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It’s a whole new era for American Liberty—telecommunications industry representatives have been kicked off an international commission for supporting John Kerry:

The Inter-American Telecommunication Commission meets three times a year in various cities across the Americas to discuss such dry but important issues as telecommunications standards and spectrum regulations. But for this week’s meeting in Guatemala City, politics has barged onto the agenda. At least four of the two dozen or so U.S. delegates selected for the meeting, sources tell TIME, have been bumped by the White House because they supported John Kerry’s 2004 campaign.

The State Department has traditionally put together a list of industry representatives for these meetings, and anyone in the U.S. telecom industry who had the requisite expertise and wanted to go was generally given a slot, say past participants. Only after the start of Bush’s second term did a political litmus test emerge, industry sources say.

The latest report from the National Counterterrorism Center doesn’t seem to support the Bush Administration line that they’re making excellent progress in the War on Terror. So, following standard Administration procedure, they’re eliminating the report:

The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government’s top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

Now that’s spin doctoring!

More good stuff by cartoonist Ruben Bolling. Same deal as before: you can click to get free access after viewing a short ad. Watch the ad once, and you can access any of the cartoons for the rest of the day.

Meet the Regulators, a crack squad of specialists handpicked by President Bush to regulate industry for the public good.

In 2002, a Wall Street Journal editorial complained that people who make $12,000 a year or less pay “a little less than 4 percent of income in taxes” and called them “lucky duckies.” (Really!) Now, the administration wants to rescue Social Security for Lucky Ducky.

Judge Scalia in “Kids These Days.”

Judge Scalia walks a lonely path across the American states, meting out justice.

It’s a few days old, but This Modern World remembers the murders in Oklahoma City, and reminds us just what Ann Coulter stands for:

Ten years ago today, at 9:02 a.m. midwestern time, terrorist Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Among the victims were 19 children attending day care in the building.

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.”

–Ann Coulter as quoted in the New York Observer, Aug. 20, 2002

“RE: McVeigh quote. Of course I regret it. I should have added, ‘after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.’”

–Ann Coulter, from an interview with Right Wing News

Cartoonist Ruben Bolling on President Bush’s Culture of Life Blowout Sale.

(The cartoon is easy to see if you’re a paid subscriber to Salon.com. If not, you can click for a “Day Pass,” which will show you an ad, then give you access to the Salon site.)

• Conservative columnist Ann Coulter:

College professors are the only people in America who assume they can’t be fired for what they say.

No, she’s not upset that the rest of us lack freedom of speech. She’s upset that anyone has it.

• On Veterans Day last year, the ABC television network broadcast Saving Private Ryan. But sixty-six ABC affiliates balked at carrying the movie, fearing indecency fines from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC knew the content of the movie, but wouldn’t say whether they would fine stations for airing it.

Republicans in Congress have moved to increase the indecency fines the FCC can levy from $32,500 to $500,000 — high enough to still almost any tongue. Republican Senator Ted Stevens wants to extend the FCC’s authority to regulate content to include cable and satellite TV and radio. In a court case on a different issue, the FCC has claimed:

regulatory power over all instrumentalities, facilities, and apparatus “associated with the overall circuit of messages sent and received” via all interstate radio and wire communication.

Broadcast, cable, satellite, internet… am I missing anything?

• House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, in the Washington Times, discussing some things he opposes (emphasis added):

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.

• California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in a 1990 profile in U.S. News and World Report:

My relationship to power and authority is that I’m all for it… People need somebody to watch over them… Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.

Connect the dots. What do you see?

Every couple weeks, it seems, I get a new flyer from my internet service provider asking me to sign up for their internet-based telephone service. And, for the past few months, my internet connectivity has gone flaky about once a week, usually for about a day at a time.

At the moment, I have very poor connectivity, but it’s the best I’ve had for two days. There is reason to believe it’s not going to get better until Saturday, at the earliest. I may not be able to post anything new here until these problems are resolved.

I didn’t know that Tom DeLay and Bill Frist knew enough about network configuration to pull this off, but I shouldn’t be surprised. The Amazing Dr. Frist can do anything!

Right-wing politicians complaining about judicial activism are very selective about their targets:

Not since the 1960’s, when federal judges in the South were threatened by cross burnings and firebombs, have judges been so besieged. Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, set off a furor when he said judges could be inviting physical attacks with controversial decisions. And last week the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, called for an investigation of the federal judges in the Terri Schiavo case, saying ominously: “We set up the courts. We can unset the courts.”

Conservatives claim that they are rising up against “activist judges,” who decide cases based on their personal beliefs rather than the law.

…

The inconsistency of the conservative war on judges was apparent in the Terri Schiavo ordeal. Mr. DeLay, an outspoken critic of activist courts, does not want to investigate the federal trial judge and the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit for judicial activism, but for the opposite: for refusing to overturn the Florida state courts’ legal decisions, and Michael Schiavo’s decisions about his wife’s medical care.

