose mouthpieces consistently spun bin Laden’s tape to impugn John Kerry instead. He concludes by saying

Well, irony of ironies, al-Qaeda's real goal was apparently to get Bush re-elected, and it succeeded. All "without firing a shot." I wonder if the President ever sent Bin Laden a thank-you note.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Rush Limbaugh’s little drug problem (the Viagra, not the Oxycontin) has led to much laughter in the blogosphere. Digby has a good laugh at Rush’s expense, observing that the “impotent, thrice divorced, ex-drug addict, conservative, parolee” “went on a sex tour in the Caribbean and found himself rudely embarrassed for carrying recreational prescription drugs in his doctor's name.”

Who can't relate to that? This is a man who has been run through the mud and I think we would benefit from a thorough national conversation to try to understand Rush's urgent need for sex in one of the most poverty stricken countries in the world. Wouldn't he feel unburdened if he could share his thoughts with some of his staunch allies like James Dobson or Pat Robertson? Surely they'd be willing to hear his testimony.

And from the conservo-libertarian standpoint, I frankly think anonymous Viagra for every American male should be a right, not a privilege. The jack-booted customs agents should not be able to roust good taxpaying citizens who just need a little discrete help when they go on vacation and want to score a couple of underage sex slaves. It's unamerican. Perhaps some legislation is in order. We could call it Rush's Law.

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Another of the GOP’s pandering project has gone down in flames: their proposed Constitutional amendment to solve the non-problem of flag “desecration” has failed to clear the Senate by a single vote. The New York Times mentions the conservative desire to overturn the 1989 Texas v. Johnson decision (491 US 397) that invalidated existing state flag protection statutes. This Washington Post article has the best anecdote:

The Citizens Flag Alliance, a group pushing for the Senate this week to pass a flag-burning amendment to the Constitution, just reported an alarming, 33 percent increase in the number of flag-desecration incidents this year.

The number has increased to four, from three.

I guess that, since all the real problems of our nation have been solved, the GOP felt justified in going after a few purely symbolic ones.

update (12:27pm)
ThinkProgress has Orrin Hatch’s comments on the relative importance of flag-burning when compared to “the Iraq war, terrorism, the energy crisis, the 45 million Americans without health insurance or the 37 million Americans living in poverty.” Senator Hatch says:

I was asked this afternoon by a large body of media: Is this the most important thing the Senate could be doing at this time? I can tell you: You’re darned right it is.

It’s “the most important thing” for whom, exactly?

Posted by cognitivedissident at 8:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

George Lakoff has co-written a great piece at The Rockridge Institute (reposted at HuffPo) which states flat-out that “Bush Is Not Incompetent.” The authors point out that “Bush's disasters -- Katrina, the Iraq War, the budget deficit -- are not so much a testament to his incompetence or a failure of execution. Rather, they are the natural, even inevitable result of his conservative governing philosophy.” After listing his “accomplishments”—from “centralizing power within the executive branch to an unprecedented degree” to “Passing Orwellian-titled legislation assaulting the environment,” the article notes that

the Bush administration has been overwhelmingly competent in advancing its conservative vision. It has been all too effective in achieving its goals by determinedly pursuing a conservative philosophy.

It's not Bush the man who has been so harmful, it's the conservative agenda.

Among its main tenets are: expanding market fundamentalism, impugning social programs and regulatory agencies, trying to spread democracy via advanced weaponry, and the “unitary executive” theory of the Decider-in-Chief. In none of these areas has the Bush administration actually demonstrated incompetence. In fact,

Had Bush actually been incompetent, he would have never been able to lead us to war in Iraq. Had Bush been incompetent, he would not have been able to ram through hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts. Had Bush been incompetent, he would have been blocked from stacking the courts with right-wing judges. Incompetence, on reflection, might have actually been better for the country.

