Month: April 2008

Hey Pennsylvanians

by digby

Here’s a neat tool to use tomorrow:

Help Make Sure Every Voter’s Story Gets Told in 2008

The VoterStory web widget is programmed to collect and classify voter complaints in real time across the Internet and will provide a data feed of complaints that can be addressed in real time by Voter Protection groups who partner with VoterStory. Originally developed for the 2006 General Election, the VoterStory Web Widget is distributed web technology that enables a broad and expandable network to easily place sophisticated voter protection functionality on news, organizational web pages, blog and social media sites such as FaceBook or MySpace.

The VoterStory widget will be active on April 15, 2008. Complaints generated in the Pennsylvania Primary will be shared with election protection partners.

Click here to download the VoterStory Media Advisory.

1 On Election Day, the voter completes the form with their story.

2 When they hit “submit” their information is transmitted to voter protection organizations who will be standing by to intervene or lend support if necessary.

3 The voter also receives an email confirming that their story was transmitted.

4 Voter information is entered into a database of election incidents.

5 Voter Protection groups receive live information about voting problems during the election.

You can download this handy widget for your site:

I think this tool could be extremely important in the fall campaign. (You know they will try to steal it…)

This is, by the way, a tool developed by political activists, which is pretty great.

.

It’s Time To Defund Torture

by digby

Congressional candidate Darcy Burner has a post up at Open Left today talking about Blackwater:

It’s high time we picked a fight over this.

Blackwater’s contract was just renewed by the State Department. The supplemental appropriation that’s about to be brought up before the House includes ongoing funding for Blackwater’s activities in Iraq. If we’re going to fight this, we need to fight it now.

It is not just that too many of Blackwater’s employees in Iraq conduct themselves in ways that are counterproductive and deeply immoral. It is not just that there is no accountability for the company or its employees either in Iraq or here. And it is not just that the Iraqis have clearly and unambiguously called for Blackwater to leave.

Blackwater is a threat to the core underpinnings of our democracy. Who is this private army loyal to? Because they aren’t ours. They don’t wear our flags on their clothing — they wear the symbol of Blackwater.

Burner provides a list of House and Senate sponsors for a bill which would defund the security contractors and requests that we begin calling our reps and asking them to join. (And guys, if the Blackwater style contractors are defunded, so is the war. They can’t run it without them.)

For those of you who have been as appalled by the latest revelations about the Bush torture regime, I remind you that contractors are intimately involved with it. Blackwater and subsidiaries handled many of the rendition planes. Contractors were intimately involved in torture and abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq:

Civilians working for private military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan are alleged to have committed serious incidents of abuse including assault, torture and sexual abuse, some of which occurred at Abu Ghraib prison. While reports of alleged incidents of abuse by civilians have been forwarded to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Eastern Virginia, there have been no convictions and only one indictment, though at least 20 cases were forwarded by the Department of Defense and the CIA to the Department of Justice since the beginning of the conflict in Afghanistan.

[…]

Incidents of torture involving civilian contractors at Abu Ghraib were documented in the US Army’s Fay and Taguba reports investigating Abu Ghraib. These reports implicated employees of two companies, CACI International (based in Arlington, VA) and Titan Corp (based in San Diego and recently acquired by L3 Communications). Steve Stefanowicz of CACI reportedly directed the use of dogs at Abu Ghraib, ordered that a prisoner not receive his prescription pain killers, made a male prisoner wear women’s underwear, failed to report abuse, and lied to investigators. Daniel Johnson, also employed by CACI, allegedly directed and participated in prisoner abuse and interrogated a prisoner in an “unauthorized stress position,” according to descriptions in the Fay report and alleged in a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Johnson is the contractor alleged to have directed military personnel Sgts. Ivan Frederick and Charles Graner to torture a detainee during an interrogation. Three Titan employees were accused of abuses in the Fay and Taguba reports including allegedly raping a male juvenile detainee, making false statements about interrogations and failing to report detainee abuse.

