DEEP GREEN PERSPECTIVE

The upcoming contest for mayor of Nashville has been a bit of a yawner so far. None of the current crop of mayoral candidates has been able to generate much excitement. Let’s face it—Bredesen and Purcell are hard acts to follow—they were highly motivated technocrats who, in the long view of history, will be seen as having used the last flush of American prosperity to create and consolidate metropolitan Nashville in its final blaze of post-industrial glory. The next mayor is probably going to see himself as a curator more than an initiator. But the drum of history is starting to beat. Life in America is shifting.

There are three main contestants in the race now—Howard Gentry, Bob Clemens, and Buck Dozier. For me, as a Green, the question is, do any of them have the vision to steer Nashville through what’s about to happen? Do any of them even notice what’s about to happen? Is there any possibility any of them could notice it?

Buck Dozier is a representative of unabashed, good ol’ boy, old line redneck Nashville—a roads n’ strip malls good, public spending bad kinda guy. He was a major backer of the late and unlamented Harpeth dump until he gauged how much opposition it had generated—then he went to a basketball game instead of showing up for the mass meeting and taking some heat. I don’t have a lot of faith in Buck Dozier.

Bob Clemens could be charitably described as a professional public servant, meaning he’s spent most of his adult life in politics. He seems to me to be just another smiling suit who is deeply committed to maintaining the status quo—but his skills will not do us much good when the status quo starts slipping rapidly and noisily away.

I have the most hope for Howard Gentry, who has been known to shop in alternative food stores, because I think that questioning the diet and exercise habits you were raised with can be an opening to questioning the society that fostered those habits in you. Meanwhile, Gentry is playing it safe politically. He is definitely not running as a radical.

Although the mayoral race in Nashville is technically nonpartisan, maybe a green mayoral candidate could inject some reality into the dialog–but that person would likely suffer from the same conundrum of credibility that our Green Party candidates are dealing with in the current election cycle.

The dilemma is that people perceive, correctly, that our governmental system is dominated by power-hungry neurotics who shouldn’t be trusted with the job—but these neurotic power-trippers are the only ones with the bureaucratic skills to keep our vast, complicated system functioning at all. Sanity and honesty, however valuable in individuals, are no more qualifications for running a government bureaucracy than they are for piloting an airliner. Are there truly hip, forward-looking, mentally balanced people who are also politically savvy enough to run our massively bureaucratic government? We may have to vote for sanity and honesty and let the chips fall where they may.

Meanwhile, here are some green questions for our mayoral candidates–

what will you do to assure a local food supply for Nashville?what will you do to encourage general local self-sufficiency?what will you do to get people out of their cars and long-distance commutes and into local employment or at least mass transit?what will you do to stop sprawl?

what will you do to increase neighborhood cohesion and self-governance?

what will you do to help increase access to affordable medical services?

what will you do to decrease Nashville’s waste stream?(As an aside, a private, pioneer effort is now underway to compost farmer’s market waste and wood chips. This could be expanded to take a major source of landfill materials into the recycle circle, if it is properly managed. For that matter, we could have massive quantities of humanure available for our farming and gardening needs if it wasn’t for all the other junk people put in the sewer system—many composted sewage sludge products have been found with excessive levels of heavy metals, and not because people are chewing the chrome off car bumpers—but I digress…)

Nashville needs somebody like the South Bronx’s Majora Carter, who has developed an organization called Sustainable South Bronx and has recently been the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. In a recent interview in Grist magazine, she said, “There’s this big fear that environmental justice is fiscally irresponsible, that communities like ours need all kinds of money and assistance. The irony is that our public-health problems — our rampant asthma and other environmental illnesses — do need such resources. Our sustainability strategy, on the contrary, does not. Our organization is beginning to prove that we can implement our strategy in a pretty darn economically and fiscally responsible way. Things like parks and green roofs and decent zoning policies and green-collar jobs and public transportation don’t cost a huge amount, but can make a tremendous difference that has long-term economic advantages both locally and nationally. “ It’s important to note that Ms. Carter didn’t come into the South Bronx with an agenda—she started getting together with people and helping them visualize what they wanted, and now she’s helping them implement it. That’s the Green way, folks.

