December 2009: The Not-So-Great Depression

failblog.org

As Clever Sister has long said, we've had an economic depression for years—only it's been masked by credit card spending, something not available to the masses during the 1930s.

The old image of investors jumping out windows—it does seem somewhat fitting, at least compared to how many people of the non-investor class will probably be victims of a new upswing in murder-suicides, domestic violence, and workplace shootings.

Though according to this, the idea that the rich reacted to the Depression by suicide is mainly mythical, planted in the public mind—and histories—because of a few highly publicized incidents.

Having a government that responded to that particular depression was in the end a reality. And it tends to make me long for the good old, bad days—before the possibility of real discussion was suppressed, so that nothing important can ever be put "on the table" in our own time.

Thom Hartmann often plays clips of F. D. Roosevelt's 1936 speeches at the Democratic Convention in June, and at Madison Square Garden, just before Election Day.

From the convention speech transcript–

Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of Government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.

The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the Government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business...They granted that the Government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the Government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live.

...

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

And from the October speech—

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

No wonder he was hated by the wealthy. And no wonder they have worked relentlessly ever since, to become as safe in their ownership of government as they are today.

By now, they've also suceeding in making workers pretty much invisible.

Or at least until Republicans need to fake some populism—like thrusting "Joe" the "Plumber" into the media...

After "Joe" is set up in his latest incarnation—as "war correspondent"—Hartmann makes a point of inteviewing "Joe" about the real "areas of his expertise." [Not-to-be-missed audio here.]

And there's the other current fake populism: corporate lobbyist-financed teabagger rallies, where Medicare recipients demand that the gubmint lay off their health care.

While workers suffering from the lack of medical attention they can't afford have to line up for a rare chance like this.

But our media prefers reporting on those exciting rallies, with their dozens of "real people."

We've had a year of political pretense that bi-partisanism and post-racism are real. In other words, a year of lost opportunities.

A Department of Justice staying packed by the Bush administration.

The power of life and death over healthcare-deprived Americans being granted to Joe Lieberman.

There's no new New Deal in the works. Tragically mistaken, but completely predictable, given how far rightward acceptable discourse has been driven over the last thirty years. When Thom Hartmann broadcast from Denmark last January, he noted that the local conservative politicians were mystified by how right-wing Obama is. This researcher found the same reaction in Norway.

While the rest of the economy collapses, one commodity is booming: right-wing violence.

A women's health care provider can be gunned down in church, and the media label the victim, "Abortion Doctor." Both implied and direct messages being that it was only natural for there to have been strong feeling against him. Or, it could be said: he asked for it.

At least NYT readers took the paper to task over its shameful coverage.

And business is booming for right-wing propagandists.

They don't get the fabulous pay of the wingnut class, but the writers at Sadly, No persevere in cutting the right-wing pundits down to size.

From this Spring, as the right howled over DHS' release of its report on right-wing violence, is Gavin M.'s summary of a screed by right-wing blogger Ed Morrissey—

It is ridiculous to blame Bush for commissioning the DHS report, because while the Bush administration might have wanted an assessment of right-wing extremist threats, it would not necessarily have wanted one that blamed it on right-wing extremism.

Gavin adds a footnote—

We've switched Ed's favorite coffee with Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, James Adkisson, Michael F. Griffin, Chad "The Michelle Malkin Anthrax Fraudster" Castagana, John "Dirty Bomb" Cummings, Richard Poplawski, Donald Cooper, Paul Jennings Hill, Tharin Robert Gartrell and associates, David McMenemy, Albert Brock, Francisco Martin Duran, Frank Eugene Corder, John Salvi, Japes Kopp, Bradley T. Kahle, Clayton Waagner, Martin Uphoff, Chad Altman, Shelley Shannon, Timothy Dale Johnson, Buford Furrow, probably some others that we're forgetting, a scheme by Georgia wingnuts to kill Mexican people with machine guns; numerous unknown arsonists, bombers, assailants, and killers, possibly including the Leahy/Daschle anthrax terrorist; assorted anti-government militias; let's not even get into the whole Aryan Nations thing; and last and also pretty much least, Matthew Derosia, who rammed an SUV into an abortion clinic in January '09, in Ed's own demesne of St. Paul, MN. Let's see if he notices!

It's just a routine bit of brilliance from S, N.

As the decade ends—or at least, the atrocious aughts finish—it's Jonah Goldberg who gets a million dollar book deal.

December 2008: Exits

Exit, shredding.

Cheney snowglobe; from Philip Toledano's America, The Giftshop

Well, it is something that distinguishes our guys from the Nazis—who were so proud of their recordkeeping.

Exit, admitting on teevee to authorizing torture.

Exit, ducking. As an Iraqi journalist speaks for millions. An event later commemorated (if not for long).

The shoes being the first honest statement made in Bush's presence since this.

A Sadly, No reader posts the news of Bush's Baghdad presser in this thread. Commenter Smut Clyde will respond, "The insurgency is in its last throws."

Though the shoes might have been served as a contribution to the wardrobe—after all, it takes great effort to clothe a naked emperor.

And our free press does go all out to join in the effort.

By next month, there will be the bizarre performance at his last press conference—

I've thought long and hard about Katrina -- you know, could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge. The problem with that and -- is that law enforcement would have been pulled away from the mission. And then your questions, I suspect, would have been, how could you possibly have flown Air Force One into Baton Rouge, and police officers that were needed to expedite traffic out of New Orleans were taken off the task to look after you?

He really believes a photo op would have made everything right.

Of all that was unleased in NOLA, there are still horror stories coming to light only now.

Just this month, Nation writer A.C. Thompson's Katrina's Hidden Race War tells of white vigilantee terror. Including murders, committed with impunity, and with apparent police involvement.

More exits, more players...

Exit, removing inconveniences. "Rove's IT Guru" is killed in the crash of the small plane he had flown for years.

Connell had been warned of possible plane sabotage. And he had been been ordered to testify in Ohio lawyer Cliff Arnebeck's suit alleging Connell's 2004 role in flipping votes from Kerry to Bush.

Exit, stealing. The well-connected are kept busy with the final looting of treasury.

Exit, avoiding prosecution. The lot of them.

It's over a year old, but this from driftglass may be the ultimate punchline of the joke that's been played on the country all these years.

Along with driftglass' corollary punchline:

100 years from now, historians will say that, after eight years of lavishing attention on every ginned-up, half-baked, crackpot, wingnut-financed Clinton rumor, the media felt real, real bad about how awfully they'd behaved and decided to make it up...

...to George W. Bush.

December 2007: What Arte Said

"Very interestingk...
But a Mein Kampf it wasn't."

The writers at Sadly, No have been slipped an advance copy of a book long anticipated. And long mocked: as if its insane theme weren't enough, its author has also missed his publication date by over two years, while using his blog to beg readers to do his research for him.

A few months ago, Jon Swift offered Jonah Goldberg a modest proposal for tackling his theme, "Liberal Fascism"—as explained by LOLcats.

Whenever a meme being pushed by the right reaches new heights of absurdity, someone on S, N will suggest that Peak Wingnut has been reached. Which is immediately countered by the other school of thought: that There Is No Such Thing As Peak Wingnut, which is an endlessly renewable resource.

S, N posts a series on the booklike object, inspiring weeks of mockery of a target that could not be more deserving.

Among the mockery (and LOLcats): here, here, here, and here.

"Revisionism" is such a mild term.

Among other S, N posts deconstructing the book's contents—Joseph McCarthy: Man of the Left.

Using the Hitler-moustached smiley face of the book's cover, Mister Leonard Pierce takes Goldberg's claims that Mussolini was a "socialist," and rates them on a scale of one to five ("an A-bomb of idiocy") Hitler-smileys.

In "The Dread Face Of Liberal Fascism" Brad writes—

Let’s recap what we know about liberal fascists:
• Much like the Nazis, their ranks are teeming with homosexuals.
• Much like the Nazis, they enjoy bossing people around.
• And worst of all, liberal fascists just love lecturing others on the value of (shudder) exercise and nutrition. Just like THE NAZIS DID.
So to find Liberal Fascism’s Grand Führer, we must find someone who’s gay*, bossy and fitness-obsessed. And then it hit me...

Funny stuff, but of course the real point of Goldberg's text is in this part of S, N's takedown—

Believe it or not, we're about to reach the part where he identifies Progressivism itself as fascist. As in, the end of child labor, the forty-hour work-week, the founding of America's national parks — in short, all that totalitarian goose-stepping stuff that interferes with the natural order of human society, i.e. feudalism under the ministry of robber barons.

Goldberg deserves to be made the laughingstock that he is here. But he will undeservedly have platforms in Serious Venues. Such as the LA Times—which dumps Robert Scheer and replaces him with Goldberg.

If there were any doubt about how low we've sunk—the media will push Goldberg's book as a serious work, when thirty years ago his notions would have been considered the fringiest of lunacy.

Though it's clear that the right has long tried to push this stuff. The Wiki entry on the New Deal and corporatism quotes Reagan telling Time in 1976: "Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal. It was Mussolini's success in Italy, with his government-directed economy, that led the early New Dealers to say 'But Mussolini keeps the trains running on time.'"

Thom Hartmann quotes a re-write of portions of Mein Kampf, as done by Ann Coulter [or fill in the name of any other right-wing pundit]. This version substituting "the Liberals" for "the Jews."

There are people with first-hand knowledge of the Nazis who are still around, horrified by the current parallels, and speaking out.

Historian Fritz Stern.

Former Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz continues to speak and write on the rule of law.

And there are still surviving generations with close links. Ray McGovern writes on December 27, 2007—

...Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel)... as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as "Geschichte eines Deutschen" (The Story of a German).

The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages—in English as "Defying Hitler."

I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner's birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and e-mailed to ask me to "write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush's America. ... This is almost unbelievable."

Unlike Goldberg's doorstop, this is a succinct guide to how fascism really manifests itself. Which is looking all too familiar, with Britt's signs constantly being illustrated.

Just one recent example—revelations of the CIA's destruction of torture evidence, along with past and current obstruction of justice by US Attorneys, Mukasey, and the White House.

The fascist marriage of corporation and state is in plain sight, and in gruesome detail. Former KBR/Halliburton employee in Baghdad, Jamie Leigh Jones testifies before the House Judiciary Committee this month. Since July 2005 she's pursued justice, after her gang-rape by other contractors—immediately followed by the company's destroying evidence and imprisoning Jones in a shipping container.

Jones also testifies that eleven other women have contacted her with similar stories.

During the hearing, Congressman Robert Scott says that the Department of Justice "can enforce with respect to contractors who commit crimes abroad, but it chooses not to."

The DOJ fails to send a representative to the hearing.

The Washington Post publishes a particularly bizarre piece it presents as a human interest story: a Vietnamese immigrant who repays her gratitude to the US as "bomb lady" weapons designer. Among her quotes: "A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot? In Vietnam, our guys didn't have this tool."

Noticing the Post's lack of comment on its "shoot...on the spot" quote, Robert Parry decides to fill the story in a bit more, with, Mobile Labs to Target Iraqis for Death. In which Parry also notes of the Post story—

Similarly, U.S. newspapers have consigned stories about U.S. troops engaging in extrajudicial killings of suspects mostly to pages deep inside the newspapers or have covered the news sympathetically. While some harsh criticism has fallen on trigger-happy Blackwater "security contractors," U.S. troops have been given largely a free pass.

And we have our political imprisonments.

There's a scene in "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," where Anton Walbrook's refugee character is questioned by English immigration officials. He describes life in Germany after WWI, until the Nazis came to power—

After the war years crime was increasing, and the honest citizens were having a hard job to put the gangsters in jail. Well, I needn't tell you, sir, that in Germany the gangsters finally succeeded in putting the honest citizens in jail.

December 2006: Hillbillies And Other People Of The Year

hillbillybento.com

Given responsibility to arrange catering for the year-end faculty bash, Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant chose someone from her neck of the boondocks.

Party time approaches, with no sign of food delivery.

Jesus' BAA makes a frantic call to the caterer...

Who done wrote the wrong day on his calendar.

Clever Sister, who long worked in the food biz, raises virtual eyebrows—

OMG!!!!! That's something!
Did they run out to the 7-11 to get some vittles?

The lunch is moved to the next day, when the guy promises there will be much wonderous comping.

"Bologna & velveeta? Stuck on frilly toothpicks?" asks CS.

Time has met the Person of The Year, and it is Us.

watertiger agrees that she is the Average American—

1. I'm adamantly against the war.
2. I think George Bush is a criminal failure who should be impeached.
3. I hold down at least 2 (well, 3, if you count the blogging) jobs to keep ahead of the cost of living.

And so on.

whitehouse.org captures the quality of year-end reporting. The bloodthirstiness and triumphalism around Saddam Hussein's execution, here and here.

And of the tears shed over another death—Remembering Gerry Ford: President Bush Mourns Loss of Innovative Bestower of Felony-Erasing Pardons.

In other predictable events, the Frat Boy-In-Chief sneers at a persistent reporter: "It's bad in Iraq. That help?"

And baits Senator-elect Jim Webb about his son serving in Iraq. This, after being asked to be especially sensitive, because of the son's recent, narrow escape from death.

Not a circumstance Bush could conceivably have had anything to do with.

December 2005 (II): Brand Loyalty

Poor Clever Sister: forced to hear a co-worker's daily news roundup, accompanied by hearty praise of her source—"I'm a liberal! I listen to NPR!"

Now that the latest corporate takeover has hit local phone service, this woman burbles: "I'm so happy it's AT&T again! It's what I grew up with!"

This is after revelations of the scope of NSA spying on Americans' calls, accomplished with the "cooperation of American telecommunications companies."

CS' annoying co-worker also keeps announcing, "I can't wait until 2008, to vote for John McCain—he's a maverick!" Now, wherever could she have gotten that idea?

CS finds this seasonal item—

A bah humbug moment
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
BARRIE BARBER
THE SAGINAW NEWS

A Saginaw Township leader wants an apology from national talk show TV and radio host Bill O'Reilly for his on air declaration that the suburb has banned anyone from wearing red and green clothing.

