Quotable: Morley Callaghan on fascism and the church
"It seems to me that those who have tried to make the rebel cause the Christian cause have no shame. All those who are heart and soul with the rebels have made a clear cut choice between the things that are Caesar's and the things that are God's. They are on the side of property rights against human rights."
--Morley Callaghan, Canadian author, writing during the Spanish Civil War as a Catholic in support of the Republican cause. The Vatican notably took the opposite side, and still does.
From the Halifax News, some important information about the difference between Canadian privacy law and that of our neighbors to the south--a difference that is now being eroded due to the push for "deep integration":
Individual privacy is best protected in Canada and under threat in the United States and the European Union as governments introduce sweeping surveillance and information-gathering measures in the name of security and border control, an international rights group said in a report released yesterday.
Canada, Greece and Romania had the best privacy records of 47 countries surveyed by London-based watchdog Privacy International. Malaysia, Russia and China were ranked worst.
Both Britain and the United States fell into the lowest-performing group of "endemic surveillance societies."
"The general trend is that privacy is being extinguished in country after country," said Simon Davies, director of Privacy International. "Even those countries where we expected ongoing strong privacy protection, like Germany and Canada, are sinking into the mire."
He cites the CIA's accessing the banking records of Canadians through the SWIFT banking information system, the Canadian no-fly list, and the Toronto Transit Commission's installation of security cameras as examples of the erosion of privacy rights.
He also decried the increasing number of programs involving the United States, which he said unfortunately has no federal privacy law.
"What's happening, is that Canadian information, sensitive information, is flowing across the border in increasing volumes," Davies said.
"Frankly, that the sort of situation where government should put pressure on the U.S. government to protect that information legally," he said, "But it's not doing so."
And that's what worries me. Our government has a long and sorry history of caving to that elephant just to the south of us.
Back when Dr. Ewen Cameron was doing his "brainwashing" torture experiments on behalf of the CIA, no one stopped him. He wasn't even a Canadian citizen, but he was allowed to torture Canadians in the name of a grotesque travesty of science. Our government never raised hell on their behalf. Too afraid to confront that behemoth. The CIA settled out of court the day before they were to go on trial, for a then-unheard-of $750,000. Our government also agreed to a payoff--in exchange for the victims not being able to sue them or the hospital in which the experiments took place.
Frankly, they should be sued. For being so prostrate and intransigent and just plain feckless. Their job--for which we hire them by voting in elections--is to take responsibility for the safety and security and well-being of all Canadians. They are our public servants, and they fell down on the job. Why? Because Uncle Sam told them to bow. I doubt if they even asked how low; they just all kowtowed on command. Or more accurately, they kowtowed without even waiting for the command.
Now, this is very strange, because none of us ever voted for Uncle Sam. Back in 1812, our troops torched the White House rather than let the Yanks take our land. Canada is the only country that ever did that and got away with it. Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter to the contrary, we were not lucky, nor were the Yanks benevolent--we were fierce, we prevailed, and we fought 'em to a draw. We did not cede so much as an inch of our border to them. The Americans learned to respect us as they seem not to have respected any other country since. Maybe that was because it was relatively early in their history, and they did not yet have the Military-Industrial Complex that rules them today. Whatever the reason was, though, the War of 1812 defined us and set us apart from them. We fly the Maple Leaf today, and not the Stars and Stripes, because of that victory.
I went to university in Kingston, Ontario--a town storied for its role in that war, since the troops from nearby Fort Henry were part of our defence force. One of the martello towers that kept watch over our shore is very near the Queen's University campus, and in spring, its moat is a carpet of violets. But that's now. Back then, it was filled with water. It had to be: New York State is right across the lake from us.
I have friends in the States. How indignant would they be to know that our own government won't protect us from theirs--which they rail against all the time too, because it tramples on their liberties as much as it does on those of people all over the world? Probably just as indignant as was Joe Rauh, the American lawyer Dr. Cameron's Canadian victims engaged to sue the CIA on their behalf. They see us as different from them all right, but in an enviable way. They wish they had a government more like ours. Ours provides us with universal healthcare and schooling and a social safety net. And until recently, it wasn't spying on us citizens. Theirs is now hellbent on doing away with what little it used to provide on all those fronts. Instead of serving the people, it serves its capitalist masters. And, oh yeah--to serve those masters better, it spies on the people. Its own people. And now, our people.
And if you think Dr. Cameron's mad-scientist experiments were some kind of aberration and that all that shit is in the past and there is no sense bringing it up now, have I got news for you: they are still being used by the CIA today. As part of its current torture-interrogation manual, no less. Iraqis and Afghans, most of them innocent, have been subjected to the very tortures investigated by Ewen Cameron in Montreal. So have countless Southeast Asians and Latin Americans since the 1960s. Everywhere the war machine went, it used those techniques--often not so much to obtain useful information, but simply to ensure compliance and docility in the shocked populace it sought to suppress.
How ironic would it be if those horrors came back and were used against us Canadians?
Well, in a way, they have been. Just ask Maher Arar. Being a Canadian, and utterly innocent, didn't spare him from the wrath of Uncle Sam. They sent him to Syria for an extended session of outsourced torture. Part of it involved extreme isolation, electroshock and mental torment strikingly similar to the kind researched by Ewen Cameron.
Our government has not stood up for Maher Arar any better than it did for Cameron's victims. On the contrary: it was complicit in what happened to him. Project A-O Canada was the name of the sting that turned him over to the hands of his torturers. Basically, the Mounties gave his name to the US authorities to investigate. And our government did nothing to stop it, even though it was their duty to intervene on his behalf. Presumably it was because Arar was born in Syria, but I have a sneaking suspicion they'd have done it even if he were a native son. They have no pride that way.
Exactly what they expect to gain from all this, I have no idea. Unless maybe it's kickbacks from the Military-Industrial-Espionage Complex. Which are also deeply illegal here. Just ask Brian Mulroney. Don't expect an honest answer, though; the man's not known for his honesty. His nickname is "Lyin' Brian", and his finest moment was when he burst into song with Ronnie Ray-Gun, another professional liar. And then promptly sold us down the river. (Guess who to.)
Shameful? Oh yeah. Surprising? Hardly. Like I said, our government is prostrate, intransigent and feckless. It has been for a very long time, and with but a few honorable exceptions (who were all promptly termed "anti-American" for telling it like it was).
Shit, we're only Canadians. We only kicked ass and took names in the War of 1812, and the allies in both world wars would have lost if not for us. We were in it all from the beginning and to the hilt, but we were never imperialistic, unlike some countries I could name.
