Listen HERE.

Takeway quote: “Change your leaders, not your lightbulbs.”

Also, the interview with Jerry Coyne on evolution and creationism is worth a listen.

This was brought to mind last week when Fresh Air replayed an interview with the televangelist D. James Kennedy on the occasion of his death. Asked the question of whether a judge who believes abortion is wrong should decide based on the law or based on his conscience, he invoked a simple analogy. He said that in Nazi Germany, Jews were denied all rights, including eventually the right to live, so there was no law against killing a Jew. Thus, a judge who threw out a murder case against someone who killed a Jew, or a million Jews, would be acting entirely within the law. By the principles of the Nuremberg court, however, the killer would be guilty of crimes against humanity and a judge who pushed, promoted and actively abetted these killings by his activities in his court might also be guilty depending on his actual actions and degree of complicity. According to the Nuremberg court, it was not just those who gave the orders or those who carried them out, but also those in between who greased the wheels who could be guilty of crimes against humanity. Furthermore, the fact that a crime is not punishable by internal law does not, according to Principle II, exempt a person from international law. The definition of crimes against humanity used in Nuremberg included "Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhumane acts". They don’t specifically mention torture, but mass torture would not doubt constitute a crime against humanity (which does, by the way, have a connotation of scale that could not be realized through a single act against a single individual).

Now, let’s imagine that all the laws concerning crimes against humanity were applied not just to men in Germany and Serbia, but also to, well, Americans. This is totally abstract, though, right? Not exactly. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and others worked hard to make torture possible. There is the nasty little matter of "aggressive" interrogation techniques like waterboarding which would, almost undoubtedly, meet the test as torture in almost any context except the fanatic milieu of the Bush administration. In the initial “torture memos” out of the White House Office of Legal Counsel, they defined torture as limited to something that caused major internal bleeding or organ failure and damage like that. This was an absurdity caused because the statutes against torture prohibit causing great pain, but failed to define pain. So they looked to totally unrelated and irrelevant statutes governing medical care which said that organ failure can cause great pain. This was absurd and allowed many practices that any reasonable court would find to be torture, as Gonzales successor found when reviewing the legal underpinnings of administration actions.

But let’s say they get away with torture actually committed by Americans (and they have and they will). There is also the dirty little matter of “renditions” where the US has turned over at least 150 foreign nationals, often in the absence of any damning evidence, to foreign governments known to practice torture during interrogations (Jordan, Syria, Egypt). Extraordinary rendition violates the UN Convention Against Torture which the US finally signed in 1992 after much hand-wringing and foot-dragging for fear of exactly this situation: that US officials would be culpable under the terms of the treaty (and justifiably so, it would appear, in light of recent events). In addition to the UN Convention Against Torture and the basic principles laid out by the Nuremberg trials, it turns out that one can also try to stop these practices through the Alien Tort Statute, passed by Congress in 1789 in order to guarantee foreign nationals access to the US court system. This, then is a long-standing protection in in international law and in US Statute, both clearly violated by the Bush administration and their helpers (is that me? I paid taxes).

Still think this is just abstract? The American Civil Liberties Union has recently brought suit against Jeppesen Dataplan, the company that aids and abets the CIA by providing flights for renditions and whose unfortunate motto in light of these accusations is: "Making Every Mission Possible". Apparently that includes CIA torture flights, flights that apparently the CIA did not think that more closely-watched institutions like the Air Force could make possible. The ACLU are presenting a case on behalf of a handful of unhappy Jeppesen passengers. These are people such as Abou Elkassim Britel, an Italian who was bound and blindfolded and flown from Pakistan to Morocco and held and tortured for eight months without being allowed to contact anyone. He has permanent damage to his left eye and other body parts and was never even charged with anything. Upon release, he was arrested by the Moroccans and sentenced to six years in prison. Binyam Mohamed was blindfolded, shackled and repeatedly had his head beaten against a wall until he bled. He was beaten to the point that several bones were broken. They put small cuts on his genitals and then poured stinging liquid over them. He is now held without charge at Guantanamo. So the ACLU is brigning suit against those who transported these victims at the behest of the CIA.

Is there precedent for trying people who organize transportation that contributes to crimes under international law? Well, yes, there is. Adolph Eichmann, Nazi transportation minister for Jewish affairs was treated to his own extraordinary rendition in 1962. Discovered in Argentina, the Israeli Mossad kidnapped Eichmann, drugged him, and smuggled him out of Argentina and off to Israel. There Eichmann was tried and exectued. There were some protests in the UN for the violation of Argentinian sovereignty, but more or less the incident was allowed to pass.

