DOJ demands records of Wikileaks volunteers' Twitter accounts

In a disturbing and potentially game-changing development on the Wikileaks front, the United States Department of Justice has served a subpoena on the wildly popular microblogging website Twitter. Specifically, they want all manner of personal information about various Twitter users connected to the online whistleblower organization, Wikileaks, which group of notable activists, writers, and even government figures includes a member of Iceland's parliament.

On Friday, Glenn Greenwald reported (emphasis mine):

Last night, Birgitta Jónsdóttir -- a former WikiLeaks volunteer and current member of the Icelandic Parliament -- announced (on Twitter) that she had been notified by Twitter that the DOJ had served a Subpoena demanding information "about all my tweets and more since November 1st 2009." Several news outlets, including The Guardian, wrote about Jónsdóttir's announcement.

What hasn't been reported is that the Subpoena served on Twitter -- which is actually an Order from a federal court that the DOJ requested -- seeks the same information for numerous other individuals currently or formerly associated with WikiLeaks, including Jacob Appelbaum, Rop Gonggrijp, and Julian Assange. It also seeks the same information for Bradley Manning and for WikiLeaks' Twitter account.

The information demanded by the DOJ is sweeping in scope. It includes all mailing addresses and billing information known for the user, all connection records and session times, all IP addresses used to access Twitter, all known email accounts, as well as the "means and source of payment," including banking records and credit cards. It seeks all of that information for the period beginning November 1, 2009, through the present. A copy of the Order served on Twitter, obtained exclusively by Salon, is here.

The Order was signed by a federal Magistrate Judge in the Eastern District of Virginia, Theresa Buchanan, and served on Twitter by the DOJ division for that district. It states that there is "reasonable ground to believe that the records or other information sought are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation," the language required by the relevant statute. It was issued on December 14 and ordered sealed -- i.e., kept secret from the targets of the Order. It gave Twitter three days to respond and barred the company from notifying anyone, including the users, of the existence of the Order. On January 5, the same judge directed that the Order be unsealed at Twitter's request in order to inform the users and give them 10 days to object; had Twitter not so requested, it would have been compelled to turn over this information without the knowledge of its users. A copy of the unsealing order is here.

Greenwald is in close contact with Jónsdóttir, a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee (of Iceland's Parliament) and the NATO parliamentary assembly--if you follow Glenn on Twitter, you can also follow their correspondence, it's all out in the open, ahem. She informed him that she intends to meet with other Iceland leaders and plans to protest the subpoena.

Icelandic Interior Minister Ögmundur Jónasson, in the Iceland Review Online, called the matter "very odd and grave", and while he is waiting to speak with Jónsdóttir before going into more detail, he said:

“Of course it is a very serious matter, if a demand has been put forward that she submit personal information to US authrities. She is an Icelandic member of Althingi and furthermore a member of the Foreign Relations committee of Althingi.”

Jónasson continued: “The information from Wikileaks and others have only hurt people who work behind the scenes. I think that if we manage to make government transparent and give all of us some insight into what is happening in countries involved in warfare it can only be for the good.”

Well, yes. Many, many of us share that very sentiment: If we manage to make government transparent and give all of us some insight into what is happening in countries involved in warfare it can only be for the good.

Yet saying this--and meaning it, and living by it--will earn you all sorts of opprobium. It seems our country is more comfortable with a presidential candidate who repeatedly promises that his leadership will be all about unparalleled transparency but who, unbeknown to us, actually has his fingers crossed behind his back while doing so. (When they take the oath of office, and they swear to uphold and defend the United States Constitution, do you suppose they cross their fingers ever-so-slightly then, too?)

Finally, I'd like to call your attention to one of the comments at the Salon article, by reader Kitty Antonik Wakfer, who points to an excellent way for citizens to protest abuses like this via peaceful, effective means:

Withdraw voluntary association with harm-doers and their enablers/supporters

So there is actually a subpoena - and one that was signed by federal Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan in the Eastern District of Virginia!

Judge Buchanan has been very cooperative since at least early 2002 with the government's "war on terror" by sealing affidavits submitted in support of terrorism-related search warrants. An attempt to challenge her actions met with a US 4th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that "will encourage judges to seal more search-warrant materials and offer fewer reasons for doing so." www.firstamendmentcenter.org/commentary.aspx?id=15658

Judge Buchanan is described in an online account of the trial of Steve Wooford, a local Virginia anti-war activist who was convicted and sentenced by her in March 2003 to 6 months in prison for throwing blood on the Pentagon building's door and walls. Stated in this article to be a relative of conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, she sounds like just the type that the Department of Justice [sic] will continue to make much use of. www.indyweek.com/indyweek/when-war-breaks-out-its-other-peoples-blood-being-spilled/Content?oid=1188929

Only image I find of her online so far www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=118111 Maybe others have found something more identifiable so that voluntary association with her can be withdrawn by those who do not approve of her actions.

But the real key is the enforcers of her subpoena since she would never get out in the field and threaten or actually initiate force on Twitter personnel herself in order to compel them to turn over records. So I urge Twitter staff/mngt to photo/video the enforcers who come to their offices and do the threatening of and/or initiation of actual physical force. Let everyone see who they are and supply names so that the same negative Social Preferencing towards them can take place.

This selective (discriminating) association to exclude those who cause harm - and it is the enforcers who do the harm - is a potentially *very* powerful method of non-violent action, referred to as ostracism by many down through the ages. It is included in Gene Sharp's 2nd volume (of 3), "The Politics of Nonviolent Action", Chapter 4, "The Methods of Social Noncooperation".

Make it undesirable to be a government enforcer or to "support them", which has become mostly support of restrictions on voluntary mutually beneficial exchanges - in this case support of WikiLeaks. When the large numbers of enforcers begin to be uncomfortable with being Socially Preferenced against - avoided, shunned, ostracized - many will cease being government enforcers and the most of the rest will likely stick to arresting physical harm-doers. Additionally, those considering government enforcement "careers" will not see that position as so desirable. And that is the very point!

So many Darrell Issa skeletons; so little time...

"Mr. Obama could also use a little bit more self-awareness. He should consider how powerful—and inappropriate—a model he sets by his own frequent coarse and uncivil language." -- Über-thug Karl Rove--surely Darrell Issa's idol these days--criticizing the president for using harsh language in describing various Republican obstructionists.

WELL.

It seems the Republican party's newest Head Hatchet Man, one Darrell Issa, is no stranger to thuggery. Originally, I was going to describe, in detail, all these mind-boggling...ah, let's call them episodes in Issa's past and not-so-distant past. But after a bit of research, I quickly realized that sort of raconteurship would turn my blog post into something resembling a doctoral thesis. So let me just throw a few of them on the table, with links, and let readers come to their own conclusions about the man who wants to impeach President Obama while also repealing healthcare reform, "shrinking government", quashing every single good thing--every move in the right (as in, somewhat left) direction that the Dems were miraculously able to get done despite the obstructionism of Issa and his GOP cohorts--and generally set the bar even higher when it comes to being a Grade-A Classic ReThug.

I'd heard about the car-theft thing only recently. The arson, the weapons charges, the Duke Cunningham stuff, and so on and so on, well, to be honest, dear reader, I find myself a little in awe of someone so clearly bereft of even a shred of human conscience, so utterly devoid of self-awareness, and so packed-to-the-eyeballs with hypocrisy it's a wonder he can view himself in the vanity mirror when he does his morning muscle-flexings.

From (appropriately) Crooks and Liars:

In 2003, the former car thief turned car alarm magnate Issa led the effort to recall California Governor Gray Davis. (Davis was undone by the energy crisis which crippled the Golden State thanks in large part to market manipulation by Enron.) But part two of the Issa plan - to capture the Governor's office himself - abruptly ran aground when Arnold Schwarzenegger decided to get in the race.

