David Ortiz Is MVP

According to the players, that is. Not F-Rod. Ortiz, the true MVP.

Big Papi was voted American League Outstanding Player in the 2005 Players Choice Awards, as voted by his fellow players.

Let's hope the baseball writers do the right thing. Dan Shaughnessy, the cowardly writer/steno who helped run Theo out of town, gets to vote. That makes me sick.

Congratulations to the Chicago White Sox, the latest curse-breaking team!

Turn the Other Cheek

Now this could make me go to Tex-ass. From ActforLove

Moon the Klan
Wow, now this is a protest we can get "behind" for sure...

http://www.moontheklan.blogspot.com/

US health care: "[T]he highest error rates, most disorganized care and highest costs"

From the WaPo:

For Americans, Getting Sick Has Its Price
Survey Says U.S. Patients Pay More, Get Less Than Those in Other Western Nations

Americans pay more when they get sick than people in other Western nations and get more confused, error-prone treatment, according to the largest survey to compare U.S. health care with other nations.

The survey of nearly 7,000 sick adults in the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and Germany found Americans were the most likely to pay at least $1,000 in out-of-pocket expenses. More than half went without needed care because of cost and more than one-third endured mistakes and disorganized care when they did get treated.

Although patients in every nation sometimes run into obstacles to getting care and deficiencies when they do get treated, the United States stood out for having the highest error rates, most disorganized care and highest costs, the survey found.

Do not allow the statement "We have the greatest health care system in the world" go unchallenged. It's bullshit. Because of our crazy patchwork system, we pay more for much worse care. And that's people who can afford to pay. There are still some 45.8 million Americans who have no health insurance.

The Incompetence, The Corruption, The Cronyism: November 4, 2005 edition

The Incompetence:

Heckuva Job Brownie, aka Mike Brown, late Director of FEMA, who is still on the federal payroll, is back in the news. Even this kind of breathtaking stupidity can't get the breathtakingly stupid President to just fire your ass.

In Katrina's aftermath, FEMA chief mused about his future

On Aug. 31, two days after the storm flooded the city, a FEMA regional director sent Brown an urgent e-mail about patients dying "within hours," a lack of food and water, hundreds of rescues and a situation "past critical."

Brown's response? "Thanks for update. Anything specific I need to do or tweak?"

[]

E-mails released last month by Collins' committee showed that Brown and his press secretary, Sharon Worthy, were concerned about time for dinner at a Baton Rouge, La., restaurant and an upcoming TV interview while a FEMA regional director, Marty Bahamonde, warned of the desperate situation at the New Orleans Superdome.

Wednesday's release added further insight into their concerns, with one showing Worthy advising Brown to roll up his sleeves to "just below the elbow" the way President Bush did: "In this crisis and on TV you just need to look more hard-working ... ROLL UP THE SLEEVES."

The Corruption:

A 62-year-old Republican state legislator from Hawaii was convicted of sexually molesting a 27 year old woman on an airline flight. Ewwwww. The incident happened on a flight to California, so that's where the trial took place. He didn't even reveal he had been charged until he was convicted.

Testimony against legislator includes details of molestation

The 27-year-old woman who accused state Rep. Galen Fox of sexually molesting her on a United Airlines flight testified that she awoke to find his hand inside her jeans and rubbing her crotch.

[]

In her statement, the woman, identified only as Jane Doe in court documents, told the FBI that she had taken a sleeping pill because she wanted to rest and fell asleep holding a folded airline blanket on her lap, her arms crossed over her blanket.

She said she awoke to a warm sensation pressing against her crotch. Lifting her blanket, she saw Fox's right hand rubbing her crotch, according to a statement of probable cause filed by Special Agent Rodney G. Fung of the FBI's Los Angeles International Airport Office.

According to the affidavit, the woman jumped up and said, "What the ---- are you doing?" to which Fox allegedly replied, "I touched you, I'm sorry I touched you." The woman alerted her parents who sat across the aisle from her and then notified flight attendants, who moved them to other seats.

