Please note new links at right…

Billionaires for Bush

Halliburton Watch

Village Voice

All recommended by me and provided us all by the redoubtable Jolly Dr. Max. Thanks, Max!

Karl Rove spent four hours testifying to a grand jury and then took the rest of the day off in the middle of the Miers confirmation battle and a crucial time in Iraq. Hmmmm. Is it time to revive our Watergate mantra — “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!”?

Read the whole story at:

Rove Testifies for 4th Time

Commentator Cronyism

First, it was Rush Limbaugh’s drug use and now a payola scandal in the U.S. Dept. of education. The right wing blasted Clinton for Monica and then a bunch of them had to resign over their own extra-marital affairs. Even more than the pious crap the religious right tries to feed us, I dislike the hypocricy of the far right wing Bushies. I’m not the only one. The last graph from the linked article:

Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, who first disclosed that prosecutors were involved, sharply criticized the administration, saying in a statement: “This case falls into the pattern of corruption and cronyism we are seeing from this administration. Instead of looking out for their political pals, this administration needs to start looking out for the American people and their hard-earned tax dollars.”

My thanks to Jolly Dr. Max for this contribution

chicagotribune.com >> Editorials
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The Bush years: Outrage, after outrage, after …
Asked to name the Outrage of the Week, how could anyone possibly choose?

By Molly Ivins
Published October 13, 2005

AUSTIN, Texas — On one of those television gong shows that passes for journalism, the panelists used to have to pick an Outrage of the Week. Then, each performer would wax indignant about his or her choice for 60 seconds or so. If someone asked me to name the Outrage of the Week about now, I’d have a coronary. How could anyone possibly choose?

I suppose the frontrunner is the anti-torture amendment. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) proposed an amendment to the defense appropriations bill that would prohibit “cruel, inhuman or degrading” treatment of prisoners in the custody of the U.S. military.

This may strike you as a “goes without saying” proposition-the amendment passed the Senate 90 to 9. The United States has been signing anti-torture treaties under Democrats and Republicans for at least 50 years. But the Bush administration actually managed to find some weasel words to create a loophole in this longstanding commitment to civilized behavior.

According to the Bushies, if the United States is holding a prisoner on foreign soil, our soldiers can still subject him or her to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment-the very forms of torture used by the soldiers who were later prosecuted for their conduct at Abu Ghraib. Does this make any sense, moral or common?

So deeply does President Bush feel our country, despite all its treaty commitments, has a right to torture that he has threatened to veto the bill if it passes. This would the first time in five years he has ever vetoed anything. Think about it: Five years of stupefying pork, ideological nonsense, dumb administrative ideas, fiscal idiocy, misbegotten energy programs-and the first thing the man vetoes is a bill to pay our soldiers because it carries an amendment saying, once again, that this country does not torture prisoners.

This is the United States of America. It is our country, not George W. Bush’s personal property. The United States of America still stands for the rights of man, for freedom, dignity and justice. We do not torture helpless prisoners. Our soldiers are not the Nazi Waffen SS, not the North Vietnamese who tortured McCain and others for years on end, not bestial Argentinean fascists, not the Khmer Rouge.

Remember, we invaded Iraq because Saddam Hussein was such a horrible brute that he tortured people. This is beyond disgusting. The House Republicans, who have no shame, will try to weaken McCain’s amendment. They need to hear from decent Republicans all over this country. Don’t leave this hideous stain on your party’s name. This is not what America stands for. We’ve had more loathsome and more dangerous enemies than Al Qaeda and managed to defeat them without resorting to torture.

And leading the charge in the House will be Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), that pillar of moral rectitude and Christian mercy. Wait a minute: Didn’t DeLay have to step down from his leadership position after he got indicted? Well, yes, but some step-downs are more down than others. There was “The Hammer” in full glory Friday, twisting arms and working the floor on behalf of a real cutie of a bill to benefit the oil companies.

Even Republicans revolted. As Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.) said, “We are enriching people, but we are not doing anything to give the little guy a break.”

I have become inured to Bush’s idea of foreign policy. But the policy does result in some lovely ironies. On Friday, Mohamed ElBaradei, the highly respected head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Quite apart from whether you support Bush or not, ElBaradei and the IAEA deserve the honor-they have been both diligent and effective.

ElBaradei was right when he repeatedly warned the Bush administration that Iraq did not have any weapons of mass destruction and has said the day the United States invaded “was the saddest in my life.”

But you know our boy George: not for him the gracious, “Gee, you were right, and we were wrong after all.” Nope, after ElBaradei was proved right, Bush tried to have him fired. And the man in charge of carrying out the campaign to have the guy fired for being right? John Bolton, now our ambassador to the United Nations.

Molly Ivins is a syndicated columnist based in Austin, Texas. E-mail: [email protected]. Creators Syndicate

Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune

Scandals rock administration

A couple days ago, I tried to round up some of the scandals that affect the Bush administration. Here’s the Washington Post’s effort to do the same thing.

Bill Moyers on commondreams.org

The privacy shattered Sharon Astrin offers this excellent speech by Bill Moyers to environmental journalists. We both recommend it to you.

One of my readers took umbrage at yesterday’s blog entry. The claim was that this reader is a Christian and runs a business and is, ergo, a Christian businessperson. “I’m not motivated by money in my business,” I was told. “I’d do this even if there weren’t any money in it. I’d just get a job doing anything and still help the people I’m working with now.” I was sternly admonished not to make such generalizations. We will have to agree to disagree, I’m afraid. Christ answered this himself in the Sermon on the Mount; he said that if you try to serve the interests of both God and money, you’ll either do a good job of one and not the other or you’ll make a hash of both. Yesterday, I didn’t mention that God also said that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven. I also think it’s significant that Judas Iscariot sold out Jesus for 30 pieces of silver and not for an idea or a belief. My reading of the Gosplels is “extreme”, I was told. I still maintain that it is not my “reading”, it is the radical and revolutionary thinking of Jesus that is extreme. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to believe me or the words of Jesus. I’m ready to be taken to school, though, and if you think I’m reading Jesus as being extreme, please bring up the verses and the evidence that dispute my conclusions and don’t just baldly assert what is not in the text.

“Greed is good,” intoned the character Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglass) in the movie “Wall Street”. “Greed works.”

The very Hand of God moves over the marketplace and the outcome will be just, Adam Smith instructs in “Wealth of Nations”, the seminal book of economics and the progenitor of laizze faire economics.

God must love poor people, else why make so many of them?

We would sure like to believe that we’re reading this blog on our laptops in our historic neighborhoods because we’ve been blessed by God. We drive our SUVs to church believing that we’re so darn good.

We spend our Sundays soaking up God in what has become America’s most segregated hour in church.

The poor will always be with us.

Can we be moral and have wealth while thousands suffer?

The ultra wealthy aristocracy of France and Russia thought that they were in charge of the world as a result of divine intervention and they got their heads chopped off for their troubles. America’s oligarchs think the same. I wonder as to their ultimate fate.

Under this present American administration, a very few of the very wealthy have become even more wealthy. The few have benefitted to an unassailable degree. Wealth has been amassed that cannot really be comprehended by most of us.

Meanwhile, millions have been driven into poverty under this administration.

The gap between rich and poor has grown and grown and grown during the past six years.

Corporate moguls have traditionally earned about 15 times the wages/salary as the common worker in an American corporation. Now, CEOs earn upwards of 23 times the income of a worker.

We’re talking CEOs making hundreds of millions.

How’s that working out for us?

I can tell you from my own observation that America in the past half century has moved from a society in which mothers stayed home with children to a working mother as the common situation. It seems as if every household is now a two income family just to keep the wolf from the door. Children are raised by televisions and find out about morality and language and sex and drugs and cigarets and alcohol from other children because there is no strong parental role model at home. Mom and Dad are both physically as well as emotionally absent — they come home exhausted.

We are working more hours a week now than ever (at least as far back as we have records) and we work far more hours than our Asian and European fellows.

Fewer of us have fewer benefits now than ever. Tens of millions have lost their health insurance and millions more are finding their pensions are broke or no longer offered.

We compete with workers in Asia and elsewhere who live in squalor and we lose our jobs to them routinely.