Is there a Majora Carter in Nashville? Would he or she want to detour out of doing real things for real people for the frustrating job of being Mayor and having to answer to business and financial interests?

I’m tempted to submit my questions to our current crop of candidates, although I suspect that all I would get back would be easy, empty platitudes. To be honest, I ought to try and answer them myself. I’ll keep you posted.

music: Laurie McClain, “In My Home Town“

WELL, GEE WHIZ–I bet Gordon and Constance Gee are getting tired of that joke, among many others, by now. Anyway, nobody is going to be asking for any Gee whiz. Class structure in America has never been more clearly delineated. The wife of the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University can be outed as a pot smoker in the Wall Street Journal, and all anybody does is titter. For the rest of us, it’s a different story.

She smoked“Only for medical use?” Look: Constance Gee graduated from high school in 1971, and spent time in Los Angeles in art school before going to Pratt Institute in New York in the late seventies, when she was in her mid-twenties. Pratt Institute. New York. Art student. Mid-twenties. The late seventies, when the punk scene was exploding and the Talking Heads were a fresh, young, cutting edge band opening for the Ramones. I suspect the lady inhaled, at the very least. Just about everybody else did, y’know? And when I look through her publication titles…. “Spirit, Mind, and Body: Arts Education, the Redeemer”; “The ‘Use and Abuse’ of Arts Advocacy”; “I Can See Clearly Now,” “The Arts—Education for a Life of Wonder”;”Somewhere Over the Rainbow”–I suspect she may have had more than a student fling with, and a recent medical need for, the Wonder Weed.

But, like I said, nobody’s likely to be asking for any Gee whiz. The Gees do not appear to be in any legal peril over this. Although official University policy is that illegal drug use is grounds for expulsion from University housing, the Gees are not being asked to move from the President’s mansion. There are no rumblings that Gordon is going to lose his job if he can’t control his poor, drug-addled wife. According to the Vanderbilt paper, nobody’s concerned about her marijuana use, or likely marijuana use by many students and professors at the school. It’s not an issue. And, really, I think that’s as it should be.

But that’s not how it is for the rest of us, who aren’t associated with ruling-class enclaves like Vanderbilt. Most of us would be fired, if not arrested, if our boss found out that we used marijuana, even “medically,” at work. Anyone in public housing whose marijuana use was outed would be outed into the street, along with everyone else in their family, regardless of whether they knew of or approved of the so-called “offense.”

This is not pot-smoker’s paranoia, folks. Marijuana arrests reached an all-time high—pardon the pun—last year– 786,545 people were arrested for marijuana issues last year. That’s over two thousand people a day. That’s one person every forty seconds. During the course of this broadcast, ninety people will be arrested for marijuana use in this country. And you can bet your roach clip that Constance Gee will not be among them.

“Money changes everything,” Cyndi Lauper sang, and it does change a lot. It was big news that Willie Nelson was arrested in Louisiana for a pound and half of marijuana and almost a half pound of mushrooms in a moving vehicle. Several people were cited for misdemeanors. A friend of mine spent a year in jail and will be on probation for seven years because he had a quarter-ounce of mushrooms in the privacy of his home, which was raided because his new, upper-class neighbors didn’t like having a poor, older hippie living in an old school bus next door to them, and they had some pull with the cops. Another friend is serving two years in a halfway house and being threatened with loss of the homestead he has lived in for over thirty years for growing not much over a pound and a half of marijuana—for his own medical needs and those of his friends. I hear no word that Willie Nelson’s tour bus has been impounded over his so-called “crime.” Equal justice under law? Hello? To add to the injury, my friends are now disenfranchised felons.

