What happened when the rock stars from the 1960's and early 1970's ran out of good ideas and began releasing mediocre albums? New wave rock took its place. Some new wave took the form of punk. Other new wave artists took the hooks of the 1960's and made them all their own. The Pretenders took the latter route, recording Talk of The Town in 1981, their high point and one of the best-crafted pop songs of all time.

NASA this week beamed a Beatles song into the Universe, hoping that someone or something somewhere will hear the song a million years from now. By then the Sun will have devoured the Earth, and all the art created here will be lost forever, except for Across the Universe, recorded in the Beatles's final phase. This song was recorded several times in 1968-69, officially released on Let it Be in 1970. But the better version, You Tubed below, was in the vaults until 1995-96, when the Beatles issued their unreleased recordings for the Anthology series.

This version of Across the Universe sums up the Beatles career in a way that few songs have. John Lennon wrote and sang it, unlike the earlier days when he and Paul McCartney jointly wrote and sang the Beatles' greatest hits. You can hear sitar on this song, an Indian instrument that George Harrison became enamored with, whose sound seems to capture the spirit of that decade, even if Indian musicians had long mastered the instrument decades before. The weary sound on 1968's Across the Universe reflects a real-life fatigue as the 1960's began to catch up on the Beatles, their manager having died in 1967 and the Beatles left to run the business. They did so poorly, hiring bad advisers and fighting amongst themselves over money, all the while churning out the best music of the 1960's. Nowadays, when celebrities fight over money and legal problems, they stop working. Somehow the Beatles found the time to record the White Album, Abbey Road and Let it Be, three essential albums in the Beatles' canon. Not to mention Hey Jude, the anthemic masterpiece that stands along the best of the late 1960's.

By 1968, the Beatles were still the best band in the business. But they no longer towered over the competititon. It wasn't 1964 anymore, when the nearest competitor was the Beach Boys. By 1968, we had Jimi Hendrix, the Who, Rolling Stones, Cream, Bob Dylan. It's revisionist history to say that these artists picked up where the Beatles left off. By this point John, Paul, George and Ringo were still leading the way. Only a schmendrick would believe otherwise.

Torture violates U.S. law. No rational person would say that waterboarding is not torture. The Bush adminstration has confessed to committing yet another impeachable act: waterboarding. A few years ago, George W. Bush admitted that the government was wiretapping Americans without a warrant, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Violating an American law normally would be grounds for impeachment, if we take the presidential oath to uphold the Constitution seriously.

Bush guffawed when he saw that he could get away with warrantless wiretapping. So he upped the ante. What would happen if we admit to committing acts of torture? Don't say it out loud, said Vice President Cheney. Nah, Bush said, as he gulped another mouthful of Vodka. I'm gonna do it! I'm gonna do it!. "Fine, do whatever you want," Cheney snarled. "No one gives a shit anyway." And Cheny's right.

White House Defends Interrogation Method By JENNIFER LOVEN February 6, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House on Wednesday defended the use of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding, saying it is legal — not torture as critics argue — and has saved American lives.

President Bush could authorize waterboarding for future terrorism suspects if certain criteria are met, a spokesman said.

A day earlier, the Bush administration acknowledged publicly for the first time that the tactic was used by U.S. government questioners on three terror suspects. Testifying before Congress, CIA Director Michael Hayden said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002 and 2003.

Waterboarding involves strapping a suspect down and pouring water over his cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years, to the Spanish Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world.

Hayden banned the technique in 2006 for CIA interrogations, the Pentagon has banned its employees from using it, and FBI Director Robert Mueller said his investigators do not use coercive tactics in interviewing terror suspects.

Senate Democrats demanded a criminal investigation after Hayden's revelation.

Bush personally authorized Hayden's testimony, White House deputy spokesman Tony Fratto said.

There's been a lot of talk about the utility of nuclear power to deal with the energy crisis and the related belief that nuclear energy is clean and won't contribute to global warming. I'm no expert in this area, but these arguments always sounded a little fishy to me. One expert in this area, however, has written up a readable and timely summary of why nuclear power is not the answer and also why the media is promoting nuclear power. This article appeared in Extra!, the magazine published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a great organization, by the way.