General Michael Hayden admitted under oath In February that security and intelligence contractors are still directly involved in the torture –a legal quagmire which was undoubtedly designed to protect them from prosecution.

From WIRED:

FEINSTEIN: I’d like to ask this question: Who carries out these [enhanced interrogation] techniques? Are they government employees or contractors?

HAYDEN: At our facilities during this, we have a mix of both government employees and contractors. Everything is done under, as we’ve talked before, ma’am, under my authority and the authority of the agency. But the people at the locations are frequently a mix of both — we call them blue badgers and green badgers.

FEINSTEIN: And where do you use only contractors?

HAYDEN: I’m not aware of any facility in which there were only contractors. And this came up…

FEINSTEIN: Any facility anywhere in the world?

HAYDEN: Oh, I mean, I’m talking about our detention facilities. I want to make something very clear, because I don’t think it was quite crystal clear in the discussion you had with Attorney General Mukasey.

The article goes on to question whether or not the so-called “black sites” have now been completely outsourced, something we don’t have the answer to.

Look, it’s going to take some very serious congressional and hopefully, Department of Justice, investigation into what went on with this torture regime. But the first step is to defund the Blackwater security contractors, right now. End it. Full stop. This is a fight we need to have.

* I would also add that we should have known that Blackwater and its ilk were a bad idea from the earlier experience we had in Bosnia with DynCorp, which was involved in white slavery. Fool me once, won’t get fooled again …

.

Do You Know How Much Your Co-Workers Make?

by digby

In the midst of a cavalcade of Bushian atrocities, sometimes it’s hard to focus on just what a horrible legacy this administration has left on the federal courts. And that is going to be a living legacy — Roberts, Alito and Thomas aren’t even 60. They’ll be with us for decades, handing down decisions like the Ledbetter Case, which made it nearly impossible to prove job discrimination.

Here’s Christy at FDL:

In [this] video …, provided by Alliance for Justice, you can hear Lilly Ledbetter tell you in her own words about the gender pay discrimination she discovered had been going on for 19 years of her employment — and only by an anonymous note. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said from the bench in her blistering oral dissent to the majority’s decision in the Ledbetter case:

In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination. Title VII was meant to govern real-world employment practices, and that world is what the court today ignores.

Any woman who has had to fight her way into a position, or prove herself worthy of even being considered as comparable to her male counterparts — because of fears that she might have children, or a family to care for, or “female issues” or whatever other excuse is used to keep her behind even when she was overqualified for the job — any woman who has walked in those shoes can tell you how difficult it can be to rise above in-grown discriminatory attitudes and practices.

This is not feminist special pleading or “whining.” Pay discrimination on the basis of sex exists. And the court used arcane procedural reasoning to make it nearly impossible for anyone to prove it. (Echidne has written a very persuasive three-part series on the gender gap and pay discrimination.)

This Ledbetter decision reversed decades of employment discrimination law, which had evolved to deal practically with the real world instead of the Randian wet-dream that exists in the minds of Federalist Society fantasists. The ACLU says:

…The Ledbetter decision not only reversed years of employment law, it also ignored the realities of a workplace. Often employees don’t know what their co-workers are paid; an expectation that they learn that information within the first 180 days of a pay decision is unreasonable. Unless Congress intervenes, companies will be able to discriminate for years and unjustly profit from paying women, minorities, the elderly, and people with disabilities less, as long as it keeps the discrimination secret for a few months.

The congress can fix this, (although I’d bet money that President “She can clean her room” Bush won’t sign it.) Christy hosted Eleanor Holmes Norton earlier this morning to discuss the Ledbetter Fair pay Act, which the House passed quickly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision and which will be voted on in the Senate this week.

As I said, I doubt that Bush will sign it. But if this legislation can be passed, it will be waiting for the new Democratic president next January. It would be a very powerful affirmation of Democratic ideals for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton to sign this legislation as one of his or her first acts in office.