At Democratic Underground, where this excerpt still dwells, a commenter says O'Reilly has made this claim before—when it supposedly happened in Plano, Texas.

It would seem illogical for O'Reilly to pick on good Republican-voting places in "The Heartland" for his rants. But this must be part of your right-wing demagogue's confidence that cognitive dissonance is unknown to his audience, since it would require cognitive ability in the first place.

Just as it's fine for him to scream about "values," while writing bad, dirty fiction. And whose sexual harassment of an employee includes turning a previously innocent vegetarian dish into something revolting.

At work, the funds raised for poor folk have been distributed. And the thank-you cards are posted in the lunchroom.

One is from a woman who tells us how she prayed for her family to have Christmas this year. She is not surprised that her prayers were answered, because, "My God is an awesome God!"

Her God, apparently, being the God of Cheap Shit Made By Chinese Slave Labor.

And there's the letter from a man who tells how he's never asked for a handout, yet—he was laid off; he developed a life-threatening medical condition; he has small children; his unemployment (which he only took for the sake of the children) ran out...

All detailed in several pages the guy needs for self-justification.

Finally thanking those responsible for the gift, the wonderfully voluntary and non-governmental people [never mind that their paychecks are subsidized by State and Federal funds...], Mr. Fox Target Audience signs off—

I could wish you "Happy Holidays," but instead I will say: "Merry Christmas!"

A bold, defiant stand, in his own mind.

He may have nothing else, but his friends on the teevee will make sure he always has imaginary liberals to blame for threatening his Christmas...

December 2005 (I): War On Brains

Soon after my arrival in this office, Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant forwards me a pantyhose coupon—"I hope you can use this! I send them to all my friends!"

She has "friends"? When the other workplace fundies try avoiding her, because she creeps out even them?

Of course, it may only have been meant to suggest that pantyhose are something I should be wearing...

Jesus' BAA does take sartorial improvement as one of her Rapture™ preparation duties.

Once, as I'm looking through the Chair's Office drive for a file, I come upon a Word doc of hers: "How to choose the right purse for your personality," copied from a cheesy site by one "Crystal Coons." I can't find the document or that site (if it still exists)—too bad I didn't save Jesus' BAA's extracurricular work at the time.

In over a year of having to brace myself to go to this environment every week day, listening to "Morning Sedition" until 8:00 was a sanity preserver. Something no longer there, since Air America yanked the show this month.

Considering how much we, the peons, have our lives ruled by executive decisions over which we have no say, this is a small thing. Yet it reaches some classic level of executive stupidity, connected as it is to the media climate we live in.

After the cancellation was announced last month, the network was deluged with support for the hosts and pleas to continue the show. But the program was deemed "not funny" by an audience of one: the CEO who wanted the show axed. Air America may not have much of a reach, but its management proves,unsurprisingly, that those who control media are those who shouldn't.

It's true that the show often made me late getting into the shower. And—a geezer on a rush hour bus full of sullen, half-asleep undergrads—I often had stretches of laughing uncontrollably.

There are audio archives here, thanks to a fan. This has selections for entire shows and individual segments, including the Jim Earl bits that had me hopelessly cracked up on the bus. "Rapture Watch" and "The War on Brains"—what could have been more appropriate, just before my daily in-person encounter with such things.

Jesus' BAA has been out since having shoulder surgery at the beginning of the month. This was supposed to have happened next March, but the hospital suddenly re-scheduled a few weeks ago.

Cruella was livid that Jesus' BAA "just ups and leaves when she feels like it!" She has spent the whole month bitching about Jesus' BAA, to everyone in earshot.

That even includes me—when I have to ask Cruella about something, I get a tirade on the lines of, "it's here, though it should have been done this way, but Jesus' BAA is incapable of that."

There already was a temp working on this floor; she has since been planted at the empty desk in our office, where she can listen daily as Cruella and Ghengis attack the missing one.

Whenever Jesus' BAA is not around, Red State Girl can be counted on to step in and keep up the annoyance level. She's another character I might feel a little sympathy for, if she weren't so obnoxious about trying to bully the other women into her schemes as would-be social director. And she always comes across like she's taking names of the gals who don't fall in line.

RSG is forever bringing in fund-raising projects on behalf of nieces and nephews, and I often hear her talk about how much time she spends with them. Judging from how officious she is with the female employees, I assume that she hijacks the kids to have people small enough to dominate. And I also assume that she uses them as a public shield, to look as if she were really a married lady with kids.

RSG's current project: selling plastic baggies of "Reindeer Food"—

Make a wish and close your eyes tight,
Then sprinkle on your lawn at night.
As Santa's reindeer fly and roam
This food will guide them to your home.
For your gift to the reindeer and Rudolph
Your wish may be real,
Your dreams may come true.

A pome so bad, I was sure she wrote it herself. Until I found it all over the Web—along with the recipe for oats mixed with glitter. Schools all over the Murkan Heartland must be making the kids raise funds with this. So there must also be mass wildlife poisonings from glitter ingestion.

I have no idea what blend of horror at the thought of idleness plus need for martyrdom motivates her. But on the 23rd Jesus' BAA drags herself from her sickbed, stopping by to distribute "gifts"—bags of homemade cookies and candies.

I didn't see her (or what kind of condition she was in)—just came back from lunch to find the bag left on my chair. Sugar cookies, three kinds of fudge, chocolate-coated peanuts, and peanut butter balls. I unloaded nearly all of it in the lunch room, but kept some of the peanut things, thinking my choc-aholic brother-in-law might like them.

He wasn't home when I got there, but Clever Sister tried a chocolate. And immediately spat it out, with an outraged—"Is she trying to poison you?!" The peanuts tasted rotten, the coating was dollar store quality fake flavor... of course I should have known better than to think anything from Jesus' BAA could be edible.

This is Jesus' BAA in a [rancid] nutshell: she believes she's doing a wonderful good deed and goes to so much work over the gastronomic equivalent of her "camp crafts."

Jesus' BAA will return to work early in the new year. When she will sit happily at her keyboard, and say, "It's amazing how much your shoulder hurts after surgery!...eh HEH eh HEH eh HEH..."

December 2004 (II): Watch Your Words

Ministry of Homeland Security poster: The Propaganda Remix Project

The family friends who have lived under fascism find current events fighteningly familiar. One is Spanish and grew up under Franco—since last month, he's been busy planning his return to Spain early next year. er:

Another friend has been a frequent point of reference, as she compares her past experience with what she observes now. As in, "That's just like the Soviet Union!"

She also worries about her 8-year old son speaking his mind, as Clever Sister notes when forwarding this—

When the two plainclothes Loudoun County sheriff's investigators showed up on her Leesburg doorstep, Pamela Albaugh got nervous. But when they told her why they were there, she got angry: A complaint had been filed alleging that her 11-year old son had made "anti-American and violent" statements in school.

Albaugh, her Israeli husband, and their children previously lived in several other countries. Yishai, an outspokenly anti-war 11-year old who was upset by a Veterans' Day assignment to write a letter to marines, burst out with some words to the effect that he didn't care if all the marines died.

