Jim Crow Lives

And it flourishes in The Land That Time Forgot (further proof here), which constitutes the vast majority of the state of Georgia and too much of the South in general.

I try to stay out of stories involving crime and punishment since this blog would get filled up pretty quickly if I did and I wouldn’t be able to post on anything else, but this is a particularly egregious case.

This tells you the story of Genarlow Wilson (pictured), a high school scholar-athlete who was on his way towards a college scholarship, and I say was because he has been convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison for a youthful indiscretion (the following information from the NAACP describes the case in detail, in addition to the ABC News story)…

Less than two years ago, Genarlow Wilson was an African American scholar-athlete. He maintained a 3.2 GPA and had multiple offers for college football scholarships.

Sign the petition to free Genarlow now!

Today. Genarlow Wilson is twenty-three months into a ten-year prison term mandated by a Georgia law for the “crime” of consensual oral sex with a fellow high school student. A Georgia court convicted Genarlow Wilson of aggravated child molestation.

Though Genarlow and the female student were only 2 years apart in age, the high school female student, who was 3 weeks from her 16th birthday, admitted to initiating the sexual act. Genarlow, however, was convicted and sentenced under a law meant to penalize adult child molesters. Unless justice is served, he will be forced to carry the label of “sexual predator” for an act engaged in by more than half of all American high school-aged boys.

There is a double standard at play in the sentencing of Genarlow Wilson. Around the same time that Genarlow was sentenced, a high school teacher was convicted of having sex with a student. The white female teacher was sentenced to just 90 days in the same Georgia courthouse that sentenced Genarlow to 10 years.

The NAACP has made a formal request to both Governor Sonny Perdue and Georgia Senate Judiciary Committee Chair, Preston Smith, to pass and sign Senate Bill 37 into law. Senate Bill 37 will allow trial judges to review and modify the sentences of individuals, like Genarlow, who have been harshly sentenced under the antiquated Georgia law.

Let it be known that you are outraged at the decision to throw away the life of this promising young man for reasons that defy logic, and demand restitution (please note the talking points in this letter).

Sign the petition to free Genarlow now!

For more information about the campaign to Free Genarlow Wilson, please contact me at: 410-580-5762 or jjackson@naacpnet.org.

Sincerely,
Dr. John Jackson
NAACP Chief Policy Officer

So let's totally stigmatize this kid's life full of promise over some adolescent stupidity in the name of a legal interpretation that belongs to the legacy of Bull Connor, attack dogs and "white" vs. "colored" water fountains.

To digress briefly, I just read an excellent (and scary) article on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times about witness intimidation in Essex County, NJ, including the city of Newark, which has resulted in about 14 unprosecuted murder cases. I realize Newark is a completely different locale, but something is wrong in a major way when we prosecute honor students in this country for a consensual “crime,” but let drug dealers and gang members accused of capital murder offenses wander free (aided in no small part by gangsta rap “artists” who discourage witnesses from coming forward).

Update 11/01/07: This is wonderful news...

On Friday afternoon (10/26), just hours after the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that his sentence amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, Genarlow Wilson was released from prison.

In 2005, Genarlow Wilson, a 17-year-old star athlete and top student, was convicted of aggravated child molestation for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old classmate. The NAACP has been involved in the Wilson case since 2003, when the youth was initially charged with rape, working with both the Georgia legislature and the judicial system to free Genarlow.

He had been incarcerated for almost three years of a ten-year sentence, even though only months after his conviction, a "Romeo and Juliet" law was passed that would have had a maximum allowable sentence of 12 months. Genarlow remained incarcerated until Friday in spite of June decision by a Monroe County Superior Court judge to void the original sentence on constitutional grounds and reduce it to one year.

Cases like Genarlow Wilson, Marcus Dixon, and the Jena 6 highlight the rampant discrimination against African-American youth that exists in our criminal justice system. The NAACP is committed to doing whatever is necessary to see justice served in these cases and the hundreds of others, as well as working to reform the judicial system so that our youth are afforded the dignity, respect and equal treatment they deserve under the law.
Sincerely,

Dennis Hayes
Interim President & CEO, NAACP

Here's more.

Jackass: The Presidency

Congratulations to Dubya on descending into the ‘20s in his latest approval ratings as noted here.

As Kos notes, Broderius Ignoramus noted that Bush is poised for a rebound, so given that fit of lunacy, I think it’s appropriate to revisit Broder’s original column on this (as well as the recent ramblings of J.D. “Wide, But Not Deep” Mullane).

Thursday Videos

The Decemberists ("O Valencia" - interesting love song)...



...Happy Birthday (No. 59, I think) to Winston Rodney, otherwise known as Burning Spear ("Walk")...



...Happy Birthday also to Roger Daltrey of The Who ("Without Your Love," a song which apparently did well as a single from Daltrey as a solo artist in the UK, but not here, from a movie that came and went also called "McVicar")...



...and in recognition of what would have been the 103rd birthday of Glenn Miller, here's "In The Mood" (still photos only - I read about a year or so ago that his plane may have been shot down as a result of friendly fire).

The Terror War’s “Harvest Of Shame”

Two quick notes here: 1) I should put “terror war” in quotes based on our mismanagement due to the Iraq horror, but I didn’t because the title would look too confusing, and 2) everyone who crows about illegal immigration in this country should watch the landmark “CBS Reports” documentary I referenced in the title produced by Edward R. Murrow in 1960 and narrated by a young reporter just starting out named Dan Rather – sadly, we are not likely to see that type of a program from that network or any other again.

This column by Bronwen Maddox of the Times of London online points out the resurgence of poppy growth in Afghanistan, which has led to a boom in heroin trafficking throughout Asia and the continent, particularly in Afghanistan itself where, as Maddox reports, “one million Afghans take heroin or opiates, including 60,000 children under 15.”

I’ll let those staggering numbers speak for themselves (and the Maddox report also notes that poppy growth is on the rise in Pakistan – why shouldn’t they get a “piece of the action” also, right?).

And while we’ve seen a lot of reporting about Iran and its emerging nuclear capability, I haven’t seen any report that points out the following (from this link)…

At present, there are three million drug abusers in Iran, most addicted to heroin. (in comparison, the US has an estimated 900 000 heroin addicts). The addiction rate is fueled by high unemployment, poverty, hopelessness, and boredom, the same reasons that fuel addiction in other countries. However, unlike the US or many parts of Europe, where heroin addiction is a small part of the overall addiction problem, it is the main drug of abuse in Iran.

As far as drug abuse in this country is concerned, it looks like “pharma is still king,” but heroin may be making an impact (as noted here)…

Rates of pharmaceutical drug abuse exceed that of all other drugs except marijuana, resulting in a high number of pharmaceutical overdose deaths annually. However, recent success within several states in reducing the illegal diversion of pharmaceutical drugs, particularly pharmaceutical narcotics such as OxyContin, through various antidiversion initiatives and monitoring programs has caused some individuals addicted to or dependent on such drugs to substitute other drugs, such as heroin, for prescription narcotics. In some areas, such substitutions among prescription drug abusers have been widespread, creating new challenges for local law enforcement and public health agencies compelled to address a widening local heroin user population.

The USDOJ report also notes international drug organizations competing in this country for “market share,” if you will, including Mexican “DTOs” (drug trafficking organizations) that present tougher challenges for law enforcement in communities in this country because they aren’t locally based.

And as the post by Dr. Nancy Reyes notes, a huge secondary problem as a result of the boom in drug trafficking is needle sharing that is leading to a spike in cases of HIV (I haven’t been able to determine if the U.N. is looking at any recommendations having to do with needle exchange, but if it isn’t, it should – first and foremost, we’re talking about a health issue here).