On August 7, 2003, Issa shocked supporters and announced he would not continue his candidacy, comically claiming:

"It had nothing to do with Schwarzenegger's decision."

Issa at times wept uncontrollably as he made his premature withdrawal. His teary laments of "God Almighty" may have had something to do with the $1 million he invested to unseat Davis. This video shows Issa's pathetic performance as he concluded his gubernatorial ambitions had been terminated. The water works start around the 7:30 mark above.)

Okay, so Issa, along with his brother, engaged in felony auto theft and fraud--not once, but apparently three times--then bragged about forming an auto alarm company because, as he joked, "My brother was a car thief"; then, he bankrolled the California recall effort so he could run for the governorship himself and then withdrew in tears when Arnold Schwarzenegger stepped up and, er, terminated his aspirations. What else?

From Perrspectives' Top 10 Darrell Issa Hall of Shame Moments (go read the whole thing, seriously):

5. Issa Drives the Firing of U.S. Attorney Carol Lam

As it turns out, Congressman Issa was also a key player in another major Bush administration scandal, the political purge of U.S. attorneys.

Carol Lam, who successfully prosecuted disgraced San Diego Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, was one of the 8 U.S. prosecutors forced out by Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department. But it was Issa who helped create the façade that supposedly lax immigration enforcement by Lam's office was behind her dismissal.

It was Issa, after all, who released an anonymously written 41 page Border Patrol report which claimed "that Lam was giving less attention to human smugglers than she should." As the Voice of San Diego reported in March 2007:

Six days after the Associated Press story broke, Issa's office sent a letter to Lam, in which the congressman called the memo "an embarrassment to your office."

Monica Goodling, a Justice Department spokeswoman, sent the letter to Kyle Sampson, Gonzales' chief of staff who resigned in the attorney firing scandal's wake, and two other high-ranking officials.

"FYI," she wrote, "the assault continues."

Lam was eventually sacked, as TPM Muckraker concluded, "despite the fact that no one from the Justice Department ever confronted Carol Lam over her performance on immigration prosecutions."

And from San Jose's Mercury News:

Two years after the San Jose charges, Issa came under suspicion again
when the Ohio factory housing his fledgling auto-alarm business went
up in flames.

Issa had wrested control of the small, struggling electronics company
from two brothers in Cleveland.

A few months later, the business was destroyed in a Labor Day weekend
fire.

Arson investigators hired by the state concluded that ``this was not
an accidental fire.''

Suspicion focused on Issa, who had recently more than quadrupled the
building insurance from about $100,000 to $460,000, was inside the
building several times over the weekend and had taken a key computer
from the business a few days earlier.

Arson suspicion

The president of the business at the time, Joe Adkins, told
investigators that he thought that Issa had set the blaze.

Adkins was one of the people from whom Issa had seized control of the
company, and Issa has described him as being disgruntled.

Wednesday, Adkins stood by his statement in a telephone interview.

``Let's put it this way: There was an awful lot of very far-reaching
coincidences,'' he said.

At the time, Adkins said, one of Issa's brothers also aroused
suspicion.

As they were cleaning up the building, Adkins said, some employees
noticed that the brother's hair was burned off one arm.

About those weapons charges:

Issa was arrested twice for weapons charges, once in Ohio and once in Michigan. While Issa was in Ohio, he was given the job of firing a high level executive, Jack Frantz. Frantz recalls that Issa came into his office carrying a box. Issa opened the box and showed Frantz the gun. Frantz knew he was being fired and felt that was Issa's method of intimidating him. Frantz relayed the story to the Los Angeles Times and in response, Issa told the reporter, "No shots were ever fired." He further stated that he doesn't even remember whether he had a gun that day. The bookkeeper backed up Frantz's story, telling the LA Times that day was frightening. In the Michigan case, Issa received probation and paid a fine. Please see: http://politicalcorrection.org/factcheck/201006010007

So please tell me, someone, anyone: how does such a manifestly sociopathic thug rise to power in the United States Congress?

I mean, sure, there are plenty of crooks and liars scurrying about those halls, but wow, this kind of over-the-top, baldfaced criminal behavior from a man around whose neck hangs a past so blatantly checkered, Michelle Malkin might well accuse him of wearing a terrorist scarf? It strikes me as something that even the Bush family would shun as far too grubby and gangsta for their tastes--Bar would never want to besmirch her beautiful mind contemplating such behavior going on within her husband and sons' party. No, better to contract it out to the underlings and go boating or something.

I think I just answered my own question there.

Dogs are beyond awesome

Readers know how much I adore cats--all cats, all shapes and sizes and species--but in light of the recent addition to the family, one Ruby Lucille Tornello the Magnificent, allow me to show some love to my dear canine friends too. Watch the above Dogs are Awesome video (via Dependable Renegade) and be amazed!

Here she is, by the way, our own little Jack Russell Terrorist, posing with me (in a rare apron-wearing moment) on Christmas Day 2010:

Monday Marley: Burnin' and Lootin'

Long ago, my eldest son--then just a wee thing with a very grown-up taste when it came to music--had been playing deejay, going through our CDs, and he asked me if he could see Jimi live one day soon.

"Ah, actually no, baby," I said. "He died a long time ago. Before Mama even came to the States."

Okay, well, can we go to see Miles Davis?

"Er, ah, him too, my love. I'm sorry."

How about Bob Marley? Frank Zappa?

I shook my head again. I probably said something Mama-like and encouraging, along the lines of At least we have their music forever, to love and learn from. I don't recall exactly, though I do remember weeping a bit, privately (I hope), as I am wont to do when my children remind me how very fragile we are, to quote yet another musician.

Genius is immortal; human beings are not. We're not even especially tough or adaptive--not when we shove our heads in the seductive sand of convenience and denial and refuse to learn. A surefire recipe for extinction, that is.

Listen, grieve, learn, and look ahead. We've got work to do.

This morning I woke up in a curfew;
O God, I was a prisoner, too - yeah!
Could not recognize the
faces standing over me;
They were all dressed in
uniforms of brutality. Eh!

How many rivers do we have to cross,
Before we can talk to the boss? Eh!
All that we got, it seems we have lost;
We must have really paid the cost.

(That's why we gonna be)
Burnin' and a-lootin' tonight;
(Say we gonna burn and loot)
Burnin' and a-lootin' tonight;
(One more thing)
Burnin' all collusion tonight;
(Oh, yeah, yeah)
Burnin' all illusion tonight.

Oh, stop them!

Give me the food and let me grow;
Let the Roots Man take a blow.
All them drugs gonna make you slow now;
It's not the music of the ghetto. Eh!

Corporate-owned media and government agencies (i.e. the C.I.A.): two close friends working closely together for many, many years

Following up Sir Charles' recent post about the pathetic state of our mainstream press--who continue to do their masters' bidding while oblivious to pesky concerns like ethics and responsibility to readers, and who see nothing remotely questionable about the cozy relationships they enjoy with government officials--I wanted to call everyone's attention to a fascinating, in-depth, and surprisingly timeless (and depressingly timely) article written in the Rolling Stone by Pulitzer-winning journalist Carl Bernstein, which I found linked in comments at Glenn Greenwald's place.

In this excellent article--written in 1977, mind you--Bernstein discusses the beyond-close friendship of top American journalists and media outlets and the Central Intelligence Agency, specifically with regard to the procuring and sharing of information and sources.

I think you'll find it incredibly illuminating--certainly it goes a long way toward explaining the genesis of that loathsome subset of entrenched, maintain-access-at-all-costs journos whom we in Left Blogistan often call "The Villagers".

