Thieves in the Temple.

penny rants for the day of December 31, 2006.

David Corn suggests that Iran might be telling the truth when it claims its desire for nuclear power is peaceful -- because, according to a National Academy of Sciences analysis, Iran's oil revenues are dwindling and could disappear by 2015. This argument has problems, of course. For one, Mr. Ahmedinejad, not the sharpest knife in any drawer, may not agree that there's a crisis. For another, if he did, he's still chosen to solve said crisis through nuclear power rather than, say, solar or wind power. But there are, of course, still plenty of other reasons to oppose an attack on Iran. Like, that it'll empower Mr. Ahmedinejad and the Assembly of Experts (however much daylight there might be now between the two). Like, that Iran has already signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and can be held to account on that basis. And like, that the Mobbers that would be doing the attacking are a bunch of untrustworthy, incompetent boobs.

The FDA is ready to OK cloned animal meat for human consumption -- there's still a 60-day public comment period, and of course if I find that comment page I'll put it up -- and after reading yet another article which casts the battle as one between corporations and people who won't eat cloned meat because it's icky, I have to ask: where are Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum when we need them? Brownback fought human cloning tooth and nail, after all, and Santorum has long been a stalwart opponent of animal cruelty. I must conclude yet again that the conservative movement has utterly failed, failed because it values mammon (in this case, the entry of new "players" into a "free" "market") more than it values its own principles. A real conservative might say that since we have no idea what'll happen with cloned food, we ought to at least lay off until we know more. But I don't hear many conservatives saying that. Maybe if a Hillary Clinton FDA continues this guff, those conservatives will come back out in force.

Finally, yeah, I saw that video, and I found the sight of Mr. Hussein's head swinging from a noose, in the dark, to be quite unnerving. I didn't feel anything else, though. He's not, after all, the lynchpin of some vast network of enemies who hate America; he's just another murderous despot in a world full of murderous despots. It's a shame he's achieved super-villain status with the far-right in this country, especially when he was such a useful policy tool for the far-right for so many years. Useful right up until the end, in fact. I wonder how many of them broke open bottles of champagne.

introduce yourself right now! introduce yourself right now! introduce yourself right now!

Velvet Revolution looks past H.R. 550, the Rush Holt-sponsored "gold standard" of voter-verified paper trails, and espouses paper ballots, not merely paper trails. Would you be a hypocrite if, having supported H.R. 550 in the past, you supported this as well? Hell to tha no! What's our job? Our job is to make things better, not maintain a foolish consistency that pleases small-minded right-wingers. Do one or the other and it'll be progress. Personally, I'd feel better with paper ballots, even if machines have to count them -- then you could do a machine count and a hand count with the same hard data, rather than recount machine data that might be wrong in the first place.

The REAL ID Act is yet another one of those hifalutin big-government unfunded mandates that won't even do the job it's supposed to do, which is "make Americans safer." Rather, the REAL ID Act subjects state identification records, like your driver's license, to draconian uniform standards, and forces all ID records to be linked together in a national database -- which no Mobb, be it a Bush or a Clinton at the head, would ever, ever, ever abuse, right? Daniel Akaka (D-HI) and John Sununu (R-NH) ride to the rescue with the Identification Security Enhancement Act of 2006, which would call for more flexible ID standards and protect your data a lot better. I don't have a letter-writing tool for this bill, but Congressional contact tools are in the upper left-hand corner, as per usual.

Also in the news, someone bought a 150-year-old hickory-carved hockey stick for almost two million bucks. No truth to the rumor that said someone then found Johnny Bower's initials carved in it.

why would Tha Bush Mobb attack Iran?

Scott Ritter -- one-time U.N. weapons inspector and one-time Bush supporter until he said, in October 2002, that he didn't think Saddam Hussein had WMDs -- says that although the reality-based community knows attacking Iran is a bad idea, Tha Bush Mobb will still do it. Iran's ability to hurt the American economy, after all, hasn't changed with the Iranians' recent repudiation of their erstwhile President -- as I've said, an attack would empower Mr. Ahmedinejad in the eyes of his people, and once the U.S. is able to provoke or fake a Tonkin Gulf-style incident, Iran can (as Ritter says) take its oil off the market, stop oil production elsewhere in the Middle East, and close the Strait of Hormuz so no one else can ship oil, either. You like gas prices now? You'll really, really like them when the market is a lot more volatile, and your pocketbook will scream uncle, Ritter says, within two days. Ritter also suggests that American businesses don't want war with Iran either, because they have pocketbooks, too. So why would Tha Bush Mobb, having faced its own repudiation at the polls a month and a half ago, having most of its ground troops locked down in an unpopular ground war, think attacking Iran is a good idea?

To answer this question, we first must ignore the propaganda Tha Bush Mobb (and their votaries in the "liberal media") feeds us. Tha Bush Mobb doesn't particularly care about democracy in the Middle East. Tha Bush Mobb isn't acting crazy in an effort to get better behavior out of other crazy people. And Tha Bush Mobb doesn't understand Iran -- Iranian kids won't "rise up" in case of invasion, but prefer to change their country their own way, thank you very much, and international organizations have found no evidence that Iran is making nukes (versus enriching uranium, which they're permitted to do as signers of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). Tha Bush Mobb doesn't even particularly love Israel; nor are they particularly concerned about the flow of oil to the West -- wouldn't we be filling up on less than a buck a gallon if that were so?

What does that leave? I think it leaves Tha Bush Mobb's sole motive in attacking Iraq, which was making their crony corporations rich. No other explanation makes as much sense -- I don't think Tha Bush Mobb serves Israel's ends, for example, but uses Israel to further its own ends. Tha Bush Mobb won't be able to occupy Iran and rip off the American taxpayer in a phony "reconstruction" scheme as they've been able to do in Iraq -- Iran, you may know, has a lot more people, and you see how hard it is to keep the Iraqis down. But Tha Bush Mobb only has two years left in power to make off with all the cash they can -- Tha Bush Mobb doesn't care about oil the way you and I care about oil, but they do care about oil the way their buddies in the oil industry care about oil, and in the event of the "volatility" in the market, their oil industry cronies will make a mint, even if the American businesses talking to Senator Lugar suffer.

In other words, we're looking at the banality of evil here. We're not looking at Tha Bush Mobb gloating about their ability to enact "bold" policy or "get things done." We're looking at them gloating about their ability to steal taxpayer money. Please understand that (all together now!) I don't say these things to depress you. I say them in the perhaps vain hope (vain as in "arrogant" as well as vain as in "fruitless") that perhaps saying them aloud will help stop them from happening. It certainly can't hurt.

and before I forget.

Send your "happy holidays!" greeting, as always, to oreilly@foxnews.com.

penny rants for the day of December 22, 2006: "stupid, stupid, stupid!"

Some penny rants, short as they are, are very hard to write. And some are easy. Like this one: are they freaking kidding with this "Barack Hussein Obama" stuff, this "Obama is one letter away from Osama" stuff? Doesn't the mainstream media have anything better to do? Do they think "humor" is any species of air-headed stupidity or self-absorbed irony? Or do they think Americans are the stupidest people who have ever walked the earth? I'm neither a fan nor a hater of Barack Obama, but when putative journalists go around saying things like "his middle name is the same name as the dictator," I can't help but envision them as unpleasant five-year-olds who earn the bullying they later get in the public schools. And the mainstream media wonder why no one respects them.

New Defense Secretary not-Rumsfeld appears to have little awareness of that Naval buildup around Iran. You know, the one you heard about here a few months ago (which, admittedly, I posted about probably a few weeks after I heard about it). Mr. not-Rumsfeld has been a Bush Mobber for about a thousand years, so there's no way he could be this dumb. Except that he, well, sounds awfully dumb. Maybe he thinks if he sounds awfully dumb, we won't think they're about ready to attack Iran. And wouldn't that be brilliant of Tha Bush Mobb, brilliant and bold, attacking Iran right after an election that's as close to a repudiation of its President as you're going to get in a police state? If the U.S. attacks Iran, Mr. Ahmedinejad will become a lot more popular with his countryfolk, thanks to Newton's Fourth Law: "he may be a jerk, but he's our jerk, and your jerk doesn't get to screw with our jerk." Sound familiar, all you 9.12 Republicans?