Look: I'm all for solidarity with my brothers and sisters south of the 49th Parallel, but I am not for "deep integration" and corporatist spying and RCMP-facilitated torture taxis to Syria (or wherever else they outsource that shit to). Call me funny, but I like sovereignty.
And now that I've said that, I will probably be called "anti-American", too.
Gol-dang, if that Osama isn't the most talkative spook or the most animated corpse you've ever seen. Now that everyone is talking about his death (thank you, Beni!), he has to pipe up via audiotape and claim that the rumors of his demise are premature...
Most of the 56-minute tape dealt with Iraq, apparently al-Qaida's latest attempt to keep supporters in Iraq unified at a time when the U.S. military claims to have al-Qaida's Iraq branch on the run.
The tape did not mention Pakistan or the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, though Pakistan's government has blamed al-Qaida and the Taliban for her death on Thursday. That suggested the tape was made before the assassination.
Or by someone who isn't in fact Osama.
This is hardly the first time we've seen an impostor being fobbed off as him. Or heard one, come to that. Apparently, since we aren't overly familiar with his voice (are you? I'm not), and all Arabic-speakers are supposed to sound alike to our western ears, we are meant to take it on faith that if a Pentagon "expert" says it's him, it must be him. Never mind that the Pentagon has had a problem with Arabic translations, since it refuses to let perfectly qualified gay people do the job even in the face of an acute shortage.
So...how are we to know if this latest "Osama" is, in fact, the real Osama? Or, come to that, if any of the rest of them were?
We aren't meant to. We are meant to simply accept the explanation we are given. Such as that the tape was made before the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The possibility that it's a fake isn't even being entertained. Why? Because we're also supposed to take the Pakistani dictator government's word for it that al-Q and the Taliban are responsible for her death.
And of course, we are not to pay any attention to all those little men from the CIA and the Pakistani ISI behind the curtain.
What we are meant to believe is that the war in Iraq is going better than it is. It must be going better, else why would Osama pipe up so conveniently just now to buck up the insurgents? Remember, the Pentagon says that al-Q is on the retreat in Iraq. And why would the Pentagon lie?
So here we are, seeing them kill two birds with one stone--the rumor of Osama's early demise, and that of BushCo's MessO'Potamia having turned into an irrevocable clusterfuck, right along with BushCo's Pakistan. The fact that there was no al-Q in Iraq before the Coalition of the Killing invaded is being conveniently left out of this narrative, along with Goddess only knows how many other salient facts. Instead, we're getting crapaganda like this:
White House spokesman Tony Fratto said bin Laden's tape shows that al-Qaida's aim is to block democracy and freedom for all Iraqis.
"It also reminds us that the mission to defeat al-Qaida in Iraq is critically important and must succeed," Fratto said. "The Iraqi people — every day, and in increasing numbers — are choosing freedom and standing against the murderous, hateful ideology of AQI. And we stand with them."
Several hours before the tape was issued, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, said al-Qaida was becoming increasingly fearful of losing the support of Sunni Arabs and had begun targeting the leaders of the Awakening Councils.
Petraeus said al-Qaida attaches "enormous importance" to "these tribes that have turned against them, and to the general sense that Sunni Arab communities have rejected them more and more around Iraq."
"They are trying to counter this and they have done so by attacking them," which is increasingly turning Sunnis against al-Qaida, he said.
Never mind that the majority of Iraqis, Sunni or otherwise, were never for al-Q (remember, it was never in their country before the invasion.) The anti-coalition sentiment in Iraq is not due to any agitation on the part of al-Q or other terrorists, but is simply the Iraqis fighting back against an unwelcome foreign presence which is there to take their oil, override their elected officials, and open the country to big foreign businesses while closing off all prospects for Iraqi self-determination--politically, economically, you name it.
The idea that Iraqis would welcome the US-dominated coalition as liberators was ludicrous from the moment it crossed Rummy's shrivelled lips. Never mind Saddam's evils, whether real or imaginary. Even he was better than the "freedom" the disaster-capitalists were hell-bent on ramming through over the objections of the Iraqis themselves. For that "freedom" was not meant for Iraqis, not ever for them--it was only for the big business moguls, particularly those of the mercenary-industrial complex. Ordinary Iraqis weren't being invited to rebuild the country the US had so thoughtfully broken. They were basically told to go fuck themselves while foreign contractors came to do the job--poorly and at great expense.
This is why we have to treat with extreme skepticism anything we hear from the current squatters in the White House (and their hand-picked lackeys at the Pentagon). They lied to us all along; why stop now?
And I doubt very much we're hearing the truth about the murder of Benazir Bhutto from them, either. Already the cause of her death has changed so many times, and with no autopsy (and no photos), there is no way to verify anything. One thing I can say with absolute certainty is that there is no way in hell that I would believe she could have bumped her head so hard ducking inside her vehicle as to fracture her own skull. Or, come to that, leave bullet wounds in it:
Pakistan People's Party Information Secretary Sherry Rehman said on Saturday that she saw a bullet wound in Benazir's head when she bathed her body after her assassination, AFP reported.
She said that she was in the former premier's motorcade at the time of the gun and suicide attack and rejected government claims that the death was caused when Benazir's head hit her sunroof.
"I was actually part of the party which bathed her body before the funeral," she said, adding that her car was used to transport Benazir to hospital. "There was a bullet wound I saw that went in from the back of her head and came out the other side. We could not even wash her properly because the wound was still seeping. She lost a huge amount of blood," Sherry explained.
Cover-up: Sherry accused the government of mounting a cover-up over Benazir's death. "The hospital was made to change its statement. They never gave a proper report," she said. "I believe the Interior Ministry is saying that she died from some concussion that may have taken place against the sunroof. This is ridiculous, dangerous nonsense because it is a cover-up of what actually happened," she added. She said the government had denied Benazir the security measures she had been asking for, Reuters adds.
Once again, the finger of blame points back at Musharraf. No surprises there; Pakistanis of all walks refuse to believe he is blameless.
I think they would also do well to keep their eyes on his puppet-masters in Washington. Get a load of this latest bit of weirdness from the State Dept.:
It was a decidedly odd moment. On Thursday, within hours of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, State Department spokesman Tom Casey told reporters in Washington that his boss, Condoleezza Rice, had quickly made two calls. One was to Bhutto's bereaved husband, Asif Ali Zardari. Rice's other call, Casey said, was to the man he called Bhutto's "successor," Amin Fahim, the vice chairman of her Pakistan Peoples Party. Casey couldn't even quite master this obscure politician's name, but he said, "I'll leave it up to Mr. Amin Fahir—Fahim—as the new head of the Pakistan People's Party to determine how that party is going to participate in the electoral process."
