Senator Byrd on the Intelligence Reform Bill

Excerpted from his website:

When the elected representatives of the people allow themselves to be coerced into a process that encourages the abdication of our responsibility to understand and thoroughly review legislation, the people are robbed of their voice in their government.

Senators take an oath to defend the Constitution, and common sense suggests that that means reading and studying the legislation before the Congress.  We are duty bound to explore the opinions on all sides of an issue, and to work toward a process that does not exclude opponents or silence the opposition.

In its heyday, the Senate was known as the greatest deliberative body in the world.  What we have seen in recent times, however, is a hollow shell of that noble tradition.  Time after time, the Senate forgoes its responsibility to deliberate and carefully review legislation, and even defers to others to craft legislation for it.

Legislation is passed by the Senate, and then, too often, hastily rewritten in a conference committee behind closed doors marked, "no minority view admitted."  All too often during the 108th Congress, the party leadership has held bills until just before a recess, and then employed disingenuous rhetoric about last opportunities to get something done.  Senators preoccupied with holiday schedules and travel plans, for example, timidly roll over and accept whatever is placed in front of them.  They do it time and time again.

I anguish about the eroding character of the Senate, and the message it sends to the American people, when this body allows itself to be stampeded into passing legislation without thorough examination.  We congratulate ourselves on a job well done, and vote overwhelmingly in support of legislation, and yet we cannot even be bothered to ask questions about the changes made in conference.  Like pygmies on the battlefield of history, we cower like whipped dogs in the face of political pressure when it comes to issues like intelligence reform. 

I do not claim to know as much about this legislation as the managers of the bill, but I do know about process, and it galls me that the Senate has allowed itself to be jammed against a time deadline in considering this conference report.

This is the most far reaching reorganization of our intelligence agencies since 1947.  These changes will remain for decades, and they will impact the security of our nation at countless levels.  Such matters ought to be held to a higher standard of consideration by the Congress than is the case here.  

This conference report has been reworked and redrafted over the course of two months in a closed door conference, and the Senate has only received a printed copy of the conference agreement less than 24 hours ago.  As late as yesterday, the conferees were making changes.  It is outrageous to expect Senators to read and understand a 600-page bill in less than 24 hours.

[...]

I say again, let us not believe that we understand what has been included in this conference report.  It is, in effect, a new bill that is very different from anything the Senate has considered to date.  Common sense suggests that the Congress ought to hold hearings on the contents of this new bill, so that we may be informed by experts about its benefits and defects. 

[...]

What the American people will remember is that the Congress abdicated its role to protect their security interests.  The American people will remember that the Congress empowered an unelected bureaucrat while doing little else to protect against future intelligence failures.

This process has been hurried and rushed from the beginning, and it has been tainted ever since the decision was made to tie its consideration to a political schedule.   

Detainees

From WaPo:

Under a presidential directive and authorities approved by administration lawyers, the CIA is allowed to capture and hold certain classes of suspects without accounting for them in any public way and without revealing the rules for their treatment.

I'd be more worried about this, but it appears the CIA is actually more circumspect about torture than the DoD. I quote Matt Yglesias on this:

We've learned recently that both the CIA and FBI eventually decided that the interrogation tactics being used by the military in Iraq were going too far and that Agency and Bureau personnel ought not participate. The Defense Intelligence Agency, too, got into a dispute with the Special Operations soldiers conducting the interrogations. Phil Carter's comments on this are worth a read:

Both the FBI and the CIA -- not agencies with a good historical record when it comes to civil liberties -- objected to the Pentagon's approved interrogation tactics. The FBI objected primarily for courtroom reasons; the CIA appears to be object for operational reasons. Yet, both were unable to sway the Pentagon through the policy vetting process, so they simply decided to abstain from these practices in the field. The natural inference here is that the tactics approved, adopted and used by the military really did go too far, as evidenced by the FBI and CIA's refusal to play ball. Clearly, I think, the FBI and CIA cared as much about squeezing HUMINT out of foreign prisoners as the military, especially when it came to Al Qaeda members plotting against the U.S. (as opposed to insurgents in Iraq.) And yet, they either saw these interrogation methods as counter-productive, inhumane, illegal, or all of the above.

The other thing to note, I think, is that it's hard to see how this level of interagency disagreement could have arisen without the dissenting agencies' disquiet with what was going on coming to the attention of top policymakers. The FBI, CIA, and DIA all joined with the International Committee of the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations to push for changes and no one listened. The problems here, clearly, are systemic, but also somewhat narrow in their scope, with large swathes of the American security establishment wanting nothing to do with the Defense Department's policies.

