King of Zembla

To Quote Our Good Friend Rev. Joe . . .

2008-11-05T13:17:00.000-08:00

"God DAMN, America!"

Some People Call You Batshit Crazy. John McCain Calls You His Base

2008-10-21T23:09:00.001-07:00

Via Zemblan patriot J.D.: A Mr. Jim Bramlett of the online community site InJesus.com has been calling for all-out "spiritual warfare" since he received the extremely disturbing missive excerpted below. He describes the author, Flo Ellers, as a credentialed member of "the International Fellowship of Ministries which is based in Washington State. She is also a member of EndTime Handmaidens and Servants of Jasper, Arkansas" -- so we think it is safe to conclude that Ms. Ellers knows a thing or two about chicken sacrifice:

Two days ago, I listened to a 9-6-08 message by Bree Keyton, a young woman evangelist who had just traveled to Kenya and visited Obama's home village and what she found out about his relations with his tribal people was chilling. And his "cousin" Odinga was dreadful. She said the witches, warlocks and those involved in satanism and the occult get up daily at 3 a.m. to release curses against McCain and Palin so B. Hussein Obama is elected.

Bree Keyton told the tribal "Christians" you are NOT Christian if you practice "tribalism" where they do voodoo to conjure up a goddess spirit or a "genie" and then come to church on Sunday to worship Jesus! What she discovered there is apparent in most churches around the world; namely, mixture in the church. Some renounced their devilish practices of blood covenant by killing sheep, goats, humans to be inducted into the tribe or to get a wife or to get revenge.

She said the current president of Kenya is a Christian. However, Obama's cousin Odinga ran aganist him and said he rigged the election and stirred up the masses to rape woman and boys, kill and burn and torture Christians, etc. until Obama contacted Condeleeza Rice and she granted Obama the right to contact Odinga and other ruling elders and he "convinced" them to stop terrorizing the Christians. Bree Keyton said the current Christian President was forced by our government (!) to "create" an office for Odinga (to make "peace") so he was made the Prime Minister (!) to make peace between the Christians and Odinga's Muslim religion!

Bree Keyton went and visited Obama's tribal people and she found out Obama is 75% Arab and his family are Muslims. Odinga is strill trying to become the President of Kenya. If he does, he will make a law forbidding all public preaching and institute Sharia Law. Bree K. said Odinga has made a pact with satan.

Bree K. also said when Obama visited his tribe in '06 and as late as Jan. '08 he went to every elder's home which has a "shrine" inside to worship the genie and asked for their blessing. She was told Obama and Odinga were both "destined" before they were born to be president/leader of their nation. They say "he is the chosen one". She said Obama's grandmother sacrificed a black and a white chicken to the "goddess of the river" so both whites and blacks will vote for Obama. All Islam loves and worships Obama. The world is mesmerized by him. Oprah's 200 million followers are out to elect Obama. Also, Dick Morris of Fox News was sent to Kenya to help Odinga run his campaign! I find that unbelievable.

The occultists are "weaving lazy 8's around McCain's mind to make him look confused and like an idiot". Bree K. said we need to break these curses off of him that are being sent from Kenya.

I read a portion of "Obama Nation" book and looked at several websites and found most of this information to be true, all except the curses part, of course....

First off, we'd like to apologize for our earlier, constant, and may we say, in retrospect, tasteless, mockery of candidate McCain's consistenly vapid, disjointed ramblings (you will find a typical example here). There is of course a world of difference between an idiot and a man who is compelled by warlocks (or genies) to act like an idiot, and believe us, we would never knowingly make fun of the latter. As far as we're concerned, voodoo-induced inanity is a type of, well . . . disease, we guess, or handicap . . . you know, like being a cripple. Disability, that's the word! Call it what you will, but the victims of this Satanic scourge deserve our respect, our sympathy, and -- for having the remarkable courage to appear before large crowds of people in a state of utter, stupefied bewilderment -- our admiration.

And secondly, we don't know how much Gov. Sarah Palin paid this wanker to rebuke every form of witchcraft against her, but we surely do hope she had a money-back guarantee:

Give Us $700 Billion in Small Bills or We Turn the Whole Country Over to Ollie North

2008-10-06T23:47:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you think we're joking:

See also this (courtesy of our funkalicious colleague Avedon Carol).

Ripe Pimple

2008-10-01T23:05:00.000-07:00

(Thanks to Zemblan patriot B.K. for the unpalatable metaphor.)

In a Week of Profoundly Scary Items . . .

2008-09-18T23:17:00.001-07:00

. . . we initially thought this one, by Mark Crispin Miller, the most profoundly scary:

To understand how Team McCain intends to get away with stealing this election, we must recall how Team Bush got away with it four years ago. (Those aren't two different teams.)

The plan for stealing this contest has everything to do with the ostensibly surprising choice of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP.

Here's why:

1. Election Day, 2004: The Myth of Bush's Christian "Surge"

First, let's recall that, after the 2004 election, everybody said that Bush had won because the true believers of the Christian right had come out--or, rather, poured forth--in unprecedented numbers, often at the last minute, to support him. Of course, by "everybody," I'm referring to the entire commentariate, both mainstream and left/liberal. On TV and in print, in news analyses and op-ed articles, they all said that Bush/Cheney had been re-elected by America's "values voters."

And they said it with a certain awe--as well they should, since Bush's victory was a sort of miracle. He had disapproval ratings in the upper 40's: higher than LBJ's in 1968, higher than Jimmy Carter's in 1980. Nor was he very popular in his own party, as many top Republicans came out against him--including moderates like John Eisenhower, rightists like Bob Barr, and many others such as William Crowe (chair of the Joint Chiefs under Ronald Reagan), General Tony McPeak (former Air Force chief of staff and erstwhile Veteran for Bush), libertarian Doug Bandow, neocon Francis Fukuyama, Lee Iacocca and Jack Matlock, Jr. (Reagan's ambassador to the USSR); and many other, lesser figures in his party also publicly rejected him.

And so did sixty (60) newspapers--all in "red" states--that had endorsed Bush four years earlier: two thirds of them now going for Kerry, the others none of the above. American Conservative, Pat Buchanan's own magazine, ran endorsements of five different candidates, only one of them for Bush. And 169 tenured and emeritus professors from the world's top business schools all signed a full-page ad decrying his economic policies, adducing them as reasons not to vote for him. (The ad was written by top faculty at his own alma mater, Harvard Business School.) The ad ran in the Financial Times, which, like The Economist, endorsed John Kerry.

And still Bush won, despite such big defections, thanks to that enormous turnout by the Christian right, as everybody kept on saying--even though there were good reasons to be very skeptical about that notion.

2. Election Day, 2004: There Was No Christian "Surge"

First of all, that talking point came from the Christian right itself, whose members certainly had every reason to exaggerate their clout. That they thus credited themselves, and that the claim was duly amplified by their own party and its propaganda organs (Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, et al.), should have been enough to make all non-believers doubtful.

And non-believers should have been especially suspicious of that claim because there's not a shred of evidence to back it up. On the other hand, there's solid evidence that that immense, last-minute vote for Bush was nothing but a propaganda fiction, cooked up by Karl Rove to mask his party's theft of that election.

To begin with, that fiction is preposterous on its face, since there were nowhere near enough of such right-wing believers to account for the incumbent's staggering advance, as Bush reportedly received 11.5 million more votes than he had won four years before. And how many evangelicals did that surge include? According to Karl Rove himself (among others), there were 4 million evangelicals who had not voted for Bush/Cheney in 2000. So, even if Rove managed to get every single one of them to vote for Bush this time around (and it's unlikely that he did), they could not possibly have made so big a difference--unless, of course, their numbers somehow
magically increased inside the polls, like Jesus's loaves and fishes.

