Gagliano? A 'soldier'? Get real

I have often thought that if Alfonso Gagliano, now trying to track down his condo records, hadn't been a politician he could have had a career playing mobsters in the movies -- his appearance is so 'New Jersey Italian' that he could easily fit in with all the shadowy figures sitting in the background at the Bada Bing.
This whole brouhaha comes from the story of another mobster, remembering a meeting more than a decade ago and basing his ID on a photograph. Who can take seriously the accusation that he was a "soldier" in the Montreal mafia?
At the very least, Gagliano would have been a capo.

The Honourable John F. Kerry, Leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition

Go, John, Go! Protect Every Child is a winner.
In a way that no "losing" American candidate has ever done before, John Kerry is asserting himself as the Leader of the Official Opposition.
Usually, the losing presidential candidate just disappears off the public stage in America -- while in a parliamentary system, the Leader of the Opposition remains in the public eye and keeps pushing his party's agenda.
John Kerry received the second-highest number of votes anyone has ever received for president -- 55 million people voted for him. And he mobilized a campaign organization like no democrat has ever done before. So why shouldn't he take advantage of that, and begin using his Senate seat as a focus for vigorously opposing Bush and promoting the kind of progressive ideas that could help democrats win the midterms?
And he has picked a great issue -- one I thought could have been the focus of his whole campaign -- health insurance for children.
Who can be opposed to this? The republicans are caught flat-footed by this initiative. If they oppose it, as will be their natural inclination, they look like cheapskate, ignorant, uncaring fat-cats. Who could deny a baby a life-saving operation? How could anyone say no to wheezing child needing treatment for asthma? When the parents of these children see their kids being helped, they will know who did this for them. And when these children reach adulthood, they will NOT stand for being denied health care again.
And I wouldn't be surprised if his "catastrophic coverage" idea gets revived again, too -- the big HMOs and health insurers would love it if the government would take these expensive and controversial cases off their hands.
Now, Kerry's assertiveness won't be popular with some Senate democrats -- and no, I'm not talking about Hillary. I'm talking about some of the high-profile senators like Durbin and Rockefeller -- the ones who, in talk show appearances during the campaign, never lifted a finger to defend Kerry against the swift boat smears and the 87 billion twist. The "public as co-sponsor" gambit in Kerry's health care initiative prevents his fellow Senators from ignoring him or watering his initiative down before the public even sees it.
Keep your $15 million, John -- maybe you can use it better than the other dems can.

"Virtuous Violence"

In this Antiwar.com column, There Is No One Left to Stop Them author Paul Craig Roberts says "Many Bush partisans send me e-mails fiercely advocating "virtuous violence." They do not flinch at the use of nuclear weapons against Muslims who refuse to do as we tell them." I had never heard the term "virtuous violence" before, so I Googled it.
A lot of the references referred to "virtuous violence" as a term used by parents to justify spanking and even forms of child abuse. It also has had religious connotations in some references.
But this March, 2004 essay on Virtuous Violence by Chicago journalist Bob Koehler seems to be the most relevant definition.
In it, he quotes a 1962 paper by psychologist Gabriel Breton, writing about the human compulsion to find a reason for waging war.
"Peace constitutes a terrible danger. . . As (peace) presents itself today, it threatens to deprive us forever of the justifications of virtuous violence. What shall we do? Along with representations of hell, it is the destruction by arms of large human groups which nourishes most assiduously the popular imagery. If violence ceases to be demanded by right and justice, will we have to deal directly with the monster who inhabits each one of us? . . . The purely political categories disappear and any position, opinion or policy is classified as good or evil. . . Violence has never tried to look so righteous.”

Bleak

Rentogen's diary on Daily Kos described Seymour Hersh's recent talk at Hampshire College - Seymour Hersh at Hampshire College, blasts Bush
Lots of sound criticisms (Condi Rice is a "dimwit") and policy analysis. And at the end, this summary of future prospects: "Hersh was particularly bleak when outlining his thoughts about the future. His most important point is that Bush is incapable of changing course, and at this point we will simply have to wait for events to transpire. Europe has turned against the U.S. and will begin to act soon (after the upcoming election in Germany) to restrain the 'craziness' of the Bush administration. He expects they will move to settle the war in Iraq. The economic consequences of the turn against the U.S. will be severe. Europeans will start to avoid buying U.S. made goods. Soon the Chinese and French will begin to buy oil in euros rather than dollars, and there will be a big move away from the dollar as an international currency. Europe (led by Germany and France) will take over brokering a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The neo-cons still hope to invade Syria and Iran. They think it will be easy to knock off Syria. There is nothing to stop their trying (reality certainly won't stop them)."

