I recently received a copy of the Patriotism volume of the Educational Archives DVD series. The first short on the disc contains a stunning short called Despotism that contains a fascinating look at how democracies become dictatorships. Although they’re clearly referencing Nazi Germany (the film was made in 1945), the parallels to modern-day America are shocking. I’m not going to try to make the argument that we’re close to being a dictatorship or anything, but there are very clear similarities between the warnings in this film and current societal trends.

What follows are a few screengrabs from the film as well as a partial transcript. If you’d like to see the full film for yourself, you can download it at the Prelinger Archives.

When a competent observer looks for signs of despotism in a community, he looks beyond fine words and noble phrases.

“. . . for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.”

Many observers have found that two workable yardsticks help in discovering how near a community is to despotism. The respect scale and the power scale.

A careful observer can use a respect scale to find how many citizens get an even break. As a community moves towards despotism, respect is restricted to fewer people. A community is low on a respect scale if common courtesy is withheld from large groups of people on account of their political attitudes; if people are rude to others because they think their wealth and position gives them that right, or because they don’t like a man’s race or his religion.

Equal opportunity for all citizens to develop useful skills is one basis for rating a community on a respect scale. The opportunity to develop useful skills is important but not enough. The equally important opportunity to put skills to use is a further test on a respect scale.

A power scale is another important yardstick of despotism. It gauges the citizen’s share in making the community’s decisions. Communities which concentrate decision making in a few hands rate low on a power scale and are moving towards despotism. Like France under the Bourbon kings, one of whom said, “The state? I am the state.”

The test of despotic power is that it can disregard the will of the people. It rules without the consent of the governed.Look beyond the legal formalities of an election in measuring a community on the power scale to see if the ballot is really free.

If the citizens can vote only the way they are told, a community approaches despotism. When legislatures become ceremonial assemblies only, and have no real control over lawmaking, their community rates low on a power scale.

The spread of respect and power in a community is influenced by certain conditions which many observers measure by means of the economic distribution and information scales.

If a community’s economic distribution becomes slanted, its middle income groups grow smaller and despotism stands a better chance to gain a foothold.

Where land is privately owned, one sign of a poorly balanced economy is the concentration of land ownership in the hands of a very small number of people.

When farmers lose their farms they lose their independence. This one can stay on, but not as his own boss any more. To the extent that this condition exists throughout a nation, the likelihood of despotism is increased.

In communities which depend almost entirely on a single industry, such as a factory or mine, maintaining economic balance is a challenging problem.

If this condition exists over the nation as a whole, so that the control of jobs and business opportunities is in a few hands, despotism stands a good chance. Another sign of a poorly balanced economy is a taxation system that presses heaviest on those least able to pay.

A larger part of a small income is spent on necessities such as food. Sales taxes on such necessities hit the small income harder.

A community rates low on an information scale when the press, radio, and other channels of communication are controlled by only a few people and when citizens have to accept what they are told. In communities of this kind, despotism stands a good chance.

What sort of community do you live in? Where would you place it on a democracy/despotism scale? To find out, you can rate it on a respect scale and a power scale. And to find out what way it is likely to go in the future, you can rate it on economic distribution and information scales.

The lower your community rates on economic distribution and information scales, the lower it is likely to rate on respect and power scales and thus to approach despotism. What happens in a single community is the problem of its own citizens, but it is also the problem of us all because as communities go, so goes the nation.

So how do you think we rate on the four scales? The screenshots I chose roughly represent where I think we are, although my answers would probably jump all over the scale based on what kind of mood I’m in.

Respect – Of all the measures, I think we probably do best in this one (which isn’t saying much). It’s kinda hard to gauge this one, since either pendulum of conventional wisdom tends to swing widely from left to right. In some ways, our society is becoming more polarized, but overall it doesn’t seem to have caused a total breakdown in civility (yet).

Power – Have we ever scored high on this one?? Since day one, our country has been run to rich, white males. Sure, we’ve come a long way in the last hundred years or so, but we’re still at a point where the only woman running for president is viewed as a gimmicky candidate who has no chance of winning.

Economic Distribution – While I was cooking my turkey yesterday morning, I saw a show on VH1 where Lil’ Kim was bragging about the $20,000 “bling bling” she bought for her dog. When I left to go to my friend’s house, I drove by supermarket picketers who have been standing in the cold for six weeks fighting to keep the right to take their families to the doctor. The Republicans are doing everything in their power to force this scale all the way to the bottom. When 17% of the children in the richest country on Earth are living in poverty, you know that this is getting worse.

Information – How many media companies control the news now?? Isn’t it only like four or five? The number one news network is in the pocket of the party that runs this country while most of the news that we receive about the war we’re stuck in comes from “embedded” reporters. As long as there are at least two news sources, the illusion of “competition” will be enough to fight off any monopoly claims. Of course, the big irony here is that you’re reading these words from the most senate information source in human history. Unfortunately, most people are too goddamn lazy to seek out the news that isn’t prepackaged into soundbytes.

Now I don’t think we’re gonna wake up tomorrow morning and be in a dictatorship, nor do I think that Bush and the GOP are entertaining Napoleonic visions of world domination. But I do think that the corrupting influence of power and money, inbred xenophobia, and the general public’s ignorance and apathy are working together to slowly destroy all the rights that Americans take for granted.

Y’know, for a little while yesterday I thought Bush might be an alright guy. Sure, it was probably a combination of a lack of sleep, surplus of wine, and an overall good natured feeling I get around holiday time, but I was touched when I heard that Bush flew to Iraq to spend Thanksgiving with the troops. And the whole “he had to keep it secret thing” added a whole level of excitement to it.

But I’ve slept on it and am now seeing it a lot more for the cynical publicity stunt that it is. I still think it was a decent gesture, but it’s too little too late for this president. He’s got to do a lot more than buy the troops dinner to make up for all the shit he’s pulled over the last year.

The media has been really playing up the whole “secret trip” thing, but they always add the vague warnings about security and terrorist threats. C’mon, cut through the jargon and just say it. The real reason the trip was secret was because everyone in Iraq wants to kill Bush.

If Bush’s secret trip to Iraq for a few hours makes him a hero, then Hillary Clinton’s trip damn-near makes her a goddess :

Former US first lady Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Baghdad hot on the heels of a lightning stealth visit by US President George W. Bush for a Thanksgiving dinner with US troops, officials said.

