Category Archives: media

Wut up.

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I find myself staring at a smattering of open browser tabs, each a reminder of a subject I had intended to write about this week.  Some of these tabs have been open so long now, I get the distinct impression they are purposefully mocking me and daring me to do something about it: you know, like, actually write something.  But when I reviewed them this morning, I realized the sources speak perfectly well for themselves.  There really is no need for some smart-ass blogger to pretend she has anything to contribute whatsoever.  So without further ado, I bring you:

IRIS’S OPEN BROWSER TABS.

A Frontline report, The Untouchables, investigates why there have been no prosecutions of Wall Street criminals.

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The Truth About the Deficit : It’s Not Very Big, And There’s Only One Way To Close It.  (See also: Deficit Hawks Down, a good piece by Paul Krugman.)

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UN launches inquiry into drone killings:

The inquiry will assess the extent of civilian casualties, the identity of militants targeted and the legality of strikes where there is no UN recognition of a conflict.

…

Some kinds of drone attacks – in particular “double tap” strikes where rescuers attending a first blast become victims of a second – could constitute a war crime…

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A Rape a Minute, a Thousand Corpses a Year: Hate Crimes in America (and Elsewhere).  I have a love/hate relationship with Rebecca Solnit’s writing.  For example, words cannot express the depth of my contempt for her grotesquely ill-informed condescension to lefties who do not partake of the Obama/Democratic Party KoolAid.  But this piece is outstanding, and deserves the widest possible audience.

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This piece by Julian Assange is from late November, but I had not seen it until recently.  It details quite explicitly the machinations of the U.S. government, as revealed by the State Department cables allegedly leaked by Bradley Manning and published by Wikileaks over the last two years.  Assange:

It is the case that WikiLeaks’ publications can and have changed the world, but that change has clearly been for the better. Two years on, no claim of individual harm has been presented, and the examples above clearly show precisely who has blood on their hands.

Indeed.  When U.S. foreign policy routinely includes war crimes, cover-ups, lies to the citizenry both here and abroad, support for death squads and brutal anti-democratic regimes, corruption, rendition for torture, and the deaths of untold numbers of civilians and children — to say nothing of dead, maimed, and psychologically destroyed American soldiers — the American public should damn well know the truth.  As you read it, consider whose interests U.S. foreign policy serves.  (SPOILER ALERT:  It is not We the People.)

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On a somewhat related note, here is a good Citizen Radio interview of former CIA officer John Kiriakou.  He has just been sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison for blowing the whistle on CIA torture, the latest casualty of President Obama’s unprecedented war on whistleblowers.  To date, no one who created, directed or participated in the U.S. torture regime has been charged by the DOJ with any crime.

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My WordPress stats page (which I cannot link you to) helpfully informs me that one of the week’s top search terms that brought people to the Palace is this:

it’s large phallus thrust deep into her virgin womb

I don’t really know what to say about that, except to point out for the sake of accuracy that a womb is a uterus, where no phallus should be found thrusting.  Like, EVAR.

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Finally, tomorrow is a travel day for me: I will be heading to London for a week.  Longtime Loyal Readers™ may recall my last trip to that lovely city, and the resulting groundbreaking journalism for which the Palace is deservedly renowned.  Our fearless and intrepid investigation into the pie-facing of Rupert Murdoch and the British government’s strategic response thereto still stands to this day as one of our proudest accomplishments.  Look for upcoming London dispatches — well, assuming the hotel wifi doesn’t suck.

In no uncertain terms: Israel and Gaza.

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We are hardly deaf to the prominent voices of the liberal blogosphere; neither are we oblivious to their critics on the left.  In particular, writers who consistently offered scathing condemnation of evil policies enacted during the Bush administration lost all credibility when they utterly failed to criticize the same evil policies under Obama — or worse, began defending them.  I still read some of those writers, but with a jaundiced eye:  I find that they frequently make insightful or informative points, but since 2009 I am no longer under the illusion that these are people who object to evil on principle.  Put another way, I may visit their Palaces from time to time but I would never trust them with the keys to my own.  Or with children.

And so it was that I came across David O. Atkins’ recent piece at digby’s blog, which I read with accelerating horror and disgust.  Although he does not deign to say it, it was written in response to this post by Chris Floyd (whose Palace we find very much to our liking, and would not fear for the safety of any small children residing there).  The good Mr. Floyd had written about the deafening silence of leading progressive bloggers on the slaughter in Gaza, which I excerpt here at some length (although I urge you to go read the whole thing):

It sure was a quiet weekend in the progressive blogosphere, where peace, justice and the alleviation of human suffering is an earnest, burning concern. At Eschaton, Atrios gave an amiable shrug and declared, “I got nothing to say.” Digby and her co-pilot, David Atkins, did have a few things to say – about Sarah Palin, General Pants-Down Petraeus, the grubby “Grand Bargaining” in the Beltway, and several examples of the stupidity and perfidy of right-wing Republicans. The posters at Daily Kos plied the same themes.