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Andrew Sullivan has several recent posts (here, here, here, and here) about political philosopher Leo Strauss. Sullivan twice refers to a “paranoid left” that has “never bothered to read or engage Leo Strauss,” but I’m not sure to whom he is referring. When he quoted from a reader who opined that “the liberal attack on Strauss is a misguided, ignorant, and nasty campaign. I have not seen a single citation from a book by Strauss in one of these critiques,” I thought immediately of Shadia Drury and Anne Norton. Drury (The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss) and Norton (Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire) both quote liberally from Strauss, and they are the most prominent of his critics on the left (leaving out Daniel Flynn, who criticizes Strauss from the right). My own criticisms of Strauss (from the left, to be sure) stem directly from reading his books, as well as those of his protégé Allan Bloom. While paranoid and ill-informed liberal assessments of Strauss and Straussians have been written, such as the Lyndon LaRouche variety, it is disingenuous to claim that honest and informed criticism does not exist.

Having said all that, I nevertheless eagerly anticipate Sullivan’s treatment of this greatly revered (and greatly reviled) figure of American conservatism in his upcoming book.

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Joe Conason writes at the New York Observer about the predictable pandering of the Right on the pseudo-issue of flag “desecration.” (Need I even make the point that, as a secular symbol, the American flag is technically not “sacred?”)

Noting that the House and the various state legislatures cannot be depended upon to defend the Constitution, Conason points out that

the final bulwark against this historic assault on freedom of speech consists of 34 Senators with enough courage to stand up for the substance of the nation’s ideals—and to resist transforming the beloved symbol of those ideals into an authoritarian fetish. That is the real danger to the flag, whose spirit the Republican majority is desecrating with a cynical partisan zeal.

After launching into Democratic minority leader Harry Reid for his support of the proposed amendment, Conason observes:

Fortunately, there is someone else in power who is willing to stand up for free speech, even at the risk of his own future prospects. If the Senate rejects the flag amendment and preserves the Bill of Rights from unprecedented disfigurement, a full measure of thanks will be owed to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican whip and prospective leader. He has vowed to vote “nay,” even though his party plans to use the amendment to preserve their majority.

Conason concludes:

Like so many resolutions and acts of Congress—and like the proposed statutes to prohibit flag desecration—this misguided amendment is a “solution” without a problem. But unlike many of the stupid things that politicians do, this one is important. It is a statement of contempt for the First Amendment and a dangerous step toward further restrictions on speech and expression. Let’s hope that Mr. McConnell and at least 33 of his colleagues can resist the entreaties of those in both parties who would protect the flag by torching the Constitution.

Let us hope.

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Some blue-staters have been feeling a twinge of triumphalism lately, between Bush’s abysmal approval ratings and the terminally stalled wingnut agenda (see my previous post), but it’s useful to see this Human Events satire as a cautionary tale.

Stare not into the abyss…

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Here is my letter-to-the-editor in response to an unsigned editorial in the most recent issue of The Advocate.

Thank you for your editorial "Freedom and Its Limits" about the danger that fundamentalism poses to freedom. I think, however, that more care should be taken to distinguish theists from theocrats. "Christianist" is a useful term in this endeavor, for which we can thank several bloggers (particularly Andrew Sullivan) who have begun to popularize its use. Goldberg makes this differentiation in her book, writing that “Christian nationalism and Christianity are two very different things,” and noting that the word “Christianism” can be used to parallel how “political Islam is often called Islamism to differentiate the fascist political doctrine from the faith.”

Although we may disagree with others’ religious opinions—as an atheist, I regularly do so—we must recognize that believers are a large majority of this nation. They gave invaluable support to the movements for abolition, suffrage, and civil rights; they may do the same for gay equality if we don’t drive them away by conflating their honest faith with the Christianists’ power-hungry demagoguery.

Many fair-minded religious Americans are dismayed that homophobic hate-mongers like Fred Phelps have become the public face of their faith. Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Michael Lerner of Tikkun (authors of God’s Politics and The Left Hand of God, respectively) are the most obvious examples of religious progressives, and there are far too many others—drawn from Reform Judaism and the Unitarian Universalist Association to the United Church of Christ and the Metropolitan Community Church—to list here. Reconstructionists, Dominionists, and other Christian nationalists may get the most press, but a large proportion of religious believers have not closed their minds to modern knowledge about sexual orientation.

We slight them and their faith at our peril.