Clinton was due to spend just one day in the insurgency-ridden Iraqi capital after her visit to Afghanistan Thursday in which she spent Thanksgiving with troops there, said a coalition interior ministry official, Thomas Basile.

Before lunch, she met with senior officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority including US overseer Paul Bremer, said Clinton’s spokeswoman.

“She then had lunch with troops from her home state (New York) in the dining hall at the palace,” she said, referring to the city centre mansion of Saddam Hussein which is now the seat of the occupation administration.

“She was walking through the hall and people were coming up to her. It was a half-hour lunch,” the spokeswoman said.

Unlike the US president, who never even left the main military camp at Baghdad airport during his two-and-a-half hour stopover, Clinton then left the heavily fortified complex around the palace to go and visit troops.

That’s right, she went to Iraq and Afghanistan (a place that Bush can’t even be bothered to mention anymore, much less visit).

For somebody who listens to his fair share of “hippy music”, I have very little tolerance for new-agey bullshit. Not only is it, for the most part, every bit as ridiculous as anything being preached on the 700 Club (but to its credit, not nearly as xenophobic), but New Age beliefs always seem to give themselves faux credibility by wrapping themselves in scientific terms. This excerpt from a letter by Yoko Ono is a good example of what I’m talking about :

The second good news has come from an experiment done by a Japanese scientist, Masaru Emoto, who has discovered and demonstrated that “water reads.” This is unbelievable information, but it’s true. To put it simply, Emoto put water in a bottle, put a label on the bottle with a word written on it facing inside the bottle. He then froze the water and examined the crystal created by the water under a microscope. The photos of the crystals show, that when you write a word such as, love, regardless of which language, the water creates a beautiful crystal. When you write “happiness” it also creates a beautiful crystal. But when you write “unhappiness” it cannot form a crystal. Interestingly, the word “Hell” created terrible dirty water. Don’t ask me why! (Messages from Water: Masaru Emoto, translated in English)

Sentences create equally fascinating results. When you write “how pretty you are!”, it creates a beautiful crystal, whereas “you stupid guy!” creates muddy, ugliness, reminiscent of extremely polluted water. The water reacts to very delicate differences, too. When you write “you better do it!” it creates a muddyness like an expression of rebellion. However, it creates a beautiful crystal if you write “let’s do it, shall we?” Of course, the biggest hit is “I love you.” There is no limit to how much this sentence in many different languages can do to clean the water and create beautiful crystals. The muddiest, polluted water can become clean.

The water not only reacts to the written words but to music. When music was played to the water, many beautiful crystals were created. It was interesting for me that the song “imagine” created a crystal very similar to the word “angels.”

And, of course, 80 percent of our bodies are made up of water! What does that mean?

We are probably making very dangerously muddy people as our opposition by constantly throwing verbal attacks at them. If we make them muddy, we will pretty soon become muddy, too. Just by sending good words, it not only clears the people you send the good words to, but it clears you, too. So if you are insulting someone, that is the same as insulting yourself. All this is demonstrated by the photos of the waters and their crystals.

Water knows how to read?! Seriously, that’s one of the craziest fucking things I’ve ever read. How does water react if you make a typo? Or if you write something neutral like “I Made Some Brownies and They Were Pretty Good”? Can water read Klingon?

Just because someone uses the words “experiment” and “science” doesn’t mean that’s it’s automatically true. So next time somebody says something like “There was this scientists who proved in his lab that women are made out of ribs”, just remind him/her that until the experiment is submitted to peer review and the findings are verified through repeated testing, those results are essentially worthless.

Via Josh Marshall, I see that the GOP is resorting to some of their classic “dirty tricks” :

senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch said Tuesday he had put one of his staffers on administrative leave for improperly obtaining data from the secure computer networks of two senate senators.

Hatch, R-Utah, said preliminary interviews suggested that a former Republican member of the committee staff may have also been involved in penetrating the senate computers.

“I was shocked to learn that this may have occurred,” Hatch said in a statement. “I am mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch.”

Hatch launched an investigation after Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., protested what they said was the theft of memos from their servers. The memos, concerning political strategy on blocking confirmation of several of President Bush’s judicial nominations, were obtained and reported on by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times.

Hmmm…this all sounds so familiar. Wasn’t there some other story a few years ago about Republicans breaking into a senate something or other? Remember what I’m talking about? It was something about the Republicans stealing something from the Democrats. Watergain? No….that’s not it….Washergate? Hmmm…no…don’t tell me…..

Oh well, I’m sure it’s no big deal.

Okay, I know this is probably because I’m a self-absorbed young person, but I really have a hard time getting worked up about this Medicare “reform” issue. From what I understand, the bill that just passed through congress is a basically a blank check to the insurance industry under the guise of providing “competition” or some other bullshit. Pretty typical for the GOP. I’ve tried to pay attention, but every time I talk turns to Medicare, my eyes start to glaze over. This long exchange from yesterday’s debate is a good example of what I’m talking about :

KERRY: No, I want to talk about it, because Dick Gephardt is absolutely correct. And it’s important to look at the record here.

The fact is that Governor Dean raised prescription costs for seniors in his state when he needed to balance the budget.

He called himself a “balanced budget freak” — those are his own words. And what he did was raised those costs, as well as take money out of a teachers’ pension fund in order to balance it.

Now, I have a different approach. I’ve asked the governor several times at several debates: Will he still try to reduce the rate of growth in Medicare? He’s said several times he’s going to cut the rate of growth in Medicare.

And I think it’s important for people — I’ve laid out a very specific plan. Governor Dean has no plan for actually balancing the budget or reducing the deficit.

And I’d like to know if he still intends to reduce the rate of growth in Medicare as one of the ways in which he’s going to balance the budget.

BROKAW: Governor Dean, I know — and this will be the last word on this.

DEAN: I most certainly appreciate all this attention that I’m getting.

We have never taken money out of the teachers’ pension fund. That is grossly irresponsible. It has happened in other states, one of which I happen to have to say is Massachusetts, although I don’t think Senator Kerry had anything to do with that.

We have never taken money out of the teachers’ pension fund, and we have the best health care record of virtually any state in the country.

So a lot of these accusations are the kinds of things people go through to pick up little pieces of this and little pieces of that.

Look at the big picture: We’ve done a great job on health insurance…

KERRY: But you still haven’t answered my question.

DEAN: We’ve done a great job on kids.

KERRY: But you still haven’t answered my question.

DEAN: And Tom Beaumont wrote in the Des Moines Register weeks ago that Medicare is off the table.

BROKAW: Congressman?

KERRY: No, the question is will you slow the rate of growth? Do you intend to slow the rate of growth in Medicare because you said you were going to do that?

DEAN: Well, what I intend to do in Medicare is to increase reimbursements for states like Iowa and Vermont, which are 50th and 49th respectively.

KERRY: Are you going to slow the rate of growth, Governor, yes or no?

DEAN: We’re going to do what we have to do to make sure that Medicare lasts…

KERRY: Are you going to slow the rate of growth, Governor?

(LAUGHTER)

Because that’s a cut.

DEAN: Well, I’d like to slow the rate of growth of this debate, if I could…

(LAUGHTER)

… but we’re going to make sure that Medicare works.

KERRY: Well, I’m sure you’d like to avoid it altogether, but…

BROKAW: OK. Let me ask you, Senator Kerry…

DEAN: Medicare is off the table.

We are not going to cut Medicare in order to balance the budget. I’ve made that very clear. I’ll do it one more time.

We will not…

KERRY: That’s not the question.

DEAN: … cut Medicare in order to balance the budget.

Dean is clearly getting his ass handed to him by Kerry, but it’s hard to get excited about about “Dean wants to slow the rate of growth!” I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who really care about this stuff though, so I hope they’re getting the message that the Republicans are more interested in funneling money to big businesses than helping the elderly :

Seniors will face annual increases in premiums and deductibles ? and a growing gap in coverage ? for the prescription drugs they buy under the new Medicare law, budget analysts say.

For example, the $250 annual deductible at the start of the program in 2006 is projected to rise to $445 by 2013.

The legislation that won final congressional approval Tuesday would allow seniors to buy coverage ? at an estimated monthly premium of $35 ? for their prescription drugs beginning in three years. After they agreed to the monthly premiums and paid their first $250 in pharmacy bills, the coverage would kick in, paying 75 percent of their bills between $250 and $2,250.

After that, there would be no further coverage until beneficiaries’ drug bills for the year reached $5,100, leaving a gap of $2,850 that they would have to pay out of their own pockets. Above $5,100 the insurance would pick up roughly 95 percent of costs.

Those are the numbers supporters of the bill have used, with little mention that they would change in future years.

But after just one year, the Congressional Budget Office (news – web sites) projects that seniors would see their $250 deductible and the $2,850 gap for which there is no coverage both jump 10 percent.

By 2013, the eighth year of the program, the deductible and the coverage gap are both projected to grow by 78 percent.

In other words, seniors would pay a $445 deductible and those with the largest drug bills would be entirely responsible for more than $5,000 in drug costs.
. . .
At the same time, CBO said, Medicare’s contribution also would rise each year so that the program would pay $1,500 of the first $2,250 in drug costs in 2006 and $2,666 of the first $4,000 in 2013.

Insurance premiums, which are not set in the bill even for 2006, are projected to increase 65 percent to $58 a month by 2013.

I have no doubt that there’s a political cartoonist hack out there getting the word out about how awful this bill is by writing the word “MEDICARE” on a picture of an elephant or something. I’m sure that will probably reach the Medicare audience a lot better than a potty-mouthed blogger will.

Ahhh…Thanksgiving is around the corner and I’ve got turkey on my mind. Unfortunately for those of us who prefer meat to tofurkeys, a new beverage has come along to make us projectile vomit :

A new Turkey and Gravy Soda tastes, well, pretty much like you would imagine. But that’s not stopping people from buying it.

Even the producers of the Thanksgiving-themed beverage at Jones Soda Co. were surprised by the demand. They sold out all 6,000 bottles online within about two hours last week.
. . .
The liquid’s ominous, murky brown color accurately warns consumers about the taste. The first sips bring a mix of sweet caramel and savory lard ? and it’s downhill from there.
. . .
Mary Turner, a radio DJ in Lansing, Mich., who is auctioning off a bottle for charity, has sampled the drink and warns that it’s not for the faint of stomach: “If you roasted a turkey and mashed potatoes, put it in a blender, left it out for three days and then poured it into a Jones bottle, you’d know exactly what this drink tastes like!”

In other turkey news, Bush was uncharacteristically compassionate when he did something for a turkey that he was never willing to do for a human being :

Stars the turkey may have pushed his luck by gobbling throughout a Rose Garden ceremony on Monday but President Bush just the same gave him a presidential pardon from being served for Thanksgiving dinner.
. . .
It was the 56th consecutive year the pardoning ceremony was held in the Rose Garden. The bird, supplied by the National Turkey Federation, was picked from among a group of 40 birds hatched on July 10 in a turkey barn in the Carthage, Missouri, area.

Rather than being eaten on Thursday, like millions of other turkeys, Stars will live out the rest of its days at Frying Pan Park in nearby Herndon, Virginia.

Turning serious, Bush thanked U.S. forces serving in Iraq and elsewhere around the world.

Speaking of Turkey, remember all those people who have been killed in Turkish guerilla attacks? That’s okay, neither does Bush…

Points for the first person to identify the pop culture reference in this post’s subject. (And don’t say “Zing!”)

Just when I thought the resolve of the picketers in the supermarket strike might start to crumble, something amazing happens :

Striking grocery clerks said Monday their picketing against three major supermarket chains would be extended to stores in northern California and to Washington, D.C.

The move came as the Teamsters union said its members would stop making deliveries to the Vons, Ralphs and Albertsons chains in Southern California in an effort to shut off supplies to their stores during the critical Thanksgiving shopping week.
. . .
The clerks expanded picket lines Monday to supermarkets in Sacramento, Fresno and the San Francisco Bay Area, said Greg Denier, national spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union.

The union also said it would begin picketing Safeway stores in the District of Columbia and Maryland this weekend.

The Teamsters’ decision to halt deliveries was called a “silver bullet” by Jim Santangelo, president of Teamsters Joint Council 42 in El Monte.

“If this doesn’t end it nothing will,” Santangelo said of the labor dispute.

I wonder if this is how France and England felt when the U.S. finally decided to jump into WW2?

