Republican House Whip John Kyl famously said this a few days ago:

Everybody goes to clinics, to doctors, to hospitals, so on,“ Kyl said. ”Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90% of what Planned Parenthood does.

As you probably know, this was not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. Only 3% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortion services, and not one penny of federal money–by law–is spent on that.

When this was pointed out, one would expect Kyl to retract in some way, such as that he “misspoke” or “temporarily mixed up the numbers” or something of that sort. Naturally, one would expect some form of retraction followed immediately by a restatement of the general idea. However, the way his office explained it was rather stunning:

His remark was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, a organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions.

“His remark was not intended to be a factual statement”? I’m not a professional semanticist, but if you intentionally say something which is not factual, isn’t that a lie?

Meaning that the official statement was, essentially, “Yeah, he lied, but his point was that they’re abortionists.”

Wow.

By the way, only one non-political news outlet, ABC News (which I won’t link to because every news story on their site autoplays video beginning with ads that cannot be turned off) carried this story.

On the issue, Republicans are fully embracing this new tack: that federal money should be completely shut off for an organization that does stuff they don’t like even if no federal funds go to the activities they don’t like. (Of course, part of the strategy is to act like federal funding is used for the activity in question.) This was their big push against Planned Parenthood this time around, and you can expect to hear it again. Of course, they will not apply this evenly–a lot of federal money goes to organizations promoting religion, for example, and yet Republicans don’t want cut off their funds–exactly the opposite. But, of course, by now it is fully obvious that this is about ideology, not consistency.

Planned Parenthood is simply one more organization seen as a liberal bastion, and so is marked for elimination, just like ACORN, unions, AARP, NPR, PBS, and any number other organizations that can in any way be deemed left-leaning. Demonize, defund, destroy.

Just to punctuate the fact that Republicans really want to shut down the government so they can try to blame the Democrats and have a handy excuse for not accomplishing anything after winning the House, we have the fact that Republicans are lacing the budget with poison pills: take away all federal funding for Planned Parenthood and completely dismantle government regulation of pollution through the EPA, allowing corporations to pollute freely. The abortion riders would defund all family planning at the federal level as well as impact other women’s health programs, and the EPA riders look like a Christmas list for big-time polluters.

This would be like the Democrats attaching riders to rename Reagan Airport and remove any mention of God from U.S. currency. In other words, the GOP knows full well that Democrats–even if they did cave completely on the spending cuts–would still never vote for this bill.

It’s not that the GOP isn’t trying; they are trying–to force a shutdown. The Republicans don’t want the Democrats to agree, and they absolutely want the shutdown to happen.

Even more evidence: the latest emergency resolution to keep government funding going for another week contains $12 billion in spending cuts not germane to the extension, essentially parceling out extra cuts Republicans want in exchange for avoiding a shutdown. Again, a poison pill.

And again, proof that Republicans don’t want to solve anything, they just want every opportunity to say it’s the Democrats’ fault.

We have to create a new adjective: republican. As in, “I can’t believe that he embezzled five million dollars from the charity and then blamed it on that nun. That was so republican.”

Or, a phrasal verb–to “go republican,” as in to “go postal,” e.g.: “Little Jimmy went republican yesterday, taking the ball home in a whining fit so no one could play, and blamed everyone else for it, including the cat. And it wasn’t even his ball.”

Join in. What sentences would best exemplify these new terms?

We just got hit by another big quake. This was a big one. The TV reports say it hit Miyagi, but it was a long and strong quake even here in Tokyo. They’re calling it a “strong 6” in many parts of Tohoku. Like they need that. More in a few moments.

That quake lasted a good minute or more, and really shook the place. I would even say that it was stronger than anything we’ve felt since the day of the quake, or maybe the day after.

TV is reporting a 7.4 magnitude on the Richter scale. Wow.

Shutdown or no shutdown, it’s pretty damned clear which side wants one, which side has been pushing for one and still is. A Tea Party rally in D.C. was populated with signs urging a shutdown, while the crowd chanted, “Shut ‘er down! Shut ‘er down!” All this while trying to blame it on the Democrats. CNN called this “mixed signals,” as if there were no unified game plan here.

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The Wisconsin election for the state’s supreme court chief justice brought out the crowds, tripling participation from the last such election. David Prosser, claiming to be a non-partisan independent who just happens to be a Tea Party favorite, is endorsed by Sarah Palin, and goes around the state addressing right-wing organizations, was in fact rather easily identified as a conservative who would rule in favor of governor Walker. Before this whole union issue, Prosser was expected to win hands-down. Having won 55% in the general primary, with his challenger, assistant attorney general JoAnne Kloppenburg getting only 25%, Prosser was still expected to win easily. However, Kloppenburg, labeled as an inexperienced extremist in the millions of dollars of of out-of-state, Tea-party-funded advertising, surged way beyond her primary numbers as Prosser faded–so that now it is a virtual tie, with Kloppenburg ahead by only about two hundred votes. Even if Prosser winds up winning in a recount, this will be a hard slap in the face for state Republicans, who lost most of the other races outright.

So, naturally, the moment this is announced, the right-wingers start shouting “vote fraud.” Gee whiz, who could have predicted that would happen?

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Glenn Beck is leaving Fox News. Who will we buy gold from now?

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The new GOP plan to private Medicare and gut Medicaid will save $5.8 trillion in the next ten years, we are told. Except that the numbers they predict for economic growth and unemployment due to their miraculous plan are so ludicrous that they are almost literally laughable. We’re talking Magic Pony numbers here. Rep. Paul Ryan claims that his budget will create gazillions of jobs, bringing unemployment down to 2.8%, a number so far-fetched that even conservatives are shaking their heads. The “$5.8 trillion” he claims he will save is just as fictional, with $1.4 trillion coming from scrapping Obama’s Health Care Reform, which is strange, as the CBO said Obama’s plan would save almost exactly that much over the next 20 years. And his plan to “save” Medicare would only end up costing seniors more. Just like the GOP’s alternative to the Democrats’ health care reform, Republicans are claiming Democrats will send us to the poorhouse while GOP alternatives will bring cause money to fall from rainbows. Too bad the Congressional Budget Office disagrees. All the time.

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Hmm. Some of the major blogs seem to be agreeing with what I wrote two days ago.

Yep, the RIAA really set a class act for others to follow, all right.

For years, the RIAA waged a campaign against piracy. Blaming piracy for revenues lost due to a slumping economy and their own poor choices, the RIAA successfully lobbied Congress to pass an intellectual property law with ridiculously bloated penalties. They then used that to threaten file sharers. Knowing that taking thousands of individuals to court would be unfeasible, they took a page from the satellite TV anti-piracy attempts from a few decades earlier and also accepted “settlement” fees, nothing more than extortion really, usually at $3000 a head. Targets of the campaign usually had little choice, as defending themselves would cost more than the settlement fees would–the classic nuisance lawsuit. That was the idea: the RIAA wanted to establish that file sharing could cost users far more than they were comfortable risking; it was the whole point to be scary and intimidating. They cared little for fairness, propriety, or even guilt or innocence.

Although they now claim to have ended their campaign, they established a dangerous precedent. Others with even less scruples than the RIAA are now using the tools the RIAA left behind not as a means of discouraging piracy, but rather as a means of simply shaking down thousands of people at a time for money. It’s not about protecting intellectual property any more; it’s now seen as a revenue stream for shady film producers.

It started with the producers of The Hurt Locker. They changed the game by altering the method of shaking people down: instead of suing file sharers individually like the RIAA did–expensive due to individual filing fees–they came up with the plan of suing thousands of people all at once in a single venue. This would still allow them to extort people for thousands of dollars apiece, but to do so more quickly and inexpensively. Where the RIAA probably lost money, these producers saw a chance to enhance the earnings of their films.

While the Hurt Locker suit was eventually dropped, it didn’t take long for really scummy B-movie producers to pile on. Soon enough, small-time producers of cheesy and/or pornographic dreck started employing ratty ambulance chasers to file legal extortion rackets of their own, jumping into the game with the same enthusiasm–and just as much legitimacy–as Nigerian scammers. Now as many as 130,000 people have been sued in these new mass filings. Often they are thrown out, but the producers hope that, before that happens, they can scare enough enough people into coughing up settlements that they’ll end up with a tidy profit.

I don’t think anyone expects any of the lawsuits to come to anything, but there’s money to be made by giving these people the choice between paying a certain amount as a settlement or paying more in legal fees to defend yourself–especially if the extortionists are able to sue people all over the nation from one courtroom, forcing 70-year-old computer-illiterate grandmothers in Florida to defend themselves in Los Angeles courtrooms.

