No News Flash: GOP Hates Education

Sahil Kapur of TPM:

Senate Republicans’ Tuesday filibuster of a Democratic bill to avert a student loan interest rate hike signals a return to familiar territory for the party. The move comes after a brief detour that spurred speculation about whether, with the general election in full swing, Republicans were ready to ease up when it comes to blocking hot-button issues.

...

As recently as Monday the Capitol rumbled with rumors that Senate Republican leaders would follow the same playbook [as on VAWA] with the student-loan measure — which President Obama’s re-election campaign is seizing on to energize young voters — and potentially let Democrats advance it. But the GOP’s position quickly hardened and it didn’t happen. Tuesday’s party-line 52-45 vote fell short of the 60 needed to overcome the GOP’s filibuster.

...

Until the rules of the Senate are changed to prevent a 41-vote minority from suppressing legislation even if it has a majority of Senators voting for it... we do not live in a democracy.


As for the issue, I was a poor kid who went to college only because he got an outright scholarship. Without help, or with a loan instead of a scholarship, I'd have been out of luck altogether. On the whole, I think society got a pretty good deal by paying for my education (through the good offices of Rice University). But kids like me today will not have that opportunity... and our nation will suffer.


AFTERTHOUGHT: GOP theme song!


CORRECTION: "40-vote minority" corrected to "41-vote minority".

NY DA: All Your Base Information Are Belong To Us

Kevin Gosztola of FDL Dissenter:

Twitter has moved to quash a court order requiring the company to hand over data on  one of its users. The user, Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protester who is being prosecuted in New York for disorderly conduct, has been battling a government subpoena for his communications. 

On April 20, a judge ruled Harris did not have standing to stop the state’s District Attorney from compelling Twitter to produce “any and all user information,” including his email address as well as any tweets posted between September 15 and December 31 of last year. However, under a provision of the federal Stored Communications Act (SCA) that allows a service provider to quash orders for information if it would “cause an undue burden,” the company submitted a motion to protect Harris’ data. 

... 

The defense of Harris—a user—that Twitter submitted is significant. It challenges a judge’s ruling that Harris had “no right to challenge the District Attorney’s subpoena for his own communications and account information” because he supposedly has “no proprietary interest in the content that he submits to Twitter.” This, Twitter points out, “contradicts Twitter’s Terms of Service and express language of the SCA.”  

... 

Twitter finds handing over data would force the company to violate federal law, namely the Fourth Amendment. ... 

...

Not that anyone in power gives a good damn about the Fourth Amendment anymore...

Gosztola then enumerates some prosecutorial fishing expeditions against Occupy members and against Wikileaks volunteers, and details the ACLU and EFF responses. Are these actions relevant to you? They probably are, if you are any kind of activist and want to stay out of possibly indefinite detention. To all appearances, though, Twitter is on your side:

... 

Twitter was ordered to turn over information on the WikiLeaks volunteers. It did not have to let them know they had been given a court order, but they did inform them and that led to the volunteers challenging the order in court (albeit unsuccessfully). 

...

This cannot end well. If the courts succeed in forcing online services to provide information they hold on users, information not given for the purpose of possibly indicting the users, then they have, among other things, compelled a user to testify against him- or herself.

Welcome to America. "All your base are belong to us."

(The Blogger text editor is a bloody aggravation if you do any block quoting at all.)

Hypocrite Paul Ryan: 'I Got Mine; Fuck You!'

Of course Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) didn't say "fuck you" in words, but rather in his actions. So what hypocritical thing has he done this time? Here's bal of Daily Kos, drawing on a piece from WPRI that (I think) was intended to be complimentary to Ryan:

Entitlement-hating Paul Ryan collected Social Security benefits until he was 18

I guess it's only when social programs help other people that they're bad, because I haven't seen Paul Ryan acknowledging how Social Security benefits helped him and his family in trying times:

...

[quoted by bal from an article by WPRI]

With his father’s passing, young Paul collected Social Security benefits until age 18, which he put away for college. To make ends meet, Paul’s mother returned to school to study interior design. His siblings were off at college. Ryan remembers this difficult time bringing him and his mother closer.
Within months, Paul’s maternal grandmother moved into the house. She suffered from Alzheimer’s, and it often fell on young Paul to care for her, including brushing and braiding her hair. Ryan credits his father’s death and the care of his grandmother as giving him first-hand experience as to how social service programs work.

Ryan sure did get first-hand experience on how social programs work.  They made it possible for Paul Ryan to attend college, get an education, and make a name for himself in the political world.  And he's now using that name to make sure others don't get the same opportunities he did.

What an evil hypocrite.

bal said it. Ryan effectively says "I got mine; fuck the rest of you." How Republican of him!

UPDATE: I can't help thinking of the second song in this YouTube video...

ASIDE: Speaking of evil... Blogger seems to have changed text editors and code generators on me overnight, to ones that generate "kitchen sink" HTML code which is almost totally inscrutable to the human eye. Any thoughts?

Greenwald On McCullagh On 'Surveillance State Democracy'

Americans: your privacy rights have been vanishing apace since at least 2001, and by now virtually all the laws are in place to allow your government to tap, without a warrant, just about any damned thing of yours they want to tap.

Now that the law has been imposed, the ability must be realized. Of course in many cases it already has been. But the government wants "backdoor" access to literally all forms of electronic communication, mandated by law and forcibly implemented by the carriers. Following an introduction by Declan McCullagh of CNET, here's a sample from Glenn Greenwald, regarding the conflict between RIM (BlackBerry) and the Saudi and UAE government, the two governments' decision to ban BlackBerry possession in their countries, and US official... and unofficial... reaction:

... 

What was most amazing to me back when I first wrote about these Obama administration efforts was that a mere six weeks earlier, a major controversy had erupted when Saudi Arabia and the UAE both announced a ban on BlackBerries on the ground that they were physically unable to monitor the communications conducted on those devices. Since Blackberry communication data are sent directly to servers in Canada and the company which operates Blackberry — Research in Motion — refused to turn the data over to those governments, “authorities [in those two tyrannies] decided to ban Blackberry services rather than continue to allow an uncontrolled and unmonitored flow of electronic information within their borders.” As I wrote at the time: “that’s the core mindset of the Omnipotent Surveillance State: above all else, what is strictly prohibited is the ability of citizens to communicate in private; we can’t have any ‘uncontrolled and unmonitored flow of electronic information’.” 

In response to that controversy, the Obama administration actually condemned the Saudi and UAE ban, calling it “a dangerous precedent” and a threat to “democracy, human rights and freedom of information.” Yet six weeks later, the very same Obama administration embraced exactly the same rationale — that it is intolerable for any human interaction to take place beyond the prying eyes and ears of the government — when it proposed its mandatory “backdoor access” for all forms of Internet communication. Indeed, the UAE pointed out that the U.S. — as usual — was condemning exactly that which it itself was doing: 

...

