Sherry Chandler

Are you bored at work?

Play Boomshine.

And if you figure out how it works, please tell me.

Courtesy of Harry.

But I’ll start with Glenn Greenwald’s blog:

Chris Dodd went to the Senate floor last night to speak against the FISA bill and delivered one of the most compelling and inspired speeches by a prominent politician that I’ve heard in quite some time. He tied the core corruption of the FISA bill’s telecom amnesty and warranltess eavesdropping provisions into the whole litany of the Bush administration’s lawless and destructive behavior over the last seven years — from torture and rendition to the abuse of secrecy instruments and Guantanamo mock trials — with a focus on the way in which telecom amnesty further demolishes the rule of law among our political class.

That speech signals that the small minority in the Senate devoted to stopping this bill have made this a priority. Small, vocal, passionate minorities in the Senate — backed up by vocal, passionate and engaged citizens — can do much to prevent a bill’s quick and painless passage. Dodd’s speech can be seen and/or read here. I highly recommend it, and if I had one wish this week, it would be that any journalist who will ever write or utter the words “FISA,” “telecom immunity” or “Terrorism” would be forced to watch this speech from start to finish without distraction.

…

Beyond the FISA bill’s evisceration of the rule of law, the Fourth Amendment and surveillance safeguards, what has always been so striking with this controversy has been how transparently sleazy and corrupt it reveals the Congress to be. Right out in the open, telecoms have just led Congressional supporters of telecom immunity around like little puppets. It’s just amazing — though extremely common — that while negotiations over the bill occurred in total secrecy, with civil liberties groups and the public at large being completely excluded, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer “negotiated” directly with the telecoms over how the telecoms’ amnesty bill should be written.

Telecoms broke our surveillance laws, and then our Democratic Congressional leaders ran to them to take instructions on how to write the special law to protect them, and they didn’t even really bother to hide that.

White House Refused to Open Pollutants E-Mail :

The White House in December refused to accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened, senior E.P.A. officials said last week.

The document, which ended up in e-mail limbo, without official status, was the E.P.A.’s answer to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that required it to determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment, the officials said.

This week, more than six months later, the E.P.A. is set to respond to that order by releasing a watered-down version of the original proposal that offers no conclusion. Instead, the document reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.

Over the past five days, the officials said, the White House successfully put pressure on the E.P.A. to eliminate large sections of the original analysis that supported regulation, including a finding that tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions could produce $500 billion to $2 trillion in economic benefits over the next 32 years

Ideology-Based Hiring at Justice Broke Laws, Investigation Finds

Senior Justice Department officials broke civil service laws by rejecting scores of young applicants who had links to Democrats or liberal organizations, according to a biting report issued yesterday.
…
Former Justice Department officials from both Democratic and Republican administrations said the study underscores the challenge for the next president.

“The Honors Program at DOJ has always been the ‘A-list,’ ” said Nicholas M. Gess, a Justice official under President Bill Clinton. “The next attorney general will be stuck with many from the ‘B-list.”

High Medicare Costs, Courtesy of Congress

On Wal-Mart’s Web site, you can buy a walker for $59.92. It is called the Carex Explorer, and it’s a typical walker: a few feet high, with four metal poles extending to the ground. The Explorer is one of the walkers covered by Medicare.

But Medicare and its beneficiaries aren’t paying $59.92 for the Explorer or any similar walker. In fact, they’re not paying anything close to it. They are paying about $110.

For years, Congress has set the price for walkers and various medical equipment, and it has consistently set them well above the market rate, effectively handing out a few hundred million dollars of corporate welfare every year to the equipment makers.

But as of July 1, this system is set to change. Companies will instead have to submit bids — to compete with one another, just as Wal-Mart competes with Target — if they want to continue selling products to Medicare. Based on a pilot program, the price of walkers, delivery and setup included, will fall to about $80.

Now, would you like to guess how the equipment makers feel about this?

Right.

With the changeover looming, they have increased their contributions to Congress. They have also started publicly claiming that competitive bidding will, among other things, deprive some patients of oxygen equipment they need.

Hillary Clinton returns to the Senate:

But as she returned in defeat to her old home in the Senate yesterday, she was received as if in triumph. And, in a sense, her stature had increased during the failed primary battle: She left as a legislator but returned as the leader of an 18 million-strong movement of women and working-class voters — a group whose support Clinton’s Democratic colleagues fervently desire.

And so, as Clinton entered a private luncheon in the Capitol, these colleagues greeted her with cheers, hugs and high-fives. “It’s great to be here among my colleagues,” Clinton teased, “just another regular, plain old superdelegate.”

