Politics

I’m pretty strongly liberal — about as far left as one can go without falling into libertarianism. Posts collected under this tag will likely reflect that viewpoint.

Vice Versa

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Here’s a thing of beauty:

On Wednesday, March 1st, 2006, in Annapolis at a hearing on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at AU, was requested to testify.

At the end of his testimony, Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs said: “Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman. What do you have to say about that?”

Raskin replied: “Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”

The room erupted into applause.

(via Pharyngula)

Clooney Comes Out

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…just not out of that closet. ;)

Rather, he’s just made the startling public admission that — believe it or not — he’s a liberal. And he’s not afraid to admit it.

I am a liberal. And I make no apologies for it. Hell, I’m proud of it.

Too many people run away from the label. They whisper it like you’d whisper “I’m a Nazi.” Like it’s a dirty word. But turn away from saying “I’m a liberal” and it’s like you’re turning away from saying that blacks should be allowed to sit in the front of the bus, that women should be able to vote and get paid the same as a man, that McCarthy was wrong, that Vietnam was a mistake. And that Saddam Hussein had no ties to al-Qaeda and had nothing to do with 9/11.

This is an incredibly polarized time (wonder how that happened?). But I find that, more and more, people are trying to find things we can agree on. And, for me, one of the things we absolutely need to agree on is the idea that we’re all allowed to question authority. We have to agree that it’s not unpatriotic to hold our leaders accountable and to speak out.

[…] Bottom line: it’s not merely our right to question our government, it’s our duty. Whatever the consequences. We can’t demand freedom of speech then turn around and say, But please don’t say bad things about us. You gotta be a grown up and take your hits.

(via Mike)

Update: Apparently there’s a bit of a tussle going on between Clooney and The Huffington Post, where the above-quoted passage was posted.

It’s George Clooney versus Arianna Huffington in a standoff worthy of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

The newly minted Oscar winner says he did not write a blog posted Monday on commentator Huffington’s Web site, though he gave her permission to use a compilation of his critiques of the Iraq war from interviews with Larry King and London’s The Guardian.

“Miss Huffington’s blog is purposefully misleading and I have asked her to clarify the facts,” Clooney, 44, said in a statement issued Wednesday. “I stand by my statements but I did not write this blog.”

Vidal on Oscars and Politics

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One of these days I’m actually going to start reading more of Gore Vidal’s work, as each time I’ve run across him (beginning with his role as the Democratic incumbent facing down up and coming right-winger Bob Roberts in Tim Robbins’ excellent political satire), I’ve found him fascinating and incredibly intelligent.

There’s a two part interview with Vidal in TruthDig conducted just before the Oscars that has some wonderful quips in it. Part one looks primarily at the then-upcoming Oscars:

If [Brokeback Mountain] were to win an Oscar, would it be a step forward in tolerance? How important is Hollywood in this equation?

Well, it never has been, and I don’t see why it should be suddenly now. That it was made at all and that it was made so honestly and so well is a good thing, better than to make a mess out of it, or not try at all….

Look, homophobia is fed into every child in the United States at birth. It is unrelenting, it never lets up. They asked a whole raft of high school boys across the country a couple years ago, one of those polls about what they would most like to be in life, and what … they would hate to be, and so forth, and what they would most hate to be was homosexual.

There wasn’t anyone, not one, who just skipped the question. They all said “oh no, that’s the worst thing you could be.”

To get over that training, that’s generation after generation. And it has not done the character of our nation much good. And that’s why we are a joke to the rest of the world, because we carry on about sexual matters everyone else has forgotten about.

Part two concentrates on more political matters:

This is old news now, but in terms of terrorism, there was a lot of protest against the Palestinian Oscar nominee, “Paradise Now,” with a 36,000-person petition to get the film dropped from the roster because it sympathized with “terrorists.”

Never forget there are 1 billion Muslims on Earth. The United States is far too small a country to play big boss – and now far too insolvent a country; we have no revenues, we can’t repair our own infrastructure, much less rebuild the cities that we’ve just knocked down in the Middle East. I think we should learn a little modesty, we’re not number one! At invoking terrorism, yes, we’re pretty good at provoking people to hate us. In fact we’ve been quite successful at that. But we live in a small country, a vulnerable country, a country with no defenses, only “homeland security.” But there’s no true security here – anyone can do anything he wants and will!

Right, so now we have these proposals to build a wall on the Texas/Mexico border, to fill in the tunnels….

Oh it’s just Looney Time, but you see, we have no educational system for the general public. If you come from a well-to-do family, you get a fairly good education, but you get a lot of propaganda along with it. And we have a media that is quite poisonous and only echoes what the administration—and corporate America, which owns the administration—wants us to hear. So the average person has no information, or what he has is so distorted. How can he make up his mind intelligently on any subject?

(via Slog)

iTunes “Metal on Metal” by Kraftwerk from the album Industrial Revolution, 2nd Edition (1977, 3:18).

Name Five…

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Prairie bounced into the room this morning as I was scanning headlines while I woke up. “Quick — name all the members of the Simpsons,” she said.

“Um…Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie.”

“Now — what are the five rights given by the first amendment?”

“…um. Oh. Heh…that’s not good. Let’s see,” I fumbled. “Freedom of speech, religion, freedom to assemble….”

She grinned. “That’s three.”

Kind of a sad commentary, isn’t it? At least I’m not alone.