His mother thought that the matter had been resolved by conferences with the school, followed by a day of in-school suspension for Yishai. Then investigators showed up for "two hours of polite but intense and personal questioning"—

They asked how she felt about 9/11 and the military. They asked whether she knows any foreigners who have trouble with American policy. They mentioned a German friend who had been staying with the family and asked whether the friend sympathized with the Taliban. They also inquired whether she might be teaching her children "anti-American values," she said.

"It was intimidating," [Albaugh] said. "I told them it's like a George Orwell novel, that it felt like they were the thought police. If someone would have asked me five years ago if this was something my government would do, I would have said never."

Finally, of "lessons learned"—

Albaugh said that Yishai is not violent and that the school could have used the classroom incident as a "teachable moment," helping him learn to say what he was feeling in a less offensive manner.

Instead, Yishai said he has learned that it is not worth challenging authority. "At the end of the day, you lose," he said, adding: "All of these freedoms and things they're supposed to uphold, they bash them."

Our free press can hand-wring about Ukraine, while steering clear of Ohio.

As unwelcome as truth-tellers are, one slipped through in 1996, via a new-fangled news source, "The Internet." The ensuing years of professional frustration ended in Gary Webb's suicide this month.

Jeff Cohen's obit: R.I.P. Gary Webb -- Unembedded Reporter.

America's Debt to Journalist Gary Webb is the piece by former AP and Newsweek reporter, Robert Parry. He recalls Webb's 1996 investigative reports on the CIA's links to Nicaraguan Contra drug trading of the 1980's, how this introduced crack into the U.S., and how the Reagan-Bush administration protected those involved. And how a 1998 CIA Inspector General's report largely confirmed Webb's reporting.

And as to how this reflects on the gatekeepers of news—

Unintentionally, Webb also exposed the cowardice and unprofessional behavior that had become the new trademarks of the major U.S. news media by the mid-1990s. The big news outlets were always hot on the trail of some titillating scandal – the O.J. Simpson case or the Monica Lewinsky scandal – but the major media could no longer grapple with serious crimes of state.

Marc Cooper:

First the L.A. Times helped kill off Gary Webb’s career. Then, eight years later, after Webb committed suicide this past weekend, the Times decided to give his corpse another kick or two, in a scandalous, self-serving and ultimately shameful obituary. It was the culmination of the long, inglorious saga of a major newspaper dropping the ball journalistically, and then extracting relentless revenge on an out-of-town reporter who embarrassed it.

Parry notes that instead of using Webb's death to set the record straight, "the Times acted as if there never had been an official investigation confirming many of Webb's allegations."

And—

To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-drug story has been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, many of them are now top executives at their news organizations. On the other hand, Gary Webb’s career never recovered.

Of Webb's contribution, says Parry—

...it should be noted that his great gift to American history was that he – along with angry African-American citizens – forced the government to admit some of the worst crimes ever condoned by any American administration: the protection of drug smuggling into the United States as part of a covert war against a country, Nicaragua, that represented no real threat to Americans.

Cooper quotes Webb, in his interview—

...for a book [Into the Buzzsaw] profiling 18 journalists who found themselves discredited or censored. Let his own words be a more fitting epitaph than the hack-job L.A. Times obituary:

"If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me . . . I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests . . .

"And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job . . . The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress."

Still, at times there are small cracks in the arrangements that have been made—as when Yes Men Hoax on BBC Reminds World of Dow Chemical's Refusal to Take Responsibility for Bhopal Disaster.

December 2004 (I): Ukraine, Ohio

Grand Lake Theater

Late last month:

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on [November 24] said the United States does not accept the results of Ukraine's presidential elections as legitimate, citing "credible reports of fraud and abuse."

Powell has said plenty of other things with a straight face throughout his career.

But the irony is not lost on Columbus-based The Free Press, as it continues ongoing election coverage, including numerous county by county reports of November 2 vote-rigging, undercounting, and withholding of voting machines.

Citizens groups file legal action to force a recount—which will be conducted largely in precincts picked by a key figure in the fraud, Ohio Secretary of State and Bush campaign co-chair, J. Kenneth Blackwell. As The Free Press describes in its final report of the month, Ohio's official non-recount ends amidst new evidence of fraud, theft and judicial contempt mirrored in New Mexico.

Clever Sister forwards this, from the Ukraine—

A third exit poll, by Frank Luntz, a pollster for the U.S. Republican Party, and Douglas Schoen, of the Washington based market research company Penn, Schoen & Berland, showed Yushchenko winning with 56 to Yanukovych's 41 percent, Schoen said. The margin of error was 2 percentage points.

"Crap - that was Kerry's problem," adds CS, but "Yuschenko's American wife worked for Reagan & Bush Daddy."

It happens that the Columbus area is the site of an actual prosecution of charges connected to the Iraq war. The nature of the prosecution—

At a time when some U.S. troops in Iraq are complaining they have to scrounge for equipment, six Ohio based reservists were court martialed for taking Army vehicles abandoned in Kuwait by other units so they could carry out their own unit's mission to Iraq.

The six receive six-month sentences for theft, destruction of Army property and conspiracy to cover up the crimes.

The sentence comes just a few days after Rumsfeld's encounter with some other guardsmen. Also reported by whitehouse.org: MEDIA ALERT: CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF SECRETARY RUMSFELD'S FRIENDLY, NON-CONTENTIOUS BULL SESSION WITH JOYOUS, 100% GUNG-HO NATIONAL GUARDSMEN IN KUWAIT.

After a few weeks at boot camp, the son of Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant has left the marines. It was a medical discharge: Sonny, Jr. injured himself wearing a pack.

I've spoken to Sonny, Jr. when he's phoned Jesus' BAA. As I've spoken to Sonny, Sr., and the daughter: they're all mouth-breathers.

It comes as no surprise that Sonny, Jr. couldn't march and carry a pack at the same time—really not a cheap joke, just a fact. And I'm happy for Jesus' BAA, that her son will not be In Harm's Way. But I also know how puffed up she will be that Sonny, Jr. "served in the Marines." While he's safe, and other people's sons die for her Leader.

November 2008: A Morning After

Photo: James Jordan

Around 11:30 the night of November 4, I started to hear horns honking, along with a roar—coming from the direction of the main thoroughfare, a couple blocks away. The roaring got louder, as students who had gathered on campus went into the streets and spontaneously marched through town.

The steady roar of joy and relief was still heard in my neighborhood, when I nodded out at 12:30.

The following morning was unusually sunny and warm—50 degrees or more, at 7:45. Which is when I was rushing to work, and running late, as usual.

Crossing a street, I was headed into the path of two other pedestrians: a black man and his daughter of about eight or nine. I hadn't seen them before on the route, and supposed the father must be walking the daughter to school, after staying up late to watch returns.

As our paths met, the father smiled, and said, "Good morning." I smiled back and said, "Hi." And rushed on—knowing I wanted to stop and say something more adequate. Despite the significance of the day, nothing came to me, in my usual inability to function at that hour.

A little later, I realized I could have said, "It's a beautiful morning, in so many ways..." Despite the missed moment of connection, it was clear how different everything feels. And how possibilities suddenly seem to be opening.

And things feel so different for now—when my clock radio came on that morning, Cokie Roberts was talking sense, to the effect of, "he won, it was big. I didn't understand why he spent time in New York and places he'd win anyway; now I do: it was about turnout, more Democrats, and showing he has the people behind him, and Congress..."

Sense emanating from the pundits can't last. And there's the grim likelihood that a Republican decision was made to not steal this election, in favor of leaving the staggering mess to the Democrats.

But even that can't mar the prospect of possibilities that have been suppressed for eight long years.

Just over a week later, the Yes Men pull off a "New York Times" edition dated July 4, 2009. Front page stories—

IRAQ WAR ENDS
Nation Sets Its Sights On Building Sane Economy

November 2007: White House, Black Hole

NASA art, from "Top Ten Strangest Things in the Universe"—

Beyond a black hole's gravitational border -- or event horizon -- neither matter nor light can escape.

Source of inspiration for the Cheney-Rove White House?

The question suggests itself, but the one Dan Froomkin asks is, "Where Are the E-Mails?"

The e-mails in question date from March 2003 to October 2005 -- a crucial period that includes the Iraq invasion, a presidential election and Hurricane Katrina.

White House officials have known for more than two years that the messages were deleted -- a clear violation of presidential records-preservation statutes. But the president's aides won't explain what happened, what sort of backups they have and what they're doing about it.

That obstinacy led a federal judge to step in yesterday and order the White House to preserve every bit of related data in its possession -- just to make sure nothing untoward happens while a civil suit by two open-government groups goes forward.

The suits are by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and National Security Archive lawyers.

Farther down in his column, Froomkin helpfully points out that this all came to light due to "Scandal Convergence"—after CIA leak special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald notified Libby's lawyer, that "we have learned that not all e-mail of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."

Froomkin also wants us to be clear that these are "Not the Same E-Mails"—

...there are two entirely different sets of missing e-mails: These and the ones that top White House aides including Karl Rove intentionally sent and received using their Republican National Committee e-mail accounts even while knowing full well that circumventing the White House servers for official business was a violation of federal law.

When congressional investigators looking into the suspicious firings of nine U.S. attorneys last year started asking after those e-mails, it turned out those were missing, too, just for different reasons: They'd been deleted by the RNC. The White House is ostensibly trying to recover those as well.

"Ostensibly" being a correct if polite word, which is to be expected from the accurate, polite Dan Froomkin. But knowing who is "trying to recover" the e-mails, the results will be predictable.

I have to admit that, when an unsolicited publication from Pakistan arrived at the Department Oval Office, I thought the envelope had a rather ironic stamp in its Supreme Court commemorative proclaiming "Justice for All."

That was last year. For much of this year, Pakistani lawyers have taken to the streets, protesting the government's attack on the judiciary, with removal of the chief justice. A struggle that continues–with Musharraf moving this month to suspend the Constitution, over 2500 lawyers in detention, and the chief justice remaining under house arrest.

As to own variety of rulers who answer to no one, Talking Points Memo offers "Bush Admin: What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Us, 2007 Version."

November 2006: Psychopaths? We Got 'Em!

A faculty wit signs a report, then returns it to me—addressed to the Department's "Oval Office."

Maybe he wanted to suggest my address is exalted—not that our Department administrators are psychopaths.

My read is certainly the latter.

Speaking of the type... the loathsome Joe Lieberman keeps his Senate sinecure. Having been unable to win a primary and unwilling to abide by the results, he's re-elected—by Republicans.

But, they always have been responsible for his career. Some background from Howie Klein—

In 1988 he challenged progressive Republican incumbent U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker-- attacking from the right-- and beat him. Lieberman ran a brutal and viciously negative campaign, mocking Weicker personally and even red-baiting him for being soft on Castro (William Buckley formed a PAC to raise money for Lieberman and later Jack Kemp called him "one of us.")

OpEdNews has more on Lieberman's history of Buckley/National Review backing here.

Now Lieberman has a new lease on doing Republican work—still Chairman of the Homeland Security committee, and ready to block a Katrina investigation that he claimed to want, pre-election.

As well as being in place to do as much other sabotage of the public good as he can. Kelly Caldwell—

Where does he find the time?

Not only has Sen. Joe Lieberman been working overtime to smother health reform, he's parked himself squarely in the path of another badly-needed, long-awaited change.

Namely: preventing restoration of FEMA to the previous status it had as an autonomous agency, before it was subsumed and subverted by DHS.

In other news of psychopaths: Bush waits until the day after the election to announce Rumsfeld's resignation—which Rummy submitted just before the vote.

Think Progress updates the post above

—The word "Iraq" doesn't appear in former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's resignation letter. Neither does the word "war."

And Clever Sister forwards this amusing post-midterm piece from the Washington Post: Republicans' Angry Factions Point Fingers At Each Other. Michael Grunwald writes that—

After minutes upon minutes of soul-searching, Republicans are now in recrimination mode. And the GOP's various factions all agree: This wouldn't have happened if the party had listened to us.

And in Grunwald's description, finger-pointers attribute the party's losses to its rejection of "popular causes such as the minimum wage, embryonic stem cell research and lobbying reforms while ignoring health-care issues that did not involve Terri Schiavo." [!]

Along with communiqués addressed to the Oval Office, the month at work opens with a mysterious absence by Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant. As the hours go by without my hearing a word of explanation, I wonder if she has finally been Raptured™ away.

"Medical emergency?" suggests Clever sister.

Perhaps... Could there have been another starfish attack?

The mystery is solved late in the morning, when Dr. G. Zuss asks me to do something. Taking being spoken to as an opening for me to speak, I ask if Jesus' BAA will be in today. She will, is the answer. But sometime later—because, "the dog is delivering."

CS: "Family sick leave, then?"

Jesus' BAA is out of my life for the entire week of Thanksgiving. In the process of straightening out a mess she created, I cc her on an e-mail. Then get her so very professional out-of-office message: the dates she will be away; who to contact for assistance; and—

Have a very blessed Thanksgiving!

November 2005: Lies, Spies, Pies

With no major elections to propagandize this year, Bill O'Reilly has been busy with his "War on Christmas" publicity grabbing shtick.

Yes, the threat is all around—as in the incessant Christmas fundraising at the public institution where I work.

But anything to distract the masses is a win for Republicans.

On another, highly orchestrated, win: Rolling Stone publishes James Bamford's, The Man Who Sold the War. Bamford documents the activities of—and publicly-funded fortune taken in by—"Bush's general in the propaganda war," John Rendon.

After the CIA, in an "extraordinary transfer of secret authority," hired the Rendon Group in 1991—

Rendon assembled a group of anti-Saddam militants, personally gave them their name -- the Iraqi National Congress [INC] -- and served as their media guru and "senior adviser" as they set out to engineer an uprising against Saddam. It was as if President John F. Kennedy had outsourced the Bay of Pigs operation to the advertising and public-relations firm of J. Walter Thompson.

Rendon helped to install as head of the INC Ahmad Chalabi— whose "primary focus was to drag us into a war," former Baghdad CIA chief Whitley Bruner tells Bamford. On Chalabi's behalf—

Rendon made considerable headway with the INC, but following the group's failed coup attempt against Saddam in 1996, the CIA lost confidence in Chalabi and cut off his monthly paycheck. But Chalabi and Rendon simply switched sides, moving over to the Pentagon, and the money continued to flow.

