Sherry Chandler

Here is a snippet of op-ed from Steve Bell, a British cartoonist who offended me mightily with his lampoons of Hillary Clnton a few weeks back. He is writing in The Guardian:

So should we tread warily, lest we are misunderstood? Of course we should. Cartoonists are some of the most painstaking, careful, shy and sensitive people on earth, yet we do play with fire, toying with other people’s (and of course our own) most deeply held beliefs and most cherished illusions. Is it possible to go too far? Of course it is? Should we go too far? Of course we should. That’s what makes our job so interesting. There’s no better feeling than, having taken a risk in a drawing, seeing the thing in print and knowing it works. The converse is also true, which is why I work in a bunker on the south coast.

When I first saw a tiny thumbnail of the offending Barry Blitt New Yorker cover I thought, for a fleeting moment, that I could understand why Obama supporters would be so pissed off. After all, here was a drawing depicting the worst possible caricature of their man: a smug Muslim and his gun-toting black-power wife who would burn the flag in the Oval Office beneath a portrait of Osama bin Laden. But then, surely that’s the point? If you take it that literally you literally turn yourself into an idiot (though not quite a psycho). I didn’t think it looked a particularly good drawing, but I couldn’t judge from a thumbnail.

Now, having seen the full image (along with unimaginable numbers of idiots and psycho-paths worldwide), I can say that I rather warm to it. I look at it, and it works, for me anyway.

I particularly like the expression on Michelle’s face. Cartoons don’t work as shopping lists of points to be made with labels tacked on to clarify things for the culturally deprived. Too much cartooning operates on that level, especially in the US. Cartoons need to be disturbing, and they should also dare to ask questions. People in the US aren’t generally fools (even though the fools have been over-represented of late, particularly in the current administration), though some may be a little over-literal, and these are not always the psychos. Not so long ago I drew a cartoon of Obama as rifle-range target, and received a torrent (OK, a very heavy trickle) of emails, mostly from concerned liberal supporters asking me if I really wanted him dead.

I am probably going to get myself into trouble for saying this but, while I wasn’t particularly amused by the New Yorker cover (I am not the best audience for satire as my satiric husband will tell you), I am not ready to join a letter-writing campaign to protest it. Liberals seem to deal in “stern letters” of protest and see where that has gotten us.

Instead, I invite you to view this David Horsey cartoon. And this from Kentucky’s own Joel Pett.

The Curious George parody of Obama is racist; this New Yorker cover is not. (Thanks to BoGardiner for reminding me.)

See also The Poor Man.

From the BBC News:

A videotape of a detainee being questioned at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay has been released for the first time.

It shows 16-year-old Omar Khadr being asked by Canadian officials in 2003 about events leading up to his capture by US forces, Canadian media have said.

The Canadian citizen is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier in Afghanistan in 2002.

He is seen in a distressed state and complaining about the medical care.

The footage was made public by Mr Khadr’s lawyers following a Supreme Court ruling in May that the Canadian authorities had to hand over key evidence against him to allow a full defence of the charges he is facing.

Mr Khadr, the only Westerner still held at the jail, was 15 when he was captured by US forces during a gun battle at a suspected al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.

During the 10-minute video of his questioning in Guantanamo a year later, he can be seen crying, his face buried in his hands, and pulling at his hair. He can be heard repeatedly chanting: “Help me.”

You can view the video at the link.

Link from Jeralyn at TalkLeft.

Scanning the comments there gives some indication of what a controversial issue this is. For myself, I think the boy was a child when he was taken prisoner and should never have been kept for six years at Guantanamo Bay as though he were a major terrorist, without even the rights of the Geneva conventions. I don’t think we should have held any prisoners in that way but it’s particularly egregious in this boy’s case. I’m not so naïve as to think that 15-year-old boys can’t be dangerous. But we do not treat children that way.

For three decades or so now, I’ve been very concerned about the way children have been turned into warriors of hate for various guerrilla or resistance or rebel or terrorist groups. They are children and very maleable. To turn them into killers is possibly the worst crime I can think of. I am appalled that our government has exacerbated the crime against this child.

As for whether the events recorded on this tape amount to torture, that is not even a conversation we should be forced to engage in.

of the Great Flydini!

Hattip to Charlie Hughes.

It’s Saturday night. I have a glass of merlot. Time to unwind!

Or maybe there’s some hope after all, according to Paul Krugman:

But the vote was bigger than the theatrics. It was the first major health care victory that Democrats have won in a long time. And it was enormously encouraging for advocates of universal health care.

Ostensibly, Wednesday’s vote was about restoring cuts in Medicare payments to doctors. What it was really about, however, was the fight against creeping privatization. Democrats finally took a stand — and, thanks to Senator Kennedy, seem to have prevailed.

The story really begins in 2003, when the Bush administration rammed the Medicare Modernization Act through Congress, literally in the dead of night. That bill established large de facto subsidies for Medicare Advantage plans — plans in which Medicare funds are funneled through private insurance companies, rather than directly paying for care.

Since then, enrollment in these plans has been growing rapidly. This has had a destructive effect on Medicare’s finances: the fastest-growing type of Medicare Advantage plan, private fee-for-service, costs taxpayers 17 percent more per beneficiary than Medicare without the middleman. It also threatens to undermine Medicare’s universality, turning it into a system in which insurance companies cherry-pick healthier and more affluent older Americans, leaving the sicker and poorer behind.

…

In previous years, payments to doctors were maintained through bipartisan fudging: politicians from both parties got together to waive the rules. In effect, Congress kept Medicare functioning by expanding the federal budget deficit.

This year, the Democratic leadership decided, instead, to link the “doctor fix” to the fight against privatization and offered a bill that maintains doctors’ payments while reining in those expensive private fee-for-service plans.

…

Here’s how it will play out, if all goes well: early next year, President Obama will send his health care plan to Congress. The plan will face vociferous opposition from the insurance industry — but the Medicare vote suggests that this time, unlike in 1993, Democrats will hold together.

Unless Democrats win even bigger than expected, however, they won’t have the 60 Senate votes needed to override a filibuster. What the Medicare fight shows is that the Democrats could nonetheless prevail by taking their case to the public, daring their opponents to stand in the way of health care security — so that in the end they get some Republicans to switch sides, and get the legislation through.

A lot can still go wrong with this vision. But the odds of achieving universal health care, soon, look a lot higher than they did just a couple of weeks ago.

From the NYTimes:

JOHN McCAIN and Barack Obama are not the only winners to emerge from the long presidential primary season.

The two presumptive nominees, along with the many candidates who bowed out along the way, spent more than $900 million through the end of May, about $470 million more than was spent on primaries in 2000, when both major parties last had competitive primary battles. Nearly half of the current spending has been paid to just a few dozen companies.

…

Some experts say they think that as campaign spending rises, the candidates benefit much less than the companies. “The total amount of money doesn’t matter, especially since you start to see diminishing returns,” said Ray C. Fair, an economist at Yale who studies economic influences on presidential elections. “What matters is the difference in spending between the two parties.”

Elections are bought in this country. So, while it may be one (wo)man, one vote at the polls, it is not on human one dollar. That’s only on your IRS return.

My husband was doing some work up in the attic when he came across this WWII vintage advertising card. I leave it to you to find any irony on this Independence Day:

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Added: By the way, I’d like to go on record as believing that the mere fact of being a war hero is not necessarily a qualification for the presidency just as the fact of not being such a hero is not a disqualification. I recommend that we all take a little time to read Paul Krugman’s column for the day, Rove’s Third Term. It begins like this:

Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet. Howard Dean didn’t scream. Hillary Clinton didn’t say she was staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. And Wesley Clark didn’t impugn John McCain’s military service.

Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, titled his tell-all memoir “What Happened.” But a true account of modern American politics should be titled “What Didn’t Happen.” Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place.

