I am a citizen of the United States of America. In this country, I can criticize my government as intelligently, as profanely, or as stupidly as I wish. I can call the president of the nation an unintelligent, uninspiring, and incompetent leader — which I have done. I can call my representative in Congress a buffoonish party hack — which I have done — and urge his removal from office by the voters. I can attack the policies enacted by government at all levels as often as I wish.

I can assemble with others to complain about the government. I can petition the government for redress of grievances. I can practice a religion free of government interference. Most importantly, I have the right to speak my mind. I can say whatever I want about the government short of advocating violence against it. I am free to speak or write critically about the actions or inactions of my government.

I can be a critic of my government because for hundreds of years, hundreds of thousands of Americans before me fought and died for my right to do that.
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Aung San Suu Kyi probably knew she was courting danger when she allowed “that wretched American,” as one of her lawyers called John Yettaw, to sleep overnight in her home. He’d exhausted himself swimming across the lake on which her house is situated and withholding mercy doesn’t come naturally to the type of person who wins a Nobel Peace Prize.

Burma’s ruling junta is another tiger that can’t change its spots. No doubt, its 12 generals are congratulating themselves over catching up Suu Kyi in a technical violation of her house arrest (allowing, however uninvited, an unauthorized visitor).

Aung Din, executive director of the US Campaign for Burma called it a “cunning scheme.” But there’s nothing clever or cunning about using the flimsiest and most obvious of legalistic pretexts to deposit Suu Kyi in Rangoon’s infamous Insein prison. Like many of the junta’s actions and policies, it’s heavy-handed, just like you’d expect from a tin-pot dictatorship. Even more pitiful, the junta seems to work at cross purposes with itself. Full Story »

(updated below: updates I-II)

Clark Hoyt’s New York Times public editor column on Sunday, “Telling the Brutal Truth,” brings the ongoing “debate” over whether waterboarding is torture to brave new heights of absurdity.

Hoyt opens the column:

A LINGUISTIC [all caps are Hoyt's] shift took place in this newspaper as it reported the details of how the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to strip Al Qaeda prisoners naked, bash them against walls, keep them awake for up to 11 straight days, sometimes with their arms chained to the ceiling, confine them in dark boxes and make them feel as if they were drowning.

Reading this, you might think, “Finally, in its news pages, the Times is going to call waterboarding what it is and what it always has been since its first recorded use during the Spanish Inquisition — torture. Plain and simple.” Yet you would be gravely disappointed.

For Hoyt then writes:

Until this month, what the Bush administration called “enhanced” interrogation techniques were “harsh” techniques in the news pages of The Times. Increasingly, they are “brutal.” (On the editorial page, they long ago added up to “torture.”) Full Story »

The Karen independence movement in Myanmar has entered its seventh decade.

Episode 1

Three years before she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi emerged as a national leader when thousands of protesting students and monks were mowed down by the ruling junta. The 8888 Uprising (August 8, 1988) was reprised, if on a lesser scale, in 2007 when over 100 civilians and monks were killed during the “Saffron Revolution.” Full Story »

Y’know, these days, so many people with so many different motives are trying to tell me in so many ways what the “truth” is that I wonder whether I’d recognize a “truth” — any “truth” at all.

I give up. I’ve collapsed under the oppressing weight of lies, prevarications, deceits, “policy adjustments,” rhetoric, no-longer-operative statements, attack ads, Perino-isms, cunningly packaged spin, and Rovian stump speeches with the rhetorical content equivalent to the unflushed contents of a toilet bowl.

Would someone please make possession of a Teleprompter a federal crime, punishable by listening to Rush Limbaugh 24/7 for life? Or Al Franken, for that matter? Can we stop the incessant harangue so reminiscent of “Father Knows Best” or, in the event Sarah Palin is speaking, “Mother Knows Best”? Or Hillary or Bill: “We Know Best”?
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Another year, another opportunity for the GOP to use 9/11 to pump fear into our populace while “honoring our dead.”

As a New Yorker, while that day and weeks and months that followed will always be with me, I’d long grown numb from the Bush administration’s and Republicans Party’s branding of 9/11 for their own despotic aims: an America in which democracy has been gagged, waterboarded and renditioned to a dank faraway cell for its own protection, while our “heroic” protectors of freedom fight against a noun — terror — and something that’s been around since the dawn of time — terrorists.

For a brief moment, however, during the Republican National Convention’s “9/11 tribute” film, I was viscerally reminded of the lengths to which our current leadership will go to terrorize their own citizens into handing over their liberties for another four years. Full Story »

Something I have always enjoyed about the US is its propensity for intensive navel-gazing. Hell, the mainstream western nations in general are all good at this, but the US has turned it into an art-form.

The agonising over Iraq started long before the US even began the war, and continues till now. There is a voluble and energetic debate as to the best way to deal with the situation. You can call the president a traitor, or even – with a nod to Bugliosi – demand that he be tried for murder.

And this is all deeply pondered, and vitriolically debated.

Unless, of course, one suggests that other nations undergo similar scrutiny. Russia, for instance. Then you get flamed to a sizzle. Writers in Russia are treated even worse. They get killed. Full Story »

There’s a game I used to play with my geopolitics university students. I’d get them to form a circle and then I’d ramble about in the middle linking them up with black cotton thread. It would form a dense and incomprehensible jangle, tying them up in improbable ways. I’d always leave a few free.

Then I’d get one of the untied students to “attack” one of the tied students. As he moved towards the other, he would have to cross the threads in the middle and would quickly draw others into the conflict.

The thread, I told my students, are the ties of international trade and politics. And Russia has just played silly-buggers with everyone else’s party. Full Story »

Young man, you have the gift of gab. Keep it up and some day you’ll be President of the United States.

— an old Republican to a young Warren G. Harding after his first political speech, according to a New York Times obituary of President Harding; Aug. 3, 1923.

I predicted that New Orleans would come back as a stronger and better city. That’s the prediction I made. I also pledged that we’d help. And $126 billion later, three years after the storm — we’ve helped deliver $126 billion of U.S. taxpayers’ money. (Applause.) And I thank you for applauding on that statement, but I know you’re applauding the American taxpayer. A lot of people around the country care deeply about the people down here. And so it was — you know, it was money that we were happy to spend.

— President Bush, speaking at the historic Jackson Barracks in New Orleans on the recovery of the Gulf Coast region three years after Hurricane Katrina; Aug. 20.
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“It would appear that not only did the Bush administration lie this nation into war and order documents forged, but they allegedly tried to plant WMD in Iraq.” Larisa Alexandrovna noted this yesterday in her post “Can’t find WMD in Iraq? Plant it?”

In the comments section I wrote:

Yet Nancy Pelosi is still saying the case has to made for impeachment. Nancy Pelosi, our fearless leader who is apparently scheduled to be one of the first speakers at the Democratic National Convention. Nancy Pelosi, who at least until last week (when approached at one of her book signings) has yet to read Dennis Kucinich’s multiple articles of impeachment (*cough* isn’t that part of her job?!). Nancy Pelosi should hang her head in shame. Full Story »

It’s my day off, so I was home, and the ground starts rockin’ and rollin’. So I thought, ‘You know what? I’m gonna go to the bar, drink with my bros, and if this is the Big One, I’ll go down with a cold one.’

— Ed’s Pub patron Michael Gallardo after a 5.4-magnitude earthquake shook the Los Angeles area; July 30.
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Dear Mr. McClellan:

Let me just start by saying that I don’t like you.  You are part of a fraternity of yes-men, mouthpieces, and belly-crawling boot-lickers spawned by Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, the father of public relations, and author of the seminal work, Propaganda.  Like you, Bernays helped some of the most despicable organizations and people get their way by manipulating public opinion. 

So, now you’re repentant, are you?  I suppose that’s something.  It doesn’t absolve you any more than it absolved Lee Atwater when he apologized on his death bed for being one of you, but it probably drops you a notch below Joseph Goebbels in the Public Relations Society of America’s Hall of Heroes.  Maybe if you devote the rest of your life to good works, you’ll come back as E. coli. 

It’s the most you can hope for. Full Story »

You want a dark, Goth version of Tweety Bird? Have at it.

— Lisa Gregorian, executive vice president for worldwide marketing at Warner Brothers Television, in a story about “[a]n unusually large number of classic characters for children … being freshened up and reintroduced — on store shelves, on the Internet and on television screens — as their corporate owners try to cater to parents’ nostalgia and children’s YouTube-era sensibilities”; June 11.

Your eminence, you’re looking good.

— President Bush, addressing Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican; June 13.
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What critical news story received less overall mainstream media coverage than Dennis Kucinich’s introduction of 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush? What same news, with immense impact on our First Amendment rights, got even shorter shrift than last week’s Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report confirming that the Bush administration “led the nation to war on false premises”?

Give up?

Here’s a hint: Fox News, if inadvertently and riddled with falsehoods, devoted more attention to this story than almost any other news outlet.

The answer? The National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR).

You know, where all those “fascists” and “loons,” who “live in an alternative universe,” come together to revivify freedom of the press even though “about 50% of the liberals say [the media] is unbiased.” (Please click on that link to see video of Bill O’Reilly, “journalist” Juan Williams – who officially forfeits any remaining semblance of journalistic credibility – and “political analyst” Mary Katherine Ham discuss the conference; it’s a cartoonish example of what inspired the media reform movement to begin with.) Full Story »

We were just having fun making posters. There was no time to think about what we were doing. It was a furious time, but I think most great art is created in a furious moment.

— Stanley Mouse, artistic partner of Alton Kelley; the pair created hundreds of classic psychedelic rock posters and threw “the world’s first psychedelic dance-concerts at Longshoreman’s Hall in September 1965, essentially starting the San Francisco scene”; Mr. Kelley died this week at age 67; June 3.

When it comes to issues like this, [corporations] don’t want to be anywhere near them and they will cave very, very quickly — anything to stop the pain, anything to stop the press from calling.

— Eric Dezenhall, the head of the crisis public relations firm Dezenhall Resources, on Dunkin’ Donuts’ decision to remove an ad from its Web site featuring celebrity chef Rachael Ray after conservative bloggers complained her scarf resembled a keffiyeh, labeling it “jihadi chic“; May 30.
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History has returned from the dead. The idyllic future, once considered inevitable by Western leaders in the early 1990s, is dead instead. The dreams of a liberal, all-men-are-created-equal world are dead, too.

So says author Robert Kagan in his new book The Return of History and the End of Dreams, a sober, realistic evaluation of the world today.

But while it may be sober, Kagan’s take on the world is not necessarily sobering—at least not in a slap-in-the-face, really-bad-news-from-the-doctor kind of way. Kagan rationally and dispassionately looks at the world stage and the actors currently playing major roles, as well as the actors who wish they were playing major roles. Full Story »

The Bush administration and its surrogates are stepping up attacks against former press secretary Scott McClellan over his explosive White House memoir.

Ari Fleischer, President Bush’s first press secretary and McClellan’s old boss, elaborated this morning on previous statements from several current and former Bush administration officials that “this is not the Scott I know.”

Speaking with NBC Today co-host Matt Lauer, Fleisher said, “You know, Matt, the guy we all knew seemed completely willing to disseminate lies about a war of choice that would lead to the senseless deaths of over one million Iraqis and 4,000-plus American soldiers. In other words, we knew him as a loyal, soft-spoken and honorable man. Scott led us to believe that he, like us, was little more than a soulless husk of a human being. A ruthless, unethical, democracy-killing zombie. Sadly, that’s apparently not the case.”

“So you’re saying he lied to you, Ari?” asked Lauer. “That he misled the administration and the American people?”

“Yes. I’m saying he was not the doughy-faced Goebbels comfortable with seeing his country irrevocably slip into the grip of murderous fascists that he presented himself to be,” Fleischer clarified. “And I think it’s incredibly dishonorable for Scott to do this now. He could’ve at least waited until President Bush left office. But,” Fleischer said, shaking his head in disgust, “I guess that vestige of decency is gone. I’m heart-broken. It makes me wonder if Scott ever believed the propaganda he said from the podium.” Full Story »

Exxon Mobil is acting like a dinosaur now, not adopting to a changing environment.

— Stephen Viederman, a New York shareholder, after “Exxon Mobil’s chairman and chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, defeated a shareholder effort … to take away one of his jobs at an annual meeting punctuated by a debate of the company’s policy toward renewable energy and global warming”; May 28.

Despite significant challenges in the U.S. market, we continue to reshape our business for long-term success. This attrition program gives us an opportunity to restructure our U.S. work force through the entry-level wage and benefit structure for new hourly employees.

— from a statement by Troy A. Clarke, the president of G.M.’s North American operations, announcing that “19,000 hourly workers — a quarter of a unionized work force that already has been drastically pared down — have accepted buyouts“; up to 16,000 of these $28-an-hour workers may be replaced by “entry-level” non-assembly workers making $14 an hour; May 30; emphasis added.
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It’s a pleasure to watch Obama’s mastery of the technique. And Clinton — and I didn’t say “even Clinton” — uses it much better than McCain does. And just about everybody does it better than the capering loon who does soft-shoe in the White House while young Americans are dismembered and splattered in Iraq. Sometimes when he speaks I can forget who he is momentarily and find myself actually pulling for him; probably from misplaced performer empathy. His speechifying has a strong odor of remedial reading about it, combined with an apparent fear that there might be some hard words ahead.

— from a New York Times commentary by Dick Cavett discussing President Bush’s public speaking skills; March 28.
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I have little to say about the Kabuki theater that is Elliot Spitzer’s fall from grace, so aptly summed up is the situation by my man Motherwell over here. But it does tie in to a larger point–if a former Attorney General and current Governor of one of the most powerful states in the country can be brought down by a wiretap this easily, what chance does anyone have in this, the modern surveillance state?

Because that’s what this is, folks. We’re living in a surveillance society now, our every move tracked, our emails catalogued, our phone calls traced, our Web sites marked for future reference. It doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad, they know when you’re sleeping and awake. And they know who your friends are, who you speak to, where you go, what you buy, and what you do with all of it.

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