Reality Bites

From self-described the champions of "fiscal restraint":

Junior Florida Republican Party staffer had $1.3 million charged to party credit card

Among the damages:

Over the next 2½ years, nearly $1.3 million in charges wound up on Melanie Phister's AmEx — $40,000 at a London hotel, and nearly $20,000 in plane tickets for indicted former House Speaker Ray Sansom, his wife and kids, for starters. Statements show thousands spent on jewelry, sporting goods and in one case $15,000 for what's listed as a month-long stay at a posh Miami Beach hotel, but which the party says was a forfeited deposit.

The credit card records, obtained by the St. Petersburg Times and Miami Herald, offer the latest behind-the-scenes look at extravagant and free-wheeling spending by the party touting fiscal restraint. Not only did certain elite legislative leaders have their own party credit cards to spend donors' money with little oversight, but Phister's records show these leaders also liberally used an underling's card — without her knowledge, she says.

[...]

The Florida Democratic Party requires staffers and leaders to use their own credit cards and seek reimbursement for appropriate expenses. That's now the practice at the Florida Republican Party, and fundraiser Hoffman suggested it's about time.

[h/t C&L]

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

America's War On Terror: A Cage Of Our Own Making

America’s fight against terrorism is a stooge scene. Washington meets every new attack not by addressing the root causes of Islamist violence, but by adding another layer of security to infringe on Americans’ privacy and dignity.

In the Three Stooges short, “A Plumbing We Will Go,” Curly tries to stop the water spraying out of a bathroom wall by threading on some pipe fittings. The water just sprays out the end. So he threads on more. And more. And more. But the water just sprays from the end of each new piece. Curly eventually discovers that he’s imprisoned himself in a cage of pipe, with water still spraying out of the last piece he added.

So, terrorists armed with box cutters bring down three airliners on September 11, 2001. Washington’s response? Institute a massive domestic electronic surveillance program. Gut habeas corpus. No nail clippers in carry-on. Make passengers empty their pockets and raise their arms for a sweep with a handheld metal detector.

Richard Reid makes it through airport security in Paris with explosives in his shoes. Washington’s response? Make passengers stand in line and take off their shoes.

Police in England disrupt a plot to blow up transatlantic flights using liquid explosives. Washington’s response? No skin cream, toothpaste, shampoo over 3 oz. in your carry-ons; have them ready in a zip-lock bag for inspection. Deposit anything larger in the trash bins, please.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab goes through airport security in Lagos, Nigeria. He goes through security again in Amsterdam. He then tries to bring down an airliner over Detroit using a bomb hidden in his underwear. Washington’s response? Colonoscopies for passengers boarding in Cleveland.

Okay, full body scans. Whatever. Thread on another stick of pipe. Overlay another level of “security.” But whatever you do, don’t address the motives behind the violence.

At a White House press briefing last week, reporter Helen Thomas asked and asked again why these terrorists “want to do us harm.” White House Counterterrorism and Homeland Security advisor, John Brennan, gave Thomas a response right out of the Bush administration playbook, “Al Qaida is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents.” Not exactly post-Pearl Harbor "slant-eyed japs" rhetoric, but not far off either.

Glenn Greenwald went all reductio ad absurdum on that response:

Brennan's answer -- they do this because they're Evil and murderous -- is on the same condescending cartoon level as the "They-Hate-us-For-Our-Freedom" tripe we endured for the last eight years. Apparently, if Brennan is to be believed, Islamic radicals, in their motive-free quest to slaughter, write down the names of all the countries in the world and put them in a hat and then stick their hand in and select the one they will attack, and the U.S. just keeps getting unlucky and having its name randomly chosen. Countries like China, Brazil, Japan, Chile, Greece, South Africa, France and a whole slew of others must have really good luck. That Al Qaeda is evil and murderous and perverts Islam is a judgment about what they do, not an answer as to what motivates them.

Osama bin Laden himself gave a few clues in his February 1998 fatwa, Greenwald notes. Why do they attack us? Because we have our infidel "crusader armies" on the Arabian peninsula and in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holiest sites. Because of the destruction wrought on Iraq and Iraqi children by economic sanctions. Because of U.S. support for Israel – because of Gaza, and Sabra and Shatila. Post-September 11, add the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, uncounted civilian deaths, and torture, prisoner abuse and killings at American-run prisons, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram.

