Dispatches from the Culture War
March 19, 2010
12:16
Michael Mukasey, the last of the Bush administration's Attorneys General, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that purports to be a defense of those attorneys who have defended terror detainees in court against the attacks of Liz Cheney and Andrew McCarthy. But he rather quickly reveals an ulterior motive in equating the attacks on those attorneys and criticism of the Bush administration's torture proponents:
More recently, we've witnessed a campaign to impose professional discipline on two former Justice Department lawyers, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, for legal positions they took as to whether interrogation techniques devised and proposed by others were lawful--a campaign that also featured casual denunciations of them as purveyors of torture. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
12:09
That's the actual headline on a Worldnutdaily article, which is really just a written infomercial for a rally organized by one of their columnists, Janet Porter (previously Janet Folger). At the rally they'll be calling on God to save the country:
While the nation is riddled with soaring debt, government expansion, abortion, declining morality and a raging culture war, Christian and Jewish leaders are urging Americans to stop shaking their fists at their television sets and come seek the real solution to today's moral crisis by calling out to God from the nation's capital.
"May Day: a Cry to God for Our Nation in Distress" will take place May 1 from sunrise to 2 p.m. at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
12:02
Wendy Kaminer, a former national board member of the ACLU who has been a critic of the organization for not being sufficiently vigilant in defending the free speech rights of the religious right, has an article in the Atlantic making that same argument again.
And let me make clear up front that I don't necessarily think she's wrong in general. I think sometimes the ACLU does let its political biases take precedence over supporting free speech universally, though not nearly as often as its critics - particularly those who are part of the religious right, as Kaminer is not - like to think. Kaminer is more absolutist about free speech than the ACLU; so am I. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
11:16
If you really want to understand the reconciliation process and the changes the House will attempt to make to the Senate version of the health care bill, you need to read this article at the Michigan Messenger by Mike Lillis. It goes into great detail on the differences between the House and the Senate bills and how they hope to smooth them out using the reconciliation process after the House passes the Senate bill.
One thing that jumped out to me is the Medicaid reimbursement fix, which was not in the Senate bill but will likely be added after the bill is passed. Currently, Medicaid only pays about 65% of costs, which is why so many doctors don't take Medicaid patients. That problem is bankrupting hospitals, who really can't refuse Medicaid patients; they're being forced to shut down units, particularly OB units, because of this problem. Read the comments on this post...
09:30
Once more into the breach, dear friends. Some have wondered why I didn't bother to critique the arguments Vox Day made in his Powerpoint presentation in this post the other day. The answer is that nearly all of those arguments strike me as pointless and irrelevant.
I don't much care about arguments over whether theism or atheism causes wars (though for the record I actually agree that the "religious causes wars" argument tends to be overblown and exaggerated) or whether most criminals are theists or atheists. Such questions have nothing to do with the validity of either position at all.Even if was true that theism or atheism caused wars or anti-social behavior, that does not mean that either position is true or untrue. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
09:23
This would make a pretty good working definition of chutzpah:
ROVE: We saw it in Honduras. Where rather than monitoring the situation, they [the Obama administration] let a cowboy president try to act in an extra-constitutional way to violate a fundamental principle in the Constitution, all without having done their homework in advance.
He's blaming Obama for allowing the president of another nation violate the constitution of his own country -- you know, like the man Rove got into office in this nation. Seriously, this is where the media should act more like the Gong Show. Buzzers should go off when someone says something this stupid and hypocritical. Everyone on the set of the show should come on camera, point and laugh at the idiot saying it. Read the comments on this post...
09:16
And yet another example of Obama morphing into George W. Bush. Now he's threatening to veto a bill that provides for more congressional oversight of intelligence operations.
President Obama will veto a major intelligence funding bill unless lawmakers remove provisions that would toughen congressional oversight of spy agencies and require more stringent congressional notification of intelligence activities.
Three sections of the bill are of "serious concern to the intelligence community," OMB Director Peter Orszag wrote to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Vice Chairman Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Calif.) and ranking member Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.). The three sections are "so serious that the president's senior advisors would recommend that he veto the bill if they are included." Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
09:09
I never watch 60 Minutes, but Sunday night I was flipping channels and came across their interview with Michael Lewis, whose new book explains the Wall Street financial collapse as a result of the subprime mortgage market collapse. I thought it was very informative, and very much in line with what I saw during my years in the mortgage business leading up to the (predictable) collapse. Here's video of the segment. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
09:02
Conor Friedersdorf has a very important blog post about Fouad al-Rabiah, a one-man counter argument to the vile and anti-American position of Andrew McCarthy, Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol that anyone who defends someone accused of terrorism is a terrorist sympathizer themselves.
Fouad al-Rabiah, you see, was an innocent man imprisoned at Gitmo, though hardly the only one. But in his case, the CIA knew very soon after his capture in late 2001 that he was innocent. By the summer of 2002, they had already concluded that he was just an aid worker caught by mistake and not a terrorist. And it took American attorneys seven more years to win the man his freedom. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
March 18, 2010
12:23
On tonight's Declaring Independence:
Daphne Eviatar, an old friend of the program, will be back with us. She is now an attorney with Human Rights First. We'll be attacking Liz Cheney with a verbal meat cleaver.