Read the whole thing. Plus ça change, as they say... (bolds are mine):

The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception for the following principal reasons:

The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence‑gathering employed by the CIA. Although the Agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalist‑operatives are still posted abroad.

Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

The CIA’s use of the American news media has been much more extensive than Agency officials have acknowledged publicly or in closed sessions with members of Congress.

(Bear in mind, Bernstein wrote this in 1977; today, after 9/11 and with the relatively recent passage of legislation like the Patriot Act, and the attendant erosion of privacy rights and the White House and NSA's widespread use of warrantless wiretapping of the phones of citizens and journalists alike, it is highly likely that this "special relationship" is no less extensive now than it was then, and indeed is probably even more far-reaching and corrosive in its scope and effect.)

These are a few of my favorite things, Part 1: The Nutcracker

Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing in Tchaikovsky's holiday classic, The Nutcracker.

They're simply brilliant together. Kirkland is a floating doll-child; Baryshnikov, a leaping soldier. He is as explosively powerful as she is delicate, ethereal, weightless.

Now it feels like Christmas.

What does it for you?

Book Review: Game Change, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.

-- from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

You'll hear no argument from me that the 2008 presidential election was a game-changer for American electoral politics. Certainly, it was a game-changer in terms of the leading candidates' gender and ethnic identities--for the first time ever, the top contenders for the country's two highest offices included a woman and an African-American man.

It was also a game-changer by default in that Americans, after eight years with George W. Bush in the White House, found themselves in a worse position economically than ever before--real wages had long been stagnant while the cost of living continued to rise, and the national debt had skyrocketed as the government borrowed more and more in order to finance two wars--and all signs were pointing to an impending sea-change. The table had been set.

And it was a game-changer in that a relatively new and exciting medium--the Internet--would now play a vital role in electing our next president.

From a November, 2008 New York Times piece:

One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president has echoed that of John F. Kennedy is his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet. [...]

Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign -– which was run by Mr. Trippi –- was groundbreaking in its use of the Internet to raise small amounts of money from hundreds of thousands of people. But by using interactive Web 2.0 tools, Mr. Obama’s campaign changed the way politicians organize supporters, advertise to voters, defend against attacks and communicate with constituents.

Mr. Obama used the Internet to organize his supporters in a way that would have in the past required an army of volunteers and paid organizers on the ground, Mr. Trippi said.

My fondness for politics (some might call it a masochistic streak)--and propensity to examine the natures and narratives of the human players involved therewith--added up to my being eager to read Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, which is now out in paperback.

No matter where on the spectrum your politics lie, Game Change is a terrifically absorbing and entertaining read. There is truly something for everyone. For the political novice, Game Change serves as a primer on How Americans Elect Leaders as well as a decent, almost-court-side seat at the Big Game, as it were, where the reader can see the posturing, promising, and bruise-delivering up close; where he can hear the the sotto voce swearing and deal-making with his own ears.

For the political junkie, it's a sustained--if limited and carefully controlled--glimpse of the mindset and methodology our would-be leaders. Yet despite enjoying the fly-on-the-wall perspective that Heilmann and Helperin weave into the stories (tales?), I found myself wanting more.

Numerous analyses of the campaigns of Hillary Clinton and, of course, Barack Obama have hit the blogosphere in the years since the election. I want to focus on two of the book's underdog protagonists, for lack of a better term, namely Senator John McCain and former-governor Sarah Palin. I'd already heard about Senator John McCain's hot temper and fondness for expletives, so reading that he screamed "Fuck you! Fuck, fuck, fuck (10x)" into his wife Cindy's face and made her cry at an early strategy meeting, while disturbing, did not really illuminate anything. What about his constantly-changing positions? Could a fly on the wall have perhaps noted the underlying reasons for McCain's various about-face moments--that he was not quite the "maverick" of yesteryear, but rather, an ambitious politician who'd embrace conventional wisdom and conservative-politics-as-usual (promoting the war machine, cutting taxes, tacitly supporting anti-immigration sentiments in word if not heart) if that's what it took to get himself elected?

I am deeply interested in that: what happens in a man or woman's mind when what one assumed were their core principles seem change so radically before one's eyes. And I remain interested, even as I fully understand the difficulty of getting into someone's head, particularly when that head belongs to John McCain. An omniscient hidden narrator--in this case, Heilemann and Helperin--needs to be bolder and more comprehensive in his filling-in of the motivation blanks. We cannot figure out McCain--he is unlike anyone we know--so given only limited information about his campaign's financial woes and his hot temper and foul mouth, we're going to liken him to a furious, bitter, more-than-a-little-unhinged older relative, or else a perpetually embattled and resentful history teacher we once knew and feared.

In their coverage of former-Governor Sarah Palin, in a chapter entitled "Sarahcuda", the authors famously discuss McCain's Vice Presidential preferences, namely, that he really, truly wanted to have Democratic Senator Joe Liebermann on the ticket. Liebermann had endorsed McCain, and along with Senator Lindsay Graham, the men had apparently become known as The Three Amigos, a group of guys who yukked it up on the trail and amused themselves by watching repeat screenings of John Edwards fixing his hair in a YouTube video. We learn that despite McCain's close friendship with Liebermann and his earnest wish to have him on the ticket--and despite John McCain's advisers being on board with him as the VP pick (at first), having contacted Liebermann and told him as much--the combined efforts and influence of Karl Rove and adviser Charlie Black led to his abandoning the notion of choosing a pro-choice candidate. We then find out that with mere days remaining before the Republican convention, McCain advisers, led by Steve Schmidt, recommended that he consider Alaska's then-governor, Sarah Palin. Quoting the authors as they describe Schmidt's pitch: "She was pro-life, anti-stem-cell research, pro-gun, and pro-states' rights...She was intensely competitive, apparently fearless, and endlessly watchable." We also learn how very little vetting of Palin was actually carried out; less, in fact, than "a potential assistant secretary of agriculture would receive".

Fast-forward to the present, bearing in mind the many skeletons that have fallen from Palin's closet and the ones yet to fall, one is hard-pressed to understand how an experienced politician like John McCain could possibly have chosen a candidate whose presence on the ticket would ultimately prove detrimental. Yes, Palin was pro-life, and that would please the evangelical voters. She was also charismatic and possessed of the kind of confidence and poise exhibited by aspiring beauty queen students with good pageant coaches. And she was attractive--all the better, as far as McCain was concerned.

She was also, as the authors subtly note, "unprepared"; however, inherent in that that term is the implication that with appropriate amounts of work, the subject can be "prepared". This was clearly not the case, we learn. In reading about the intensive efforts to educate and re-make Palin, one can only surmise that the best coaches and stylists money could buy were corralled and sent to her suite, and while the surface results would prove impressive, Palin's apparent lack of knowledge and unwillingness to study the issues would ultimately turn off one of the very voter blocs McCain and his advisers were counting on winning over: women. Particularly women who'd supported Hillary Clinton. She wasn't "unprepared": she was obtuse, and she seemed adamant about remaining so.

I found this passage to be especially shocking:

They sat Palin down at a table in the suite, spread out a map of the world, and proceeded to give her a potted history of foreign policy. They started with the Spanish Civil War, then moved on to World War I, World War II, the cold war, and what Scheunemann liked to call the "three wars of today--Iraq, Afghanistan, and the global war on terror.

That someone with so little knowledge could conceivably have become Vice President of the United States--a 72-year-old cancer-survivor's heartbeat away from the presidency, as they say--is utterly shameful, and after reading Game Change (and after having researched and written about Palin in the time since the election), I am still unclear as to how or why John McCain could make such an irresponsible choice.