Well, since we’re about words here, we’d probably better do this one, too. I found it at Via Negativa

While I’m stealing memorials to George Carlin, I’d be remiss in not pointing you to Lance Mannion’s George Carlin is Safe at Home. Lance gives us one of Carlin’s sports routines:

Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.

Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park.The baseball park! Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dying.

In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap.

Football is concerned with downs - what down is it?
Baseball is concerned with ups - who’s up?

In football you receive a penalty.
In baseball you make an error.

I am not into sports but this one is fun, and touching in the context. Click over and read it all.

I can’t claim to have been a big George Carlin fan but he has been part of the cultural texture of my life for a long time and in losing him we have lost the voice of an era, a voice of my era, a speaker of truth, and his passing grieves me.

Mike Graves’s conversation with Georgia Green Stamper, the one I mentioned recording last week, is now posted on WUKY’s tonic and you can listen to it via streaming audio at the link.

The blurb for the segment reads like this:

Join tonic’s Mike Graves, Georgia Green Stamper, and a host of others for a two-part discussion about the author and WUKY commentator’s roots and how they led her to explore the history that shaped them.

That would make Leatha Kendrick and me a “host,” a role we can probably fulfill on odd Tuesdays. We contain multitudes. Leatha most assuredly has power, presence, and spirit enough for several ordinary human beings. Through the power of skillful editing, I sometimes sound a little intelligent myself.

Anyway, better to be “a host” than “and others,” a category where I often wind up in publicity blurbs.

The title, by the way, is a pun on the name of a local town, Stamping Ground, in western Scott County. Many European settlers found their way into Kentucky by way of buffalo traces and Stamping Ground was the site for a confluence of buffalo. But of course a “stamping (or stomping) ground” is also, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, “a customary territory or favorite gathering place.”

Georgia writes mostly about her stomping grounds in her new essay collection <em>You Can Go Anywhere from the Crossroads of the World.

The morning’s NYTimes has a fascinating look at a survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. “Survey shows,” to quote Monty Hall,

Although a majority of Americans say religion is very important to them, nearly three-quarters of them say they believe that many faiths besides their own can lead to salvation …For example, 70 percent of Americans affiliated with a religion or denomination said they agreed that “many religions can lead to eternal life,” including majorities among Protestants and Catholics. Among evangelical Christians, 57 percent agreed with the statement, and among Catholics, 79 percent did.

Among minority faiths, more than 80 percent of Jews, Hindus and Buddhists agreed with the statement, and more than half of Muslims did.

The findings seem to undercut the conventional wisdom that the more religiously committed people are, the more intolerant they are, scholars who reviewed the survey said.

“It’s not that Americans don’t believe in anything,” said Michael Lindsay, assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University. “It’s that we believe in everything. We aren’t religious purists or dogmatists.”

It might be argued that to believe in everything is to believe in nothing, but hey! I’m agnostic.

Speaking of which,

The survey indicated that the group that had the greatest net gain was the unaffiliated, accounting for 16 percent of American adults.

The new report sheds light on the beliefs of the unaffiliated. Like the overwhelming majority of Americans, 70 percent of the unaffiliated said they believed in God, including one of every five people who identified themselves as atheist and more than half of those who identified as agnostic.

Since the American Heritage Dictionary defines atheist as “one who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods,” I find the concept of a believing atheist, well, unbelievable.

“What does atheist mean? It may mean they don’t believe in God, or it could be that they are hostile to organized religion,” [said John C. Green, an author of the report and a senior fellow on religion and American politics at Pew.] “A lot of these unaffiliated people, by some measures, are fairly religious, and then there are those who are affiliated with a religion but don’t believe in God and identify instead with history or holidays or communities.”

Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? Boggles mine, anyway.

Scholars said such tolerance could stem in part from the greater diversity of American society: that there are more people of minority faiths or no faith and that “it is hard to hold a strongly sectarian view when you work together and your kids play soccer together,” Mr. Lindsay said.

But such a view of salvation may also grow out of doctrinal ignorance, scholars said.

“It could be that people are not very well educated and they are not expressing mature theological points of view,” said Todd Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. “It could also be a form of bland secularism. The real challenge to religious leaders is not to become more entrenched in their views, but to navigate the idea of what their religion is all about and how it relates to others.”

But if most of us seem to have some sort of warm fuzzy, especially fuzzy, notion of religion as something that lets us celebrate Christmas and eat chocolate bunnies at Easter, well, there is an upside:

Nearly two-thirds of respondents favored more government help for the poor, even if it meant going deeper into debt. Sixty-one percent of respondents also said “stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost.”

