Everybody's working for the weekend

10.6.05 14:29


War profiteering, GOP style


Josh has an interesting post on defense contractors and the Republican Congressman they love.

Mitchell Wade is the owner of MZM, Inc., a defense contractor with offices in Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Md.; Charlottesville, Va.; Tampa, Fla.; Martinsville, Va.; San Diego, Calif.; Seoul, South Korea; Stuttgart, Germany; and Baghdad, Iraq. A few years back, Mr. Wade, perhaps inspired by Saturday morning get-rich-quick infomercials, decided to hop into the red hot San Diego real estate market. He purchased a home for $1.67 million, intending to resell it at a profit.

But the deal went sour, and the house sat empty for seven months. Wade ended up selling the property for $700,000 less than it cost him, violating one of the main tenets of business, which is to buy low, sell high.

But that's OK, because soon after Wade bought the property, his defense contracting business really took off. Wade racked in tens of millions of dollars in lucrative federal contracts.

The San Diego Union-Tribune suspects Mr. Wade's good fortune might be related to the fact that the house in question belonged to U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R), a prominent member of the House Appropriations Committee's Defense Subcommittee. I suspect the paper might be right about this one.
12.6.05 23:52


How would you like to go up in a swing?




Photo by Mrs. Heraldblog
13.6.05 01:48


Schiavo autopsy results

It's been nearly ten weeks since Terri Schiavo succombed to dehydration in her Florida hospice, and early news reports of her autopsy results are trickling in. The Pasco/Pinellas County medical examiner says that Schiavo's brain weighed about half of what would normally be expected in an adult; she was blind; and there is no evidence of physical abuse, as had been alleged by legions of baying Schiavo "supporters".

Results from right wings blogs are predictable. Over at The Sheep's Crib, a southern Baptist pastor peers over the proverbial slippery slope then tells us that if it's OK to pull Ms Schiavo's feeding tube, then it's OK to exterminate Africans "(to) put these poor people out of their misery ... they're going to die anyway!"

Fr. Frank Pavone, the Catholic priest who was presumably with Ms. Schiavo at the time of her death, says the autopsy results don't matter: "A person with a 'profoundly atrophied' brain needs profound care and love. Terri did not die from an atrophied brain. She died from an atrophy of compassion on the part of her estranged husband and those who helped him to have her deliberately killed."

Over at the aptly named Mike's noise, the Noisy One tells us "Michael Schiavo's side in this case was undeniably morally wrong, because terminating the life of a person who is in no immediate danger of dying - even if that person is physically or mentally diminished - is murder, plain and simple. Even if it is ordered by a court."

No wonder Bush wants to pack the courts.
15.6.05 19:44


George Bush's cowardly ally

Pervez Musharraf is the president of Pakistan, and an important ally in America's war against Islamofascism. And he is a coward. A quaking, mewling, trembling little Nancy Boy.

And what has little Pervez wetting himself with fear? An illiterate peasant woman named Mukhtaran Bibi .

Bibi, whom I wrote about here, is under house arrest, and forbidden from leaving Pakistan. Her crime? Educating women, and speaking out against sexual abuse.

Bibi knows a thing or two about abuse. Three years ago, Bibi's brother was gang raped by a group of men in a small Pakistani village. To cover up their crime, the rapists accused the brother of having an affair with a higher caste woman. The case was heard before the village Islamic judges, who ruled that the proper punishment was for Bibi to be gang raped.

This incredibly sad story was reported by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, and by sheer force of public opinion, Bibi had her own day in court. The Pakistani government awarded her $7,000 for her pain and suffering. Bibi unselfishly used the money to open two schools in her village: one for boys, one for girls. Another $130,000 poured in from around the world, and soon Bibi, who cannot read or write, was a major power player in Islamic sexual politics.

Soon she was speaking out about the outrageous acts committed against women in Pakistan, such as honor killings, bride burnings, and acid attacks. Bibi, who was expected to kill herself after she was gang raped, is a survivor, and a natural spokesperson for the war against Islamofascism. Unfortunately, she is also Nancy Boy Musharraf's worst nightmare. The Pakistani dictator ordered soldiers to surround her house and not let her out. Then they disconnected her phone. Then they took away her cell phone. Then the local Islamic judges released Bibi's attackers from jail.

Then they took away Bibi. Nobody outside of Musharraf's band of cowards knows where she is.

"This is all because they think they have the support of the U.S. and can get away with murder," says Asma Jahangir, a Pakistani lawyer who is head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Indeed, last week, just as all this was happening, President Bush received Pakistan's foreign minister in the White House and praised President Musharraf's "bold leadership."

Freedom is on the march.




Is it OK yet to call Bill Frist a quack?

Sen. Bill Frist, furiously backpeddling on ABC's "Good Morning America", said it's time to close the books on the Schiavo case:
"She had devastating brain damage, and with that the chapter is closed."
Frist denied ever having made a long-distance diagnosis of Schiavo after watching a heavily edited video tape of the 41-year-old woman. At that time, Frist said it was apparent that Schiavo was responding to visual stimuli, and he questioned the persistent vegetative state diagnosis of numerous doctors who had actually spent time with Mrs. Schiavo.

According to the autopsy report, Schiavo was blind.
16.6.05 14:56


Deep Throat: the movie


According to Editor and Publisher, Universal Studios and Tom Hanks's Playtone production company has paid nearly $1 million for the rights to "Deep Throat" Mark Felt's story.

And can anybody tell me the last time a pornographic movie inspired the name for a character whose exploits inspired a non-pornographic movie? This is all getting to weird.


Echoes of Schiavo

From Friday's WaPo:
Two hours later, Annie Santa-Maria, director of inpatient and residence services, enters her pitch-black office.

"Since the Terri thing, I've had trouble sleeping," she says. "So I just come in. I get e-mail done or read."

Like many of the staff, Santa-Maria is only now processing the Schiavo episode. Her nightmares are the what-ifs. What if one of the bomb threats was real? What if someone had broken past the barricades and given Schiavo a sip of water?

"If they had given her a cup of water, she would have choked to death," Santa-Maria says, her frustration bubbling up. "I just wanted to yell at them, 'We have people die with feeding tubes all the time.' "

Some of her devout Catholic siblings disapproved of her role in the Schiavo case. The Catholic police chief peppered her with questions of ethics and morality. Congress subpoenaed her.

Santa-Maria opens her laptop to a PowerPoint presentation. The working title is "Woodside: A Fortress of Caring." Unlike the television images beamed around the world, the photos depict The Siege from the inside. Police in camouflage patrolling the verdant back grounds, people in wheelchairs pressing against orange mesh fencing, and the signs:

"Feed Terri! For God's Sake."

"Stop the Murder."

"Auschwitz Woodside."

"I would watch volunteers feeding and bathing our patients day and night, and they're out there calling us murderers," she says, her voice piercing the 5 a.m. silence.
Other than the barking loons outside the hospice, most Americans understand the inevitability of death, and the personal nature of a family that is faced with the passing of a loved one. Yet still, President Bush sides with the loons and their radical clerics, all to score political points. That his little gambit backfired so spectacularly fills me with optimism and hope for a return to a more sane political climate. But it will take more stories like this one. I'm not so sure that our journalists are up to that.
18.6.05 16:10


Brand America


I know there are some who read this piece in today's NY Times, about the discovery of an insurgent "torture house" and its four survivors, and say "We have to torture these guys right back." But that is precisely the wrong message to be taking from this story:
When marines burst in, one of the captives was lying under a stairwell, badly beaten. At first, they thought he was dead.

The others were emaciated and battered. Mr. Fathil had fared the best. The other three were taken by medical helicopter to Balad, a base near Baghdad with a hospital.

But he still had been hurt badly. Marks from beatings criss-crossed his back, and deep pocks, apparently from electric shock burns, were gouged in his skin.

The shocks, he said, felt "like my soul is being ripped out of my body." But when he would start to scream, and his body would pull up from the shock, they would begin to beat him, he said.
Isn't it obvious: the US wins when we present a viable alternative to jihadism. But when the US also tortures, what reason do a billion moderate Muslims have for supporting us?

We're better than this.


Happy Father's Day to me!



Photo by my neighbor Mike
19.6.05 12:10


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