For the executive branch, giving Thomas’ question the answer it deserves is a no-win proposition. To discuss why Islamist terrorists preferentially target the United States means examining those events. It might require a serious examination of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and maybe changes to it, changes that might provide al Qaida’s murderers with a thin veneer of legitimacy. The media, the GOP and the American right wing would have a field day.

It's easier just to keep threading on more pipe until we find ourselves prisoners in a cage of our own making.

(Cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future.)

Other than that, she was probably a swell gal

SC Gov. Mark Sanford doesn't know enough to quit while he's behind. He's in Newsweek with a review of some new books about the life of Ayn Rand. Sanford's takeaway? "Government doesn't know best."

Whoa.

Sanford pauses in his paean to Rand long enough to acknowledge that her freedom fetish did not apply to members of her cult:

Ironically, as Heller's biography makes clear, while Rand's philosophy was based on the individual's absolute freedom, Rand herself exercised a dictatorial control over her followers. She would denounce anyone who expressed opinions even slightly diverging from her own... For the leader of a group dedicated to human freedom, Rand didn't allow much of it around her.

Sanford doesn't mention (and may not know) that Rand based one of her early fictional heroes on William Edward Hickman, who author Michael Prescott describes as "a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer. Other than that, he was probably a swell guy."

Prescott continues:

According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should." (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)

The free-spirited Hickman kidnapped, held for ransom and dismembered a twelve year-old girl, after which the throw-social-convention-to-the-wind sprite threw her body parts out the door of his car.

Yeah, he was an axe murderer, but that wasn't what impressed Rand, but his personal credo, "what is good for me is right." As she writes in her journals:

"This is not just the case of a terrible crime. It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. It is the fact that a crime has been committed by one man, alone; that this man knew it was against all laws of humanity and intended that way; that he does not want to recognize it as a crime and that he feels superior to all. It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul."

Yes, a real man.

And Rand? Yeah, she was a sociopath, but that's not what impresses Gov. Mark Sanford. Rand's "one more major flaw" was that her sociopathy led her to her reject conventional Christian morality. But interpreting Atlas Shrugged as parable about limited government makes Rand "more relevant than ever."

Thus endeth Sanford's high school book report. A lot of people read Atlas Shrugged in high school. Most of them grow up.

Four Point Oh!

WNC Blogapalooza 4.0

Mountain XPress handles the voting here.

Back to Boise

Today I finally looked back in on Bill Cope of Boise Weekly. A few weeks ago, I saw where Cope had ventured into the mountains to get some insight on socialist health care from "Badger" Bob, the socialist. Bob is both a capitalist libertarian and a socialist, so he ought to know socialism when he sees it. Bill found Bob drinking pitchers of Oly and throwing horseshoes with his buddy, Hoot, "a straight-up libertarian."

Things got a little heated:

"Tell me something, Hoot. Were you so damned confident in the free markets back when Enron was kicking the crap out of California by manipulating the energy grid? Or how about when we found out that Halliburton bunch was screwing the military out of billions? Did that make you proud of your unfettered laissez faire? Huh? Or what we're going through now with all these damn banks and such? ... Doesn't that make you wonder even a little bit if unregulated commerce ain't entirely what it's cracked up to be? You really suppose this is what your precious Adam Smith had in mind?"

If you look further, Cope explains the common medical condition, HUHA.

Something I ran across

As for the argument that government is unable to pull off anything like health care successfully, Steve Benen at Washington Monthly recalled a memorable scene from film:

It reminds me a bit of a scene in “Life of Brian.” The People’s Front of Judea are having a meeting and considering what the Romans had ever done for them. Reg asks, “Apart apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Waiting in line for health care

Just back from a Saturday morning trip over to Newport, TN, where Knoxville-based Remote Area Medical (RAM) is holding one of its medical “expeditions.”

RAM’s head honcho, Englishman Stan Brock used to wrestle large snakes and gators for Marlin Perkins on TV's "Wild Kingdom." Brock formed RAM in 1985 to bring medical care to patients in remote areas of third-world countries. Now, sixty percent of RAM’s work is in “urban and rural America.”

The earliest patients arrived at Cocke County High School on Thursday to secure a numbered place in line for Saturday's free health care clinic. RAM expected to treat about 480 patients on Saturday and about half again as many Sunday. (They stopped accepting new patients about 9 a.m. Saturday morning.)

Most of the cars in the high school parking lot were nondescript. Some had people still sleeping in them. Others had blankets or sleeping bags inside or airing out on the hood. A few autos were missing grilles or glass and looked as if people lived in them. Some of those held animal carriers. RAM’s Newport expedition included veterinarians who provided pet services.

RAM’s patients are Americans without health insurance or jobs that provide it. Most need eyeglasses or dental care. Some exiting the gymnasium had rolls of gauze where teeth had been. One man held an ice pack to his jaw. A mother told us that while she has insurance through her job, her husband and kids do not. But adding them to her policy would take her entire monthly take home pay.

RAM does much of its work in Tennessee because the state allows doctors and dentists licensed in other states to practice within its borders for these events. North Carolina is not one of those states, Brock said in an e-mail earlier this week, otherwise residents in WNC’s remote western counties might receive a visit from RAM.

We noticed that October 3-4, RAM will be visiting the Appalachian coal country town of Grundy, VA, hometown of NC Governor Bev Perdue. Maybe the governor would support changing the rules in cash-strapped North Carolina to allow the state’s growing number of unemployed and uninsured a chance for the kind of free care RAM brings to Grundy.

[Photo courtesy of Jill Boniske.]

Bailout Bank Banks Bucks

Goldman Sachs rakes in billions:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. set aside a record $11.4 billion for compensation and benefits in the first half of 2009, up 33 percent from a year earlier and enough to pay each worker $386,429 for the period.

The figures were released today with the firm’s record second-quarter earnings results. Revenue jumped 31 percent to $23.19 billion in the first half and the New York-based firm set aside 49 percent to cover its largest expense, compensation and benefits.

But here in downtown Charlotte, the banking center of the South, things aren't so rosy:

Just as first-time claims for unemployment insurance surged in the sour economy, final payments – made when laid-off workers have exhausted their initial benefits and all extensions – are climbing, with Mecklenburg County numbers more than double from a year ago.

[...]

Relief, in the form of new jobs, doesn't appear imminent, based on the latest labor statistics. The national unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent in June, a 26-year high, with companies cutting 467,000 jobs – more than economists expected. Charlotte-area unemployment has outpaced the nation, reaching 12 percent in May. Economists expect both numbers to rise further before the end of the year.

Last month, the number of Mecklenburg County residents who ran out of unemployment benefits climbed to nearly 2,900 – the fourth straight month above 2,000 and more than double the number of people in June 2008, according to new data from the N.C. Employment Security Commission. Before the recession, the number of final payments in a single month never topped 2,000.

I'm just lucky to have a job again.

Still, I'm thinking of The Mouse That Roared for some reason.

Those wild and crazy Stompers

An e-mail arrived today from Asheville City Council candidate, Cecil Bothwell, which included this note:

Those wild and crazy Stompers
Thunderpig is on the loose again. Our volunteer video crew posted a YouTube version of Mayor Leni Sitnick's speech at the Grey Eagle campaign kick-off event, June 12. Because the team used a sound feed from the sound board, that is, from the stage microphones, the sound dropped out when Leni had to pause for applause from the capacity crowd. So our intrepid amateur videographers spliced in some applause from elsewhere in the recording so Leni's pauses "made sense."

Well, the Carolina Stompers, those ever vigilant defenders of all things radically right, took note and decided to mock our efforts. Good on you guys! We've reposted the original video here.

In response to the Stompers' critique, the blogger who goes by the name Thunderpig put together a new version of Leni's talk. Click the laugh track below for his version of her great speech. (Thanks to Thunderpig for helping to publicize this campaign and thanks again to Asheville's best mayor ever for endorsing me!) Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh

The Stomper-doctored Sitnick video (in sepia-tone) and the pointless effort that went into it reminded me of a story.

An old friend of mine - an upstairs neighbor, Chris - used to have a blue tick hound named Blue. No lie.

Blue was a hunting machine ... except Chris didn't actually hunt. But Blue loved to chase squirrels.

Chris and Blue would be out in the yard and, just for fun, Chris would call Blue to attention and snap, "Blue! S-q-u-i-r-r-e-l."

Blue would take off like a shot and tear around the yard, running around tree trunks, glancing up and down and sniffing, looking for the squirrel. Eventually, Blue would slow down, stop, and look back at Chris quizzically as Chris slapped his thigh and laughed.

Stompers! D-e-m-o-c-r-a-t-s.

Inoculated at Birth

South Carolina’s Gov. Mark Sanford is contrite about his extramarital affair. He plans to tour the state asking constituents for forgiveness. In South Carolina, he will probably get it.

In Southern Baptist-steeped South Carolina, public repentance is a tradition. Weepy evangelists, altar calls, redemption pageants and encounter weekends are deeply rooted in the culture.

There is a joke southern towns share about having a church on every street corner. It is also a competition – several claim the informal title of “Buckle of the Bible Belt.”

In this culture, it is a time-honored ritual to answer a tearfully delivered altar call at the end of the church service. The repentant rise slowly from their seats and shuffle humbly to the front of the church – or stadium, in the case of a Billy Graham crusade – for a humiliating public cleansing, to shed their own tears and accept Jesus as their personal savior. Or to accept him again. Or to receive forgiveness, prayers and the laying on of hands after “backsliding.”

Church audiences love testimonies, sordid, public confessions of a life ill-spent before finding God. Personal testimonies featuring all the forbidden fruits – alcohol, sex, drugs, and rock and roll – allow them to vicariously partake of guilty pleasures right out in public.

In church, even, and without taking their clothes off.

Returning to the faith after some really good sinning was entertainment in these parts long before the VCR.

Decades ago, I caught a piece of a late-night, AM gospel talk radio show out of somewhere in Georgia. The host was interviewing Demond Wilson, the actor from the 1970s TV sitcom, “Sanford and Son.” After the show went into reruns, Wilson had become a minister and was on the radio to talk about his new ministry.

But the host didn’t want to hear about that. He wanted to hear about Wilson’s life as a rich Hollywood celebrity. What about the wild parties? the host wanted to know. What about the sex and the drugs?

Wilson explained that he and his wife weren’t really party people. He played tennis, he said, with some star (whose name I can’t remember). But basically, he went to work and they had largely kept to themselves.

The host kept at it. He kept pushing.

You could hear the anxiousness in his voice. He’d expected some really quality sinning, but this more was like coitus interruptus.

“But when did you really hit bottom?” he asked a couple of times. This guy hoped to hear how Wilson had found Jesus after coming to in some strangers’ bathroom after a drunken orgy, a needle still in his arm. You know, a really good testimony.

He never got it. Wilson just decided one day that he would rather give up acting and serve God. The radio host was audibly disappointed.

What has any of this got to do with Gov. Mark Sanford’s Argentine junket? Inoculation.

For conservative politicians, the testimony has morphed into “inoculation politics,” e.g., falsely accusing opponents of personal failings they themselves share. Accustom the public to your neighbors’ faults so as not to look as bad in case you are caught indulging them yourself.

“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God,” Paul wrote in Romans 3. Anybody who has ever been to a revival meeting knows that one.

Sinning. Everybody does it. But unlike a godless liberal, a good conservative who confesses his sin publicly is eligible to be welcomed back into the fold. Just one of the boys.

“Hallelujah, brother!” as Dwayne Hickman once said.

Southern-strategy Republicans learned that lesson well. Man is sinful by nature. The Mark of Cain. It's old news.

Soon enough, Sen. John Ensign of Nevada (and of the Promise Keepers) will be old news. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (of The Fellowship), too.

But unlike Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-FL) men’s room affairs, Mark Sanford's Argentine junket sounds like really good sinning. Already, fleets of tabloid photographers have arrived in Buenos Aires, hoping to give us a glimpse of just how good.

Thus, when Sanford contritely strikes out on his political redemption tour of South Carolina, pious sinners anxious to hear all the details will probably forgive him his sins. They've already been inoculated.

Published as a "letter" in the July 2009 issue of the Asheville Daily Planet.

Empathy for the Common Man

One of the president’s stated qualifications for his Supreme Court picks – including Judge Sonia Sotomayor – is that they approach judicial rulings with empathy for the real people whose lives their decisions will affect. The notion owes more to Solomon than to the strict constructionist dogma of the Federalist Society. As others have observed, if interpreting the Constitution were a simple matter of strict textual analysis, we might see fewer five-four decisions (and more disputed babies divided in half).

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Reassurance

Tom Friedman today cites Congress for more posturing than progress on the economy and the president for joking about his lousy bowling skills on Jay Leno’s show. Friedman writes, “There don’t seem to be any adults at the top.”

But Friedman’s reactions frame a much narrower time span than mine. In the context of the last eight years, I had the opposite reaction, at least to the president on Leno.

Obama was cool, friendly, confident and in control. Putting aside the “special Olympics” flap, when he joked his jokes were funny, self-deprecating and not mean-spirited. Watching was unexpectedly emotional. It was joyful, reassuring.

The last eight years have been, emotionally, somewhat akin to the experience of a four or five year-old losing his parents on a crowded city sidewalk. Surrounded by strangers in a strange, potentially dangerous place, you realize that the world has gone suddenly very wrong. Your parents are no longer beside you. Your head snaps around searching for them. The panic builds as you realize you are lost.

Then you spot them down the street and a sudden wave of joy and relief washes over you. The panic subsides. Everything is going to be all right now.

I’m not suggesting Obama is a parent figure, and things may not be all right, but after eight, long years of George W. Bush, Obama's appearance on Leno evoked that kind of emotional response. Congress may still be filled with childish fools, but there’s an adult in charge again at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

It's Still a Wonderful Life

This year’s election was right out of Frank Capra. An army of Obama volunteers fanned out like Boy Rangers, knocking on doors, making calls and registering voters. At 11 p.m. on Election Night, when networks called the race for Obama, little guys around the world began crying and chanting, “Yes, we did!”

Capra himself couldn’t have done it better.

Read more at Campaign for America's Future ...

Coming Down

Post-election, I don't come down from running on coffee, chocolate and little sleep until mid-November. I spent Friday afternoon and yesterday in bed trying to shake off the traditional post-election cold. My wife says, with Obama's election, it feels as if the country's long fever has finally broken.

But not completely. Stephen Towe's piece this morning in the Asheville Citizen-Times (sorry, no link) reminded me of what Bill Maher said Friday: "The hard core Republican base is like a stalker. Rejection just makes them crazier." Towe's probably out stockpiling guns.

Honestly, based on rhetoric I heard in the last weeks before Election Day - thoughtfully reprised by Mr. Towe - if Obama won, walls would bleed, closets would eat children, rivers would turn to blood, and we'd all spew pea soup. Well, none of those Election Night events were reported by the press. Leave it to an MSM in the tank for Obama to suppress the truth.

It's the GOP's turn to do some soul searching, if it still has one to search. Commenting on the Special Prosecutors and "trumped up" investigations of the Clinton years, Maher said, "If Republicans really want to look into something for the next four years, my suggestion, try a mirror."

Amen.

Type, Baby, Type

Tom Friedman was just on Meet the Press, hawking his new book in his usual full-of-himself way. He said that the next, great revolution beyond the IT revolution will be the the ET revolution: Energy Technology.

We'll need a mix of technologies going forward, including oil (as everyone agrees). The GOP's mistake is placing oil at the center of their energy "plan." When the GOP convention exploded in chants of "Drill, Baby, Drill," he said, imagine how the Chinese, Venezuelans and Saudis would have responded had they been sitting in a sky box.

Conventioneers might as well have been chanting, "IBM Selectric Typewriters! IBM Selectric Typewriters!"

At the Fair

I walked the Hendersonville, NC Apple Festival parade route today beside Democratic senatorial candidate, Kay Hagan, and her daughter, and behind Congressman Heath Shuler, who walked carrying his daughter (at least part of the way). I've done the parade before, but this time I saw no "thumbs down" or scowls, and the only "boo" was kidding from somebody's friend. Still, I noticed that there was a good bit of applause heading into downtown. It tapered off and got quiet in the thicker crowds in the middle of Main St. Then the applause picked up again as we headed out of downtown. The folks on the fringes tended to look less well-to-do.

On the way back up the parade route, I got my first-ever glimpse of Sen. Elizabeth Dole. She was with Republican gubernatorial candidate, Pat McCrory, riding high above the street on a colorful float.

We walked. They rode.

We are the microgeneration

A new government report to be released Monday mirrors a Conservative Party policy announced six months ago advocating "a decentralised energy revolution," according to The Independent of London.

The government-backed report, to be published tomorrow, says that, with changed policies, the number of British homes producing their own clean energy could multiply to one million – about one in every three – within 12 years.