The classic example of conservative inconsistency remains Bush v. Gore. Not only did the court’s conservative bloc trample on the Florida state courts and stop the vote counting – it declared its ruling would not be a precedent for future cases. How does Justice Scalia explain that decision? In a recent New Yorker profile, he is quoted as saying, with startling candor, that “the only issue was whether we should put an end to it, after three weeks of looking like a fool in the eyes of the world.” That, of course, isn’t a constitutional argument – it is an unapologetic defense of judicial activism.

George W. Bush is trying to dismantle the legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the Roman Catholic Church has selected a new pope who may try to dismantle the legacy of Pope John XXIII.

He criticised the introduction of the non-Latin Mass as a “tragic breach” and in the 1980s dubbed homosexuality an “intrinsic moral evil” and said rock music could be a “vehicle of anti-religion”.

In 1981, Cardinal Ratzinger was appointed Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) – an organisation once known as the Inquisition – and has since stamped his rigorous theological conservatism on the Church.

It is claimed that he saw his mission as defending Catholic teaching following liberal moves after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

He had public disagreements with moderate German Cardinal Walter Kaspe and has also been accused of prompting decrees from Rome barring Catholic priests from counselling pregnant teenagers about choices available to them.

Others claim he blocked German Catholics from sharing communion with Lutherans at a joint gathering in 2003.

Latin was not the language of Jesus, but of the Caesars. Pope John XXIII’s “tragic breach” was to reach out to ordinary people. While Karel Wojtyla (John Paul II) fought the Nazis occupying his native Poland during World War II, Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) was a member of the Hitler Youth. Ah, progress!

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert on the 60th anniversary of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death:

Last week – April 12, to be exact – was the 60th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

…

That more wasn’t made of this anniversary is not just a matter of time; it’s a measure of the distance the U.S. has traveled from the egalitarian ideals championed by F.D.R. His goal was “to make a country in which no one is left out.” That kind of thinking has long since been consigned to the political dumpster. We’re now in the age of Bush, Cheney and DeLay, small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the fortunate few.

…

Roosevelt was far from a perfect president, but he gave hope and a sense of the possible to a nation in dire need. And he famously warned against giving in to fear.

The nation is now in the hands of leaders who are experts at exploiting fear, and indifferent to the needs and hopes, even the suffering, of ordinary people.

“The test of our progress,” said Roosevelt, “is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Sixty years after his death we should be raising a toast to F.D.R. and his progressive ideas. And we should take that opportunity to ask: How in the world did we allow ourselves to get from there to here?

Washington Post writer Dana Milbank:

lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [Supreme Court Justice Anthony] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,'” Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush’s judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.

A judge in Atlanta and the husband and mother of a judge in Chicago were murdered in recent weeks. After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said that “the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to “engage in violence.”

“The people who have been speaking out on this, like Tom DeLay and Senator Cornyn, need to be backed up,” [conservative activist Phyllis] Schlafly said to applause yesterday.

(You can listen to Vieira’s invocation of Stalin here. The audio quality isn’t very good.)

New York Times columnist Frank Rich:

It’s not for nothing that Mr. DeLay’s nickname is the Hammer. Or that early in his Christian Coalition career, Ralph Reed famously told a Knight-Ridder reporter that he wanted to see his opponents in a “body bag.” The current manifestation of this brand of religious politics can be found in the far right’s anti-judiciary campaign, of which Mr. DeLay is the patron saint. As he flew off to the pope’s funeral in Rome, the congressman left behind a rabble-rousing video for a Washington conference on “Confronting the Judicial War on Faith” staged by a new outfit called The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. Another speaker, a lawyer named Edwin Vieira, twice invoked a Stalin dictum whose unexpurgated version goes, “Death solves all problems; no man, no problem.” The reporter who covered the event for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank, suggested in print that one prime target of the vitriol, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, might want to get “a few more bodyguards.” It wasn’t necessarily a joke.

You can see why Dick Cheney and President Bush in rapid succession distanced themselves from Mr. DeLay’s threats of retribution against judges who presided in the Schiavo case. If an Eric Rudolph murders a judge in close chronological proximity to that kind of rhetoric, they’ve got a political Armageddon on their hands.

Republican Senator and video diagnostician Bill Frist joins the jihad:

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as “against people of faith” for blocking President Bush’s nominees.

In the 1970s, there was a late-night television commercial for a correspondence school offering training for an exciting career as a game warden or park ranger. Toward the end of his spiel, the announcer held up a leather badge holder with a gleaming metal badge, and said, “Carry a badge! Enforce the law! Arrest violators!”

Somewhere out in the vast television audience, there were people who were stirred to their very soul by those words—people ravenous for the power to push someone around. These folks are the real-life counterparts of Barney Fife and Eric Cartman, but in real life, they are all mean spirit, not at all cute or funny.

One of the first tasks of good police training is to weed out people like that. I hope it’s tough for them to become game wardens and park rangers, too.

I thought of that old commercial when I saw this:

The State Department’s former intelligence chief yesterday described John R. Bolton, President Bush’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, as a “bully” who abused his authority and power, intimidated intelligence analysts, and damaged the integrity of the agency.

Bolton’s behavior “brings real question to my mind about his suitability for high office,” said Carl W. Ford Jr. He told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is considering Bolton’s nomination, that he is a loyal Republican, a staunch supporter of Bush and a “huge fan” of Vice President Cheney. “I’m as conservative as John Bolton is,” Ford said. “But the fact is that the collateral damage and the personal hurt that he causes is not worth the price that had to be paid.”

…

Ford called Bolton “a quintessential kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy. He’s got a bigger kick, and it gets bigger and stronger the further down the bureaucracy he’s kicking. And he stands out. I don’t have any other example to give you of someone who acts this way.”

Much of the world thinks all Americans are like this. Only the Bush Administration would think of sending someone like Bolton to the United Nations to prove them right.

Some fun George W. Bush videos, found via This Modern World.

Thirty-five years ago this evening, a spherical oxygen tank in the Apollo 13 spacecraft exploded, with a loud bang that rocked the spacecraft.

Flight controllers on the ground didn’t hear the bang, but they noticed sudden changes in numbers displayed on the computer terminals where they monitored the many systems that made up the spacecraft.

The controllers talk to each other with headsets wired into a communications channel called the loop. Many of the controllers are listening to two loops: the main flight controller loop, and a second loop connecting specialists in a particular mission sub-system. Thirty-five years ago tonight, the real action was on the EECOM loop, where the experts monitoring the environmental and electrical systems of the spacecraft’s command and service modules worked to understand the most serious problem America had yet faced in space.

Astronaut Swigert: Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here.

Unidentified voice #1: What’s the matter with the data, EECOM?

Unidentified voice #2: We’ve got more than a problem.

EECOM: Okay, listen, listen, you guys. We’ve lost fuel cell one and two pressure.

Unidentified voice #2: We lost O₂ tank two pressure. And temperature.

Astronaut Lovell: Uh, Houston, we’ve had a problem.

EECOM: Okay.

Unidentified voice #2: Standby, they’ve got a problem.

Astronaut Lovell: Main B bus undervolt.

Capcom: Roger, main B undervolt.

Later, EECOM Sy Liebergot realized, with dread, exactly what had happened:

Unidentified voice #3: I want to psych out what those fuel cells are doing here. We might have a pressure problem in the fuel cells, it looks like.

EECOM: Yeah, I see the N₂…

Unidentified voice #3: Two fuel cells simultaneously.

EECOM: That can’t be.

Unidentified voice #3: I can’t believe that, right off the bat, but — but they’re not feeding current.

EECOM: Yeah, if you believe that N₂ pressure, we blew a sphere.

Apollo 13’s lunar landing mission was doomed from the moment the oxygen tank exploded. Through the heroic efforts of the astronauts and the ground crew, the three astronauts were returned safely to earth.

For years, NASA considered the Apollo 13 mission a failure, and tried to sweep it under the rug. It took years to understand that Apollo 13 was not a failure. It was the most severe test imaginable of the people and the processes of the Apollo program; they passed the test. The other Apollo missions were engineering triumphs. Apollo 13 was more than that. The safe splashdown of the Apollo 13 command module was the greatest moment of the entire Apollo program.

Years later, Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell wrote a book about the experience, called Lost Moon. Hollywood turned the book into the blockbuster movie Apollo 13, and Lovell’s book was renamed Apollo 13 to take advantage of the publicity. The book is well worth reading. (The movie is entertaining, but overly melodramatic.)

The best book about Apollo 13 is 13: The Flight That Failed, by Henry S. F. Cooper. I think I’ve read it five times. It’s never taken me much more than a day to read it, because I just can’t put it down once I start reading. If you have any interest in the Apollo program, Cooper’s book is the best place to start reading.

Forty-four years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to fly into space.

It’s been reported that after he returned, he said, “I looked and looked but I didn’t see God.”

Apparently he looked out the window, saw the curving horizon, the deep black sky above and the earth, blue and white, below. He watched the sun rise and set. And he thought, “Nope, no God here!”

That kind of blind certainty can come only from unquestioning faith, I think. Atheism was the official government-sanctioned religion of the Soviet Union, like Islam in Iran and Afghanistan, or Judaism in Israel. Gagarin, apparently, was a True Believer.

Space exploration has come a long way since Gagarin’s pioneering flight. Men have walked on the moon. Robotic explorers have visited every planet in our solar system except Pluto. We communicate via satellite; our weather reports include photos from orbiting spacecraft, and we take that all for granted. The Hubble Space Telescope has shown us astonishing images of the universe around us.

The Bush administration is cutting money for the Hubble telescope from the NASA budget, but they will include funds in the 2006 budget to de-orbit the telescope, sending it to a fiery death in the earth’s atmosphere. Many reasons have been given for that decision — the Hubble Telescope is too expensive, a maintenance mission is too dangerous, new technology will make better alternatives available. I can’t help wondering whether there’s another, unspoken reason.

Biblical literalists can find it difficult to reconcile images of things a billion light years from earth with their certainty that God created the heaven and the earth about 6,000 years ago. Blinded by certainty, they can look and look at the Hubble pictures, but they don’t see God. So, down with the Hubble telescope!

This administration embraces the literalists on many issues. Was Hubble, too, sacrificed to blind faith?