Friday, May 30, 2008

Bogus science in CO (10:21 am)

TPM is all over the saga unfolding in Colorado of senate candidate Bob Schaffer’s dirty fuel connections.

The nuts and bolts of it basically go like this. A Denver businessman named Bill Orr lobbies Congress and gets a $3.6 million earmark to help develop some new kind of non-polluting fuel. And he sets up the National Alternative Fuels Foundation to get your tax dollars for the earmark. The only problem was that “science” Orr used to get the EPA to fork over $2 million of the $3.6 million of earmarked money was apparently bogus. And as will happen in such cases, it’s gotten him indicted by the Feds for multiple counts of defrauding the government.

Now, Schaffer was still in the House when Orr got his prized earmark. And then not long after he gave up his House seat, he signed on as a “director” at Orr’s highly-credible-sounding National Alternative Fuels Foundation. In other words, Schaffer was a board member of Orr’s outfit/racket during at least part of the time Orr was allegedly bilking the government out of its money.

Somewhere, likely on a mountain in the Rockies, Mark Udall is smiling.

posted by Adam Doster | start the discussion

Sirota on Colbert (8:19 am)

In These Times Senior Editor David Sirota did battle with Colbert last night, and held his own quite well, I think:

My favorite Colbert line:

Regular people work for the establishment. That’s what makes them regular.

posted by Jeremy Gantz | start the discussion

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Sirota and Colbert: Let “The Uprising” begin (3:37 pm)

Let it be known far and wide: David Sirota, In These Times senior editor and New York Times bestselling author, will be sitting down with Stephen Colbert tonight to kick off the national tour for his revolutionarily titled new book “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington.” (A portion of which was excerpted as this month’s In These Times cover story, “Why Democrats Won’t Stop the War,” which you can read here.)

So tune in to Comedy Central to watch our favorite faux reactionary do battle with a real progressive.

And check out the Facebook group for “The Uprising” here, and Sirota’s full book tour schedule here.

posted by Jeremy Gantz | start the discussion

Denied in Full (3:11 pm)

Enough was enough. Badgered by an ongoing FOIA lawsuit from the ACLU, the CIA has turned over some eighteen heavily-redacted documents regarding the treatment of overseas detainees and prisoners held in US custody. Here’s a glimpse of one:

Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project, says:

Even a cursory glance at these heavily-redacted documents shows that the CIA is still withholding a great deal of information that should be released.

What’s more:

This information is being withheld not for legitimate security reasons but rather to shield government officials who ought to be held accountable for their decisions to break the law.

Surprised?

posted by Brian Allen Anderson | start the discussion

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

A campaign season profile of real Progressives (7:30 pm)

Chris Hedges, author of I Don’t Believe In Atheists, profiles the scrappy, tenacious, slowly-growing Vermont Progressive Party over at Truthdig. The party’s issues and concerns read like a progressive’s wish-list:

Here is a political party, founded in 1999, which really does not take any corporate funds and refuses to discuss any potential health care solution but a single-payer, not-for-profit system. Here is an anti-corporate party that seeks legislation to protect small business. Here is a party that demands workers be paid a living wage. Here is a party that calls for state investment in renewable energy. Here is a party that condemns the “two brand-name parties” because they act in concert to “serve the same corporate interests” by “taking the most important issues off the table and preventing discussion of issues important to most Vermonters: health care for all, property tax reform, energy independence.” The progressive candidates, one of whom is making a credible run for governor, seek to represent the interests of the working class. What a novel idea.

They’re supporting Obama for president, but they are under no illusions that he’ll be affecting the kind of sweeping progressive change he promises. “He is not much farther to the left than Hillary, to be honest,” quips state Rep. Zuckerman, one of the party’s leading advocates.” But, it seems, the positives far outweigh the negatives, especially after years of disastrous Republican rule:

“He at least inspires people, especially young people, to believe in the institution, that the institution can do good,” Zuckerman said. “This is positive for the country.

They look forward to holding Obama’s feet to the fire from the left. “When a Democrat is in power, you can say, here are the people who said they were going to do great things,” Zuckerman said. “You can say, where are the results?” It’s what all progressives need to ask our elected Democratic officials - where are the results?

