http://rebelreports.com/post/103831597/al-jazeera-strikes-back-at-pentagon-releases-unedited

I have seen consistent reports of this kind of stuff in Iraq and Afghanistan since we first went in there. The hunting people for Jesus stuff is just weird and sick, but the distribution of bibles in the Dari and Pashto languages should be criminal.

I think the entire military chaplaincy needs to be pulled out by the roots and replaced.

I just watched the series finale for Battlestar Galactica today. I had managed to avoid seeing any spoilers and any discussion of the finale so far. Though I don’t intend to disclose any detailed spoilers, you should stop reading now if you want pristine mind going into the thing.

I hated it. My strongest belief about humanity is that learning and creativity define us as a species. From the earliest bone tools onward, learning and creativity result in technology. We can debate whether specific technologies are used for good or ill. I do not endorse fully unrestricted use of any technology that we can come up with. To me, the BSG finale had a maddening luddite streak to it. It managed to be both nihilistic and naive at the same time. For a show that did such a grand job of examining what it means to be human, the finale was disgustingly anti-humanistic. I’d like to just forget it. I can think of few shows that I’ve really loved which have managed to disappoint me so thoroughly with a planned series finale. There have been plenty of times where I wished things had ended differently for specific characters, where their ultimate fate was counter to the tone of the show or the arc of a specific character. I’m still bothered by the way Wes died in the Angel finale. I’m not bothered that he died. I think, given the finale’s premise, that it made sense for Wes to die. The moment of death was a betrayal of the character. I don’t think I’ve ever felt like the end was a betrayal to an entire show.

I think I’ll just try to forget that final episode.

I probably shouldn’t allow myself to watch any national TV news in the morning. It makes me cranky. We usually watch a local channel. That channel has genuine, if sometimes odd personalities instead of the usual plastic news people. They’re so unlike typical large city local news that we’ve taken to calling the broadcast “the island of misfit news”. I woke up this morning, made my coffee, etc then turned on the TV. It was still on MSNBC after last night’s post speech coverage. I watched Monica Novatny play a clip where Obama pledges to cut the deficit in half during his first term. She and an analyst then proceed to do an SNL style “Really?!” segment where they rant about how he can’t possibly cut the debt in half.

The federal debt and the federal deficit are not the same thing. How does someone without a basic understanding of our decades long political debate make it as a news anchor?

On the topic of the speech itself, I don’t have much to say. It was an okay speech. The novelty of having a president who is well spoken and knows what he’s talking about hasn’t worn off yet, but I’m sure it will. The news of the night should be that Bobby Jindal all but killed any chance he had of being president in 2012 last night. His speech sounded like he was reading a children’s story to a room full of kindergartners. Beyond the incredibly poor delivery, though, it was the same generic speech that every Republican has given for twenty years. Please let them continue to be just that politically tone deaf for the next four years. We just might increase our majorities in 2010 and 2012 enough to undo some of the damage that’s been done to this country since 1981.

I woke up this morning and turned on MSNBC. President Obama was about to make his speech at the national prayer breakfast. I watched the first few minutes before getting in the shower. I was really pleased that he took yet another high profile opportunity to acknowledge Americans of “no faith”. I have never in my lifetime been acknowledged as a part of the national community in that sense. I have never been acknowledged as someone who might be a good, thoughtful, committed person who wants good things for the world and community he lives in. It’s a powerful thing that really placates my sense of disappointment in some of the other things he’s doing. He also said that when he, later today, makes an announcement about his office of faith based and community programs that this office will not privilege one religion over another nor privilege religious groups over secular ones. Win.

I may be the only person in this country outside of the Blagojevich family to say this, but I think the impeachment was a travesty.

I think he probably broke the law. I expect that he will either end up convicted of a federal offense either through a plea bargain or a conviction via a jury trial. I also think he was absolutely correct in saying that the rules under which the Illinois senate impeached him were patently unfair. This was a show trial where conviction and removal from office were the only possible outcomes.

I wouldn’t want to be tried for anything under those rules.

