Category: Politics

The Night the Water Ran Out in Georgia

The state of Georgia, like much of the southeast this year, has experienced well-below-average rainfall, and drought conditions there have forced some water usage limitations to be enacted until enough of the wet stuff falls from the sky to replenish supplies.

(No, I’m not bringing this up with a global warming angle in mind, though there are certainly connections to be made.)

Governor Sonny Perdue and other officials have been going back and forth with the Army Corps of Engineers over possible shortcomings in the handling of the water supply there and how to address them, as is certainly an appropriate thing to be doing.

What caught my attention today was an article mentioning the governor’s plan to alleviate the drought through prayer. Yes, a prayer service will be held at the state capitol next week to try to bring the rain.

“The only solution is rain, and the only place we get that is from a higher power,” Perdue spokesman Bert Brantley said on Wednesday.

I’m going to assume that when he uses the term “higher power”, Bert isn’t referring to the complex interactions of winds, temperatures, sunlight, and tidal forces that shape our worldwide weather patterns.

Of course they’ve scheduled this rite on a day when rain is actually in the forecast, so if a few drops do come down they can proclaim, “It’s a miracle!” Failing that, they can wait until it does rain, and still proclaim, “It’s a [delayed] miracle!”

Perdue’s office has sent out invitations to leaders from several faiths for the service, set for Tuesday.

Why not just open it to the public? Invite everyone, and make it a festival with a good old-fashioned rain dance! That way it’ll be useless and interesting and maybe even fun – instead of just useless.

Doom, Gloom, and Potential Kaboom

I don’t know what’s got me down this week – maybe the news, maybe the switch back to Standard time from Daylight Savings over the weekend, or maybe the arrival of cool weather after several unseasonably warm months has finally convinced me that summer might, possibly, be over. Probably some combination of all of the above.

World news certainly isn’t cheerful. That nuclear-armed “democratic” dictatorship the US has supported, in much the same way it used to support Saddam Hussein when he was our puppet, is crumbling. The declaration of martial law there and the imprisonment of dissenting voices are examples of what can go wrong when one single executive is given too much power. They’re also examples of steps Bush can legally take now in America, thanks to a batshit-insane executive branch and a congress packed with lapdog Republicans and invertebrate Democrats.

On the flip side, the folks in Pakistan who are standing up to Musharraf are mostly sympathetic to the fanatical Islamists (like Al Qaeda, the real, Osama Bin Laden one, not the made-up Al Qaeda of news reports from Iraq). So if the military dictatorship fails, it will most likely be replaced by a cruel and corrupt government that enforces oppressive sharia law at nuclear-missile-point.

So, really, it’s a lose-lose situation, exacerbated of course by our little adventures in Afghanistan (where the Taliban are taking back control of one large province after another) and Iraq (do I even have to mention how well that’s going?)

Hey, but at least the economy is good! Well, okay, the dollar is plummeting. Yeah, our national debt is skyrocketing faster than oil prices. It could be that the fall of our currency will make the price of goods from all those third-world countries (you know, the ones that decades of of Free Market Uber Alles economic policy have sent tens of thousands of US jobs to, all in the name of saving 10 cents on a pack of socks at Wal-Mart) more expensive for us.

Not to worry, though, I’m sure our friends in China and Saudi Arabia will take advantage of the exchange rate and bolster our economy by investing billions more in US-owned companies. I hear the auto industry in particular is ripe for tak- er, “investment”.

There are a few uplifting stories in the news this morning, though.

I’ve been following the news about the 8-limbed little girl in India who underwent surgery to have her not-fully-formed conjoined twin removed so she can do normal things like walk and live. Word on the news networks this morning is that, though she’s not out of the woods yet, the surgery was a success. (As an aside, I wonder if births of children like her were the basis for the many-limbed deities of the Hindu religion. Certainly seems likely, and she herself was worshipped by some in her village.)

In a stunning turn of events, Republican Chuck Grassley has launched an investigation into the finances of several prominent televangelists. Go get ’em, Chuck!

As I wrote this, the sun finally peaked out from behind the clouds, and my mood has begun to improve. I think I’ll slip on a jacket and take a short walk amid the fall foliage. The fact that a species evolved that can take such enjoyment from the feel of sunshine and the sound of a breeze blowing through colored leaves is one of those many wonders of the universe that are cheapened when we ascribe them to some imaginary higher power. The fact that such wonders exist in such great numbers, and that most of them will go on existing no matter we hairless apes do to ourselves, is uplifting. I feel better already.