In my own profession as an attorney, we’ve known for a long time that money matters. Martin Luther King, Jr., accurately described the legal system when he said that it’s Justice for Just Us who can afford it.

Do you really think that greed, one of the seven deadly sins, is good?

Don’t you, like me, know people who have been driven into bankruptcy and poverty through no fault of their own other than to have a child or spouse who became ill?

Have you met our homeless? They are people who lived in nice suburban houses but only a paycheck away from disaster and then, an illness or a factory closing drives them onto the street to live with children in their cars.

They are the last, but they will be the first. You and I will be known in heaven by the way we treat the least of these.

Your bloated bureaucratic entitlement program is their lifeline to dignity and decency, but nevermind.

Got a dollar bill in your pocket? Take it out and look at it.

Is it a Baptist or a Catholic dollar bill?

It isn’t atheist, it seems; after all, it says we trust in God.

What’s the morality of a dollar bill? Of money?

Your dollar. Our dollar. You don’t really care about that particular dollar bill; you’d be just as happy with another one.

Your dollar bill. Ask yourself this question: Would this dollar be equally comfortable in the pocket of a priest as in the purse of a prostitute? Damn. Seems like the answer must be “yes”.

Myself, I always laugh when I hear someone described as a “Christian businessman”. I doubt that there is such a thing.

Christ wasn’t too keen on money. The only time he got really angry was with the bankers changing money in the Temple. When the lawyers asked him a snarky question about money, he told them to give the government what belongs to the government as long as you were careful to give God what is His. He ignored the popular hatred of taxes — maybe you remember him asking the taxman to come out of the tree. He also was pretty clear about our love of Polo shirts and DKNY dresses: in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, he tells us that the lillies of the field are well dressed and he’d take care of our clothes and not to worry about such things. He also said that we can’t love money and love God both at the same time. He tells us not to worry even about the most basic things, food, for example.

How can you be a Christian and a businessman since to be a businessman is to worry about nothing BUT money?

Even the 10 Commandments of the Old Testament makes it clear that it is a sin to want the things your neighbors have. Very different from the “keep up with the Joneses” culture of the good ole U.S. of A.

Historically, Americans knew this stuff up until the end of the 19th Century when we got the idea from the very rich that there was something called Social Darwinism. It’s the idea that God blesses some people with great wealth. Poppycock! It’s the last thing God would do. Besides, don’t you know good people who lose thier jobs, get sick and otherwise struggle to keep body and soul together? You know it isn’t true, but we act like it’s true. The Prayer of Jabez, indeed!

Your dollar bill has no more morality than the Godless, souless, bloodless, perpetual corporations that run your life.

Your unease about your spiritual life begins at the mall.

The love of money is the root of all evil.

The American Dream is not God’s dream, it comes from someplace entirely different.

