Fiat Lux

Thanks, Tommy Thompson, you're our winner!

I think Arnold Schwarzenegger's, Governor Schwarzenegger's speech last night was one of the finest I've ever seen at a convention, and I've been going to conventions for 28 years. his speech was outstanding, he gave a portrayal, he painted a picture of why people should be a Democrat, better and more ably than any person I've ever heard before.

Emphasis added. Thanks Atrios!

I realized this morning that yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of my blog's existence. Some 260 posts later, here I am, still blogging away.

In looking through my Technorati links and SiteMeter referrals, I've noted that over time I've gotten listed in a handful other people's blogrolls. That's of course gratifying to my ego, but when I see myself listed as being a "Progressive" blog it also makes me feel a little like I'm there under false pretenses. With my recent increase in spare time and the heating up of the political front, I've posted a lot about politics, but Fiat Lux was not meant to be a political blog as such. And I do not consider myself a "Progressive" - which seems to be the label people adopt when they believe the Democrats aren't sufficiently to the left.

When Howard Dean said, "I'm from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party" that had a lot of resonance for me. I'm a 3rd generation Democrat and proud of it. That said, I also voted for Giuliani and Pataki when I lived in New York City. I felt they were the better candidates for the job at the time. I'd vote for a Republican again if I honestly felt that s/he was the better candidate and more closely matched my policy beliefs. The way things are today, I don't think that's very likely though.

America, in my mind, is a grand social experiment. We've tried for 200+ years to build a better society, one that is a standard of success for the rest of the world. Problem is we're human and we don't always get things right. The industrial revolution brought some dramatic changes to the role of labor in people's lives. I think a lot of the social programs that have been introduced during the 20th century were various attempts - some more or less successful - to try to bring some balance to the equations that had been changed but the new modes of work. Some have been more successful than others; and of course the world is still changing. We may never get it right - but we cannot stop trying.

In short, I consider myself a firm Democrat and more centrist than far left, although others may not see me that way. And Fiat Lux is a blog that talks a lot about politics, but is not confined to it.

Happy anniversary, Fiat Lux! Let's see what the next year will bring.

I know you wanted to just relax and enjoy life but I'm glad to see you back. Otherwise I might have missed this gem from the dirty tricks book:

It seems that a Republican polling firm is conducting push polls in Wisconsin that explicitly use the accusation of the Swift Boat Liars for Bush in their misleading questions.

Unfortunately for them, they called the wrong guy: A democratic activist who jotted down their questions, and signed an affidavit confirming all of it.

They also made a boo boo by trying that in Wisconsin, which has a state law requiring any polling firm to reveal who is paying for a poll if asked. Naturally, the gentleman asked the caller who was paying for the poll.

Just as naturally, they clammed up.

What really pisses me off is that the SCLM just lets this stuff slide 99.99999% of the time. Without the Blue Blogosphere we'd be in even deeper doo-doo than we already are.

I was wondering if Kerry was ever going to step up to the plate and do something about the vile smear campaign BushCo is running against him. Tonight he did:

"For the past week, they attacked my patriotism and my fitness to serve as commander in chief," Kerry said. "We'll, here's my answer. I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and by those who have misled the nation into Iraq."

Indeed.

This president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child,

So said White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card.

I suspect Card was trying to express how much Bush loved America when he chose that phrase. But the way it came out, it sounded grossly paternalistic and insulting to the intelligence of Americans.

And to me, this is a classic example of what's wrong with the crew in the White House. They really do think they know better than the rest of us, and that this justifies their actions.

2 months to Election Day. Bring it on.

A quadruple bypass is not a walk in the park. I'm sending President Clinton & his nearest & dearest some good energy today.

Update - I'm also sending a get-well card - like anyone who's been sick, I'm sure he'll appreciate the support. If you're of like mind here's a mailing address:

The William J. Clinton Foundation
55 West 125th St.
New York, NY 10027

Gimli has settled in very well indeed. Tasha doesn't mind him, grumpy old lady Tina only hisses at him when he gets in her face. Tommy stopped hissing at him after about two days and now they play and groom each other a lot. Here's a sample:

He's taken to stealing the dish and hand towels off their racks and dragging them all over the house, which is pretty funny to watch. I have some pix of that too but need to get them developed.

Happy Labor Day weekend to all!

Once upon a time I wasn't so cynical, I like to remind myself. But the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this headline on Yahoo news today was, "There's the October Surprise".

U.S. Official Says Close to Catching Bin Laden

Cofer Black, State Department coordinator for counter-terrorism, said in Islamabad the entire "infrastructure" was in place to capture bin Laden and his close lieutenants, Pakistan's English language Daily Times reported.

[snip]

"Success against people that you know about, Osama, could happen tomorrow, could happen the day after, a week from now, or a month from now," he added.

Of course. Right in time for the election run-up. How convenient.

I wasn't always this cynical. I don't LIKE being this cynical. But when it's this obvious, it's damn hard to NOT be cynical.

I wish this had been available when I was in college! Sounds like a fantastic idea. Pet-friendly dorm debuts at Missouri college.

Some students are definitely not ready for the responsibility of pet ownership, but for those who are, it's a great way to give some stability and emotional support in what can be a emotionally trying time of life.

I knew one guy who had a ferret in his dorm room and another who had a rabbit for a while, but like most colleges Vassar did not allow pets in campus facilities. My last year in college I lived in a college-owned townhouse just off campus that did not allow pets either but one roommate and I each had a cat anyway. (She's old and cranky now but is sleeping on my desk as I type this).

There's a strong feeling in some parts of the blogosphere that in this campaign season, Democrats need to pull out all the stops and start smearing Bush with as much mud as is being thrown at Kerry. My own preference is try to stay out of the mud as much as possible (except for the occasional snarky comment. I'm not perfect.)

Why? Some years ago, my mother told me something very wise. We were discussing some personal issues and the temptation to play 'tit for tat' with people who are being hurtful to you. She told me that she felt it was important to always take the high road, even if the other person doesn't, even if you really don't want to. And she was right.

So in keeping with the high road theme, here's The Decembrist on Why Bush Must Go:

Consider, for example, the domestic policy proposals that Bush unveiled in his convention acceptance speech. The charges against them were as obvious and as uninteresting as the proposals: They're recycled. There's not enough detail. They're going to be expensive. All true, but not every idea has to be new; I don't need details; and if Bush really has the will, then maybe he can find the money -- he seems to find it for everything else.

What seems to have gone unsaid about this laundry list was that these weren't proposals that were blocked by a hostile Congress or that he couldn't find the money to fund. It's that most of them died as a result of his own incompetence and that of his administration. Could Bush have partially privatized Social Security in his first term? Quite possibly, but the commission he appointed, and the hacks he had working for him, didn't understand the first thing about it, and treated the serious technical problems they were paid to solve ? mainly the huge transitional costs -- as PR problems to be obscured by patently dishonest claims such as that Social Security is a bad deal for African-Americans. His "ownership society" proposals for tax-free accounts for health and retirement were so transparently just cover for another tax cut for the rich that he backed off even offering them in the State of the Union this year. His two domestic accomplishments, No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug bill, are basically sound ideas marred by profound incompetence in design. Most of those who support or supported the Iraq War now have the same view of that misadventure. And then there's allowing North Korea and Iran to become nuclear powers. On the macroeconomic front, while a president is not necessarily responsible for every turn of the business cycle that takes place on his watch, Bush is wholly responsible for his total indifference to the distinction between tax cuts and deficit spending that might shorten the recession and generate demand, and those that would not. That indifference is incompetence.

Emphasis added. And the rest of his piece is well worth a read.

Like I said, I am not perfect and I don't expect other people to be. I know it is very hard to try to hold onto your values when you feel so much is at stake and you're scared of what might happen if you don't win. I also think that holding on to your values when the going gets tough is important because it defines what kind of a person you really are. We're all going to have to live with ourselves after November 2, win or lose.

All this is not to say that Kerry should not fight for the election. Of course he - and we all - should. I'm happy to hear that more of the Clinton team is joining the Kerry campaign. They fought hard but they fought clean - just what we need right now.

Josh Marshall has the text of a letter sent from former President Jimmy Carter to Zell Miller regarding his recent screech -- sorry, speech -- at the Republican convention. It's worth a read. Here's the conclusion.