Local Agriculture, Terrorism, and the Red State

An excellent op-ed by Jennifer Wilkins, a 'food and society fellow' at Cornell, in the NYTimes today about the homeland security benefits of a better local food supply:

The combination of cheap food from overseas and the consolidation of domestic production compromises America's ability to feed itself. A food system in which control of the critical elements is concentrated in few hands can and will fall victim to terrorism or accidents.

The solution to these insecurities is to establish community-based food systems that include many small farmers and a diversity of products. Such systems make large-scale contamination impossible, even for determined bioterrorists. Far more people have contact with the Mexican lettuce at the supermarket, for example, than with the locally grown lettuce at the farmers' market.

But is it possible for farmers' markets to feed a growing country and provide the range of produce we demand? The answer is yes.

The op-ed only talks about security concerns, since Tommy Thompson brought up our current food system's vulnerability to terrorism. But a system of local farming has many other benefits as well. Local food by definition does not travel as far from the farm to the table: nutrients and flavor have less time to degrade, and less energy is used to transport and store the food. Small-scale local food production builds community and provides jobs. Eliot Coleman, organic farmer extraordinaire, says 5 acres of farmland can be enough to make a living as a market gardener, provided you manage it well. And growing your own food, in backyard plots, on roof decks, in vacant lots, is possible even for die-hard urbanites. Last night my family ate salad that included a particularly cold-hardy variety of arugula that I've been growing in what used to be a weedy room-sized patch between my building and the next.

Ms. Wilkins complains that all kinds of federal policies discourage small-scale local farmers and that policy would need to change. Then, hysterically, she suggests that "the change in the cabinet, at both the department of health and human services and the department of agriculture, is an opportune moment for a such a change in policy."

If you, unlike Ms. Wilkins, don't feel like waiting for hell to freeze over, learn more about all this stuff from some of the resources below. But I'd like to make one more point about why it should matter, especially to dems who realize that we need a so-called rural strategy to make headway not just in the red states, but in the red parts of the blue states, and in the purple states. Agrarian reform must be an important feature of any such strategy. Our agricultural system is overwhelmingly corporate, and improving opportunities for small-scale farming in areas without much employment opportunity would mean that some people could go back to jobs with dignity (farming) rather than work at the wal-mart for lack of anything better to do. There are plenty of wise people already out there doing agrarian reform stuff, they just need the people in the blue pockets to reach out and say 'yeah, we'll buy your food.'

Resources

On growing your own, for snotty urban liberals, see the mother of all urban agriculture sites, www.cityfarmer.org.

On growing your own, for snotty urban liberals who have moved to rambling farmhouses with a little more land than 'none', see this interesting article about part-time farming and The New Farm.

For buying local, learn about community supported agriculture at the USDA's Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education site. SARE also has a bunch of other useful stuff, so poke around.

A 'new agrarian' reading list.

And for everyone, a book that combines personal history with suburban farming with starting a community garden with history and explanations of how we ended up with our current dysfunctional food system, This Organic Life, by Joan Dye Gussow.

On the dignity of human life...

The Vatican says same-sex marriage is an attack on the fabric of society. Not exactly surprising, but I still don't get the whole 'fabric of society' thing. The fact that a friend of mine is today marrying her partner here in MA (ooh, congratulations, you know who you are!) does not mark a "defeat for the dignity of human life." And if you think it does, I'm sorry, but you really don't understand what the dignity of human life is all about.

Some notes on being a nobody; or What is Biscuit For?

A few days back I posted a quote from Pandagondiscussing the problem that nobody in the Dem party establishment seems to take blogger advice anyway, so what's the point of all our blogging?

If even bloggers whose audience can be numbered in the thousands and tens of thousands are basically engaged in a conversation that goes nowhere, what about blogs like Biscuit, who can count their readers on the fingers of one hand? (Well, two, on a good day). Since Biscuit is a nobody, what possible, useful, purpose can be served by Biscuit's blog? Does Biscuit have nothing better to do?

Actually Biscuit has many theoretically more pressing things to do. Biscuit's 20-month-old is rummaging in a box of what could only generously be called 'crap'. Hecate only knows what might be in there that he could get himself into trouble with. Biscuit is glad to be a touch-typist, and watches toddler while attempting to think in complete sentences.

So why blog? What is Biscuit for?

I have several answers to this question, but I'll have to put them in several posts.

Answer #1: The Biscuit Report is my defense against reality.

I don't mean that it is not reality-based; Biscuit is most certainly a member of the reality-based community. What I mean is that everyone has defenses that allow them to live in a world in which Abu Ghraib or [insert other horrible things here] happens. Some people defend by ignoring reality. Some people defend by not feeling it. They know it's there, but they don't really want to look into that abyss. The guilt and horror and fear of that abyss is nasty stuff. There is a hell of a lot of bad news these days, lots of bad shit going down, and yet people need to get on with their lives too. So, defenses.

