News Round-Up, Thursday, April 12, 2007

Thick smoke rises from the site of an explosion at Baghdad's Al-Sarafiyah bridge where a suicide bomber blew up a truck, 12 April, 2007. A suicide bomber has blown himself up in the Iraqi parliament canteen in Baghdad's Green Zone, killing three people in a major breach of security at the country's most heavily guarded site.(AFP/Ali Yussef)

A suicide/homicide bomber blew himself up in the Iraqi parliament cafeteria this morning. That would be in Baghdad, which the surge is supposed to be making safe, and within the heavily fortified U.S. Green Zone. George Bush's disaster continues.

The real story behind the US Attorney Purge, from Talking Points Memo. It's a giant Karl Rove operation designed to keep poor and black and Democratic voters from exercising their right to vote:

Republican party officials and elected officials use bogus claims of vote fraud to do three things: 1) to stymie voter registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts in poor and minority neighborhoods, 2) purge voter rolls of legitimate voters and 3) institute voter ID laws aimed at making it harder for low-income and minority voters to vote.

The White House claims that all those off-the-books emails on the RNC/GWB43 servers have just disappeared. How convenient. Jesselyn Radack, a Justice Department lawyer who was hounded out of the department for challenging the prosecution of John Walker Lindh, has a dailykos diary on how emails are forever. (She found emails the Justice Dept. had erased in order to keep from producing them in response to a federal discovery order; when she revealed this, she was fired! Justice, Bush style.) 50 White House officials have used the RNC accounts; of course Karl Rove is one of them.

George Bush's Pentagon announced yesterday that EVERY U.S. Army soldier's tour will be extended from 12 to 15 months. George Bush is breaking the Army.

George Bush is looking for a 'war czar', but three generals he's approached have turned him down. As many bloggers have pointed out, isn't that his job? Or the Secretary of Defense? For a guy who complains about the bureaucracy all the time, Dubya sure does love to create it.

Media Matters for America has a timeline of the decline and fall of Don Imus. It took seven days. I think the timeline shortchanges the impact of the Rutgers women's basketball press conference. They made a powerful statement.

BoingBoing has some good links to audio and video of the late Kurt Vonnegut.

RIP Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was the first author that after I read a book (Cat's Cradle, I think) I bought all his other books and read them, too. He hated assholes. Of course, that means he hated Bush.

NYTimes: Kurt Vonnegut, Writer of Classics of the American Counterculture, Dies at 84


In These Times: Kurt Vonnegut vs. the !&#*!@ (2003 interview)

Q: Based on what you’ve read and seen in the media, what is not being said in the mainstream press about President Bush’s policies and the impending war in Iraq?

A: That they are nonsense.

Q: My feeling from talking to readers and friends is that many people are beginning to despair. Do you think that we’ve lost reason to hope?

A: I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!

The Salon Interview: Kurt Vonnegut (1999)