I'd never heard of U.S. Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA) before he spewed his awful spew about the Muslim horde, and his Bushian refusal to back down from the deserved firestorm of criticism he's received isn't endearing him to me, either. There are some other things I did not know about Mr. Goode: he was a Democrat until 2000, which must have been about the time he couldn't stand being part of a minority anymore; he got his damn hands caught in the same military-contracting cookie jar that cut off Duke Cunningham's hands; and he's sponsored legislation making English the official language of the United States, because it's not like English is the unofficial language of the entire planet or anything. And, of course, his general anti-immigration stance aims "to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America." By "values and beliefs traditional (sic)" you mean values like freedom of religion, don't you, Virgil? You don't? Oh, you mean those other traditional values -- you know, values like hating dark-skinned people. But there's a limit to the value of such disgusting pandering -- Mr. Goode got only 59% of the vote in his last House election, in which he ran against a fellow named Weed. Dare I call that Goode news?

"old Europe" values.

Vauban, a development in southwestern Germany occupying land that used to belong to a military base, experiments with car-free living. Vauban provides citizens with free tramway passes and hikes up the price of parking to some $23,000 per parking spot per year, and voila! Vauban residents do a lot of cycling and own only 150 cars per 1,000 residents, versus 430 per 1,000 in adjoining Freiburg, or 640 per 1,000 in the United States. Moreover, this isn't a case of hifalutin social engineering but "as much a grass-roots initiative as it is pursued by the city council," as one researcher puts it.

We could do a whole lot worse, and have. Speaking of "we," if you live in Philadelphia, a city in which I of course have no personal interest and have chosen entirely at random, you might want to check out PhillyCarShare, which permits renting of automobiles by the hour, as is also done in some parts of Old Europe and that putative bastion of the "radical homosexual agenda," San Francisco.

As I've said before, I wonder how long it is before some idiot like Glenn Beck blows a gasket at all these people in the world deciding that having all your own stuff ain't where it's at, that maybe sharing and being part of a community are good things and maybe corporations shouldn't tell us what kinds of communities we ought to have anymore. Of course, Tha Bush Mobb, or whatever Careerists of Evil succeed them, could always designate us "terrorists."

Mr. Ahmedinejad's bogus journey.

This has not been a good week for Iran's erstwhile President, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Hard to believe, isn't it? After all, everyone knows that hosting a conference full of Holocaust-denying historians right before an election is a sure winner. But his hard-line supporters apparently won a mere twenty percent of city council seats in Friday's nationwide elections, including 3 of 15 in Teheran, so now Mr. Ahmedinejad can't go ahead with his long-planned Engineers Against Physics conference. Moderate conservatives appear to have won the lion's share of council seats, while Khatami-esque reformers did much better than they did in recent years. Student demonstrations have also picked up in frequency, which is miraculous. Maybe there's not that much daylight between a moderate conservative and a hard-liner, especially in a state that concentrates so much power at the top. But the Iranian people still deserve a lot of credit for rejecting Mr. Ahmedinejad's agenda. And the students demonstrating against him are heroes and heroines. In the U.S., student demonstrators get followed around by the FBI and the CIA and might get their houses broken into, but in Iran they stand a greater chance of getting the crap kicked of them on the spot, and you tell me which is more persuasive. Those kids are a lot more courageous than I.

Of course, Mr. Bush (thought I'd forgotten, didn't you?) can claim exactly none of the credit for this, no matter how many Western media outlets claim the vote is a mandate against Mr. Ahmedinejad's anti-Americanism. Could it be possible that the Iranian people do not weigh every decision in terms of how it relates to the United States? Many citizens of many countries, believe it or not, have been known to ignore the United States altogether when they enter their country's voting booth. Mr. Ahmedinejad's main domestic problem is not terribly different from Mr. Bush's main domestic problem -- an economy whose growth benefits the rich far more than it benefits the poor. A country that makes that much oil and that has embarked on an, er, ambitious nuclear program should not have 40% of its citizens sitting below the poverty line. Sure there are reformers in Iran who've made better relations with the West part of their plank, but I'd look to the poverty line to understand these results before I'd look toward the West.

the "government" seems to think I'm a "terrorist."