In any case, Bush seems to have done worse with evangelicals than he had four years before. Consider how his "base" performed, in fact, on that Election Day, as measured by the National Exit Poll (and scrupulously analyzed by Michael Collins, whose essay, "The Urban Legend," is included in Loser Take All). Close study of the numbers in 2004 reveals that there was no big national surge of "values voters": on the contrary.

First of all, the nation's rural vote declined, dropping from 23% to just 16% of the overall national vote; and Bush's total rural vote went down from 14 million to just under 12 million. And while the nation's small town vote increased substantially--by 88%--those voters did not favor Bush as they had done four years before, but opted in near equal numbers for John Kerry. Of those 9.5 million votes, Bush got 4.9 million, while Kerry got 4.7 million. (In 2000, Bush had won 3.1 million small town votes, to Gore's 2 million.) And then there were the voters in the suburbs, who did come out for Bush in greater numbers than four years before--but hardly by enough to make for a decisive jump of any kind, as Bush won 28.3 million of those votes, to Kerry's 25.6 million.

Thus was there no elevated turnout in those regions where most "values voters" live--nor did the post-election polls suggest that "moral values" drove Bush/Cheney's startling re-election. On Nov. 11, Pew published the results of their most precise survey of the electorate. Having asked Americans to name the issue that most concerned them as they cast their ballots, Pew found that Iraq was Number One, noted by 25 percent, followed by "jobs and the economy," noted by 12 percent, with 9 percent invoking "terrorism." Only 9 percent named "moral values" as their main concern--with only 3 percent of them referring specifically to "gay marriage" (and another 2 percent referring to the candidates' own private lives).

Those numbers tell a very different story from the one hyped proudly by the men atop the Christianist machine. In particular, they said that they helped Bush prevail through their well-managed opposition to gay marriage--which Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, called "the hood ornament on the family values wagon that carried the president to a second term." That there was evidently no such wagon did not blunt the impact of such theocratic propaganda, which quickly resonated all throughout "the liberal media," so that it now stands as the truth.

Indeed, it was accepted as the truth so quickly that it went unquestioned even after the dramatic mass reaction to the Terri Schiavo case a few months later, when Bush and the Republicans in Congress intervened in that domestic tragedy, trying to force the very outcome that the Christianists were calling for: "Americans broadly and strongly disapprove of federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case," ABC News reported. The public supportedthe removal of Schiavo's feeding tube by 63% to 28%, according to the network's polls.

And so it was throughout the media. According to USA Today, 76% disapproved of Congress's handling of the case, while only 20% approved. CBS News found that 82% believed that Bush and Congress should have stayed out of it. And so it went, with poll after poll confirming that the Bush Republicans' attempt to force their "moral values" on the situation was appealing only to a small minority, a/k/a the fringe. "When nearly 70 percent of the American public disagrees with you," wrote Eric Boehlert at the time, "you're out of step with the mainstream."

That strong reaction by (at least) two-thirds of us was far more telling than the press, and most top Democrats, were willing to perceive, and so they couldn't, wouldn't see the awful truth: Either We the People had abruptly given up our "moral values" since Election Day, or our apparent vote for Bush was a deception, based on vote suppression and election fraud committed in Ohio and elsewhere throughout the nation.

Thus the myth of that immense, last-minute Christian turn-out was a rationale concocted to "explain" Bush/Cheney's re-election--and the US press immediately bought it, out of a clear eagerness to close the book on that election right away, and thereby black out all the glaring signs of fraud throughout Ohio (and Florida, and elsewhere). Indeed, the press at once laughed off the "theory" of widespread election fraud, dismissing all the facts as fantasy; and in their place it offered fantasy as fact (as they had done before, and have done since).

Last night we felt reasonably certain that we would be able to count Mr. Miller's piece the most disturbing of the fortnight. Then, earlier today, right on cue, along came Scott Horton.

Meanwhile, in a Kingdom Far, Far Away . . .

2008-09-18T23:17:00.000-07:00

. . . just across the border from Zembla:

It was brief, two minutes. His brow was furrowed, and his words were careful: “The American people can be sure we will continue to act to strengthen and stabilize our financial markets and improve investor confidence.” Then, having imparted no specifics, he once again slipped out of sight.

In the increasingly surreal world of the White House, the appearance was a sign that all pretense of normalcy is gone. All week long, with Wall Street engulfed by what analysts are calling the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, President Bush had mostly stayed out of sight, except when trying to maintain the façade of business as usual . . . .

On Monday, as Americans absorbed the news that the venerable investment bank Lehman Brothers had been forced into bankruptcy, Mr. Bush received John Kufuor, the president of Ghana, at the White House. The sun-dappled South Lawn was awash in color that morning, as a full military honor guard and a fife and drum band marched across the grass, entertaining the leaders before they exchanged the customary pleasantries.

“Your tenure has been full of events and challenges, some very mind-boggling and hair-raising,” Mr. Kufuor told Mr. Bush, raising more than a few eyebrows. “You are a survivor,” the Ghanaian leader told the American president. “And my hope is that history would prove kinder to you.”

That evening, after the stock market had nose-dived, with the Dow Jones industrial average falling more than 500 points, Mr. Bush, his wife Laura and more than 100 of their guests dined on Maine lobster and ginger-scented lamb during a state dinner in the African leader’s honor. Then, in their tuxedoes and ball gowns they repaired to the Rose Garden to watch actors from Disney’s musical “The Lion King” perform a medley of songs under the cool, dark Washington sky.

(Photo links courtesy of Zemblan patriot J.M.)

Remedial English: the Metaphor

2008-09-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

She's the lipstick. He's the pig.

However, if Felony Convictions Are Going to Be the Topic of Discussion . . . .

2008-08-26T18:49:00.000-07:00

Mitt Romney, would-be second banana to presumptive GOP nominee John McCain, discussing the elderly former P.O.W.'s bewildering array of primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary, quinary, senary, septenary, and octonary residences:

Speaking to reporters at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, Romney said that while McCain deserved his houses because of the "hard work" of himself and his family, "Barack Obama got a special deal from a convicted felon."

"I think it was a strange thing for Barack Obama to seize upon," Romney said. "If homes is going to be the topic of discussion that Barack Obama is going to end up on the short end of that one."

But Romney's attack stretches the truth. He was referring to Tony Rezko, a political fixer in Chicago and former Obama fund-raiser who was convicted by a federal jury earlier this year on corruption charges. It's true that Obama bought a piece of land from Rezko's wife to expand the yard of his $1.65 million Chicago home while Rezko was under federal investigation; Obama has since said the deal was a "bone-headed move," given the cloud that was already surrounding his former patron.

There is no evidence, however, that the Obamas got any "special deal" engineered by Rezko. Obama was able to buy the place thanks to two best-selling books and the six-figure salaries he and his wife were both earning.

Writing a best-seller can't be all that hard; in fact, we are at a loss to understand why more people don't do it more often. But what of the genuine "hard work" Mr. Romney mentions, by McCain "and his family"? McCain's own work consisted of dropkicking his first, poorer, crippled wife in favor of a good-looking beer heiress, which sounds on any number of counts like an easy call to us. The beer heiress's work consisted of being born into a rich family, which we are here to tell you can be quite trying, especially if there are hereditary obligations involved -- but we cannot in good conscience call it labor-intensive.

That leaves the beer heiress's father:

From Day 1, Hensley money has enabled McCain to be a full-time politician, free from financial concerns.

This story examines the roots of the Hensley fortune and John McCain's implacable bond to the liquor industry -- how it has enriched him personally and as a politician, and how those ties have dictated his actions on questions of public policy.

John McCain's political allegiances to liquor purveyors and his father-in-law's interests are subtle. That narrative is marked by a pattern of patronage.

The Hensley saga, meanwhile, swirls with bygone accounts of illicit booze, gambling, horse racing, deceit and crime. James Hensley embarked on his road to riches as a bootlegger . . . .