The problem is, nobody but the State Department—especially not the political elites in Pakistan, even those within Bhutto's own party—sees Fahim in such a role, and certainly not so soon. Critics suggest that the administration is so eager to graft legitimacy onto President Pervez Musharraf, its ever-more-unpopular ally in the war on terror, that it is pressing too hard to move past Bhutto and continue with scheduled Jan. 8 parliamentary elections, even though riots are paralyzing the country. "They're trying to rush everything. This is a disaster," says Marvin Weinbaum, a former State Depratment official and current scholar at the Middle East Institute. "This is now our new game plan: We're working out a deal between Fahim and Musharraf after the election. They mention Fahim because they don't know any better. The fact is, she [Bhutto] didn't trust him."
Pakistani political experts tend to agree with Weinbaum. Although Fahim was sitting next to Bhutto in her SUV when she died, "he's not the successor," says Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani diplomat and scholar who was very close to Bhutto and knows many within the party. "He's respected. He has a constituency. But he's not a charismatic figure" like Bhutto. In fact, given the dynastic politics of Pakistan, the person who succeeds her is far more likely to be her husband, Zardari, the former Karachi playboy and polo star who is widely blamed for the tangle of corruption that strangled and cut short Bhutto's two terms in office. (Zardari was labeled "Mr. 10 Percent" in the Pakistani press because of the commissions and kickbacks he allegedly demanded from contractors doing business with the Pakistani government.) A long shot PPP candidate to succeed Bhutto might be Aitzaz Ahsan, who personally engineered the reinstatement of sacked Supreme Court Chief Justice Chaudhry earlier this year. Ahsan, however, was known to have broken with Bhutto over her decision to hold tentative talks with Musharraf about a coalition government and is considered to have too little support inside the party.
With emotions still so raw, no one knows whether anyone can even begin to fill the void that Bhutto left behind. Casey told Newsweek Friday that he had misspoken on Thursday when he named Fahim as Bhutto's successor. "That's my mistake," Casey said. "That's technically inaccurate. He is the nominal interim head of the party. But God knows it may not be, in the end, a single person. There isn't a single one who stands out right now. My own personal thought on this is they may end up with something like India's Congress Party, where Sonia Gandhi is head of [the] party but doesn't lead the ticket." Casey added, "U.S. policy isn't to anoint candidates or pick leaders for Pakistan."
No? Well, you could have fooled me. They certainly have their pugmarks all over not only the current so-called president, but also the "successor" that Bhutto certainly would never have picked.
Séances at the Pentagon. Bizarre prognostications from the State Dept. Jeezus, what next? Will the ghost of Ronnie Ray-Gun start sending messages by way of his old astrologer?
At this rate, my trusty Ouija board could soon become obsolete.
Festive Left Friday Blogging: Operation Emmanuel is a go!
The operation to bring three hostages out of FARC territory in Colombia is now on. This afternoon, military helicopters left Venezuela for Colombia, bearing the Red Cross logo to signify that this is a humanitarian mission.
And of course, it was a great day for two faithful campaigners who didn't stop working for this moment:
Chavecito and Colombian senator Piedad Cordoba go over a map to see what path the rescue 'copters will take.
They were also joined by a third amigo:
Former president of Argentina, Nestor Kirchner, there to lend Argentina's support and oversight to the mission.
And...they're off! Good luck, compañeros, see you on the other side.
An intriguing David Frost interview from last November, shortly after a failed assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto, who was killed today in Rawalpindi, Pakistan:
At 6:13 in this video, she mentions an "Omar Sheikh, who murdered Osama bin Laden" (italics mine).
Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot???
Who in hell is this Omar Sheikh? Is it the same one who murdered Danny Pearl? And when/where/how did he do the deed? And most importantly, why is there still a war on Terra going on when Emmanuel Goldstein is dead?
And oh yeah: might Beni have been murdered for spilling the beans on all this? She was certainly inconvenient to more people than just Dubya's pet dictator. She very clearly states in the interview that she stopped Pakistan from becoming a terrorist state as far back as 1993. In fact, Ramzi Yousef--the author of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre--is said to have made an attempt on her life in that same year. Yousef also hatched the Bojinka plot in the 1990s after the first WTC bombing failed to produce the desired results; Bojinka failed, but eventually yielded knowledge that the 9-11 hijackers were able to use successfully. Ramzi Yousef, owing to his having been a fighter in the Afghan-Soviet war of the 1980s, is also known to have ties to the CIA. He also has ties to the Pakistani ISI--who have motives of their own for wanting Beni dead, I'm sure.
Noise, at UNN, suggests something worth looking into:
Omar Saeed Sheikh has been alleged to be an MI6 asset. Some people have suggested Bhutto meant Daniel Pearl was murdered by Sheikh but it seems strange to get confused between Pearl and Bin Laden.
Sheikh was arrested for the murder of Pearl on February 12, 2002. So if Bhutto's statement was accurate that obviously means Bin Laden has been dead for years.
Obviously Benazir Bhutto was not killed by a lone nut. There were surely others behind him. Who are they, and what was their real motive? And most importantly, where does their money trail lead back to?
Questions, questions. Who's got some answers for me?
...and neither does he, nor any of his lackeys, have the slightest concept of a little thing known as reading comprehension.
Think Progress has ferreted out the real source of Dubya's antipathy to embryonic stem cell research--a total misinterpretation of an improbable scenario from Aldous Huxley (read aloud to him, of course, by one of his loyal flunkies, since Dubya can't be bothered to bestir himself):
In a new piece in Commentary magazine, Jay Lefkowitz — who advised Bush on stem cells — reveals how the President formulated his 2001 policy. While Bush heard from a variety of groups on both sides of the issue, the turning point appeared to come when Lefkowitz read from Aldous Huxley's fictional novel, Brave New World, and scared Bush:
A few days later, I brought into the Oval Office my copy of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's 1932 anti-utopian novel, and as I read passages aloud imagining a future in which humans would be bred in hatcheries, a chill came over the room.
"We're tinkering with the boundaries of life here," Bush said when I finished. "We're on the edge of a cliff. And if we take a step off the cliff, there's no going back. Perhaps we should only take one step at a time."
It's unclear what passage Lefkowitz read, but Brave New World opens with a scene at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where embryos are turned into full human beings — often dozens of pairs of "identical twins" to ensure "social stability."
Say, isn't Dubya the father of (apparently non-identical) twins?
