Mick Arran

Like everybody else, I found it amusing - and sad - that the current president, persona-non-grata in 90% of the world’s countries and merely tolerated by the rest, had to flee to the home of an infamous dictator like Enver Hoxha to find a sympathetic audience. But then today, Peter Lucas - a political reporter who just finished a book about Albania - pointed out in a Globe Op-Ed that it wasn’t really Bush they were cheering. It was the US - and Bill Clinton.

Albania’s love affair with the United States did not begin overnight. It started when President Woodrow Wilson, after World War I, stood up to the victorious nations of Europe and insisted that Albania, made up of one of the oldest peoples of Europe, was a true nation and that its borders had to be preserved and protected.

Back then the so-called victorious Great Powers — Britain, France, and Italy — wanted to divide Albania up among its neighbors, as a sort of reward for fighting and defeating the German/Austrian coalition.

Serbia was slated for a piece here, Greece a chunk there, and Italy a section of the coast. But for Wilson standing up for Albania, the tiny, poor and defenseless country would have disappeared. So it is no small wonder than many an Albanian boy born after 1919 was named Wilson.

Keep reading →

DLC Mastermind and GOP camp-follower Bob Shrum actually had the balls to go on last night’s Daily Show and refer to himself as a progressive. And not just a progressive, but a leader of the progressive movement over 25 years.

It would appear that the Republicans aren’t the only ones living in BizarroLand.

Ready for a third party now?

The corporate privatization of education in general but particularly at the university level is a continuing scandal to which no one is paying any attention that I can see. Turns out it’s gone a lot further than that, even. Pharmaceutical companies have been allowed to hijack the training of our doctors.

THE revelation that the diabetes drug Avandia can potentially cause heart disease is the latest in a string of pharmaceutical disappointments. Vioxx was pulled from the market in 2004 because it doubled the risks for heart attacks and strokes. Eli Lilly recently paid $750 million to settle lawsuits alleging that Zyprexa causes diabetes. Many have criticized the Food and Drug Administration as being too lax about monitoring drug safety.

While those criticisms have merit, there is another culprit: the transformation of continuing medical education into an enterprise for drug marketing. The chore of teaching doctors how to practice medicine has been handed to the pharmaceutical industry. As a result, dangerous side effects are rarely on the curriculum.

Keep reading →

I said yesterday that we hadn’t heard from Georgia’s Atty General. Well, now we have and with true Southern Justice-style stubbornness, he’s going to drag his state through even more mud and make them look even more like revenge-hopped hicks than they do now.

Wilson, now 21, learned Monday that his more than two years in prison were apparently coming to an end with the order by Monroe County Superior Court Judge Thomas H. Wilson. Within hours, however, state Attorney General Thurbert Baker filed notice that he would appeal the ruling to the Georgia Supreme Court, arguing the judge had overstepped his authority.

Determined not to be outdone in the Stoopidity Dept, the prosecutor is fighting bail and prison officials want to check back with the original court before they do anything.

That set Wilson’s attorneys scrambling to free him on bond from the Burruss Correctional Training Center in Forsyth. But a prosecutor in the case would not immediately agree to a bond arrangement, Wilson’s attorneys said. And state prison officials said they would not release Wilson until they receive guidance from Baker’s office or the court where he was originally sentenced in Douglas County.

The twists and turns in the legal case sent Wilson’s attorneys and family through several emotional highs and lows Monday. Wilson’s mother, Juannessa Bennett, praised the judge’s ruling, calling it a “miracle.” But by afternoon, she was too worn out to speak, said a spokeswoman for her son’s attorneys.

Call this “Travesty Cubed”. Georgia “legal” authorities (I have to put that in quotes now because they’re obviously less concerned with the law than they are with making sure they don’t have to admit a mistake) seem hell-bent on persecuting Genarlow to protect the reputation of an autocratic prosecutor who got pissy when Wilson wouldn’t subordinate his rights to a power play. They think if they can drag this thing out, everybody will forget about prosecutor Eddie Barker’s hissy-fit and there won’t be any political blowback.

Hopefully, they’re wrong. Because what they’ve just done takes a legal mistake into the realm of outright racism. Would they be doing this dance if Genarlow was white? Hell no, and everybody knows it. If he was white he would most likely never have been prosecuted in the first place. He would have been placed on probation and sent home.

And that’s what this most recent nitwittery is going to force people to acknowledge, people who were otherwise willing to put this down to arrogance, political ass-covering, and dumb legal inflexibility. Fighting both the judge’s decision and bail for Wilson virtually proves that Georgia’s legal system remains a racist backwater with a double-standard, one for whites and another for everybody else.

Update 6/13/07: Thanks to a racist legal system and a state AG willing to cover for a prosecutor’s inexcusable tantrum, Wilson will now spend at least another month in prison until yet another judge can hold a hearing to decide whether he should be granted bail.

You know, Georgia reminds me of that kid in every class who says and does stupid things because getting some attention for moronic behaviour is better than getting none at all.

Then again, maybe all the stereotypes are, you know, true.

Update 2, 6/15/07: This is just pathetic. Georgia’s AG is taking some well-deserved flak over his appeal of this case and is trying to cover his ass.

The 10-year prison sentence imposed on Genarlow Wilson for receiving oral sex from a 15-year-old girl when he was 17 is “harsh,” but his punishment must stand to protect the law and keep more than 1,000 child molesters behind bars, Attorney General Thurbert Baker declared Thursday.

“As attorney general, I took an oath to uphold the laws of this state,” Baker said during news conference he called to explain why he is appealing a judge’s order to free Wilson. “And in taking that oath I don’t have the luxury of taking the law into my own hands, or picking which cases to defend.”

Of course he does. All prosecutors make those decisions a hundred times a day. Who’s he think he’s kidding?

The wide-spread meme developed by the RWNM as cover for side-stepping its responsibility for Bush - that the reason Republicans got whaled in November was because “they weren’t conservative enough” - has spawned a somewhat surprising off-shoot: a group of Reaganite conservatives who are attacking Republicans for their disinterest in the Constitution.

A new political group recently asked Mitt Romney to promise not to wiretap Americans without a judge’s approval or to imprison US citizens without a trial as “enemy combatants.” When Romney declined to sign their pledge, the group denounced him as “unfit to serve as president.”

Such rhetoric might be expected from liberal activists. But these critics, who call their organization American Freedom Agenda, are hardly leftists. They represent what they insist is a growing group of disaffected conservatives who are demanding that the Republican Party return to its traditional mistrust of concentrated government power.

“Mitt Romney’s ignorance of the Constitution’s checks and balances and protections against government abuses would have alarmed the Founding Fathers and their conservative philosophy,” said Bruce Fein, one of the group’s co founders and a Reagan administration attorney, in a press release last month attacking Romney for not signing the pledge.

Better late than never, I suppose, but one has to wonder about the absence of a similar blast at Bush. The Emperor and his Grand Vizier are the ones who have put what the AFA is upset about in place. It’s all well and good to demand of the candidates who would take his place that they renounce “ignorance of the Constitution’s checks and balances”, but how seriously can we take them if they don’t denounce the guy who’s purposely and blatantly violating the principles they say are so important? Without that one would be tempted to assume that this is, what? An election ploy? A cynical strategy to put the self-destructive GOP back in the hunt by appealing to those infamous swing voters?

“Conservatives have to go back to the basics,” said co founder Richard Viguerie , a veteran direct-mail strategist and author of “Conservatives Betrayed: How the Republican Party Hijacked the Conservative Cause.” “We have to go back and re launch the conservative movement. And for traditional conservatives, it’s part of our nature to believe in the separation of powers.”

The other two co founders are Bob Barr , a former Republican congressman from Georgia, and David Keene , chairman of the American Conservative Union .

All four argue that Bush is not a true conservative, and they decided to join forces earlier this year to make the expansion of executive power a topic of debate in the 2008 presidential election. They have applied for tax-exempt status, created a website, and drawn up a 10-point pledge that they intend to ask every candidate to sign.

