Crimes and Misdemeanors...

Slate has an interesting Venn-diagram* about the key players in various Bush administration scandals, and which scandals they are involved in...

http://www.slate.com/id/2195892/

Fun stuff...

-vvk

* Venn-diagrams are awesome by the way... :-)

Things that sadden me...

... in no particular order.

• Despite an eighteen month old ruling from the Supreme Court ordering the EPA to regulate greenhouse gasses as pollutants, the Washington Post is reporting that the Bush administration has decided to punt the issue on to the next administration. One of the tricks they pulled in order to make this happen? They refused to open emails. Seriously.
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/10/AR2008071003087.html
  UPDATE: More on this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/11/AR2008071101703.html


• President Bush's parting comments to G8 leaders who had gathered in Japan to discuss global climate change, "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."
  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/2277298/President-George-Bush-'Goodbye-from-the-world's-biggest-polluter'.html


• U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 110th Congress - 2nd Session
  
  Vote Summary
  
  Question: On Passage of the Bill (H.R. 6304 )
  Vote Number: 168 Vote Date: July 9, 2008, 02:47 PM
  Required For Majority: 1/2 Vote Result: Bill Passed
  Measure Number: H.R. 6304 (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 )
  Measure Title: A bill to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to establish a procedure for authorizing certain acquisitions of foreign intelligence, and for other purposes.
  Vote Counts:
  YEAs 69
  NAYs 28
  Not Voting 3
  ...
  Grouped By Vote Position
  YEAs --- 69
  Alexander (R-TN)
  Allard (R-CO)
  Barrasso (R-WY)
  Baucus (D-MT)
  Bayh (D-IN)
  Bennett (R-UT)
  Bond (R-MO)
  Brownback (R-KS)
  Bunning (R-KY)
  Burr (R-NC)
  Carper (D-DE)
  Casey (D-PA)
  Chambliss (R-GA)
  Coburn (R-OK)
  Cochran (R-MS)
  Coleman (R-MN)
  Collins (R-ME)
  Conrad (D-ND)
  Corker (R-TN)
  Cornyn (R-TX)
  Craig (R-ID)
  Crapo (R-ID)
  DeMint (R-SC)
  Dole (R-NC)
  Domenici (R-NM)
  Ensign (R-NV)
  Enzi (R-WY)
  Feinstein (D-CA)
  Graham (R-SC)
  Grassley (R-IA)
  Gregg (R-NH)
  Hagel (R-NE)
  Hatch (R-UT)
  Hutchison (R-TX)
  Inhofe (R-OK)
  Inouye (D-HI)
  Isakson (R-GA)
  Johnson (D-SD)
  Kohl (D-WI)
  Kyl (R-AZ)
  Landrieu (D-LA)
  Lieberman (ID-CT)
  Lincoln (D-AR)
  Lugar (R-IN)
  Martinez (R-FL)
  McCaskill (D-MO)
  McConnell (R-KY)
  Mikulski (D-MD)
  Murkowski (R-AK)
  Nelson (D-FL)
  Nelson (D-NE)
  Obama (D-IL)
  Pryor (D-AR)
  Roberts (R-KS)
  Rockefeller (D-WV)
  Salazar (D-CO)
  Shelby (R-AL)
  Smith (R-OR)
  Snowe (R-ME)
  Specter (R-PA)
  Stevens (R-AK)
  Sununu (R-NH)
  Thune (R-SD)
  Vitter (R-LA)
  Voinovich (R-OH)
  Warner (R-VA)
  Webb (D-VA)
  Whitehouse (D-RI)
  Wicker (R-MS)
  [... these Senator's listed above should be ashamed of themselves]
  NAYs --- 28
  Akaka (D-HI)
  Biden (D-DE)
  Bingaman (D-NM)
  Boxer (D-CA)
  Brown (D-OH)
  Byrd (D-WV)
  Cantwell (D-WA)
  Cardin (D-MD)
  Clinton (D-NY)
  Dodd (D-CT)
  Dorgan (D-ND)
  Durbin (D-IL)
  Feingold (D-WI)
  Harkin (D-IA)
  Kerry (D-MA)
  Klobuchar (D-MN)
  Lautenberg (D-NJ)
  Leahy (D-VT)
  Levin (D-MI)
  Menendez (D-NJ)
  Murray (D-WA)
  Reed (D-RI)
  Reid (D-NV)
  Sanders (I-VT)
  Schumer (D-NY)
  Stabenow (D-MI)
  Tester (D-MT)
  Wyden (D-OR)
  [... these Senator's did their job, but honestly, they failed. The Congress, as an institution, failed.]
  Not Voting - 3
  Kennedy (D-MA)
  McCain (R-AZ)
  Sessions (R-AL)
  [... Senator Kennedy had a decent excuse for not showing up. I have no idea why Senator Sessions wasn't there, but given the fact that he rarely misses a vote, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt on this one.
  Senator McCain hasn't actually shown up for 61.8% of the votes during the 110th Congress. He has missed more votes than Senator Johnson (51.4% missed), who missed many months of work after suffering from a stroke. Senator McCain should be ashamed of himself. He's cheating the People of Arizona out of the work he promised to do for them. Click here to see a list of Senators ranked by how many votes they've missed.]