And isn't he also a proponent of adopting the excess embryos from in-vitro fertilizations, which would otherwise be dumped as medical waste?
And just totally apropos of nothing, isn't the planet already overrun with mass-produced human beings--while religious conservatives of various stripes are still busily militating against not only abortion, but birth control (but not, interestingly, fertility treatments that produce excess embryos)? Therefore, human cloning would make no sense on either a scientific or an ethical level. There are already so many of us that there is no need, particularly from a standpoint of social stability, for heaps of DNA-matched human bookends bred on purpose.
BTW, the correct term for Brave New World is not "anti-utopian", it is dystopian. Brave New World is not set in anything remotely resembling an Utopia, and therefore can hardly be said to be opposed to the concept. Huxley's dystopian vision was that of a world where a strange amalgam of capitalism and totalitarianism had run amuck. Everything is mass-manufactured, assembly-line style, including human beings, and Henry Ford is the God of their religion. Not very utopian, is it now?
And the most chilling aspect of this dystopian vision is not the human cloning, but the aspect of the manufacturing process that follows--in the second chapter:
Not so very long ago (a century or thereabouts), Gammas, Deltas, even Epsilons, had been conditioned to like flowers--flowers in particular and wild nature in general. The idea was to make them want to be going out into the country at every available opportunity, and so compel them to consume transport.
'And didn't they consume transport?' asked the student.
'Quite a lot,' the DHC replied. 'But nothing else.'
Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport. For of course it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it. The problem was to find an economically sounder reason for consuming transport than a mere affection for primroses and landscapes. It was duly found.
'We condition the masses to hate the country,' concluded the Director. 'But simultaneously we condition them to love all country sports. At the same time, we see to it that all country sports shall entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport. Hence those electric shocks.'
"Those electric shocks"--my, how little has changed in the 600-some years since Our Ford manufactured the world as the Brave New Worlders know it. Say, isn't Dubya also rather big on the use of electric shocks, particularly as a means of terrorizing people into compliance, not only with cruel interrogators, but with the very laboratory-grown world as Corporate America would like us to consume it? That's quite the ethical, scientific position...
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
Dystopia is looking an awful lot like the here-and-now, even without the decanted cloned babies. We have mass conditioning, only it's a lot more subtle and sophisticated than the crude Pavlovian shit we see in Brave New World. We call it The Media. Its job is, quite simply, to get us to consume crap, be smug about whatever our paltry and limited status in this cowardly old world may be, and above all, do nothing to change the paradigm. After all, that is what our current totalitarian capitalist society thrives on: apathy, ignorance, mass production (preferably in a sweatshop in a country with lax environmental and labor regulations) and mass consumption (everyfuckingwhere).
The media's job is not really to enlighten us; it is to encourage the "right" attitude ("U-S-A! U-S-A!! U-S-A!!!") by feeding us a highly selected diet of information (or rather, misinformation). Think of the last time you picked up a women's magazine: how much of what was in it was actual information, impartially offered for the enlightenment of a woman? Precious little, I'll bet. Most of the "information" I see in such magazines is aimed (often not even subtly) at pushing product. They could tell us how to do our own hot oil treatments, for example, but they don't. They would rather tell us to buy a pricey "shine-boosting serum" concocted by an "expert" from some expensive salon. (My humble guess is that they're not taking payola from the olive-oil industry.) They could also share with you (as I'm about to do) the great secret that Vitamin B complex, 100 mg a day, is a better treatment for clinical depression than any expensive, brand-name prescription drug that you see advertised in a US magazine. For that matter, so is learning to stand up and cuss out your oppressor instead of just lying down and taking it. But no, the media must stay on message: "Soma--a gramme is better than a damn!"
I could go on, but you get the picture. Why bother banning stem-cell research on "ethical" grounds when you already have no more ethics than the Goddess gave a can of pickled water chestnuts? Why bother saving all the "snowflake babies" from being chucked out in their test tubes and petri dishes when you've already got a society of conformists who might as well be clones, even if they weren't decanted from an assembly line of laboratory flasks? And why worry about the nonexistent prospect of decanted babies when surplus embryos--sorry, little Susie Snowflakes--have to be decanted, so to speak, into the wombs of their "adoptive mothers", right here and now, in accordance with the whims of George W. Lebensborn Bush?
I know this will come as a terrible shock to all the fetus fetishists out there, but the frightening misuses of reproductive technology Dubya is supposedly so worried about will never come to pass. Human cloning? Um, Dolly the short-lived sheep single-hoofedly put the kibosh to that idea. (Huxley never heard of telomeres; they hadn't been discovered when he wrote his work of fiction. Apparently Dubya has yet to hear of them himself. Quick, somebody, read something to him.) Animal-human hybrids? When the vast majority of informed people have a healthy fear of genetically tampered Frankenfoods? Um, yeah. Wake me up when it happens; I'm not about to lose sleep over the prospect that one morning I will find myself with cat eyes and a monkey tail. I'm far more concerned about what will happen to the right to privacy and reproductive freedom of my American sisters if more morons like Dubya get their mitts on them.
And even more than that, I'm worried about the way the media has turned so many of my contemporaries' brains inside out.
You see, I not only own a copy of Brave New World, I can actually comprehend it. Something Dubya and whatsisname can't be bothered to do, because it requires the use of a lot more grey matter than either one has got.
Of course, embryonic stem cells might help them with that. But since they're opposed, and we have it all in writing, they're not entitled to any.
American Fascists: the Hour interview with Chris Hedges
George Stroumboulopoulos, host of CBC's The Hour (he never introduces himself as "your host", always, endearingly, as "your boyfriend") interviews Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists:
Hedges makes the interesting and useful point that the reason Canada doesn't have a fundie-dominionist problem is because we still have some semblance of a social safety net. He observes that fascism takes hold when there is prolonged instability and insecurity in a country. His only fault, as far as I can see, is that he doesn't see it is already happening in the United States.
Quotable: Oskar Lafontaine on the neo-con world order
"The European Left has lost credibility. It has opened itself too much to neoliberalism, which spells destruction for the social order. If it reverts to its origins, it will make gains again."
--Oskar Lafontaine, German leftist politician, in an interview with Aporrea. Translation mine.
John McCutcheon tells the story of his ballad and the dedicated band of German followers it won him.
The Christmas Truce of 1914 really happened, and I often wonder what would have happened if only that spirit had prevailed. If only all the soldiers in the trenches had simply disobeyed their commanding officers on both sides, and no one fired another shot again--except maybe at the commanders, to tell them to back off.
