Month: April 2012

Dignified graft

by digby

So Rick Warren really went on TV and said that “subsidizing” poor people”robs them of their dignity?” On Easter?

I just love it when people who pay no taxes make this case. Especially when all they have to do is crook their fingers and millions of tax free dollars flow in to them — no questions asked:

It’s been a heck of a year for mega-pastor/bestselling author/power broker Rick Warren of the enormous Saddleback Church. It started out with Warren’s invocation at the historic inauguration of one President Barack Obama – and it concludes with Warren asking his flock to cough up nearly $1 million in just two days to keep the church out of the red.

“Dear Saddleback Family,” begins today’s missive from Warren. “THIS IS AN URGENT LETTER unlike any I’ve written in 30 years. Please read all of it and get back to me in the next 48 hours.

“I have thrilling news to share with you below but first some seriously bad news: With 10% of our church family out of work due to the recession, our expenses in caring for our community in 2009 rose dramatically while our income stagnated. Still, with wise management, we’ve stayed close to our budget all year. Then… this last weekend the bottom dropped out.

“On the last weekend of 2009, our total offerings were less than half of what we normally receive – leaving us $900,000 in the red for the year, unless you help make up the difference today and tomorrow.”

The church does not make its financial information public, so it’s impossible to tell just how big of a hole in the boat this $900,000 represents. A spokeswoman for Warren said the church does not release detail on its finances, so it’s hard to put the shortfall in context. (Suffice to say it may not represent a terribly significant portion of Saddleback’s annual budget, and that his personal appeal may well close the hole, and then some.)

In his letter, Warren goes on to detail the church’s accomplishments for the year, and then says:

It’s obvious that your giving through your church family is providing more “bang for the buck” than anything else you could support. It is no wonder that our ministry was named the top religious newsmaker of 2009 as reported by Associated Press.

YOU CAN HELP SAVE THE DAY 3 WAYS BEFORE JAN 1.
Click HERE right now to and give as large an end-of-the-year gift as you can to help avert this crisis. If we all do what God leads us to do, we’ll all be a part of a miracle.

Mail in your gift today. Gifts must be postmarked in 2009 to be posted as 2009 gifts for tax purposes. Mail to: 1 Saddleback Parkway, Lake Forest, CA 92630.

Drop your gift in the box at the front door of the Ministry Center at 1 Saddleback Parkway so you know for certain we get it TODAY or Thursday….

I love you so much. It is a deep privilege to be your pastor….

Yeah, I’m sure it is.

Of course his flock isn’t exactly hurting for money either. Here are a couple of his famous followers — who also fell on hard times when their multi-million dollar mortgage went underwater and they had to engineer a short sell. I’m sure they found some extra cash to pass on to Saddleback Church, however. Or somebody did. Warren apparently averted his “shortfall.”

Nobody knows what it was used for, of course. But I guess we know it didn’t go to “subsidizing” the poor and robbing them of their dignity, so there’s that.

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And so it begins

by digby

Here it is — Bush Was Right:

Bush administration officials feared a repeat of Iran’s 1979 revolution, when the collapse of an oppressive, U.S.-backed government led to a power vacuum that violently anti-American Islamists were best positioned to exploit. Iraq aside, the Freedom Agenda was intended less to bring about full-blown transitions to democracy than to treat the pathologies of existing regimes, maximize the capacity of secular opposition groups to compete with Islamists, and dispel the widespread belief among Arabs that the United States, as Al-Quds al-Arabi editor Abdelbari Atwan once put it, “wants us to have dictators and monarchical presidents.”

You have to love the “Iraq aside …” Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you like the play?

This article, the first of many to come I’m sure, is an attempt to give the Bush administration credit for every good thing that unfolded in the middle east since he’s left office while ignoring the dead elephants all over the region that his misguided policies left in his wake.