Perhaps McCain had truly grown to hate politics, and as the authors imply, had come to despise his own role in it and take a sort of scorched-earth approach to his own career. Or perhaps he wanted to make a big, tantrum-like point to other Republicans--to show them that they were wrong (in counseling him away from choosing Joe Liebermann) and he was right.

Even though many of its revelations have become common knowledge since its first publication, and despite the many questions that the book leaves largely unanswered--questions about McCain's motivations; about Palin's strange and self-contradicting lies about her then-recent alleged pregnancy and her husband's membership in the secessionist Alaska Independence Party; and about Cindy McCain's inexplicably enduring tolerance for verbal and emotional abuse--Game Change is a thumping good read. In a world where messaging is so tightly controlled as to make one wonder if politicians consult their advisers before wishing their friends a Happy Birthday, it's rather delicious to see and hear our leaders (and would-be leaders) in all their flawed glory--worrying, swearing, sniping, and generally acting much like the rest of us. Only with private jets and nicer suits.

R.I.P. Journalism, part ∞ : Mainstream media completely ignores significant war protest

What did American journalists based in our nation's capital and elsewhere do when over a hundred U.S. veterans chained themselves to the White House fence--during a snowstorm, mind you--to protest the country's ongoing wars in Afghanistan and other countries?

If your answer is something along the lines of bupkis, nada, or sod-all, give yourself a chocolate reindeer.

Because that's exactly what happened on Thursday and Friday last week. Nothing to see here, folks, let's keep it moving... [bolds mine]

Washington Police arrested 135 of the protesters, in what is being called the largest mass detention in recent years. Among those arrested were Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who used to provide the president’s daily briefings, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the government’s Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration, and Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for the New York Times.

No major US news media reported on the demonstration or the arrests. It was blacked out of the New York Times, blacked out of the Philadelphia Inquirer, blacked out in the Los Angeles Times, blacked out of the Wall Street Journal, and even blacked out of the capital’s local daily, the Washington Post, which apparently didn't even think it was a local story worth publishing.

Making the media cover-up of the protest all the more outrageous was the fact that most news media did report on Friday, the day after the protest, the results of the latest poll of American attitudes towards the Afghanistan War, an ABC/Washington Post Poll which found that 60% of Americans now feel that war has “not been worth it.” That’s a big increase from the 53% who said they opposed the war in July.

Clearly, any honest and professional journalist and editor would see a news link between such a poll result and an anti-war protest at the White House led, for the first time in recent memory, by a veterans organization, the group Veterans for Peace, in which veterans of the nation’s wars actually put themselves on the line to be arrested to protest a current war.

Friday was also the day that most news organizations were reporting on the much-touted, but also much over-rated Pentagon report on the “progress” of the American war in Afghanistan--a report prepared for the White House that claimed there was progress, but which was immediately contradicted by a CIA report that said the opposite. Again, any honest and professional journalist and editor would immediately see the publication of such a report as an appropriate occasion to mention the unusual opposition to the war by a group of veterans right outside the president’s office.

And yet, the protest event was completely blacked out by the corporate news media. (Maybe the servile and over-paid White House press corps, ensconced in the press room inside the White House, didn't want to go out and brave the elements to cover the protest.)

I wonder if the protesters might have got themselves a bit more (as in, any) news coverage if they'd worn bright red Fight The War on Christmas sweatshirts decorated with tiny plastic made-in-China baby Jesuses and big faux-fur Santa hats festooned with tea bags?

Ah, staying indoors where the message, like the controlled climate, is reliably warm and fuzzy--all in a day's work (where "work" = rubbing shoulders and kissing backsides) for the poseurs who bring us what they call news and I call gossipy, meaningless effluvia.

How transparently bought-and-paid-for of them. How completely irresponsible, craven, and dishonest.

How utterly disgraceful.

The Rational Actor's Libertarian Fête

In the winter of 2007, I wrote this sonnet sequence in response to some of the worrisome events I'd seen take place that year--specifically, the many ill effects that deregulation and greed had wrought, and the often ghastly (and even fatal) consequences of holding profits and self-interest in greater esteem than such incidental and seemingly trivial matters as the health, safety, and financial well-being of human beings both here and abroad, from whence much of our food and most of our consumer goods are imported.

The FDA and Consumer Product Safety Commission are in marginally better shape under our current White House (though I've yet to hear of any of the shuttered labs being re-staffed and re-opened).

Sadly, however, this poem would seem to be even more on-point now, in late 2010, than it was when I first wrote it. Especially the last two lines.

The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached.
-- from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

The Rational Actor's Libertarian Fête

Come now, the ever-bitterer winter wind
Reminding one and all what season nears,
And with it come the needs and wants of friends;
The plight--the suffering!--told of distant spheres.
Ah, what is there to do but shake one's head
And wonder at the choices people make?
They knew what they were doing. He made his bed.
Some people want to live life on the take.
I suffered; there were sacrifices made.
The roads I chose have led me to this place,
And all my efforts now will be repaid;
My just desserts spread forth before my face.
Let this be, then, the year we celebrate
At the Rational Actor's Libertarian Fête!

Come in, have drinks; we've everything to please--
Our own self-interest, you'll be glad to know,
Means cocktails that are light on antifreeze
And bread with just the faintest melamine glow.
We're reasonably sure the Champagne flute
Won't leach a cloud of lead into each bubble--
Or Christmas-colored plastic cups might suit?
No need to thank the Chinese for their trouble.
It's quite a spread, when all is said and done:
There's corn--and beans--with tortured DNA;
The Monkfish, I am told, will surely stun;
There's penicillin in the shrimp souffle.
It's doubtful that the roasted pig will kill you;
Though, even then, the hospital will bill you.

Come now, the ever-bitterer winter wind,
Reminding one and all that all are one;
And so the needs and wants of nearby friends,
And suffering humans under a distant sun,
Become our needs and wants--it's all-impacting.
Each dollar saved becomes a lead-laced train
That sickens those too young for Rational Acting.
Each weakened law begets a poisoned grain.
And so the guests of honor at their Fête
May find their appetites are somewhat numb;
They'll hope the howling coming from the gate
Is not The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come,
His corrupted chains of debt stretched through the air,
Borne by toxic winds of laissez-faire.

D.N.T. 11/25/07

Originally published at Ezra Klein, Jon Swift's Best Blog Posts of 2007, and litbrit.

Wikileaks reveals yet more taxpayer-funded mercenary malfeasance in Afghanistan--now with child rape

So, about the whole Wikileaks matter. You weren't thinking, Well, I've pretty much heard everything, were you? Behold the latest serving of even more everything, and prepare to be horrified (bolds mine):

The Afghanistan cable (dated June 24, 2009) discusses a meeting between Afghan Interior Minister Hanif Atmar and US assistant ambassador Joseph Mussomeli. Prime among Atmar's concerns was a party partially thrown by DynCorp for Afghan police recruits in Kunduz Province.

Many of DynCorp's employees are ex-Green Berets and veterans of other elite units, and the company was commissioned by the US government to provide training for the Afghani police. According to most reports, over 95 percent of its $2 billion annual revenue comes from US taxpayers.

And in Kunduz province, according to the leaked cable, that money was flowing to drug dealers and pimps. Pimps of children, to be more precise. (The exact type of drug was never specified.)

Since this is Afghanistan, you probably already knew this wasn't a kegger. Instead, this DynCorp soiree was a bacha bazi ("boy-play") party, much like the ones uncovered earlier this year by Frontline.

For those that can't or won't click the link, bacha bazi is a pre-Islamic Afghan tradition that was banned by the Taliban. Bacha boys are eight- to 15-years-old. They put on make-up, tie bells to their feet and slip into scanty women's clothing, and then, to the whine of a harmonium and wailing vocals, they dance seductively to smoky roomfuls of leering older men.

