Recently Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has been garnering a lot of grass roots attention. Even as an unrepentant liberal, a lot of what Paul says appeals to me because of his unequivocal stand on the Bill of Rights and ending this absurd war on terror. This anti-war/anti-police state stance is the main issue that seems to attract a lot of younger supporters who might otherwise consider themselves to be more left-leaning. Unfortunately, there are no Democrats aside from Dennis Kucinich who are so strident on these issues.
Unfortunately, as appealing as Paul’s stand is on these issues, he has some equally disturbing positions on other issues that just aren’t getting the attention they deserve. Paul has made it clear that in spite of his belief that the government should stay out of people’s private beliefs, that doesn’t apply to a woman’s right to decide whether to have a baby. Paul want’s the supreme court to repeal Roe v Wade and thinks abortion should be outlawed by states. Perhaps even more disturbing, when he was asked at a recent event about his response to a debate question on whether he believed in evolution, he made it clear that he does not. Any potential president who can simply disregard scientific evidence in this way has absolutely no business even being considered for the position. In an increasingly technological world with a lot of problems that we must address, it is critical that we have a president who has basic scientific literacy. On this count Ron Paul along with several of his GOP colleagues fails and should be dismissed from the race immediately.

The School Board selected two new members tonight to fill the vacancies left by the resignations of Amy Doyle and Cam Getto. Eric Temple and Sarah Devaney are now members of the board for the next year until they have to run for election. The recordings of the interviews are up on the podcast feed. Best of luck to Sarah and Eric because they are going to have an extremely tough job in the coming months and I don’t envy them one bit.

On an unrelated note, I also want to send best wishes to Dr. Maggie Brandt. Maggie is a trauma surgeon and also Steve Pierce’s wife as well as an army reservist and she is heading off to Iraq at the end of this week. Unfortunately it looks like she is going to be very busy for the next few months repairing the physical damage being done to troops over there. Stay safe Maggie.

Surely by now you have heard about the fiasco that is Walter Reed Army Medical Center.  Contrary to the to all the bullshit rhetoric from republicans about supporting the troops, they have consistently done nothing of the sort.  Wounded troops undergoing outpatient treatment at Walter Reed, have been living in disgracefully squalid conditions in buildings at the facility, and the number of wounded has been drastically undercounted by the defence department.

Now in a further insult to the wounded troops,  instead of addressing the problems at WRAMC, and all the VA hospitals around the country, they have ordered the soldiers living there to be up at 6am every day and ready for inspection at 7am.  In addition they have barred everyone at the facility from talking to anyone in the press.  Don’t fix the problem, just ignore it.

We were watching the documetary Iraq for Sale the other day, and it just never ceases to amaze me how corrupt everything associated with this war and the Bush administration is. One thing that the new congress should do is pass a law on war profiteering. Better yet, a constitutional amendment. If someone is found to be a war profiteer, they should be forced to pay back all money received from the government, and all officers of the company should receive a lifetime ban from ever doing business with the government in any way, shape or form. Furthermore, any company doing business with the government should be prohibited from any association with any individuals or companies who have been found to have been war profiteers.

Also all the tasks that were formerly done by military personnel such as maintaining equipment, security, feeding troops, etc, should be brought back into the military. A proper accounting system also needs to be established for the military. Past accounts are so screwed up that they can never be fixed, but all future expenditures need to be accounted for properly. Cost plus contracts also need to be eliminated, since they are a breeding ground for corruption. Past administrations from both sides of the aisle are to blame for this mess, but clearly the republicans will not take responsibility for cleaning it up, so the democrats must.

I just stumbled across a very interesting site called Maps of War that features a variety of animated maps of the middle east. The Imperial History map is particularly fascinating if you’re unfamiliar with the history of region. Over the last five millenia there have been a succession empires that rose and fell and these are shown in conjunction with an animated time line. In general, empires have lasted about three centuries, including their rise, peak and eventual decline with periods of chaos in between. The United States is well into it’s third century and the downward spiral has accelerated in the past five years as the chaos has accelerated.

A lot of people know of President Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address to the United States just before leaving office in January 1961. That’s the one where he warned people about the dangers of letting the military-industrial complex have too much power. If you’ve never seen it, it definitely worth watching especially in this time when the military-industrial complex is so explicitly personified by the likes of Dick Cheney. The whole speech is available on Google Video and is definitely worth watching. The relevant portions of the speech are also shown in the film Why We Fight which is also on Google video. It’s definitely worth watching to see how the military industrial complex has corrupted American democracy.

The military is so desperate to get new recruits, that recruiters are telling outright lies to students to get them to sign up. They’re going so far as to tell them that the war in Iraq is over and troops are being brought home. They’re also telling them that if they don’t like it that they can just quit, which is definitely not the case. The New York city ABC news affiliate did an investigation, sending students into 10 different recruiting stations in the city with hidden cameras. The results were startling, and that’s one of the reasons why we don’t want recruiters coming into our schools trying to sign up our kids. Fortunately, the Ypsi school district has a policy and it will now be enforced to stop giving recruiters free run of the cafeteria. That’s especially important after hearing that two more local kids died this week in this senseless, unnecessary war.

If your read my previous Bullshit post, or other posts you might get the impression that I’m paranoid or a conspiracy theorist. Nothing could be further from the truth. I just look around me at what is happening and what people say and come to my own opinions. Based on the “truthiness” record of anyone associated with Bush administration and real story that ultimately comes out after their highly touted terrorism “victories” I think anyone paying attention would be foolish not to be highly skeptical of anything that they say. Remember the Miami terror cell a few months ago?, the Tonawanda 6?, Jose Padilla?, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi? All of these were huge stories when they broke. But every one them also turned out to be much ado about nothing. The guys in Miami were a bunch of losers trying to hatch some plot, and they weren’t even Muslims. Padilla never actually did anything. Same with the guys from Tonawanda. And the violence in Iraq has only gotten worse since Zarqawi’s death. After each one of these instances, the media followed the Bush line and made a huge deal about important the bust was. However, once it became clear that there was nothing of importance in each case, the story was forgotten by the major media.