Me, I'm having what my shrink calls "some breakthrough symptoms" of my DSM IV 296.3, Major Depressive Disorder, recurrent. One of the charming things about this is that I have none of the ordinary defenses against reality. Also, I am afflicted with crippling guilt. So here I am: I see and feel the utter horror of some of the things going on today, and I am overwhelmed by guilt about them. I feel helpless and frustrated and guilty. I can't not pay attention, and I can't not feel awful about what I see when I pay attention, and I can't understand how everyone doesn't feel the same urgency I do about how very wrong things are going. I mean, I know a lot of people do feel this urgency, but they can also get on with their lives. But I am riveted.

I am in this position because of the disease I have, but the disease is not responsible for Abu Ghraib, for Guantanamo, for Alberto Gonzales and missile defense and tax cuts for the wealthy and our impending economic crisis and unsecured nukes in Russia and dead Iraqi children and traumatized soldiers and people with their legs blown off. The disease is not responsible for GWB's election, or the outing of Valerie Plame, the stolen 2000 election, Diebold, the EPA's unethical attempts to study infant exposure to pesticides, and members of Congress who think that doctors who perform abortions should be executed.

So the blog is a makeshift defense I have invented to help me cope with the temporary lack of the ordinary kind of defenses that other people have to keep them from going mad. My defense is to try to break through other peoples' defenses. So I write about what I see that other people may not see, and I write about how it makes me feel, because other people may not feel it. I write so that other people can be forced, for a moment, to encounter some painful realities. I do not know if I succeed. But if I do not try, then the disease is just a disease, and I am just alone in my horror and guilt and despair.

Heh. After that long and overly-melodramatic tale of how blogging gives my mental illness meaning, probably no one has stuck around to see what I might have to say that's applicable to other, non-mentally-ill bloggers. Also, the above does not address the original issue, which is that I'm nobody, so who exactly do I think is reading this blog and having all these amazing revelations about the state of the world, and saying "thank Yoruba for Biscuit, without whom I would still be seeing through a glass darkly."

So that's what my second answer will be about, when I have time to write it.

Latest on Torture

LA Times summary of newly-revealed nasty behavior by Marines in Iraq.

Andrew Sullivan on a "Culture of Abuse"

Gonzales Update

First the good news: Ex-military lawyers gearing up to protest Alberto Gonzales for AG. Then the bad: "while several opposed the nomination, some were unsure if opposition would be 'worth the effort' because of little expectation the nomination could be derailed." [my bold]

Um. Opposing Nominee for AG who is responsible for widespread torture: PRICELESS.

And yet more bad news, from Nick Hentoff at Village Voice:

Even the Democrats' attack dog on the Judiciary Committee, Charles Schumer, has said he prefers Gonzales to John Ashcroft. That's like saying you prefer Torquemada to Attila the Hun. Indeed, the ranking minority member on the committee, Patrick Leahy, has said that with Bush re-elected, if he sent up Attila the Hun to replace Ashcroft, he'd get his way.

The Democrats prefer to hold their fire until the next Supreme Court nominee. As a result, for the next four years, the manipulative Alberto Gonzales will be finding additional ways to expand the Patriot Act, integrate the further surveillance of us all into government data banks, and, as he already has, make the Bush administration the most secretive in American history.

[...]

So, as we are abandoned by the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, what can we do? For one thing, keep in touch with the website of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (bordc.org). It has a continuing record of cities and towns passing resolutions pressuring their members of Congress to pass liberating anti–Patriot Act (and future anti-Gonzales) legislation. (A number of such bills will be reintroduced in the next session of Congress.) And the website includes organizing strategies and useful news reports.

Also, while I have substantial differences with certain American Civil Liberties Union policies and with the quality of some of its top leadership, the ACLU staff is persistently effective in countering, through communication and lawsuits, the administration's subversion of the legacy of Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Eugene Debs, Bayard Rustin, and other freedom defenders.

The ACLU membership has increased in direct ratio to the ascendancy of Bush, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, et al. And the more members it gets, the more it can accomplish. I suggest you join the ACLU (the national office is in New York: 125 Broad Street, 18th floor; Attention: membership department; NY, NY 10004; 212-549-2585).

Misc:

Well, good for Joe Lieberman. CNN reports he has twice turned down offers to serve in the new Bush administration.

Pandagon makes what ought to be the obvious point that Michael Moore is not the problem, just the face the Republicans have pasted onto a caricature of the left as part of their strategy to provoke the self-evisceration of the Democratic party. "Moore is immaterial. The real question is why we ever took the debate in the first place."

