No, it’s not a hospital, police station, or school. That’s right: While everyone else in Baghdad must survive among violence, inadequate public utilities, a joke of a security force, and only a few hours of electricity per day, the US ambassador will be spread out wide in his (or her) new 16,000 sqft personal residence with all the amenities (including what looks like an Olympic-sized swimming pool).

The staff of about 4,000 will enjoy their own water treatment plant, a gymnasium, and private school.

To top it off, the construction looks to be completed by US contractors — and not Iraqis (who are in desperate need of good paying work).

I suppose this new project is meant to bury the Hanging Gardens of Babylon deeper into history. It’s like sticking the Stars and Stripes into the moon. I can’t imagine this project making any Iraqi citizen feel good.

Bush is losing staff at a very fast pace. The latest to leave is his top political directory Sara Taylor, who is a Karl Rove aide. I suspect that these folks are leaving due to the new accountability initiatives that Democrats are pushing. But Taylor is also involved in the attorney scandal. The Senate has approved a subpoena for her testimony.

that “Taylor is the latest top Bush aide to leave in recent weeks. Earlier this month, deputy national security adviser J.D. Crouch II announced plans to step down. His departure followed that of Meghan O’Sullivan, the deputy national security adviser who oversaw the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

Looks like an exciting year ahead!

I was listening to a show on our local public radio, a Montana based show and critism of Hillary came up.

The first person said they had lost respect for Hillary because of her support for Israels invasion of Lebanon last summer. He identified himself as being Jewish and also having Lebanese relatives. He was voicing concern that Hillary was willing to pander to AIPAC in her presidential ambitions.

I can respect his opinion though I suspect he isn’t going to find anyone running who defys that vice.

The next caller was a woman. She felt that Hillary couldn’t be trusted as president because she had not divorced Bill for his extramarital afairs. Then she went on to how a woman should not show such strong ambition as Hillary does.

I think what pisses me off the most is that I have heard this alot, mostly from women. It is like…How DARE Hillary step out of her role. Yet when I think of it both are making the same critism; that Hillary is so ambitious that she will set aside anything in order to gain that power.

I am leery of Hillary also. She is too adamant that she knows what is best for the rest of us. I thought DH put it well, she is Bush in different clothing. Yet this critism is directly opposite of the first two.

How do the rest of you think?

Yeah, I know it is insanely early to be thinking of this and I was sure I was going to ignore all conversations along these areas till next year. Yet my blood just got a good boiling

Book Excerpt: The Assault on Reason
by Al Gore | Time Magazine

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: “This chamber is, for the most part, silent — ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate.”

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: “Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?” The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: “What has happened to our country?” People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

It is too easy — and too partisan — to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason — the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power — remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

American democracy is now in danger — not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess — an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.

While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.

Those of us who have served in the U.S. Senate and watched it change over time could volunteer a response to Senator Byrd’s incisive description of the Senate prior to the invasion: The chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else. Many of them were at fund-raising events they now feel compelled to attend almost constantly in order to collect money — much of it from special interests — to buy 30-second TV commercials for their next re-election campaign. The Senate was silent because Senators don’t feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much anymore?not to the other Senators, who are almost never present when their colleagues speak, and certainly not to the voters, because the news media seldom report on Senate speeches anymore.

Our Founders’ faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people. The Founders took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could flow freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of assembly, they made a special point — in the First Amendment — of protecting the freedom of the printing press. And yet today, almost 45 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers. Reading itself is in decline. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the empire of television.

Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention — but it is television that still dominates the flow of information. According to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every day — 90 minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time the average American has.

In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The “well-informed citizenry” is in danger of becoming the “well-amused audience.” Moreover, the high capital investment required for the ownership and operation of a television station and the centralized nature of broadcast, cable and satellite networks have led to the increasing concentration of ownership by an ever smaller number of larger corporations that now effectively control the majority of television programming in America.