After the show is over, their services are auctioned off to the highest bidder, who will sometimes purchase a boy outright. And by services, we mean anal sex: The State Department has called bacha bazi a "widespread, culturally accepted form of male rape." (While it may be culturally accepted, it violates both Sharia law and Afghan civil code.)

How is the United States caught up in this appalling, outrageous scenario? Well, we--or rather, DynCorp (the American private contractor whom the DOD retained to train the Afghan police) , were busy doing two things the United States seems to do better than anyone else in the world: throwing pallet-loads of tax dollars around the Middle East, and leaning on the press with all our fearsome might whenever a potentially troublesome story looms, bringing to bear whatever pressures are needed in order to get the story spiked altogether or, at the very least, spun and sugarcoated until it becomes more bon-bon than bombshell. DynCorp, or its local representative, used our money to hire the boys and throw the "party". Here's what happened next:

So perhaps in the evil world of Realpolitik, in which there is apparently no moral compass US private contractors won't smash to smithereens, it made sense for DynCorp to drug up some Pashtun police recruits and turn them loose on a bunch of little boys. But according to the leaked document, Atmar, the Afghani interior minister, was terrified this story would catch a reporter's ear.

He urged the US State Department to shut down a reporter he heard was snooping around, and was horrified that a rumored videotape of the party might surface. He predicted that any story about the party would "endanger lives." He said that his government had arrested two Afghan police and nine Afghan civilians on charges of "purchasing a service from a child" in connection with the party, but that he was worried about the image of their "foreign mentors," by which he apparently meant DynCorp. American diplomats told him to chill. They apparently had a better handle on our media than Atmar, because when a report of the party finally did emerge, it was neutered to the point of near-falsehood.

The UK Guardian picks up the tale:

US diplomats cautioned against an "overreaction" and said that approaching the journalist involved would only make the story worse.

"A widely-anticipated newspaper article on the Kunduz scandal has not appeared but, if there is too much noise that may prompt the journalist to publish," the cable said.

The strategy appeared to work when an article was published in July by the Washington Post about the incident, which made little of the affair, saying it was an incident of "questionable management oversight" in which foreign DynCorp workers "hired a teenage boy to perform a tribal dance at a company farewell party".

A tribal dance? Could illegal strip clubs stateside possibly try that one out? "Naw, those are not full-contact lap-dances, Mr. Vice Cop. Krystal and Lexxis are just performing an ancient Cherokee fertility dance. See those buck-skin thongs on and those feathers in their hair?"

As we mentioned, this isn't DynCorp's first brush with the sex-slavery game. Back in Bosnia in 1999, US policewoman Kathryn Bolkovac was fired from DynCorp after blowing the whistle on a sex-slave ring operating on one of our bases there. DynCorp's employees were accused of raping and peddling girls as young as 12 from countries like Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. The company was forced to settle lawsuits against Bolkovac (whose story was recently told in the feature film The Whistleblower) and another man who informed authorities about DynCorp's sex ring.

There's your tax dollars at work, Joe Six-Pack. Maybe now you won't get so worked up about the fact that KPFT gets about ten percent of its funding from the government and uses some of it to air Al-Jazeera.

That's right: the same DynCorp whose employees were accused of raping girls as young as twelve--and selling them into sex slavery--during the Bosnian conflict in 1999, was nonetheless, just a few years later during the Bush administration, hired to teach Afghan police recruits how to be good Afghan policemen.

The rape of children, ladies and gentlemen.

In our name. Enabled by our money. Now you know. And now you can let your Congresscrittes know, too.

You're damned right I think Julian Assange is a hero of sorts, not a "terrorist", for crying out loud. A flawed hero, perhaps (aren't they all?) but a hero nonetheless. One who is willing to risk his own freedom--his own life, to put not-too-fine a point on it--in order to do that which our well-funded, well-oiled (pun intended) mainstream press are too craven, too cowed by their paymasters, to do:

merely tell the truth.

Abandon Hope and beware of falling contrapassi*

Cowardice asks the question - is it safe?
Expediency asks the question - is it politic?
Vanity asks the question - is it popular?
But conscience asks the question - is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position
that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular;
but one must take it because it is right.

-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Kant was right (thank you, Driftglass): the flawed and distressingly contorted raw material that is human nature happens to be, for better or worse, all we've got to work with when we members of the species set out to build our lives. And by extension, to build our cultures, our societies, our governments, our world, and our history. Flawed and contorted; bendy and vulnerable in all the wrong places; rigid and unyielding at the most inconvenient of times. That's us.

I bring this up because I've been thinking a good deal about this inherently imperfect nature of ours, as well as the not-small matter of how certain crimes--like torture and murder and lies that cause innocent people to be killed--are what I consider to be Absolute Wrongs, and how all of this pertains to the sea change that has recently taken place with regard to my attitude toward American politics, or, more specifically, American politicians.

Who, after all, are us. Our government is us: We, the People. (For the time being, anyway.)

The opiated trudge toward oligarchy by The Reliably Fleeceable; the widespread indifference to the ongoing dilution (and eventual total dissolution) of civil rights; the childish solipsism that elides (if not outright denies) the destruction surely taking place at the other end of a pelted rock's--or launched Predator Drone's--ruinous trajectory; the willingness of far too many on the so-called Left to assume the position--to dress ourselves in sackcloth and ashes and write on our foreheads the twin legends Please Divide! and Please Conquer!

Us. That's all us.

I have been patient (having had lots of on-the-job training in that respect, trust me). I have looked at everything from thirty thousand feet; I've thought about it all in considerable depth, being my own Devil's advocate as well as allowing my frontal cortices to marinate in a complicated stew comprised, in equal parts, of the wisdom, experience, perspective, historical background, ideology, misguidedness, and even flat-out-wrongheadedness of others as expressed in their writings and speeches and guest appearances.

I kept coming back to the same thought. Kant (again) said it so well:

"Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity."

And there it is, the profoundly cramped and uncomfortable moral corner into which I've painted myself every time I've countered a criticism of President Obama and his administration with some variation on the Be Patient/Grow up and Be Realistic/Look, He's Done An Awful Lot of Good Stuff/Well Tell Me, Would You Prefer A Wingnut President? theme.

Welcome to Deborah's Corner of the Categorical Imperative, wherein I will attempt to reinvigorate my weary, battered moral self by noting the all-encompassing importance of doing that which is right, and doing it for no reason other than its own intrinsic rightness.

I can no longer applaud the actions and policies of President Obama; I can no longer bite my tongue and remain "patient" while the actions and policies carried out by that We the People group we call our government--regardless of their underlying (and lied-about) motivations--continue to wreak havoc, harm, and widespread injustice, on our fellow human beings.

The last straw was not, as I thought most likely, the president's unnecessary caving in to the obstructionist Republican minority in Congress and extending the costly Bushian tax cuts for wealthy Americans. No, it was this nasty Wikileaks revelation--about the current White House administration's despicable sotto voce attempts to strong-arm certain more law-abiding (and probably more morally-upright) foreign governments and thus stymie war crimes investigations abroad--which sparked my own epiphany. I realized that despite my having passionately called for the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney for their war crimes back in 2007 (great comment thread there at Ezra's old place, if you've got time), I was now at a point where I was allowing others--even some fellow lefties--to (nearly) convince me of how politically inexpedient, how inconvenient, and how costly-to-the-national-morale such war crimes investigations would be. And I was also--mistakenly (oh how mistaken I was!)--believing, all along, that President Obama would eventually turn his seemingly robust moral attentions to the ugly task of holding the criminals accountable. I could wait; it would happen. I was wrong. Jonathan Turley sums it up nicely:

Just as many conservatives abandoned their principles in following George Bush blindly, many liberals have chosen to ignore Obama’s concerted efforts to protect individuals accused of war crimes. Under our treaty obligations, the United States has the primary responsibility to prosecute torture by U.S. citizens. That responsibility rests with the Executive Branch – the prosecuting authority of the United States. What is particularly disgraceful is that Obama would refuse to fulfill this responsibility under our treaties and international law and then demand the same hypocrisy from our allies.

