May 2009 archive

Considered Forthwith: House Intelligence Committee

This will appear in Orange tomorrow. If this column is finished on Saturday, I will share here early. It is also posted on my own blog, A Little R&R.

Welcome to the sixth installment of “Considered Forthwith.”

This weekly series looks at the various committees in the House and the Senate. Committees are the workshops of our democracy. This is where bills are considered, revised, and occasionally advance for consideration by the House and Senate. Most committees also have the authority to exercise oversight of related executive branch agencies. If you want to read previous dairies in the series, search using the “forthwith” tag or use the link on my blogroll. I welcome criticisms and corrections in the comments.

This week, I will examine the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. This is an example of a select committee that has become a permanent fixture in the House. Select committees are usually investigative in nature, but this one also handles intelligence bills like the annual Intelligence Authorization Act.

Note: Last week, I mentioned covering the Senate Judiciary Committee. I’ll get to Senate committees after the fallout has settled from the Specter party switch.  

A Look At The “9/12 Project”

(Cross-posted at The Free Speech Zone)

Now many of you have already laughed at the title, possibly even rolled your eyes, but you should be scared.

No, not because this is a group of people led by Glenn Beck that will “rise up” successfully, but because of the fact that some people actually believe this bullshit he fucking spews for ratings on Fox News to the leftover Bush Lovers and they might be living in your community.

So for your safety I will provide you with an exposé of the “9/12 Project” so you can spot these fucking nutcases from a mile away and laugh them out of existence.

 

Utopia 7: Civics Lesson

 

Power has to be insecure to be responsive.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

Ralph Nader

Please Help an Atty Defending Guantanamo Detainees

I enjoy discussion, debate, analysis.  I have deep appreciation for the thoroughness which this community has parsed every issue of our country’s shameful involvement in torture.  Not so my ex-wife.  I was once on the telephone trying to help my brother think his way through a tough patch when Doris called dismissively from the kitchen, “Tell him to bake a black velvet cake.”  While the rest of us passionately debate the role of the new administration in cleaning up the messes of the old, Doris is busy responding to the reality by doing what she can to find justice for her client at Guantanamo, Abdul Aziz Naji.  We all should be so lucky as to have Doris and her partner Ellen as fierce advocates.

I recently received a letter from Doris and Ellen.  My purpose is to share this letter, both for showing the effects of the current climate on those doing the yeoman’s work and for asking for contributions from those who are moved to support the legal defense of one Guantanamo detainee.

The Hourglass

It is appropriate that time be measured

by the stark shadow cast by a stake in summer

or by the flow of water in the river

where Heraclitus saw time’s ironies

since, seen as time and fate, they are alike;

the movement of the mindless daytime shadow

and the irrevocable running on

of river water following its flow.

Just so, but time discovered in the deserts

another substance, smooth and of some weight,

that seemed to have been specifically imagined

for measuring out the ages of the dead.

And so appears this instrument of legend

in the engravings in the dictionary,

an object graying antiquarians

will banish to a dusty underworld

of things — a single chessman, a broadsword,

now lifeless, and a clouded telescope,

sandalwood word away by opium,

a world of dust, of chance, of nothingness.

Weekend News Digest

Weekend News Digest is an Open Thread

From Yahoo News Top Stories

1 Mexico sees flu stabilizing but world on guard

By Catherine Bremer, Reuters

40 mins ago

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – Mexico’s flu outbreak appeared to be stabilizing on Saturday but officials warned it was too early to ease vigilance against an unpredictable virus which still threatens a global pandemic.

“It would still be imprudent to say that we’re past the worst of it but I do think…we are in a stage of stabilization,” Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova told reporters.

In Geneva, a World Health Organization official said the virus had not spread in a sustained way outside North America, as would be required before the global pandemic alert level is raised to its highest level — but he added he still expected this to happen.

Black & White Blues

Dawn

Human history has been a long bloody march to get to precisely this moment. This moment where we not so much choose the future, but reject that past.

Life, on every level is about one thing, choice. The choices we make as individuals, the choice we make as societies and the choice we make as a human race.

