Yet again with the news - 8 October 2010

In today's world, there's ridiculous, and then there's politics in America. We are spending time talking about whether or not Christine O'sDonnell's father was an official Bozo the Clown or not. I could make an argument about personal character, integrity, and lying, but instead I'm whacking everyone with a rolled-up news...what? An illiterate clown in Brazil won his election by saying that his entire term is going to be spent learning what the senators actually do and reporting it back to the people? I guess clowns are important now. And here I had a slow news day gag lined up...

Anyway, officials in the United States military admit that elements of Pakistan's intelligence service are working with insurgents, and not against them, which is either an admission that this is a lot harder than it looks or a set-up to officially declare the Third Land War in Asia and go at it with the gloves off. Back in Afghanistan, Marjah continues to be a tough place for NATO forces to hold and maintain security in.

Kim Jong Un will succeed Kim Jong Il as leader of North Korea.

Inside the United States, the organizers of a marathon on the same day as the Stewart/Colbert political rallies have decided they don't want to share their portable toilets, and have instead purchased locks for them to ensure that the rally attendees will be unable to use them. This comes after Comedy Central contacted them and offered to share in costs and cleaning if they would let both events use them.

A band from Texas was stopped by the Border Patrol and asked for their immigration papers while in Alabama, driving to a gig. This is an SB 1070 answer - what does an illegal immigrant look like? Latinas in the front seat, driving a van with Texas plates and stuff in the back. The ACLU reminds us that if you live within 100 miles of a coast or border, you are in a Constitution-free zone when it comes to being stopped and asked for your immigration status. That covers a significant amount of the population.

A judge in Detroit sided with the government and ruled that the requirements to carry insurance mandated in the health care bill passed at the beginning of the year are legal. This particular opinion is nonbinding on all of the other challenges to the bill in other states.

The governor of New York wants to make it so food stamp money is not spent on sugar drinks. Which is a nice gesture toward trying to get health to the people, but ultimately will be a failure if left to hang out there. The reason sugar drinks are usually a staple is because they're cheaper than the healthy stuff - same for unhealthy foods. Subsidies manipulate the price of crops such that candy and HFCS is cheap and healthy foods that require prep, time, and some culinary skills to cook are priced out of the range of people on food stamps. Eating healthy for half the week is not a preferred alternative to eating unhealthy for all of the week.

Taking a wider perspective, the middle class has cut out as much spending as they can, even as their income remains stable, because they're watching other necessary expenses eat up more of their income.

Last out of this section, Gallup numbers on unemployment and underemployment for the country - still looking pretty bad. And the numbers on spending and deficits don't look all that hot, either. Which, when combined with 72,000 payments for closing the "donut hole" going to people who have already expired, makes the case against the Democrats and the previous administration look that much better.

Sciences and technologies opens with the discovery of a Yoda bat and several other species, moves from there into recognition that dancers have a different genetic makeup than other people, looking at another exoskeletal system to help the paralyzed walk, augmented reality displays that clip on your glasses, wireless sensors that could send your health status to your cellphone, so that you could then send that data to your physician, and landing on the Salk Institute developing a map of retinal cells so that we know what parts of a picture are handled where. Mmm, retinal reconstructive surgery and/or rewiring to let the eye-damaged see again?

Electrolux's design contest produces eight finalists, ranging from a modular kitchen to a clothes-cleaning closet. From those eight finalists, three winners were selected.

Just wait until certain social conservatives get a hold of this. A study suggests that testosterone levels during pregnancy will help determine the level of "masculine-typical" behavior in a female child. I'm waiting for the next encyclical or pulpit-pounding sermon telling pregnant women to get estrogen injections for their girl children, so they turn out like little girls instead of tomboys or worse, butch lesbians or transition to being the men they've always felt they were since birth.

Last out, an excellent case for requiring and institutionalizing anonymity in your leak site - if it gets hacked, the names and addresses of your contributors are potentially exposed.

