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.
Author: lux
Follow Up to Bush = Torturer
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.
This Is Not Who We Are
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.
Bush v Gore Redux
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.
That Delux Apartment Is Good For You…
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.
On Blogs and Blogging
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.