In fact, one movie producer, the Camelot Distribution Group, makers of the widely-acclaimed Nude Nuns with Big Guns, is jumping into the game, suing nearly 6,000 people for tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars, unless, of course, they pay the $3000 or whatever the scam goes for today.

The problem, in this case? Aside from it being a quasi-legal extortion racket? Camelot, it turns out, doesn’t even own the rights to the movie they’re trying to sue people over. That’s the level of scumminess we’re looking at now: scumball hack excuses for movie producers churning out pornographic trash using the court system to legally extort thousands of people… for a piece of fecal matter they don’t even own.

Thank you, RIAA, for setting the bar so low.

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Speaking of the RIAA, a case going to court could, potentially, change the landscape of these scam lawsuits. One of the two lawsuits that the RIAA did actually follow through on is going to a federal appeals court, which will be asked to judge on the legitimacy of the vastly inappropriate penalties in the intellectual property laws–the ones that the RIAA bribed Congress to get passed. There’s no question that they are far too excessive; the question is, will the court, often setting aside its own moral outrage, treat this as a purely technical matter and refuse to recognize the impropriety of fining an individual $150,000 for copying a $0.99 item and sharing bits of it between other people.

The whole idea of the penalty is flawed: it holds each file sharer responsible for the downloads made by a large number of other people in the network. If all users were penalized, the payoff to the title holder would be vastly disproportionate to the actual value lost–if any.

Let’s hope that this court will finally do away with the outrageously inappropriate penalty and remove from these scumwad movie producers the weapon they’re using to extort people for fun & profit.

If reports going around are accurate, then the GOP may finally be making a huge blunder that could cost them dearly in 2012: they are planning to dismantle Medicare. Or, more precisely, to turn it into something resembling the health care reform Obama and the Democrats set up.

The proposal would do away with (for everyone presently under 55 years of age) the current single payer government system for senior medical care and replace it with a program whereby seniors would choose private health insurance coverage from a menu of approved private health insurers. The government would subsidize the program by giving seniors a voucher to be used in purchasing coverage, the amount of such payment to be defined according to need.

The article goes on to note that the plan would actually be weaker than what Obama got passed, but that’s a side point at best. The main point is, they are pulling a Bush–they seem to be planning to firmly grasp a third-rail issue. One can only assume it is blind arrogance and a sense of invulnerability that allows them to think that this is a good idea.

Apparently they forgot what happened in 2005, when Bush went on his “Bamboozlepalooza” tour, trying to sell the American public on the idea of privatizing social security. It not only fell flat, but likely was a major factor contributing to further erosion of Republican power, leading to the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006.

Now, just months after taking the House back, they seem to think they are indestructible again. I mean, seriously, do away with Medicare? Do they really think that voters in their late 40s and early 50’s, now looking forward to getting on Medicare, will sit still for it to be yanked away from them? Do they think that those over 55 won’t see this as an encroachment, a threat that their own Medicare programs will be next on the GOP hit list?

And let’s not forget that the Tea Party faithful, the very same people who were flooding Democratic town halls at the behest of the Republicans, were furious at the suggestion made by Republicans that Democrats were going to fund health care reform at the expense of Medicare. Ergo the self-contradicting demands of “no socialized medicine, and don’t you dare touch our Medicare!”

Seriously, if these reports are accurate and the GOP truly plans to dismantle Medicare, they must be insane. Which, of course, you probably know I have long believed is likely the case.

Apparently, they will try to sell it as “reform” which will save up to $4 trillion. They seem to think that people will buy that, and be enticed by the prospect of slashing spending. Doubtless they will soon start pitching the line that Medicare is unsustainable and this will actually save it.

The thing is, people won’t buy it. The Republicans will find themselves in the same place they put Democrats in with health care reform: trying to justify an obscure promise of future benefit to a group of people fearful of losing what they have. People will far sooner believe that something bad is coming than hope that something good will come instead. The GOP would, in essence, be turning its own favored tactic on itself.

What surprises me is the idea that Republicans don’t see this. After all, this has been their chief weapon to gain power and beat Democrats with over the past decade.

