Sign Of The Times: The Irrefutable Reason

 
I was chatting on the phone with my good friend Ms. M. She is an octogenarian in good health, and out of necessity (and fortunately with considerable ability) works full-time at a job she has had for quite some years. Ms. M. described a recent story that seems both a message about the economic times we live in and a tale of the worst of these times, with one of the most deplorable participants in the workplace today.

Ms. M. had failed to receive her latest paycheck. Indeed, it was about a month late.

"Why are you holding my paycheck?" asked Ms. M.

"Because I can," answered her mean mother of a boss.

I guess you can't argue with that in these times. Welcome to the Republican era of deficit management: "borrow" your employees' funds to underwrite your own deficit. Don't set any cash on the table; it may walk off...

Missing Chucho

 
I've been reminiscing about some of the concert-going experiences of my slightly younger days. Tonight I'm focusing on a concert by the famed Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdés, in Houston's Hermann Park Miller Theater in the late Nineties or early Naughties... a concert I awaited in the audience, a concert that never took place, due to the interference of... the government of Cuba, right? No, because it was cut off, after promotion and with an audience awaiting, by... The Almighty U.S. State Department. That's right. Thanks presumably to Hell's denizen Sen. Jesse Helms, several hundred of us were deprived of the opportunity to hear Valdés. And that is what Helms accomplished for me in his lifetime: he "protected" me from Chucho Valdés.

Chucho has been to the U.S. many times since then, and I am happy to note he is still living and performing, a spring chicken at just a shade under 70 years old. For unrelated reasons, I will not be able to see him... concert-going is not an option for me these days... but it gives me joy to know he's out there and occasionally visiting us.

Jesse Helms is fucking dead, of course... may he be damned to the part of Hell so deep there's no music there, the racist bastard.

Enough about Helms. I'm going to return to listening to recordings... that's what I have available... of Chucho Valdés. One could do worse things with an evening!

Geeks-On-Call-Ogy

 
David Kurtz of TPM:

Remember our old buddy Scott Bloch, the guy who headed up the Office of Special Counsel and allegedly summoned Geeks on Call to wipe his hard drive clean to conceal evidence from an inspector general's investigation? Who can forget.

Well, he's now been charged by the feds with contempt of Congress for failing to reveal to congressional investigators the whole story about his use of Geeks on Call. 

It's not nice to conceal evidence from Congress...

Chinese Food... It's What's For Disaster*

 
ellroon undertakes the prodigious task of listing every toxic disaster China has shipped us in the past few years. The list is interminable... and it's increasingly clear the Chinese government doesn't care. Indeed, they seem ready to place restrictions on food imported from America in retaliation for American restrictions on Chinese food products and other products already demonstrated to be toxic to humans.

How far can they go before we stop importing and eating their dangerous foods, playing with their lead-painted toys, etc.? I don't know, but I am certain they will not stop until we make it unprofitable to slip poisons into the foods they supply us. I have cut back almost entirely on my consumption of Chinese food... canned or takeout or anything that likely was imported from China... and I recommend you do the same thing, for the sake of your health and survival... and that of your children. There is too great a pattern here for any of us to risk ignoring it.

(*And you thought beef was bad...)

Moyers Interviews FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps On Net Neutrality

 
Here.

Bill Moyers just gets better as he approaches the end of his on-air career.

And we should all be grateful that we have Michael J. Copps as FCC Commissioner: without him, we could well find the internet owned and effectively controlled by the telecom's.

Don't expect AT&T, Comcast etc. to look out for anything other than their profits... and if they succeed in stifling our wide-open network with their "tollbooths" and their ability to control what content gets what bandwidth, you can forget about this wonderful platform on which we all communicate.

And America will be alone in the world in allowing these restrictions for pure corporate profit; I've seen our internet services ranked 27th in the world. Do you want to watch the American economy throttled, not just within your lifetime but in the next few years?

Please watch Copps and Moyers, and advise Obama that you want him to instruct the FCC to reclassify the internet as "communications" (which it was since the beginning until George W. Bush) instead of "information services" (Bush's little stick-in-your-ear that removes the FCC from its regulatory role over the 'net). The comfort of your children's golden years may depend on it.

Ihre Papiere, Bitte!

 
Arizona's Gov. Jan Brewer (R) signed a bill allowing police to stop people whom they have reasonable suspicion of being in the country illegally, demand proof of citizenship on the spot, and arrest them for a criminal act... at the state level. Here's Huffpo's Paul Davenport and Jonathan J. Cooper with this summary:

...
The legislation, sent to the Republican governor by the GOP-led Legislature, makes it a crime under state law to be in the country illegally. It also requires local police officers to question people about their immigration status if there is reason to suspect they are illegal immigrants, allows lawsuits against government agencies that hinder enforcement of immigration laws, and make it illegal to hire illegal immigrants for day labor or knowingly transport them.
...

Well, that's interesting. Gov. Brewer, how recently are your people "off the boat"? A long time ago? Can you prove it? Do you carry papers with you everywhere to prove it? Oh, I forgot, you're white; no one will stop you on suspicion of being an alien...

I don't know the consequences of this law... perhaps none, because it is surely unconstitutional, and even if not, the ridicule thrown at the Governor will soon become unbearable to her... but I do know that if truly implemented, this law will cause civil unrest. And justly so.

The Tea Party, Aptly Depicted

 
... by labor cartoonist Mike Konopacki.

(Mike has published six collections of labor cartoons, and worked with the late great Howard Zinn on an illustrated edition of A People's History. Gary Huck is the only full-time cartoonist employed by a union. Out of respect, I'm not violating their copyright. Go to their site; their cartoons are at once funny and exasperating.)

Greenwald's Assessment Of The Beltway Crowd

 
Wow. Does Greenwald nail it or what?

... Beltway denizens play various assigned roles -- this one reads from the Journalist script, that one poses as a legislator, this one's a Democrat and that one's a Republican, the one over there is a regulator, this one is a lobbyist, etc. -- but they all feed from the same trough, and their sole allegiance is to their decadent, insular, endlessly nepotistic, and deservedly dying pseudo-aristocratic culture, and to one another.  ...

Is journalism alive? is it independent of those it reports on? can we trust anyone to tell us the straight story on anything, when the media has that kind of relationship with the government officials on whom it allegedly reports?

Personally, I have to answer those questions "No, no and no." We live in parlous times, and the media is no help.

Canceling Insurance For Women Who Get Sick

 
Grrrr...

WellPoint Targets Breast Cancer Patients For Recision

By: Jane Hamsher Thursday April 22, 2010 9:00 am

Federal investigators have told Reuters that WellPoint, the country’s largest insurance company, is using an algorithm to target women with breast cancer for the express purpose of dropping their coverage.

Murray Waas writes that WellPoint “specifically targeted women with breast cancer for aggressive investigation with the intent to cancel their policies”:

...

Traditionally, insurance is the assumption of risk, uncertain but statistically predictable across a population, for a fee. What WellPoint is doing is using more statistics on its customer population to remove the uncertainty for some individuals, take their money... and drop their coverage anyway.

Call it what you will, theft, fraud, etc., what WellPoint is committing is both unconscionable and criminal. Their executives should rot in jail for a long time. And former WellPoint VP Liz Fowler, who literally wrote Sen. Max Baucus's part of the healthcare "reform" legislation, should find herself banned from all contact with anyone in Washington for the rest of her life.

Hatfill And Ivins: FBI Intimidation And Willful Fraud On Americans Re: 9/11

Greenwald has the details, as he so often does. The short version: Bruce Ivins is being blamed because he committed suicide in the face of extreme FBI pressure; Steven Hatfill refused to give them his life like that, but has had his life effectively ruined for not "cooperating" (i.e., committing suicide). Apparently, that's how it is if you encounter the FBI: you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. And the case, in real life, remains unsolved, no matter what the Bureau says.