[]

The woman testified that Fox apparently unfastened the button and zipper of her jeans, and she awoke to find his hand inside her jeans and groping her, Goswami said.

The Cronyism:

So, former baseball owners and Republican fundraisers are experts on intelligence? President La La La, I Can't Hear You thinks so:

In the Company of Friends
Bush may be besieged by charges of cronyism, but they don’t seem to have affected his picks for a panel assessing intelligence matters.

President Bush last week appointed nine campaign contributors, including three longtime fund-raisers, to his Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, a 16-member panel of individuals from the private sector who advise the president on the quality and effectiveness of U.S. intelligence efforts. After watching the fate of Michael Brown as head of FEMA and Harriet Miers as Supreme Court nominee, you might think the president would be wary about the appearance of cronyism—especially with a critical national-security issue such as intelligence. Instead, Bush reappointed William DeWitt, an Ohio businessman who has raised more than $300,000 for the president’s campaigns, for a third two-year term on the panel. Originally appointed in 2001, just a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, DeWitt, who was also a top fund-raiser for Bush’s 2004 Inaugural committee, was a partner with Bush in the Texas Rangers baseball team.

Other appointees included former Commerce secretary Don Evans, a longtime Bush friend; Texas oilman Ray Hunt; Netscape founder Jim Barksdale, and former congressman and 9/11 Commission vice chairman Lee Hamilton. Like DeWitt, Evans and Hunt have also been longtime Bush fund-raisers, raising more than $100,000 apiece for the president’s campaigns. Barksdale and five other appointees—incoming chairman Stephen Friedman, former Reagan adviser Arthur Culvahouse, retired admiral David Jeremiah, Martin Faga and John L. Morrison—were contributors to the president’s 2004 re-election effort. Friedman also served a year on the intelligence board under President Bill Clinton, who appointed chairmen with very different profiles from Bush's Pioneers: former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. William Crowe, former Defense secretary Les Aspin, former House speaker Tom Foley and former GOP senator Warren Rudman. (Clinton did also appoint two donors who gave $100,000 apiece to the Democratic National Committee: New York investment banker Stan Shuman and Texas real estate magnate Richard Bloch.)

In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
H. L. Mencken

Thought for the Day

Just remember though. Governor Ryan? Indictment number 66. Fitzgerald has already shown he has superhuman amounts of patience and persistence. So while an indictment would take a good bit more work, if anyone can do it [indict Cheney], Fitzgerald can.

-- Emptywheel, at The Last Hurrah


[George Ryan is the former (Republican, natch) governor of Illinois, indicted by Fitzgerald's office, currently on trial on fraud and racketeering charges.]

The Gulag Archipelago

From the front page of today's Washington Post:

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

Now that we've taken over and are operating the old Soviet Union secret prisons, what could be next for the Bush Administration? Maybe we could re-open Auschwitz to get rid of those pesky guys at Guantanimo. Because freedom is just one more word for nothing left to lose.

Bush makes Nixon look like a piker.

This is American? I am sickened.

"Of course he's against abortion."

Alito's Mom: 'Of Course, He's Against Abortion'

From the mouths of old people. So we know he passes that ultra-right wing litmus test.

The lefty blogs are calling him "Scalito", for Scalia. If he is confirmed there will be five Roman Catholics on the Supreme Court.

Let's see if the Democrats in the Senate really have a spine.

Not Just a Tired Seamstress

From Common Dreams:

The Real Rosa Parks
by Paul Rogat Loeb

We learn much from how we present our heroes. A few years ago, on Martin Luther King. Day, I was interviewed on CNN. So was Rosa Parks, by phone from Los Angeles. “We’re very honored to have her,” said the host. “Rosa Parks was the woman who wouldn’t go to the back of the bus. She wouldn’t get up and give her seat in the white section to a white person. That set in motion the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery. It earned Rosa Parks the title of ‘mother of the Civil Rights movement.’”

I was excited to hear Parks’s voice and to be part of the same show. Then it occurred to me that the host’s description--the story’s standard rendition and one repeated even in many of her obituaries--stripped the Montgomery boycott of all of its context. Before refusing to give up her bus seat, Parks had been active for twelve years in the local NAACP chapter, serving as its secretary. The summer before her arrest, she’d had attended a ten-day training session at Tennessee’s labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she’d met an older generation of civil rights activists, like South Carolina teacher Septima Clark, and discussed the recent Supreme Court decision banning “separate-but-equal” schools. During this period of involvement and education, Parks had become familiar with previous challenges to segregation: Another Montgomery bus boycott, fifty years earlier, successfully eased some restrictions; a bus boycott in Baton Rouge won limited gains two years before Parks was arrested; and the previous spring, a young Montgomery woman had also refused to move to the back of the bus, causing the NAACP to consider a legal challenge until it turned out that she was unmarried and pregnant, and therefore a poor symbol for a campaign.

In short, Rosa Parks didn’t make a spur-of-the-moment decision. She didn’t single-handedly give birth to the civil rights efforts, but she was part of an existing movement for change, at a time when success was far from certain. We all know Parks’s name, but few of us know about Montgomery NAACP head E.D. Nixon, who served as one of her mentors and first got Martin Luther King involved. Nixon carried people’s suitcases on the trains, and was active in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the union founded by legendary civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph. He played a key role in the campaign. No one talks of him, any more than they talk of JoAnn Robinson, who taught nearby at an underfunded and segregated Black college and whose Women’s Political Council distributed the initial leaflets following Parks’s arrest. Without the often lonely work of people like Nixon, Randolph, and Robinson, Parks would likely have never taken her stand, and if she had, it would never have had the same impact.

[]

Think again about the different ways one can frame Rosa Parks’s historic action. In the prevailing myth, Parks decides to act almost on a whim, in isolation. She’s a virgin to politics, a holy innocent. The lesson seems to be that if any of us suddenly got the urge to do something equally heroic, that would be great. Of course most of us don’t, so we wait our entire lives to find the ideal moment.

Parks’s real story conveys a far more empowering moral. She begins with seemingly modest steps. She goes to a meeting, and then another, helping build the community that in turn supported her path. Hesitant at first, she gains confidence as she speaks out. She keeps on despite a profoundly uncertain context, as she and others act as best they can to challenge deeply entrenched injustices, with little certainty of results. Had she and others given up after her tenth or eleventh year of commitment, we might never have heard of Montgomery....

I first learned the "true" story behind Rosa Parks seven years ago while preparing a case for trial. I was trying to come up with a good analogy in a sex discrimination case where my client tried for years to get a job for which she was qualified, for which only men were hired. She didn't have any monetary damages as the law recognizes them, because the job she held instead paid just as much as the one she longed to hold. When I suggested using Rosa Parks as our analogy -- how much could that bus ride have cost, 5 cents, but how much was it really worth, to be treated as a human being -- my friend S asked me if I knew the real story, that Parks was a local NAACP activist. I was shocked, having never heard anything but the sanitized version.

While I was in England most of the English papers printed the true, NAACP activist story. Was that the case here in the US?

Thought for the Day

Received this quote in an email:

"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."

--- Sydney J. Harris, American journalist (1917 - 1986)

Things I did not do that I regret: I didn't apply to Harvard, thinking it would be too hard for me. I would have loved it, I now realize. I turned down the honors program at my college; I didn't want to be different than the rest of the students, and I was intimidated by the reading list. I wonder who I would have met. I didn't invite my parents to my swearing-in as a lawyer. I didn't realize it would be such a big deal, in Faneuil Hall, with the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court presiding.

Live and learn.

