2005 archive

I listened to the weather report. The weather this week is supposed to suc–er, be less than desirable.

So I did my outside Christmas decorations Saturday; then, since I had the extension ladder out already, cleaned the gutters. Four hours on a 28-foot extension ladder. Sunday I was sore. Not to mention that, before that, I washed both dogs and mopped a couple of floors.

I won’t turn the decorations on until Thanksgiving, though. I have some standards. Not many, but some.

Monday, I’m still sore.

Sunday, I got out this neato hydraulic log splitter I bought from a neighbor of my boss and split logs for an hour and a half. Given what’s predicted to happen to natural gas prices, I expect I will be using my fireplace a lot over the next four months. I doubled the size of my woodpile Sunday afternoon. And . . .

Monday, I’m still more sore.

I noticed a couple of newspaper columns this weekend that I want to muse about, but I don’t have the energy yet. I’m still letting my brain cogitate on them in the background.

It will be a different Thanksgiving. I no longer have any parents to visit. My father died in May and my mother is in a home. My kids are scattered to the four winds, except for Second Son, so it will just be him and me. (I will go to Pine View Farm and visit my mother on the Friday after Thanksgiving.)

So, instead of a turkey, I got a turkey breast. I’m working on the menu. Turkey, rice, gravy (not out of a can–homemade; it’s so easy to make there’s no point to buying canned gravy), some kind of vegetable, and sweet potato pie. Same color as pumpkin pie, but it tastes good, not bitter. And maybe sweet potato biscuits–depends on how much energy I have on Wednesday. Oh, yeah, and cranberry sauce, the real kind, the kind with the rings around it.

If you haven’t had sweet potato pie and sweet potato biscuits, you have suffered great deprivation.

Oh, yeah, and SWEET POTATOES ARE NOT THE SAME THING AS YAMS! A pox on anyone who thinks otherwise.

Happy Thanksgiving, Everyone!!

The Honorable Jean Schmidt, speaking about the Honorable John Murtha’s resolution about the war in Iraq:

Ms. Schmidt: Yesterday I stood at Arlington National Cemetery attending the funeral of a young marine in my district. He believed in what we were doing is the right thing and had the courage to lay his life on the line to do it. A few minutes ago I received a call from Colonel Danny Bop, Ohio Representative from the 88th district in the House of Representatives. He asked me to send Congress a message: Stay the course. He also asked me to send Congressman Murtha a message, that cowards cut and run, Marines never do. Danny and the rest of America and the world want the assurance from this body – that we will see this through.

Mr. Murtha has earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Here is part of what Mr. Murtha said:

Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence. U.S. troops are the common enemy of the Sunnis, Saddamists and foreign jihadists. I believe with a U.S. troop redeployment, the Iraqi security forces will be incentivized to take control. A poll recently conducted shows that over 80% of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and about 45% of the Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis.
I believe before the Iraqi elections, scheduled for mid December, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice that the United States will immediately redeploy. All of Iraq must know that Iraq is free. Free from United States occupation. I believe this will send a signal to the Sunnis to join the political process for the good of a “free” Iraq.

My plan calls:

To immediately redeploy U.S. troops consistent with the safety of U.S. forces.
To create a quick reaction force in the region.
To create an over- the- horizon presence of Marines.
To diplomatically pursue security and stability in Iraq

Mr. Murtha is no dove. You can read his official bio here.

Yet, the Republicans have the gall to accuse him of cowardice. They are back to the politics of character assassination, their refuge whenever the truth is not on their side.

Here is the letter I shall post tomorrow to the Honorable Jean Schmidt:

The Honorable Jean Schmidt
238 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-3502

Dear Ms. Schmidt:

I am no great fan of the Honorable John Murtha. I am familiar with him because I lived in Pennsylvania for several years before moving to Delaware. I disagree with many of his positions on a variety of issues.

Nevertheless, for you to accuse a decorated American veteran who sustained wounds on behalf of his country (that is what the Purple Heart means—look it up) of cowardice is an example of the lowest form of the politics of character assassination.

Have you no shame?

Very truly yours,

Frank W. Bell, Jr.

It’s been about three weeks, and I was playing road warrior for two of them, but this is what I observed today. There have been significant drops:

Claymont, Del., Exxon, $2.09.

Claymont, Del., Sunoco $2.04.

Claymont, Del., Wawa, $2.01.

Claymont, Del, BP, $2.06.

Claymont, Del, Getty, $2.05.

Claymont, Del, Cumberland Farms, $2.03.

Claymont, Del., Gulf, $2.11.

Holly Oak, Del., Mobil, $2.07.

Penny Hill, Del., BP and Getty, $2.09.

Penny Hill, Del., Exxon, $2.11.

Courtesy the Huffington Post. After being caught out on an attempt to shoplift by changing price stickers, Stacy Clay Driver fled and was pursued by a Walmart Loss Prevention employee:

When confronted, Driver ran into the parking lot, pursued by a loss-prevention employee. According to the suit, the employee wrestled Driver to the ground. Other Wal-Mart employees assisted in subduing Driver as he struggled to get up.

On Nov. 4, the medical examiner ruled Driver’s death was caused primarily by asphyxia because of neck and chest compression while a secondary cause was hyperthermia with methamphetamine toxicity.

If you talk with a policeman, he will inform you that there is a very precise legal definition of what constitutes “restraint” of a suspect. Asphyxiation is not part of that definition.

Mr. Clay’s survivors are reportedly seeking legal redress.

Whether or not they deserve redress is another issue. Somehow, it doesn’t seem right to me that his estate should benefit from his being caught out in wrong-doing, however improperly he might have been treated, but I haven’t thought that through yet.

Daniel Rubin, in Blinq, points out this story from Forbes, which offers a view of the dangers of blogs and blogging.

Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It’s not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can’t even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM’s Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims–even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat.

Seems to me that the Forbes article is merely a hysterical recognition that frauds and lies happen in cyberspace, not just in the White House.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, November 15, 2005

From this morning’s editorial page:

. . . It’s an embarrassing standoff, which does untold damage to this nation’s image as a beacon of liberty. As it unfolds, it has a Twilight Zone feel.

Citizens behold a President saying Americans don’t torture, yet unwilling to set policy that would forbid it.

Vice President Cheney appeals to McCain to grant exemptions so that CIA operatives can turn the screws on terror suspects abroad. This, as news reports disclose a network of secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere where who-knows-what goes on beyond public view.

Finally, the same Senate that gave slam-dunk approval to McCain’s measure narrowly approves a distressing proposal to bar federal court appeals by detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Uphold constitutional values with one hand, take them away with the other.

Taken together, these moves send the wrong message about America.

Who is better qualified than McCain to explain why:

“The enemy we fight has no respect for human life or human rights,” he said recently. “They don’t deserve our sympathy. But this isn’t about who they are. This is about who we are. These are the values that distinguish us from our enemies, and we can never, never allow our enemies to take those values away.”

In the meantime, the Senate wrestles with Senator Lindsey Graham’s attempt to further dehumanize America’s captives.

I emailed my Senators last night. I kept it short:

“Please oppose any attempt to limit the right to habeas corpus.

“The very attempt to limit habeas corpus signifies how important it is. This attempt is a further effort to hide from the American people, and everyone else, the bankrupt policies of the current Federal Administration.”

Every step this Federal Administration takes towards torture, towards imprisoning persons without cause, towards proscribing the civil liberties of American citizens, towards spying on persons as they go about legitimate and harmless day-to-day activities is another step towards tyranny and away from the ideals and beliefs that this country has stood for, however imperfectly and with whatever fits and starts, for over two centuries.

We had a graceful approach, turning over Seattle to descend into SeaTac International Airport from the north. Fortunately, we landed on the correct runway.

At least eight times since December 1999, experienced pilots from five different airlines have mistaken Taxiway Tango for Runway 16R.

Three planes, including an American Airlines MD-80 carrying 111 passengers and crew members, actually landed on the taxiway. Five others — most recently in January of this year — either performed last-minute “sidesteps” to shift course and land on 16R, or aborted their landings before circling and touching down safely on the runway.

According to today’s Washington Post, the Know-Nothings are cleaning out the Department of Justice:

The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which has enforced the nation’s anti-discrimination laws for nearly half a century, is in the midst of an upheaval that has driven away dozens of veteran lawyers and has damaged morale for many of those who remain, according to former and current career employees.

Nearly 20 percent of the division’s lawyers left in fiscal 2005, in part because of a buyout program that some lawyers believe was aimed at pushing out those who did not share the administration’s conservative views on civil rights laws. Longtime litigators complain that political appointees have cut them out of hiring and major policy decisions, including approvals of controversial GOP redistricting plans in Mississippi and Texas.

David Vise, writing in today’s Washington Post, thinks there is more than just a colorful search engine there:

Google’s colorful childlike logo, its whimsical appeal and its lightning-fast search results have made it the darling of information-hungry Internet users. Google has accomplished something rare in the hard-charging, mouse-eat-mouse environment that defines the high-tech world — it has made itself charming. We like Google. We giggle at the “Google doodles,” the playful decorations on its logo that appear on holidays or other special occasions. We eagerly sample the new online toys that Google rolls out every few months.