Not only is the Obama administration (through FBI-drafted proposed legislation extending existing surveillance to Web-based services) wanting to compel warrantless wiretaps across all sorts of "wires," they also want the carriers to implement the skulduggery for them. This is bad news. If the Obama administration and congressional Democrats do not back us in long-established matters of fundamental individual privacy, who is on our side? The ACLU, of course... but is there anybody in government who doesn't advocate spying on every damned American citizen?

France, Greece Reject Incumbents

It's hardly a surprise, in light of economic events. David Dayen of FDL outlines the results, and discusses consequences for the Eurozone. Paul Krugman offers a few thoughts as well.

Based on what I've read, it seems the French and the Greeks had good reasons to boot out their current governments: in France at least, the political center-right was the author of the failed austerity policy, which together with Germany it managed to impose on the rest of the Eurozone.

Turning to the coming US election, the economic disaster on Obama's watch is largely... not completely, but mostly... the fault of his Republican predecessor, GeeDubya Bush. But the instinct of any electorate seems to be to blame the party in power, and I wonder if our voters will do that.

And if Rmoney wins (or successfully steals) the election, I wonder how long it will be before we have people "dumpster-diving" for food and clothing, as we recently learned is happening in Greece.

L'Enfant de la Haute Mer (start at this link and scroll down) examines both French and Greek elections, though her accompanying graphics (cartoons?) seem not to be serving at the moment.

The frustrating thing is that we know, from actual national experience in the 1930s, how to remedy the greater part of the economic downturn... and our leaders, all of them, are doing just the opposite of what worked before, utterly ignoring the wisdom of Keynes. The "reasons" they offer for the bad policy decisions are all just plain nuts: the real reason is that under current conditions, the wealthiest of the wealthy in America are doing just fine, better than ever.

Aren't you glad we have a representative form of government? [/snark]

UPDATE Mon. about 2:00PM CT: David Dayen of FDL explains: "Hollande Issues Challenge to Germany" ... well worth your time to read.

UPDATE Mon. about 10:00PM CT: Maria Margaronis, London correspondent of The Nation, contributes "The Day After: Europe Rejects Austerity" ... again, well worth your time.

Michael Moore Sings The Times They Are A-Changin'

Here. He's not Bob Dylan... in a way, that's the point; the rendition is emphatically and uniquely Michael's own... but he has a very pleasant voice, and of course the performance is heartfelt. This audio-only recording appears to have been made as part of a set called Occupy This Album. And to my amazement, the excellent work on the pennywhistle is done by... composer David Amram. It's a small world! (No, please don't sing that... please, please...)

Stella's Hanging

No, she's not dangling from a rope. The art opening she attended last night included a collaborative work she created with another artist, a work inspired by an exhibit sponsored by WiVL_Λ - Women in Visual and Literary Arts - on the theme "Mixed Messages."

In keeping with the double meaning of the show's theme, each work was a collaboration of at least two artists working in two different media. In Stella's case, the work was a watercolor (by the other artist) with a lettered poem (by Stella) interwoven among the depicted dancers.

A good time was had by all. All Stella's friends were there... well, all of them except for me; this damned cold, or at least the following cough, is not quite gone yet.

 (Blogger is giving me grief as I attempt to publish this. It's not a good second-beginning.)

From WordPress.com, A Word... And A Press

The mystery is resolved. I have control of the WordPress blog again, though I don't know if I will be permitted to retain it. The Word is "change this" and the Press is... well, here it is:

Hi, Can any links to [site name withheld by me].com be removed, please? These are not permitted on WordPress.com, and our system has an automatic check in place for them. Thank you very much.


-- [Name Initial].


WordPress.com | Automattic

Well, I guess that explains it. It's good, red-blooded American CENSORSHIP, of the kind one expected in the days of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.

But... from WordPress? Really? Yeah, really, to the point at which they were willing to whack my blog with no warning, no attempt to allow me to "correct" the situation, no information directed to me about why my blog was disabled except a vague warning that WordPress.com was not the place for sites with too many links... which of course had nothing whatsoever to do with the problem as they saw it.

It's been years since I've encountered the fellow they mentioned on the web. He used to comment on quite a few of your blogs. He was a young guy, ex-Army and very disgruntled (aren't we all!), fairly outspoken about it. I wonder who filed a complaint, or whether he simply ran afoul of some secret agency's routine searches. The site is still out there, missing most of its graphics and obviously no longer maintained. But who would have imagined that my neglect of my cobweb-riddled blogroll would be an offense punishable by blog death!

I have not yet decided whether to move to Blogger for my quasi-permanent address. WordPress is superior software in many ways, but a willingness to censor a user who is not himself the offender (?) is IMHO rather extreme. And the fact that they have automated the process suggests that they either have done it or will do it again. That troubles me a lot, and may outweigh my inclination to use WordPress's better interface. Censorship... not even of unprotected speech but of links to presumed unprotected speech (I glanced around the site and didn't find any right away)... is an ugly business.

One of these days I'll tell you all about it. For now, it's enough to know that you knew the victim, and that technologically and within the habits of corporations, it could just as easily have been you or me.

A Blogger's Bad Karma

Sometimes I think that as a blogger, I'm just snake-bit.

My original hand-coded blog eventually enhanced with HaloScan comments (don't you miss 'em?), I retired when it was clear that HaloScan was about to be replaced with a paid service, which I always called "JK-Shit".

At that point, I moved to a Blogger blog. JK-Shit gave me about 10 days' notice that it planned to fuck me over, and that 10 day period included Christmas and New Year's.

So I set up this Blogger blog, and rocked along with it for not even quite a year (??) before Google suffered The Great Crash. I don't know about other Blogger bloggers, but I actually lost posts in that one. I wasn't happy about that.

So I girded my loins for battle and created a somewhat similar WordPress blog. This was my third blog in two years (??), and I wasn't very happy about another move. But I did it. WordPress had some distinct advantages and a couple of disadvantages (e.g., ads silently prepended to the comment areas of posts, ads not visible to the logged-in owner). Still, it wasn't bad.

Then this morning at about 2:00 AM CT, WordPress did the equivalent of the political Friday Night News Dump. They disabled my blog, alleging a violation of Terms of Service. WTF? I wasn't doing anything I hadn't seen other bloggers doing on WordPress dozens of times. And if, as one of their messages implied but did not say, they thought I had created some sort of "link farm" or whatever it's called to tweak the search engine stats, they can go suck eggs. I use a lot of links, but the only entity that could mistake my posts for spam is a 'bot unverified by any human backup.

I registered my ire... politely, because they can do ANYTHING they want to... in two civilly worded messages early today. But I doubt this matter will be resolved in my favor. People who set up systems of that kind are like preachers who involve parishioners in programs of abuse to "purify" them: they're absolutely certain they are right, and nothing will make them change their minds.

So I am preparing myself for a permanent (?) move back to Blogger; this is a start. Thanks for your patience and wish me luck.

BTW, I'm using a backup of the blogroll that is about 3 weeks old. If you were on the previous roll, and are not on this one, please email me at my usual blog email of dogge~relist~@~stephenb~~ates.com, with the tildes removed.