I've posted many civil liberties articles over the past few years, some having to do with 9/11 and a lot that don't. This is one of the single most important articles I've seen on the subject: please read it (it's too involved to summarize here) and vow to yourself never to let the matter drop, no matter what the Bushes and Cheney did, and no matter what Obama is still doing. This one is important to America's future: don't let go of it.

Review: Cat Of The Century

Cat of the Century: a Mrs. Murphy Mystery

Rita Mae Brown.

I almost wrote "Rita Mae Down" because the latest effort by Rita Mae Brown is a depressing bit of work, laden with frequent sententious and pretentious right-wing rants delivered by several of the characters. The content is sufficiently and needlessly political that the politics is a real distraction from Ms. Brown's otherwise well-crafted mystery plot. As one reviewer on Amazon put it, Brown may as well have simply told us to join the Tea Party and be done with it. I, for one, don't see why there should be heavy political content in a cozy cat mystery; it's out of place, and there are cat-mystery lovers of every political stripe.

I dutifully read to the end because the "Fairchild Alumni Center" mentioned a few times in the book is named after the late mother of our friend Catherine Fairchild: her mother had much to do with William Woods University* in her lifetime, and Catherine loaned me the book. Thank goodness for that; I am relieved to have saved my $15.21 for the hardbound edition... or should that be "hidebound edition"? ... and I recommend you do the same.

To date, I have collected all of the Mrs. Murphy series. I shall not seek them out again. Let Ms. Brown draw her readership from the Tea Party set instead.

---

* Corrected per Catherine Fairchild's reminder: her mother was very active at and in behalf of William Woods University, not Mr. Woods himself. - SB

Another Clarification

Once again, a clarification for those who may have confused these items:

Golden Sax	Goldman Sachs

This message has been a public service of the Yellow Something Something.

Krugman offers the best discussion I've seen online of the possibilities of What Allowed the Fraud and Where We Go From Here. I don't know. It seems to me that raw greed by Wall Street operators and egregious neglect of duty by the SEC (until now) are sufficient explanation, and the question in my mind is not so much how to fix what's broken, but rather whether it can be fixed.

I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach that reminds me of the S&L scandal in the 1980s and 1990s. Yes, I know: the wiki tells me I should call it the "S&L crisis" but believe me, it was a scandal. We got a recession out of that one, too, and many of us sat back in horror, watching financial institutions engaging in practices our mothers would have warned us against (and making out like bandits in doing so), and... then as now... endangering our retirements. In those days, retirement was, for me, a lot further off, and there seemed to be time to recover. But with enough government financial regulators winking at enough institutional bad behavior, we find ourselves back in the same position today. If the phrase "too big to fail" seems familiar to your ears, that's because it isn't new. Wall Street is still broken, and Wall Street has screwed us ordinary mortals again.

Diane Wood: Why She Is Not Obama's Candidate For The Supreme Court

This is not an in-depth post on Wood and her many excellent qualifications to sit on the Court; for that, I recommend Glenn Greenwald's post. But one thing Greenwald wrote provoked a thought in me, and the more I pondered it, the more it bothered me.

Here's the line from Greenwald:

Wood's ability to craft legal opinions to induce conservative judges to join her opinions is renowned, as is the respect she commands from them through unparalleled diligence and force of intellect.

And here's my question:

Who would NOT want such a Justice on the Court, and why?

Here's a possibility: Forty-one members of the U.S. Senate... and the President of the United States... want the Court to stay "broken," dysfunctional, unable to render independent reasonable decisions or reach consensus, because such a state of the Court enhances the real power of the Congress and the presidency at the expense of the Court. In other words, are we witnessing the deliberate weakening of one of our essential three branches of government, brought about by the other two branches?

Scary thought, eh?

Cause And Effect

Iranian clerics have an interesting perspective on that relationship, especially when it comes to immodest women and their link to... earthquakes???

Monday, Apr 19, 2010 11:06 EDT
Broadsheet
Iranian cleric: Immodest women cause quakes

Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi issues a warning about seismically slutty dames

By Tracy Clark-Flory
Reuters/Eduardo Munoz//Salon

Amid all the recent speculation over what only feels like an unusual number of earthquakes around the world, an Iranian cleric has offered a novel explanation for the source of seismic activity: promiscuous women. Unless Iranians "take refuge in religion" and "adapt our lives to Islam's moral codes," they can expect to be "buried under the rubble," said Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi, a senior cleric, during Friday prayers in Tehran. As usual, these moral responsibilities are projected onto women's bodies: "Many women who do not dress modestly ... lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes," he said.

Just two weeks ago, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted a devastating earthquake in the country's capital and called for "at least 5 million" to relocate. The thing is, Iran does sit on some major fault lines, and experts have long warned of a catastrophic quake in Tehran. ...

...

OK. Let's do some comparisons...

Here is a world map of earthquakes (NASA/GSFC), a very topographical-looking cylindrical projection (I think). For correspondence and so that I don't have to learn Google Maps better to create an overlay, here is a world political map (mapsofworld.com). Just for good measure, here is another world map of earthquakes (USGS), this one much more typically map-like and flat-looking, intended for use in explaining plate tectonics.


Had enough of world maps yet? We're almost done with them. Oh, I almost forgot: Here is an earthquake map of Iran, Google-simplified to point out only the big ones.


So, let's return to immodest women. (I am always happy to return to immodest women!)


Where are most of the earthquakes on those maps? Well, there's the West Coast of the United States... the East Coast, not so much, but I think we can agree that if Cleric Kazem (forgive me; his name is irrelevant, but I need something shorter to call him) is correct about the connection with earthquakes, that almost all the women on the West Coast must parade around 99 percent undressed at least half the time. Then there's the West Coast of South America: it must be similarly populated almost exclusively with gals perpetually unclad. Again, not so much the East Coast, though Rio has had more than a few earthquakes over the past century... hey, we wouldn't want the traditionally scantily clad Girl from Ipanema to be left out! (Calm down... Astrud Gilberto is anything but scantily clad in this video. Completely covered, and performing more stiffly than I remember ever seeing her, is what she is in this video.)


Ah...now let's look at Iran! (See links to maps at top of post.) Now answer the question, Mister Kazem: where are the women sluttier, more immodest, etc. than on the West Coast of the U.S.? Right. Good job you're doing over there!

'Unlimited Energy' Promised, This Time Through Photosynthesis

 
Remember those Fifties movies on atomic power, "too cheap to meter," providing "unlimited energy" to all of us? At the time, only one teeny-tiny problem remained to be solved; remember how that has worked out? Well, here we go again:

Published on Tuesday, April 13, 2010 by The Independent/UK

Breakthrough as US Researchers Replicate Photosynthesis in Laboratory
GM viruses offer hope of future where energy is unlimited

by Steve Connor

Scientists have made a fundamental breakthrough in their attempts to replicate photosynthesis - the ability of plants to harvest the power of sunlight - in the hope of making unlimited amounts of "green" energy from water and sunlight alone.

The researchers have assembled genetically modified viruses into wire-like structures that are able to use the energy of the sun to split water molecules into their constitute parts of oxygen and hydrogen, which can then be used as a source of chemical energy.

If the process can be scaled up and made more efficient, it promises to produce unlimited quantities of hydrogen fuel, a clean source of energy that can be used to generate electricity as well as acting as a portable, carbon-free fuel for cars and other vehicles.

Replicating photosynthesis - in which plants convert sunlight into a store of chemical energy - has been a dream of the alternative energy business for decades. ...

...

Oh, indeed, it has. And... forgive me if I offer a prediction... it will remain so for decades, along with cold fusion, clean coal, and of course safely disposable waste from ordinary (fission) nuclear power plants. How many times must I say it: nothing... no political process, no scientific discovery and no feat of engineering is going to save us from ourselves. We must do it on our own, probably in small, incremental steps. I'd love to be proved wrong, but the only breakthrough in power generation I expect to see in my lifetime is when Uncle Stumblestep, attempting to put up solar panels, breaks through the weak patch on the roof.