Americans apparently know more about “The Simpsons” than they do about the First Amendment.

Only one in four Americans can name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances.) But more than half can name at least two members of the cartoon family, according to a survey.

The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just one in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms.

For the record, here’s the First Amendment to the Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

iTunes “What the Hell” by Radioactive Goldfish from the album Rhythm and Rave (1992, 3:16).

Humor in Tragedy

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I’ve always had a predilection for black humor. It’s a trait that will occasionally raise its head at entirely inappropriate times.

Like today, when I saw the following headline (which has since been replaced on CNN’s site):

Tear gas, gunfire beat back cartoon protesters

All I could see in my head was a Toon Town riot, and I couldn’t help laughing. Wrong, and I’m going to hell…but funny.

(For the record, I think the local Muslim community is doing a far better job of responding to the cartoons than the rioters are. Also, until I read this article, I had no idea that the it was considered blasphemous to portray images of Mohammed. That little piece of information makes the anger at the cartoons a little more understandable to me — but I still in no way believe that the violence that’s taking place is the appropriate response.)

iTunes “Groove to Move” by Channel X from the album Technomancer (1996, 5:20).

Bush’s hit list

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What follows is a list originally posted on Yahoo and copied here because Yahoo tends to remove news articles two weeks or so after they’re posted. I also reformatted the list to make it easier to read.

These are the proposed cuts in Bush’s 2007 budget. A lot of things in here make me wince, but it’s the education sections that really make me mad. I want my 24.6 seconds back.

Read more

The Ciccones: Lies

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Here’s a mashup worth listening to: The Ciccones‘ “Lies” (6.5Mb .mp3). While most of the all-Madonna mashup album is fairly hit-and-miss, this is by far the standout track. Over the music for “Live to Tell“, audio quotes from the justifications for the Iraq war are juxtaposed with the song’s original chorus:

A man can tell a thousand lies,
I’ve learned my lesson well,
Hope I live to tell the secret I have learned,
’till then, it will burn inside of me.

Cute and clever.

iTunes “Lies” by Ciccones, The from the album Immaculate Concoction, The (2005, 5:45).

The 24.6 Second College Degree

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Update: I munged up some of my math this morning and got the numbers slightly wrong. I’ve updated the post with correct numbers. They’re still scary and infuriating.

According to this morning’s Seattle Times, the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing approximately $118,000 per minute — $100,000/minute for the war in Iraq, and $18,000/minute in Afghanistan.

CNN/Money reported last October that the average cost of attending a four-year public university was approximately $12,127 per year, or $48,508 for four years.

In other words, 2.69 minutes worth of the money we’re spending in Afghanistan would pay for the average four-year degree. Only 29.1 seconds worth of the money we’re spending in Iraq would do the same. So would 24.6 seconds of the two operations combined.

Every day, we’re spending enough money in Iraq and Afghanistan to pay for 3,503 four-year public school college degrees.

And yet, George Bush is asking for $70 billion more to pay for those wars, while cutting education funding by $12.7 billion.

The bill the U.S. Senate passed in the last hours of its 2005 session is called a “budget reconciliation” – an attempt to force the federal budget into balance with spending cuts or tax increases. But there’s no way to reconcile one of the biggest items on the chopping block, aid to education, with the long-term interests of the nation, its students, families and economy.

The bill includes a $12.7 billion cut in federal aid to education. The Senate passed it 51-50 with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the deciding vote. The cut, the first in federal education spending in more than a decade, accounts for nearly a third of the bill’s spending reductions.

[…] If the House approves them, the cuts will be very real. Here’s what they will mean:

  • An increase in the federal Stafford Loan Rate from 4.7 to 6.8 percent. The will go to 8.25 percent in July.

    The higher interest rates mean that on average students will pay $2,000 more and parents $3,000 more.

  • Pell Grants to low and moderate-income students will remain frozen at $4,050 for the fourth straight year despite the president’s earlier promise to raise them to $5,100.

    According to the American Council on Higher Education, Pell Grants covered 84 percent of the cost of attending the average public four-year college when they were created in 1972. They now pay 34 percent.

The cuts come at a bad time. In five years the average cost of tuition at a public university has increased by 57 percent, the cost of room and board by 44 percent. American higher education is becoming more unaffordable at a time when attending college has never been more important.

A conversation Prairie and I had while walking into NSCC about how we’re going to afford getting me a degree prompted this little exploration. Meh. Not happy right now.

Bush targets Al-Jazeera for bombing

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The man is certifiably batshit insane.

President Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a “Top Secret” No 10 memo reveals.

But he was talked out of it at a White House summit by Tony Blair, who said it would provoke a worldwide backlash.

A source said: “There’s no doubt what Bush wanted, and no doubt Blair didn’t want him to do it.”

[…]

Al-Jazeera’s HQ is in the business district of Qatar’s capital, Doha.

Its single-storey buildings would have made an easy target for bombers. As it is sited away from residential areas, and more than 10 miles from the US’s desert base in Qatar, there would have been no danger of “collateral damage”.

Dozens of al-Jazeera staff at the HQ are not, as many believe, Islamic fanatics. Instead, most are respected and highly trained technicians and journalists.

To have wiped them out would have been equivalent to bombing the BBC in London and the most spectacular foreign policy disaster since the Iraq War itself.

The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over US claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors.