Another socialist blog

Terrorism is up. Way up. According to Patterns of Global Terrorism, the annual report that until now has been prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center, there were 625 terrorist attacks worldwide last year, up from a previous high in 2003 of 175 attacks.

Wow. Doesn’t that make the Bush administration’s so-called War on Terror look not just ineffectual, but counterproductive? So, predictably, the government will no longer produce terrorism statistics. They’ve done well before with their tactic of hiding bad news, so why change now?

I’ve previously mentioned the wounding of Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena by U.S. troops, in a suspicious shooting incident that killed Italian official Nicola Calipari. Democracy Now! has an interview with Giuliana Sgrena in which she recounts the incident in her own words.

Sgrena is standing by her story, apparently ignored by American military investigators and American press, that she and Calipari were shot without warning from behind, and that depite U.S. assertions to the contrary there was no checkpoint at all.

A third passenger in the car also survived the incident, and corroborates Sgrena’s story. This man placed a phone call to Italian officials immediately after the shooting, and for some reason was forced at gunpoint, by the American soldiers, to end the call.

Italian officials had not yet, at the time of the interview, been permitted to inspect the vehicle or to know the names of the soldiers involved in the shooting.

The religious right is flexing its muscles of late, trying for no less than the destruction of the independent judiciary branch of government. The LA Times has obtained an audio tape of a two prominent right-wing religious leaders, James Dobson and Tony Perkins, discussing their plans to get Congressional Republicans to directly interfere in the federal court system. They, and House Speaker Tom DeLay, propose stripping funding from federal courts that make decisions conservatives disagree with.

Conservatives don’t like activist judges. They believe the law is objective and disinterested, not (as leftists would argue) a tool of the powerful to control the less powerful. They like “judicial restrant,” or at least they say they do. They do fall off the judicial restraint wagon now and then, as they did in Bush v. Gore.

It’s worth a look back at Bush v. Gore because today’s power struggle over judges illustrates the same bedrock hypocrisy that was in evidence then. In Deconstructing the Election, Win McCormack showed how the Republicans shredded their own doctrine of objectivity as they clawed to win Florida in 2000.

If the objectivity and disinterestedness of the law…are bedrock conservative doctrine, then James Baker, and his associates and conservative columnist sympathizers like William Safire, once again challenged and compromised that doctrine in the Florida presidential election imbroglio. The idea that law is (on the whole) neutral, objective and disinterested necessarily implies that the judges who interpret it are (on the whole) neutral, objective and disinterested; there is no conceivable syllogism whose conclusion is that our legal system is (more or less) objective and fair that can have as a premise that our judges are not and are not capable of being so. Yet this was the blatant premise of Republican commentary as an assortment of legal cases relating to the election wound their way through the Florida court system. Just as Republican operatives and commentators trashed the integrity of the county canvassing boards simply because they were under Democratic control, they also used the fact of their being Democratic appointees to attempt to discredit–often in advance–the decisions of various Florida judges, from the circuit level up to the state’s Supreme Court. The clear implication was that Democratic judges would necessarily, either reflexively or by calculation, rule in favor of the Democratic candidate. They could not be trusted to be disinterested and objective.

In addition to being a monumental betrayal of the conservative movement’s stated intellectual principles, this line of argument creates another problem for its Republican promoters: It tends to discredit in advance the decisions of Republican as well as Democratic judges. For if Democratic judges cannot be trusted to be evenhanded and judicious, what logic can be called forth to argue that Republican judges can be? They are also human. They are also partisan. They also owe something to the people who selected them. The theory unavoidably predicts that judges appointed by Republicans will rule, in a biased and partisan manner, against Democratic candidates and causes when occasions to do so arise.

It is doubly ironic, therefore–and doubly troublesome, one would think, for the integrity of the conservative cause–that this is exactly what happened when the case called Bush v. Gore reached the highest court in the land.

Just in time for any war crimes trials coming out of the Iraq war.

The Vatican has condemned a bill expanding gay rights which has passed the lower house of the Spanish Parliament. The bill would make Spain the first European country to allow homosexual people to marry and adopt children. This is consistent with the new pope’s earlier statements, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, describing homosexuality as an “intrinsic moral evil.”