I know people who do not technically have legal custody of their children in certain states because the police took a look at them and their kids in their kinda older car, found an excuse to pull them over, and turned that into a body-cavity search. My friends have started driving a newer car. They don’t get stopped much any more, and the troopers don’t seem nearly so inquisitive. Profiling has been forbidden? You’ve got to be kidding!

The government’s latest anti-marijuana commercials are taking an interesting tack. “I smoked pot and I didn’t die. Nothing bad happened. Actually, nothing happened at all. We just sat on my friend’s couch– for eleven hours.” Another one features a “straight-arrow” kid who talks about how he shepherds all his stoner friends around—he’s the one that makes sure they get to the parties on time, he’s the one who talks to all the girls, etc. The stoners just stand there like sheep.

Now, there are some inaccuracies here. The most glaring one is that people who are using marijuana are socially incapacitated. Most people I know who smoke herb are livelier when they’re high. A more subtle inaccuracy is the idea that there’s something wrong with sitting in one place for eleven hours. Whether there was a conversation going or not, it could have been the most profound eleven hours of somebody’s life. Know what I mean? And yeah, it could have been a totally spaced-out waste of time.

But the main inaccuracy here is, even if strong sedation is the main result of marijuana use, why did we arrest over three quarters of a million people for it last year—more than were arrested for violent crimes? Eight million people have been arrested for marijuana use in the last decade, out of an estimated 90-100 million people who have tried it. Hey, I’ve been arrested for marijuana use twice, myself. Once the charges were dropped, and once I had to pay about four hundred dollars and I lost my favorite pipe, which all my friends said was a real nose-burner anyway. I think I’ve been lucky, and I’m grateful for that.

Interestingly enough, the people who get the most militant about locking up marijuana smokers are also among those most driven to lock up all illegal aliens. They are also frequently the people who are against abortion and against making contraceptives widely available. Do you see a pattern here?

Can you say, “Social Control,” boys and girls? Can you say, “pissing into the wind?”

Social Control is not a Green value. We are not Calvinists, who believe that deep in the heart of everyone is a sick, selfish monster who must be controlled by laws and regulations. We believe that the essence of each person is noble and beautiful and deserves to be nurtured like the bloom of a rare flower. Whether that nurturing involves sex, drugs, or austerity is a choice all adults are qualified to make for themselves. Make no mistake about it. Drug prohibition in this country is driven by irrational religious fundamentalism just as surely as the veiling of women in some Muslim countries.

We are at a slippery philosophical slope here. If we are all free to express our values and beliefs as long as we don’t try and force them on others, isn’t that forcing our values on those who value forcing us to observe their beliefs?

This is a koan I have been meditating on for almost forty years, but ultimately it comes down to the facts of the matter. The fact of the matter is that we live in a pluralistic world, and those who demand that it be uniform are functionally neurotic, even though their numbers are significant enough that they have to be taken somewhat seriously. All we can do about our nation’s neurotic drug warriors is keep giving them reality therapy. Professor Barrett Rubin of New York University gets our Truth In Strange Places Award for telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including Senators George Voinovich and Richard Lugar, “in effect, by turning drug use into a crime, we are funding organized crime and insurgency around the world. And it may be that we need to look at other methods of regulation and treatment.”

Water drips through stone. Stoners drip through squares. Hang in there, people. They can’t put all 90 million of us behind bars. We all deserve the same kind of attention—or lack of it—that Constance Gee gets. We shouldn’t have to be millionaires to get it.

music: Talking Heads, “And She Was“

William McDonough, the renowned advocate of sustainable development, paid a visit to Nashville recently. I wish I’d been there, but I’m having to settle for a friend’s account of what he said—many Nashville publications announced his talk, but none of them reported on the talk itself. My friend said he does his best to stay technical and avoid any kind of politics—he mentioned that for a mere four billion dollars (which we’re burning up in a blink of an eye in Iraq) China could be set up to manufacture solar panels at a rate and price that would make them highly attractive to U.S. buyers, creating four jobs installing and maintaining solar panels in the U.S. for every job making solar panels in China. He didn’t address the question of what we’re going to use for money to buy solar panels from China or to hire Americans to install them after we totally blow our wad on Iraq.