Under Chalabi's direction in 2001—and with the new political opportunities after September 11 of that year—came Adnan al-Hadieri's fake testimony to being a civil engineer who had helped bury tons of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons still hidden in Iraq. The phony information then needing to be disseminated, Paul Moran, a freelancer in Bahrain with access to Australian Broadcasting Corporation work—as well as being an employee of Rendon's—was in place to broadcast the story.

Next—

The INC's choice for the worldwide print exclusive was equally easy: Chalabi contacted Judith Miller of The New York Times. Miller, who was close to I. Lewis Libby and other neoconservatives in the Bush administration, had been a trusted outlet for the INC's anti-Saddam propaganda for years. Not long after the CIA polygraph expert slipped the straps and electrodes off al-Haideri and declared him a liar, Miller flew to Bangkok to interview him under the watchful supervision of his INC handlers...despite her vaunted intelligence sources, she claimed not to know about the results of al-Haideri's lie-detector test. Instead, she reported that unnamed "government experts" called his information "reliable and significant" -- thus adding a veneer of truth to the lies.

Her front-page story, which hit the stands on December 20th, 2001, was exactly the kind of exposure Rendon had been hired to provide. AN IRAQI DEFECTOR TELLS OF WORK ON AT LEAST 20 HIDDEN WEAPONS SITES, declared the headline...

For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's story, they could point to "proof" of Saddam's "nuclear threat." The story, reinforced by Moran's on-camera interview with al-Haideri on the giant Australian Broadcasting Corp., was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.[my bold]

Bamford describes more levels of the post-9/11 war propaganda effort—

Still another newly formed propaganda operation in which Rendon played a major part was the Office of Global Communications, which operated out of the White House and was charged with spreading the administration's message on the War in Iraq...The office also worked closely with the White House Iraq Group, whose high-level members, including recently indicted Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby, were responsible for selling the war to the American public.

In a suicide bombing on day three of the invasion, Paul Moran—

freelance journalist and Rendon employee [became] the first member of the media to be killed in the war – a war he had covertly helped to start.

...

Although Moran was gone, the falsified story about weapons of mass destruction that he...had broadcast around the world lived on. Seven months earlier, as President Bush was about to argue his case for war before the U.N., the White House had given prominent billing to al-Haideri's fabricated charges. In a report ironically titled "Iraq: Denial and Deception," the administration referred to al-Haideri by name and detailed his allegations -- even though the CIA had already determined them to be lies. The report was placed on the White House Web site on September 12th, 2002, and remains there today. One version of the report even credits Miller's article for the information.

Which brings us to the little matter of the indictment of I. Lewis Libby, on one count of obstruction of justice, and two each of perjury and making false statements.

At work, the topic is raised by one of the occasional visitors who braves trying to inject a little reality into the room. Jesus' Best Administrative Assistant drops her normal mask of feverishly happy righteousness, to say—with quite the cold little sneer—"How can there be an indictment? There was no crime! Everyone knew she wasn't undercover!"

"She" being Valerie Plame, and Jesus' BAA sure has received her instructions on this subject.

Talking points of the delusional aside, it's easy to see that, if Cheney's immediate objective was to discredit and silence Plame's husband, it was an unexpected win for the warmongers to simultaneously sabotage years of undercover work in weapons of mass destruction proliferation.

There is no shortage of bizarre twists to be found in observing the criminal outfit that runs this country. This reminds me of how, after Plame's cover was blown two years ago, some outraged former CIA people appeared on Nightline.

Clever Sister and I watched the program together. And were amazed to realize: the CIA are the good guys in this!

Watching interviewees with their identities concealed, we were struck by hearing a woman whose peculiar vocal quality was apparent even through electronic distortion.

It took no more than a second or two for CS to catch on: "It's Julia Child, former spy!"

A couple days later, we happen be browsing in a remainder bookstore, when CS spots the book at top. Recipes not from the Culinary Institute of America, but courtesy of the United States Central Intelligence Agency Family Advisory Board.

But, hey: that mango pie recipe sure is tastier and more wholesome than the concoctions cooked up by our neocons and their subcontractors...

In other literary efforts, Libby himself made a notable contribution to the crowded genre of salacious novels written by members of the Party of Family Values. Lauren Collins, on Scooter's Sex Shocker–

Libby has a lot to live up to as a conservative author of erotic fiction...from Safire...to Buckley...to Ehrlichman...to O'Reilly...extracurricular creative writing has long been an outlet for ideas that might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast. In one of Lynne Cheney's books, a Republican vice-president dies of a heart attack while having sex with his mistress.

...

So, how does Libby stack up against the competition? This question was put to Nancy Sladek, the editor of Britain's Literary Review, which, each year, holds a contest for bad sex writing in fiction. (In 1998, someone nominated the Starr Report.) Sladek agreed to review a few passages from Libby. "That's a bit depraved, isn't it, this kind of thing about bears and young girls? That's particularly nasty, and the other ones are just boring," she said. "God, they’re an odd bunch, these Republicans." Unlike their American counterparts, she said, Tories haven't taken much to sex writing. "They usually just get caught," she said.

Well, ours certainly have much worse crimes to answer for. And they've been "caught," all right—just not stopped.

Instead, we get what happens to someone like Steven Kurtz–

...a Professor of Art at SUNY Buffalo and a founding member, with his late wife, Hope, of the internationally acclaimed art and theater collective Critical Art Ensemble...

In May 2004 the Kurtzes were preparing to present Free Range Grain, a project examining GM agriculture, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art... when Hope Kurtz died of heart failure. Police who responded to Kurtz's 911 call deemed the couple's art suspicious, and called the FBI. The art materials consisted of several petri dishes containing three harmless bacteria cultures, and a mobile lab to test food labeled "organic" for the presence of genetically modified ingredients. As Kurtz explained, these materials had been safely displayed in museums and galleries throughout Europe and North America with absolutely no risk to the public.

The next day, however, as Kurtz was on his way to the funeral home, he was illegally detained by agents from the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force, who informed him he was being investigated for "bioterrorism."

This month, Prof. Kurtz is released from pre-trial supervision, over the objections of the DOJ.

And it will take fours years before Kurtz is finally cleared of all charges. When he will say, after being asked for a statement–

I don't have a statement, but I do have questions. As an innocent man, where do I go to get back the four years the Department of Justice stole from me? As a taxpayer, where do I go to get back the millions of dollars the FBI and Justice Department wasted persecuting me? And as a citizen, what must I do to have a Justice Department free of partisan corruption so profound it has turned on those it is sworn to protect?

These have become sadly mundane questions we can all ask of this regime.

November 2004: Thieves In The Night

Grand Lake Theater
Or to be more precise, thieves in the early morning, just after midnight.

Thom Hartmann—

...I'd been doing live election coverage... during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

Of course the thieves also had been hard at work in daylight—around the country, and for years—as seen in stories compiled here, and the Project Censored report here.

My state appears to have had a fairly clean process. But we also have a Republican State legislature and Secretary of State, and major polling place changes were timed for this particular election. I worked outside a polling place in my majority Democratic county, and nearly all the black voters who arrived were directed to a different location.

