Revised Patriot Act Will Make It Illegal To Read Patriot Act

The Onion:

WASHINGTON, DC—President Bush spoke out Monday in support of a revised version of the 2001 USA Patriot Act that would make it illegal to read the USA Patriot Act. “Under current federal law, there are unreasonable obstacles to investigating and prosecuting acts of terrorism, including the public’s access to information about how the federal police will investigate and prosecute acts of terrorism,” Bush said at a press conference Monday. “For the sake of the American people, I call on Congress to pass this important law prohibiting access to itself.” Bush also proposed extending the rights of states to impose the death penalty “in the wake of Sept. 11 and stuff.”

Judge not, lest ye be judged

Wired News: Furthermore:

A California judge has lost his job for neglecting to mind his manners. Bruce Van Voorhis was canned after a state judicial watchdog group found 11 acts of misconduct in an inquiry into his behavior. Transgressions included telling a public defender from Ecuador to “lose the accent” and throwing files at a clerk. He also wrongly badgered a defense attorney in front of a jury and suppressed evidence that was otherwise admissible to see how a rookie prosecutor would handle it. This is not his first run-in with Miss Manners; in 1992, the judicial commission concluded he was rude to court staff and attorneys, but did not remove him from office.

LDS Response to Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven

Three responses from the Church posted under Mistakes in the News. “The first is a short response from the Church’s Director of Media Relations. The second is a summary by Richard E. Turley, managing director of the Family and Church History Department and an authority on Church history and doctrine. The third is a review by Robert L. Millet, Professor of Religious Understanding at Brigham Young University.”

The Boy Who Cried “Wolf!”

There was once a shepherd-boy who kept his flock at a little distance from the village. Once he thought he would play a trick on the villagers and have some fun at their expense. So he ran toward the village crying out, with all his might, —

“Wolf! Wolf! Come and help! The wolves are at my lambs!”

The kind villagers left their work and ran to the field to help him. But when they got there the boy laughed at them for their pains; there was no wolf there.

Still another day the boy tried the same trick, and the villagers came running to help and got laughed at again. Then one day a wolf did break into the fold and began killing the lambs. In great fright, the boy ran for help. “Wolf! Wolf!” he screamed. “There is a wolf in the flock! Help!”

The villagers heard him, but they thought it was another mean trick; no one paid the least attention, or went near him. And the shepherd-boy lost all his sheep.

That is the kind of thing that happens to people who lie: even when they tell the truth no one believes them.

An interesting perspective on unions

The American Prospect’s Tapped on UNIONS, CONT.:

…but Tapped is afraid that there remain plenty of problems in the American economy and within Americans’ workplaces that unions, even where they do exist, simply don’t have the power to confront. All we mean to say is that it would be a nice change of pace if Democratic politicians could address the millions of nonunion employees who don’t see themselves as “workers” and instead see themselves as people with crappy jobs and not a lot of help.

Things just look different to people who’ve never been in unions, never worked in unionized sectors and are unlikely to ever get a chance to join a union unless they start one themselves. It’s important to realize how distant a lot of folks feel from unions — whether that’s out of ignorance of what unions do or out of the reality of their lived experiences in the work world…

General Clark

Also from TomPaine.com:

As speculation heats up about Wes Clark, one thing’s for certain — he’s probably closer to Howard Dean on the issues than anyone else. He’s fiscally conservative, pro-choice, against the Patriot Act, for repealing the Bush tax cuts, thinks gun control is a local issue, for affirmative action, liberal on immigration, a firm believer in the social safety net, against opening up public lands like ANWR to commercial exploitation, a foreign-policy multilateralist, and extremely critical of the way Bush pursued war against Iraq.

Turnabout is fair play

From TomPaine.com:

Pulitzer prizewinning humorist Dave Barry has scored a coup against the American Teleservices Association, the industry group for telemarketers (Barry’s suggested motto for the organization: “Some Day, We Will Get a Dictionary and Look Up ‘Services'”). Barry encouraged readers of his column to call the ATA — even gave their number — to express their views about the “services” provided (reminding them to wipe the receiver afterwards). The ATA’s hopping mad now, having received such a tidal wave of calls that the group has resorted to the strategy Americans use to block telemarketers: they let the machine answer it. Their recorded response explains that, due to an “overwhelming positive response to recent media events, we are unable to take your call at this time.” Barry says he feels “just terrible, especially if they were eating dinner or anything.”

Major League Baseball

Atlanta Braves 93 57 .620 $106,243,667
New York Yankees 92 57 .617 $152,749,814
San Francisco Giants 90 57 .612 $82,852,167
Oakland Athletics 89 60 .597 $50,260,834
Boston Red Sox 86 62 .581 $99,946,500
Seattle Mariners 86 63 .577 $86,959,167

Two weeks to go in the baseball season (12-15 games) and listed above (with their 2003 payroll) are the only teams that have won more than 85 games (the Detroit Tigers have lost 110). Of course, these six teams don’t play the same schedule so this comparison isn’t entirely fair, but I find it interesting.

