Better to light a candle...

Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah

More bad news on Iraq, Abramoff details, wiretap loss and sex scandal as Republican Congress ends and campaign begins

The Republicans were feeling smug. The elaborate pantomime of idealistic Republican rebels facing down the President over torture seemed to have worked. The Republican congress had managed to have their cake and eaten it too, by loudly opposing an unpopular President while in actuality giving him exactly what he wanted - seemingly under the very noses of a dozey and compliant mainstream media.

Gas prices dropped, improving sullen voter's moods.

The word of Rove was once again to go after Democrats as being cut and run bad for security social deviants who wanted to tax away all your money. The groundwork was being laid and the narrative constructed by Disney owned ABC television and the trained monkeys disguised as journalists at Fox:

Turns out it was all Clinton's fault after all.

Even though 9/11 happened eight months into Bush's watch, even though Clinton had a left a detailed terrorism fighting plan ignored by the Bush administration, even though the Republicans had fought tooth and nail against Clinton's terrorism fighting in Somalia and Sudan and Afghanistan - despite all that: Clinton had been the one to be distracted from terrorism, had passed up chances to kill Bin Laden - directly refuted by multiple witnesses - and generally worried more about stains on dresses than security.

Never mind that this is recent history and everybody remembers the truth, some political operatives study Machiavelli, Sun Tzu or Musashi. Karl Rove studies Orwell. And Goebbels.

Then over the course of a few days the whole increasingly rosy picture fell apart.

Republican Congressman Mark Foley of Florida Co-chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus apparently sent suggestive e-mails and pornographic IMs to teenage male pages. The Republican leadership knew about it, hushed it up, even kept it from the Democrat on the Ethics committee that 'investigated' the matter. It was revealed that Foley was known for such behavior and Pages were warned to avoid him

Before that could even begin to sink in, excerpts from a book by Bob Woodward, partially redeeming some truly epic White House asskissing over the last few years, began to be released. They describe a President and a White House reducing every decision to politics, missing opportunities in Iraq and the war on Terror. The excepts reveal that everybody was calling for Rumsfeld's head, including the First Lady but Cheney told Bush to keep him rather than admit at all that mistakes had been made.

Reports confirmed extensive contact between disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the White House.

A Republican Congressman from South Carolina called for the sterilization of the parents of law-breaking youth.

They ran out of time to ram through wiretapping legislation.

The National Intelligence Estimate proved stubbornly resistant to being obfuscated away. The conclusions were clear and unavoidable.

The polls ticked slightly upward for the GOP buoyed by low gas prices but later polls showed huge numbers of Americans believe the lower prices are politically orchestrated by the Oil companies and will be raised again after the elections.

It's been like a perfect storm for the GOP.

Even if the GOP were to hold on to one or both of the houses - still a distinct possibility when the incumbency aristocracy advantage, more money, lower gas prices, a compliant mainstream media and Diebold voting machines are taken into account - there are experts in both party's saying losing might be a blessing.

Its going to be a nasty couple of years. Military estimates predict Iraq will get even bloodier, the slow deflation of the US housing market is building steam and oil prices will rise again, don't kid yourself.

Whoever is in control, no matter how nominal a majority they have will be the focus of the public's anger as things spiral from bad to worse. If November isn't the GOP's Waterloo, 2008 may be their Armageddon.

Assuming Bush is willing to wait that long

The myth of out of control health costs revisited

The Tyee has an excellent article about BCs Liberal government's highly deceptive claim that health costs are out of control and will soon devour the majority of the provincial budget. The same applies to similar deceptive alarmist rhetoric coming from Alberta's government prevaricators.

With a straight face, (BC Finance Minister) Carole Taylor warned that exploding health expenditures will soon threaten the viability of other government outlays.

In a decade, she claimed, health spending could consume nearly three-quarters of Victoria's annual budget. With education taking up the remaining quarter, nothing would be left to fund children's services, welfare, transportation, the police, the courts, environmental protection, debt servicing or other valued programs.

"You can see what I'm trying to impress upon everyone," Taylor told the assembled scribes, referring to a chart that showed health costs rising from 41.6 per cent of last year's budget, to 71.3 percent in 2017-18. "This is an issue that we all have to get our heads around."

On top of that, so as to bring a sense of urgency to the looming catastrophe, B.C.'s finance minister also disclosed that the province's six health authorities recently requested an additional $1 billion-plus over the next three years to deal with unidentified cost "pressures."

Why, money is just flying out of the provincial treasury to pay for out-of-control health care. Action is needed, now!

But there is just one, tiny problem with Taylor's bleak forecast, and the underlying premise of Campbell's desire to introduce dramatic reforms to B.C.'s public health system.

There is no fiscal crisis.