Christy helpfully supplies the information if you’d like to take a moment and make some calls:

We’re asking that you contact your Senators and tell them to support the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (H.R. 2831). The ACLU has set up an easy contact tool to e-mail your Senators, as has the National Women’s Law Center. Phone numbers for Senators can be found here.

.

Bring It On II

The first time a Bush Administration official dared the Iraqi insurgency to attack Americans, they did, with devastating consequences that reverberate to this day. In a show of sound judgment, they went and did it again (h/t Newshoggers):

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice mocked anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr as a coward on Sunday, hours after the radical leader threatened to declare war unless U.S. and Iraqi forces end a military crackdown on his followers.

Rice, in the Iraqi capital to tout security gains and what she calls an emerging political consensus, said al-Sadr is content to issue threats and edicts from the safety of Iran, where he is studying. Al-Sadr heads an unruly militia that was the main target of an Iraqi government assault in the oil-rich city of Basra last month, and his future role as a spoiler is an open question.

“I know he’s sitting in Iran,” Rice said dismissively, when asked about al-Sadr’s latest threat to lift a self-imposed cease-fire with government and U.S. forces. “I guess it’s all-out war for anybody but him,” Rice said. “I guess that’s the message; his followers can go too their deaths and he’s in Iran.”

Don’t think for a second that it wasn’t intentional to have Rice do this, either. At Abu Ghraib and other detention camps the rationale behind stripping prisoners and forcing them to walk around naked was that such humiliations at the hands of women would be even worse in their culture. This is the same “Arab Mind” garbage that these guys have been using as a template for years.

Never mind the absurdity of the statement – Condi shows up in Baghdad, behind fortified Green Zone walls, one day a year, and she’s talking about someone ELSE sending minions to their death while they’re in calm and comfort? – but this is a death warrant for many of our troops. Maliki wants to hold power and is inciting this conflict while he has American troops and air support on his side so that he can vanquish the Mahdi Army before the elections. But it’s an open question whether he has the popular support to carry this through – he certainly didn’t in Basra. Which means that Americans will end up on the front lines, and now that Condi has attempted this little humiliation game, Sadr has all the impetus he needs to stage a massive rebellion based on nationalist fervor. Brandon Friedman puts it best.

Again, we have yet another member of the Bush administration who–in a ham-handed effort to help our “allies”–is actually placing our own troops in more danger. I don’t think there’s any question that this echoes George W. Bush’s provocative invitation for terrorists around the world to descend on Iraq when he declared, “Bring’em on” in July 2003. And we all know how that worked out.

But it’s not just about Rice’s dismissive, provocative tone, either. It’s also this continuing, obnoxious Bush-brand of hypocrisy that the whole world sees: If Sadr had said the same thing of Rice–that she’s a Washington, D.C. bureaucrat who sends others to fight her own battles–the Bush administration would freak out. And that fact isn’t lost on Iraqis.

As Rice is one who will not have to stay and fight the Mahdi Army side-by-side with our troops, I suggest that she keep her mouth shut if she’s not going to say anything helpful. Because statements like these are certainly not.

Gen. Petraeus didn’t approve of the attack in Basra because he understood it could blow up into a popular uprising. The focus on “special groups” and “criminals” was an effort to cast the battle away from Sadr and his militia. Maliki completely bungled that, and now Rice stomps in with this pathetic schoolyard taunt that’s going to do incredible damage. The next several days in Iraq will be incredibly tense. It’s April 2004 all over again.

And look what happened WHILE Rice made this statement.

Warning sirens sounded at least twice while Rice was inside the temporary embassy, housed in a beat-up Saddam-era palace. She did not visit the site of a new fortified U.S. Embassy set to open in a few weeks.

They call that a metaphor.

.