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On Friday evening, Salman Rushdie led off Bill Moyers’ Faith and Reason series on PBS. Rushdie talked about being “a hard-line atheist,” discussed signing the manifesto against Islamism, and asked “What kind of a god is it that’s upset by a cartoon in Danish?” about the cartoon controversy earlier this year. The highlight was when Rushdie noted that “morality is previous to religion:”

…it's perfectly possible for me to say that we can as civilized people create moral codes to live by. We do not need that ultimate arbiter. And one answer to the question is democracy. And it seems to me that what happens in a democracy is that we don't have an absolute view of what is right and wrong. We have an argument about it, you know. And the argument never ends.

We have a continuing argument about what's okay and what's not okay, you know. At a certain point we believed that slavery's okay, you know. At the later point the argument develops and we decide-- I mean in that case with a lot of bloodshed--we decide that slavery's not okay. At a certain point we believed that women should not have the vote. Or that people-- or that only property holders should have the vote. At another point the, the argument proceeds and we say that that's not right, and that everybody--we have universal suffrage. So it seems to me that that argument is freedom. You know, it's not to win the argument, because actually nobody ever wins that argument. But the argument itself is freedom. [emphasis added]

You can read the first episode’s transcript here. Check the PBS schedule for information about the next episode.

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Commenting on Bill O’Reilly’s “malign viciousness,” Andrew Sullivan points out the latest error from the Spin Zone:

…when trying to excuse what might have been a war crime in Haditha, and in attempting to ignore or belittle the first American president to order the pre-meditated torture of military detainees, O'Reilly went a little too far. He got his facts wrong, and attributed a World War II Nazi massacre of unarmed American soldiers to the victims, Americans. He did this twice. Faced with this error, he blustered, lied again and then altered the transcript. [emphasis added]

The video of Keith Olbermann demolishing O’Reilly is here.

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Matthew Yglesias has some comments on the Coulter/Hitler quiz and how the Right’s writing style has changed over the past half-century:

Their rhetoric does have a lot of similar themes -- namely that liberals are evil and hell-bent on betraying the country -- but you really can tell them apart. For one thing, they have distinctive attitudes toward the question of the bourgeoisie. For Hitler, liberals are bourgeois (Hitler was, it's worth recalling, using liberal in the broader, European sense) and that's part of the problem. Coulter, by contrast, sees liberals as assaulting bourgeois values that she's defending.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here’s a simple refutation of the “atheism is a religion” canard. It’s funny, too!

(Thanks to Delta at Freethought Weekly for the tip.)

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Hank Steuver suggests a real “marriage protection” amendment over at The Stranger:

Amendment: Congress shall recognize no votes or opinions about the sanctity and preservation of marriage from its members who have been divorced and/or remarried while their first spouses are still alive. (To say nothing of those who are married while not-so-secretly fucking someone on their staff.)

The rest of his essay, and its discussion on “family-values” hypocrisy, is also worth reading.

(Thanks to John at AmericaBlog for the tip.)

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The InterAcademy Panel on International Issues has issued a press release and a statement on the teaching of evolution. Backed by 67 of the world’s national science academies, including the US National Academy of Science, the IAP observes that the science of evolution is being”concealed, denied, or confused with theories not testable by science.” Here is the meat of the statement:

We agree that the following evidence-based facts about the origins and evolution of the Earth and of life on this planet have been established by numerous observations and independently derived experimental results from a multitude of scientific disciplines. Even if there are still many open questions about the precise details of evolutionary change, scientific evidence has never contradicted these results:

1. In a universe that has evolved towards its present configuration for some 11 to 15 billion years, our Earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago.

2. Since its formation, the Earth – its geology and its environments – has changed under the effect of numerous physical and chemical forces and continues to do so.

3. Life appeared on Earth at least 2.5 billion years ago. The evolution, soon after, of photosynthetic organisms enabled, from at least 2 billion years ago, the slow transformation of the atmosphere to one containing substantial quantities of oxygen. In addition to the release of the oxygen that we breathe, the process of photosynthesis is the ultimate source of fixed energy and food upon which human life on the planet depends.

4. Since its first appearance on Earth, life has taken many forms, all of which continue to evolve, in ways which palaeontology and the modern biological and biochemical sciences are describing and independently confirming with increasing precision. Commonalities in the structure of the genetic code of all organisms living today, including humans, clearly indicate their common primordial origin. [emphasis added]

(Thanks to CommonDreams for the tip.)