I’ll try to recap where I’m going here:

1) We didn’t manage the war in Afghanistan properly (diverting forces to Iraq), and partly as a result of that, poppy growth has increased (as Dr. Reyes says, when farmers don’t have another crop they can grow that will make as much money – and again, we’re talking about the third world here, let’s not forget – then growing poppies looks pretty good).
2) This has led to an explosion of heroin from Afghanistan to Iran and throughout Europe and Asia, competing with other worldwide suppliers.
3) It has also led to an increase in HIV due to sharing of dirty needles by drug addicts.

So the next time you hear about our government waging a “drug war” of one type or another, try not to hurt yourself by laughing too hard.

Another Bushco Flunky Departs (03/07)

Let us also not forget to note the recent sentencing of Lester Crawford, the former head of Bushco’s Food and Drug Administration who, as noted here, was ordered to pay $89,377 in fines and was sentenced to three years probation for owning stocks of companies regulated by his agency (a prior post on Crawford is here – I have other issues with this guy, particularly his refusal to sell Plan B “over the counter”…also, I predicted a year in jail, and I turned out to be wrong; oh well…).

Maybe he and Porter Goss, another of Bushco’s “disappeared,” can get together and share memories of their lousy government service. The good thing is that neither of them are in a position that they can screw up any more.

Change The Course

The latest from Democracy For America...

You are against the war in Iraq. You want to end the occupation and bring our brave men and women home. In fact, DFA members have been standing up and speaking out since before the war began. Our work led Democratic candidates to take Iraq head-on in the last election and your support created the new majority in Congress.

Now, you need to lead the way again.

Congress needs to know which exit plan you support. Should Congress limit funding to force redeployment? Should new troops only be sent if they meet the basic safety standards of training, rest and equipment? Tell Congress what you think:

Click here.

Maybe you feel Congress is already doing everything they can and trust them to choose the specifics. Maybe you think Congress should set benchmarks and a binding deadline to bring the troops home? Finally Congress has options on the table, now they need to hear from you.

Some milestones aren't worth reaching. We are only months away from reaching a horrible milestone: four thousand fallen soldiers and a financial cost of one trillion dollars. March 19 will mark the beginning of a fourth year in Iraq with no sign of when our troops will come home. In the last election, we told Congress to change the course. Now, we need to tell them how. Make your voice heard right now:

Click here.

Together, we will lead.

Thank you for everything you do.

Tom Hughes
Executive Director

And speaking of Iraq, it looks like Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad is going to use the more-realistic Congressional Budget Office estimates for war funding as opposed to the nonsensical ones from Bushco; the CBO estimates are higher, but again, they actually reflect reality.

Senator Man-On-Dog’s New Job?

Oh golly gee, it looks as if the Stinky Inky is going to get really stinky now!

So what’s next, Editorial Page Editor Chris Satullo? Trying to fleece us for “select” online content from former Senator Whack Job and Smerky too?

Yep, I think you can officially start the countdown until the end of my subscription.

Al Gored By Global Warming Wingnuttia

Hackmeister Jack Kelly of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette attacked Al Gore today in the pages of the Bucks County Courier Times, citing fellow denialists at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and various other individuals refuting global warming science, which I would consider to be pretty sound at this point (I’ve posted about global warming many times, including here and here, and I also refuted Kelly’s fellow shill Suzanne Fields recently here).

Also, David Roberts of HuffPo explodes the supposed controversy over what is alleged to be Gore’s own inefficient energy use here (the quote from Churchill about a lie getting halfway around the world before the truth puts its pants on comes to mind).

Also, I’d like to point out some things which I’ve been wondering about for some time.

The point of the whole discussion (which should no longer be a debate at this point) about global warming is to encourage cleaner energy, development and funding of mass transit alternatives and reduced use of fossil fuels.

Given that, I’d like to ask the global warming denialists this question: even if global warming was not in fact taking place, why shouldn’t we be doing that anyway? Why do you continue to encourage dangerously inefficient use of our energy resources?

Not that I would expect intelligent answers from Kelly (who I posted about previously here), though what else can you say about someone who wrote these malicious and highly incorrect words (from the Gore column)…

“For liberals, sacrifices are something other people make.”

I’ll tell you what: read the headline from this story and note the date and ask me how it is that Kelly is granted column space for anything except supermarket tabloids.

Finally, here is a YouTube video for "An Inconvenient Truth."

Wednesday Videos

Patty Griffin ("Heavenly Day," a theme for a true treasure of a YouTube video by David L. Jaffe)...



...Happy Birthday to Joe South ("Games People Play")...



...and I promise, for real, that today really is the birthday of Michael McDonald (he and the rest of the Doobie Brothers perform "Takin' It To The Streets")...



...and Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones would have been 65 (here he is with the boys - and they really were boys back in '64 - performing "Around and Around"; doesn't Ed Sullivan look thrilled, by the way?)

A Time To Remember

I really didn't say anything about Black History Month, but as February is about to end in these parts, maybe I should pass this along from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

This past month, across America, we celebrated and commemorated Black History Month.

It is important that all Americans remember the outstanding contributions African Americans have made to this country, in the arts, in science, in the military, in politics, and in religion. We must never forget that African Americans have risked their lives and have struggled all in the name of making the world a better place.

While our country is still changing, I am encouraged by the progress we are making. Last year, we saw the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, a tribute to everyone who marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 and risked their lives in the name of democracy. And, this past November, we welcomed six more members of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds to Congress, to lead our nation and make positive changes.

America is made stronger by our differences and as we celebrate we must remember the path we have traveled and the struggles undertaken. We must honor those who stand up and fight so that one day we can reach a truly interracial democracy where we lay down the burden of race and class.

Sincerely,

John Lewis
Member of Congress, Georgia's 5th District

Click here to learn more.

What, No Mitt? Roger Simon Will Cry!

(re: the “man-crush” of the year so far…)

I’d like to make some points about the poll mentioned here that has just been released showing that John McCain and Rudy Giuliani would defeat Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in a head-to-head presidential matchup (I was going to blow it off, but it was noted by Kos, so…).

(I won't comment for now on the absurd perception that McCain is some kind of "moderate," by the way.)

First of all, the poll was commissioned by the Philadelphia Daily News with Keystone Politics of PA. Keystone are the geniuses who noted that Mike Fitzpatrick was leading Patrick Murphy by 9 points in the closing days of the campaign this year, and they arrived at this calculation by including a candidate who had dropped out of the race (the name escapes me at the moment, and I have not been able to determine who he is through a couple of Google searches).

Second, the poll was conducted by G. Terry Madonna of Franklin and Marshall College, who I assume is qualified enough in these things, but it would be nice if we had another person and/or another service conducting these polls from time to time – I don’t think it’s a good situation for our news organizations to go to one person automatically in these matters since anybody can have a bias of one type or another, and that is what always happens. I’m not trying to malign Madonna; it’s just human nature.

Third, there is no mention given at all to John Edwards, though I know Edwards is generally polling low against Clinton and Obama at the moment.

But really, it’s way too early for this stuff anyway.

(And by the way, here's more "straight talk" from McCain...)

Don't Play With Our Food

So it looks like the source of the most recent E. coli outbreak has been traced to “wild pigs that may have spread the bacteria in the field” where spinach was grown on a farm on San Benito County, CA.

Well, it’s a comfort to know that our produce is safe once more for the time being. However, this paragraph from the Signs On San Diego story got me as hot as a jalapeno pepper…

In an effort to restore consumer confidence in the wake of the outbreak, California lettuce and spinach processors crafted a voluntary inspection program, overseen by the state, that will allow participants to put a food safety seal of approval on their products. Officials and industry leaders are working to outline the inspection guidelines.