The New Word On This Blog's Location

Heh. WordPress has axed me for a TOS violation. They did not tell me what triggered it... but for the moment I'm back on Blogger.

As always, if you bookmark http://yellowdoggereldemocrat.org/ you will be referred to my current blog location. For now, it will be here on Blogger; I don't know about later on.

Yes, things are pretty untidy and a bit ancient looking over here. Sorry. If indeed I have to return here, I'll clean it up a bit.

UPDATE: I managed to get far enough into the WordPress dashboard to create an export of my entire blog over there. I've no idea how to import all or part of it here, but I've had no sleep tonight, so that will have to wait.

Mad suggested that I use the locally hosted WordPress software because they never had any such trouble with it. All I can say is that after this incident, Texas will freeze over in mid-July before WordPress gets any money from me. Trust is difficult to establish and easy to breach.

I suppose I'll move a couple of recent posts over before I sleep. It might make me feel more at home.

A Short Excerpt From Paul Krugman's New Book

... via the New York Review of Books. The question "when shall I read this book" has devolved into a question "when will this book be available from the public library." I just looked in the online catalog: with only one copy and five holds, it may be a while. Similar questions will have similar answers... until and unless we manage to End This Depression Now! so that I can buy the book outright. (The link is to Elliott Bay Book Company because I once visited them and liked their store a great deal.) The free chapter in New York Review makes it clear that the book is well worth reading. Maybe someone should send a copy to Obama... and another to Rmoney. COD, of course.

TransCanada Quietly Reapplies, Keystone XL Pipeline Planned On Original Schedule

We live in an age of zombie environmental nightmares, and the Keystone XL pipeline, slated to transport tar sands, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, from Canada to Texas, has just risen from the dead to resume its glazed-eyed walk across our landscape, defying tradition by crossing and endangering an estimated 101 bodies of water. Here are a few details from MarketWatch:

TORONTO -(MarketWatch)- TransCanada Corp. TRP -1.29% said Friday that it resubmitted an application for a U.S. permit for its controversial Keystone XL oil-pipeline expansion, rejected by the White House earlier this year after it became a political flashpoint ahead of this year's presidential election.

The Calgary-based pipeline company said it will supplement its application, which was submitted to the U.S. Department of State, with a proposed, alternative route in Nebraska as soon as that route is selected. Nebraska became the focal point of some of the most vocal opposition to the line.

TransCanada has long maintained it planned to resubmit its application. U.S. President Barack Obama rejected the line after Republican lawmakers imposed an early deadline on the decision, part of a broader tax compromise with the president.

The reapplication doesn't likely change the timing of an ultimate decision on the project. The White House said it would welcome a resubmission, but because of the time required to process and review a new application, a decision isn't expected until after the November presidential elections.

...

Read the rest, if you have the stomach. Remember, this is from an investment web site; don't expect much in the way of politics, either pro‑environment or pro‑fossil‑fuels. I chose it specifically for that reason.

Whatever Obama's virtues... the primary one being that he is not Mitt Romney, and one of the two of them will be president next year... he's always been a lover of fossil fuels. Remember how easily BP got off from the Deepwater Horizon disaster that effectively wrecked the Gulf Coast... Obama seems ready to let drilling companies go at it again. (There are a few conspiracy theories on the web that I do not believe: Obama, not a creature of malice, is simply a pro-business Republican-style president who isn't going to let a massive Gulf-destroying oil spill get in the way of further drilling. Back in the day, his biggest sin was regulatory negligence.)

But Obama has another flaw... or virtue, depending on how you look at it: like most other politicians, he loves to look good to the public. Our task is to keep the pressure on him to do what he's disinclined to do... reject Keystone XL's permit application... especially after the election if Obama wins. (I consider the matter hopeless if Rmoney wins... there's no pro-environment Richard Nixon in that man!)

What can you do? Try writing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson (email: jackson.lisap@epa.gov). Find a petition and sign it; e.g., CREDO has one going here. Lather Reince; repeat... um, I mean, lather, rinse, repeat, several times between now and elections... and again, louder, after elections, if Obama wins.

CISPA: Your Privacy At Severe Risk Of Government‑Corporate Surveillance

Following up on the earlier CISPA post, Anjali Dalal of AlterNet has a concentrated summary of CISPA and all the last-minute amendments applied last Thursday evening before the bill was passed unexpectedly by the House. Many of the amendments appear to have been inserted (and others deleted) in defiance of reservations expressed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Democracy and Technology, all of whom were at least in theory invited to "participate" in amending the bill. Here's Dalal:

Learning their lesson from SOPA, the House decided to invite civil liberties constituencies to the table so as to avoid having to witness another implosion of a major legislative goal. As a result, a number of amendments were introduced that began to address some of the most egregious parts of the bill, and, in response, some members of the civil liberties community decided to withhold further, vocal opposition. Then, on Thursday evening, it all fell apart. As Josh Smith at the National Journal described, the CISPA that was passed by the House on Thursday didn’t reflect this negotiation: ...

Ah, the grand Republican tradition, let everyone have their say and then pass whatever they damned well please. "We listened to you!" they will doubtless protest. Yes, fuck them dead, they did. An overwhelming number of the amendments ultimately incorporated were Republican, while most Democratic amendments were omitted by the Republican-dominated House Rules Committee. The linked AlterNet article discusses quite a few amendments. All I can say on a quick reading is that the words "warrantless" and "immunity" appear often, allowing warrantless searches by corporations (!) to be reported to government agencies with immunity for the corporations involved. These GOP guys 'n' gals really, really don't like the "no search without a warrant" principle, and they really, really do like subcontracting legitimately government-only activities to private corporations. Do you get the feeling that that pompous, ritualistic reading of the Constitution at the opening of the last House session was totally lost on the members of one party, and maybe some of the other party's members as well? Does anybody know the status of Obama's original threat to veto this bill if it crosses his desk? Has he caved yet?

Lily Can't Express Herself

(Original post here.)

Political Writing Is A State Of Mind... Here's Mine

(Original post here.)

Friday Lily-High-On-Monteverdi Blogging

(Original post here.)

Friday Large Lily Blogging

(Original post here.)

Friday Stripes-On-Spots Blogging

(Original post here.)

Friday 'Momcat's Home!' Blogging

(Original post here.)

Me! Me! Me! Aaaooowww!

(Original post here.)

Friday Lazy Lily Blogging

(Original post here.)

Friday ‘There’s A Nap For That’ Blogging

(Original post here.)

Friday Cat Begging

(Original post here.)

Lilian Jackson Braun (1913-2011) – The Cat Who Died Twice

(Original post here.)

Friday Interrupted Cat Nap Blogging

(Original post here.)

Esther

Lily

Friday Typical Esther Blogging

(Original post here.)

Friday Lily Snockered Blogging

(Original post here.)