You might balk at equating Jeppesen Dataplan with the Nazi minister of transportation for Jewish affairs, but I would say it’s just a question is one of scale. Yes, scale does matter, but it reminds me of the joke where a man turns to a woman at a bar and asks if she would have sex with a stranger for ten million dollars.
“Sure, she says.”
“Well, then, will you have sex with me for $100?”
“Certainly not! Do you think I’m a whore?” she replied indignantly.
“My dear lady,” the man replies, “we’ve already established that you’re a whore. Now we’re just haggling over price.”

Is it necessary to say that it makes no difference whether or not these people are guilty or plotting terrorism or not? As John McCain said so brilliantly when criticizing the Bush administration for promoting torture, “This is not about who they are. This is about who we are.” The goal should not be first and foremost to protect our country, but first and foremost to have a country worth protecting. A country and government that does not protect civil liberties, engages in torture, approves torture at the highest levels, and has willing corporations who, for a few dollars, are willing to engage in crimes against humanity is, I’m sorry to say, not worth protecting. The country that government represents may be worth protecting, but not the government. As Mark Twain said: Loyalty to your country always. Loyalty to your government when it deserves it.

Is there a meaningful difference between a government that, at the highest levels, approves torturing a few hundred people and a government that, at the highest levels, approves torturing a few million people? On just that one criterion, I don’ think so. That isn’t to say that I think there is no difference between Eichmann and Jeppesen, no difference between the US and Nazi Germany. That would be an obscene trivialization of Nazi crimes and a gross exaggeration of the Bush administration crimes. And for a long time, that gap made me oppose impeachement and criminal prosecution Bush officials, but in pondering the Kennedy interview and thinking over Eichmann and Nuremberg, I’ve changed my mind. I now feel that if we have a country worth protecting, we need to prove it by holding people at the highest levels accountable for their crimes against humanity.

Then I noticed all sorts of products (like that swanky countdown clock to the left) and, as time went by, my crappy little site got pushed further and further down in Google for “Bush is evil”. Now, there is just incredible competition and, I have to say, for the most part I’ve moved beyond Bush in my head. I just don’t really care what happens to him. It’s unclear how much damage he can pack into his last year and half in office, but I don’t see any chance of him getting impeached or forced to resign and I don’t see him pushing through any more controversial policies. It’s just a question now of whether he gets pressured to fix the many civil liberties, foreign policy and environmental errors he’s made or whether he withstands the pressure and leaves the entire mess to his successor.

What I have found incredible lately, though, is the way in which the Republican party has already started its countdown to inauguration 2009. Some examples:

• Alberto Gonzales recently said that he would not step down and referred to his last eighteen months in office as “a sprint to the finish.” Now, Gonzales has only been AG for a bit over two years, so he may find eighteen months to be a long sprint (as may we all)
• Robert Gates, secretary of defense, has decided not to even attempt to get Peter Pace reappointed as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, because his hearing would basically be an occasion for an open discussion of the handling of the war in Iraq. Pace has, for the most part handled himself admirably, disagreeing with Rumsfeld on matters concerning torture and so forth, and I don’t think that his personal conduct is in question. Again, it is the countdown phenomenon.
• Meanwhile several top Republicans admitted to breathing a sigh of relief when Newt Gingrich lambasted Bush as incompetent. Why a sigh of relief? Because they all know that the crucial task of the Republican party right now is to get beyond Bush.

In short, the Bush administration is so embattled and so disgraced that both inside and out, the Republicans themselves are counting down to inauguration 2009. And outside the White House, they are hoping to make Bush appear as though he is already gone so that they can go out and campaign about the future, but the truth is, no matter how vulnerable the past makes Hillary Clinton, the present is going to be a heavier weight on the Republican candidates. Now if we can only get one inspiring candidate in the race. Is Obama inspiring? I thought so after the Democratic Covnention, but I haven’t seen anything especially inspiring. Clinton? Giuliani? McCain? Isn’t astounding that the wealthiest nation in the world, with the longest-standing tradition of being a democratic republic is stuck with these choices. Until I see someone inspiring (if Wellstone were still alive for example), I’m counting down, but with less and less enthusiasm all the time.

The president proposed that in place of the vague language of the Decalogue, that US forces be bound by a new code that would spell out exactly which acts constituted coveting thy neighbor’s wife and killing. “Just because a few thousand people end up dead, does that mean they were killed?” asked the president. He proposed language that would make it clear that US forces acting on command of a superior officier in a combat situation would not be in transgression of the Ten Commandments. Similarly, soldiers and presidents who copped a look at the cute butt of another man’s wife would not necessarily be in violation of the Decalogue. Asked specifically about oral sex, the president replied “See, now that’s why we need this spelled out. We think that oral sex with another man’s wife would be covered under the the ‘thou shalt not covet’ rule, but the previous administration had a different interpretation of that particular rule.”