In practice, what television’s dominance has come to mean is that the inherent value of political propositions put forward by candidates is now largely irrelevant compared with the image-based ad campaigns they use to shape the perceptions of voters. The high cost of these commercials has radically increased the role of money in politics — and the influence of those who contribute it. That is why campaign finance reform, however well drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the dominant means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue in one way or another to dominate American politics. And as a result, ideas will continue to play a diminished role. That is also why the House and Senate campaign committees in both parties now search for candidates who are multimillionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources.

When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never took a poll during the entire campaign. Eight years later, however, when I ran statewide for the U.S. Senate, I did take polls and like most statewide candidates relied more heavily on electronic advertising to deliver my message. I vividly remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent, a fine public servant named Victor Ashe who has since become a close friend, was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent’s campaign and the planned response to the response, my advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: “If you run this ad at this many ‘points’ [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead in the polls.”

I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5%. Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the “consent of the governed” was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder. To the extent that money and the clever use of electronic mass media could be used to manipulate the outcome of elections, the role of reason began to diminish.

As a college student, I wrote my senior thesis on the impact of television on the balance of power among the three branches of government. In the study, I pointed out the growing importance of visual rhetoric and body language over logic and reason. There are countless examples of this, but perhaps understandably, the first one that comes to mind is from the 2000 campaign, long before the Supreme Court decision and the hanging chads, when the controversy over my sighs in the first debate with George W. Bush created an impression on television that for many viewers outweighed whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise gained in the verbal combat of ideas and substance. A lot of good that senior thesis did me.

The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according to “psychographic” categories that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for the functioning of our democracy.

As a result, our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public’s ability to discern the truth. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the rule of reason.

And what if an individual citizen or group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But too often they are not allowed to do even that. MoveOn.org tried to buy an ad for the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast to express opposition to Bush’s economic policy, which was then being debated by Congress. CBS told MoveOn that “issue advocacy” was not permissible. Then, CBS, having refused the MoveOn ad, began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the president’s controversial proposal. So MoveOn complained, and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporarily, I mean it was removed until the White House complained, and CBS immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the MoveOn ad.

To understand the final reason why the news marketplace of ideas dominated by television is so different from the one that emerged in the world dominated by the printing press, it is important to distinguish the quality of vividness experienced by television viewers from the “vividness” experienced by readers. Marshall McLuhan’s description of television as a “cool” medium — as opposed to the “hot” medium of print — was hard for me to understand when I read it 40 years ago, because the source of “heat” in his metaphor is the mental work required in the alchemy of reading. But McLuhan was almost alone in recognizing that the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process. Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made.

As a young lawyer giving his first significant public speech at the age of 28, Abraham Lincoln warned that a persistent period of dysfunction and unresponsiveness by government could alienate the American people and that “the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectively be broken down and destroyed — I mean the attachment of the people.” Many Americans now feel that our government is unresponsive and that no one in power listens to or cares what they think. They feel disconnected from democracy. They feel that one vote makes no difference, and that they, as individuals, have no practical means of participating in America’s self-government. Unfortunately, they are not entirely wrong. Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for easy manipulation by those seeking their “consent” to exercise power. By using focus groups and elaborate polling techniques, those who design these messages are able to derive the only information they’re interested in receiving from citizens — feedback useful in fine-tuning their efforts at manipulation. Over time, the lack of authenticity becomes obvious and takes its toll in the form of cynicism and alienation. And the more Americans disconnect from the democratic process, the less legitimate it becomes.

Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not. We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems.

Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century’s ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself — because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people don’t have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they’re being “taught” in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way — a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets — through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators — principally large telephone and cable companies — have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content. If they went about it in the wrong way, these companies could institute changes that have the effect of limiting the free flow of information over the Internet in a number of troubling ways.

The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people — as Lincoln put it, “even we here” — are collectively still the key to the survival of America’s democracy.

In a May 23rd Report, Amnesty International asserts that Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers committed “serious human rights abuses” against the Palestinians in 2006, mostly with impunity. This, and other findings, are included the report.

The report also tags Hezbullah as human rights abusers during the war with Israel last summer.

