Category: Politics

It’s bad enough that this horrible administration is rolling back all the liberal victories of the last few decades: a woman’s right to choose, civil rights, protection of endangered creatures, worker safety, and much more. Now it is even looking to destroy some of the conservative ones as well.

It turns out now that our nation’s mismanagement of foreign policy is leading back to another blast from the past, the cold war.

The issues around the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe are complex. I’ll admit that I don’t think I know enough about this to make a comment on the viability of the treaty itself (A blogger first!), but I do know that statements like “The idea that somehow 10 interceptors and a few radars in Eastern Europe are going to threaten the Soviet strategic deterrent is purely ludicrous, and everybody knows it” from Donna, oh, I mean, Condoleezza Rice don’t fucking help when the Secretary General of NATO has called CFE, “one of the cornerstones of European security.”

Yet again, the W administration has a complete incompetent running the show. This time it is the most intelligent of the bunch. When she became Secretary of State it seemed a bit weird since her background as an academic was Soviet Russia, not the Middle East. Finally, she gets a problem that talks straight to her experience and she resorts to 80’s style Cold War attacks on one of our freaking allies. Yeah, can I double-check that your PhD isn’t from some university run by a televangelist?

[nytimes article]

not much to add here

“The U.S. is not the only country in which random acts of gun violence have erupted in seemingly everyday circumstances to destroy lives, families and communities,” Britain’s Guardian newspaper said. “But the U.S. is one of the few countries that seems collectively unwilling and politically incapable of doing anything serious to stop such things happening again.”

“Having the right to have a gun for civilians is completely wrong in a country like America,” said Haji Aziz, 48, a businessman from Wardak province in Afghanistan who said he has three Kalashnikov assault rifles at home for protection but said he will not let his sons use them. “Security is good there, they have well-trained police, they are not in a war zone, so why should they keep weapons at home?”

International community castigates U.S. “gun culture” (Seattle Times)

from Vatican abolishes the concept of limbo (Seattle Times)

A church decision to abolish limbo has long been expected.

Benedict and his predecessor, the late Pope John Paul II, expressed misgivings about the concept. Benedict, when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and the church’s top enforcer of dogma, said he viewed limbo as a mere “theological hypothesis.”

The document published Friday said the question of limbo has become a “matter of pastoral urgency” because of the growing number of babies who do not receive the baptismal rite. Especially in Africa and other parts of the world where Catholicism is growing but has competition from other faiths such as Islam, high infant-mortality rates mean many families live with a church teaching them that their babies could not go to heaven.

I can understand the concept in a religion where scholars are always researching and interpreting the documents of the faith and are continually presenting and debating the meanings.

That isn’t the way the Catholic church (or for that matter, any main-line Christian church that I can think of) works. The church is infallible, the interpretation of the bible via the leaders of the faith is always correct.

So when the leaders change their mind on a central tenant of the faith like this to make it easier to recruit new members, it leads to an existential crisis of faith for everyone. What about those horrified mothers in previous decades whose children died before baptism preventing them from going to heaven. Does this rule change mean that their children actually went to heaven, or are still stuck in limbo, or are in hell?

What hard and fast rule that has been a continual test of belief for the last couple hundred years are they going to change next?

Two new articles came out recently that show that the administration is uncowed in their attempts to control the truth and eliminate the perception of dissent.

First of all is this article from the Seattle Times describing how the defense in a 1st ammendment case stemming from the 2005 ejection of a George Bush “town hall” meeting of two people for having a “liberal” bumper sticker on their car is legal because “the president’s staff can lawfully remove anyone who expresses points of view different from his.” (quote from the Times, not the lawyers)

Secondly is this opinion piece, from the New York Times, which makes a convincing argument that the lawyer firing case is really about the perception that the Bush administration was trying to plant that the Democrats have been tampering with elections (possibly to deflect the view that the Republicans have been tampering with elections).

Since 2005, Bush has appointed at least three U.S. attorneys who had worked in the Justice Department’s civil-rights division when it was rolling back longstanding voting-rights policies aimed at protecting predominantly poor, minority voters.

Another newly installed U.S. attorney, Tim Griffin in Little Rock, Ark., was accused of participating in efforts to suppress Democratic votes in Florida during the 2004 presidential election while he was a research director for the Republican National Committee. He has denied wrongdoing.

Read the original article in full. This is some serious evil the Bush administration has been trying to get over on the American people.

Seattle Times: New U.S. attorneys seem to have partisan records

White House Said to Prompt Firing of Prosecutors – New York Times

The administration is blaming the blatantly political firings of federal prosecutors on Harriet Myers, who resigned in February. I mean this is just so dumb. First, you recommend her for Supreme Court justice and spend countless pages of print talking about how close she and the president are. Then, you stab her in the back and claim she’d gone upriver and was doing evil things without the president’s knowledge. Yet again, the hubris of the White House is shown in stark relief. They seem to be under the impression that the American people have the attention span and memory of a gnat.

Anger over Halliburton’s move to Dubai | The Daily Telegraph

Halliburton, headed by Dick Cheney from 1995 to 2000 before he became US Vice President, has announced it is relocating to the United Arab Emirates to capitalise on the Gulf region’s booming energy market.

Wow, do they live in the “we’re-too-evil-to-give-a-fuck-what-anybody-thinks” world.

I mean, c’mon, this is essentially stabbing the administration in the back. They take a zillion dollars of taxpayer money and then basically move into the heart of we-hate-america-central. It’d be like MacDonald Douglas moving to Moscow at the height of the cold war.

Of course, they can. They don’t sell stuff in stores. It is pretty hard to boycott Haliburton. It makes the company look horrible, but then again, with all the graft, they couldn’t look much worse.

The acid test will be to see how many no-bid govenment contracts they get and mismanage from now on.

Op-Art: Who Do You Think We Are? – New York Times

Nothing earth shattering here, but interesting none the less. Assuming that they used a decent mechanism to gather the data, Americans are super liberal!