Snow cited many examples of plots that were only uncovered when more aggressive techniques were employed. Soon after taking up the struggle against witchcraft, inquisitors of the papal inquisition found a woman who confessed to giving birth to a monster after having intercourse with a demon. Furthermore, plague spreaders posed a major threat throughout Europe as well. The same investigative process uncovered many cases of plague-spreader cells that made pacts with the Devil to spread plague and kill Christians. Snow noted that just as extreme danger from terrorists using biological weapons called for severe solutions in the sixteenth century, so to does it in the twentieth century. “Because of the will of inquisitors and civil authorities to track down these covens and cells, we no longer worry about plague spreaders and witches who have made pacts with Satan to kill Christians.” It would be naive, Snow added, to think that such hardened witches and Satanists would have given themselves up to simple questioning. “Then, as now, the safety of God-fearing people and liberals too, depended on aggressive interrogations to uncover plots to have sex with the Devil, eat Christian babies and use biological weapons. Can we really afford to turn our backs on what worked in the Middle Ages.”

See also: Does Torture Really Work? – Newsweek – MSNBC.com

Bush did not elaborate on why he picked Abu Ghraib as one of the most regrettable mistakes, but one has to ask whether he thinks it was so bad for the US image abroad or whether he regrets the acts themselves. It was obviously bad for our image, but that could be said of almost every single thing that George Bush has done, so why pick that? I suspect that it is actually because he found what happened in Abu Ghraib personally distasteful. Bush is an ideological conservative who has no trouble putting ideology before people or good policy when considered in the abstract, but he has more trouble separating out the personal when he can attach names and faces to the people. I think Abu Ghraib forced him to confront what the US was doing in Iraq in real terms, not just an ideological screed about freeing the Iraqi people, and he saw that there was… er… room for improvement.

Meanwhile, as for his regrets about his swaggering tough talk, he weaseled out of that a bit saying that in certain parts of the world those remarks were misunderstood. I suppose by “certain parts of the world” he means Blue states? It certainly played poorly with all the bleeding heart liberals I know. Of course, in Europe it was a disaster. Somehow, though, Bush thinks those statements only played poorly in the Middle East or something. I would say that shows Bush at his dillusional best, but realistically, he is not Bill Clinton and he does not think carefully before he speaks and doesn’t ponder the meaning of “is” and “sexual relations” and believe that there is wide room for interpretation of those terms. If not speaking extemporaneously, I think at this point Bush would realize that the Europeans and the Democrats didn’t find those terms comforting either. The one positive aspect of his first choice of mistake is that it is something that in fact leaves no room for interpretation — it was Bush’s fault, not the result of a confused signal with an underling.

The other interesting aspect of his admissions is that they all concern actions that negatively impacted the perception of the US among our allies and enemies. In the 1940s, the United States saved democracy in Europe. It’s that simple. The British fought bravely and the Soveits spent more lives than anyone else, bleeding the Germans dry in a war of attrition. But American industry provided the weapons that let the British and the Soviets hang on and then we provided the troops that dealt the final blow. After the war, we drew the line in the sand that stopped the Soviets from taking all of Germany and perhaps eventually more. The Berlin airlift kept Berlin free. For a time, all Europeans understood this. My first trip to France, I was surprised how many monuments to American soldiers were erected by the French in gratitude for the American actions. Robert Kennedy Jr has talked about how, as a child touring Europe with his father and presidential uncle, you could feel the good will and gratitude directed towards Americans. As late as the 1980s, I was picked up hitch-hiking by an older French man who said he stopped because I was American, explaining that he would never forget what the Americans had done for France. American presidents, despite inadvertent blunders like Reagan going to Bitburg, American presidents since Truman have done their best to treat that political capital from the 1940s as a long-term investment to manage carefully. Not Bush. In the course of his first term, he managed to pretty much expend that. Bush effectively wiped out what remained of the savings account that we built up in World War II at the expense of hundreds of thousands of US soldiers and a hefty debt, especially when you add in what we spent keeping the Soviets out of western Europe even as European countries had the resources to offer medical care and good schools to their citizens. It is hard to imagine that we can ever recover that good will without saving Europe again, and I don’t believe that America will ever be in a position to do that again (let’s certainly hope not!).
It made me start to wonder what to nominate for Bush’s Greatest Errors. I don’t even know where to start, but other than the war in Iraq itself, the first things that come to mind are the first things he did, such as:

