Category: Issues of the Day

At Time, Joe Klein writes about poor Dick Cheney.

He seemed stunned, uncertain for once. And the haunted look in his eyes reminded me of what soldiers in Vietnam used to call the Thousand-Yard Stare—the paralytic shock that comes from seeing the impact that even low-caliber weaponry can have on human flesh.

An appalled Charles P. Pierce points out one difference between south Texas and Vietnam — “NEITHER HARRY WHITTINGTON NOR THE QUAIL WERE SHOOTING BACK!”

“[I]n the current Harper’s the estimated cost of this horrific war to each American taxpayer is just under $20,000.”

Eric Alterman

Maureen Dowd in Wednesday’s Times:

Maybe it’s corporate racial profiling, but I don’t want foreign companies, particularly ones with links to 9/11, running American ports.

What kind of empire are we if we have to outsource our coastline to a group of sheiks who don’t recognize Israel, in a country where money was laundered for the 9/11 attacks? And that let A. Q. Kahn, the Pakistani nuclear scientist, smuggle nuclear components through its port to Libya, North Korea and Iran?

It’s mind-boggling that President Bush ever agreed to let an alliance of seven emirs be in charge of six of our ports. Although, as usual, Incurious George didn’t even know about it until after the fact. (Neither did Rummy, even though he heads one of the agencies that green-lighted the deal.)

William Neikirk writes in the Chicago Tribune’s Washington blog: “Sometimes a visit by a president can change a lot of things — such as keeping your job. Just ask some 32 people who had been fired last week from their high-paying positions at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.”It appeared that all was lost for these workers until President Bush decided to visit the laboratory on Tuesday to promote his proposals for renewable energy (which will require a good bit of new research by this very institution). “Suddenly, the earth moved. Suddenly, sympathy for the plight of these victims soared. Suddenly, it dawned on someone in the White House that the president might be coming to Colorado with a mixed message, talking about the promise of renewable energy while slashing some of the very people working on it.”

Dan Froomkin

From Jane Hamsher at firedoglake:

I don’t know if anyone remembers the ABC news story from September, 2002 when they tested the security of American ports by attempting — with frightening success — to smuggle depleted uranium into the country via the port of New York. They did the same thing again, this time through the port of Los Angeles, in 2003.

One would think that the response of a Homeland Security Department that actually cared about protecting the country from the great fear they are always so quick invoke would be to take measures to make sure that the ports were strengthened such that real terrorists who actually attempted this could not succeed.

What did the Bush administration do?

They began an investigation of ABC news for violation of felony smuggling laws. Intimidate the whistleblowers. It’s the mafia’s stock in trade, too.

I remember this very clearly because it really terrified me. One of the reasons I really came to admire John Kerry was due to the fact that he had an actual plan (can you imagine) to strengthen the big holes in the US port security system. Because contrary to what wingnuttia would have you believe, liberals don’t want to hand over the US to the terrorists. We just want real measures to be taken to secure the country, as opposed to the millions upon millions of dollars wasted in meaningless measures that do nothing to protect national security while a lot of empty rhetoric masks the true intent their efforts: namely, funnel big bucks to your buddy. Then they stomp around and pretend like they actually did something.

Anyone who thinks that BushCo. has done more to make this country secure isn’t “tough on terror.” They’re just a bunch of marks.

Now George Bush wants rake in the big bucks by outsourcing control of our ports to a country that has been a key transfer point for illegal shipments of nuclear components to Iran, North Korea and Lybia, and he’s so accustomed to screaming “look fast, the boogyman’s over there!” while he lifts your wallet he thinks nobody will notice this time either.

Is the the game finally over? Are the Bush cultists finally coming to realize what we’ve known all along — that this bunch of crooks is all about making money and only about making money, national security be damned?

Let’s hope so, because the wingnuts have been the major impediment to true national security for years. It’s high time the scales fell off their eyes for all our sakes.

If you don’t know what this is all about, the Bush Administration is proposing to contract the management of six American ports to a company from the United Arab Emirates. Bush, who has vetoed not one bill in more than five years, promised today to veto any attempt by Congress to undermine this deal.

The following happened in the United States of America on Feb. 9 of this year.

The scene is the Little Falls branch of the Montgomery County Public Library in Bethesda, Md. Business is going on as usual when two men in uniform stride into the main reading room and call for attention. Then they make an announcement: It is forbidden to use the library’s computers to view Internet pornography.

As people are absorbing this, one of the men challenges a patron about a Web site he is visiting and asks the man to step outside. At this point, a librarian intervenes and calls the uniformed men aside. A police officer is summoned. The men leave. It turns out they are employees of the county’s Department of Homeland Security and were operating way outside their authority.

From a column by Leonard Pitts

Any use of the term “homeland” just makes NewMexiKen shiver.

From The New York Times:

The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department’s just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

The royalty relief stems from a time 10 years ago when oil was $10 a barrel (it was a mis-guided effort to encourage production and consumption if you ask me). But do you think Congress will react to the changing times? I doubt it. Providing “relief” to that poor Exxon Mobil company is more important, I guess.

… had to be intoxicated, right?

That alone would seem to explain both the accident and the delay in making it public.

Update: Two men hunting with two women not their wives might be another explanation for the delay in reporting.

“‘The vice president was concerned,’ said Mary Matalin, a Cheney adviser who spoke with him yesterday morning. ‘He felt badly, obviously. On the other hand, he was not careless or incautious or violate any of the [rules]. He didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do.'” (Washington Post)

So, he was “supposed” to shoot Whittington in the face. Presumably it was an accident. The person with the gun is always responsible for where he shoots.

Talk about spin.

Know your target and what is beyond.
Be absolutely sure you have identified your target beyond any doubt. Equally important, be aware of the area beyond your target. This means observing your prospective area of fire before you shoot. Never fire in a direction in which there are people or any other potential for mishap. Think first. Shoot second. (NRA Gun Safety Rules)

Always worth reading, Anne Lamott has an essay on the abortion debate. Go read it. This excerpt should motivate you:

I sat there simmering, like a samovar; nice Jesusy me. The moderator turned to me and asked quietly if I would like to respond. I did: I wanted to respond by pushing over our table.

It takes a smart person to explain things to dummies. Professor Juan Cole lays out the whole Plame story (with pictures!) in a style we all can understand.

Digby speaks for many of us.

Malcolm Gladwell has a New Yorker article currently online that provides new insight into the homeless and other issues and the whole way we understand and react to social problems.

One brief excerpt from this especially informative article:

The homelessness problem is like the L.A.P.D.’s bad-cop problem. It’s a matter of a few hard cases, and that’s good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard. They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections and mental illness. They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it. Murray Barr used more health-care dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state of Nevada. It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.

Read Gladwell’s article and it will change your thinking on the homeless, police violence and smog-control.

“It is very much ingrained in me that you do not manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.???

Ordering a Pizza — the neo-con way. This is good! [Has sound.]

Link via A Closet Full of Rattling Bones.

All the liberal and left bloggers are linking to Digby for post-mortems on yesterday’s cloture vote, so NewMexiKen will too. It’s a good, positive statement at the end of a pretty discouraging process.

Alito was confirmed today 58-42. He will appear tonight at the State of the Union in the robe of a Supreme Court Justice.

NewMexiKen has decided to watch the DVD of The Aristocrats instead.

Mark Morford is in fine fettle. Read it all, but here’s an excerpt:

How about how Bush’s insane rate of issuing those now-infamous “signing statements,” those little firebombs of judicial misprision wherein your mumbling president gets to reserve for himself the right to ignore any law he signs — yes, any law he desires: anti-torture, surveillance, you name it — whenever he feels like it, if he deems that law unconstitutional. Screw Congress. Screw the system of law. And screw, well, you.

For the record: Ronald Reagan issued 71 signing statements during his unholy term. Bill Clinton issued 105 over the span of eight years. Bush 41 signed off on 146, the previous record.

And Dubya? Well, little George has slapped his color-crayon signature on over 500 signing statements so far, reserving his right to disregard the law more times than all former American presidents combined. It is a record. It is a disgusting abuse of power. It is another thing to stack on the pile o’ embarrassment for our nation. Shall we see how high we can go before we topple and implode?

(Here is the beautiful kicker, the thing to make you shudder and sigh: As this Knight Ridder report illuminates, in 2003 lawmakers attempted to rein in Bush’s abuse of signing statements by passing a bill that required the Justice Department to inform Congress whenever BushCo decided to ignore a legislative provision. Bush signed the bill into law — but then immediately issued a signing statement asserting his right to ignore it. Ah, the nauseating poetry of it all.)

If you’ve been aware this past week of the government’s efforts to subpoena web searches (and Google’s, but not Yahoo’s or MSN’s, refusal to comply), tell me you haven’t hesitated as you typed something no one’s business but your own into Google (or the others). An article in today’s New York Times describes people rightfully nervous. It begins:

Kathryn Hanson, a former telecommunications engineer who lives in Oakland, Calif., was looking at BBC News online last week when she came across an item about a British politician who had resigned over a reported affair with a “rent boy.”

It was the first time Ms. Hanson had seen the term, so, in search of a definition, she typed it into Google. As Ms. Hanson scrolled through the results, she saw that several of the sites were available only to people over 18. She suddenly had a frightening thought. Would Google have to inform the government that she was looking for a rent boy – a young male prostitute?

Ms. Hanson, 45, immediately told her boyfriend what she had done. “I told him I’d Googled ‘rent boy,’ just in case I got whisked off to some Navy prison in the dead of night,” she said.