We are at a moment of choice right now. And we are, by and large, making the right ones. Or I should say, they are making the right ones. They being the young people of today. They are choosing tolerance, peace and what amounts to love, on the societal level. They are choosing to leave the bloody history of the past behind and are embracing the paradigms set forth by Christ and the hippies and rejecting the paradigm of hate and fear.

They are not doing this, which is a good thing, out of the spiiritual information of Christ or the starry eyed idealism of the hippies but for a much more solid and lasting reason.

It works.

It is the most practical approach. Peace and love are pragmatic. They are cheaper than fear and hate. They are less complicated. They are easier. And they work.

As we watch the republicans wallow around in their mud trying to find a way to get people to join them in the fifth of hate, they are getting no takers. Not because people have stopped having the capacity for hate or that they are not affected by fear, but because the young people of today are coming to realize that other than emotional satisfaction, it has nothing to offer.

Hate doesn’t put food on the table or clothe your children. Taking something away from another doesn’t make you significantly better off, because it just forces them to try to take it back from you, and who needs the headache.

It is better to try to make sure that we share our resources. It is better to have a little less, if that means you don’t have to fear and defend against someone trying to take it from you.

The bankers tried to take wealth from the homeowners, and now they have to fear them. You get more and better information from being “kind” and reasonable towards your captured enemies than by torturing them. “Letting” gay people marry is much less trouble than repressing them. Talking to your enemies is cheaper than trying to destroy them. You don’t want anyone to mess with your choices, so why the hell should you mess with theirs, just because you don’t agree with them.

Living in fear is not as much fun as living in ‘love.’ Or at least tolerance.

It is quicker, easier, and cheaper to shrug your shoulders and tolerate our human differences than to spend the time and effort to control others. Or kill them.

We are at the dawn of the Progressive Era not because the ideology of it is somehow philosophically superior to Conservative ideology. We are at the dawn of the Progressive Era because it works better and is easier.

Guantanamo cases may go to military courts?(more)

For all the reading Ive done in recent months, I have not quite gotten to this whole issue of military versus criminal court systems for trying the Gitmo prisoners, so Im pretty clueless here. I can gather a few things from this article but I just don’t have the whole picture at all. The article has an awful lot of “could be’s” and “mights”.

New York Times has U.S. May Revive Guantánamo Military Courts today.

Anyone care to fill me in or comment further?

NOTE: This story was diaried last night at the orange, by marketgeek,  but went without much comment. It was late I guess.

Walter Reed at 100

Walter Reed celebrates 100 years at forefront of medical research.

The Right Goes Insane

Once in a blue moon I stumble across  an essay by Mark Morford and, as always, I am automatically compelled to share it with other Progressives. For better or worse, Morford has a style you don’t easily forget. He can make you laugh and cry all in the same sentence.  

Evil overlords to flaccid clowns in the blink of Jesus’ eye. Adorable!

Mark Morford:

This much we know: Hand evil a big, sticky gob of power, and it quickly becomes a feral monster, dangerous and cruel and willing to sell its own shriveled heart and the heart of its very remorseful mother for a shot at everlasting infamy, even more power and maybe some fresh, raw kitten blood, intravenously, just for the hell of it.

Oh, but take that same vile leviathan and suddenly strip away all its power and influence and capacity for wickedness, and watch it deflate like a wheezing circus tent, quickly turning into a trembling caricature of its former self, a tiny, elfin thing small enough to fit into a shoebox of panic and pathos and residual Godspit.

[…]

But weep not for Miss California, who’s happy as a Prozac clam to take on the title as the new face of Republican hetero marriage. Isn’t she lovely? A skinny, fake-breasted blonde mouthful of air who does exactly as she’s told and never questions her scary Bible and doesn’t really like sex and you want to stick that thing where? Ewww! She’s perfect.

learnmore

Why 137?

I’ve decided that I want to write about physics for a while…

I’ll get started by explaining my username. Well, the r and the b aren’t very exciting (they’re my initials), but the 137 represents a story about one of the fundamental constants in the universe: the Fine Structure Constant. The story, though, has to do with the way people tend to think about science.

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