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This quiz asks readers to distinguish between quotes from Adolf Hitler and Ann Coulter. I answered all of them correctly. This isn’t surprising, as many of them are outrageously easy. I’d like to see a revised version with more carefully chosen quotations.

(Thanks to John at AmericaBlog for the tip.)

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John at AmericaBlog has the details and the photo. How will the constantly pandering wingnuts react to this?

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Stephen Pizzo writes at AlterNer about being a “cut-and-run” liberal, and lists all the things the electorate should repudiate in November. (It reminds me of the list I wrote a week ago. I'm thinking that a t-shirt based on this list might be a good idea.)

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Kim Zetter writes at Salon about a government presence (presumably the NSA) at an AT&T facility in St. Louis that manages their Internet backbone. (This appears to be similar in purpose to the secret spying room in San Francisco, as Zetter wrote last month.)

(Thanks to Josh at TPM for the tip.)

Posted by cognitivedissident at 9:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hume’s Ghost writes over at Glenn Greenwald’s site about why the public square must not be ceded to the hateful and eliminationist rhetoric of media mouthpieces such as Malkin, Coulter, and Savage:

We must answer Coulter and her ilk, because unanswered their hateful rhetoric creeps into society, meant to divide us from our friends, family, and fellow Americans. The reason these pundits are incapable of disagreeing with someone without first labeling an opponent as liberal, Democrat, socialist, far left, moonbat, communist etc. (and the same can go for those who do the reverse) is because their tribal binary logic requires them to identify an outgroup, a "them" to be excluded, or worse, eliminated.

[…]

So it behooves us to answer and expose Coulter's puerile drivel so long as our national media continues to legitimize her and her compatriots.This isn't a partisan issue, it's a human decency issue, as principled conservatives recognize. If we want to stop the rot of our democratic institutions, then we must counter the putrid rhetoric of Coulter, Malkin, and company which acts as corrosive acid dissolving the bonds of our democratic society, dividing the country into "Us" versus "Them".

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Randall Balmer’s “Jesus is Not a Republican” is an excerpt from his upcoming book Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America.

Noting the Bush administration’s support for torture, and how “[c]orporate interests are treated with the kind of reverence and deference once reserved for the deity.,” Balmer observes that “The leaders of the religious right have led their sheep astray from the gospel of Jesus Christ to the false gospel of neoconservative ideology and into the maw of the Republican Party:”

I went to Sunday school nearly every week of my childhood. But I must have been absent the day they told us that the followers of Jesus were obliged to secure even greater economic advantages for the affluent, to deprive those Jesus called "the least of these" of a living wage, and to despoil the environment by sacrificing it on the altar of free enterprise. I missed the lesson telling me that I should turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, even those designated as my enemies.

(Thanks to TChris at TalkLeft for the tip.)

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Most people have, by now, seen the email purporting to prove the usefulness of racial profiling in preventing terrorism by means of questions like this:

In 2002, reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by:

a. Bonnie and Clyde

b. Captain Kangaroo

c. Billy Graham

d. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

Patrick Smith at Salon has a useful retort with questions like this:

In 1962, in the first-ever successful sabotage of a commercial jet, a Continental Airlines 707 was blown up with dynamite over Missouri by:

a. Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

b. Ann Coulter

c. Henry Rollins

d. Thomas Doty, a 34-year-old American passenger, as part of an insurance scam

Smith writes that:

The trouble with profiling isn't necessarily that it's racist or discriminatory. The trouble is that it doesn't work.

Which data points are we supposed to use? Formulating some religious-ethnic template becomes extremely unreliable. Most of the world's Muslims aren't Arabs. Not all Arabs are Muslims. Nearly half of Lebanon is Christian. Iranians aren't Arabs. Neither are Turks. Plenty of Syrians have red hair and green eyes. The Bali bombers weren't Middle Eastern, they were Asian. And the blabbermouth reactionaries who scream for ethnic profiling were mum when USA Today reported that al-Qaida was actively recruiting white Chechens.

Just think for a moment about our homegrown American terrorist incidents: Oklahoma City, the Atlanta Olympics, the Unabomber, and the DC snipers. You will notice that none of the perpetrators were men of mid-eastern descent. No one, however, suggests singling out white males—or ultra-conservative while males, or white male militia members—for special scrutiny.

