Strange Mayonnaise

I was reading about the Mandeans (members of a monotheistic, pacifistic religion that holds John the Baptist as the Most Important Spiritual Home-Slice You'd Ever Want To Know) on their official website and stumbled across this gem of an article by a Christian reverend on how Islamists in Baghdad are returning the grand city into an early Islamic Caliphate-era dump.

Outlawed "post-Muhammad" anachronisms include: mayonnaise, ice coolers, goatees ("Jew beards," according to the extremists), and falafels.

And you know I love me some falafels...

(I'm not hating on Islam, of course, just extremism/falafel-haterism. I mean, I'm against violence. But if you take away a man's delicious chickpeas... Well, it's enough to make me want to fire some attorney generals and start a war with somebody...)

Win For The Home Team On The Mountain

The flat-top / lobotomized mountain.

People Speakin...

Mos Def Reads Malcolm X:

Awesome!

Michael Jackson has a brilliant idea.

My Goat = Got

From "Still Trying to House Katrina’s Victims," March 28, 2007, Editorial, NYTimes:

The Bush administration’s mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina housing crisis has often looked like an attempt to discourage survivors from applying for help. The House has taken an important step toward reversing this policy with a bill that would require the Department of Housing and Urban Development to issue tens of thousands of new housing vouchers under the Section 8 program, which allows low-income families to seek homes in the private real estate market.

Many of these families would have long since found permanent homes and settled into new lives had the Bush administration brought HUD — which was created to deal with these kinds of situations — into the picture at the very start. But Hurricane Katrina arrived just as the administration had made up its mind to cripple HUD and the successful Section 8 program, partly as a way of offsetting tax cuts for the wealthy.

The administration instead rigged up a confusing and inflexible housing program and put the Federal Emergency Management Agency in charge. FEMA frustrated landlords and Katrina’s victims alike. Last year, one federal judge likened the convoluted application process — which too often led vulnerable families to lose aid without knowing why or having reasonable recourse to appeal — to something out of a horror story by Kafka.

With thousands of families scheduled to lose their temporary aid by September, the Senate should move quickly to pass this much-needed legislation. Hurricane Katrina’s victims should not have to keep paying the price for the administration’s misplaced animosity toward low-income housing.

EJ--my next-door neighbor, growing up--is originally from New Orleans. His family was displaced by the hurricane and has been moving around the South for a whilenow, from Texas to Georgia to I think Tennessee, shacking up with sundry relatives and unable to return... because there are no houses in their neighborhood. I don't mean that there are just some fixer-uppers or some trailers--I mean nothing. Nada. Grass-&-sky.

Anyway, it just gets my goat.

These kids today

Students at Wilton High School create an original play about the war in Iraq for a class, and are kept from performing it by their school principal who seems to have felt it would be too inflammatory.

Three girls at John Jay High School are suspended for saying the word “vagina,” while performing an excerpt of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues.

And they say kids today are apathetic.

I say, hell no.

We live in a world where the line between child and adult is irrevocably blurred. Twelve year olds can be tried as adults in the criminal court system; eighteen year olds are dying in Iraq and other war-torn countries; fifteen year old girls in Africa are raising their siblings and their own children after losing their parents to AIDS; the former governor of New York suggested that an eighth grade education should be considered sufficient for most (read: working class) Americans.

And young people are stepping up. They are demanding that their voices be heard, demanding that they and their peers be properly cared for and educated, demanding that we pay attention.

If you want to get to know them better, here are some places to start:
Global Action Project
Sista II Sista
We Got Issues
Youth Speaks

(Holy) crap !!

This is sick.

Omertå

I'll admit my bias. Steven Weber is a friend of mine and I've always found him to be extremely passionate and articulate. He's also a great actor and a funny funny guy. His post today in The Huffington Post is worth a read. I'm giving you the whole thing cuz it's just that good:

Omertå: A code of silence, a refusal to give evidence to authorities.

Watching the latest hearings and the standard administration responses one sees what and who they really are and what they've always been: this White House makes the Sopranos look like the Little Rascals. Their spokemen take their orders without question and eat the paper it's written on.

They spout identically metered bullet points with the same dread filled intonations. They stand as an immovable wall of scowling muscle, the blue-suited, flag-on-the-lapel sporting E Ring protecting the seething inner core from which their ideology of greed emanates. They divide and conquer, deride and sneer and of course they are cold-blooded killers. They kill hope, they kill diversity, they kill science, they kill logic. And they occasionally kill people, too. Sure, brown people, poor people, people who sometimes wear camouflage uniforms who have an unflinching commitment to the idea of protecting their mother nation. But still, people. And all these murders performed with their trademark plausible deniability. No transcripts, no oaths, no witnesses. And this nation, utterly gobsmacked at the mob's hubris, is itself shocked into silence and inaction because of the sheer brazenness of such behavior, the lack of care as to its appearance, the daring with which it carries out its mission even as its term may very well be coming to a close. Dons Bush and Cheney, their various consiglieri, capos, soldiers, bought-and-sold judges, street corner dealers, fencers and bag men have virtually rubbed out the very idea of a democratic society and erected in its place a cheaply made (outsourced, naturally) two dimensional proxy, complete with undulating red white and blue backdrop.

For millennia thugs have employed as motivators Fear and Profit to gain dominion over those who just want to live in peace and security and who, at the end of the day, just want to be left alone. We continue our fealty to Omertå at our peril because---make no mistake---the thugs mean to scuttle this country. That's their plan. It's no accidental result of well intentioned but poor planning. Because while they say they do, they actually have no political affiliation, they worship no god, they respect no law, they hold no love for America land of the free home of the brave. They saw an opportunity and, planning very carefully, seized it.

What do we do? Should we just get out of the way of the inexorable tide of corporate-fascist greed that controls the ebb and flow of what we used to call a free society and continue to be scared into paying for protection from the very thing that is killing us? We've been sold out by ruthless Men Without a Country. They are neither patriots, nationalists nor Christians. They are businessmen, pure and simple. The lore and allure of America are but weapons they wield in their war on democracy.

And will our own reluctance to admit all this, that we have been highjacked by the current incarnation of small, petty crooks who think big, be the straw that breaks the back of America's promise of a future of peace and freedom?

a clarification...

In the post below, I noted that the 9 attorneys who replaced the 'purged' US Attorneys all had histories of voter suppression. I got ahead of myself - only 3 have been proven to excel in that particular line of work. I'm sure the other 6 have other distinctions we'll soon come to know....

Well well well....

It seemed like this US Attorney "purge" was about firing attorneys who were getting too close to Republican scandals. Like Carol Lam in San Diego who was investigating Randy "Duke" Cunningham. Or David Iglesias who wasn't done with his investigation of a state Democratic Senator in New Mexico before the 2006 election. Rep. Heather Wilson (R NM) and Senator Pete Domenici (R NM) wanted the state senator out before the election and they were pissed he was dragging his feet waiting for 'the facts', so they went to good ol' Karl to get the guy canned. It didn't seem all that surprising that Gonzalez and Bush and Rove would stoop to bring politics to the Justice Department just to protect some corrupt colleagues. But oh, just wait for it - it's much much MUCH bigger than that.

McClatchy newspapers has just broken this thing wide open. It's not just about the guys who they fired - oh no - it's about where those attorneys resided and who they replaced them with. See there are 11 states that the Republicans were targeting for 2008. 11 states that Karl Rove told the Republican Lawyers Association were "in play" and vital for the 2008 election. And guess what? Those 9 US Attorneys who have been 'purged' were from 9 of those 11 states. And guess who they replaced them with? 9 lawyers known for their histories supporting voter suppression of Democrats - you know, like the guy in Florida who purged voter rolls of poor, black people. The only silver lining is we can say goodbye to Gonzo (the AP is reporting the proof of his concerted effort to target these attorneys here).

And you can read the full, unbelievable tale of voter suppression here.

One amazing aspect of this story that only the LA Times has fully reported - this story, the full scope of which we are only now learning, would never have come to light if Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo hadn't taken some time last year to wonder why Carol Lam was fired after she so successfully investigated Duke Cunningham. He kept digging, kept asking questions, kept writing about it - and slowly and surely uncovered another, and then Iglesias, and then another and another. Josh's team at TPM did this country a tremendous service. Now that McClatchy has unearthed this scope and depth of this conspiracy, I shudder to think what would have happened next year without Josh. We owe him. Huge.

The Democrats in the House today passed a bill to start withdrawing troops. But we cannot stop there. We must support our Democrats in both houses so they have the strength to continue these investigations. If you have a minute on Monday, call your Representative, call Harry Reid, call Henry Waxman, call Barbara Boxer and Patrick Leahy and tell them to stay strong. Tell them to never bend to the White House - tell them to force Karl and Harriet and Gonzo to testify under oath, with a transcript. What this administration has done is evil.

As Edmund Burke said, "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing".

Let's do something.

Good News/Bad News

So, Robbie Gates is no Donald Rummie, that's good...

New to Job, Gates Argued for Closing Guantánamo
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID E. SANGER, NYTimes

WASHINGTON, March 22 — In his first weeks as defense secretary, Robert M. Gates repeatedly argued that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had become so tainted abroad that legal proceedings at Guantánamo would be viewed as illegitimate, according to senior administration officials. He told President Bush and others that it should be shut down as quickly as possible.

Mr. Gates’s appeal was an effort to turn Mr. Bush’s publicly stated desire to close Guantánamo into a specific plan for action, the officials said. In particular, Mr. Gates urged that trials of terrorism suspects be moved to the United States, both to make them more credible and because Guantánamo’s continued existence hampered the broader war effort, administration officials said.

Mr. Gates’s arguments were rejected after Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and some other government lawyers expressed strong objections to moving detainees to the United States, a stance that was backed by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, administration officials said.

...but Zee Germans are now arbiting Islamic law, wtf...?

German Judge Cites Koran, Stirring Up Cultural Storm
By MARK LANDLER, NYTimes

FRANKFURT, March 22 — A German judge has stirred a storm of protest by citing the Koran in turning down a German Muslim woman’s request for a speedy divorce on the ground that her husband beat her.

In a ruling that underlines the tension between Muslim customs and European laws, the judge, Christa Datz-Winter, noted that the couple came from a Moroccan cultural milieu, in which it is common for husbands to beat their wives. The Koran, she wrote in her decision, sanctions such physical abuse.

News of the ruling brought swift and sharp condemnation from politicians, legal experts and Muslim leaders in Germany, many of whom said they were confounded that a German judge would put seventh-century Islamic religious teaching ahead of German law in deciding a case of domestic violence.

Forgetting even the very concept of the separation of faith and government for a moment, let us examine the basic, common sense-grounded options presented to a judge by such a case: 1) Tell a wife, repeatedly beaten by her husband, to go fuck herself. 2) Help the poor woman (or man, what if it were a man?).

Clearly, this is a fucking no-brainer. How absurd to read news of this judge's hurtful and indefensible decision on the same day we read that Robert Gates--some old-school Commie-stoppin bad-ass general-type--has decided that illegally detaining Muslims in a foreign country for indefinite periods of time is not only not cool, but, more to his point, is doing America more harm than good.

Rahm rocks the House

I'm not a huge Rahm Emanuel fan actually. I consider him one of the DCCC/DSCC 'blue dog' Dems who take too much corporate money, supported the war four years ago, want to move the party "to the middle" - all that nonsense. However, watching him on C-Span just now debate the historic Iraq War bill was inspiring. This bill will pass the House very shortly and start bringing our troops home, while redeploying some to the borders, continuing to train the Iraq Police force and opening dialogue with the leaders and neighbors in the region. The other vital aspect of this bill is that it provides funds for our troops - on the ground and when they get home. It adds pay to death and disability benefits - in other words it truly "supports the troops".

But one line Rahm said really put it all into perspective.

"When you (Republicans) talk like the President did in January and say 'we want the Iraqis to meet our benchmarks' and then you set no benchmarks? Well, I can only say what we say in Chicago - you're all hat and no cattle".

Great friggin' statement.

Pill stops cow burps and helps save the planet

And it's not a joke.....

From the Guardian:

Cut down on flying, sell the car and recycle your bottles. But if you really want to tackle global warming, you should stop your cow from burping.

According to scientific estimates, the methane gas produced by cows is responsible for 4% of greenhouse gas emissions. And now, German scientists have invented a pill to cut bovine burping.

The fist-sized plant-based pill, known as a bolus, combined with a special diet and strict feeding times, is meant to reduce the methane produced by cows.

Read the whole article here.