I will close with two more quotes. The first is from Numbers 32:23 in the Bible, the book on which our President placed his hand when he swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States: Be sure your sin will find you out.

And the second is a Latin phrase: Fiat justitia, pereat mundus, which means "Let justice be done, even if the world should perish". Or, if you prefer (as I do), a translation with a minor adjustment that allows for self-preservation:

Let justice be done, even if the world's evildoers should perish.

* cf.

The terrible price of acquiescence

Cassandra

I heard one who said: "Verily,
What word have I for children here?
Your Dollar is your only Word,
The wrath of it your only fear.

"You build it altars tall enough
To make you see but you are blind;
You cannot leave it long enough
To look before you or behind.

"When Reason beckons you to pause,
You laugh and say that you know best;
But what it is you know, you keep
As dark as ingots in a chest.

"You laugh and answer, 'We are young;
Oh, leave us now, and let us grow:'
Not asking how much more of this
Will Time endure or Fate bestow.

"Because a few complacent years
Have made your peril of your pride,
Think you that you are to go on
Forever pampered and untried?

"What lost eclipse of history,
What bivouac of the marching stars,
Has given the sign for you to see
Milleniums and last great wars?

"What unrecorded overthrow
Of all the world has ever known,
Or ever been, has made itself
So plain to you, and you alone?

"Your Dollar, Dove, and Eagle make
A Trinity that even you
Rate higher than you rate yourselves;
It pays, it flatters, and it's new.

"And though your very flesh and blood
Be what the Eagle eats and drinks,
You'll praise him for the best of birds,
Not knowing what the eagle thinks.

"The power is yours, but not the sight;
You see not upon what you tread;
You have the ages for your guide,
But not the wisdom to be led.

"Think you to tread forever down
The merciless old verities?
And are you never to have eyes
To see the world for what it is?

"Are you to pay for what you have
With all you are?"--No other word
We caught, but with a laughing crowd
Moved on. None heeded, and few heard.

-- Edwin Arlington Robinson, American poet and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

(H/T and big hugs to Cogitamus reader MR Bill)

Here's to you, Alan Grayson--A liberal turns her lonely eyes to you

I know I'm not alone in hoping that Florida Congressman Alan Grayson returns to Washington soon. He's been one of the very few Good Guys to ever represent our unique and complicated state, and now he's leaving:

"There's not any doubt about it. The people's business is not being done. There's enormous influence by lobbyists and by special interests," he says. "And the other side has completely sold out to them."

Grayson says he always resisted the influence of those lobbyists.

"A good description of what happened in my case is that they couldn't buy me, so they decided to destroy me with negative ads [during the midterm campaign] that people in my district saw an average of 70 times," he says.

Grayson responded with a controversial ad of his own. It called his opponent "Taliban Dan" and repeated clips in which Webster appeared to say about his wife "she should submit to me." Although the spot was roundly criticized, Grayson says he was justified in running it.

"We had to do it because, in my case, he ducked every debate we were scheduled to have. And the result of that is that we had no way to communicate his record except for the fact that we could run ads that people called negative ads," he says. "And it's unfortunate that the system leaves no other possibility."

Grayson says the ad was a last resort.

"The average voter in Orlando saw that ad twice. The average voter in Orlando saw 70 ads calling me, an incumbent Congressman, a liar, a national embarrassment, a loudmouth, a dog and an evil clown," he says. "So I don't think that my opponents or anyone in the media for that matter — none of whom ever came to my defense — can lecture me on civility in politics."

Let's face it, this whole "civility" argument is a baldfaced joke. It's a silencing technique, really; it's what the entrenched Villagers, aka the White House press corps, call the lefty bloggers--Oooh, they're so foul-mouthed and uncivil!

But why should it be considered uncivilized to speak the plain truth? It should not be thought rude or "conversation-stopping" (ahem, Jon Stewart) to point out that Bush is a war criminal--that's exactly what he, Dick Cheney, and a slew of administration members, not to mention all the unethical (and often thieving, brutal, and/or murderous) independent contractors who profited wildly from the Iraq boondoggle, actually are.

Don't people realize that the lying war criminals who brutalized and murdered others without reproof could, as easily and with as little fear of consequences, harm them?

It's not indelicate to call out the Republicans and Blue Cross Blue Shield Dog Democrats for their pro-insurance-industry stance on health care reform (which is to say, don't reform it at all)--it's dead accurate, and Grayson, in his bold, unflinching, and courageous way, was simply doing his job as one of Florida's elected leaders.

Speaking the truth, and fighting for people instead of plutocrats.

Sadly, those who control the message are, themselves, controlled by corporations--some of which have vast defense industry sectors--who own the majority of media outlets now. It is beyond frightening, and I don't know what we can do to counteract it other than keep speaking out on the fora which remain available to us and informing and encouraging people.

They do eventually come around. Some of them do, anyway.

Minstrel Boy is often writing that democracies are historically short-lived and bloody. I often wonder if human nature, even modern-day human nature, is still not that different from the ethos of our canine brethren in that we fall into packs, each with its leader and attendant hierarchy, as opposed to running governments of the people, by the people.

I wonder if, despite the noble intentions of our more cognitively evolved individual pack members, the group at large will always, inevitably, return to the ways of the wild.

At least wolves don't lie to each other about why they're attacking something or collapse their entire social structure by selling worthless debt instruments en masse and leaving countless numbers of their pack-mates homeless and hungry while they line their own dens with yet more mink and caviar.

TSA "logic" explained: I'm going to need to see you naked before you get on your flight.

"When I contemplate the natural dignity of man, when I feel (for Nature has not been kind enough to me to blunt my feelings) for the honour and happiness of its character, I become irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools, and can scarcely avoid disgust at those who are thus imposed upon."
-- Thomas Paine

Greetings readers, and once again--*sigh*--my apologies for the long absence. (I'll spare you the boring details.)

In light of the current outrageous state of affairs with airline security--and our government's wholesale casting aside of Americans' civil rights and privacy, just because we want to go from point A to point B--I'm posting the spot-on (and dreadfully funny) Xtranormal video and strongly recommending the series of excellent TSA posts my co-blogger Lisa Simeone has been putting up at Cogitamus.

In case you're still catching up: the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) have, in recent months, been spending countless millions of dollars on new, intrusive full-body scanning machines that utilize a type of x-ray radiation in order to see your skin beneath your clothes. So yes, that means they get to see you naked, from top to bottom, if you want to get on board an airplane at most U.S. airports. And it means your skin gets irradiated.

Well, you do have another option, one which, in addition to being shockingly invasive and sadistic, would seem to be punitive and coercive--in other words, aimed at forcing more people to submit to the scanners: you can undergo what is euphemistically called an "enhanced pat-down".

Enhanced as in, they will grope your sexual organs and breasts, sometimes directly on the skin, often without informing you that they're going to do that--in full view of other passengers waiting in line--and ask you to remove any medical devices or prostheses so they can humiliate you by holding them up and examining them, as they did to one flight attendant who was a cancer survivor wearing a breast prosthesis after her mastectomy. Yes, they will offer "private screenings", but you won't be allowed to document their procedures on video, not unless you want to be arrested; for this reason, many passengers who wish to avoid the radiation and thus submit to the gropefest are choosing to have it done out in the open, in front of witnesses.

