"The Wizard of Oil"

Many thanks to MB for sending this link. It’s really, really funny. Make yourself some popcorn (no worries about the keyboard; you’ll only need your scrolling finger) and enjoy.

Another law broken by the Bush administration?

Buzzflash, in their inimitable way, pretty well said it all this morning…

“Bush, Taking a Page from the East German Stasi Secret Police, Ordered Secret Wiretaps on Americans (Perhaps in the Thousands), Without Court Approval. Gulags, the Pentagon Spying on Americans, Unauthorized White House Wiretaps on American Citizens, Our Library Books investigated, Rampant Torture. Al Qaeda Doesn’t Need to End Our Democracy; Bush Has Done It For Them. Stalin Would be Proud. (Also, NYT Delayed Report for a Year.)”

They’ve moved on to another header by now, but the story this one refers to is here and here:

President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign
nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying, sources with knowledge of the program said last night.

The super-secretive NSA, which has generally been barred from domestic spying except in narrow circumstances involving foreign nationals, has monitored the e-mail, telephone calls and other communications of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people under the program, the New York Times disclosed last night.

And the follow-up here — what Bush has done is probably illegal. (See here, too.) And what the Times did - sitting on a story like this for a full election year - should be.

Friday Cat Blogging

It just gets better (Warning: disturbing animal news)

It’s not my night for random television encounters. First, I stopped by just in time to see sharks being “finned” and dropped back into the sea to drown. And just now, I took a break to see who’s on Larry King, and it’s Alec Baldwin and some other folks discussing the booming trade in cat and dog fur in China! I couldn’t watch, so I googled: cats and dogs are being captured by the thousands in the Czech Republic and China, and then skinned - in many cases, still alive - so that their “pelts” can be sold to a “thriving cat and dog skins industry and trade.”

When the transcript shows up on Larry King’s web site, I’ll link to it here. (Update: here it is.)

Finning

I’m neck-deep in paper-writing this week and next. But I just wandered past the television on my way to get another Diet Coke, and 60 Minutes’ Bob Simon was talking about how sharks are facing extinction because of finning:

In some regions, shark populations are down 90 percent, and some species are approaching extinction.

Why is this happening?

The answer boils down, literally, to soup. Shark fin soup. In China, it’s been an expensive status symbol for millennia. Chefs in the emperor’s court were once beheaded if they prepared it incorrectly. But these days, with China booming, more people can pay $100 for a bowl. Finning sharks is a billion-dollar business, and it’s not a pretty sight.

That’s because as soon as a shark is caught, his fins are cut off and he is thrown overboard, alive, to sink to the bottom and drown…

So the shark is killed, quite brutally, for a minute fraction of its edible flesh - the rest of which sinks to the ocean floor. This kind of “thinking” makes my head hurt.

The whole story - on shark tourism - is here.

What are you doing here when you could be reading Fafblog?

I haven’t worked Fafblog into my daily rounds, yet: it takes practice to develop a good habit. But the times I remember, I’m well-rewarded.

The Central Front In The War On Facts

The usual antiwar suspects have been up in arms for well over a week over the military’s planting of covert propaganda in Iraqi newspapers, caterwauling about the undermining of a fundamental tenet of Iraqi democracy. As always, their concerns are wildly misplaced. First, shouldn’t a pretend democracy have a pretend free press? Second, most of these pieces weren’t factually inaccurate, but mere “spin” - such as the article that spun an Iraqi general’s death under torture as death under not-torture. Third, propaganda is merely a weapon. America’s leaders would be foolhardy indeed to refuse a weapon in their arsenal, especially against an adverary as deadly as the truth.

While it may not be the ideal of journalism in a free society, is this planted, pro-military propaganda so different from the anti-military truthaganda published every day in the New York Times? While military propaganda shows a bias towards distortion, obfuscation, and outright lies in the service of the war effort, the baleful face of the Mainstream Media shows a clear bias towards reporting reality - and reality has always been America’s greatest enemy in Iraq.

Along with facts on the ground and the ugly truth, cold hard reality has persistently undermined America’s efforts in the war on terror. Were it not for reality, America would already have destroyed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear-powered robo-mummy factories while uniting Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd in common love of their American liberators. Malicious facts, however, have conspired to turn Iraq into a bloody war zone racked by insurgent violence and sectarian bloodshed, and the war itself into an unwinnable quagmire built on a transparent fraud. Even now, reality is working to tarnish America’s reputation by exposing its routine torture of military prisoners, in defiance of the stated policies of the Bush administration. This pattern of obstruction and interference can leave no doubt: reality isn’t merely misguided or ill-informed. It’s on the other side.

Read the rest. While you’re there, check out their links to “Vital Resources” such as Animals on the Underground. Somehow, BART just doesn’t fire the imagination in the same way.

Molly Ivins

Some Christians seem to me inclined to lose track of love, compassion and mercy. I don’t think I have any special brief to go around judging them, but when the stink of hypocrisy becomes so foul in the nostrils it makes you start to puke it becomes necessary to point out there is one more good reason to observe the separation of church and state: If God keeps hanging out with politicians, it’s gonna hurt his reputation.

The whole column is here.

Akk-centuate the positives…

Rummy says we’re missing the good news - the insurgents Enemies of the Legally Elected Government have not blown up the oil fields! (the latter via Buzzflash) If the media would just stop “looking for drama” and reporting on US casualties, we’d recognize the progress in Iraq. And hey, says Rummy, let’s have a little perspective on this whole casualty count thing:

In remarks delivered at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, Rumsfeld suggested that news organizations are reporting on deaths in Iraq because they are “looking for drama.”