The Last Word On This Blog's Location

The last word is... I don't have to decide, and you don't have to know, because I license a domain I specifically created long ago to use for this blog. I probably won't physically move the blog's content to that domain, but I can simply point that URL to wherever I intend to blog. Here is the one and only address you need for me:

http://www.yellowdoggereldemocrat.org/

That's it. Bookmark that, and it will take you where I am at any given moment.

Of course, the hardwired versions will still work to get to the individual sites, at least for now.

Something Else Blogger Failed To Restore

Blogger bloggers...

Did you have any static pages (the ones created/edited using Edit Page, not dependent on date and time)? Yes?

Among those, did you have any pages to which you did make changes on a regular (say daily) basis? Yes?

Then you lost any changes to those pages you made since the great crash yesterday morning. This happened to my "Quotes from the Top" page.

Love 'Em And Leave 'Em... And Leave 'Em... And Leave 'Em...

At this rate, I'm going to have changed to a new blog more often that Newt Gingrich has changed wives. But more than 24 hours after the initial crash of Blogger, the failed restore, etc. etc., I finally have all my posts back on this blog, but a bunch of comments have simply not reappeared. They're just gone, apparently.

That is not acceptable. And so until Blogger gets its Shift-key together, I'm going to relocate, probably temporarily, to a wordpress.com blog with a similar URL:

http://yellowdoggereldemocrat.wordpress.com/

I've overlapped one post on the new site: the 'Getting their Goat' doggerel. Starting with that post, I'll ask you to make comments on the new site, not on this site.

I don't know if I'll move back here or not, but I'll keep you posted. If you made a comment here on Wednesday or maybe even Thursday, you might want to check to see if the comment is still there.

After OBL's Death? More Of The Same

Glenn Greenwald addresses the commonly heard suggestions that with Osama bin Laden dead, wars will end, troops will come home, civil liberties will be restored, etc., etc.

The reality? Not so much. Meet the new Boss Obama, same as the old Boss Obama. According to Greenwald, we can...

• Expect expansions of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
• Expect ongoing wars and even some new ones. 
• Expect to learn about secret wars already underway.
• Not reasonably expect Guantánamo to be closed.
• Expect Congress to issue a new AUMF. (This is already underway in the House Armed Services Committee.)
• Not expect Obama's executive-detention-without-trial policy to end.

And so on. Read Greenwald's article.

Quoting Greenwald reporting on a letter from the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, among other org's:

In a joint letter to Congress, about two dozen groups -- including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights -- contended that the proposal amounted to an open-ended grant of authority to the executive branch, legitimizing an unending war from Yemen to Somalia and beyond. 

"This monumental legislation -- with a large-scale and practically irrevocable delegation of war power from Congress to the president -- could commit the United States to a worldwide war without clear enemies, without any geographical boundaries" and "without any boundary relating to time or specific objective to be achieved," the letter warned.

We seem headed inexorably toward an executive-only government. I, for one, am not happy about that.

Florida Passes Law Which May Ban All Sex

It has to do with the fact that humans are animals, and the law bans sex with "dumb animals." Details are at Bryan's place, but I'll tell you the story in man-on-doggerel:

 Getting their Goat

So now the moment has arrived Floridians all dread:
The threat of bestiality has reared its Mossy Head!
They think they're safe when people chafe at human-livestock sex,
But soon they'll find it isn't only Oedipus it wrecks!

The men may not be COWards and perhaps they don't do CHICKEN;
The women aren't full of BULL; with human males they're stickin'.
But gals or blades must note, their clades appear in ANIMALIA...
It's laws on bestiality with which they'll try to jail ya!

And thus with "animals" the Legislature is researchin':
Have all the KIDS gone wild? or is each goat a bestial virgin?
Now on each "date" they tabulate what everybody did...
It ain't just Chucky Cheese's WHERE A KID CAN DO A KID!

- SB the YDS

Full-Blown Bat-Shit Crazy - UPDATED

That would be the Republ(ic)ans in Congress:

The GOP's New Constitutional Amendment: Give States Veto Power Over Federal Laws

Evan McMorris-Santoro and Ryan J. Reilly | May 11, 2011, 4:50PM

...

A group of Republicans in the House and Senate are proposing an amendment to the Constitution that would allow a vote by two-thirds of the states' legislatures to override any federal law they did not agree with.

The proposed constitutional amendment, a tea party favorite, is being touted by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) in the Senate and co-sponsored by Sens. John Barasso (R-WY) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT). In the House, Reps. Rob Bishop (R-UT), Morgan Griffith (R-VA) and Paul Broun (R-GA) are leading the charge.

...

That's it for me. If the federal system goes, I go, too. I will not live here under a form of government that our Founders considered, more-or-less tried before the Constitution was ratified, and discarded as being weak and utterly chaotic. In our own time, the United States cannot effectively exist as a patchwork of 50 different independent regions run by an assortment of radical right-wing governments, varying in degree, manner and details of craziness, with no congressional power to keep a firm hand on those right-wing state legislatures. That way lies madness.

You think you've heard the worst the Tea Party can come up with, but they're always prepared to disappoint you and sink to new depths one more time. "Full-blown bat-shit crazy" is the only description adequate to the nutsiness...

UPDATE:  In my anger and haste I probably exaggerated the implication of likelihood that such an amendment to the Constitution could actually pass, even in these crazy times.

There are two ways to propose amendments and two ways to ratify them:

• to propose, you must gain the support of two-thirds of both houses of Congress, or persuade two-thirds of state legislatures to call a constitutional convention, which then approves the amendment; 
• to ratify, you must gain the approval of three-fourths of state legislatures or three-fourths of ratifying conventions in each state. 

I doubt they can get this dog past the houses of Congress, which is the route they obviously intend to try, because there are some Teabaggers in Congress. So I'm not packing my bags just yet.

Mad Kane...

... has something rather astringent to say about the men of Der Tzitung, the Hasidic newspaper in Brooklyn with a policy against publishing women's pictures so strict that they literally airbrushed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton out of a photo in the White House Situation Room. And of course, Mad being Mad, she rhymes what she says!

What are you doing, why are you still here? Go... read...

Nashian Rhyme For Lily

  

Age-Related Annoyance

Almost any adolescent
Will at times behave unplescent.

- Steve Bates

President: Commander Or Dictator? - Terrorist: Criminal Or Warrior?

Glenn Greenwald addresses these and one other vital question in his article, "Democratic principles in the War on Terror."

First, outside of the fever-riddled brain of John Yoo and the icy heart of Dick Cheney, is there any basis in a constitutional democracy (remember? that's what we're supposed to aspire to be) for assigning our chief executive total and unreviewable power over citizens and noncitizens alike, including the unilateral power to decide life and death, when those people are far from any battlefield, and when the only "war" going on is what the late lamented Molly Ivins used to call a "war on a noun"?

Second, is terrorist behavior really combat in a war, requiring massive military response and comparably great compromises of our civil liberties in pursuit of victory? Or is it straightforward criminal behavior which can, and in the past, has been, dealt with in our duly constituted courts system, with all its trappings of due process?