• Beginning his term by repealing every environmental measure passed in the last days of the Clinton administration, even though most were recommended by experts in the field after years of study.
• Obstructing any action to reverse global warming or even paying lip service to our allies who see this as important (and there are good arguments, given the “progress” Europeans have made, to believe that lip service is all anybody is paying)
• Obstructing any action to promote alternative fuels
• Illegal detention in secret prisons and Gitmo
• Possibly legal but nevertheless imprudent surveillance and wiretapping of peaceful Americans
• Fiscal policy that has added to the debt faster than any other president in history, even more so than Johnson, the bête noir of the right.
• Prescription drug benefit that we simply cannot pay for which panders to the drug companies (agreement not to bargain to lower prices through collective buying) and to the AARP and their constituency (why do wealthy older people get the government to buy their drugs?)

These items may come to haunt us for as long as the war itself, perhaps longer. They have weakened America both by putting us in an even worse financial position than we already were and by making our energy supply even less secure. They have destroyed our image abroad. They have polluted our planet and will continue to do so. Furthermore, if the money spent on the war had been spent on more promising methods of keeping oil cheap, we would be immeasurably better off. We might even be able to afford prescription drugs to those who can afford them anyway.

Under this sweeping theory of executive power, the liberty of
every American rests on nothing more than the grace of the White House.78

Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power.

Anyway, it’s worth a read.

Before we have any discussion of Republican energy policy, though, I have to throw out two numbers: 3 and 8.

• The auto industry contributes three times as much to Republicans as to Democrats
• The oil industry contributes eight times as much to Republicans as to Democrats

So both parties have sold their souls to lobbyists and corporate interests, of course, but in this respect Republicans should be in the eighth circle of the Inferno, while Democrats are up there in the fith circle of eternal damnation.

Something has to be done though, right? People are reduced to stealing gas right? Well, April was the busiest retail month in two years. Wal-mart, considered a bellwether of the retail economy and notable also in that it caters to low-income people, those presumably hardest hit by the current rise in gas prices, saw sales jump 6.8% over last April. According to the New York Times, this is partly because Easter fell in mid-April this year rather than late March like last year, so Easter sales came in April.

Thomas M. Schoewe, the chief financial officer at Wal-Mart, said “rising fuel costs were overshadowed by the customers’ response to merchandise” like toys and candy, two Easter staples.

I wonder if any quote could serve as a better equivalent of Nero fiddling while Rome burns. We are in “crisis” (or so they tell us), but it’s offset by expenditures on toys and candy. There may be nothing left to say about America in our time beyond that.

Except this… The Republicans have proposed a $100 rebate on gas tax to all Americans, which ranks among the stupidest ideas to come out of Washington and that’s saying a lot. That idea is dead, but meanwhile they have gone on to find other ways to save Americans money. Assuming, of course, you happen to be among the wealthier Americans who, presumably, can afford to buy gas anyway, but I guess can’t afford to buy companies, which is the constituency the Bush administration is usually pandering to. So the proposed tax bill will cut 0.4% or $20 off the annual tax bill of the typical taxpayer in the middle quintile (that is, 40% earn less and 40% earn more). The bottome 40% are, of course, out of luck. Meanwhile, those who make 5.3 million dollars per year, and who no doubt need help paying for gas for their limos and Leer jets, would have 4.8% or over $82,000 lopped off their tax bill. Those taxpayers making $75,000 to $100,000 would have $403 lopped off. Why bother?

Meanwhile, the Forest Service is set to sell off as much as 375,000 acres of land to raise money because the government can’t find funds to pay the money it owes, under an agreement dating back to Theodore Roosevelt, to rural communities impacted by the creation of National Forests. Because it has become politically incorrect to sell timber off this land, especially old-growth timber, the Forest Service needs to raise money somehow. So instead of giving uneconomical subsidies to logging companies and having them clear cut with at least the chance to regrow in four hundred years, we have switched to letting condo developers pay fair market value and plowing the land under forever. This is not what folks had in mind when we said we didn’t want our National Forests harvested.

So to tie together the seemingly disparate elements of this rant: maybe those people who make $75,000 or more per year could just pony up their $403 and let us keep our National Forests and we can just let gas prices rise so that there is more incentive to use sustainable energy and, with luck, climate change won’t destroy our National Forests if the the Forest Service doesn’t get to them first.

Meanwhile, the real mystery in recent news: the only massive street protests in recent days concern immigration law.