CommonCause wants your comments opposing further media consolidation by tomorrow, although the action page also gives a January 16, 2007 deadline. If you're going to write in the next two days, you might want to mention the disgusting way the major media outlets have covered Senator Tim Johnson's illness -- all horse-race speculation about who can appoint whom to what and what the balance of power in the Senate will be, with the least hysterical information (Tim Johnson ain't going nowhere unless he dies or resigns) buried at the end of articles, if at all. A lot of damn sound and fury et cetera and there'd be a damn sight less of it if we had smaller media outlets to contend with. In smaller media outlets, some of these people might be our neighbors. Think Roger Ailes and Leslie "Survivor: Race War" Moonves are anyone's neighbors? Not if they can help it. But there is good news on the big media front: despite Chairman Kevin Martin's various efforts to get Commissioner Robert McDowell to vote on the AT&T/BellSouth merger, Commissioner McDowell still won't do it, citing his own ethical concerns. Read his statement and you'll see a tiny bit of wiggle room, but this is a victory for now.

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act somehow got through the lame duck session of the Last Republican Congress Ever Let Me Dream. S. 3380, the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, "threatens to sweep up – criminalizing as 'terrorism' or otherwise chilling – a broad range of lawful, constitutionally protected, and valuable activity undertaken by citizens and organizations seeking change," so says the U.S. Humane Society. With a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, we might be able to get this law rewritten so that we don't wind up in some midwestern Guantanamo Bay someday just for telling our friends to get their free-range chicken from some local grower they know and trust. But we still have to say something. Tools are in the upper-left hand corner, as always.

Don't let it be said that Harry Reid can't find the wind if given enough time -- he was in favor of a 30,000 troop "surge" under very specific conditions that most people would mistake for, I don't know, nuance or something, but now he's singing a different tune, maybe after Colin Powell gave him some cover. Another 20,000 or 30,000 troops ain't gonna stop this ship from sinking. The Peace Team helps you tell your lawfully-elected Representatives what to do with their surge. Oh, and they also help you express your desire to impeach the idiots.

UPDATE. Common Cause informs me that the FCC has apparently extended the deadline for media consolidation comments at the request of a large telecommunications concern; this probably explains the disparity between comment due dates noted in paragraph one above.

"San Francisco values."

In today's Washington Post, of all places, we read about folks who take "recycling" to a higher level -- they buy only used items, except for things like, you know, toothpaste and brake fluid and such. They call themselves "Compactors," a magnificently patriotic pun, and they now count 1,800 members. I buy a lot of used stuff -- I buy all my long-sleeved shirts at Goodwill, and I look damn sharp, thank you very much -- but my Kung Fu sure ain't as good as theirs.

How long before Bill O'Reilly calls people like these "terrorists," or before Glenn Beck decides he wants to "strangle" people like these (no doubt asking "is it wrong to feel like doing that?")?

light posting notice.

I'm going to be working on a few short stories over the next few months, so I may not post as much here (though, really, the Democrats' capture of Congress has not slowed the onslaught of truly odious news). I'm not going to stop posting here, of course; I'm just going to post less. I'm also planning to a) work more overtime at my job and b) spend more time with loved ones. And, finally, I'm going to increase defense spending, cut taxes, and balance the budget. More details as they arrive.

escape from the killing fields.

Think that Iraq Study Group report (already a book!) is really going to kick-start our withdrawal from Iraq? We'll get out of Iraq only when Congress stops funding the war. Jim McGovern introduced a bill in the House in 2005 toward this end, and now Dennis Kucinich has called for the same. There is no harm in trying, no matter what the nutjobs tell you.

Meanwhile, the Department of Defense plans to build a new compound for military trials at Guantanamo Bay. This may come as a shock to you, but Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Root, and Brown plans to bid for the job. In addition, the DoD didn't ask Congress, either -- and some Congressfolk, hard as it may be to believe, have made some noise about it. Give the DoD what-for here.