But even for those who didn’t got nothing to say, it was all very much in a low-key, mopping-up, post-election mode. It seemed as if there were no major news events going on anywhere in the world that involved the violent, unjust infliction of human suffering, with the direct monetary, military and political support of United States government and its entire bipartisan political and media establishments. Nothing that might grab the attention — even in passing — of writers publicly and professionally dedicated to discussing and analyzing major news events involving American policy, politics and the media.

Anything like that going on this weekend? Anyone? Digby, Dave? No? Kos and the gang? Anything? Atrios?

Nope. They got nothing.

Not on Friday. Not on Saturday. Not by Sunday evening (as I write this).

If you were a follower of many of the major “progressive” bloggers, you could have passed the weekend blissfully unaware that the American-armed, American-backed Israeli military was busily raining death into the cramped and crowded concentration camp of Gaza. Children dying, old people being blown to bits in their houses, the Israeli government ordering a massive call-up of troops and reserves for a possible invasion; top officials from Egypt and Tunisia flying into the besieged camp to show solidarity, mass demonstrations across the Middle East, some meeting with violent repression, others threatening to escalate into revolutionary outpourings. On every side: death, turmoil, suffering, chaos, whole nations in ferment — and Barack Obama standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Benjamin Netanyahu in defending assassination, aggression and the bombardment of defenseless civilians with massive military force.

As everyone reading this well knows, the Palace currently operates as a strictly VIP operation:  Many Tens of Loyal Readers™ do not an A-List progressive blogger make.  (We prefer to think of our readership as exceptionally discerning.)  Still, we were more than a little stung by Floyd’s criticism.  After all, we too had remained silent.

Not out of cowardice or amoral indifference mind you, but at least in part from sheer, wanton laziness exacerbated by our rather notorious capriciousness — which vices look positively virtuous next to the aforementioned failings, I would add in my defense.  Nor did I avoid the topic of Gaza out of a sense of complicit guilt.  Such guilt, I strongly suspect, accounts for the silence on the part of Atkins, Kos, and the rest of the A-list prog bloggers who actively campaigned to reelect Barack Obama.  But as Loyal Readers know, I did not vote for Barack Obama.  Indeed, I deployed every weapon in the Palace arsenal in an effort to convince others to desert him in droves.  And I hope that this is not interpreted as some smug sense of vindication on my part, but in that series of posts (and elsewhere) I have said all I could think of to say about the unconscionable evil that is U.S. foreign policy, under Bush and now Obama.  Watching it play out this week in Gaza (again) I noted with a grave weariness that the details change, but the story arc never does.  Nor, apparently, does the blood-soaked self-deceit of the American public.  I do not feel vindicated:  I feel saddened, sickened, and, more troubling to me than anything else, resigned.  That is about as uninspired a state in which a writer can find herself.  And so I remained silent — or perhaps more accurately, distracted myself with other topics.  But whatever one might say of my motives, there is no denying this fact:  instead of opining on the American-armed, American-backed Israeli military busily raining death into the cramped and crowded concentration camp that is Gaza, I chose to write an insufferably long post about Conservative Personality Disorder and my theory that a hierarchical worldview is the nexus between fiscal and social conservatism.  And then I threw a fucking birthday party for Voltaire.

And so I will remedy my omission now.

I do not support Israeli actions against Palestinians.  One of those two groups is an impoverished, oppressed minority whose lands were (and are presently being) forcibly taken from them and whose children are stunted from malnutrition due to years of punishing sanctions following a victory by Hamas in a democratic election; the other one is a theocracy backed to the hilt by American military power.  And if there is one thing I hate, it’s a goddamn theocracy with heavy artillery.

The notion that Israel is acting in self defense is a lie so enormous it would be hilarious if it were not so deadly.  Look at this map [h/t born on the wrong continent]:

How does a defensive action result in the total conquest of someone else’s lands? The answer is that it does not. Israel is the aggressor. The maps of Israel then and now prove it. [source]

I have no love for Hamas, which desires nothing more than its own theocracy with heavy artillery (and as I believe we’ve already established, I fucking hate those).  I am certainly no fan of rockets being rained on Israeli civilians, and I condemn such actions by Palestinians or anyone else.  But I simply cannot bear Barack Obama, a unanimous U.S. Congress, and the entire U.S. media establishment deliberately ignoring the fact that those rockets were not unprovoked:  on November 14, Israeli forces assassinated Ahmed Jabari, the very Hamas minister with whom Israel had been negotiating a long-term peace agreement via a backdoor channel.  (Jabari was killed in a targeted airstrike that took out a bunch of innocent civilians too, including the 11-month old son of a BBC cameraman.)  As Chris Floyd put it:

In other words, the Netanyahu government deliberately scuttled a deal which would have provided exactly what it says it is seeking. They knew the assassination would kill the deal; they knew it would provoke violent relatiation.

I found illuminating this Op-Ed in The New York Times by Gershon Baskin, who with the knowledge of Israeli security officials had been crafting the negotiated proposal for a long-term cease-fire with Jabari (via an intermediary, the deputy foreign minister of Hamas) at the time he was killed:

In the draft, which I understand Mr. Jabari saw hours before he was killed, it was proposed that Israeli intelligence information transmitted through the Egyptians would be delivered to Mr. Jabari so that he could take action aimed at preventing an attack against Israel.