A majority said the United States should pay more attention to problems at home than those abroad, but in the area of foreign policy, 6 of 10 said that diplomacy, not military strength, was the best way to ensure peace.

There’s something I can believe in.

____________
Addendum: On the other hand, here via Juan Cole is an observation from Rick Shenkman, author of Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter (Basic Books, 2008). It seems right relevant to the notion that Americans are a little uninformed in their beliefs:

I do not wish to engage in a debate about the Iraq War. But the thought of planting a largely Christian army in the middle of the Muslim Middle East over the opposition of most countries in the region, when put as I have just put it, sounds daft. Why did it not ring bells of alarm to Americans in 2003 and after, especially as it became clear that our troops would be staying a long time and that no quick victory was possible? It did not because the administration saw to it that the issue was framed differently. We weren’t planting an army. We were spreading God’s miraculous gift of freedom to a benighted people very much in need of America’s missionary help. It was the triumph of myth over logic.

Why were Americans so susceptible to myth? Foreign policy specialists don’t usually spend a lot of time reflecting on this question. They should. It’s the key to what often goes wrong when foreign policy issues become the subject of public debate.

The answer is, I’m afraid, simple. Myths count more than facts in these debates because Americans don’t know many facts and don’t care to take the time to learn them…

__________
Update: It’s good to know, I suppose, that James Dobson thinks Al Sharpton an extremist. Lance Mannion has some intelligent things to say about this issue. But I still would like to see religion removed from our political discourse.

[This post contains spoilers, I guess. But the end is inevitable.]

This weekend my husband and I watched Letters from Iwo Jima. We have been a long time working up to the experience. After watching Flags of our Fathers, we had some idea of what we were in for, only worse, because there would be no victory at the end of this movie.

And the violence of the real world is such that I am not all that eager to experience vicarious violence whether it is “art” or “entertainment.”

Still, we were definitely not in the mood for yet another superannuated super hero. I mean Indiana Jones was fun, but come on. All good things pass. As for Rambo, never watched his movies in the first place.

And Letters from Iwo Jima really is a must-see movie.

In the end, I was able to pull back from the violence. It seemed so obviously stage blood to me — or computer animated blood — and then our television screen is tiny so the impact of exploding men and burning men is diminished. I was pulled out of the movie, too, by the panoramic shots of the U.S. army storming the beaches. It seemed so obviously computer animated. I do hate computer animation, though this too may have been more compelling on the big screen.

But I could not disassociate myself from the emotional impact of the film nor did I want to. The real power of Eastwood’s movie is not in the fx but in the characters, the human condition of these men — the general Kuribayashi, the grunt Saigo, the Olympic gold medalist Baron Nishi, the failed secret policeman Shimizu — who are being sacrificed by their country for a lost cause. This has to be the focus, because the outcome is known. Suspense, the unfolding story, has to be found in the interaction of the characters.

Chris Vognar of the Dallas Morning News sums it up like this:

If Flags of Our Fathers is about heroism – why we need it, how we create it – then Letters From Iwo Jima is about honor, its importance, and its folly. For the officers who stand in Kuribayashi’s way and sneer at his unconventional methods (including kindness to enlisted men), honor is a code to be followed blindly and by the book. For the core characters, it’s a way of life, of treating other human beings, of facing the impossible with dignity.

I would say also that it’s about the clash of the old rigid code of warrior honor with the mechanized faceless slaughter of modern warfare. My son points out that this has echoes of Europe at the beginnings of World War I, when the French and British sent cavalry charges out against barbed wire and machine guns. The result, of course, was wholesale slaughter.

That echo is made somewhat explicit fairly early in the film, when the two old cavalry men, General Kuribayashi and Baron Nishi, remember the good old days when soldiers could fight heroically and face to face. No more, they say. The machines have changed things.

Modern warfare has rendered the old style of honor impractical and a little ridiculous. When one commander fails to hold his wing, he orders his entire troop to commit suicide because they have been dishonored. They do this by means of hand grenade. Each man in turn pulls the plug and grasps the grenade to his chest and explodes himself. This is probably the most notorious scene in the movie, and while it doesn’t become as silly as it might, it is not death with dignity. What is more, it is a waste of manpower. The more honorable thing would have been for the commander to do as he was ordered, to fall back and add his force to defending the core position.

