Its up-is-downism, again

WorldNetDaily: Nazis: Pioneers in medicine
This Buchanan column talks about how Terri Schiavo is like a Christian martyr groaning under the Nazi heel.
I've seen a lot of stuff in the last two months talking about American fascism under Bush and worrying about the fascist tendencies in the Bush administration. Do you think this Schiavo hysteria is what the Bush fascists were waiting for, so that they can use it to try to accuse their opponents of what they themselves are guilty of?
It's like the supporters of AWOL Bush accusing war hero Kerry of cowardice.
Its another example of what Josh Marshall calls Up-is-Downism.
I am calling it Jessica Lynch syndrome -- the desire to see Jeb Bush and the 101st Fighting Keyboarders burst into Ms. Schiavo's hospice room, scoop her up at gunpoint, and spirit her away to a hospital where, because the doctors likely wouldn't do this surgery without legal authorization, they would also have to force the doctors at gunpoint to reinstall the feeding tube.
Still crazy, after all these years.

Best line of the day

From a commenter on this post at Daily Kos :: What Happens When Worlds Collide?:
"Reality is what refuses to go away when you stop believing in it."

A uniter, not a divider

CBS News | Poll: Keep Feeding Tube Out
My daughter raised this point -- if 82 percent of the public think that Bush and congress made a mistake in interfering with the Terry Schiavo case, I guess it can now be proven that Bush is actually a uniter, not a divider. He has united the American public in disapproval of what he did.

What a great weight loss idea!

Yahoo! News - You Want Fingers with That? A customer took a spoonful of chili which included a human finger. After spitting it out, authorities said "Then they had some kind of emotional reaction and vomited."
Well, I should think so.
Hey, maybe Weight Watchers should try this with their frozen dinners -- having to watch out for the occasional body part would be a guaranteed way to make you eat slowly, and maybe even lose interest in eating altogether, wouldn't it.

NOW I get it

Pandagon: The ghouls and vampires who oppose choice
Well, I'm finally starting to understand why the anti-abortion people are leading the "culture of life" charge to try to get the feeding tube reinserted in Terri Schiavo.
Like abortion, its not about life, its about choice. And once again, its not "what choice" but "whose choice" that is basically the issue.
I have argued on this blog that many of the people who say they are anti-abortion are actually just anti-choice -- what they are actually opposed to is allowing individual women to choose for themselves whether or not to get an abortion. They usually concede that if her reasons are "good enough", like that the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest, or that carrying the baby will kill her, then a woman could get an abortion in that situation. In other words, they think its OK for a woman to have an abortion if a committee of doctors OKs it , but not if the woman decides for herself.
Parenthetically, this is why I was so pleased to see the Conservatives agree last weekend that they would not adopt a policy supporting new abortion legislation -- they finally accepted that people can be pro-choice without being pro-abortion.
Getting back to the Schiavo case, I see the same "anti-choice" approach as it taken toward abortion. The basic attitude seems to be that Ms. Shiavo's own choice must be disregarded, ignored, marginalized, disbelieved or overturned. This choice has been confirmed by legal evidence presented in court, reviewed and cross-examined, evaluated by lawyers and by Ms. Schaivo's own guardian, and accepted as factual by judge after judge -- first, that Ms Schiavo is and will always be a vegetable, and second, that she would choose to die rather than to continue to live in such a condition. Instead, the argument seems to go, the choice should be made by her parents or her sister or her brother or the congress or Jeb Bush or the Supreme Court -- anyone, really, who would base the choice on their own mystic, magical, wishful thinking rather than on Ms. Schiavo's choice. Baiscally, they are writhing and turning to avoid accepting that she made her own choice.
And in a postscript -- I read the saddest comment on a blog today. The commenter said she had worked in the same workplace as Ms. Schaivo's brother and that he was a sad man, having spent his entire adult life, 15 years, embroiled in this case. I wonder if her parents or brother or sister ever considered whether Ms. Schiavo herself would have wanted them all to suffer for so long over her twisted body and empty mind.

Signs that the apocalypse is upon us

Capitol bill aims to control ‘leftist’ profs
Read it and weep.

