Thursday night Congress passed a bill rescinding the Constitution* and giving the President unilateral power to kidnap, imprison, torture, and murder anyone in the world just ’cause he feels like it. All he has to do — though really, do you suppose anyone will hold him to even this minimal standard? — is decide that the individual has “purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States.”
Not coincidentally, Friday morning the President remarked that people who criticize the war in Iraq are embracing “the enemy’s propaganda.” There’s your purposeful; donating to MoveOn or even just volunteering your time and labor, and you got your material.
*I note that this item is already off the front page of the newspapers and the Google news feed. Tyranny, like the fog, comes on little cat feet.
Posted by Violet under Just Impeach the Stupid Freak on September 30, 2006, 5:31 pm EST
25 Comments »
We apologize for any difficulties you may have experienced in accessing this website today. Due to the overwhelming number of bloggers praising the passage of the President’s bold new Anti-Terror Act, our servers were temporarily unable to handle the increased load. All servers are now back online and functioning perfectly.
Dr. Socks is currently meeting with the Ministry of Love to learn more about the terror-fighting provisions included in the new bill.
Posted by Minitrue under Reclusive Leftist on September 29, 2006, 6:50 pm EST
6 Comments »
It’s Day Two of my burning question, What The Fuck Is Wrong With The Democrats?
In the last episode, your blogger was wondering aloud why the fuck the Democrats don’t realize that taking a stand against torture and in favor of the core judicial rights we’ve had for 200+ years might actually be a good move. The self-defeating futility of our so-called “opposition party” boggles the mind.
Reading through the liberal blogs, it seems that everybody’s take is pretty much the same as mine. Here’s Jack Balkin:
The reason why the Democrats have not been doing very well on these issues, however, is that the public does not believe that they stand for anything other than echoing what the Republicans have been doing with a bit less conviction. If the Republicans are now the Party of Torture, the Democrats are now the Party of “Torture? Yeah, I guess so.” Not exactly the moral high ground from which to seek office.
The Democrats may think that if they let this pass, they are guaranteed to pick up more seats in the House and Senate. But they will actually win less seats this way. For they will have proved to the American people that they are spineless and opportunistic– that, when faced with a genuine choice and a genuine challenge, they can keep neither our country nor our values safe.
All of us out here beyond the beltway can see that the Dems are self-destructing; why can’t they see it? There are even polls showing that most Americans oppose torture; can’t the Dems read polls?
It was the same thing with the Alito confirmation, and any number of other jackbooted bullshit moves pulled by BushCo. The Democrats squander every single chance to galvanize support from the millions of Americans who are appalled by what’s happening in Washington. They ignore polls showing that most Americans actually favor abortion rights, oppose the war in Iraq, and so on.
Why?
The usual answer is that they’ve lost the media wars with Karl Rove, et al, so many times that they’re gun-shy. But as you and I and everybody else who isn’t a Democratic politician knows, the reason they’ve lost those wars is because they haven’t fought hard enough. When a Rovian accuses you of being soft on terror, you come back and say why do you need the power to torture American citizens? Why do you need the power to lock up anybody you please without judge or jury? Is this really about fighting terror or about making yourself a dictator? Then you keep saying that and keep the conversation on target. You fucking fight.
Posted by Violet under Politics on September 28, 2006, 12:00 am EST
14 Comments »
Over the weekend the gremlins in Washington got to work adding a few refinements to the pro-torture “compromise” bill, chief among them the fascinating proviso that habeas corpus no longer applies in the United States. The Washington Post and Glenn Greenwald have good summaries, but here’s the CliffNotes version from Greenwald:
Put another way, this bill would give the Bush administration the power to imprison people for their entire lives, literally, without so much as charging them with any wrongdoing or giving them any forum in which to contest the accusations against them. It thus vests in the administration the singularly most tyrannical power that exists — namely, the power unilaterally to decree someone guilty of a crime and to condemn the accused to eternal imprisonment without having even to charge him with a crime, let alone defend the validity of those accusations.
The bill does not distinguish between foreign nationals and American citizens. It applies to anyone who “supports hostilities” against the United States. Anyone can be arbitrarily declared an ‘enemy’ of the United States, subjected to torture, and locked away for life. No legal charges necessary; the President just has to decide that you’re a bad guy.
The conventional wisdom is that Democrats cannot risk opposing this bill because they will be seen as “soft on terror.” I do not understand this. Seriously, I don’t. If I were a leading Democrat right now, I’d be all over television with this simple message:
“This bill gives the President the right to torture anyone, to lock anyone up for life — you, your mother, your son, any one of us. All he has to do is decide we’re “working against the United States,” and we have no more rights. No right to an attorney, no right to be heard in court. The President doesn’t even have to bring charges. He can just secretly send you or me to Guantanamo, order us to be tortured, put us in a prison cell for the rest of our lives.
“This bill goes against everything this country stands for. It goes against everything we fought for in the Revolution.
“This isn’t about fighting terror. This is about taking away your rights. This is about turning the President into an absolute dictator.”
Why don’t the Democrats do that? Plain language, telling people exactly what the bill is about.
Posted by Violet under Politics on September 26, 2006, 6:09 pm EST
14 Comments »
God help me, but I miss this man.
I miss the Big Dog. I miss having a president with a triple digit IQ.
I never gave a good goddamn what he did with his dick. I spent the entire Lewinsky scandal in a state of appalled disgust not with him, but with the Republicans who were cynical enough to derail the country and wipe their asses with the Constitution just to get a political edge. Those fucktwits spent eight years assassinating Clinton’s character, and because of that we now have Shrub, Worst President Ever.
Every now and then, when I’m contemplating the awesome moral depravity of the gibbering sadists who run this country, I’m reminded of how those same people howled with calculated outrage over the “moral depravity” of Bill Clinton’s sex life. It would be funny, if it weren’t for the thousands of dead bodies in Iraq and the corpses of torture victims piled up in Baghdad morgue and the incinerators of Guantanomo Bay.
But I won’t speak of that today. It will make me cry again.
Posted by Violet under Politics on September 26, 2006, 1:13 am EST
8 Comments »
There used to be a joke about the heated rivalry between Mississippi and Louisiana: always neck-and-neck for 50th place in whatever was being measured — school funding, road repairs, percentage of citizens with birth certificates and opposable thumbs. In recent years Kansas and South Dakota have made bold moves for the crown, but by God, Virginia is a comer. We are all over those Midwestern wannabees. If you want medieval social values and politics just to the right of the Ayatollah Khomeni, look no further than the Old Dominion, where the United States of America was born:
Item: We are home to not one but two of the most batshit-crazy godbags in the whole world!
Jerry Falwell is in the news today for announcing that Hillary Clinton is scarier than Satan. Considering that Falwell also thinks feminists caused 9-11, this is not surprising.
Our other top-flight godbag, Pat Robertson, hasn’t weighed in yet on the Clinton-Satan issue; he’s probably busy this week with a Hugo Chavez Assassination prayer vigil.
Item: Our incumbent Senator, George ‘macaca’ Allen, is a neo-Nazi!
We already knew about the Confederate flag pin and the noose he kept in his office as governor; now there’s this:
“Allen said he came to Virginia because he wanted to play football in a place where ‘blacks knew their place,’” said Dr. Ken Shelton, a white radiologist in North Carolina who played tight end for the University of Virginia football team when Allen was quarterback. “He used the N-word on a regular basis back then.”
A second white teammate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution from the Allen campaign, separately claimed that Allen used the word “nigger” to describe blacks. “It was so common with George when he was among his white friends. This is the terminology he used,” the teammate said.
A third white teammate contacted separately, who also spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of being attacked by the Virginia senator, said he too remembers Allen using the word “nigger,” though he said he could not recall a specific conversation in which Allen used the term. “My impression of him was that he was a racist,” the third teammate said…
…Shelton said he also remembers a disturbing deer hunting trip with Allen on land that was owned by the family of Billy Lanahan, a wide receiver on the team. After they had killed a deer, Shelton said he remembers Allen asking Lanahan where the local black residents lived. Shelton said Allen then drove the three of them to that neighborhood with the severed head of the deer. “He proceeded to take the doe’s head and stuff it into a mailbox,” Shelton said.
No word yet if he continued stuffing deer’s heads into black people’s mailboxes while he was governor, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Posted by Violet under Politics, Godbags on September 25, 2006, 3:14 pm EST
10 Comments »
So, it’s official. We’re a nation that tortures. The so-called compromise between Bush and McCain, et al, is that Bush will continue to violate the Geneva Conventions and Congress will look the other way.
As eRobin at the American Street says:
Now the debate seems to be over. Barring a filibuster of the Great Torture Compromise, which, like Digby, I think is simply not going to happen, state-sanctioned torture will become the official policy of the United States of America. When we vote, we will be voting in support of torture. When we recite the pledge, we will be pledging our allegiance to waterboarding and other, undisclosed torture techniques. When we pay our taxes, we will be paying for torture. When our children, God, our poor children, write essays in praise of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, they will be writing in praise of torture.
How does it feel?
Posted by Violet under Politics on September 22, 2006, 3:11 pm EST
21 Comments »
Doesn’t he? He’s all yellow and billowy and translucent, there on his green hilltop. Lose the Boris Karloff face and the dead guy on a stick, and you’ve got yourself one fine daffodil. A really, really big daffodil, but that could be interesting in a genetically-modified, deeply horrifying kind of way. Like the vegetables in Woody Allen’s Sleeper.
I would love to know who took this picture, but the cyber gods do not wish me to have this information. I was cruising through the news to see what fresh hell we’re in now, and this lovely photograph captivated me. I stole it and uploaded it here, and then realized that I’d accidentally closed the news window before ascertaining the photographer’s name. In fact, I don’t even remember what newspaper it was. And now both the article and the image are nowhere to be found on the Google News feed. It’s as if they never existed at all.
I suspect a conspiracy.
Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on September 21, 2006, 1:16 pm EST
11 Comments »
Amanda at Pandagon has linked to a post over at Biting Beaver’s that is just astonishing. Astonishing because for all the talk about how The Handmaid’s Tale is coming true, it’s still difficult to grasp that it’s really happening.
Biting Beaver has been denied emergency contraception. She committed the heinous crime of having voluntary sex while unmarried, and now, by God, she must pay — by getting pregnant.
Friday night the condom broke; Saturday morning BB called her doctor to get EC. The doctor — a female — refused to prescribe it, though at first BB didn’t realize this because instead of refusing point-blank, the doctor blew her off by telling her she needed to go to the emergency room instead. Having never asked for EC before, BB thought this was standard procedure.
Actually, her doctor could have just prescribed the stuff to be dispensed through a pharmacy. I myself once needed emergency contraception, back in 1999 when we still called it the morning-after pill. I telephoned my ob-gyn’s office and they called the prescription into the local drugstore. No big deal. But I lived in a very blue city in a very blue state, and 1999 was a long time ago.
After being told she had to go to the emergency room, BB called the local hospital and the slut-shaming began:
“Well see,” he begins, his voice dropping a little, “the problem is that you have to meet the doctor’s criteria before he’ll dispense it to you.”
“Criteria?” I question.
“Well,” the nurse sounds decidedly nervous as though what he really wanted to do was hang up the phone completely, “Yes, his criteria. I mean…ummm…well, are you ok? Is there any, ummm….trauma?” he asks me.
My face changes expression and I hurry to explain, “No, no” I said, “No. I haven’t been raped. This was consensual sex.”
“Oh…” he trails off.
I wait expectantly.
“Well, ummm….*clears throat*…So you haven’t been raped?” he asks again.
“No. I have not been raped. The condom broke”. I state, becoming very frustrated at this point and wondering what the hell is going on.
“Ok, well ummm….Are you married?” he mumbles the words so low I can barely hear them.
Suddenly I get this image of the poor nurse standing at the hospital reading from a cue card that was given to him by a doctor.
“No.” I state plainly. “I am not married. I’ve been in a relationship for several years and I have three children, I don’t want a fourth.” I respond tersely.
“Oh, I see.” He says and then he hurries on, “Well, see. *I* understand. I want you to know that I understand what you’re saying. But see, the problem is that we have 4 doctors here right now but only one of them ever writes EC prescriptions. But see, the thing is that he’ll interview you and see if you meet his criteria. Now, I called the pharmacy but I also talked to him and well….*clears throat*….you can come down and try to get it. You know, if you meet his criteria he’ll give you a prescription, I mean, there’s really no harm in trying.” the nurse trails off, his voice falters as I realize what I’m being told.
It’s fascinating, isn’t it? Well, actually it’s horrifying, but in a clinical, objective kind of way we can view this as a chance to dissect the godbag mind. Contraception is okay for women who have been raped and women who are married. As Amanda says, “What these two groups of women have in common, at least from the traditionalist point of view, is that both have had their agency taken from them, by force or by tradition.”
I opened the phone book again and called the Urgent Care in my county. Who knows, maybe they’ll do it for me. “No,” the nurse said, “We don’t prescribe the abortion pill here”.
“No, wait I’m not asking for the abortion pill. I’m asking for EC!” I say, “It’s not the same thing.”
“Well, we use the words interchangeably here. Sorry, we don’t prescribe it”. She all but races to get off the phone with me.
I start looking through the telephone book, dialing hospitals from counties all around me. It seems that nobody will prescribe it to me. None of the hospitals are willing to touch me, of the ones that will prescribe it I am asked a series of questions to ’screen’ me before I come to the hospital. The results aren’t good. I’m not married and wasn’t raped, so there’s very little they can do for me.
Right. Not Married + Not Raped = Slut. And sluts mustn’t be allowed to get away with their sluttishness!
At the end of her post, the maybe-now-pregnant* Biting Beaver asks rhetorically what the moral of the story is. The moral of the story is that the anti-contraception/anti-choice movement doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with making the world safe for little baby blastocysts. The whole point is to control women. We feminists already know that, of course, but cases like this illustrate it with blinding clarity. If Biting Beaver were married, no problem — the sex happened because a man was in proper legal control of her body (which is how conservatives understand marriage). If Biting Beaver had been raped, no problem — the sex happened because a man physically seized control of her body, albeit illegally. BB’s terrible crime was having sex of her own free will, without being owned or coerced by a man.
In a few months EC will be available over-the-counter, but I see no reason to expect that these shenanigans will stop. The obstructionist techniques will simply shift from the doctors to the pharmacists. It’s my understanding that EC won’t be out on the shelves but will be kept behind the counter, so that customers will have to ask the pharmacist to hand over the goods. Godbag pharmacists all over the country are already refusing to dispense prescribed birth control when the voices in their heads tell them to; there is nothing to keep them from refusing to dispense over-the-counter EC.
A few years ago I wouldn’t have believed that the godbags could gain so much territory and that women could lose so much. But then, I wouldn’t have believed that my country would become a world-leader in legitimizing torture and unprovoked war. I don’t know how much more of this “culture of life” I can take.
*As of 2:00 on Monday afternoon, Biting Beaver announced that she’d finally found a clinic (an hour and half away) that would dispense the pill. I hope it’s not too late.
Posted by Violet under Why We Still Need Feminism, Gender Issues on September 19, 2006, 12:09 am EST
26 Comments »
Christian godbag quotes a Byzantine emperor who thought Islam was irrational and violent.
Muslim godbags around the world erupt in protest, responding with irrationality and violence (or threats thereof).
A pox on both their houses.
(*By the way, this is the most accessible summary I’ve seen of the Pope’s widely misunderstood remarks. The theological question he was addressing was whether rationality is an attribute of the godhead or merely a Western conceit.)
Posted by Violet under Godbags, Religion on September 17, 2006, 8:19 am EST
16 Comments »
From the Washington Post (really!):
PRESIDENT BUSH rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.
Of course, Mr. Bush didn’t come out and say he’s lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to “an alternative set of procedures” for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.
Here’s what I want to ask all these people who think torture is a good idea: When you were a kid watching Masterpiece Theatre about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, did you think, “Hey, it’s a good thing they tortured Mark Smeaton! Sure, there was no evidence that he’d been having an affair with Anne, but under horrible torture he confessed, so you know it had to be true!” Or when you were learning about the European witch-hunts, did you think, “Gosh, all those people really were flying on broomsticks and coating themselves with devil’s grease so they could slip through keyholes — they admitted it under torture! That’s the way to get the truth out of people, by golly!”
HOW FUCKING STUPID CAN YOU BE?
Posted by Violet under Just Impeach the Stupid Freak on September 16, 2006, 12:13 am EST
24 Comments »
True.
I can’t help but wonder if mightn’t have been better to take on the Swift Boaters during the campaign, actually before people voted in 2004. Rather than waiting two years. But of course I’m not a professional politician.
Posted by Violet under Politics on September 15, 2006, 7:48 am EST
5 Comments »
Salon has an interesting article about a new batshit-crazy Christian cult in Seattle, Mars Hill, which, despite the tattoos of its members and Snoop Doggy Dog patter of its pastor, is the same as just about every other fundamentalist Christian cult: a troupe of beta males following an alpha male with all the females bullied into submission.
The men at Mars Hill attentively ape their alpha male pastor, handle all the decision-making for themselves and their chattel, and occupy their manly minds with Deep Thoughts about God. The women are the servant class: they cook, clean, obey the men, and bear their husbands as many children as possible.
One of the female cult members, Judy Abolafya, is representative: before her conversion she had her own career and enjoyed her life as an independent woman. She didn’t even want to have children. But then, shortly after imagining that she’d been “saved,” the re-education started:
At a weekly Bible study class at a Mars Hill pastor’s home, Abolafya first heard about the doctrine of wifely submission. The pastor’s wife gave Abolafya a book to study called “The Fruit of Her Hands,” which can essentially be summed up in Ephesians 5:22: “Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord.” When Abolafya stretched out on her couch one evening to read the first chapter of the book, she screamed and threw it across the room. But she prayed to God and was led back to the Bible, to understand Wilson’s perspective. In the Bible, Abolafya found story after story about women being willfully deceived, following their own desires, wreaking travesty in their relationships and homes. In these stories she saw signs of her own past, her mother’s behavior, her friends’ actions. She began to submit to Ari about purchases and plans she wanted to make.
Why? Why on earth would a reasonably intelligent modern woman convince herself that a load of patriarchal hogwash was true? One of Salon’s letter writers explains:
“These people aren’t converting because the party line is the one they want to hear. They’re converting because there’s a need that the world doesn’t fill and the church does. The church then proceeds to exploit this to push them into lives they don’t necessarily want, in order to keep the community. Don’t want kids? Too bad! You’re a woman who loves your work? Sorry! If you want to keep this new family, you do what we say.
“This is exactly the same driving force that works in cults. And when young people go off to live in eco-communes. And, for that matter, when they join the military. There’s a pattern. A group says, ‘Join us, and you’ll belong.’ And we want to belong so badly that we’ll do it, no matter what it costs.”
Precisely, though I would point out that Christian churches like Mars Hill aren’t like cults; they are cults. Once people are sucked into that familial cult cocoon, they will do damn near anything — and convince themselves of anything — to stay there. The cult assists in this process of isolation and self-delusion by providing a parallel world of friends and social groups so that the cult member doesn’t have to interact with the real world. For example:
Abolafya no longer reads secular books or speaks to her old friends. She is now a deacon at Mars Hill and is responsible for planning the weddings held there, which always include a biblical explanation of marriage and gender roles; each year Mars Hill averages about one hundred marriages between couples within the congregation, all of whom must agree with this doctrine. Between her marriage ministry, the women’s Bible study she runs, her two small children, and taking care of her husband and her home, Abolafya says she doesn’t have time for many relationships anyway, and when she starts to home-school her kids soon, her time will be even tighter. “It’s not what I ever imagined,” she tells me, “or even what I ever wanted, but it’s my duty now, and I have to learn to live with that.”
Lordy. I feel sorry for the woman, though it’s difficult for me to really understand that mindset. I can’t imagine wanting to belong to something or believe in something so much that I could sacrifice my own critical faculties, much less my own sense of self-worth.
What is most disturbing about all this, though, is the children. Abolafya has a daughter, who of course will be brought up to regard herself as an inferior being whose role in life is to serve men. The Mars Hill troupe is cranking out lots of daughters, lots of little girls whose minds will be warped forever with this noxious crap. Remind me again why this isn’t child abuse?
Posted by Violet under Godbags on September 14, 2006, 8:38 am EST
16 Comments »
According to a new study released by Baylor University, Americans — who are already the most god-sick people in the world, after the Philippines and Vanuatu — actually worship four distinct versions of the Great Godbag in the Sky. Here are the four gods, as defined in the Baylor study (the numbers indicate the percent of respondents who identified that god as the god):
Authoritarian God (31.4%): “Individuals who believe in the Authoritarian God tend to think that God is highly involved in their daily lives and world affairs. They tend to believe that God helps them in their decision-making and is also responsible for global events such as economic upturns or tsunamis. They also tend to feel that God is quite angry and is capable of meting out punishment to those who are unfaithful or ungodly.”
Distant God (24.4%): “Believers in a Distant God think that God is not active in the world and not especially angry either. These individuals tend towards thinking about God as a cosmic force which set the laws of nature in motion. As such, God does not “do” things in the world and does not hold clear opinions about our activities or world events.”
Benevolent God (23.0%): “Like believers in the Authoritarian God, believers in a Benevolent God tend to think that God is very active in our daily lives. But these individuals are less likely to believe that God is angry and acts in wrathful ways. Instead, the Benevolent God is mainly a force of positive influence in the world and is less willing to condemn or punish individuals.”
Critical God (16.0%): “Believers in a Critical God feel that God really does not interact with the world. Nevertheless, God still observes the world and views the current state of the world unfavorably. These individuals feel that God’s displeasure will be felt in another life and that divine justice may not be of this world.”
This is interesting, though I’m rather annoyed by the clumsiness of the published report. For example, the authors include a section on “The War on Terror” in which they list the first question as, “Was the United States justified in entering Iraq?” Nice GOP framing! And in the section of the report on belief in god, they helpfully explain that, “Atheists are certain that God does not exist. Nevertheless, atheists may still hold very strong perspectives concerning the morality of human behavior and ideals of social order but have no place for the supernatural in their larger worldview.” Only a godbag could even think it necessary to explain that people who don’t believe in god can still possess a sense of morality and ethics. The actual survey instrument doesn’t include these prejudicial references, which is the main thing, but the reporting is sloppy.
Posted by Violet under Godbags, Religion on September 13, 2006, 8:21 pm EST
6 Comments »