Despite what you see at the multiplex, The Cat in the Hat isn’t really about a grown man in a Pep? Le Pew costume looking at boobs and selling potato chips. The book is actually a lot more crafty than that :

“I’m subversive as hell,” Geisel declared in an interview decades earlier, shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize. “The Cat in the Hat is a revolt against authority, but it’s ameliorated by the fact that the cat cleans up everything in the end. It’s revolutionary in that it goes as far as Kerensky and then stops. It doesn’t quite go as far as Lenin.”

The origins of The Cat in the Hat, too, are political — in the broadest sense of empowering the powerless. Geisel was of the opinion that “too many writers have only contempt and condescension for children, which is why we give them degrading corn about bunnies.” Clearly, they deserved better.
. . .
Other interpretations are more political in focus. Art Spiegelman, in his essay accompanying Richard Minear’s Dr. Seuss Goes to War: The World War II Editorial Cartoons of Theodor Seuss Geisel, posits the cat as a permutation of Uncle Sam in his stovepipe hat. (In many of Geisel’s earlier political cartoons, the U.S. is figured as a busted-down eagle in a high hat.)

It’s worth noticing that The Cat in the Hat was written not long after the Americans ended their peacetime occupation of Germany and Japan. Can it be read, one wonders, as a parable of American interventionism, with Geisel implying, albeit subliminally, that the United States always cleans up its mess? (Okay, so he had a few all-American blind spots.) Still, it’s not so far-fetched when you consider that he declared Horton Hears a Who to be inspired by the plight of the Japanese following the war.

Okay, so Spiegelman’s analysis may be a bit farfetched, but it’s not like this would be the first time Seuss slipped pointed political themes into his books

But Geisel’s other works tackle a host of political issues with increasing explicitness. The Butter Battle Book, with its escalating, fear-driven contest between the Yooks and the Zooks, is a cautionary tale about nuclear proliferation. Horton Hears a Who brings us a kindhearted elephant who saves the kingdom of microscopic Whos from extinction. (Are the Whos the Jews?)

Yertle the Turtle is, by the author’s admission, a take on Hitler’s rise to power. (In early drafts, Yertle sports the Fuhrer’s short-cropped mustache.) And in The Sneetches, a capitalist named Sylvester McMonkey McBean profits from the trade in imprinting and erasing stars on the bellies of the trend-conscious bird-like beasts, manipulating their desire like the expert Madison Avenue ad man Geisel himself once was. (These stars are also, for many readers, an echo of the Star of David borne by Jews in Hitler’s Germany.)

Geisel’s own favourite of his books, however, was The Lorax, in which the rapacious Once-ler discovers the profits to be made from chopping down all the truffula trees, building factories and convincing the masses of the need for thneeds (an ambiguous knitted garment), which he produces in his pollution-spewing textile factory. The Swomee Swans fly away looking for fresh air, and the Humming-Fish die. At the end, just one seed is left from which regeneration might begin anew, held aloft by the Lorax, a short and fuzzy prophet of environmental doom, and a repository of wisdom for the future.

Readings of the book have taken place in anti-logging rallies from the Pacific Northwest to Australia, and several U.S. school boards have been petitioned, unsuccessfully, to censor the book, with Seuss detractors alleging that it misrepresents the forest-products industry.

Together these works are delicately coded moral parables on the perils of capitalism, xenophobia and intolerance.

Geisel’s biographer, Neil Morgan (who wrote the definitive Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel with his wife, Judith), insists on the central importance of political ideas in Geisel’s work, but says that the artist thought of it rather just as ethics, as a case of teaching kids, and maybe their parents, what’s right and wrong.

As far as the movie goes, I can’t really comment on it since it looks like a stinky (but colorful) pile of shit. If it’s anything like The Grinch, then it has no business being called “Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat”.

A post at Pandagon reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write a post about David Horowitz’s crusade to end the “liberal bias” on college campuses :

Conservative author and speaker David Horowitz says that American colleges and universities need an “Academic Bill of Rights” in order to counter what he says is the radical liberal agenda that exists on campuses today.

Horowitz, who exposed the left-wing bias of higher education in a book he wrote in 1994 entitled “The Heterodoxy Handbook: How to Survive the PC Campus,” says the time has come for the “Academic Bill of Rights” to become a reality because conservatives are being denied equal time and access to the university classroom.

“The most successful and pervasive blacklist in American history is the blacklist of conservatives on American college campuses, their marginalization in undergraduate life, and their virtual exclusion from liberal arts faculties, particularly those that deal with the study of society itself,” Horowitz proclaimed in an e-mail.
. . .
Horowitz has proposed an “Academic Bill of Rights” for colleges and universities in the United States. It would call for intellectual diversity, balanced reading lists, a ban on political bias by professors, equalized funding for student groups and on-campus guest speakers, and a non-hostile environment for conservative students.

Horowitz says higher learning has been hijacked by liberals for far too long and it is time for conservatives to demand students get a complete education.

“It should not be a fight for young students to get a complete education, to learn more than half the story,” Horowitz argued. “It shouldn’t be a battle for conservatives or Christians to gain teaching positions, to have their work seriously considered, and to be tenured.”

Has it ever occurred to people like Horowitz that the reason the vast majority of intellectuals disagree with him is that he’s..um…wrong?

You hear similar complaints from conservatives when they talk about the evils of the “liberal media”. Despite the fact that the editorial boards of most media outlets are Republican-leaning, the fact that journalists tend to be liberal is enough to convince people that there’s a “vast left-wing conspiracy”. Once again, you’d think that the opinions of people whose job it is to understand and report both sides of an issue would indicate that the left is right and the right is wrong.

And in science, you’ll hear about the liberal bias of scientists, who base their opinions on the scientific method. Nevermind the fact that repeated testing in various scientific fields support the liberal positions on the environment, evolution, sex education, etc., any “science” that disproves a conservative position is obviously part of a socialist plot. As Occam’s Razor states, “Of two competing theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred”. And in this case, the simplest answer is that conservatives are just wrong.

But in a sense, conservatives are correct. There is a liberal bias. It’s not a conspiracy or anything, but it’s still pretty one-sided. Y’see, liberals are have a bias toward facts and the truth, to the detriment of fiction and lies. While known for having a pretty “big tent”, those who want equal time for superstition and falsehoods are persona non grata. While an “Academic Bill of Rights” is one way to deal with the problem, I’ve got a better one for Horowitz : Stop Being Conservative.

