Paging Dr. First– we need a remote diagnosis. Is the WaPo totally fucking braindead??? Who let a sports writer chime in on the intelligent design controversy? I’m not even going to quote it. I agree with Atrios– it may be the single dumbest thing I have ever read. I’m not going to quote it– you have to check out the sheer idiocy of it for yourself. But the basic gist is that athletes are evidence of an intelligent designer. Seriously.

Having grown up in Jesus H. McFootball land, I would be more apt to look at organized athletics as proof that Hell exists, sometimes in P.E. class.

Do these people have nothing better to do? The Uptight Busybodies of America is up in arms because Starbucks has a quote from Armistead Maupin on some of its coffeecups as part of its “The Way I See It” campaign. The quote in its entirety is:

My only regret about being gay is that he repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.

Starbucks’s response in the article is perfectly reasonable — “Embracing diversity and treating people with dignity is one of the guiding principles of our corporation” — but how long before the American Taliban bullies other organization into self-censorship when it comes to anything related to gay culture?

Via Digby, a must-read from TNR. My friends, we are all idiots. The putsch is over and the junta is polishing its boots with the Constitution:

The Bush administration has adopted this radical approach because it is defending the idea that the Constitution empowers the president to conduct war exclusively on his terms. A series of memos written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 effectively maintained that any law restricting the president’s commander-in-chief authority is presumptively unconstitutional. (When GOP Senator Lindsey Graham recently quoted to Pentagon lawyer Daniel Dell’Orto the inconvenient section of Article I, Section 8, granting Congress the authority to “make rules concerning captures on land and water,” he farcically replied, “I’d have to take a look at that particular constitutional provision.”) Last month, when some GOP senators tried to bar “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment” of detainees in an amendment to the 2006 defense bill, the White House sent them a letter threatening to veto any attempt to “restrict the President’s authority to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack and bring terrorists to justice,” and Vice President Dick Cheney warned senators against usurping executive power. For good measure, the White House instructed the Senate leadership to pull the entire half-trillion-dollar bill from the floor, lest the offending language within it pass.

[snip]

That’s not all. Before a Senate panel last month, Dell’Orto argued that Congress shouldn’t create a statutory definition of the term “enemy combatant,” since the administration needs “flexibility in the terminology in order to … address the changing circumstances of the type of conflicts in which we are engaged and will be engaged.” The very next week, before an appellate court panel, Solicitor General Paul Clement, arguing for the continued detention without charge of American citizen and suspected Al Qaeda terrorist José Padilla, explained what the administration has in mind for its “flexible” definition. Federal appellate Judge J. Michael Luttig, a Bush appointee, noted that, since Padilla was arrested not on an Afghan battlefield but at a Chicago airport, the administration’s discretion to detain an American citizen ought to be fettered, “unless you’re prepared to boldly say the United States is a battlefield in the war on terror.” Clement immediately replied, “I can say that, and I can say it boldly.” In essence, the administration is claiming authority to detain anyone, captured anywhere, based not on any criteria enacted by law but rather at the discretion of policy, and to hold that individual indefinitely.

That position–that the war on terrorism requires executive latitude at odds with hundreds of years of law–has animated every single step of the administration’s approach to the war. It’s why Bush has kept nato allies at arm’s length while simultaneously trumpeting their absolute necessity to the defeat of Al Qaeda. It’s why he didn’t just oppose the creation of an independent 9/11 Commission to investigate the history of counterterrorism policy, he also argued it would be an unacceptable burden on his prosecution of the war. And it’s why he’s blasted any move by the courts to exercise oversight of the war as a dangerous judicial overreach: When a district court judge last year challenged the constitutionality of the administration’s military commissions for the trial of enemy combatants, the Justice Department “vigorously disagree[d],” as a spokesman put it, and contested the ruling until the commissions were reinstated on appeal last month. For the administration, its expansion of executive power is synonymous with victory in the war–regardless of the real-world costs to the war effort.

In this case, the War in Iraq and the War on Terror are both tremendous successes–they have allowed Bush to create an Imperial Presidency beyond the wildest dreams of Nixon. His lawyers can laugh at Republican Senators when they cite the Constitution. All he needs now is another attack on the U.S. to consolidate the kind of power we would recognize as tanks-in-the-street martial law. Think I’m exaggerating?

Gen. Tommy Franks said in an interview with the lifestyle magazine Cigar Aficionado that if another terrorist attack occurs in the United States “the Constitution will likely be discarded in favor of a military form of government” The stunning revelation is the headline story on the right-wing news site NewsMax for Friday. Franks said that another terrorism attack will result in “… the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years…” He indicated that if another terrorism attack occurs Bush will likely declare martial law and the Constitution will apparently be “discarded”.

Because the forecast today looks like it’s sunny with a chance of rapture.

I am working on the assumption that this is a joke. Right? It is, isn’t it?

To paraphrase Homer Simpson. “Bacon. Is there anything it can’t do?

I love a food geek. Especially a food geek with a particular speciality, as it were. The Bacon Show, in addition to providing a bacon recipe a day, every day, also provides no end of links to all things bacon–from bacon curers and hogfarmers to literature extolling the joys of cured pig’s bellies to, uhm, resources to purchase bacon bracelets and bandaids.

Though I’m a little disturbed by the Bacon Robots. Specifically, the tagline: “Because the only thing better than bacon is a hot animatronic lady to cook it for you.”

Get your FREE Bullshit Deflector here!

You might be going, you might not, right? It’s too crowded, it’s too expensive, you can’t be bothered. I know, I know. But if you’re sitting on the fence, thinking you MIGHT go if only there was that one killer act, well, let me help you make up your mind. You know who’s playing at Bumbershoot this year? ME. Yup, that’s right.

Okay, okay, I’m not solo, I’m just part of the back up for the Polynesian extravaganza that’s happening on the newly added Volcano Stage. We have two short sets: Sunday, September 4, 7:00-7:45p and 8:30-9:15p – Volcano Stage (International Fountain) at the Seattle Center.

Stop by for one of them. I’ll be the one with the ukulele and the Hawaiian shirt. It would make me ever so happy to see your smiling face in the audience. Come see us before you go see Elvis Costello, k?

So, following up on my last post… what do people think about the idea of a general strike to protest the continuation of the war in Iraq? One of the big problems we face when trying to organize a protest or march in this country is that we are all so overworked [and driven] that it’s hard to squeeze political action into our schedules. Sad, isn’t it? Don’t think that lesson is lost on businesses that fight against giving Americans time off commensurate with the rest of the civilized world–we might not just watch more TV. But that’s the beauty of a general strike–we can cause inconvenience, social disruption, lost productivity AND get a day off.

There is actually a lot that could be done in the Fall that would be very effective at creating concern–especially for Wall Street, because let’s face it, we wouldn’t be trying to convince Bush & Co. of anything. Their funders, however, believe after Coolidge that “the business of America is business.” Business, we would be seeking to remind them, not war. Business needs workers working, airplanes flying, trucks crossing the country full of things to buy.

If everyone against the war participated not only in the general strike itself, but also a “sacrificial” refusal to watch TV during the Fall sweeps, voluntary “war savings” of half of our projected Holiday spending [maybe to buy some armor for the troops?], even a week-long “vacation strike” where they agreed to forgo discretionary travel, it would begin to add up. A bad fourth quarter makes for a bad year in any sector driven by consumers. Think about two weeks where even 10-20% of Americans made a concerted effort to drive less and boycott the fuel pump? It doesn’t have to be centralized–every liberal blog could make suggestions for its readers about the “Q4 Freeze.” Let a thousand sabots bloom.

There have been scattered “Buy Nothing Days” but frankly Adbusters-style anti-consumerism alone is not enough to mobilize average Americans outside of the predictable liberal enclaves. Tying this call to the war–and our concern for soldiers sent to fight without proper armor and die in the service of a morally bankrupt commander-in-chief–would be much more powerful. We as Americans have not only not been asked to make any sacrifices, we have repeatedly been told to “buy more” as our patriotic duty.

We’re not all moms, and we haven’t all lost sons. But we can show the powers that be that on some level, we are all Cindy Sheehans. We can all say “I’m against the war,” but to a degree unprecedented in history, we as consumers are the engine of the War Machine. Our daily choices fuel the economy and line the pockets of those who put Bush in office. I think we should either put up, or shut up. Blogs are not limited to wondering aloud, or handwringing. They are a means for collective action. We’ve done it before, and we can do it again. Anyone interested?

Sometimes the phrase “Republican attack dogs” is a metaphor and sometimes it’s reportage:

Today in Oakland in front of the Army Recruiting Center on Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh Police and University of Pittsburgh Police fought with protestors on the sidewalk. At least six people were arrested; police fired tasers and other weapons at the crowd, including restrained arrestees and bystanders.

During the rally at the station, a freelance Fox News cameraman who was aggressively filming demonstrators’ faces was told to leave and started a minor confrontation with protestors. He returned with police officers, claiming that either he was punched or that his camera was broken (although he continued to use his camera the rest of the day). Witnesses confirm that neither of these things happened. On this pretense, police began chasing any masked protestors they could find, arresting several and firing weapons at the crowd. Several people have confirmed that they were hit with tasers and chemical weapons. Video cameras captured tasers being fired at people who had already been subdued and restrained by police officers.

Later, police dogs were used to chase away protestors on the sidewalk, and one woman was bitten from behind by a police dog. Some time later, after telling police she wanted to file a complaint, she was told the police would “take her information,” but instead she was arrested and placed in the back of a police van.

The arrested woman is the mom of a good friend of my coworker Diane. Diane notes that she was “pleading with the cop to back his dog off the guy when it turned and bit her. She was arrested and questioned before they finally took her to the hospital.”

Her friend is managing to control his rage better than I would in his shoes: “My Mother is OK, but I can’t believe the police had to use a dog on my 68 year mother. She was bitten, handcuffed, thrown in a paddy wagon, complained for about twenty minutes before the police took her the the hospital.”

Maybe it’s the Okie in me, but if that happened to The Judy, the PD would be talking to my $400 an hour lawyer and the Fox cameraman would be well advised to watch his back.

The link above has photos and video, including disturbing images of protesters being tasered. What I want to know is, when do we stop letting the grandmothers take the heat? When do we all decide enough is enout? General strikes have never been particularly effective in this country, but then again a few days’ lost productivity would probably get the attention of the money men behind Bush. Anyone game for a few days off?

If you’ve read much about nanotechnology– or sci-fi based on it–you’ll know that the future is all about carbon nanotubes. But until now it was hard to manufacture them. Who knew that a team of Aussies and Texans would find a way to produce sheets of nanotubes at the rate of seven meters a minute? The sheets are “stronger than the same-weight steel sheets and have demonstrated applicability for organic light-emitting displays, low-noise electronic sensors, artificial muscles, conducting appliqués and broad-band polarized light sources that can be switched in one ten-thousandths of a second.” There is even talk of using the fabric to trap solar power–something we could use help with right about now.

“Rarely is a processing advance so elegantly simple that rapid commercialization seems possible, and rarely does such an advance so quickly enable diverse application demonstrations,” said the article’s authors.

If you’re inclined to be optimistic about our ability as a species to innovate ourselves out of the corners we seem hell-bent on painting ourselves into, this is a reason to be happy. If you’re a pessimist, well, you can rest assured we’ll figure out a way to make some nasty weapons out of this shit. Ploughshares into swords and damn the torpedoes!