Arianna Huffington did a great piece at AlterNet: The Things I Want to Forget, an overview of everything evil and absurd in the United States in 2005. It may come off as negative but I think she succeeds in being more populist than partisan.
Tag Archive for 'democracy'Page 2 of 6
The House voted 251 to 174 yesterday to renew the USA Patriot Act, setting up a confrontation over the revised anti-terrorism measure with a group of Democratic and Republican senators who say it would not go far enough to protect civil liberties.
The Patriot Act, approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, made it easier for the FBI to conduct secret searches, monitor telephone calls and e-mails, and obtain bank records and other personal documents in connection with terrorism investigations.
Civil liberties groups say the proposed renewal would do too little to let targeted people challenge national security letters and types of subpoenas that give the FBI substantial latitude in deciding what records — including those from libraries — should be surrendered.
Good House! (althought this one was a no-brainer)
In an unusual bipartisan rebuke to the Bush administration, the House on Wednesday overwhelmingly endorsed Senator John McCain’s measure to bar cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners in American custody anywhere in the world.
The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to consider the legality of Texas’s 2003 congressional redistricting plan, which was engineered by then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and helped cement GOP control of the House.
The court will hear challenges from Democrats and minority groups who say that the mid-decade redistricting unlawfully diluted the strength of minority voters, injected undue partisanship into the congressional map and violated the concept of one person, one vote by drawing district lines with outdated census data.
Saw this on boingboing:
(Noam Chomsky speaking about Bush)
So therefore you have… George Bush… this pampered kid who came from a rich family and went to prep school and an elite university. And you have to present him as an ordinary guy who makes grammatical errors, which I’m sure he’s trained to make–he didn’t talk that way at Yale–and a fake Texas twang, and he’s off to his ranch to cut brush or something. It’s like a toothpaste ad. And I think a lot of people know it.
This is the kind of thing that annoys me about Chomsky. Most of the time he is so well researched, and then other times he is so anecdotal, making vague references to non-falsifiable conspiracy theories. Does he have any proof that George Bush makes grammatical errors on purpose? Furthermore, Chomsky has been hanging out at pretty fancy institutions his entire life, hasn’t he seen the rich and privileged barely-literate idiots that go in and out of those places?
Don’t get me wrong, there is certainly an elaborate plan to sell Bush as the President that you can relate to, the President who doesn’t talk too fancy.
If there is one thing Bush is great at, even when on the spot in public, it’s completely undermining the question that was asked and either not addressing anything, or steering the dialogue toward what he wants to talk about. He performs this pretty much flawlessly.
Which makes me see Chomsky’s point more. Hmmm.
I don’t know. I ask you, Dear Reader, is Bush’s idiocy an elaborate show?
“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in [The Patriot Act] undermine the Constitution.”
“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”
As the creator (and lazy maintainer) of Deathdata, I have a great appreciation for worldmeters.
Justice Department lawyers concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) violated the Voting Rights Act, according to a previously undisclosed memo obtained by The Washington Post. But senior officials overruled them and approved the plan.
The memo, unanimously endorsed by six lawyers and two analysts in the department’s voting section, said the redistricting plan illegally diluted black and Hispanic voting power in two congressional districts. It also said the plan eliminated several other districts in which minorities had a substantial, though not necessarily decisive, influence in elections.
Guardian Unlimited pulls no punches. Some excerpts:
It was JRR Tolkien who converted CS Lewis to Christianity during one long all-night walk that ended in dawn and revelation.
Disney is deliberately promoting this film to the religious - it has appointed Outreach, an evangelical publisher, to promote the Christian message behind the movie in British churches. The Christian radio station Premier is urging churches to hold services on the theme of The Gospel According to Narnia. Even the Methodists have written a special Narnia-themed service. And a Kent parish is giving away £10,000 worth of film tickets to single-parent families. (Are the children of single mothers in special need of the word?)
US born-agains are using the movie. The Mission America Coalition is “inviting church leaders around the country to consider the fantastic ministry opportunity presented by the release of this film”. The president’s brother, Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida, is organising a scheme for every child in his state to read the book. Walden Media, co-producer of the movie, offers a “17-week Narnia Bible study for children”. The owner of Walden Media is both a big Republican donor and a donor to the Florida governor’s book promotion - a neat synergy of politics, religion and product placement. It has aroused protests from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which complains that “a governmental endorsement of the book’s religious message is in violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution”.
…43% of people in Britain in a recent poll couldn’t say what Easter celebrated. Among the young - apart from those in faith schools - that number must be considerably higher. Ask art galleries: they now have to write the story of every religious painting on the label as people no longer know what “agony in the garden”, “deposition”, “transfiguration” or “ascension” mean.
This Christ-lion willingly lays down his life, submitting himself to be bound, thrashed and humiliated by the white witch, allowing his golden mane to be cut and himself to be slaughtered on the sacrificial stone table: it cracks in sympathetic agony and his body goes missing. …
But so far, so good. The story makes sense. The lion exchanging his life for Edmund’s is the sort of thing Arthurian legends are made of. Parfait knights and heroes in prisoner-of-war camps do it all the time. But what’s this? After a long, dark night of the soul and women’s weeping, the lion is suddenly alive again. Why? How?, my children used to ask. Well, it is hard to say why. It does not make any more sense in CS Lewis’s tale than in the gospels. Ah, Aslan explains, it is the “deep magic”, where pure sacrifice alone vanquishes death.
Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls. Did we ask him to? Poor child Edmund, to blame for everything, must bear the full weight of a guilt only Christians know how to inflict, with a twisted knife to the heart. Every one of those thorns, the nuns used to tell my mother, is hammered into Jesus’s holy head every day that you don’t eat your greens or say your prayers when you are told.
Tolkien hated Narnia: the two dons may have shared the same love of unquestioning feudal power, with worlds of obedient plebs and inferior folk eager to bend at the knee to any passing superior white persons - even children; both their fantasy worlds and their Christianity assumes that rigid hierarchy of power - lord of lords, king of kings, prince of peace to be worshipped and adored. But Tolkien disliked Lewis’s bully-pulpit.
Over the years, others have had uneasy doubts about the Narnian brand of Christianity. Christ should surely be no lion … He was the lamb, representing the meek of the earth, weak, poor and refusing to fight. Philip Pullman - he of the marvellously secular trilogy His Dark Materials - has called Narnia “one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read”.
Why? Because here in Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America - that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right.
Lewis said he hoped the book would soften-up religious reflexes and “make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they met it later in life”. … Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children’s minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism.
look at this shit:
- the navy trains dolphins to patrol and SHOOT POISON DARTS AT TERRORISTS. FURTHERMORE, these dolphins ESCAPED during huricane katrina. ARMED WITH THE DARTS. THIS IS REAL. link
- gillette came out with a FIVE BLADE RAZOR. think about that. not only are they all the way up to 5, but they actually SKIPPED 4. this is actually something that the onion specifically predicted. link
- that barbara bush quote about the people in the astrodome being “underpriviliged anyway”. i mean really, i could not be more pleased that katrina happened while barb was still alive, so that that quote could go down in history. link
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[actually from 2004, but it's too good to leave out]this quote, from a “senior bush advisor” (speaking to a journalist):
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We”re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you”re studying that reality ‚Äì judiciously, as you will ‚Äì we”ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’’s how things will sort out. We”re history’’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
- update: I had this one bookmarked but forgot to include it in my initial post:
A spokeswoman for the Family Research Council (FRC) says young women should have to deal with the consequences of a rapidly spreading sexually transmitted disease rather then rely on a new vaccine.
The FRC’s Bridget Maher said her group believes over-reliance on the vaccine for the human papilloma virus (HPV) could send the wrong message to young women. “Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV,” Maher told New Scientist. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.”
what is wrong with 2005? the onion describes reality. the daily show is the only mainstream news source. politicians don’t even try to pretend that they aren’t living in an alternate, self-centered reality. and ideoologically driven groups assert that a solution to a problem should not be implemented because it makes a previous solution to the problem seem less important. YES, THAT IS THE POINT OF NEW, MORE EFFECIENT/COMPREHENSIVE SOLUTIONS. WE NO LONGER HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE DRAWBACKS OF THE OLD SOLUTIONS.
if anyone has any more “2005 is the onion becoming reality” examples, let me know.
With only four dissenting votes, the state Assembly easily passed a bill that would require that electronic voting machines create a paper record.
The goal of the legislation is to make sure that Wisconsin’s soon-to-be-purchased touch screen machines create a paper ballot that can be audited to verify election results.
“Wisconsin cannot go down the path of states like Florida and Ohio in having elections that the public simply doesn’t trust,” Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Madison, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said in a news release. “By requiring a paper record on every electronic voting machine, we will ensure that not only does your vote matter in Wisconsin, but it also counts.”
The bill, which was co-sponsored by Rep. Steve Freese, R-Dodgeville, has also been introduced in the state Senate, where it awaits action.
Gov. Jim Doyle applauded the Assembly’s passage of the bill.
[snip]