Bush always had an interesting take on his own legacy. This was in 2004:

In two interviews with Woodward in December, Bush minimized the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction, expressed no doubts about his decision to invade Iraq, and enunciated an activist role for the United States based on it being “the beacon for freedom in the world.”

“I believe we have a duty to free people,” Bush told Woodward. “I would hope we wouldn’t have to do it militarily, but we have a duty.”

The president described praying as he walked outside the Oval Office after giving the order to begin combat operations against Iraq, and the powerful role his religious belief played throughout that time.

“Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will. … I’m surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for personal strength and for forgiveness.”

The president told Woodward that “I am prepared to risk my presidency to do what I think is right. I was going to act. And if it could cost the presidency, I fully realized that. But I felt so strongly that it was the right thing to do that I was prepared to do so.”

Asked by Woodward how history would judge the war, Bush replied: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

Some people sooner than others — thanks to him.

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The most idiotic thing you’ll read all day

by digby

Of course, it’s still early. But this is going to be hard to beat:

Filmmaker James O’Keefe demonstrated just how easy it is [to steal elections]on Tuesday when he dispatched an assistant to the Nebraska Avenue polling place in Washington where Attorney General Holder has been registered for the last 29 years. O’Keefe specializes in the same use of hidden cameras that was pioneered by the recently deceased Mike Wallace, who used the technique to devastating effect in exposing fraud in Medicare claims and consumer products on 60 Minutes.

O’Keefe’s efforts helped expose the fraud-prone voter-registration group ACORN with his video stings, and has had great success demonstrating this year in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Minnesota just how easy it is to obtain a ballot by giving the name of a dead person who is still on the rolls. Indeed, a new study by the Pew Research Center found at least 1.8 million dead people are still registered to vote. They aren’t likely to complain if someone votes in their place.

That article is by “voter fraud” crusader John Fund, who has yet to uncover the mass conspiracy of Democratic partisans who have been coordinating to steal elections by actually impersonating dead people at the polls. But maybe he can enlist the crack journalist James O’Keefe to help him. I’m sure nobody will be bothered if he uses outtakes from The Walking Dead. His reputation is sterling. He’s the new Mike Wallace.

Well, except for the open political agenda, the dishonest editing, the rap sheet and the bizarre public sexual obsessions. (And you’d think John Fund, of all people, would know better.

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Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

David Atkins

Pure comedy:

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) said Sunday that he counseled President Obama not to champion the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission recommendations because that would have “automatically” turned House Republicans against them.

On a Fox News Sunday panel, freshman Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), a member of the Budget Committee, said the president “totally ignored” the work of Bowles-Simpson and showed “no leadership” on the matter.

“I don’t think that’s fair,” Conrad responded. “Look, he asked me for my advice. I told him look, ‘If you embrace this totality of Bowles-Simpson, what will happen is Republicans in the House will automatically be against it. So you need to make the case for why it’s necessary, but you need those of us in Congress to work it out.’”

I can’t decide: is it better for President Obama to have supported Bowles-Simpson, thus thankfully killing it but putting the President on record for supporting the awful thing? Or would it have been better for President Obama to have opposed it, making the leadership position more progressive, but giving the abomination a chance of passing through congress?

I have an idea: let’s just get rid of all the congressional Democrats who would actively support Bowles-Simpson instead?

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Torture probe

by digby

Writing about the strip-search decision the other day, I said:

This is punitive, anyone can see that. They are “breaking down” suspects with humiliation to make them docile and afraid. There is no reason to grant the police blanket permission to do this except for a naive belief that anyone who is arrested must be guilty of something.