…

Moreover, it included the understanding that if Israel were to take out a real ticking bomb — people imminently preparing to launch a rocket — such a strike would not be considered a breach of the cease-fire and would not lead to escalation.

Instead, Mr. Jabari is dead — and with him died the possibility of a long-term cease-fire. Israel may have also compromised the ability of Egyptian intelligence officials to mediate a short-term cease-fire and placed Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt at risk.

This was not inevitable, and cooler heads could have prevailed. Mr. Jabari’s assassination removes one of the more practical actors on the Hamas side.

More from Baskin:

This war is being presented in Israel, once again, as a war of “no choice.” The people of Israel are rallying around the flag as would be expected anywhere in the world. The United States government has voiced its support of the Israeli operation by stating, “Israel has the full right to defend itself and protect its citizens.” It certainly does, but we must ask whether there is another way to achieve the same goal without the use of force.

And if we are not @$$holes, we must also ask why Israel has a right to defend itself but Palestinians do not.

Unlike David Atkins, I do not give a flying fuck if I am deemed a vicious anti-semitic terrorist enabler (or worse) for saying this:  I stand squarely on the side of all of the world’s children and its innocent civilians — and the government of Israel is the belligerent, bellicose aggressor in the region.  Just like its big, bullying brother, the United States government, which endorses and enables all of it.

But of everything related to the story I so shamelessly avoided writing about this week, this little nugget absolutely takes the cake:

Barack Obama: “There’s no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.”

Well, except maybe for Yemen.  Oh, and Somalia.  And Pakistan.  Afghanistan.  Libya. And now, apparently, Gaza.

RAGESOB.

Pernicious powers.

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I’ve written before about the collective pants-wetting I witnessed in the months and years after 9/11.  I watched with abject horror as the citizens in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave — freedom-loving liberals and government-intrusion-hating conservatives alike — meekly acquiesced to one abridgment of their constitutional rights after another, all justified by the highly dubious rationale of “Keeping Us Safe.”  With the creation of the DHS, the principled, “small-government” conservatives in the Bush/Cheney administration and the Republican-controlled Congress were responsible for the largest expansion of the Federal government in history.  The abominable Patriot Act continues to be renewed with broad bipartisan support, and a secret, sprawling, massive, unaccountable Surveillance State now has its tentacles in virtually every American’s private life.  The system has a perfect, self-sustaining justification:  if there are no (Islamist) terror attacks on American soil, then it is credited for Keeping Us Safe and must be perpetuated.  If on the other hand there are (Islamist) terror attacks on American soil, then obviously we need to expand funding for more of it.

I said screamed then as I say again now: the rights we relinquish to the government will never be restored, and the power that we grant to it will never be relinquished.  I was (and still am) incredulous that any American in the 21st century could be so blindly gullible, so ignorant of all of history, to believe that secret surveillance programs, secret legal rationales, separate judicial systems, the militarization of the nation’s police forces, and a thousand other un-American abuses of power would only ever be used against Those Bad People.  Such powers are always —always — expanded beyond their intended limits, and abused for political purposes.

In addition to the NYPD infiltrating liberal groups and placing the expressly nonviolent Occupy movement under the purview of Counterterrorism Bureau’s Terrorism Threat Analysis Group, we have Glenn Greenwald reporting on the outrageous harassment and abuse to which U.S. citizens — who are suspected of no crime — are subjected upon returning from foreign trips by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP).

With no oversight or legal framework whatsoever, the Department of Homeland Security routinely singles out individuals who are suspected of no crimes, detains them and questions them at the airport, often for hours, when they return to the U.S. after an international trip, and then copies and even seizes their electronic devices (laptops, cameras, cellphones) and other papers (notebooks, journals, credit card receipts), forever storing their contents in government files. No search warrant is needed for any of this. No oversight exists. And there are no apparent constraints on what the U.S. Government can do with regard to whom it decides to target or why.

Lest you think these targets are all scary Muslims traveling back from madrassas in Pakistan, Glenn recounts the story of Laura Poitras, the Oscar-and Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker and journalist, who has been continually subjected to unconscionable harassment virtually every time she returns to the United States.  Her first film, My Country, My Country, was released in 2006 and nominated for the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary.  According to Glenn, it “focused on a Sunni physician and 2005 candidate for the Iraqi Congress as he did things like protest the imprisonment of a 9-year-old boy by the U.S. military.” Her second, The Oath, chronicled the lives of two Yemenis caught up in America’s War on Terror, and won the award for Best Cinematography at the 2010 Sundance film festival.  Poitras is currently working on the final installment of her War on Terror trilogy:

As Poitras described it to me, this next film will examine the way in which The War on Terror has been imported onto U.S. soil, with a focus on the U.S. Government’s increasing powers of domestic surveillance, its expanding covert domestic NSA activities (including construction of a massive new NSA facility in Bluffdale, Utah), its attacks on whistleblowers, and the movement to foster government transparency and to safeguard Internet anonymity. In sum, Poitras produces some of the best, bravest and most important filmmaking and journalism of the past decade, often exposing truths that are adverse to U.S. government policy…
[Emphasis added.]