In a discussion thread that started with my last post, I was asked why I think the Bush people got away with all the criminality we’ve seen and the Nixon people didn’t. It’s a really complicated question. I may not have time to fully flesh out my thoughts on it in the near future, so let me just offer up some basics.

First, I’m not convinced they will get away with it. There are some serious people who have been involved with war crimes trials who believe that members of the Bush administration, if not Bush himself, may end up indicted I have real worries about how the Obama administration may react to that. Obviously, no US president is going to allow a former US president to go on trial for war crimes. It won’t happen. What do they do if a senior Bush administration official gets indicted, though? The American people, by and large, seem to think that we’re above being judged by other countries. We’re the good guy. Period. It would be wholly inconsistent for Obama not turn one of those guys over and it would be a nightmare politically if does. Anyway…

One suggestion for why the Bushies haven’t been caught is that they’ve learned from the mistakes that the Nixon and (to a lesser extent) Reagan administrations made. There’s something to that, for sure. Impeachment is a wholly political thing, though. So if you’re talking about Bush or Cheney, specifically, politics is your answer. For the first six years of his administration, Bush had a Republican House. He had a Republican House where the majority was created by guys like Newt Gingrich who thought that “bipartisan” was a dirty word and who saw themselves as revolutionaries. Party loyalty rules. I suspect that some of the high profile Republicans (especially some of the more libertarian ones) who “retired” from Congress during Bush’s presidency did so out of party loyalty. They couldn’t go along with what was happening, but they couldn’t criticize their party while they were office holders, either. On the Democratic side, the politics are different, but no less prevalent. The Democratic leadership is timid. They’ve largely been unable to successfully frame the issues and they’ve been scared to death of being labeled shrill liberals. They also learned exactly the wrong lessons from Clinton’s impeachment. Pelosi et al are afraid that impeachment would have made Bush more popular, themselves less so, and resulted in losing seats in the next election.

Nixon had a very different House. The Democrats had been in charge for a generation and weren’t too worried about losing that. The Republicans of that era would just about all be considered RINOs today. They were more northeastern, more liberal, and less partisan that what we’ve got today in the GOP. Nixon had a very different set of crimes, too. Burglary and cover up are easy for the average person to wrap their heads around. The target of that burglary–the other party– left little doubt that this was simply a crime with no defense. Bush’s crimes have been harder for the average person to wrap their heads around. They’ve also come with a lot of legal justifications from his own lawyers, often as or before they were committed. To see Bush’s crimes you have to be willing to honestly evaluate the US’s place in the world. You can’t just assume we’re the good guys. If your knee jerk inclination is to trust authority and admire the “stern leader” who does what he thinks is best for you, then you’re not likely to see those crimes. I believe there’s a huge chunk of the US population who will never, could never, see the actions of the Bush-Cheney administration as criminal.

In the commercials for Frost/Nixon, one of the moments that is clearly meant to draw a reaction from liberals shows an inflamed Nixon saying something like “I’m saying if the President does something, it isn’t illegal”. I bet there are enough Americans who have a knee jerk inclination toward believing that to allow Bush to sleep easily at night.

Edit: Let me add here that Nixon committed some far worse crimes in SE Asia than what he was impeached over. There’s been talk here and there over the years of indicting Kissinger over some of those, but nothing ever came of it that I’m aware. Bush’s crimes are much more like the things that Nixon got away with in SE Asia than what he got impeached over.

Andrew Sullivan provides a clear, cutting explication of why Dick Cheney should be prosecuted for the crimes he has committed as veep. Definitely worth a read.

My major prof from grad school and I used to spend a lot of time talking about nationalism and economic development. That was done in several contexts. One of those was the context of elites who served the interests of international capital rather than national interest. You could have entire regions, millions of people who were thrown into or deeper into poverty and debt while a tiny fraction of the elites enriched themselves and their U.S. and European corporate puppet masters via the power of national government–power that they usually hadn’t come by in a truly democratic election.

Today, MSNBC is reporting that Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm has called a segment of southern, conservative senators “unamerican”. That’s a heated term and one that we’re used to seeing right wingers throw around. I think, in a very real sense, she’s right. My major prof and I used to talk about “the Latin Americanization” of the U.S. What we meant by that was the ways in which neo-liberalism was turning the U.S. into a nation with an obscenely wealthy minority who lived on estates in gated communities while the number of poor increases and the middle class shrinks (among other things). These southern senators are doing exactly what the elites of Latin America have done for a hundred years. They’re serving the interests of foreign corporate capital (Nissan, Toyota, BMW, Hyundai) at the expense of the national interest. If they succeed, they’ll reduce the standard of living for hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans.

This is a press release from the CWA:

Judge Slams CNN for Illegal Firing of NABET-CWA Members

In a major victory for NABET-CWA members who worked at CNN, a
National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge issued a
scathing decision against the cable network and ordered that 110
workers be rehired, the union recognized and their economic
losses restored.

CNN violated federal labor law and the legal rights of more than
250 workers at the Washington, D.C., and New York bureaus by
using a phony reorganization scheme for the sole purpose of
eliminating their NABET-CWA representation, the administrative
law judge found.

In late 2003, CNN terminated its more than 20-year contract with
Team Video Services, which employed union camera operators,
broadcast engineers and other technicians for CNN, in effect,
firing more than 110 workers. The network claimed it would
create its own unit of employees, however, Judge Arthur J.
Amchan called that unit a “sham,” used to get rid of employees
and their union. CNN’s goal was to “achieve a nonunion technical
work force in its Washington, D.C., and New York bureaus.” CNN’s
“widespread and egregious misconduct” showed a flagrant and
general disregard for employees’ fundamental rights, he said.

Noting that the case goes back nearly five years, CWA President
Larry Cohen stated: “This is a prime example of the way that
justice comes far too late, if at all, under our labor law
system. These workers never should have lost their bargaining
rights or their jobs, and it wouldn’t have happened if we had
the Employee Free Choice Act. What’s more, CNN has said it will
appeal this ruling. This should fire us up even more to fight to
strengthen workers’ bargaining rights.”

One of the fired workers, Jimmy Suissa, worked for CNN for 17
years, starting as a camera operator, but mastering nearly every
technical job in the Washington bureau, from running the audio
and video boards to technical director. “Many of us rotated
through these positions and that’s why we knew that CNN’s claims
that we weren’t able to learn new equipment were completely
false,” he said.

It was very stressful and difficult in the month leading up to
the point when CNN began firing workers, he said. And it was
clear that anyone associated with the union or providing
representation to workers on the job wasn’t going to be rehired
into the new non-union workplace.

Suissa said the process was disheartening because it took so
long to resolve. “It’s hard to find a job to replace the work I
was doing, and I’ve been making less money over these past
years,” he said.

Sarah Pacheco joined CNN as a videographer and worked at the
Washington bureau from 1990 to 2003, and she also was an active
and aggressive union steward. Despite acknowledged experience in
non-linear editing, a skill CNN management claimed was necessary
when it rejected other applicants, Pacheco was not rated among
the top 55 applicants. A “lack of people skills” described by
management likely “is related to her aggressiveness as a union
steward for (NABET-CWA) Local 31,” the judge wrote.

“I applied to Time Warner (CNN’s parent company) but never was
called,” she said. “This decision is tremendous and a validation
of our long fight,” she said.

The judge’s order calls for reinstatement and full back pay for
more than 110 employees, with training for those rehired, if
necessary, restoration of union representation and terms of the
former collective bargaining agreement, and the return of
bargaining unit work that has been outsourced since the
termination of the Team Video contracts.

Rachel Maddow credits the head of the Steelworkers’ Union (my dad’s union) with the following quote on the classism involved with bailouts and bailout politics:

“The people who take a shower before work get bailed out. The people who have to take a shower after work get thrown out.”

I’d like to point out that the sacrifice we’re asking of the top leadership on Wall Street and at the car companies includes things like not taking their million dollar bonuses, not flying in private jets, and not going on extravagant corporate retreats. The sacrifice that we’re asking of the line workers at GM, Ford, and Chrysler is their health care and their retirement security.