new since…

Mr. United Nations is especially well depicted. Courtesy of Al Jazeera

That’s the actual headline of this corporate media news blog.  Frankly, this verdict makes me feel like “evacuating”…all over Oakland.  I’ll use my biggest outputs to adorn the roofs of police stations.

Just imagine if a young black man had shot a cop and then claimed he’d intended to use some other weapon he had on him.  How likely is it that the jury would have bought into that?

As far as I can tell, Mehserle is a cold-blooded killer.  So are many other cops–he just had the bad luck to be caught on video.  And he’s still only going to pay the price for involuntary manslaughter, assuming this verdict even survives appeals.  That’s what you get for negligently killing someone in a car crash, for example.

It makes me sick.  I’ve got to go now…and evacuate.

Let’s give Harriet Miers a little company.

Here is why I’m glad the very watered-down health bill is about to pass.  Witness the surprisingly honest and cogent analysis by Former Bush speechwriter David Frum:

WATERLOO

Conservatives and Republicans today suffered their most crushing legislative defeat since the 1960s.

It’s hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disaster. Conservatives may cheer themselves that they’ll compensate for today’s expected vote with a big win in the November 2010 elections. But:

(1) It’s a good bet that conservatives are over-optimistic about November – by then the economy will have improved and the immediate goodies in the healthcare bill will be reaching key voting blocs.

(2) So what? Legislative majorities come and go. This healthcare bill is forever. A win in November is very poor compensation for this debacle now.

So far, I think a lot of conservatives will agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.

At the beginning of this process we made a strategic decision: unlike, say, Democrats in 2001 when President Bush proposed his first tax cut, we would make no deal with the administration. No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo – just as healthcare was Clinton’s in 1994.

Only, the hardliners overlooked a few key facts: Obama was elected with 53% of the vote, not Clinton’s 42%. The liberal block within the Democratic congressional caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course the Democrats also remember their history, and also remember the consequences of their 1994 failure.

This time, when we went for all the marbles, we ended with none.

Could a deal have been reached? Who knows? But we do know that the gap between this plan and traditional Republican ideas is not very big. The Obama plan has a broad family resemblance to Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s that formed the basis for Republican counter-proposals to Clintoncare in 1993-1994.

Barack Obama badly wanted Republican votes for his plan. Could we have leveraged his desire to align the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance it without redistributive taxes on productive enterprise – without weighing so heavily on small business – without expanding Medicaid? Too late now. They are all the law.

No illusions please: This bill will not be repealed. Even if Republicans scored a 1994 style landslide in November, how many votes could we muster to re-open the “doughnut hole” and charge seniors more for prescription drugs? How many votes to re-allow insurers to rescind policies when they discover a pre-existing condition? How many votes to banish 25 year olds from their parents’ insurance coverage? And even if the votes were there – would President Obama sign such a repeal?

We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.

There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination. When Rush Limbaugh said that he wanted President Obama to fail, he was intelligently explaining his own interests. What he omitted to say – but what is equally true – is that he also wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.

So today’s defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry. Their listeners and viewers will now be even more enraged, even more frustrated, even more disappointed in everybody except the responsibility-free talkers on television and radio. For them, it’s mission accomplished. For the cause they purport to represent, it’s Waterloo all right: ours.

Actually overhead on a daytime soap–

Man (as he desists from pummeling another man):

Beating you up will never give me back Miami.

‘Jesus Guns’: Two More Countries Rethink Using Weapons with Secret Bible References

After an ABC News report that secret Bible messages are encoded on gun sights used by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, at least two other countries that also use the equipment in Afghanistan are now considering what action to take.

…The sights are used by U.S. troops and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The model numbers inscribed on the scopes include coded references to New Testament verses.

…”The perfect parallel that I see,” said Maj. John Redfield, spokesperson for CentCom, told ABC News, “is between the statement that’s on the back of our dollar bills, which is ‘In God We Trust,’ and we haven’t moved away from that.”

…On Tuesday, Redfield of CentCom told ABC News that the inscriptions did not violate the directive against proselytizing. “This does not constitute proselytizing because this equipment is not issued beyond the U.S. Defense Department personnel. It’s not something we’re giving away to the local folks.”

The U.S. is not a Christian nation–it’s a secular nation and always has been, despite the attempts of fundamentalist know-nothings (and some knowing liars) to rewrite history.  The U.S. Constitution does not mention God, and it specifically prohibits any governmental establishment of religion or any religious test to hold office.  A U.S. treaty from 1797, signed by our second President John Adams, states explicitly that “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”

Major Redfield’s arguments are ludicrous.  Constitutionally, the U.S. military can’t proselytize among U.S. soldiers any more than it can among foreign nations.  And “In God We Trust,” constitutionally dubious as it is, isn’t offensive to Muslims and isn’t used to kill people–people overseas are not going to care that it’s on U.S. money.  But Muslims may find it very offensive indeed for their coreligionists to be shot at with guns that have Biblical citations on them.

They’re not in some secret code, as the lede might imply–the article later states, “John 8:12 [is] referred to on the gun sights as JN8:12″  JN8:12 is hardly a very secretive way to refer to this verse, which reads, “Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”  I guess that has some mystical connection with the light of a gun sight.  (I’m not joking here–apparently all of the verses cited on various different guns have to do with light.)

Trijicon’s director of sales and marketing “said the issue was being raised by a group that is ‘not Christian.’”  In other words, the person who represents the firm making these guns uses an ad hominem fallacy to try to discredit a message because the people it comes from are purportedly the wrong religion.  The gun sight codes aside, why is the U.S. government doing business with religious bigots?

“When I run, I’m totally incognito because I’m not wearing the trough full of makeup.”

–Sarah Palin, Alaska’s First Jogger
[update: soon to be FORMER First Jogger]

The celebrity mag pol strikes dirt again

Just imagine how angry she’d get if a Democrat suggested that there’s something she gets out of a TROUGH…let alone LIPSTICK…

Toon courtesy of BradBlog…