October 27th, 2007
From the department of “You gotta be shittin’ me…”
This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the committee’s website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the “strictest confidence.”
But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email were accidentally included in the “to:” field — instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or “bcc:”.
How is this even possible… the staff person that sent this out should be castrated and flogged.
October 16th, 2007
Some haunting images of Bush’s America, as captured in Christopher Morris’ “My America”:
From an interview with the photographer:
Nina Berman: The best description of your work came from a powerful introduction you wrote for an exhibition of your images in France. You excluded this from the book. Can you share with us what you wrote?
Christopher Morris: In the Name of God the Flag and Bush Almighty. This is my America, my New Republic. If the hijackers on September 11 accomplished anything, this is it. They have given us the divine Bush. A man who has said, “you’re either with us or against us.” A man who teaches our children that “they hate us because we love freedom”.
This is my America. An America with Homeland Security, a Patriot Act. An America with paranoia. An America with hatred and ignorance. An America that wraps itself in its President and its flag. This is my America.
Now when I see the eagle of freedom, I see an eagle of fascism. Now when I see the American flag, I’m afraid for my America. We have become an ugly nation. A nation that has wrapped its eyes so tightly in red, white and blue that it has gone blind. Blinded by nationalism. This is my America. And this is why they hate us, and its not because we love freedom. They hate us because we think like that.
October 11th, 2007
Yet one more example of why we like Jon Stewart, via CrooksandLiars.com:
CHENEY: You know, I think when the history books are written, that we will look back on this period of time and we will say, on 9/11, we really thought within six months, we would be attacked again, maybe six weeks. It’s been more than six years and that is not an accident. I think this administration – my husband and the President – deserve a lot of credit for that.
STEWART: Okay.
CHENEY: Good (laughter)
STEWART: Well, alright. There was, I mean, there was the anthrax thing. And then there was-well, you know, the first time they bombed the World Trade Center, it was eight years until we got attacked again. And they weren’t apparently doing anything…
CHENEY: Well, yes, but there were many attacks in between 1993 and the World Trade Centers coming down in 2001. Remember the USS Cole, for example. There were worldwide bombings going on, the bombings in embassies in Africa. So the terrorists weren’t reluctant to damage American interests and kill Americans. Friends?
STEWART: We are friends, it’s just…you know they have been doing that all these past six years. They’ve been…I mean, you know, the Spanish bombing and the English bombing and all the bombs in Iraq…
CHENEY: Yes, but I’m talking about American interests [emphasis added]
STEWART: Aren’t we interested in…? Alright, I assumed that they were our allies.
You gotta check out the video.
October 8th, 2007
Sarah Stephens, blogging at HuffingtonPost.com, frames the issue correctly, I think:
Think of how angry Americans would be if Pakistan’s government let Osama bin Laden emerge from his cave of refuge and take up open residence in Islamabad?
Reportedly, this is precisely what the Bush Administration is doing: harboring a well known terrorists against legal prosecution for allegedly blowing up Cubana flight 455 and murdering all on board.
Luis Posada Carriles, who ranks in the top ten list of the world’s most prolific terrorists, is living freely in Florida–despite his known involvement in blowing up a civilian airliner and other bombings and assassination attempts over more than forty years. Since May, when a Federal judge tossed out the minor charges of immigration fraud leveled by Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department, Posada has been enjoying life in Miami’s hard-line Cuban exile community. The U.S. media has all but forgotten about him. His victims, however, remain seared by this remarkable injustice and so should we.
Today, after all, marks the anniversary of the mid-air destruction of Cubana Airlines flight 455, which took the lives of 73 passengers and crew, including the Cuban Olympic Fencing team and a group of teenage Guyanese science students on their way to Cuba to go to medical school. Their families will commemorate this day of loss, as they have for 31 years, wondering whether Posada and his co-conspirator Orlando Bosch–who is also living freely in Miami–will ever be brought to justice.
But for those of us in the United States, the case of Luis Posada Carriles is not only about a long overdue legal reckoning for the victims of terrorism, it is about the hypocrisy of the purported leader in the global fight against international terrorism now harboring a renowned purveyor of terrorist violence. “The United States cannot tolerate the inherent inhumanity of terrorism as a way of settling disputes,” declared a 1989 Justice Department ruling that Orlando Bosch should remain detained or deported after he illegally returned to the United States from Venezuela. “We must look on terrorism as a universal evil, even if it is directed toward those with whom we have no political sympathy.”
That principle was ignored by the administration of George H.W. Bush which, urged on by politically powerful rightwing Cuban exiles in Florida, set Bosch free in 1990. Following in his father’s footsteps, George W’s administration has politicized the Posada case as well, allowing him to go free and flaunting the credibility of the U.S. war on terror in the process.
October 5th, 2007
It’s so great to have access to Paul Krugman’s columns once more. To read what I’m talking about, here’s a taste of what had been missing from the blogsphere since the NY Times put its columnist behind a paid firewall (which, luckily, is no more):
In 1960, John F. Kennedy, who had been shocked by the hunger he saw in West Virginia, made the fight against hunger a theme of his presidential campaign. After his election he created the modern food stamp program, which today helps millions of Americans get enough to eat.
But Ronald Reagan thought the issue of hunger in the world’s richest nation was nothing but a big joke. Here’s what Reagan said in his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” which made him a national political figure: “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”
Today’s leading conservatives are Reagan’s heirs. If you’re poor, if you don’t have health insurance, if you’re sick — well, they don’t think it’s a serious issue. In fact, they think it’s funny.
[...]
Before the last election, the actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s and has become an advocate for stem cell research that might lead to a cure, made an ad in support of Claire McCaskill, the Democratic candidate for Senator in Missouri. It was an effective ad, in part because Mr. Fox’s affliction was obvious.
And Rush Limbaugh — displaying the same style he exhibited in his recent claim that members of the military who oppose the Iraq war are “phony soldiers” and his later comparison of a wounded vet who criticized him for that remark to a suicide bomber — immediately accused Mr. Fox of faking it. “In this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking. And it’s purely an act.” Heh-heh-heh.
[...]
Mark Crispin Miller, the author of “The Bush Dyslexicon,” once made a striking observation: all of the famous Bush malapropisms — “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” and so on — have involved occasions when Mr. Bush was trying to sound caring and compassionate.
By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that’s when he’s speaking from the heart.
[...]
So once again, if you’re poor or you’re sick or you don’t have health insurance, remember this: these people think your problems are funny.
