Our country seems to have killed at least a million Iraqis at the whim of George W. Bush and his cabal of neocons.
I know that his former friends have started disowning him — he’s no True Conservative now — but since he is officially a mass-murdering monster, can we also expect them to retroactively declare him an atheist?
Mark Hoofnagle is urging everyone to get behind a simple, non-partisan goal that would greatly benefit science policy: bring back the Office of Technology Assessment.
It used to be, for about 30 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment, which worked for the legislative branch and provided non-partisan scientific reports relevant to policy discussions. It was a critical office, one that through thorough and complete analysis of the scientific literature gave politicians common facts from which to decide policy debates. In 1994, with the new Republican congress, the office was eliminated for the sake of budget cuts, but the cost in terms of damage to the quality of scientific debate on policy has been incalculable. Chris Mooney described it as Congress engaging in “a stunning act of self-lobotomy” in his book the Republican War on Science.
Spread the word. Build a drumbeat of support for this idea in the blogs. Write to your congresspeople. Write op-eds for your newspaper. It’s a simple idea that everyone should agree on: we want our government to be well-informed and to be able to make decisions based on evidence, and having an advisory office dedicated to providing information from the scientific community would be a real boon.
It’s not happy Roy, but cynical Roy … but then, these are cynical times.
Now, can we give the troops some real support? Like, by bringing them back home?
Here’s another online petition you can sign — this one is to censure Kathy Griffin’s censorship. Go ahead and sign, although I’m beginning to wonder if the reason people aren’t marching in the streets and fending off flying teargas canisters and roaring angrily in person at the bad guys is that they’re too damned busy filling out all these forms on their computers, instead.
Maybe I need to create a new category here: “futile, impotent political posturing” or something. But at least it feels a little bit good.
(via Greg Laden)
The appropriate testimonial would be to disband the thugs at TSA.
While we’re at it, impeaching Bush/Cheney and repealing their damage to our civil liberties would also be a good start.
I’m not impressed with moments of silence or candlelight vigils or noble rhetoric about this event. If you want to do something to remember that tragedy, the best thing to do is to simply stop living your life in fear.
Daniel Cooper knows how to properly evaluate what’s important. He’s George W. Bush’s undersecretary for benefits at the Department of Veterans Affairs. We’re in the middle of a bloody, wasteful war, and we’ve got lots of veterans who deserve support and, you know, benefits, so I think Mr Cooper’s job is fairly important.
What does Mr Cooper think is important? He’s made a video for Campus Crusade for Christ in which he plainly spells out where his priorities lie.
Friends for a Non-Violent World (FNVW)
Presents:
Leaving Iraq Now
Why it’s the best chance for peace & security and why September is our best
chance to make it happen.
Phil Steger
In Morris on
Saturday, September 8
11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Morris Public Library
America needs an “end the war” push in
the last months of 2007 to equal the “no
to war” push of 2003. Bring friends, neigh-
bors, family members. Learn why leaving
is the best, most just, most secure choice
for Iraqis and Americans. Learn why Sep-
tember is a must-act month for ending the
war and what YOU can do.
Phil Steger is a three-time traveler to Iraq and has
been one of Minnesota’s most prominent, widely
seen and best received voices explaining, opposing,
and proposing solutions to the U.S. war in Iraq. He
was executive director of FNVW from 2002 to 2007.
Our president has been away in Australia. Who knew? Who cares? I only care because Australia has some of the most venomous wildlife around, and because anything that sends the asshole-in-chief to the other side of the planet is a good thing.
Anyway, the Australians waste $A165 million on security, rather than giving Bush a few hundred dollars and telling him to go play with the stingrays up around the Great Barrier Reef, and look what happens: a comedy troupe gussies up a few cars to look officially Canadian, and drove an Osama bin Laden imitator right up to the president’s hotel. They simultaneously showed that all this anti-terrorist security nonsense is pure performance art made to inflate the egos of the government and instill fear in our citizens, and made a sharp jab at our president’s priorities and accomplishments.
Bravo. Brilliant.
Now, please, can we impeach the incompetent boob? He’s an evil joke. We really need to end the long national embarrassment.
You’ve got to read this account of the intelligence that led to the Iraq war.
On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. “We continued to validate him the whole way through,” said Drumheller. “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”
Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller’s account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri’s intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.
Bush knew there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He was told that the source that claimed there were was not credible, and he was told that the information coming from a source close to Hussein had been validated.
Bush lied to drag us into a pointless, unjust war.
Bush must be impeached. It doesn’t matter how impractical the process seems to be, or how timid the Democrats are. This is an issue of the rule of law: are we to be governed by criminals? Is there to be no punishment for such hideous acts that lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people? These men are monsters.
All I’m asking is that Bush and Cheney be thrown out of office in disgrace. If justice were served, there’d also be a subsequent act of extraordinary rendition that delivered them into the hands of the government of Iraq.
Mooney says that because polls show that Americans are so blinded by religion that they would choose the words of a bloody-handed Middle Eastern sky god over the evidence of science, Dawkins and all us uncompromising atheists are wrong in our tactics. We are henceforth to heed the words of Nisbet and stop confronting people on their religious biases.
Huh?
But that’s exactly the problem that we’re addressing — that people will foolishly prefer “white-beard-in-the-sky-guy” over reality. And the message he takes home from this is that we’re wrong? This is nuts. I read that poll and it says we have a serious problem that we cannot simply ignore any more; this rather craven avoidance that Mooney/Nisbet propose is not working and will not work.
I’m definitely siding with Jason on this one.
Those attitudes, and the unflagging respect for religious faith that they entail, must be weakened. Can that be done? I don’t know. It certainly isn’t easy, but other Western countries have managed to do it.
But I am definitely certain that you can not weaken those attitudes by refusing to attack them.
These polls represent the state of affairs today. What got us here was not the vocal opposition to religion served up by Dawkins and the others. They are newcomers on the scene. Instead, what got us here is years of Republican pandering to the religious right, coupled with Democratic cowardice in the face of increasing challenges to church-state separation (among other factors, of course). As I have written before, it is the nicey-nice strategy of non-engagement endorsed by Mooney and Nisbett that is refuted by these polls. The strategy where you publicly attack bad religious ideas has barely been tried.
I have this suspicion that Mooney and Nisbet are drinking too deeply of the kool-aid of public approval. They’ve got a message that says do nothing, avoid criticizing people on their deeply held beliefs, and instead try to smuggle little bits of good policy past them by actively pandering to them by “framing” your proposals in their terms … and of course audiences love that and eat it up and congratulate them on their wise and sensible perspicacity afterwards, because nothing they say will ever confront the root of the problem, and those people will never feel the need to change. Nisbet/Mooney provide a feel-good façade for inertia on our side, and reinforcement for the destructive beliefs of the religious right.
You are doing something wrong if the purveyors of ancient lies and dumb dogma are thanking you for your conciliatory position; we should be making them angry and worried, and if you have deep differences with someone, you are doing neither you nor them any favors if your sole strategy is conflict avoidance. You might as well just surrender and be done with it.