Olga Akselrod, an attorney with the Innocence Project, will be on to talk about the scandal of wrongful convictions and how to prevent them.
As always, you can listen to the show live by clicking here from 6-7 pm EST. Read the comments on this post...
12:16
So now we have a whole new example of the two parties exchanging scripts, this time on the "deem and pass" procedure. Republicans are suddenly up in arms at the thought of using the self-executing deem and pass rule to pass legislation, calling it unconstitutional and horribly unjust. Never mind that in 2005-2006, the last year the Republicans controlled Congress, they used that same procedure 35 times in that year alone.
And never mind that all their talk about demanding an up or down vote on the bill itself conflicts with the fact that if they would allow an up or down vote in the Senate, the House wouldn't even need to be considering using this procedure in the first place. It's precisely because they can't get an up or down vote in the Senate at this point that they're having to pass the Senate version of the bill in the House. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
12:09
2010 may prove to be a major turning point for the United States. AP explains why:
For more than two decades, Social Security collected more money in payroll taxes than it paid out in benefits -- billions more each year.
Not anymore. This year, for the first time since the 1980s, when Congress last overhauled Social Security, the retirement program is projected to pay out more in benefits than it collects in taxes -- nearly $29 billion more. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
12:02
And more bad news on the hope and change front. AP reports that the use of exemptions to deny FOIA requests actually has gone up under the Obama administration, even after Obama made a big public show of signing an executive order and allegedly making transparency a priority.
Federal agencies haven't lived up to President Barack Obama's promise of a more open government, increasing their use of legal exemptions to keep records secret during his first year in office.
An Associated Press review of Freedom of Information Act reports filed by 17 major agencies found that the use of nearly every one of the law's nine exemptions to withhold information from the public rose in fiscal year 2009, which ended last October. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
09:30
A jail guard in Texas has been fired from his position after saying a whole lot of quite obnoxious things to his fellow officers. And Stephen Johnson has some seriously crazy opinions:
In October, he interrupted a private conversation among jail staff and "interjected his own opinions," telling them all gays should be annihilated, sheriff's reports show. He also said that whites were the superior race and that he supported slavery, reports show.
Johnson said the Bible supported his opinions, reports show.
He showed a co-worker an ancestry binder that he said proved his family once owned several slaves, reports said. Johnson refused to leave after co-workers told him they were offended by his comments, according to reports. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
09:23
Here's an appalling story about an Air Force officer who followed the rules. She wasn't asked and didn't tell, but when the police in Rapid City, South Dakota saw her marriage certificate to another woman in her home, they notified the military and she is now being kicked out of the military.
Jene Newsome played by the rules as an Air Force sergeant: She never told anyone in the military she was a lesbian.
The 28-year-old's honorable discharge under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy came only after police officers in Rapid City, S.D., saw an Iowa marriage certificate in her home and told the nearby Ellsworth Air Force Base. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
09:09
For those with a penchant for ironic coincidence, it is interesting to note that the latest outbreak of McCarthysim -- the right wing witch hunt for attorneys who dare to represent those accused of terrorism -- was started by Andrew McCarthy. As far as I know, he is no relation to Tailgunner Joe. And you really have to see some of his appalling claims on the subject in this idiotic screed. McCarthy writes:
The lawyers chose to offer themselves, gratis, to our enemies for litigation the Constitution does not require. They did so knowing that this litigation would be harmful to the war effort -- a fact the Supreme Court emphasized when it denied war prisoners the right to file habeas claims in 1950. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
09:02
Here's a bizarre story. A pair of Jewish legislators from Maryland who are sponsoring a gun control bill have been attacked by an allegedly Jewish pro-gun group using nasty anti-Semitic slurs.
A Maryland senator and delegate are the targets of a flier that attacks them as "bagel brain Jews" for their support of pending firearms legislation in the General Assembly and accuses them of pursuing "racist policies to destroy your gun rights."
Sen. Brian E. Frosh, a Montgomery County Democrat, said the flier - with the headline "Bagel Brain Jews Want Your Bullets and Your Guns" - was mailed to his home and to those of others in his precinct. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
March 17, 2010
12:09
The blogosphere has added another star to the mainstream media pundit list. Unfortunately, it's Erick Erickson of Red State, who has long history of saying truly vile things and is little more than a budding Michael Savage. And he's just been hired by CNN. Media Matters documents and links to some of those really vile things he's said. Like this:
At Red State, Erickson defended Glenn Beck's assertion that President Obama is a "racist." Erickson stated, "A while back, Glenn Beck called Barack Obama a 'racist.' Given all the terrorists, thugs, and racists Barack Obama has chosen as close personal friends (see e.g. Rev. Wright), it's not a stretch to say it." Erickson went on to call for a boycott of companies that have pulled out of Beck's show and are, according to Erickson, "kowtowing to Barack Obama's worshippers, brownshirts, goons, and thugs." Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
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