Here’s an amazing example of “suvival of the fittest” (via Atrios) :

A bullet fired in the air during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony came down and struck a participant in the head, critically injuring him, authorities said.
Gregory Allen Freeman, 45, was charged with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment in the Saturday night incident that wounded Jeffery S. Murr, 24.

About 10 people, including two children, had gathered for the ceremony. The man who was being initiated was blindfolded, tied with a noose to a tree and shot with paintball guns as Freeman fired a pistol in the air to provide the sound of real gunfire, Sheriff Fred Phillips said.

A bullet struck Murr on the top of the head and exited at the bottom of his skull, authorities said.

What a retard. I’d feel sorry for these guys if I wasn’t too busy laughing at them. If I was a religious person, I’d probably interpret this is as sign from God. Maybe Jesus shot that guy in the head for being a racist asshole….

This is grotesque and depressing:

Iraqi teenagers dragged two bloodied U.S. soldiers from a wrecked vehicle and pummeled them with concrete blocks Sunday, witnesses said, describing the killings as a burst of savagery in a city once safe for Americans.
. . .
Witnesses to the Mosul attack said gunmen shot two soldiers driving through the city center, sending their vehicle crashing into a wall. The 101st Airborne Division said the soldiers were driving to another garrison.

About a dozen swarming teenagers dragged the soldiers out of the wreckage and beat them with concrete blocks, the witnesses said.

“They lifted a block and hit them with it on the face,” said Younis Mahmoud, 19.

It was unknown whether the soldiers were alive or dead when pulled from the wreckage.

Initial reports said the soldiers’ throats were cut. But another witness, teenager Bahaa Jassim, said the wounds appeared to have come from bullets.

“One of the soldiers was shot under the chin and the bullet came out of his head. I saw the hole in his helmet. The other was shot in the throat,” Jassim said.

I hate to play politics with the deaths of these soldiers, but the fact is our troops are now paying the price for the Bush Administration’s optimism :

For obvious domestic political reasons, the Bush Administration going into the war had downplayed the scale and duration of a post-war occupation mission. When then-Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki told legislators that such a mission would require several hundred thousand U.S. troops, his assessment had been immediately dismissed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as “wildly off the mark.” Wolfowitz explained that “I am reasonably certain that (the Iraqi people) will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down.” Six weeks ago, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was still suggesting the U.S. force in Iraq could be reduced to 30,000 by the end of the year. But the prevailing assessment in Washington appears to be shifting to the idea of a figure closer to Shinseki’s.

So here we are now, eight months since the war began, and we’re stuck in a quagmire that’s getting bloodier and bloodier every day. As the old saying goes “Hope for the best, plan for the worst”. Well, as our soldiers are discovering, conducting a war isn’t one of those things you can only do halfway.

So I’m flipping through the book All Things Oz (which once of those great Chip Kidd-meets-Taschen, collage-style art collections) when I find a section called (I swear to god) “The Legal System in Oz”. These two quotes struck me as particularly funny in light of the current political climate :

No thief, however skillful, can rob one of knowledge, and that is why knowledge is the best and safest treasure to acquire.
- The Lost Princess of Oz, 1917

A good many laws seem foolish to those who understand them, but no law is ever made without some purpose, and that purpose is usually to protect all the people and guard their welfare.
- The Patchwork Girl of Oz, 1913

Meanwhile back here on Earth, our great leader, while on a state visit to our biggest ally to discuss one of the biggest threats to our freedom since WW2, interrupted his plans long enough to promise that he’d do his best to make sure gay people aren’t allowed to have equal rights. Where’s a twister when you need one?

There’s quite a few great things I didn’t get a chance to post about recently that shouldn’t be missed. For starters, here’s a testimonial about what the supermarket strike is really about from a guest writer at Calpundit :

With regard to health care, I?ve heard people say over and over again that ?everybody contributes something to their health plan ? so should grocery workers.? Well, did you know that over the years grocery workers have given up pay raises in exchange for the assurance of having good health insurance? The employer’s contribution toward healthcare has been a part of their compensation. The union could have negotiated it the other way. They could have agreed to higher wages and higher employee premiums…but the workers wanted a lower paycheck in exchange for fully paid health care.

OK, so that was then and health costs have been escalating. If this was about “contributing a little to their healthcare” there would be no strike. The employer proposal that led to this strike put so little money on the table that, in addition to the premium pickup of $5 to $15 a week, workers? health benefits under their insurance plan would have to be cut 50% (which means that health care costs would be shifted onto the workers outside their insurance plan, meaning out of their own pocket). If the workers want to get the same insurance plan, it would cost them $95 a week or nearly $5,000 a year. THAT IS 25% OF THE AVERAGE WORKER’S SALARY. Is that what “everybody ” pays out of pocket on a percentage basis? Hardly….

The fact is that most of these workers ? at an average annual gross income of $20,000 ? live paycheck to paycheck and earn their healthcare. If the cost to the worker is too high, experience has shown that workers “opt out” of insurance and roll the dice by becoming uninsured.

The bottom line regarding health care is that when a worker lives paycheck to paycheck she can only get her healthcare one of two ways: earn it or get it from the taxpayer. The answer as a taxpayer is clear to me: I would rather people earn their healthcare than get it from me as a taxpayer. What about you?

The companies have proposed to pay all new hires ? and the stores have about 1/3 turnover each year, which means that there are a lot of new hires ? $3 to $4 an hour less than the current employees. What does this mean? This means that new hires will be making Wal-Mart wages, which means that anybody with kids will be eligible for food stamps and taxpayer subsidized health care…

Ans speaking of health care, Matthew Yglesias over at Tapped showed that universal health care would be cheaper than our current system :

Take a look at the OECD’s numbers for public health care expenditures as a percent of GDP and you’ll see that the American government is spending a larger portion of its economy — 6.2 percent in 2001 — on health care than are many countries offering universal coverage. The Spanish government spent just 5.2 percent of GDP on health in 2001, while the Netherlands spent 5.7, Ireland spent 4.9, Greece spent 5.2 and Austria spent 5.3 percent. New Zealand and Britain were at the same level as the United States. Those countries cover a higher percentage of their populations, and the public sector takes on a much larger share of health spending (Greece takes on 56 percent; the others all come in higher) than it does in the United States, where the government picks up just 44.4 percent of the tab.