Oh, dear me.  Not truths!  How on Earth is the U.S. government supposed to conduct its secret, imperialist and counterproductive “wars” if Americans learn the truth about their actions?

Let’s look at what the U.S. government has been doing to Ms. Poitras, an American citizen suspected of no crime whatsoever:

Since the 2006 release of “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called when she arrived at immigration). Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length about where she went and with whom she met or spoke.

…

She has had her laptop, camera and cellphone seized, and not returned for weeks, with the contents presumably copied. On several occasions, her reporter’s notebooks were seized and their contents copied, even as she objected that doing so would invade her journalist-source relationship. Her credit cards and receipts have been copied on numerous occasions. In many instances, DHS agents also detain and interrogate her in the foreign airport before her return, on one trip telling her that she would be barred from boarding her flight back home, only to let her board at the last minute. When she arrived at JFK Airport on Thanksgiving weekend of 2010, she was told by one DHS agent — after she asserted her privileges as a journalist to refuse to answer questions about the individuals with whom she met on her trip — that he “finds it very suspicious that you’re not willing to help your country by answering our questions.” They sometimes keep her detained for three to four hours (all while telling her that she will be released more quickly if she answers all their questions and consents to full searches).
[Emphasis in original.]

It is abundantly clear that Poitras is being targeted solely for her extraordinary film work and activism — which, last time I checked, are precisely the kinds of activities for which the United States Constitution ostensibly has a First Amendment. She has been reluctant to speak publicly, for fear doing so would further impede her ability to work and make matters worse, but an incident last week changed that:

On Thursday night, Poitras arrived at Newark International Airport from Britain. Prior to issuing her a boarding pass in London, the ticket agent called a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agent (Yost) who questioned her about whom she met and what she did. Upon arriving in Newark, DHS/CBP agents, as always, met her plane, detained her, and took her to an interrogation room. Each time this has happened in the past, Poitras has taken notes during the entire process: in order to chronicle what is being done to her, document the journalistic privileges she asserts and her express lack of consent, obtain the names of the agents involved, and just generally to cling to some level of agency.

This time, however, she was told by multiple CBP agents that she was prohibited from taking notes on the ground that her pen could be used as a weapon. [She should have demanded a crayon. -Ed.] After she advised them that she was a journalist and that her lawyer had advised her to keep notes of her interrogations, one of them, CBP agent Wassum, threatened to handcuff her if she did not immediately stop taking notes. A CBP Deputy Chief (Lopez) also told her she was barred from taking notes, and then accused her of “refusing to cooperate with an investigation” if she continued to refuse to answer their questions (he later clarified that there was no “investigation” per se, but only a “questioning”).

Really, you should just go read the whole thing.  And then come back here and tell me who or what is going to Keep Us Safe from the U.S. government.

60 Minutes warns of the deadly, white powder. God hates figs. Media-bashing. Blasphemy. The top 0.001 throw their filthy lucre at the contemporary art market. All the usual gratuitous asides, including an F-bomb. And nuance . . . everything a loyal reader could hope for.

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My brother is a smart, thoughtful and well-informed guy who just happens to agree with me on most issues, including nutrition and nutrition research. So this past Sunday night, on his advice, I watched 60 minutes – for the first time in more than ten years. Yes, 60 Minutes: that formulaic, infotainment, cash-cow icon that sets something of a standard for American TV journalism. Long after you and I have departed this veil of tears, when the iconic 60 Minutes finally succumbs to the total takeover of the medium by “reality” shows, the headstone should read, “Better than Fox News,” or maybe “Could’ve Been a Lot Worse.”

Reader challenge: I know you can do better . . .

Now for some perspective: It has been so long since I watched the show that I’ve forgotten the specific reasons it pissed me off, although I’m sure it came down to shoddy, careless, unreliable reporting. As in putting ratings, entertainment and profit ahead of in-depth, honest and responsible journalism. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that’s the rule rather than the exception for commercial, mainstream media these days, especially when they try to cover demanding subjects such as, say, science. Or even really simple stuff like religion – you know, that hallowed, contrived institution that always gets a free pass from the free press. Free with the facts, that is.

Case in point: the bizarre mythology masquerading as historical fact in the dreary, annual, media-driven lead-up to Easter Sunday. You know, like, hey, let’s all of us exceptional Americans get all worked up and worshipful one more time and remember that God “died” for “our” sins! Damn thoughtful of Him/Them, don’t you think? I mean shit, He/They can do anything He/They wants/want, just with the snap of a metaphorical finger; so going through the motions of getting crucified must have really been a BIG DEAL for the Omnipotent Creator(s) of the Universe who somehow had to rest on the seventh day. Give me a fucking break.

While we’re on the subject of Easter, I never knew until yesterday how busy – and how pissed off – the Son of God was during those final few days. Did you know it was during that time frame when he drove the evil money changers out of the temple? Raised Lazarus from the dead? Dispatched an unlucky fig tree with a curse? Whatever happened to those magical powers when he needed a mere fig or two? And there’s quite a bit more to be learned in a very interesting take on those final days over at Edwin Kagin’s Blasphemous Blogging. Check it out, it’s well worth the trip. But as usual, I digress.

That Would be Most Helpful

Anyway, my last recollection of 60 Minutes was their mishandling of Bush’s National Guard coverup that culminated in Dan Rather’s firing. Not being able to prove their charges, 60 Minutes only succeeded in “validating,” at least in the impressionable minds of low-information voters, the right-wing claims of liberal bias in the media. (But we know, dear readers, that “reality has a well-known liberal bias,” as Steven Colbert so memorably, and correctly, said. Which means liberal bias is consistent with the traditional job description of a free press – something about the importance of discovering and publishing the truth. Lamentably, in this hyper-commercial, ratings- and profit-driven free-market era, that indispensable job description is honored more in the breach than the observance, particularly by Republicans.) Again, I digress.

Anyway, all their resources notwithstanding, 60 Minutes somehow succeeded against all odds in actually making Bush look better, in making it look as if the pampered, alcoholic, cocaine-snorting draft evader was the victim of a liberal smear campaign. Did that factor into the minds of undecided ignoramuses  voters enough to counteract the disgraceful Swift Boat tactics employed by the right? Way to go, 60 Minutes – you gave David Brooks an excuse to  write one of his patented false equivalence columns.

But hey, I’m not one to dwell on ancient history, so let’s fast-forward back to the present and last Sunday’s episode of 60 minutes. It was the segment titled Is Sugar Toxic? that my brother recommended, and after viewing it I’m passing his recommendation on to you. The gist was that sugar (fructose, really), in all its forms, is toxic to humans – a cause of or major contributor to obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer! CBS even went out of house to secure the services of a highly-qualified correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta from CNN. The researchers Dr. Gupta interviewed offered up some persuasive evidence and altogether made a strong case that sugar consumption has caused a public health crisis. I was also impressed by how much scientific evidence they packed into a short, 15-minute segment. I urge you to watch it.

Then, for an entertaining change of pace and a glimpse of the ultra-rich at play, you might want to watch the segment titled Even in tough times, contemporary art sells, wherein Morley Safer reprises an infamous story he did about the art world almost 20 years ago. Warning: You’ll have to endure a Goldman Sachs commercial. Amazing, isn’t it, what can be done with millions of dollars?

So Typical

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These bizarre claims demonizing The Affordable Care Act – Boehner called it “Armageddon” – are a perfect example of how Republican leaders speak on every subject. They have no interest in truth or even a semblance of accuracy. As someone, maybe Bill Maher, said, “They just make shit up” – whatever they think is going to play well with the nasty, mean-spirited, bigoted dittoheads that make up their base. They do the same thing with global warming, and now they’re demagoguing gas prices. They distort and lie about every issue, and they conspire to make sure they’re all repeating the same lies. Because even though they are always wrong about everything, when low-information citizens hear the same lies often enough, they believe them. And Fox News guarantees those lies will be played and replayed until their viewers have internalized them.

Is it really that simple? Yeah, people who believe Republigoons™ and their Ministry of Propaganda, Faux News, really are that simple. They want to hear what reinforces their biases, and the Ministry/Faux does not disappoint.

This isn’t politics, it’s a propaganda war. Unfortunately, only one side seems to realize it. So when liberals and moderates repeat right-wing lies in the process of refuting them with facts and reasoned arguments, guess what the net effect is? You can’t defeat mass propaganda with arguments appropriate to a scholarly debate; you defeat it with more effective framing of the issues, based in truth. (Don’t you hate it when Democrats are caught being deceptive, as happens far too frequently at FactCheck.org? Is it necessary for Dems to distort the facts? Doesn’t truth have a liberal bias?)

When the goal is persuasion, you must necessarily tailor the presentation to the audience; but if in the process you distort the facts, it will come out and the other side will be able to say, “See, they do it too,” or words to that effect. They would say that anyway, of course, but let’s not make it easy on them; and let’s not be truthful and accurate just because we might be caught – let’s do it because that’s who we are.

There’s just so much more liberals and moderates need to be doing to begin to reverse the right-wing tide. Paying more attention to the framing of our messages would be a good start.

About Scientism: “Seeing is Unbelieving”

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A quick, high-yield read in the NY Times’ estimable Sunday Book Review today . . . well-written, insightful, nuanced, and informative – qualities all of us value and enjoy in an article. Back in the day I might have added, with a straight face, “fair and balanced.” But as you know, that perfectly legitimate phrase has been misappropriated and corrupted by the right-wing @$$holes at Faux News to the point that it may never be rehabilitated (except as a joke) in our lifetimes and to the lasting detriment of the American language.

I love science but not the smug pretentiousness of scientism. It is not helpful and reminds me of evangelicalism. It violates the cautious skepticism and the desire to get things right that lie at the heart of good science.

Phillip Kitcher is one impressive dude, and he gets it just right. IMHO, as always.

Heroes of Science and Secularism Update

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Reverend Barry W. Lynn, Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a future featured Hero of Science and Secularism, interviews my first featured hero, Sean Faircloth, about “the crumbling wall of separation between church and state.” This wide-ranging conversation between two leaders of the secularist movement brings to light the nature and extent of a multitude of government- and taxpayer-supported atrocities routinely being inflicted upon children and adults in the name of religion.

