February 11, 2008 archive

Pony Party, NFL Withdrawal

“We are your SP’s.”

“Hello, Scientology. We are Anonymous….Anonymous has…decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind–for the laughs–we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form…..If you want another name for your opponent, then call us Legion, for we are many.

Yet for all that we are not as monstrous as you are; still our methods are a parallel to your own. Doubtless you will use the Anon’s actions as an example of the persecution you have so long warned your followers would come; this is acceptable. In fact, it is encouraged.

We are your SPs.Yes, we are SPs.

But the sum of suppression we could ever muster is eclipsed by that of the RTC.

Knowledge is free.

We are Anonymous.

We are Legion.

We do not forgive.

WE DO NOT FORGET.

Nationwide below the fold……

Happy Trails

Documdharma is a wonderful site. I have tremendous respect for what folks here are doing and the atmosphere here, IMHO, is much more positive and supportive than many others.

This is the place for me to inform friends that I’ll be taking a brief/long/permanent leave from diary/essay writing. Anyone who’s tried to quit understands that this sort of exercise is as much a letter to myself as anyone reading.

Why? Lot’s of reasons. Folks I like and respect are doing well here and in ‘meat world’. I’m  generally optimistic about the future.

That said, I feel generally out of touch with much of what passes for progress. I’m unimpressed with much of what’s happening politically. I find I have next to nothing in common with the most voluble and highly recommended diaries.

I don’t do drugs, drink or smoke. I pray regularly and don’t mind paying taxes. Our family functions fairly well and we’re generally grateful for the good things in our lives. I’ve had the same job for a long time.

I’ve enjoyed my two active years in the blog world very much. The memories that stand out are of your fine work rather than my own. I’ll keep my own tiny operation going and will surely continue to read folks here, and maybe even recommend the odd comment here and there, just to say hi.

I’d like to thank all the good folks I’ve met along the way. I wish I could say more to many who’ve already moved on without a formal good-bye. I’ve learned from you all in some way or another.

I’ll continue to write, but on different topics and in a different media. I won’t bore you with the arcane details.

All the best to one and all and forgive me please if I don’t post a comment jar or respond. I don’t frankly know what I could say to anyone here other than thank you and good luck.

See ya!

The Morning News

The Morning News is an Open Thread

1 East Timor president wounded in attack

By GUIDO GOULART, Associated Press Writer

13 minutes ago

DILI, East Timor – Rebel soldiers shot and wounded East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta and opened fire on the prime minister Monday as part of a failed coup in the recently independent nation, officials said.

Ramos-Horta, a Nobel Peace laureate, was injured in the stomach but in stable condition, while Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao escaped the attack on his motorcade unhurt.

Army spokesman Maj. Domingos da Camara said notorious rebel leader Alfredo Reinado was killed in the attack against the home of Ramos-Horta, while one of the president’s guards also died.

Muse in the Morning

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Muse in the Morning

The muses are ancient.  The inspirations for our stories were said to be born from them.  Muses of song and dance, or poetry and prose, of comedy and tragedy, of the inward and the outward.  In one version they are Calliope, Euterpe and Terpsichore, Erato and Clio, Thalia and Melpomene, Polyhymnia and Urania.

It has also been traditional to name a tenth muse.  Plato declared Sappho to be the tenth muse, the muse of women poets.  Others have been suggested throughout the centuries.  I don’t have a name for one, but I do think there should be a muse for the graphical arts.  And maybe there should be many more.

Please join us inside to celebrate our various muses…

Congressman Conyers Is Waiting for a Push to Start Impeachment Hearings

John_conyers

Please pass on to your lists today – THANKS

Congressman Conyers Is Waiting for a Push to Start Impeachment Hearings

On Thursday, Chairman John Conyers’ House Judiciary Committee held a hearing at which Attorney General Michael Mukasey said that he would not investigate torture or warrantless spying, he would not enforce contempt citations, and he would treat Justice Department opinions as providing immunity for crimes.

None of this was new, but perhaps it touched something in Conyers that had not been touched before. Following the hearing, he and two staffers met for over an hour with two members of Code Pink and discussed activism and impeachment, including Congressman Robert Wexler’s proposal to begin impeachment hearings on Cheney.

Conyers expressed his concerns about what might happen following an impeachment, the danger of installing a Bush replacement or losing an election. He cited potential ramifications that have not yet been examined that could have the opposite effect. Conyers told Ellen Taylor and Manijeh Saba that you need to be more than brave and courageous, you need to be smart.

Help us let Conyers know that the smart thing right now would be bravery and courage.

The Chairman told Taylor and Saba that he has been listening to several advocates for impeachment, including Liz Holtzman and David Swanson. He hinted he could be swayed by a convincing argument, leaning out of his chair for dramatic effect.

We want to continue the dialogue with Congressman Conyers. On Rosa Parks’ birthday last week, Leslie Angeline began a fast for impeachment. Taylor and over 20 other activists have joined the fast . Conyers has agreed to meet with Leslie to discuss impeachment on Tuesday.

Lend your voices to the conversation and make phone calls, send faxes and Email Congressman Conyers on Monday and Tuesday. Let the Chairman know that only impeachment hearings:

1-will reach a broad TV audience

2-will force compliance with subpoenas by eliminating “executive privilege”

3-will hold brazen criminals accountable

4-will convince citizens that Congress cares about upholding the Constitution.

Call: 202-225-5126

Fax: 202-225-0072

Email: [email protected]

Torture Amnesia – Shame on America

There are some things one never forgets. I’ll never forget my brief encounter with torture 40 years ago. Our patrol engaged some VC hidden in a tree-line and a firefight ensued. The tree-line held a small hamlet. Predictably the village people fled in our direction. They fled because they knew their village would most likely be shelled, strafed or bombed. It was.

Our Viet counterparts detained a young lady they suspected of being a VC, a nurse they claimed. We brought her back to our dilapidated compound where they bound her, stripped off her shirt and attached wires to her nipples and proceed to use a crank operated electrical device to shock her. Needless to say it was thoroughly disgusting. Through it all she refused to talk. I admired her courage. I don’t know where they sent her but I hope she survived.

In April 2004, Americans were stunned when CBS broadcast those now-notorious photographs from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, showing hooded Iraqis stripped naked while U.S. soldiers stood by smiling. As this scandal grabbed headlines around the globe, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the abuses were “perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military personnel”…

OAC Archive: Big Idea: Automatic Run-Off Elections

From the One American Committee supporters blog, “Argument and Analysis” OpenMic post,

3.05.2006, posted here for archival purposes

I read that John Edwards calls on the Democratic Party to present Big Ideas, and I would stand up and applaud (except that risks having someone else in the computer lab call security).

After living in Australia for a decade, my number one suggestion for a Big Idea is about the fight to restore democracy to the US of A.  And the biggest step in that direction is a mandatory automatic Run-Off election in all federal elections.

First, Do No Harm…”Torture Light” on Prime Time

Originally posted on ePluribus Media.

The inability to hold those accountable for crimes committed with regard to Iraq — illegal detainment, torture, murder — is a major loophole that must be closed.  Redefining “torture” to exclude certain activities and calling those activities “enhanced interrogation techniques” doesn’t change what it is, nor does it alleviate the guilt or responsibility of those who have assisted and participated in it.

The biggest concern of the White House and the Republicans in Congress — and, indeed, at large — is that the public will finally reject their waffling and dissembly and ultimately hold them all accountable for what evil they have wrought.

They are right to be concerned.  

The Stars Hollow Gazette

So.  Do you think The New York Times finally gets it about the Protect America Act?

Even by the dismal standards of what passes for a national debate on intelligence and civil liberties, last week was a really bad week.

The law then, and now, also requires the attorney general to certify “in writing under oath” that the surveillance is legal under FISA, not some fanciful theory of executive power. He is required to inform Congress 30 days in advance, and then periodically report to the House and Senate intelligence panels.

Congress was certainly not informed, and if Mr. Ashcroft or later Alberto Gonzales certified anything under oath, it’s a mystery to whom and when. The eavesdropping went on for four years and would probably still be going on if The Times had not revealed it.

To defend themselves, the companies must be able to show they cooperated and produce that certification. But the White House does not want the public to see the documents, since it seems clear that the legal requirements were not met. It is invoking the state secrets privilege – saying that as a matter of national security, it will not confirm that any company cooperated with the wiretapping or permit the documents to be disclosed in court.

What about our Democratic Congress?  Glenn Greenwald

… they are now not only capitulating to, but actually leading (in the form of their Intelligence Committee Chair, Jay Rockefeller), the Bush/Cheney crusade to legalize warrantless eavesdropping and institutionalize lawlessness through telecom amnesty.

That is the same failed strategy that Democrats have been pursuing with complete futility for the last eight years. In 2002, they became convinced by their vapid, craven “strategists” that if they voted for the war in Iraq, it would take national security off the table and enable the midterm elections to be decided by domestic issues. In 2004, they decided that they would reject a candidate who provided too much of a contrast on national security (Howard Dean) in favor of one who, having supported the war and with a record of combat, would neutralize national security as an election issue.

Notably, the one time they actually allowed a contrast to be created on national security — in the run-up to the 2006 midterm election, when they were perceived to be the anti-war party and the GOP was perceived to be tied to Iraq — they won a decisive victory. When they seek to remove national security as an issue by copying Republicans, they lose.

I don’t get it.  Mike Tabbi

The story of how the Democrats finally betrayed the voters who handed them both houses of Congress a year ago is a depressing preview of what’s to come if they win the White House. And if we don’t pay attention to this sorry tale now, while there’s still time to change our minds about whom to nominate, we might be stuck with this same bunch of spineless creeps for four more years. With no one but ourselves to blame.

Democrats insist that the reason they can’t cut off the money for the war, despite their majority in both houses, is purely political. “George Bush would be on TV every five minutes saying that the Democrats betrayed the troops,” says Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Then he glumly adds another reason. “Also, it just wasn’t going to happen.”

Why it “just wasn’t going to happen” is the controversy. In and around the halls of Congress, the notion that the Democrats made a sincere effort to end the war meets with, at best, derisive laughter. Though few congressional aides would think of saying so on the record, in private many dismiss their party’s lame anti-war effort as an absurd dog-and-pony show, a calculated attempt to score political points without ever being serious about bringing the troops home.

But any suggestion that the Democrats had an obligation to fight this good fight infuriates the bund of hedging careerists in charge of the party. In fact, nothing sums up the current Democratic leadership better than its vitriolic criticisms of those recalcitrant party members who insist on interpreting their 2006 mandate as a command to actually end the war. Rep. David Obey, chair of the House Appropriations Committee and a key Pelosi-Reid ally, lambasted anti-war Democrats who “didn’t want to get specks on those white robes of theirs.” Obey even berated a soldier’s mother who begged him to cut off funds for the war, accusing her and her friends of “smoking something illegal.”

Even beyond the war, the Democrats have repeatedly gone limp-dick every time the Bush administration so much as raises its voice. Most recently, twelve Democrats crossed the aisle to grant immunity to phone companies who participated in Bush’s notorious wiretapping program. Before that, Democrats caved in and confirmed Mike Mukasey as attorney general after he kept his middle finger extended and refused to condemn waterboarding as torture. Democrats fattened by Wall Street also got cold feet about upsetting the country’s gazillionaires, refusing to close a tax loophole that rewarded hedge-fund managers with a tax rate less than half that paid by ordinary citizens.

Instead they simply pretend to live in fear of the Villagers, a group of ineffective toothless sycophants (Greenwald again).

… there are plenty of people who still insist that people like Chris Wallace and Brit Hume are real journalists, somehow distinguishable from the likes of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Shouldn’t this question from Wallace, by itself, preclude that assessment? Is Wallace’s embarrassingly deferential inquiry really any different than the defining question asked of the Commander-in-Chief which exposed Jeff Gannon:

Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines. And Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work — you’ve said you are going to reach out to these people — how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

Both Wallace and Gannon — with the opportunity to question the U.S. President — basically asked: “Mr. President, how do you handle so well the fact that your political opponents are so crazy, malicious and anti-American”? Just compare Gannon’s mentality (“how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”) with Wallace’s (“are you ever puzzled by all of the concern in this country about protecting of rights of people who want to kill us?”). Brezhnev-era Pravda would have been too ashamed to ask such blatantly subservient questions of political leaders. But Chris Wallace is a Very Serious Journalist and Fox is a real news network.

Real journalists?  Yup, just like Tweety and Timmeh and Shuster and Mrs. Greenspan and Wolfie from AIPAC and Candy and Mr. Matlin and the Beckmiester of hate.

Serious.  Respected.

Pfui.

Classical Persia

Would-be imperialists beware: You gotta be careful when you go to pick a fight with a country possessed of a 5000-year history, for such a nation will inevitably have in its historical record an example of every kind of victory and every kind of loss, and every kind of human triumph and failing in between.  In these countries, ideas like a Declaration of Human Rights aren’t imports; they’re the original products of ancestors and fellow countrymen. Been through a few golden ages, followed by periods of decline and ruin?  Check.  Dealt with foreign aggressors and internal revolt?  Check. Been led by people that history remembers as “the Great,” as well as by guys so incompetent that they make George W. Bush look adequate?  Check.

Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll take a look at Persia in the Classical Age – and find out that Iran’s willingness (and ability) to go toe-to-toe with the West’s greatest superpowers is not something that first emerged in the Era of Petroleum.  As a courtesy to the neo-imps among us, I should give fair warning: We may also find that the Iranian contemporaries of Rome influenced the makings of our modern world far more than might first seem apparent.

the world at their fingertips

finger tips…

heat-seeking missiles

exploiting target-rich terrain

tongues… peanut butter salty sweet smooth

sex smell. sweat, sticky warm

an audience of two

falling backwards,

landing like pick up sticks

arms legs fingers toes interlocked

soft there

safe there

in amber chamber light

he catches her breath

she holds his hand

moaning laughing at the groaning

not afraid to find each others eyes

to look there, stay there

smile as a child and say

i love you

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