For it was the commanders, far behind the lines, that got the shooting started up again--go figure, the troops had a hard time working up the animosity to shoot at people they'd been singing carols, sharing candies and playing pick-up soccer with just hours before. Indeed, the average footsoldier had trouble understanding just what was so evil about the other side, because those other guys looked just like him. The language and the uniform might be different, but the spirit was the same. The Germans and the British were of the same religion. And the fact that their religion centred around a Prince of Peace, whose birthdate they all celebrated the same way (and to the tune of the same hymns!) could not have been lost on a single one of them. And it wasn't.
Nor was it lost on the commanders, who ordered artillery bombardments on Christmas Eve in all subsequent years of the war to prevent just such truces from happening again. It's very hard to sing "Silent Night" with gunfire erupting all around.
I often think that the Germans and the British have more in common than just religion and holidays and traditional songs. There's another element of spirit, a more pernicious one, that they share. Kurt Vonnegut once asked the great German novelist, Heinrich Böll, what was the worst thing about the Germans, and Böll promptly replied that it was obedience. Suddenly, that phrase "the dogs of war" takes on a new meaning: obedience, vicious obedience, trained in by hard drilling. Bark, lunge and bite on command, like a junkyard dog.
In the Nazi era, a new noun came into use, a chillingly appropriate one: Kadavergehorsamkeit. Literally, cadaver-obedience. Obedience unto death, because corpses can neither rebel nor complain.
What might the world look like today if that canine obedience-unto-death had been circumvented or ignored? Would there have been another war? Would the Kaiser have lasted in power until 1918? Would Adolf Hitler have risen to power with as little challenge as he faced, if Germans had grown used to being disobedient and independent-minded in the intervening years? And what would Britain have looked like if its own troops had decided that an empire wasn't worth getting politely and obediently killed over, let alone politely and obediently killing someone else who looked and acted remarkably like them?
Poor St. Nick--Yuletide isn't over yet, and already it's getting awfully rough on him. In Bethlehem, he got busted:
Israeli soldiers arrested various Palestinians--among them, one dressed as St. Nicholas--who were protesting the apartheid wall which the Israeli Zionist occupiers had built in that location.
Residents of Bethlehem, a city famed as the birthplace of Christ, had been protesting peacefully against the occupying forces and the "wall of shame" which separates the Palestinian lands and families.
Translation mine. Photos at the link; warning--may scar your little children for life.
Meanwhile, in New Zealand, some dopey elves got a little too far into the holiday cheer:
Kate Gorman, 35, was waiting to see "Enchanted" with her two young children.
"At least 50 drunk idiots dressed up like Santa came in through the main door," she said. "They were kicking things over, ripping down posters and smashing everything in sight."
"They were all dressed as Santa and shouting 'ho f*****g ho'," she told the paper.
Her children, Gabriella, 6, and Jackson, 7, had been confused by the incident, she said.
"They asked me, 'are they Santa's helpers gone crazy?' and I said 'no, they are just idiots'."
It's things like this that make you go Bah humbug.
The Playboy and the Prettyboy stir up shit in the barrios
Remember how awhile back I blogged about Leopoldo Lopez, the mayor of a wealthy district in Caracas? And only yesterday, I had a little item about Yon Goicoechea? Well, now there's proof that Prettyboy Lopez and Playboy Yon-Yon are up to no good...
Neighbors of the most populous zones of Caracas have denounced Yon Goicoechea and mayor Lopez for coming into their communities to organize clandestine meetings there, with the intent of fomenting violent actions in the new year to get rid of President Chavez.
The meetings took place in the districts of Antimano, Caricuao and Los Cortijos; one took place this past week in the Colegio San Agustin in the UD4 sector of Caricuao, according to our source, and was attended by members of the "Comando de la Resistencia".
Translation mine.
A few days ago the Miami Herald reported "Chavez opposition brewing in barrios". They made it sound like once-loyal Chavistas were turning on their president because they feared that the proposed constitutional reform would mean a loss of private property--a lie frequently hyped by the opposition media (and echoed by its faithful foreign counterparts such as the Miami Herald.)
The fact that reality looks nothing like the scare stories didn't stop the misreporting. In fact, I suspect that the anti-reform media campaign was so strident precisely because the reforms were far-reaching and largely beneficial to the poor in the barrios, while leaving Venezuela's traditional ruling classes (to whom the Prettyboy and the Playboy both belong) out in the cold. If the people had been properly informed as to their nature by all media in Venezuela, chances are the reforms would have passed with a resounding yes. The right to collective and communal property, for example, would mean that big landowners looking to grab more land would have a harder time doing it, since collectives have strength-in-numbers going for them, while land-grabbers prefer to divide and conquer.
And don't anyone believe that the old owners of Venezuela don't have their eyes on those barrios. If they're not up for playing slumlord, they are almost certainly hoping to drive the poor out and plunk either expensive condos or golf courses onto the land on which those shantytowns are currently sitting. The idea that the shantytown dwellers have a right to own the land, not just squat on it (and thus remain vulnerable to being driven out by force) is profoundly threatening to those who already own more than enough property in Venezuela as it stands. Therefore, it makes perfect sense that elitists like Lopez and Goicoechea should be out and about in those same poorer neighborhoods, fomenting violence through clandestine meetings and at the same time trying to sow open doubt about the intentions of a president who, throughout his tenure, has enjoyed the reputation of being a friend of the poor.
Meanwhile, it must be shocking for people in those poor neighborhoods to see the mayor from a rich municipality slumming on their turf. He has no legitimate reason to be there, and neither does the "student" from the private university. No wonder they sounded the alarm.
The question is, will the lamestream media hear it, or will they just go on making like this?
From the Department of People You Can't Take Seriously, a real doozer:
Check the headline circled in yellow. That's an interview with Yon Goicoechea, a Venezuelan "student opposition leader". Yon's apparently not a bit modest about his media whoredom--the headline quotes him saying "I always knew I'd be a leader".
Here's what Aporrea has to say about Yon and his glorious destiny:
Between an ad for Scotch whisky (12 years old) and some pictures of a semi-nude "bunny", between pages 32 and 35, you can read the article with abundant text, 30 questions, and six photos of the young "director".
Of course, being a public personage like he is, there's nothing wrong with him offering declarations via the media. If he dedicates himself to political militancy, his business is to make himself heard one way or another.
But...okay fine: You make political declarations on human rights via Playboy? Is it a legitimate forum to speak of liberty and democracy in a publication which is macho, sexist, and which treats women as objects or merchandise? Is it possible to take seriously someone who talks about his drunken antics between pictures of semi-nude girls...that he is fighting for human rights?