These are not exactly moderates we’re talking about. They’re only slightly less extreme than the movement neoconservatives with which Bush surrounds himself. Viguerie and Barr were both vocal defenders of Reagan’s Iran/Contra operation, and Barr wasn’t exactly the Voice of Reason when he was in Congress. He played the part of hack and did what he was told.

So is this real or a PR play for sympathy and a plea to be allowed back into the reality-based community in time for the ‘08 election?

At this point, I’m leaning toward the latter, but I’m willing to be convinced.

Update 6/17/07: In the “I Shoulda Knowed” Dept, Sideshow’s Avedon Carol explains what’s actually behind this apparent anomaly.

[T]hey’re especially worried about putting the power of a runaway executive into Hillary Clinton’s hands.

Now it makes sense.

From the WaPo:

Maybe Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and his staff are just in denial. Or maybe they don’t read the papers, thus missing the sad news that Sen. Craig Thomas (R-Wyo.) died Monday, seven months after he was diagnosed with leukemia.

Whatever the case, Leavitt’s office called Thomas’s office late Thursday afternoon to request a meeting with the late senator.

Needless to say, grief-stricken Thomas staffers were stunned. One aide to Thomas sent the following e-mail to a friend (both names have been redacted):

From: (Thomas staffer) <@thomas.senate.gov>
To: (Staffer’s friend)
Sent: Thu Jun 07 16:49:36 2007
Subject: RE:

Oh yeah, note to Secretary Levitt’s [sic] office: Senator Thomas passed on Monday, 4 June. You may want to pass that along to his staff especially after they called today to get a meeting with the late Senator.

Call me if you’d like, really unbelievable!

These guys are so deep in the bubble, so insensitive to anything going on outside it, that they didn’t even know Thomas - a Republican, one of their own - was sick, let alone that he had died. An HHS flack tried to put the best spin possible on it, of course.

HHS spokeswoman Christina Pearson says she does not know who from the agency called Thomas’s office to set up a meeting but she acknowledged “obviously it’s a mistake.” She added, “Senator Thomas is held in the highest regard by the secteray [sic] and this office.”

Such high regard that they couldn’t be bothered to find out that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer 7 months ago, let alone that he had died. Somebody was ordered to arrange a meeting because they needed him for something. Until the moment they wanted use him, they couldn’t care less.

Keep reading →

Back in January, I wrote a post called “Southern Justice: Travesty Squared in Georgia” about a black teenager named Genarlow Wilson who was given an incredibly harsh sentence for a technical infraction of the law because a prosecutor got pissy when Wilson wouldn’t accept a plea bargain arrangement and forced him to go to trial. Voices were raised in Genarlow’s defense, including ESPN’s (Wilson was a well-known high school athlete). One commenter wrote:

It’s disgusting. I can not see any way, shape or form that the interests of the state of Georgia are served by throwing away Genarlow’s youth and opportunity to become a vibrant contributor to the state. All his situation does is reinforce some unfortunate stereotypes that the state is backward and misgoverned. No one with a conscience can look at this case and conclude that justice has been served.

Well, today a judge ordered Genarlow Wilson be freed.

A judge today ordered that Genarlow Wilson be freed from prison, where he has spent more than two years for receiving consensual oral sex from a 15-year-old girl when he was 17.

Monroe County Superior Court Judge Thomas Wilson also amended Wilson’s felony conviction to a misdemeanor without the requirement that he register as a sex offender.

Wilson’s lawyer, B.J. Bernstein, appealed to a judge Wednesday to free him from prison, arguing that his 10-year prison sentence and inclusion on the state’s sex offender registry is grossly disproportionate and violates the Constitution.

Keep reading →

Moved by the crowds of admirers, no doubt (the NYT says he “was treated like a rock star”), Bush got so confused he sounded like one - a drug-addled, not too bright rock star. Keith Richards, say.

The future of Kosovo is of paramount interest here; some Kosovo residents traveled to Tirana to join the crowd. The United Nations Security Council is considering a plan for independence, but Russia objects. On Saturday in Rome, the president agreed that there should be a deadline to end the United Nations talks, saying: “In terms of a deadline, there needs to be one. It needs to happen.”

But on Sunday, Mr. Bush tried to backtrack when asked when that deadline might be. “First of all, I don’t think I called for a deadline,” Mr. Bush said, during a press appearance with Mr. Berisha in the courtyard of a government ministry building. He was reminded that he had.

“I did?” he asked, sounding surprised. “What exactly did I say? I said deadline? O.K., yes, then I meant what I said.”

Uh, how can you mean what you say when you don’t even remember what it was?

The reporters laughed.

Yeah. Funny.

Our press. You like ‘em, you keep ‘em.

From the Boston Globe:

MAXWELL CORYDON Wheat Jr. was on his way to becoming the first poet laureate of New York’s Nassau County when county legislators realized he wrote not just about marshes and natural beauty, but also about war. The first verse of his poem “Iraq” reads:

“Males and one woman
sip coffee mornings in the White House,
talk of desires about Iraq.
For ten years
Less-than-Elected-Vice-President Cheney
evolves The Plan,
the Empire of the United States of America.”

The hearing on Wheat’s appointment erupted into an argument about supporting the troops. Nuance was lost. Tossing out this unruly poet, the unanimous choice of the nominating panel, came to seem like an act of valor.

Voted down by county legislators 6 to 1, Wheat nonetheless stands in the proud tradition of poets who write about war, an unflinching group who dip their pens into the worst of battle.

***

[C]ommunities in search of laureates should stop fooling themselves: Poets are largely not to be trusted with the work of comforting the comfortable.

Perhaps what some towns want instead is a publicist laureate or a cheerleader-in-chief, someone who puts out good news that rhymes or lights up a metaphor.

Poets won’t do for that job. Because poets, like Langston Hughes, won’t just let rivers be rivers; they freight them with sorrow and hope. Poets may hunt beauty, speculating as Walt Whitman does that maybe grass “is the handkerchief of the Lord,” or writing as Mary Oliver does that lilies are “like pale poles / with their wrapped beaks of lace,” but they almost never stop there. Poets also turn readers’ eyes to the rest of life, to jealousy, frustration, fear, loneliness, despair, and death.

It’s their job.

According to the BBC, the Emperor “received a hero’s welcome in Albania”.

Albania.

Reminds me of a story.

Once upon a time a man came to a NY nightclub for dinner and a show. He was arrogant, pompous, loud, and abusive. He threw his meal on the floor because he claimed it was undercooked, he yelled at the waiters and called them names, he spit out his wine, and he told the people at the next table they were low-class morons.

The manager, in an apparent attempt to mollify the man, sent a bottle of his best champagne to the table. When the man continued to be disruptive, the manager sent a maitre d’ over with a cheesecake - which the club was famous for - on the house. Still the man wouldn’t stop being offensive to everyone around him. Finally, the manager took off his own Rolex and sent it over to the man.

A waiter asked, “How can you give such an obnoxious jerk all those expensive gifts?”

The manager answered, “Well, he must be somebody’s father and I’m so glad he’s not mine, he can have anything I’ve got.”

Drew Sheneman

Tony Auth

Ben Sargent

I haven’t read his book but I’m going to take a wild guess here that George Tenet didn’t mention anywhere in it that he had his agency, the CIA, use NATO cover to set up the secret prison system in Europe that Cheney wanted in order to circumvent US laws against torture.

The CIA exploited NATO military agreements to help it run secret prisons in Poland and Romania where alleged terrorists were held in solitary confinement for months, shackled and subjected to other mental and physical torture, according to a European investigative report released here Friday.

Some of the United States’ highest-profile terrorism suspects, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, considered the prime organizer of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, were detained and interrogated at the facility in Poland, according to the 72-page report completed for the Council of Europe, the continent’s human rights agency.

Dick Marty, a Swiss lawyer hired by the council, said the CIA conducted “clandestine operations under the NATO framework,” providing military intelligence agencies in member countries — including Poland and Romania — the cover to assist the agency in disguising the use of secret flights, operations and detention facilities from the days immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks until the fall of last year.