Reports published by the finance ministry -- readily available to the public, and the news media, too -- show that provincial expenditures on health have not exploded, nor are they expected to do so in the foreseeable future. Taylor's warning of a looming fiscal crisis caused by skyrocketing health spending is contradicted and refuted by her own department.

Olberman. Kicks. Ass.

I linked to a download of this. I love it so much, here it is now that its been youtubed:

The Hallmarks of a Civilized Society

The Onion has a Scoop:

WASHINGTON, DC—Led by a bipartisan group of senators critical of White House policy on suspected terrorists, the Senate passed a bill Thursday that prohibits interrogators from exceeding 100 amps per testicle when questioning detainees. "Even in times of war, it counterproductive and wrong to employ certain inhumane interrogation techniques, and using three-digit amperage levels on the testicles of captives constitutes torture," said Sen. John Warner (R-VA), who has also supported reducing the size of attack dogs and the height of nude pyramids. "Using amperages of 99 and lower, with approved surge protectors on the jumper-cable clamps, are the hallmarks of a civilized society." The legislation did not address amperage restrictions on suspected terrorists' labia.

Bottom Line

This is what should be airing on every channel in the States leading up to the election.

The news too tough for Americans

Newsweek's cover story for its international editions is a picture of an armed Jihadi and titled 'Losing Afghanistan'.

In it's stateside edition the same issue's cover is a profile of a celebrity photographer.

The American people are being treated like milk-fed veal and told no unpleasant truths that might affect their digestion - or their vote.

This is what we can expect from the American media with an election in the offing: Iraq vanished from the news, any negative stories about the Bush administration soft-pedaled, flat-out lies like 'Bush loses torture fight' and if all else fails, an October surprise that makes Bush look like a winner.

Expect some new celebrity scandal media frenzy to push the real news off the air, something involving Brad Pitt or a runaway bride maybe.

Come on Americans please snap out of it and show the rest of us you haven't really become such sheep.

Because it's later than you think.

Olberman points out that the Emperor is naked

Holy Crap.

I didn't think the American Media was even allowed to tell these kind of truths anymore.

You did not try.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor.

You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people.

Then, you blamed your predecessor.

That would be the textbook definition… Sir, of cowardice.

To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past.

That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair — writing as George Orwell — gave us in the novel "1984."

The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar to you, as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power…

"Power is not a means; it is an end.

"One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

"The object of persecution, is persecution. The object of torture, is torture. The object of power… is power."

Canada's Free Trade Deals: A record of grotesque abysmal failure.

Our first free-trade agreement (with the United States in 1989) has been studied to death. But the next four deals with Mexico, Israel, Chile and Costa Rica have hardly been studied at all. They should be, because they indicate that, where free trade is concerned, Canada is getting worse with practice.

These agreements spur dramatic increases in trade volumes on average by 200 per cent across the five deals, over their first 10 years. But in each of the later four deals, Canada's imports grew far faster than our exports: by 275 per cent after 10 years, versus 86 per cent for our exports. Collectively, our deficit with those four countries worsened by $9-billion under free trade. Only with the U.S. did exports grow as fast as imports.

Even more incredible, under each deal (including the U.S. one), Canada's market share in the imports of our trading partner actually declined. A free-trade agreement is supposed to provide preferential market access. Yet every time we've signed one, our market share has shrunk....

How Democrats can win

Fight the Class War

If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, crying “class warfare” is the last refuge of wealthy elitists. Yet, inexplicably, this red herring emasculates Democrats in Washington. Every time pro–middle-class legislation is offered, Republicans berate it as class warfare. Worse, they get help from corporate factions within the Democratic Party itself.

But as countless examples show, progressives are making inroads into culturally conservative areas by talking about economic class. This is not the traditional (and often condescending) Democratic pandering about the need for a nanny government to provide for the masses. It is us-versus-them red meat, straight talk about how the system is working against ordinary Americans...(cont...)

Sunday Night Link Blast

• US Intelligence Community: Invading Iraq Increased risk of Terrorism
  In related news, Sky Blue, Scientists say.
  
  
• Bill Clinton finally gets Mad
  The time for bipartisan spooning is over, Bill seems to have finally figured this out.
  
  
• Canadian Border Guards walk off job because of potential murderer coming their way
  Oh for... Give them guns already!
  
  
• Dobbs and Buchanan: Standing up for the Working Man
  Why are the racist Right doing the Left's job?
  
  
• IRS harasses American Church for dabbling in politics
  One of those Southern Evangelical ones that make their kids pray to cardboard cutouts of Bush, Right? Right?

And Now, on a...ahem...lighter note:
Dave Matthews - Gravedigger

Last Trumpet

Yeah I'm featuring a lot of music lately -
When you're blogging about torture almost non-stop, you need some balance.