Here is Michael Moore himself. Yeah, I have lots of problems with Michael Moore. But at least he agrees it's time to stop getting hit.

Talking Points Memo is still obsessed with the Bernie Kerik thing. Distractions, distractions.

Guardian reports on new movie "Battle for Fallujah" to star Harrison Ford. I don't even know what to say about this.

Op-Eds worth reading today

Krugman still, thank Jazus, op-edding in NYT, despite his supposed break to write an ec textbook, trying to save the country from social security privatization.

Thank Kali for Bob Herbert, who calls the Bushites out for shifting to domestic crap in the midst of their much ballyhooed wartime:

This administration has many things on its mind besides the welfare of overstretched, ill-equipped G.I.'s dodging bombers and snipers in Iraq. In addition to the inauguration, which will cost tens of millions of dollars, Mr. Bush is busy with his obsessive campaign against "junk and frivolous lawsuits," his effort to further lighten the tax load on the nation's wealthiest individuals and corporations, and his campaign to cut the legs from under the proudest achievement of the New Deal, Social Security.

E.J. Dionne on the assault on freedom of the press, in WAPO: "Who is hurt most when citizens fail to learn about bribe-taking, discontented soldiers or out-of-control intelligence programs? You know the answer, and it's chilling."

Newsflash: War is crazy-making. Especially counterinsurgency war...

Ugh. Mental Health Crisis looming for returning soldiers. Speaking as someone who suffers from Major Depressive Disorder, I am really horrified:

"There's a train coming that's packed with people who are going to need help for the next 35 years," said Stephen L. Robinson, a 20-year Army veteran who is now the executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center.

Many of these guys are likely be tormented for life by a hideous disease in which the mind literally attempts to torture itself to death. And that's just people who might otherwise look like they survived the war okay. Then there are the soldiers who also lost legs, arms, penises, parts of their faces...

Terrorist violence, serious as it is, does not threaten our existence, says member of Britain's House of Lords.

From Crooked Timber:

From Lord Hoffmann’s remarks in the judgement by the House of Lords (PDF, 102 pages) that the British government is wrong to detain foreign terrorist suspects indefinitely without trial :

This is a nation which has been tested in adversity, which has survived physical destruction and catastrophic loss of life. I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups of terrorists to kill and destroy, but they do not threaten the life of the nation. Whether we would survive Hitler hung in the balance, but there is no doubt that we shall survive Al-Qaeda. The Spanish people have not said that what happened in Madrid, hideous crime as it was, threatened the life of their nation. Their legendary pride would not allow it. Terrorist violence, serious as it is, does not threaten our institutions of government or our existence as a civil community….

[S]uch a power in any form is not compatible with our constitution. The real threat to the life of the nation, in the sense of a people living in accordance with its traditional laws and political values, comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these. That is the true measure of what terrorism may achieve. It is for Parliament to decide whether to give the terrorists such a victory.

What is Biscuit?

I first read about biscuit inthis Molly Ivins article about the torture thing. Oh, I'm sorry, the alleged 'abuse' thing:

The creepiest aspect of the Red Cross report is the involvement of doctors and psychiatrists in something called "biscuit" teams. Get used to that acronym: It stands for Behavioral Science Consultation Team and will end up in the same category of national shame as Wounded Knee. According to The New York Times, "biscuit" teams are "composed of psychologists and psychological workers who advise the interrogators." Shades of Dr. Mengele.

Wes Boyd of MoveOn talks to Farhad Marjoo

in Salon today:

For Boyd to declare 'mission accomplished' after the kind of bruising defeat the left suffered on Nov. 2 may seem to play into just the thing MoveOn has been criticized for recently -- being too satisfied with the strength of its cyber-presence while ignoring the piling losses in the offline world. But Boyd's not blind to the defeats. (He insists he's of the 'reality-based' world.) He just has a different yardstick for assessing his progress. If you believe your society needs to undergo fundamental change, as Boyd does, and you understand that such change is not a short-term proposition, you fight your war as a series of battles, and you don't fret over every loss, because it's the fighting, not the winning, that makes you stronger. This, anyway, is Boyd's theory. 'It's interesting, our way of doing business,' he says. 'We can build a vibrant opposition even if the machinery is owned by the other side because we're not afraid to lose. In fact, win, lose or draw, we get stronger.' [emphasis mine]

Basically, MoveOn's strategy is one of non-cooperation, and Peter Beinart's (and the rest of the would-be purgers) is one of appeasement. As with abortion, it doesn't matter what Democrats say about terrorism -- if it isn't what Republicans say, Dems will be painted as soft on terror. We can't win those battles right now, so we should stop caring what names they call us and just be in opposition.