I’m sick of reading about “voluntary industry compliance” of one type or another that is supposed to serve as a substitute for legitimate government enforcement, particularly when it comes to the safety of what we eat.

You may feel the same way I do after you consider the following information provided to us by Rep. Henry Waxman, who thankfully for us all is no longer the minority member but the actual chairman of the Committee on Government Reform (in particular this excerpt)…

(As of October 2006), this most recent outbreak (of E. coli) is not an isolated occurrence. This is the (21st) outbreak…in fresh produce since 1995, and the (now third) outbreak specifically linked to spinach.

Produce-related outbreaks have doubled from 44 outbreaks in 1998 to 86 in 2004. Overall, an estimated 76 million cases of food borne disease occur each year in the United States, causing about 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths annually.

And the predictable response from Bushco?

Food safety funding has not kept pace with rising costs and new responsibilities. Nominal funds for FDA food programs have risen from $407 million in 2003 to $439 million in 2006.

This funding increase, however, has not been enough to keep up with rising personnel costs and new duties protecting the food supply from terrorism. According to an FDA budget official, the agency’s food division operated under a shortfall of $135 million in 2006 due to increased personnel costs and new terrorism responsibilities, which the official described as equivalent to a 24% budget cut.

The official stated: “as long as the resources available to FDA do not keep up with the realities of increasing costs, it is increasingly difficult for FDA to perform in a way that meets public expectations.”

And as the Waxman document notes further, the proposed 2007 budget from Bushco is more of the same.

Well, at least the veggies themselves may be protected from any slander or negative publicity in California if Assemblywoman Audra Strickland has her way (“libeling a legume” – heh, heh).

And I’m going to engage in a bit of a pre-emptive strike on this subject and announce to people like Tom Tancredo and Lou Dobbs who are riding the anti-immigrant bandwagon that, before they try to use food safety as an issue to punish illegal immigrants, they 1) reconsider doing this because it’s xenophobic and absurd on its face, and 2) read this post debunking the fact that immigrants are lazy and are more highly incarcerated than individuals born in this country (I’m a little hesitant about using the phrase “Native Americans,” and I’m not completely sold on the issue of immigrants driving up wages either, but the Kos post still makes some good points).

Repug Anti-Labor Baggage

So Dubya and the Repugs are going to kill an anti-terrorism bill if it includes language that allows airport screens to unionize, are they?

Can you guess what their official explanation is for this nonsense (and if your answer was “terra, terra, terra, terra and more terra,” then you get an autographed photo suitable for framing of every campaign contributor in Dubya’s “Pioneer” Club, one of whom, Sam Fox, was appropriately grilled by John Kerry for donating to the Swift Boat Liars – you could also hang it on your dartboard or use it in your bathroom if you run out of paper)….

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said that allowing screeners to unionize would impede the department's quick response to possible threats. Fast redeployment of screeners, such as in response to Hurricane Rita and the failed London plot to blow up airliners, cannot wait for negotiations, he said.

Chertoff said screeners are as much on the front lines in the war against terror as military troops.

"Marines don't collectively bargain over whether they're going to wind up, you know, being deployed in Anbar province or in Baghdad," Chertoff told reporters after a briefing with senators. "We can't negotiate over terms and conditions of work that goes to the heart of our ability to move rapidly in order to deal with the threats that are emerging."

More breathtaking nonsense from Chertoff…

First of all, Mr. “City Of Louisiana” (and no, I will never let Chertoff off the hook for that moment of transcendent stupidity), our airport screeners are not military personnel, though I will assume that many have military service in their background. Airport screeners are not likely to be killed by sniper fire or blown up by an IED or an EFP in the terminal. Airport screeners are not required to wear armor or transport themselves in armored vehicles. They are not likely to receive fire or engage in hostilities with armed combatants during the normal course of their job duties.

More precisely…

Chertoff's reasoning, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, is "an insult to the hundreds of thousands of dedicated public safety officers with collective bargaining rights — from border patrol agents to firefighters to the Capitol Hill police," said John Gage, president of the federation.

Further, as this post from the AFL-CIO states, noting an ILO ruling last year in support of the airport screeners…

The Bush administration has used the same national security argument in its bid to deny collective bargaining rights through new personnel rules to more than 700,000 U.S. Defense Department workers and 160,000 employees in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Federal courts have ruled against new personnel rules in both cases. Congress also has weighed in against the Defense Department’s so-called National Security Personnel System. But the Bush administration is appealing the Defense Department ruling in the suit brought by United DoD Workers Coalition made up of more than 30 unions that represent department workers.

The ILO decision, say the union leaders…calls into question the administration’s policy of using national security to justify the denial of basic worker rights.

I had planned to post about this later, but this story is about as good a reason to mention the latest from Dr. Dean as I could ever expect, so…

American workers need help - and there's something you can do about it.

Regardless of where you live or what you do, labor unions are our first line of defense for worker's rights. What do they fight for? Raising the minimum wage. Improving labor standards. Expanding health care benefits. Protecting retirement security.

And these fights don't only make a difference in the workplace: They are critical to providing economic security for families, strengthening our communities and rebuilding America's middle class. Every day, millions of Americans work hard and play by the rules but are still struggling to get by. Democrats understand the important role that labor unions play to fix this crisis.

The House of Representatives is set to debate and pass a bill that will restore American workers' right to freely choose whether or not to form a union. Join the Democratic majority in the House and show your support for the Employee Free Choice Act:

Click here.

Research shows union members earn 30% more than nonunion workers. What's more, union workers are 63% more likely to have employer-provided health insurance, and are four times more likely to have a guaranteed pension.

The benefits of union membership are clear. That's why nearly half of American workers who are not currently represented by unions -- 60 million people -- say that they'd join one if they had the chance. But every year since 1981, union membership has declined. And a major reason for that fall-off is the many obstacles workers face when they try to form a union or negotiate a union contract.

The Employee Free Choice Act is a simple, effective solution to restore the right of workers to form unions and bargain for better wages and benefits for themselves and their families. It has three key provisions:

- Require employers to recognize a union if a majority of workers sign authorization cards saying they want union representation.

- Provide mediation and arbitration for first-contract disputes.

- Strengthen penalties for companies that illegally intimidate employees to prevent them from forming a union.

No management coercion, no waiting period, no stacked deck -- just the freedom for workers to stand up for their rights.

Democratic leaders in the House overwhelmingly support the Employee Free Choice Act. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called it a "top priority." House Labor Committee Chairman George Miller called it "an important step towards strengthening America's middle class." Now you can join the leadership in calling on Congress to pass this critical legislation:

Click here.

Big business is scared of the Employee Free Choice Act -- and that's why they're doing everything in their power to stop it.

75% of companies hire consultants or union-busters to fight organizing campaigns. And their tactics work: every 23 minutes, a worker is fired or discriminated against for supporting a union. All in all, over 22,000 workers each year are illegally fired, demoted, laid off, suspended without pay, or denied work by their employers as a result of union activity.

Why have our leaders in Washington allowed this to happen? Follow the money trail.

The public opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act is funded in large part by GOP-allied corporate lobbyists and interest groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Conservative Union, and Americans for Tax Reform. The dozens of groups that make up the "Coalition for a Democratic Workplace" spend big bucks each election cycle buying Republicans' votes on bills like this one.

This is nothing new. Big Business always gets what it wants from the Republicans-- from an energy bill written by Cheney's oil industry pals to a prescription drug bill full of giveaways to Big Pharma.

This time, though, the Democrats in Congress can stop them. Show the House that you will stand with America's workers:

Click here.

Do you believe in the right to demand a raise? Health care coverage? A pension? Do you believe workers should have a voice in their workplaces?

The fate of the Employee Free Choice Act depends on your work. Help score an important victory for worker's rights and for rebuilding America's middle class.