In opinions, Mr. Mohler posits that Christians should not practice yoga, based on its emphasis on the body and its spiritual roots in non-Christian religions, taking his cue from Stefanie Syman's The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America. The book traces the roots and routes of yoga coming to America, but Mr. Mohler fixates on Syman's acknowledgement that the bodily practice of yoga cannot be completely separated from its spiritual roots (as with any discipline or art that seeks to bring mind and body into harmony together) and the use of sexual energy in some yogic traditions. From there on out, he orbits between two arguments as to why yoga and Christianity don't work together: Yoga has sex energy components and originates from a non-Christian culture, and a more sane argument that the ideas that yoga holds about the body being a pathway to the Divine are not compatible with the idea that Christians should connect with God only through the Bible and the material contained therein. The opinion is not without its critics, many who argue that they can use the practice for exercise and leave any non-Christian spiritual components out if it, a position Mr. Mohler rejects, reasoning if it takes concentration or meditation to hold a particular pose, then it passes past the point of exercise into something more spiritual and dangerous.

Mr. Carroll reminds us that our ability to respond to major disasters like oil spills are not at all organized or effective, and blames mostly this administration for trying to use the crisis for political purposes, instead of focusing on cleaning it up. Good on advocating for better and more coordinated response, bad on trying to pin it all on one administration.

Mr. Levin wants an investigation into Media Matters, whcih it claims has been illegally advocating for the Democratic Party in violation of its 501(c)(3) status, which permits "issues" advocacy but not specific candidate or political party advocacy. I'm surprised that Mr. Levin doesn't recognize that he's calling for someone to open the prank can that says it has nuts inside but instead has a coiled rubber critter. If we're going to investigate on whether IRS categories are being respected, then several conservative groups are going to receive the baleful eye about their practices and donors, like, say, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce potentially spending foreign money on U.S. electioneering in violation of the law, or whether the anonymous donors funding the astrotruf groups are all legally contributing to them and their money is being used in legal ways. Or whether organizations like News Corp. have been working as arms of a political operation and not as a news organization - not sure if that actually violates any laws, but it would certainly make "Fair and balanced" an objectively-proven lie. So, go ahead and investigate, but don't be surprised if the backfire is substantial.

Ms. Strassel conflates two issues - whether things like cap-and-trade are sound policy and whether cap-and-trade is sound politics when your consistuency is in the middle of coal country. By showing how the Republicans are finding attacks and gains in painting their Democratic opponents as all in favor of killing coal jobs, regardless of whether they actually voted yes on a cap and trade bill, Ms. Strassel makes a strong case that such things are bad politics if you want re-election. Nowhere, though, does she point out whether it's a bad policy to enact, but she hopes you'll conflate the attack ads that claim there will be lots of jobs lost as facts, rather than hypotheticals, and conclude that it's also bad policy to support cap-and-trade. (There are other issues with cap-and-trade versus straight funding of alternatives, but that's a separate column.) It's a very subtle sleight-of-mind, but a very important one.

Last out, a return to a well that we haven't heard from in a long time - Mr. Mukasey, former Attorney General, rah-rahs for indefinite detention without rights on foreign spaces where laws don't apply because it apparently helped to foil a plot to attack European train lines. He laments that Faisal Shahzad should have also been given the same treatment to see what he would have coughed up under "enhanced interrogation", instead of being given his Miranda rights as a person arrested for a crime in the United States is entitled to. The need to gather intelligence on other terror plots is paramount, apparently, to anything else. This is the danger that leads to the abuses already documented in the past. Why does Michael Mukasey want to encourage captured people to lie and say anything at all, instead of working to get useful, actionable, and correct intelligence from them?

Special Thinky: The Point of Political No Return

Saw something on the back of someone's truck a few days ago as a back window decal. Up top, it said "Liberalism is" and then proceeded to spew several nouns and adjectives such as:

• sin,
• treason,
• spiritually deficient,
• racist,
• murder,
• socialism,
• fascism

and several others before ending with the big finish that said:

"Domestic terrorism."