New Feature: The Biscuit Compendium of Pessimism

We here at Biscuit are pessimists (or, if you will, members of the reality-based community, 'depressive realists', poopy-pants, naysayers, or just plain downers). The Biscuit Compendium of Pessimism will quote other pessimists, both famous and not, on a variety of depressing topics: the environment, civil liberties, economic meltdown, fascism, the draft, health care, etc.

Indulge at your own risk, and only when supervised by a licensed mental health specialist.

Today's pessimist quote is from one of our favorite pessimists, Paul Krugman, in a Reuters article entitled "Krugman: Economic Crisis a Question of When, Not If": "So if you ask the question do we look like Argentina, the answer is a whole lot more than anyone is quite willing to admit at this point. We've become a banana republic."

Atrios, Amy Sullivan, and Abortion

Responding to Amy Sullivan's recent post on Political Animal, he asksWhat do pro-life Democrats want?.

Do they want to outlaw abortion? If so, I'm not going to tell them that view is okay.

Do they want to add additional legal restrictions to abortion in response to the latest Republican icky-abortion-scare? If so, I'm not going to tell them that view is okay.

Sullivan insists that neither she nor Sarah Blustain, whose Prospect article I discussed in a previous post, are trying to take away anyone's rights or suggest a change in the party platform, just that they want to change the "perception" that Democrats are pro-abortion. Sullivan traces this perception to a vocal, powerful, minority of embarassingly strident people who refuse to believe abortions are a mortal sin, and thus bring all of us pro-choice dems down with them.

So she speaks approvingly of a recent report in Newsweek about John Kerry:

When John Kerry stopped by a meeting of the liberal 527 America Votes two weeks ago, EMILY's List president Ellen Malcolm asked him about the future of the Democratic Party. Kerry "told the group they needed new ways to make people understand they didn't like abortion. Democrats also needed to welcome more pro-life candidates into the party, he said."

Sullivan goes on to write, "If Democrats can change the perception that they are pro-abortion, they will finally be free to go on the offensive."

Unfortunately, the perception that Dems are pro-abortion is not the result of the behavior of any particular faction of college chicks attending pro-choice rallies, taking their shirts off, and inking "keep your laws off my body" on their breasts.

No one can accuse John Kerry himself of having EVER been rah-rah about abortion. When asked about it in the debates this year, John Kerry did not say "I love em. I think getting an abortion is great way to use up spare sick days." No, he sounded like what he was, a man who felt pretty sick about abortions but believed he couldn't legislate it.

This is not new for him. The Washington Post reported, in an article about Kerry's stance on abortion, that

Kerry has professed his personal opposition to abortion since his unsuccessful 1972 campaign for Congress. "On abortion, I myself, by belief and upbringing, am opposed to abortion but as a legislator, as one who is called on to pass a law, I would find it very difficult to legislate on something God himself has not seen fit to make clear to all the people on this earth. . . . And I think, therefore, with a sense of justice in mind that one has to leave the question of abortion between a woman and her conscience and her doctor," he told the Sun, a Lowell, Mass., newspaper, in 1972.

My point is that Democrats are not responsible for the perception that they are 'pro-abortion'. Our 2004 presidential candidate was about as squeamish as you can get about abortion while still supporting the party platform. And what did he get for it? A bunch of Catholic bishops calling him "pro-abortion" and refusing to serve Communion to him; President Bush saying "Well, it‘s pretty simple when they say:  Are you for a ban on partial birth abortion?  Yes or no? And he was given a chance to vote, and he voted no.  And that‘s just the way it is.  That‘s a vote.  It came right up.  It‘s clear for everybody to see.  And as I said:  You can run but you can‘t hide the reality." That John Kerry would have voted for a ban on late-term abortions if it included an exception for the health of the mother made no difference. He was still tarred as "pro-abortion" and not supporting the "culture of life".

So the reality is, people, that the only way Dems are going to change the perception that they are "pro-abortion" is by becoming anti-abortion, not just by modulating our rhetoric, which, from most of the people in actual power, is already modulated. After we've succesfully changed our image by agreeing to make abortions really hard to get, what exactly will we be free to go on the offensive about?

Anyway, abortion is a red herring, like so much we are arguing about these days. I'll tell you what we should go on the offensive about, and we can do it now, without first retreating, either in rhetoric or in fact: torture.

How about giant billboards, with the famous Abu Ghraib prisoner on box with hood and electrodes, and the words "MR. PRESIDENT, IS THIS WHAT A 'CULTURE OF LIFE' LOOKS LIKE?"

Wherein Amy responds to the liberal retreat on abortion...