Translation mine.
Of course, to really get to know Yon, it's important to remember the old biblical saying, "By their fruits shall ye know them." He's been linked to a lot of recent student violence leading up to the latest referendum.
It's also instructive to see the little angel in action:
You can see Yon at around 2:23 in this video. He can't keep his beady eyes still. Especially when he's prattling about "human rights".
When's the last time you felt a person who looked so shifty was worth taking at face value?
This just in from Aporrea: Three hostages have just been released by the FARC rebels in Colombia, to be handed over in response to negotiations with president Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and senator Piedad Cordoba of Colombia. They are Clara Rojas (presidential running-mate of Ingrid Betancourt), her son Emanuel, and Consuelo Gonzalez.
Here's the video:
The hostages will be handed over to Chavez, or whomever he designates as a go-between. (Piedad Cordoba seems an obvious choice to me.)
The newsdesk at Globovision was able to contact Clara Rojas's mother by phone. She is understandably very emotional at the good news.
The second caller, Juan Carlos Lecompte (Ingrid Betancourt's husband), characterizes this as a major goodwill gesture. Clearly, everyone is hoping Ingrid will be next on the list of those released.
Oh, and to all you right-wing windsocks at FrontPage Magazine: You can stow your cutesy headlines now. Nobody "FARCed up" (except Alvaro Uribe); the negotiators were successful despite the idiocy--or more likely, deliberate sabotage--on the part of the Colombian government. It's worth reminding y'all that Ingrid Betancourt's family--and the French government--have all been solidly behind the Chavez/Cordoba negotiations the whole time, and when Uribe called them off, there was a huge clamor for reinstatement. Like it or not, President Chavez is the only political leader the FARC respect enough to make such a gesture. That should tell you something about him. You may want to keep your future words on Chavecito soft and sweet, in case you have to eat them again.
Viva Uruguay! First, on the trade front, the Uruguayan congress punched a fat hole through BushCo's plans for the Southern Cone:
The Uruguayan ruling leftist coalition Frente Amplio (FA) reiterated on Sunday its rejection of a free trade agreement with the United States.
[...]
Montevideo explored the possibility of a free trade agreement with Washington, but the idea sank amid reluctance on the part of sectors of the governing coalition and the members of Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, while Venezuela is on the verge of full membership), which does not permit bilateral negotiations with third countries.
Uruguay's last military dictator, Gregorio Alvarez, was charged Monday with the forced disappearance of political prisoners, cheering human rights activists who have long campaigned for his prosecution.
Alvarez, now 82 and retired, was the army general who led Uruguay from 1982 until shortly before the country restored democracy in 1985.
Arrested without incident at his home on Monday, he was sent to a military prison to await trial in connection with the disappearance of some 40 Uruguayan political prisoners who were seized by military rulers in neighboring Argentina and secretly returned to Uruguay in 1977 and 1978, prosecutor Mirtha Guianze said.
His arrest is a "historic moment" for human rights, said activist Oscar Lopez Goldaracena, whose group, Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared, has campaigned for justice for years.
Alvarez said in an earlier court appearance that he knew nothing of the illegal abductions and forced disappearances, but the prosecutor has argued that Alvarez was in a position to know what happened as former army commander in chief and later, de facto president.
Prosecutors say Uruguayan political prisoners were secretly airlifted from Argentina as part of "Operation Condor," in which South America's right-wing military regimes cooperated, with secret help from U.S. intelligence agencies, to crush leftist dissent and leave no sanctuary for dissidents fleeing their countries.
The military ruled Uruguay between 1973 and 1985. Argentina was under military dictatorship from 1976 until 1983.
Some 150 Uruguayan activists remain missing, believed to have been seized by governments of the era. Argentines are still seeking information about nearly 13,000 officially listed as dead or missing from the period of military rule.
[...]
The detention of Alvarez comes 13 months after the arrest of the man who headed the first military-dominated government, Juan Maria Bordaberry, who faces 14 homicide charges related to "dirty war" killings of the 1970s. He is under house arrest due to health problems.
It's a great time to start righting the wrongs of the past, and it's no coincidence that these two things are linked. Uruguay's military dictatorship was, like those of Argentina and Chile, installed by Washington to make South America safer for capitalists and more dangerous for everyone else. Read Naomi Klein's latest book if you don't believe me.
Looks like the dictatorships are well and truly ending now.
...and as proof of that, I offer the latest thoughts from the mouth of Fidel Castro:
Ailing leader Fidel Castro said in a letter read on state television Monday that he does not intend to cling to power forever or stand in the way of a younger generation, but invoked the example of a renowned Brazilian architect who is still working at 100.
"My elemental duty is not to cling to positions, or even less to obstruct the path of younger people, but to share experiences and ideas whose modest worth comes from the exceptional era in which I lived," Castro wrote in the final paragraph of a lengthy letter discussing the Bali summit on global warming.
[...]
"I think like (Oscar) Niemeyer that you have to be of consequence up to the end," Castro wrote in Monday's essay, referring to the Brazilian architect who was honored around the world as he turned 100 on Saturday.
Niemeyer helped design the U.N. headquarters and the main buildings of Brazil's capital, winning in 1988 the Pritzker Architecture Prize — dubbed the Nobel of architecture.
In an essay over the weekend, Castro paid homage to Niemeyer, a lifelong communist who was exiled for several years during Brazil's 1964-85 military dictatorship.
If anyone is looking to accuse somebody (I won't say who) of trying to impose "Castro-communism" and make himself president for life, don't bother. Even Castro the communist isn't interested in being president for life.
Yeah, tell it to the Beeb. It seems to have been bending over to prove the opposite lately. Especially with "reports" like this:
This so-called reporter, John Sweeney, is absolutely incredible. As in, "not credible". As in, "like a three-dollar bill". As in "Is he carrying water for Big Oil and that crazy Boris Johnson? Smells that way to me!"
To Sweeney-among-the-nightingales, Simon Bolivar (whose name apparently isn't even worth pronouncing correctly) is just a statue covered in pigeon crap. Thus, the president of the country is "the high priest" of crap-coated-statue worship. No mention of what Simon Bolivar did--a task which he was forced by the native oligarchy to leave undone when he died prematurely (177 years ago today) in Colombia. No mention of his heroism in liberating five Latin American nations from Spain. No mention of anything about him at all, except that his statue attracts a lot of pooping birds (as does, I'm sure, that of Sir Winston Churchill, that laudable old imperial racist).
