1. From the International Longshore and Warehouse Union:

   Longshore Workers Stand Down at West Coast Ports

   “Longshore workers are standing-down on the job and standing up for America,” said ILWU International President Bob McEllrath. “We’re supporting the troops and telling politicians in Washington that it’s time to end the war in Iraq.” …

   “Big foreign corporations that control global shipping aren’t loyal or accountable to any country,” said McEllrath. “For them it’s all about making money. But longshore workers are different. We’re loyal to America, and we won’t stand by while our country, our troops, and our economy are destroyed by a war that’s bankrupting us to the tune of 3 trillion dollars. It’s time to stand up, and we’re doing our part today.”

   Perhaps the most significant protest against the Iraq occupation ever is receiving scant attention from the corporate media. The Los Angeles Times reports Dockworkers take May Day off, idling all West Coast ports. Notice, how LA Times headline mentions nothing about protesting the war?

   Thousands of dockworkers at all 29 West Coast ports, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, took the day off work today in what their union called a protest of the war in Iraq, effectively shutting down operations at the busy complexes.

   The action came two months before the contract expires between the dockworkers, represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and the Pacific Maritime Assn., which represents port operators and large shippers, many of them foreign-owned.

   The Associated Press reports Arbitrator orders union to tell West Coast dockworkers they can’t skip work for war protest. The ‘man’ has ordered the workers back to work.

   [Coast Arbitrator John Kagel] ordered the union that represents dockworkers at West Coast ports to tell its members they must report to work on Thursday and not take the day off to protest U.S. military conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan…

   Union spokesman Craig Merrilees said the union was complying with the contract, but he declined to specify whether it had taken steps to order members to report to work as the arbitrator ordered.

   “The decision by members to take a day off work on May 1 to protest the war is their right under the U.S. Constitution and it’s about time that citizens stood up to tell the truth about the need to end the war,” he said.

   According to Peter Cole, an associate professor of history at Western Illinois University, who wrote a guest column for the Seattle Post-Intelligence:

   For those unfamiliar, the ILWU is perhaps the most militant and politicized worker organization in the nation. It operates in one of the most important sectors of the world economy — marine transport — and, thus, is in a strategic location to put peace above profits…

   The ILWU is highly democratic. A caucus of more than 100 longshore workers representing every union local establishes policies for the Longshore Division. It was this caucus that voted to declare the May Day strike…

   These days, such examples of worker power are increasingly rare in the U.S. The tragedy is that, historically, labor activism gave us the 40-hour workweek (and the weekend) and helped humanize the exploitative excesses of unregulated capitalism. As income inequality continues to grow in the United States, it is wise to remember how, in the past, strong unions created a larger middle class as well as a more democratic and egalitarian nation.

   The ILWU strike also reminds us that unions still have an important role in public discussions beyond the workplace. As a democratic institution, the ILWU is precisely the sort of “civic society” that the Bush administration has been trying to create in Iraq. On May 1, dockworkers will speak loud and clear — end the endless war in Iraq. Other American workers who want to support our troops by bringing them home can make their voices heard by joining with the brave men and women of the ILWU and taking the day off.

   A big thank you to the 60,000 ILWU members.

Four at Four continues below the fold…

2. The Washington Post reports CIA chief sees unrest rising with population. Translation: There are more of “them” than of “us”.

   Swelling populations and a global tide of immigration will present new security challenges for the United States by straining resources and stoking extremism and civil unrest in distant corners of the globe, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in a speech yesterday.

   The population surge could undermine the stability of some of the world’s most fragile states, especially in Africa, while in the West, governments will be forced to grapple with ever larger immigrant communities and deepening divisions over ethnicity and race, Hayden said…

   The CIA director also predicted a widening gulf between Europe and North America on how to deal with security threats, including terrorism. While U.S. and European officials agree on the urgency of the terrorism threat, there is a fundamental difference — a “transatlantic divide” — over the solution, he said.

   While the United States sees the fight against terrorism as a global war, European nations perceive the terrorist threat as a law enforcement problem, he said.

   Since the Bush administration changed counter-terrorism efforts into a “war”, terrorism has risen around the world. The U.S. approach of making everything into a war has failed. It is the wrong strategy.

3. I wonder if these are some of the “them” the CIA is worried about? The Los Angeles Times reports the census shows Latinos still the largest, fastest-growing minority in the U.S.

   The United States grew steadily more diverse last year, with Latinos holding on to their rank as the nation’s largest and fastest-growing minority group, a trend with far-reaching implications for American politics and immigration policies.

   Newly released figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the nation’s Latino population grew by 1.4 million in 2007 to reach 45.5 million people, or 15.1% of the total U.S. population of 301.6 million. Blacks ranked as the second-largest minority group, at 40.7 million.