In Solidarity,
Governor Howard Dean, M.D.

To read a prior post on the Employee Free Choice Act, please click here.

Update 3/1/2007: Awesome! (and MissLaura at The Daily Kos has more).

Maybe They Remembered "Best Defense"

So, since Eddie Murphy stormed out of the Oscars after losing out to Alan Arkin for Best Supporting Actor, does this mean we have 27 more “Klump” movies to look forward to?

Maybe Arkin was overdue the recognition and it just happened to be his time, Eddie, or is that too difficult for you to accept?

Let’s see – “The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter,” “Wait Until Dark,” “Catch-22,” “Freebie And The Bean,” “Edward Scissorhands” more recently, and those are only the few movies I can recall off the top of my head…Arkin has been doing good work playing a wide range of characters forever (and I know TV movies don’t really count here, but Arkin was fantastic in “The Defection of Simas Kudirka,” in the ‘70s, a movie which spoke volumes about the Nixon Administration, though it if had happened under Dubya, Kudirka would have been captured and tortured also.)

The photo in this post isn’t the only thing looking like an ass at this moment.

(Obligatory qualifier; this came from Fox, so be warned…I'll owe up if I have to).

No Happy Meal For Chucky

Kudos to Prince Charlie for encouraging kids to eat right and avoid fast food; he made the remarks cited in this Times of London story in Dubai in the UAE, which has the second highest prevalence of diabetes in the world (didn’t know that).

Yes, I know McDonald’s sponsors sporting events and runs ads promoting a healthy lifestyle, but the fries will always be cooked in gobs of shortening (though perhaps reduced in trans fats), the burgers will always be seared thoroughly in grease before they are consumed, the drinks will always be full of sugar and/or caffeine, and the milkshakes will always be full of this white, gelatinous goo colored to simulate different flavors, and the less you know of it, the better.

You can run TV promos with all of the skateboarding kids and cartoon characters jumping around and singing that you want, but there are some universal constants, and when it comes to Mickey D’s, I just named some of them.

Also, this review of “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser points out something else for which McDonald’s has made an everlasting and indelible imprint on our lives ("behind the wall" - sorry; aaarrrgghhh!!!)…

In the early 1970s, the farm activist Jim Hightower warned of the McDonaldization of America. He viewed the emerging fast food industry as a threat to independent businesses, as a step toward a food economy dominated by giant corporations, and as a homogenizing influence on American life. In Eat Your Heart Out (1975), he argued that bigger is not better. Much of what Hightower feared has come to pass. The centralized purchasing decisions of the large restaurant chains and their demand for standardized products have given a handful of corporations an unprecedented degree of power over the nation’s food supply. Moreover, the tremendous success of the fast food industry has encouraged other industries to adopt similar business methods. The basic thinking behind fast food has become the operating system of today’s retail economy, wiping out small businesses, obliterating regional differences, and spreading identical stores throughout the country like a self-replicating code.

America’s main streets and malls now boast the same Pizza Huts and Taco Bells, Gaps and Banana Republics, Starbucks and Jiffy-Lubes, Foot Lockers, Snip N’ Clips, Sunglass Huts, and Hobbytown USAs. Almost every facet of American life has now been franchised or chained. From the maternity ward at a Columbia/HCA hospital to an embalming room owned by Service Corporation International - the world’s largest provider of death care services, based in Houston, Texas, which since 1968 has grown to include 3,823 funeral homes, 523 cemeteries, and 198 crematoriums, and which today handles the final remains of one out of every nine Americans - a person can now go from the cradle to the grave without spending a nickel at an independently owned business.

So be careful, Charlie. I know you have good lawyers, but McDonald’s has some barracudas of their own (another type of fish, if you will, besides the faux ones in their sandwiches).

More Lies That Never Die

A Letter to the Editor in the Bucks County Courier Times today contained this excerpt…

I’m glad we have a president who isn’t afraid to go after the terrorists. That’s better than the previous one, who failed to respond when the terrorists attacked us.

John P. Eperjesi
Morrisville, PA

Check this out, Mr. Eperjesi (the following in particular)…

• On 26 February 1993, a car loaded with 1,200 pounds of explosives blew up in a parking garage under the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring about a thousand others. The blast did not, as its planners intended, bring down the towers — that was finally accomplished by flying two hijacked airliners into the twin towers on the morning of 11 September 2001.

Four followers of the Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman were captured, convicted of the World Trade Center bombing in March 1994, and sentenced to 240 years in prison each. The purported mastermind of the plot, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was captured in 1995, convicted of the bombing in November 1997, and also sentenced to 240 years in prison. One additional suspect fled the U.S. and is believed to be living in Baghdad.

• On 13 November 1995, a bomb was set off in a van parked in front of an American-run military training center in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, killing five Americans and two Indians. Saudi Arabian authorities arrested four Saudi nationals whom they claim confessed to the bombings, but U.S. officials were denied permission to see or question the suspects before they were convicted and beheaded in May 1996.

• On 25 June 1996, a booby-trapped truck loaded with 5,000 pounds of explosives was exploded outside the Khobar Towers apartment complex which housed United States military personnel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen Americans and wounding about three hundred others. Once again, the U.S. investigation was hampered by the refusal of Saudi officials to allow the FBI to question suspects.

On 21 June 2001, just before the American statute of limitations would have expired, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicted thirteen Saudis and an unidentified Lebanese chemist for the Khobar Towers bombing. The suspects remain in Saudi custody, beyond the reach of the American justice system. (Saudi Arabia has no extradition treaty with the U.S.)

Oh, but the Saudis are such good freinds of ours, right? Gosh, I'm just shocked!

• On 7 August 1998, powerful car bombs exploded minutes apart outside the United States embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding about 5,000 others. Four participants with ties to Osama bin Laden were captured, convicted in U.S. federal court, and sentenced to life in prison without parole in October 2001. Fourteen other suspects indicted in the case remain at large, and three more are fighting extradition in London.

• On 12 October 2000, two suicide bombers detonated an explosives-laden skiff next to the USS Cole while it was refueling in Aden, Yemen, blasting a hole in the ship that killed 17 sailors and injured 37 others. No suspects have yet been arrested or indicted. The investigation has been hampered by the refusal of Yemini officials to allow FBI agents access to Yemeni nationals and other suspects in custody in Yemen.

(The USS Cole bombing occurred one month before the 2000 presidential election, so even under the best of circumstances it was unlikely that the investigation could have been completed before the end of President Clinton's term of office three months later.)

And we know what happened when Clinton was asked about the Cole bombing by Chris Wallace (pictured above), even though Wallace had never asked anyone from Bushco about it despite their numerous appearances on his program.

Another AP Hit Job On Iraq

Here is the lede paragraph for this AP story (another one for which the authors didn’t have the courage to provide their names, apparently)…

Democratic leaders backed away from aggressive plans to limit President Bush's war authority, the latest sign of divisions within their ranks over how to proceed.

And once again, I give you Virginia Senator Jim Webb from Sunday…

"The true issue here is the federal system," Webb said, "the notion of accountability of the executive branch to Congress for not having conducted itself properly in the diplomatic arena."

Once again, it must be pointed out that, in the process of conducting oversight of Iraq at long last, Congress, in response to overwhelmingly favorable public opinion, is trying to find a way to perform a “check and balances” function on a president who has never shown any interest in upholding the Constitution as required by his oath of office or respecting the separation of powers that is a critical component of our government.

THAT is the story. Not the internal machinations of the Democrats in Congress as they try to find a way to rein in a president who thinks he’s king just because we are in a state of war (the Dems have to get it together, sure, but that pales in importance).

Oh, and how’s this for some genuine AP snark?