Good riddance to Carolyn

Canada: Parrish meets political shredder after vowing not to fit cookie-cutter
Don't let the door hit you in the ass as you leave.
Parrish learned, as did Sheila Copps, that the media loves you for being colourful and outspoken and sassy and cute, but your political teammates will soon despise you. If you want to be outspoken, start a blog!
And in the end, her insulting nattering has made it a little harder for other Canadian politicians to develop a respectful but meaningful Canadian independence from the Bush administration, which is particularly important in terms of our policies on border security and immigration and NAFTA and timber and beef.

The song is ended

but the melody lingers on
Powell Says Iran Is Pursuing Bomb Substitute "Iraq" for "Iran" and "Iraqi National Congress" for "National Council for Resistance in Iran" . . . its deju vu for 2002.
Maybe the wolf is really there this time. The problem for the US is that no one, particularly in Europe or the Middle East, believes the CIA or Powell anymore. If the US starts bombing Iran, then Iran could invade Iraq to destroy the US military there. Iran has an airforce, so the result would be 50,000 US troops dead. If Israel uses US intellegence as a rationale to start bombing Iran, the Middle East will explode.

Gay-bashing as publicity device

Pandagon highlighted this story Coming Out for One of Their Own about a gay teen in Oklahoma whose church got the news that it was going to be picketed by one Fred Phelps.
And I thought the name Fred Phelps rang a bell, so I Googled him -- and sure enough, just as I suspected, this is the same guy who keeps announcing he is bringing hundreds of people to Canada to picket here, there and everywhere against gay rights -- like when Conservative leader Joe Clark led Calgary's gay pride parade in 2001.
Apparently, he showed up in Oklahoma with nine people, mostly from his own family. I think he managed four or five people in Calgary.
So why would any church or any reporter take this guy seriously? The media need to learn to Google these people before they write stories implying that they have any credibility.

"We've got to get out" say the generals

Thanks to Antiwar for this link: Rolling Stone - The Generals Speak
It's too bad they didn't speak a little earlier and a lot louder, but here is what they are saying:
"We are losing people at a fairly steady rate of about two a day; wounded, about four or five times that, and perhaps half of these wounds are very serious. And we are also sustaining gunshot wounds, when, before, we'd mostly been seeing massive trauma from remotely detonated charges. This means the other side is standing and fighting in a way that describes a more dangerous phase of the conflict. The people in control in the Pentagon and the White House live in a fantasy world. They actually thought everyone would just line up and vote for a new democracy and you would have a sort of Denmark with oil."- Gen. Merrill "Tony" McPeak, Bush 41's Air Force chief of staff
". . . this is now an insurgency using the techniques of terrorism. With the borders poorly guarded, the terrorists come in. All in all, Iraq is a failure of monumental proportions."- Adm. Stansfield Turner, Carter's CIA director
"The idea of creating a constitutional state in a short amount of time is a joke. It will take ten to fifteen years, and that is if we want to kill ten percent of the population." - Lt. Gen. William Odom, Reagan's National Security Agency director. And by the way, 10 per cent is 250,000 people -- what a mass grave THAT would be.
"To me, it was astonishing that Rumsfeld would presume to tell four-star generals, in the Army thirty-five years, how to do their jobs . . . As he was being briefed on the war plan, he was cherry-picking the units to go. In other words, he didn't just approve the deployment list, he went down the list and skipped certain units that were at a higher degree of readiness to go and picked units that were lower on the list -- for reasons we don't know. But here's the impact: Recently, at an event, a mother told me how her son had been recruited and trained as a cook. Three weeks before he deployed to Iraq, he was told he was now a gunner. And they gave him training for three weeks, and then off he went. Rumsfeld was profoundly in the dark. I think he really didn't understand what he was doing. He miscalculated the kind of war it was and he miscalculated the interpretation of U.S. behavior by the Iraqi people." - Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, Clinton's Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence
"Have you seen an American strategic blunder this large? The answer is: not in fifty years." - Gen. Wesley Clark
"We screwed up. we were intent on a quick victory with smaller forces, and we felt if we had a military victory everything else would fall in place. We would be viewed not as occupiers but as victors. We would draw down to 30,000 people within the first sixty days. All of this was sheer nonsense.They thought that once Iraq fell we'd have a similar effect throughout the Middle East and terrorism would evaporate, blah, blah, blah. All of these were terrible assumptions. A State Department study advising otherwise was sent to Rumsfeld, but he threw it in the wastebasket. He overrode the military and was just plain stubborn on numbers . . . There is not a very good answer for what to do next. We've pulled out of several places without achieving our objectives, and every time we predicted the end of Western civilization, which it was not. We left Korea after not achieving anything we wanted to do, and it didn't hurt us very much. We left Vietnam -- took us ten years to come around to doing it -- but we didn't achieve what we wanted. Everyone said it would set back our foreign policy in East Asia for ten years. It set it back about two months. Our allies thought we were crazy to be in Vietnam. We could have the same thing happen this time in Iraq. If we walk away, we are still the number-one superpower in the world. There will be turmoil in Iraq, and how that will affect our oil supply, I don't know. But the question to ask is: Is what we are achieving in Iraq worth what we're paying? Weighing the good against the bad, we have got to get out."- Adm. William Crowe, Reagan's Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman.
And this was all said BEFORE the Fallujah and Mosul battles.

