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Wednesday, August 24, 2005
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Apparently some of us have fewer constitutional rights than others:
NEW YORK The American Legion, which has 2.7 million members, has declared war on antiwar protestors, and the media could be next. Speaking at its national convention in Honolulu, the group’s national commander called for an end to all “public protests” and “media events” against the war, constitutional protections be damned.
“The American Legion will stand against anyone and any group that would demoralize our troops, or worse, endanger their lives by encouraging terrorists to continue their cowardly attacks against freedom-loving peoples,” Thomas Cadmus, national commander, told delegates at the group’s national convention in Honolulu.
The delegates voted to use whatever means necessary to “ensure the united backing of the American people to support our troops and the global war on terrorism.”
Cadmus added: “It would be tragic if the freedoms our veterans fought so valiantly to protect would be used against their successors today as they battle terrorists bent on our destruction.”
Without mentioning any current protestor, such as Cindy Sheehan, by name, Cadmus recalled: “For many of us, the visions of Jane Fonda glibly spouting anti-American messages with the North Vietnamese and protestors denouncing our own forces four decades ago is forever etched in our memories. We must never let that happen again….
“We had hoped that the lessons learned from the Vietnam War would be clear to our fellow citizens. Public protests against the war here at home while our young men and women are in harm’s way on the other side of the globe only provide aid and comfort to our enemies. ”
Resolution 3, which was passed unanimously by 4,000 delegates to the annual event, states: “The American Legion fully supports the president of the United States, the United States Congress and the men, women and leadership of our armed forces as they are engaged in the global war on terrorism and the troops who are engaged in protecting our values and way of life.”
Cadmus explained, “No one respects the right to protest more than one who has fought for it, but we hope that Americans will present their views in correspondence to their elected officials rather than by public media events guaranteed to be picked up and used as tools of encouragement by our enemies.” This might suggest to some, however, that American freedoms are worth dying for, but not exercising.
“Let’s not repeat the mistakes of our past,” Cadmus advised. “I urge all Americans to rally around our armed forces and remember our fellow Americans who were viciously murdered on Sept. 11, 2001.
(Via Suburban Guerrilla.)
10:11:02 PM 
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Amazing. Instapundit posts, apparently approvingly ("it's a good point"), an email from one of his fans that says the only problem is that Bush isn't sleeping enough!
I think whats wrong with the President is that he is tired, as we say in the south "slam wore out". Like a good blue tick after hunting, he needs to crawl up under the porch out of the heat and sleep for a good long spell. Look at pictures of him, you can see the graying, the wrinkling, and the fraying take place right before your eyes.
The man has had to preside over some momentous events during his 2 terms, from 9/11 to Enron et al to recession to Afghanistan to Iraq to a bitter, long and momentously important election to supreme court appointments. Every step of the way he has been criticized, demonized, lied about, misrepresented, belittled and opposed. No matter what he has done, he has been trashed out by someone somewhere, often including his own party members and some "supporters". He has been betrayed by members of his own party in the senate. HIs victories are ignored and his losses maginified a thousand times over.
Well, he's already taken more vacation time than any other president over an 8-year term, and he's not even been there 5 yet! How much sleep does this guy need? Though I do have to admit that having him crawl under the porch to go away for a good long spell is not the worst idea I've ever heard. If only there weren't Cheney; but his poll numbers are even lower than W's.
10:02:06 PM
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BBC: Iraqi marshlands returning to health. Under Saddam Hussein, the area of marsh was reduced to a tenth of its former size, as the government punished people living there for acts of rebellion. The latest United Nations data shows that nearly 40% of the area has been restored to its original condition... ..."The near-total destruction of the Iraqi marshlands under the regime of Saddam Hussein was a major ecological and human disaster..." United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) executive director Klaus Toepfer said in a statement... ...According to Chizuru Aoki, Iraq project co-ordinator for the Unep, the situation changed rapidly with the end of Saddam Hussein's government in April 2003. "Immediately after the fall of the last regime, local people started to breach dykes which had taken water away from the marshes and bring water back into drained areas," she told the BBC News website.
(Via EdCone.com.)
9:49:31 PM
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Crazy Apple Rumors Site: Apple Issues More Cease And Desist Orders.:
what is less well known is that Apple also sent a cease and desist order to 9-year-old Ricky Beehler, a resident of Kensington, Maryland. According to Beehler's attorney, Apple is seeking a legal injunction on Howard to get him to stop holding OS X so close to a PC and taunting the company.
Sources indicate that Beehler has been holding an unopened box of Tiger install DVDs up to his Dell Dimension and saying "I'm not installing it! Is this bugging you? I'm not installing it!"
(Via Teal Sunglasses.)
9:31:04 PM
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The truth is, Bush's Iraq misadventure has become such an huge disaster, it's probably impossible for us to get out cleanly now, without leaving a civil war in our wake. How many would die in this civil war? Juan Cole's proposal for disengagement is probably the best we can hope for, and it's extremely unlikely this "stay the course" crowd would ever adopt it. We'll probably end up just declaring victory, and getting out with our tail between our legs sometime next year, leaving some isolated bases behind, with civil war in most of the country. It's such a depressing thought, because it was all so unnecessary and so predicatable.