Torture Is Always Immoral

by tristero

For the sake of the younger people here, whose idea of “normal behavior” by an American president is that of the current one, let me explain that until, George W. Bush, torture was never official US policy. Not during any war fought by the US. Not in World War 2 against a far worse threat than extreme Islamism. Why was that? Because up until the Bush administration, the United States officially believed what all the rest of the great civilizations had long ago concluded: Torture is always immoral. Yes, Americans – to their everlasting shame – have used torture in the past. The difference with Bush is that it was never official policy. Now it is, and that means torture has been normalized by the United States. And that creates a slippery slope. Today, only “terrorists” will be tortured, but tomorrow the practice will spread to other “undesirables.” Unless, that is, this country’s voters and their representatives proactively demand that presidents again obey the rule of law and that torture once again be unequivocally banned.

There are many reasons why torture is immoral, so many, in fact, that its immorality can be thought of as an axiom of civilization. It is simply obvious that there are no acceptable excuses for torture. Ever. And therefore I’ve had, and still have, little interest in discussing the ethics of it – there really is nothing to discuss. But given its normalization by Bush, it may not be so obvious to some of you, so let us explore some of the excuses currently around. Don’t worry, I don’t have any gruesome tales of torture to tell. You are all capable of imagining what torture is.

If you’ve seen ‘24,’ you know the drill for excuse #1, sometimes called “The Ticking Bomb.” Suppose there’s a terrorist bomb in my daughter’s school, and I, working for the CIA, have captured a terrorist in on the plot. There’s 10 minutes left ‘till it blows up unless I can get the code needed to defuse the bomb from the terrorist. Don’t I have a right to torture him? You might think the answer is obvious, but it is not.

This is a cynical and emotionally manipulative example. Of course, I would do anything at all I could to keep my daughter safe. But I would never torture anyone to do so. Why? Because this situation has never, ever happened, Nothing like it has ever happened. And it is never likely to happen. And if it did, it is not likely the terrorist would give up the code no matter what you did to him. This is not an honest hypothetical example of what “could” happen. It is a simply disgusting, useless nightmare of a fantasy. It might make good tv if you like that sort of thing. But it is as close to reality as little green men from Mars landing on the earth. (That has not stopped “serious people” who really ought to know better to treat this as worthy of philosophical exegesis.)

But what, you persist, if it did happen? So, let’s put the answer another way. It is much more likely that you will win 200 million dollars in the lottery AND that all the countries in the world that have them will disable their nuclear weapons tomorrow than that a situation like this would ever happen. In other words, the question is so absurd, it makes more sense for you to open up a new bank account to hold all that money you’re going to win. A lot more sense.

Now, let’s examine a second excuse: torture can be useful. In defending the torture of a 9/11 suspect, Bush said, “I didn’t have any problem at all trying to find out what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew.” And apparently, KSM, as he’s called, started talking immediatley after Bush’s thugs started torturing him.

So, isn’t torture moral if we can use it to obtain information to save lives?

Well, no. In fact obtaining information’s the big problem with torture. Sure, KSM talked. He told his torturers anything at all to get them to stop. Some of it was true. A lot of it was false, as in totally misleadingly, dangerously, and obviously false. Indeed, Bush has claimed that the torture of KSM stopped more attacks. But he is lying about this as he has lied about nearly everything else (including that the US doesn’t torture: it does, and you and I are paying the torturers’ salaries). There’s a reason no one has ever provided any evidence that anything KSM said under torture was helpful in the slightest to preventing future attacks. That’s because there is no evidence. Sure, it’s possible that KSM actually did reveal helpful information under torture which is so sensitive it can’t be revealed. And it’s just as possible Elvis really is alive, putting the finishing touches on a duet cd with Kurt Cobain.

Don’t get me wrong. Torture is not immoral because it doesn’t work very well. Torture does not become moral if it works. No. Torture is immoral AND it doesn’t work.

