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The Face of Peace, Pablo Picasso (1881-1974)Cottage in Snow (Source: unknown)"This is the field where the battle did not happen, where the unknown soldier did not die. This is the field where grass joined hands, where no monument stands, and the only heroic thing is the sky. Birds fly here without any sound, unfolding their wings across the open. No people killed – or were killed – on this ground hallowed by the neglect of an air so tame that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.---William Stafford, USA (1914-1993) ...

Abe Lincoln's Vision and How the System Really Works * They did it. VP Cheney cast the tie-breaker vote to pass the bill to reduce the budget deficit. Applause, grinning faces in the Republican side of the aisle. They got what they fought for. What their victory means and how they won it."......that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863.The Washington Post: According to budget experts, the bill would barely dent the federal deficit, cutting less than one-half of 1 percent from an estimated $14.3 trillion in federal spending over the next five years. Opponents said the poor would bear the brunt of the cuts -- especially to Medicaid, child support enforcement and foster care -- whereas original targets for belt-tightening, such as pharmaceutical companies and private insurers, largely escaped sanction. From the Los Angeles Times: A sixth defection — by Sen. Norm Coleman of the sugar-beet-producing state of Minnesota — was headed off when Republican leaders restored $30 million in subsidies for sugar producers. "Sugar farmers will not face any cuts in this important agreement," said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), "and Sen. Coleman will support the … package." "........the whole package would trim about $3 for every $1,000 the government would otherwise spend. In tandem with the spending-cut bill, Congress has prepared legislation to extend some of the temporary tax cuts that it enacted in 2001 and 2003. The spending bill would save $40 billion over the next five years. The tax bill, which Republican congressional leaders hope to bring to a vote early next year, would cost $70 billion. "Put the two together," said Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the top Budget Committee Democrat, "and guess what: You have increased the deficit, not reduced it." Much of the criticism of the measure came from groups speaking for the poor, the elderly and college students. "The provisions … would cause considerable hardship among low-income families and people who are elderly or have disabilities," said the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Medicaid recipients, particularly those just above the poverty line, would have to pay more for their healthcare or accept fewer medical services. Some could be forced to pay as much as $100 for services that now cost $3, the center said. For elderly and disabled Medicare recipients, the premium that covers visits to the doctor would be increased. A previously enacted reduction of 4.4% in the fees received by doctors for treating Medicare patients would be erased.

Judge James Robertson Quits Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court*"A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources." The Washington Post report by Carole D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer includes: Robertson indicated privately to colleagues in recent conversations that he was concerned that information gained from warrantless NSA surveillance could have then been used to obtain FISA warrants. FISA court Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who had been briefed on the spying program by the administration, raised the same concern in 2004 and insisted that the Justice Department certify in writing that it was not occurring. "They just don't know if the product of wiretaps were used for FISA warrants -- to kind of cleanse the information," said one source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the FISA warrants. "What I've heard some of the judges say is they feel they've participated in a Potemkin court." The late Arthur Koestler's novel Darkness at Noon (1940) described the trial of a man named Rubashov in Stalin's Russia. Michael Schaub wrote an excellent article about the book. No, we are not anywhere near the conditions in Soviet Russia under Stalin. But there are times when I get the feeling that we are inexorably heading that way. Efforts to politicize our judicial system are indisputable facts.

They are looking after welfare of the usual suspects*The Washington Post reported: "House passage early yesterday of major budget-cutting legislation and authority to drill for oil in the Alaskan wilderness touched off fierce resistance in the Senate, where Democrats and moderate Republicans threaten to derail the legislation over concerns about the impact on the poor and the environment." Not only the ANWR is in danger but Medicaid recipients and students in need of financial assistance are also targets of proposed cuts in the budget while the Bush tax cuts remain inviolate !Excerpt: In an unusual pre-dawn vote yesterday, the House narrowly passed a broad five-year budget plan to cut spending on Medicaid, student loans and other entitlement programs by $39.7 billion. That 212 to 206 vote, concluded at 6:07 a.m., came one hour and three minutes after the House voted 308 to 106 on a 2006 defense spending bill that included a provision opening Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, a move long sought by President Bush, energy companies and Republican leaders. The Republicans mounted a sneak attack by attaching the drilling provision to the defense spending bill. In a filibuster it would require only a 51-vote majority for passage. If it were a separate legislation then a 60-vote majority would have been needed. Opponents will try to strip the provision from the budget bill during debates which have commenced in the Senate. The VP is expected to emerge from his bunker to be available to cast a tie breaker.