   Overall, the nation’s 102.5 million minorities accounted for 34% of the U.S. population, a new milepost on America’s inexorable journey toward greater diversity and a harbinger of the growing political clout of nonwhites.

4. The Guardian reports Ocean currents may offset global warming over coming decade.

   Global warming is set to stall over the next 10 years as natural variations in ocean currents counteract manmade climate change.

   Researchers modelling the climate of Europe and North America found that a major ocean current that brings warm water northwards is set to weaken, potentially offsetting temperature rises caused by human activity.

   A team led by Noel Keenlyside at the Leibniz Institute for Marine Science in Germany focused on an ocean current known as the meridional overturning current or MOC. The current acts as a huge conveyor belt, bringing warm water into the North Atlantic and returning cold water to the south.

   “Our results show that global mean temperatures may plateau or cool weakly over the next 10 years because of natural fluctuations, but in the long term temperatures will continue to rise,” said Dr Keenlyside. “This doesn’t change the bottom line on global warming.”

   A bit of breathing room to do something positive.

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

You’ve read, of course, the New York Times story from last week, yes? The one about how retired military officers were paid by the Pentagon to sell the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq by spewing administration propaganda to the “news” media?

It was a breathtaking and horrifying account of the lengths this administration will go to to lie to the American public so that certain people (not you and me) can get richer, and the level of disgrace that certain members of the military are willing to bring upon the uniform by prostituting themselves for an illegal war that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

As I read the article, I thought of a snippet from a book I had read and re-read in high school:

[I]n the early 1960s, an interviewer was trying to get Ernest Hemingway to identify the characteristics required for a person to be a ‘great writer’. As the interviewer offered a list of various possibilities, Hemingway disparaged each in sequence. Finally, frustrated, the interviewer asked, ‘Isn’t there any one essential ingredient that you can identify?’ Hemingway replied, ‘Yes, there is. In order to be a great writer a person must have a built-in, shockproof crap detector.’

                   – Teaching as a Subversive Activity,

                     by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

                     (excerpt; PDF file)

Accepting Hemingway’s statement as true, and knowing the revelations contained in the Times story, and recalling the gusto with which nearly every talking-head newsreader and access-grubbing hack writer from virtually the entire corporate media world swallowed the administration’s line of bullshit about Iraq for almost all of the past six years, one can only conclude that there are very few great writers working in American journalism today. Almost none, in fact.

The crap that the bloody-handed Pentagon whores cited by the Times were peddling was eagerly gobbled up by johns stenographers “reporters” across the country, “reporters” who had dropped their crap detectors where they stood to join in a mindless stampede of groupthink, jockeying and jostling for position to see who could bury their nose furthest up the collective ass of the BushCheney administration and their loathsome enablers.

It is hard to argue with the logical extension of Hemingway’s assertion when applied to modern American “journalism”; indeed, the art and science of crap detecting has never in my lifetime been in a sadder state. And that is no accident.

Take a look at what the Times article said:

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

It requires no great leap of imagination to infer what Enemy these “force multipliers” were sent out to attack and destroy.  It is the same Enemy that has proven to be such an inconvenient stumbling block for so many Republican plans over the past 35 years. These REMFs were and are mercenaries – erm, security contractors – in the BushCheney administration’s Global War On –

Truth.

Or, as it is known in some circles, Reality.

The Enemy for Republicans is, was, and always will be The Truth. Reality. They and their plans don’t tend to do so well when subjected to Reality, so they prefer not to deal with it:

”That’s not the way the world really works anymore . . . We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The technical term for the “reality” the BushCheney administration has “created” for itself and its followers is “bullshit” – or, to use Hemingway’s more polite coinage, “crap.” The economy, Iraq, the environment, the Constitution, America’s standing abroad, the U.S. military, America’s infrastructure, product safety – the list is nearly endless, but the point is simple: every single “reality” the BushCheney administration has “created” has been a disaster.

Unfortunately, over the past 35 years Republicans have on the one hand developed crap proliferation to a high art while on the other hand degrading the ability of and incentive for the American populace and the American media to exercise their respective crap detecting faculties. This result has been achieved incrementally, deliberately and without fanfare through the consolidation of corporate media, the rescission of the Fairness Doctrine and the intentional redirecting of school curricula away from the development of critical thinking skills.

All of which explains how the current administration has been able for so long to sell so much crap to the American media and public: so few still had the ability to see the crap for what it was.

The results of the 2000 presidential election would seem to bear that out. Strongly encouraged by the corporate media, a lot of Americans just put their crap detectors in storage eight years ago, figuring, What do I need a crap detector for, when I can just have a beer with this guy?

