A Babbling Stream of Semi-Consciousness
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Over at Boing Boing, Jay Kinney shows us a page from a 1952 comic book that predicts today’s Bush-Cheney mideast policies.
It was all there in T-Man #3, 55 years ago! Perhaps Cheney read this comic in his youth and just bided his time until he was in a position to actualize it in real life.
Let me guess — when Cheney was young, the kids used to call him Mr. Glass.
What does George W. Bush have in mind for Iraq and America’s future? You might be surprised. Columnist Georgie Anne Geyer reports:
[B]y all reports, President Bush is more convinced than ever of his righteousness.
Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest three times while he repeated “I am the president!” He also made it clear he was setting Iraq up so his successor could not get out of “our country’s destiny.”
“What I wreck, stays wrecked.”
Go read Geyer’s entire column. She exposes some of the ways Bush policies are aiding the terrorists.
It’s time to think way beyond impeachment now, to imprisonment. If this president’s behavior is not criminal, we need some new laws.
Today would have been John F. Kennedy’s 90th birthday.
We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.
The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?
Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?
One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.
Must-see TV, from the PBS NewsHour: what is the War in Iraq costing us?
(The full report is about three minutes longer than this clip, and includes discussion of countervailing costs — the cost of maintaining continuing sanctions against the Saddam Hussein regime, for example — and can be viewed here.)
Bill Moyers, after showing clips of old conversations with World War II veterans:
Every Memorial Day I think about what those men did and what we owe them.
They didn’t go through hell for a political system that functions on bribery, or for offshore tax havens that pass the cost of national defense from the conglomerates that profit from war to the ordinary people whose children fight it, or for an economic system that treats working men and women as disposable cogs to be tossed aside at a predator’s whim, or for an America where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Yes, our soldiers did fight and sacrifice for freedom, but as wiser men than I have said through the ages, when liberty is separated from justice, neither liberty nor justice is safe, and those who sacrifice for both are mocked.
On April 30, 2004, the late-night ABC News show Nightline aired a tribute to the fallen, showing photos of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq while Ted Koppel read their names. (Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns the local ABC affiliate, banned the broadcast on stations they owned.) Nightline repeated the tribute, with more names, on Memorial Day 2005.
Nightline is a half-hour program. If they had repeated the tribute this year, with no interruptions, they would have had only about half a second for each fallen soldier. We are currently at 3,455 dead — and counting.
Obama can take it, and he can dish it out:
Cartoonist D.C. Simpson drew this.
On The Daily Show Thursday night, John Hodgman examined George W. Bush’s frequent statements that he’s “looking forward to” things he’s not looking forward to at all.
Hodgman: The president is a legitimate optimist. He is compelled to always look forward.
Jon Stewart: Why do you say “compelled?”
Hodgman: Well, if he were to look back, he might see the trail of devastation he’s left behind him.
Gee, I wish I was optimistic.
Boing Boing found a slip-up on CNN’s International channel:
Okay, they meant to say “Blair resigns.” But I can dream, can’t I?
Via Crooks and Liars, amusing political ads for Democrat Bill Richardson:
The purpose of freedom is to create it for others. — Bernard Malamud, The Fixer
Different people have different opinions. Christian Dominionist Gary North said the purpose of freedom is to deny it to others:
So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.
I don’t even have to guess who gets to pick out the “enemies of God” in North’s ideal world.
The folks at Crooks and Liars suggested three questions for the Republican debate:
Should the President have power to imprison U.S. citizens without charging them with a crime and without providing them a judicial forum in which they can contest the accusations against them, as the Bush administration did to American Jose Padilla?
Do you think the process of waterboarding — where the U.S. takes prisoners, straps them to a chair, and pours water on their face so they are in terror of drowning to death — is a practice consistent with America’s moral credibility in the world?
A recent worldwide poll showed that under the Bush presidency, America has become the third most unpopular country in the world — right behind Iran and just ahead of North Korea. Why do you believe that has happened?
I would have liked to hear how the candidates — particularly the rubber-stamp congressional Republicans — would have answered those questions.
Thirty-seven years is a long time.
It’s about half the average human lifespan.
By the time a typical American male turns 37, he may already be shopping for some impractical extravagance — like an expensive sports car — to tide him over the dreaded “mid-life crisis” that all the experts tell him to expect. He’s already older than half of his fellow Americans, and substantially more than half of the world’s population.
Thirty-seven years ago today, Ohio National Guardsmen were ordered to break up a student anti-war rally on the Kent State University campus in Kent, Ohio. They put on gas masks, fired tear gas, and advanced with fixed bayonets to clear the Commons where the protesters were gathered.
When they had cleared the Commons and were returning to their original positions, one group of Guardsmen suddenly stopped, turned, and fired into the crowd of students.
Thirteen seconds. Sixty-seven shots. Thirteen hit, all students. Four dead in Ohio.
One of those wounded, Alan Canfora, has listened to an audio recording of the shooting. Right before the first shots, he believes he hears “Right here. Get set. Point. Fire.” (You can listen to a short audio clip. The orders, if present, are faint.)
“There has been a 37-year cover-up at Kent State. The commanding officers have long denied there was a verbal command to fire. They put the blame on the triggermen,” Mr Canfora told the Guardian.
He said he wants the FBI to use new technology to analyse the recording. He also said he planned to post an audio clip of the recording on two websites.
Mr Canfora, who was 21 years old at the time of the shootings, was barely 60 metres away from the Guards when they opened fire. He was shot in the wrist.
“They stopped, turned, raised the weapons, began to shoot and continued to shoot for 13 seconds,” he said. “It was like a firing squad.”
The young National Guardsmen moved on. Got married. Got jobs. Had careers. By now, some may have retired. They have friends and families who love them. Children and grandchildren.
A lot of water under the bridge in 37 years.
Allison Krause would be 56 years old now. She would have celebrated her birthday on April 23, just a week ago this past Monday.
Jeffrey Glen Miller would be 57.
Sandra Scheuer would be 57.
William Schroeder would be 56.
No careers. No children. No grandchildren.
Yep, a lot of water under the bridge.
Okay, I think I know what’s happening here.
When the United States invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 terror attacks, we drove out the Taliban and the dreaded religious police, who executed teachers, banned music and jailed men for trimming their beards.
Apparently some of the religious police settled in Millersville, Pennsylvania.
A woman denied a teaching degree on the eve of graduation because of a MySpace photo has sued the university.
Millersville University instead granted Stacy Snyder a degree in English last year after learning of her Web-published picture, which bore the caption “Drunken Pirate.”
“I dreamed about being a teacher for a long time,” said Snyder, 27, who now works as a nanny.
The photo, taken at a 2005 Halloween party, shows Snyder wearing a pirate hat while drinking from a plastic “Mr. Goodbar” cup. It was posted on her own MySpace site.
Although Snyder apologized, she learned the day before graduation that she would not be awarded an education degree or teaching certificate.
They hate us for our freedom.