To this potential opportunity to galvanize opposition to the GOP in general, add recent demographic studies showing likely increased minority influence in many states helping Obama and the Democrats.

I can only hope that the Republicans remain clueless, and, like Bush in 2005, stick to this plan. The only danger is that the Democrats, in their usual stupid, weak-kneed manner, fearing any slight possibility of disadvantage, will react by caving in before there is any time for the public to react–unfortunately, a very real possibility. Another possibility is that these reports reflect a simple trial balloon, or perhaps Republicans will catch on to their error very soon.

But if this is a mainstream right-wing plan, and if (hoping against hope) the Democrats don’t cave instantly, and if the Republicans are going to boldly campaign for this plan to its foreseeable end–then we could see Democrats actually make gains against Republicans next year instead of losing the Senate as many feel is now possible.

The conservative think tank in Michigan which joined with the Wisconsin Republicans in intimidation attempts against college faculty is reporting bomb threats against them:

The Mackinac Center For Public Policy — the conservative-leaning think tank in the news this week after it requested emails from Michigan labor studies professors regarding Wisconsin and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow — says it has called in the FBI after receiving a series of threatening voicemails that promised to bomb their Midland, Michigan headquarters.

“You are on Main Street,” one of the voicemails said, according to details posted on the Mackinac website. “You are the first place to be bombed.”

If authentic, then the bomb threats are indeed vile, no matter who they came from.

The thing is, I don’t buy it. Oh, I am sure there are those on the leftist fringe who could certainly do such things. However, considering the calls for “false flag” operations and the rather strong attempts by the right wing to create the impression that left-wingers in general and teacher unions specifically are violent, I would not be surprised in the least if this were indeed orchestrated by the conservatives to give themselves some free publicity and give liberals and teachers both a black eye at the same time.

Again, it could be authentic, but the language is just a little too over the top:

[A] female was quoted as saying the following in one of the messages: “Scotty Walker is dead. So are you. We know where you live.” The woman then recited the Mackinac Center’s address and said, “We are coming up to destroy you.” …

In another message, the Capitol Confidential article stated the woman said: “We are going to destroy everybody. We are going to destroy all of you. All of you die. Midland, Michigan. Get ready. We are going to destroy all of you.”

Usually I would not question stuff like this. But the current right-wing efforts in the Midwest simply have lost all credibility, and I would not put anything past them. And I think that needs to be said. By all means, have the police investigate and necessary precautions taken.

But keep your hands on your wallet. These people deserve protection without question, but not our unquestioning faith in their sincerity.

Republicans continue to try to work the media and the public so they will believe that the government shutdown they have been working so hard to make happen is actually the Democrats’ fault. I am reminded of what child bullies sometimes do, pinning down another child and forcing the victim’s arm to hit the their face while the bully chants, “Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!” That’s the GOP right now, forcing the government into a shutdown while chanting at the Democrats, “Stop shutting down the government! Stop shutting down the government!”

Really, it’s pathetic. Compromise is the way things work in Washington. It always has been; it’s precisely how things were designed to work. “No compromise” was the Republican’s plan, one which they stated boldly since the budget disagreements started last year. It was the Republicans who advanced the specter of shutdown, and it is they who dominate its discussion over the airwaves.

The Democrats have already compromised, they have lived up to their side of the bargain, coming literally halfway. Every time there was an extension, they participated. They have done everything reasonable to keep the government from shutting down. It is hard to blame them for refusing to cave in completely, to give up everything and get nothing.

The GOP, on the other hand, is demanding just that; give us everything, 100% of what we want and you get nothing, or else there’s no deal and no budget and the government shuts down–but it’s your fault if that happens. The problem is, it’s not reasonable on its face. It’s like co-workers jointly responsible for a project, but one of them says, “I get 100% of the bonus pay for this work, and you get nothing, and if you refuse, I’ll make us miss the deadline and assign all the blame on you.” The coworker being coerced does not truly have any blame so long as they are OK with a 50-50 split and work in good faith, which is exactly what the Democrats are are doing. Compromise is the reasonable settlement, and Democrats are already there.

And that’s the GOP’s dilemma: the shutdown will only work for them if the public believes that it is truly the Democrats’ fault. And with the GOP saying “no compromise,” and with the Democrats compromising, and with the GOP being the one shouting about shutdown all the time, it’s kind of hard for them to make their case.

That’s why they have come up with temporary extensions up until now–they don’t feel the public believes them yet. They remember the shutdown of 1995 in which Clinton successfully managed to make it look like the Republicans’ fault. Clinton, however, had it relatively easy–Gingrich had sourly complained about being seated in the rear of Air Force One when flying to Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral. This complaint was connected to Gingrich by the media, and made him look bad.

This time, the Republicans not only will not have that kind of blunder coloring perceptions, but they will have Fox News at its prime advancing their narrative 24/7, with most of the rest of the media likely following close behind.

Even so, it will be a tough sell. With all of this bluster behind them, it is doubtful they will simply decide not to pull the trigger, even if the chances are against them. Even if they are blamed, it is likely they will still see it as a agin for them, as bad perceptions of Congress in general will still probably play worst against Democrats in 2012.

It’s been a while since I have been birdwatching. It’s nice weather these days, which is to say, clear and sunny but not so cold. So Sachi and I took a walk outside to a few close-by parks. One was really close, right outside the door; the other just a block or so away. Anticipating a few birds, I took the camera with the zoom lens. There were a lot more birds out than I thought–none unusual, but some nice standards.

We got the Japanese Pygmy Woodpecker, Great Tit, Brown-Eared Bulbul, Oriental Greenfinch, Dusky Thrush, Grey Starling, Japanese White-Eye, and the Bull-Headed Shrike. (There were sparrows and crows also, but aren’t there always.) The Shrike was the least expected, but the prettiest was the Japanese White-Eye, pretty partly because of the yellow-green plumage, but also because it is framed by the newly-arrived cherry blossoms. They were mostly in the daikan-zakura, a kind of cherry tree that blossoms early despite the cold.

In any case, here are the better shots I took this morning. Click to embiggen, with only a few exceptions. First, the mejiro, or Japanese White-Eye:

This next image is not upside-down, the bird is. The White-Eyes often hang upside down to reach the blossoms and drink the nectar.

Next is the kawarahira, or the Oriental Greenfinch.

I was lucky enough to catch one in mid-flight, which is where you can see the lovely yellow and black wing markings.

In our local park, I caught the Pygmy Woodpecker (kogera), always a nice little catch.

Less spectacular is the Grey Starling:

Often on the ground at this time of year is the tsugumi, the Dusky Thrush:

And the nice surprise, the Bull-Headed Shrike, with lovely color, the eye stripe, and the overbite:

…and, of course, the flowers were pretty.

Finally, this annoying Bulbul–one of my least-favorite birds (they’re everywhere and don’t sing, but instead screech) which did nothing to improve my opinion by chasing off all the White-Eyes–the two birds compete for the same food source at this time, namely the cherry blossoms.

Afterwards, we stopped by the small pizza house at the edge of the park, the one that was really a coffee house and had just one type of pizza. But it was nice, and more than anything, a nice little day out.

Republicans are more and more trying to get away with ignoring the law. Of course, in the past, it has been mostly interpretations, such as that of constitutional law–that the First Amendment doesn’t mandate a separation of church and state, for example, or that the Ninth Amendment effectively does not exist. Recently, we have started to see more examples of Republicans rather blatantly flouting the legal process.

After Republicans in Wisconsin rammed through a law which stripped educators of their collective bargaining rights, Democrats filed a lawsuit pertaining to the process involved in passing the law; pending the outcome of that case, a Wisconsin judge ordered that the law not be published or implemented. Republicans ignored the the judge, publishing it anyway. Laws are published by the Secretary of State in an official publication, which is what the judge order halted. Republicans simply published it on their own elsewhere and claimed that this effectively invalidated the judge’s order.

So the judge reissued the order, noting that the original order was more than clear enough but emphasizing that the law may in no way be published. Again, Republicans ignored the judge, taking only minutes after the second order to publicly claim that the law was in effect and that was that.

Republicans were, effectively, claiming that they could simply ignore the courts. The court was not amused, and the judge issued a terse order stating unequivocally that the law was not published according to law and it was not in effect. Probably knowing the Republicans would simply continue thumbing their noses at the law, the judge threatened sanctions this time if they did not comply. Finally, the Republicans gave in.