The developments on both sides of the Capitol reflected a new level of disarray in Democratic ranks on Iraq. Swept into power by voters clamoring for an end to the war, Democrats have seen their efforts falter under a reality more complicated than they found on the campaign trail.

That reads like it came directly from the RNC.

And speaking of the Repugs, just how are they, as the primary architects of this fiasco, treated in the story? Do you even have to ask?

Internal divisions, Republican opposition and a president who -- while weakened -- still appears to have the dominant voice on the war have all left Democrats flailing for a way to change the war's course.

That’s it, ladies and gentlemen.

Our corporate media will never, never, never, never hold Bushco and the Repugs responsible for this horror.

Never (and as Atrios pointed out yesterday, Republicans want the war to go on and the Democrats want to end it; it’s that simple.)

It will ALWAYS be the fault of the “divided Democrats” who were elected to make everything right and bring sweetness and light to this epochal horror but were unsuccessful for two main reasons: 1) It is impossible, and 2) They, as yet, do not have enough of a majority in the Senate (and, if they are going to be continually blocked, then why should we not take this opportunity to boot Lieberman out, since he’s a Repug anyway though not officially by name?).

And with all due respect to Zbigniew Brzesinski, I think his comments about Congress “micromanaging” the war are instructive, but he’s not really in the middle of this fray, acting pretty much as an interested observer instead.

And how’s this for “giving the knife a final turn” at the end?

"The party's not unified. Until you control the executive branch, you really don't have a party -- you have all these independent actors," Lawrence Korb, a Reagan administration Defense Department official, said of the Democrats' plight.

Now really, do you expect someone sympathetic to the Repugs to say anything different (though I will note that an exception like Paul Craig Roberts does come along from time to time).

No, we and the Democrats will continually encounter Repug obstructionism in the form of war-friendly politicos and right-wing hatemongers like Cal Thomas calling the Democrats every name in the book (if Thomas wants to use Sgt. Daniel Dobson as his quote vehicle here, fine; I’ll use Pfc. Drew Merrell and Spec. Josh Lake here, then – how long does Thomas wish to continue this stupid little game?).

But God forbid that we are in the same state on November 2008 as now for a lot of reasons, one of which is that the Democrats will get blamed for not figuring out how to solve a mess they were handed by a regime that, as Webb pointed out above, has no interest in diplomacy or real governance of any kind.

Monday Videos

Incubus ("Dig")...



...30 Seconds To Mars ("From Yesterday" - big production values, and LOUD!)...



...Happy Birthday to Fats Domino ("Blue Monday" - thank God he's OK after Katrina)...



...and Johnny Cash would have been 75 today ("I Walk The Line" - hopefully he's found peace).

Patrick And Iraq Madness

These two letters appeared in the Bucks County Courier Times today (I’ll try to get to one other letter and a great Guest Opinion from today possibly tomorrow)…

I must contest the arguments by Don Mihalek in his Feb. 6th Guest Opinion, arguments that were backed by weak analysis and even weaker evidence.

Congressman Patrick Murphy has served admirably during his first few weeks in office. Murphy is managing to both serve his constituents of Bucks County and effect change on a national level on some very important issues.

On Iraq, perhaps the defining issue of our time, Murphy has already introduced two crucial pieces of legislation aimed at changing the course of this mismanaged war. But Murphy’s intensive work on Iraq has been done while he simultaneously works to maintain close contact with his constituents and the issues closer to home.

As evidence, I would point out that Murphy can still be seen frequenting SEPTA train stations in the area, discussing local issues with constituents and listening to feedback from them on important issues. Just because Murphy is a leading voice on big issues such as Iraq doesn’t mean we should forget about how hard he is working for his constituents, even is small ways, like greeting commuters on their way to work.

Jo Ann Teague
Bristol Township, PA

Referring to a recent letter by Gerald E. Jones Sr., I strongly urge him to begin digging his shelter now. Jones ignores the fact that Vietnam is a peaceful nation of nearly 85 million people today and it accomplished this feat without the assistance or interference of the United States.

Congressman Patrick Murphy aptly concluded the other day: “You know, a few blocks away from this great chamber, when you walk in the snow, is the Vietnam Memorial, where half of the soldiers listed on that wall died after America’s leaders knew our strategy would not work.”

It’s not about liberals. It’s about what is morally the right path to follow. We were lied to in Vietnam and we were lied to about Iraq. This is the true failure of United States intelligence.

Jones’ facts are skewed to the Bush side and I applaud his desire to not greet liberals at his door and to dig a hole in his backyard. I can only wish that he would suggest the same to his fellow delusional groupies who support this gross act of warfare.

Iraq was created by the British without regard for cultural, ethnic, religious or political concerns of the people. I don’t believe anyone can define what an Iraqi is or should be and therefore, like in Vietnam, the people of that great historical birthplace of civilization need to decide for themselves.

Dig your hole, Mr. Jones. Stay safe, because living above ground hasn’t made you any more aware of your surroundings. Let’s learn a lesson from Vietnam – meddling in other nations’ affairs is a dangerous game and sometimes when you stand on the sideline, like children they can grow up and fend for themselves.

Viva liberals!

Rich Papirio
Bristol Township, PA

And judging from this post from Joe at Americablog, it sounds like Iraq denial is contagious within the Bush family (the whole damn bunch is crackers).

Oscar Finally Knocks At Marty's Door

How cool is it that Martin Scorsese finally won an Academy Award for Best Director last night for The Departed?

There’s a whole bunch of Scorsese movies that I haven’t gotten around to yet, such as The Color of Money, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Cape Fear and No Direction Home about Bob Dylan (yes I know – what I am waiting for, right?).

But among the ones I have seen, I would have to put Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence and The Aviator at the top of the list, with Casino and The Last Waltz (annoying, fawning interviews and all, more than made up for by the great performances) as close seconds.

I’m sure anything I have to say has already been expressed by those who know more about this stuff than I do, but I’d never seen such stark use of violence and language in the movies until I saw Taxi Driver and the other Robert DeNiro-Joe Pesci movies, including Raging Bull and Goodfellas (I thought Taxi Driver was hurt by it’s happily-ever-after-sort-of ending; Casino was interesting also, but the formula was really getting old by then).

I think it’s interesting to watch the earlier Scorsese movies I just mentioned and then watch The Age of Innocence and The Aviator to see how Scorsese’s understanding of basic human motivations was incorporated into other settings and periods of time (for example, you can sense a similarity of the pining Daniel Day-Lewis felt for Michelle Pfeiffer in “Innocence” versus that felt by DeNiro for Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull, but in the former movie, the societal conventions prohibited the male from acting on those urges, but not so in the latter one). And you truly understand the technical challenges Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio – really tough call between him and Jamie Foxx last year for Ray, I thought, though Foxx was certainly deserving) encountered while building the “Spruce Goose” as he fought his personal demons also – that’s a dimension of Scorsese’s filmmaking that developed over time.

And anyone who would make a film as crazed as After Hours certainly should earn a special place among directors as far as I’m concerned (and The King of Comedy was truly difficult, a film almost destroyed single handedly by Sandra Bernhard).

So congratulations to Scorsese for his visionary films, often so truthful in their complexity and eloquent in their brutality (and for the five-part PBS series The Blues also). And with his win last night, I may even give Kundun and Bringing Out The Dead another shot also.

Osama Who?

This column from Smerconish appeared both at HuffPo and in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday.

After my boys recently requested new targets for paintball in the backyard, I found myself online, ordering a 25-pack of Osama bin Laden likenesses for $19.97. They arrived last week, on the same day as reports of an al-Qaeda resurgence in Pakistani training camps. Seems bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are still alive, and apparently not the irrelevancy we had hoped, six years removed from 9/11.