Money Is the Real Green Power: The hoax of eco-friendly nuclear energy

By Karl Grossman

Nuclear advocates in government and the nuclear industry are engaged in a massive, heavily financed drive to revive atomic power in the United States—with most of the mainstream media either not questioning or actually assisting in the promotion.

“With a very few notable exceptions, such as the Los Angeles Times, the U.S. media have turned the same sort of blind, uncritical eye on the nuclear industry’s claims that led an earlier generation of Americans to believe atomic energy would be too cheap to meter,” comments Michael Mariotte, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service. “The nuclear industry’s public relations effort has improved over the past 50 years, while the natural skepticism of reporters toward corporate claims seems to have disappeared.”

The New York Times continues to be, as it was a half-century ago when nuclear technology was first advanced, a media leader in pushing the technology, which collapsed in the U.S. with the 1979 Three Mile Island and 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accidents. The Times has showered readers with a variety of pieces advocating a nuclear revival, all marbled with omissions and untruths. A lead editorial headlined “The Greening of Nuclear Power” (5/13/06) opened:

Not so many years ago, nuclear energy was a hobgoblin to environmentalists, who feared the potential for catastrophic accidents and long-term radiation contamination. . . . But this is a new era, dominated by fears of tight energy supplies and global warming. Suddenly nuclear power is looking better.

Nukes add to greenhouse

Parroting a central atomic industry theme these days, the Times editors declared, “Nuclear energy can replace fossil-fuel power plants for generating electricity, reducing the carbon dioxide emissions that contribute heavily to global warming.” As a TV commercial frequently aired by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), the nuclear industry trade group, states: “Nuclear power plants don’t emit greenhouses gases, so they protect our environment.”

What is left unmentioned by the NEI, the Times and other mainstream media making this claim is that the overall “nuclear cycle”—which includes uranium mining and milling, enrichment, fuel fabrication and disposal of radioactive waste—has significant greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

As Michel Lee, chair of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, wrote in an (unpublished) letter to the Times, the

dirty secret is that nuclear power makes a substantial contribution to global warming. Nuclear power is actually a chain of highly energy-intensive industrial processes. These include uranium mining, conversion, enrichment and fabrication of nuclear fuel; construction and deconstruction of the massive nuclear facility structures; and the disposition of high-level nuclear waste.

She included information on “independent studies that document in detail the extent to which the entire nuclear cycle generates greenhouse emissions.”

Separately, Lee wrote to a Times journalist stating that the “fiction” that nuclear power does not contribute to global warming “has been a prime feature of the nuclear industry’s and Bush administration’s PR campaign” that “unfortunately . . . has been swallowed by a number of New York Times reporters, op-ed columnists and editors.”

Greens for hire

In “The Greening of Nuclear Power,” the Times, like other mainstream media touting a nuclear restart, also spoke of environmentalists changing their stance on nuclear power. “Two new leaders” have emerged “to encourage the building of new nuclear reactors,” according to the editorial. They happen to be Christine Todd Whitman, George W. Bush’s first Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and Patrick Moore, “a co-founder of Greenpeace.” The Times heralded this as “the latest sign that nuclear power is getting a more welcome reception from some environmentalists.”

However, “both Whitman and Moore . . . are being paid to do so by the Nuclear Energy Institute,” noted the Center for Media and Democracy’s Diane Farsetta (PRWatch.org, 3/14/07). In her piece “Moore Spin: Or, How Reporters Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Front Groups,” Farsetta also reported:

A Nexis news database search on March 1, 2007 identified 302 news items about nuclear power that cite Moore since April 2006. Only 37 of those pieces—12 percent of the total—mention his financial relationship with NEI.

Whitman and Moore were hired as part of NEI’s “Clean and Safe Energy Coalition” in 2006, which is “fully funded” by the institute, Farsetta noted. As for Moore and Greenpeace, his “association . . . ended in 1986,” and he “has now spent more time working as a PR consultant to the logging, mining, biotech, nuclear and other industries . . . than he did as an environmental activist.”

