Bush Admin: What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Us

Making information disappear. 2007 version. 2006 version.

Truth hurts, so it seems.

Bush Administration Subjects of Criminal Probes

Wow, it's a New Era in Government. Bush Administration Officials Indicted, Convicted, Pled Guilty, Resigned due to Investigation, Pending Investigation of Allegations of Impropriety, Nomination Failed Due to Scandal, Under Investigation but Still In Office: listed.

Our Undemocratic Constitution

On the December 21 episode of his Journal, Bill Moyers interviewed Sanford Levinson, whose most recent book is Our Undemocratic Constitution. We find ourselves decrying the degree to which the United States is undemocratic. It turns out, it was never intended to be a democracy. Rather, our founders of the United States of America deliberately and extensively devised strategies to isolate its government from its people. Would we imagine that the word "democracy" would be found in the Declaration of Independence or in the Constitution? It's not. We talk about spreading democracy around the world, yet our own government is explicitly designed otherwise. For starters, the veto gives the president the power to override congress 95% of the time. The electoral college! And the Senate! Very interesting to grasp the implications of how this most undemocratic of institutions can block anything the House of Representatives does. There is a transcript as well as a video at Bill Moyers's site.

The Christmas Story

Today I stumbled onto a particularly coherent explanation of the the origin of the Christmas story. It's in the form of a 33 minute video. I have not seen Parts 2 & 3 of the same series, which appear to be polemics on "911 Truth", and on "History of the Federal Reserve", respectively. I think the Part 1 linked above can stand alone as a good piece of scholarship.

The piece feels a little too pat, simplistic, at wrapping up the origins of Chrisianity. My gut feel is that the brief survey of the historians like Josephus is more or less veridical; that the resonance of the attributes of Jesus with those of Horus and Mithra seems convincing; and that the broad basis in astrology, though surprisingly explanatory of many core Christian themes, might be overstated. But this stuff should be the starting point for any serious consideration of what Christianity is about.

Bush Administration Scandals.

On December 6, we mentioned that Hugh at Netrootsmass had compiled a list of 284 Bush Administration scandals. Now it's 15 days and 8 scandals later. You've got your give-aways to lobbyists; the Administration's assertion of the right to kidnap British citizens; its assertion of States Secrets privilege to keep the purpose of Jack Abramoff's White House visits secret; the destruction of video tapes documenting use of torture; the underfunding of Social Security disability payments; the attempt to put the JAGs under the control of political appointees; the hidden costs of the Iraq occupation; the failure of the Justice Department to participate in the matter of Jamie Leigh Jones who was drugged and gang raped by employees of Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

Keith Olbermann on Bill Moyers Journal

On his Journal last night, Bill profiled and interviewed Keith Olbermann.

There is but one

Women in art

Bush Administration Scandals: Anybody Keeping Track?

This guy's trying. As of November 28, 2007, he had counted 284 scandals. To be fair, some are moral lapses of Republicans in Congress, and some are just indications of general governmental collapse, not specific to the Administration. I wonder if anyone is counting how many due to George W's "decisions" are now maimed or dead, or worse.

What happens at Guantanamo if you're found innocent?

You guessed it. You remain locked up because your release might compromise national security.

Cafferty: White House Illegally Deleted Over 10,000,000 emails

In a Jack Cafferty December 5 video essay (with transcript): "The Presidential Records Act of 1978 mandates White House communications be preserved. Another law broken -- Another example of nobody doing a damn thing about it." Anybody remember the 18 minutes on Nixon's tapes that were erased accidentally?

Ten Steps To Close Down an Open Society

Naomi Wolf's April 24 essay summarizing her good book.

Bush v. Bill of Rights

Phil Leggiere has written a timeline of the actions by the Bush Administration, beginning in January, 2001, to shut down public scrutiny of their activities by curtailing FOIA requests and limiting release of presidential documents, to surveil, wiretap, and read the email of the citizenry without search warrants, to maintain massive databases on citizens including, e.g., their library, credit card, and travel records, to detain indefinitely without charge, to interfere with dissidents' right to travel via the "watch" list, to infiltrate and monitor political and religious groups, permanently to retain data collected on innocent citizens in the course of criminal investigations, to authorize torture, to detain U.S. citizens indefinitely without charge or due process, to declare a public emergency and round up "disorderly" citizenry, to place the president in charge of all three branches of government in the event of "extraordinary" disruption.

Don't Tase me bro

I just saw for the first time the video of the student, Andrew Meyer, who was tased while asking John Kerry why he capitulated in the 2004 election. It was perhaps the student's holding Greg Palast's book Armed Madhouse that caused the police to consider him a danger.

Walter Kronkite on what U.S. should do in Iraq

Walter Cronkite tells why we are still in Iraq and what we should do.