No to Bush! demonstrations

So the CTV news story Presidential visit raises Bush-bashing concerns says that peace groups are already planning to converge on Parliament Hill during Bush's first 'official' visit to Canada at the end of November.
So I searched out the information about what is being planned. Here it is -- under the general title of No to Bush! the Canadian Peace Alliance is organizing the demonstrations in Ottawa on Nov. 30. Wish I could be there in person, but I will be in spirit.

Still crazy after all these years

In Salon.com | Bush's night of the long knives Sydney Blumenthal concludes ". . . vindictiveness against the institutions of government based on expertise, evidence and experience is clearing the way for the intellectual standards and cooked conclusions of right-wing think tanks and those appointees who emerge from them. In this strange Soviet Washington, a system of bureaucratic fear and one-party allegiance has been created in which only loyalists are rewarded. Rice stands as the model. One can never be too loyal. And the loyalists compete to outdo each other. Dissonant information is seen as motivated to injure the president -- disloyalty bordering on treason. Success is defined as support for the political line, failure as departure from the line. An atmosphere of personal vendetta and an incentive system for suppressing realities prevail. This is not an administration; it does not administer -- it is a regime. On one of Powell's recent futile diplomatic trips, his informal conversation with reporters turned to a new book, 'The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency' (where) Powell is quoted as describing the neoconservatives to British Foreign Minister Jack Straw as 'fucking crazies.' That, the reporters suggested, might be an apt title for his next volume of memoirs. Powell laughed uncontrollably."
Sad, isn't it.

Next year country

It's always so gratifying when the US media notice something about Canada -- USATODAY.com - Home of CFL player vandalized after loss
This is so embarassing - apparently CNN used it too.
Actually, the egging incident wasn't a typical reaction from Saskatchewanians -- if you were listening closely from, say, Montana or Alberta on Sunday, you would have heard a whole province scream "Oh, shit" as the field goal kick sailed wide, and then, in chorus, "Well, we'll do it next year."
We often describe ourselves as "next year country" here in Saskatchewan -- we should have used this slogan on our license plates, instead of the insipid and creepy "Land of Living Skies" which was chosen after a contest and which always, for me, brings to mind some sort of mist-shrouded monster striding over the landscape a la Stephen King.
Anyway, go Riders go -- we're with you, boys, and you gave us a great season even though it was prematurely cut off. I guess if I can't root for the Riders in the Grey Cup, I'll root for the Lions instead.

The shallow meaning

Chris Matthews talks about Powell's resignation in Power shifting in the president's cabinet?.
I continue to be amused by media pundit thinking in the US -- they actually think the Bush administration is just like all of the other administrations in US history, where the president was a person who actually had a plan, a purpose and a policy. And they keep trying to find deeply meaningful interpretations of Bush administration actions. Matthews says "The real power in this administration lies between the president and the vice president. . . . Will George W. Bush relieve Dick Cheney of some of his enormous power and give it to a secretary of state? . . . I think there's going to be some power shifting and not just name changing. And the one to watch here is the vice president. Will George W. Bush continue to allow the public perception that he has almost a co-president in Dick Cheney? Or will he say that it's time (to) govern without a chief counsel?"
Now, isn't that just silly? Matthews has been listening too much to Pat Buchanan-- who actually thought that Bush was going to get rid of all the neocons right after the election - ha!
Does George Bush worry that Dick Cheney is running US foreign policy? Not in the least. Does Bush even care about what that policy is? Not at all. Bush only wants someone to tell him that that "freedom is on the march" and he's happy as a clam. He once described Condi Rice as "a fabulous lady", which is the kind of terminology parents use to describe their child's kindergarden teacher, not the way presidents usually describe their National Security Advisor.
With Rice as Secretary of State, Cheney is happy as a clam, too. Unlike that spoilsport Powell, Rice will never tell Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld that they are wrong about anything, ever. And acquiesence is the only thing which makes anyone fabulous in this administration.

