Please tell me this is a joke :

Even as the American assault on Iraq continues, the federal government is launching new attacks in media to try to improve America?s image in the Arab world. The government is planning the Middle East Television Network to provide news and entertainment in the region, and the State Department is planning to reach young adults in the Middle East with an Arab-language magazine celebrating the American lifestyle, called ?Hi.? The idea is to promote understanding. But some say people will discount them as American propaganda — and, that the problem is not pop culture, but U.S. policy. But those involved say a staff of Arabs and Arab-Americans will give the network and magazine an authentic voice.

Now I can understand the reasons for wanting to try to counter the rise of anti-Americanism in the Middle East, but Arabs aren’t stupid. Unlike most Americans (apparently), they know when they’re being lied to. Maybe if the Bush Administration started treating the Arabs like they’re people instead of “evildoers”, they wouldn’t have to start their own TV network to try to undo they damage they’re causing. If they actually listened to anti-American rhetoric, they’d see that underneath it all are some legitimate grievances that deserve to be addressed. Puff-pieces about “liberation” sandwiched between overdubbed Seinfeld reruns are only going to make things worse.

On a somewhat unrelated note comes this galling story :

They may be the ones facing danger on the battlefield, but US soldiers in Iraq are being asked to pray for President George W Bush. Thousands of marines have been given a pamphlet called “A Christian’s Duty,” a mini prayer book which includes a tear-out section to be mailed to the White House pledging the soldier who sends it in has been praying for Bush.

As an atheist, I don’t think prayer is any more effective than meditation or generally having a positive attitude, but that said, shouldn’t Pres. Bush be keeping the troops in his prayers and not the other way around?

I wish this war would hurry up and end so I wouldn’t have to keep reading stories like this :

The statement said a total of 13 women and children were in the van. But The Washington Post, whose reporter is embedded with the 3rd Infantry, said 15 passengers were in the van and 10 were killed, five of them children who appeared to be younger than age 5. One of the wounded was a man not expected to live, the Post reported on its Web site.

Should we even bother to act surprised? The news media is finally starting to pay attention :

But “precision” weapons also miss. Human and mechanical errors send 10 percent or more astray, Pentagon (news – web sites) and civilian experts say ? a disastrous percentage for civilians living near the intended targets. “No weapons system is foolproof,” said Lt. Cmdr. Charles Owens, a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command in Qatar. “We’ll always have one or two that go off target.”

What other industry is allowed to have a 10% failure rate?? If one in ten infant car seats ended up killing a baby, there would be an uproar. If one in ten SUVs exploded whenever you stick the key in the ignition, there would be a massive congressional investigation and the auto industry would go bankrupt. If one in ten Big Macs contained broken glass, they’d be burning Ronald McDonald in effigy. When the defense industry has a 10% failure rate, they get more than $500 billion dollars in tax money (not to mention kill thousands of people). If you’re as pissed as I am, click on the links to the right (under “Complain”) and contact your representatives in the Congress and senate.

Who needs the international community when you’ve got the help of chickens, dolphins, and monkeys?

Here’s some more religious tolerance from South Carolina :

Several City Council members have walked out of a meeting to protest an atheist giving the invocation. Some of the half-dozen or so Charleston City Council members who left Tuesday said their religious beliefs compelled them to leave.

I must have missed the part of the Bible where Jesus told his followers to be judgmental assholes. I could have sworn Jesus spent most of his time making the exact opposite point. So what was the the athiest’s invocation that offended everybody?

What divides us is not so much our religious differences in this diverse country but the degree of commitment we have to equal freedom of conscience for all people. We are gathered today, both religious and secular members of our community, with the shared belief that we must treat our fellow human beings with respect and dignity.

Why is it that the only taxes that are deemed “unfair” are the ones that primarily affect rich people? Republicans have convinced the public that taxing divdends is “double taxation”, turned the estate tax into the “death tax”, and complained loudly about how unfair it is that the super-rich are bearing the tax burden for the poor. One of the reasons Republicans have been so effective is that they can boil every issue down into an “us vs. them” argument. While the Democrats are busy discussing the complexities of an issue, the Republicans are already telling the public the issues are simple and that they’ve got the answers.

The answer to this is that the Democrats need to come up with as many buzzwords as possible and disseminate them among themselves. The Republicans are experts at this. Their rhetoric instantly enters the lexicon because they all start using it at the same time and act like they’ve been saying it for years. The only way for the Democrats to counter this kind of rhetoric is to come up with some rhetoric of their own. That said, here’s a couple suggestions :

Earned Money Taxes – Taxes on money that is earned as the result of actual labor (ie. your paycheck), primarily payroll and income taxes.

Found Money Taxes – Taxes on money that is earned that doesn’t involve labor (eg. estate taxes, capital gains taxes, dividend taxes, etc.) Found money taxes are the exact opposite of “earned money taxes”.

Every time the president talks about tax cuts, every Democrat needs to be on TV the next day saying things like :

“It’s a shame that the president is more concerned with cutting the taxes on found money than the taxes on earned money.”

“The president and I agree on tax cuts, but I think the American people would be better off if we cut the taxes on work money than luck money.”

“On one hand you’ve got someone who spends 15 minutes a week trading stock and on the other hand you’ve got a single mother who works 80 hours a week at her two jobs so she can afford clothes for her kids that she never sees. You tell me who deserves a bigger tax cut.”

Because the Pentagon threatened to kill independent journalists, that’s why! For those of you who missed it, check out the this article :

The Pentagon has threatened to fire on the satellite uplink positions of independent journalists in Iraq, according to veteran BBC war correspondent, Kate Adie. In an interview with Irish radio, Ms. Adie said that questioned about the consequences of such potentially fatal actions, a senior Pentagon officer had said: “Who cares.. ..They’ve been warned.”

And for those of you who think they’re bluffing, let’s not forget that the Coalition forces bombed Iraq’s state-run TV and killed BBC reporter Terry Lloyd :

Immediately the allied tanks started heavy firing directly at us. Rounds were coming straight at the Jeep, smashing the windows and puncturing holes in the bodywork. Then the whole car was on fire. We were enveloped in flames. It was terrifying. I’m so angry that we were fired on by the allies. The Iraqis must have been their real target but I’m sure they were surrendering and anyway they were all dead within minutes.

Since the Bush administration is so keep on giving “faith-based” organizations money (often for providing the kinds of services that he tries to eliminate so he can afford his massive tax cuts), why should the Christians and Jews have all the fun? Here’s a few ideas :

The Rastafarians can set up a drug counseling program and get up to $50,000 in grants from the Department of Justice’s Weed and Seed program.

The Breatharians (people who believe we can get all our nutrients by breathing instead of eating) get a piece of the $150 million that the Department of Agriculture has set aside for the Emergency Food Assistance Program.

The Tantra Hindus could try to get some of the $83 million set aside for abstinence education.

The Church of Satan could try for some of the $12 million allocated for the DOJ’s Juvenile Mentoring Program.

Take a look at all the programs that offer money to “faith-based” organizations here and post some ideas in the comments.

Amnesty International has been closely watching the war in Iraq and has a good report about the Bush administration’s hypocritical stance on human rights here :

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld added that “the Geneva Convention indicates that it’s not permitted to photograph and embarrass or humiliate prisoners of war, and if they do happen to be American or coalition ground forces that have been captured, the Geneva Convention indicates how they should be treated.” His statement came after interviews with five captured U.S. soldiers had been broadcast on Iraqi television.

On the same day, about 30 more detainees were flown from Afghanistan to the U.S. Naval Base in Guant?namo Bay in Cuba. This brought to about 660 the number of foreign nationals held in the base. They come from more than 40 countries. Most were taken into custody during the international armed conflict in Afghanistan. Some have been held in Guant?namo, without charge or trial, and without access to lawyers, relatives or the courts, for more than a year. Their treatment has flouted international standards.

From the outset, the U.S. government refused to grant any of the Guant?namo detainees prisoner of war (POW) status or to have any disputed status determined by a “competent tribunal” as required under Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention. In April 2002, Amnesty International warned the U.S. administration that its selective approach to the Geneva Conventions threatened to undermine the effectiveness of international humanitarian law protections for any U.S. or other combatants captured in the future. The organization received no reply to this or other concerns it raised about the detainees.

In the last week they’ve also brought up human rights concerns about “shock and awe”, POW’s, the bombing of Iraqi state TV, and the use of clusterbombs and landmines (which I briefly mentioned last week here).

From the Independent (via Salon) :

It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still-smouldering car.

Two missiles from an American jet killed them all — by my estimate, more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be ‘liberated’ by the nation that destroyed their lives. Who dares, I ask myself, to call this ‘collateral damage’? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning …

How should one record so terrible an event? Perhaps a medical report would be more appropriate. But the final death toll is expected to be near to 30 and Iraqis are now witnessing these awful things each day; so there is no reason why the truth, all the truth, of what they see should not be told.

For another question occurred to me as I walked through this place of massacre yesterday. If this is what we are seeing in Baghdad, what is happening in Basra and Nasiriyah and Kerbala? How many civilians are dying there too, anonymously, indeed unrecorded, because there are no reporters to be witness to their suffering?

It looks like the senate and House have cut Bush’s tax cut in half. I suppose this is good news in a way, but it’s still providing massive tax cuts for the rich. Of course to pay for these cuts, there have been billions cut from a variety of social services programs including Medicaid, veterans programs, student loans, school lunches, child care, food stamps, and cash assistance for the elderly and disabled poor. There’s a good review of the budget the house passed last week here :

Yet as large as these programmatic cuts would be, they would be surpassed in size by the tax cuts proposed in the same budget that would be received by the top one percent of the population. In other words, if the budget contained no spending cuts but the top one percent did not receive any tax cuts, it would cause less of a dent in the nation?s fiscal outlook.

I know to people like Bush and his cronies programs like welfare and social security are just line items on budgets that can be adjusted at will, but to the poor, cuts in these budgets can mean the difference between life and death. To take away money from these kinds of programs to give more tax money back to the richest of the rich is repulsive.

While I’m on the subject of taxes, let’s not forget the billions of dollars that are being siphones from the government every year in offshore tax shelters (“tax motivated expatriation”) :

Nobody is sure precisely how much this corporate exodus is costing us, but the IRS estimates that it’s siphoning off at least $70 billion each year from the U.S. Treasury. And that number doesn’t include the billions in taxes that corporations avoid paying by creating offshore subsidiaries. Enron, for example, had 881 of them and paid no taxes in four of the last five years. That’s right, if you paid one dollar in taxes in those years, you paid more than this longtime fixture on the Fortune 500.

Personally I don’t mind paying taxes as long as the money is helping people that need assistance (as well as paying for shared services, going towards social security, etc.), but every year I hear people gush to each other about how much money they saved in taxes. Since when is it a virtue to contribute as little to society as possible?

The rest of this insane tract (including the part where the Vatican is blamed for the Holocaust) can be found here. This kind of conspiracy theorist crap isn’t much different than the anti-Catholic views of Bob Jones University, the notoriously racist college where Bush appeared during his 2000 presidential campaign. In the past, officals of BJU have called the Pope the “Antichrist” and refered to Catholicism as a “satanic cult”.

Personally, I don’t like Catholicism or fundamentalism, but in the case of the war, the Pope was right. The current war in Iraq doesn’t fit under the criteria of a “just war”. Go here for an excellent article about “just war” written by former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter :

As a Christian and as a president who was severely provoked by international crises, I became thoroughly familiar with the principles of a just war, and it is clear that a substantially unilateral attack on Iraq does not meet these standards. This is an almost universal conviction of religious leaders, with the most notable exception of a few spokesmen of the Southern Baptist Convention who are greatly influenced by their commitment to Israel based on eschatological, or final days, theology.

…either way, they shouldn’t be leading us to war. The New Yorker has a great article about the fake documents claiming that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger. Apparently the information in these documents was so explosive that the allegations made their way into the State of the Union address. It’s too bad they didn’t warrant a little fact checking as well :

One senior I.A.E.A. official went further. He told me, ?These documents are so bad that I cannot imagine that they came from a serious intelligence agency. It depresses me, given the low quality of the documents, that it was not stopped. At the level it reached, I would have expected more checking.?
…
The problems were glaring. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed with the name of Allele Habibou, a Niger Minister of Foreign Affairs and Co?peration, who had been out of office since 1989. Another letter, allegedly from Tandja Mamadou, the President of Niger, had a signature that had obviously been faked and a text with inaccuracies so egregious, the senior I.A.E.A. official said, that ?they could be spotted by someone using Google on the Internet.?

Images from thememoryhole.org.