I wish them luck. The process may provide unlimited energy, or it may not. (Where will all that energy go? how will it dissipate once it's released as heat after it drives a motor or a light for a while?) But it will not solve all our problems, and we need to rein in our media-driven expectations, focus our energies (so to speak), and institute some serious conservation measures.

Friday Goat Blogging

The people and goats of Polymeadows Farm:

If you live in Vermont, or at least in the Northeast, check out their products. You say you don't like goat's milk? Think again. Treat yourself to one of their maple smoothies... mmm! Ken and Anne (see post upstream) were kind enough to have some of the yogurt and a couple of smoothies shipped to me refrigerated (it's not yet regularly available in Texas), and I'm ready to move to Vermont (yes, winters and all) just for proximity to this wonderful dairy farm!

(Photo "borrowed" from Anji Johnston, to whom thanks... hey, it's free advertising. Click picture to enlarge. See web site for more info. And please, please, readers, treat yourselves to some of that Polymeadows Farm yogurt!)

GOP Plans Own Demise: Prepares To Filibuster Financial Reform

 
Heh. For Republicans, in an election year, this is nuts. If only Senate Dems don't screw this up...

Yet Another Reason...

... to avoid dealing with Apple if at all possible:

Apple App Store Bans Pulitzer-Winning Satirist for Satire
By Ryan Singel ... April 15, 2010  | 7:07 pm  | Categories: Media

Editorial cartoonist Mark Fiore may be good enough to win this year’s Pulitzer Prize, but he’s evidently too biting to get past the auditors who run Apple’s iPhone app store, who ruled that lampooning public figures violated its terms of service.

Fiore irked Apple’s censorious staffers with his cartoons making fun of the Balloon Boy hoax and the pair that famously crashed a White House party, according to Laura McGann at the Neiman Journalism Lab.
...

So they can't take Fiore, the funniest political animator out there. Their new company slogan must be, "Apple... No Damn Sense of Humor."

J.K. Rowling Writes... Politics?!???

Yes, she does... a forthright, well-researched, well-supported treatment of the issue of the frequent poverty in which single parents must live. Rowling's first husband died divorced her, leaving her with a child, and she knows the worst of bleak, hopeless poverty... firsthand. Far from poor now, she responds as the whole world attends to what she says... and when she responds, she says it so very, very well. No surprise there, I suppose!

Did I mention she has proclaimed her intention to continue her unbroken record of never voting Tory? Does that sound anything like a certain YSS's long-ago proclamation that he will never, ever again vote for a Republican?

(Corrected after initial posting - SB)

Obama DOJ Prosecutes NSA Whistleblower

... but not the NSA crooks from the Bush administration themselves. Intimidating, no? Greenwald has details.

(Laptop display is holding up, but I'd better let it cool for a while now.)

Laptop Display Problems

Earlier this afternoon, my laptop display blanked and stayed blank. I think the computer overheated. It's working now, but I have no confidence I'll be able to surf and blog from this seat, and doing so from anywhere else (e.g., my desktop computer) is a bit of a physical challenge right now. If you don't see me for a few days, that's why. On the other hand, maybe I'll resolve one or another issue and continue posting as usual. I just don't know.

Is Liberalism Dead, Or Does It Just Smell Funny?

Sam Smith gives us a lot to agree with, a lot to disagree with, and in general a lot to think about in his essay, Liberalism is Dead. Time to Move On. It's long but definitely worth a read.

H/T Susie Madrak, who remarks, "This isn’t just about winning. What do you want to win for?"

(Lower) Tax Day - UPDATED

You wouldn't know it by the systematic lies perpetrated by the GOP, but you are probably in one of the 98% of working families who are paying lower taxes now that Democrats are in power. AP:

Tax Day rhetoric aside, Americans' bills are lower

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER (AP) – 11 hours ago

WASHINGTON — You wouldn't know it by the Tax Day rhetoric, but Americans are paying lower taxes this year, even with increases passed by many states to balance their budgets. Don't expect it to last.

Congress cut individuals' federal taxes for this year by about $173 billion shortly after President Barack Obama took office, dwarfing the $28.6 billion in increases by states.

...

Face it: all conventional wisdom to the contrary, the GOP is the party of higher taxes. They need the money to support their endless invasive wars, their no-bid sweet deals with their cronies, their so-called faith-based programs, their nonfunctional abstinence-only family planning proselytizing and their own personal greed. Oh, and they need it to service the debt on all the programs they instituted off-budget, leaving the cost to be borne by later administrations and later generations. Do not be deceived. The GOP is the party of higher taxes.

(Small editorial update inserted moments after initial posting. - SB)

---

Afterthought: I got to thinking about Ohlemacher's "[d]on't expect it to last." Put aside the obvious transformation of the AP into a conservative-leaning news organization that feels compelled to take GOP-style potshots at Obama on every possible occasion, and notice that no sane person would expect it to last, considering the eight years of profligate spending by the Cheney/Bush administration, truly adolescents on a spree with their parents' credit cards. At some point, higher taxes are inevitable; the real question, which AP would never address, is whether Barack Obama will follow through on his campaign promises to redistribute that inevitable tax burden away from working families and toward the wealthiest Americans. But the entity that was once merely "the wire" has become an opinion-news vendor, along with CNN and yes, Fox. It's a sad fact for those of us old enough to remember "the wire."

Primary Runoff Results (Yawn)

As the ever-useful Charles Kuffner notes, there were few if any surprises: election results mostly tracked early voting results. I was happy to note that Republicans managed to oust one of the State Board of Education's scariest right-wing nut-jobs (yes, there have been several) at the primary level.

Other than that, who knew that so many people in both parties actually want to be local judges!

Primary Runoff; Today's Good Grammar Award

Today is the day of the runoff election in Texas for the Democratic and Republican party primaries. All the basic information can be found at the personal web site of State Rep. Scott Hochberg (D-137). Please note that the polling place at which you usually vote may be closed: only some are open, because of the expected light turnout.

An aside: Hochberg was my state representative for about a decade and is himself the model of what an elected official can be if s/he is deeply committed to actual public service... and (in Rep. Hochberg's case) very, very bright.

Rep. Hochberg also wins today's good grammar award for the following excerpt from a broadcast email about the primary runoff:

If you voted in one party's primary last month, you can vote only in the same party's runoff. 

Nine of ten people would have said "only vote," leading one to think that one can only vote in it, not put up signs for it, follow returns for it, etc. Not Scott: he got it just right. In English, word order can make all the difference.

Why The Banner Quote?

Who is Ken Weiss? and what is he doing in my banner quote, offering a commentary on the evo/devo subject du jour? Ken Weiss is a department head at Penn State (anthropology, if I remember right). He and his equally brilliant and similarly credentialed spouse, Anne Buchanan Weiss, are two of the most astute commentators on the practice of biological science in the world today, and they blog together on The Mermaid's Tale, ecodevoevo.blogspot.com, which you may have noticed in the blogroll. The Mermaid's Tale is also the title of their latest book, The Mermaid's Tale: Four Billion Years of Cooperation in the Making of Living Things.

Did I mention that I'm proud to have worked for Ken and with Anne as one of his programmers for many years a couple of decades ago?

These people are the real deal, practicing scientists as well as philosophers and critics of science. Read and learn.

Creative Writing Award For The Day

From commenter antiprop1 on a thread at Huffington Post debating nuclear disarmament:

Once Oppenheimer opened Pandora's box, the cat was out of the bag.

Hmm... post-Schrödinger, I thought that... dead or alive... the cat was in the box...

I'll Drink To That

WSJ:

HOJE-TAASTRUP, Denmark—Michael Christiansen, a truck driver turned union representative, is fighting hard to preserve one of the last, best perks of the beer industry: the right to drink on the job.


Mr. Christiansen's union brethren are wort boilers, bottlers, packers and drivers at Carlsberg A/S, Denmark's largest brewer. For a century, they've had the right to cool off during a hard day's work with a crisp lager.


But on April 1, the refrigerators were idled and daily beer spoils were capped at three pint-sized plastic cups from a dining hall during lunch hour.


"This is a right workers have had for 100 years," Mr. Christiansen says. "Carlsberg has taken it away without any negotiating at all."


...

Of course, it's the union aspect of this story that attracts me. It has nothing to do with what it must be like to live in a country in which such a dispute is even possible... oh, no, not at all. Nothing to do with three cold ones a day while I work. Nothing... [/snark]

H/T Susie Madrak.

The Last Laugh

This sign must have been in place since before the days of the internet:

Basketball Team Drinks, Gets Thoroughly Pissed

Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

Saginaw High cheerleaders disciplined for giving teammates sodas with urine

12:00 AM CDT on Friday, April 9, 2010

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Several Saginaw High School cheerleaders have been disciplined for giving teammates sodas mixed with urine.

Eagle Mountain-Saginaw ISD officials declined to specify how many students were involved but said at least two girls were given in-school suspensions and others lesser punishments. They will not be allowed to participate in cheerleading events through the end of the school year but will be allowed to participate next school year.

The incident occurred during a basketball game last winter, according to a parent of one of the students who drank the soda. He said at least one cheerleader urinated into a cup and mixed the urine into drinks. Other cheerleaders encouraged her to give the tainted sodas to teammates.

...

Best hed comes from Jonathan Turley, who begins his headline,

GIVE ME A PEE

---

CROSS-CULTURAL NOTE:  "pissed" (American English) means 'really angry'; "pissed" (British English) means 'really drunk'.

American Tune

"We can't be forever blessed." - Paul Simon, "American Tune"

(NOTE: earlier references to IE8 problems were resolved when I replaced a more than five-year-old Adobe Flash player with the current one. I had long since done that in Firefox, but apparently not in IE.)

Gitmo In America

Yes, specifically in Illinois. The Obama administration appears to intend to reconstruct the essence of Guantanamo in the Thomson Correction Center facility, and is looking into purchasing (already has purchased?) that facility for the purpose. [UPDATE: the Pentagon is seeking $350 million as part of its Afghanistan funding to use in purchasing the facility.] As Spencer Ackerman says in the linked article,

According to a senior administration official who briefed reporters on the plan to close Guantanamo in December, the facility will house detainees either convicted by military commissions or held in some form of indefinite detention without charge. To civil libertarians, that would entrench some of the most intolerable legal abuses of Guantanamo Bay in the name of ending it, rendering the shutdown of the facility Pyrrhic at best and misleading at worst. 

 Wonderful. Our own little due-process-free black hole, right in the middle of America. It gives you a warm feeling, doesn't it, thinking of all those people held indefinitely without charge or trial, without an opportunity to show their innocence... right here in the middle of what used to be America. Such a black hole would, I am certain, eventually suck all our liberties into it, no matter who we are, American citizens included (see downstream post here).

As a free and just society... we are done for. Welcome to the end of our era.

Obama Targets American Citizen For Assassination - UPDATED

Earlier, the Obama administration claimed the right to target American citizens abroad for assassination, without charge, without trial, without formal evidence of criminal acts... in other words, without due process as required by the Constitution. Now they've actually ordered an assassination under this policy:

Reports: US OKs radical US-born cleric for death

The Associated Press
Wednesday, April 7, 2010; 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration has authorized the killing of a radical Muslim cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen believed to be hiding in Yemen and thought to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the U.S. to participating in them, according to published reports.

Al-Awlaki has emerged as a prominent al-Qaida recruiter and has been tied by U.S. intelligence to the 9/11 hijackers, along with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, as well as Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in November at Fort Hood, Texas.

...

Somebody has to say it: to the best of our knowledge, even George Bush and Dick Cheney never did this.

Now, if you're an American citizen abroad, and Obama says you're a terrorist, you're a terrorist, and may be assassinated on sight, no matter what you have or have not done, and no matter if you are or are not engaging in hostilities against the United States when you are assassinated. Your Fifth Amendment, Sixth Amendment and arguably Eighth Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution are utterly forfeit. Perhaps the most sacred aspect of your American citizenship... your right to due process under law... is stripped from you by presidential decree alone.

America is no longer America. How long will it be before this purported presidential power will be used in response to Americans abroad who are merely critical of this President or a future President? ComposeLet me re-emphasize: it does not matter what a citizen has done. Even an American citizen accused of treason gets a trial.

Until now.

God save the United States of America. It seems no one else will.

---

UPDATE: It's all confirmed. Heaven help us all.

'The Dog Ate It' - UPDATED

How many times do they expect the so-called journalists covering this war to believe and publish this kind of crap?

Military can't find its copy of Iraq killing video

PAULINE JELINEK and ANNE FLAHERTY
AP News
Apr 06, 2010 20:37 EDT
The U.S. military said Tuesday it can't find its copy of a video that shows two employees of the Reuters news agency being killed by Army helicopters in 2007, after a leaked version circulated the Internet and renewed questions about the attack.

Capt. Jack Hanzlik, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command, said that the military has not been able to locate the video within its files after being asked to authenticate the version available online.

...

What's that? one more time? Oh, well, OK then; I'll believe it... I haven't renewed my Journalist's Utter Wuss  License this month yet; I need a few more toady credits with the military...

Dog-DAMN, where do our so-called journalists come from these days? Why didn't they call "bullshit" the moment the brass made their dog-ate-my-homework statement?

---

UPDATE: The Wikileaks site Collateral Murder contains the full-length documentary. Ugh.

Federal Court Ruling: Comcast 1, Net Neutrality 0 - UPDATED

Net neutrality lost big-time in the federal appeals court for DC. This is the worst possible news for... well, for you, who obviously spend time viewing Web content.

Net neutrality is the short name for the tradition, reinforced until now by FCC policy and/or regulation, that internet providers and carriers must serve all material to end users at the same rate. Simply put, content from the Yellow Something Something must be served to you upon request at the same transmission rate as Google and the New York Times.

Now, under this ruling, Comcast, a major carrier of internet data, may set up a schedule of fees and say to Web content providers, "pay up, or we'll put your content to the end of the line." Comcast sued with the intention of doing just that if it won in court.

It did. It will.

Google and the NYT will have to pay up, but they'll manage, passing on their costs to us. Bloggers and similar ne'er-do-wells... well, they'll probably lose readership as people discover that they have time to go get coffee while the Yellow Something Something loads in their browser.

Congress can, of course, pass a net neutrality law, fixing in statute what was merely policy and FCC tradition before. But the telecom industry (e.g. Comcast) is a veritable gravy train of campaign contributions to members of Congress and presidential candidates. I wouldn't hold my breath.

Please view the hypothetical end-user internet service pricing ad at the end of the linked article. It's an eye-popping vision of what we are likely to see if this issue is unaddressed.

(Minor changes made moments after posting.)

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UPDATE: there may be another way to protect net neutrality other than a new statute... but regrettably it will require (ulp) courage on the part of Obama's FCC chair. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: more on this approach, from Free Press's Save the Internet program.

Clarification

For anyone who may have confused these items:

Egg Roll	Egg Roll

This message has been a public service of the Yellow Something Something.

Typo Of The Week

From Jonathan Turley's blog (new to the blogroll here), a truly monumental typo in a headline:

Monumental Failure? Senegal Trades Land to North Korea For Massive Statute Designed By President — Jesse Jackson Applauds Result

In Turley's defense, I assume he writes a lot more about statutes than statues.