The press – for so much of our nation’s history, the watchdog of our democracy, the unofficial “fourth estate” of government – evidently heard the siren call of Gee Dubya’s tall cold one as well, abandoning the field to Crap back in 1999, powering down a whole frosty 40-ouncer of Compassionate Conservative:

[Bush says,] “I worry about the haves and the have-nots. [Mine] is a message that says nobody should be left behind.” . . .

There are important differences between Reagan and George W. Bush. Reagan paid only lip service to maintaining a safety net for the poor. Bush seems determined to improve their lives. . . “People who adhere to the conservative philosophy better figure out how to make sure it includes everybody,” he warns. “Not just say it, but mean it.”

(For those still nursing that 40-ouncer, our apologies if reading that little gem nine years later made you lose it all over your monitor. – o.h.)

It’s sad, really. Pathetic, in fact. Modern-day “news” gatherers have mistaken “access” for openness. Their crap detecting skills are so poor, and they are so desperate for what they stupidly believe is “access,” that they can’t even tell when they’re being shat upon – and, just as pathetically, they don’t care. Members of the modern corporate news media don’t even recognize crap when they’re being forced to eat it. Rapping with Karl Rove has been the least of their embarrassments, and the fact that they don’t even realize that is a sad commentary.

The irony, of course, is that many “news” gatherers believe they could not do their jobs without the golden-shower-masquerading-as-“access” that they are “granted” by the BushCheney administration. This would no doubt would be true, if it were not for three things: (1) their “access” is nothing of the sort; (2) they’re not doing their jobs anyway, with or without “access”; and (3) the kind of “access” that puts you onstage with MC Rove is not the kind of access you need in order to do real journalism.

The problem is that most “news” gatherers don’t understand Quality – or they don’t care about it. From amid the entire universe of facts out there waiting to be reported on and investigated, from amid the literally countless possible subjects that today’s corporate media “journalists” could choose to spend their time, money and talents on – the occupation of Iraq, food riots across the globe, an economy teetering on the edge of depression, the systematic destruction of the United States Constitution, the hunt for Osama bin Laden – out of all that, what do modern-day corporate journalists, those who would inherit the mantle of Edward R. Murrow, choose to give us?

Hannah Montana! (her back!)

Reverend Wright! (he’s black!)

Lapel pins! (tie tack!)

Corporate media? They’re hacks!

In his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig discusses the need to use Quality as a filter when processing the huge volume of raw data that we as humans – and members of a democratic society – are inundated with every day. He cites the work of French mathematician, physicist and philosopher Jules Henri Poincaré. Poincaré tried to figure out how it was that good scientists, out of literally an infinite number of possible hypotheses for a given phenomenon, knew which hypotheses to pursue. And Poincaré boiled it down to a question of Quality (all emphases added):

Poincaré laid down some rules: There is a hierarchy of facts . . . Poincaré concluded [that] a scientist does not choose at random the facts he observes . . . Mathematics, he said, . . . doesn’t merely make the most combinations possible according to certain fixed laws. The combinations so obtained would he exceedingly numerous, useless and cumbersome. The true work of the inventor consists in choosing among these combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones . . .

Pirsig – as the title of his book suggests – uses motorcycle maintenance as a metaphor for life. In one of the book’s most telling passages, he deconstructs the problem-solving process of a mechanic confronted with a stuck crankcase-cover screw. Pirsig examines what will happen – or won’t happen – if the mechanic – faced with a universe of facts from which to choose – fails to bring the filter of Quality to his assessment of those facts:

We have been looking at that screw “objectively.” According to the doctrine of “objectivity,” . . . what we like or don’t like about that screw has nothing to do with our correct thinking. We should not evaluate what we see [, according to the doctrine of “objectivity”]. We should keep our mind a blank tablet which nature fills for us, and then reason disinterestedly from the facts we observe.

But when we stop and think about it disinterestedly, in terms of this stuck screw, we begin to see that this whole idea of disinterested observation is silly. Where are those facts? What are we going to observe disinterestedly? The torn slot? The immovable side cover plate? The color of the paint job? The speedometer? The sissy bar? As Poincaré would have said, there are an infinite number of facts about the motorcycle, and the right ones don’t just dance up and introduce themselves. The right facts, the ones we really need, are not only passive, they are damned elusive, and we’re not going to just sit back and “observe” them. We’re going to have to be in there looking for them or we’re going to be here a long time. Forever. As Poincaré pointed out, there must be a subliminal choice of what facts we observe.

The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to care! . . .

By returning our attention to Quality [we can get] out of the noncaring subject-object dualism and back into craftsmanlike self-involved reality again, which will reveal to us the facts we need when we are stuck.

Read that last sentence again:

By returning our attention to Quality [we can get] out of the noncaring subject-object dualism and back into craftsmanlike self-involved reality again, which will reveal to us the facts we need when we are stuck.

“The facts we need when we are stuck.” Hmmm . . .