Here's Lyric's Born and Lateef the Truth Speaker, collectively Latyrx
laying down some truth.

US Democracy slipping away

I'm not the kind of leftist who routinely throws around words like fascism or tyranny. I've criticized those who do, and I cringed a bit at Hugo Chavez calling Bush 'the devil' thinking it was unhelpful and demagogic.

But the fact remains that tyranny doesn't usually happen overnight with tanks on the streets and a sudden transition from the rule of law to the 2 AM banging on the door. It happens gradually, bit by bit under the guise of national pride, law and order and protecting us from appalling foes.

The United States is now a nation of torturers and abettors of torture. Rick Margolis correctly identified the trend as the Sovietization of the US. As Digby points out, all those years of railing against The Soviet Union it turns out the Republicans were only really upset with Soviet economics not the totalitarianism they now so eagerly embrace.

Waterboarding, which Americans once prosecuted Japanese war criminals for, is now an acceptable tactic. From this point on the Republican Party is the Torture Party and the Democrats are the Accessories to Torture Party.

Democracy has been so subverted and warped in America that its citizens barely blink at transparently flawed and corrupt voting machines, seemingly designed to miscount votes. Most Americans don't know that, almost alone among democratic nations, they have no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote, a fact used by Republican lawmakers to disenfranchise poor and minority vorters at every opportunity. Republicans now openly brag about disenfranchising black voters. When The US imposes a constitution on conquered nations like Japan or Iraq they always insist on a right they themselves don't have.

And as the Maher case showed, America's descent into tyranny is followed in lockstep by our Conservative government here in Canada.

The desire to avoid irresponsible rhetoric is a positive one, but it's time to call a spade a spade and a fascist a fascist.

While we still can.

Pride and Joy

Stevie Ray Vaughan Unplugged

Republicans perfected their torture techniques on American Children

Bush rewarded one of his loyalists with the ambassadorship to Italy -- despite his past as the founder of a cult-like teen rehab clinic.

For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993. Just one of many survivors is Samantha Monroe, now a travel agent in Pennsylvania, who told The Montel Williams show this year about overcoming beatings, rape by a counselor, forced hunger, and the confinement to a janitor's closet in "humble pants" -- which contained weeks of her own urine, feces and menstrual blood. During this "timeout," she gnawed her cheek and spat blood at her overseers. "I refused to let them take my mind," she says of the program. The abuse took years to overcome."It sticks inside you," she told Williams, "it eats at your soul."

Mad World

'Cause it is.

The United State of Torture

If you are arrested by the US on suspicion of terrorism, their government's representatives now have a firm legal foundation to:

• Handcuff you naked in a meatlocker for hours until hypothermia has been induced.
• Force you to stand in place through clubbings and kicks for hours.
• Threaten to track down your family, your children, and torture or kill them.
• And of course, tie you to a board and hold your head underwater until you believe you are drowning.

Most of these methods were perfected by the KGB in the Soviet Union's network of gulags.

I'm embarrassed that I thought Republicans like Lindsey Graham and John McCain were going to hold out in a principaled opposition to betraying everything the USA stands for. In fact they were just grandstanding and passing the buck. George Bush's administration now has legal protection for the crimes they have committed and the ones they plan to. It's actually being called the 'torture compromise'.

Watching one of the world's biggest most inspiring democracies slip away is immeasurably sad and immeasurably terrifying.

'One'

Easing into the weekend: 'One' covered by the incomparable Johnny Cash.
Audio only.

Bush Supporters For Torture

Unambiguously, unapologetically, unashamedly for torture.

When the first American serviceman is tortured to death by a country selectively interpreting the Geneva Conventions and using this as their precedent, will these vicious sheep feel shame then?

Do they even know what the word means?

The Big Picture Week Two: THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL?

Avi Lewis's second week of brick throwing provocation (He said approvingly) on The Big Picture brings us Richard Dawkins and THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL? The film companion piece to his book The God Delusion. Its a fun polemic that starts with Resolved: Religion is the root of all Evil.

Discuss.

The film is a sarcastic and full throated attack on mysticism and the religious impulse and equally robust defense of the rationality of Atheism. Well, religious faith gets a whole TV network here in Canada, and an entire government south of the border, its not unreasonable to devote a couple hours on Newsworld to the alternative viewpoint.

I discussed panel guest Charles Mcvety President, Canada Christian College and the Canada Family Action Coalition here. He argues that Christians are under attack and everyone should just show more tolerance to the religious.

Mcvety first came to prominence, of course, for cyber-squatting the names of pro-gay rights Members of Parliament and redirecting web hits to his rabidly anti-gay site.

Other guests and subjects of the film argued that only the faithful can be moral or ethical because only faith in God can be a basis for morality. I address that idea here.

Another great segment of a program rapidly becoming my favorite CBC offering.