Scott Horton points out in this article called “The High Court’s Body-Cavity Fixation” that this is a well documented technique,

Just as the Florence decision was being prepared, the Department of Defense released a previously classified training manual used to prepare American pilots for resistance to foreign governments that might use illegal and immoral techniques to render them cooperative. Key in this manual are the precise practices highlighted in Florence. Body-cavity searches are performed, it explains, to make the prisoner “feel uncomfortable and degraded.” Forced nudity and invasion of the body make the prisoner feel helpless, by removing all items that provide the prisoner with psychological support. In other words, the strip search is an essential step in efforts to destroy an individual’s sense of self-confidence, well-being, and even his or her identity. The value of this tool has been recognized by authoritarian governments around the world, and now, thanks to the Roberts Court, it will belong to the standard jailhouse repertoire in the United States. Something to consider the next time you walk Fido without scooping up his droppings—a cop may well be watching, ready to seize the opportunity to invade your rectum.

This reminded me of this from Jane Mayer back in 2007:

“The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. ‘It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,’ an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. ‘At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.'”

[…]

“A former member of a C.I.A. transport team has described the ‘takeout’ of prisoners as a carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported by plane to a secret location. A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to ‘sodomy.’ He said, ‘It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.’ The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, ‘because it’s demoralizing.”

Strip searches are a form of torture. So is tasering.

Partisan (Judicial) Review

by digby

From Up With Chris Hayes today. Important to note that at the end of the previous segment Jonathan Alter helpfully pointed out the Village wisdom that “Democrats started it” and then muttered a bunch of stuff about liberals on the courts. This is where the conversation picked up:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Yep. We can have as many right wing fascists on the court but Democrats should only nominate people who “moderate” and have a “reasonable” judicial temperament.

These Village “liberals” are killing us. He is completely wrong about this. If the people didn’t give a shit that a partisan court stole an election, giving them a lecture about the Obamacare mandate isn’t going to get the job done.

No, we are living in an ideologically polarized age and this guy wants liberals to stand around tittering politely about how wrong it is that we be so. History shows how well that works out for them when the other side has gone mad.

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RIP Mike Wallace

by David Atkins

Mike Wallace has passed away. No one is perfect, of course, but Wallace was a bright star in the firmament of journalism. He spent a lot of time comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, aggressively confronting the seats of power, probing and trying to delve down to find the truth rather than playing at High Broderist balance.

That made him something of an archaism in the decrepit world of modern journalism.

So thank you, Mike, for creating more justice in this world than would have existed without you. It’s all that can be asked of a person.

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The worst idea in history?

by digby

This is just what we need:

American scientists have drawn up plans for a new generation of nuclear-powered drones capable of flying over remote regions of the world for months on end without refuelling.

The blueprints for the new drones, which have been developed by Sandia National Laboratories – the US government’s principal nuclear research and development agency – and defence contractor Northrop Grumman, were designed to increase flying time “from days to months” while making more power available for operating equipment, according to a project summary published by Sandia.

“It’s pretty terrifying prospect,” said Chris Coles of Drone Wars UK, which campaigns against the increasing use of drones for both military and civilian purposes. “Drones are much less safe than other aircraft and tend to crash a lot. There is a major push by this industry to increase the use of drones and both the public and government are struggling to keep up with the implications.”

I’ll say. But here’s the good news:

A halt has been called to the work for now, due to worries that public opinion will not accept the idea of such a potentially hazardous technology, with the inherent dangers of either a crash – in effect turning the drone into a so-called dirty bomb – or of its nuclear propulsion system falling into the hands of terrorists or unfriendly powers.

Yeah, the public might balk at that. What fools, eh?

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“White Americans don’t have many spokespeople”

by digby

So now they’re just another “civil rights” group …

Hallelujah

by digby

I’m not going to try to compete with David’s Easter post below. I’ll just say what I say every year — while I might not be religious, I do respect the essential spring-rebirth-new life aspect of the spring rituals. It’s a time to throw yourself open to the possibilities.

In that vein, I offer you my own favorite religious experience: cute baby animals. Here are a couple of very happy piglets enjoying the spring for you to enjoy. (Click over to the Youtube page to read their whole story)

And if you’re interested, here’s a story analyzing why humans all love them (and why it’s obviously therapeutic to look at them after a day reading horrible political stories)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Happy Easter everyone.

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