Let’s take what Pirsig says about scientists and mathematicians and see whether we can apply it equally to another pursuit:

The difference between a good mechanic reporter and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to care! . . .

How often have you heard representatives of the corporate media defend the mediocrity of their product by protesting that, gee, all they’re doing is being “objective,” presenting “both sides” of an “argument”? Like, say, “both sides” of the global warming “argument”? Or “both sides” of the evolution “argument”? Or “both sides” of the illegal wiretapping “argument”? Or “both sides” of the torture “argument”?

As if there were an “argument” in the first place. As if “both sides” of such an illusory “argument” carried equal weight.

The reason we are bombarded 24/7 with crap in the corporate media is because most of the so-called “journalists” in this country have been out of the crap detection business for years. Their corporate masters have decided instead that crap dissemination is more profitable. No one involved in running corporate media – and way too few people involved in consuming corporate media content – gives a tinker’s damn about Truth, about Quality.

Whereas once upon a time in America, journalists served as a front line of Crap Detection against the torrents of Crap spewing from the seats of government and the corridors of corporate power, now, if anything, most corporate media outlets serve their literal corporate masters; rarely does one see a Quality-driven decision about which content to foist upon a heedless public.

As Pirsig would argue, what the corporate media have abandoned in their supposedly doe-eyed, innocent, oh-so-fair-and-balanced presentation of the “facts” is an application of Quality. To give airtime and ink to the repeatedly and provably incorrect assertions and predictions of idiots like William Kristol or Doug Feith or Dick Cheney or Alberto Gonzales or John Yoo, or the global warming deniers, or those who would replace the teaching of evolution with the teaching of creationism, is to throw Quality out the window, and leave the consumer to decide what is valuable and what is, well, Crap. Caveat viewer.

To cite one very current example, it is only because our corporate media and many of our educational institutions have promoted such a climate of “all-hypotheses-are-of-equal-merit” that it is even possible to make and market a film such as Ben Stein’s recent laughfest, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, about which (in spite of its unintentionally hilarious self-referential title) the right is in a fervor. And why wouldn’t they be? According to Scientific American (whose editors I am more inclined to believe than, say, those of The Washington Times),

Stein . . . is uninterested in paleontology, or any other science for that matter.

So in our Quality-devoid corporate media environment, a film that über-seriously tries to (get this) blame the Holocaust on Charles Darwin (no, I am not making this up, and – OMG!! – I can already see the sequel: Rick-Santorum-as-Arnold-Schwarzenegger-as-T101 going back in time, racing frantically to prevent a buffed-out Ann-Coulter-as-Linda-Hamilton-as-Sarah-Connor from stowing away to the Galápagos on HMS Beagle with a flintlock set to full auto, intent upon blowing away a bespectacled Darwin as he looks up uncomprehendingly from scratching notes in his journal) is treated seriously instead of as the pitiful, expensive joke that it is.

C’mon, face it: Irony is dead. Dead from an overdose of right-wing hypocrisy administered over 14 years. While right-wing true believers and blowhards like Limbaugh and O’Reilly make a great show of protesting “moral relativism,” the right wing itself, of course, engages in moral relativism to a degree unheard of by anyone on the left.  Hookers with diapers, pedophilia, gay sex in bathrooms, torture, corruption, stealing presidential elections, advocating genocide, wishing death upon Americans – all of these are okay if you’re a Republican “limited to the present circumstances”.

And at the same time they supposedly eschew moral relativism, they are perfectly okay to live with relativism when it comes to science.  Assertions that would have sent my eight-grade science classmates into paroxysms of laughter nowadays often are accorded equal time with real science in the news media, in the halls of our deliberative bodies and, God help us, in our schools.  An unwillingness to use the knife of Quality when weighing scientific evidence is what makes possible a waste of time, energy and money such as Stein’s film.

The slippery slope to fascism is greased by media consolidation and its accompanying destruction of high-Quality news reporting. Silvio Berlusconi’s party has risen to power in Italy, fascist salute and all and, as commenter droogie6655321 put it,

This is what happens when you deregulate media to the point that one guy owns everything.

America has been on that slippery slope for the past 20 years. The Fairness Doctrine was rescinded under Reagan in 1987. The Telecommunications Act was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1996; Fox News was launched the same year.

The past seven years have seen a deterioration in the Quality of American journalism unprecedented in recent history, as witnessed by the amount of Crap that Americans are evidently willing to put up with. Torture. Secret trials. Renditions. Outing of CIA agents. Illegal surveillance. Destruction of an American city. National debt exceeding $30,000 for every man, woman and child, while the wealthiest Americans get tax cuts. Gasoline at $4 a gallon while oil companies wallow in record profits and receive tax subsidies.

And we’re OK with all of that now, after seven years.