What is certain is that what occurred that December day was standard operating procedure for the Hensley brothers between April 1945 and January 1947. During this period, a 1948 federal criminal indictment charged, the Hensleys made approximately 1,284 false entries related to the sale of thousands of cases of liquor by their two companies -- United Sales Company in Phoenix and United Distributors in Tucson.

Ratliff's testimony eventually led to James and Eugene Hensley's conviction on federal conspiracy charges "with the intent and design to hide and conceal from the United States of America, the names and addresses of the person or persons to whom the said distilled spirits were sent, and the prices obtained from the sale thereof."

A federal jury in U.S. District Court of Arizona in March 1948 convicted James Hensley on seven counts of filing false liquor records in addition to the conspiracy charge. Eugene was convicted on 23 counts of filing false statements and the conspiracy count. Eugene was sentenced to one year in prison, and James to six months. Neither brother testified during the trial, relying instead on their lawyers, who included Louis B. Whitney, a prominent attorney who served as mayor of Phoenix from 1923 through 1925.

After a two-week stint in the Maricopa County jail, the men were released on bond on May 17, 1948, pending an appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit. The appeals court affirmed the conviction on February 8, 1949.

Two weeks later, a judge sentenced Eugene to one year in a federal prison camp near Tucson, but suspended James' sentence, placing him on probation instead. Both men were fined $2,000. United Sales and United Distributors were also convicted and fined $2,000.

The criminal convictions had little immediate impact on the brothers' fortunes . . . .

Although Hensley wealth has helped propel McCain's political career, the senator will never get his hands directly on the Hensley fortune because of an antenuptial agreement he signed before his 1980 marriage.

A centerpiece in McCain's remarkable and sudden rise to national prominence is his promise of campaign-finance reform.

Yet McCain has relied heavily on the financial contributions from big corporate donors -- with the liquor and beer industry near the top of the list. McCain won -- one could say bought -- his first election to the House of Representatives in 1982 with lavish sums of Hensley beer money.

Far be it from us to suggest that felons are not hard workers. After his initial conviction, Mr. Hensley continued to show great entrepreneurial zeal:

[O]ld newspaper clips . . . showed Jim Hensley had been an underling to well-known power broker Kemper Marley Sr., a rich rancher and wholesale liquor baron with suspected links to the 1976 car-bomb murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles . . . .

In 1953, Jim Hensley was again charged with falsifying records at Marley's liquor firms. The companies were defended by William Rehnquist, who would go on to become chief justice of the Supreme Court. Hensley was found not guilty.

The Hensley Bros. subsequently invested some of their profits in the Ruidoso Downs racetrack. Yet, in a hearing before the New Mexico Racing Commission, they mysteriously omitted to mention a third, silent partner, bookmaker Clarence Baldwin:

At a May 1953 commission hearing in Albuquerque records show the Hensley brothers readily told of their connections with the Arizona wholesale liquor business and Marley in the 1930s and 1940s and the federal convictions in 1948 for making false entires on government records regarding ???? liquor sales.

However, the Henleys denied at the same hearing that Baldwin their old croney in Phoenix, had any stock interest in Ruidoso Downs.

But two years later, at another hearing records reflect Baldwin did have stock interest in the track.

We do hope that Mr. Romney secures his party's vice-presidential nomination, because we are always eager to learn more about the value of hard, extralegal work, and the difficulty of inheriting its fruits.

(Thanks to our eminent colleagues Josh Marshall and Jon Schwarz for the links.)

Headlines That Do Not Inspire Us to Continue Reading, Pt. XXVII

2008-08-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

From the AP feature "Entertainment Report," as seen in this morning's S.F. Chronicle:

Dick Partially Cleared

The Seven-Year Itch

2008-06-17T16:42:00.000-07:00

George Bush has it.

(Thanks to our venerated colleague Avedon Carol for the link.)

It's the Thought That Counts

2008-06-10T22:28:00.000-07:00

Via Zemblan patriot J.D.: We are taking this opportunity to remind the female denizens of Zembla that the anniversary of Yr. Mst. Bnvlnt. Dspt.'s nativity is less than six months away:

Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner had a series of naughty sweet treats for his recent 82nd birthday, including chocolate body parts and a cake presented to him by a nude Pamela Anderson . . . .

Kendra Wilkinson, one of Hef's three girlfriends, says, "I think it was the perfect surprise for him - Pam Anderson, walking out with a cake naked . . . . what can get better than that?"

Wilkinson tells Us Weekly magazine she gave her man a white chocolate replica of her naked butt.

She adds, "I molded my ass, so I could call it 'chocolate starfish'. It was white chocolate, and I put a dark chocolate little thing right in the middle."

O Anus Mirabilis! -- or has Nathanael West already worn that gag out? At any rate, kudos to the free-thinking Ms. Wilkinson for resisting the societal pressure to bleach.

UPDATE: And kudos to us, for resisting our initial impulse to recast this item with John and Cindy McCain.

Perpetual Bush

2008-06-10T22:07:00.000-07:00

We commend to your attention an excellent five-part series by WaPo columnist Dan Froomkin, writing at his downtown crib, the Nieman Watchdog. The subject? What Mr. Bush will likely do to ensure that his pernicious influence lingers on well past the end of his benighted term as President. From installment #1, "Do We Really Expect the Bushies to Go Quietly?":

In any number of ways -- some overt, some covert – Bush, Vice President Cheney and their loyalists are assuredly taking steps to assure that their successors will find themselves hemmed in by limited options, balky subordinates, and inescapable obligations. Journalists should be looking for them and exposing them for what they are.

PART I: Iraq, Iran, and the Military

Iraq: The Petraeus Factor

The Bush legacy that has the most inertia, of course, is Iraq. The next American president will take office with as many as 140,000 troops still in harm’s way in Iraq, inheriting a war that will be hard to end even in the best-case scenarios. And while Obama is committed to a rapid pullout, there are ways the Bush administration can make it even more difficult than it has to be to change course. Among them: Putting stubborn loyalists in key military positions; continuing to build near-permanent bases until the last minute; letting out multi-year contracts; and committing to long-term agreements with the Iraqi government. In fact, the Bushies are doing all those and more . . . .
There are lots of other ways Bush can try to make it easier to stay in Iraq than to go. One particularly effective way is to make long-term commitments before he leaves office. To that end, two accords are currently being negotiated between the White House and the Iraqi government: a status of forces agreement and a separate "strategic framework."

Administration officials insist that the new agreements will not specify troop levels or otherwise tie the hands of the next president – but a “Declaration of Principles” signed by President Bush and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in November describes “a long-term relationship of cooperation and friendship” and calls for the U.S. to help Iraq defend itself “against internal and external threats.”

Negotiations on both accords are being held in secret, and the White House has said it does not intend bring the agreement before the U.S. Congress.

Some elements of the American negotiating position were recently leaked to Patrick Cockburn of the Independent, who wrote that Bush wants to retain the use of more than 50 military bases in Iraq and is insisting on immunity from Iraqi law for U.S. troops and contractors, as well as a free hand to carry out military activities without consulting the Baghdad government. At the same time, Iraqi resistance to such an accord is apparently on the rise, with many Iraqi lawmakers saying Bush's terms would infringe on Iraqi sovereignty and perpetuate the violence there. For more, see my June 5 column for washingtonpost.com, Bush’s Secret Iraq Deal.

And here’s one possibility Bush is likely to fight tooth and nail: Karen DeYoung wrote in the Washington Post on Friday that the Iraqi government may request an extension of the United Nations security mandate authorizing a U.S. military presence, due to expire in December, which would leave the negotiations over a future U.S.-Iraqi relationship and the role of U.S. forces in the country to the next American president.

Q. What are the White House’s goals in negotiating these two agreements? How are the negotiations proceeding? Why isn’t there greater transparency? Will Congress at least exercise its oversight power to find out what’s going on?