According to Harvey Wasserman, senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and co-author of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience With Atomic Radiation (Brattleboro Reformer, 2/24/07), “Moore sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign, but he did not actually found the organization.” Wasserman went on to cite an actual founder of the organization, Bob Hunter, describing Moore as “the Judas of the ecology movement.”

Scarce high-grade fuel

Insisting that “there is good reason to give nuclear power a fresh look,” “The Greening of Nuclear Power” further claimed, “It can diversify our sources of energy with a fuel—uranium—that is both abundant and inexpensive.”
This, too, was bogus. The uranium from which fuel used in nuclear power plants is made—so-called “high-grade” ore containing substantial amounts of fissionable uranium-235—is, in fact, not “abundant.” As Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation told BBC News (11/29/05), another “dirty little secret” of nuclear power is that “startlingly, there’s only a few decades left of the proven high-grade uranium ore it needs for fuel.” This has been the projection for years.

Indeed, this limit on “high-grade” uranium ore is why the industry projects that, in the long-term, nuclear power will need to be based on breeder reactors running on manmade plutonium. But use of plutonium-fueled reactors has been stymied because they can explode like atomic bombs—they contain tons of plutonium fuel, while the first bomb using plutonium, dropped on Nagasaki, contained 15 pounds. Because it takes only a few pounds of plutonium to make an atomic bomb, they also constitute an enormous proliferation risk.

Blaming Jane Fonda

“The Jane Fonda Effect” (9/16/07), a Times Magazine column by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, blamed nuclear power’s stall on the 1979 film The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, which opened days before the Three Mile Island partial meltdown. “Stoked by The China Syndrome,” it caused “widespread panic,” wrote Dubner and Levitt, even though, they maintained, the accident did not “produce any deaths, injuries or significant damage.”

In fact, the utility that owned Three Mile Island has for years been quietly paying people whose family members died, contracted cancer or were otherwise impacted by the accident. While settlements range up to $1 million, the utility company continues to insist this does not acknowledge fault. The toll of Three Mile Island is chronicled in my television documentary Three Mile Island Revisited (EnviroVideo, 1993) and Wasserman’s book Killing Our Own (which includes a devastating chapter, "People Died at Three Mile Island”), among other works.

But Dubner and Levitt continue undeterred, declaring, “The big news is that nuclear power may be making a comeback in the United States.” They acknowledge the Chernobyl accident, stating that it “killed at least a few dozen people directly.” They admit that it “exposed millions more to radiation,” but keep silent about the consequences of this in terms of illness and death. This atomic version of Holocaust denial flies in the face of voluminous research on the disaster that puts the number of dead in the hundreds of thousands.

“At least 500,000 people—perhaps more—have already died out of the 2 million people who were officially classed as victims of Chernobyl in Ukraine,” said Nikolai Omelyanets, deputy head of the National Commission for Radiation Protection in Ukraine (Guardian, 3/25/06). Dr. Alexey Yablokov, president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, calculates a death toll of 300,000. In the book Chernobyl: 20 Years On, which he co-edited, Yablokov writes, “In 20 years it has become clear that not tens, hundreds of thousands, but millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere have suffered and will suffer from the Chernobyl catastrophe.”

The New York Times Magazine also published “Atomic Balm?” (7/16/06), by Jon Gertner; the subhead read, “For the first time in decades, increasing the role of nuclear power in the United States may be starting to make political, environmental and even economic sense.” Gertner used the term nuclear “renaissance,” and again forwarded the claim that “the supply [of uranium] is abundant.”

Gertner told of how the “lifespan” for nuclear plants was set at 40 years because this was considered “how long a large nuclear plant could safely operate.” This has “proved a conservative estimate,” he states—without providing a factual basis. So the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been “granting 20-year extensions” to the 103 U.S. nuclear plants so they “can run for a total of 60 years.” (Consider the safety and reliability of 60-year-old cars speeding down highways.)

“Even with such licensing renewals, though, it’s doubtful the current fleet of plants will run for, say, 80 years,” he continued, and “that means the industry, in a way, is in a race against time.” It needs to build new plants because the “absence” of nuclear power “would probably pose tremendous challenges for the United States.”