Dinesh D’Moron

Dinesh D’Souza is a right-wing pundit who has made a nice living for himself by blaming all the world’s ills on liberalism. Liberals caused 9/11 and the Virginia Tech shootings through their immoral behavior; the ’64 Civil Rights Act should be repealed; that sort of nonsense. This guy wants to be Ann Coulter but doesn’t have the adam’s apple for it.

His latest soon-to-be-bestseller, “What’s So Great About Christianity”, appears at least in part to be a screed against the recent rise in atheists who actually dare to speak out. An excerpt of his book was posted to his blog on the 19th. Predictably, he attacks prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett, and predictably, his argument consists of a long-winded rehash of the old formula:

(Stuff I don’t understand) = GOD

Says D’Souza:

The Fallacy of the Enlightenment [as described by philosopher Immanuel Kant] is the glib assumption that human beings can continually find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. The Enlightenment Fallacy holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, that human knowledge is constrained not merely by how much reality is out there but also by the limited sensory apparatus of perception we bring to that reality.

Kant and D’Souza go on to say that our meager five senses are inadequate to perceive and measure reality. I agree. It’s nice, therefore, that we’ve found a couple of ways to supplement those senses and overcome some of their natural limitations.

Magnifying glasses, for instance, or thermometers. Ohmmeters, ammeters, and voltmeters, perhaps. Electron microscopes, radio telescopes, and spectrometers. Scales. Radar. Sonar. Digital imaging. Satellites. Space probes. X-ray and MRI. Wide-spectrum cameras, ultra-sensitive audio sensors, lasers, medical tests of all kinds. The list goes on, and so far I’ve only named things I saw on sale in this week’s Home Depot flier.

D’Souza assumes without offering evidence that there are aspects of reality which we can’t possibly perceive (I’m guessing even with a truckload of the above instrumentation) because of our own inherent shortcomings. Yet somehow, though we can’t and will never, ever be able to detect it or make any observations about it at all, we can know it’s there.

How?

We learn from Kant that within the domain of experience, human reason is sovereign, but it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason.

Alright, now we get the heart of the matter. D’souza thinks that it is in no way unreasonable to believe things on faith that simply cannot be adjudicated by reason. Read that again. So I could claim with perfect reason and authority that the stars are the magical eggs of a giant cosmic chicken.

I suppose the right’s embrace of this sort of logic goes a long way toward explaining that “Iraq has WMDs”, “the surge is working”, “Bush was elected” business.

Christianity teaches that while reason can point to the existence of this higher domain, this is where reason stops: it cannot on its own investigate or comprehend that domain.

No, Christianity teaches that the universe was made by a magical invisible being who gave his creations free will and then decided to punish them for using it. Christianity teaches that this being sent his son to (temporarily) die to absolve us of guilt for a dietary mistake made by a woman who got her nutritional information from a talking snake. (The snake was punished for its insolence by, uh… being turned into a snake.)

This is the pseudo-deistic fallback position dogmatists of all kinds have to retreat to when confronted with the utter absurdity of their myths. When cornered, they say “you can’t disprove the existence of God because he’s outside of human perception” – forgetting, apparently, the numerous instances in their holy books where their deity of choice talks to, smites, or performs miracles on behalf of mortal men in the part of reality they can actually see.

Which is it? Outside our reality or butting in all the time to do the jealousy/vengeance thing? Please pick one or the other and stick with it.

I know of no atheist who’s ever claimed we know all the mysteries of the universe or that we ever will, but there is absolutely no logical progression of thought I’ve yet found that will carry us from “I don’t know” to “God did it” (or “Allah did it”, or “Vishnu the destroyer did it”, or “Chuck Norris did it”, etc.)

D’Souza will be debating Christopher Hitchens on October 22nd. Hopefully Hitch will show up sober enough to make Dinesh look silly (and not launch into one of his tirades in support of the Iraq war (which have, of late, been turning toward the genocidal.)

The Righteous, Behaving Badly

A trio of news items this week lend support to my theory that the folks screaming the loudest about other people’s morals or lack thereof are the ones with closets full of skeletons.. usually skeletons dressed in leather and handcuffs.

Exhibit A, and the mildest of the bunch: James Oddo, New York City Councilman, whose participation in a Norwegian “Daily Show” style fake news interview came rather abruptly to a halt:

Now, to be fair, I couldn’t find many specifics about this guy’s politics. But he’s a Republican, the party of the Christian Right and “family values”. Are threats of physical violence and shouts of “get the fuck out of my office!” acceptable to this crowd? All he had to do was say, “I’m sorry, this interview is over. Please leave.” Better yet, he could have just played along.

Exhibit B: Gary Aldridge, Liberty “University” graduate and cohort of the late and unlamented Jerry Falwell, was found dead in his Alabama home back in June. It’s not his death that lands him on this list, though, it’s the circumstances surrounding it, as revealed by the autopsy report released this week:

The decedent is clothed in a diving wet suit, a face mask which has a single vent for breathing, a rubberized face mask having an opening for the mouth and eyes, a second rubberized suit with suspenders, rubberized male underwear, hands and feet have diving gloves and slippers. There are numerous straps and cords restraining the decedent. There is a leather belt around the midriff. There is a series of ligatures extending from the hands to the feet. The hands are bound behind the back. The feet are tied to the hands. There are nylon ligatures holding these in place with leather straps about the wrists and ankles. There are plastic cords tied about the hands and feet with a single plastic cord extending up to the head and surrounding the lower neck. There is a dildo in the anus covered with a condom.

Apparently God hates gays, nudity, and premarital sex, but I suppose the Bible doesn’t specifically rule out rubber-leather-bondage-asphyxiation fetishes, so those are okay.

(But honestly, if a scuba suit and a rectal dildo or two among consenting adults is what you’re into, then go for it – but please spare me the details. The breathing thing, though? Kind of important. Try to remember that good respiration trumps a good orgasm every time.)

Exhibit C: Now we turn to a man whose hypocrisy is just the filler in a big ol’ casserole of evil: Christian Von Wernich, a Roman Catholic priest who used his position to support a brutal Argentine military dictatorship in the 70s and 80s. Convicted of complicity in 7 murders, 31 torture cases, and 42 abductions, Christian says his efforts were justified because those people were all possessed by the devil.

Bush Admin Trying to Do Something RIGHT?

Could it be? Dare we hope that the Bush folks are at least making an attempt to address a problem in the way it probably should be addressed?

Let’s put aside that fact that BushCo policy is at least partly responsible for the troubles in the mortgage and housing sector, what with interest rates kept artificially low for so long in an attempt to hide the real state of the economy behind high home sales figures. Let’s not think too much about the frequent warnings over the last few years from many economists that the trend of high-risk mortgage lending – driven by low rates and rising prices – would come back to bite us if nothing was done. Let’s allow ourselves to hope, for just a fleeting moment, that the initiatives mentioned to correct this problem will actually be carried out competently and will have the desired effect. (Hah!)

What surprised me is that, at least on the surface, the Bushies seem to be on the homeowners’ side rather than in the lending companies’ pockets! The plan is to assist borrowers in danger of foreclosure to get into affordable FHA-insured loans that will allow them to keep their homes; further, Bush himself has said that there will be no assistance to the mortgage companies and speculators who have gotten themselves into this mess: “A federal bailout of lenders would only encourage a recurrence of the problem.”

I… oh this is so difficult…

I…

(I can’t say it!)

I…

I agree with George Bush.

There. That wasn’t so bad.

Potentially earth-shattering as this news may be, it’s not enough to keep me from being very frightened when reading this quote from the AP article in my local paper, especially given Bush’s track record on predictions:

President Bush confidently predicted the country would safely weather the financial storm.

Uh-oh.

Not just predicted, but confidently predicted?

We’re screwed. Man the lifeboats, America!

Impeachment: Is it already too late?

Nancy “Impeachment is off the table” Pelosi’s feelings on the subject aside, the “I” word has gained a lot of traction lately, what with at last count 15 congressfolk signed on in support of an impeachment bill, Bush’s poll numbers going down faster than the power grid in Baghdad on a hot day, and lots of republicans trying to pretend they’re not that kind of Republican, the kind that blindly follows the dictates of King George. The Gonzales mess, the refusals to appear before congress or enforce congressional subpoenas, and the utter failure of the more-of-the-same “surge” are further helping to sway even the blindest of the blind away from BushCo in spite of its massive propaganda machine and its army of flunkie-pundits.

Within the blogosphere, impeachment talk has been all the rage lately, too. Most on the left argue (quite rightly, in my opinion) that impeachment has become a necessity at this point, that it’s the only way to save our Constitution from further abuses, or simply that it’s necessary for America to say to the the world via this action, “We’re back, see? We’re not going to take this kind of shit from our own leaders anymore. Fool me once, shame on… uh … fool me… can’t get fooled again!”

But scariest argument for kicking out the neandro-cons, one which in a sane America, under any other administration at least in my lifetime, could be written off as nutty conspiracy-theory rambling, is this one: If we don’t impeach them now, we might not be able to later. Into the open wound of our loss of habeus corpus rights, Bush and his handlers have recently poured the salt of seizure of property and the putrid lemon juice of impending martial law, all subject only to the whim of the chief executive.

Thinking of joining a peaceful war protest? Bush can, should he desire, declare you an enemy combatant and have you arrested, dragged away to an undisclosed location, imprisoned indefinitely without charges, and waterboarded for fun.

Legally.

Thinking of supporting a charity that tries to arrange for food and medical relief to reach Iraqi civilians? Careful, because The Decider can Decide that you’re providing material aid to Al Qaeda (a group whose numbers have apparently expanded of late to include every single Iraqi), and take away your house, your car, your savings, even that rare comic book that for some reason your mother didn’t get around to throwing away when you were a kid.

Legally.

And what if we’re struck by some catastrophic event sometime between now and January 20, 2009? A terror attack, a hurricane, an earthquake? Have no fear, Bush is here! For our safety and protection, he’s given himself the right to throw out checks and balances (what few we have left), set aside the democratic process (which the Neandros never really understood anyway), and transform our country into a dictatorship overnight.

Legally.

Ernest Partridge over at The Crisis Papers wrote an essay last week called “A Republic, If We Can Keep It“, that summarizes the danger quite well. He argues that with signs pointing to massive Repub losses in ’08, these guys can’t afford not to go to extreme measures to stay in power – because if they don’t, there’s a vague shot that they could actually be held accountable for their actions, and hey, our prisons are crowded enough already.

I have a small problem with this part of his analysis, though. Why should republicans fear that the Dems – even given control of two full branches of government – would pursue real legal action against these lying, war-mongering, murdering-by-proxy Constitution-shredders? What in their experience over the last seven years has happened to suggest they’ll be subjected to anything worse than a slap on the wrist en route to their cushy jobs at think tanks and Saudi-supported oil concerns? Maybe a stern talking-to before they go off to host their own liberal-bashing radio shows?

The only thing Bush (et al) have been totally, consistently right about – hell, pretty much the only thing they’ve been close to accurate on, period – is that when push comes to shove, the democrats will keep pushing weakly against right-wing shoving.

To the Vitter End

(Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s been a while.)

“Family-values” crusader congressman David Vitter is a hot news topic this week over his alleged solicitation of prostitutes and alleged wearing of diapers during the resulting encounters. He’s admitted to using the DC Madam’s “escort service” but has denied frequenting the establishment in his home state of Louisiana. He says that his wife knew of his admitted-to transgressions.

I’m wondering what the conversation between them was like after his admission. I’ll bet it went something like this:

Her: “I’m glad you’re finally being honest with me. Is there anything else you’d like to confess?”

Him: “I dunno… Depends.”

Buried in a Matchbox

Sure, I’m a week behind in jumping on the “Talk about Jerry Falwell now that he’s dead” bandwagon. I debated posting something the day the news debuted, but didn’t. I could claim the delay was “out of respect for the dead” or some such nonsense, but honestly, what really factored into the delay were a) my addiction to Lord of the Rings Online, and b) that I was really, really sick of hearing about his death by about day 2.

Falwell was a human being and as such, I will not celebrate or glorify his death in any way.

Just because I’m not actively glad he’s dead, though, doesn’t mean I will ever celebrate or glorify his life in any way, either.

The man was a hateful, bigoted, sexist, bloated, bloviating theocrat who built an economic and political empire on the beliefs of the gullible. A snake oil salesman with his own Home Shopping Network. The intertubes this week have been jam-packed with choice examples of Jerry quotes where he blames the world’s woes on women, jews, liberals, gays, Teletubbies, and basically anyone and everyone else who doesn’t believe the world is 6,000 years old and the national anthem should be changed to “Onward Christian Soldiers”.

My favorite quote of the week (and the inspiration for the title of this entry) was uttered by Christopher Hitchens during a FAUX Noise interview on Hannity & Silent Bob: “If you gave Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox.”

There’s little to say about him that hasn’t already been said, so instead I leave you, oh search engines who are the only ones reading this, with a song in honor of the angry, jealous, vengeful God in whose name Falwell preached his hate.

Some People Just Don’t Get It

I come across a fair amount of evidence of sheer, unbridled stupidity during my internet wanderings, and most of the time I just shake my head in astonished disgust and then move on. But this little gem was just too good/bad not to pass on. From an editorial in an Arkansas paper:

The REAL Culprit

Yes, a conservative who actually believes man is the cause of global warming, but it’s not the fault of industry, autos, deforestation, or any of the usual suspects. No, it’s that damned “liberal congress” who, by moving daylight savings time forward a month (wait, wasn’t that “liberal congress” dominated by conservative republicans at the time?)… because by doing so, the writer argues, those liberals actually created more daylight.