Personally, I think "US out now" as a simple mantra neglects to consider the full range of possible disasters that could ensue. For one thing, there would be an Iraq civil war. Iraq wasn't having a civil war in 2002. And although you could argue that what is going on now is a subterranean, unconventional civil war, it is not characterized by set piece battles and hundreds of people killed in a single battle, as was true in Lebanon in 1975-76, e.g. People often allege that the US military isn't doing any good in Iraq and there is already a civil war. These people have never actually seen a civil war and do not appreciate the lid the US military is keeping on what could be a volcano.
All it would take would be for Sunni Arab guerrillas to assassinate Grand Ayatollah Sistani. And, boom. If there is a civil war now that kills a million people, with ethnic cleansing and millions of displaced persons, it will be our fault, or at least the fault of the 75% of Americans who supported the war. (Such a scenario is entirely plausible. Look at Afghanistan. It was a similar-sized country with similar ethnic and ideological divisions. One million died 1979-1992, and five million were displaced. Moreover, all this helped get New York and the Pentagon blown up.)
And what's more likely, the neocon vision of peace spreading throughout the mid East, or this?
[A]n Iraq civil war will likely become a regional war, drawing in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey. If a regional guerrilla war breaks out among Kurds, Turks, Shiites and Sunni Arabs, the guerrillas could well apply the technique of oil pipeline sabotage to Iran and Saudi Arabia, just as they do now to the Kirkuk pipeline in Iraq. If 20% of the world's petroleum production were taken off-line by such sabotage, the poor of the world would be badly hurt, and the whole world would risk another Great Depression.
Like I say, Cole's prescriptions seem to make a lot of sense, much more sense than we hear from the White House these days. Which means they have next to zero probability of happening.
5:59:34 PM
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Get your atheistic quotations here.
The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.
-- John Adams, "A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America" (1787-88), from Adrienne Koch, ed., The American Enlightenment: The Shaping of the American Experiment and a Free Society (1965) p. 258, quoted from Ed and Michael Buckner, "Quotations that Support the Separation of State and Church"
(Via Cynical-C Blog.)
4:32:53 PM
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Over on the Dylan Pool, there's a rumor going around (actually, so far it's just one guy) that there's an an album of new Bob songs due in December. It would be nice if it were true, but it's hard to put much credit in it now.
As soon as I saw the thread, I was reminded of a much better rumor from '97 about an album to be called "Stormy Season." This was a great title, maybe, and the purported songs on the album had some great titles, too:
- Butcher's Crew
- The Fire Starter
- Apollo's Love
- Police State
- You Belong To Me
- Abraham's Altar
- When You Give Me Your Love
- Up On The Hill
- Stormy Season
- No Compassion
These are pretty much too obviously fake Dylan titles, especially with the duplicate mythology titles in the Fire Starter and Apollo's Love; and Bob had recorded You Belong to Me for the soundtrack of Natural Born Killers. This brings up the two best non-song titles in the Dylan fake cannon. The first is from a hoax Christmas album, and the song title is Snow Over Interstate 80. The Church with No Upstairs was/is a rumored unreleased song from late '65 or early '66. It's a great title, and I remember Paul Cable speculating on it in his early, exciting work on Dylan bootlegs. I can't find my copy of that fantastic book around anymore; it was great reading. But today we're much better served by the web and Glen Dundas.
4:12:44 PM
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Wow! George Schlossnagle, along with the Bricolage folks have found a way to embed Pearl in PHP and PHP in Perl! I haven't checked it out yet, but it sounds pretty exciting.
3:33:05 PM
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Scarily true: For political reasons, the president has a history of silence on America's war dead. But he finally mentioned them on Monday because it became politically useful to use them as a rationale for war - now that all the other rationales have gone up in smoke.
"We owe them something," he told veterans in Salt Lake City (even though his administration tried to shortchange the veterans agency by $1.5 billion). "We will finish the task that they gave their lives for."
What twisted logic: with no W.M.D., no link to 9/11 and no democracy, now we have to keep killing people and have our kids killed because so many of our kids have been killed already? Talk about a vicious circle: the killing keeps justifying itself.
(Via AMERICAblog.)
12:55:28 PM
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Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Usama Bin Ladin have a lot in common. Take the quiz and see if you can identify statements by each of these "leaders."
12:38:30 PM
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A security hole in version 1.x of CPAINT, which is used to make AJAX applications. Interestingly, I've been working with CPAINT intensely this week, though I'm using Version 2.0, so I'm not affected. This sentence seems overstated to me: "Tens of thousands of companies...are likely to be affected by the flaw in Cpaint -- a tool kit used to create applications using an approach known as AJAX -- short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML." I hope that tens of thousands of companies are using this -- lots of job opportunities there! -- but it seems an awful big number to me.
10:10:58 AM
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Very depressing stuff.
A three-day visit by a reporter working for the Guardian last week established what neither the Iraqi government nor the US military has admitted: Haditha, a farming town of 90,000 people by the Euphrates river, is an insurgent citadel.
That Islamist guerrillas were active in the area was no secret but only now has the extent of their control been revealed. They are the sole authority, running the town's security, administration and communications.
A three-hour drive north from Baghdad, under the nose of an American base, it is a miniature Taliban-like state. Insurgents decide who lives and dies, which salaries get paid, what people wear, what they watch and listen to.
Haditha exposes the limitations of the Iraqi state and US power on the day when the political process is supposed to make a great leap - a draft constitution finalised and approved by midnight tonight.
(Via The Liberal Reality-Based Avenger.)
9:43:14 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
Last update: 9/2/2005; 10:19:19 AM.
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