That's right, liberalism is domestic terrorism. My first response to such a thing is, I would like to think, what sane people would do when confronted with such a claim: *thfffffffffthahahahahahahahahahahaha* This person needs a visit from the Inigo Montoya School of Linguistic Meaning.

And then I thought about the implications of what such a thing entails, and what kind of world you have to live in to believe that liberalism is the equivalent of people creating explosives out of vehicles and detonating them in crowded areas, people deliberately sabotaging and/or destroying infrastructure or property to send a political message, or doing harm to people to hold them in fear of your organization. So I put on my thinking cap and started a metaphorical journey. My starting point was Tea Party Land, because they seemed to be the best fit for coming to that conclusion. They have a built-in fear of governmental mechanisms and have been successfully inculcated with the idea that liberalism is able to resolve entirely contradictory philosophies and meld them into some sort of whole, control the airwaves through the mainstream media and silence anyone with the truth, and are actively working to undermine the religious and constitutional foundations on which the country and its government rest so they can enrich themselves and take greater control over the life of someone else. As I spent time there, though, I realized that most of the Tea Party residents would be totally fine if the debts were backed off on and some sort of fiscal responsibility came into play. They don't think of liberals as terrorists, just big spenders.

So I moved on, a little further to the right, and stopped off at the Church of Religious Fundamentalism. After all, sin and abortion had been mentioned. Listening to the sermon on repeat, I heard about the evils of liberal government trying to push religion out of the public sphere, fund the murder of innocent children, teach other children that heterosexuals are only one of many orientations, and otherwise drive America into moral ruin. I thought they would be a good fit, considering many of them have endorsed or participated in acts of domestic terror, especially when it came to clinics that provided abortion services. But I couldn't find a match. They thought liberals were the agents of Satan, or satans themselves, but they didn't think of them as terroists, excepting perhaps to the unborn. So I left the church and continued on my way.

I thought I would go visit the compounds of the survivialists, convinced the government is already illegal and has been for a while, and their uneasy-but-useful allies, the Galts of the world, sitting in their countinghouses, reveling in their Objective superiority, and likely providing a slightly more legitimate front group for the survivalists as the people who will do enough damage in trying to realize the Randian vision that they'll start the cascade that results in the governmental collapse and the survivalists sweeping into power so they can remake the country in their idealized anarchic vision. I notices a lot of trip-wires and pits along the path, and I was certain at least once in my approach that I saw a familiar red dot on something near me, as if to point out the obvious - I was being watched. After politely asking permission to come in, I chatted for a while and listened to the theories in play at the moment, but I quickly realized that this was not the place to find my "Liberals are domestic terrorists" viewpoint. These people thought government was oppressive, regardless of who was in charge, and would give the same hearty Frak You to any government agent that came near them and looked like they wanted to enforce a law.

But in listening to all of those viewpoints playing out in my head, I realized that I did know who would think of liberals as domestic terrorists after all. I just didn't have the perspective I needed. After making polite goodbyes and putting as much distance between myself and them as I could without seeming like I was trying to run in a hurry, I headed straight toward the place that I had initially overlooked - The City of the Big Tent, the place where Republicans venerate the Great Saint Reagan at the Temple of Conservatism. I had a sneaking suspicion about the place that I hadn't noticed before. Having stocked myself with a sweater with a loose thread, I tied one end to a rock outside the city, and while signing a refrain snippet from a Weezer song, I walked the main drag of the city, with their giant billboards, flashing inert gas signs, and gilded, opulent (and occasionally tacky) building fronts. I got glared at for singing off-key, so I just kept walking, stopping occasionally to tie a new knot from the sweater to a yarn ball of the same color, and then one yarn ball to another, looking for the secret that I thought I had grasped. After quite a while, though, I found what I had sought - the thread I had started with. The City of the Big Tent was a Moebius strip - one surface, folded back in on itself, that you could traverse endlessly without having to pick up your thread.

The importance of all this? Well, you don't notice a chameleon unless you know what to look for. What I had seen on the back of that truck was the smokescreen of a bog-standard Corporatist Republican. To the Tea Party folks, he appeared to be someone concerned about the debt and the inclinations of the country to be moving away from founding principles they cherish. He could wink knowingly about how White People Had It Tough in the era of the Black Man In Charge, and how much better it was when minorities and women knew their place. He looked like one of them. To the fundamentalist religion folk, he seemed concerned about the moral and spiritual health of America, ready to crusade against a thousand wrongs done against God and the unborn, a foot soldier in the War against Christians, clad in the Armor of God and ready to give preferential treatment to his fellow believers and return the country to its Christian glory. He looked like one of them. To the survivalists, well, they wouldn't trust him farther than they could shoot him, but to the Galt guys, he looked like someone ready to decry government in whatever form it might appear and advocate for its privatization and dismantling wherever it would make sense. He'd be a useful idiot for them, because only True Believers would get through unscathed, but he could certainly serve his purpose by getting things going. He looked enough like one of them that they'd let him tag along.

Really, though, the people who would think of liberals as "domestic terrorists" are people with a stake in the things that liberalism tends to dismantle, like absolute corporate control over the hours, wages, and conditions of their workers, or the idea that the market should be the only force for quality control and safety, or the idea that profit should be the sole concern of any corporation and any other considerations are distantly secondary at best. The idea that government and law should be decided by the rich, written by the rich, and enforceable by the rich against the poor, without leniency, without mercy, and definitely without anyone stopping to ask whether or not the laws are just or the rich should be given all of these breaks and advantages so as to make themselves richer at the expense of the poor. They are the people who are at the top of the pile, who actually control the capital, try to control the politicians, exert their influence on the media, and wish for nothing to ever be known about how they conduct their business. From that perspective, anyone claiming that the poor should be helped, the rich taxed progressively, the minority protected from the majority, and that corporations need to have someone more powerful than them to keep them in check and prevent them from simply chewing everything up and spitting it back out when it's no longer profitable is a direct threat to their way of life. The truly liberal inspire fear and terror in the rich and the corporate, because actual left-liberals will cheerily pick apart the structure they've carefully built in the name of things like fairness and justice and demand that they turn their profit-making, self-enriching enterprise to a profit-making, everyone-enriching enterprise. They'd probably even offer them fair market value for their stuff, while requiring them to pay a wage that would let their workers potentially afford their stuff. It would undermine the system and stop them from being able to use their excess wealth to drive war and conflict with other places so as to keep the people faced outward and scared of The Other, instead of turning inward and seeing how the show is actually run. They are, in two words, "domestic terrorists", inspiring fear in the hearts of the people who believe that they are the only people that (should) matter.

What I saw on the back of that truck was a Corporatist Republican hiding behind the rhetoric of conservatives. He succeeded in making me laugh at the dopiness of the messenger he was using as his front, but he hoped that I wouldn't notice the wire that pulled the messenger's strings as effectively as any puppeteer. I wonder who that Corporatist Republican is that came up with the message now being disseminated by the Tea Partiers and the religious fundamentalists, he who courts the Galts while giving them the finger when their backs are turned. If only I knew who the donors were, but they rigged it so they can pull the strings anonymously.

This ended up in a lot darker place than I had imagined. I was going to swing for incredulity and a good laugh at the person who could be so deluded as to believe this, and maybe riff a bit on how far beyond the pale we've gone that people are leveling these charges in a serious manner, because they actually believe it, but then one thing led to another, and here I am, wondering whether the "takeover" of the Republicans by the Tea Party isn't an attempt at obfuscating the clear corporate-over-people attitude of the Republican Party of these last few decades, with the brass good-naturedly going along with the removal of the "moderates" by the Tea Partiers to take the heat off, only to plan on putting the hammer down if and when they get enough power to go back to what they were doing with vengeance. That's...depressing. Can we has real liberal candidates in office nao, not corporatists and their centrist allies?