One particularly contentious issue is that of “permanent military bases.” It should be clear to everyone by now that when Bush administration officials deny that they are building permanent military bases, that doesn't mean a thing. See, for instance, this exchange last month between Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) and Assistant Defense Secretary Mary Beth Long. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a permanent military base. So even as Bush officials insist they have no intention of establishing permanent bases in Iraq, they have spent the last five years doing just that.

From installment #2, "Midnight Rulemaking, Last-Minute Hires and Executive Fiats":

Q. Are political appointees continuing or even accelerating their attempts to drive key civil servants out of their jobs?

A recent example of such behavior comes from Michael Hawthorne of the Chicago Tribune, who reported in early May that Mary Gade, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Midwest office, was forced out of her job after turning up the pressure on Dow Chemical to clean up dioxin contamination in Michigan.

A particularly unique facet of Bush’s approach to the executive branch has been a pattern of driving out competent, senior-level civil servants – often by removing their decision-making power – and replacing them with unqualified Republican loyalists. As Princeton University Professor David E. Lewis wrote on NiemanWatchdog.org, the effect of that can be profound:

Driving out career employees can result in a loss of expertise, institutional knowledge, long term perspective, and break up networks of relationships that facilitate governance across agencies. Career employees at the management level have worked their way up through the agency and know how it works, its routines, its culture, where the power is, and the ins and outs of policy. They often know and have ongoing relationships with key stakeholders. These stakeholders are key for implementing any agency policy. When careerists leave or get forced out it becomes harder to manage the agency.

FEMA’s incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina will of course be one of the lasting legacies of the Bush term. The White House’s disregard for scientific findings that don’t support their political beliefs is another hallmark. But there is also reason to believe that by removing people who know how to make government work, Bush political appointees have presided over a stealthy but steady erosion of government competence across the board. The question now is how bad have things gotten, and will they keep pushing good people out until the last minute . . . .
Q. Are appointees in federal agencies trying to cover their tracks? Are documents being properly retained?

As Steven Aftergood recently wrote on NiemanWatchdog.org:

The next President will have the authority to declassify and disclose any and all records that reflect the activities of executive branch agencies. Although internal White House records that document the activities of the outgoing President and his personal advisers will be exempt from disclosure for a dozen years or so, every Bush Administration decision that was actually translated into policy will have left a documentary trail in one or more of the agencies, and all such records could be disclosed at the discretion of the next President.

But that, of course, depends on appointees not destroying key documents.

Coming later this week: "Pardons and the Courts" (Wednesday); "Vice President Cheney" (Thursday); "Trying to Keep the GOP in Control" (Friday).

Bomb Iran, and We'll Make It an Even Three Dozen

2008-06-10T21:38:00.000-07:00

To the list of great listmakers (Joyce, Berrigan, Sorrentino, Barth) please add the name of Dennis Kucinich, author of "Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush," immediately below:

Article I: Creating a Secret Propaganda Campaign to Manufacture a False Case for War Against Iraq.

Article II: Falsely, Systematically, and with Criminal Intent Conflating the Attacks of September 11, 2001, With Misrepresentation of Iraq as a Security Threat as Part of Fraudulent Justification for a War of Aggression.

Article III: Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction, to Manufacture a False Case for War.

Article IV: Misleading the American People and Members of Congress to Believe Iraq Posed an Imminent Threat to the United States.

Article V: Illegally Misspending Funds to Secretly Begin a War of Aggression.

Article VI: Invading Iraq in Violation of the Requirements of HJRes114.

Article VII: Invading Iraq Absent a Declaration of War.

Article VIII: Invading Iraq, A Sovereign Nation, in Violation of the UN Charter.

Article IX: Failing to Provide Troops With Body Armor and Vehicle Armor

Article X: Falsifying Accounts of US Troop Deaths and Injuries for Political Purposes

Article XI: Establishment of Permanent U.S. Military Bases in Iraq

Article XII: Initiating a War Against Iraq for Control of That Nation's Natural Resources

Article XIIII: Creating a Secret Task Force to Develop Energy and Military Policies With Respect to Iraq and Other Countries

Article XIV: Misprision of a Felony, Misuse and Exposure of Classified Information And Obstruction of Justice in the Matter of Valerie Plame Wilson, Clandestine Agent of the Central Intelligence Agency

Article XV: Providing Immunity from Prosecution for Criminal Contractors in Iraq

Article XVI: Reckless Misspending and Waste of U.S. Tax Dollars in Connection With Iraq and US Contractors

Article XVII: Illegal Detention: Detaining Indefinitely And Without Charge Persons Both U.S. Citizens and Foreign Captives

Article XVIII: Torture: Secretly Authorizing, and Encouraging the Use of Torture Against Captives in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Other Places, as a Matter of Official Policy

Article XIX: Rendition: Kidnapping People and Taking Them Against Their Will to "Black Sites" Located in Other Nations, Including Nations Known to Practice Torture

Article XX: Imprisoning Children

Article XXI: Misleading Congress and the American People About Threats from Iran, and Supporting Terrorist Organizations Within Iran, With the Goal of Overthrowing the Iranian Government

Article XXII: Creating Secret Laws

Article XXIII: Violation of the Posse Comitatus Act

Article XXIV: Spying on American Citizens, Without a Court-Ordered Warrant, in Violation of the Law and the Fourth Amendment

Article XXV: Directing Telecommunications Companies to Create an Illegal and Unconstitutional Database of the Private Telephone Numbers and Emails of American Citizens

Article XXVI: Announcing the Intent to Violate Laws with Signing Statements

Article XXVII: Failing to Comply with Congressional Subpoenas and Instructing Former Employees Not to Comply

Article XXVIII: Tampering with Free and Fair Elections, Corruption of the Administration of Justice

Article XXIX: Conspiracy to Violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965

Article XXX: Misleading Congress and the American People in an Attempt to Destroy Medicare

Article XXXI: Katrina: Failure to Plan for the Predicted Disaster of Hurricane Katrina, Failure to Respond to a Civil Emergency

Article XXXII: Misleading Congress and the American People, Systematically Undermining Efforts to Address Global Climate Change

Article XXXIII: Repeatedly Ignored and Failed to Respond to High Level Intelligence Warnings of Planned Terrorist Attacks in the US, Prior to 911.

Article XXXIV: Obstruction of the Investigation into the Attacks of September 11, 2001

Article XXXV: Endangering the Health of 911 First Responders

Is there anything else you'd like to know?

(Thanks to Zemblan patriot B.K. for the link.)

UPDATE (via Zemblan patriot J.D.): An MSNBC poll asks, "Do You Think President Bush's Actions Justify Impeachment?" Well . . . do ya, punk??

And If We Attack Iran, He May Give Up Sticking Lit Firecrackers in the Asses of Frogs

2008-05-13T21:41:00.000-07:00

Play on through!

(Courtesy of every Zemblan patriot we know.)

UPDATE: Despite the President's bold example, Iraq vet Dan Nevins plans to keep on playing golf. (Courtesy of the Wounded Warrior Project. Read more, or make a donation, here.)

A Line in the Sand

2008-05-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

We are great admirers of Sen. Russ Feingold, and although we found his L.A. Times op-ed on the subject of Mr. Bush's secret laws mostly admirable, we must take issue with one term he uses in the excerpt directly below. When the executive branch can ignore or emend the law of the land at whim, behind the backs of the electorate, the nation we inhabit cannot reasonably be called a "democracy":

It's a given in our democracy that laws should be a matter of public record. But the law in this country includes not just statutes and regulations, which the public can readily access. It also includes binding legal interpretations made by courts and the executive branch. These interpretations are increasingly being withheld from the public and Congress.

Perhaps the most notorious example is the recently released 2003 Justice Department memorandum on torture written by John Yoo. The memorandum was, for a nine-month period in 2003, the law that the administration followed when it came to matters of torture. And that law was essentially a declaration that the administration could ignore the laws passed by Congress . . . .

Another body of secret law involves the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). In 1978, Congress created the special FISA court to review the government's requests for wiretaps in intelligence investigations, which is -- and should be -- done behind closed doors. But with changes in technology and with this administration's efforts to expand its surveillance powers, the court today is doing more than just reviewing warrant applications. It is issuing important interpretations of FISA that have effectively made new law.

These interpretations deeply affect Americans' privacy rights, and yet Americans don't know about them because they are not allowed to see them. Very few members of Congress have been allowed to see them either. When the Senate recently approved some broad and controversial changes to FISA, almost none of the senators voting on the bill could know what the law currently is . . . .

No one questions the need for the government to protect information about intelligence sources and methods, troop movements or weapons systems. But there's a big difference between withholding information about military or intelligence operations from the public and withholding the law that governs the executive branch. Keeping the law secret doesn't enhance national security, but it does give the government free rein to operate without oversight or accountability . . . . Congress and the public shouldn't have to wonder whether the executive branch is following the laws that are on the books or some other, secret law.

The descent into tyranny is always a shorter one than we would like to imagine, shorter yet when ordinary citizens, through indifference, intimidation, or simple ignorance, acquiesce in the abrogation of their rights. That is why we must doff the imperial diadem to Zemblan patriot Brewster Kahle, inventor of WAIS, founder of Alexa Internet, and current director of the Internet Archive (which maintains and operates, among other worthy online projects, the Wayback Machine). We were shocked to learn, upon opening this morning's S.F. Chronicle, that Mr. Kahle has been embroiled in an ongoing contretemps with the FBI, and although he has never, in our presence, said a word about it, we are delighted to forgive him the oversight. He stood up, invoked the rule of law, and made the government blink:

Brewster Kahle, who runs an online library in San Francisco, was appalled when his volunteer lawyers told him in November that the FBI was demanding records of all communications with one of his patrons as part of an investigation of "international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

The FBI document, called a national security letter, told Kahle he could be prosecuted if he discussed the subject with anyone but his lawyers, and allowed him to speak with his attorneys only in person. Kahle said his Internet Archive, which has 500,000 card-holders, doesn't even keep the records the FBI was seeking.

He was allowed to speak publicly Wednesday under a rare settlement in which the FBI agreed to withdraw its letter and lift the gag order. That should show other librarians, and members of the public who receive any of the nearly 50,000 national security letters the government issues each year, that "you can push back on these," Kahle said.

National security letters are subpoenas issued by federal agencies to require businesses and other institutions to produce records of their customers. The agencies do not need court approval for the letters.

A 1986 law initially authorized their use against suspected spies, but the USA Patriot Act, passed after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, allowed agents to seek records of anyone connected to a foreign terrorism or espionage investigation, even if the target is not a suspect.

The Bush administration has increasingly used the letters to sidestep a 1978 law requiring federal agents to get a warrant from a special court, in a secret session, to obtain similar records. A law passed in 2006 bars agents from issuing national security letters to libraries, with some exceptions, and requires regular audits by the Justice Department's inspector general, who has found thousands of cases of misuse of the letters.

A federal judge in New York ruled national security letters unconstitutional in September, saying the gag order violated free speech and interfered with judicial authority. The government has appealed.

The bad news: according to Mr. Kahle's lawyers, there are only two other cases in which a national security letter has been challenged in court. As EFF attorney Marcia Hoffman put it, "The big question is, How many other improper (letters) have been issued by the FBI and never challenged?"

(Feingold link courtesy of our goldarndest colleague Avedon Carol.)

UPDATE: From Wired.com we learn that, of the three known court challenges to an NSL, "all of [them] ended with the FBI rescinding the NSL . . . . The ACLU has successfully quashed two other NSLs, including one request to a library system asking for web surfing histories of patrons and another to a small New York hosting provider asking for data about a website it hosted. The Internet Archive case is only the second time the courts allowed the recipient of a Patriot Act National Security Letter to reveal his or her identity."

Unelectable

2008-05-07T00:02:00.000-07:00

There's good news and better news. The good news: after a huge win in North Carolina and a hairsbreadth loss in Indiana, Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee, and can finally turn his attention to November's general election. The better news: John McCain, who has had the Republican nomination sewn up for weeks now, failed to manage 80% support in either state primary, which means that almost two hundred thousand Republicans went to the polls simply to cast a protest vote against him:

In Indiana, McCain earned the backing of 78 percent of Republican primary voters, with exited candidates Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney gaining 10 percent and five percent respectively. Congressman Ron Paul, who is still in the race, has received seven percent of the vote.

The numbers were even worse in North Carolina, where McCain won 74 percent of the vote, with Huckabee earning 12 percent, Paul earning seven percent, and four percent of Republican primary goers simply voting "no preference."

None of these totals, to be sure, will affect the Arizona Republican's almost certain path to the nomination. But it has been more than two months now since McCain became the presumptive GOP candidate, and in each state election since he achieved that measure he has continued to lose a relatively substantial chunk of Republican support. In Pennsylvania, for example, McCain won 73 percent of the vote, with Paul pulling in 16 and Huckabee 11.

The troubling figures, however, may be the popular vote totals - individuals who McCain will theoretically have to woo back into his good graces. In North Carolina more than 105,000 Republicans did not vote for McCain. And in Indiana, 85,000 voters - whether they were Republican, Democrat or Independent - cast their ballots for someone other than the Arizona Republican.

UPDATE: Zemblans of a certain age may recall the 1976 presidential debate in which Gerald Ford made a complete fool of himself by asserting that Poland was "independent and autonomous" from the USSR. When pressed on the point, instead of relenting, he insisted that there was "no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" -- an astonishing brainfart from which his campaign never recovered.

And McCain? Well, let's put it this way: he ain't gonna get any less senile.

Bend That Twig!

2008-05-05T22:57:00.000-07:00

Via Zemblan patriot B.K.: From Dark Roasted Blend, an assortment of hideous playground sculptures, mostly from Russia and the Ukraine:

The Old Bait 'n' Switch

2008-05-05T00:46:00.000-07:00

Government programs that work must be watered down, undermined, or dismantled altogether, lest citizens draw the naive and dangerous conclusion that government programs can work. The personal account of veteran Patrick Campbell:

When I was sitting in a humvee in Baghdad two years ago, we had plenty of time to talk. While the conversations varied between musing about the morning's chow, the stifling heat or what type of truck we were going to buy when we got home, one theme remained constant. Everyone said they were going home to get that college degree that Uncle Sam promised us when we enlisted.

Last December, a year and a half late, I finally graduated. I still laugh when people ask me whether the military paid for my education. When I tell them how meager the actual education benefits are, their shock always make me feel like I just told a child that there is no such thing as the tooth fairy. Unfortunately, many of my battle buddies realized the hard way that the GI Bill isn't what it used to be. The education benefits for troops are so low that they either never enrolled, or dropped out of school because they couldn't handle working two part-time jobs or living back home on Mama's couch to afford to attend school.

My fellow veterans are struggling because the current GI Bill is woefully inadequate. Service members are forced to take out loans just to start classes, and then wait months to get any reimbursement. Even then, the benefit only covers 60 to 70 percent of the cost of a four-year public university. For expensive private schools, the GI Bill is barely a drop in the bucket. And every year, the GI Bill is losing value because education benefits have failed to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of education . . . .

Today, we are still reaping the benefits of one of the greatest social investment programs ever implemented. A 1988 congressional study proved that every dollar spent on educational benefits under the original GI Bill added $7 to the national economy in terms of productivity, consumer spending and tax revenue. Many of our leaders and luminaries took advantage of the GI Bill, including former Presidents Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, former Sen. Bob Dole, and authors Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer and Frank McCourt . . . .

For the hundreds of thousands of veterans returning with a mental health injury, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, earning a college degree will also create a safe space to readjust to civilian life. Since I have been back, there have been at least a few days when I was unable to attend class because something I saw in the news caused my mind to shoot right back into that cramped humvee. Thankfully, as a student, I had the luxury to take those days off and get the notes from a friend. Unfortunately, I know many veterans working full-time jobs who have had their jobs threatened because their bosses couldn't understand why that veteran needed a personal day.

A World War II-style GI Bill is more than just a social investment or an ethical obligation to our veterans; it's an important readiness tool. The GI Bill is the military's single most effective recruitment incentive; the No. 1 reason civilians join the military is to get money for college.

We have already seen the military double the number of GED waivers and increase the number of felonies allowable by a recruit. Enlistment bonuses have already climbed to $40,000 and could grow even higher. Instead of lowering standards and handing out big cash bonuses, why not keep the promise we made to our veterans, and help them get the education they have earned?

From the House of Ideas

2008-05-04T19:27:00.000-07:00

Via Zemblan patriot J.D.: We'll bet you a pristine copy of Tales to Astonish #35 that the U.S. government has poured many billions of dollars into the creation of robotic spy bugs designed to perform the exact same tasks that ordinary insects used to do for free, as a personal favor to Dr. Henry Pym:

A swarm of robotic insects is being developed for the military to hunt down enemy fighters in buildings and caves, carry mini bombs and identify chemical, nuclear or biological weapons . . . .

They are to be fitted with cameras, as well as sensors to identify different types of weapons, and can be kitted out with a small payload of explosives . . . .
A particular sound may be the courting equivalent of, "Come over here, you sexy beast." But a tiny change can alter the message entirely, making it something akin to, "You're about to be torn to shreds if you don't get out of my territory."

So remember: if you should happen to find yourself, of a langourous summer's evening, stretched out on the back-porch glider with a bag of pork rinds and a Mickey's Wide Mouth discussing the virtues of socialism with Uncle Clem, think twice before you swat that pesky mosquito. You may be costing the American taxpayer millions -- and hindering our national security efforts in the process!

But it isn't just the bugs. From that now-remote morning when we first saw the men in dark suits at curbside, rummaging through our garbage, raccoon-like, in the first harsh light of dawn, we have always harbored a powerful suspicion that our beloved collection of Marvel Comics (consigned to the trashbin by our Sainted, if Short-Sighted, Maw) wound up not at the dump but at DARPA. That longstanding conviction was only reinforced by the article excerpted below, from the website of the Brookings Institute; it is entitled "How to Be All That You Can Be: A Look at the Pentagon’s Five Step Plan For Making Iron Man Real," and it comes to us through the kind agency of our BARBARian colleague Swopa, at Needlenose:

The home for much of the work on the new technologies of the Future Force Warrior system is the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT. The program was started in 2002, with a $50 million grant from the Army, the largest ever grant in MIT’s history. Among the consortium working with MIT on the soldier systems are traditional defense firms like Raytheon to unexpected players like DuPont, the plastics company, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a leading research hospital of cancer and women’s health issues.

Without any sense of irony, the designers of this system say the ultimate plan of Future Force is to give soldiers near “super-powers.”[4] The system will come with many of the same components as the Land Warrior, just updated and sexed up. For example, while the gun in the old system was planned to be the venerable old M-16, the Future Force Warrior will carry a new “Weapon Subsystem,” that crosses a machine gun with a missile launcher. Most likely using the Metal Storm electrical system, it will shoot either bullets or tiny 15 mm explosive rockets. The advantage of the rockets is that they not only will be able to blow things up, but also are planned to have sensors that guide themselves at any designated target, raising every soldier to the level of an expert marksman. The weapon will also shoot an “electro-dart” that instead of exploding, stuns an enemy with an electrical shock . . . .

The sensors will also be a vast improvement. For example, instead of just regular night vision goggles and a video camera mounted on the rifle, the soldiers will be able have the enhanced MANTIS (Multi-spectral Adaptive Networked Tactical Imaging System) sight. Inspired by research into how insects “see” the world, MANTIS is a system which fuses together all the various images that different sensors (such as infrared light, thermal, etc.) detect into one single image. Individually, each of the sensors work well in some environment and poorly in others (infrared, for example, works great in low light, but terribly when there is smoke or dust; the reverse for thermal), but the combination into one gives the soldier the ability to see the world in multiple spectrums, much like the alien super-warrior in the movie Predator. MANTIS comes with a further twist. Each soldier’s helmet in the system is wirelessly linked to those of everyone else in their squad, "so that each person sees what every other person sees." The system also has “a TiVo-like record and playback capability” that allows the soldiers to rewind what they just saw and give anything that struck them as important an extra look . . . .

Much like Iron Man’s powered armor, future soldiers’ protections will also be computerized. The plan is for new body armor that, instead of Kevlar, is filled with nano-materials that are connected to a computer. It would normally be as flexible as regular uniform made of fabric. But, like how a crash-bag works inside a car, it would activate whenever the system detects a bullet strike and turn as hard as steel in an instant. Bullets would then bounce off the Future Force Warrior like those off of Superman’s chest.

This flexibility creates all sorts of other advantages. While traditional body armor can only take a limited number of strikes from a machine gun before the plate cracks, "When you have a uniform with this new nanotechnology, it can absorb unlimited numbers of machine-gun rounds," tells the Army’s soldier systems representative “Dutch” DeGay. The pliability could even be controlled. Gloves could turn into real-life brass knuckles, to give them a punch like Mike Tyson. Or, if the soldier gets hurt (such as from tripping on a rock while reading an email with their eyepiece), the uniform could go rigid to create a tourniquet or cast. The fabric could even be woven in with "nanomuscle fibers" that simulate real muscles, giving soldiers more an estimated “25 to 35 percent better lifting capability."[10]

The incorporation of electronics into the fabric also means that the armored uniform would not just be able to change shapes, but also may even change colors. Already, Fujitsu has made a computer screen that is made of fabric, while the E-Ink company has created ink that actually changes colors depending on its electronic charge. Incorporated into a uniform, such technology could create “chameleon” camouflage. The soldier’s uniform would be able to take the color of whatever is behind them or even form a rough holographic image like that in the movie Predator . . . .

But when it comes to actual development of real exoskeletons, the most influential of the science fiction visions comes from Robert Heinlein and his 1959 novel Starship Troopers.[13] Heinlein envisioned the infantry of the future as wearing technologic suits that make “You look like a big steel gorilla, armed with gorilla-sized weapons.” As the main character describes, “Our suits give us better eyes, better ears, stronger backs (to carry heavier weapons and more ammo), better legs, more intelligence (in the military meaning...), more firepower, greater endurance, less vulnerability… A suit isn't a space suit - although it can serve as one. It is not primarily armor - although the Knights of the Round Table were not armored as well as we are. It isn't a tank - but a single M.I. [Mobile Infantry] private could take on a squadron of those things and knock them off unassisted.” The book is so popular among military readers, that it is on almost all the various military professional reading lists and DARPA even footnoted it in a research proposal on turning Heinlein’s vision into reality.

We would not be a bit surprised if the men from DARPA also found Starship Troopers in our garbage, although this time around Maw is not to blame: we tossed it there ourselves, scarcely imagining the influence it would later have on future generations of lavishly-funded Imagineers. Nor did we foresee that our discarded paperback edition of Farnham's Freehold would provide the model for decades of Republican social policy.

We can, however, state with authority that we did not, inadvertently or otherwise, expose any impressionable minds to the outlandish sci-fi visions of Miss Ayn Rand. Our copy of Atlas Shrugged went straight to the imperial outhouse, where it grew shorter by a chapter or so each day until only the dust jacket remained.