Abortion is a Right that Ends in Sorrow, says Sarah Blustain in this month's American Prospect:

To this generation, the “choice” of a legal abortion is no longer something to celebrate. It is a decision made in crisis, and it is never one made happily. Have you ever talked to a woman who has had an abortion? Even a married, intentionally pregnant woman who has had a “D and C” for a dying or dead embryo? A college student whose birth control failed? I promise you, such a woman does not talk about exercising the “right to choose.” You may accuse her -- and me -- of taking such rights for granted, and maybe you’d be right. But mainly she will tell you how sad she is, how she wished she hadn’t had to make that “choice,” how unpleasant the procedure was. She is more likely depressed than defiant.

Ms. Blustain would like us all to not sound so damn happy about abortions. She rightly points out that lots of women who have abortions are depressed about it afterward. But she should also recognize that some women who have abortions are not depressed afterwards. ( see www.imnotsorry.net ). And that some women who do not have abortions are depressed afterwards too.

To single abortion out as a right that ends in sorrow is to claim that it is somehow different from other rights we have, other choices we might make. This is not the case. To choose is to close doors, to annihilate a possible future, and in that sense, all choices may carry sorrow with them, sorrow for the future that was lost. The right to choose, yes, opens us up to making the wrong choice, one that may well weigh on you for the rest of your life. This is the tragedy of our free will, and it is not confined to abortion.

The truth is, we humans swim, breathe, and sometimes choke and drown in sorrow. It is right and good to talk about that sorrow. But this argument, suddenly, that I'm hearing from many quarters, that pro-choice activists are too strident, too focused on rights and choices, too hardline, it bothers me.

Pro-choice activists must take a hardline stance about abortion precisely because it is the strategy of pro-life activists not to. They pretend to moderation, suggesting reasonable restrictions, a little FDA warning here, a little parental notification there. At the same time, they increase funding for abstinence-only programs, which do not prevent pregnancy, and decrease access to birth control. They do not intend to make abortion "safe, legal, and rare". They do not compromise; they use an incremental strategy to deceive the American public. So that one day, when we wake up and find that abortion is not safe, not legal, and no longer rare, we will wonder how we got there.

And this is how; by conceding to them that there should be some restrictions, since abortion is such a really awful thing. We should not do this.

Yes, abortion is a right that sometimes ends in sorrow, as all rights sometimes do. But sorrow never was decreased in this world by taking rights away. To live with the choices you have made is not always easy, but it sure beats living with the choices someone else made for you.

Lone Gunmen Department: Where's the Gorilla?

I have a paranoid theory about the whole Bernie Kerik nomination: what if the whole fiasco was actually planned as part of an overall strategy to distract the press? And, at the same time, to contribute to taking Rudy G. out of the running for 08 (too moderate).

Spouse says, "I dunno, sometimes they're just incompetent" and that's true enough, but sometimes they're not.

I'm just saying. I consider, like Paul Krugman, that the current administration actually has revolutionary aims: to utterly remake this country and our government. They mean to break the government so badly that we all, essentially, give up on it, and thus do nothing when they drown it in Grover Norquist's bathtub. In fact, by then, we may be happy to see it go.

They just won a major battle in the 04 elections, and now they are pressing ahead on many fronts: creating their fake social security crisis; preparing the ground for their horrible judicial nominations;, keeping Senate dems under control by threatening to take away the filibuster; completing their efforts to gut environmental protections; and egging on the Democratic party as it turns in on itself, arguing about Michael Moore and the DLC.

They are advancing, people, and we are bickering. They are advancing on so many fronts, and our energies are divided, distracted, dissipated. They are running a good war here, and they are winning it.

So maybe I'm just a paranoid geek straight out of The X-Files, but Bernie Kerik appears too obvious to me. Yesterday someone I was working with showed me this internet perception experiment thing, where you're supposed to watch a video and count the number of times people in white shirts pass a basketball to one another. The instructions tell you to really focus on the white shirts and the basketball, that it is really really important to get the count right. And while you're paying attention to the white shirts and the basketball, a man in a gorilla suit walks through the middle of them all, waves his arms wildly, and walks off again.

Most people, apparently, simply don't notice the gorilla. I did, because the instructions were soooo insistent that I pay attention to the basketball. I've always been bad at following instructions.

So I'm just asking, what with this fake social security crisis, and the bernie kerik thing, and all the other basketballs they're throwing around, that we pay attention instead to the gorillas. Because I see a whole bunch of them out there, all of them waving their arms wildly, and nobody noticing.

Miitary: We don't know how many troops we've sent to Iraq. WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU DON"T KNOW??