Greenwald points out that even Eric Holder, during the Bush administration, answered those questions "no" and "criminal," offering compelling arguments for both answers... but he has now reversed both positions and argues in behalf of Obama's assuming breathtaking powers.

Greenwald quotes Yglesias, who in turn quotes a Rand Corporation study. Greenwald's conclusion is devastating:

... In 2004, the Democratic nominee John Kerry famously (and correctly) said -- echoing Cole's words above -- that Terrorism was comparable to prostitution, gambling, and organized crime:  "nuisances" to be dealt with primarily through law enforcement but that will never go away entirely.  In a 2008 Atlantic article, Matt Yglesias declared that "Kerry was right" when he " said something about counterterrorism being primarily a question to be dealt with through law enforcement and intelligence rather than something that should be understood as primarily a kind of war," and as proof, Yglesias cited this study from the Rand Corporation, which concluded as follows:

Its report said that the use of military force by the United States or other countries should be reserved for quelling large, well-armed and well-organized insurgencies, and that American officials should stop using the term "war on terror" and replace it with "counterterrorism."

"Terrorists should be perceived and described as criminals, not holy warriors, and our analysis suggests there is no battlefield solution to terrorism," said Seth Jones, the lead author of the study and a Rand political scientist.

That view now, of course -- once the centerpiece of the Democratic Party's Terrorism arguments -- is decreed to be a fringe and radical view.  The same is true for Cole's argument that Terrorists should be deemed criminals, not warriors, and treated exactly the same way we treat criminals: with the full range of due process rights under our normal system of justice.  Believe me, to make that very same argument now is to prompt accusations of radicalism and even Terrorist sympathies. ...

All of those views -- Democratic Party orthodoxy a mere three years ago -- have become relegated to the fringe under the Obama presidency ...  But it's worth recalling that they were indeed the backbone of the Democrats' once-vigorous opposition (at least in rhetoric) to the Bush/Cheney worldview of using war and battlefield theories to fight Terrorism and to erode core Constitutional and civil liberties.

I would like to think that it goes without saying that our civil liberties as American citizens, even in wartime (which this arguably is not), must not depend on who sits in the White House, and what expediencies s/he is willing to resort to in pursuit of goals that may be as much politics as national security.

How do we get from here to there? Perhaps I have too much faith in the core of the old Democratic Party from bygone days, but I can only hope that at least some of old-timers can and will pressure President Obama not to become former "President" Bush, but rather to apply some of that constitutional scholarship he so proudly claims in his speechifying, to leave off his literal assaults on American citizens in a war that isn't a war, pursued not in his role as C-in-C of the armed forces but as a genuine leader in the face of confrontations against an opposition party of certifiable crazies who have no intention of governing, but rather are intent only on milking America dry and scaring her electorate half to death.

Does Mr. O have it in him? I don't know, but under the circumstances, we'd better Hope he can Change.

What Texans Reasonably Expect Of Louisiana

I once had a good job offer at a major university in Louisiana. I turned it down entirely because it would have required me to live in Louisiana. The man who offered me the job, a friend and colleague of mine, asked me forthrightly what the difference was between Texas and Louisiana. I answered, "About 200 years."

That was about 30 years ago, and one could hope things would have changed by now. One would hope that... in vain. Louisiana has put in place something called the Louisiana Science Education Act, R.S. 17:285.1, which requires public schools to allow teaching of creationism and/or "intelligent design" in their science classrooms. The state BOE's discussion made the classic "teach the controversy" argument, which is of course invalid on two grounds:

• first, a taxpayer-funded public school may not legally, under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, teach any tenet of any religion in any classroom, and 
• second, a more substantive objection, there is no legitimate sense of the word "science" in which creationism is a science... it is wholly a religious doctrine.

The law also allows schools to include climate change denial in science classrooms... this is less a religious issue than a political one, but the content permitted is just as false.

One 17-year-old student has organized a petition drive, implemented by change.org, demanding that the Legislature repeal the law. It is an open petition, which means you and I may sign it. I have already; I hope you will do so.

And Never The Trains Shall Meet

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) seems to have decided that Americans are not sufficiently put upon by machines that effectively strip them naked when they board a plane, lists that prevent some Americans from boarding a plane at all, with absolutely no recourse for people added to that list in error (or deliberately, with political malevolence), etc. etc.

So Sen Schumer wants to remedy a disparity: he wants to impose similar restrictions on people who ride Amtrak trains. That's right: he wants a "no-ride" list, initially including the demonstrably faulty "no-fly" list.

Um, Sen. Schumer... [stage whisper...] it's not about the passengers. America will be the target of terrorism even if we check every passenger on every city bus against a printed list that would extend from here to the Moon. Terrorism will persist if we stop and check all drivers in all vehicles for driver licenses, voter IDs, passports, whatever. Terrorists will assault America if they have to walk to the next town to do it. Terrorists intent on attacking trains will attack tracks, tunnels and bridges, not the passenger compartments of railroad cars, because they can do so much more damage that way. Terrorist attacks are the inevitable fate of anyone who decides to play the biggest mofo on the block... and the US seems determined to be just that.

In Iraq, are those who use IEDs aboard the vehicles they blow up? No? Then why would they be aboard a train they intend to destroy? They know where it's going: it's not as if the train is going to change routes all of a sudden. Measures to discover IEDs brought aboard trains are a reasonable precaution, and monitoring tunnels, bridges etc. may be worth the effort. But no-ride lists are nothing but security theater. It's simply not about the passengers.

There's also the fact that a bomb on a train... literally on the train... has a relatively local destructive effect. Blow up a plane, and everyone aboard dies; gravity does part of the work. Crash a plane into a skyscraper... well, you know about that. But set off a bomb in a railroad passenger car? It would have to be quite a bomb to kill more than a few people.* No, terrorists will go after tracks, tunnels and bridges.

Senator... this is the stupidest proposal I've heard in a long time, excepting only Paul Ryan's "Path to Pathology" budget. Why don't you just give it up now, before we spend billions of dollars on totally ineffective "anti-terrorist" measures that probably make real terrorists laugh?

---

* In the 2004 Madrid commuter train bombings, thirteen IEDs were placed on trains and set off at peak traffic times. While many people were injured, fewer than 200 were killed. Bombs carried onto trains are, at best, devices to terrorize, not devices to kill large numbers of people.

Oh, Kay...

If you aren't visiting Kay's Thinking Cap at least once a week for her Groaner of the Week, you must be no more than half groan. This week's downright criminally bad pun sent both me and Stella into fits of groaning and shaking our heads!

Read This

FDL Book Salon hosts Tad Daley on his book Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World. Hosts: Valerie Plame Wilson and Joe Wilson. Need I say more?

Actually, I'll say just a bit more. This reminds me of a book I read about 30 25 years ago called The Fate of the Earth, by Jonathan Schell. I found it reprinted perhaps 10 years ago; it is still available in local bookstores. So far, I haven't located Daley's book other than on Amazon and the above-linked Rutgers Press; Houston Public Lib ain't got it, dammit.