"Stop the insanity"

Well, I'll say.
Poor Mrs. Schindler was quoted today as saying this, and I agree but in a different context.
Schiavo's Parents Suffer More Setbacks
This is reminding me now of the Princess Dianna funeral on speed -- in that case, we saw a riotous two-week outpouring of hysterical grief, followed by an embarassed and somewhat shamefaced return to normalcy. In this case, it has taken only a few days to go through the hysteria phase and reach the embarassed stage, the stage where people see Ms. Shiavo's "baby seal" face and mutter to themselves, please no more. and change the channel.
Except, of course, for Pat Buchannan -- who said tonight on Hardball that President Bush should get federal marshals to burst into Ms. Schiavo's hospice room and scoop her up and take her to a hospital where, presumably at gunpoint, doctors would reinstall the feeding tube by force. When Matthews asked him under what authority the president could do that, Buchannan said, well, he's the president. Oh for heaven's sake, do you guys think you elected a king?
Please, please, stop the insanity!

So how are things going in Iraq these days?

John Burns writes in this NYT article, There Are Signs the Tide May Be Turning on Iraq's Street of Fear, about how maybe, just maybe, things are going better on Haifa Street in Iraq.
But the article gives me a whistling-past-the-graveyard feeling. "In the first 18 months of the fighting, the insurgents mostly outmaneuvered the Americans along Haifa Street, showing they could carry the war to the capital's core with something approaching impunity. But American officers say there have been signs that the tide may be shifting. On Haifa Street, at least, insurgents are attacking in smaller numbers, and with less intensity; mortar attacks into the Green Zone have diminished sharply; major raids have uncovered large weapons caches; and some rebel leaders have been arrested or killed."
This is progress? An 18 month battle for a single Baghdad street, where things are so much better now because the insurgents are attacking "in smaller numbers"? Oh wow!
And then there is Today in Iraq's reference to this Asia Times article: Shocked and awed into 'freedom' , which provides an Iraqi-eyed view of daily life now in Iraq:
"Highways in and out of Baghdad are suicidal: the Americans can't control any of them. Anyone is a potential kidnapping target, either for the Sunni guerrilla or criminal gangs. Officials at the Oil and Electricity Ministries tell of at least one attack a day. Oil pipelines are attacked and distribution interrupted virtually every week. There's a prison camp syndrome: almost 10,000 Iraqis incarcerated at any one time, in three large jails, including the infamous Abu Ghraib. . . . The Sunni guerrillas register an average of scores of attacks a day, all over the country. Roadside and car bombs are still exploding in leveled Fallujah. The Baghdad regional police commander was assassinated on Saturday. The resistance has infiltrated virtually all government and police networks . . . "
So I don't think it matters very much whether things are going better for the Americans along Haifa Street.

Yes!

Every time I start feeling that our civilization is crumbling, something like this gives me hope.
This Catholic bishop originally refused a Catholic funeral for a gay bar owner. Now, following protests organized by Americablog among others, and obviously some soul-searching, the bishop has changed his mind, saying he now realizes his condemnation was unjust. Its impressive to see that people CAN change, isn't it. Bishop apologizes for barring Catholic funeral of gay nightclub owner

It only hurts when I laugh

Rumsfeld Cautions Iraqis on New Government
This made me laugh -- "[Rumsfeld] warned that Iraqis had to 'be darned careful about making a lot of changes just to be putting in their friend or to be putting in someone else from their tribe or from their ethnic group. This is too serious a business over there and the United States has got too much invested and too much committed and too many lives at stake for people to be careless about that.'
So here is Rumsfeld warning Iraq against hiring people just because they're friends or from a particular tribe -- when the United States screwed up the Iraq economy and reconstruction because it insisted on hiring people to staff the coalition provisional authority office whose only qualification was that they were Republicans who had sent their resume to the White House or posted it on the Heritage Foundation website. The Washington Post reported last June that "most CPA hiring was done by the White House and Pentagon personnel offices, with posts going to people with connections to the Bush administration or the Republican Party. The job of reorganizing Baghdad's stock exchange, which has not reopened, was given in September to a 24-year-old who had sought a job at the White House. "It was loyalty over experience," a senior CPA official said."
Read this entire WP article to refresh your memory about the miserable history of the Iraq occupation -- and see if you agree that the insurgency is really all Turkey's fault because Turkey wouldn't let the US send 30,000 troops into Iraq from the north, as Rumsfeld also said this weekend, or whether this is just one more ass-covering remark from an incompetent administration.