These would produce enough power to replace five large nuclear power stations, tellingly at about the same time as the first of the much-touted new generation of reactors is likely to come on stream.

[. . .]

The 130-page report . . . has been produced by a consultancy, Element Energy, after a wide-ranging survey of public attitudes on installing household renewable energy systems. It has been financed, and steered by, 14 official and other bodies including DBERR, the official Energy Savings Trust, five regional development agencies, British Gas, the Micropower Council and the Ashden Trust.

After some hemming and hawing over energy policy in Britain, including entertaining building more nuclear stations and reducing support for microgeneration that leaves Britain well behind the rest of Europe, the report may offer a change of direction:

The report offers a very different future, as do the Tories, who see microgeneration as central to their philosophy of redirecting power to individuals. David Cameron sees "decentralised energy" as "a key part of our political vision, energy for the post-bureaucratic age". He believes microgeneration could make Britain, and individual communities, "self-sufficient in energy".

Post-bureaucratic? Decentralized? Self-sufficient? What kind of conservatives are they growing over there? Real conservatives know that the only way to cheaper gas and more freedom is drilling, drilling and more drilling. Clearly, British conservatives are a looney bunch of DFHs. Call Bill O'Reilly to have them arrested.

When was the last time you heard "lily-livered"?

Sir Simon Jenkins, writing for the Sunday Times of London, declares al Qaeda beneath the dignity of James Bond:

Oh do pay attention, 007, this enemy simply isn’t worthy of you.

Jenkins traces our need for a great enemy and laments that al Qaeda simply doesn't measure up to Cold War-inspired villains of the Bond books.

But the histrionics of the neocons, Bush and Blair has been a boon to this ragtag troop, Jenkins says, inflating al Qaeda "into a body of fiendish efficiency and global strength. Its cells had to be everywhere, its influence titanic, its fanaticism superhuman." They all but painted bin Laden with a mechanical hand and a white cat.

The West has not curbed Al-Qaeda.

The movement has been honoured by Blair, the neocons and the military industrial complex as the global antithesis to the once-vaunted new world order. Never can so wretched an outfit have been awarded so vast a dignity.

Al-Qaeda is thus an Orwellian classic, a necessary enemy. As portrayed by Philip Bobbitt in his new book, Terror and Consent, it is the ultimate Smersh, terrorist without aim or purpose, secretive, fanatical and blessed with an awesome arsenal on the brink of going chemical, biological and nuclear. Its alleged goal is to create mayhem as a prelude to some notional world theocracy.

Now if the loutish Yanks at Halliburton would just deliver that new Mach 2 jetpack, Bond could kick some Islamofascist butt . . . after a few, quick hands of Baccarat.

Jenkins concludes,

What I cannot do is join the pessimists in claiming that western civilisation is so enfeebled by immorality, as the Bishop of Rochester implied last week, as to be structurally vulnerable to bomb explosions, devoid as they are of any political programme or local support. Because a terrorist claims to attack western culture does not make the claim plausible. Conrad’s terrorist was equally grandiloquent in his demented ambition. This is childish fear-mongering.

I have more faith in western democracy than the lily-livered neocons. I believe in the robustness of its institutions, its traditions and its liberal outlook. They beat the real threat of communist totalitarianism. Nothing on the present horizon is remotely comparable to that. I rather agree with the St Petersburg comrades. That some people need the emotional prop of a Great Satan does not make Satan any more real.

Lily-livered, yet. All things old are new again.

“There’s no ‘business class’ in law enforcement." - ACLU

Au contraire.

First, there was Pinkerton. Now there's InfraGard!

[h/t A-TONE MUSIC]

Not available in stores

On Christmas Eve, two stories on NPR's Morning Edition celebrated the embrace of American consumer Christmas traditions in Turkey (99% Muslim) and India (80% Hindu). Red Santa hats, Christmas trees, and English-speaking, Jingle Bells-singing Chinese Santa dolls are appearing in Istanbul shopping malls and New Dehli street-vendor stalls.

Together, the stories conjured images of the Tyrell Corporation's Los Angeles, with its Latino/Asian/Anglo cultural blend and brightly lit blimps displaying Japanese advertising.

A happy Blade Runner Christmas to all, and to all renegade replicants, Good Night.

(Not available in stores . . . yet.)