SIDEBAR: Reading the Brookings article leads us to wonder whether certain Republican candidates might have been exposed to unhealthy levels of gamma radiation:

Is he man, or monster? Or . . . is he both? All we can say for sure is that we wouldn't like him when he's angry. And he's always angry.

UPDATE (courtesy of Zemblan patriot T.H.): Engadget has posted BAE's in-house animation of robo-bugs in action. Rock out, li'l robo-bugs!

UPDATE II: Is no one safe? Now we learn that even tiny woodland creatures are being spied upon by robotic simulacra of squirrels, lizards, even -- say it ain't so! -- cock-a-roaches:

Named Rocky after the cartoon character, the robo-squirrel is working its way into Hampshire's live-squirrel clique, controlled by researchers several yards away with a laptop computer and binoculars.

Sarah Partan, an assistant professor in animal behavior at Hampshire, hopes that by capturing a close-up view of squirrels in nature, Rocky will help her team decode squirrels' communication techniques, social cues and survival instincts.

Rocky is among many robotic critters worldwide helping researchers observe animals in their natural environments rather than in labs. The research could let scientists better understand how animals work in groups, court, intimidate rivals and warn allies of danger.

In Indiana, for instance, a fake lizard shows off its machismo as researchers assess which actions intimidate and which attract real lizards. Pheromone-soaked cockroach counterfeits in Brussels, meanwhile, exert peer pressure on real roaches to move out of protective darkness. In California, a tiny video camera inside a fake female sage grouse records close-up details as it's wooed - and more - by the breed's unusually promiscuous males . . . .

A particular sound may be the courting equivalent of, "Come over here, you sexy beast." But a tiny change can alter the message entirely, making it something akin to, "You're about to be torn to shreds if you don't get out of my territory."

"There's been the old, classic trade-off for years between the ecological relevance you get (researching) in the field, versus those studies in the lab where you can control the environment while knowing they're not going to react as much," [IU researcher Greg] Demas said. "Having these models out in the field is taking us to the next steps of the research."

The Horse Is Epitaph

2008-05-03T16:38:00.000-07:00

It's from a handicapper that's real sincere (namely Zemblan patriot J.M.):

The filly Eight Belles finished second behind favourite Big Brown in the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, then collapsed with two broken front ankles and was euthanized after crossing the wire.

The field of 20 horses was galloping out around the first turn at Churchill Downs when Eight Belles suddenly went down on both front legs and jockey Gabriel Saez slid off.

"When we passed the wire I stood up," said Saez, a first-time Derby rider. "She started galloping funny. I tried to pull her up. That's when she went down."

An equine ambulance reached her on the track and put down the filly.

"There was no possible way to save her," on-call veterinarian Dr. Larry Bramlage said. "She broke both front ankles. That's a bad injury."

Trainer Larry Jones and owner Rick Porter decided to run Eight Belles against the boys in America's greatest race despite her never having done so before.

Omen?

We are insuffiently skilled in the dark art of augury to offer a definitive explication of today's events, but we do hope the Democratic leadership had a qualified haruspex on hand to read the late filly's entrails:

Democrat Hillary Clinton has revealed her favorite for the 134th running of the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, May 3rd.

The presidential hopeful urged a group of her supporters in Louisville Thursday to put their money on the filly, Eight Belles.

And This Unwieldy Sceptre from Our Hand

2008-04-24T19:40:00.000-07:00

We thought we had stopped these devils at the Zemblan border, but despite our best efforts it seems a few of them managed to slip through:

Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumors of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure . . . .

"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," [police chief Jean-Dieudonne] Oleko said.

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.

Oh, they know, m'sieu. Believe us. They know.

(Link via our occasionally indecorous colleague Susie Madrak of Suburban Raunch Queen, whose site we usually visit for the political commentary. No, really.)

SIDEBAR (courtesy of our equally indecorous colleague Badtux the Snarky Penguin): Even if they did steal your penis, socks-in-the-basket is not the answer:

A Hamilton man Tasered by police is in hospital after the stun gun ignited a "flammable object" in his pants, burning him . . . .

"Three officers went there in response to a disturbance call," said SIU spokesman Frank Phillips yesterday. "During the interaction, an officer discharged his Taser. A flammable object the man had in the waistband of his pants ignited."

The man, 31, was burned on his hand and thigh. He was taken to Hamilton General Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.

Double the Death Toll

2008-04-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

In heartening news, two senators have called for the resignation of Dr. Ira Katz, the VA official who conspired to suppress information about the epidemic of suicide among veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. That information emerged in a pro bono lawsuit brought by attorney Gordon Erspamer, the subject this morning of an S.F. Chronicle profile that includes the following jawdropper of a quote:

"If you add up the veterans' suicides among those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and compare it to the total combat deaths, the veteran suicides are higher," says Erspamer, who introduced a VA e-mail at the trial that showed an average of 18 vets a day are committing suicide. "The VA doesn't want that out" . . . .

His father, Ernest, was one of the "atomic veterans" exposed to large doses of radiation during bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946. When his father developed incurable leukemia 33 years later, Erspamer, a year out of the University of Michigan law school, was frustrated at the lack of governmental support for veterans.

"My dad said, 'I don't want to spend the last year of my life fighting the VA,' " Erspamer says. "So I carried it on for him."

His father died in 1980, but it took 10 years for Erspamer to manage to get disability and death benefits from the VA.

"We won $90,000," he says. "And to tell you the truth, I probably spent $200,000 of time working on the case" . . . .

Erspamer has high hopes for this case, although he expects that it may take five or six years to work its way through the courts. A win would mean, at least in theory, a quicker response to claims and more rights to appeal for veterans, although Erspamer puts it more succinctly.

"It would mean that you can't treat them like crap, to be blunt," he says.

SIDEBAR: The MIT Technology Review has now posted Part II of Emily Singer's article "Brain Trauma in Iraq":

Scientists have preliminary evidence that forces unique to blasts can damage the brain directly, independent of any blunt injuries that the blast might also cause. The key questions, however, remain unanswered. Which aspects of the blast do the most damage? How can the military better protect its personnel? And perhaps most important for legions of soldiers on patrol, can repeated exposure to weak blasts lead to long-lasting brain damage?

The prognosis for soldiers returning home with symptoms of brain damage is not encouraging. Decades of research into civilian head trauma have come to very little; treatments that seemed promising in animal models have turned out to be ineffective in human tests. "It's a completely untapped area of medical development," says trauma surgeon Jon Bowersox. While the military is testing a handful of existing drugs, there's a "time mismatch" when it comes to developing new treatments specifically for traumatic brain injury, Bowersox observes. "The military is interested in developing products they can have out during the current war," he says. "They are not used to the fact that medical development has a longer time line."

If you missed it earlier this week, part I is here.

UPDATE (via our stalwart colleague the Fixer at Alternate Brain): Just so's you'll know: while Iraq vets are begging for scraps, the Navy pays John McCain -- whose wife is reportedly worth something in excess of $100 million -- an annual "disability pension" of $58,358 that is 100% tax-exempt. Asks commenter Pansypoo: "Do I see a WELFARE QUEEN?"

A Conspiracy Theory We Can Root For

2008-04-24T00:48:00.000-07:00

The resignation of Adm. William Fallon as commander of CentCom and his imminent replacement by surgemeister David Petraeus have removed one large impediment to Dick Cheney's sinister designs on Iran -- but don't pop the champagne, or the bomb-bay doors, just yet. Our indefatigable colleague Scott Horton has caught wind of a rumor so wacky it might be true:

Over at the American Conservative magazine’s blog, Antiwar.com columnist and former CIA officer Philip Giraldi reports that Israeli sources have indicated to him that the recent leak to the FBI about the new-old Israeli spy case came from inside the Israeli government toward the end of thwarting Ehud Olmert, Dick Cheney and the War Party’s plans to expand the Middle Eastern slaughter to Iran – and that there are more spies to be revealed.