Seven years of political decisions based on fear, ignorance and cynical power-grabbing. Seven years of treating the Constitution like a goddamned piece of toilet paper. Seven years of treating the U.S. Treasury like an ATM for the super-rich, and the U.S. taxpayer like a hapless boob.

Seven years of a snarling, mean-spirited, self-loathing vice president, the Willie Sutton of Big Oil, the president of the Senate who would tell a colleague, Go Fuck Yourself, and who would say, “So?” when told that 70% of the American people oppose the war in Iraq.

Seven years of those who would deny the reality of global warming, the reality of evolution, the reality of contraception, the reality of hazardous mines, the reality of 2,000 people drowning in a major American city.

Seven years of lies, added to and embellished, built upon unchallenged by the corporate media, bought into and spouted by sheepish Democrats in Congress, cowed into submission and timid silence by the sheer weight and breathless audacity of the lies.  Cowed, with a few notable exceptions, into timid silence. Suckered by the notion of “bipartisanship” – only, when Democrats are in charge, “bipartisanship” becomes another word for “appeasement.”

Seven years of Are You F-ing Kidding Me? No Child Left Behind.  Clear Skies Initiative.  Patriot Act.  Protect America Act.  It’s part of the dumbing down of America; the effort to create, not well-informed voters, but over-pressurized consumers.  Operation Iraqi Liberation didn’t make the cut, because it was The Truth.

Seven years of You Can’t Make This Shit Up has left me tired. Seven years of asking the question, Just Exactly How Dumb Do You Think I Am, Anyway? is enough already.

As the Times story of the co-opted Pentagon whores illustrates, modern Republicans have learned well the lesson of Don Corleone: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.  To a Republican, truly independent, critical thinking journalists are the enemy – or at least an ally of the Enemy; the real Enemy is Truth.  So when the administration invites journalists in, those journalists should be doubly wary.  Unfortunately, when the current crop of slavering, lazy, spoonfed stenographers are with great fanfare given a peek behind the curtain chosen by the administration, they never bother to ask the obvious question: So,  what is it you are choosing not to show me? The result is an uninformed, apathetic electorate.

But that electorate is beginning to wake up. In the next installment, we’ll work together, you and I, to compile a catalog of the crap the BushCheney regime has tried to foist upon the American people over the past several years, and we’ll look (audaciously) for hope as America starts to bring out of storage those rusty crap detectors.

Thanks for reading!

Also available in Orange

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Today, May 1, 2008, in addition to everything else is Law Day in the United States:

Fifty years ago President Eisenhower proclaimed the first Law Day a “day of national dedication to the principle of government under law.” The ABA [the American Bar Association] invites you to celebrate this enduring principle during the 50th anniversary of Law Day.

Law Day 2008 will explore the meaning of the rule of law, fostering public understanding of the rule of law through discussion of its role in a free society.

The Rule of Law.  How interesting that the Bush Administration would today inform us that one of the functions of law is to keep certain laws secret from the public.  Don’t bang your head on the desk.  You read that properly.  On Law Day the Bush Administration announced that it could enact laws and keep them a secret from you.  That’s in your very own best interest, of course.

Join me in the Irony Corner.  

Today’s New York Times reports that El Presidente doesn’t have to tell Congress about its legal arguments about torture, and El Presidente doesn’t have to tell the citizenry what Executive Orders, what laws he’s enacted:

In a partial concession to Congressional pressure, the Bush administration agreed on Wednesday to show the Senate and House Intelligence Committees secret Justice Department legal opinions justifying harsh interrogation techniques that critics call torture.

The decision, announced at a Senate hearing where Democrats sharply criticized the administration’s secrecy on legal questions, did not satisfy other members of Congress who have pushed for the documents for several years, notably Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

A spokesman for the Justice Department said officials were discussing whether to share part or all the opinions with Mr. Leahy’s panel.

In other words, members of Congress, according to the Administration, might not be shown all of the legal opinions El Presidente relies upon to justify torture, some of them might just have to be kept secret from Congress.

But that’s not the ironic part, that the Government thinks the Senate and House cannot be told the legal arguments for its policies even though the Senators and House Members have security clearances.  No.  Later in the story is the part channeled directly from Bizarro world.  Here it is:

At the hearing, a department official, John P. Elwood, disclosed a previously unpublicized method to cloak government activities. Mr. Elwood acknowledged that the administration believed that the president could ignore or modify existing executive orders that he or other presidents have issued without disclosing the new interpretation.

Mr. Elwood, citing a 1980s precedent, said there was nothing new or unusual about such a view.

This is May 1, not April Fool’s Day.  Elwood is not kidding.  In other words, those Executive Orders you can read in the Federal Register that tell you what the law is, well, they might not be the law after all, because El Presidente can ignore or modify existing executive orders and then — this is the most bizarre part–  not tell you or anybody else outside the Government about it.