Faircloth also appeared on the Alan Colmes radio show back in February.

And in case you didn’t see this over at PZ Myers’ world-renowned web site at Freethoughtblogs.com, here’s a video of Faircloth’s latest speech, Can Religion Justify Bullying Children? I was choked up throughout the last three minutes. Faircloth is so good he gives us a fighting chance.

Faircloth and Barry Lynn deserve the support of everyone who values Constitutional democracy. And the support of every humanitarian. And everyone who gives a damn about children. Because I’ll tell you this, Faircloth makes a convincing case that the religious right poses a grave and imminent threat to all of us, most tragically to the success and happiness of children – perhaps more than any movement in the history of the U.S. You’ll cringe as he talks about the depraved agenda of Focus on the Family. Give the religious right enough power and they’re nothing less than an American Taliban.

OMFG! Actual Guest Post!

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You know, I would really like to write about many more things in depth than I do, but unfortunately I cannot.  This is because SJ sends me really interesting and/or infuriating links.  Relentlessly.  I can barely get anything else done, because I want to read all of them.  I am now beginning to suspect that SJ is actually an operative of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy™ on a covert mission to shut down the Palace mockery machine by distracting us with really good reading material.  But I am now onto him.  And I have come up with a clever way to test my hypothesis:  he will be guest posting his timely, time-sucking links right here at the Palace.  This way, my many tens of loyal readers can help me determine whether he is in fact the dangerous double-agent I suspect he is, or the thoughtful writer and commenter he appears to be, with a knack for sniffing out the good stuff on the web.

In either case, I figure we can all go down the rabbit hole together.

Please give a warm Palace welcome to SJ.

*****
The following email update from ThinkProgress.org offers a pretty decent summation of Republigoon misogyny (plus the usual pathology) this past week:

“Where are the women?” With those four words, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) made the most poignant statement of the week about the House GOP’s attitude towards women. The simple answer to Maloney’s question is that women are being callously left out and left behind by the right wing.

According to a recent Democracy Corps survey, there’s been a net 18-point swing away from Mitt Romney in favor President Obama among unmarried women in the past few months. Why? Because women have been watching and listening to conservatives. Here’s a sampling of what we heard just this past week:

  • GOP Chairman Darrell Issa defending the exclusion of a woman from his all-male panel on contraception: She’s not “appropriate and qualified.” [Read more]
  • Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld explaining why “liberals” support contraception coverage: “It’s more about getting rid of the poor.” [Read more]
  • Right-wing billionaire Foster Friess delivering his contraception advice on MSNBC: “You know, back in my days, they used Bayer Aspirin for contraceptives. The gals put it between their knees and it wasn’t that costly.” [Read more]
  • Virginia Republican Delegate Todd Gilbert rationalizing a state-sponsored bill mandating vaginal probes: A woman already consented to being “vaginally penetrated when they got pregnant.” [Read more]
  • Fox News’ Liz Trotta justifies why some women are assaulted in the military: “Now what did they expect?” [Read more]
  • Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association on women in combat: “Women are not wired, either by evolution or by God…to be in those positions.” [Read more]
  • Rick Santorum explaining his concerns about women in combat: “People naturally may do things that may not be in the interests of the mission because of other types of emotions that are involved.” [Read more]

At least they’re being honest about what they feel.

–Faiz    Editor-in-Chief, ThinkProgress.org

But who the fuck is Liz Trotta, and what cesspool did she crawl out of? . . . Google pause . . . Oh, the Washington Times. The perfect outlet for a low-level operative in the Right-Wing Ministry of Propaganda. Actually, False News makes her out to be some kind of elite, award-winning journalist. Damn, I thought journalism had some connection with reality. More research needed.

My only quibble is where Faiz says of the ‘Goons, “At least they’re being honest about what they feel.”

That’ll be the day.

If we could be the proverbial fly on the wall and overhear a typical wingnut conversation, I guarantee we would experience a steady stream — no, a deluge — of hate-driven, racist, sexist, homophobic, fascistic, delusional, dogmatic vituperation that would strike fear into the most cynical among us. I mean, just look at the hateful shit they actually say for public consumption. Not to mention some of the stuff they say in private that comes to light from time to time.

From the standpoint of reality, they are fools; but from the standpoint of the life-and-death power struggle known as the culture war, they may actually be winning. I know, it’s hard to believe we have to fight so hard for principles that should be obvious to every educated person living in the 21st Century.

And it’s discouraging that so many liberals with a stake in this are not fighting hard. Why do they wait until the last few minutes of the quadrennial election cycle to start paying attention?

-SJ

Blackety black blackout.

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Readers may have heard some buzz about the backlash against PIPA and SOPA:   tomorrow, January 18, websites like Wikipedia, Boing Boing and Reddit are going dark in protest.

PIPA, the Protect IP Act in the Senate, and SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, have been presented as a way to protect movie studios, record labels and others.  Supporters range from the Country Music Association to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Wait.  Record labels?  Record labels?  OMFG.  There are still record labels?  And they have a lobby?  Wow…  I think maybe I need to get out of my fabulously well-appointed underground lair more often.  And there’s more:

“More than 2.2 million hard-working, middle-class people in all 50 states depend on the entertainment industry for their jobs and many millions more work in other industries that rely on intellectual property,” Michael O’Leary of the Motion Picture Association of America said in a statement. “For all these workers and their families, online content and counterfeiting by these foreign sites mean declining incomes, lost jobs and reduced health and retirement benefits.”
[Citation fucking needed. -Ed.]

Forget everything I’ve ever said, about anything, ever.  The MPAA has real problems, people.  If these bills don’t pass, 2.2 million jobs will cease to exist!  They will evaporate into thin air!  

I am sure readers here will agree:  the threat PIPA and SOPA pose to the very nature of the Internet as we know it is nothing — NOTHING! — compared to the potential hypothetical unquantifiable possible overseas lost profits of the U.S. entertainment industry.

Nevertheless, in solidarity and with deference to people who know WAY more about this stuff than I do, Perry Street Palace will go dark tomorrow, January 18, 2012.  Yes, you read that right:  Iris will attempt to STFU for one whole day.

…

OMFG!  I am already positively bursting with stuff I absolutely need to blog about right now!  My many tens of loyal readers expect — nay, demand! — nothing less of me!  Brilliant and witty ideas are furiously pouring forth — at this very moment — into draft post after draft post after draft post!

I’M NEVER GONNA MAKE IT.

But yeah.  I’m down.  See you on the 19th.

Coathanger lobby update: fake candidates.

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Via Tim Murphy at Mother Jones:

Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who is currently challenging President Obama in the Democratic presidential primary, will begin airing graphic campaign ads featuring what purport to be aborted fetuses, during local news broadcasts.

…Although networks and their local affiliates have the authority—and a legal imperative, in some cases—to block “indecent” material from the airwaves, there’s an exception when it comes to political spots, so long as they’re within 45 days of a primary or caucus.

Per a release:

The ad has multiple graphic images of babies [sic] murdered by abortion, and makes the argument that to vote for Obama knowing that Obama supports the murder of babies [sic] is a betrayal of the Catholic Faith.

The ad will run on every TV station in Iowa and the five state regions that surrounds Iowa (Iowa, Nebraska, Illinois, Missouri, and Minnesota).  The ad will run on at least one news broadcast per station.

Mr. Terry has recruited several other “candidates” to run in elections they have no intention of even trying to win:  the sole purpose of the exercise is to blast major media markets with their gruesome ads, presumably to inform inflame really stupid people about what abortion actually is.  Murphy previously reported:

David Lewis will not be the next congressman from Ohio’s 8th District. But for Lewis, an unemployed former IT technician who is challenging House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) in next year’s Republican primary, winning isn’t the objective.

By running for federal office, Lewis can compel local television stations to run grisly anti-abortion ads that would otherwise never stand a chance of making it on the air. Emphasis on grisly: Lewis’ ads feature what purport to be dismembered fetuses, tied together in neat little bundles, or simply mangled beyond recognition. “The FCC says that 45 days out from a primary and 60 days out from a general election, we can run ads on a television station with FCC licenses—unedited, uncensored, they can’t deny it as long as we buy the spot,” he explains.

Terry said in an interview, “By running campaign ads in the top 25 media markets, we can reach one-third of the nation with a message about the truth and horror of abortion.”

I wonder: who will reach one-third of the nation with a message about the truth and horror of abortion restrictions?  Sadly, it will not be Planned Parenthood.  And this is not because of funding cuts:  it is because they advocate a reasonable, reality-based, “common ground” approach when dealing with their mortal enemies.  That is Planned Parenthood’s right of course, but unfortunately for them (and most unfortunately for women and girls) the evidence is overwhelming that this tired tactic simply has not worked (“the first half of the year saw Republicans in statehouses passing ever more outrageous [anti-choice] laws — 80 in all this year, more than double the previous record.”)  This is true for many reasons, but primarily because the enemies of choice are not reality-based, and/or they are sociopaths.  Either way these primates are misogynists by definition.  But in any case there is no common ground.

In an excellent post excellently entitled Respect Mah Forced Pregnancy Dickishness, Tbogg at FDL recently reported:

Wombless fetus-humper Steve Ertelt is very outraged that Planned Parenthood is providing guidance on how to deal with God-bothering douchebags like Steve Ertelt who like nothing better than to interrupt a perfectly pleasant Thanksgiving dinner conversation about football and favorite episodes of Two and A Half Men and ‘can you pass the rolls, thank you’ by suddenly blurting out, “You know, women who kill their unborn babies are whores who have consigned themselves to a fiery eternity of pain and agony in Hell because they have angered a vengeful God”.  Well, yeah.  After that it is kind of hard to get back  to talking about what a great season Aaron Rogers is having.  So did Planned Parenthood advise making light of the situation with a good old fashioned joke (“Hey, anybody know how to make a dead baby float?”)?  No, they didn’t – although they should have.

(“Fetus humper.” Hahaha.)  Eschewing dead baby jokes, Planned Parenthood’s proffered advice on speaking to the rabid anti-choicers one may encounter at holiday dinners instead stresses “diplomacy” and “understanding.”  For example:

“Debating when life begins or whether or not abortion is federally funded may get you nowhere. Instead focus on your shared values and the big picture—for instance, talk about how you believe everyone should be able to afford to go to the doctor, or how the decision about when and whether to become a parent is a personal one.”

The obvious problem with this approach is that these are not shared values:  it is an easily demonstrable fact that conservatives do not believe everyone should be able to afford to go to the doctor, nor do they believe that the decision about when and whether to become a parent should be a personal one.

Planned Parenthood knows this, just as surely as Randall Terry knows that the incidence of abortion is not reduced by legal restrictions and therefore criminalizing it will only result in the disfigurement and death of American women and girls.  And just as surely as the Catholic Conference of Bishops and those @$$holes at the Southern Baptist Convention know that birth control bans cause unconscionable misery on a scale that makes Dickensian England look like Disneyland.  So why does Planned Parenthood advocate a failed communication strategy?  I’m guessing there are several factors at work here, not the least of which is the dominant instinct on the political left to be “civil” and “non-confrontational” no matter how unproductive (or even counterproductive) this has proven to be.  Another factor could well be projection:  because the people promoting this strategy are themselves relatively reasonable and compassionate, it is all too easy for them to assume that their opposition is also reasonable and compassionate.  To be fair, in a few instances this may indeed be the case.  For example, there are undoubtedly reasonable and compassionate people who are simply uninformed — or deliberately misinformed — and who, when confronted with facts and evidence, will thoughtfully reconsider and ultimately change their position to one that reflects reason and compassion.

But such people are not the real problem:  they are but a symptom of it.  More importantly, they are not the ones picketing clinics, or photographing the women who enter them and posting their pictures online, or harassing, firebombing, and killing abortion providers and staff, while feverishly working to elect troglodytes like Michelle Bachmann to force their evil agenda on the rest of us.  Treating these assclowns with deference and respect — even while disagreeing — sends the unambiguous message to them and to everyone within earshot that their positions actually deserve deference and respect, when they do not.  What they deserve is across-the-board social and political marginalization.  In the same way that vast sections of American society now routinely call out bigotry to the point that racists are wary about espousing their noxious views in public, so too should extreme misogynists like Randall Terry and his ilk be openly mocked and condemned at every turn until they remain silent and stewing, isolated and alone, in their seething resentment of the humanity of women.

But Iris, you may inquire, what can we do to effectively marginalize these primates?  Well, thank you for asking!  That is truly an excellent question.  And it will not surprise loyal readers to learn that the answer is:  a constant, unrelenting application of mockery and ridicule.

Even before George W. Bush and his snowflake babies photo op, conservative loons like Randall Terry got the message loud and clear that their sick agenda enjoys massive public support, or at least no formidable opposition, and this perception has naturally emboldened them.  The result is that there are more and more of them, on the streets and in the state houses, proudly proclaiming that women are property — specifically, incubators — and that these incubators are to be used at the sole discretion of a fetus, a man, or the state.

Here’s some more TBogg, who speaks my language fluently:

You see, trying to find common ground and pointing that abortion is a very personal and private decision that should be made by the woman and her doctor and the deity of her choice is actually an act that is the moral equivalent of feeding newborns into a woodchipper,* so you and Planned Parenthood should be ashamed of yourselves because, as Steve says, you’re “promoting abortion”.  In fact, failure to completely agree with Steve that all abortion should be banned and doctors who perform them should be hunted down like animals and immediately dispatched to hell with a bullet between their eyes means that you probably don’t love God as much as you think you do.

If that is the case, and since you are going to go to Hell anyway, you might as well as go all in by dispensing with the Planned Parenthood ‘diplomacy’ and telling the Steve Ertelts  in your  family, to, oh I don’t know… “Why don’t you mind your own fucking business you panty-sniffing twatwaffle”** or the ever popular, “What?  Aren’t there already enough kids in the world for you to molest?.”  Not only will the subsequent uproar change the direction of the conversation, but the dinner may come to a premature ending meaning more pie for you.

And who doesn’t like more pie?

I don’t know about you, but I love pie.  And it should go without saying that there should be no more pie for the Randall Terrys of the world.

__________
*In general, anti-choicers do not really believe that an abortion is the moral equivalent of feeding newborns into a woodchipper, although they may emphatically insist that they do.  To test this, ask what he or she would do in this scenario:

You find yourself in a cryo facility that stores hundreds of frozen embryos for future implantation (Snowflake baybeez!  Yay!), and a terrible fire has broken out.  There is a terrified, screaming infant on one side of the room, and a freezer chock full of frozen embryos on the other.  The fire is raging and you can only possibly save one or the other:  the crying baby, or the contents of the freezer.  What do you do?

If the answer is “save the crying baby,” you have just demonstrated that the person does not in fact view an embryo and a newborn as having the same moral standing.  (Neither does the bible for what it’s worth, which is of course nothing.)  On the other hand, if the answer is “let the kid burn a fiery death and save the popsicles,” then you need to stay as far away from this person as possible: anyone who expresses this view of humanity is giving you a clear indication of just how dangerous, unhinged, and evil they really are.

**One can do this without gendered insults, obviously.