Another Obama-Driven Environmental Nightmare

You've read about Obama's relaxing of the offshore drilling regulations, but did you know about the Obama administration's decision to defend in court the Bush administration's regulation allowing unlimited dumping of hard rock mining waste on public land?

The hits just keep coming.

Little Fricassees For Your Cat

Catherine sends a link; BoingBoing provides the YouTube video of this very Sixties-looking Little Friskies commercial. And if you really want to take yourself back, there's a psychedelic remix. (Peter Max, what are you doing these days?)

Catherine says her cats don't get this cat food. I remarked that she should be grateful... all those turkeys and fish are bound to leave an awful mess!

Happy Spring Holiday Of Your Choice

For many (not for me), that's Easter. Happy Easter, if this Sunday is when your calendar places Easter.

If you're devout, celebrate secure in the knowledge that you have the approval and sometimes admiration of one whose religion, unlike yours, posits no concept of Hell, no damnation, universal salvation (that's for everyone, no exceptions) and one deity in one part who's just not all that mean. Enjoy your salvation; I see everyone as pre-saved. I'll stay out of the way for Your Day. I do identify with the notion of someone (Jesus) who cared so much about his people that he was willing to sacrifice his life to save them (as he saw it); now that's true commitment.

If you are not devout, or simply areligious, go easy on the chocolate eggs and bunnies...

Blog Wars, Nothin' But Blog Wars...

♪ Avedon  expresses about as compactly as possible the elements of the latest Blog Wars between the Greenwald/Hamsher faction, which has established a PAC, and the dKos faction, which seems determined to use innuendo to cast aspersions on any liberal blogger who either (a) earns part of his or her living from the blog, (b) gets paid anything at all for work done in behalf of "the cause," or (most significantly) criticizes Obama in any way. The whole business is regrettable, and is certain to reduce the total effectiveness of both the Democratic and the Progressive blogosphere in the political arena. It seems that does not matter to some people.

Mine has never been more than a tiny individual blog, nor have I sought anything grander; in theory, I don't have a doggerel in this race. But I have a stake in political outcomes and inevitably in the means employed to bring them about. I cannot help having feelings about it when the suggestion is made that people either contribute their usually paid skills for free or sacrifice time in which they otherwise could be doing paid work to work pro bono instead for progressive causes, or else be accused of not being dedicated to "the cause." Avedon names writers and artists as targets of this (usually but not always well-intended) expectation; to that short list I would add IT professionals and sometimes musicians (there are doubtless others I have inadvertently omitted). If you're not on that list, you may be amazed at what people will ask you to do for free, and how indistinguishable it is from what you do for a living. In my experience, most people who ask are not on the list themselves... why am I not surprised.

Let's face it: blogging will not save the world, or even the nation. If you want to save our collapsing political system, you have really only two choices:

• Phone-bank, block-walk and (if appropriate and possible) contribute money to individual candidates you think might help. It's all very labor-intensive, but I did my share of it before my feet went south, and it's the only thing an ordinary American can do that has an actual effect on outcomes. The effectiveness of shoe leather is only marginally greater than that of spitting in the wind, but people do notice who's at their front door or on their phone... and they truly do not give a damn what you post on your individual blog.
• Support someone like Hamsher and Greenwald (through their Accountability Now PAC) to do some of your homework for you. The results of doing this are even dicier than of helping individual candidates yourself, but it gives some sense (rightly or wrongly) of extending one's reach nationally in a way that few of us can manage on our own. 

Here ends the sermon for the day. I suppose it is futile to ask the big players to put away their light sabers, but I hope that in this blog war, as in all that have gone before it, something resembling sanity prevails before the combatants (yes, particularly the dKos crowd) look around and see nothing but spited faces and cut-off noses.

Court: Bush Wiretapping Illegal - UPDATED

No fooling! Keith Olbermann interviews James Risen:

H/T Blue Texan.

UPDATE: Greenwald has a worthwhile analysis and many useful links to related commentary.

Drill, Barack, Drill!

Read this. Have your barf bag handy.

Can you spell "co-opted,"children? If not, the President will help you...

More Doc Work

I'm going in for more tests today. I'm sorry the blog is so consumed with personal and medical items lately, but when it takes me 20 min. just to go to the bathroom or for a glass of orange juice, there's just not enough time and energy to do a proper job of researching a real blog post. On top of all that (whine), tree pollen is so extremely high that I am queasy 24x7. I hope to be back in less than a day; thanks for your patience.

Oh... the medical news? It's at least not worse. I'm waiting, waiting, waiting for results...

Tuesday Morning, 3 A.M.

Stella and I discovered each other independently wakeful, she in the office, I in my perpetual chair, neither of us likely to sleep soon. Stella found a stack of old photos, so old they emerged mostly from my now-defunct film camera of yesteryear, spanning many of our adventures in Central Texas, friends and their kids, and Stella in her youth. (If you think she's gorgeous now, she was truly stunning in her 20s and 30s. Still, alll in all, I'll take today's version, thank you.) So we sat up paging through old glossies, reminiscing about the old days. I'm very sleepy this morning, but happy for the diversion. It does mean that any serious blogging will have to wait...

Priestly (Di)Vestments

Matt Taibbi (admittedly not everybody's favorite guy) gets into it one more time with the Catholic Church over ongoing pedophilia scandals and Pope Benedict's (Ratzinger's) apparent involvement in cover-ups. The scandals widen, the numbers of kids abused continues to grow, and to all appearances the Church continues cover-ups and evasions of criminal law.

I'm sorry, but the Church receives no special exemption in these matters: priests, as surely as anyone anywhere, must be subject to ordinary criminal law in matters of physical abuse. Until the practices are rooted out and stopped... until the hierarchy of the Church ceases enabling these crimes... it is damned well our business to see that the abusers are found and prosecuted. Too many children's lives and mental health are at stake.

Warning: Catholics may be offended by Taibbi's post. What they should be offended  by is the unconscionable priestly behavior it reveals.

Connection Problem

Apologies for my absence. We had "technical difficulties" on this end.

We sat up late attempting to render two of Stella's documents into a file format we could print from my computer... her fancy printer has quit, just as Murphy's Law requires, at the most inconvenient possible time, half a day before a deadline.

No problem, right? Right: email 'em to me; let me print 'em. Um, that may take a while. Just locate and install M$ Word 2003 SP3 in my copy of Word so it would support newer file type converters that recognize .docx files. Like any M$ install procedure, the SP3 and the converters together, on a three-year-old machine, took about 1½ hours.

Exhausted, we emailed and printed the documents... only to discover that my ancient HP inkjet printer has gone defunct, mostly due to disuse, and neither head-cleaning nor new cartridges helped... the printed output looked like crap, completely unacceptable for a presentation document. Damn that printer... it lasted only about 15 years of useful life!

That was the less frustrating part of the adventure.

Stella's new plan, arranged by phone, was to burn a CD of the docs and take them to Kinko's to be printed. But a little later, she phoned a colleague and arranged to email them to the colleague, to be printed in the morning because everyone was exhausted last night. This morning, our internet connection was kaput. This rarely happens... our local AT&T is one of the more reliable services I've experienced anywhere... but Murphy prevailed again. Here's the frustrating part: the phone line associated with the DSL was working fine. All the cabling appeared properly plugged across our little network. All modem lights were green across the board. The router lights appeared normal; besides, bypassing the router did not fix the problem. Restarting computer and router had no effect.

The nature of the problem seemed to be domain name service. Eventually it occurred to me to power-cycle the modem itself, despite its solid-green appearance. Within seconds, I had Google on my browser and Stella's document in my out-box to her colleague. Apparently AT&T had lost its DNS overnight and later restored it, but my truly ancient equipment does not always detect and recover the service on my end.

And so at last, we were successful. As a result, today's departmental Easter Egg Hunt can go forward just as planned!