That’s called “secret laws,” laws that are, well, secrets from us.

According to the Times, Senator Russ Feingold accused the administration of a “sinister trend” of promoting “secret law.”  Feingold said:

“It is a basic tenet of democracy that the people have a right to know the law,” Mr. Feingold said.

I bet you thought that was how things were supposed to go, that the people have the right to know the law.  That people are supposed to know exactly what the law is.  What a radical concept.  According to Bushco, that would be simply w.r.o.n.g.:

Mr. Elwood, deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, disputed that declining to make legal opinions public created improper “secret law.” He said some legal opinions had to be kept from public release, at least for a time, because they deal with classified programs or to ensure that government lawyers can give confidential legal advice.

Ditto Executive orders.

According to the Times, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse disagreed, pointing out that the administration’s legal stance would let it secretly operate programs that are at odds with public executive orders that appeared to be in force:

Mr. Whitehouse, who sits on the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, has said the administration’s contention that it can selectively modify executive orders “turns The Federal Register into a screen of falsehoods behind whose phony regulations lawless programs can operate in secret.”

Mr. Elwood said publicly available legal opinions dating from 1987 make clear the Justice Department’s view that the president has the power to change executive orders.

Mr. Whitehouse said, “There’s an important piece missing from that, which is not telling anybody and running a program that’s completely different from the executive order.”

Of course, the “legal opinions” from the 1980’s and from 1987 aren’t printed in today’s Times, nor have they been identified elsewhere, so we cannot read them and marvel at their brilliance.  I can hardly imagine what these opinions, written during the tenure of that great Constitutionalist, Sainted Ronald Reagan actually say.

El Presidente’s response to these criticisms?

Asked about those remarks, a spokesman for the Justice Department, Brian Roehrkasse, said the president would “generally” publicly modify or revoke an executive order before directing actions that conflicted with it.

“With respect to classified programs, however,” Mr. Roehrkasse added, publicly changing an executive order might “not be in the interest of the country’s national security.” In such cases, he said, the Congressional Intelligence Committees or their leaders would be informed.

Isn’t this a wonderful way for El Presidente to mark Law Day, the day that is supposed to “explore the meaning of the rule of law, fostering public understanding of the rule of law through discussion of its role in a free society.”  Que ironia.

Liberals are coming to a country near you!

Well, perhaps not liberals in the sense that you and I consider them, but certainly liberal thinking is progressing in our Caribbean Island neighbor.

From BBC:

Cuba’s President Raul Castro says nearly all death sentences are to be commuted to prison terms of between 30 years and life.

It is the latest in a series of liberalising measures. Mr Castro said the decision was humanitarian and not due to international pressure.

Three people charged with terrorism will stay on death row for the time being. Their cases will be reviewed.

While Cuba plans to keep the option of the death penalty on their statute book, this is a very promising move by the Raul Castro administration towards joining the 21st Century in the arena of human rights improvements.

I’m not saying that Cuba is all of a sudden a world leader in promoting Human Rights, but this does bode well as a beginning.

snip

Cuba has been under pressure from human-rights organisations to abolish the death penalty, which is carried out by firing squad.

There are no official figures, but the Cuban Human Rights Commission estimates that between 40 and 50 inmates could be affected.

Fourty to fifty inmates on Death Row in Cuba, you say?  That doesn’t seem like a lot considering the amount we have here in the USA.  The state of Ohio alone currently has 184 inmates on Death Row.

Below is a list of countries that still have the death penalty as an option in their judicial sentencing structure:

Afghanistan

Antigua and Barbuda

Bahamas

Bahrain

Bangladesh

Barbados

Belarus

Belize

Botswana

Burundi

Cameroon

Chad

China (People’s Republic)

Comoros

Congo (Democratic Republic)

Cuba

Dominica

Egypt

Equatorial Guinea

Eritrea

Ethiopia

Gabon

Ghana

Guatemala

Guinea

Guyana

India

Indonesia

Iran

Iraq

Jamaica

Japan

Jordan

Korea, North

Korea, South

Kuwait

Kyrgyzstan

Laos

Lebanon

Lesotho

Libya

Malawi

Malaysia

Mongolia

Nigeria

Oman

Pakistan

Palestinian Authority

Qatar

St. Kitts and Nevis

St. Lucia

St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Saudi Arabia

Sierra Leone

Singapore

Somalia

Sudan

Swaziland

Syria

Taiwan

Tajikistan

Tanzania

Thailand

Trinidad and Tobago

Uganda

United Arab Emirates

United States

Uzbekistan

Vietnam

Yemen

Zambia

Zimbabwe

Please take note of how many countries in the so-called Western world still use the death penalty as a deterrent to crime.

A rather small, yet glaring list, wouldn’t you say?

snip

This is the latest in a series of social changes announced by Raul Castro since taking over as president from his older brother Fidel in February. They are designed to make life easier and less restrictive for ordinary Cubans.