Unfortunately, the OECD doesn’t have data on the per capita public spending in dollar terms, but by combining this data with this data, I generated a table of 2001 per capita public health spending in purchasing-power-parity-adjusted U.S. dollars (I can email the Excel file to interested parties). The results are a bit surprising — the American government spends more per capita ($2169.828) than any other country with available data except for Iceland ($2191.047) and Norway ($2496.6). More than Sweden ($1934.04), more than Canada ($1976.736), more than France ($1946.36) and way more than Britain ($1637.424) or Spain ($1142.4).

Maybe the right dreams of a country in which the government does nothing to provide health care for the very poor, the elderly, veterans, the disabled and people who show up at emergency rooms without insurance — but if you need to choose between the status quo and Sweden, socialism wins hands down purely on the basis of delivering smaller government.

On a completely unrelated note, Ampersand posted these excerpts from the Massacusetts Supreme Court’s recent gay marriage ruling :

Our laws of civil marriage do not privilege procreative heterosexual intercourse between married people above every other form of adult intimacy and every other means of creating a family. General Laws c. 207 contains no requirement that the applicants for a marriage license attest to their ability or intention to conceive children by coitus. Fertility is not a condition of marriage, nor is it grounds for divorce. People who have never consummated their marriage, and never plan to, may be and stay married. See Franklin v. Franklin, 154 Mass. 515, 516 (1891) (“The consummation of a marriage by coition is not necessary to its validity”). People who cannot stir from their deathbed may marry. See G. L. c. 207, ? 28A. While it is certainly true that many, perhaps most, married couples have children together (assisted or unassisted), it is the exclusive and permanent commitment of the marriage partners to one another, not the begetting of children, that is the sine qua non of civil marriage.
Moreover, the Commonwealth affirmatively facilitates bringing children into a family regardless of whether the intended parent is married or unmarried, whether the child is adopted or born into a family, whether assistive technology was used to conceive the child, and whether the parent or her partner is heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. If procreation were a necessary component of civil marriage, our statutes would draw a tighter circle around the permissible bounds of nonmarital child bearing and the creation of families by noncoital means. The attempt to isolate procreation as “the source of a fundamental right to marry,” post at (Cordy, J., dissenting), overlooks the integrated way in which courts have examined the complex and overlapping realms of personal autonomy, marriage, family life, and child rearing. Our jurisprudence recognizes that, in these nuanced and fundamentally private areas of life, such a narrow focus is inappropriate.

The “marriage is procreation” argument singles out the one unbridgeable difference between same-sex and opposite-sex couples, and transforms that difference into the essence of legal marriage. Like “Amendment 2″ to the Constitution of Colorado, which effectively denied homosexual persons equality under the law and full access to the political process, the marriage restriction impermissibly “identifies persons by a single trait and then denies them protection across the board.” Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 633 (1996). In so doing, the State’s action confers an official stamp of approval on the destructive stereotype that same-sex relationships are inherently unstable and inferior to opposite-sex relationships and are not worthy of respect.

The department’s first stated rationale, equating marriage with unassisted heterosexual procreation, shades imperceptibly into its second: that confining marriage to opposite-sex couples ensures that children are raised in the “optimal” setting. Protecting the welfare of children is a paramount State policy. Restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples, however, cannot plausibly further this policy. “The demographic changes of the past century make it difficult to speak of an average American family. The composition of families varies greatly from household to household.” Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57, 63 (2000). Massachusetts has responded supportively to “the changing realities of the American family,” id. at 64, and has moved vigorously to strengthen the modern family in its many variations. See, e.g., G. L. c. 209C (paternity statute); G. L. c. 119, ? 39D (grandparent visitation statute); Blixt v. Blixt, 437 Mass. 649 (2002), cert. denied, 537 U.S. 1189 (2003) (same); E.N.O. v. L.M.M., 429 Mass. 824, cert. denied, 528 U.S. 1005 (1999) (de facto parent); Youmans v. Ramos, 429 Mass. 774, 782 (1999) (same); and Adoption of Tammy, 416 Mass. 205 (1993) (coparent adoption). Moreover, we have repudiated the common-law power of the State to provide varying levels of protection to children based on the circumstances of birth. See G. L. c. 209C (paternity statute); Powers v. Wilkinson, 399 Mass. 650, 661 (1987) (“Ours is an era in which logic and compassion have impelled the law toward unburdening children from the stigma and the disadvantages heretofore attendant upon the status of illegitimacy”). The “best interests of the child” standard does not turn on a parent’s sexual orientation or marital status. See e.g., Doe v. Doe, 16 Mass. App. Ct. 499, 503 (1983) (parent’s sexual orientation insufficient ground to deny custody of child in divorce action). See also E.N.O. v. L.M.M., supra at 829-830 (best interests of child determined by considering child’s relationship with biological and de facto same-sex parents); Silvia v. Silvia, 9 Mass. App. Ct. 339, 341 & n.3 (1980) (collecting support and custody statutes containing no gender distinction).

The department has offered no evidence that forbidding marriage to people of the same sex will increase the number of couples choosing to enter into opposite-sex marriages in order to have and raise children. There is thus no rational relationship between the marriage statute and the Commonwealth’s proffered goal of protecting the “optimal” child rearing unit. Moreover, the department readily concedes that people in same-sex couples may be “excellent” parents. These couples (including four of the plaintiff couples) have children for the reasons others do — to love them, to care for them, to nurture them. But the task of child rearing for same-sex couples is made infinitely harder by their status as outliers to the marriage laws. While establishing the parentage of children as soon as possible is crucial to the safety and welfare of children, see Culliton v. Beth Israel Deaconness Med. Ctr., 435 Mass. 285, 292 (2001), same-sex couples must undergo the sometimes lengthy and intrusive process of second-parent adoption to establish their joint parentage. While the enhanced income provided by marital benefits is an important source of security and stability for married couples and their children, those benefits are denied to families headed by same-sex couples. See, e.g., note 6, supra. While the laws of divorce provide clear and reasonably predictable guidelines for child support, child custody, and property division on dissolution of a marriage, same-sex couples who dissolve their relationships find themselves and their children in the highly unpredictable terrain of equity jurisdiction. See E.N.O. v. L.M.M., supra.

