Category: Evil

Talk about the Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations!

No Comments

Because, seriously for Bush and His Evil Minions™ to try to spin the continued breathing of Osama bin Laden with this:

Q: But Osama bin Laden is the one that — you keep talking about his lieutenants, and, yes, they are very important, but Osama bin Laden was the mastermind of 9/11 —

MS. PERINO: No, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11, and he’s sitting in jail right now.

I guess that bin Laden was some 6 foot 6 inch tall dude suffering from Marfan’s related kidney failure who occasionally attended meetings of the Ladies Sewing Circle & Terrorist Society, or some such.

Every time I think that I’ve grown too cynical to be shocked, they kick it up a notch.


The mendacity of these folks, even after 7 years, continues to stun me.

Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?

No Comments

Olbermann apologizes, but what he should have done is ask, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?“

Sasha Issenberg notes that this is the death of a taboo, and it does not bode well for our political discourse:

One of the most enduring taboos in American politics, the airing of graphic images from the September 11 attacks in a partisan context, died today. It was nearly seven years old.

Republicans, at least the idealogue ones who grew up sucking at the tit of Ayn Rand, believe that there is no role for government in public life….None at all, so all that running for office is an attempt to grap power.

They believe that they can do evil to seize power, because they believe that all government is evil.

Democrats Rebuke Lieberman for Speech at Republithug Convention

No Comments

Yep, they are saying that they are very, very, disappointed.

Sorry, but Lieberman jumped the shark when he refused to investigate failures during Katrina; in which he clearly showed that he was aggressively covering up for Bush and His Evil Minions&trade, and you did not do anything then.

And we are supposed to expect that you will do something now?

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, we won’t get fooled again.

Bush Still Pushing to Have Your Daughter Carry Her Rapist’s Baby

No Comments

As I mentioned in an earlier post, see my earlier post, All Your Uterus Are Belong to Us, Bush and His Evil Minions&trade are determined to make sure that Abortion will be unavailable, even if it is legal.

So, they are pushing ahead with a modified plan now, and they have changed the definition, so that contraception is no longer abortion, but it still allow a doctor to refuse to give birth control information to a woman, for example.

These folks are more like the Mullahs in Iran than they admit.

American Psychological Association Debates Torture

No Comments

There is nothing wrong with a psychologist participating in a legitimate military interrogation, but what the APA is debating now is whether psychologists should participate in torture.

Water-boarding, sleep deprivation, beatings, stress positions, extremes in temperature, threats to children…These are torture, and any psychologist, or for that matter any medical professional who aided in this, should never be licensed to practice medicine ever again.

Why I Won’t Be Watching the Republican Conventon

No Comments

Cheney will be speaking on the first night of the convention.

It’s the same reason that I don’t watch slasher flicks, I don’t like being creeped out.*

*Though, interestingly enough, my second favorite film of all time, after Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai, is John Carpenter’s The Thing, which, unlike the 1951 film, hews much closer to the John Campbell’s novella Who Goes There.

I would argue that the tension in the story is very different, and far more engaging, than the standard slasher flick.

DoJ Subpoenas Bush Admin Vote Suppression Specialists

No Comments

I would note that the DoJ having to subpoena former DoJ lawers, even political appointees, is almost unheard of, but it’s pretty clear that former Civil Rights Division* head Bradley Schlozman, and Hans “der Novotenfuhrer” von Spakovsky, former counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights are under some serious legal jeopardy, with credible allegations of perjury before Congress, and also appeared to be hip deep in the hiring scandal.

Dudes, bring your toothbrushes.

*Who says that irony is dead?

When Does a Writer Become too Personally Repulsive to Read?

No Comments

Orson Scott Card does not raise the question for me, I read Ender’s Game, and was not particularly impressed, but he does for a lot of avid readers of SF.

His recent essay equating gay marriage with allowing blind people to drive, and suggesting a fascist state will mercilessly expose children to “te gay” will further conflict those folks who think that he doesn’t write crap, particularly when he seems to call for a revolution to promulgate anti-gay discrimination in our society.

Luckily, I find his plotting pedestrian, his characterizations flat, and his writing not particularly engaging, which is which I read Ender’s Game 20+ years ago, and haven’t read anything else of his since.

I’d Call This Kafkaesque, but the Term Seems Wholly Inadequate

No Comments

A press release from the ACLU:

Justice Department Asks Intelligence Court To Review New Wiretapping Law In Secret (7/30/2008)

ACLU Says Any Proceedings On New FISA Law Should Be As Transparent As Possible

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

WASHINGTON – In a brief filed late yesterday with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the Bush administration asked that any review of the new warrantless surveillance law be kept secret and that the court refuse to accept legal briefs from anyone other than the Justice Department itself. The government is responding to a motion the American Civil Liberties Union filed earlier this month asking the FISC to ensure that any proceedings relating to the scope, meaning or constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) be open to the public to the extent possible.

The following can be attributed to Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project:

“The government is proposing that the intelligence court should consider the constitutionality of the new surveillance law in proceedings that will be entirely secret. If the government’s request is granted, the court won’t hear arguments from anyone except the government and those arguments will be presented to the court in secret briefs. At the end of the process, the court will issue a ruling that is also secret. The process the government is proposing is completely unacceptable. Especially because the new surveillance law departs so significantly from the standards that have applied to government surveillance for the last 30 years, any proceedings relating to the new law’s constitutionality should be adversarial and as informed and transparent as possible.”

In a separate legal challenge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the ACLU seeks a court ruling declaring that the FAA is unconstitutional and ordering its immediate and permanent halt. Plaintiffs in the case include Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, the Nation and PEN American Center.

(emphasis mine)

I’m Speechless.

Department of Justice Broke Law on Hiring

No Comments

Representatives of Bush and His Evil Minions™ at the Justice Department routinely broke the law in the hiring of career lawyers.

In particular Monica Goodling and Kyle Sampson aggressively selected on the basis of partisan affiliation.

Bush’s butt boy at the DoJ, Michael Mukasey, released a statement that he is, “disturbed” by these developments, but I see no suggestion of actual prosecution.

There can be no greater threat to the nation than when political partisanship is used to corrupt the administration of justice.

Bush Claims Executive Privilege on Documents from a Criminal Investigation

No Comments

It’s the interviews by the FBI with him and Cheney in the Plame Affair, and Bush is insisting that it’s covered by executive privilige, and Mukasey going along with it.

Simply put, enough is enough. Find Mukasey in contempt, and have the sergeant at arms of the Congress throw his ass in th t cell in the basement of Congress.

While you are at it, get Miers and Bolton in a cell.

International Committee of the Red Cross Reported Torture by US Forces

No Comments

Well, it turns out that the ICRC specifically warned members of the military and the Bush administration that they were engaging in war crimes:

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.

The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.

….Citing unnamed “sources familiar with the report,” Ms. Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.” Red Cross representatives were not permitted access to the secret prisons where the C.I.A. conducted interrogations, but were permitted to interview Abu Zubaydah and other high-level detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The book says the C.I.A. shared the report, which Ms. Mayer first described last year in less detail in The New Yorker, with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

I really hope that there is a prosecutor in The Hague getting his ducks in a row over this case now.

It’s Fracking Ritual Cannibalism, Not a Cracker!

No Comments

Well, once again the forces of ignorance and hate, specifically those people who allow their own Satan to dominate their lives, have decided that what ever perverse god that they worship gives them the right to be and do evil.

As frequently happens, this story started with a, one Webster Cook, who decided that he would go to mass, and not eat the Eucharist, the cracker that is supposed to be the body of Christ, but instead, he would remove it from church.

It appears that he wanted to show it to a friend sitting in the back to help explain rituals of the church. A member of the church then assaulted him in an attempt to recover said cracker, or human flesh, or spiritual flesh, or whatever it is under Catholic theology, so Mr. Cook left.

What followed was a series of death threats from around the world, and Mr. Cook, fearing for his life, returned the cracker.

From what I understand of Catholic Dogma, and to be honest, this incident is making me far less interested in knowing or understanding, or respecting these beliefs, because those people who assaulted him and threatened his life are no different from the 19 men who flew planes into buildings on Septermber 11.

I understand that Mr. Cook did something that many Catholics find offensive. He shouldn’t have done it. In fact, he could have gotten one of the crackers before it was blessed, when it was still “just” a cracker, as opposed to some sort of mystical human flesh according to Catholic dogma, and showed it to his friend that way.

People had a right to be offended. They had no right to invoke behavior that reeks of the inquisition, and the behavior of the President of the School, the state school the University of Central Florida, who tacitly endorsed harassing the young man, should never be allowed to work in education again.

In any case, noted science blogger PZ Myers, of Pharyngula, came across this, and understood, as I do, that this behavior is not that of a fully developed human being, and noted that, “IT’S A FRACKIN’ CRACKER!“, and rightly condemned the behavior of the Taliban-Catholics.

Of course, now he’s being subjected to moronic harassment and likely threats of violence, in addition to demands to his employer that he be fired.

And, of course, racist and anti-Semitic bigot Bill Donohue, of the “Catholic League” (his own private rent-a-crowd) has had to weigh in on a witch hunt for Prof Myers too..

Satan does not exist in Jewish theology. Rather the Satan exists, where Satan is a title, meaning “adversary” or “prosecutor”. The Satan is our own evil inclination, and the people who are harassing Cook and Myers are doing their Satan’s work, not God’s work, because at their core, all they need is someone to hate.

I disagree with Mr. Meyers in only one area. It isn’t a cracker, it’s ritualized cannibalism.

There is actually a long history of cannibalism, both real and ritualized simulations, in religious observance, from Catholicism to the tribes of Papua New Guinea , and while I find it odd it’s not my business…Until you decide that your desire to eat human flesh, real, imagined, or spiritual allows you to justify violence against another.

If God is kind and just, and I believe he is, though it is impossible for a human to percieve the totality of God (Ein Sof in Kabbalistic Judaism), the God hates Bill Donohue and his ilk, because there is no greater sin than profaning his name (chillul Hashem).

Once Again, Bush and His Evil Minions&trade Stun Me Into Sputtering Rage

No Comments

It seems that it happens every month, and when I say, “That’s it there is no way it could get any worse,” and each time I am wrong.

Now, they are using the Cuba embargo and anti-Terror regulations to prevent the Guantánamo Bay defense attorneys from being paid or reimbursed for expenses.

Note that these guys are billing at $250/hour when their normal rate would be north of $500 an hour, but they aren’t even getting that:

When U.S. law groups announced in April that they were hiring the nation’s top criminal defense lawyers to defend alleged al Qaeda terrorists at the war court here, one executive called the lawyers “The A Team.”

Now, they’re the No-Pay Team.

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has pledged to cover costs of civilian lawyers defending alleged arch-terrorists, is in a struggle with the U.S. Treasury Department over a permit to pay $250-an-hour fees and other expenses to attorneys who have been shuttling to this remote U.S. Navy base from as far as Boise, Idaho.

….

I can do nothing but look at the screen with an expression on my face resembling that of a cow that just stepped on its own udder.

Unbelievably F&%$ing Bad Ideas: London Stock Exchange Edition

No Comments

So it appears the bright young (but evil) men from Lehman have been talking to the bright young (but evil) men from the London Stock Exchange, and they will be working together to make our world a worse place:

London Stock Exchange Group said Thursday that it would create a pan-European trading system in partnership with Lehman Brothers, as the exchange sought to regain its leading role in the region.

The deal creates a system for so-called dark liquidity pool trading. The exchange, known as the LSE, said the trading facility, to be named Baikal, would be open to other investors and was expected to begin operating in the first quarter of 2009. Lehman, based in New York, operates its own dark pool network. It is bringing sophisticated trading technology and an established customer base to the table.

……..

Dark liquidity pools are off-market trading networks where large orders can be executed anonymously, without divulging prices to public exchanges. Off-market trading has always existed in the form of over-the-counter transactions, but the technology now exists to bring investors together electronically in anonymity. Dark liquidity in European equities is growing rapidly, according to the LSE, and currently accounts for around €12 billion, or nearly $19 billion, in daily trading value.

…….

…..

David Shrimpton, head of equity market development at the London Stock Exchange, said that the LSE was hoping to bring other investors aboard as partners, and the response to the announcement had been “very positive.”

He said it might be possible for a quite a few trading systems to co-exist. “You’ve got 50 broker dark pools in the U.S.,” he added, “and they share about 10 percent of the market.”

…..

Yep. There’s a recommendation. Let’s get into a new anonymous and unregulated type of exchange pioneered by the Americans, whose toxic financial products currently threaten to poison the world financial systems.

Evil, unregulated, dangerous, and will likely be disasterous.