They include lifting the ban on owning mobile phones and staying in the same hotels previously reserved for foreigners.

It’s not much, yet.  But I’m sure the people of Cuba will take what they can get and be emboldened by any new freedoms that come their way.

When it comes to the death penalty, the people of this country could only be so lucky as to be the receipient of this kind of freedom.

Please read (or re-read) one, some, or all of these Docudharma May Day Strike Essays

^{the image above was found on google, and though google states the image may be copyrighted, it is used on many sites, and i cannot determine its origin or who “owns” it.  I will be happy to take it down if the owner objects to its use here.  ~73v}

Long as I remember the rain been comin down.

Clouds of mystry pourin confusion on the ground.

Good men through the ages, tryin to find the sun;

Thursday’s Headlines: For Striking Factory Workers, U.S.-First Pledge Falls Flat: Low Spending Is Taking Toll on Economy: Air raid ‘kills Somali militants’: Zimbabwe prepares to verify count: Russia’s new rich help British luxury cars drive out the venerable Zil: Wanted: The last Nazis: Unholy water: Delhi’s rotting river: Tibetan rebel in gunbattle with China police: two dead: A fabled Iraqi instrument thrives in exile: Chavez orders expropriation of Venezuela’s largest steel maker  

Clinton Gas-Tax Proposal Criticized

Economists Share Obama’s View

A growing chorus — including a top congressional Democrat — labeled Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s proposal for suspending the federal gasoline tax ineffective and shortsighted yesterday, even as she continued to paint Sen. Barack Obama as insensitive to drivers’ woes for not endorsing the plan.

The Democrats’ clash on the issue has emerged as a flash point in the week before the presidential primaries in Indiana and North Carolina and is emblematic of the broader contrast that the candidates have presented: Clinton says she would make immediate bread-and-butter fixes for struggling Americans, while Obama portrays himself as a truth-teller who would bring a new kind of politics to Washington and produce more lasting change.

USA

For Striking Factory Workers, U.S.-First Pledge Falls Flat

DETROIT — American Axle and Manufacturing employees viewed their boss Richard E. Dauch as a hero. He bet against the odds when he led a group of investors who bought five decrepit auto parts plants 14 years ago. An outspoken champion of American manufacturing, he backed his words by pouring $3 billion into modernizing the old factories. The strapping Dauch often walked the assembly line, stopping to arm-wrestle employees or to ask about their children.

But times are changing, and Dauch is reneging on a critical part of the wager. The America-first chief executive says he can no longer afford the $73 an hour his employees cost. Without worker concessions, he said American Axle’s five major U.S plants could be forced to close.

Low Spending Is Taking Toll on Economy

For months, beleaguered American consumers have defied expert forecasts that they would soon succumb to the pressures of falling home prices, fewer jobs and shrinking paychecks. Now, they appear to have given in.

On Wednesday, the Commerce Department reported that the economy continued to stagnate during the first three months of the year, with a sharp pullback in consumer spending the primary factor at play.

Pressures on households in which cash is tight appeared to weigh significantly in the calculations of the Federal Reserve as it rolled back interest rates Wednesday for the seventh time since September – this time by one-fourth of a percentage point – in a bid to prevent a further falloff in the economy.

Africa

Air raid ‘kills Somali militants’

The leader of the military wing of an Islamist insurgent organisation in Somalia has been killed in an air strike, reports say.

Aden Hashi Ayro, al-Shabab’s military commander, died when his home in the central town of Dusamareb was bombed.

Eight other people, including a senior militant, are also reported dead.

Al-Shabab, considered a terrorist group by the US, was the military wing of the Somali Sharia courts movement until Ethiopian troops ousted them in 2006.

The group has since regrouped and is in effect in control of large parts of central and southern Somalia.

Zimbabwe prepares to verify count

Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission is due to start verifying the country’s delayed presidential election results.

Representatives from both the governing Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change will oversee the collating process in Harare.

There is no indication when the result of March’s election will be announced.

Meanwhile, the MDC downplayed official reports that Morgan Tsvangirai had defeated President Robert Mugabe while failing to secure an outright victory.

The opposition criticised what it said appeared to be a government leak of some results.

Europe

Russia’s new rich help British luxury cars drive out the venerable Zil

A love of English style opens up UK’s third biggest vehicle market

The 100,000th Land Rover Freelander 2, recently rolled off the company’s production line at Halewood on Merseyside. Its destination was the city of Surgut in the Siberian oil fields and the Rimini red 2.2 diesel is part of a flood of British-made luxury cars heading for the Russian market.

Land Rover sold more than 12,000 vehicles in Russia last year. In the first quarter of 2008, the total has reached 4,690 vehicles and the company expects Russia will soon overtake Italy to become its third largest market after Britain and the US.