That Sinking Feeling

No man is an island entire of itself. Indeed, this island isn't even an island, at least not above water:

Disputed isle in Bay of Bengal disappears into sea

AP

By NIRMALA GEORGE, Associated Press Writer Nirmala George, Associated Press Writer – Wed Mar 24, 9:29 am ET

NEW DELHI – For nearly 30 years, India and Bangladesh have argued over control of a tiny rock island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have resolved the dispute for them: the island's gone.

New Moore Island in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said.

"What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Hazra.

...

I've always said global climate change would ultimately resolve all of humankind's disputes... [/snark]

H/T ellroon.

Friday Cat Blogging

Please see the picture two posts upstream. Indeed, "I has a sad" about the loss of our cats. R.I.P. Samantha. R.I.P. Tabitha. In-house cat-blogging will have to wait a while; we're still mourning.

Last night I had a literal sleeping dream about Samantha. At least I assume it was Samantha; in the dream, it was a kitten at most a few months old, but it was the spitting image of Samantha as she must have looked at that age. She was playing among the legs of an old-fashioned wooden dining chair; I knew it was Samantha because the deep red finish on the chair legs (courtesy of my late father) set off Samantha's cinnamon highlights.. The image was so vivid I sat up with a start. I leaned forward in my easy chair for a better look (I knew I might not get another chance), somehow tripped the latch on the easy chair's footrest and sent it (and my feet) crashing to the floor, and sighed as Samantha vanished from my view, doing a disappearing number that would have been a credit to the Cheshire Cat.

Bye, gal; I miss you a lot.

Encapsulation Of Republican Philosophy

Here's a video... somehow familiar, somehow a little bit different... that embodies the essence of Republican politics in our era. Even as one who is not much of an Obama fan, I have to say this one cracked me up. Enjoy... if that's the right word.

Too Many Worthy Creatures...

... are meeting their untimely demise these days.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

H/T Badtux for the LOLcats link.

Tragedy

Catherine, our good friend for over 35 years, lost one of her other best friends to a motor vehicle crash on I-45 on her way to Dallas. News reports are a bit sparse, but the crash... I cannot bring myself to call it an accident... was as classic as it was senseless. Her friend was a back-seat passenger in a tiny Honda Civic that was reportedly going "slowly" (on a Texas interstate, that could mean anywhere from 65 to 75 mph). A massive Dodge Ram pickup approached from behind, failed to control speed (God knows what that speed was), and... as I said, this kind of crash is classic on our interstates. As a result, a dear person approaching retirement age died needlessly. Of course the truck driver survived. How many times have we Texans driven that same road? how many times held our breath? how many times shouted oh shit oh jeezus, only to be spared at the last instant?

Momentum equals mass times velocity; that is a law of classical physics. Given that we in our wisdom have decided that everything from multi-ton trucks to motorcycles shall share the same road, only one of the two variables... velocity... is left to adjust if one hopes to reduce the momentum of that truck behind you before disaster ensues. I admit I've driven Texas' absurdly high speed limits myself, in much smaller vehicles, but when drivers of massive trucks take to the road at 90mph, it is inevitable that innocent people will be killed. And thus it apparently happened to Catherine's friend CR.

CR was a musician, a teacher and an exceptionally gifted speaker and writer of English. Like many of us, she had a "straight job,"  at which she reportedly excelled. And she was truly a dear person. All of that is now lost to us on this earth. Please, please, people... drive on the highway as if your own best friend's life depended on it.

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Medical events in my life are coming thick and fast; I'll have to enumerate them later. Meanwhile, chew on this: tomorrow, my doc is making (take a deep breath, now) a house call. No kidding!

Triumph Over Fear

Is Paul Krugman right? Does the healthcare reform bill represent not so much the Democratic Party's political defeat of the Republicans... many would assert that; many would deny it vehemently... but an American triumph over the worst of fearmongering to which we have been subjected? I welcome your opinions (within reason, of course): are we better off for this vote, for more than just a political victory? I am uncertain; the resulting bill has some terrifying flaws. But if it is indeed a first successful challenge to the politics of raw fear practiced by the GOP in recent years, it may be worth it. As a body politic, we really need to move past that abject, irrational fear; any such step may be a good step.

Nothing is ever simple...

Healthcare Reform Bill Passes

Well, I'll be damned. I didn't think they had the guts or the political craft to do it. All they had to do to accomplish it was to throw about half the traditional Democratic base under that bus mentioned below, but I have to give them credit for rising out of their stupak stupor and actually crafting a legislative victory.

So... why do I care? I'm no longer a party member, and the bill manifestly sucks eggs in some important ways. Well, here's why:

• the collapse of the Democratic Party, however little I like the damned thing, could well lead forthwith to the collapse of the nation. And believe me: a legislative failure of that magnitude would lead to the collapse of an already shaky party. We... all of us.... still need the Democratic Party, and we need it in at least minimally operable condition for a while; 

• this was almost certainly the last political opportunity of my lifetime to address healthcare reform at the federal level. In other words, a bad law can be tinkered into shape after its passage; a failed bill that did not become law has a snowball's chance in South Texas in July of being reintroduced in a reasonable time. How long has it been since Hillary's bill? See?

I may have more on this tomorrow, but I'm also addressing some medical problems of my own. Thanks for your patience.

Under The Bus

That's where the women of America are about to be tossed, in the name of political expediency.

Read. Howl in outrage. And as far as I'm concerned... shut the motherfucker down.

I believe I've had enough of the goddamned games Congress... and yes, Obama... are playing with women's basic rights and civil liberties. New procedures seem to be introduced... invented?... daily to allow conservative extremists with a 'D' after their names to change the meaning of legislation after it has in essence been voted on. We have met the George III of our day, and he is most of the entire goddamned Congress.

We no longer live in a representative democracy. Women are among the first to pay the price for that abandonment. But they will not be the last. It's going to be crowded under that bus. Anyone else unwilling to stay there?

Status Update

This week, getting definitive answers on anything medical has been like pulling teeth. OK, maybe that's not the best choice of phrase. But that MRI that I had about a week ago... those things are a real carnival ride of fun, let me tell you... seems to have yielded less information than I at least had hoped, including answers to a couple of specific questions that should determine the course of my future treatment. I can't really even doctor-shop if I don't know a bit more specifically what the ailment is. So I'm pressing my primary care provider for assistance in making some decisions, and to my surprise and dismay, he's not returning my phone calls, which is unusual for him. To his credit, he arranged for an assistant to walk me through the prose summary of the MRI results. Some mostly predictable observations were made, and a couple of additional diagnostic avenues suggested... but no overall course of action was made clear.

Stella cleared most of the hallways in our home so that it is much easier to get around in a wheelchair. Unfortunately, the bathroom is not among the straightforwardly accessible rooms, and that's a damned nuisance... I'll leave it to you to imagine the solutions. On the food prep front, I get to pretend I'm a seven-year-old boy: the counter-tops are at eye level, the back of the kitchen sink is almost impossible to reach, the dish cabinets may as well be on another planet, I can choose foods from only some parts of the freezer or refrigerator, and even a lot of the canned goods in the pantry are out of reach. We're gradually remedying these limitations, but it's awfully slow going. Once in a while, I work myself into a corner or tight spot, from which exit requires me to dismantle the wheelchair... releasing the footrests, removing the footrests, etc. (piling stuff in my lap) until the thing is narrow enough for the passage. It's a learning experience... an exhausting one.

And that's the news from Lake Misbegotten...

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I realized after I posted this that I had not devoted nearly enough time to the hand (hands) of Stella in all this. All of a sudden, about two weeks ago, Stella found herself doing her usual full-time job, and another full-time-equivalent taking care of me. In addition to that, she also inherited most of my household chores on top of her own, because there are so many things that cannot be done by a non-driving, wheelchair-bound person. I was the grocery shopper of the family. No longer. I was the dishwasher-etc. guy (not often the cook). No longer. We combined efforts on the trash. No longer. And so on. It makes me feel like a lazy lout, but I have little choice in what I can and cannot do these days. Stella is a veritable saint for taking on all these tasks, and has persisted in doing them in the face of excessive job-related work and other fatiguing unavoidable responsibilities. If you ever wondered why I love Stella... well, this is just another set of reasons.