I abhor this practice, call it Swiftboating if you will, and think it should be broadly condemned no matter which candidate it is used in support of. One of the things that appalled me so about the Democratic primary this year is that partisans within the party were not just willing but enthusiastic about just this kind of Rovian attack. As voters we should not tolerate it.

“Will Rovian tactics work this year?” Mr. Krugman asks. If you ask me, these tactics have already worked. See Melissa McEwan and Maureen McClusky, Destroying Hillary Clinton (and here for part two) in The Guardian.

A more relevant question might be “Will Rovian tactics continue to work this year?”

Mr. Krugman thinks the press is a little ashamed of themselves over their attacks on Clark. I sure hope so. I sure hope they’re a lot ashamed.

What was it George W. Bush said?

Fool me once … can’t get fooled again?????

From the NYTimes, Judge Rejects Bush’s View on Wiretaps

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in California said Wednesday that the wiretapping law established by Congress was the “exclusive” means for the president to eavesdrop on Americans, and he rejected the government’s claim that the president’s constitutional authority as commander in chief trumped that law.

The judge, Vaughn R. Walker, the chief judge for the Northern District of California, made his findings in a ruling on a lawsuit brought by an Oregon charity. The group says it has evidence of an illegal wiretap used against it by the National Security Agency under the secret surveillance program established by President Bush after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Justice Department has tried for more than two years to kill the lawsuit, saying any surveillance of the charity or other entities was a “state secret” and citing the president’s constitutional power as commander in chief to order wiretaps without a warrant from a court under the agency’s program.

But Judge Walker, who was appointed to the bench by former President George Bush, rejected those central claims in his 56-page ruling. He said the rules for surveillance were clearly established by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant from a secret court.

The implication of this ruling, it seems to me, is that Congress should not be falling all over itself to provide legal coverage for the Bush administration’s illegal activities. As the Times article concludes:

The ruling comes as the Senate is overhauling the foreign intelligence law. The measure would reaffirm FISA as the exclusive means for the president to order wiretaps through court warrants, but it would also provide legal immunity to phone companies involved in the eavesdropping program. A vote could come Tuesday.

The immunity issue would not directly affect this lawsuit because Al-Haramain is suing the government, not the phone companies. But the nearly 40 other lawsuits against phone companies that Judge Walker is overseeing would almost certainly have to be dismissed if immunity is signed into law, legal analysts say.

But there is more than just retroactive immunity at stake here. It is bad enough that we have to have a “secret court” but the government should not be allowed to spy on whomever it pleases with no oversight and no accountibility. That is absolute power and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It isn’t as if all this illegal spying has gained us much. The Bush record on arrests, convictions, is pathetic, al Qaeda is still active, and Osama bin Laden is still at large.

By now you’ve no doubt heard that Obama supporters are making a concerted effort to change the Senator’s stand on this issue. Currently, as The Falcon’s Gyre points out:

Barack Obama has been moving to the right since the middle of June. He’s always advocated Social Security “reform,” and several times he has praised Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party as “the party of ideas,” but now he’s folded on FISA along with most of the so-called Democratic Congress.

That’s right. Barack Obama, right now at least, has no use for the Fourth Amendment. Furthermore, he’s basically promised to use his powers to spy on us without warrants only for good.

The Falcon provides a link where you can join this effort to get Obama to support the filibuster of the bill.

Added: More on this.

Chris Dodd is seeking signatures, too.

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.”

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

Well, it broke yesterday anyway. That’s good enough for this blog. Always up to the minute.

A correspondent has sent me this item from WLEX-TV news in Lexington:

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - A Kentucky grand jury has indicted an Ohio historian who led efforts to pull an 8-ton boulder from the Ohio River.

Greenup County Commonwealth’s Attorney Cliff Duvall says a local grand jury indicted Steve Shaffer of Ironton, Ohio, on Thursday for allegedly breaking Kentucky law by removing a protected archaeological object from the river. The charge is a Class D felony, punishable by one to five years in prison.

If you’ve been reading here, you know that we’ve been following the story of Indian Head Rock for over a year now.

Things is getting serious.