(Thanks to Bruce Schneier for the tip.)

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Amnesty International has put up a parody website called AirTorture, which advertises “No Fares, No Paperwork” flights:

Air Torture is the premiere airline transporting detainees to select torture chambers around the world. Organizations such as Amnesty International like to call our business "outsourcing torture" because we deliver all our customers to countries where torture is routinely practiced - but our partners at the U.S. government have come up with a much better name: "extraordinary rendition."

Thanks to the Bush Administration, the "war on terror" has been a big boon to our business. All flights are fully funded by unsuspecting taxpayers in the United States.

Their “exclusive services” include:

All Air Torture reservations are booked through government intelligence agencies.

Air Torture takes seatbelts to a whole new level, providing passengers with restrains such as shackling in uncomfortable positions for the duration of their flight, and amenities such as hooding. As an added bonus, we'll forcibly drug you so you can spend the entire trip in a disoriented state!

Air Torture respects your privacy. We won't tell your family or loved ones where you are, what's happened to you, or when you'll be back - ever! It will be just like you disappeared.

I wonder if we progressives should leave this sort of humor to conservatives. Although the website makes several important points, I’m sure that none of this is funny to the victims.

(Thanks to TalkLeft for the tip.)

Posted by cognitivedissident at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon keeps tabs on the wingnuts, and receives email from the American Family Association. Her latest post, “To the Christmobile, Jesus! It’s time to save traditional marriage!” illustrates another of the wingnut lies about the “gay agenda.” The AFA had this to say:

Once homosexual marriage is legal, our religious liberties will be stripped away. Even pro-homosexual marriage advocates agree with that statement.

and Marcotte responded:

That’s completely wrong. For instance, he thinks lying is okay and I think it’s wrong, which is why he’s lying here about threats to religious liberty and I’m pointing out the truth, which is that the ban on same sex marriage is what is threatening to religious liberty. After all, the same sex marriage ban exists for only one real reason–the government is favoring bigoted churches over non-bigoted ones, which is a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment, if not the letter. [emphasis added]

That is a good point, and one that I have not read before.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Glenn Greenwald is righteously indignant about Specter’s ass-covering lies. Greenwald obtained a copy of the marked-up legislation wherein Specter proposed amnesty for the Bushevik lawbreakers, proving that Jack Cafferty was right: Specter is indeed a “gutless Republican worm.”

In sum, Specter's legislation amends the provision of FISA which provides for criminal penalties, and then, astonishingly, makes those revisions retroactive all the way back to 1978 (when FISA was enacted). The effect and almost certainly the intent of those revisions is to immunize the President and anyone acting under his authority from criminal liability for violating FISA -- just as the Post and the ACLU correctly reported, and just as Specter falsely denied. [emphasis added]

Why does the arcane process of amending a 28-year-old statute matter? Greenwald provides the answer:

…if we stand by and allow the Republicans in Congress to legislatively exonerate the President and his aides from breaking the law, it is hard to imagine what we won't stand by and tolerate. If the President can break the law and then use his party's control over the Congress to grant him legislative immunity from the consequences of his criminal behavior, no hyperbole is required to say that the rule of law exists only as an illusion. [emphasis added]

Posted by cognitivedissident at 1:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New Scientist reports that the Pentagon is

funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.

Jon Callas, chief security officer at encryption firm PGP, supplies words of wisdom for our times: “I am continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves. […] You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé.”

(Thanks to Bruce Schneier for the tip.)

Posted by cognitivedissident at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

PZ Myers explains at Pharyngula why he still thinks it wise to wade into the fever-swamp of wingnut lunacy:

I've watched good people do nothing about creeping lunacy and anti-intellectualism for decades. I watched appalled when that senile fool Reagan was elected. I was even more appalled when George W. Bush, airhead extraordinaire and utterly unqualified ignoramus, became president. The citizenry howls to destroy the science standards in our public schools, or complacently votes to lower property taxes at the expense of our children's minds.