Still, all was going well before before midnight, when I went to bed. It was a very different story in the morning, when the mass media reversed the earlier, more honest reporting.

Greg Palast, here, on the depressing math of grand theft in Ohio and New Mexico; the quantities of Democratic votes not counted; the lack of Democratic Party response.

The rank and file, on the other hand, are outraged. A grassroots group in Ohio holds public hearings, where witnesses testify to how majority black precincts were shorted on voting machines. And about the setup at Kenyon College, where students were forced to wait in line for 10 to 12 hours.

Testimony includes that of a woman whose friend's husband died during the three-hour period he was alone, while his wife waited to vote.

Kerry's concession was almost immediate. Presumably, what the party establishment wants. And probably a careerist's move that Kerry himself wants—he must believe this is a gentleman's game, and that if he shows acceptable sportsmanship, he'll play again.

In the general post-November 2 horror, there was a small thing that struck me.

In all my time volunteering with local Dems this year, I sold buttons and yard signs at lots of public events. And each time, I watched excited kids line up to buy buttons—then saw them go to their parents and beg money to buy more buttons.

One of the designs was an oversized button with a portrait of Kerry. Adult buyers mostly avoided that one. But kids were drawn to it. They seemed to like Kerry's face, but more importantly, they trusted him—he looked to them like a strong adult who would banish the scary monster.

Last month, Clever Sister had forwarded this: Kids Pick Kerry to Be the Next President—

NEW YORK - Kid power! Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites) is the winner, and the rest of the country should pay attention because the vote on Nickelodeon's Web site has correctly chosen the president of the United States in the past four elections.

It wasn't wishful thinking—Kerry did win.

But he and the Party failed the kids.

They failed the voters who waited so many hours in a miserable November rain.

They failed the country we want back—in place of a "Homeland."

October 2008: Invasion of The Liberal Bodysnatchers...

...A scenario which must already have happened—if we are to believe this mailer—Yes, indeedy; that reads—

McCain-Palin Solutions for our Families

• Increase funding for stem cell research
• Address climate change
• Fight wasteful spending

Inside the leaflet is this, convincingly all caps:

JOHN MCCAIN AND SARAH PALIN WILL WORK WITH DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS FOR SENSIBLE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEMS FACING AMERICAN FAMILIES... LEADERSHIP THAT REACHES ACROSS PARTY LINES.

Everywhere else, reality is on display.

There's this bit of failed stage management, as one of McCain's camera-unsafe volunteers speaks up.

Yet another volunteer with psychological projection issues sets out to prove The Blacks [and no doubt, Mooslims] are persecuting Republicans—by displaying self-inflicted wounds. One little detail she overlooked: letters read backward, because she used a mirror to create them.

watertiger on the Palin rally crowds: here, here, and here—

It's freakin' Gam-a-vision™. Sweet mother of Hades, women will never be taken seriously in American politics ever again.

watertiger also critiques Palin's outfit, which seems to be on backwards.

The Republicans dream up a Joe Sixpack figure, in "Joe" the "Plumber": not really a plumber, and with a possible Charles Keating family connection... Workers being a non-subject, until Republicans need to fake some populism. And no matter how obvious and lame the stage managing, the media dutifully grab the narrative and run with it.

And "Joe" says that Obama does a "tap dance... almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr."—is there a more obvious tell than that? The guy is in his 30s—and all by himself he thinks up dog whistle comparisons with Sammy Davis, Jr.? Something tells me a person closer to the candidate's age is feeding "Joe" his lines.

Brad at Sadly, No offers a suggestion for the Obama campaign: the perfect working class icon for countering the phony "Joe."

Among the comments:

Leon Trotsky, Exile-in-Mexico—

Joe the Unlicensed Scab Plumber Taking Good Jobs Away From Legal Working Men And Has Avoided Paying What Fucking Taxes He Already Owes So Should Shut His Face About Some Hypothetical Tax Increase...

Hm, doesn't have the same zing.

Dragon-King Wangchuck—

Here’s a better counter to Joe Wurzelbacher:
Under Obama’s plan, Joe would be getting a tax cut even if he made six times as much as he did in 2006:

Court records from a divorce show Mr. Wurzelbacher made $40,000 in 2006.

Also from that Toledo Blade article:

He is also not registered to operate as a plumber in Ohio, which means he's not a plumber.

...

Mr. Wurzelbacher’s notoriety has raised the ire of Tom Joseph, business manager for Local 50 of the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters, and Service Mechanics, who claimed that Mr. Wurzelbacher didn't undergo any apprenticeship training.

So not even a Plumber in Training, he's a Plumber's Assisstant.

"Joe": the plumber's helper...


The effort to demonize Obama as a "community organizer" is funny, even if obvious code for, "poor darkskins forming mob: be afraid!"

This all jogged my mind about "De Organizer"—a 1940 opera by James P. Johnson and Langston Hughes. After its debut, the piece was performed only a couple of times, then believed to be lost. The score was rediscovered a few years ago, and productions since then include one I've seen.

Plot and characters are unfortunately wooden, but the gist is that a group of southern sharecroppers want to form a union and fight their oppressive conditions, so they send for an organizer, to show them the way. There is a strong messianic* tone: the poor, downtrodden farmers await arrival of De Organizer, who will transform their lives by revealing the path to justice.

When I saw this show (late in 2002), we had been through a mere two years of Bush, just over one year of living in a Homeland, and had not yet invaded Iraq.

As the opera ended and cast exited, my reaction to the 60+ year old libretto was, "Hey, I'm still waiting for De Organizer to show up and straighten things out!" It got some bitter laughs from people sitting in earshot.

* It's a good thing this opera is too obscure for the noise machine to connect it to Obama...

The only contemporary recordings of music from the opera were two arrangements of "Hungry Blues," both sung by Anna Robinson. The tune is catchy and lyrics are pointed; an MP3 is here, on Ben Greenberg's very worthwhile blog—named after the song.

Ben is the son of Paul Arthur Greenberg, in the 1960s a special assistant to Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC. A civil rights and labor lawyer, with jazz world connections—I don't know if the two ever met, but Greenberg would have been a man after the heart of Studs Terkel, who's just died at 96.

The country has lost its great oral historian of American life. Studs talked to people of all kinds about living through the Depression; about the American Obsession (the two books specifically on race here and here); and about the subjects of so many other books, written over a lifetime of asking questions and listening to what people had to say.

Which—speaking of media plant "Joe"—included talking to people about work.

And talking to real people about how they've experienced the American Dream.

October 2007: Scream, Electorate, Scream!

As Rumsfeld arrives in Paris, a torture suit is filed by European human rights groups and the Center for Constitutional Rights. From CCR's press release—

We filed a complaint with the Paris prosecutor on October 25, 2007 charging Rumsfeld with ordering and authorizing torture. Rumsfeld was in Paris for a talk sponsored by Foreign Policy magazine, and left through a door connecting to the U.S. embassy to avoid journalists and human rights attorneys outside. Under French law, there is a duty to prosecute and investigate such complaints when the torturer is on French soil. The Paris case is particularly relevant because eight former Guantánamo detainees live in France.

In Paris, watertiger notes: What they didn't count on was his cunning plan to escape!

A seasonally appropriate move by Rumsfeld. As is his next, when he is seen lying low in The Netherlands...

Among other Republican observances of the season, watertiger spots: "Trick or treat for Unitary Executive!"

Not particularly connected to Halloween–Republicans go as bullies every day–but gruesome nevertheless, is the stalking of Graeme Frost and family, after the disabled 12-year old testifies before Congress, prior to the children's health care vote.

Tim Grieve, does the math on this bit of hypocrisy–

When [Tony] Snow announced in August that he was leaving his job as White House press secretary, he said he was doing so because he "ran out of money." Snow made $168,000 at the White House and presumably received health insurance as a federal employee.

...

The clear implication: The $168,000 Snow was making at the White House wasn't enough to handle month-to-month expenses for Snow, his wife and their three kids.

So how about that 12-year-old? His family of six -- one kid bigger than Snow's -- has an annual income of about $45,000. Without SCHIP -- and without health insurance subsidized by an employer -- the family's only route to medical insurance for the kids would have been to buy it themselves on the open market, if they could have gotten it; they apparently tried but were refused because of preexisting conditions.

And about the Republicans' deeming the Frosts fair game–Oh, no. The Republicans would never use children as props–says watertiger, who compiles just a few examples of Bush's photographic child exploitation.

Also from the Family Values Party–

WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 — Senator Larry E. Craig of Idaho, defying the wishes of many in his own Republican Party, said Thursday that he would remain in the Senate through next year despite a court ruling against him in Minnesota, where he had sought to rescind his guilty plea stemming from an undercover sex sting.

While Craig is an easy, obvious target, driftglass concludes that—

Beneath the gales of laughter, what Republican Senator Craig has been mostly is pathetic. A frail human caught up in his own frantic flight from himself, tripping and falling into the spotlight because his pants were tangled up around his ankles.

Under other circumstances, he would just be sad. Under other circumstances, I would feel genuinely sorry for the guy.

But these are not other circumstances, because Republican Senator Craig has spent his professional life choosing to lend his voice to this nation’s chorus of hateful, vicious, self-righteous scum.

...in the end, Republican Senator Craig’s only real mistake when busted was not thinking fast enough on his feet to claim – loudly and con mucho outrage – that he was just looking for WMDs in the potty.

Craig's only mistake, says driftglass, was to Lie Small—when, "Had he Lied Big, stuck his chin out, and stridently accused anyone who questioned him of being an America-hating traitor, he would not today be a figure of ridicule and farce." Had he done that—

Instead of being a national punchline, at this very moment, in an off-ramp men’s room outside of Tacoma, he’d be heroically conducting Operation Raging Beefhammer with some new best friend.

While proudly sporting his freshly-minted Presidential Medal of Freedom.

October 2006: To Hell In A Basket

[Telltale school colors
have been removed]
We're in the thick of the annual fund-raising season at work. There are multiple bake sales, raffles, auctions, contests—all pushed non-stop, until December.

The annual sale of indulgences begins—with labels saying, "I AM WEARING JEANS BECAUSE I HAVE DONATED $1 TO OUR CHARITY" now available. The secretaries slap these on their blouses so they can violate the dress code on Fridays.

It's true that anonymous contributions to the Suggestion Box have asked, "why do we have to observe a dress code in the first place, if it can be tossed out when people cough up $1?" Publicly, everyone is very, very enthusiastic, as management is very, very big on all this.

In December, the final take is divided among families of indigent patients at the University's hospital.

I would prefer to live in a civilized culture where people have health care and living wages.

But bake sales for the poor gets the seal of approval of our trailer park Republicans. Who like to believe, "we take care of our own: don't need no gubmint"—except for funding their jobs at a public institution...

One of the most beloved events of the season is the basket raffle. Work units come up with some theme and assemble a gift basket. The results are photographed and posted for employees to choose which baskets to buy chances for.

This time around, we have the creation above, with the donors' description—

"Homeland Security basket, Be Ready for ANY Emergency"
Camp Lantern & batteries, Faraday flashlight, candles, waterproof matches, portable camp shower (wash off chemicals from a chemical attack), first aid kit, Swiss army knife (to open the bottle of wine in an emergency), canned goods, can opener, water, Twinkies, chocolate bars, clothing bag (change your clothing in case of chemical attack), hand & toe warmers, photo album (keep pictures of your loved ones in case of emergency), playing cards, waterproof UNO cards, bottle of wine, “personal protection” (* and *, of course, [*school colors], and Glow in the Dark for power outages), and a fleece [Department logo] blanket.

Clever Sister asks,

"personal protection"? Condoms?

Robert Parry, on the Military Commissions Act: History should record October 17, 2006, as the reverse of July 4, 1776.

Marjorie Cohn brings up some past campaigns against dissent and perceived threats, from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to McCarthyism. And—

In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in Korematsu v. United States. Justice Robert Jackson warned in his dissent that the ruling would "lie about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."

That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides the basis for the President to round-up both aliens and U.S. citizens he determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Cheney's Halliburton, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of undesirables.

The closeness of Halloween to Election Day may lead to some obvious metaphors, but they're unavoidable in the last few years.

Clever Sister sends an article published in the UK, Republicans say top Democrats support 'group of gay paedophiles'. Andrew Gumbel reports that in races around the country—

Republicans aren't going after their Democratic challengers much on Iraq, or the war on terror, or nuclear proliferation. Instead, members of President Bush's party are accusing their adversaries of being apologists for gay sex between adults and children.

This latest tactic is to try connecting Dems to NAMBLA. One of Gumbel's examples—

In California, a struggling Republican congressman called John Doolittle has argued that since his opponent, Charlie Brown, is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and since the ACLU has in the past defended Nambla's free-speech rights, he is tainted by association. "It is astounding," Mr Doolittle said in a recent press release, "that anyone could defend a group dedicated to aiding and abetting paedophiles." (Mr Doolittle failed to mention that he once acted as a character witness for a friend convicted of sexually assaulting six of his patients.)

Michael Winship's take on this and other slimy tactics—Election '06: I Know Pornography When I See It. From Limbaugh's attack on Michael J. Fox's courageous ads in support of pro-stem cell research candidates, to the NAMBLA charges, to absurdities like

...the...ad accusing New York State Democratic congressional candidate Michael Arcuri of spending tax dollars by calling a fantasy chat line from a New York City hotel. Apparently, an aide -- not even Arcuri himself -- was calling the state Division of Criminal Justice and misdialed the prefix code. The billing records are pretty clear. Cost to the state: $1.25. Humor value: priceless.

Winship concludes—

You want to know what real pornography is? It's the vice president's disingenuous comments about waterboarding and other forms of torture. It's American servicemen and women placed in harm's way by tragic miscalculation. It's an Iraq so deadly people are afraid to leave their homes for fear of abduction or murder...

It's kickbacks and bribes and naysaying scientific research on stem cells and global warming. It's attacking the lame, the halt and the needy and making the lie as American as apple pie.

watertiger creates a hideous jack o'lantern. And notes of another Republican–

Well, he's certainly hellbent on damaging the psyche of the next generation.