E M P H Y R I O

Dude, Like It's a Different Douglas

At least these Fox idiots didn't use a picture of Kirk or Michael.

A Torturer's Agony

This put a smile on my face.

A mostly polite, but extremely challenging audience met John Ashcroft when he spoke at Knox College (where Abe Lincoln also spoke, some time earlier).

With the speech well publicized in advance, the protesters were ready with powerful symbols, pertinent questions, and even documentation. 

Even for the easy fifteen grand the College Republicans paid him, I can't imagine Ashcroft wanting to do this again.

How do College Republicans raise that kind of dough?

I suspect this protest is a portent of the future.  That everywhere they go, those that dishonored this country by making torture its official policy will meet with shaming.

It's no comfort to those many who died in agony behind bars, but maybe the survivors will gain some satisfaction at seeing Dick and Rummy and the gang always defensive, always infuriated.

It's a great blow-by-blow diary with a good YouTube clip at the end.

Reading how Ashcroft triumphantly makes the distinction between waterboarding (simulating drowning by pouring water on a cloth covering the victim's mouth and nose) and "the water torture" (forcing water into the stomach by tube) is a bracing experience of the mad logic of the torturers. 

Kudos, Elsinora and the rest of you activists.  You honor your nation.

Via Pine Belt Progressive

YouTube against Bad Plumbing

This is a pretty cool bit of activism about something disgusting.

This guy's soldier son was in a forward operating outpost in Afghanistan for fifteen months, dodging IEDs and freezing in his gritty clothes (eight weeks without a shower at one point). 

That's okay.  It was duty.

But when he came home, they put him and his buddies back in a sh*thole barracks that should have been torn down thirty years ago. 

Peeling lead paint, gutted of fixtures, and blackened with mold.  Broken locks.  Rust on every metal surface.  Broken toilet seats. Sewer gas emanating from open pipes.  Sewer water backing up and flooding bathroom floors.

Dad sounds like a rock-ribbed Republican but he's mad as hell and 100% right to be. 

Putting his pictures up on YouTube with his righteous voiceover (along with calls to lawmakers) will, I hope, shake the trees enough to get some Congressional action on this.

Via Digby. 

Al Franken, Sinking

Oy!

This isn't what I like to see.

From TPM:

The round of negative stories about Al Franken's failure to properly pay business taxes in all the states he was active now appears to be damaging him and endangering his effort to oust Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN), a new poll finds.

The latest numbers from Rasmussen, compared to last month:

Coleman (R) 50% (+2)
Franken (D) 43% (-3)

Perfectly Ambiguous

Neither larger nor smaller than the predicted margin of victory.  Lucky gal can win the spin wars by saying "double digits."  But I don't see this changing a single Superdelegate mind (didn't he fight The Mighty Thor in issue #95?).

Well, you never know what twists of fate will be good for you or bad for you.  Maybe this'll be a good thing.  Joan Walsh observed that in his concession speech, Obama:

...peppered it with specifics about healthcare, job loss and the mortgage crisis. He sounded like John Edwards sometimes, and that wasn't just the John Mellencamp soundtrack behind him.

More of that, please.

Meanwhile, we're #1!  Go America!

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a ...distinctive American approach to crime and punishment.

Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled...

A period of madness.

And, funny, Rupert Murdoch doesn't seem to think newspapers are a dying buisness.  Just bought Newsday.

I wonder what his game is.  He's getting to be a rather old man.  What's he mean to accomplish over the fifteen or so active years he has left?

If You Have Voting Problems, Report Them!

That Surreal Ron Paul ad

It's nicely anti-imperialist, but the drowned city imagery evokes the climate crisis rather than its apparently intended reference to the bankrupting of America. 

Anyway, it's a wonderfully bizarre computer animation.  Note the ruffling of Mr. Paul's hair in the wind.

It feeds my hope/dread that computer-animation smear ads may appear this cycle.

Can you imagine the possibilities?

Via Eschaton.

You, Reading This, Killing Gorillas

I sympathize with No Impact Man. It seems every damned thing you buy has some horrendous consequence. 

A neighbor recently  learned our organic black beans come from China!  Shipped from China!

Now I read a mineral I've never heard of, Coltan (used in capacitors and elsewhere), has spiked in price since 2000 and is causing a mining boom in the Congo. 

Poor miners are destroying river habitats panning for the stuff, and killing Gorillas to put into the supper stew.

Auuugh!

McClatchy

The best national news service we have, shows what it's like for our GIs in Sadr City.

Holed up in a commandeered house with no electricity and plugged toilets, getting stray shots from both Sadrists and the Iraqi Army.

Miserable.

Prozac Nation

RAND corp study estimates 300,000 Iraq War vets have mental problems.

I've said it before: the going-to-pieces Iraq vet is going to be a cliche in popular entertainment for the next decade.

Bleak Post-WWII European cinema, and American Film Noir were artistic reactions to that trauma.  God knows what we're going to get this time.

Anybody notice how much torture there is in movies and TV these days?  Not just 24...all kinds of thrillers have an obligatory torture scene.

Even friggin 3:10 to Yuma had Russell Crowe tied up and tortured with an electrical dynamite ignition system (!).  For pity's sake.

I'm already sick of it.