The report was released yesterday and within hours the Denial Machine was in full swing.

Officials speaking on behalf of the CIA, NATO, Poland and Romania on Friday criticized the report’s findings. Both Poland and Romania have denied that the CIA established secret prisons on their soil.

“The CIA’s counter-terror operations have been lawful, effective, closely reviewed, and of benefit to many people — including Europeans — by disrupting plots and saving lives,” CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said. “Our counter-terror partnerships in Europe are very strong.” He described the report as “biased and distorted.”

Of course it is. Whenever Bush Administration spokesmen use words like that, it’s practically a guarantee that whatever it is they’re attacking is not only accurate, it’s the tip of a much larger iceberg. The only truthful statement in Gimigliano’s response is “Our counter-terror partnerships in Europe are very strong.” Everything else he said is a demonstrable lie. Keep reading →

I keep hoping somebody somewhere is going to hold the Emperor’s feet to the fire, and I thought maybe the G-8 conference on global warming would be the place. Host Angela Merkel, German Chancellor and a fire-breather when it comes to the environment, started out pushing Bush harder - a lot harder - than our home-grown Bubble Boy is used to. She was dead-set on specific commitments: actual numbers attached to real targets with specific end-dates. No more of these vague “voluntary” agreements from the US - the biggest polluter on the planet - that leave corporations free to spew as much poison into the air as they feel like without consequences or any kind of realistic plan to reduce harmful emissions in, like, this century.

Alas, it was not to be. Bush wanted the spotlight moved away from the US and onto the next two biggest polluters, China and India, and he got what he wanted by making another vague promise to “enter negotiations” before - get this - 2009.

The United States agreed Thursday to “consider seriously” a European plan to combat global warming by cutting in half worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, averting a trans-Atlantic deadlock at a meeting here of the world’s richest industrial nations.

The compromise, worked out in tough negotiations between the United States and Germany, also endorses President Bush’s recent proposal to bring together the world’s largest emitting countries, including China and India, to set their own national goals for reducing emissions.

The agreement reached Thursday does not include a mandatory 50 percent reduction in global emissions by 2050, a key provision sought by Chancellor Angela Merkel, nor does it commit the United States or Russia to specific reductions.

Coming from the man who has made a million promises in the past 6 years and kept two of them - tax cuts and the permanent occupation of Iraq - this one is worth nothing. Less than nothing. Bush, complaining of a convenient tummy ache, wasn’t even there for the announcement.

Keep reading →

Recent statements in which Bush seemed to have reversed his barricaded stand against acknowledging global warming and crossed to the other side got some people excited and made others suspicious. Those statements ignited a certain amount of legacy talk - as in, “Bush is finally concerned that his legacy as a president ought to include something other than the Iraq debacle” - and had people wondering if it he had finally come to his senses.

Now we know. He hasn’t.

As thousands of protesters clashed with police nearby, President Bush and leaders of other industrial nations traded markedly opposing views here Wednesday on how to combat global warming.

Despite the refusal of the United States, China and some developing countries to agree to calls for mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, Bush expressed optimism that the summit of the Group of Eight countries would result in agreement for a common strategy.

And what might that “common strategy” be, so you suppose? Ta-da:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, host of the gathering at this Baltic Sea resort, has said she wants action on global warming to be the centerpiece of the meeting. She has pushed for specific numerical targets for lowering gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050 and holding temperature rises to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

As an alternative, Bush has offered to convene a series of meetings among the world’s 15 top greenhouse gas-emitting nations with the goal of reaching consensus on nonbinding goals for reducing the pollution. Scientists say the gases are the prime cause of the current warming trend.

Asked by reporters whether he could relent and sign on to Merkel’s goals, Bush said: “No. I talked about what I’m for. Remember? I said I’m for sitting together with the nations to sit down and discuss a way forward.”

(emphasis added)

That’s precisely the same bullshit “strategy” Bush has been selling from the beginning. Now he wants to shove it onto the rest of the world.

Keep reading →

Pat Oliphant