But that's not all! FCC Chair Kevin Martin will force Republican commissioner Robert McDowell to vote in favor of the AT&T merger -- even though Mr. McDowell recused himself from the vote because he was involved in the merger as a lobbyist before he joined the FCC. At times like these I think Republicans of integrity may have it even harder than I do. We can tell Kevin Martin to be an honest broker, though I wouldn't lay money that he's any more interested in what good Americans think than Michael "the Lesser" Powell was. And while we're on the subject of the FCC's Nefarious Plans, Common Cause still has a letter-writing tool with which you can tell the FCC what they can do with Their Nefarious Plan to relax media ownership rules so big companies can pollute the airwaves with tripe even more than they already do.

The House passed S. 2370 by voice vote this week; S. 2370 severely restricts funds to the Palestinian people without excepting humanitarian U.N. funds from that restriction, and it also severely limits diplomatic contact with the elected Palestinian government. All the polls I've seen suggest that the American people are more evenhanded toward Israel and Palestine than our elected representatives are -- our elected representatives still treat any act of non-cruelty toward the Palestinians as if it were anti-Semitism. We'll never get a real two-state solution in the Middle East, and therefore peace in the Middle East, unless we stand against cruelty like S. 2370. You may want to tell Mr. Bush to veto this law, either by navigating here or calling Mr. Bush directly at 202-456-1111 (the White House fax number is 202-456-2461). Think he'll listen? It doesn't matter. Doing the right thing is all that matters.

After today, this Republican Congress is gone. As a famous philosopher once said, let it rest in the deep grave.

how much is enough?

With Congress in session for a few more days and determined to slink quietly away into the night, the Council for a Livable World suggests that now might be a good time to demand that they resurrect the office of Inspector General for Iraq reconstruction. Maybe that'll stop Halliburton from charging a hundred bucks to do a bag of laundry. Maybe it'll give Iraqi citizens as much water and power as they enjoyed under the inimitable Mr. Hussein, who was deposed, you may recall, over three and one half years ago. It's a continuing source of shame for Tha Bush Mobb that their drive to bring "democracy" to Iraq has mainly brought money to their cronies' pockets without even bringing utilities to Iraqis. The Capitol Switchboard's number is (202) 224-3121; you can ask for either your Representative or either of your Senators.

While Katherine Harris's defeat (or, as she might put it, God's failure to choose her) is certainly welcome, I'm no great fan of her vanquisher, Senator Bill Nelson, who appeared to hold the line on coastal off-shore drilling until the moment he realized Harris had no shot at beating him. S. 3711 would be one last (we hope!) giveaway to the oil companies by opening up American coastal areas, including Florida's, to off-shore drilling. Like the ANWR drilling project that's so close to Mr. Bush's heart, off-shore drilling would provide very little oil -- though it would provide a nice welfare handout to the oil industry. TrueMajority has a page, and so does the League of Conservation Voters.

penny rants for the day of December 4, 2006.

Gannett has apparently decided the future of the newspaper -- mobile journalists, or "mojos," will cover local events and post them online. Sounds neat -- after all, who couldn't use more local news? But then you realize a) this "local news" they're finding is little more than someone else's public relations; b) investigative reporting will still suffer, since Gannett's still not putting the cash out for that; c) union representation will be nonexistent, in no small part because these "mojos" are too pomo to appreciate it; and d) since said "mojos" are supposed to "assist" the ad people with pitching the story to advertisers, Gannett will ultimately decide the ad people are redundant and they'll heap that responsibility onto the reporters. Even the best idea -- soliciting "reader experts" to assist with the investigative end -- might be a little too conveniently anti-worker if these "reader experts" don't get paid (or only get paid if they dig up salacious information). So many right-wingers try to cast themselves (ironically enough) as "forward thinkers" or "bold experimenters," but ultimately Gannett's concern remains entirely with the bottom line. Newspapers must re-learn that the truth is their bottom line, not mammon, and if they don't, they'll continue to wonder why no one respects them no matter how many mojos cover calendar fundraisers.