Bentley is another luxury marque aiming to appeal to well heeled Russians, who are no longer content to drive a mere Mercedes or BMW. The days of Zil limousines – the car of choice among Russia’s communist aristocracy – are a distant memory. Instead, you are more likely to spot a Bentley or a Rolls-Royce parked outside central Moscow’s flashier restaurants, and in the bucolic garden suburb of Rublyovka, where President Putin has his dacha.

Wanted: The last Nazis

They are accused of some of the worst war crimes of the 20th century. Now a final bid has been launched to bring them to justice before they die

By Claire Soares

Thursday, 1 May 2008

At first glance, the mugshots appear to be a gallery of roguish grandfathers, but the octo- and nonagenarians are the 10 most-wanted fugitives of one of the most heinous regimes the world has ever seen. They are the last remaining Nazis, and the codename of the hunt to find them – Operation Last Chance – says it all

More than 60 years after the Nuremberg trials put the first of Hitler’s henchmen in the dock, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre yesterday released its most wanted list of the remaining Nazi war criminals. The battle to bring them to justice is complicated by a mix of political apathy, legal wrangling, legendary powers of evasion and what Nazi-hunters term “misplaced sympathy” for the craggy-faced men in their twilight years.

Asia

Unholy water: Delhi’s rotting river

The Yamuna is the largest tributary of the revered Ganges, but its polluted waters pose an increasing health hazard to the Indian capital. Now campaigners are calling for urgent action to clean it up

By Andrew Buncombe

Thursday, 1 May 2008

On Delhi’s sacred Yamuna River, beneath a wrought-iron bridge built by the British more than 100 years ago, the remains of the dead were falling on to the living.

From the footbridge – or else from the windows of passing cars and passenger trains – people were throwing bags containing human ashes and garlands of flowers. On the black stinking river below, children sitting astride homemade rafts waited for the bags to fall and then paddled quickly towards them, ripping them apart and collecting the polythene. Sometimes the bags broke open in mid-air, creating a cloud of ash and petals that fell on to those waiting below.

Tibetan rebel in gunbattle with China police: two dead

Two Tibetans – a policeman and a suspected protest leader – have been killed in a rare gunfight in northwestern China after a raid to arrest the wanted man.

It is the first time China has announced that a protester has been killed since the latest bout of anti-Chinese unrest in Tibet in March. The outburst of anger against Beijing is among the most serious to challenge Chinese rule of the Himalayan region since an uprising in 1959, when the Dalai Lama fled into exile.

The protesters and rioters have traditionally taken up knives and stones to attack security forces and Tibetans armed with guns are almost unheard of.

Middle East

A fabled Iraqi instrument thrives in exile

BAGHDAD: Dhia Jabbar hides his oud in a sack when he walks down the street in his Baghdad neighborhood.

He used to teach students in the back room of a photo shop, where the sound could not be heard. But last week, militia gunmen invaded the store, destroying one of his instruments and ordering him to stop teaching. He had dreamed of a performing career, but now he has lost hope.

“Iraq is dead,” he says.

Seven thousand miles away, Rahim Alhaj, who fled Iraq in 1991, carries his oud without a second thought through the streets of Albuquerque, where he now lives. In New York, Washington and other cities, he plays for audiences of hundreds. An album he recorded was recently nominated for a Grammy Award.

The two musicians are bound by their passion for the oud, a pear-shaped instrument whose roots run deep in Iraq’s history. Some say that in its music lies the country’s soul.

Iran-US talks await new leadership era

By Omid Memarian

BERKLEY, California – A week after Democrat Senator Hillary Clinton’s harsh remarks that if hardliners in Tehran were to attack Israel, it would result in the “total obliteration” of Iran, a Republican member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, Peter Hoekstra, suggested on CNN that “engaging in a full-court diplomatic press with Iran is a good thing to begin the process” of reaching out to Tehran.

The hawkish tone of Clinton and the more moderate view of Hoekstra about dealing with Iran’s so-called threat leaves a major question unanswered: What can and should the United States do about Iran’s alleged influence in Iraq and its nuclear program?

Latin America

Chavez orders expropriation of Venezuela’s largest steel maker

CARACAS, Venezuela – President Hugo Chavez on Wednesday ordered the expropriation of Venezuela’s largest steel maker after attempts by the government to acquire a majority stake in the company failed.

Venezuela’s government will turn Siderurgica del Orinoco, which was controlled by Luxembourg-based Ternium SA., into “a socialist company,” Chavez told workers gathered at a Caracas theater.

Sidor, as the company is known, “has now recuperated by the revolutionary government,” Chavez said.

Since winning re-election in 2006 on promises to steer his country toward socialism, Chavez has made nationalizing major industries a top priority.