brainrow

If, like me, you are a bitter pathetic loser who dreads Valentine’s Day, then this cartoon from Joy of Tech is for you.

If you’re not a bitter pathetic loser, then, umm… Happy Valentine’s Day, I guess.

Via Crooks and Liars: Editor & Publisher reports on a V.A. nurse investigated for “sedition” for criticizing the Bush Administration:

Laura Berg, a clinical nurse specialist for 15 years, wrote a letter in September to a weekly Albuquerque newspaper criticizing how the administration handled Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. …

The agency seized her office computer and launched an investigation. Berg is not talking to the press, but reportedly fears losing her job.

…

V.A. human resources chief Mel Hooker had said in a Nov. 9 letter that his agency was obligated to investigate “any act which potentially represents sedition,” the ACLU said.

Peter Simonson, executive director of the ACLU of New Mexico, told The Progressive magazine: “We were shocked to see the word ‘sedition’ used. Sedition? That’s like something out of the history books.”

In a press release, Simonson also said: “Is this government so jealous of its power, so fearful of dissent, that it needs to threaten people who openly oppose its policies with charges of ‘sedition’?”

Accidents happen. I know this from personal experience. But only a few people try to get away with a hit and run. From Editor & Publisher:

The more than 18-hour delay in news emerging that the Vice President of the United States had shot a man, sending him to an intensive care unit with his wounds, grew even more curious late Sunday. E&P has learned that the official confirmation of the shooting came about only after a local reporter in Corpus Christi, Texas, received a tip from the owner of the property where the shooting occured and called Vice President Cheney’s office for confirmation.

The confirmation was made but there was no indication whether the Vice President’s office, the White House, or anyone else intended to announce the shooting if the reporter, Jaime Powell of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, had not received word from the ranch owner.

…

While E&P was first to raise the question about the delay Sunday afternoon, Frank James, reporter in the Chicago Tribune’s Washington bureau, put his own spin on it later in the day, asking, “How is it that Vice President Cheney can shoot a man, albeit accidentally, on Saturday during a hunting trip and the American public not be informed of it until today?”

Indeed, others raised questions as well. “There was no immediate reason given as to why the incident wasn’t reported until Sunday,” The Dallas Morning News observed. “The sheriff’s office in Kenedy County did not respond to phone calls Sunday.”

…

The [Houston] Chronicle also reports Monday that hunting accidents are amazingly rare in Texas. In 2004, it said, the state’s 1 million-plus hunters were involved in only 29 hunting-related accidents (19 involving firearms), four of which were fatal.

Let’s think about this for a second. If one percent of the hunters in Texas were as careless as Dick Cheney, there would have been 10,000 hunting accidents in 2004. If a tenth of one percent were as careless as Cheney, there would have been 1,000 accidents. If one one-hundredth of one percent of Texas hunters were as careless as Dick Cheney, there would have been 100 accidents.

Dick Cheney is in a rarefied group. In 2004, only 0.0019% of hunters in Texas were as careless with a gun as he was on Saturday.

I’ve long thought that we should select exceptional men and women for high office in this country. I just thought it would work out a little differently.

Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. He was born on February 12, 1809.

Years ago, my favorite president was Thomas Jefferson, but I think that preference was based almost entirely on his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, and very little on his presidency. Besides, almost everyone was in the Lincoln camp, and I didn’t wish to hop on a crowded bandwagon.

But the more I learned about Lincoln, the higher my opinion of him grew. Abraham Lincoln was not just the greatest president; he was the greatest American. But he was more, even, than that.

An eyewitness account of Lincoln’s February 27, 1860 speech at Cooper Union, from the New York Tribune:

He was tall, tall — oh, how tall, and so angular and awkward that I had, for an instant, a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man. His clothes were black and ill-fitting, badly wrinkled — as if they had been jammed carelessly into a small trunk. His bushy head, with the stiff black hair thrown back, was balanced on a long and lean stock, and when he raised his hands in an opening gesture I noticed that they were very large.

He began in a very low tone of voice as if he were used to speaking out of doors and was afraid of speaking too loud. He said, ‘Mr. Cheerman” instead of ‘Mr. Chairman,’ and employed many other words with an old-fashioned pronunciation. I said to myself: “Old fellow, you won’t do. It is all very well for the wild west, but this will never go down in New York.”

But pretty soon, he began to get into his subject: he straightened up and made regular and graceful gestures. His face lighted as with an inward fire; the whole man was transfigured. I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities. Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet with the rest, yelling like a wild Indian, cheering this wonderful man. In the close parts of his arguments, you could hear the gentle sizzing of the gas burners. When he reached a climax, the thunders of applause were terrific.

It was a great speech. When I came out of the hall, my face glowing with excitement and my frame all aquiver, a friend, with his eyes aglow, asked me what I thought of Abe Lincoln, the rail-splitter. I said, ‘He’s the greatest man since St. Paul!’ And I think so yet.

“The greatest man since St. Paul.” That seems about right.

I think this summer, I’ll make a pilgrimage to Springfield, Illinois, to walk in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln, a secular saint and the greatest of great men.

This is not a joke:

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.

Harry Whittington, 78, was “alert and doing fine” after Cheney sprayed him with shotgun pellets on Saturday while the two were hunting at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong.

Cartoonist Ward Sutton charts the differences between Republicans and Democrats. Neither side comes out looking very good.

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling looks at George W. Bush’s memoir of addiction, A Million Little Barrels, including a publisher’s disclaimer that says Saddam’s “possession of WMDs was an ’emotional truth,’ not the ‘actual truth.'”

On CBS News tonight, Steve Kroft previewed a 60 Minutes story from this Sunday’s show. The subject is the $8.8 billion in Iraq reconstruction funds that has simply disappeared.

Kroft quoted a memo in which a government official wrote about a particular contractor who received $100 million in reconstruction contracts. The memo said the company:

has shown themselves to be (1) unresponsive; (2) uncooperative; (3) incompetent; (4) deceitful/manipulative; and (5) “war profiteers.” Other than that, they are “swell fellows.”

It’s not really surprising that the Administration is doing business with companies like this — they recognize a kindred spirit. The description of the contractor in the memo seems to fit the Bush Administration itself just like a glove.

I’m tuning in to 60 Minutes this Sunday. Looks worth watching.

Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow notes that while the innocent have nothing to hide, the Bush Administration has plenty to hide.

Tom DeLay says the Constitution provides no right of privacy to the American people, and for years Republicans have been filling federal judgeships with people who share that view. Privacy, it seems, is the Divine Right of King George alone.

After every big sports event, it seems, reporters make their way into the winning team’s locker room, where we hear player after player give all credit for the victory to Jesus.

I hope that someday an enterprising cub reporter will go to the losing team’s locker room, so we can hear the players complain that Satan has let them down.

Given Jesus’ sports record in recent decades, I’m surprised that any athlete trusts Satan these days. The Jesus team always wins the big games, and yet there is always a losing team, too. Don’t those players know that the Devil’s a liar?

Actually, maybe that’s how Satan lures them in.

Have you ever thought about finding out which team Satan’s backing in a big game, and laying down a lot of money on the other team? It seems like a sure bet, doesn’t it? But I resist that temptation when I consider that perhaps Satan’s been throwing all these games just to run up the odds, and that someday he’ll win a game and cash in big time. Perhaps that’s the story he tells his hapless players.

Never trust Satan, folks. He cheats.

I’m not much of a football fan, and I quickly tire of relentless hype, so I didn’t watch the Superbowl yesterday. I see today that the Pittsburgh Steelers beat the Seattle Seahawks 21-10, ABC bleeped the Rolling Stones twice during the halftime show, and people are talking about the ten thousand or so commercials that aired during the game.

Well, maybe it wasn’t ten thousand commercials, but it sure was a lot. Superbowl commercials generate so much buzz that this site was created with links to all the commercials. (I had some trouble getting the page to load, but I’m on a Macintosh, running an unconventional brower, OmniWeb. Hope it works first time for you.)

I haven’t seen all the commercials yet. I don’t think I’m ever going to watch all of them — I’m a middle-aged man, and life is short. I did see this one. It isn’t what I expected from a Superbowl commercial. To that, I say “Bravo!”

(I confess: I’m just an old softy at heart.)

MoveOn.org has a new TV ad asking whether you can tell Bush and Nixon apart. (A larger version of the video is available at Crooks and Liars.)

I was just watching an episode of the PBS program American Experience, about the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal after World War II. During his cross examination of Hermann Goering, Robert H. Jackson, the chief counsel for the United States and a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, asked the following question:

You did prohibit all court review, and considered it necessary to prohibit court review of the causes for taking people into what you call protective custody. That is right, isn’t it?

Goering answered, in a roundabout way, that Jackson was correct.

You know, this situation reminds me of something more recent. Gitmo, perhaps? Or was it Tom Delay, bemoaning the existence of judicial review in the Washington Times?

I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution. The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn’t stop them.

Or perhaps it reminds me of the Bush Administration’s determination to skip constitutionally-mandated warrants for their domestic wiretaps. There are just so many things to choose from, when looking for examples of official unwillingness to be constrained by law.

This little exchange from the Nuremberg transcript sends a shiver down my spine, for some reason:

MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Was it also necessary, in operating this system, that you must not have persons entitled to public trials in independent courts? And you immediately issued an order that your political police would not be subject to court review or to court orders, did you not?

GOERING: You must differentiate between the two categories; those who had committed some act of treason against the new state or those who might be proved to have committed such an act, were naturally turned over to the courts. The others, however, of whom one might expect such acts, but who had not yet committed them, were taken into protective custody, and these were the people who were taken to concentration camps.

Brrrrrrrrrrr!!!

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on the grim state of the union:

So President Bush’s plan to reduce imports of Middle East oil turns out to be no more substantial than his plan — floated two years ago, then flushed down the memory hole — to send humans to Mars.

…

Here’s the story on oil: In the State of the Union address Mr. Bush suggested that “cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol” and other technologies would allow us “to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East.”

But the next day, officials explained that he didn’t really mean what he said. “This was purely an example,” said Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary. And the administration has actually been scaling back the very research that Mr. Bush hyped Tuesday night: the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is about to lay off staff because of budget cuts. …

…

What about the rest of the speech? The State of the Union is normally an occasion for boasting about an administration’s achievements. But what’s a speechwriter to do when there are no achievements?

One answer is to pretend that the bad stuff never happened. The Medicare drug benefit is Mr. Bush’s largest domestic initiative to date. It’s also a disaster: at enormous cost, the administration has managed to make millions of elderly Americans worse off. So drugs went unmentioned in the State of the Union.

Another answer is to rely on evasive language. In Iraq, said Mr. Bush, we’ve “changed our approach to reconstruction.”

In fact, reconstruction has failed. Almost three years after the war began, oil production is well below prewar levels, Baghdad is getting only an average of 3.2 hours of electricity a day, and more than 60 percent of water and sanitation projects have been canceled.

…

There’s a common theme underlying the botched reconstruction of Iraq, the botched response to Katrina (which Mr. Bush never mentioned), the botched drug program, and the nonexistent energy program. John DiIulio, the former White House head of faith-based policy, explained it more than three years ago. He told the reporter Ron Suskind how this administration operates: “There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. … I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues.”

In other words, this administration is all politics and no policy. It knows how to attain power, but has no idea how to govern. That’s why the administration was caught unaware when Katrina hit, and why it was totally unprepared for the predictable problems with its drug plan. It’s why Mr. Bush announced an energy plan with no substance behind it. And it’s why the state of the union — the thing itself, not the speech — is so grim.

A CNN transcript of their coverage, three years ago today, when the space shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry:

MILES O’BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: All right. Got a little problem on the space shuttle Columbia. It’s been out of communication now for the past 12 minutes. Let’s take a look at a live picture of Mission Control in Houston.
As we’ve been telling you all this morning, it is on its way in for a landing, and flight controllers there in Houston are busy going through their no-com procedures, in other words, lack of communication from the shuttle. They’ve been trying to raise the space shuttle Columbia for quite some time now.

…

And at this juncture, we — I cannot tell you honestly the significance of it, except to tell you that the space shuttle Columbia was due for a landing right about now. We are watching this very closely.

More of the transcript, plus other related transcripts, can be found here.

In T.H. White’s great novel, The Once and Future King, King Arthur is a radical thinker who works to replace the rule of brute force with the rule of law. It’s not easy, and he takes some missteps along the way.

In this scene, Arthur is talking with his queen, Guenever, and his greatest knight, Lancelot. The King is worried about certain factions in his court, and Lancelot suggests that he could simply kill one critic who particularly worries him.

The King suddenly looked surprised, or shocked. He had been sitting relaxed between them, because he was tired and unhappy, yet now he drew himself up and met his captain in the eye.

“You must remember I am the King of England. When you are a king you can’t go executing people as the fancy takes you. A king is the head of his people, and he must stand as an example to them, and do as they wish.”

He forgave the startled expression in Lancelot’s face, and took his hand once more.

“You will find,” he explained, “that when the kings are bullies who believe in force, the people are bullies, too. If I don’t stand for law, I won’t have law among my people. And naturally I want my people to have the new law, because then they are more prosperous, and I am more prosperous in consequence.”

These days, presidents wish to be kings in order to be free of all law.

All kings, it seems, are not created equal.