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? - Who will watch the watchers?"-- Juvenal Decimus Junius Juvenalis (Juvenal) Roman rhetorician and satirical poet (1st to 2nd cent. A.D.)*The President spoke today and strongly defended the recently exposed domestic spying program authorized by him. As usual, the president rehashed a litany of bogies to justify his action. Some Americans will buy that as they have done in the past. Based on what we know of this administration and the war in Iraq, can we trust the president ? Has he earned it ? From an editorial in the NY Times, Dec.18, 2005: Mr. Bush said he would not retract his secret directive or halt the illegal spying, so Congress should find a way to force him to do it. Perhaps the Congressional leaders who were told about the program could get the ball rolling. December 18, 2005Editorial NY Times This Call May Be Monitored On Oct. 17, 2002, the head of the National Security Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, made an eloquent plea to a joint House-Senate inquiry on intelligence for a sober national discussion about whether the line between liberty and security should be shifted after the 9/11 attacks, and if so, precisely how far. He reminded the lawmakers that the rules against his agency's spying on Americans, carefully written decades earlier, were based on protecting fundamental constitutional rights.If they were to be changed, General Hayden said, "We need to get it right. We have to find the right balance between protecting our security and protecting our liberty." General Hayden spoke of having a "national dialogue" and added: "What I really need you to do is talk to your constituents and find out where the American people want that line between security and liberty to be."General Hayden was right. The mass murders of 9/11 revealed deadly gaps in United States intelligence that needed to be closed. Most of those involved failure of performance, not legal barriers. Nevertheless, Americans expected some reasonable and carefully measured trade-offs between security and civil liberties. They trusted their elected leaders to follow long-established democratic and legal principles and to make any changes in the light of day. But President Bush had other ideas. He secretly and recklessly expanded the government's powers in dangerous and unnecessary ways that eroded civil liberties and may also have violated the law.In Friday's Times, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported that sometime in 2002, President Bush signed a secret executive order scrapping a painfully reached, 25-year-old national consensus: spying on Americans by their government should generally be prohibited, and when it is allowed, it should be regulated and supervised by the courts. The laws and executive orders governing electronic eavesdropping by the intelligence agency were specifically devised to uphold the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures.But Mr. Bush secretly decided that he was going to allow the agency to spy on American citizens without obtaining a warrant - just as he had earlier decided to scrap the Geneva Conventions, American law and Army regulations when it came to handling prisoners in the war on terror. Indeed, the same Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, who helped write the twisted memo on legalizing torture, wrote briefs supporting the idea that the president could ignore the law once again when it came to the intelligence agency's eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mail messages."The government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties," he wrote.Let's be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or not. Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution would have difficulty seeing that. The law governing the National Security Agency was written after the Vietnam War because the government had made lists of people it considered national security threats and spied on them. All the same empty points about effective intelligence gathering were offered then, just as they are now, and the Congress, the courts and the American people rejected them.This particular end run around civil liberties is also unnecessary. The intelligence agency already had the capacity to read your mail and your e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The burden of proof for obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11, but even before the attacks the court hardly ever rejected requests.The special court can act in hours, but administration officials say that they sometimes need to start monitoring large batches of telephone numbers even faster than that, and that those numbers might include some of American citizens. That is supposed to justify Mr. Bush's order, and that is nonsense. The existing law already recognizes that American citizens' communications may be intercepted by chance. It says that those records may be retained and used if they amount to actual foreign intelligence or counterintelligence material. Otherwise, they must be thrown out.President Bush defended the program yesterday, saying it was saving lives, hotly insisting that he was working within the Constitution and the law, and denouncing The Times for disclosing the program's existence. We don't know if he was right on the first count; this White House has cried wolf so many times on the urgency of national security threats that it has lost all credibility. But we have learned the hard way that Mr. Bush's team cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of the law, much less respect them.Mr. Bush said he would not retract his secret directive or halt the illegal spying, so Congress should find a way to force him to do it. Perhaps the Congressional leaders who were told about the program could get the ball rolling.