Who's The Fairest Of Them All?

This morning... indisputably... Stella. She has jury duty in the city courts. I know her: she will bring her undivided attention and soberest judgment to getting it right. Parties in a case may or may not want a fair and impartial trial, but to the extent that a mere determiner of fact can influence the matter, they will get just that if Stella is on their jury. She's the fairest of them all.

Of course, maybe "they" replaced jury verdicts with executive decrees overnight; I haven't read the news carefully yet...

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UPDATE:  Guilty! guilty! guilty! Never let it be said that liberals are not tough on crime! Seriously: the charge was speeding in a construction zone, going 92mph through a stretch of road work occupied by an estimated 40 construction workers. No one was hurt, but the speeding was observed visually and then documented by not one but two radar readings. Stella and five other jurors agreed that there was no way the driver wasn't speeding. Why the defendant took it to court is beyond my ability to explain; there's a time to swallow hard, say "I did it," and pay your fine. But I guess she had her day in court. I love the easy ones!

The USA Is Dead. Long Live The USA!

If this bill by McCain and LIEberman becomes law, in essence formalizing the powers Bush arrogated post-9/11 and later (indefinite detention, no habeas rights,warrantless searches, nonstandard courts with draconian rules for administering "justice," permission to inflict torture, etc.), the President will assume the powers that every dictator from Stalin to Saddam Hussein has exercised... and the United States of America, as the institution envisioned by our Founders and encapsulated in our Constitution, will be effectively dead. Glenn Greenwald:

Meanwhile, the bill recently introduced by Joe Lieberman and John McCain -- the so-called "Enemy Belligerent Interrogation, Detention and Prosecution Act" -- now has 9 co-sponsors, including the newly elected Scott Brown.  It's probably the single most extremist, tyrannical and dangerous bill introduced in the Senate in the last several decades, far beyond the horrific, habeas-abolishing Military Commissions Act.  It literally empowers the President to imprison anyone he wants in his sole discretion by simply decreeing them a Terrorist suspect -- including American citizens arrested on U.S. soil.

Worst of all, according to Greenwald, the introduction of this bill caused... storms of outrage? No: hardly a stir in Congress.

My medical conditions assure that I experience sustained moderately severe pain every moment of every day. That is nothing compared to the pain in my soul at the thought of the legal transformation of the USA into a fascist dictatorship with a violent predisposition. I physically cannot leave the country... hell, I often cannot go to another room... and I cannot abide the thought of living with such a transformation. Suggestions welcome.

(Edited to include the Greenwald quote.)

Liberals And Democrats

vastleft of Corrente shows us the relationship in a simple cartoon.

HAL, Open The...

... GOP's closed minds. Sorry, Dave, I'm afraid HAL, or in this case Hal, can't do that, either. From a comment by reader Hal in Tucson, AZ, on a thread on Paul Krugman's hilariously titled post, Saving Ryan's Privatization:

I am trying to think of a time when so many of the GOP were simply stupid or addle-brained and cannot. It used to be a party of predominantly sensible people. No longer.

And so it is. At age 61, I can remember a few sensible Republican officials over the years (especially in my youth), people with whom I more often than not disagreed on policy issues, but who saw that there were genuine issues and differences to be addressed, and who had less of a slash-and-burn approach. As the man said... no longer. GOPers in Washington now behave as if no one will notice that their announced policies (when they deign to grant us a preview of them) and their obstructive/destructive legislative actions are, as a package, fucking full-blown bat-shit crazy. Oh, no, we don't notice at all, do we?

Be sure to read Krugman's post in full; it is excellent, notwithstanding its title that sounds like (OK, better than) one of mine.

Not Without Some Merits

On the Merits

I borrowed a wheelchair. Its brand name is 'Merits' ...
I like it mighty fine.
Most people may stand or may fall on their merits...
I sit and roll on mine.

Steve Bates

Samantha Cat (~1995 - 2010)

It grieves me to report the death of Samantha, virtual daughter of Stella, of renal failure. All of us expected her to die, but only Samantha may have known how soon it would happen. Stella is heartbroken, and after a period of time living with the little critter, I find that I am devastated myself. I have no more stamina to tell the eight stories of the past three days, but I promise more of an obit tomorrow.

Samantha: In Memoriam

A:

See Samantha living: fire and flash and feline frenzy all,
See her feeding, flying, playing jokes and chasing "mouse" or ball;
See her loving Stella, Steve and Life, at loving quite a wizard,
Watch her as she shows us how to capture joy (and yes, a lizard)!

B:

Now observe her dead, inert, mere fur and flesh, retracted claws,
Now obeying...  as all must... that most immutable of laws.

Cat:

Look! beyond that rainbow bridge... Who's gamboling and chasing mice?
Strong, alert, with ears a-point? Cat A or B? Need I ask twice?

 Steve Bates

Ay, Bast, how I miss her...

Dragging Feet, Pulling Legs, Etc. - UPDATED

This morning at the crack of dawn I visited an orthopedist selected by my PCP. According to him, old and new X-rays combined indicate that my right foot and ankle should be amputated below the knee. I asked about alternatives; like most surgeons, he was contemptuous of nonsurgical options. He said modern medicine could drag out the process of losing the foot for years, nonetheless losing it in the end, whereas an amputee stands a reasonable chance of returning to something of a normal life within a year. Hmph, said I, and thanked him for his candor.

I immediately sought advice from my PCP, the aforementioned Dr. B. He promptly suggested another option that needs to be investigated, and is attempting to arrange me affordable admission for a major hospital's wound care center, which also deals with diabetes-related injuries. Tomorrow (Friday) I meet with their admissions department to determine what kind of deal we can strike for self-pay. If we agree, I will be admitted immediately to begin stabilization and attempted disinfection of my increasingly messed-up foot. That suits me, because even getting from room to room at home is nearly impossible right now. I have a pretty good borrowed walker and a really heavy, almost unusable rental wheelchair in house; I presume I'll take the first of those with me in case I'm admitted, and I'm resisting dumping the wheelchair in the bayou (instead returning it and finding something more suitable).

Which brings me to the YSS. I doubt I'll be able to post it from Memorial Hermann hospital; I have no wifi privileges there that I know of, and I doubt a daily list of my complaints would be of much interest anyway. If I come back home tomorrow, you'll hear from me that night. If not, I could be gone three weeks or more. I presume y'all will take care of things for me.

I know it's not yet Friday, but note that Samantha is getting very finicky about taking some of her medical treatments. She's been exceptionally sweet to me lately; keep your fingers crossed for her well-being as well as mine.

---

UPDATE: the new doc at the hospital's wound care center says the wound is completely healed (yay!) but that he is not an orthopedist, and I need one of those to determine what I really should do. He did offer one observation: the original orthopedist was waaaay premature and overbearing in insisting on immediate amputation unless my life was in serious danger; that he needed far more info to make that determination, and that I should never be bolted into such a decision in such haste... and with so little basis. I'm glad to know that more of the medical profession is sane than not. (Some of these guys have offered unsolicited opinions... on health care reform, unasked by me. So far, no one backs Obama's version, but some object for my reasons and some for reasons that sound as if they came from a Tea Party mailer.)

'We Come And We Go...'

'... it's a thing that I keep in the back of my head.' - Paul Simon

This morning I saw a male cardinal, sporting that impossible color, topknot erect, whole body alert and ready for whatever came its way, sitting on a backyard fence. I see them occasionally here at the house, as I almost never did at the apartment complex.  They just didn't come around.