Recently, I heard a third excuse, namely that the urge to physically harm our enemies is natural, deep-seated. Many people truly want those they hate to suffer in all sorts of horrible ways, even if doing so doesn’t serve to provide information or otherwise protect them.

True enough, I suppose. But that is all the more reason to ban torture. Simply because many people wish to commit an immoral act does not make it moral. Until Bush, the leaders of (at least all modern) first world societies have understood that torture can never be an official government policy. The thirst for revenge can never justify immoral behavior by a democratic government like the US which, for all its many, many faults, intended its laws to be based upon. and administered by, what Lincoln called “cold reason,” rather than the lusts of a lynch mob.

Finally, I’ve heard a variant of excuse #3. Who are you to be so high and mighty? Are you telling me that if someone harmed your family, you wouldn’t want to see them suffer? I have two responses to such trash. First of all, the question itself makes me wonder about the hostility of the questioner who wishes me to imagine my family harmed. Secondly, the question illustrates one reason why there are laws based upon cold reason, in order to restrain those who are too emotionally distraught to act in a rational manner – as I very well might, if my family were harmed. It’s oh so cathartic in the movies, when the supermoral hero beats the Evil One to a bloody pulp and then rolls him over a cliff, it feels real good. But people, we don’t live inside a movie. Here, in reality, even Bruce Willis is not BRUCE WILLIS, believe it or not, and Clint Eastwood is not Dirty Harry. And catharsis has nothing to do with (or shouldn’t, at least) justice.

If you have read this far, I apologize. “The ethics of torture” is a topic that no one in a healthy democracy should have to spend too much time discussing because its immorality should be self-evident to its citizens. But we don’t live in a healthy democracy – and, after Bush, it is at least arguable the extent to which we actually live in a democracy. So I’m sorry you have felt you had to read this far. So now, to quickly conclude a tedious subject, please remember this if nothing else:

Torture is always immoral. End of discussion.

Gasbag Performance Art

by digby

This Politico story about McCain running an “unconventional campaign” of triangulation against the Democrats and Bush is very intriguing:

Facing the prospect of competing against a Democrat who is on track to shatter every fundraising record — and confronted by his own inability to rake in large bundles of cash — McCain and his key advisers have largely been forced into devising a three-pronged strategy that they hope can turn their general election weaknesses into strengths.

McCain will lean heavily on the well-funded Republican National Committee. He will merge key functions of his campaign hierarchy with the RNC while also relying on an unconventional structure of 10 regional campaign mangers.

And finally — and perhaps most importantly — McCain will rely on free media to an unprecedented degree to get out his message in a fashion that aims to not only minimize his financial disadvantage but also drive a triangulated contrast among himself, the Democratic nominee and President Bush.

(He has every right to feel that the free media are going to help him every step of the way. They are, as Chris Matthews says, his base.)

So he’s going to triangulate against Bush. But that would seem very risky considering that I keep hearing from the media gasbags just how unpopular McCain remains with the right wing — the last gasp of Bush’s support. Everyone’s always fretting that the conservatives are going to stay home because McCain is such a free-wheeling free spirit that they can’t trust him. What’s the maverick up to?

Well, first of all,despite the fact that many of the radio and TV bloviators are pretending that McCain has a problem with the base, he doesn’t:

Although John McCain’s candidacy is still viewed with suspicion by many conservative leaders, polling suggests he has overcome the concerns of rank-and-file conservatives: McCain isn’t viewed more unfavorably by conservative voters today than George W. Bush was at this point in the 2000 election cycle.

In the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, 18 percent of conservatives said they have an unfavorable view of McCain. The same percentage expressed an unfavorable view of Bush in CBS News polls conducted in March and April of 2000; higher percentages of conservatives held unfavorable views of Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush at similar points in 1996 and 1988, respectively.

Bill Clinton famously said that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. There you have it. The Republican party is behind their nominee, just as they always are. The problem is whether they can get the independents and swing voters who have come to loathe Bush.

And that’s where the gasbags come in. They need to convince the independents that McCain isn’t really a conservative. And the good news for the Republicans is that the free media believe it. They think he’s the “coolest guy in school.”

This isn’t the first time a Republican has run such a triangulation campaign. Someone who’s involved in Pennsylvania politics described in an e-mail why the Democrats were unable to burden Arlen Specter with his votes with Bush:

“…no amount of “votes with him 89% of the time” could overcome folks’ perceptions, esp. buttressed by a GOP primary that emphasized conservatives’ dissatisfaction with him.“

I have never bought this public loathing among the conservative cognoscenti for McCain. They’re professional political operatives. They want to win. The whole show they put on at CPAC and on talk radio struck me as bizarre. Indeed, Coulter saying she would vote for Clinton should have been enough to tip us off that this was some kind of elaborate performance art piece.

It’s not that they don’t care about McCain’s heresy on campaign finance reform and illegal immigration, or despise him for his sanctimony. But they don’t care about that more than McCain’s national security policy, which is their obsession, and raison d’etre. McCain is their best hope to win and continue the glorious GWOT.

He kissed all the right hems and he made all the right pilgrimages to the social conservatives and that is what they require. (In fact, like many petty tyrants, they actually prefer it when the person requesting an audience is insincerely seeking their favor. It’s a sign of their power.) McCain embraces the conservative label and will let them have their way as much as he can get away with — certainly on judges —because he just doesn’t give a damn about them. They know this. It’s all about war with him. It’s what he does.

Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t some in the GOP rank and file who do hate him. But the radio gasbags and the religious poohbahs don’t work independently of the party’s wishes. When I heard Bill Bennett railing against McCain on CNN as he wound up the primaries even though he’d maxed out for McCain in contributions, it was clear to me that this was a strategy. (Bennett is an out and proud supporter now.)

The Republicans know the brand has been severely damaged by Bush. They can read polls as well as anyone. So, they helped the supine media brush off their 2000 narrative and pretended that despite everything he’s done in the past eight years, McCain isn’t a Real Republican. They continue to perpetuate the myth that he’s mistrusted by the Republican base in order to help him triangulate against Bush. What better way to do it than to trot out Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh’s to call him a traitor to conservatism? That’s music to the independent swing voter’s ear in 2008 and they know it.

The conservatives never get enough credit for being pragmatic. They are. When faced with the total repudiation of their most precious ideals in the wreckage of the worst presidency ever, they picked the one guy in their whole party who any voter could possibly believe wasn’t a loyal Bushie. The only thing they required was that he was a bloodthirsty sonofabitch who would keep the flame of war alive. He is happy to oblige.

.

The Times Catches Up With Us

by tristero

There’s a pretty good editorial on the high level torture approvals by the Bush administration today in the Times, what Digby, Dday, and I – as well as others in the blogosphere have been complaining loudly about since April 11 when ABC published and broadcastBush Aware of Advisers' Interrogation Talks. Here’s an excerpt from the Times editorial:

We have long known that the Justice Department tortured the law to give its Orwellian blessing to torturing people, and that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved a list of ways to abuse prisoners. But recent accounts by ABC News and The Associated Press said that all of the president’s top national security advisers at the time participated in creating the interrogation policy: Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Rumsfeld; Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser; Colin Powell, the secretary of state; John Ashcroft, the attorney general; and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence.

These officials did not have the time or the foresight to plan for the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq or the tenacity to complete the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But they managed to squeeze in dozens of meetings in the White House Situation Room to organize and give legal cover to prisoner abuse, including brutal methods that civilized nations consider to be torture.

Mr. Bush told ABC News this month that he knew of these meetings and approved of the result.

Those who have followed the story of the administration’s policies on prisoners may not be shocked. We have read the memos from the Justice Department redefining torture, claiming that Mr. Bush did not have to follow the law, and offering a blueprint for avoiding criminal liability for abusing prisoners.

