brainrow

Jason Spitalnick asks a pointed question about Supreme Court nominee John Roberts:

…if Democrats want to strike a chord with American voters, they’ll need to focus national attention on how John Roberts’s approach to legal questions will impact lives. If John Roberts had been the deciding vote on the Court for the entire twentieth century, what would America look like today?

The question casts light not only on Roberts and what he might do on the Court, but on the ideal world dreamed of by Bush and Company.

Yikes.

Arlo Guthrie on “Alice’s Restaurant”:

Nobody in their right mind would have expected an 18-minute monologue to have shelf life, especially in an era when radio refused to play anything that was over 2 1/2 minutes.

It’s been forty years since the true story told in the song took place. Generations have grown up without hearing it. Rats.

On the plus side, what fun to play it for someone who has never heard it before!

If you want to end war and stuff, you gotta sing loud.

On January 28, 1986, I was working in the lab supply storeroom on the first floor of the Biological Sciences Building at the Ohio State University. A graduate student stuck her head in the door and said, “Did you hear, Mike? The space shuttle exploded!”

That — not the subsequent video replays — is the moment I’ll never erase from my memory.

I asked questions, but she didn’t have many details. What she had heard wasn’t encouraging. I hoped she’d heard wrong.

I imagined a hundred different scenarios. There had been a terrible accident on the launch pad, but everyone had gotten safely away. If the shuttle exploded in orbit, ground controllers would see only a loss of downlink: the radio would go silent, and the constantly-changing numbers on their consoles would stop changing. Then someone would observe that radar was tracking multiple targets. I didn’t want to think of the scenarios where the astronauts didn’t escape.

We’ve been putting people onto rockets since 1961, and every journey begins with a lump in the throat, and a sense of dread that takes the breath away, and makes us whisper “Godspeed.” When do we breathe easy?

Before the Challenger disaster, I think we breathed a sigh of relief when the shuttle cleared the launch tower. The rockets had all lit, and hadn’t exploded. The spacecraft was on its way. Everything was going to be alright.

The night of the Challenger explosion, I saw a high-school class cheer and groan when the shuttle exploded. The sequence of launch events had been explained to them. Most saw the two solid-rocket boosters (SRBs) flying away, and thought it was the planned SRB separation. Others sensed instantly that there was something wrong.

Later, we learned that the Challenger was destroyed by a flaw in one of the SRBs. After the Challenger disaster, we held our sigh of relief until after the SRB separation. I held mine for MECO — Main Engine Cutoff. I suspect the people really in the know didn’t relax even then.

The shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry 17 years and 4 days after the Challenger disaster. Controllers lost their downlink. Radar started tracking multiple targets. Witnesses heard a sonic boom that lasted for thirty seconds or longer. What they heard was actually a sequence of sonic booms — the spacecraft had broken into pieces, and each piece made a separate boom.

Email from my brother living near Los Angeles:

At about 5:02AM Tuesday, August 9th, a double sonic boom rattled Southern California
announcing the return of the space shuttle Discovery.

It woke me up. ………. Hoorah!

I saved my sigh of relief until the wheels stopped turning.

Godspeed, Discovery, and welcome home.

MoveOn.org lets you print your own Karl Rove poster:

Al Franken:

I respect everyone else’s religious beliefs. But you know what? I expect them to respect mine.

We are a secular society, and that’s why religion has flourished in this country. That’s why this is such a religious country, why it’s so successful. And we have to maintain that separation.

If you remember the story of Bill O’Reilly’s Peabody awards from Al Franken’s book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, it will come as no surprise to you that
Bill O’Reilly makes stuff up:

Media Matters has repeatedly debunked O’Reilly’s false claims of success regarding a French boycott. On April 27, 2004, he asserted that the boycott had cost France “billions of dollars,” citing the “Paris Business Review” as a source, but Media Matters documented that Census figures actually showed an increase in U.S. imports from France; additionally, there is no evidence of a publication named the “Paris Business Review.”

(Franken’s celebrated BookExpo run-in with O’Reilly is supposedly online here. It appears to be in RealMedia format. I can’t run it myself, because I don’t use RealPlayer.)

Annie Lamott, on the Bolton appointment:

Bush acts more and more like Bam-Bam Rubble, from the Flintstones: 4 years old, out of control—Bam! Bam! Bam! It used to work when we were still in Act II, waiting for the critical mass of lies and betrayal to be reached. But now that we are in Act III, where things are unraveling for the White House—winning CAFTA by two votes? Iraq and Iran’s new alliance?—it’s not going to help them in the long run.

Last night, on PBS’s News Hour, Abraham Sofaer, a State Department official during the Reagan Administration, defended the recess appointment of John Bolton:

He’s been Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, and while he was there, he was the point man on putting together the coalition on Iraq.

And in this administration, when you fail spectacularly, you get a promotion or a medal. Everybody knows that.

You may think you know what you’re dealing with, but believe me, you don’t.

—John Huston as Noah Cross, in Chinatown

A great mystery story is like skinning an onion. You peel back the lies and corruption, and expose… another layer of lies and corruption.

Think Progress cites a Time magazine report about how administration officials learned about Valerie Plame:

If these revelations are true, the least of Rove and Libby’s concerns is perjury. Today’s disclosure adds further evidence that the White House consciously dug out Plame’s identity, used it, and then engaged in a massive cover-up by pinning blame elsewhere. Moreover, it appears far more players were involved in this orchestrated, administration-wide effort than previously believed. The key question, if these revelations are true, is why did these administration officials lie so overtly to the special prosecutor? Knowing hard evidence would come out sooner or later against them (through leaks, emails, etc), the White House officials still chose to lie. What could they possibly be trying to hide? Perhaps this wasn’t just a “third-rate smear.”

PERRspectives has a list of senior officials who appear to be implicated in Rovegate or Plamegate or Traitorgate, or whatever you want to call it:

The mushrooming Karl Rove CIA outing scandal increasingly looks like it will rack up quite a body count within the White House. It was only two years ago that President Bush concluded of the Valerie Plame outing, “I don’t know if we’re going to find out the senior administration official.” Now it is beginning to appear that he will have no credible senior officials left.

In politics and business, we use dramatic language to make our little jobs seem bigger and more exciting. We’re constantly “dodging bullets” and “putting out fires,” and scandals rack up “body counts.”

It will probably be twenty years or more before we know what kind of body count was racked up outside the White House. Governments tend to be very protective of their secrets regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Valerie Plame’s specialty as an undercover CIA operative.

When “senior administration officials” blew her cover for the sake of a good political jab, they also blew the cover of the CIA front company that ostensibly employed her. That blew the cover of an unknown number of other undercover operatives. We haven’t heard their names, but you can be certain that foreign intelligence services, who pay very close attention to matters like this, know who they are. Those foreign intelligence services also tend to keep a close watch on the people in their own WMD programs, so they’ve learned who was talking to undercover CIA operatives.

Now we’re talking body counts.