At the same time, he said, they are not giving intense coverage to fatalities in the United States, where an average of 42,000 traffic deaths and 16,000 homicides take place each year.

McCain

Every time I get a little magnanimous and allow myself to think of John McCain as more principled than most Republicans of his Republican colleagues (update: I was a little hasty, there, but I caught myself within minutes), he proves me wrong. He is now leading the administration’s attack on John Murtha. Sure, it’s a kinder, gentler attack than Jean Schmidt or RoboScotty could pull off, but that’s probably exactly the point. And McCain apparently is willing to do it for them. That’s disgusting.

The hundred-year old liberal plot to destroy Christmas!

I know this is making the rounds, but there’s a good reason for that; it’s a great editorial!

This Season’s War Cry: Commercialize Christmas, or Else
By ADAM COHEN

Religious conservatives have a cause this holiday season: the commercialization of Christmas. They’re for it.

The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not using the words “Merry Christmas” in its advertising. (Target denies it has an anti-Merry-Christmas policy.) The Catholic League boycotted Wal-Mart in part over the way its Web site treated searches for “Christmas.” Bill O’Reilly, the Fox anchor who last year started a “Christmas Under Siege” campaign, has a chart on his Web site of stores that use the phrase “Happy Holidays,” along with a poll that asks, “Will you shop at stores that do not say ‘Merry Christmas’?”

This campaign - which is being hyped on Fox and conservative talk radio - is an odd one. Christmas remains ubiquitous, and with its celebrators in control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and every state supreme court and legislature, it hardly lacks for powerful supporters. There is also something perverse, when Christians are being jailed for discussing the Bible in Saudi Arabia and slaughtered in Sudan, about spending so much energy on stores that sell “holiday trees.”

What is less obvious, though, is that Christmas’s self-proclaimed defenders are rewriting the holiday’s history. They claim that the “traditional” American Christmas is under attack by what John Gibson, another Fox anchor, calls “professional atheists” and “Christian haters.” But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing is not defending America’s Christmas traditions, but creating a new version of the holiday that fits a political agenda.

The Puritans considered Christmas un-Christian, and hoped to keep it out of America. They could not find Dec. 25 in the Bible, their sole source of religious guidance, and insisted that the date derived from Saturnalia, the Roman heathens’ wintertime celebration. On their first Dec. 25 in the New World, in 1620, the Puritans worked on building projects and ostentatiously ignored the holiday. From 1659 to 1681 Massachusetts went further, making celebrating Christmas “by forbearing of labor, feasting or in any other way” a crime.

The concern that Christmas distracted from religious piety continued even after Puritanism waned. In 1827, an Episcopal bishop lamented that the Devil had stolen Christmas “and converted it into a day of worldly festivity, shooting and swearing.” Throughout the 1800’s, many religious leaders were still trying to hold the line. As late as 1855, New York newspapers reported that Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist churches were closed on Dec. 25 because “they do not accept the day as a Holy One.” On the eve of the Civil War, Christmas was recognized in just 18 states.

Christmas gained popularity when it was transformed into a domestic celebration, after the publication of Clement Clarke Moore’s “Visit from St. Nicholas” and Thomas Nast’s Harper’s Weekly drawings, which created the image of a white-bearded Santa who gave gifts to children. The new emphasis lessened religious leaders’ worries that the holiday would be given over to drinking and swearing, but it introduced another concern: commercialism. By the 1920’s, the retail industry had adopted Christmas as its own, sponsoring annual ceremonies to kick off the “Christmas shopping season.”

Religious leaders objected strongly. The Christmas that emerged had an inherent tension: merchants tried to make it about buying, while clergymen tried to keep commerce out. A 1931 Times roundup of Christmas sermons reported a common theme: “the suggestion that Christmas could not survive if Christ were thrust into the background by materialism.” A 1953 Methodist sermon broadcast on NBC - typical of countless such sermons - lamented that Christmas had become a “profit-seeking period.” This ethic found popular expression in “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” In the 1965 TV special, Charlie Brown ignores Lucy’s advice to “get the biggest aluminum tree you can find” and her assertion that Christmas is “a big commercial racket,” and finds a more spiritual way to observe the day.

This year’s Christmas “defenders” are not just tolerating commercialization - they’re insisting on it. They are also rewriting Christmas history on another key point: non-Christians’ objection to having the holiday forced on them.

The campaign’s leaders insist this is a new phenomenon - a “liberal plot,” in Mr. Gibson’s words. But as early as 1906, the Committee on Elementary Schools in New York City urged that Christmas hymns be banned from the classroom, after a boycott by more than 20,000 Jewish students. In 1946, the Rabbinical Assembly of America declared that calling on Jewish children to sing Christmas carols was “an infringement on their rights as Americans.”

Other non-Christians have long expressed similar concerns. For decades, companies have replaced “Christmas parties” with “holiday parties,” schools have adopted “winter breaks” instead of “Christmas breaks,” and TV stations and stores have used phrases like “Happy Holidays” and “Season’s Greetings” out of respect for the nation’s religious diversity.

The Christmas that Mr. O’Reilly and his allies are promoting - one closely aligned with retailers, with a smack-down attitude toward nonobservers - fits with their campaign to make America more like a theocracy, with Christian displays on public property and Christian prayer in public schools.

It does not, however, appear to be catching on with the public. That may be because most Americans do not recognize this commercialized, mean-spirited Christmas as their own. Of course, it’s not even clear the campaign’s leaders really believe in it. Just a few days ago, Fox News’s online store was promoting its “Holiday Collection” for shoppers. Among the items offered to put under a “holiday tree” was “The O’Reilly Factor Holiday Ornament.” After bloggers pointed this out, Fox changed the “holidays” to “Christmases.”