As I stood opening the cylinder containing the terrorist's image, one of my sons asked what had become of the mastermind of the plot that killed 3,000. I found myself parroting the usual lines about the difficulty of finding one man amid rugged terrain. But the more my son prodded, the angrier I became.

By the way, in case anyone missed it yesterday, Prof Marcus had some words on Smerky and the whole paintball thing with his kids that I thought were interesting.

Because I no longer believe we are hunting bin Laden. Worse, no one seems to care. What happened to the days when a suburban soccer mom would have yearned to strangle bin Laden or Zawahiri with her bare hands?

That sentiment is still very much alive, Smerky. And even if it weren’t, whose fault is that? The soccer moms?

To what passes for our presidential “leadership,” bin Laden is the guy who shows up once every great while when Dubya needs some kind of a spike in the polls (assuming that still possible at this point, and it isn’t) with some video from his Undisclosed Location, if you will, making his cowardly threats. And absolutely nothing more than that.

We've been told bin Laden fled from the battle in the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan into Pakistan. We know that last September, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf reached an accord with tribal leaders that gave them continued free rein. Since July, we've known that late in 2005 the CIA disbanded Alec Station, the secret FBI/CIA unit dedicated to finding bin Laden. Sounds discouraging? There's more.

In October, I was one of 45 civilians invited to the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference, an incredible, one-week military-immersion program sponsored by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Our focus was the Cent-Com region, comprising 27 countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan.

We traveled 15,000 miles in one week and visited Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Djibouti. We drove a 10-kilometer obstacle course for humvees on the Kuwait/Iraq border, boarded (by helicopter) the USS Iwo Jima in the Persian Gulf, and took turns firing advanced weaponry in 120-degree sands. We received military briefings from leaders that included Rumsfeld, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the vice admiral of Cent-Com.

Extraordinary in their detail, the briefings were notable for what was missing - any mention of bin Laden. I later described him as the Lord Voldemort of the trip - He Who Shall Not Be Named.

When I asked repeatedly about what we were doing to find him, I was always assured that the hunt continues. But I don't buy it.

Deep inside a command center in Doha, Qatar, I found myself in a hangarlike building, watching war in real time. To my left, on an array of giant screens, I watched our military air activity over Iraq, as well as ground images from unmanned predators. Fox News was also on. On my right, it was Afghanistan, plus a live feed of CNN.

Both maps showed a beehive of activity. Lots of aircraft, plenty of movement. I noted that the activity in Afghanistan was heavily concentrated on its border with Pakistan. But there, all the action stopped. Pakistan, including the north Waziristan region where bin Laden is presumed to be hiding, was devoid of any military presence, at least on the map.

I'd like to think that, unseen, were the movements of some Pat Tillman-type heroes combing the rugged terrain of Pakistan, paying off the locals, cutting deals, using sophisticated spy gear, and doing whatever is necessary to find and kill bin Laden and Zawahiri.

But I doubt it.

Uh, Smerky, I’d watch it with the Pat Tillman references if I were you (this provides more, including this excerpt about Tillman’s death)…

Dozens of witness statements, e-mails, investigation findings, logbooks, maps and photographs obtained by The Washington Post show that Tillman died unnecessarily after botched communications, a mistaken decision to split his platoon over the objections of its leader, and negligent shooting by pumped-up young Rangers -- some in their first firefight -- who failed to identify their targets as they blasted their way out of a frightening ambush.

The records show Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath. They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman's commanders.

Army commanders hurriedly awarded Tillman a posthumous Silver Star for valor and released a nine-paragraph account of his heroism that made no mention of fratricide. A month later the head of the Army's Special Operations Command, Lt. Gen. Philip R. Kensinger Jr., called a news conference to disclose in a brief statement that Tillman "probably" died by "friendly fire." Kensinger refused to answer questions.

Back to Smerky…

Instead, I suspect we are completely reliant on Musharraf, who is willing to do only as much as guarantees him the continued support of America, but not enough to undermine his tenuous hold over his nation's tribal leaders. During my trip, I questioned senior military leaders about my suspicion.

One was quick to use the word sovereignty in his reply before describing the search as "difficult and nuanced."

No disrespect to our military, but I thought Bushco “didn’t do nuance,” like that brie-eating, Botox-injecting (joke, I think) liberal John Kerry.

Another told me the hunt was the equivalent of finding one man in the Rockies. Several asked me what would happen if they did find him, insinuating that support for the war in Iraq would further dissipate if that were to occur.

I'm not blaming our military. But if I am correct that bin Laden is in Pakistan and not the subject of an aggressive hunt, our political leadership is at fault for not freeing the hands of our soldiers to find him.

Names, Smerky! WHO in political leadership?

Oh, right…the Repugs have been running the show in Washington for most of this wretched Iraq war, so you can’t name names. Gotcha.

And I fault the media for banging the Iraq drum, but leaving the bin Laden beat silent.

You have got to be kidding me! Again, WHO was it who kept leaking every piece of propaganda on Iraq as part of The Never Ending You Godless Commie Liburul Including That King Of Pork John Murtha Of The Democrat Party War On Terra to our bought-and-paid-for corporate media, who dutifully lapped it up virtually without question?

Besides, every time any news organization with initials made noise, we’d get a leak about how we supposedly captured the No. 2 or No. 3 man in al Qaeda, and that was reported and subsequently forgotten. And that suited Bushco just fine, and you’re as big an enabler of this despotic regime as anyone.

Six years removed from 9/11, and with reports of an al-Qaeda resurgence, it's time to wonder what we've really accomplished and what we do now. Maybe I'm mistaken, but one thing is clear: Whatever we are doing isn't working.

If you believe that, then you should be supporting Democratic efforts to redeploy our troops to an over-the-horizon force in Iraq and concentrate once more in Afghanistan to pick up the hunt some more (of course, our military has been wrecked by Iraq, so I don’t know how feasible redeployment is at this point).

I ran my concerns past Michael Scheuer, former head of Alec Station and author of the best-seller Imperial Hubris. He told me, "Ultimately, we have had neither the focus nor resources to find and capture or kill bin Laden et al., and so almost by default we have had to hope that our Pakistani proxies would come to our rescue. Common sense should have told us that this was never going to occur. Why? Bin laden and his men and the Taliban are heroes to the great majority of Pakistanis - they beat the Soviets and are now beating the Americans - and Pakistani political stability could not survive Musharraf killing the population's heroes."

Which only reinforces my concern that, at this rate, my kids have as much chance of bagging bin Laden in our backyard as Musharraf's men do in the mountains of Pakistan.

It’s actually funny to hear Smerky make some remark that bin Laden is He Who Shall Not Be Named, because that description really applies to Dubya here. There's some interesting stuff in this column (some), but all of what is noted here about the difficulties of finding him and the tenuous leadership situation in Pakistan, among other things, should have been determined and incorporated into policy before the first shot was fired in Iraq.

As I’ve pointed out before, I’m currently working through “State of Denial” By Bob Woodward, and I’m at the point where the war has just started (and unbelievably, the decision of who would be named “viceroy” had not yet been made – I’m curious to find out now exactly where the hell Paul Bremer came from, and I know I’ll find out).

I’m about a quarter of the way through the book, and bin Laden has been mentioned once or maybe twice. That’s it. And yes, ratcheting up the pressure on Musharraf to work harder to get bin Laden could get Musharraf killed (and then imagine al Qaeda officially running Pakistan).

That’s the nightmare scenario we should have been preparing for, not Iraq (and Rumsfeld actually told Woodward in a recent interview quoted in the book that they never really believed Saddam Hussein had nukes – the only thing I, for one, care about – but chemical weapons only).