A Fence Taken

My back neighbor has been wielding a chainsaw along his side of the fence line, removing large tree branches and cutting them up. He has a perfect right to do so, and probably a need as well, given that hurricane season will be approaching sooner than I'd like to think. But...

DAMN, it's hot in this office (my back bedroom)!

My electricity provider sends me a weekly bill summary by email. Between two weeks ago and last week, the usage literally doubled. This summer is gonna hurt, in more ways than one...

Mutterer's Day

In about 1988 my Mother passed behind the veil of Alzheimer's disease. The portal hidden by that veil is largely one-directional: brilliant, vibrant, articulate people go in; only their incoherent mutterings come out.

Two years later, Mom's body died. It was a tough two years... for Dad, for me, and yes, for Mom: in the early stages of that terrible disease, the Alzheimer's victim is at least partially aware of what is happening to her.

So here's a toast to Mom as I remember her from earlier, better days. If I enjoy wit, poetry, music and fine Southern cooking, it is all because of Mom. Solo singer that she was, Mom must also have been a saint to love and marry my Dad, with his complete lack of pitch sense...

Note To Andy Card: Fuck You

Sometimes the Republan exceptionalism is breathtaking:

President Obama has 'pounded his chest' too much and taken too much pride in the success of the mission to take out Osama bin Laden, according to, of all people, George W. Bush's former Chief of Staff, Andrew Card.

...

Card, of course, was a top official in an administration noted for its theatrical press events, most notably the decision to have President Bush land a fighter jet on board an aircraft carrier before delivering his famous speech celebrating the invasion of Iraq in front of a giant "Mission: Accomplished" banner.

...

Does Card have any idea how much his shit stinks? IMHO, he knows exactly how much it does. And doesn't care. Optics for the next election? Fuck optics, says Card; elections can be bought, or if necessary, stolen...

UPDATE: on the above-linked thread, commenter Mickey Bitsko nails it precisely:

Sounds like this Card is missing a full deck.

Yep!

Floridians: Beware Your Locally Grown Crops!

Jonathan Turley tells you why:

Florida House Approves Use of Human Waste To Treat Crops For Human Consumption
Published 1, May 6, 2011

Some Chinese may be steaming eggs in urine but Florida is about to grow its crops in such waste. After a heavy lobbying effort by industry, Florida is about to rescind a ban on the use of human waste to treat crops. Soon more than 90 companies will be pumping waste from about 100,000 septic tanks on to their fields — an estimated 40 million gallons treated with lime. ...

(Emphasis mine.)

We've only known of the dangers of doing this for, um, what? two or three millennia? I suppose the lime is supposed to make everything hunky-dory, but somehow I wouldn't want to depend on that to render the human waste literally safe for consumption.

And I thought Texas was bad...

Obama Issues Presidential Assassination Orders - Revisited

Glenn Greenwald is among the very, very few columnists who address this issue: on what possible constitutional basis is the President granted the unilateral power to issue an assassination order against an American citizen, omitting due process altogether and playing the roles of judge, jury and executioner, as he has done in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki? Isn't this the sort of thing, among many others, that led to the original American Revolution? Isn't this the sort of tyrannical, arbitrary punishment without due process of law that caused our Founders to craft the Bill of Rights in the first place?

Greenwald points out that the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution "expressly guarantees that 'no person shall be deprived of life[, liberty, or property,] without due process of law' -- and provides no exception for war." The U.S. has managed to survive numerous terrible wars and one extended, ideologically driven Cold War without sacrificing that guarantee to the degree Obama seems willing to sacrifice it. When a president begins ditching constitutionally guaranteed liberties as easily as he would pour out yesterday's coffee, I have a problem with that... and you should, too.

I will not be voting for Mr. Obama in 2012. I will not be voting for his Republan opponent, either, but on the matter of fundamental civil liberties, I see very little difference between President Obama and his predecessor... except that Obama has actually issued assassination orders against American citizens far from any battlefield context, something that even the deplorable GeeDubya Bush never did. How could I vote for someone who illegitimately claims the power to assassinate American citizens without due process?

We are nothing without our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Without those guarantees, none of us... not one solitary American... has anything that can reasonably be called "security." I do not have an easy answer to Obama's behavior, but I know with certainty that if he is not confronted and the behavior addressed concretely, we can kiss our freedoms goodbye, no matter what terrorists Mr. Hopey-Changey manages to kill.

Friday Fat Cat Blogging

Lily has grown rather large, larger than Esther, larger than any cat Our House has ever had in residence...

I am glad I never met Lily's father; he might be rather frightening!

Jobs A Priority? Not To House GOP: See HR 3

H.R. 3, just passed by the Republan-dominated House with the assistance of 16 Democrats, is a draconian anti-abortion bill. It goes so far as to penalize businesses (by eliminating their tax credits) for offering employees insurance that covers abortion... even when the insurance is paid for with private money. Now there's a "conservative" maxim for business owners: "you can't spend your own money on a legal procedure, indeed, a constitutionally protected right, if we disapprove of the procedure." The bill also redefines rape in a way that requires a woman to prove she was forcibly raped before allowing her an abortion... now that's just what society has always wanted, a way to force a woman to bear her rapist's baby. [/snark] I've always said today's GOP has a cruel, dictatorial streak running right through it.

Once again, for the record, though I have grown tired of saying it: the Hyde Amendment, attached as a rider to a succession of funding bills since 1976, already prevents federal funds from being used for abortion. Although that amendment slashes access to abortion for poor women by removing it from Medicaid coverage, that's not the issue here. This bill goes much further than that: now the GOPers want to place the same restriction on the use of private funds. It seems to me that is mighty close to burdening a woman's right to an abortion as established in Roe.

Reportedly this bill has zero chance of making it into law. That's presuming the Senate does what it says, or Obama actually keeps a promise and vetoes it. But the fact that this is the third bill introduced in the GOP-controlled House shows just how much the GOP cares about dealing with unemployment, declining wages, home foreclosures, rising prices of every damned thing, etc.

Welcome to the Republan brave new world, where radical social-conservative measures displace basic bread-and-butter issues at the top of the priority list. Are those your priorities? No? Remember that fact in November 2012.

Obama Refuses To Release Bin Laden Death Photos

... says (at least) CBS News.

In other news, an estimated 572 photos allegedly of bin Laden's corpse, some obviously faked, immediately appeared on the Web... [/snark]

(Seriously, though: the FBI has announced that at least one email purporting to show bin Laden dead is a carrier of a virus. Be careful what you open.)

On Our Terms Or Bin Laden's Terms?

Rachel Maddow examines the issue. Long, but full of insights on both process and substance:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

AFTERTHOUGHT: I did not know that a headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security is being built in Anacostia on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeth's mental hospital. Need I say more?

Government By Poll

Obama's poll approval jumped by 9 points in the wake of bin Laden's assassination:

Immediately following the announcement that American forces had killed Osama bin Laden, President Obama's approval rating leapt to its highest level since 2009 in a Washington Post/Pew poll.

In the poll, which was conducted on Monday, 56% of Americans said they approved of Obama's job performance, compared to 38% who said the disapproved. That's a marked turnaround from one month ago, when 47% of Americans gave Obama positive marks on his job performance, while 45% said otherwise.

...

It worked for GeeDubya Bush; why shouldn't it work for Barry Obama? Americans luuuuuvs them some violence: if a president's approval ratings are slipping, he (or she, someday soon, please?) can always improve them by ordering direct military action. We are not a subtle people, and we (that's the generic "we," not including me) don't want a subtle president.

But time and Rove wait for no man, and I am certain as I sit here that Obama's lead will evaporate long before November 2012: the truths told about him will be bad enough, and the lies will be still worse.

Low Teacher Pay

This PSA is brought to you courtesy of a post by PZ Myers of Pharyngula, reflecting an NYT op-ed by Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Calegari... TEACHER PAY SUCKS BIG-TIME. The op-ed contains many interesting facts, but the center of it from my perspective is in these three grafs:

At the moment, the average teacher’s pay is on par with that of a toll taker or bartender. Teachers make 14 percent less than professionals in other occupations that require similar levels of education. In real terms, teachers’ salaries have declined for 30 years. The average starting salary is $39,000; the average ending salary — after 25 years in the profession — is $67,000. This prices teachers out of home ownership in 32 metropolitan areas, and makes raising a family on one salary near impossible. 

So how do teachers cope? Sixty-two percent work outside the classroom to make ends meet. ...

We’ve been working with public school teachers for 10 years; every spring, we see many of the best teachers leave the profession. They’re mowed down by the long hours, low pay, the lack of support and respect. 

When I was born, Dad, trained as a schoolteacher, was working as a shipping clerk for a railroad, basically so he and Mom could afford to have a kid AND rent a very modest place to live. (Two-income households were uncommon in the working class in those days.) A decade later, when Dad decided he really, really wanted to teach school, we made the decision as a family, because it meant a drop in annual income from $13k to under $10k. Add another decade; Dad's salary was still not back to where it had been, though he was well over halfway to a Master's degree earned at UH in night classes, and I went to work in my first full-time job as a programmer... at a salary higher than Dad's salary at the time.

Add 40+ years, and not a damned thing has changed except the dollar amounts. Forgive me if I barf on the next person who says a bunch of damned lies about public school employees including teachers having such a great deal. That person is already soiled in my opinion; it's going to be difficult to see exactly how much of them to wipe away...

Another Question Answered: Torture, Once Again, Did Not Work

You all know by now that bin Laden was located at least in part by his use of a courier. In all the bragging since bin Laden's assassination, some security hawks have claimed that "harsh interrogation techniques" (let's call it what it was: torture) led Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to reveal the name of the courier.

As with all such claims to date, this one is bogus. Since I'm going to quote AP from ABC News, you'll have to depend on Mother Google to find the quote; I don't need the harassment:

Mohammed did not discuss al-Kuwaiti while being subjected to the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, former officials said. He acknowledged knowing him many months later under standard interrogation, they said, leaving it once again up for debate as to whether the harsh technique was a valuable tool or an unnecessarily violent tactic.

Bolds mine. Only a news wire wholly owned by the tough guys on the right would say that it leaves matters "up for debate"; clearly, torture didn't work, and standard interrogation did. Suck on that, nut-cases!

(H/T jamie of IntoxiNation.)

Killing Him Was The Mission

I don't often send you to Politico, but there are a couple of interesting items in this article:

...

The SEALs took fire on their way to the compound’s third floor, where bin Laden had been sleeping, officials said. The encounter with bin Laden lasted only seconds, and ended with a kill shot to his face.

...

“They were told, ‘We think we found Osama bin Laden, and your job is to kill him,’” an official recalled.

...

So at least in theory, and with some risk, the SEALS presumably could have captured bin Laden... but their specified mission was to kill him. I take that to mean that bin Laden knew things that some Americans did not want said aloud.

How long before WikiLeaks releases the contents of those hard drives? [/snark]

Fair Play For The Texas Senate - UPDATED

The Texas Tribune:

Senate lawmakers have tentatively passed a controversial measure to require women seeking abortions to receive sonograms — and have the details of the fetus described to them — prior to the procedure. Pending a final vote tomorrow, the bill will head back to the House so the lower chamber can sign off on the Senate's changes. 

...

This bill is certain to pass, and Gov. Goodhair is certain to sign it. I found this exchange very revealing, between Sen. Dan Patrick (R-Houston) and Sen. Wendy Davis (D-Ft. Worth):

Davis alleged the purpose of the bill "is to traumatize women." Patrick fired back: "You know me better than that."

Oh, indeed, we know you well, Sen. Right-Wing-Radio-Talk-Show-Host-Turned-Right-Wing-Pol. We know you better than you want to imagine.

OK. Once we've established in law that the State of Texas can require a doctor to perform a procedure that is medically unnecessary but conforms to a set of social/religious views, I propose the introduction of a similar law, one that requires every male state representative or senator who voted for that law to undergo a sonogram every time a woman in their district is compelled to undergo the same.

But wait... how can a male be given such a sonogram? Isn't it biologically impossible? No, it's not. Have you ever seen the device used to treat urethral meatal stenosis in a man, a thick steel rod? Surely the transducer of a sonogram isn't much larger than that. Just cram that muthafucka into that muthafucka and PUSH...

AFTERTHOUGHT: a friend reminded me on the comment thread that in my anger I advocated avoidable violence and the resulting pain. Perhaps I am becoming what I most abhor. More likely, I was just mad as hell at people bent on harming women. Either way, in the light of day (actually it's not quite dawn yet), I retract my fantasy violence. Dog knows there's enough of the real thing out there.

Glenn Greenwald

... offers a sensible assessment of the killing of Osama bin Laden. What he says is not that different from what I said upstream, but as always, he says it much better than I ever could.

Limericks 101 Assignment

OK, class, we have more serious material than usual available to us today. In the spirit of the Lipinski-Lewinsky-Kaczynski limericks of a few years ago, please write a limerick that rhymes...

• Obama
• Osama
• yo Mama

You have 30 minutes. Use your time wisely.

Let The Mythology Begin

From the Guardian: Osama bin Laden corpse photo is fake. They even show the original images of which the fake is a composite. The photo has already been out on the intertubez for two years, in various publications with various labels.

Here we gooooooo...

Follow-Up: Interview With Baratunde Thurston About His Trump Video

Here's the interview by Steven Thrasher in Village Voice. As Thurston also works for The Onion, don't miss this one-panel jewel. He swears it came from The Onion's staff writers, that he had nothing to do with it...

H/T Kay for the link to the interview.

'Obama 1, Osama 0'

Thus spake a handmade cardboard sign, reminding us that bin Laden's death is a political victory for the president. After all, this is America; every president has to prove himself (herself? will that ever happen?) as a mighty warrior. If signs could contain more words, this one might have held another line: "Obama succeeded where Bush failed." Of course, neither president was really there when the deed was done; if there's to be credit, it must go to the troops in that firefight. But whatever. I am content to allow Obama to bask in reflected glory; it's the American way.