Playing snakes and ladders

Google Search: Conservatives Looking through the Google Search at the Conservative convention news of the last three days, it shows a party which avoided most of the snakes and seized the ladders.
They finally, finally, appear to have realized that being pro-choice is not the same as being pro-abortion (except for Elsie Wayne, but why would that be a surprise). They voted down a divisive rule change which would have split the party between Alliance and PC. Though the media didn't report on this, its likely that they also fleshed out many of their other paper-thin policy positions -- I hope at least they changed that insulting "we support farmers, loggers, and fishermen" reference from their election platform last year.
And, of course, they remain purposefully ignorant about gay marriage and the Canadian supreme court and the notwithstanding clause -- this is the snake that they just cannot seem to get past, and it will continue to pull them down.

Digby says it all

In The Days of Our Lives, Digby points out the facts that the American public are NOT seeing on their television screens today:
1. ". . . George W. Bush signed a law in Texas that expressly gave hospitals the right to remove life support if the patient could not pay and there was no hope of revival, regardless of the patient's family's wishes. It is called the Texas Futile Care Law. Under this law, a baby was removed from life support against his mother's wishes in Texas just this week. A 68 year old man was given a temporary reprieve by the Texas courts just yesterday. "
2. ". . . republicans have voted en masse to pull the plug . . . on medicaid funding that pays for the kind of care that someone like Terry Schiavo and many others who are not so severely brain damaged need all across this country."
3. ". . . the tort reform that is being contemplated by the Republican congress would preclude malpractice claims like that which has paid for Terry Schiavo's care thus far. "
4. ". . . the bankruptcy bill will make it even more difficult for families who suffer a catastrophic illness like Terry Schiavo's because they will not be able to declare chapter 7 bankruptcy and get a fresh start when the gargantuan medical bills become overwhelming."
5. '. . . this grandstanding by the congress is a purely political move designed to appease the religious right and that the legal maneuverings being employed would be anathema to any true small government conservative. "

Don't believe what they say

MSNBC - U.S. misled allies about nuclear export
This is a huge story.
When meeting with China, Japan and South Korea five or six weeks ago, the Bush administration tried to bolster their demonization of North Korea and scare everyone by accusing North Korea of having sold nuclear materials to that rogue state Libya.
They lied. On purpose.
Actually, North Korea had sold the materials to US ally Pakistan. It was Pakistan's Abdel Qadeer Khan who then sold the materials to Libya, without North Korea's knowledge.
US intelligence showed all along that it was Pakistan that made the sale. But the Bush administration wanted to scare everyone, so they lied about what their intelligence said.
"The Bush administration's approach, intended to isolate North Korea, instead left allies increasingly doubtful as they began to learn that the briefings omitted essential details about the transaction, U.S. officials and foreign diplomats said in interviews. North Korea responded to public reports last month about the briefings by withdrawing from talks with its neighbors and the United States. In an effort to repair the damage, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is traveling through East Asia this weekend trying to get the six-nation talks back on track. The impasse was expected to dominate talks today in Seoul and then Beijing, which wields the greatest influence with North Korea."
As the story points out, this is just the latest of several lies about US intelligence findings -- "The new details follow a string of controversies concerning the Bush administration's use of intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. In the run-up to the Iraq invasion in March 2003, the White House offered a public case against Iraq that concealed dissent on nearly every element of intelligence and included interpretations unsupported by the evidence."
In fact, the world will realize now that there's a pattern of lying here, using inflated intelligence to promote political agendas. And no one will believe the Bush administration anymore.

Best line of the day . . .

. . . from Steve Gilliard, speaking about people who think abstinence education is working: "Is there ANY area of science besides ballistics that these people pay any attention to?"
From Steve Gilliard's News Blog : Yet another study shows abstinance fails:

Iraq war protests worldwide

Here, for my American readers, are photos of the Iraq war protests around the world today -- just in case the American media doesn't cover this story, I can't imagine why not:

New York


Chicago


San Francisco


Mexico City


Rome


Sao Paulo


Madrid


Copenhagen


Athens


Glasgow


Istanbul


Lahore, Pakistan


Sophia, Bulgaria


Tokyo


Manila


Seoul


and two stories, from The Globe and Mail and from Yahoo.