Have there been abuses? You betcha. Already. Head on over to Cogitamus, and scroll through Lisa's numerous posts and the attendant comment threads. A Christian cookbook author was forced to strap her baby into a stroller and was then sexually assaulted when a TSA agent groped her beneath her clothes (she has wisely retained a lawyer). Numerous women report having their shirts unbuttoned and their underwear exposed to all and sundry; some have even had their underwear pulled away from their bodies while the agent peered in, front and back.

Listen, I'm not a prude. I've gone to nude beaches; I've been dressed, undressed, and re-dressed by fashion-show folk; I've given birth three times; when I was at UF, my friends and I would regularly go skinny-dipping in one of the many lakes and sinkholes near Gainesville. Furthermore, I don't belong to any organized religion, much less one that forbids women to expose their bodies. I respect the worldview of those individuals, of course; I simply don't have a problem, myself, with voluntary nudity in the appropriate context.

No, this is not about my modesty--or the lack thereof, ahem!--or, for that matter, yours.

This is about our Fourth Amendment right to be free from intrusive and unreasonable search and seizure.

This is about our rights to be secure in our person. Our right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent.

This is about our right to refuse to allow our children to have strangers touch parts of their bodies when we have all along been teaching them that only parents and doctors should touch said parts, and if someone else attempts to do that, they should scream loudly and inform a responsible adult.

This is about what it means to live in America, Land of the Free (to travel about the country) and Home of the Brave (as opposed to Home of the Pants-wetting Sheep Who Are Easily Coerced Into Giving Up Our Rights The Moment Someone Invokes The Terrorist Bogeyman).

As numerous security experts, including one responsible for the highly successful procedures at Israel's Ben Gurion airport, have noted, these scanner machines are not effective, and despite dosing you up with potentially cancer-causing radiation, they are not subject to the strict regulatory oversight, maintenance protocols, and calibration rules the way medical x-ray machines and CAT scanners are. They cannot detect some kinds of explosives, and they cannot detect anything that resides in a body cavity. Though the so-called Underwear Bomber is often cited as the reason the TSA needs to see you naked, the aforementioned experts state that these scanners probably would not have detected the type of explosives he attempted to use. It was passengers who thwarted that attack, as he succeeded only in setting his testicles on fire and embarrassing the CIA (again) when reports surfaced indicating that foreign offices had ignored the warning communiques of his own father, thus leaving him free to board an airline without setting off any alarm bells real or metaphorical.

Indeed, they are an enormous and shamefully wasteful expenditure by our government, one that was shot down by the House and somehow still foisted upon the public. A boondoggle and a giveaway to certain ex-Department of Homeland Security heads and their new, Dickensianly-named employers.

Good police work--by the FBI, for example--is what stops terror attacks before the perpetrators even get near an airport. Well-trained air marshals on select flights, metal detectors, responsible behavioral profiling by highly-trained personnel, chemical explosive detectors, and selective, secondary screening of high-risk passengers are what will keep us as safe as can be expected in a world, in a reality, where--let's face it--there are never any guarantees.

Other than this one: you are far more likely to be struck by lightening than to experience an airborne terrorist attack.

Oh, and this one: history tells us that when you give up some of your rights, you shouldn't expect to ever get them back.

Please contact your Senators and House Representatives and let them know you will not stand for these shameful, unconstitutional, and (ironically) terrorizing TSA procedures.

Meet Florida's next governor

I had not seen this footage, compiled by the Alex Sink campaign, prior to this morning--a full three days after the midterms. And I'm guessing I am a bit more politically active (and aware) than the average bear. Therefore it's a given that a sizable number of Floridians never saw it, either.

So why wasn't this--and other revelatory information about Scott that I understand to be out there--blasting from every television station on every tv set in the state, every day, for the past two weeks?

Because ad time costs a fortune, and Alex Sink did not--could not--go the Buy Yourself A State route, the way Rick Scott did here, the way Meg Whitman tried to in California. And you can be certain that the billions of dollars in anonymous (i.e. corporate and foreign) donations--the Citizens-enabled stuff that fueled the fire that boiled the tea that washed through the electorate and invigorated the frightened, angry, and newly-impoverished Old White Religious Right--were landing, disproportionately, in the rightmost coffers, not in those of struggling Democrats.

From comments at the YouTube site:

We know this video is put together. It is a campaign ad. But the fact remains that there is a very legitimate doubt about this guy. By the way, he owns many urgent care centers here in Florida. He will benefit if a legislation that is currently in the makings in Tallahassee is passed. He will benefit if Medicaid is contracted with the HMOs. If elected Gov. he will have a saying on the Medicaid-HMO contracting.

Coincidence?

Heaven (if there is one) help us. Because all hell is about to break loose.

What all the hot air boiled down to

Yesterday morning, after I'd taken my two younger sons to school and before I would take my eldest son to the polls to vote in his first-ever election, I realized my car was running low on fuel and pulled into what must be one of the last remaining full-service gas stations in America that still offers niceties like checking one's oil and tire pressure.

The gentleman on duty was an older man, although come to think of it, I am getting old myself these days, so I'd say we were contemporaries, or close to it. He asked if I'd like him to check the oil while the tank was filling.

"Just the tire pressure, please," I said.

"Where you from?" the man asked.

"England, originally. I've been here a while, though," I said.

"Well, we've got to do something about that," he said, pointing to my bumper, where an Obama/Biden sticker remains. "You should be voting conservative."

Oh dear, I thought. As much as I'd love to set him straight, I'm not sure it's a good idea to get into a political argument at this hour, particularly when I don't want to upset the person responsible for my tires being properly inflated.

"Ah...um...well, my husband is a Republican but our family supports Democrats, Republicans, AND Independents. Whomever we think is right for the office, you know?" (Which is true.)

And he said, "Well, that might have been a good strategy in the past, but look what happens to some of the Republicans, even--that Charlie Crist is not a real conservative. He turned around on his values."

At that point, I thought it best to say nothing and quietly hope for a change of subject. But the man seemed determined to make his point to me, an audience of one, captive as I was in my little steel cocoon littered with soccer gear and old detention slips: "He used to be a great pro-life candidate, but he's no better than any of the others, and turned on his values." He jabbed his finger in the air again, gesturing toward my bumper. "The ones that turn on their values need to go."

So there you have it. As if the tea-leaves, as it were, had not already coalesced so legibly, so ominously. What we saw yesterday--particularly in states like mine, among older voters--was a broad display of something I've worried about and written about so many times before, particularly with regard to Sarah Palin and her ilk: the religious fundamentalism and "Handmaid's Tale" mentality that winds through the body politic and all too often chokes off voters' other concerns, even economic ones.

This man working at the service station will not be benefiting from an extension of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. He will not benefit when the cost of living continues to rise but his hourly wage remains effectively stagnant, as it has for decades now. He will not benefit from the billions of dollars Big Defense, Big Oil, Big Insurance, Big Pharma, and Big Ag will make thanks to their new friends in government; he will not benefit as small businesses continue to go under, college costs soar out of reach for most middle class Americans, and the only career paths open to his children involve either low-paying service jobs or putting on a uniform and getting sent to the Middle East (again). To "protect our freedom" (again).

No, he will not benefit at all when the cut-out characters lined up on the puppet stage of my mechanic friend's straight-Republican ticket get their sticky little fingers on yet more levers of power.

But like far too many other white, middle-aged men and women, he supported the so-called Values Candidates and in so doing, voted against his own best interests in ways he may not even realize.

Because the wedge-issue-wielding slimebags who preach and pontificate their way into government for the sole purpose of furthering the interests of the United Corporations of America need only do one thing to get these Americans' votes:

Say they are going to Save the Babies.