They are not the only ones to have unique views on how the rule of law works, however. Republicans in Washington are currently trying to engineer a shutdown of government, held back only by the knowledge that they would, rightly, be blamed for the shutdown. In their latest ploy to make it all seem like the Democrats’ fault, they are presenting a “Prevention of Government Shutdown Act” (so named to give the impression that Democrats have been trying to shut down the government while Republicans have been trying to stop them). That little piece of grandstanding is not so startling as what Cantor, at a press conference, claimed would happen:

On Friday, we will bring to the floor, the Government Prevention of, excuse me, the Prevention of Government Shutdown Act. And that will say to the American people: the Senate’s got to act, prior to the expiration of the CR. If it doesn’t not act, HR 1 becomes the law of the land. [emphasis mine]

Cantor and the Republicans were actually claiming that they could enact a law all by themselves so long as the Senate did not agree to what they demanded. Which, of course, is utter horse manure. Both houses must agree on the exact wording of the bill and then the president has to sign it. To simply claim that House passage alone can make it “the law of the land” is astonishingly stupid.

So said Lawrence O’Donnell, who took Cantor to task for this attempt to ignore not just the law, but the Constitution itself. Apologists for Cantor called it an “error,” as if it were a slip of the tongue Cantor made at the press conference–but that “error” was written directly into the legislation, H.R. 1255, which says:

Deadline for Consideration of Legislation Funding the Government for the Remainder of Fiscal Year 2011- If the House has not received a message from the Senate before April 6, 2011, stating that it has passed a measure providing for the appropriations for the departments and agencies of the Government for the remainder of fiscal year 2011, the provisions of H.R. 1, as passed by the House on February 19, 2011, are hereby enacted into law. [emphasis mine]

There’s no error; Republicans were trying to claim that if the Senate didn’t vote on the issue by a date that Republicans set, the House would just overrule the Senate and roll past the president and make their own law.

One can only assume that, unless the Republicans have gone completely insane–which I am not discounting–that this is precisely nothing more than a PR stunt. After all, for H.R. 1255 to pass, it also would have to be approved by the Senate and signed by the president. However, to assume that this would happen would be complete and utter fantasy. In short, it’s all window dressing, all intended to give the public the impression that everything bad that happens is the Democrats’ fault–that being the cover the GOP is looking for the shut down the government.

Something in me, however, says that there are actually Republicans who believe that they could do this, or at least claim they did it and then hold their breath until they turned red in the face (they would never turn blue, after all). This is the extent to which Republicans have simply stopped recognizing what the law is and instead believe that they can claim that the law is whatever they say it is.

For the past few days, the cherry blossoms in the trees outside our apartment have been showing buds, almost ready to blossom. The weather this week is sunny, and for the next few days at least, is middling-to-warm–good weather for the trees to open.

Today, in fact, the first one opened. It looked like it would yesterday evening, and as it turns out, we were right.

In a day or two, the trees should start to look nice and fluffy, but will likely be gone before we move out. We closed on the new home today–got the keys and everything–and appropriate timing too, just as the first blossom arrived.

Click on either image to enlarge.

Not long ago, the Republican Party of Wisconsin demanded to see the emails of Professor William Cronon at the University of Wisconsin Madison, just a few days after Cronon wrote a blog post critical of the Republican governor of that state. Instead of being shamed by the blatant attempt to intimidate a scholar for exercising his freedom of speech, conservatives upped the ante and now a Michigan think tank is demanding email files on a number of other professors in that state.

They claim that the requests are legitimate because the professors, technically, are state workers and thus their files open to public review. They claim that it is not an act of intimidation because they are only looking for emails containing certain keywords. They even claim that it is the protests against their demands that are “chilling,” rather than the demands themselves.

Frankly, their claims are all self-serving and baseless. The requests should be denied out of hand for several reasons.

The first reason is academic freedom. Academics are often targeted by political figures and organizations, their jobs threatened for doing nothing more than speaking out. This is the key purpose of tenure, a hot-button issue in exactly this political debate–not as a cushy, union-based job security perk, but to protect academics from being punished for holding certain points of view that diverge from prevailing opinions, particularly those held in political circles. There is a long history of academics being punished, particularly in the form of career derailment, for the opinions they hold or the ideas they express, either publicly or in the classroom. The demands by political parties for private email records by educators regarding political matters is itself the best example why tenure should be protected and those making the demands should be censured.

