Arbeit macht frei

(AP) A Republican gubernatorial candidate's call for creation of a forced labor camp for illegal immigrants drew rebukes Friday from two GOP lawmakers, who labeled it a low point in the immigration debate.

Don Goldwater, nephew of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, caused an international stir this week when EFE, a Mexican news service, quoted him as saying he wanted to hold undocumented immigrants in camps to use them "as labor in the construction of a wall and to clean the areas of the Arizona desert that they're polluting." [my em]

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[Link]

What more to say?

Tip o' the Brain to C&L

Get them out

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Of course, the wingnuts will be all over this, pointing out that such "bad news" is hurting the morale of the troops. blah blah blah blah blah. What's hurting their morale is being left in a situation by a bunch of self-serving politicians who are enriching themselves and their buddies by running a "war of choice", with no cost to themselves, and no end in sight. [my em]

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Jo Fish on the troops accused of raping an Iraqi woman and killing her family to cover it up. So long as our troops are there, more and more of this is going to happen.

Update:

It hits a bit closer to home for Lurch.

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The 502d has a long proud history of combat, tough, hard, but not murderers of women and children. I was proud to wear the "crying crow" on my left shoulder. If I had to be there, I was thankful that I was with a unit that had some pride in its history, an esprit de corps. And later I proudly wore it on my right shoulder. I felt sick when I first hear about this story and now, knowing the 502d is involved, I just feel dirty.

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Armchair Patriots

Good rant at Station Charon on the chickenhawks and their flag-burning charade. Damn near has 8x10 glossy photos with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one describing what each one was*.

They are the ones who are shouting the loudest for others to die in foreign lands, they are the ones waving the flag the most vigorously while undermining all that it is supposed to stand for. These are the Armchair Patriots, and they are legion. The insistence of the most vile of all, the Republican party, a group that has come to symbolize the darkest of all American traits to 'wave the bloody flag' and tar all others as disloyal and tresonous is a low point in our nation's history. This made it especially nice to see the party's failure to mount a successful effort to implement a constitutional ban on flag burning. "Old Glory" lost today" moaned Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist, his latest crusade to amend our governing document to include language denying rights to Americans beaten back by only one vote.

Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii gets it, a World War II veteran who lost an arm in service to his country said in regards to the Republican push for the amendment:

"Our country's unique because our dissidents have a voice....While I take offense at disrespect to the flag...I nonetheless believe it is my continued duty as a veteran, as an American citizen and as a United States senator to defend the constitutional right of protesters to use the flag in nonviolent speech."

Of course being a Democrat he is by that very association deemed `unpatriotic' and a `coward' in using the dastardly labeling of Frist, Karl Rove and the rest of the unscrupulous and yellow thugs who control the government, the media, the courts and by extension are the operators of the message machine that spits out the hateful swill that motivates the most reactionary and ignorant segments of the populace who represent their base. This anti-American political party could never carry the torch were it not for their deception and demagoguery in playing to the most base and vile instincts of the perennially angry. Like any good purveyor of tyranny enabling double speak and race baiting, they have a little something for everybody.

"Something for everybody" list follows. Go read.

*If you don't understand the reference, go get a note from your Mom saying you 're old enough to be here! And if it's signed "Epstein's Mom", kick rocks, kid!

What's that hissing noise?

For a light Saturday read, here's a quick, concise recent view of the housing bubble by Robert Reich:

America's housing bubble has not exactly burst. It's just sprung a leak the size of your average mortgage banker. What's clear is the boom is over. All across America, backlogs of unsold homes are long. Price increases are slowing. In some markets, home prices are actually dropping. I just bought a house in Berkeley, California, that I couldn't have afforded a year ago. I still can't afford it, but at least I'm breathing.

It's better that bubbles leak than burst. Gradual declines are always easier to manage than explosions. But the housing boom has been so large and important to the American economy over the past five years that even this slow leak will cause severe headaches.

One will be experienced by millions of households that had turned their growing home values into piggy banks to finance their continued consumption. That easy route to cash is just about gone. The inevitable result will be less consumption, which will mean fewer jobs.

A more immediate problem will arise for all the people making, financing, and selling houses. Here we're talking about a vast army of carpenters, plasterers, roofers, plumbers, electricians, mortgage bankers, home inspectors, real estate agents, architects, structural engineers and many more. According to Moddy's Economy.com, housing-related employment has accounted for almost a quarter of the five million jobs that have appeared since 2003.

In other words, without the housing bubble, the American economy will lose a lot of its fizz. I don't like bubbles, but from a jobs standpoint this recovery has needed all the fizz it can get. Median wages have gone nowhere. The ranks of the long-term unemployed have been unusually high. The percent of the labor force with jobs is lower than in 2000. Housing has been one of the few bright spots in the economy.

All of which brings us to Ben Bernanke and his gang at the Federal Reserve Board Open Market Committee. They're determined to raise interest rates because they think the economy is too fizzy and still prone to inflation. I hope they listen carefully: The hissing sound they hear is air escaping the housing bubble. There's less fizz in the economy than they think. Raise interest rates, and the Fed raises the likelihood the economy will deflate.

Bush takes credit for "creating" all these jobs. I wonder if he'll take the credit for their loss? I doubt it.

None of this bothers me personally. My house is paid for, my equity line is paid up, and I have enough money in the bank to pay off my credit cards if I had to. It's one of the advantages of staying in one place for a long time, and probably the only advantage of getting to be a sweet, curmudgeonly Olde Farte (Lctp!*) such as I. It helps that real estate prices have increased by a factor of six in the last thirty years and we were able to use that to our advantage a few times. Having said that, if I had to buy it today, I couldn't afford the house I live in.

My advice to you youngsters who would like to have your own home is to wait a year or two until the bubble is pretty much deflated. There's going to be lots of foreclosures due to the free-wheeling mortgage deals that sucked in marginally qualified homebuyers, and you may find just what you want at a bargain price - or at least a manageable one. It should go without saying that it is better to buy and pay for your own place than to rent and pay for someone else's.

*Lurch coined that phrase!

Cartoons

The Saturday funnies are up at Bob Geiger's. I especially like the one with Adolf and Uncle Joe.

Quote of the Day

Shakes:

Why, oh why, is my blog starting to look like The Onion when I'm writing about real things?!

The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds

Go read this article at Truthdig. Long, but worth it.

Editor's note: Truthdig contributor Nir Rosen, an American reporter who has lived for the last three years in Iraq and who can pass as Middle Eastern, describes what it's like to live under the boot of a culturally callous - and sometimes criminal - occupying force in Iraq. "The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media."

That's the first paragraph. Here's the last:

Imagine. The American occupation of Iraq has lasted over three years. The above stories are based on my two weeks with one unit in a small part of the country. Imagine how many Iraqi homes have been destroyed. How many families have been traumatized. How many men have disappeared into American military vehicles in the night. How many crimes have been committed against the Iraqi people every single day in the course of the normal operations of the occupation, when soldiers were merely doing their duty, when they were not angry or vengeful as in Haditha. Imagine what we have done to the Iraqi people, tortured by Saddam for years, then released from three decades of his bloody rule only to find their hope stolen from them and a new terror unleashed.

I can't really blame the troops. They've been put in a situation most of 'em haven't been trained for. They're exhausted, and more scared than they would ever admit, never knowing when or where an attack or explosion may come. They do what they've been trained to do, which is use overwhelming force. They want to come home alive, and I want them to as well. It's too bad this kind of shit happens, but the predictions that it would were ignored.

Bush and his handlers may have lost Iraq for us forever.

Countermajoritarian, No! Democracy forcing, Si!

A pretty good take on the Supremes' decision on Hamdan from Balkinization.

What the Court has done is not so much countermajoritarian as democracy forcing. It has limited the President by forcing him to go back to Congress to ask for more authority than he already has, and if Congress gives it to him, then the Court will not stand in his way. It is possible, of course, that with a Congress controlled by the Republicans, the President might get everything he wants. However this might be quite unpopular given the negative publicity currently swirling around our detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay. By forcing the President to ask for authorization, the Court does two things. First, it insists that both branches be on board with what the President wants to do. Second, it requires the President to ask for authority when passions have cooled somewhat, as opposed to right after 9/11, when Congress would likely have given him almost anything (except authorization for his NSA surveillance program, but let's not go there!). Third, by requiring the President to go to Congress for authorization, it gives Congress an opportunity and an excuse for oversight, something which it has heretofore been rather loathe to do on its own motion.

I repeat: nothing in Hamdan means that the President is constitutionally forbidden from doing what he wants to do. What the Court has done, rather is use the democratic process as a lever to discipline and constrain the President's possible overreaching. Given this Administration's history, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

This whole deal isn't really about the rights accorded to detainees or even the detention itself. It's about our own ideals and whether we live up to the things we profess to believe in, you know, little things like democracy and rule of law, or just pay them lip service. So far, it's just Bush's lips flappin'.

We need to rein Bush et al in (tossin' them out on their ass would be better) and SCOTUS' ruling has at least started a discussion. Boy, has it ever!

Much, much more lawyer-speak on this and other subjects of national importance here.

"Hi. My name's George and I'm an alcoholic potentate..."

Yahoo! Health via Truthdig

"Mr. Bush lives by the creed, 'Stay the Course!' But that course is disastrous on everything from the environment to health care to education to national security. He is like a drunk who insists on driving even as the passengers in the car scream, 'Stop! For God's sake, stop!' "

Parts 1 through 5 in the series "George Bush, alcoholic" here.

Impeachment? No. Impalement!

I might have posted this previously, but rather than look it up to see if I did, I'll just do it because I like it.

Will Durst

I don't know about you guys, but I am so sick and tired of these lying, thieving, holier-than-thou, rightwing, cruel, crude, rude, gauche, coarse, crass, cocky, corrupt, dishonest, debauched, degenerate, dissolute, swaggering, lawyer shooting, bullhorn shouting, infra-structure destroying, buck passing, hysterical, criminal, history defying, finger pointing, puppy stomping, roommate appointing, pretzel choking, collateral damaging, aspersion casting, wedding party bombing, clearcutting, torturing, jobs outsourcing, torture out-sourcing, election fixing, women's rights eradicating, Medicare cutting, uncouth, spiteful, boorish, vengeful, jingoistic, homophobic, xenophobic, xylophonic, racist, sexist, ageist, fascist, cashist, audaciously stupid, brazenly selfish, lethally ignorant, journalist purchasing, genocide ignoring, corporation kissing, poverty inducing, crooked, coercive, autocratic, primitive, uppity, high-handed, domineering, arrogant, inhuman, inhumane, inbred, inept, insipid, incapable, incompetent, ineffectual, insolent, insincere, know-it-all, snotty, pompous, contemptuous, supercilious, gutless, spineless, shameless, avaricious, noxious, poisonous, imperious, merciless, graceless, tactless, brutish, brutal, Karl Roving, backward thinking, persistent vegetative state grandstanding, nuclear option threatening, evolution denying, irony deprived, consciously depraved, conceited, perverted, peremptory invading, thirty-five day vacation taking, bribe soliciting, hellish, smarty pants, loudmouth, bullying, swell headed, ethics eluding, domestic spying, medical marijuana busting, Halliburtoning, narcissistic, undiplomatic, blustering, malevolent, demonizing, Duke Cunninghamming, hectoring, dry drunk, Muslim baiting, hurricane disregarding, oil company hugging, judge packing, science disputing, faith based advocating, armament selling, nonsense spewing, education ravaging, whiny, insane, unscrupulous, lily livered, greedy (exponential factor fifteen), fraudulent, delusional, CIA outing, redistricting, anybody who disagrees with them slandering, fact twisting, ally alienating, betraying, chickenhawk, sell out, quisling, god and flag waving, scare mongering, Cindy Sheehan libeling, smirking, bastardly, voting machine tampering, sociopathic, cowardly, treasonous, Constitution shredding, oppressive, vulgar, antagonistic, trust funding, nontipping, tyrannizing, peace hating, water and air and ground and media polluting (which is pretty much all the polluting you can get), deadly, traitorous, con man, swindling, pernicious, lethal, illegal, haughty, venomous, virulent, mephitic, egotistic, bloodthirsty, yellowbelly, hypocritical, Oedipal, did I say evil, I'm not sure if I said evil, because I want to make sure I say evil... EVIL, cretinous, slime buckets in the Bush Administration that I could just spit. Impeachment? Hell no. Impalement. Upon the sharp and righteous sword of the people's justice. Make it a curtain rod. Because it would hurt more.

Yes, political comic, writer, actor, radio talk show host Will Durst received a thesaurus for his birthday, but he didn't need it.

Non-tipping? How low can they go?!

Isn't that just the best one-sentence description of those clowns ever?

"We will see the burial of the empire of the eagle"

Greg Palast interviews Hugo Chavez at The Progressive, plus a little perspective on why Bush has refused his offer of $50-a-barrel oil.

But the ascendance of Venezuela within OPEC necessarily means the decline of the power of the House of Saud. And the Bush family wouldn't like that one bit. It comes down to "petro-dollars." When George W. ferried then-Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah of Saudi Arabia around the Crawford ranch in a golf cart it wasn't because America needs Arabian oil. The Saudis will always sell us their petroleum. What Bush needs is Saudi petro-dollars. Saudi Arabia has, over the past three decades, kindly recycled the cash sucked from the wallets of American SUV owners and sent much of the loot right back to New York to buy U.S. Treasury bills and other U.S. assets.

Chavez would put an end to all that. He'll sell us oil relatively cheaply - but intends to keep the petro-dollars in Latin America. Recently, Chavez withdrew $20 billion from the U.S. Federal Reserve and, at the same time, lent or committed a like sum to Argentina, Ecuador, and other Latin American nations.

Q: How do you respond to Bush's charge that you are destabilizing the region and interfering in the elections of other Latin American countries?

Chavez: Mr. Bush is an illegitimate President. In Florida, his brother Jeb deleted many black voters from the electoral registers. So this President is the result of a fraud. Not only that, he is also currently applying a dictatorship in the U.S. People can be put in jail without being charged. They tap phones without court orders. They check what books people take out of public libraries. They arrested Cindy Sheehan because of a T-shirt she was wearing demanding the return of the troops from Iraq. They abuse blacks and Latinos. And if we are going to talk about meddling in other countries, then the U.S. is the champion of meddling in other people's affairs. They invaded Guatemala, they overthrew Salvador Allende, invaded Panama and the Dominican Republic. They were involved in the coup d'etat in Argentina thirty years ago.

Q: Is the U.S. interfering in your elections here?

Chavez: They have interfered for 200 years. They have tried to prevent us from winning the elections, they supported the coup d'etat, they gave millions of dollars to the coup plotters, they supported the media, newspapers, outlaw movements, military intervention, and espionage. But here the empire is finished, and I believe that before the end of this century, it will be finished in the rest of the world. We will see the burial of the empire of the eagle.

Interesting stuff.

Friday Cattle Dog Blogging

I'm late for work so I put up another baby pic. I took this a couple hours after we brought her home from North Shore Animal League. She was just over 8 weeks old.

Shhhh ...

Don't tell me, I'm taping it while I'm at work and I'm gonna watch the match when I get home.

Update:

Germany wins after 90 minutes, 30 minutes of overtime, and penalty kicks! Oy, I didn't think my heart could take it.

Oh, Rudy?

Are you still planning to run for President in '08? Remember your big pal Bernie?

Former top cop Bernard Kerik is slated to stand before a Bronx judge today and admit to wrongfully accepting more than $200,000 in renovations to his home and failing to disclose a loan from a real estate developer.

Kerik has agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanors and pay a fine, instead of facing a possible felony indictment, according to a source briefed on the matter.

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You got too many skeletons in New York, pal. Time to leave quietly.

North Korea

I've been meaning to direct you to Lurch's place. He has links to photo essays about North Korea. During my handful of 'visits' across the DMZ (in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere), I never got to see the 'tourist sites', though I can vouch for the abject poverty in the countryside. Open sewage ditches are the norm and the infrastructure is crumbling, if any modernizing was done in the first place. I feel so badly for those poor people, under control of that insane midget. You know, I might have even supported a war to bring about 'regime change' and prevent NK from developing weapons of mass destruction.

Just think about that, ladies and germs. The third member of the 'Axis of Eeeeevil' has nukes (and the means to deliver them here), oppresses his people, and seeks to destabilize his region. Is it just me, or is the 'War Preznit' nothing more than a big fucking pussy?

Bed ... made

Blah3 via Pauly at Skippy's:

Dear Media,

I hope you all enjoy lying in that bed you've made.

All those years of making excuses for George W. Bush's ineptness, inadequacies, and illegalities have earned you absolutely nothing. You brushed aside his lack of experience and intellectual incuriosity in 1999 and 2000, mostly because you didn't like Al Gore. Your behavoir gave him a much better position from which to steal the 2000 election.

You bought the spin from Bush's minions, ignoring the crisis that was taking place in Florida after the election. You believed every lie they came up with, from 'The votes have been counted and re-counted and re-counted' to 'Al Gore is trying to steal the election,' and you decided that letting Bush take office (in the most literal sense possible) was 'best for the country.'

You papered over the fact that he was scared out of his mind on September 11, 2001 - to the point where he flew to Idaho to hide - in favor of painting him as a 'resolute leader.' You swallowed, hook, line, and sinker, every lie that came out of the White House in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq - in many cases embellishing the lies to make them sound more plausible.

You let the elite members of your profession use their positions as opinion-shapers to shove cooked intelligence down the throats of the American public. You placed that cooked intel on the front pages of every newspaper and magazine in the country, and you played that cooked intelligence at the top of every hour on your cable news outlets.

You never once asked, 'Where is Osama bin Laden?' [my ems]

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As I've said about the press on many occasions, worry less about the blogs and a little more about the folks who want to put you out of a job.

So...

Are they gonna fuck my neighbors over they way they did to New Orleans?

(New York -WABC, June 29, 2006) - It's being called the worst flooding the east has seen in decades. More than 200,000 people are waiting for flood waters to recede so they can return home. The flooding in New York is now blamed for at least four deaths and $100 million in damage.

States of emergency remain in New York and New Jersey and FEMA is expected to tour upstate New York in the next two days.

Levees around vulnerable Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania held against the swollen Susquehanna River on Thursday, ending an evacuation order for 200,000, but other towns anxiously watched as rivers approached record crests that threatened to extend the misery from flooding that already has killed at least 13 people.

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They're still taking stock of the damage and some rivers still haven't crested. I'm not too confident federal help will be there when these folks need it. Fortunately for us on Long Island, almost everything drains right off.

John Houseman Murtha

About Holy Joe, "You have to earn it". Feingold too.

The Neocon Battle for Media

Robert Parry, at ConsortiumNews, has an interesting take on the administration attacks on the NYTimes. Today's "must read".

Since the 1980s, when the neoconservatives burst onto the Washington scene, they have always understood the power that comes from controlling the flow of information that passes from the U.S. government to the news media and then to the American people.

This transmission of information through Washington was to these savvy neoconservatives what a key railroad junction was to Civil War generals, a strategic switching point to be captured and exploited.

For years, the Times' news pages had been the neocons' preferred conduit for fictitious stories about Iraq's nuclear weapons program as well as for criticism of Al Gore and other political challengers. During the war fever of 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice loved to cite supportive stories in the Times, made even more convincing because the Times editorial page opposed the Iraq invasion.

However, following the humiliating discovery in 2003-2004 of how the nation's "newspaper of record" had been deceived about Iraq's WMD, Times news editors began to resist the administration's propaganda themes and even rebuff some White House demands for silence on terrorism-related stories.

After using the New York Times for years as a favorite propaganda vehicle, the administration may now be making the newspaper and its editors an example of what happens to journalists who stop toeing the line.

But the larger significance of the Times bashing is that it marks the opening of a decisive phase in the Bush administration's long campaign to lock in a revised version of the American constitutional system, in effect putting Bush's national security judgments beyond question and outside any meaningful oversight.

Meanwhile, Bush's neoconservative administration is tightening its grip on what information the American people get to see and hear.

Message to journalists: Now that you know what chumps you've been played for, and how ill-used you've been, fight these motherfuckers like all our lives depend on it, because they do. You've let 'em get away with their criminal takeover for years, been complicit in it. Show some balls and help get our country back by finally telling the truth which you should have been all along.

Play your cards right and you can help put these bastards behind bars where they belong. Maybe you'll even sleep better.

It's them or you. Your call.

White House NYT Bashers: Hypocrites

Well, DUH! From DefenseTech.org, not exactly a far left outfit:

Bush administration officials have been lining up to condemn The New York Times for revealing a program to track financial transactions as part of the war on terrorism. But if the Times' revelation about a program to monitor international exchanges is so damaging, why has the administration been chattering about efforts to monitor domestic transactions for nearly five years?

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, many journalists - including this one - were briefed by U.S. Customs officials on Operation Green Quest, an effort to roll up terrorist financiers by monitoring, among other things, "suspicious" bank transfers and ancient money lending programs favored by people of Middle Eastern descent.

Interesting. Go read. Election year posturing and an attempt at intimidation. Basic Rove bullshit. More info about the fact that all this "secret" follow-the-money stuff has been a matter of public knowledge for almost five years is coming out all over the place as well.

One 'comment' reads simply "Hastert & "Loose Lips"?" I'm going to go bleach that visual out of my brain now.

Update:

Go read Wolcott.