A long time ago, in what must seem like a galaxy far, far away, a man named Marx, sitting in a London library, wrote an essay about “alienation of labor”. Trotsky and Lenin and Mao got it all wrong in so many ways, but good old Karl had a good idea about alienation of labor that still applies to modern American state capitalism. Make no mistake about it, America is not a strictly capitalist country. In fact, our corporate coddling at the expense of the American worker looks a lot more like fascism than Adam Smith’s laizze faire dream of God’s hand moving across the marketplace. Anyway, Marx said that there was a time when we made things for their use. If you made a shoe, it was because you liked making shoes and/or needed shoes for your family. Once the fact of industrial capitalism became the economic model, no one made a shoe any more. A worker might make a part of a shoe, or even put together parts of shoes made by other workers. No one made shoes for the joy of making shoes any more. Workers made shoes for the weekly paycheck after industrial capitalism dominated the marketplace. Thus, we were “alienated” from our labor. Americans no longer are dominated by industrial capitalism because we are no longer an industrial nation as we were in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Nevertheless, the economic system of a service economy with state sponsored assistance to capital interests still has us working for the paycheck. A very great many of us provide some kind of service in the way of selling cars or teaching school or even practicing law not because we love that kind of work, but because we’re led to believe that we must have credit cards and a house in Edmond and an SUV and deoderant and Polo shirts and whatever else it is that advertising has created as a demand in our lives. We trudge to our insurance office or bank or whatever because we don’t like the work but we NEED the paycheck. We’re alienated from our labor. We get on that credit treadmill when we’re 19 or 20 years old and we stay there for another half century until we die of a stress related heart attack or stroke out. IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THAT WAY!!! It is possible for you and me to do that which we love for the love of the work and let the money be damned. It’s not easy, though. You have to either throw out your television or be strong enough to avoid being manipulated by the constant messages of sex and death that come out of the commercials and the programs and the movies and whatnot. You have to be able to set your own priorities and discriminate between wants and needs — a very adult thing to do in a very juvenile culture. You have to be strong enough to laugh at your peer group when it buys its SUVs. You have to be strong enough to withstand the stares and condemnation of people you’d like to have as friends. You have to value a very different path. It must be important to you to read philosophy and spend quiet time thinking about what you believe is important. OUCH! Who does that??!!?? You must find your pleasures on your own and not be handed them by others. You must actually be an individual rather than one who merely mouths the comforts of atomization as you’ve been taught by the Henry Adams machine that put you in rows and columns for 12 years of school, Pavlovian responding to bells once an hour. You DO realize that all that schooling you suffered was subliminal training for you to be docile when you clocked in at your local factory, don’t you? The American Dream, so-called, is a nightmare of soul deadening enslavement to an oligarchial few who are now in control of the levers of our society, our culture, our economy, our very minds and thoughts. We use their words to express what can’t be expressed: our ennui, our angst, our frustration, our sublimation of ourselves to the outsized female breast selling us another useless and senseless piece of crap.
Nevermind, my children, nevermind. Go back to your blow things up gratuitous nudity slasher movies and lust after sleeker and faster penis substitutes. Class dismissed.

Ever get the sense that the American dream just ain’t all that dreamy?

You go to school and get good grades so you can get into a good college. You work a little harder to get pretty good grades so you can get a good job. You get a job and it’s something you’re greatful for, but you wouldn’t call it great. You marry someone. They’re better than you deserve, but marriage isn’t all that perfect, either. You get your three bedroom house and your station wagon and sedan and have your 2.2 children, but that’s no bowl of cherries by any means. You do not come home to fresh baked cookies and June Cleaver in her pearls because your spouse also works to pay the utility bills and mortgage. There you are. The American dream. And you look through your white picket fence at 25 more years of putting on a tie for 50 weeks a year and watching a lot of TV nights while the kids romp around your feet and get older and take the car out for their shot at the same game you’ve played. Then, you get to take care of your parents and become the in between generation. You go to church, hoping for some pie in the sky by and by. Your wife goes to the mall to keep the kids in athletic shoes and jeans. Once a year, you take a vacation to visit her parents in BumFuck Egypt. And, you think that someone, somewhere is having fun and “making it”, but it’s not anyone you know. Now, you’re the in between generation at work, too. Old farts frustrating you at the top of the pyramid and young bucks nipping at your heels below. No more grand schemes, just trying to make it through the day. A few things start to slip: it’s the shoulder you hurt at age 17 that now aches after every round of golf. You get contacts or glasses and bifocals slip their way into your life. Your hair thins. Your teeth are capped and crowned and bridged. Your belly gets more and more uncomfortable in more and more of your pants. Screw it, it’s not like Paris Hilton is ever going to ask you to party with her, anyway. You find Jesus, have an affair, go to rehab or you don’t. You vote, but it doesn’t seem to matter. You pay your taxes and your credit card bills and just when it seems like the light can be seen at the end of the tunnel, it’s time to pay for college for the kids and the car breaks down and the 3 bedroom house really needs a new roof and a general overhaul of the kitchen and baths and all at once, you’re behind again.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Don’t let my use of gendered words fool you: it’s equally crappy to be a woman.

You want to scream, but you’re inarticulate and who would you scream at?

Dad dies. Mom dies. The kids have kids and are too busy for your concerns.

Your ticker, your colon and your knees are gone.

Wha’d ya say?

Can you bring that light over here?

Comfortably numb, you go quietly into that last good night.

Monday morning? Again?