Meanwhile, TPM offers a large number of snapshots of the celebrations in NYC and DC.

I can understand that in these awful times the public needs a victory of some sort. We've lost our jobs; many of us have lost our homes. But by damn, we killed bin Laden... and no one else is ever gonna pull a stunt like 9/11/2001 on us again. [/snark]

These scenes are heartening in their own limited way. But jeez, folks, it ain't VE Day. I just looked around and all my problems are still here this morning. How about you?

AFTERTHOUGHT:  the NYT can never resist a partisan political cheap shot. Headline: "Bin Laden is Dead, Obama Says." Awwww, c'mon, folks... maybe, just once, you could, like, do some actual reporting and find sources to tell you whether bin Laden is dead, rather than using that maybe-it's-not-true voice? I don't recall any headline 10 years ago that read, "Mission Accomplished, Bush Says" ...

AFTERTHOUGHT:  I will bet you money that this gets the wing-nuts chattering:

US officials say that Osama bin Laden has now already been buried at sea. 

Islamic tradition calls for quick interment, preferably within hours of death. But that won't keep the nut-cases from talking endlessly about how he's not really dead, the body buried was not really Osama, etc., etc. ad nauseam. "Show me the death certificate!!1!11!!!!"

Osama Bin Laden Killed

Details here.

Over the decade in which I have written this blog, I have had a tacit policy of not celebrating anyone's death; doing so seemed at best tasteless and at worst counterproductive. I think you will forgive me if I suspend that policy in this one instance: Good riddance to bad rubbish. Yet even that celebration is counterproductive.

Bin Laden's death changes essentially nothing, at least nothing for the better. The United States is still involved in (arguably) three wars directly and ineffectively related to terrorism, and some unspecified number of covert conflicts that are wars in all but name. The US is also still violating treaties, international laws including the Geneva Conventions, its own military laws, and various US policies against things like torture, as if there were no tomorrow and none of America's actions would ever come back to haunt us.

Meanwhile, our civil liberties are being revoked at a breathtaking pace, allegedly in the effort to curb terrorism, but we all know the real reasons. As some of our enemies predicted, the US is effectively destroying itself.

Bin Laden, on the other hand, seems to have gotten everything he wanted. Economically, militarily, and in terms of international relations, the US is headed downhill so fast it makes our heads swim. And presumably Osama is busy with those 72 virgins...

I have only one arguably partisan question: why did this never happen during the administration of George W. Bush? Forgive me if I doubt that omission was accidental: they wanted to leave this on the Democrats' plate. I suppose that turns out to have been a political fuck-up on the part of the GOP.

But before you dance on bin Laden's metaphorical grave, remember this: our nation is probably being buried along with him. To use the phrase popular in 2001... the terrorists have won. Welcome to Hell; enjoy your stay.

Supremes Effectively End Class Action Lawsuits Against Corporations

Elaine Magliaro on Jonathan Turley's blog has details.

The case is AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. Along classic 5-4 ideological lines, the Court voted to validate contracts with clauses that require arbitration or mandate individual rather than group claims in the event of disputes. As you might surmise, corp's can fight such a lawsuit simply by exhausting an individual's resources: even if there are thousands of such individuals, they can be drained and defeated one-by-one using the corp's effectively unlimited supply of lawyers.

Welcome to the new order. Maybe you can fight City Hall, but I doubt seriously you have the money to fight AT&T.

Don't Proselytize Me

There I was, "easy like Sunday morning," sitting in my most comfortable chair, sipping soda and reading an excellent murder mystery.

There was a knock at the front door. The mystery was suspenseful enough that the knock made me jump, but there are a few friends who know me well enough to be welcome to drop in, so I got out of my comfy chair, onto my walker and galumphed my way to the front door. I could not see anyone through the peephole, so I didn't open the door; I merely said "Who is it?"

After a second, a young family, dressed for church and carrying their bibles, appeared. The young man said something; I didn't understand and asked him to repeat. Rather than repeating himself, perhaps influenced by my reluctance to open the door, he said "Have a nice day" and departed.

My strong feeling is that these good people came by with the intention of converting me to their religion. Maybe they are "required" to do so by some mandate, real or imagined, of that religion. Usually they are not interested in the give-and-take of real discussion; they know they have the One True Religion, and they need only tell me about it... truly a one-directional communication... for me to be Saved, as they already are.

I know these people are exercising their First Amendment right, and I do not begrudge them that. I am invariably civil in my interactions with them. But they are wasting their time with me, and life is too short for them to waste their time, or mine.

Unlike one friend's car, I am not convertible. I have my views on Life, the Universe and Everything, and I'm just not interested in buying a package someone else is selling. Threatening me doesn't work, either; I find it utterly incredible that an all-powerful god would bother to condemn anyone to an eternity of hell, for any reason whatsoever. If belief in your god requires me to accept the existence of a hell, I don't want to waste your time or mine talking with you. (Atheists and agnostics, on the other hand, are welcome here. Have a seat and I'll fetch you a beer.)

In earlier days, in another house, on Sundays, in pleasant Spring weather, I often sat inside with my front door open, with a screen door to keep out mosquitoes, reading and sipping, enjoying the breeze. Unfortunately, the whole proselytizing game became too popular in that neighborhood, and I found myself becoming less than polite to those not easily discouraged by a first rebuff. Eventually I started closing my door. Bye bye, Spring breezes.

So let me make it clear to anyone walking in my neighborhood: I don't buy anything sold door-to-door. That includes religion and politics, even though I've done some block-walking myself in the past. If you're a friend or neighbor, come on in. If you are walking for a candidate, please stick a brochure in the outer door. If you have any other agenda, please just keep walking.

Republans At It Again: Gerrymandering Texas

You may have thought that Republans (note: I shall continue to lose the "ic" in "RepublICan" until Republans stop losing the "ic" in "DemocratIC Party") could not possibly do any more redistricting damage than they did in a mid-cycle redistricting in 2003 through the efforts of now convicted criminal money-launderer Tom DeLay (R-Jailhouse). But if you thought that, you would be wrong.

Republans in the Texas House have created a plan that does more minority packing than I would have thought possible after what DeLay already succeeded in doing less than a decade ago... but no, the state House succeeded in diluting-by-combining minority voting strengths, both African American and Hispanic, even more than was done in 2003. State Rep. Garnet Coleman (D-Houston) (official site/political site/public statement on this issue) has written a heads-up letter to US AG Eric Holder regarding the problems this unreservedly Republan plan has with respect to the Voting Rights Act. Read Coleman's letter to see what the bastards are up to this time. It's at least as ugly as what DeLay & Co. did in 2003. And it's being done without even minimal input from the Democratic delegations of counties most affected.

I'm sorry to have to say it... these people are just plain evil. They have, or at least display, not the smallest shred of conscience, nor the tiniest intention of submitting to the will of the majority. If I believed in Hell, I'd cheerfully consign them there.