He pointed out that China’s growth rate is going to demand housing for another four hundred million people—more than the entire population of the United States—in just the next seven years, and that’s why forests all over the world are going bye-bye. That question was of serious concern to him, and he is attempting to address it.

Mr. McDonough is trying to do what he can to make China’s expansion sustainable. Technological sustainability is his thing, and I agree that it’s very important. He not only believes that everything should be recycled, he finds ways to change manufacturing processes and ingredients so it can happen. This is a good thing. But I think he’s leaving an important component of sustainability out of the equation—the human element.

A reporter from the Sydney, Australia, Morning Herald visited the Chinese “model village” McDonough has helped create, and found a great deal lacking in the execution of McDonough’s wonderful plan. Home building was being done by a private contractor who had changed the construction material from straw bale to cinder blocks made from coal dust, which may create indoor air pollution. The contractor was building the houses without solar orientation, solar panels, or insulation, all of which McDonough had called for, and they all lacked the garden space that Chinese peasants traditionally appreciate having around their dwellings. Beats a run to the supermarket, y’know? Speaking of runs to the supermarket, the homes were all equipped with attached garages, although nobody in the village owns, or can afford, an automobile, and the homes were priced well out of reach of the local villagers, who all complained that the houses were not appropriate for their lifestyle and that nobody involved with the project had consulted them about their needs and wishes.

The contracor’s response to the local community’s criticism of his project, and lack of investment in it, has been, according to the Herald, to start lobbying local authorities to force the villagers to move into the houses he’s building. Hey, that’s how they do things in China. Mr. McDonough’s projects here in the states seem to have worked a little better than this Chinese boondoggle, but his work over here involves only the wealthy and the willing, so far.

Mr. McDonough said in an interview that his goal is to create, “a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, soil, water, and power — economically, equitably, ecologically, and elegantly enjoyed, period. What’s not to like?” Well, from the way the China project is going, a little more justice and a healthy helping of democracy wouldn’t hurt—and, by the way, in all the research I did on him, this was the only time I heard him mention the word “justice”–and it was in Business Week Magazine.

Speaking of democracy, it’s also the element lacking in the continuing Walmart makeover, which is leading the company to do everything from cutting the amount of packaging it uses to selling only sustainably harvested fish to offering low-cost prescription drugs in its pharmacies—which will pull business away from its competitors and make life a little easier for Walmart employees who need prescription medication, since the company’s health plan has a pretty high deductible.

Meanwhile, Walmart continues to treat its employees unfairly just about any way it can, and has decided to increase its percentage of part-time employees so it won’t have to offer benefits to so many people—gee, Scrooge is going green, but he’s still Scrooge. He’s just looking out for his bottom line.

We like to say that we live in a democracy in this country, but democracy ends at the workplace door for most of us. Employers are the moral equivalent of kings—you can only argue with them very gingerly. Your job, your wages, your hours, your working conditions, benefits, vacations—all of that is at their discretion, and we all accept that as a given, unless we are in a union, in which case our union, which is at least theoretically a democracy, has standing to negotiate with the boss. Thus we see that those who advocate against unions are, essentially, advocating feudalism, which is the status quo for the 7/8ths of the American workforce that is not unionised at this point.

Of course, Walmart is not alone in their cavalier treatment of their employees and the communities they invade. They’re just the biggest player in the game. Many environmentalists are excited by Walmart’s move toward green technology because whatever the biggest player in the game does tends to set the standard for how the game gets played. Maybe Walmart’s awakening will extend to respectful relations with its workforce and the communities in which it does business. Sustainable technology without workplace democracy just creates green prisons. W here’s Lech Walesa when we need him?