Which, of course, they are not. Not the way the fundies hope they will--by rescuing Blastocyst Americans and Embryo Americans and Frozen Embryo Americans and Stem Cell Americans via the outlawing of abortion--and not the way one would hope a government would save babies, either, like not letting their city drown or their food supply be poisoned or their basic medical needs go unmet because they didn't choose wealthy parents.

The capital-C Citizens-loving Supremes are not going to mess with settled law. And the babies belonging to families who've lost their homes? The babies born into poverty for whom vital pre-school programs represent hope for an education and a better life? The babies who may never know what fresh spinach or strawberries taste like but whose little bodies will be soon be well-acquainted with the ill effects of polysyllabic food additives largely banned by the rest of the developed world; recombinant bovine growth hormone; and cheap, obesity-and-diabetes-inducing corn-sugar analogs? The babies that wind up having babies themselves, thanks to the success *cough* of abstinence-only programs and the lack of widely-available and affordable birth control? The babies who might, had their bodies and brains been appropriately nourished, have grown up and become business owners, community leaders, artists, writers, musicians, teachers, astronauts, or presidents, but who will instead continue, in ever-greater numbers and in ever-worsening health, to meander through the bleak landscape of service-work serfdom?

Those babies?

They don't get saved. They need to stop relying on government, apparently, and learn to believe in and rely on themselves, those babies. And if they can't, there will be plenty of private security thugs to keep them in line and evangelical-staffed privatized prisons to house them--no worries!

I cannot understand this country. But I do understand what happened yesterday.

Today in poetically synchronous modern fables

Mural by Bansky; Canal Street, NYC

The New York Times:

Replying to Report, Halliburton Says BP Is to Blame in Gulf

WASHINGTON — Halliburton, whose failed cement job on the BP well in the Gulf of Mexico was identified as a contributing factor to the deadly blowout by a presidential investigative panel on Thursday, is defending its work and assigning the blame for the accident to BP.

In a six-page statement issued late Thursday night, Halliburton questioned tests that showed its cement to be unstable and incapable of holding back the oil and gas in the well, saying they were conducted on different formulas than what was eventually used on BP’s doomed Macondo well. It said that a sample of the cement it planned to use on the well, tested shortly before pumping began on April 19, had produced a positive result.

But Halliburton admitted that no stability test was conducted on the actual recipe for the cement used on the well. The company said that BP had ordered a change in Halliburton’s customary formula for cement by adding a higher proportion of a chemical that slows the hardening of the mixture.

The well blew out on April 20, killing 11 workers and eventually releasing nearly five million barrels of oil into the gulf. Since then, BP, Halliburton, Transocean and other partners in the well have traded accusations of blame as civil and criminal investigations proceed.

Meanwhile. Having been lovingly retrieved from the abandoned moorlands of archived digitalia where they usually float, some reanimated anonymous pixels once again have a question for Y! Answers:

Why did my rats eat each other?

I had a cage of male dumbo eared rats. They always got along and were very tame. They were not starving. They were overweight. To my horror while i was cleaning their cage i noticed the skeletal remains of their father and the smallest male half eaten in the corner. It was disgusting! Why would they turn on each other like that?? ewwww!!!

There was a restrainer below and a stomper above; see--two sides!

In a statement sent to the Associated Press, [Tim] Profitt (with Rand Paul, above) has admitted placing his shoe firmly on the face of a Lauren Valle outside a Senate debate on Monday night, but insisted that the camera angle of the footage that captured the alteration made the scuffle look worse than it was. The fact that Profitt is an official coordinator of the Rand Paul campaign opens Paul to potential civil liabilities.--SFGate

The kudzu-like proliferation of Both-Sides-ism that has all but choked off any hope of redemption, via committing real journalism (ha!), for just about every pundit, pretty face, and "reporter" these days is why I had to stop watching Morning Joe altogether. Joe Scar and Mica are, I believe, contractually obligated to say "...and we hear rhetoric like this on both sides" or "...this is a problem with both parties" or "extremists on the far right AND the far left", and so on, after any and every story in which wingnuts might conceivably look bad (which is to say, virtually all stories in which the powerful hurt the less-so, and you have to pity the poor Villagers because there's really no way to temper the sheer viciousness and lawlessness of these people other than to make vague allusions to George Soros and the incivility of lefty blogs while counting the hours until your next Georgetown cocktail party).

It matters not how uncompromisingly godawful the wingnuts' behavior might be. It matters not that both the First Amendment and American criminal law--hell, the human brain--can and do recognize a world of difference between the sticks and stones that break bones and the words that never harmed.

Because whenever an episode of violence and thuggery erupts--like the one in Alaska, when security secessionists militia military members hired goons armed with semi-automatic penis-extenders handcuffed and illegally detained a journalist at a public event for daring to do his job and ask questions of Senate hopeful Joe Miller (R-Kochsuckerville), or the one this week at a Kentucky rally, during which a Dickensian villain/Rand Paul campaign coordinator named Tim Profitt quite literally joined forces with other Randians and engaged in a little brownshirt-style aggravated assault and battery (video here, if you can stomach it) against Lauren Valle, a relatively small-framed and pixie-haired protester who had apparently donned a blonde wig, á la the FOX News bots, in order to express her opinion via the deeply threatening vehicle of satirical theatre--in which Conservatives come off as ever more dangerously unhinged and violent, you can be certain our Barbecue Media will dutifully dig through its memory banks and recall a shocking story about some member of the Professional Left who--back in...oh, 2004 it must have been--didn't like the salad dressing choices at a fundraiser dinner and registered his gustatory protest by using a napkin and water glass to moisten the corner of every place-card at the table.

Then there are all those bloggers who say fuck too much. They're so uncivilized, those hippies!

See? Both sides, people. Both sides.

Now hold still and stop getting styling gel all over my new jackboots.

(H/T Barefoot Progressive, via Prup)

Muslims wearing things: A post in which I ease back into blogging

Greetings and salutations to anyone still reading here at my little corner. I've been dealing with a rather enormous body of...stuff, I suppose I should call it. Personal stuff, work stuff, health stuff. I'll spare you the gory details.

But I'm still here, a bit better rested, and I'm very excited about matters small (the impending put-the-clocks-back-to-normal event, hooray for morning sunlight!) and momentous (the midterms, news of which has me alternately deathly worried and tentatively hopeful).

Via Amanda, check out this Tumblr, Muslims Wearing Things.


As I noted on Facebook:

Oh my goodness, who knew--Muslims wear suits and dresses and army uniforms and surgical scrubs and gowns and tiaras and track suits and swimsuits and jeans and sneakers...how will we ever know when to be afraid? *eyeroll*

What are you up to on this gorgeous fall weekend?

Better than Esther?

Vanity Fair writer Michael Gross is staying on the Palin beat, having recently published a rather chilling e-mail, sent shortly before the 2008 election, to then-VP candidate Palin by a man named Lou Engle. Gross writes:

The e-mail was written by Lou Engle, a right-wing pastor and political activist who founded a movement known as the Call, which has coordinated widespread prayer and fasting to protest health-care reform and same-sex marriage. Of the latter, he has said, “What happened to California will release a spirit that is more demonic than Islam, a spirit of lawlessness and anarchy. And a sexual insanity will be unleashed into the Earth.” Engle’s e-mail was sent to Palin as a last-minute exhortation just before she took the stage for her vice-presidential debate against Joseph Biden on October 2, 2008. It is an extraordinary document, referring to legalized abortions as a “holocaust,” and casting Engle in the role of Mordecai to Palin’s Esther.

The e-mail itself is at the VF link, as is a painting, Esther at Her Toilet (ca. 1684), by the Dutch painter Aert de Gelder. I thought it could use a little updating, so I sent it to the brilliant Blue Gal for treatment, and she happily obliged: