Internal Monologue

Dog-whistle politics refers to the practice of using coded language in political speech that only your intended target audience can hear. The rest of us just find it confusing if we hear it at all. George W. Bush used the technique in the presidential debates. Remember when he mentioned the Dred Scott slavery case ? Everyone was scratching their heads wondering what the hell he could be referring to. But it was actually quite obvious , once you let Google do the work for you: anti-abortion activists see themselves as similar to anti-slavery activists. For them, Roe v. Wade is like Dred Scott. So when he criticized Dred Scott, he wasn't just stating the glaringly obvious (that slavery is wrong), he was sending a message to anti-reproductive rights folks that he's on their side, without alerting pro-choice people that this is the case. A more recent example of this technique might be his seemingly bizarre statement that Iraq is " just a comma ". Some on the left have ...

Someone in the UK was looking for "driven to insanity. monologue" on Google UK and stumbled on to my blog (and promptly left). But this person has the honor of being my 10,000th visitor since I installed Sitemeter (and I'm proud to say I started my counter at zero).

Man, the news does not stop tonight. Is there a coup going on in Iraq ? There's a curfew . Somebody got arrested. Was it Shiite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr ? Here's Iraq the Model : Earlier on Friday, al-Sharqiya and al-Hurra TV networks reported that the home of a senior lawmaker from a "large political bloc" was raided by a joint Iraqi-American force. The identity of the lawmaker was kept secret "due to the sensitivity of the case" the report said. The news also indicated the politician was arrested after a bomb factory and at least one VBIED were discovered during the raid. So some people are speculating that the current escalation is a reaction to the arrest. Others believe the situation is connected to the threat a senior aide to Sadr made during the Friday prayers. Hazim al-Aaraji, one of the closest aides to Muqtada al-Sadr warned the government on Friday that the Sadr movement would "start a revolution to topple the government if anyone dared...

Oh my God, this could be huge. See Daily Kos and other places. Speaker Hastert knew about this ? Pelosi called for ethics hearings and it passed 410-0. In 10 days there must be a report. I'm sure I won't be able to keep up with this. If Republicans were trying to cover this up, they are a bunch of sick fucking hypocrites.

Here's a cartoon that says something I and others have been trying to say for a while now (HT: Mad Latinist):

[Updated Below] Pretty creepy : ABC News reported Friday that Foley also engaged in a series of sexually explicit instant messages with current and former teenage male pages. In one message, ABC said, Foley wrote to one page: "Do I make you a little horny?" In another message, Foley wrote, "You in your boxers, too? ... Well, strip down and get naked." Foley, as chairman of the Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, had introduced legislation in July to protect children from exploitation by adults over the Internet. (HT: Firedoglake ) The irony is almost too heavy-handed to be believable. I had heard about this a day or so ago but I didn't post on it because it seemed like it could be some kind of smear campaign, but he's resigned and the Florida Republicans are scrambling to find someone to replace him for the November election. Poor kid: becoming a congressional page only to get hit on by a congressman. To the kid's credit, he reported it. App...

Remember back when I advocated "commented" blogrolls over "naked" blogrolls? OK, you probably don't. But I'm happy to point out Progressive Gold 's blogroll as an example of the sort of thing I'd like to see more of in the blogosphere: each link comes with a brief description of what the blog or website is about. I don't think Progressive Gold did it because of me, but it's good to see the notion cropping up in other places. I hope this becomes the standard form for blogrolls.

The quote on my sweatshirt, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." is from The Tempest . So far, Kitty and baby Quinn have been getting along just fine. Kitty seems somewhat circumspect around Quinn. She'll sniff him occasionally, but usually keeps her distance. The one exception is when I'm sitting at my computer with Quinn on my lap on this pillow. She'll often jump up and join him, or at least check him out before running off.

Jon Stewart has a great little segment on Bush's incoherence on Iraq and the recently partially released National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). See the video on Crooks and Liars .

It's funny to recall how Lieberman worked himself up into a moral tizzy about video game violence back in the 90's, but today voted to allow the Bush administration to torture people. OK, technically he voted for a bill that included provisions allowing the Bush administration to determine what acts constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions, but given what we know about the Bush administration that basically means allowing them to torture.) Atrios has the appropriate reaction : A hideous human being, a disgusting moralist who is morally bankrupt...Today Joe voted for torture. A sick and twisted man, obsessed with his own image and his desire for Tim Russert's love. One of David Broder's Wise Old Men, one who hates the constitution, human rights, and the rule of law. The same could be said of the other 64 in the "yea" column, but Lieberman is supposed to be so "principled" and "moral". And he used to be a Democrat. We need to rid th...

To illustrate what our government is doing, it is now helpful to visist Khmer Rouge prison museums. There, you will find instruments of torture, such as a waterboard. Here's a photo, courtesy of blogger David Corn (HT: Sullivan ): Go read the post . There's another view of the waterboard and an illustration of the waterboard in action. And here's the most important quote: Why is this relevant to the current debate? Because the torture techniques of North Korea, North Vietnam, the Soviet Union and its proxies--the states where US military personnel might have faced torture--were NOT designed to elicit truthful information. These techniques were designed to elicit CONFESSIONS . That's what the Khymer Rouge et al were after with their waterboarding, not truthful information . Bottom line: Not only do waterboarding and the other types of torture currently being debated put us in company with the most vile regimes of the past half-century; they're also designed speci...

Bwahwahwahah. American Christians are so full of it. OK, I should say a lot of them are full of it. They claim they're all moral, but according to this poll from a year ago they are more likely to think that it's OK to torture suspected terrorists than secular people are: (HT: Slacktivist , a Christian whose writing and thinking I respect immensely, and who is rightly disturbed by this poll.) Note that the poll asked about suspected terrorists. Not known terrorists or convicted terrorists, but suspected terrorists. Is it OK to torture them? I'd say hell, no. But apparently a lot of people disagree. And the Christians are more pro-torture than the seculars. Given what happened to the leader of their weird cult, you'd think Christians would endorse torture as a rate significantly less than us secular folk. But no. You'd think that all that time spent contemplating the suffering of some guy getting nailed to pole two thousand years ago would drive home the evil of ...

My Left Wing has a different take on the shameful bill that recently passed the Senate. Here are some of the main points: All this bill is, is an utterly MEANINGLESS piece of kabuki theater. ... 1) Congress has NO authority to decide if these things are legal or not. That's up to the COURTS to decide. ... 2) The torture is happening the same, regardless of whether this bill passes or not. ... 3) Bush cannot claim retroactive immunity based on Unconstitutional law. ... 4) A Democratic congress will easily reverse this bill . It's worth taking a look at the whole post. Thereisnospoon has a good point. We shouldn't let this shameful grandstanding distract us from the major political fight right now, which is getting as many Democrats elected to congress as possible. Still, I disagree that people shouldn't be angry about this bill. Whether or not it's constitutional or meaningful, it still reflects the moral direction of the country, which is pretty sick. I wonder...

I step out for a week to have a son and what is my government doing? This is insane. Bush can declare anyone an enemy combatant, imprison them without trial forever, and then gets to decide what is and is not torture? This makes me sick. I'm angry the Democrats did not filibuster this. Of course, the blogosphere is in flames. Digby here , Sullivan here (and many other places. Say what you want about Sullivan, he's been on top of this issue for a long time), the superb Greenwald here . It's pretty clear that our hard-won freedoms mean nothing when there are political points to be scored. Sad, disgusting, and awful. And don't buy this bullshit"three valiant Republican Senators" narrative that the mainstream media seems so enamoured with. These three all voted against the habeas corpus amendment that Specter introduced (HT: Atrios ). Watching McCain allow the Bush administration get away with some of the very same things that were done to him in Vietnam is li...

Via Blogometer , here's a funny video re-edit of the iconic 80's flick that pokes fun at Joementum for missing so many Senate votes. Certainly more entertaining than the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act . I think Internal Monologue might have to be renamed Zac's YouTube Selections .

Yo! All you "stay the course" folk, get a load of this: if you believe in Iraqi democracy, I think you should support American withdrawal from Iraq. Or at least relocation of US forces to the Kurdish-dominated areas. Take a look at this graphical representation of Iraqi opinion on the matter from the Washington Post (HT: Kevin Drum via Atrios ): Can we please quit this ridiculous "we must stay the course" charade? The American public has turned against this war, the Iraqis want us out, our army is overextened. What the hell are we waiting for?

Here's a funny little Star Wars parody scene (HT: Mad Latinist): It's funny that in episodes IV, V, and VI, we see plenty of Vader reprimanding his own subordinates (as only Vader can), but never Vader getting chewed out by the Emporer.

Apparently, our intelligence agencies are not drinking the same Kool-Aid as the Bush administration. The national intelligence estimate has some pretty glaringly obvious conclusions about how Iraq has worsened the terrorism situation. (Though apparently the White House is refusing to release the whole document, so who knows what else is there.) Sullivan thinks it's time to either withdraw from Iraq or "up the ante" in a major way. My opinion is that increasing the strength of our occupying forces may have been a viable option a couple years ago, but not now. Persuading the public to ramp up for a war that a solid majority of Americans oppose is not going to work. And my suspicion is that increased military presence in Iraq would exacerbate the anti-American sentiment already prevalent throughout the Muslim world. Even if we did succeed in stabilizing Iraq, the only thing we would accomplish from a geopolitical standpoint is building up an Iran-friendly state. People s...

Via rubber hose , here's one of those do-it-yourself toys that make the Internet such a wonderful thing: Make your own motivational posters! Here's one rubber hose did:

It's been said before, but Orcinus says it well : When it comes to the left, the mainstream media have exactly two all-purpose storylines going. We will always be portrayed as either spineless wussies, or angry loonies. The only choice we have here is to decide which one we're going to play to. Given that choice, I'll go for angry loony every day of the week. [...] I say it's high time we borrow this [Republican] strategy, and put it to work. Let go of the fear. Accept that they're gonna say what theyre gonna say. Stop apologizing for anything. And let's bring on the angry Democrats. Yes! Let's at least be entertaining! Kicking ass is fun.

(Photo from Sullivan's blog .) While Allen's claim that "macaca" was just an invented nickname he came up with on the spur of the moment has always rung false to me, this photo makes that claim sound even more dubious. I believe he came up with it at the spur of the moment, but the fact that when he reached into his mental grab bag for a spur-of-the-moment nickname and came up with a monkey-derived insult that's a racial slur in the area his mother comes from says something about his psychology. It's particularly pathetic because Allen doesn't have the excuse of growing up in a particularly racist culture. He grew up in an upper middle class family in California (his dad was a famous football coach ). All his racist cultural traits were adopted delibrately. (OK, it's possible his family environment was racist, but it didn't have all the cultural trappings of the racism that Allen seems to flaunt.) I might be able to forgive a racial slur if wasn...

Via Crooks and Liars, Keith Olbermann lays into Bush like never before (they have the video). Olberman's reacting to this Bill Clinton ambush on FOX news that Clinton turned around and make Chris Wallace look like a chump. He thanks Clinton for calling Bush and his minions on this anti-Clinton revisionist history we've been seeing recently. And he calls Bush a coward. Now one can read this kind of rhetoric in the progosphere all the time, but there's a great sense of uplift to hear this come from a news anchor on a prominent mainstream cable network. I'm tired of Bush getting the kid glove treatment. Someone needs to call him the corrupt criminal he is. It's so refreshing to hear Keith's special comments. Why aren't more TV pundits willing to go into this territory? I understand that these editorials are increasing his popularity a good deal.

(HT: Sullivan ) But only if you buy them in the airport : He said that most liquids and gels that air travelers purchase in secure areas of airports will now be allowed on planes. He called the new procedures a "common sense" approach that would maintain a high level of security at airports but ease conditions for passengers. That means that after passengers go through airport security checkpoints, they can purchase liquids at airport stores and take them onto their planes. The new procedures go into effect on Tuesday, Hawley said. When I put on my tinfoil hat , I wonder how much the airport vendor lobbyists had to do with this. Seems like a reasonable compromise, though. Or more reasonable than the previous rule, anyway. Sullivan thinks this particular London plot was probably "hyped for political purposes", and I agree. I'd go further and say that the whole airline terrorism threat is highly overblown. Indeed, the entire "War on Terror" is overblown,...

I keep reminding myself of the hideous irony: John McCain has just allowed the U.S. president to use some of the techniques the North Vietnamese once used on McCain when he was a P.O.W. If that doesn't make you sick to your stomach, then I guess you'll never understand why so many of us feel so strongly about this. I don't feel I can raise the proper amount of noise on this, given my new status . But this is sick and sad. I want nothing more than to pull the American flag up out of the shit this administration has trampled it in. That's why I have it in my blog's sidebar: so it can be associated with something other than what my government is doing while waving it. I worry about this administration, but I worry more about the America that would let this happen. I'd like to think that Bush is just ramming this immorality down our throats, but the sad truth is that there are many of us who are cheering him on as he does so. Unlike Sullivan, I've pretty much g...

Here's why it's hard for me to get worked up about Internal Monologue's usual topics these past few days. Quinlan Francis Drake Taylor ("Quinn") was born Thursday September 21 at 5:16pm, weighing 7 pounds, 15.5 ounces, and measuring 20.75 inches in length. Baby, mother, and father came home from the hospital today and are doing very well. So far, Kitty has not eaten him. And yes, we plan to sing him the appropriate Bob Dylan song a lot.

I must second Kevin Drum on his motion to have a national ID card provided for free to all Americans. Having 50 different driver's licenses is just ridiculous from a security standpoint. And if everyone had a photo ID, all of these voter fraud vs. disenfranchisement arguments could go away. (Or the Republican "supress the minority vote" stance would be revealed for what it is.) I'm not sure why people object to this ID card so much. If people are so concerned about the government intruding on their lives, it seems like the first thing to do is get rid of the Bush administration. Yes, an ID card may make you easier to track or something, but that's small potatoes compared to the notion that you can be declared an "enemy combatant" and held indefinitely without trial and subjected to "alternative interrogation techniques" (i.e. torture).

Via Crooks and Liars : The Army is lowering recruiting standards across the board, but they're still excluding homosexuals. "Islamofacism" is an existential threat worse than anything the United States has ever faced (bullshit, but that's what Bush is spouting), but we wouldn't want any gay Arabic translators. Time to end this crap. I'd love to hear some Democrats make some noise on this. Time to lead, people. If you want some enthusiastic support from this blogger, some public statements on this would go a long way. Can someone point me to Democrats who've gone on the record supporting a lift of the ban?

Boy I love it when intolerant monotheists go at each other! I agree with Kevin Drum that this Daily Show segment captures what's going on better than most stuff out there: Despite my track record of Vatican bashing (do a search if you want examples), I'm leaning towards the Pope in this little spat. I must add my voice to the chorus of folk (including Journal of Applied Misanthropology and Andrew Sullivan ) who say those people who are protesting this seem awfully thin-skinned. If an imam said something equivalent criticising Christianity or Judaism, I highly doubt Christians and Jews somewhere would start throwing fire bombs. The violence our country engages in is sometimes sick, wrong, and misguided, but at least in the area of religious provocation we seem to have a welcome nonchalance. I find it difficult to believe that people even care so much what the Pope says. As far as I'm concerned the Pope is a joke . But people take him seriously. And the response to his dis...

Here's the publicity photo for a movie I'm starring in, Cassandra's Echo . It's premiering at the 2006 FAIF Film Festival on Tuesday October 10th, 4:45 pm Screen #3 of the Mann Chinese 6 in Hollywood (next to the famous Graumann's Chinese Theater ). Festival schedule here , purchase tickets here . I will try to be there, but with the new baby (he better be born by then!) I might not be able to make it. I'm not really a creepy homeless stalker (I have a home), but I play one in this movie. I get to mutter a lot of strange, portentous things at the main character and lumber around the streets of San Francisco. This movie is an indie thriller with a creepy script that was a lot of fun to make. It was shot on a very small budget but with a great deal of professionalism. I haven't seen it yet, but the producers will send me a DVD after the premiere if I can't make it. UPDATE: The film festival seems to have exceeded its bandwitdth. I should have hosted the...

My wife and I will probably be leaving for the hospital tonight, but there's a chance we won't. So this could be my last post for a while. Keep insulting Bush and his enablers while I'm gone.

If this is true , then it's pretty frickin' mind-blowing. Well, actually it's not that surprising anymore. But in any decent Democracy it would be mind-blowing: The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet. (Emphasis in the original, HT: lamertstrether on Daily Kos.) I agree with this commenter on Kos (via Corrente ): Princeton needs to release the software they used to change the vote. Widespread access to this would end all e-voting immediately. I think this would be a good solution. Or better yet, as a form of civil disobedience someone should actually hack a real election. They should create an absurd result, such as making the communist, or a joke write-in candidate like "E. Leckshin Steeler" win. That would make headlines all over the country, and g...

Via Kevin Drum , I came across this LA Times editorial by Sam Harris which accuses liberals of having a "head in the sand" attitude about Islamic extremists. I have been a supporter of Sam Harris' book End of Faith , because I think it provides a much needed antidote to the pieties and politeness surrounding religios dogma in our society. But here I think he gets a lot of things wrong. Or rather, I think he's attacking a conspiracy theory America rather than Liberal America: At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe ...

Via Balloon Juice , here's a long and detailed report on how the Iraq occupation has decimated our Army's fighting capability. It was put out by Nancy Pelosi 's office. Here's the intro: The U.S. Army’s preparedness for war has eroded to levels not witnessed by our country in decades. As deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan continue unabated, there is a very real prospect that Army readiness will continue to erode, undermining its ability to meet the theater commanders’ needs and foreclosing any option for the U.S. to respond to conflicts elsewhere around the globe. The degradation of Army readiness is primarily a function of unanticipated high troop deployment levels to Iraq, chronic equipment and personnel shortages, funding constraints, and Pentagon civilian mismanagement. Now I'm pretty anti-war in most cases. I require an enormous amount of convincing before I can come to believe that killing lots of people is the best available solution to a problem. But I do ...

OK, something trivial is pissing me off. I know that what with Darfur and our nation's constitutional crisis and Iraq and global climate change, this is pretty small potatoes. But I've been in extensive discussion with Grishnash and Mad Latinist on this, and thought I'd share my outrage with the world. Why do we have all these different words for "someone who goes into space"? Astronaut, cosmonaut, spationaut, taikonaut, and now the Malaysian " angkasawan " (and yes, they use that term on their English website). It's a ridiculous Orwellian relic of the Cold War , and needs to be reformed. I can understand why each language might want its own word for something (though I think the French are fighting a losing battle). That's not the problem. What annoys me the fact that we call people of a certain profession from one country one name ("astronaut") while we call people with the exact same profession from another country another name (...

Whose crack this is I think I know His house is in the Village, though; He will not see me stopping here To steal some cash and snort some blow. My strung out whore must think it queer To stop without some needles near, Between the park and Avenue A She knows that smack is comon here. She gives her nipple pierce a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the beep Of my dealer calling for his take. This coke is lovely, white and cheap But I have promises to keep, And deals to do before I sleep, And deals to do before I sleep. This parody of Robert Frost's classic "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" was written by someone in my college sketch comedy group back in the mid-90's. I think it was Alexis Soloski, but I'm not sure (it wasn't me, though I wish it was). It popped unbidden into my mind as I woke up this morning, and it seems like the sort of thing that should be on a blog somewhere. You can find the original in a zillion antho...

Via Feministing , here's the NYT : WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Internal Revenue Service has revoked the tax-exempt status of the anti- abortion organization Operation Rescue West for prohibited political activity during the 2004 election.

Here's something I don't quite understand in all this sick and immoral torture legalization debate: why does it matter what law Congress passes? If Bush ordered torture or inhumane and degrading treatment, that is a violation of the Geneva Convention. The United States is a signatory of the Geneva Convention. Therefore, if Bush violated the Geneva Convention, isn't he a war criminal regardless of what US law says? Unless the US secretly withdrew from the Geneva convention, I don't quite understand why any of this crap going on in Congress right now even matters. Do treaties of this kind have to be backed up by additional laws? Can Congress effectively abrogate the Geneva Convention by passing laws that contradict it? Another question: Why doesn't some foreign government charge the Bush administration with violations of the Geneva Conventions? Would that be the diplomatic equivalent of farting at the dinner table? Or are other countries just afraid to expose the fra...

Cronyism above all else : After the fall of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003, the opportunity to participate in the U.S.-led effort to reconstruct Iraq attracted all manner of Americans -- restless professionals, Arabic-speaking academics, development specialists and war-zone adventurers. But before they could go to Baghdad, they had to get past Jim O'Beirne's office in the Pentagon. To pass muster with O'Beirne, a political appointee who screens prospective political appointees for Defense Department posts, applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration. O'Beirne's staff posed blunt questions to some candidates about domestic politics: Did you vote for George W. Bush in 2000? Do you support the way the president is fighting the war on terror? Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their view...

There's a fascinating interview here. Michael J. Totten, in an effort to get outside the Israeli "left-wing bubble", talks to Yaacov Lozowick , author of Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars . But he ends up hearing a critique of the recent Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah war very similar to what he heard from the leftist Peace Now people he interviewed earlier: MJT : Why was it stupid? Lozowick : It was stupid because we stumbled into what…it wasn’t a full-fledged war, but it was pretty close to it. From the perspective of the people living up north it was a full-fledged war. So we stumbled into what was an almost full-fledged war with absolutely no prior strategy. (HT: Sullivan ) What fascinates me is how differently Israel and the United States react to their failed wars. Israel seems to have no problem figuring out pretty quickly that the whole venture was completely FUBAR . Furthermore, it seems that there isn't a whole lot of left/right division on t...

Via Minipundit , I discover that according to this Rolling Stone profile New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg thinks the threat of terrorism is overblown: Nowhere is Bloomberg's independent streak more evident than in the way he handles the dicey political territory of terrorism. Say the threat is dire, and you look like a fear-monger; say it's overblown, and you look naive. Bloomberg, who has seen the intelligence reports and has dispatched NYPD officers to London, Afghanistan and the Middle East to investigate the jihadist threat, doesn't hesitate. Americans, he tells me, are "too freaked out" about the threat of another attack. "There is a much greater risk from lifestyles that hurt you - smoking, walking across the street without looking both ways, not putting bars in the window if you've got kids and you live above the first floor, those kinds of things." Amen. I'm glad to hear a nationally prominent politician saying something like this....

Who would have throught that gloriously pessemistic war critic Billmon would make a major contribution to the struggle against the Iraqi insurgency by deducing the existence of a high-tech weapon no one thought the insurgents could possibly have: "We've seen almost total loss of advanced brain functions among scores of top commanders and officials -- Sanchez, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rumsfeld, Cambone, Pace, you name 'em," one doctor explained. "The vice president's office, for example, is practically a coma ward. And yet most of these people have been nowhere near the fighting." Pentagon researchers say they are exploring the possible use of a "stupid ray" or some other high-tech device by the insurgents. "The implications are pretty grim," one scientist said. "Some of the worst-hit patients haven't even been to Iraq. If the terrorists now have a weapon that can reach all the way to Washington D.C., we've probably lost th...

It's been a while since I've taken a cheap shot at Joe Lieberman (CT-Lieberman), but this post prompted me to do so. According to the transcript on Lieberman's website (congrats on finally getting that up, by the way), Lieberman didn't say the word "Iraq" once in his September 15 speech at Fairfield University. LamontBlog and Atrios give him grief for this, but I'm not sure that's entirely fair. After all, the speech is titled “A Report to the People of Connecticut on the War on Terror” and we all know that Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror. So there's no reason for Joe to mention it. Of course, given that Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror, the good senator might have taken a moment to explain what it is exactly we're doing there (aside from depleting our military and bolstering Iran ). I'm sure that Lieberman's next speech will spell all that out in great detail. [insert link to .mp3 of crickets]

I hope to have photographs instead of ultrasounds in a few days, but until then here's a preview of the baby. He's hard to see, but the thing in the center that looks vaguely like an Asteroids spaceship outline is his nose (or his nose hole--ultrasound has an annoying way of seeing through your unborn child's flesh), and his right eye is just above it in the image. This reminds me of one of those images where people claim to see Jesus or the Virgin Mary in an armpit stain or something.

Within the next few days, it is likely that Internal Monologue will be going on paternity leave for a period of time. I'm sure all the Bush idiocy, ridiculous puritanism, theist delusion, and funny YouTube videos will be there for me to comment on when I get back. I will continue to post as time allows, but if there's an extended gap you know the likely cause.

Sullivan has an excellent post that drives at the heart of why the military is pushing back so hard against Bush's contempt for the Geneva conventions and for standards of decency in general. It's a letter from a marine who fought in Iraq in Desert shield/Desert Storm (Gulf War I) : Looking back, I think that one of the main drivers in these [surrendering Iraqi] men's heads was that they knew, absolutely, that they'd get fair treatment from us, the Americans. We were the good guys. The Iraqis on the line knew they had an out, they had hope, so they could just walk away. (A few did piss themselves when someone told them we were Marines. Go figure.) Still, they knew Americans would be fair, and we were. [...] We don't have that reputation for fairness anymore. Just the opposite, I think. And the next real enemy we face will fight like only the cornered and desperate fight. How many Marines' lives will be lost in the war ahead just because of this asshole who n...

From Google's Investor Relations site : Our informal corporate motto is "Don't be evil." I think that's going to be difficult if this Raw Story snippet is to be believed (I've had some trouble with Raw Story in the past): Google is "eager" to work with the Republican Party and has boosted its presence in Washington, D.C., according to Roll Call . "Google, one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley, is ramping up its political clout in Washington, D.C., while taking a series of steps to court Republicans," report Tory Newmyer and Paul Kane for Roll Call . "The company is filing paperwork today to open its first-ever political action committee, and later this month, it will make an endangered GOP incumbent the beneficiary of its first-ever Washington fundraiser." "The search-engine giant this month also deepened its ties to Republicans by inking a deal with former GOP Sens. Dan Coats (Ind.) and Connie Mack (F...