Music: Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, “When the Lie’s So Big”

The big news lately has been about the Bush junta’s violations of the Kyoto Protocols, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Charter, the Magna Carta, and the US Constitution, but those aren’t the only agreements they’re violating. I’d like to focus on three lesser-known documents that are being ignored: the Montreal Protocol and the Stockholm and Rotterdam Conventions. The Montreal Protocol is the international agreement controlling ozone-depleting chemicals; the other two are international agreements on the use, production, and export of pesticides.

First, let’s examine the Montreal Protocol. Methyl Bromide is the most serious ozone-depleting chemical still in widespread use today. In 1996, about a third of the methyl bromide applied worldwide was used in the US; today, as other countries have moved faster to ban methyl bromide, the US is both the major user and the major producer of this highly toxic soil fumigant. Our government says it is critical to the continued production of strawberries, tomatoes, and peppers, without which the American economy and way of life would totally fall apart. Tell it to the organic growers, guys. The US continues to drag its heels on ending methyl bromide use, asking for (and being granted) extension after extension, while US producers are stockpiling several years’ worth of supply in their warehouses, violating the treaty, which mandates manufacturing more only when the current supply is used up. It’s true that production and use have dropped significantly, (though American use has not declined as fast as use elsewhere in the world) but recent observations note that the Antarctic ozone hole not only is not healing as fast as had been expected but is larger than it’s ever been, and that US methyl bromide use is largely to blame for this. Screw the Aussies, pass the strawberries.

Now, let’s look at the Stockholm and Rotterdam Conventions. Stockholm’s initial aim is to ban aldrin, endrin, dieldrin, chlordane, DDT, heptachlor, hexachlorobenzene, mirex, and toxaphene, PCBs, dioxins, and furans—phew. what a nasty mouthful!

The Stockholm Convention also sets up a review board to consider banning other chemicals. Two of the ten that it currently is considering are lindane and PBDE, a flame retardant that has been used in baby clothes. The Republican-dominated US congress has been reluctant to pass legislation to enforce these bans domestically—the only legislation introduced on the subject so far would have ended states’ rights to have more stringent standards than the federal government and virtually insured that the bans would not be enforceable in this country. Those family values people—gotta love ‘em—putting corporate profits ahead of poisoning babies. Wealth is evidently the primary Republican family value.

In typical fashion, Bush announced plans to work for ratification of this treaty on Earth Day 2001 and has done nothing for it since. Now that the election is looking tight, he may trot it out again…but it’s more likely that he’ll whup out a war against Iran and intern enough of us dissidents for “providing aid and comfort to the enemy” to swing the election his way again. Gotta watch out for that ol’ “October Surprise.” Karl Rove…what a sense of humor…gotta love ‘im. But, I digress….

OK, from Stockholm to Rotterdam. According to Kristin Schaffer, writing for Foreign Policy in Focus,

The Rotterdam Convention… is a complementary treaty(to the Stockholm Convention) providing important controls on international trade of highly toxic chemicals. It requires that any country importing pesticides and certain other hazardous chemicals must be informed of bans or severe restrictions on those substances in other countries. This gives a receiving country the option of refusing shipments of chemicals listed under the treaty on the grounds that they may be harmful to the environment or to the health of its population.

What the Bush junta has done with this is indicative of its venality. The US asked that, in order to be put on the restricted list, a chemical would have to be banned in both Europe and North America. Europe is much more conservative about chemicals than the US—they have adopted what is called “the precautionary principle,” meaning that if there is a possibility that something will cause damage, they ban it. In the US, on the other hand, we run on the profitability principle, meaning that as long as the chemical companies that support the Republican Party are making a profit from a pesticide, it will not be banned, even if it’s causing obvious damage. This is at the heart of these negotiations, make no mistake—the US is one of the leading pesticide producers in the world– we exported 1.7 billion pounds of poison in the three years 2001-3 alone, and about a sixth of that was chemicals whose use is banned in the US. The kicker here is that, having effectively sabotaged the treaty, the US has still not ratified it.

