Another socialist blog

I’m no fan of the Democratic Party, especially this month, but an enterprising liberal blogger has come up with a scheme to Google bomb John McCain, and I’ll help in whatever small way I can.

If you’re not familiar with the term, Google bombing is a way to increase the ranking of particular web pages in the Google search results, by linking to those pages. It would be nice if people searching for information on John McCain came up with the articles that describe how John McCain voted to filibuster a minimum wage hike, how John McCain said it would be “fine” to keep the troops in Iraq for a hundred years, how John McCain said Bush was right to veto health care funding for poor children…you get the idea.

Nine articles are part of the project. I can’t figure out why McCain’s admitted use of the word “gook” wasn’t one of them. I think he’d lose a vote or two if one of the top ten Google searches for “McCain” pointed to his recent use of the racist epithet. This wasn’t just during his time as a POW, no, he said “gook” right out during a conversation with reporters, on his campaign bus, in 2000. “I hated the gooks,” said McCain. “I will hate them as long as I live.” Sounds like straight talk to me, much more believable than the apology that followed some days later.

The House of Representatives has passed a bill that permits local police to demand the forfeiture in criminal proceedings of stuff used to violate copyright. That’s right. Instead of civil lawsuits for money, the recording industry wants to criminalize what they call copyright violation, and empower law enforcement to permanently seize any property they claim was used to violate copyright. This expands a government power that even some conservatives will acknowledge has been widely abused.

This is the future of property rights. They will own the property. You can only rent it.

This week, under intense political pressure, Newsweek retracted its story about how U.S. guards at Guantanamo desecrated the Koran. Conservatives are bashing Newsweek like a piñata with apparent glee—they get to trash the liberal media, intimidate any reporters who might be working on the next torture story, and wrap themselves in the flag, all at the same time. The official line is that the Koran desecration story is false, and by implication all other reporting about the U.S. torture policy is also false.

But whatever corners the magazine cut in getting its story to print, fact remains that Americans at Guantanamo have been desecrating the Koran as a means of psychological torture of Muslim prisoners. There are many more sources for this than just Newsweek’s unreliable anonymous source, and the reports have been around for a long time. Molly Ivins runs through a short list:

The first mention I found of it is March 17, 2004, when the Independent of London interviewed the first British citizen released from Guantanamo Bay. The prisoner said he had been physically beaten but did not consider that as bad as the psychological torture, which he described extensively. Jamal al-Harith, a computer programmer from Manchester, said 70 percent of the inmates had gone on a hunger strike after a guard kicked a copy of the Koran.

…

The reports kept coming: Dec. 30, 2004, “Released Moroccan Guantanamo Detainee Tells Islamist Paper of His Ordeal,” reported the Financial Times. “They watched you each time you went to the toilet; the American soldiers used to tear up copies of Koran and throw them in the toilet. …” said the released prisoner.

…

The New York Times reported on May 1 on the same investigation Newsweek was writing about and interviewed a released Kuwaiti, who spoke of three major hunger strikes, one of them touched off by “guards’ handling copies of the Koran, which had been tossed into a pile and stomped on. A senior officer delivered an apology over the camp’s loudspeaker system, pledging that such abuses would stop. Interpreters, standing outside each prison block, translated the officer’s apology. A former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans.”

Ivins has it right: the seventeen people who died in those riots didn’t die because of anything Newsweek did. They died because of what our government did.

Right-wingers seem to have a favorite debate tactic: when you don’t know what you’re talking about, make shit up. Bill O’Reilly uses it (pardon the term) liberally.

O’Reilly apparently needed to come across as tough on crime the other day. So when the Houston Chronicle, in an editorial, criticized Florida’s new sex offender law, he lambasted them for saying the law was too harsh. He complained that the editorial advocated “community service” for sexual predators. He read a long quote from the editorial that appeared to back up his points. And he accused a guest on his show from trying to “mislead” his listeners by saying otherwise.

Trouble is, none of what O’Reilly said about the editorial was true. The Chronicle never said the law was too harsh, certainly never called for community service for sex offenders. They did say the law should be more effective in preventing crime, which you might think would be enough to get you some points with a rabid law and order right-winger. Even the words he claimed to be quoting from the editorial, did not appear anywhere in the piece, nor did they appear anywhere in the Chronicle ever.

In its response, the Chronicle charitably suggests that O’Reilly confused their editorial with someone else’s. I think he made it up out of whole cloth, which is not out of character for a liar like Bill O’Reilly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson could have been talking about Bill O’Reilly when he said,

The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.

Thanks to the Chronicle for the Emerson quote.

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.

I’m no liberal, I’m a Socialist. Liberals accept the basic logic of capitalism, but they want to make it less brutal, more humane. Socialists agree with liberals on many issues, but we see capitalism as the fundamental problem, not something that can be reformed.

But bless ‘em for coming up with an antidote to right-wing talk radio. Air America Radio turns one year old today. It was a difficult first year, and not just because of widespread conservative media bias.

You don’t often hear me agreeing with the Libertarian Party, but once in a while they’re absolutely right, and they’re right about Rush Limbaugh:

“One thing we don’t hear from American politicians very often is silence,” said Joe Seehusen, Libertarian Party executive director. “By refusing to criticize Rush Limbaugh, every drug warrior has just been exposed as a shameless, despicable hypocrite.

“And that’s good news, because the next time they do speak up, there’ll be no reason for anyone to listen.”

The revelation that Limbaugh had become addicted to painkillers — drugs he is accused of procuring illegally from his Palm Beach housekeeper — has caused a media sensation ever since the megastar’s shocking, on-air confession last week.

As the Limbaugh saga continues, here’s an important question for Americans to ask, Libertarians say: Why are all the drug warriors suddenly so silent?

“Republican and Democratic politicians have written laws that have condemned more than 400,000 Americans to prison for committing the same ‘crime’ as Rush Limbaugh,” Seehusen pointed out. “If this pill-popping pontificator deserves a get-out-of-jail-free card, these drug warriors had better explain why.”

To that, I can only add that Limbaugh is one of those hypocrites. Like the Republicans and Democrats, Rush Limbaugh has been making a career of demanding that drug users should all go to prison:

Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up. — Rush Limbaugh, October 5, 1995