The amount of time and energy devoted to this furtive exercise at the very highest levels of the government reminded us how little Americans know, in fact, about the ways Mr. Bush and his team undermined, subverted and broke the law in the name of saving the American way of life.

We have questions to ask, in particular, about the involvement of Ms. Rice…

I have two equally urgent, perhaps more urgent questions: since impeachment is not, and will not, be on the table, is there anything that can be done to stop present torturing and prevent future torture by Bush?

Second, what laws can be passed to prevent any future administration from torturing those in its grip, be they called “prisoners,” “non-comabatants,” or anything else?

Saboteurs In Waiting

by digby

I’m sure most of you have already read about the Republican retired officers who pose as unbiased military “analysts” on television. I guess I should be shocked, but it always seemed obvious to me that they were in the tank (no pun intended) and that they got their talking points directly from the Pentagon brass. Looks like it’s even worse than I thought. What I assumed to be a more or less sincere application of Pentagon propaganda, looks like it might have been done as much for financial gain as anything else:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

It’s another example of media corruption as well. These networks have an obligation to present these people honestly. If they are corrupt, then the networks that employed them are equally corrupt.

It’s a very good thing that this story came out now because as bad as it is that these ex-Generals were touting the Bush administration line, when a Democrat is president something much more insidious is likely to happen. The top military brass are notoriously conservative — and Republican. During the last Democratic administration they worked very hard against their Commander in Chief whenever they disagreed with him. At times they, particularly Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, came perilously close to defying the civilian rule of the military.

I see little reason to believe that won’t happen again if a new Democratic president decides to chart a course the mostly Republican military brass disagree with. Having all these proxy “analysts” available to go on television and tell the American people that the president doesn’t know what he’s doing is a recipe for political disaster right out of the box.

Any military analysts who took part in the propaganda operation should be fired immediately. At the very least, if they stay in their jobs after this they must be identified as Republican operatives. That’s what they are.

.

A Real Cult

by digby

Here’s some interesting Sunday reading. If, like many Americans (and all “Big Love” enthusiasts) you are a fascinated by the story of the FLDS cult down in Texas, Sara Robinson has written a couple of fascinating posts on the subject.

This one, taking on the mainstream media’s insistence that the women aren’t technically “brainwashed” is very informative.

The problem, as it so often is with the mainstream media, is that absolutely everybody involved with reporting or commenting on this story has been airlifted into it in the past few days. (You’d think somebody would have at least taken the time on the plane flight to skim Krakauer’s book and get up to speed. You’d be wrong.) And this is just one example of the ways that ignorance of the backstory cheats the rest of us out of a real understanding of what’s going on here.

Because, by the definition offered by these experts, the FLDS is very coercive indeed.

Almost every feature of these women’s lives is determined by someone else. They do not choose what they wear, whom they live with, when and whom they marry, or when and with whom they have sex. From the day they’re born, they can be reassigned at a moment’s notice to another father or husband, another household, or another community. Most will have no educational choices (FLDS kids are taught in church-run schools, usually only through about tenth grade — by which point they girls are usually married and pregnant). Everything they produce goes into a trust controlled by the patriarch: they do not even own their own labor. If they object to any of this, they’re subject to losing access to the resources they need to raise their kids: they can be moved to a trailer with no heat, and given less food than more compliant wives, until they learn to “keep sweet.”

At the very least, women who do decide to leave the sect leave without money, skills, or a friend in the world. Most of them have no choice but to leave large numbers of children behind — children who are the property of the patriarch, and whom many of them will never see again. If a woman is even suspected of wanting to leave, she’s likely to be sent away from her kids to another compound far yonder as punishment for her rebelliousness. For a woman who’s been taught all her life that motherhood is her only destiny and has no real intimacy with her husband, being separated from her children this way is a sacrifice akin to death.