Worth a read.

posted by Jarrett | start the discussion

Friday, May 23, 2008

Fear not the pump (10:37 am)

A barrel of crude now runs about $130. Regular is going for nearly $4 a gallon. That means it will cost you in the neighborhood of $128 to fill up your Hummer H2’s 32-gallon tank. I broke out my handy abacus to calculate what else you could get with your dwindling dollars.

For about $128 dollars you could buy:

-A lovely set of presentation grips for your Smith & Wesson revolver.
-About eight boxes of 50 count 9 mm rounds. 400 rounds total to go with your new grips.
-Nearly six cartons of Viceroy cigarettes or four cartons of Newports. Respectively, that’s 1,200 or 800 delicious ways to pollute only yourself.
-More than five cases of “Colt 45” 40 oz beers or 2,400 individual ounces of malty goodness if you prefer to think of it that way. You won’t remember or care soon anyway.
-Eight half logs of “Rooster” dip. 40 tins in all.
-Six canvas handbags from Mossy Oak for the ladies in your life - with enough left over for another tin of the Rooster!

Alternately, it will cost you about $48 to fill your Prius’ 12-gallon tank. For about $48 you could buy:

-16 t-shirts at Discount Village thrift store.
-Two pairs of certified organic hemp boxers. Righteous.
-Nine vente caramel Frappuccinos!!
-3.5 lbs of Yerba Mate.
-One Widespread Panic concert ticket - maybe.
-Like, so many Phish bootlegs.

As you can see, the purchasing power from driving an H2 outstrips the savings from a pansy-ass Prius by more than 2.5 times. So, why don’t you start doing something good for your country and the economy, hippie? Buy an SUV and watch the savings pile up!

posted by Matthew Schwartzman-Stubbs | start the discussion

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

The torture plot thickens (12:09 pm)

Another day, another report offering an awful glimpse into Washington’s tortuous torture policies. After so many previous torture revelations, what’s most surprising to me about the 370-page report from the Justice Department’s Inspector General isn’t the horrific tactics themselves, or that word of them reached the National Security Council in 2003, but the fact that FBI agents apparently stood apart from CIA and military officials’ torture tactics, like these:

…”a frequent flyer program” meant to lessen resistance by extensively disrupting sleep, use of strobe lights in conjunction with loud rock music, twisting of thumbs backward, and exposure of detainees to extreme temperatures, threatening dogs, pornography and sexual taunting.

Detainees in Iraq had water poured down their throats while they were cuffed and kneeling, the FBI agents told investigators.

Washington may not have acted with monolithic venality, but that doesn’t absolve the bureau:

The report also highlights intensifying friction between FBI agents and their military counterparts over these strategies, some of which were eventually repudiated by the Bush administration.

After hundreds of interviews and reviews of more than 500,000 documents, investigators working for Inspector General Glenn A. Fine also said they found an interrogation process awash with confusion and conflicting sets of rules. Fine generally praised the FBI’s actions but faulted the bureau for waiting until abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison became public in early 2004 to develop a policy obliging its agents to report similar abuses by other government employees.

Even then, the bureau’s guidelines remained a source of uncertainty for many agents in the field, the report said.

When bureaucracy meets war, does confusion always ensue?

posted by Jeremy Gantz | 1 comment

What’s lost when yearning goes (10:17 am)

The below is an excerpt from J.M. Coetzee’s latest book, Diary of a Bad Year, published by Harvill Secker, September, 2007. Written with three concurrent perspectives per page, the top portion of each chapter is an essay written by the book’s protagonist, J.C., an “eminent” seventy-two year old Australian writer of South African descent, who “is invited to contribute pieces to a book entitled Strong Opinions.”

On Music

Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings have a history too. Music is a history of the feeling soul.

Consider singing. Nineteenth-century art-song is very remote in its kinaesthetics from singing today. The nineteenth-century singer was trained to sing from the depths of her thorax, (from her lungs, from her “heart”), bearing the head high, emitting a large, rounded tone of the kind that carries. It is a mode of singing, meant to convey moral nobility. In performances that were of course always live, those present had staged before their eyes the contrast between the mere physical body and the voice that transcends the body, emerging from it, rising above it, and leaving it behind.

From the body, thus, song was born as soul.

*

Much of the ugliness of the speech one hears in the streets of America comes from hostility to song, from repression of the impulse to... read more