[…]

…at least some of us are obligated to stand against the tide of garbage and fight it. We have to be loud and we have to be vocal and we can't afford to just shrug our shoulders and let it all pass. If we accept the idea that we're wasting our time criticizing patent idiots, then we might as well retire silently with folded hands and let the liars and scoundrels and frauds and kooks continue their campaigns unhindered. It's really worked well for us so far, hasn't it?

And for those who think Coulter is a buffoon and clown and opportunist, it doesn't matter how cynical she is, or whether she believes her own lies. Other people do. You don't want to take her seriously? Too bad. They do. [emphasis added]

Intellectual pugnacity is often underappreciated. Myers is right to illuminate Coulter’s ignorance of evolution, just as RawStory and the Rude Pundit (here, here, and here) are right to publicize her plagiarism, and anyone who bemoans her slanders of the 9/11 widows is likewise correct in doing so.

None of us should refrain from criticizing Coulter when she’s wrong, although it can be a time-consuming endeavor.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Joe Conason’s piece in the New York Observer reminds us that, without the 9/11 widows who Ann Coulter likes to slander, Bush would have blocked the 9/11 Commission’s investigation:

The truth about the Jersey Girls—Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie van Auken—is that they loved their husbands deeply, of course. They and their children continue to suffer from the loss that Ms. Coulter so heartlessly mocks. The truth is that in their suffering, these courageous women joined with other widows and family members to demand a serious investigation of 9/11. Together, they organized, researched and lobbied for thousands of hours to win the appointment of an independent commission, against the determined political opposition of the White House. The truth is that their success was an important victory for every American, without regard to party or ideology, and a vindication of grassroots democracy. The nation owes them all a debt of gratitude. [emphasis added]

(Thanks to Peter at the Daou Report for the tip.)

Posted by cognitivedissident at 1:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Once again, the Christianists demonstrate their poor grasp of history in an attempt to justify keeping the phrase “under god” in the Pledge. CWA (Concerned Women for America [sic]) Director of Government Relations Lanier Swann said:

Our country's founding fathers were men of faith who intentionally included the phrase 'under God' in an oath that serves as a symbol of loyalty and patriotism to our great country.

“Men of faith” is an acceptable description of the Founders, although “Deists” would be more accurate; they were certainly not CWA-style fundamentalists. Swann is off by more than a century for the difference between the Founding and the writing of the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. The phrase “under god” wasn’t added until 1954, compounding her error by another 62 years

Some people will believe anything, as long as it fits their preconceptions.

(Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip.)

Posted by cognitivedissident at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When Karl Rove said this about war heroes Sen. John Kerry and Rep. John Murtha,

"They may be with you for the first few bullets but they won't be there for the last tough battles."

Christy Setzer of the Senate Majority Project fired back with this:

"Unfortunately for the American military, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and their merry band of draft-dodgers won't be with you for the first few bullets, the last tough battles, or anywhere along the way."

Bravo!

Posted by cognitivedissident at 4:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amanda Marcotte’s “Morality 101 for the ‘Judeo-Christian’ Moralist” gives Dennis Prager’s Coulter-like opinions exactly what they deserve: ridicule and contempt. I have a few words of my own for Prager’s denunciations of Michael Berg and Cindy Sheehan, but I would rather reply with the words of another “morally twisted” pacifist, one who didn’t hesitate to lay down his life in the service of principle. The pacifist in question had some choice words for those consumed by anger, hatred, and revenge:

Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. […] Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. (Matthew 5:5-9)

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. (Matthew 5:39 and Luke 6:29)

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you… (Matthew 5:44)

Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven. (Matthew 18:21-22)

So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. (John 8:7)

Would the “Judeo-Christian values” maven Prager dare to call Jesus a “fanatic” who had “lost his moral bearings” amid “moral darkness” and caused “far more cruelty and death” as a result of his pacifism?

What a hypocrite.

Posted by cognitivedissident at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Tristero writes at Hullabaloo about the Libertarian/Democratic nexus, which reminded me of my comments on this Kos post from last week. Tristero writes:

Libertarians were sold a bill of goods by Republicans. As all, repeat all, recent Republican history has shown, they are as much the party of Big Government as the Democrats. Before going blue, however, libertarians will need seriously to refine their notion of what government is. Make no mistake: Democrats do not loathe government. They recognize that there are some functions a government must do. And they are honest - unlike their red counterparts - about their belief that there are some things governments shou