• Lastly, I highlighted it above, but I think it deserves its own bullet point. Senator Obama voted for the FISA Amendment bill. This embarrasses and saddens me. I thought better of him. I'll still vote for him—the alternatives are worse—but he will no longer get any of my money. He'll have to earn that back somehow.

-vvk

Red State vs Blue State... or is it Old Economy vs New Economy?

Pollster John Zogby has an interesting post on his blog at The Huffington Post. In it, he argues that our traditional view of Red States vs Blue States is no longer valid. Instead, he proposes a concept he calls Equinox Voters. The Equinox Voters fall into two categories, the Spring-Aheads and the Fall-Backers. The Spring-Aheads are people who are prospering in the new information economy. They tend to vote for Democrats. The Fall-Backers are voters who prospered in the old economy. They're suffering now. They tend to vote for Republicans.

To read more: The Changing Times and Equinox Voters.

Today's Horoscope...

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22).
You're joyous when making other
people happy. If what you're doing
doesn't delight you to the degree you
thought it would, that's okay with
you, too. Your fun is in the
preparation and the giving. Let
nothing damper that.

(Washington Post, 7/8/2008)

That sort of describes me... except it doesn't encompass my jadedness...

Torture...

So if you're going to torture (aka interrogate") prisoners at Guantánamo, you have to teach people how to do it. And if you're going to teach them, you have to come up with a curriculum. Where do you come up with said curriculum? You take the "How to survive torture"* curriculum, and you turn it upside down.

Along the way, you conveniently forget that your torture survival curriculum is base in part on a paper titled Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War written in 1957 by U.S. Air Force employed sociologist, Albert D. Biderman. Biderman wrote this paper after interviewing many Americans held by Chinese and North Korean forces during the Korean War. These Americans had been tortured into confessing all sorts of things that the U.S. military new to be false. Biderman set out to find how how these confessions were coerced.

So, you start with known false confessions. You figure out how these confessions were extracted from Americans. You then transfer this knowledge into an interrogation program that you claim is necessary to produce facts from people you hold prisoners. That makes a hell of a lot of sense.

To make things even better, you base part of your curriculum on a verbatim copy of a chart in Biderman's paper that summarizes the techniques the Chinese used to torture Americans. Sure, you reformat it a bit, but really, verbatim? Come on.

Idiocy, institutionalized. Splendid!

More on this:
China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo by Scott Shane. Published in the NY Times, July 2^nd, 2008.

-vvk

* The "How to survive torture" curriculum is called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape.