June 2008 archive

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Have a lovely day! Be excellent to each other!

& dont wRECk the pony!

The Supreme Court of the United States of America will be issuing a ruling from the bench today regarding a 32 year old law that bans handguns in Washington, District of Columbia.  

Yesterday, John Roberts & the Supremes issued a ruling regarding Capitol Punishment where they found, once again by the magic number of 5 – 4, that Capitol Punishment was only to be used in cases of murder and not for cases of rape or rape of a child.

Of course, the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse (John Robert, Clarence Thomas, Vlad Scalia and Samuel Alito) all wanted to expand the ruling regarding Capitol Punishment but were held at bay by the more thoughtful members of the Supreme’s.

Much Wingnut gnashing of the teeth, pulling of the hair and wailing of the in-lockstep voice of the Right Wing could be seen and heard directly after this ruling.  

I must admit, I do get a slight kick out of watching and listening to the Right Wing extremists when they get told they can’t go forward and do what they want to do!  It’s like witnessing a mass group of 5 year olds being told they have to take a nap before they can eat their cupcakes!  Quite noisy and somehow hilarious!

what does that mean… freedom of speech. does it mean say what you want? does it mean say what you want within limits? within constructs and conventions?

or does it mean: say what’s on your mind. in the way it is in you to say…

is there something deeper here? freedom of speech brings me to ask you: what about freedom of ideas? doesn’t it start there? the way we think. how we think. and then expressing those thoughts and ideas.

it makes me wonder what we progressives really want… do we want a clash of ideas? a messy debate? or are we just plain folks, yearning for unity in our ideas?

do we have room for a poster like stu piddy? or lasthorseman? or pfiore8? pinche tejano… the blogosphere would be poorer without his ideas disrupting our brain rhythms.

and good god. what happens when a guy like stu piddy becomes mainstream? when what he’s been saying turns out to be right? that obama will be a big let down. that obama is just another corporatist jerk who sells it better.

how incredible can any idea be after these seven years of absolute crap in America? what have we learned? when we are still reactionary to outside ideas… challenging visions of others that don’t fit what we WANT to happen. and while we can’t really dismiss these outliers, we can blame it on their delivery. the way they say it. how they say it. why the fuck are they saying it?????????

yeah. because we want. i want. obama to be the next coming of Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Ghandhi.

but what if he’s not? what if he’s like Steny Hoyer and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid? What if he’s another Bill Clinton. Makes you feel good as he strips your freedoms by allowing, as Clinton did, a concentrated media and beginning a stepped up version of outsourcing our tax dollars…

but back to the point. the last seven plus years have been so incredibly outlandish that it seems absurd to the nth degree to marginalize anyone’s paranoid concerns about the next phase in country.

so here’s my perspective. as i left in a comment to Robyn. i am going to say what i say the way i say it. because, as i look back on what i’ve said, i think i’ve been fucking right. i’ve been bashed a bit… but, hey. i’m not going to back down. i say it again: change the game. change the board. change the rules. it is time for third or fifth parties. target the essential congressional seats in 2010 and Nancy Pelosi in 2008. get outside of DEMOCRAT… they will hold us prisoner to their empty promises… but but but find those in Washington, whoever they are and whatever party, who want to wrest control from the corporatists and get our country functioning again. stop the fucking outsourcing. kick the wingnuts off the school boards and the developers off planning boards. shop local and pay cash. we need to come up with armchair strategies and release the power of citizens to understand they have power in this play.

i’m not going away. so stu, pinche, Jay, Night Owl, Balzac, LastHorseMan, and all the other outliers… keep singing. i don’t always like your song choice, but i am so awfully glad you’re out there. On the fringes of conventional thought… seeing truth in a slightly different way.  

Shrub Love

No What It Use To Be

A tragic failure of leadership: Mandela’s verdict on Mugabe

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor

The Guardian,

Thursday June 26, 2008

Nelson Mandela last night broke his silence on the political and humanitarian crisis in Zimbabwe, saying the country was suffering due to “a tragic failure of leadership”.

The former South African president and political icon made the remarks at a dinner in London last night attended by Gordon Brown and Bill Clinton. Mandela is reported to be deeply troubled by events in Zimbabwe which have sent thousands of refugees into South Africa, but he has been careful not to create a rift with his successor as president, Thabo Mbeki, who has emerged as Robert Mugabe’s most important protector on the African continent.

“We watch with sadness the continuing tragedy in Darfur. Nearer to home we had seen the outbreak of violence against fellow Africans in our own country and the tragic failure of leadership in our neighbouring Zimbabwe,” Mandela said.

U.S. border agents copying contents of travelers’ laptops

By Federica Narancio | McClatchy Newspapers  

WASHINGTON – U.S. border agents are copying and seizing the contents of laptops, cell phones and digital cameras from U.S. and foreign travelers entering the United States, witnesses told a Senate subcommittee Wednesday.

The extent of this practice is unknown despite requests to the Department of Homeland Security from the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution and several nonprofit agencies.

The department also declined to send a representative to the hearing. Subcommittee Chairman Russ Feingold, D-Wis., said Homeland Security had told him that its “preferred” witness was unavailable Wednesday.

Feingold added that he’d submitted written questions about the seizures of electronic data – and of some devices – to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in April. To date, Feingold said, he’s gotten no reply.

USA

Senator Stalls Housing Relief With Call for Energy Credits

Ensign’s Demand Spurs Showdown as Foreclosures Keep Mounting

  By Lori Montgomery

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, June 26, 2008; Page D01

A Republican senator from Nevada, home to the highest foreclosure rate in the nation, yesterday blocked an ambitious plan to help troubled borrowers save their homes, saying he will not permit the measure to go forward unless the Senate adds tax breaks to encourage the production of renewable energy.

The demand by Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) stalled a massive housing package with broad bipartisan support even as a report showed that new-home sales continued to tumble, underscoring the severity of the nation’s housing slump

The Armed Services Committee’s hearings last week on interrogation and torture gave us a startling look into how torture was taught at the Naval Prison at Guantanamo Bay. Most articles have not bothered to look deeply into what was discussed in meetings between officials of the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, program and ranking officers and personnel at Guantanamo. This article will look in some detail at what actually occurred. (At the end, I will address an important correction and clarification to an earlier article on SERE.)

As Mark Benjamin writes in his “timeline to Bush government torture”:

Soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon and the CIA began an orchestrated effort to tap expertise from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school, for use in the interrogation of terrorist suspects. The U.S. military’s SERE training is designed to inoculate elite soldiers, sailors and airmen to torture, in the event of their capture, by an enemy that would violate the Geneva Conventions. Those service members are subjected to forced nudity, stress positions, hooding, slapping, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and, yes, in some cases, waterboarding.

Volume doesn’t work for me, I have to turn it up.  Lyrics below.

Say hello to Chip.  

Your host for tonight’s Open Thread.  

 

The topic below was originally posted on my blog, the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

David Iglesias is the prototype twenty first century Republican: charismatic, Hispanic, an evangelical Christian and a captain in the Navy Reserve who served for many years in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps (“JAG”). In  1998, Iglesias campaigned to become Attorney General of New Mexico against the heavily favored Patricia Madrid. He nearly pulled off an upset and the Republican Party took notice. In 2000, Iglesias paid his party dues and worked for George W. Bush’s election.