I ask you, what kind of human habitation is unfit for birds?

That reminded me of a toad. No, I kid you not: when I was a very young child, we lived in a rental duplex... brick, real yard and everything; people of modest means often lived in civilized circumstances back then... and Mom and Dad kept a small flower garden on one side of the house. Some evenings we would water the garden as a family, taking turns at the hose, watching the family of toads that lived under the house come out to soak up some water. There were a lot of them! Many years later, I learned that they were of the species Houston toad (Bufo houstonensis). Years later again, I learned that they are an endangered species, with only 3000-4000 adults left alive in the world.  

I ask you, what kind of human habitation is unfit for toads?

That thing we're doing to the planet we live on? We're not doing it only to ourselves. When we "all go together when we go" (Tom Lehrer), "we" will include all the toads and cardinals.

It's a thing that I keep in the back of my head.

Status Update

... specifically, my health status. Short version: to quote the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in an interview in his last few months of life, "I'm comin' apart." To which I must add, "The pieces don't look good at all."

Yes, the first time I fell, I really did shout out to Stella, "I'VE FALLEN AND I CAN'T GET UP!" Memories of old commercials never die...

I've fallen twice attempting to walk from the den to the kitchen... fortunately the injuries were minor each time. Stella arranged me the loan of a rolling walker, not really how I'd prefer to deal with it, but much better than nothing, and I haven't fallen since I started using it. With the walker, I can do the bare essentials in the bathroom or kitchen, if I plan ahead about 10 minutes for transit. And even with the walker, it hurts quite a bit. The one Stella borrowed is a really high-end Dalton, with four wheels, decent caliper brakes and a basket. It lacks one thing: a lock for the brakes. Keep your hand at the ready at all times, and don't carry things in your hands!

Needless to say, this is happening at a time of maximum household chaos, and Stella's career-related outside activities are as busy as they ever get. Think about the places I can't go now (did I mention I can't even think about driving?)... grocer, Post Office, etc. All these duties devolve on Stella, who already had plenty of her own. And she's not what I'd call a cool-headed responder in such circumstances. She would doubtless say the same of me.

So there probably won't be a lot of political blogging right away. I'm supposed to hear from my doctor and my accountant (death and taxes, you know) today, but I can't imagine the medical news will be cheery. Thanks for sticking with me through the rough patch.

First Robin

 I awoke and opened my window blinds to a view of my first robin of spring, hopping along a tree root, gathering whatever it could find...

... only to see the poor bird chased away by the 142,857^th squirrel of winter. Clearly the seasonal transition is well-covered, at least in our front yard.

Life goes on!

Bag O' Bones

It's many moons from Talk Like a Pirate Day, and "bucket o' blood" is inappropriate for me anyway. Try "bag o' bones" instead. My right fifth metatarsal is exactly that: a bag o' bones, shattered in a lot of pieces. That's the same foot that contains the diabetic wound. Until today, neither my doc nor I thought of looking for a significant fracture, but hey, there it is, and it has been since probably December. It took this long for the fracture to cause enough problems to render me almost unable to walk, even indoors from room to room. That's great fun, I can assure you. My doc is consulting with a specialist about details and possible treatments. Meanwhile... ouch!

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UPDATE Friday afternoon: still no word from the docs, but Stella suggested (she's bright, that one!) that I use her desk chair to wheel myself from room to room. It works, fitting through narrow passages where a wheelchair wouldn't go. It's about 5-10 minutes from, say, the bedroom to the other end of the den where I'm tapping this, but there's relatively little pain... a very important consideration! The kitchen, with its flooring and borders, is a bit more of a problem. Still, this is much better than nothing! Unless Samantha comes right here and poses for me, utterly stationary, for about five minutes, there will not be a cat pic today... and well, you know, she's a cat, and not much inclined to co-operation...

The Whipping-Boy Profession

Welcome to the career selection seminar. My task is to help you decide if the profession to which I have dedicated my life is right for you. What is it like being a daily practitioner of this ancient and venerable profession? Here are a few characteristics:

• You will need at least a Master's degree; in other words, you must find funding and support yourself through five or six years of college.
• You must demonstrate expertise in at least two disciplines.
• You must be willing to work during office hours and a number of additional unpaid hours, often through midnight. No labor laws protect you; it is required by the job that you work these extra free hours.
• For your efforts you will be paid less than a doctor, less even than the sanitation worker who hauls your garbage, less than any other profession, for sure.
• Every day, start to finish, you will deal with aggravating people. This is part of the core activity of your profession.
• You will be evaluated at least yearly, in part according to the subsequent behavior of the aggravating people.
• Your job does not involve political activity, yet you will find politics utterly inescapable.
• And at the last, you may be rewarded by being FIRED EN MASSE, with the explicit and astringent approval of the President of the United States of America.

If you think you might like to be a schoolteacher, first talk to your therapist about your unreasoning masochistic fantasies, then contact your nearest school of education.

(H/T Jane Hamsher.)

Best News Of The Primary

GOP right-wing fundamentalist radical Don McLeroy, of textbook-spoiling infamy, has LOST the Republican primary to retain his seat on the Texas school board. His opponent is probably no prize, either, but no one could be more aggressively radical in writing textbook requirements. Buh-bye, Don; don't let the door hit your butt on the way out... oh, hell, do; you deserve that and worse.

Blooper Of The Day

From David Wayne McAvoy, in a letter supporting Bill Halter in his challenge to Blanche Lincoln:

Bare with me, I'm almost done with my pitch for your support. :-)

Uh, David, I'm sorry, but I'm not gay and I don't even know you...

Where To Vote Today

Here are ways to find your polling place. Today, you must vote in your own precinct; the early-voting places are not available. You must be registered to vote, though if your card has not arrived, you can vote on your current and correct driver's license. (A lot of us have not received our cards, which is why we need Sue Schechter (D) as county clerk.)

Voting in a party primary registers you with that party. As ironic as that seems, I am now a registered Democrat for at least an election cycle. For the ambivalent among us, that is the price we pay to have any electoral influence at all in Texas. Of course, nothing prevents you from voting in the GOP primary and doing a bit of monkeywrenching; you can damned well bet they do it. If you're like me, your primary objection (heh) is to the national Democratic Party. For me, it's worth the registration just to vote for local candidates I know and trust. Obama in 2012? probably not, but we'll see.

Swallow hard and vote. You never know whether it has an effect. And you never know if this will be the last time you get to vote. Just do it.

A Kind Of Courage

I've never been courageous about facing confrontation, especially physical violence. It's downright un-American of me to be that way, but by the end of elementary school, I had learned that, against my fragile frame, the playground bullies always prevailed. My uncle the paratrooper always wanted to teach me to fight. My other uncle, a prizefighter in his youth, had nothing to say to me on the subject; I think perhaps he had had enough of broken noses and cauliflower ears not to want to see his nephew experience the same. And Dad... Dad was a scrapper if he had to be, but by choice, at least in my experience, he would rather simply avoid the fight if possible and resolve the confrontation some other way. I have not changed a great deal from those days to these, and I still dread the prospect of a fistfight. There has to be a damned good reason to hurt that much, and most verbal conflicts are truly awful reasons.

There are other sources of pain, and sometimes one doesn't get to turn away. My current challenge... the "not feeling well" mentioned below... is a fine example, the latest of many in my life. This time, I have problems with my feet (especially one of them) which have, for about a week now, made it very painful to walk from one room to another, even with the aid of a cane. I have learned to plan the trips, managing as few as possible to as much effect as possible. I am re-learning not to forget things... the extra book, the jacket or wrap, the sandwich... that would have been no problem to fetch in a separate trip a week or two ago. One must summon some kind of courage to confront one's own physical shortcomings as surely as to confront the playground bully or the lying bastard in public office.

I'm getting good at it. I hope I don't have a great deal more reason to get better at it.