The world remains safe for American pesticide makers. Doesn’t that help you breathe easier? (Wheeze)

But, according to a report from England’s Hadley Center, there will be less need for agricultural pesticides in a global-warming tweaked future—because there will be less land suitable for agriculture. The report predicts that, conservatively, about 30% of the planet will become unsuitable for agriculture, about twice the area now in that condition. This will come about largely due to increased severity of drought in areas already suffering—such as Africa, parts of Asia, and the upper midwestern parts of the United States…gee, that’s one of the major breadbaskets of the world, isn’t it? And one of the US’s few remaining sources of export income?

No wonder the Bush junta is acting like a bunch of desperadoes—they know the situation is desperate; from their selfish, sociopathic perspective, the best course of action is “every man for himself and devil take hindmost.” Meanwhile, the Democrats continue to try and reason with this crew…you might as well try and reason with Hannibal Lecter about his dinner plans….and, by the way, satellite photography revealed that this summer, for the first time in recorded history, there was open water all the way from Spitzbergen to the North Pole. The word for the day is, “tipping point.”

music: Jane Siberry “Bound by the Beauty“

It’s been quite a month for lies…but what else can you expect from a government that sets itself apart from “the reality based community”?

For openers, there was historical fiction in the form of ABC’s “docudrama” on 9-11, which made it look like Bill Clinton was too distracted by his infatuation with Monica Lewinsky to do anything about 9-11. Bill rightly defended himself on Fox news, of all places, by pointing out that all the Republicans who are now excoriating him for letting Osama get away are the ones who were making all the fuss about Monica and pooh-poohing his attempts to kill Bin Laden, and that the Bush administration totally dropped the ball on all those efforts until after 9-11 “took them by surprise,” if indeed it was a surprise to them.

Another lie about 9-11 that surfaced was the EPA’s claim that air quality at ground zero after the blast was good enough to allow most people to work without respiratory protection. Now we find that the vast majority of those who helped clean up the twin towers are suffering from serious lung problems. What was the “Support the Troops” crew’s response to this? They killed Hillary Clinton’s move to earmark two billion dollars to help these people with their health problems. Some support. And, speaking of supporting the troops, they’ve been cutting soldiers’ access to body armor (by outlawing private body armor) and shrinking the Veterans’ Administration’s health programs. Support our troops, right. War is peace. Freedom is slavery.

The lies they told about Iraq—threat to the region, weapons of mass destruction, involvement with international terrorism, repressive government that needs to be toppled so democracy can flourish—have resulted in the deaths of as many Americans as died at the twin towers, the deaths of at least as many Iraqis as Saddam took out, a recruiting bonanza for terrorists, and a failing state in Iraq, a country where now, no one is safe. As one Iraqi commented, “Under Saddam, you knew that if you minded your own business, you wouldn’t be bothered. Now, death can come to anyone at any time.”

Lies….the facts in the Valerie Plame case are still not entirely clear, but it is possible that those who exposed her as an undercover CIA agent weren’t even well enough acquainted with the CIA’s operations to know that she was, in fact, the point person for uncovering Iraq’s secret weapons programs, if there were any—and, apparently, there were not. And this is the place where I say, “America had as much right to invade Iraq as the Nazis had to invade Poland.”

The gang that was so eager to dump Bill Clinton for a blow job sees nothing wrong with Presidential lies that have cost hundreds of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. And they see nothing wrong with protecting one of their own who’s a pedophile, if only they can get away with it ’till after the election. Boy, they’re really gonna hafta fix them voting machines good now that Representative Foley’s little indiscretions have come to light. They say incumbents can’t lose unless they’re caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy, and he’s been caught with a live boy. Chairman of the Missing and Exploited Childrens’ Caucus. Family values, yeah yeah yeah.