So will he pull off a Bush-like magic trick, and succeed in making himself seem to be a kindler, gentler anti-gay bigot? Sunday Benedictus XVI promised to listen to the world, rather than immediately setting out a program for his papacy—a program that may include denying communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians, for instance.

South Carolina Rep. John Graham Altman has killed a bill which would protect the victims of domestic abuse against their batterers by making domestic abuse a felony. Battering the wife remains a misdemeanor in South Carolina, an offense just as serious as…jaywalking.

Not so for cockfighting, which Altman voted to make a felony.

This Earth Day, educate your fellow citizens about food safety. The Center for Food Safety publishes the Food Safety Review, a series of papers on genetic engineering, bovine growth hormone, mad cow disease, and other topics of importance to your health.

Iraqi resistance fighters shot down a helicopter north of Baghdad yesterday. The commercial craft, owned by the Bulgarian company Heli Air, was carrying 6 U.S. security contractors, 3 Bulgarian crew and two Fijian guards. All were killed.

The dead are being referred to as civilians, which they technically were, but they were hardly bystanders to the war. They were mercenaries. The U.S. occupation is making heavy use of mercenaries in Iraq. Perhaps this is because they are inherently unaccountable for their actions, unlike uniformed soldiers who are supposed to obey the Geneva Conventions as well as U.S. law. American officials waging a war with hired troops can pretend they are not responsible for the mercenaries’ war crimes, a very convenient position for a government waging an illegal war of aggression.

For those who’ve believed the President when he talked and talked and talked about personal responsibility, this must be a little confusing. Keep in mind that when conservatives talk about personal responsibility, they mean other persons.

You may know already use WIFI, a technology that permits a wireless Internet connection. Turns out that a lot of forward-thinking cities are creating their own city-wide municipal WIFI networks, which make high-speed Internet access available to all citizens. This is exactly what we need more of.

Big Telecom is not amused. In an article entitled Is Cheap Broadband Un-American?, Tim Karr describes the backlash against municipal WIFI, being led by SBC, Verizon, and Comcast to stop public broadband.

Telecommunications giants have mobilized a well-funded army of coin-operated think tanks, pliant legislators and lazy journalists to protect their Internet fiefdoms from these municipal internet initiatives, painting them as an affront to American innovation and free enterprise.

Their weapon of choice is industry-crafted legislation that restricts local governments from offering public service Internet access at reasonable rates. Laws are already on the books in a dozen states. This year alone, 10 states are considering similar bills to block public broadband or to strengthen existing restrictions.

Whenever you hear big corporations talking about how it’s important to keep government out of the marketplace, look for corporate lobbyists in the legislature trying to accomplish just the opposite.

Once again it’s tax day in the U.S. The rich should be having a nice day—their government in Washington has been highly successful in transferring the tax burden off the rich and onto the rest of us, while passing it off as tax “cuts.” This is hardly ever described as “class warfare,” a term reserved for shifting the tax burden in the opposite direction.

And when you pay your tax bill, you can rest assured that 48% of it is going to pay for war. That figure, and the accompanying pie chart from the War Resisters League, are based on

a line-by-line analysis of detailed tables in the “Analytical Perspectives” book of the Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2006. The percentages are federal funds, which do not include trust funds - such as Social Security - that are raised and spent separately from income taxes. What you pay (or don’t pay) by April 15, 2005, goes to the federal funds portion of the budget. The government practice of combining trust and federal funds began in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, thus making the human needs portion of the budget seem larger and the military portion smaller.

NPR reports on the elaborate steps the Pentagon has taken to conceal the images of wounded soldiers coming home from Iraq. Some 25,000 have been wounded so seriously that they have had to be flown out of Iraq.

The Pentagon has rearranged its flight schedule so that the wounded arrive stateside late at night, lying to reporters that this is due to “operational restrictions” at the runway in Germany. Interviews with wounded soldiers are restricted to those who provide “good news stories” for the Pentagon.

Apparently the White House spin effort is effective, since most media haven’t even tried to get past Pentagon interference to talk to the wounded.