Category: Issues of the Day

Mother Jones has the results of a very interesting poll. First question:

Generally speaking, do you think that things in this country are going in the right direction, or do you feel things have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track?

Right direction: 30%
Wrong track: 62%
No answer: 8%

If you’re interested in public affairs/current issues, the results are well worth reviewing. Americans are in a deep funk.

“According to a new poll, 53 percent of Americans say the war in Iraq was not justified. The other 47 percent say, ‘There’s a war in Iraq?'”

Jay Leno

Christopher Hitchens at Slate:

But get ready. It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe (“I’m outraged more by the outrage”) have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see. And one linguistic reform is in any case already much overdue. The silly word “abuse” will have to be dropped. No law or treaty forbids “abuse,” but many conventions and statutes, including our own and the ones we have urged other nations to sign, do punish torture—which is what we are talking about here at a bare minimum.

From Whiskey Bar

Federal law commands that Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives not be tortured, and the president has ordered that they be treated humanely, but the U.S. is not required to treat captured terrorists as if they were guests at a hotel….

Former Justice Department attorney John Yoo
LA Times op-ed
June 11, 2004

A recent Soviet article quotes from the archives a written note of [Stalin’s] to Yezhov, when the old Bolshevik Beloborodov was giving unsatisfactory testimony: “Can’t this gentleman be made to tell of his dirty deeds? Where is he – in a prison or a hotel?”

Robert Conquest
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
1990

From Wonkette

Yesterday, Vice President Dick Cheney repeated the assertion that Saddam Hussein had “long-established ties” with al-Qaida. “He was a patron of terrorism,” Cheney told an audience at conservative think-tank in Florida. “He had long established ties with al-Qaida.”

Asked to defend his claims — which have been largely discredited by policy experts and denounced by members of Congress — Cheney demonstrated the administration’s latest approach to intelligence gathering, putting his fingers in his ears and singing, “La-la-la-la-la! I can’t hear you!”

Go read Wonkette’s June 11 entries (two at this writing).

But come back.

NewMexiKen agrees with TBogg:

You wanna put someone new on the ten dollar bill? [Ray Charles’s] your man…

Dave Eggers at Mother Jones on how teachers make ends meet.

The latest statistics put the average teacher’s salary at about $46,000; some teachers earn a little more, some a little less (the average teacher’s salary—not the starting salary—is $38,000 in Kansas, $36,000 in New Mexico, and $32,000 in South Dakota). Overall, that’s about the same that we pay pile-driver operators ($45,980) and about $8,000 less than the average elevator repairman pulls down. Meanwhile, a San Francisco dockworker makes about $115,000, while the clerk who logs shipping records into the longshoreman’s computer makes $136,000.

The first step to creating an education system full of the best teachers we can find is to pay them in line with their importance to their communities. We pay orthodontists an average of $350,000, and no one would say that their impact on the lives of kids is greater than a teacher’s. But it seems difficult for everyone, from parents to politicians, to shake free of a tradition in which teaching was seen as something of a volunteer project for women whose husbands brought home the real money.

“I guess the people I feel worst for are Carter and Ford. Because they have to be watching all this thinking, we’re not getting that.”

Jon Stewart, on media coverage of Ronald Reagan’s death

“CIA Director George Tenet resigned last week. Here’s the sad part, the FBI just found out today.”

Jay Leno

From Wonkette:

Just when we thought we wouldn’t actually learn anything from all this Reagan coverage, Chris Matthews gives us a real history lesson. Vamping a bit between MSNBC correspondents’ interviews of Stepford Republicans, Matthews noted that, thanks to all of Reagan’s war movies, “He seemed understand the experience of the Greatest Generation better than the guys who were actually in battle could.”

From ABC News:

When Chad Taylor noticed his son was apparently experiencing serious side effects from Ritalin prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, he decided to take the boy off the medication. Now, he says he may be accused of child abuse. …

So Taylor took Daniel off Ritalin, against his doctor’s wishes. And though Taylor noticed Daniel was sleeping better and his appetite had returned, his teachers complained about the return of his disruptive behavior. Daniel seemed unable to sit still and was inattentive. His teachers ultimately learned that he was no longer taking Ritalin.

School officials reported Daniel’s parents to New Mexico’s Department of Children, Youth and Families. Then a detective and social worker made a home visit.

“The detective told me if I did not medicate my son, I would be arrested for child abuse and neglect,” Taylor said.

Some balance.

The President “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed”.

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

In case, like others, you’d forgotten.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn’t bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn’t be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

The advice was part of a classified report on interrogation methods prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after commanders at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained in late 2002 that with conventional methods they weren’t getting enough information from prisoners.

The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national-security considerations or legal technicalities.

*****

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a “presidential directive or other writing” that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is “inherent in the president.”

The General has written another letter.

Go scroll through the photos. They’re worth a few thousand words.

Link via Making Light.

Check out the photo and caption at Body and Soul.

Talk Left has a very interesting take on O.J.

Jeanne at Body and Soul has some poetic thoughts on what it means to be patriotic.

The description at Body and Soul has always been among NewMexiKen’s favorites — “The body politic, the human soul, and Billie Holiday.” What else is there that really matters?

A jury in California awarded a woman $122.6 million in compensatory damages and $246 million in punitive damages from the Ford Motor Company Thursday. The woman’s Ford Explorer rolled over and she is paralyzed from the waist down. While NewMexiKen is sympathetic for her loss, this verdict is insane.

From CNN:

The Army will prevent soldiers in units set to deploy to Iraq and Afghanistan from leaving the service at the end of their terms, a top general said Wednesday.

That means it’s no longer a volunteer army, right?

Pointer from Billmon.