At the very worst, death is indeed what awaits them. The FLDS preaches “blood atonement” — the right of the patriarchs to kill apostates who dare to defy them, usually by slitting their throats. And they’ve done it: Krakauer hung his entire book on the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her year-old daughter, who were both killed by her husband’s brothers because Brenda rejected (and mocked) her husband’s desire to take plural wives. (Warren Jeffs also liked to rouse people out of their beds in the middle of the night for dramatic mass meetings testing their readiness for the Final Judgment — meetings that had dark shades of Jonestown.) Brenda is the only one known to have been killed, but others who’ve left report being threatened with the same fate.

So ABC’s reporters blather on about how these women aren’t really brainwashed, because that would require coercion and being held physically against their will. One hopes that if they understood that they’re holding forth about a group that routinely controls women by threatening to take away their kids — and tells them that God justifies the slaying of wayward brides and their babies — they’d change their minds and admit that this isn’t just another odd, quaint sect on the American religious scene. Without that information, though, everything else that’s going on in Texas loses much of its context.

Much more at Orcinus.

.

Saturday Night At The Movies

‘Board certified: Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park

By Dennis Hartley

Gus Van Sant’s name has become synonymous with a genre tagged as “northwest noir”, and, true to form, his latest film cozies right up alongside some of the director’s previous genre forays like Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Elephant and Last Days.

Dreamlike and elliptical in its construct, Paranoid Park is a “Crime and Punishment” type portrait of a young man struggling with guilt and inner turmoil after inadvertently causing the death of a security guard. A Portland skateboarder named Alex (Gabe Nevins), lives with his brother and their mother (Grace Carter), who is separated from the boys’ father. We get a glimpse of the otherwise taciturn Alex’s inner life through snippets from a private journal, relayed to us in voice-over a la Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle.

His parent’s pending divorce aside, Alex appears to be a typical suburban high school student. His girlfriend (Taylor Momsen) is a cheerleader; his best friend Jared (Jake Miller) is a skateboard enthusiast as well. The two friends hang out after school at an unsanctioned skateboard course, hidden beneath a freeway overpass and nicknamed “Paranoid Park” by users (the kind of place you don’t want to go to after dark). Alex and Jared spend most of their time there marveling at the prowess of the hard core boarders. Alex harbors a fascination for the fringe lifestyles of the park’s more feral denizens; a breed he describes in his journal as “gutter punks, train hoppers, skate drunks…throwaway kids.” Late one night, out of sheer boredom (and against his better instincts) Alex ventures into the park and hooks up with one of the “train hoppers”, a dubious character named “Scratch” (tempted by the Devil?). The resulting incident and its aftermath forms the crux of Alex’s churning moral dilemma and creeping paranoia.

The director’s script (adapted from Blake Nelson’s novel) features the minimalist dialogue we’ve come to expect in his films. This probably works to the young star’s advantage; especially since this was his first acting role (the director picked him out of an open casting call in Portland for extras). Nevins, a slightly built, doe-eyed teenager who bears an uncanny resemblance to 70s bubble-gum idol Leif Garrett, fits the physical profile of the typical Van Sant protagonist. He and the rest of the largely non-professional cast give naturalistic performances. There is some nifty work from cinematographers Christopher Doyle and Kathy Li, especially in the chimerical skateboarding sequences.

As with many of Van Sant’s efforts (especially those of most recent vintage), your reaction to this film may hinge on your disposition when you watch it. Fans of movies like Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge and Francis Coppola’s The Outsiders will definitely want to check out this haunting mood piece. (Note: The film is also running on PPV.)

Northwest Noir: The Parallax View, Zero Effect, Black Widow, Police Beat, Shoot to Kill, House of Games, Twin Peaks (TV series), Twin Peaks – Fire Walk with Me, Zoo , Streetwise, American Heart, Trouble in Mind, Stakeout,Freebie & The Bean, Five Easy Pieces, The Fabulous Baker Boys, Get Carter(2000), Disclosure.

.