Belfast, Northern Ireland * Scotland * Wales * England*"Two women today became the first same-sex couple to use the UK's new civil partnership laws to publicly register their commitment at a ceremony. Shannon Sickels, 27, and Grainne Close, 32, recorded the historic union at Belfast city hall this morning." The Guardian,UK Like it or not, there is a wave of such unions to follow--almost 700 of them in England and Wales on Wednesday, 21st December. Yes, there were some protesters; the usual sin and damnation crowd. "The protesters, who gathered outside the city hall, demonstrated against the "sin" of homosexuality and the new legislation. They heckled Ms Close as she arrived for the ceremony. She told one protester: "God bless you ... I'll see you at the gates of heaven." ...

Secular Europe's Humane Approach* "Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or "broken heart," is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one."--Charlotte Perkins Gilman, American author (1860-1935) While our government is determined to do all it can to trample over state's rights and override Oregon's Death With Dignity Act of 1997, according to a report in the BBC a hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland, has announced that "......it will allow assisted suicide on its premises for terminally ill patients." Earlier, doctors and church leaders in Britain dropped their opposition to voluntary euthanasia for terminally ill patients who clearly express their wish for assistance in dying. Now, before the religious right and others who oppose such measures throw a fit they should read the details of what the Swiss plan means. No one is going to be forced to die. There are enough safeguards to satisfy all but those who feel that end of life is an issue left in the hands of higher powers. The disturbing part is that the zealots want to impose their will on the rest of us. The Bush administration's challenge to Oregon's law is based on use of drugs covered by the federal Controlled Substances Act for the purpose of suicide. Ruling on the case Gonzalez v. Oregon and the Right to Die, heard by the Supreme Court in October 2005, is expected to be issued in the summer of 2006. A spokesman for the university hospital in Lausanne said the decision was taken after a long reflection. He added that the conditions for permitted an assisted suicide remained very strict. From the start of next year terminally ill patients in Lausanne's main hospital will be allowed to take their own lives on hospital premises, as long as they are of sound mind, are already too ill to return home, and have expressed a persistent wish to die. Senior doctors at Lausanne's hospital say the decision was taken after almost three years of consideration and reflects the position of the Swiss Medical Association and the National Committee on Ethics. Both bodies say that in order to respect the wishes and independence of patients assisted suicide should be permitted in exceptional cases, but that it should never become a routine procedure. Comments Lily — 2005-12-19 I feel very strongly about the 'right to die' and have trouble understanding the suspicions about it. I suppose there is the fear that relatives will knock off pesky terminally ill family members? That terminally ill people cannot make these decisions? Death can be a mercifully human decision. I recall someone I knew,terminally ill, in pain, anguish, begging to die. I recall being told all was being done to manage the pain, and that little could be done for the intense sadness... it felt cruel to me. She said that watching the pained faces of people at her pillow, hearing the voices of people talking in the house, it was too much to bear. I cannot judge those feelings or be critical of such emotions, terminally ill people often go through stages that include some intense emotional pain and grief. And the physical discomfort, the waiting to die... for what? If it is inevitable, why not give the final gift of dignity and choice? I can't understand the arguments against. if abuse is what you fear, safeguard against that but don;t let people suffer because you cannot control the correct circumstantial application...