Sources:

• Conflicting Loyalties as Republicans Confront High Gas Prices – New York Times
• Analysis of Tax Bill Finds More Benefits for the Rich – New York Times
• An April Easter Helps Retailers Post Best Sales Gain in 2 Years – New York Times
• Students Are Concerned by U.S. Plan to Sell Their Trees – New York Times

I often see the bumper sticker “Freedom isn’t free”. I guess it turns out that the price of freedom is surveillance of all your communication. Land of the wiretapped, home of the scared!

1. Various clocks (actual anti-Bush physical desk clocks and mini keychain clocks) that people are selling that count down until He Who Shall Not Be Named is out of office. Update. I keep finding these around the net and then they go away and turn into dead links. Now I have just the one clock above (or to the left) that I’m selling myself which hopefully will stay in stock and even gives me a small commission. Basically, it tells time but instead of numbers, it has illustrations from some of Bush’s more nefarious cowboy acts, and then it has a digital countdown timer at the bottom.
2. Some inauguration 2009 bumper stickers and t-shirts from CafePress counting down until we have a new president. I’ve seen better ones, but haven’t taken the time to put them up here.
3. Installation instructions for putting an anti-Bush (oops! I named Him) Javascript countdown timer on your website.
4. Some other Bush countdown clocks I’ve found here and there around the net celebrating that same event.

Inauguration 2009 bumper stickers and shirts from CafePress

America: Returning Jan 20th 2009 Sticker (Bumper) (also in tee shirts, coffee mugs and so forth)

Someone Less Dumb in 2008 (bumper sticker. Also in tee shirt, pins, etc).

The countdown timer script

[note for geeks: if your host uses CPanel, you can also just use the countdown function on your control panel to put a Java timer (rather than Javascript) on your site).]

First off, this is 99.9% not my script. The generic script that can be used to countdown from any date is made and distributed by Robert Hashemian and was modified to object-oriented code by Munsifali Rashid. Please note, that their counter is simply a generic counter and they may be Bush supporters for all I know, but that does not seem to be the case, so I don’t think he’ll be too upset about distributing this modified version (I have contacted him to make sure it’s okay). Anyway, you don’t need to credit me in any way, but it might be nice if you use the script to give credit to Robert in some way. All I have done is:

• Throw in some php into the footer part to get the time on the server and allow the user (i.e. you, not the person looking at your page) to set the timezone offset from Washington.
• Set the default date to the 2009 Inauguration.
• Changed to format so that there are non-breaking spaces between the digits and their unit indicators so it doesn’t break “10 days” onto two lines.

If you want to see how to install multiple counters on a single page or you want to run a version that does not use PHP, go to Robert Hashemian’s countdown timer page and download Mun’s version of this script, which shows you how to do that. That way you can put a “Until the Social Security Fund runs out” counter too!

Okay, first download my modified version and unzip it.

1. Transfer the countdown.js file to your site via FTP or a file manager.
2. Grab the code in the Countdown.php file in the header and put it in the header of your page. If countdown.js is not in the same directory as the page/script that the countdown timer appears on, you have to change the path in the first <script> statement so that it points to right location.
3. Grab the code from the footer and put it in the footer of your page. Make sure that you adjust the timezone correction. If you are on the east coast, this would be 0, in the Midwest, -1
4. Now just take the one line of HTML and put it where you want the timer to appear. It is currently wrapped in <div id=”clockwrapper”>. This div is not required, but the other one is and must not be changed (neither the tag nor the id) unless you want to make the necessary changes to the countdown.js file

That’s pretty much it. At that point, it should just run.

The Bush Desktop Countdown Clock – more real physical clocks

While doing this, I saw someone trying to sell a Bush countdown timer for $20 and I thought that was an incredible ripoff, until I realized this guy is selling an actual physical desk clock. That clock is no longer for sale it appears, but a quick little search found that there are alternatives. In addition to the Bush countdown clocks above, I’ve found a few others:

• National Nightmare. A pretty good looking alternative inaugural countdown clock. I like their description of themselves: “The Bush Countdown Clock is designed and sold by Bookshop Santa Cruz – an independent bookstore in Santa Cruz, CA – widely known as the makers of the Newt Gingrich Barf Bag.” I guess I missed that one.
• BackwardsBush.com claims to be the original Bush Countdown Clock and it may be so. I have no idea. (from $9 to $120 depending on the clock)
• And this guy is kind of hilarious – he has a key chain countdown clock, but also things like golf balls printed with “01.20.09″ Damn that seems like a long way off.