2 Quickies
1) The NYTimes spiked the story about Bush's hidden microphone during the debates.
(Spiked, for those who do not know, means they wrote a story, then decided not to run it.)
2) An article about the US General stupid enough to tell a room full of people that it's fun to shoot people.
He can think it's fun all he wants, this is America. He has the right to say it too. But jeez, don't you think it would be better if he had the decency to keep his insane mouth shut? I mean do you really want people to know you are a murdering pig?
These 2 stories are connected.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
Friday, February 04, 2005
No Tomorrow
Bill Moyers
---This is directly copied from a zmagazine email. I've been trying to tell this to people, but they won't listen. They think I'm overstating the case. Well read on.---
One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that thedelusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sitin the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the firsttime in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power inWashington.Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologueshold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what isgenerally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, theiroffspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is thedanger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of theinterior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engagingGrist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congressthat protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of theimminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after thelast tree is felled, Christ will come back."Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he wastalking about.
But James Watt was serious.
So were his compatriots outacross the country. They are the people who believe the Bible isliterally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recentGallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good anddecent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that thebest-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "LeftBehind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist andreligious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribeto a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple ofimmigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wovethem into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions ofAmericans.
Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer GeorgeMonbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted tohim for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied therest of its "biblical lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it,triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah willreturn for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of theirclothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right handof God, they will watch their political and religious opponents sufferplagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years oftribulation that follow.
I'm not making this up.
Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the WestBank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy.That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man." A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed- an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 - just one point below thecritical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned toeternal hellfire.
So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go toGrist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist GlennScherer - "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse. As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half theU.S. Congress before the recent election - 231 legislators in total andmore since the election - are backed by the religious right.
Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair RickSantorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House SpeakerDennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller ofGeorgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will senda famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought. And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll foundthat 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think theBible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in themotel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why peopleunder the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why careabout global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in therapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God whoperformed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lordwill provide.
One of their texts is a high school history book,"America's Providential History." You'll find there these words: "Thesecular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece."However, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people."No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers."
He turned out millions of the footsoldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics. It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whomI once asked: "What do you think of the market?" "I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."I'm not, either.
Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and theCenter for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure.It's not that I don't want to believe that - it's just that I read the news and connect the dots.I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental ProtectionAgency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration: That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and theEndangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources. That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicletailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars,sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavyequipment. That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting,coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier withcoal companies. That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refugeto drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.
I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million - $2 million of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study. I read all this in the news. I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported by ExxonMobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising" [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are "an embarrassment."I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon;a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats inCalifornia. I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer - pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking backat me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we knownot what we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."
And I ask myself: Why?
Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice? What has happened to our moral imagination?On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"I see it feelingly.
The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancientIsraelites called hochma - the science of the heart ... the capacity tosee, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.
Bill Moyers was host until recently of the weekly public affairs series"NOW with Bill Moyers" on PBS. This article is adapted from AlterNet,where it first appeared. The text is taken from Moyers' remarks uponreceiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center forHealth and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
Bill Moyers
---This is directly copied from a zmagazine email. I've been trying to tell this to people, but they won't listen. They think I'm overstating the case. Well read on.---
One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that thedelusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sitin the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the firsttime in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power inWashington.Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologueshold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what isgenerally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, theiroffspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is thedanger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.
Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan's first secretary of theinterior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engagingGrist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congressthat protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of theimminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, "after thelast tree is felled, Christ will come back."Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn't know what he wastalking about.
But James Watt was serious.
So were his compatriots outacross the country. They are the people who believe the Bible isliterally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recentGallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good anddecent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.That's right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that thebest-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the "LeftBehind" series written by the Christian fundamentalist andreligious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribeto a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple ofimmigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wovethem into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions ofAmericans.
Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer GeorgeMonbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted tohim for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied therest of its "biblical lands," legions of the antichrist will attack it,triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah willreturn for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of theirclothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right handof God, they will watch their political and religious opponents sufferplagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years oftribulation that follow.
I'm not making this up.
Like Monbiot, I've read the literature. I've reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the WestBank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy.That's why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It's why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man." A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed- an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 - just one point below thecritical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned toeternal hellfire.
So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go toGrist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist GlennScherer - "The Road to Environmental Apocalypse." Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse. As Grist makes clear, we're not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half theU.S. Congress before the recent election - 231 legislators in total andmore since the election - are backed by the religious right.
Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair RickSantorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House SpeakerDennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller ofGeorgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will senda famine in the land." He seemed to be relishing the thought. And why not? There's a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll foundthat 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think theBible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in themotel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why peopleunder the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, "to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why careabout global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in therapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God whoperformed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?"Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lordwill provide.
One of their texts is a high school history book,"America's Providential History." You'll find there these words: "Thesecular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie ... that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece."However, "[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God's earth ... while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people."No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, "Onward Christian Soldiers."
He turned out millions of the footsoldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics. It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don't know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whomI once asked: "What do you think of the market?" "I'm optimistic," he answered. "Then why do you look so worried?" And he answered: "Because I am not sure my optimism is justified."I'm not, either.
Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and theCenter for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure.It's not that I don't want to believe that - it's just that I read the news and connect the dots.I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental ProtectionAgency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration: That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and theEndangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources. That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicletailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars,sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavyequipment. That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting,coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier withcoal companies. That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refugeto drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.
I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million - $2 million of it from the administration's friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children's clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study. I read all this in the news. I read the news just last night and learned that the administration's friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported by ExxonMobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is "a myth, sea levels are not rising" [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are "an embarrassment."I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon;a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats inCalifornia. I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer - pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking backat me from those photographs and I say, "Father, forgive us, for we knownot what we do." And then I am stopped short by the thought: "That's not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world."
And I ask myself: Why?
Is it because we don't care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice? What has happened to our moral imagination?On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: "How do you see the world?" And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: "I see it feelingly.'"I see it feelingly.
The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancientIsraelites called hochma - the science of the heart ... the capacity tosee, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.
Believe me, it does.
Bill Moyers was host until recently of the weekly public affairs series"NOW with Bill Moyers" on PBS. This article is adapted from AlterNet,where it first appeared. The text is taken from Moyers' remarks uponreceiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center forHealth and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Noam Chomsky
There's a very interesting excerpt from Noam HERE.
"In fact the Pentagon announced at the same time two days ago: we’re keeping 120,000 troops there into at least 2007, even if they call for withdrawal tomorrow.
And the propaganda is very evident right in these articles. You can even write the commentary now: We just have to do it because we have to accomplish our mission of bringing democracy to Iraq. If they have an elected government that doesn’t understand that, well, what can we do with these dumb Arabs, you know? Actually that’s very common because look, after all, the U.S. has overthrown democracy after democracy, because the people don’t understand. They follow the wrong course."
He's saying (as I read him) that a "democratic" Iraq will do things we cannot let them do, so what we have to do is give them the government we think they should have. i.e. one that will keep US interests at heart. We won't stand for anything less.
There's a very interesting excerpt from Noam HERE.
"In fact the Pentagon announced at the same time two days ago: we’re keeping 120,000 troops there into at least 2007, even if they call for withdrawal tomorrow.
And the propaganda is very evident right in these articles. You can even write the commentary now: We just have to do it because we have to accomplish our mission of bringing democracy to Iraq. If they have an elected government that doesn’t understand that, well, what can we do with these dumb Arabs, you know? Actually that’s very common because look, after all, the U.S. has overthrown democracy after democracy, because the people don’t understand. They follow the wrong course."
He's saying (as I read him) that a "democratic" Iraq will do things we cannot let them do, so what we have to do is give them the government we think they should have. i.e. one that will keep US interests at heart. We won't stand for anything less.
Tuesday, February 01, 2005
Propaganda is a 4 letter word.
Via Tom Tommorrow
U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror
by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.
According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.
....A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.
The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta.
I'm glad the Iraqis voted. I just don't think it matters very much. They voted for Saddam too. 104% in the last "election." In the end, I'm not sure if this was any different. Sure, our guys were there to protect the Iraqis from the other Iraqis, but they still saw American soldiers standing around everywhere with guns. Just like when they voted for Saddam. I'm not saying it's the same- I don't think it is at all, but in terms of perception... I just don't know. I heard on NPR that the US media, reporting so authoratatively on the election, wasn't allowed to see the voting- a block outside the green zone. The sole source of the "positive" signs in Iraq are coming from the military. Grain of salt people, that's all I'm saying.
Via Tom Tommorrow
U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror
by Peter Grose, Special to the New York Times
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3-- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.
According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong.
....A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January, 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.
The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Deim was overthrown by a military junta.
I'm glad the Iraqis voted. I just don't think it matters very much. They voted for Saddam too. 104% in the last "election." In the end, I'm not sure if this was any different. Sure, our guys were there to protect the Iraqis from the other Iraqis, but they still saw American soldiers standing around everywhere with guns. Just like when they voted for Saddam. I'm not saying it's the same- I don't think it is at all, but in terms of perception... I just don't know. I heard on NPR that the US media, reporting so authoratatively on the election, wasn't allowed to see the voting- a block outside the green zone. The sole source of the "positive" signs in Iraq are coming from the military. Grain of salt people, that's all I'm saying.
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