Apples and Oranges and Monsters

2008-04-23T23:32:00.000-07:00

From the Independent (UK), courtesy of Zemblan patriot K.Z.:

An American expert in torture techniques has denounced his government for allowing "waterboarding" to be practised against terror suspects, just as a graphic advertisement showing the brutal reality of the technique is unveiled to British cinema-goers.

Malcolm Nance, who trained hundreds of US servicemen and women to resist interrogation by putting them through "waterboarding" exercises, demanded an immediate end to the practice by all US personnel.

He said: "They seem to think it is worth throwing the honour of 220 years of American decency in war out of the window. Waterboarding is out-and-out torture, and I'm deeply ashamed President Bush has authorised its use and dragged the US's reputation into the mud."

Mr Bush faced criticism recently when he vetoed a Bill that would have outlawed such methods of "enhanced interrogation" – the White House refuses to describe it as torture.

Mr Nance said: "You have a purpose-built table with straps in a pattern so that people can be strapped and unstrapped quickly. The head is strapped down in such a way so they cannot resist the water. The head is elevated so the water goes down the oesophagus.

"The water is poured very carefully over the nose – you keep a constant pour. You are drowning in water but you don't have the ability to hold your breath. You feel the water going in, you understand that water is filling your lungs."

Mr Nance, who is now an independent consultant, said the technique was also futile, as well as barbaric, as the prisoner would say anything to survive – regardless of its truth.

Amnesty International has produced a brief advertisement depicting the procedure Mr. Nance describes above. We invite you to watch it, and then, if you have not already done so, to visit Daily Kos, where diarist Elsinora has provided a transcript of last night's Q&A session between former Attorney General John Ashcroft and the students of Knox College. (You will find useful analysis by our eminent colleague dday, writing at Digby's crib, here.)

UPDATE: Enough already with the bureaucratic squabbling! Can't you see agent Bauer has a city to save?

FBI Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday recalled warning the Justice Department and the Pentagon that some U.S. interrogation methods used against terrorists might be inappropriate, if not illegal . . . .

Mueller said the FBI does not use coercive techniques when questioning suspects or witnesses, and he reportedly pulled his agents out of CIA or military interrogations several years ago to protect them from legal consequences.

FBI protocol "wouldn't engage in torture," said Rep. Stephen Cohen, D-Tenn. "But if you find out that other agencies may engage in torture, that you believe is illegal — does your protocol include informing those agencies that you believe their actions are illegal?"

"Yes," Mueller answered.

"Who did you inform?" Cohen asked.

"At points in time, we have reached out to DoD, DoJ, in terms of activity that we were concerned might not be appropriate, let me put it that way," Mueller said. DoD refers to the Department of Defense and DoJ to the Department of Justice.

Mueller said some of the FBI's concerns dated back to 2002, when top al-Qaida detainees were waterboarded by CIA interrogators. Waterboarding involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his or her cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. Critics call it a form of torture.

Asked how the Justice Department and Pentagon responded to the FBI's advice, Mueller declined to discuss it publicly, citing concerns about releasing classified information. He also referred to the Justice Department's legal guidance at the time that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods were legal as long as they did not result in organ failure or death.

That guidance, contained in a series of memos by the department's Office of legal Counsel, since has been rescinded.

UPDATE II: We must apologize for the update directly above. We made the Jack Bauer joke in the innocent belief that it was, in fact, only a joke. Then we read Scott Horton's interview with Philippe Sands, author of the soon-to-be-published Torture Team:

HORTON: The administration's narrative has been that a harsh set of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding and stress positions, was introduced in response to demands from interrogators in the field who concluded that what they had didn't work. How did you reach the conclusion that, in fact, the pressure for the new techniques came from high up in the administration and worked its way down?

SANDS: I have no doubt about the early, close, and active involvement of the upper echelons of the administration in the decision to request, approve and then use harsh techniques of interrogation on "Detainee 063," Mohammed Al Qahtani. The story that emerged from the interviews was clear and it was consistent (plus, I had the opportunity to put my findings to Jim Haynes, who was the final piece of the jigsaw). The administration's 'bottom-up' narrative--as spun by Mr. Haynes and others--is false, inaccurate, and misleading, and I believe it was knowingly intended to be so. The administration has scapegoated individuals who were on the ground at Guantánamo in order to protect itself. Names that could have been blacked out were not. That is deplorable, and the cover-up of what really happened will likely expose those who engaged in it to even greater difficulty.

HORTON: The lawyer whose legal analysis underpins the Rumsfeld memo is Diane Beaver, whom you describe as completely out of her depth dealing with a complex set of international law questions. But you also note, rather amazingly, how Beaver's description of plot points from the TV show "24" directly influenced the introduction of new techniques at Guantánamo, techniques that later were replicated by American interrogators around the world. How could that happen?

SANDS: The administration told a story which claimed that Diane Beaver's legal advice was the basis for the Haynes recommendation and the Rumsfeld approval of the new techniques. That is false. When Jim Haynes wrote his memo of November 27, 2002, recommending blanket approval for 15 new techniques of interrogation, and leaving three others open for future use (including waterboarding), he had knowledge of the contents of the Department of Justice legal memo from August 1, 2002, signed by Jay Bybee and written with the assistance of John Yoo. That document provided Jim Haynes with the cover he sought, not Diane Beaver's legal advice. She was hung out to dry by Jim Haynes, in a manner that was unbecoming of his office, deeply unfair to her and reflected what will look to many like a deliberate effort to cover up what actually happened.

UPDATE III: From Nat Hentoff, the story of an "enemy combatant" who, for some reason, has not yet received an invitation to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

A Walking Contradiction, Partly Truth and Partly Fiction

2008-04-23T21:21:00.000-07:00

-- but mostly the latter. It transpired this morning that:

In a bombshell disclosure before testimony began Wednesday morning in the Antoin "Tony" Rezko trial, a federal prosecutor said a former Rezko confidant was prepared to say that another friend of Rezko was trying to pull strings with White House political director Karl Rove to fire U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald and kill his investigation into Rezko.

Mr. Fitzgerald, as you no doubt recall, was at the same time pursuing a grand jury investigation into Mr. Rove's role in the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame. The story continues:

Rove, a former deputy chief of staff to President Bush who is now a private consultant in Washington, said through his attorney that he didn't recall any such conversations and denied he ever sought Fitzgerald's firing.

"Karl has known Kjellander for many years but does not recall him or anyone else arguing for Fitzgerald's removal," Robert Luskin, Rove's attorney, said Wednesday.

"And [Rove] is very certain that he didn't take any steps to do that, or have any conversations with anyone in the White House—or in the Justice Department—about doing anything like that." Kjellander issued a statement, saying, "I never have discussed with Karl Rove or any other person on the White House staff the proposition that U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald should or could be removed from his office."

We are pleased to inform you that Mr. Rove's memory, or that of his mouthpiece, has since received a salubrious jog. As of 3:44 EDT, TPM correspondent Paul Kiel was reporting that:

I spoke to Luskin just now, and he said that his statement ought to be qualified a bit: his statement on Kgellander stands as is, he said, but during the independent counsel investigation, he said, Rove was "frequently" approached about canning Fitzgerald: "a number of people approached Karl and suggested that Fitzgerald be removed because of the alleged politicization of the investigation, but he never took any follow-up steps except to say that I can't talk about that. He didn't want to do anything seen as compromising Fitzgerald's independence." Those approaches, Luskin said, came during fundraisers or other political events "in an unsolicited way.... Karl simply never responded and did not take any action."

The selfless paragon Mr. Rove, as you know, was called before the grand jury on five separate occasions to revise and clarify his testimony in the Plame case. We will keep you posted on further "qualifications" as they occur.