Other information in the report brings to light information (that I don’t recall ever being reported) of Israel’s use of cluster bombs in the last few days of the war — while ceasefire terms were being drafted. Many of these bombs were detonated weeks and months after the conflict ended, killing dozens of children and hundreds of adults in Lebanon.

Related Stories:

A rebuttal

My take on all rebuttals I’ve read so far:

Amnesty International has a long, long reputation of reporting and documenting human rights violations all over the world. They are trusted and each of all of their reports are poignant and relevant: from their scathing anti-Taliban reports to their harsh ‘opinion’ of secret USA CIA prisons. I find it deplorable that anyone would toss this latest report aside because Amnesty is “politically biased” or should be renamed “Arab International” just because Israel is involved in the equation. Instead of debating the facts of the accusations, most talking heads are criticizing the organization itself. Even the Israeli government isn’t disputing the findings or the facts! Their response is something like “we’re not terrorists, we do all we can to avoid civilian casualties”. I suppose carpet bombing got a lot safer in recent years. Regardless, these are serious accusations and I hope they’re taken seriously.

Could a member of a Kurdish separatist group (Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK) be to blame? The bomb went off in Ankara yesterday and is perhaps the worst such attack in recent years. Strangely, this attack comes only a few days after a long-held ceasefire between the PKK and Turkish military.

BBC Reports:

Suicide attack behind Turkey bomb
Rescue workers give first aid to people caught in a blast in Ankara
The blast happened at the entrance to a shopping centre
Turkish officials have confirmed that a suicide bomber caused a blast which killed six people and injured more than 90 in Ankara on Tuesday.

I have mixed feelings on . On the one hand, this country needs such a bill to handle the growing immigration “problem”, but on the other, is this the right approach? The bill, to my understanding, will allow the US to strengthen the border and impose fines ($5,000). Children looking to bring over parents froma foreign country will have a more difficult time. To get permanent resident status could take 8-13 years. If you’re issued a work Visa, you can forget about living in the US more than 2 years at a time.

Is this a progressive package? Doesn’t seem like it. For a country touted as a great melting pot, it would seem that the pot is almost full.

A few of the things I took from last night’s debate:

1.) Mr Romney endorses torture, saying that he supports “enhanced interrogation techniques” and that he believes Guantanamo should be “doubled” in size.

2.) Rudy is a mess. On the one hand he can’t talk about the abortion issue when his fellow Republicans are in the room, and on the other he can gain praise from the likes of John McCain for his interruption of Ron Paul’s comment that the US is to blame for 9/11 (how dare he!).

3.) Ron Paul has courage and said some things that Republicans just aren’t saying: namely, that certain US foreign policies breed contempt and hatred.

4.) Gilmore said that “[OBL] is a symbol to the people who believe, as a matter of faith, that they have a right and a duty to destroy Americans and Western civilization.” Gilmore is certainly stretching the ‘threat’. I can already hear the “They want to take away our values” argument coming from the GOP once more. *sigh*

Transcript: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18478985/

Anyone else see it?

Right-wing darling and conservative evangelist .

He can be remembered for being the first television evangelist, calling the Prophet Muhammad a terrorist, and denouncing the Teletubbies as a homosexual-promoting kid’s show. Others might remember him by his claim that God permitted 9/11 because all the gays and atheists were thriving in the US.

Ahh that Jerry! He’ll sure be missed.

I asked a while back if . The question was prompted after hearing over and over by politicians how al-Qeada is everywhere and that they have somehow taken over as some sort of blanket or umbrella group for all terrorists this side of the moon. The media happily followed along, reporting the existence of al-Qeada and their global ties with almost no proof. While this discussion can be continued in the previous topic, I thought that the current Padilla trial has some relevance to the question.

A federal prosecutor said “Al Qaeda” 91 times in just over an hour as he made his opening statement Monday against Jose Padilla and two co-defendants accused of supporting Islamic extremists.

What is this trial about? Is it about proving that Padilla works with terrorists or that he works with al-Qeada? Does it seem odd to anyone that the federal prosecutor would use this tactic ?