Looks like Bush will be rebuked by the Senate, thank goodness. As usual, Glenn Greenwald has the details : Sen. Reid stated flatly and unequivocally -- and I'm paraphrasing -- that the Specter bill was not going anywhere, that it would not be enacted. I then asked him how he could be so certain about that -- specifically, I asked where the 51 votes against the Specter bill would come from in light of the support it enjoys from both the White House and at least some of the ostensibly "independent" Republicans, exacerbated by the fact that all 10 Republicans on the Judiciary Committee voted in favor of it yesterday (at least they voted in favor of sending it to the Senate floor). In response, Sen. Reid explained that our system does not allow every bill to be enacted simply because a majority supports it, that Senate rules allow minority rights to be protected, clearly alluding to a filibuster. There's more on the Kos front page . I'm happy for two reasons: one, bec...

Swiped this picture from uggabugga . Several lefty bloggers (e.g. Digby UPDATE: and Atrios ) have noted the following irony: On the one hand, Bush and his minions have been saying that the "War on Terror" (a phrase that deserves quotation marks if there ever was one) is this huge, existential conflict of unparalleled import. On the other hand, they don't seem that interested in capturing Osama bin Laden. If this is World War IV and terrorists are as dangerous as the Nazis, shouldn't Osama bin Laden be Hitler? (Of course it isn't and of course they're not and of course he isn't, but the Bush administration clearly says otherwise.) I think that capturing Oasama bin Laden is more a point of honor and justice than something that will actually make us safe. But that's because I believe the whole terror threat has been ridiculously over-hyped. If I actually thought "The War on Terror" was as important as Bush has been saying it is, I can't ima...

One of the fringe benefits of not adhering to certain religions is that you are spared dilemmas of the following kind : We all know that Muslims have ceremonies. There's washing before prayer, praying a few times a day, and facing Mecca. But what if you're in space ? Water and zero gravity don't go together and water is very scarce in space. The sun sets and rises a lot more often if you're in orbit. And as for which way Mecca is at any given point in time.. Mad Latinist offers some advice in the comments section, as does yours truly : I think that spacecraft should install special rotating structures that you can strap yourself to that can pitch, yaw, and roll and are controlled by a complex array of motors hooked up to a positioning computer and operate in such a way as to always point you to your desired holy site (Mecaa, Jerusalem, the Indianapolis Convention Center , etc.) Then I think the other astronauts should, as a prank, reprogram this device so that people ...

I've been waiting for someone to do a demonstration like this (HT: Jules Siegel on Kos ). Now some folks at Princeton have shown just how vulnerable this particular machine is. I've stayed away from the whole vote fraud issue because of lack of expertise, but when the hacking is this easy to do, and it's this obvious how someone could do it, I've got to give it some play: For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably , modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab. Mitigating these threats will require changes to the...

Garrison Keillor has a great essay up on the ridiculousness of some of our current security procedures (HT: Sullivan ). He also makes fun of the word "Homeland": It all began with the name Homeland Security. Somebody with a tin ear came up with that, maybe the pest exterminator from Texas, or Adm. Poinduster, because, friends, Americans don't refer to this as our homeland. It's an alien term, like Fatherland or Deutschland or Tomorrowland. Irving Berlin didn't write "God Bless Our Homeland." You never heard John Wayne say, "Men, we're going over that hill and we're going to kick those krauts out of there. And we're going to raise the flag of the homeland." "Homeland" was a word you heard shrieked by a cruel man flicking his riding crop against his shiny black boots: "Zie homeland--ve shall defend it at all costs, achwohl!" Americans live in Our Country, America, the nation of nations, the good old U.S.A. He als...

Crooks and Liars has the video of Jon Stewart's response to Bush's speech. I didn't think the Little Richard part was so great, but Stewart was pretty funny.

OK, I'm going to complain about Iran: Given all we've done for them recently, they should like us more. We toppled hostile regimes in two neighboring countries (Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq), and are now spending lots of money and lots of troops to prop up a friendly regime in Iraq. We've improved their strategic position enormously, and of course continue to fund them through vast amounts of oil consumption. Really, Despite Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric, Iran has no greater friend than this administration. Maybe there's a secret pro-Iranian lobby group influencing US policy. Iran's Ahmadinejad and Iraq's Maliki: feel the love Glen Greenwald's most recent post and this one from Tuesday have a lot on the recent Iran-Iraq festival of love, and the incoherence of the US supporting the Maliki regime in Iraq but opposing the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad regime in Iran. Why they punditocracy's heads aren't exploding with the utt...

Bouncing around the progressive blogosphere, I've found a lot of people with ambivalences similar to my own about all the 9/11 memorial activity. This one on Legal Fiction captures what for me is a very important distinction: But then I figured it out — there are actually two 9/11s. The first one is — the day . The attacks themselves with the lost lives and the tragic heroism and everything else we remember all too well. But that 9/11 no longer exists. Or more precisely, it’s been pushed aside by the second 9/11. And the second 9/11 is the political prop — a mangled, grotesque doppelganger of the first one that has been whored out on the political street for over four years now. The second 9/11 is the source of policies that have made the world far worse, and have killed many times the number of people who died in the Towers. And so, what’s truly tragic about the second 9/11 is that it threatens to forever stain the legacy of the first 9/11. Specifically, given the policies that...

From this Kos story : But he did talk about Iraq, and healthcare, the Medicare drug benefit, energy policy, the estate tax, homeland security and protecting our ports, global warming, blogging, and just about everything else you can imagine. The least of which was "The Path to 9/11" and the fantastic work the blogging community did in the past 10 days in making it an issue. Yes, he reads the blogs, and has been for a while. That's why we were there. [...] What we did talk about was the rise of the left-wing blogs as a reality-based medium. He's very impressed by the amount of research and fact-checking that happens on the blogs on a daily basis, particulary compared to the traditional media. (Kind of makes you want to double-check everything you write, knowing that Bill Clinton is reading, huh?) He was impressed and grateful for the work done in pushing into the mainstream the travesty that the ABC/Disney movie was. Does he still read The New Republic ? Anyway, I thin...

Attaturk on Eschaton and on his own blog are finally saying enough is enough when it comes to fearmongering, and that this goes for Democrats as well as Republicans: I don't want to sound like Billmon here, but neither party has the guts to stand up and truly inform the public on the general "ineffectiveness" and weakness of terror groups. Anyone who actually said so would have the bodies of innocent civilians thrown at their feet and the "fear" words would come in a Katrina-level deluge. Osama and his pals got incredibly lucky on September 11th, so tragic is fate. Yes, they are highly dangerous and intelligence and police work is required. Sadly, any rationality to this clear fact cannot be engaged in now without scorn being brought down upon your head. Being afraid is the mode we are supposed to have, no matter how many times a 73 year old phrase about fear being the only thing to fear is tossed out. This is going to be a very hard point to get across to th...

Andrew Sullivan links to this Washington Monthly special featuring seven conservative commentators hoping for Democratic control of one chamber of Congress, or at least saying divided government would be good for conservative principles. Let's hope we get a chance to find out. And let's work hard to bring it about! You can always give a few bucks to a Netroots candidate . To maximize your political dollar's effectiveness, consider checking out some of the lower-profile races.

An old Dungeon Master of mine (not that kind of Dungeon Master, this kind) sent me this link to a bunch of gaming jokes done in the style of corporate motivational posters . I apologize to my non-gamer readers (if I have any non-gamer readers!) who probably won't get the jokes. Here's one to start off with (which has the added bonus of violating Disney's intellectual property rights, which I plan to do at every opportunity now that they've decided to become purveyors of right-wing propaganda that's both false and dull). If you're not a MMORPG player, you probably don't know what this means. But you know where to look ...

NYC Unveils 9/11 Memorial Hole NEW YORK—New York Governor George Pataki thanked President Bush for providing "ample, unquestioning financial support" for the $175 million pit. The Onion has a new "Blog" feature (well, new to me, anyway) that allows you to paste headlines, blurbs, and a small picutre into your blog. The Onion's novelty has worn off somewhat for me, but sometimes they just hit the nail right on the head. I thought this 9/11 story would be a great first use. It echoes the sentiments in the Olbermann editorial I just linked to and in this Billmon post . Billmon takes the most despondent pessimism about our country and makes it fun to read: The physical symptoms -- a lost war, a derelict city, a Potemkin memorial hastily erected in a vacant lot -- aren't nearly as alarming as the moral and intellectual paralysis that seems to have taken hold of the system. The old feedback mechanisms are broken or in deep disrepair, leaving America with an op...

It's great to see a media figure speak the truth to the Bush administration. 5 years later, the World Trade Center site is still a hole in the ground. Here's the video , via Taylor Marsh . I don't really know what to say on this anniversary. I worry about our fetishization of this event. It strikes me as too much like the South chewing over its defeat in the Civil War, or the Shia celebration of their leader's defeat in the centuries-old schism that produced the divisions that burn with violence to this day. But the shock and grief are real. I'm sad they've been politicized and poisoned by this administration. I'd like to feel I can put forward some token of remembrance, of grief, of respect for the dead, without at the same time contributing to an atmosphere of self-justification and blind lashing out. I don't want to feed sentiments which get corralled by people to twist the path of this nation to serve their profit and their mind-warped plans. I'd...