Feeling a blog chill?

On last Friday's Hardball, I caught the end of this exchange between Joe Trippi and Susan Molinari, described as a Republican strategist, talking about the blogger assertions that Kerry had actually won the election. I have been waiting for the transcript I've so I could check on whether I heard what I thought I heard.
Here is the key exchange:
SUSAN MOLINARI: Well, obviously, blogging has to be taken for what it is, with all due respect to Joe Trippi. It is an opportunity for people to carry on without any consequence to their actions and what they allege. . . this is just, I think, a distraction. And every vote should be counted. But, clearly, there are places all over the United States where the Republican votes are not counted . . .
TRIPPI: Susan, I'm not disagreeing with you. What I'm saying is that . . . when a conspiracy theory takes hold and starts rolling, there is a responsibility, then, for the press and for the officials to prove it wrong. And that's what I think is healthy about this process. .
MOLINARI: Absolutely. And I don‘t disagree with you on that point. I guess, just somewhere in the future, we have to find in this brave new world of ours, who holds the bloggers accountable? Or are we allowed to, at any moment‘s notice, go off on this venture and say, right, not right? Or, to Chris‘s point, when do you say, oh, I guess I was wrong, I‘m sorry, a la Election Day exit polling. That was sort of thrown all over the universe on blogs. . . .
TRIPPI: . . I think the blogs did a good thing here. And I think it‘s good that we‘re having this recount. I don‘t think it should go on. I don‘t think there should be recriminations and divisions after it is over. But I think it was healthy that the blogs began this. I actually think this speaks more towards what is the press‘ responsibility and the two parties‘ responsibility to ensure that these issues get carried out, because it wouldn‘t have been done. This would not have been followed up on if the blogs hadn‘t brought it out.
End of the transcript.
Now, this was not an unreasonable exchange of views, and all that.
But here are the lines that bothered me, both from the Republican:
"It is an opportunity for people to carry on without any consequence to their actions and what they allege" and "who holds the bloggers accountable? Or are we allowed to, at any moment‘s notice, go off on this venture . . ."
So I wonder, are the republicans actually beginning to think about ways they can "hold bloggers accountable?"
Or is this just another conspiracy theory?

Clearly, it is racism and it is systemic

Buzzflash pointed me to Greg Palast's article on the large number of "spoiled" ballots and provisional ballots from black precincts in Ohio -- Kerry won Ohio - just count the ballots at the back of the bus -- as well as the high numbers of such ballots in hispanic and Native precincts in New Mexico. Clearly, this is racism, and it is systemic -- the term "systemic" means that an apparently "neutral" procedure is actually racist in its result. Women have identified and fought systemic discrimination for years in areas like "minimum height" requirements for police and fire departments. Now, blacks are seeing this kind of discrimination in US voting regulations and procedures.
Palast notes the Republican "caging" strategy whereby they developed lists of hundreds of people in black precincts to challenge, thereby forcing them to cast "provisional" ballots which then would not be counted due to technicalities.
Ohio also refused to purchase card reading machines in black precincts, so voters could not check to make sure their punch card ballot would count. The result was almost 100,000 "spoiled" ballots -- this is clearly also systemic racism.
No wonder the exit polls showed Kerry winning in Ohio -- black people emerged from their polling stations and said yes, they had voted for Kerry -- little did they know that their vote would not be counted.
By the way, I have scrutineered and poll captained a number of elections in Canada, and the number of "spoiled" ballots in our polls you could count on one hand -- we have this little thing called national standards, you see.

Making a list; checking it twice

In a recent post on the culture wars, Digbywrote: "This is the same old shit over and over and over again. We backed off on the death penalty, gun control, welfare, affirmative action and here we are with a new slate of issues about gays. Tomorrow it will be creationism."
I have been thinking about this post and realized that Digby's list is sadly incomplete.
As well as instituting the death penalty throughout the US, overturning all gun control legislation, ending welfare, criminalizing homosexuality and mandating the teaching of creation science, there are lots of other actions which Bush voters should now be demanding to save the godless heathens in the US from certain hellfire and create a properly Christian, god-fearing, moral society:
criminalizing abortion including the morning after pill, outlawing sex education, preventing teenagers from getting birth control, permitting (nay, requiring!) prayer in schools, supporting Christian private schools, establishing a religious litmus test for adoption and for child endangerment apprehensions, preventing the removal of medical life support, outawing stem cell research, ending habeus corpus for anyone accused of terrorism, allowing evidence to be used in court regardless of whether it was legally obtained, preventing courts from overturning legislation, outlawing pornography, censoring TV and movies and music, building monuments to the Ten Commandments in all courthouses . . .