Another socialist blog

Fun quote from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his Presidential papers (November 8, 1954):

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

So many examples of right-wing Christian hypocrisy lately! If all the satirists went on strike we would hardly notice.

Spokane Mayor Jim West, an outspoken anti-gay Republican, turns out to be gay. West, who has pushed anti-gay legislation and a bill to outlaw sex among teenagers, apparently was cruising the Internet for teenage guys from his office. “‘I didn’t masturbate in my office,’ he insists with Clintonian specificity.” While not happy to be outed, West is dwelling on the fact that he’s gay, hoping to divert attention from the fact that he’s accused of being a serial pedophile.

Meanwhile, in Missouri, the Governor Matt Blunt has signed legislation enacting Medicaid cuts that will eliminate health insurance coverage for about 100,000 parents, people with disabilities and elderly people. Faced with the criticism that the cuts are simply morally wrong, the governor (a devout Christian) brazens it out and insists that cutting health care for the poor is morally correct because raising taxes is wrong. Indeed, Jessica Robinson, the governor’s press secretary, has argued that the cuts are actually good for the poor, by providing an incentive for them to get job training. As Dave Barry might say, I am not making this up.

When he’s our terrorist.

Luis Posada Carriles, a former CIA operative, is wanted in Venezuela for bombing a Cuban airliner in 1976, in which 73 people were killed. Posada Carriles has also boasted of being responsible for a series of bomb attacks on Havana tourist spots in the 1990s. He’s reportedly in the United States seeking asylum, which will put the nominally anti-terrorist Bush administration in a bit of a spot.

If the right-wing political hacks in the Bush administration had any shame or conscience at all, they’d comply with our extradition treaty with Venezuela and send this terrorist to be tried in a court of law. Or, the fact that he’s anti-Castro might get him a Get Out of Jail Free card from the White House. Hell, if Jeb Bush needed votes Posada might even get a pardon.

Perhaps they actually do feel embarrassment, though: State Department official Roger Noriega claims the Bush administration doesn’t know for sure if Posada is in the United States. Uh huh.

Oh, I’ll be getting Mom a card this year. But Mother’s Day is not one of those several holidays created by Hallmark to get me to part with my money. It was an invention of Julia Ward Howe, the author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic and a 19th Century peace activist. Her original proclamation of the holiday:

Arise then, women of this day!

Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:

‘We will not have questions decided by irrelevant agencies.

‘Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage for caresses and applause.

‘Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience.

‘We women of one country will be too tender to those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

‘From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own, it says “Disarm! Disarm!”

‘The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.

‘Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.’

As men have forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his time the sacred impress not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

As Kansas’ School Board stages a one-sided hearing on evolution versus creation (one-sided because the pro-science side refused to participate), it’s nice to have this article from Scientific American handy. It is aptly titled 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense (pdf).

New rule: if you are ordered to torture prisoners, it’s OK to torture them. Pfc. Lynndie England, who was prepared to plead guilty to conspiracy in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, has now gotten a mistrial instead. England was not permitted to plead guilty in the face of evidence that she may have thought she was following orders. This is a bizarre twist, since her co-conspirator Spc. Charles Graner Jr. insisted that he’d been following orders, and he was found guilty as hell. The refusal to accept England’s guilty plea flies in the face of the well-known Nuremburg standard: following orders is no defense.

George W. Bush himself laid out the proper standard with unaccustomed clarity, days before he started the war: “ War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders.’” Of course, he was talking about Iraqi war criminals.

That said, it is also a war crime to give the orders. Whether or not Lynndie England walks, the vastly larger injustice is that the people who gave the orders for systematic torture of prisoners are not just left unpunished, but are prospering. When George W. Bush is on trial for crimes against humanity, then we can talk about how America stands for the rule of law.

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.