Given the wide range of public benefits reserved only for married couples, we do not credit the department’s contention that the absence of access to civil marriage amounts to little more than an inconvenience to same-sex couples and their children. Excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage will not make children of opposite-sex marriages more secure, but it does prevent children of same-sex couples from enjoying the immeasurable advantages that flow from the assurance of “a stable family structure in which children will be reared, educated, and socialized.” Post at (Cordy, J., dissenting).

No one disputes that the plaintiff couples are families, that many are parents, and that the children they are raising, like all children, need and should have the fullest opportunity to grow up in a secure, protected family unit. Similarly, no one disputes that, under the rubric of marriage, the State provides a cornucopia of substantial benefits to married parents and their children. The preferential treatment of civil marriage reflects the Legislature’s conclusion that marriage “is the foremost setting for the education and socialization of children” precisely because it “encourages parents to remain committed to each other and to their children as they grow.” Post at (Cordy, J., dissenting).

In this case, we are confronted with an entire, sizeable class of parents raising children who have absolutely no access to civil marriage and its protections because they are forbidden from procuring a marriage license. It cannot be rational under our laws, and indeed it is not permitted, to penalize children by depriving them of State benefits because the State disapproves of their parents’ sexual orientation.

…and to finish back at the supermarket strike, Calpundit pointed out this L.A. Times article about a secret pact between the grocery stores to help them take on the strikers :

A union-backed consumer lawsuit filed Thursday against the three supermarket chains in the 6-week-old strike and lockout alleges that the chains’ unusual mutual-aid pact violates California antitrust law.

The suit casts a spotlight on a key element of the labor dispute that has seldom been mentioned since the strike began Oct. 11 and that executives at the grocery stores ? Kroger Co.’s Ralphs, Albertsons Inc. and Safeway Inc.’s Vons and Pavilions ? refuse to discuss publicly in any detail.

The pact basically says that if one of the three chains reaps added business during the dispute, it will share some of that money, according to some Wall Street analysts who follow the companies closely.

Ralphs is seeing a windfall because the United Food and Commercial Workers removed its pickets there Oct. 31 to focus union efforts on the other two. And under the mutual-aid deal the chains quietly made before the strike, “Kroger is obligated to share any earnings gains with the other two retailers,” analyst Mark Husson of Merrill Lynch & Co. said in a report last week.
. . .
Under the chains’ pact, it isn’t clear exactly what would be shared ? part of Ralphs’ sales or part of its profit ? or how much. Also not known is whether payments would be made before the strike ends.

“I will acknowledge that there is an agreement, but we’re not going to say anything about it,” said Gary Rhodes, a spokesman for Cincinnati-based Kroger. “I’m not going to characterize it, nor provide any details about it.”

The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, claims the “arrangement by which each agrees to share revenues with the others” restrains competition, keeps prices at artificially high levels and thus violates the state’s antitrust Cartwright Act.

The suit seeks to have the arrangement nullified and asks for unspecified damages. It was filed on behalf of three Los Angeles County residents. Their attorney, Joe Whatley, was traveling and unavailable for comment.

It looks like Gen. Tommy Franks has some pretty dire preditions for the future of our democracy (link via Pandagon) :

Discussing the hypothetical dangers posed to the U.S. in the wake of Sept. 11, Franks said that ?the worst thing that could happen? is if terrorists acquire and then use a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon that inflicts heavy casualties.

If that happens, Franks said, ?… 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 in this grand experiment that we call democracy.?

Franks then offered ?in a practical sense? what he thinks would happen in the aftermath of such an attack.

?It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world ? it may be in the United States of America ? that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.?

Franks didn?t speculate about how soon such an event might take place.

Already, critics of the U.S. Patriot Act, rushed through Congress in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, have argued that the law aims to curtail civil liberties and sets a dangerous precedent.

But Franks? scenario goes much further. He is the first high-ranking official to openly speculate that the Constitution could be scrapped in favor of a military form of government.

Okay….before you let the thought of the U.S. turning into a military dictatorship [insert sarcastic comment here] keep you up an night, this quote later in the article will make you take his judgment with a grain of salt :

?As I look at President Bush, I think he will ultimately be judged as a man of extremely high character. A very thoughtful man, not having been appraised properly by those who would say he?s not very smart. I find the contrary. I think he?s very, very bright. And I suspect that he?ll be judged as a man who led this country through a crease in history effectively. Probably we?ll think of him in years to come as an American hero.?

Y’know, I remember seeing Tommy Franks during the war giving a ton of press conferences, and I never thought he’d turn out to be this big an ass kisser.

Seriously Tommy, you really ought to try pulling your nose out of the boss’s ass every once in a while….

It’s somewhat appropriate that my birthday coincides with “The Great American Smoke-Out” since I have always hated smoking. There are a variety of reasons to quit listed on the Smoke-Out’s “Why Quit?” page…

Ex-smokers also enjoy a higher quality of life with fewer illnesses from cold and flu viruses, better self-reported health status, and reduced rates of bronchitis and pneumonia.
. . .
The prospect of better health is a major reason for quitting, but there are others as well. Smoking is expensive. The economic costs of smoking are estimated to be about $3,391 per smoker per year. Do you really want to continue burning up your money with nothing to show for it except possible health problems?
. . .
Smoking not only harms your health but the health of those around you. Exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (also called ETS, passive smoking or second hand smoke) includes exhaled smoke as well as smoke from burning cigarettes. Studies have shown that environmental tobacco smoke can cause lung cancer in healthy nonsmokers. It is also associated with sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and low-birth weight infants. Smoking by mothers is linked to a higher risk of their babies developing asthma in childhood, especially if the mother smokes while pregnant. Babies and children raised in a household where there is smoking have more ear infections, colds, bronchitis, and other respiratory problems than children from nonsmoking families. Environmental smoke can also cause eye irritation, headaches, nausea, and dizziness.

…but oddly enough, they fail to list the biggest reason I can think of why people shouldn’t smoke : Tobacco companies are evil.

And I don’t use the word “evil” lightly, either. Not in that sense that many people on the left throw the word around when descibing any megacorporation that screws people over to increase their profits. I mean evil in the sense that tobacco companies are murderers who are every bit as deserving of capital punishment as anyone on death row.

Although this isn’t really new information, this excerpt from a Justice Department report on tobacco companies shows that tobacco companies have a lot more in common with the mob than most legitimate businesses :

At the end of 1953, the chief executives of the five major cigarette manufacturers in the United States at the time ? Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Brown & Williamson, Lorillard, and American ? met at the Plaza Hotel in New York City with representatives of the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton and agreed to jointly conduct a long term public relations campaign to counter the growing evidence linking smoking as a cause of serious diseases. The meeting spawned an association-in-fact enterprise to execute a fraudulent scheme in furtherance of their overriding common objective ? to preserve and enhance the tobacco industry?s profits by maximizing the numbers of smokers and number of cigarettes smoked and to avoid adverse liability judgments. The fraudulent scheme would continue for the next five decades.

As a result of the Plaza Hotel meetings, the companies launched their long term public relations campaign by issuing the ?Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers,? a full page announcement published in 448 newspapers across the United States. The Frank Statement included two representations that would lie at the heart of Defendants’ fraudulent scheme ? first, that there was insufficient scientific and medical evidence that smoking was a cause of disease; and second, that the industry would jointly sponsor and disclose the results of ?independent? research designed to uncover the health effects of smoking through the new industry-funded Tobacco Industry Research Committee (?TIRC?), later renamed the Council for Tobacco Research (?CTR?). At the same time that Defendants announced in their 1954 “Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers” that “we accept an interest in people?s health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business,” it established a sophisticated public relations apparatus in the form of TIRC ? based on the “cover” of conducting research ? to deny the harms of smoking and to reassure the public. Once the essential strategy of generating controversy surrounding the scientific findings linking smoking to disease was organized and implemented in 1953-54, the industry’s approach was unwavering for five decades.
. . .
The public statements issued through organizations like TIRC/CTR, the Tobacco Institute, CIAR, and by Cigarette Company Defendants themselves, were flatly inconsistent with Defendants’ actual knowledge about the link between smoking and disease. At the same time that Defendants assured the public through their ?Frank Statement? that ?there is no proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes [of cancer],? internally they documented a large number of known carcinogens in their products and replicated mainstream scientific research showing the health effects of smoking. Defendants? internal documents acknowledge that their public denial that smoking cigarettes causes disease both was contrary to the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus ? established through extensive epidemiological and other scientific investigation by the early 1950s ? and was intended to convince smokers and potential smokers that there remained genuine scientific ?controversy? about whether smoking caused disease.
. . .
Just as Defendants long denied, contrary to fact, that smoking does not cause disease, Defendants also made numerous false and misleading statements denying that smoking is addictive over the past several decades. Indeed, no later than 1988, there was an overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking was a drug-driven behavior of dependence, and that nicotine was the drug delivered in cigarette smoke responsible for creating and sustaining addiction. Relying on long discarded and discredited definitions of addiction, Defendants publicly attacked the scientific and medical evidence of addiction when, in fact, overwhelming documentary evidence demonstrates that Defendants openly recognized, from at least the early 1960s, that nicotine was responsible for the pharmacological effects that keep people smoking. Indeed, researchers for Cigarette Company Defendants saw themselves as being in the ?nicotine business? and conceived a pack of cigarettes as a ?day?s supply of nicotine.? As with Defendants? statements designed to undermine the scientific evidence of smoking?s harms, the statements denying addiction were knowingly false and misleading when made, and intended to avoid product regulation, to bolster the industry?s defenses in smoking and health litigation, and to avoid increasing consumers’ concerns about smoking.

Defendants? awareness of the critical importance of nicotine to the cigarette smoker, and thus to the continued profits of the industry, were such that the Defendants dedicated extraordinary resources studying nicotine and its effects on the smoker. The evidence shows that Defendants have long had the ability to modify and manipulate the amount of nicotine that their products could deliver (including removing all nicotine), and have studied extensively how every characteristic of every component of cigarettes ? including the tobacco blend, the paper, the filter, and the manufacturing process ? impacts nicotine delivery. Indeed, Cigarette Company Defendants’ internal documents indicate that, in light of Cigarette Company Defendants? recognition that ?no one has ever become a cigarette smoker by smoking cigarettes without nicotine,? Cigarette Company Defendants have designed their cigarettes with a central overriding objective ? to ensure that the smoker could obtain enough nicotine to create and sustain addiction. Accordingly, Defendants? numerous public statements that they do not and have not manipulated the delivery of nicotine to the smoker are false.
. . .
Defendants’ fraudulent scheme also has influenced how the Cigarette Company Defendants have designed their cigarettes. From the early 1960s, Defendants’ cigarette design and research efforts were predicated on the understanding that the introduction of a cigarette that was actually less hazardous to its users would constitute an admission that all other cigarettes brands were more harmful. Accordingly, Defendants delayed and avoided development of potentially safer products, chose not to incorporate design features that they believed were likely to reduce the delivery of harmful constituents in cigarette smoke, and failed to meaningfully test their cigarettes, including “low tar/low nicotine” brands, that they developed or actually sold in order to assess whether different design modifications actually reduced the harms caused by smoking. As a result, Defendants have collectively, in the past five decades, introduced and sold a paltry number of innovative products for which the companies failed, prior to their introduction, to pursue the evidence necessary to ascertain whether they present any actual likely harm reduction to humans.

Efforts to stifle innovation and enforce the understanding that less hazardous products should not be developed were aggressive. In one instance, after Defendant Liggett spent twelve years and $15 million developing a cigarette ? the XA ? that its research showed to be significantly less carcinogenic than its conventional cigarettes, it killed the entire project before marketing the cigarette to consumers after Defendant Brown & Williamson threatened Liggett’s “very existence” if it marketed the cigarette. Brown & Williamson also threatened to freeze Liggett out of joint defense agreements and exclude Liggett from the Tobacco Institute. Delivered through Brown & Williamson’s representative on the Tobacco Institute’s Committee of Counsel, the threat was based on Brown & Williamson’s fear that selling XA would be an admission against the interest of all Cigarette Company Defendants.

But I think the ultimate responisbility goes to our dickless government officials that pander to tobacco growers and accept millions of dollars in bribes from the cigarette companies. The very fact that tobacco is “regulated” by a “Department of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms” is proof enough that they have no real interest in dealing with this problem. At the very least, tobacco should be regulated by the FDA. Of course, they might have a problem with that whole deliberately addictive product that causes cancer thing.