From the heart of America

Nearly 500 Californians have lost their lives while in service to their country in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least 58 were immigrants; more than 160 were parents, who left behind more than 300 children. One descended from two presidents; another was a Guatemalan street orphan taken in by an American family as a teenager. One high school lost six of its graduates.

The above from an article in the Los Angeles Times describing a study by the paper to be published Sunday.

“He was Mexican, but he thought like an American. And he gave his life for this country.”

Obscenity

You know, you can’t say “fuck” on the radio, but here’s a real obscenity —

“The poor guy’s been suffering for years, you know? Unfairly he’s been accused of alcoholism, but we see now that it was something much more deep-seated. And so, to cut this out in some respect for Ted Kennedy, here’s a tune coming at you from the Dead Kennedys. Go ahead and play it, please.”

Nationally syndicated radio host Michael Savage yesterday, the day Senator Edward Kennedy’s tumor was announced.

10 ways to blow your tax rebate

Mark Morford has some spending suggestions for those of you receiving the hush money tax rebate. Several are funny. My favorite:

One share of Google. Hey, it’s the most powerful company on Earth. It belches up bits of Microsoft after an organic tofu and wakame salad lunch in its massive world-class floating cafeteria in the sky. Why not buy a tiny crumb of the company that already owns a large piece of you and everything you do and play with and think about and log into every single day? Sort of like buying back a tiny, digitized, bitmapped, rebranded, YouTubed, Street Viewed piece of your own exhausted soul. Neat!

Five Years Ago Today

U.S. combat deaths before “Mission Accomplished” — 139
U.S. combat deaths after “Mission Accomplished” — 4,388

Best line of the late night

It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

Tom Friedman

Is he stupid or just full of it?

Uncapping the payroll tax reveals still another cultural misstep by Sen. Obama. He apparently has a difficult time understanding that nowadays, a veteran fireman or a veteran cop, married to a veteran schoolteacher, will make well over $100,000. In fact, they can make close to $200,000. Yet Obama still wants to go ahead and tax both the first and last payroll dollar of this group at a very high marginal tax rate by uncapping the Social Security (FICA) tax.

Larry Kudlow, The Corner on National Review Online

The salaries are questionable, but regardless of that fiction, since when did FICA become a joint tax?

The cap (currently $102,000) is on individual wages.

Via Eschaton.

Lost Town Blues

Good insight as always from Timothy Egan. He writes here about the real plight of small town America.

“People who live in small towns that have been passed over don’t need to be told that they’re bitter, or heroic. They’re stuck, is what they are.”

Some sobering stories

These kinds of stories keep appearing.

Horton Hears a Misogynist

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar takes exception to the sexism in Horton Hears a Who (the film).

What’s especially insidious here isn’t just that the subplot was written and approved and filmed, but that since the movie has come out, there hasn’t been a popular outcry about it. That we don’t even ask why, in the years it took to make the movie, no one along the line said, “This isn’t a good message to send to our kids.” Is it because sexism is so ingrained in our society that we don’t even flinch at it when it’s shoved in our faces?

Go read what he has to say.

And click here to see a mighty big rocking chair!

People for the Ethical Treatment of Nobody

Taxes

In the 1950s and early 1960s the top tax rate — on taxable incomes over $400,000 — was 91%.

Ninety. One.

[Caveat: $400,000 in 1960 dollars would be about $2,800,000 in 2007 dollars.]

The Revenue Act of 1964 reduced the top rate to 70%.

Today’s top rate is 35%.

Best line of the day, so far

“Has your candidate said anything about torture today?”

Not Atrios

Best line to keep in mind on Jefferson’s birthday

“There is no longer the shadow of a doubt that the torture of prisoners was planned at the highest levels of the US government with the explicit knowledge and approval of the president. How do we know this? Bush himself admitted it.”

tristero

Worst. President. Ever.

Best line of the day

. . . But then Vonnegut starts coughing, clearing his throat of phlegm, grasping for a half-smoked pack of Pall Malls lying on a coffee table. He quickly lights up. His wheezing ceases. I ask him whether he worries that cigarettes are killing him. “Oh, yes,” he answers, in what is clearly a set-piece gag. “I’ve been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered cigarettes since I was twelve or fourteen. So I’m going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them. And do you know why?”

“Lung cancer?” I offer.