The New York Times also allows its nuclear advocacy to slip into its news stories. In an article (11/27/07) about the French nuclear power company Areva signing a deal with a Chinese atomic corporation, Times reporter John Tagliabue wrote of Areva chief executive Anne Lauvergeon’s “long path from dirty hands to clean energy.” The “dirty hands” referred to a youthful interest in archaeology; that nuclear power is “clean energy” appears to require no explanation.

Another story, datelined Fort Collins, Colorado (11/19/07), reported on two energy projects proposed for what the paper calls “a deeply green city.” Describing the plans as “exposing the hard place that communities like this across the country are likely to confront,” Times reporter Kirk Johnson wrote:

Both projects would do exactly what the city proclaims it wants, helping to produce zero-carbon energy. But one involves crowd-pleasing, feel-good solar power, and the other is a uranium mine, which has a base of support here about as big as a pinkie. Environmentalism and local politics have collided with a broader ethical and moral debate about the good of the planet, and whether some places could or should be called upon to sacrifice for their high-minded goals.

Other revivalists

Other media promoting a nuclear revival—their words prominently featured on NEI’s website—include USA Today (3/5/06): “The facts are straightforward: Nuclear power . . . creates virtually none of the pollution that causes climate change and delivers electricity cheaper than other forms of generation do.” And the Augusta Chronicle (8/21/06): “Nuclear power—for decades perceived as an environmental scourge—is emerging as the cleanest and most cost-efficient source of energy available, a fact conceded even by environmentalists.” And Investor’s Business Daily (12/1/06): “We can worry about imaginary threats of nuclear energy or the real dangers of fossil fuel pollution.”

Glenn Beck of CNN Headline News also joined the chorus of support (5/2/07): “Look, America should embrace nuclear power, even if it’s [just] to get off the foreign oil bandwagon.” This is also common nuclear disinformation, that nuclear power is needed to displace foreign oil. The only energy produced by nuclear power is electricity—and only 3 percent of electricity in the U.S. is generated with oil.

There are a few exceptions in the mainstream media, notably the other Times, the Los Angeles Times. “The dream that nuclear power would turn atomic fission into a force for good rather than destruction unraveled with the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986,” the paper stated (7/23/07) in an editorial headlined: “No to Nukes: It’s Tempting to Turn to Nuclear Plants to Combat Climate Change, but Alternatives Are Safer and Cheaper.” Those who claim nuclear power “must be part of any solution” to global warming or climate change “make a weak case,” said the L.A. Times, citing

the enormous cost of building nuclear plants, the reluctance of investors to fund them, community opposition and an endless controversy over what to do with the waste. . . . What’s more, there are cleaner, cheaper, faster alternatives that come with none of the risks.

Staggering numbers

As to the risks, the mainstream media’s handling—or non-handling—of the U.S. government’s most comprehensive study on the consequences of a nuclear plant accident is instructive. Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences 2 (known as CRAC-2) was done by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the 1980s. Bill Smirnow, an anti-nuclear activist, has tried for years to interest media in reporting on it—sending out information about it continually.
The study estimates the impacts from a meltdown at each nuclear plant in the U.S. in categories of “peak early fatalities,” “peak early injuries,” “peak cancer deaths” and “costs [in] billions.” (“Peak” refers to the highest calculated value—not a “worst case scenario,” as worse assumptions could have been chosen.) For the Indian Point 3 plant north of New York City, for example, the projection is that a meltdown would cause 50,000 “peak early fatalities,” 141,000 “peak early injuries,” 13,000 “peak cancer deaths,” and $314 billion in property damage—and that’s based on the dollar’s value in 1980, so the cost today would be nearly $1 trillion. For the Salem 2 nuclear plant in New Jersey, the study projects 100,000 “peak early fatalities,” 70,000 “peak early injuries,” 40,000 “peak cancer deaths,” and $155 billion in property damage. The study provides similarly staggering numbers across the country.

“I’ve sent the CRAC-2 material out for years to media and have never heard a thing,” Smirnow told Extra!:

Not anyone in the media ever even asked me a question. There’s no excuse for this media inattention to such an important subject, and it shows how they’re falling flat on their faces in not performing their purported mission of educating and informing the public. Whatever their reason or reasons for not informing their readers and listeners, the effect is one of helping the nuclear power industry and hurting the public. If the public was informed, this new big pro-nuke push would never happen.

