News Junkie Scott's Blog (11/21/05) (tags)
New revelations of US military use of white phosphorus in Iraq.
News Junkie Scott's Blog (9/19/05) (tags)
America has fallen to a Jacobin coup.
Onward, Christian theocrats: the Yankee Taliban on the attack (tags)
“Our goal is a Christian nation,” says Terry Randal. “We are called by God to conquer this country.”
Filibuster Wars Power Grab at the Height of the Empire http://rwor.org/a/004/filibuster-wars.htm The Senate was heading for a major showdown, as the Republican majority and Vice President Cheney conspired to strip the Democrat minority of their ability to even filibuster the most extreme judicial nominees. Then, after playing chicken for two weeks, a "Gang of 14" Senators suddenly announced they had reached a "historic compromise based on mutual trust" -- and they announced that they had saved the Senate from destruction. And the media oohed-and-aaaahed over the last minute development. But it quickly became pretty obvious, that nothing here was an obstacle to the most dangerous plans for remaking the courts. And did the compromise "safe the filibuster" as the media said? In fact, the compromise said "If you don't take the filibuster, we promise not to use it." Which, if you think about it, gives the top reactionaries what they want. Part of this "compromise" is that the Democrats immediately stopped their opposition to Precilla Owen and several other of Bush's judicial nominees -- these are people who are literally monsters of an extreme kind, who had been stalled in the Senate (in some cases for years.) So this "compromise" meant that these vultures are headed for powerful courts. And, it is also clear that huge new showdowns lie just ahead -- as the White House and Senate brace for a struggle over putting extreme rightwing judges on the supreme court. The following article (written just before the "compromise" was announced) lays bare the stakes and dynamics of this whole crisis.
In The Kingdom Of Forgetting (tags)
Memory can be an embarrassing thing. In politics, it's often more convenient to forget. The classic illustration of this idea was Orwell's dystopian Ministry of Truth, where functionaries fed any inconvenient bit of information down the memory hole -- "whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air."