The present-day Bolivarian revolution, according to Sweeney, is also a load of birdshit. Evidence of the revolution's unimpressive "successes" is a ranch which, according to its previous owner, was confiscated without payment, at gunpoint and under death threats. One would think something as scandalous as that would have actually made the news (as does every other dust mote in Venezuela's eyes), but I can't find any actual news stories. And Sweeney doesn't question this, nor does he produce proof either in favor or to the contrary. He just takes the ex-owner's word for it--as if latifundistas never lie in Venezuela, especially about the idle land they don't want to give up OR work on. The fact that the co-op now running it has built up its own herd from practically nothing is...well, practically nothing. Sweeney prefers to fixate on the muddy floor of the milking shed as some kind of indicator--forgetting that other milking sheds, even in the developed world, aren't that much better, and that milk in Venezuela, as elsewhere, actually gets filtered and pasteurized before it's sold to consumers. Maybe we're supposed to infer that the brown hands doing the milking are also dirty.
And do we get to see any other co-op ranches, ones more successful and up to date, or reformed scrupulously in accordance with the Ley de Tierras? Nope. We're not supposed to. At least, not on the Beeb. The mission here is not journalistic honesty or even deeper digging, but simply to throw mud (and bovine feces), thick and fast, and make sure it sticks.
The same pattern pertains throughout. We get little mention of the depth of the poverty that prevailed for a good 20 years before Chavez. And no mention at all of the Caracazo, which was directly caused by poverty and capitalist greed, in accordance with IMF dictates. What we do get, in spades, is "evidence" that things have barely improved. Not a word about how the Venezuelan poverty rates have dropped dramatically. Not a peep about its impressive economic growth overall. No mention that illiteracy is ancient history in Venezuela now. And of course, we are given to understand that the schools only attract as many pupils as they do because the kids are being fed. No other mention that affordable food is an important revolutionary contribution. We're led to believe that except for the school meals, everyone is still starving. Nope, not a single Mercal in sight. And no mention of the Bolivarian community kitchens, either. In fact, we don't even get to hear from the average barrio housewife at all whether there is more sancocho in her pots today than there was ten years ago. Strange, no?
Healthcare? That too is being played down. We don't see the doctors who came from Cuba to provide it for a remarkably modest salary and free lodging; we barely hear about it at all. Presumably, we hear so little because no one at the Beeb wants to admit that maybe those Cuban commies aren't such bad guys after all--that they are, in fact, sincere and dedicated for reasons that have less to do with Marxism than plain old medicine. No mention of all the eye surgeries they've done. No mention of the fact that Operation Barrio Adentro is now in its third phase (or is it the fourth? I can't keep track anymore), and that big new hospitals have been completed, some of them providing highly specialized care, and all of it free of charge.
No, what Sweeney would rather have us see is one--just one!--young guy who's done rather well for himself in oil, presumably only because he calls himself a Chavista. Presumably this one guy is supposed to represent some kind of corrupt trend. He just bought a TV station; presumably this is meant to represent the "tightening stranglehold" of Chavez on the Venezuelan media. He speaks English very well, with a British accent no less. And he goes clubbing in fancy-pantsy nightspots from which you can see the hillside barrios, where, if we are to believe Sweeney, gunshots are constantly--CONSTANTLY!!!--ringing out, and it's supposedly so bad that the government no longer publishes crime stats. (Uh-huh. Well, some opposition-dominated municipal governments don't--because the truth makes them look rather bad. And if the municipal governments don't report, what can the feds do?)
And how convenient for Sweeney it must be never to mention the #1 root cause of crime in Venezuela. Poverty rates are still fairly high there, and as they drop, we can expect crime to follow--eventually. It's going to take time, obviously, to bring policing up to snuff, and so on. But as the link I posted makes clear, violent crime in Venezuela is nothing new, any more than is the poverty that causes it. Let's be clear here: we're talking about a problem that's been festering for 500 years. And somehow, if it's not all fixed in less than a decade, then it means the revolution is bogus--or worse, that the revolution is itself to blame for those high crime rates? Come on. What are the other political leaders, chopped liver? Don't any of them care about professionalizing their local police? For that matter, do the police care about bettering themselves? It's hardly all the fault of Chavez, as Sweeney insinuates it is.
Oh, and speaking of crime: He all but comes out and says that the Chavez government is hiring Tupamaro gang members as mafia muscle to keep the bullet-riddled barrios under his thumb. Um, doesn't that come awfully close to contravening British libel law, which tends famously to side with the accuser and place a heavy onus on the accused? (Paging Ken Livingstone, this might be a job for you. Or the good people of the British Venezuela solidarity movement. Or the Venezuelan embassy in London. What say, folks?)
Oh, and the funniest thing of all is how wrong they get the amount of oil Venezuela is sitting on. It's not home to the world's seventh largest reserves, but THE LARGEST, period. Numero fucking uno, baby. Mentioning THAT, I guess, would have given too much credibility to the accusation that the oil-thirsty US is trying to kill this high priest of pigeon-poopy statuary just so its big oil companies can get their hands on what they "worked" so hard to keep flowing.
In this case, though, what flows most fluidly is the steady stream of BBC bullshit. Never mind that Venezuela's oil was actually nationalized in 1976; Sweeney seems to think Chavez did it just recently, and totally--when in fact, all he's done is insist on a majority stake in all foreign oil developments, and joint ventures between the state company, PDVSA, and foreign oil corps. Which isn't really so bad at all when you think about it, which Sweeney would rather you didn't do. Oh, and proper royalty payments, and prompt and full payment of taxes, too--things that the foreign Big Oil guys used to count on an ever-changing series of presidential faces to look the other way about. Hmmm, maybe that's why the oily oppos are so big on term limits, which democracies like Canada and Britain don't have. When a head of state isn't allowed to stay in power long enough to actually do something about corrupt collusion between the oligarchy and foreign oil companies--or worse, is himself involved and therefore has no incentive to stick around anyway, let alone long enough to do something right...well. I think you get the picture!
I guess the Beeb feels it has to keep up with Channel 4 in the crapaganda wars. Either that, or they can no longer afford the services of a real reporter like Greg Palast. Maybe a little more state funding is in order, so that they can do better, more thorough investigative reporting that actually tells the whole story without the crapitalist skew, hmmm?
(PS: I note that the video's Spanish translators, who did a decent job elsewhere, got one detail hilariously wrong: it's "crackers", not "crackass", as they put it down. "Crackers", of course, simply means wacky, loopy, crazy. Still not a flattering thing to say about Caracas or its most famous denizen, but not nearly as bad as it's made out to be here.)
Oh, those Christians. Specifically, those right-wing Republican Christians. Rather than joining hands around their hard-fought-for public manger scene in a show of seasonal brotherly love, it seems they are now about to eat each other alive, according to FireDogLake. The cause? Mitt Romney and his apparent need to pander to those all-importand "evangelical" voters. Suddenly, his doing so is cause for alarm in the punditocracy.
Four short years ago, the party was openly courting those people, and even crediting them with its success in stealing winning the election. And we were up to our eyeballs in "news" stories, and plaudits from the pundits, proclaiming them to be the grand influence in US politics.
My, how things change. All of a sudden, those evangelicals are poison to the party they so faithfully carried water for. And the pundits can't trip over their tongues fast enough, trying to disclaim them even as the candidates are still doing the old song-and-dance for them.
First, there was Reagan's old speechwriter, Peggy Noonan. During the nineties, she couldn't hate on us non-godcrazy folks hard enough. As a self-appointed, dolphin-mythologizing guardian angel, she made saving children from their communist parents her mission, when she wasn't busy bashing anything with a D after its name just because it wasn't "godly" enough. (By "godly", read anti-abortion, unwilling to negotiate with Cuba, and ready to blame the sinful gays but not Saint Reagan for the AIDS crisis.) Her ilk would have been only too happy to make America a right-wing theocratic one-party state, with all once-public services provided by private corporations (if not church-run charities that provide a lecture on sin along with the grub). So of course, she appeared to have no problem at all with the fundamentalists. They were soul-brethren. Even though she believes in eating the Body and Blood of Christ, while they believe in wallowing in it.
Now she has finally woken up out of her decades-old coma, at least briefly. And feebly tried to repudiate what she has long been making common cause with.
"My feeling is we've bowed too far to the idiots. This is true in politics, journalism, and just about everything else."
And you've only just NOW figured that out, Peggers? Incredible. How old are you again? And what did it take to bring about this epiphany? A man who believes in angels with unintentionally funny names like Moroni, and who refuses to admit that atheists too can be Americans? Incredible!
Then there's Charles Krauthammer, who has also gone sour on the loyal shock-troopers. Probably because he just now realized that if they keep jerking the country further in the direction they want it to go, it won't be just the atheists who are in trouble, but also the Jews. Even one who'd make his argument like this:
Now, there's nothing wrong with having a spirited debate on the place of religion in politics. But the candidates are confusing two arguments.
The first, which conservatives are winning, is defending the legitimacy of religion in the public square. The second, which conservatives are bound to lose, is proclaiming the privileged status of religion in political life.
A certain kind of liberal argues that having a religious underpinning for any public policy is disqualifying because it is an imposition of religion on others. Thus, if your opposition to embryonic stem cell research comes from a religious belief in the ensoulment of life at conception, you're somehow violating the separation of church and state by making other people bend to your religion.
This is absurd. Abolitionism, civil rights, temperance, opposition to the death penalty -- a host of policies, even political movements, have been rooted for many people in religious teaching or interpretation. It's ridiculous to say that therefore abolitionism, civil rights, etc., constitute an imposition of religion on others.
Isn't that meshugah? Krauthammer is using LIBERAL religious beliefs and a few social justice movements which attracted religious liberals, to try to advance the idea that the far-from-liberal Religious Reich has the right to shove its beliefs under our noses whether we want 'em there or not. And this in the middle of an article ATTACKING the Religious Reich for doing just that, only a tad more forcefully than Krauty would like (because it's making the entire Republican Party look like it's rife with religiofascist nutbags--which it is).
You know you're about to lose, and lose badly, when you have to attack the very extremists who were once the only thing standing between your party being elected, or not--in order to save your party from being walloped in next year's election.
Meanwhile, Krauty's fellow TownHall-er, Maggie Gallagher, tries to strike her own blow for sweet reasonableness, and fails just as dismally:
The reason God is on our coins and in our Pledge is not that He is practically necessary to democratic liberty, but rather that He is the philosophical foundation of it. Our rights come from a sphere outside the reach of the state. Government may or may not recognize our rights, but it can never repeal them.
Mind you, Maggie took Mitt Romney's god-talk as a springboard to pile onto someone other than the fundies. In her case, the bugbear comes completely out of left field. It's atheist-rights campaigner Michael Newdow, who quite reasonably thinks god-talk has no place on the coin of the realm or in the Pledge of Allegiance (which, as currently constituted, conflates God with flag-worship, Nazi-style). Newdow makes the solid case that the god-talk was tacked on later, not as a recognition of the religious underpinnings of the US's national morality (if indeed there is such a bird), but as a concession to the burgeoning power of the Religious Reich. Why, Newdow asks, should we be genuflecting to them just because they are so many and so loud? If it's a free country, shouldn't people be free to disbelieve--and by that token, free from the constant public, state-backed pressure to believe, believe, believe? Why does the state take on the duty of foisting a belief in God on people? Don't the churches do that enough already? Too much, in fact?
And leave it to Maggie to forget not only that, but also the fact that the Founding Fathers were mainly Deists--who believed that God basically stepped out of the picture after painting it, leaving the Universe to its own devices. Kind of hard to build a "philosophical foundation" on that--which is why so many Repugs, even the non-fundies, prefer to believe that Thomas Jefferson propounded the church-state separation because the church needed protecting from the state, rather than the other way 'round (which was in fact the case, as a founding father of the state would be the first to tell you.) No, Maggie seems to think that God gave us our democratic freedoms ("Here you go, here's a parcel of liberties for you, and you, and you. Don't let the government get its mitts on that, my child.")
Which is pretty wacky when you consider how many anti-freedoms get perpetrated in the name of God. Especially in the United States.
Festive Left Friday Blogging: Chavecito in Argentina
The Big Fella was a busy boy this past week (when is he ever NOT?)--visiting Argentina to attend the inauguration of a good friend and former Argentine First Lady, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner...
...who got a customary Chavecito friendship gift: a copy of Bolivar's sword.
And while he was there, he toured a low-income housing construction site, where he palled around with some women workers...
...and for some strange reason, the above image was the first thing that came to my mind after reading this:
An energy bill scheduled to be voted on tomorrow by the U.S. Congress will end up helping the Venezuelan government of Hugo Chavez more than U.S. consumers, a national grassroots group charged Wednesday.
"This bill is not good for the U.S., it's not good for American energy consumers, but it sure is pretty good for Hugo Chavez," the group charged in a letter to Congress today. "The fact that Chavez will be treated better than U.S.-based companies illustrates the flawed principles on which this legislation is based."