Also in the way of sins of omission is the media silence on “routine emissions”—the amount of radioactivity the U.S. government allows to be routinely released by nuclear plants. “It doesn’t take an accident for a nuclear power plant to release radioactivity into our air, water and soil,” says Kay Drey of Beyond Nuclear at the Nuclear Policy Research Institute. “All it takes is the plant’s everyday routine operation, and federal regulations permit these radioactive releases. Rarely, if ever, is this reported by media.” The radioactive substances regularly emitted include tritium, krypton and xenon. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission sets a “permissible” level for these “routine emissions,” but, as Drey states, “permissible does not mean safe.”

Hidden subsidies

Another lonely voice amid the media nuclear cheerleaders is the Las Vegas Sun, which recently has been especially outraged by $50 billion in loan guarantees for the nuclear industry to build new nuclear plants included in the 2007 Energy Bill. The Sun demanded (8/1/07): “Pull the Plug Already.”

In reporting on the economics of nuclear power, mainstream media virtually never mention the many government subsidies for it, while continuing to claim that it’s “cost-effective” (Augusta Chronicle, 8/21/06). One such giveaway is the Price-Anderson Act, which shields the nuclear industry from liability for catastrophic accidents. Price-Anderson, supposed to be temporary when first enacted in 1957, has been extended repeatedly and now limits liability in the event of an accident to $10 billion, despite CRAC-2’s projections of consequences far worse than that.

Writing on CommonDreams.org (9/11/07), Ralph Nader explored the economic issue. “Taxpayers alert!” he declared:

The atomic power corporations are beating on the doors in Washington to make you guarantee their financing for more giant nuclear plants. They are pouring money and applying political muscle to Congress for up to $50 billion in loan guarantees to persuade an uninterested Wall Street that Uncle Sam will pay for any defaults on industry construction loans. . . . The atomic power industry does not give up. Not as long as Uncle Sam can be dragooned to be its subsidizing, immunizing partner. Ever since the first of 100 plants opened in 1957, corporate socialism has fed this insatiable atomic goliath with many types of subsidies.

Ignored alternatives

Yet another claim by mainstream media in pushing for a nuclear revival is the “success” of the French nuclear program. 60 Minutes (4/8/07) did it in a segment called “Vive Les Nukes.” (See FAIR Action Alert, 4/18/07.) Correspondent Steve Kroft started with the nuclear-power-doesn’t-contribute-to-global-warming myth:

With power demands rising and concerns over global warming increasing, what the world needs now is an efficient means of producing carbon-free energy. And one of the few available options is nuclear, a technology whose time seemed to come and go, and may now be coming again. . . . With zero greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. government, public utilities and even some environmental groups are taking a second look at nuclear power, and one of the first places they’re looking to is France, where it’s been a resounding success.

Though she was totally ignored, Linda Gunter of Beyond Nuclear told 60 Minutes of radioactive contamination in the marine life off Normandy where the French reprocessing center sits, leukemia clusters in people living along that coast, and massive demonstrations in French cities earlier in the year protesting construction of new nuclear power plants.
The Union of Concerned Scientists was upset by 60 Minutes’ downplaying of alternative energy technologies such as wind and solar. UCS’s Alden Meyer wrote to 60 Minutes:

In fact, wind power could supply more energy to the U.S. grid than nuclear does today, and when combined with a mix of energy efficiency and other renewable energy sources, could provide a continuous energy supply that would help us make dramatic reductions in global warming.

Dismissal of renewable energy forms is another major facet of mainstream media’s drive for a nuclear power revival. As the St. Petersburg Times put it (12/08/06), “While renewable sources of energy such as solar power are still in the developmental stage, nuclear is the new green.” Renewables Are Ready was the title of a 1999 book written by two UCS staffers. Today, they are more than ready. “Wind is the cheapest form of new generation now being built,” wrote Greenpeace advisor Wasserman (Free Press, 4/10/07). He pointed to an “array of wind, solar, bio-fuels, geothermal, ocean thermal and increased conservation and efficiency.”

Wasserman has also written about another element ignored by most mainstream media (Free Press, 7/9/07): “The switch to renewables defunds global terrorism. Atomic reactors are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction. Shutting them down ends the fear of apocalyptic disaster by both terror and error.” He stressed, again, that safe, clean energy is here and “we could replace everything with available technology that could easily supply all our needs while allowing a sustainable planet to survive and thrive.”

The one green thing

What are the causes of the media nuclear dysfunction? The obvious problem is media ownership. General Electric, for one, is both a leading nuclear plant manufacturer and a media mogul, owning NBC and other outlets. (For years, CBS was owned by Westinghouse; Westinghouse and GE are the Coke and Pepsi of nuclear power.) There have been board and financial interlocks between the media and nuclear industries. There is the long-held pro-nuclear faith at media such as the New York Times. (See sidebar.)

There is also the giant public relations operation—both corporate, led by the NEI, and government, involving the Department of Energy and its national nuclear laboratories. “You have the NEI and the nuclear industry propagandizing on nuclear power, and journalists taking down what the industry is saying and not looking at the veracity of their claims,” Greenpeace USA nuclear policy analyst Jim Riccio told Extra!.

And then there’s lots of money. FAIR recently exposed (Action Alert, 8/22/07) how National Public Radio, which broadcasts many pro-nuclear pieces, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from “nuclear operator Sempra Energy” and Constellation Energy, “which belongs to Nustart Energy, a 10-company consortium pushing for new nuclear power plant construction.”

The only thing green about nuclear power is the nuclear establishment’s dollars.

Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. Books he has written about nuclear technology include Cover Up: What You ARE NOT Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power. He has hosted many television programs on nuclear technology on EnviroVideo.com

Hard to believe, but in some places in the United States, it's illegal to sell sex toys. Something about legislating morality and keeping dildos away from the children. Slowly but surely, though, those laws are being struck down. It's interesting to think about why.

In 1986, the Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional right to engage in sodomy. That case, Bowers v. Hardwick, was an abomination for the gay community. True, gays were becoming more and more accepted in our society 22 years ago, but no one told the Supreme Court about this. The Bowers decision was notorious for its condescending tone towards gay sex.

The Supreme Court has moved further to the right since 1986, so everyone was shocked when the Court in 2003 when the Court overruled Bowers and struck down the sodomy law that had criminalized homosexual sex in Texas. "The majority held that intimate consensual sexual conduct was part of the liberty protected by substantive due process under the Fourteenth Amendment. Lawrence has the effect of invalidating similar laws throughout the United States that purport to criminalize homosexual activity between consenting adults acting in private. It may also invalidate the application of sodomy laws to heterosexual sex based solely on morality concerns."

When the Supreme Court hands down a ruling, lawyers around the country think about how that ruling affects their existing cases and also how that ruling can support new cases. Adventurous lawyers who wanted to challenge the laws making it illegal to sell sex toys used the Lawrence decision as part of their legal arguments. It worked last week.

A Federal appeals court in the South (the Fifth Circuit, for you lawyers out there) ruled that the reasoning in Lawrence means that the State of Texas cannot make it illegal to sell sex devices. As the appeals court put it, with certain exceptions not relevant here, "the statute criminalizes the selling, advertising, giving, or lending of a device designed or marketed for sexual stimulation." That means it was illegal for Fred to give Wilma a vibrator. For some reason, the law did not make it illegal to own a sex toy. So it was legal for Wilma to use it. Fred goes to jail.

The shocking thing about laws like this is that they are enacted at all. When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, he told us that his experience as governor of Texas made him qualified to be president. This law was not passed on Bush's watch, but, really, is this the sort of shit that governors do all day? If so, not anymore. According to the appellate court, if the Supreme Court in Lawrence ruled that private intimate conduct at home cannot be regulated by the government, then the state cannot make it illegal to sell or give away sex toys. The crux of the opinion:

Just as in Lawrence, the State here wants to use its laws to enforce a public moral code by restricting private intimate conduct. The case is not about public sex. It is not about controlling commerce in sex. It is about controlling what people do in the privacy of their own homes because the State is morally opposed to a certain type of consensual private intimate conduct. This is an insufficient justification for the statute after Lawrence.