Judy In Time(s) Out

The NYTimes gives us its long-awaited "explanation" of the Judas Miller saga:

The Miller Case: A Notebook, a Cause, a Jail Cell and a Deal

I put explanation in quotes because there ain't much there there. No mention of how the earlier, June meeting with Libby was discovered by Fitzgerald, no discussion of the "aspens connected by the roots" letter, and more importantly, Judas

[S]pent 85 days in jail for refusing to testify and reveal her confidential source, then relented. On Sept. 30, she told the grand jury that her source was I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff. But she said he did not reveal Ms. Plame's name.

And when the prosecutor in the case asked her to explain how "Valerie Flame" appeared in the same notebook she used in interviewing Mr. Libby, Ms. Miller said she "didn't think" she heard it from him. "I said I believed the information came from another source, whom I could not recall," she wrote on Friday, recounting her testimony for an article that appears today.

So if she couldn't recall which source told her "Valerie Flame"'s name, what source was she protecting?

I don't get it.


The Times also gives us Judas's own account (btw, Raw Story reporting that she is taking an "indefinite leave of absence, effective immediately"):

A Personal Account
My Four Hours Testifying in the Federal Grand Jury Room

This line from her fanciful, pretentiously written story gives me hope:

Before the grand jury, Mr. Fitzgerald asked me questions about Mr. Cheney.

If this were a game of Clue, I'd be guessing the Big Dick in the Oval Office with a w(h)ig and a chimp.

Finally: We Got The Number One in Al Qaeda

We've captured the most senior Al Qaeda

....barber.

Really! He gave the best haircuts! You should have seen his scissors fly! The blunt cuts! Oh, and his work with the clippers: chilling in its exactitude! And what a colorist! Worked miracles with extensions! Facial hair a specialty! He could make Osama bin Laden look like George W. Bush in about 25 minutes! He could make any run-of-the-mill insurgent look like the no. 2 man in Al Qaeda!

Coming attractions: Over the next few months, expect that we will arrest 33 or so of the "2nd in command" to this most senior barber.

You think I'm joking, don't you? Gotcha.

Al Qaeda "barber" arrested in Iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.S. forces in Iraq said on Saturday that they were holding a man suspected of acting as a barber to senior al Qaeda militants and helping them change their appearance to evade capture.

The man, named as Walid Muhammad Farhan Juwar al-Zubaydi -- "aka 'The Barber,"' the U.S. military statement said -- was arrested in Baghdad on September 24, the day before U.S. troops caught up with and killed a militant they described as the most senior al Qaeda leader in the capital, Abu Azzam.,

"'The Barber's' duties included altering senior al Qaeda in Iraq members' appearances by dying hair color, altering hairstyles and changing facial hair in their efforts to evade capture," the military said in the statement.

Also detained on September 24 was Ibrahim Muhammad Subhi Khayri al-Rihawi, the military said, naming him also as Abu Khalil and calling him a "close associate" of Abu Azzam.

"(He) served as an executive assistant for the terrorist emir. He also acted as a banker for Azzam and stored the terrorist organization's funds so they would not be confiscated should Abu Azzam be killed or captured," it added.

Abu Azzam was described by U.S. commanders after his death as second only to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the Islamist network's organization in Iraq.

U.S. forces are keen to show progress in tracking down insurgents.

What's next? The most senior chef? The most senior dialysis nurse? The most senior food taster?

Wanted, dead or alive.

It's Poison, Poison, I Tell You

From truthout.org, an article originally published in the French paper Le Monde:

We Are All Chemically Contaminated

When one out of two men, one out of three women, today is affected by cancer, it's no exaggeration to talk about an epidemic. Certainly, it's not as visible as the epidemic of the plague. The victims don't die on the street, but the tribute exacted is heavy, with 150,000 deaths a year in France. Risk factors other than chemical substances are implicated (diet, tobacco use ...), but with the evaluation of chemical substances, we know for certain that we can dry up a part of the source of these chronic illnesses. Moreover, it is unacceptable that this public health imperative not be imposed upon the chemical industry.

The volume of chemical substances at a global level has gone from 1 million tons during the 1930s to 400 million tons today! The chemical industry has thus put on the market - without evaluating them - substances that will sometimes be withdrawn once the damage to the population's health is assessed. That's the "proof by people" to demonstrate toxicity that was the rule at the end of many long years. Still, that's only the case for a minority of substances, since for 97% of the substances data is incomplete or nonexistent.

Years ago I read The Politics of Cancer (1978) [updated & released in 1998] by Dr. Samuel Epstein. He argues that all cancer is environmentally caused.

From a review of his book by Robert Weissman:

As Dr. Epstein points out, from 1950 to 1998, the overall incidence of cancer rose about 60 percent, with much higher increases for cancer of some organs. For non-Hodgkins lymphoma and multiple myeloma, the increase has been 200 percent. Breast cancers have increased by 60 percent. Prostate cancer has increased 200 percent. For testicular cancer in men of the ages 28 to 35, there has been a 300 percent increase since 1950.

And don't let anybody fool you into thinking that the cancer rate increase is because the population is getting older -- these rates are age-adjusted. The cancer rates of a group of 50 year old men in 1990, for example, are compared to the cancer rates of a group of men in 1950.

So, why is the cancer establishment losing the war against cancer? "The cancer establishment is fixated on damage control -- diagnosis, treatment and basic genetic research -- and is indifferent, if not sometimes hostile, to cancer prevention -- getting carcinogens out of the environment," Epstein told us recently. "The second factor is conflicts of interests, which are significant when it comes to the National Cancer Institute, but profound and overwhelming when it comes to the American Cancer Society. In the book, I go into great detail on conflicts between the American Cancer Society and the cancer drug industry, the mammography industry, the pesticide industry, and other such industries."

According to Epstein, the outgoing director of the National Cancer Institute left that organization to go to the cancer drug industry. Another NCI director in the 1970s left NCI to go to the American Cancer Society and from there to head up the fiberglass industry (fiberglass is a recognized carcinogen).

Epstein charges that the cancer establishment is misleading people into believing that it is spending a good chunk of its stashed away billions on prevention -- which is untrue.

Farewell, Fans Under Glass

From the Boston Globe:

Opening day for renovations
Maligned .406 Club is the first to go at Fenway

Originally named the "600 Club" (for its 600 seats), the name was changed to the ".406 Club" in 2002 to honor Ted Williams, MLB's last 400 hitter. (Unfortunately, this was 17 days after he died. Couldn't they have done it before then?)

[Speaking of last 400 hitters, did you know that the last 400 hitter in baseball was Artie Wilson of the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League?]

We plebians who usually sat in the bleachers always called it "Fans Under Glass".

Reportedly, it changed the wind patterns at Fenway Park, and the players hated that.

It's All About Appearances, Karl Rove edition

Karl Rove left his house this morning in his Jaguar, then showed up at Federal District Court for his court appearance in a tan Toyota Camry.

The Jaguar

Another view of the Jaguar

Karl looking annoyed getting into the Jag

Karl, leaving court in the tan Camry

CBS video of Karl getting into the not-Jaguar tan Camry

Update, 10/15/05: Today's Washington Post says the getaway car was a Ford Taurus.

Just For Laughs

When Harry met George
By John Kenney, JOHN KENNEY is a humorist who has just finished his first novel.

From the Los Angeles Times, the imagined correspondence of Harriet Miers to "cool" George W. Bush.

Rain, Rain, Go Away

Not much to say today. It's raining. I got my hair cut. Had to replace a mount on my rear tire ($169). It's still raining.

Karl Rove begged not be indicted today, for four hours. The New York Times still isn't talking. Rumor has it that Judith Miller may resign. Good riddance. Josh Marshall asks a couple of interesting questions: What did Harriet Miers know about the Plame outing and the subsequent cover-up? What does she know about what the President knew?

Still waiting for the Bush Administration's traditional post 5:00 p.m. Friday news dump, calculated to draw as little attention as possible to bad news.

No photo ops for Bushie today. Guess the White House didn't like seeing the word "staged" used so much by the MSM.

Hey, did I mention that I'm going to England next week, for two weeks? Whee-hoo!

Publication of this blog will be suspended until November 1st.

Maybe by the time I return it will have stopped raining.

The (Wo)man Behind the Curtain

Here's the official White House bio of the director of Bush's "spontaneous" Q&A today:

Allison Barber, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense

Current Assignments: Allison Barber is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Internal Communications and Public Liaison. In this position, she is responsible for the Department's communication to the men and women of the military, worldwide, and for community relations programs that link citizens to members of the Armed Forces at home and abroad. Ms. Barber is also an Army wife and her husband recently returned from a year's deployment in Iraq.

[]

Past Experiences: Ms. Barber comes to her position with extensive experience in public relations and advertising. Prior to this position, Ms. Barber was the President of Sodenta, her public relations firm in Washington, D.C. Previously, she was President of the Washington D.C. office of PlowShare, a Connecticut-based advertising agency. From 1992 to 1998, she was a Public Relations Director for the American Red Cross. From 1986 to 1991, Barber was a grade school teacher at Merrillville Public School in Indiana and served as Vice President of the Teachers Association.

Education: Ms. Barber holds a BS in Elementary Education from Tennessee Temple University and a MS in Elementary Education from Indiana University.

So, she's been

a grade school teacher (5 years)

"a" PR Director for the American Red Cross (not "The" Director) (6 years)

"President" of the Washington DC office of PlowShare advertising agency which counts among its clients the American Red Cross. (If you go on PlowShare's website, there's no mention of a President or a Washington DC office. The principals are referred to as "partners". Sounds like a bit of resume puffery to me.)

Then President of her own PR agency, Sodenta. Looking them up on the internets, I suspect a freelancer who incorporated for tax purposes.

Here's the address, on a YourTownMall services directory:

Sodenta Agency
2916 Stuart Drive
Falls Church, VA 22042
Phone: (703) 698-7608

SourceWatch couldn't find any other listing for her agency. Looking at googlemaps, I suspect she ran this out of her home.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. Another PR flack. Because the Bush Administration is all about the PR. No substance. I will say in her defense (no pun intended), like a good elementary school teacher she had those soldiers lined up nicely, well groomed, and they repeated their lines very well.

Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain!

Like We Wouldn't Notice

Bush Teleconference With Soldiers Staged

Or as the Wizard of Oz said: "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!"

WANTED: The Banana Republicans

America's Most Wanted

Click on the link to see the poster.

For many years, my dad had a poster hanging in the back of the room where he taught high school social studies. I brought it back for him from my senior trip to Washington, DC. It said "Wanted", and had pictures of Nixon, Haldeman, Erlichman and Dean and all the Watergate conspirators. All but Nixon had "Apprehended" splashed across their pictures.

I've got to dig that poster out.

When You're a Shiite, You're a Shiite All the Way

From your first cigarette to your last dying day:

From Knight-Ridder:

Sectarian resentment extends to Iraq's army

The Bush administration's exit strategy for Iraq rests on two pillars: an inclusive, democratic political process that includes all major ethnic groups and a well-trained Iraqi national army. But a week spent eating, sleeping and going on patrol with a crack unit of the Iraqi army - the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Division - suggests that the strategy is in serious trouble. Instead of rising above the ethnic tension that's tearing their nation apart, the mostly Shiite troops are preparing for, if not already fighting, a civil war against the minority Sunni population.

[]

"In Amariyah last week, a car bomb hit a U.S. Humvee and their soldiers began to shoot randomly. They killed a lot of innocent civilians. I was there; I saw it," said Sgt. Fadhal Yahan. "This happens all the time. If they keep doing this, the people will attack them. And we are part of the people."

Sgt. Jawad Majid chimed in: "We have our marja'iya [the ruling council of clerics led by al-Sistani] and we are waiting for them to decide when the time to fight (the Americans) is, when it is no longer time to be silent."

We are training and arming the Iraqis for their coming civil war. Our troops will be fortunate to be withdrawn before the guns of our trainees are turned against us.