In the end, the wounded General Kuribayashi, defeated, facing capture and dishonor, orders his aide to be behead him with his sword. This is a scene worthy of high drama, of Shakespeare’s battlefield. But it cannot be in modern warfare. Kuribayashi kneels, neck extended. The aide raises his sword over his head, ready to do the deed. But before the blow can be struck, the aide himself is struck and killed by what seems to be a stray and random bullet. The General is left to shoot himself with the pearl-handled colt he carries as a souvenir of his time in the United States.

In the final scene, both the sword and the Colt are picked up as war souvenirs by anonymous GIs who don’t know the significance of what they’ve found.

I didn’t think I was going to do this (post a Carlin YouTube that is) but Susie at Suburban Guerilla has this one up and I have to pass it on. My Daddy used to say this same thing, in language not quite so colorful, twenty - thirty - forty years ago. It’s only gotten worse.

RIP George Carlin.

From Chris Floyd at the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel (via TChris at TalkLeft), Torturegate: Truth, But No Consequences:

By week’s end, the evidence that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other top government officials had deliberately created a system of torture which they knew was illegal – indeed, a capital crime – under U.S. law was so plain, so overwhelming, and so handily concentrated that it broke through the levees of institutional cover-up and media complicity that had held this clear truth at bay for so long. The grim facts had finally worked their way into “conventional wisdom.” It was now permissible for good “centrist” folk to speak of such things, even condemn them, without being automatically relegated to ranks of “the haters,” the “unserious,” the “shrill partisans,” etc.

And yet, even as this new consensus was forming, you could see the sandbags piling up in the background to make sure that the water didn’t reach too far. A line of defense was being laid that would allow the purveyors of conventional wisdom to vent a bit of righteous outrage at official wrongdoing without actually having to do anything about it or admitting of any flaws in their fundamentalist doctrine of American exceptionalism. No one need take any risks, make any effort, or discomfort themselves in any way to rectify the injustice; indeed, even the perpetrators should be left undisturbed. Instead, our uniquely good and smooth-running political system will magically make everything all better, and somehow prevent the bad things from happening again.

I like this little paragraph from further down in the article:

(This is a point that I’ve never quite understood about American exceptionalists. On the one hand, they say the system is so strong and resilient that it can magically heal itself no matter what happens. On the other hand, it is apparently so weak and unstable that any attempt to actually apply its laws to the powerful could bring down the whole house of cards. A curious conundrum indeed; but then again, fundamentalisms invariably rest on such ineffable mysteries.)

Read all of this.

And then there’s this by Michael Abramowitz of the Washington Post, White House Dismissed Legal Advice On Detainees:

Senior lawyers inside and outside the Bush administration repeatedly warned the White House that it was risking judicial scrutiny of its detention policies in Guantanamo Bay if it did not pursue a more pragmatic legal strategy that considered the likely reaction of the Supreme Court. But such advice, issued periodically over the past six years, was ignored or discounted, according to current and former administration officials familiar with the debates

These guys so obviously think they’re above the law that it would be funny if events weren’t proving them correct.

And if you think Barack Obama is going to provide redress, I think you’re sorely mistaken. He has already proved willing to support warrantless wiretapping. Mind you, I don’t mean to be saying that Hillary Clinton would necessarily have done any better. No Democrat seems Few Democrats seem willing to do this thing. (Not to forget Dennis Kucinich and a few others brave souls.) And certainly John McCain is not going to encourage legal action.

So we are up that proverbial creek.

See Glenn Greenwald on Obama & FISA and the need to pressure the Senator to make good on his promise to filibuster this bill. As Greenwald commenter Hume’s Ghost wrote:

What really rubbed me the wrong way was how Obama in his statement says essentially trust me with these powers, I’ll use them responsibly.

Nope.

“There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” - John Adams [1772].

Here’s Charlie’s poem that he left in the comments. I thought it maybe ought to get more air, being’s it’s relevant to our current weather situation and also, perhaps, to our great Indian Rock controversy.

FLOOD STAGE

Stealthily, the river slips
Among the barren willow tips,
And bends them with the current’s swirl
At every ripple, roll, and curl.

Through apprehensive, April eyes
I stop to watch the steady rise,
And see the lines that separate
A liquid earth from solid state.

The river comes as if designed
To seek the treasures left behind
Another year in early spring
When warm rain sent her pummeling.

Legends tell of nature’s schemes
Bizarre as any midnight dreams
That what the river leaves on high
She will return for, by and by.

— Charles M. Whitt

This short film by Torill Kove, narrated by Liv Ullmann, won the 2007 Oscar for best short subjects animation. It has everything: love, death, cows, goats, dogs, cats, and poets. Posted to YouTube by the National Film Board of Canada. You can also view it there.