Now this morning, I saw on AmericaBlog that NBC is reporting that a senior British official is now acknowledging that no attack was imminent. This runs contrary to the words of Bush, Cheney, Lieberman et al, a few days ago. Evidently the suspects had not yet even purchased airline tickets, and most of them didn’t have passports. The White House obviously denies this:

“There was unprecedented cooperation and coordination between the U.S., the U.K. and Pakistani officials throughout the case,” said Frances Townsend, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, “and we worked together to protect our citizens from harm while ensuring that we gathered as much info as possible to bring the plotters to justice. There was no disagreement between U.S. and U.K. officials.”

I believe that in this case “unprecedented cooperation” means that we need to scare the people in the wake of Lieberman’s loss, and the British went along with it. The only hope the Republicans have of maintaining there majority in congress is to convince enough ignorant people this year that only they can protect them from the terrorists. But if people actually look at what has been claimed versus reality, they will see that not only can the Republicans not protect America, but they have utterly mis-managed everything they have touched in the past six years. Assuming that there even was a real plot (and I’m skeptical of that) I think that is more likely something along the lines of this cartoon I saw yesterday on BoingBoing. We have a government that seems to be so set on keeping the nation in a constant state of fear and war (see 1984 for the rationale), that Al-Qaeda doesn’t have to actually do anything. They just have to plant some “plots” so they are found, and wait for the government to destroy democracy and freedom from within. I believe the ones out to get us and destroy are civilization are not the Islamo-Fascists, but the Christian-Fascists sitting amongst us.

It is time to ignore the warnings from the White House, and start working to bring into office people who actually believe in our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

I think this whole “foiled bombing plot” in London is bullshit. I think that it is not coincidental that this happened just days after Joe Lieberman’s primary defeat and Tony Blair’s visit to shrub last week. The I think that this going to turn out to be like all the other losers that they have busted in the last few years, the guys in Miami a few months ago, the Tonawanda Six and Jose Padilla. Every few months they bust some losers who have no real chance of being able to defend themselves against the power of the federal government. The bush crew want to keep everyone scared. They do do this so that they can ram through their demolition of freedom. Now they want people to afraid of everyone carrying a bottle of water and an ipod or cell phone. Dave Winer points to an excellent summary of what this is all about from Ze Frank. The video is less than 2 minutes long.

I say if you’re going to be afraid forget about Al Queda and be afraid of George Bush and his crew. This is only going to get a lot worse between now and the November elections. The Republicans are terrified that they are going to lose big in the house and senate this year because they have done nothing good in power. The only way that they think they can win again is to keep the American people afraid of their own shadows. Don’t believe anything that this government says. They have proved conclusively in the past 5 years that they cannot be trusted.

update: Doc Searls has a partial transcription of the Ze Frank video

The strategy of terrorism is to use isolated acts of violence to instill fear and confusion into the population at large. A small number of people can incapacitate a society by leveraging our inability to understand risk.
London’s police deputy commissioner Paul Stevenson said that the plot was “intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” No, it is imaginable: between three and ten flights out of thousands would have resulted in the terrible loss of human life.
Bush today said this country is safer today than it was prior to 9/11. Personally, I don’t think he knows. Whether we like it or not, terrorist attacks on Americans are now part of the global reality. They will continue to happen. Many places around the globe have had to deal with a similar reality for years. India, Ireland, England, Spain, Russia, to name a few. In many cases, these societies have pulled together and not allowed isolated acts of violence to tear at their fiber. Like disease and the forces of nature, it’s a risk that we have to rationally come to terms with. The government’s responsibility is to make sure that fear and terror are not disproportionate to the reality of the situation.
Today the President said, “This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom to hurt our nation.” Generalized statements like this which instill nebulous fear without specific information are exactly in line with the goals of terrorism.

I’m just glad I don’t have to travel anywhere right now. I don’t want to fly because of fear, because I am not afraid of terrorists. The TSA and airlines have just made flying such a miserable experience that it is more hassle than it is worth.

The US Supreme Court today declared illegal the military commissions being run by the Bush administration at the Guantanamo Bay Prison. The white house wanted to hold military trials of some of the prisoners held there on war crimes charges. In a 5-3 decision the court ruled this illegal. Demonstrating his continued ignorance Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a strongly worded dissent in which he said

to second-guess the determination of the political branches that these conspirators must be brought to justice is both unprecedented and dangerous

Actually it is precisely the job of the supreme court to second guess the determination of the political branches and not to be a rubber stamp. Secondly, there was no determination of “the political branches” to hold these mock trials. This was a dictate from the white house and congress never approved it. In fact congress declined to approve the trials. Maybe Thomas should read Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion where he wrote

Concentration of power (in the executive branch) puts personal liberty in peril of arbitrary action by officials, an incursion the Constitution’s three-part system is designed to avoid.

Kennedy is exactly right on this point and it is well past time for both court and congress to stand up to this would be dictator and do their job.

Update: From Americablog I saw this link to the ScotusBlog. The actual decision is really huge. In the decision the court stated that the Geneva Conventions of prisoners of war do apply to these prisoners! This essentially means that most of the tactics being used by the Bush administration are illegal and in fact are War Crimes! Time to bring on the articles of impeachment!