When it was revealed that the Bush administration was violating U.S. law in eavesdropping on certain phone conversations without a warrant, the uproar that followed focused on this blatant disregard for the rule of law and the arrogant failure to even ask the Congress to amend the law to make it easier to eavesdrop on people. Screw it, the Bush administration reasoned, we'll do what we want and that's that.

A secondary concern was the rule of the U.S. phone companies for their involvment in the eavesdropping scheme. They broke the law also, didn't they? When you break the law in this country, you get sued. Bush is now trying to make the telecommunications industry immune from these lawsuits. If Bush and the phone companies have their way, the lawsuits will be dismissed and another sorry chapter in American history is swept under the rug. Bad idea all around.
But, hey, breaking the law isn't what it used to be.

Our race to the bottom doesn't stop there. It only starts there. Like I said, breaking the law isn't what it used to be.

According to the February 14, 2008 New York Times:

The Senate voted Wednesday to ban waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods that have been used by the Central Intelligence Agency against high-level terrorism suspects. The vote, following House passage of the measure in December, set up a confrontation with President Bush, who has threatened to veto it.

Some people think waterboarding is fine. Waterboarding is defined as torture under international law. Since our government does not care about international law and does whatever it wants, we can rationalize our way around this. The most common way to do this is to suggest that waterboarding and other forms of torture come in handy under the "ticking bomb" scenario. Joe Lieberman, Al Gore's running mate in 2000, repeated this theory recently: In the worst case scenario — when there is an imminent threat of a nuclear attack on American soil — Lieberman said that the president should be able to certify the use of waterboarding on a detainee suspected of knowing vital details of the plot."

But the ticking bomb theory of torture is a canard. That scenario never happens:

Human rights organisations, professional and academic experts, and military and intelligence leaders, have absolutely rejected the idea that torture is ever legal or acceptable, even in a so-called ticking bomb situation. They have expressed grave concern about the way the dramatic force and artificially simple moral answers the ticking bomb thought-experiment seems to offer, have manipulated and distorted the legal and moral perceptions, reasoning and judgment of both the general population and military and law enforcement officials. They reject the proposition, implicit or explicit, that certain acts of torture are justifiable, even desirable. They believe that simplistic responses to the scenario may lead well-intentioned societies down a slippery slope to legalised and systematic torture. They point out that no evidence of any real-life situation meeting all the criteria to constitute a pure ticking bomb scenario has ever been presented to the public, and that such a situation is highly unlikely.

The value of the ticking bomb scenario to justify torture is that this extremely narrow exception swallows the rule. It's like supporting the death penalty because some guy killed 15 people on videotape and everyone knows he did it, without considering the many people who've walked off death row after the courts decide that the guy didn't commit the crime at all.

Of course, the problem with all these proposed measures -- letting the phone companies off the hook and the use of torture -- is that once the terror threat goes away, these new rules will remain in effect. Future U.S. presidents and other demagogues will find a way to justify continued support for these new rules in light of new "threats," real or imagined. That's how it works. Scare us into supporting new oppressive measures, and those measures stay on the books forever.

As a masochist, I read conservative political blogs and also listen to conservative talk radio to see what the other side is up to. They are usually up to no good. The latest round of nonsense concerns attempts to demonize Barack Obama, now the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. There are reasons for this, not the least of which is that Republicans are stuck with John McCain, who has no charisma at all and is not a real conservative in the eyes of the radical right wing. So rather than rally round McCain, they are attacking Obama.

Attack anyone you want, I always say, so long as you focus on the issues. The problem is that our presidential elections do not concern themselves with the issues, that is, if you define issues as policy debates over war and peace, domestic priorities and the rest. No, our presidential elections focus on personality, which has almost nothing to do with governing. But it's a lot more fun that way.

Mud-slinging and other personal attacks have been with us for centuries. But, from my vantage point, politics took a sharp turn into the gutter in 1988, when Republican Vice President Bush (George W's father) ran against Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee. Bush was a man utterly without substance, a careerist who sought the presidency most of his adult life but did not really have the gravitas or even the resume for the job until Ronald Reagan plucked him from obscurity in 1980 and made him vice president, where he oversaw Reagan's horrific foreign policy for eight years and waited out the Reagan presidency for his own shot at the job in 1988.

Bush Sr. was known to have the best Rolodex in Washington. I guess no one uses Rolodexes anymore, but prior to the computer age, we had our phone numbers in a rotating device that stored our business cards and contact information which now gets programmed into the computer and our cell phones. As a high-profile vice president for eight years, Bush Sr. had a head start on his run for the presidency, with contacts from Maine to California, but those contacts were not enough. People thought Bush was a wimp, a terrible public speaker and an empty suit. He overcame those deficits with a presidential campaign that serves as a template for the current race.

Bush Sr. made the presidential campaign in 1988 all about personality. He attacked Dukakis as "soft on crime" and unpatriotic. It's easy to do this if you have a well-oiled publicity team at your disposal, and all Bush had to do was the hightlight Dukakis's tenure as governor of Massachusetts and his membership in the American Civil Liberties Union. Massachusetts is considered a liberal state, and, despite its role in advancing civil rights and liberties over the last century or so, the ACLU is deemed outside the mainstream by the anti-intellectual conservatives. Through the fall campaign that year, Bush Sr. claimed that Dukakis was a "card-carrying member of the ACLU," a subtle reference to the red scares of the 1950's, when demagogues claimed that certain liberals were "card-carrying communists." Bush Sr. also focused on the Pledge of Allegience, noting that Dukakis, a lawyer, vetoed an illegal proposal to force school children to give the Pledge every morning.

Without any serious discussion of any of the issues facing this country, Bush Sr. won the presidency in 1988. In retrospect, it's easy to see what we lost in this regard. The Soviet bloc collapsed a year later and the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, ending the Cold War once and for all. Two Supreme Court justices were appointed during the Bush presidency, and the economy slid down the chute as no one had any coherent plan to bring this country into the 1990's and the new century. The country went to war for the first time in a generation when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, and the Presidency rolled up his sleeves for that military action by invading Panama in 1989 and killing a few thousand people in the process. The monumental days of the Bush presidency (1989-1993) were preceded by a vacuous presidential campaign that did not give George H.W. Bush any mandate to run the country.

What have we learned from the pathetic 1988 presidential campaign? Nothing. Our campaigns are still devoid of substance and the pressing issues of the day -- war and peace, global warming, domestic priorities -- continue to get swept under the carpet. In 2000, the Republicans hacked away at Al Gore's presidential campaign by putting words in his mouth, reminding us over and over that he claimed to invent the Internet, something Gore never said he did. In 2004, the Republicans hacked away at John Kerry by promoting the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who misprepresented Kerry's military record and made him look like an opportunist and fake war hero. This kind of bullshit wins elections.

Take a look at what's happening now. Obama is emerging as the front-runner, so the right wing is taking the following pot-shots:

1. They are questioning Obama's patriotism. Take a look-see right here, where CNN actually asked its readers if Obama is sufficiently patriotic to serve as President. The reason for this question is that right-wingers are upset that Obama stopped wearing an American flag on his lapel. Apparently, after 9/11 we have to wear American flags on our clothing until the end of time.

2. They also question his patriotism because he did not vigorously pledge allegience to the flag once. Read about it here. Maybe Obama should run to a flag factory for a good photo-op. That's what George H.W. Bush actually did in 1988.

3. They are attacking Obama's wife. She expressed satisfaction over her husband's success at the polls by stating that she is really proud of the United States for the first time in her life. Obviously, Michele Obama did not mean this literally; she probably said it enthusiastically the way we often exaggerate when we are not thinking. Somehow this is a scandal, and it can only mean that Obama, through marriage, hates America.

Obama is a different kind of presidential candidate. He is not a degenerate or scandal-scarred politico. His brief tenure in public office means his record provides little to attack him on. As we sit here today, Republican hatchetmen are thinking of ways to destroy Obama this summer. They've already started.