Zell, I have known you for forty-two years and have, in the past, respected you as a trustworthy political leader and a personal friend. But now, there are many of us loyal Democrats who feel uncomfortable in seeing that you have chosen the rich over the poor, unilateral preemptive war over a strong nation united with others for peace, lies and obfuscation over the truth, and the political technique of personal character assassination as a way to win elections or to garner a few moments of applause. These are not the characteristics of great Democrats whose legacy you and I have inherited.

Well, after dithering for almost but not quite too long, I took the plunge and did several things to get myself on-track for getting my MBA today. I sent in my transcript request to Vassar, got signed up at UC Berkeley for the remedial math, statistics, and accounting classes I need to take, got one of my two letters of recommendation lined up, and started my GMAT prep work. Tomorrow I go over to Berkeley campus to spend an insane amount of $ on the textbooks I need.

I've been stressing out quite a lot about this course of action, but it's a relief to actually make the commitment and be doing something again instead of wallowing in uncertainty. Now I just need to figure out how to get some math to actually stick in my brain. It's never been my strong suit. And then of course I have to persuade some fine institution to accept my application.....

Atrios has another excellent one: Bush versus Jesus.

Read, laugh, cry.

God bless you, Kath, wherever you are.

Juan Cole has a lengthy article about how al-Qaeda sees the world, and what it really wants. Whether he's right, I don't know, but it's an interesting assessment of the situation.

Amazing what you'll find when you're a police officer exploring the catacombs below Paris:

a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers. None of the films were banned or even offensive, the spokesman said. A smaller cave next door had been turned into an informal restaurant and bar. "There were bottles of whisky and other spirits behind a bar, tables and chairs, a pressure-cooker for making couscous," the spokesman said.

"The whole thing ran off a professionally installed electricity system and there were at least three phone lines down there."

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

Classes start tonight for my b-school prerequisite courses. First up, Accounting. My initial feeling is that this will be the easiest of the classes I have to take because it's the least hard-math of the three, but we shall see.

I still need to go buy some graph paper and possibly a calculator for Statistics. I'm debating whether I should find a software version to install on my Tungsten C or just buy a standalone. Also still trying to find out exactly what the calculator needs to do so I get the right one.

My GMAT prep is coming along reasonably well. The Kaplan CD and the ETS dowloadable prep package are both very helpful. As expected I need to brush up on my math, but the score for my initial practice test was not as horrible as I feared it would be. Since I'm not gunning for the top-tier schools, I'll be thrilled if I pull a 650 on the actual GMAT, and a 600 would be acceptable. If by some weird miracle I do better than 650 I may revise my plan and try for UC Berkeley or even - gasp - Columbia, but that's pretty unlikely.

One thing I've noticed is that the actual math per se is not always my problem. I've gotten questions wrong several times because I'm not parsing the question correctly. The more I practice, and focus, the better I should get at that.

Sad news for fans of musical theater - Fred Ebb has died.

I was part of the technical team for a production of Cabaret in college. I have a love-hate relationship with the show - on the one hand, it's great theater, but on the other hand, given the timeframe it's set in and the unhappy ending, it's not exactly uplifting material to work on. But then you have a gem like this:

[HERR SCHULTZ]

How the world can change
It can change like that -
Due to one little word:
"Married".

See a palace rise
From a two room flat
Due to one little word:
"Married".

And the old despair
That was often there
Suddenly ceases to be
For you wake one day,
Look around and say:
Somebody wonderful married me.

[FRAULEIN SCHNEIDER (spoken)]
You don't think it would be better simply to go
on as before?

[SCHULTZ]
No.

Rest in peace, Fred. Thanks for the memories.

I was going to put an even nastier title to this post but I don't want this blog to get into any smut filters. In short, the wackoes in Berkeley are at it again - they want to decriminalize prostitution.

I consider myself to be a feminist, but I cannot understand how this is a "woman's issue". It seems to me that the people who are going to benefit most by the decriminalization of prostitution are the pimps, who will not have to worry about their 'stable' getting busted and therefore be able to make more money for them, and of course the customers, who will be able to buy as much sex as they want without having to worry about police sting operations.

Backers of the measure insist that prostitution is a societal mainstay, a commodity in perennial demand. Therefore, it should be treated like any other job and have unions, government workplace protections, fair wages, insurance and legal recourse for workers who face abuse or civil rights violations

What planet are these people on? Women who go into the sex trade don't do it becuse it's a 'good job' or has the potential to be one. They do it because for whatever combination of reasons (poor self-esteem, bad coping skills, lack of education, drug addiction, etc) they can't do anything else. What we should be doing is helping prosititues get the skills and self-confidence they need to stop being prostitiutes, not helping them stay in the sex trade.

Investivagtive reporter turned blogger Greg Palast is running with another aspect to the "Bush dodged his Vietnam responsilibilites" story that has nothing to do with memos that may or may not have been typed in 1972.

In 1968, former Congressman George Herbert Walker Bush of Texas, fresh from voting to send other men’s sons to Vietnam, enlisted his own son in a very special affirmative action program, the ‘champagne’ unit of the Texas Air National Guard. There, Top Gun fighter pilot George Dubya was assigned the dangerous job of protecting Houston from Vietcong air attack.

This week, former Lt. Governor Ben Barnes of Texas 'fessed up to pulling the strings to keep Little George out of the jungle. "I got a young man named George W. Bush into the Texas Air Guard - and I'm ashamed."

THE PAY-OFF

That’s far from the end of the story. In 1994, George W. Bush was elected governor of Texas by a whisker. By that time, Barnes had left office to become a big time corporate lobbyist. To an influence peddler like Barnes, having damning information on a sitting governor is worth its weight in gold – or, more precisely, there’s a value in keeping the info secret.

Barnes appears to have made lucrative use of his knowledge of our President’s slithering out of the draft as a lever to protect a multi-billion dollar contract for a client.

In short, Barnes kept silent about Bush and got a big payout - his client got a no-bid contract to run the Texas lottery and he got a hefty fee out of it all. I suppose that's just business as usual in politics.

I don't know which annoys me more: the mindless jingoism that assumes God is on the side of Republicans, or the offhand anti-semitism suggesting that Jews can't be Americans. Seen at a recent Republican campaign rally:

Most confusing sign of the day: "If Jesus weren't a Jew, he'd be an American."

Amidst the despair, and there is a lot of it, a small ray of hope. Go read Bob Harris' excellent column.

May this new year be a sweet one for us all.

Interesting factoid from this WaPo article ... 40% of the troops in Iraq are from the National Guard and Reserves. There is not a doubt in my mind that if Bush is reelected that this will only get worse.

The rest of the article is also interesting, looking at the stresses a Guard unit faces as it prepares to deploy, but I don't have much to say about it. More on that in another entry.

I haven't posted in a couple of days... the holiday, a general feeling of malaise, and bad news from a friend have all got me off my game. But mostly, it's a feeling of impotence. I confess to the creeping feeling Kerry is not running a good campaign and that Bush is going to win in November. So why does it matter that I record what's going on?

I've been thinking more and more lately that if you aspire to have a blog which does something beyond recording the antics of your kids or how you repainted your living room, you ultimately need the belief that what you say matters. And right now I don't feel like anything I can say or do will actually have an impact on the world at large. The Bushies are going to do whatever the hell they want to do and I can't stop them. I can't persuade the Kerry campaign to get off its ass and start being more aggressive. The people who find their way to this blog are already likely Kerry voters. And I'm not timely, eloquent or well-connected enough to offer any unique insights into the world at large.

I'm not stopping blogging, but I think I'll be dialing it down for a bit until I find a way to believe that what I say is actually going to make any kind of difference. Call it ego, but I don't want to have just another mundane personal blog that nobody reads except my husband and my sister. I would like to think that I have something to say that at least a few people who don't actually know me are going to enjoy hearing. But maybe I don't.

Joe Klein in Time this week:

There is only one significant question left in this presidential election year: Can John Kerry hold George Bush accountable for this mess? My guess is, probably not. The Republicans, with a strong assist from Kerry, have successfully painted the Democrat as a flip-flopping incompetent when it comes to national security. It will be hard for Kerry to change that impression. In fact, he has only one chance remaining, in the presidential debates.

And that won't be easy: I've never seen George Bush lose a debate. He is a brilliant minimalist. Kerry by contrast is all oratorical flab—although he did begin to show some signs of life last week in a solid speech to the National Guard convention, in which he blasted Bush's "fantasy of spin" about Iraq. It is a powerful fantasy, though. And it is easy to predict Bush's response to any Kerry criticism about Iraq: "My opponent is too pessimistic," the President will say. "See, what he doesn't understand is that the President of the United States has to stand firm. We can't show weakness. And we won't on my watch." Unless Kerry can come off with a succinct, and lethal, response to those vaporous but compelling platitudes, he will lose this election.

I haven't been in large office buildings much the past few years, but having started classes at UC Berkeley's extension campus in downtown SF I am now going to one several times a week. And the security is ridiculous.

Call it a sign of the post 9-11 times, I suppose. Every person who enters the building is supoposed to sign in and show photo ID. Fine, but you're talking about a building where both Berkeley and SFSU hold classes. At peak times you'll have several dozen students lined up at the desk trying to get in before class starts, and two harassed, overworked guards trying to check everyone in. Someone 'unauthorized' can get in with no problem by scrawling something illegible on the paper and waving their wallet in the general direction of the guards. There's no metal detectors or bag checks, so it's not in any way a deterrant. It's more of an annoyance to the students who are standing there checking their watches and wondering if they'll get to class on time.

Seems to me this is just another example of a vast trend in America -- doing something to look good although no actual result is being produced. The building management's insurance company likely insisted on it, and if they didn't, then some of the major tenants' insurance companies probably did. After all, if a terrorist decided to bomb a classroom of people studying accounting and there was no building security someone might get sued. So now there's a desk and some people and a nice set of policies to point to in case of an emergency. Not that a spiky haired kid and an overweight older woman behind a desk could really do anything about anything except possibly call 911.

Now maybe there's hidden cameras with facial ID working to provide some accurate security, in which case I take it all back, but even in the unlikely possibility that there is, why go through the farce at the desk at all?

What's even more annoying is I have to go through this three or 4 times a week for the next couple of months.

The autumn equinox is today, marking the official end of summer. Not that we here in San Francisco notice it, because the weather is at its best right about now. Sometime in November it will get a little cooler and rain a lot until March or so. Then it warms up a bit and the rain goes away, and we're back to normal again.

To someone who grew up with Northeast winters, it feels like there are no seasonal differences out here. I don't really miss those days when the wind-chill factor approached zero, but like the old song says, autumn in New York was a beautiful thing. I miss the days when Central Park looked like a big patchwork blanket of fall colors and there was a crisp freshness to the wind that you never had in summer. I hated how early the sun went down, but there were the holiday lights to cheer you up - walking through New York in December was always a joy. The real slog was January through April, when all you had to look forward to was spring and spring always seemed too far off.

Of course, there's a lot to be said for never needing a down jacket and being able to wear flip-flops and a t-shirt in March. And Lake Tahoe is only 4 hours away if I want cold and snow. Perhaps this year I'll be able to scrape the bucks together for a ski weekend, I haven't seen snow in two years. A girl can dream.

In honor of Gimli's one-month anniversary at our home, here's a new photo of him:

Gimli will be six months old in a couple of days. He doesn't quite have kitten proportions to his body anymore, but he's not cat-sized yet. His paws and tail are disproportionately large for his body, though, so we expect he has a bunch of growing yet to do.

Yom Kippur. Catch you on the flip side.

Pandagon this morning pointed to an article about leadership, to which I wanted to add some thoughts.

A personal anecdote - a few years ago, the department I was working in went to have an offsite team-building exercise. This one involved climbing "rock walls" in a warehouse in the Mission District. What was interesting was that the instructor/facilitator who was working with our team thought the wrong person was the manager of our group. The actual manager was no leader, and she picked up on that immediately. It really brought home my understanding of the difference between leading and just being in charge.

Leadership is one of those things that to be really good at it, it has to be inborn. Which is not to say that someone who is not a natural leader cannot lead effectively, but s/he generally has to work long and hard at it, and also should have some other positive attributes to help compensate. (This is pretty rampant in the technology industry - developers with good ideas rarely are good natural leaders, but some can work at it and become effective.) Less so in politics, although Al Gore is a good example of someone who has a lot going for him but is not a natural leader.

I don't claim to be a stellar natural leader, but I do know how to lead. For me, it's a feeling almost like being on stage -- when you are actively in the process of leading, you need to be putting out that extra energy necessary to carry everyone along with you. Not to get too Biblical, but the phrase "Let your light so shine before men" is pretty apt. You don't need to always be right or always have the right answer, but you must have a clear picture in your head of where you are going and you must able to effectively communicate why you need to reach that goal.

You don't need to be a genius to be a leader, although a total moron would have difficulty grasping the issues well enough to lead. You need enough self-confidence to know when you have enough information to make a decision, so that you don't fall prey to information paralysis. You also need enough humility to realize (and admit) when you're not right or when someone else's idea is better than yours. For a really good leader this not even a conscious process, it's just a part of who they are.

All this is true whether you're leading a backyard book club or the United States of America.

Billmon's op-ed on blogging in the LA Times has a lot of people navel gazing today. Given that I've been struggling with the question of my own relevance it seems timely.

Billmon takes issue with the fact that some of the top leftleaning bloggers (Kos and Atrios most notably) have achieved enough success to be self-sustaining financially and have arguably started to be taken seriously by the more mainstream press, as well as the political establishment.

In the process, a charmed circle of bloggers -- those glib enough and ideologically safe enough to fit within the conventional media punditocracy -- is gaining larger audiences and greater influence.

The fact that the New York Times would do a major Sunday story about left-leaning bloggers is a good sign - the mainstream media is starting to admit bloggers are something more than a bizarre new Internet fad. And I think that this is more a positive than a negative. I've always been more interested in results than in precess. Even if this blog is insignificant, people who more or less share my point of view are getting listened to, and that's a good thing.

There are some bloggers who, I think, have let success go to their heads, but the number is small (the annoyingly smug Matt Yglesias being the most notable one). But overall, the successfull bloggers that I most liked do not seem to have been affected by success. Billmon is going through some sort of crisis of the soul, I suspect. What it is I don't know and I am not going to speculate. I hope he's OK, because his blog was consistently excellent and I'm sad he has decided to shutter the Whiskey Bar.

I'll just add that the day Kevin Drum linked to a post here and I got 650 views in 18 hours was the day I realized exactly how big blogs really had gotten.

At any rate, blogging ablout blogging is somewhat of an exercise in navel gazing, something I've been doing too much of, so I won't belabor the point.

Final side note - As it happens I have a Six Degrees connection in all of this - my husband was a co-worker of Kos' before Kos went full-time with the blog. That does color my attitude a little.

I'm a city dweller - have been so my whole life. So the new study that says living in a city is better for your overall health is a welcome bit of news:

Living in the suburbs may have once been part of the American dream but it can lead to nightmares such as high blood pressure, arthritis and headaches, researchers reported on Monday.

An adult living somewhere like Atlanta, with its spread-out suburbs and car-heavy culture, will have a health profile that looks like that of someone who lives in Seattle -- but who is four years older, the study found.

And also

There was no link between suburban sprawl and mental health. The RAND team found no differences in the rates of depression, anxiety and psychological well-being between people living in downtown areas and those in suburbs.

Even living in San Francisco, which is less dense that New York, I've noticed that I walk less here. It's easy to see how that effect would be magnified once you leave town altogether.

Digby, as he so often does, hits the nail on the head with a long piece about Bush v Gore 2000 and the likelihood of something similar happening in 2004. I agree with him that if the election is at all close then a raft of lawsuits will follow.

In 2000, the concept of waking up the morning after election day and not knowing who was elected was new and in a way a little exciting. It was uncharted waters, and back then, we didn't know how much the fix was in. Call it naive, call it willful blindness, call it an inability to accept that the other guy is less honorable than you are -- all true. We went to a rumble without a knife, and the whole world is paying for it.

Like Atrios, I can't quite bring myself to this point, but I can't say Digby's totally wrong either:

Foolishly, Gore thought that being modest and fair still meant something. He was not prepared for a streetfight. And, looking back I realize that I wasn't either. Like a green youth I didn't believe they'd actually go that far. Even after the impeachment sideshow, an event that solidified my belief in the lethal, fascistic nature of the modern Republican party, I was not fully prepared for the no holds barred approach they would take in this situation.

It is what led me to the point at which I am able to say without any sense of restraint or caution that I would put NOTHING past them --- even a staged terrorist attack. This is because every time I think they have some limits, they prove me wrong. As the old saying goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...won't get fooled again....

No, I do not believe they would stage a terrorist attack. But when it comes to internal domestic matters, especially ones pertaining to winning elections, yeah, there's not much they wouldn't do or try to do. We just have to find a way to keep them from doing it again. Hopefully while still holding on to what makes us better than them.

At one time I would have been spitting outrage and venom. Right now I'm mostly numb, but know I have to move, to say something, to get the word out there. This is too important.

The Republican leadership of Congress is attempting to legalize extraordinary rendition. "Extraordinary rendition" is the euphemism we use for sending terrorism suspects to countries that practice torture for interrogation. As one intelligence official described it in the Washington Post, "We don't kick the sh*t out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the sh*t out of them.”

[snip]

As it stands now, "extraordinary rendition" is a clear violation of international law--specifically, the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Degrading and Inhuman Treatment. U.S. law is less clear. We signed and ratified the Convention Against Torture, but we ratified it with some reservations. They might create a loophole that allows us to send a prisoner to Egypt or Syria or Jordan if we get "assurances" that they will not torture a prisoner--even if these assurances are false and we know they are false.

Last month Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Congressman, introduced a bill that would clearly outlaw extraordinary rendition. But Markey only has 22 cosponsors, and now the House leadership is trying to legalize torture outsourcing--and hide it in the bill implementing the 9/11 Commission Report.

I've previously blogged my outrage on America's use of torture (see this link and the June archives for more). I'm not going to repeat myself other than to say that this is wrong. This is not who we are nor how we do things. And we need to make sure Congress knows it.

Hat tip: Froomkin pointed the way.

It was bad enough that it was just a proposal, but now it's looking more likely that the US is going to go forward with the godawful plan of sending people to other countries to be tortured so we don't have to dirty our hands with it.

The Bush administration is supporting a provision in the House leadership's intelligence reform bill that would allow U.S. authorities to deport certain foreigners to countries where they are likely to be tortured or abused, an action prohibited by the international laws against torture the United States signed 20 years ago.

The provision, part of the massive bill introduced Friday by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), would apply to non-U.S. citizens who are suspected of having links to terrorist organizations but have not been tried on or convicted of any charges. Democrats tried to strike the provision in a daylong House Judiciary Committee meeting, but it survived on a party-line vote.

The provision, human rights advocates said, contradicts pledges President Bush made after the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal erupted this spring that the United States would stand behind the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Hastert spokesman John Feehery said the Justice Department "really wants and supports" the provision.

And don't bring up that "known terrorist clock is ticking" freshman philosophy class canard, please. This isn't about that. This is broad permission to ship off anyone we want -- provided s/he is not a US citizen -- to some other country for torture.

It's wrong. No two ways around it.

A vote for Bush says that you think torturing possibly innocent people is a good idea.

I'll be at a friend's house for the debate, so will not be liveblogging or offering immediate post-debate comment. There's plenty of bloggers who will be doing that with or without me, so no great loss. I will post some comments once I get home though.

I tried to take some notes during the debate but my friends have 3 kids under 5, so we had frequent distracions. Still, I saw enough.

Obviously Kerry 'won'. Bush stared out OK but as the evening wore on he floundered more and more, seemed to run out of new material, looked flustered, and generally did not seem on top of things anymore.

A few bits that jumped out at me:

Kerry -- "He outsourced that job too" -- referring to how the US did not catch Osama Bin Laden. Also -- "You can have my plan in four points, which I can tell you about here or you can go to johnkerry.com and read about it. Or you can have the president's plan, which is four words: 'More of the same.'"

Bush -- "What kind of message does it send to our troops to tell them 'wrong war, wrong time?'" He said it several times. He seemed to be saying it is better to lie to our troops than to tell them that Iraq is a mess.

I thought Jim Lehrer did a very good job moderating, and except for one lame softball on character issues, asked good questions. I hope the other moderators are as good.

Time to go read the spin.