The outgoing Congress, to my surprise, is leaving most must-pass spending bills to the Democratic Congress when it reconvenes in January. No, I really am surprised -- I thought they'd take this opportunity to do as much damage as they could, and must-pass spending bills are pretty good vehicles for damage. Bob Novak casts the blockage of spending bills as an anti-pork effort by a handful of Republican Senators, including the incorrigible Tom Coburn and the, well, Jim DeMint. I'm usually willing to credit the sincerity of Messrs. Coburn and DeMint in re earmarking, but it's not coincidence that the new Congress is getting front-loaded at the get-go, when it's important to establish momentum. Do these Democrats have it in them to turn disadvantage to advantage? I wouldn't lay money on it.

Jim Webb is my homey for standing up to Mr. Bush in a picture line no matter what the "liberal media" think. Actually in this instance "conservative media" might be more accurate, since actual conservatives George Will and (say it ain't so!) Joe Scarborough have been distorting the Webb/Bush confrontation so that it reflects badly on Jim Webb, but that the "liberal media" outlets have been their enablers. Here's a thought: if Mr. Bush gave someone, anyone, any respect, might he be able to get through a photo op without someone wanting to slug him?

You know, Newt Gingrich's 21st Century Contract on America, referenced briefly here the other day, is a profoundly odious document -- when it's not merely corporatist, it's fascist. I'd explain further, but explaining further is going to be an Augean task, which is pretty much the idea, isn't it? I guess we should be thankful that Newt is, at some level, guileless -- Mr. Bush would be prettifying these ideas with names like "health opportunity accounts" and "personal strength accounts" and "defense of America education" -- so I think most Americans will see this latest Contract on America for what it really is. But I'm not sure about that, so I'll go into more detail about how wrong, wrong, wrong Newt is at a future date. Or several future dates.

tooltime!

You know, this Bush fellow just doesn't listen. To anyone. Ever. Not even the Baker/Hamilton group, which gave a rather tepid endorsement of withdrawal, mostly by the start of 2008, or not, if circumstances on the ground in Iraq dictate otherwise. Anyway, it's not Jim Baker's job to tell Mr. Bush what to do, it's ours. And the the Peace Team at the People's Email Network has created an action page which will help you tell your Reps to revoke the original Authorization for Use of Military Force, which Mr. Bush obviously has interpreted as a blank check to do whatever he pleases, which might yet include the invasion of Iran. This does not mean we hamstring our efforts against terrorism; it means we put the President (sic) in his place. The President is not supposed to be Superman; the President is supposed to be doing the people's will as expressed by their Representatives in Congress, even in time of war. The Constitution specifically gives the President the power to command armed forces, not create endless wars. In practice, Presidents of whatever political stripe tend to strong-arm Congress into doing their bidding when it comes to foreign policy. The Founders foresaw this, and gave us tools; it's up to us to use them.

Meanwhile, at the Smithfield meat processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, about 5,500 meatpackers process 30,000 hogs per day from slaughter to shipment, and as you might imagine, this plant averages well over one and a quarter injuries per day. Er, per calendar day, I meant to say. And, as you might also imagine, workers' efforts to unionize and change conditions has met with assault, intimidation, and wrongful firing. Of course, since hogs processed in this manner are also very likely very unhealthy due to (among other things!) lack of movement and excessive antibiotic intake, you're probably already avoiding eating anything they produce. But if you contact Smithfield and tell them to get with the program, you're also helping the workers put the brakes on such unhealthy practices, because -- surprise, pimps! -- the mad corporate drive for mammon just about always results in unhealthy practices. You can also tell this new Democratic Congress to let the Employee Free Choice Act come to a vote, since it presumably has a better chance of passing now.

This month, the FCC takes up its pet cause of allowing more and more media outlets to be gobbled up by fewer and fewer Leviathans, so Common Cause continues to promote its action page against media consolidation. But there's one other thing you can do -- look up H.R. 3302 on thomas. H.R. 3302 is the Media Reform Ownership Act of 2005, and it would bring back the Fairness Doctrine, reinstate the national cap on radio ownership that the 1996 Telecommunications Act obliterated, and reinstate a 25% nationwide television ownership cap (versus the current level of 35%). You might want to put that information into your letter to the FCC -- and you might want to tell Nancy Pelosi (sfnancy@house.gov, in case you were wondering) that you want to see H.R. 3302 get out of committee, now that her party controls Congress.