USATODAY.com - Army Guard now says its Iraq troops figure was inaccurate: "he Army National Guard said Monday it had given USA TODAY an inaccurate count of the total number of Guard troops in Iraq since the beginning of the war in March 2003, but still could not provide a precise count.

USA TODAY used the inaccurate Guard numbers to construct an analysis that showed part-time troops from the Army National Guard were more likely to die in Iraq than their counterparts in the active-duty Army."

The Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy also claimed not to know how many troops they've sent to Iraq. Amazing.

Joel Agee on fear

The Price of Fear Is Paid in Lost Freedom:

What impressed me most forcefully in the pictures from Abu Ghraib was how fear was employed as an instrument of torture. Humiliation too — but those photographs were meant to terrify, because they could be used to shame the victims in their communities.

Why has the discussion of these outrages very nearly vanished from public discourse? Does our silence bespeak a tacit consent to their possible continuation? If so, what would be our motive? I believe it is fear — fear of an elusive, treacherous enemy, but also fear of seeing the depths to which we may go for the sake of an equally elusive security.

We need to remember Abu Ghraib. We need to think about why we refuse to think about it. We need to look into that abyss before it swallows us whole.

Jonathan Weiler in the Gadflyer explains why real conservatives should fear the Bushites just as much as liberals do. He talks about the traditional conservative critique of utopianism on the left:

Human fallibility, conservatives argued, transformed the arrogance of social engineering into pernicious unintended consequences, upending routinized ways of living and disrupting human communities for the sake of some edenic abstraction. Conservatives viewed such thinking as millenarian, childish and fatally reckless.

What’s remarkable is how un self-consciously the American Right have become the radical social engineers of the new century, both in their vision for re-making the world order and in their desire to dismantle by-now universally accepted American institutions, like Social Security.

No place in the world currently more starkly represents the insane designs of the new global social engineers than Iraq. The recent evidence, of at least 100,000 excess deaths in the first 18 months of war, gives a sense of the impact of that arrogance on the basic functioning of human communities in Iraq. And, remember, when the evidence refers to excess deaths, it refers to deaths over and above what would have been expected had previous conditions prevailed. In other words, America’s new liberationist fanatics have visited 100,000 excess deaths on top of what likely would have prevailed in a regime still run by a murderous tyrant presiding over a barely functioning economy. Iraq is the most comprehensive dress rehearsal to date of the combined hopelessly simpleminded and utopian visions of free markets and neo-conservative fantasies of imposing freedom by force.

For obvious historical and political reasons, it was easy in the United States to criticize Marxism in toto. Just as obviously, attacking a singular Chistianity in America is not politically viable or strategically wise, nor would it be fair to do so. But, as others on this site have been pointing out, especially since the November elections, it is critical to make clear the character of a particular brand of millenarian Christianity, now being cross-pollinated with an unabashed effort at global domination as pushed by neo-conservatism to create a new super-strain of utopian transformationism.

[...]

Combined with the millennialism of Dobsonian and Fallwellian Christianity, we stand in the grip of a new pathological worldview. This, it should be clear, is not only a concern for liberals. It should also exercise the minds of cold war conservatives ... It’s important for us to see this new super strain for what it is – a mortal challenge to bedrock American institutions and a fundamental threat to world peace.

You know it's bad when even the CIA is squeamish about it...

NYT reports that the CIA in Iraq was creeped out by the use of force in military interrogations::" Concerns about harsh techniques used by Special Operations forces prompted the Central Intelligence Agency last year to bar its officers in Iraq from taking part in military interrogations where prisoners were subjected to duress, intelligence officials said.


A classified directive issued by the agency's headquarters on Aug. 8, 2003, to all its personnel in Iraq advised that 'if the military employed any type of techniques beyond questions and answers, we should not participate and should not be present,' according to an account provided by a senior intelligence official."

No doubt that was part CIA CYA, as some blogger (I don't remember who) pointed out. Still, points to the CIA here.

Byron Dorgan IS doing something besides complaining about steroid use. I stand corrected.

Democrats Planning Watchdog Role (washingtonpost.com): "Senate Democrats announced plans yesterday for wide-ranging hearings to examine Bush administration policies and conduct, saying the Republicans who control both houses of Congress have abdicated responsibility for oversight of the GOP administration.

'The congressional watchdog remains fast asleep, and we intend to wake him up,' said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (N.D.), who announced the party's plan at a Capitol Hill news conference."

This is a good start. We'll see if they manage to at least raise issues in the public consciousness with hearings, or i the hearings will go right into the C-Span 2 memory hole.

Re-erection

From yesterday's Salon:

While Ohio's electoral delegation will likely vote 20-0 in favor of reelecting the president today, agreement that Bush won the state remains far from unanimous.