But these friendly features belie Google’s disdain for the status quo and its voracious appetite for aggressively pursuing initiatives to bring about radical change. Google is testing the boundaries in so many ways, and so purposefully, it’s likely to wind up at the center of a variety of legal battles with landmark significance.

The article is well worth a read.

According to the Register, Sony is stopping production of CDs infected with a rootkit:

Sony BMG has said it will suspend production of audio ‘CDs’ that use XCP, the rootkit-style DRM developed by British company First4Internet Ltd. However the music giant refused to apologize for the software, which exposes PCs to malware and which can disable the PC’s CD drive when users try to remove the software.

Sony also declined to follow EMI’s example in September and recall CDs already in the retail channels.

But given their demonstrated underhanded willingness to sabotage their customers’ computers, can they be believed?

John Cusack quoting Winston Churchill:

“The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist.”

Courtesy Jesus’ General.

I wrote earlier about Sony’s rootkit.

It apparently has now fallen into the hands of malware authors:

Virus writers have begun taking advantage of Sony-BMG’s use of rootkit technology in DRM software bundled with its music CDs.

Sony-BMG’s rootkit DRM technology masks files whose filenames start with “$sys$”. A newly-discovered variant of of the Breplibot Trojan takes advantage of this to drop the file “$sys$drv.exe” in the Windows system directory.

Now you can have a Sony of your owny, even if you don’t want it.

Though it is aggressively unscientific, the little poll I saw here had interesting results:

Question 1:

Should the U.S. ban abusive treatment of terrorism suspects?
Yes 80%
No 20%

Question 2:

President Bush has said “we do not torture” terrorism suspects. Do you believe him?
No 88%
Yes 12%

Total Votes: 24,963

The question I have is, where have the 12% responding to question 2 been the last few weeks?

I have to remember to go back to it later.

There is nothing new here. I had the thought, let’s just pull together a bunch of stories about the current Federal Administration and their belief that torture is somehow part of truth, justice, and the American Way.

Disgusting, isn’t it?

White House pressures Congress to reject torture amendment

Senate Supports Interrogation Limits

McCain fights exception to torture ban

Senate Defies Cheney, Passes Anti-Torture Measure

Vice President for Torture

McCain Vows to Add Detainee-Abuse Provision to All Senate Bills

Torture: The Scandal Among Scandals

Senate, Cheney divided over torture ban

THE DARK HEART OF DICK CHENEY

Torture

White House Wants CIA Exempt from Torture Ban

US Senate Reaffirms Support for Amendment Banning Torture

U.S. policy: “Torture in our name?”

Cheney in the Bunker

John McCain v. Bush: Defying the president, the Senate condemns torturing anyone in American custody anywhere

Truth About Torture

Administration Wants CIA Exemption on Torture Bill

No torture, no exceptions

Negroponte won’t back Cheney on torture

Senator: Bush wrongheaded on torture ban

Cheney under siege

Today’s Los Angeles Times has a fascinating article on the last Shaker community. It’s well worth a read. Here’s a start:

NEW GLOUCESTER, Maine — For more than two centuries, the Shakers deftly balanced prayer with pragmatism. God would provide, they were certain. And what God overlooked, they took care of themselves.

Thus these pious men and women came to invent such practical devices as the spring-loaded clothespin, the flat-bottom broom and the circular saw. They patented a washing machine in 1858. Their multi-chambered oven from 1878 strongly resembles contemporary restaurant ovens.

(snip)

The Shakers were never large in number. At the sect’s peak before the Civil War, 5,000 claimed membership in the monastic Protestant fellowship in which men and women live as brothers and sisters. The group, known formally as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, counsels self-reliance and mandates celibacy.

Today, four Shakers remain: two elderly women and two graying men. They are pondering the future not only of their faith but of their way of life.

A while ago I wrote about the Dover, Pa., school board’s religious crusade.

The citizens of the Dover School District have turned out the school board.

DOVER, Pa. – Voters in this rural school district yesterday ousted eight school board members who backed a controversial policy to introduce high school students to intelligent design, which critics say is a form of creationism.

Voters replaced the GOP incumbents with a Democratic slate that called for removing intelligent design from Dover’s science curriculum, returns from all six precincts showed.

It would appear that the citizens of Dover believe that public school teachers, as agents of the state, should be responsible for course work, not missionary work.

A little win in a little battle against the forces of ignorance.

Oh my heavens.

TOPEKA, Nov. 8 — The Kansas Board of Education voted Tuesday that students will be expected to study doubts about modern Darwinian theory, a move that defied the nation’s scientific establishment even as it gave voice to religious conservatives and others who question the theory of evolution.

By a 6-4 vote that supporters cheered as a victory for free speech and opponents denounced as shabby politics and worse science, the board said high school students should be told that aspects of widely accepted evolutionary theory are “controversial.” Among other points, the standards allege a “lack of adequate natural explanations for the genetic code.”

In contrast,

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

The document is timely, coming as it does amid the rise of the religious Right, in particular in the US.

Some Christians want a literal interpretation of the story of creation, as told in Genesis, taught alongside Darwin’s theory of evolution in schools, believing “intelligent design” to be an equally plausible theory of how the world began.

But the first 11 chapters of Genesis, in which two different and at times conflicting stories of creation are told, are among those that this country’s Catholic bishops insist cannot be “historical”. At most, they say, they may contain “historical traces”

I wonder how the Board of Education of the State of Congress would react if someone wished to promulgate the creation story of Ancient Greece in the curriculum as a version of Intelligent Design. After all, it has not been conclusively disproven.

Personally, I believe the science curriculum of the State of Kansas should offer as an alternative the theory that it’s turtles all the way down. After all, no one has disproven that beyond all doubt.

Whatever one’s religious beliefs, or lack thereof, I would hope one would find the hypocrisy of the Board of Education of the State of Kansas in attempting to promulgate a particular religious view of a segment of a particular religion as science to be sick-making.

Several weeks ago, my friend Steve and I exchanged some emails about the Internal Revenue Service’s investigation of a church with a view to removing its tax exempt status; the leaders of the church in question had endorsed particular right-wing political candidates from the pulpit.

Now, Steve and I have not directly discussed political allegiances, but I suspect our votes would cancel each other out in many cases. But the idea of using the tax exempt status as a polical weapon made both of us queasy, because of the interpretation involved in determining what actually constituted prohibited speech.

Certainly there’s statements that would clearly constitute endorsement (“God says, ‘Vote for X’) and statements that would clearly not constitute endorsement (“Elections are good.”), but there’s a hell of a lot of gray in between those two extremes.

Here’s IRS Publication 557 on this topic. See pages 45-47.

Here’s a pamphlet defending the practice of investisgating tax exempt status for political speech(see pages 5 and 6 for the article).

Now the kind of thing Steve and I feared seems to be coming to pass, according to the L. A. Times:

The Internal Revenue Service has warned one of Southern California’s largest and most liberal churches that it is at risk of losing its tax-exempt status because of an antiwar sermon two days before the 2004 presidential election.

Rector J. Edwin Bacon of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena told many congregants during morning services Sunday that a guest sermon by the church’s former rector, the Rev. George F. Regas, on Oct. 31, 2004, had prompted a letter from the IRS.

In his sermon, Regas, who from the pulpit opposed both the Vietnam War and 1991’s Gulf War, imagined Jesus participating in a political debate with then-candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. Regas said that “good people of profound faith” could vote for either man, and did not tell parishioners whom to support (emphasis added).

But he criticized the war in Iraq, saying that Jesus would have told Bush, “Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster.”

On June 9, the church received a letter from the IRS stating that “a reasonable belief exists that you may not be tax-exempt as a church … ” The federal tax code prohibits tax-exempt organizations, including churches, from intervening in political campaigns and elections.

The letter went on to say that “our concerns are based on a Nov. 1, 2004, newspaper article in the Los Angeles Times and a sermon presented at the All Saints Church discussed in the article.”

Now, as Harry Shearer likes to point out, stories in the L. A. Times need to be carefully vetted.

I urge you to read the entire story to see how resoundingly the pastor’s action fall in the gray area I mentioned above.

One of the arguments made for the Patriot Act was that existing federal law made it too difficult for federal agencies to combine foreign and domestic intelligence to figure out the big picture.

The reason those laws were written was COINTELPRO, a domestic surveillance program by the FBI which turned into political surveillance of persons seen as disapproving of the Federal Administration, whoever it happened to be during the existence of COINTEPRO. The Church Report’s summary described it as follows:

COINTELPRO began in 1956, in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings limiting the Government’s power to proceed overtly against dissident groups; it ended in 1971 with the threat of public exposure. 1 In the intervening 15 years, the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.

Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that. The unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.

Well, it’s baaaacccckkkkkk:

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks — and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for “state, local and tribal” governments and for “appropriate private sector entities,” which are not defined.

National security letters offer a case study of the impact of the Patriot Act outside the spotlight of political debate. Drafted in haste after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the law’s 132 pages wrought scores of changes in the landscape of intelligence and law enforcement. Many received far more attention than the amendments to a seemingly pedestrian power to review “transactional records.” But few if any other provisions touch as many ordinary Americans without their knowledge.

Follow the link. Read the entire story. Then consider whether the Patriot Act in its current form might better be named the Patronizing Act.

And remember Lord Acton’s admonition.