Try “beating the drum” on that, Smerky, as long as you’re blaming “the media.” And if you still find yourself too frustrated when Bushco continues to ignore bin Laden because he’s protected, you and your family can just have another paintball marathon in your back yard since that seems to be your idea of fun (preceded by an episode of “24” to get you in the mood even more, I guess).

How Dare You Enforce The Law!

Adam Cohen of the New York Times wrote this fine editorial today about the seven fired Bushco Justice Department attorneys…

Carol Lam, the former United States attorney for San Diego, is smart and tireless and was very good at her job. Her investigation of Representative Randy Cunningham resulted in a guilty plea for taking more than $2 million in bribes from defense contractors and a sentence of more than eight years. Two weeks ago, she indicted Kyle Dustin Foggo, the former No. 3 official in the C.I.A. The defense-contracting scandal she pursued so vigorously could yet drag in other politicians.

In many Justice Departments, her record would have won her awards, and perhaps a promotion to a top post in Washington. In the Bush Justice Department, it got her fired.

Ms. Lam is one of at least seven United States attorneys fired recently under questionable circumstances. The Justice Department is claiming that Ms. Lam and other well-regarded prosecutors like John McKay of Seattle, David Iglesias of New Mexico, Daniel Bogden of Nevada and Paul Charlton of Arizona — who all received strong job evaluations — performed inadequately.

It is hard to call what’s happening anything other than a political purge. And it’s another shameful example of how in the Bush administration, everything — from rebuilding a hurricane-ravaged city to allocating homeland security dollars to invading Iraq — is sacrificed to partisan politics and winning elections.

U.S. attorneys have enormous power. Their decision to investigate or indict can bankrupt a business or destroy a life. They must be, and long have been, insulated from political pressures. Although appointed by the president, once in office they are almost never asked to leave until a new president is elected. The Congressional Research Service has confirmed how unprecedented these firings are. It found that of 486 U.S. attorneys confirmed since 1981, perhaps no more than three were forced out in similar ways — three in 25 years, compared with seven in recent months.

It is not just the large numbers. The firing of H. E. Cummins III is raising as many questions as Ms. Lam’s. Mr. Cummins, one of the most distinguished lawyers in Arkansas, is respected by Republicans and Democrats alike. But he was forced out to make room for J. Timothy Griffin, a former Karl Rove deputy with thin legal experience who did opposition research for the Republican National Committee. (Mr. Griffin recently bowed to the inevitable and said he will not try for a permanent appointment. But he remains in office indefinitely.)

The Bush administration cleared the way for these personnel changes by slipping a little-noticed provision into the Patriot Act last year that allows the president to appoint interim U.S. attorneys for an indefinite period without Senate confirmation.

And according to this link, it looks like our man Arlen Specter may have been responsible for sneaking that provision into the Patriot Act (he denies it, of course).

(By the way, I should point out something funny on Specter I read recently. Our dear, impartial friend J.D. Mullane wrote a column in the Bucks County Courier Times yesterday supporting Specter’s lone gunman theory on the JFK assassination (and ridiculing those who don't, of course), and the reason Mullane wrote about this was because of the photo of the motorcade in Dallas just before the shots were fired that was recently discovered. Mullane recalled that he met Specter years ago and asked him about the “single bullet theory,” and Specter got mad and said, “It’s the single bullet conclusion.” It reminded me of the time I told the young one he needed to put his Luke Skywalker doll into his toy box when he was done playing with it, and he quickly reprimanded me, saying, “It’s not a doll, it’s an action figure!”

But I digress…

Three theories are emerging for why these well-qualified U.S. attorneys were fired — all political, and all disturbing.

1. Helping friends. Ms. Lam had already put one powerful Republican congressman in jail and was investigating other powerful politicians. The Justice Department, unpersuasively, claims that it was unhappy about Ms. Lam’s failure to bring more immigration cases. Meanwhile, Ms. Lam has been replaced with an interim prosecutor whose résumé shows almost no criminal law experience, but includes her membership in the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

2. Candidate recruitment. U.S. attorney is a position that can make headlines and launch political careers. Congressional Democrats suspect that the Bush administration has been pushing out long-serving U.S. attorneys to replace them with promising Republican lawyers who can then be run for Congress and top state offices.

3. Presidential politics. The Justice Department concedes that Mr. Cummins was doing a good job in Little Rock. An obvious question is whether the administration was more interested in his successor’s skills in opposition political research — let’s not forget that Arkansas has been lucrative fodder for Republicans in the past — in time for the 2008 elections.

The charge of politics certainly feels right. This administration has made partisanship its lodestar. The Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran revealed in his book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” that even applicants to help administer post-invasion Iraq were asked whom they voted for in 2000 and what they thought of Roe v. Wade.

Congress has been admirably aggressive about investigating. Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, held a tough hearing. And he is now talking about calling on the fired U.S. attorneys to testify and subpoenaing their performance evaluations — both good ideas.

The politicization of government over the last six years has had tragic consequences — in New Orleans, Iraq and elsewhere. But allowing politics to infect U.S. attorney offices takes it to a whole new level. Congress should continue to pursue the case of the fired U.S. attorneys vigorously, both to find out what really happened and to make sure that it does not happen again.

Indeed, particularly because it may have happened for an eighth time (as noted here).

Update 3/2/07: Drip, drip, drip...

U R 2 Stoo-pid 4 WDS!

Please indulge me for a minute or two on this. This matter has nothing to do with politics really, but I read about it in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday and I thought I was going to lose my mind.

This front page story has to do with the trend of individuals, primarily teenage girls if the story is any indication, of sending text messages with their hand-held devices while driving, including cell phones.

It is obvious to many upright-walking life forms (but not all, apparently) that any kind of distracting activity that takes place behind the wheel of an automobile is highly dangerous (driving being a responsibility after all, not a right). And yes, I’ve done dumb things also, like eating take out while driving or flipping through a pile of papers looking for a note of one type or another, excessive fiddling with the radio presets or the CD changer, or calling a pre-set number on a hand-held cell phone while driving in New Jersey (in violation of one of the most totally ignored laws I have ever seen). And many years ago, I drove a couple of times after leaving a party when I know I would have failed a breathalyzer had I been pulled over.

Dumb, dumb, dumb, I’ll admit.

But as you read the Inquirer article, you realize that not only do the girls who are interviewed have no sense of contrition – “OK, you got me, I won’t do this any more” – but they’re actually proud of themselves for sending text messages while driving (or, as noted in the story)…

Maddie Kelly, 18, of Newtown Square, says her mother forbids her to use the cell phone at all while she drives.

But Maddie will continue to text while driving. It's a kind of rebellion. "My mom will try to text, but she doesn't know how," she says, smiling. "But I do."

Now really, how dumb do you have to be to admit something like this to a newspaper reporter knowing it quite probably will make its way back to her mother and she will be punished anyway?

Outside of any parental restrictions placed on Maddie Kelly, she should automatically lose her license for at least a month. A PA State Trooper should come to her door and notify her personally; nothing like having one of these representatives of law enforcement approaching you to whip “the fear of God” into you right quick.

(I’ve dumped on the Inquirer a lot lately, but I give them credit for writing this story and publicizing this issue; my only qualm is that Alfred Lubrano, the writer, didn’t find out what the penalty is for this, since it surely is a violation of some type - if not spelled out precisely in the law, it could be part of some "catchall" category.)

And also in the story, there is a photo of a collection of young Main Line women sitting around a table at their favorite “haunt” smiling and holding up their portable devices, so proud they are of creating such a potentially dangerous nuisance.

There are a lot of reasons why this story got under my skin. Like many of you I imagine, I spend a good deal of time on the road for work-related reasons. And I don’t need to deal with more road hazards, I need to deal with fewer ones.

Also, I conducted corporate training at another point in my career, and if there’s one thing that made me want to spit, it was some idiot sitting there “texting” somebody while I was trying to teach (and I can tell the difference when someone has to deal with a legitimate work-related issue that pops up and when someone is continuously chatting with their buddies or making arrangements for happy hour). When that happened, I would make a point of finding out who this individual was after class and notifying their employer about it. They didn’t always like to hear this from me, but I didn’t care. I was a prick about it, but to me, there was a principle involved.

This New York Times article from 1999 describes another reason why and many other people feel so strongly about not using cell phones or other devices on the road unless absolutely necessary due to an emergency…

In Pennsylvania on Nov. 3, a 2-year-old died of injuries after her mother's car was struck by another whose driver said he did not see a stop sign while dialing. This caused State Senator Joe Conti of Bucks County to press again for a bill he introduced in the legislature to outlaw drivers' use of handheld phones.

Maddie Kelly should speak to the mother of this 2-year-old; I believe it was a little girl. Somehow, I don’t think she would be so proud of herself any more.

Conti was on the right side with this issue as he was with others when he served in the PA State Senate (and who’s to say that he would have lost to Patrick Murphy last November had Conti been the U.S. House Rep instead of Mike Fitzpatrick, but luckily it was Mikey instead). I don’t believe Conti’s bill has ever passed or even come up for a vote.

The long and short of it? If you want to text somebody, clean out your car glove box, play with your trip odometer or have sex, then get the hell off the road and stop creating a problem for everybody else!

Update 8/16/07: State Rep. Eugene DePasquale (D-York County) is my hero to introduce a bill to ban texting while driving (here); good luck.

Update 11/28/07: As noted here, NJ Governor Jon Corzine signed into a law banning the use of hand-held items including cell phones and texting devices on Nov. 2nd (here); no word on what is happening in PA with DePasquale's bill (he can be contacted here).

Sunday Videos

Joss Stone ("Tell Me 'Bout It"...oh yeah)...



...Happy Birthday to vocalist Paul Jones of Manfred Mann ("The Mighty Quinn" - both he and guitarist Tom McGuinness of the band are featured in the Cream DVD collection I posted about a little while ago - God, were they stoned, or what?)...



...George Harrison would have been 64 ("Give Me Love, Give Me Peace On Earth" - a nice photo remembrance)...



...and congratulations to filmmaker Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore on their Best Documentary Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth."

Stinky Inky News Flash: Dems Divided!

The Philadelphia Inquirer's headline yesterday at the very top of the front page was "Battle ahead as Democrat split on war plans," and the New York Times story that followed pertained to the congressional infighting of sorts while trying to figure out what to do about Bushco's gross mismanagement of the Iraq fiasco.

Not the fact that we wrongly arrested the son of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim who is the president of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), a group we are supposed to be supporting, and then apologized for the screwup shortly afterwards.

Or the fact that the latest effort to achieving something like progress in Iraq via the embedding strategy of Gen. David Petraeus means that our troops will be in this mess for the "long haul" regardless of what any politician has to say about it.

Or the fact that the Canadian Supreme Court, to its great credit, stuck down the concept of indefinite detentions of foreign terrorism suspects while courts review their deportation orders (that was only good enough for the headline on page 2).

And by the way, this quote from Virginia Senator Jim Webb in the Times story hit the nail on the head again (Webb has done nothing but impress me throughout his campaign and his brief amount of time so far in the Senate - sorry I don't have a link, but it's Times content and not the Inquirer...I'll keep looking):

"The true issue here is the federal system," Webb said, "the notion of accountability of the executive branch to Congress for not having conducted itself properly in the diplomatic arena."

Of course, that was buried in the middle of the story, along with the note that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) used a conference call to "taunt Democrats for failing to agree on a means for winding down the war."

(Oh, but didn't Broderius Ignoramus tell us a few weeks ago that McConnell and Harry Reid had "a warm relationship of personal trust" or some such nonsense?)

I have a message for McConnell; find some names of family members and friends of our service people from this link and ask these grieving individuals if they thought your "taunts" were amusing in any way whatsoever (and given this disgusting tactic from McConnell, do you even have to ask whether or not he served?).

Friday Videos

Happy Birthday to Howard Jones ("Hide and Seek" at Live Aid in 1985, from Wembley Stadium)...



...Happy Birthday also to Brad Whitford of Aerosmith ("Milk Cow Blues" from "Aerosmith Unplugged" - not quite sure what happened at the very end there)...



...Breaking Benjamin ("Breath" - a neat little homemade video with photos of the band and the song coming through really well)...



...and now for something completely different, as those zany Englishmen used to say, and that's "Meet The Press For Idiots" with Conan O'Brien (keep the volume loud; by the way, a belated happy birthday to Ted Kennedy).

Where The Rubber Meets The Road (2/23/07)

As reported in last Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer, here is how Philadelphia-area members of Congress were recorded on major roll-call votes last week.

House

Iraq troop increase. The House adopted, 246-182, and sent to the Senate a nonbinding measure (H Con Res 63) opposing President Bush's decision to add 21,500 combat troops to Iraq and pledging congressional support of troops deployed there as well as veterans of the war.

A yes vote was to pass the resolution.

Voting yes: Robert E. Andrews (D., N.J.), Robert A. Brady (D., Pa.), Michael N. Castle (R., Del.), Chaka Fattah (D., Pa.), Tim Holden (D., Pa.), Patrick Murphy (D., Pa.), Allyson Schwartz (D., Pa.) and Joe Sestak (D., Pa.).

Voting no: Charles W. Dent (R., Pa.), Jim Gerlach (R., Pa.), Joseph R. Pitts (R., Pa.), H. James Saxton (R., N.J.) and Christopher H. Smith (R., N.J.).

Not voting: Frank A. LoBiondo (R., N.J.).

As great as it is that this resolution passed so decisively, I have to throw cold water on this even though I hate to do so and link to this post by Prof. Marcus regarding Iraq, where Bushco (and Billion Dollar Cheney in particular) wants us to stay for years and years regardless of any resolution or anything anyone has to say.

We should hound our politicians on this and make all the noise that we can until the tide eventually turns, and the more shrill, the better.

Tax breaks, minimum wage. The House approved, 360-45, business tax breaks worth $1.8 billion over 10 years, a key step toward forging a congressional compromise on increasing the minimum wage from the current $5.15 to $7.25 over two years. The measure (HR 2) now goes to conference with the Senate.

A yes vote was to approve the tax breaks.

Voting yes: Andrews, Brady, Castle, Dent, Fattah, Gerlach, Holden, Murphy, Pitts, Saxton, Schwartz, Sestak and Smith.

Not voting: LoBiondo.

I hate this, but the minimum wage bill has no shot at passing without it. However, this should be the only accommodation to the Repugs – if they come back with any more favors for their handlers in the corpocracy, then tell them to drop dead. If we have to, we’ll get this done the right way after ’08 when more of those Repug Senate clowns are booted because they’re tethered to Dubya and company on Iraq.

Senate

2007 budget. Voting 81-15, the Senate gave final congressional approval to $463.5 billion in fiscal 2007 appropriations for departments and agencies lacking regular annual budgets. The measure (HJ Res 20) keeps most spending at 2006 levels but increases spending for such programs as veterans' health care, housing subsidies and Pell Grants for needy college students, and for such agencies as the FBI, National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation.

A yes vote was to pass the budget resolution.

Voting yes: Thomas Carper (D., Del.), Bob Casey Jr. (D., Pa.), Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) and Arlen Specter (R., Pa.).

Not voting: Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D., Del.).

And as you can see, the Senate has been too busy trying to derail the work of the first 100 hours of the House to do much else.

The Inquirer reported that Congress is now officially in recess until Feb. 26.