"Reelecting"? Ah, we fight a losing battle for the history of this presidency. But please, for the record, once more, with feeling:

President George W. Bush was NOT ELECTED in 2000. Hence, even if he was elected in 2004, he cannot possibly have been "reelected." And Salon should know better.

Pandagon points out the painful truth about political blogging...

Pandagon: Talk But Don't Do, Do But Don't Listen:

On the one hand, the blogs are packed with people who talk politics, not do it. You really don't see to many of our number running for office, working in politics, applying for positions on campaigns (now, you certainly see some of us doing that, just not too many) or otherwise entering areas where the aggregate ideas and theories the blogosphere comes up with can be put into play. On the other hand, you have a party establishment that sees the blogs as a fundraising resource full of enthusiastic armchair quarterbacks who are to be courted but not listened to. So the advice reaches those who won't do anything with it (isn't Digby smart!) and misses those who might put it into practice.

I know this is against blogging code, but I have no solutions. Any ideas?

I think I have some ideas about this, but they're not formulated coherently yet so will have to wait for another post.

Liberals have hijacked the country, just like the terrorists hijacked those planes!

NYT reports on just how crappy it's going to get to live in red states:

Energized by electoral victories last month that they say reflect wide support for more traditional social values, conservative Christian advocates across the country are pushing ahead state and local initiatives on thorny issues, including same-sex marriage, public education and abortion.

I particularly like this quote from one Cynthia Davis, a Missouri state rep:

"It's like when the hijackers took over those four planes on Sept. 11 and took people to a place where they didn't want to go,' she added. 'I think a lot of people feel that liberals have taken our country somewhere we don't want to go. I think a lot more people realize this is our country and we're going to take it back."

And if we have to execute all the leftists to do it, well, let's get to it.

US admits its reports from war zones are completely unreliable; skeptics still considered freedom-haters

NYT: "Indeed, senior military officials in Washington say public affairs officers in war zones might, by choice or under pressure, issue statements to world news media that, while having elements of truth, are clearly devised primarily to provoke a response from the enemy."

So, the government lies, admits that it lies, but expects us to swallow the lies as truth anyway.

Department of Useless Senators

From The New York Times:

Senator Byron L. Dorgan joins Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, in vocally pressuring the Major League Baseball Players Association to accept such changes without hesitation.

And again I ask: Senators, is this really what you should be spending your time doing right now? Nothing else that seems important? Preparing for the avian flu pandemic, for example?

Mmmm, executing leftists! Fun for the whole family!

They Get Letters: "E&P gets feedback on the soldier's question to Rumsfeld. Support the troops!

Joe M. Richadson: 'The duped soldier should be put at the very front of the action, no armor. The cooperating sergeant's career should be over and maybe become MIA. Pitts and all his cronies should be executed as traitors. We are fighting a war, the debate is over, you’re either for us or against us, there is no middle ground. I say start executing the leftists in our country, soon.'

"

(Via Eschaton.)

More Moore-bashing

Let's get one thing straight: the Bushites are pleased as punch to have Democrats turning on each other instead of on the people with the power now. So all this internal debate about Michael Moore and Move On, thrills them. They fuel it. They want the party to engage in mass purges, to alienate an activist base. They want Democrats not just to say "well, we have a more nuanced view of some things than some of our activist base does" but to repudiate it entirely.

So you get things like George Will writing in today's WAPO that "The reason that Moore is hostile to U.S. power is that he despises the American people from whom the power arises. Moore's assertion that America "is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe" is a corollary of Kuttnerism, the doctrine that "middle America" is viciously ignorant."

Actually, George, most of America, middle or no, IS viciously ignorant. Also, that whole paragraph makes no sense whatsoever. Why do you say Moore "despises the American people from whom the power arises"? Who are those people Moore despises? What evidence do you have that he despises them? How is Moore saying that the rest of the world does not look kindly on America right now, which all the polls say is in fact true (or is true one of the words that has already been removed from the doublespeak lexicon?) a corollary of your invented Kuttnerism? As in, middle America doesn't even know the world hates us right now? Um, that too appears to be, um, true.

But can we all please not get sidetracked by this Republican-encouraged internecine warfare and focus on stuff upon which we can all agree? I suggest the following:

1) Torture is bad. Alberto Gonzales likes torture. Alberto Gonzales no make good AG.
2) Nukes in hands of terrorists bad. Russian nukes not secured. Secure Russian nukes now.

Two things: torture and nukes. Both related to terrorism. Both pretty easy to sell to people. Both pretty fucking urgent. Neither involves mass party purges and cheap shots at Michael Moore. Go, Team, Go.