The Tigers payroll is $49,168,000.

The Tax-Cut Con

Paul Krugman presents a cogent discussion of tax-cuts and government spending in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. We are not over-taxed as a nation, the wealthy received the preponderance of the Bush tax-cuts, and a huge fiscal crisis is looming.

[T]he coming crisis will allow conservatives to move the nation a long way back toward the kind of limited government we had before Franklin Roosevelt. Lack of revenue, he says, will make it possible for conservative politicians — in the name of fiscal necessity — to dismantle immensely popular government programs that would otherwise have been untouchable.

In [tax critic Grover] Norquist’s vision, America a couple of decades from now will be a place in which elderly people make up a disproportionate share of the poor, as they did before Social Security. It will also be a country in which even middle-class elderly Americans are, in many cases, unable to afford expensive medical procedures or prescription drugs and in which poor Americans generally go without even basic health care. And it may well be a place in which only those who can afford expensive private schools can give their children a decent education.

But as Governor Riley of Alabama reminds us, that’s a choice, not a necessity. The tax-cut crusade has created a situation in which something must give. But what gives — whether we decide that the New Deal and the Great Society must go or that taxes aren’t such a bad thing after all — is up to us. The American people must decide what kind of a country we want to be.

Who Owns Native Culture?

Commenting on the use of the name Redskins (as in Washington Redskins) he writes: ”Native American cultures have survived five centuries of pestilence, military conflict and dispossession. Compared to these catastrophes, in what meaningful sense does the name of a professional football team put their survival at risk? One could argue just as convincingly that petty insults actually promote cultural survival by bringing Indians together in solidarity against the dominant culture.”

From review of Who Owns Native Culture? by Michael F. Brown in The New York Times. Read a discussion of the Hopi-Voth controversy from the first chapter here.

The Bounty — Bligh Was No Charles Laughton

Review of The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander from The New York Times:

The events that took place aboard the Bounty at sunrise on April 28, 1789, boil down to the characters of two men, William Bligh, age 34, and the mutineer, Fletcher Christian, who was a decade younger. As he waited, hands bound behind him, to be lowered into the Bounty’s overloaded launch — and having shouted himself hoarse calling for aid — Bligh asked Christian, who had sailed with him twice before, how he could have found the ingratitude to mutiny. Bligh recorded Christian’s answer in his journal. ”That! — Captain Bligh,” said Christian, sounding much like Milton’s Satan, ”that is the thing — I am in hell — I am in hell.”

Prescient Onion article from January 2001

Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’

Bush swore to do “everything in [his] power” to undo the damage wrought by Clinton’s two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

Another two-year-old driver

From Debby [with permission]

Eli also decided he could drive when he was two. We were living on a couple of acres in Avra Valley at the time. The car was a standard transmission. Anyone who knows vehicles very well knows that, if you turn the key on a standard that’s parked in first gear without engaging the clutch, it will lurch forward. He was outdoors playing, and I don’t know if I was in the shower or what I was doing at the moment, but I do remember looking outside and wondering where the hell the car had gone! Turns out Eli had absconded with it. Fortunately, the car was pointed away from the road, because he had managed to “drive” it all the way to the far end of the property where, fortunately, there was a shallow wash and a fence to keep him from getting any further than he did. He was pissed as hell that he was stuck and couldn’t go any further, or that we wouldn’t let him drive it back.

Tribute to Johnny Cash

Howard Owens at Blogcritics.org:

Johnny Cash is such a complete man. He is the prototypical all-American male. He out John Waynes John Wayne, is more rugged than Clint Eastwood, has more class than Frank Sinatra, makes Ronald Reagan look like a flag burner, cares for the downtrodden and exploited more than Michael Moore and is no less faithful than Billy Graham.

He is a complete and purely American character because he is a ball of contradictions. He is patriotic, but protests war and won’t forget his country’s faults; he supports law and order, but entertains prisoners; he is God-fearing, but has abused his body and drifted and strayed; he is an artist, but for most of his career has preferred simplicity over ornament; he doesn’t give a damn about what you think about him, but has carefully crafted his own image; and, for a man who has spent his life in the adoration of the stage light, he is humble and polite to the people he meets.

Admiring a pro at work

Amazing. Yesterday’s fine September 11 piece by James Lileks was simply something he came up with after he accidentally deleted an earlier effort.

And I had nothing. I just looked at the screen for fifteen minutes. This never happens to me. I can always write something. Doesn’t mean it’s good – but as I’ve said, in this trade you have to write when called upon to do so; it’s how you pay the rent. But I wasn’t being called upon. There wasn’t any deadline. No editor would be annoyed if I didn’t write anything, no paycheck would be cast in jeopardy. I wrote a 9/11 column for Newhouse last week, and wrote about the subject earlier this week. The spleen had been vented. For a few minutes I thought, great: September 11 is turning into an essay-writing contest. Well, count me out.

I had a drink, smoked a third of the tiny evil cigars I favor, then wrote what I posted yesterday. I’m glad I put the piece up, as some folks seemed to like it.

Read the result here. Read today’s essay here.