Now, I think some people may be going too far in not trusting the junta. There are many who question whether the twin towers were planted with demolition charges, whether the Pentagon was hit by an airliner or missile,what NORAD was doing, and so on. I think getting hung up in these kinds of details is a distraction. If there was government collusion or acquiescence in the attack, they didn’t need to be concerned about whether buildings went down, didn’t need to complicate the plot and risk exposure that way—just needed to let it happen—maybe they didn’t think the buildings would come down, maybe that part of the tragedy genuinely surprised and saddened them—things got out of hand. Certainly the continuing exposure of how many warnings were willfully ignored (the CIA’s counterterrorism chief saying “we held a gun to Condi Rice’s head and did everything but pull the trigger”) suggests that they could have known about it and wanted it to happen—or were they just too preoccupied to notice? In either case, they should be criminally liable.

And of course their response since the attack has been nothing short of bizarre. Banning toothpaste from airliners? Seriously, evidence continues to mount regarding the number of individuals kidnapped, tortured, detained, and even killed who had nothing to do with any terrorism. For example, a number of the detainees at Guantanamo are ethnic Uigurs from northwestern China, who had to leave China for their own safety after unsuccessfully opposing the Chinese takeover of their homeland. They saw themselves as fighting for an American kind of freedom—but they were strangers in Pakistan where the US was offering bounties for terrorists, and somebody saw them as easy money and turned them in for the bounty. They didn’t have families who would seek revenge, y’know? And so now they’re in Guantanamo, and the American government they once admired wants to make sure they don’t get out.

Through all this, Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez, et al have insisted that there are important secrets that must be kept and that is why none of their policies can be challenged. I think the most important secret they are trying to keep is what a bunch of incompetent, selfish, lying traitors they are. Let’s put them in Guantanamo and see how they like it!

Well, gee whiz (there I go again!), that’s a dangerous statement to make—because their response to the mounting criticism of their incompetence and venality has been to pass a law that essentially makes it illegal to criticize them. While the recent bill was promoted for its provisions stripping non-citizens of their rights, it also allows the President, or anyone he designates, to deem American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” and detain us without any rights, subject us to torture, including detaining our children and torturing them in front of us. I’m not making that up, folks. John Yoo, one of the chief framers of the junta’s torture polices, admitted as much in a public debate.

It looks to me like we are dealing with people who read 1984 and decided Big Brother was cool and Winston Smith was a dumb sucker who should have kept his head down.

The way this bill is written, Cindy Sheehan is subject to indefinite detention. Congressman John Murtha is subject to indefinite detention. Shame on the Democrats who voted for this bill. Shame on the ones who didn’t, but traded the possibility of a filibuster away for the chance to try to amend the bill to soften its impact. They’re making such noble, outraged noises. They should have rushed the podium or set fire to the furniture or at least demanded to be the first ones detained. Let’s get something clear—the junta doesn’t need torture provisions to get info from Middle Easterners—they know you don’t get reliable information from people by torturing them– they need the threat of torture to intimidate Americans. Everybody knows what weenies we are.

Gonzalez says that the 9-11 attacks constitute an invasion and therefore the government has the right to suspend habeus corpus. That statement is so fantastic that I hardly need to say anything about it except that if this guy wasn’t rich and in the government, he’d be on court-ordered meds.

I HAVE PLEDGED ALLEGIANCE TO THE REPUBLIC—NOT THE REPUBLICANS!!!

They have abrogated this country’s obligations under the Geneva conventions, which makes America an outlaw country. We are just as hijacked as the people in those jets five years ago, just as hijacked as the good citizens of Germany when Hitler pushed though a similar law in 1933.

Will there be a “Night of the Long Knives” to purge the GOP of Foley, Log Cabin Republicans, and anyone else antithetical to the “family values” crowd?

How many shopping days ’till Kristallnacht?

And what about Stalingrad and the Battle of Berlin?

music: REM, “Welcome to the Occupation”