“No. No. Because I’m eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn’t work. Now I’m forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and, up until recently, ‘Colon.’”. . . .

From an article in the August 2006 Rolling Stone.

Best line of the morning, so far

“ABC: Bush admits he authorized torture. Believe it or not, it gets worse from there”

FARK.com

Here’s the worse from ABC News:

The high-level discussions about these “enhanced interrogation techniques” were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed — down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects — whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news.

The advisers were members of the National Security Council’s Principals Committee, a select group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President Bush on issues of national security policy.

At the time, the Principals Committee included Vice President Dick Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Worst. President. Ever.

Plans for the George W. Bush Presidential Library have been released

The library will include:

• The Hurricane Katrina Room, which is still under construction and looks like a disaster.
• The Alberto Gonzales Room, where you can’t remember anything you see or hear.
• The Texas Air National Guard Room, where you don’t have to even show up.
• The Walter Reed Hospital Room, where they don’t let you in.
• The Guantanamo Bay Room, where they don’t let you out.
• The Weapons of Mass Destruction Room (which no one has been able to find).
• The Iraq War Room. After you complete your first tour, they make you go back for a second, third, fourth, & sometimes fifth tour.
• The Dick Cheney Room, in an undisclosed location, complete with shooting gallery.
• The K-Street Project Gift Shop, where you can buy (or just steal) an election.
• The Airport Men’s Room, where you can meet some of your favorite Republican Senators.
• An entire floor devoted to a 1/64 scale model of the President’s ego.

Thanks to Debby for the scoop.

A Lesson In Watching Out What You Wish For

An excellent look at China and the upcoming Olympics from Functional Ambivalent. Good stuff.

An excerpt:

The Chinese wanted the Summer Games for the same reason everyone else does: the P.R. value of having everyone in the world stop by when the house is clean and the kids are in their Sunday best. The Chinese government promised, in effect, to not be itself — abandoning it’s longstanding policy of horrifying oppression and cruelty in pursuit of a perfect society. Landing the games was a triumph, but I wonder now if there aren’t a few high in the bureaucracy massaging their foreheads and asking themselves, “What were we thinking?”

You’ve got to really want to protest

“Three demonstrators scaled cables near the south tower of the Golden Gate Bridge [Monday] and unfurled banners intended to draw attention to Chinese human rights violations in Tibet.” — San Francisco Chronicle

Click image for larger version.

4,000

Click image for larger version and to learn more.

You can fool some of the people all of the time

NewMexiKen posted this just a year ago but I enjoyed reading it again and thought you might too.

In 1938, wallet manufacturer the E. H. Ferree company in Lockport, New York decided to promote its product by showing how a Social Security card would fit into its wallets. A sample card, used for display purposes, was inserted in each wallet. Company Vice President and Treasurer Douglas Patterson thought it would be a clever idea to use the actual SSN of his secretary, Mrs. Hilda Schrader Whitcher.The wallet was sold by Woolworth stores and other department stores all over the country. Even though the card was only half the size of a real card, was printed all in red, and had the word “specimen” written across the face, many purchasers of the wallet adopted the SSN as their own. In the peak year of 1943, 5,755 people were using Hilda’s number. SSA acted to eliminate the problem by voiding the number and publicizing that it was incorrect to use it. (Mrs. Whitcher was given a new number.) However, the number continued to be used for many years. In all, over 40,000 people reported this as their SSN. As late as 1977, 12 people were found to still be using the SSN “issued by Woolworth.”

Interesting Facts About Social Security Numbers at Money, Matter, and More Musings

The 40,000 are the same sort of people that some politicians would have manage their own social security investments.

Poll: Obama Receives High Marks for Race Speech

Suprisingly encouraging news about the American people, though note the huge caveat in the first line.

A new national poll released Friday showed voters who heard or read about Barack Obama’s speech on his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and race relations, broadly approved of it.

Seven in 10 said he did a good job talking about race relations and as many said he did a good job explaining his relationship with Reverend Wright, according to a CBS News poll conducted Thursday.

More than six in 10, moreover, said they mostly agreed with what he said about race relations in this country, including a broad majority of Democrats and independents, but fewer — four in 10 — Republicans.

The Caucus

Those “who heard or read about” the speech. What percentage do you suppose that is? The article doesn’t provide this essential information. And overall the issue has hurt him — the fraction who say Obama could unite the country had dropped from two-thirds to one-half.

Passport files

George H.W. Bush fired the assistant secretary of state responsible for passports (Consular Affairs) when Bill Clinton’s passport file was sought inappropriately during the 1992 presidential election campaign. I remember because I inventoried the contents of the fired woman’s desk to determine what was hers and what was ours (she wasn’t even allowed to enter the building). Many are appointed by the president, few have the distinction of being fired.

It will be interesting to see if the current circumstances are political, and if so if Jr. will act as appropriately as his father did.

Sad but fascinating

At the Freakonomics Blog Ian Ayres tells about a study into tipping habits. An excerpt:

1. African-American cab drivers, on average, were tipped approximately one-third less than white cab drivers.

2. African-American and Hispanic passengers tipped approximately one-half the amount white passengers tipped.

African-American passengers also seemed to participate in the racial discrimination against African-American drivers. While African-American passengers generally tipped less, on average they also tipped black drivers approximately one-third less than they tipped white drivers.

Guess who?

Who do you think said this?

And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…” And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

The answer is Mike Huckabee on “Morning Joe.” Transcript via Daily Kos.

Meanwhile, liberals are shrill

It was going to be so easy.

The Speech

“But this is one of the few speeches by an American politician in my lifetime that has both elegance and intellectual substance to it.”

Timothy Burke

Obama’s speech today

Talking Points Memo has selected highlights from Obama’s speech on race today. The video runs 9 minutes and 40 seconds.

Most insightful line so far about Spitzer

“Men such as those in Spitzer’s position do not so much pay for women to have sex with them; they pay for women to go away AFTER having sex with them.”

Psychologist David Buss quoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

A lesson Bill Clinton never learned.

Worst headline of the day, so far

“Friends defend call girl who took down Spitzer”

TODAY: People - MSNBC.com

Excuse me, Spitzer took himself down.

The Lost Children

The week before last Margaret Talbot had an article in The New Yorker on the T. Don Hutto Residential Center near Austin, Texas. Hutto is a detention center for illegal immigrants and their families, though not Mexican nationals who are immediately returned to Mexico when apprehended. The immigrants at Hutto (there is another center like it in Pennsylvania) are held awaiting action on their case. So are their children.

I’ve been trying to read this article for several days. I get through about three or four paragraphs and I throw the magazine down in disgust. The story it tells about us and our country is just too depressing.

Read along with me a little:

Children were regularly woken up at night by guards shining lights into their cells. They were roused each morning at five-thirty. Kids were not allowed to have stuffed animals, crayons, pencils, or pens in their cells. And they were not allowed to take the pictures they had made back to their cells and hang them up. When Hutto opened as an immigration-detention center, children attended school there only one hour a day. Detainees, including children, wore green or blue prison-issue scrubs. In November, 2006, Krista Gregory, who lives in Austin and works with church groups there, got a call from a couple of Hutto employees who, she says, were unhappy about the lack of supplies for child detainees. Gregory arranged for local churches to donate toys, baby blankets, and Bibles.

Staff members, who wore police-type uniforms, were mostly people who had backgrounds in corrections rather than in child welfare. Detainees said that when parents or children broke rules guards threatened them with separation from their children. Kevin Yourdkhani, at the prompting of one of Hines’s law students, wrote a brief description of one such occasion. “I was in my bed and my dad came to fix my bed,” he wrote. “When the police came and saw my dad in the room, he said, ‘If He comes and see my dad again in my room His going to put my mom in a siprate jail and my dad in a sipate jail and me a foster kid.’ I cried and cried so much that I lost my energy. I went to sleep. I felt If I will be siprated I can never see my parents again, and I will get stepparents and they will hurt me or maybe they will kill me.”

The adults incarcerated committed no serious crime. The children, of course, committed no crime at all. And this is how we treat them. Sometimes I am just so embarrassed to be an American.

You really should read this article.

I don’t usually believe in hell

… but there are times when it seems to fit the crime.

U.S. soldiers at a military base in Iraq were provided with treated but untested wastewater for nearly two years by KBR, the giant government contractor, and may have suffered health problems as a result, according to a report released yesterday by the Pentagon’s inspector general.

Washington Post

I’m thinking these KBR bastards probably are running around with flag lapel pins too.

Go directly to jail

The Washington Post, among others, reports that:

“More than one in 100 adult Americans is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year, in addition to more than $5 billion spent by the federal government ….”

What’s interesting about this is, according to historian Gordon S. Wood:

“Traditionally accused criminals were held in jail only until they went to trial; then if convicted they were fined, whipped, mutilated, or executed, but not incarcerated.” Wood points out that debtors were the sole exception. “But actions for debt could send the debtor to prison where he languished….”

I like the traditional approach better than the current approach.

The Wood quotation is from “Debt and Democracy” in the June 12, 2003, issue of The New York Review of Books.

Losers

Princess Sparkle Pony’s Photo Blog has some suggestions for additional Florida Confederate Heritage license plates after a Florida legislator introduced the idea.

Here’s his, but go see the others.

You’d think the bastards would want to play down the fact that in that particular rebellion THEY LOST.

Link via Crooks and Liars.

Damn right I’m a liberal

Cheers and Jeers has Dan Kurtzman’s Liberal Manifesto. Go read it.

A hypothetical situation

Just take three minutes out of your busy life and go read what Jesus’ General has written and watch the video.

And always let FUBAR be your expectation when experts act.

Is Your Printer Spying on You?

Imagine that every time you printed a document, it automatically included a secret code that could be used to identify the printer - and potentially, the person who used it. Sounds like something from an episode of “Alias,” right?

Unfortunately, the scenario isn’t fictional. In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots

Worst president ever line of the day

George W. Bush: “[B]ut most people in America understand that the rich people hire good accountants and figure out how not to necessarily pay all the taxes and the middle class gets stuck.”

Wouldn’t that be an argument for raising taxes on the “rich people” to even the playing field?

Oh, and Ephraim, didn’t you say here last September that “Only the rich pay taxes”? Seems your president disagrees with you.

Idol thoughts while watching The Grammys

NewMexiKen wouldn’t want to dis a career as an archivist like I had, but it occurs to me every once in awhile — like while watching the Grammy Awards show — that I should have given more thought to being a rock god.

There was a group of about 20 British school kids (13-15 year olds) on the plane last night from Atlanta to Albuquerque. They were flying from London to Taos for a week’s skiing. Privileged brats. (Though the U.S. is cheap these days if we’ll let you in.) Personally, I’d have given a visa to Amy Winehouse instead.

(While I think of it, I saw Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke on DVD last week with Jill. This is Lee’s four part documentary on New Orleans and Katrina. After the first two parts, we wondered what could be added, but actually it’s pretty riveting over the better part of the full four parts. I strongly recommend you see the film — if only to better understand what happened in light of so much contemporary news that got it wrong and the overall chaos. It will make you very disappointed in our country.)

Aretha, honey, no one loves you more than I do, but you’ve got to consider Jenny Craig or something.

This photo has nothing to do with anything, but I suggest it’s worth seeing and reminding ourselves every day until November.

Dylan has been right about so much, and certainly not least with: “I was thinkin’ ’bout Alicia Keys, couldn’t keep from crying.” She is something.

I saw an ad today for a wireless SD memory card for digital cameras. Move photo files from your camera to your computer via your home wireless network. 2GB for $100, so it’s pricey, but that will change. It’s called Eye-Fi.

I’d like to point out that the video for the Record of the Year was posted here nearly six weeks ago — Rehab.

Liberty

What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

“What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

Judge Learned Hand

Remarks are excerpted from a speech Hand gave at “I Am an American Day” in 1944. Hand was born on January 27 in 1872. Many consider Judge Hand the most influential American jurist to have not served on the Supreme Court.

Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge is a lengthy book review of the major legal biography of Hand. The 1961 obituary from Time is worthwhile.

Top Ten Rejected Titles for The George W. Bush Movie

From the home office, Letterman’s Top Ten Rejected Titles for The George W. Bush Movie:

10.”Jackass 3″
9.”The Lyin’ King”
8.”The Departed As Of January 20th, 2009″
7.”Stop Or My Vice President Will Shoot”
6.”Dial M For Moron”
5.”Das Boob”
4.”When Sally Met Cheney’s Daughter”
3.”White Men Can’t Govern”
2.”The Nightmare Before Hillary”

And the number one rejected title for George W. Bush Movie:

“Raging Bull****”

Thanks to DP for the pointer!