Saturday Morning Charivari * News about authorization of domestic spying by the president still making headlines but the shock wave is receding. To many people it didn't come as a surprise. While full details are not known, the fact that the administration was carrying on a secretive operation against its own citizens failed to provoke the howl that it deserved. We have become inured; revealations of lies, half-truths, deceptions have become routine; they no longer shock us. We have truly become a nation of sheep.Reading "A Scoop Deferred" by Paul Farhi in the Post one gets the impression that it is not what he described that is important but what he left unsaid.More interesting was an article by Paul Bloom (of Yale) that I found in The Guardian,UK. Professor Bloom wrote about American authors of yesterday, especially Whitman and Melville in context with the America of today. Reflections in the Evening Land reaches the heart of the sickness. The overwhelming question is why it happened. Perhaps simply because the majority (the god fearing majority ?) has a narrow vision of the world that prevents thoughts and questions about the policies being followed even when they are not for the common good.Excerpts: Huey Long, known as "the Kingfish," dominated the state of Louisiana from 1928 until his assassination in 1935, at the age of 42. Simultaneously governor and a United States senator, the canny Kingfish uttered a prophecy that haunts me in this late summer of 2005, 70 years after his violent end: "Of course we will have fascism in America but we will call it democracy!" In 2005, what is self-reliance? I can recognise three prime stigmata of the American religion: spiritual freedom is solitude, while the soul's encounter with the divine (Jesus, the Paraclete, the Father) is direct and personal, and, most crucially, what is best and oldest in the American religionist goes back to a time-before-time, and so is part or particle of God. Every second year, the Gallup pollsters survey religion in the United States, and report that 93% of us believe in God, while 89% are certain that God loves him or her on a personal basis. And 45% of us insist that Earth was created precisely as described in Genesis and is only about 9,000 or fewer years old. The actual figure is 4.5 billion years, and some dinosaur fossils are dated as 190 million years back. Perhaps the intelligent designers, led by George W Bush, will yet give us a dinosaur Gospel, though I doubt it, as they, and he, dwell within a bubble that education cannot invade. Some of my friends and students suggest that Iraq is President Bush's white whale, but our leader is absurdly far from Captain Ahab's aesthetic dignity. The valid analogue is the Pequod; as Lawrence says: "America! Then such a crew. Renegades, castaways, cannibals, Ishmael, Quakers," and South Sea Islanders, Native Americans, Africans, Parsees, Manxmen, what you will. One thinks of our tens of thousands of mercenaries in Iraq, called "security employees" or "contractors". They mix former American Special Forces, Gurkhas, Boers, Croatians, whoever is qualified and available. What they lack is Captain Ahab, who could give them a metaphysical dimension. What Whitman meant (as Lawrence knew) was that the United States itself was to be the greatest of poems. But with that grand assertion, I find myself so overwhelmed by an uncomfortable sense of irony, that I cease these reflections. Shelley wore a ring, on which was inscribed the motto: "The good time will come." In September, the US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice was quoted as saying at Zion Church in Whistler, Alabama: "The Lord Jesus Christ is going to come on time if we just wait." For G.W. Bush and his cohorts the good time has already come. Comments Anonymous — 2005-12-17 Glad to see you talking about this- I am amazed by the speed of the 'wave' you refer to, how quickly it recedes and our attention spans move on. I will try to stop by more often. I think that we are just so desensitized to corruption, we can compare things to Clinton and the reactions then to relatively minor matters (in my view at least!)but look at how indifferent we are on this! (::shaking head::) I'll come back when I am not so fed up and tired... and read more. Lew will be posting now with us at "Lose the Noose" (he often comments at Hydrogen and Stupidity where I think I first made your acquaintance!!!) I like to encourage his angry rantings...they are necessary!!! We all need to speak to truth. Anywhere we can.

Torture - Bush White House bends under pressure * The records speak for themselves. When it comes to torture we yield to none. In the face of rising criticism here and abroad, the White House retreated on its position about torture of prisoners held as terrorists. Republican Senator John McCain took a leading role in making this happen. Let's hope that the retreat was not purely diplomatic and that the terms would be honored. Tom Toles, editorial cartoonist of the Washington Post, won the Pulitzer in 1990. His December 13th cartoon says it all. For full gallery of cartoons by Toles, go to the Post.December 13, 2005 Comments Anonymous — 2005-12-17 Interesting cartoon, eh?

Author of "The Arrogance of Power"* The death of former senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin on December 15th has been widely reported. Adam Bernstein of the Washington Post covered it well. As is the norm on such occasions, there was a rush by politicians to offer eulogies. The event triggered a few of my friends to comment about another senator--the late William Fulbright of Arkansas. This what they said.SG:"Back in 1987, Senator Fulbright gave the commencement address at my graduation from U of Miami. It was an excellent speech that revealed a level of understanding of world affairs that is rare among the corridors of power in this country. After a 30-year Senate career, he died in 1995 at the age of 89."Excerpts from the Arrogance of Power are given below, which has striking relevance in the context of the current Iraq misadventure."On American foreign policy: Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But... when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism. "Fulbright also related his opposition to any American tendencies to intervene in the affairs of other nations: Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work. "He was a strong believer in international law: Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests." Sources: Wikipedia.org CommonDreams.org* K.C.R responded:"It is a good thing the good senator is no more. Today's powers-that-be would have branded his words above as irresponsible, unpatriotic, unchristian, UN-loving, terrorist-supporting, michael moore-like claptrap. His tax records would have been audited by the IRS and his phones tapped by the FBI. O'Reilly would have called him 'Frenchie', Cheney would have called him 'dangerous', Rice ' a friend of Saddam', Limbaugh 'deliriously left-wing' and Gary Bauer 'gay'.