The next reason is motives. Even if the request were made by a truly interested party for valid reasons, an open release of such academic records would still be questionable, with the matter instead best handled privately. For example, if an aggrieved parent of a student claimed that a professor was unjustly penalizing that student, that would at least qualify as a legitimate basis for a grievance which could, ultimately, lead to a limited private review of the email files of a professor. In the Wisconsin and Michigan cases, however, neither the parties asking for the information nor the purpose of their requests are legitimate to the context of the demand. The people demanding to see the professors’ emails are political entities, not parties with any legitimate interest in academic records, and the requests come immediately after the academics in question made public statements on issues that are politically sensitive–exactly the kind of situation where academic freedom is considered most relevant. The political entities’ claim that the keyword restrictions of the demands legitimize them instead prove the reverse; the keywords requested in the Michigan case, for example, are “Scott Walker,” “Wisconsin,” “Madison,” and “Maddow”–terms which reveal a blatantly political motive.

Furthermore, such records requests are supposedly intended to uncover malfeasance, but there is no–none, zero–indication that anything inappropriate was ever done by any of these professors, and the political nature of the keywords only serve to prove that the parties demanding the information are fishing for anything that could be used to discredit and otherwise harm the reputation of the professors regarding any political statements they made.

Finally, there is the issue of privacy. Not the privacy of academics making public statements, not even the privacy involved in the pursuit of academic freedom. But the privacy of students who expect full confidentiality regarding their academic work. The accounts in question are exactly those that would be used by the professors to communicate with students about the students’ work. The Michigan case, for example, involves all faculty members in the Labor Studies departments at Michigan State University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Wayne State University. Considering the keywords and the courses taught in the Labor Studies department, there is little doubt that the emails produced by such a search would include a great deal of correspondence with students over their essays, course work, grades, and even possibly could include material covering disciplinary actions (e.g., plagiarism claims) which are highly confidential and should, by no means whatsoever, be made public in any form.

In short, the demands made by these conservative groups are politically corrupt in their very nature, violate various ethical standards, and should not even be considered, much less granted.

The problem, of course, is that more and more, the conservatives talking points are being successfully sold as the New Truth. The very terms relevant to this issue have been twisted and turned to serve political ambitions and agendas. “Academic freedom,” in conservative circles, is nothing more than an end-run around constitutional prohibitions against teaching religious doctrine in the public classroom; they certainly will not respect the actual meaning or spirit of the term. Tenure, to them, is a cudgel that can be used to attack unions; it has already been at least partially redefined by the right wing to represent shiftless, incompetent, overpaid union-protected educators.

Worse, we now have a political climate in which conservatives feel comfortable doing pretty much whatever they feel like. Right-wingers are shamelessly and transparently lying about a variety of issues to make outright political attacks. Hidden-camera videos are heavily edited to mislead so as to take down organizations seen as liberal. False claims of voter fraud are fabricated so as to pass laws which would impede the ability of liberals to vote. Budget shortfalls are disingenuously said to be caused by overpaid teachers so that their unions, often supporters of Democratic causes, can be stripped of their power and influence. When a judge stops the law, Republicans simply ignore the judge–and the rule of law. Conservative officials advise “false flag operations” where faked assassination attempts can be blamed on political enemies. And college professors who dare speak their minds in public find themselves targets of political inquisitions.

We are not a fascist dictatorship. However, far too much of what goes on politically in our nation today bears far too great a resemblance to exactly that state. To which, the proper response would be shame; instead, conservatives simply blame those they seek to fraudulently vilify with the exact malfeasance they commit, with barely disguised smugness and contempt for propriety.

For them, fairness and honesty is for schmucks. They’re playing for keeps.

Recently, the blogosphere–and a good portion of the news media–went nuts about how Joe Biden “locked a reporter in a closet” during a Democratic fundraiser. Even the milder reports made it sound like the man was stuffed into an actual closet, the sort in which jackets are hung, with no lights, where you have to stand up in the dark. Not so; it was a “closet” only in the sense that things were stored in the room. The room itself was not dark or even windowless, and was big enough to hold storage and have enough space for a table and chair. But now everyone calls it a “closet,” despite the fact that the word is highly misleading.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the right-wing echo chamber immediately exaggerated the exaggeration so we got headlines like “Biden Thugs Imprison Reporter.” Of course, nothing of the sort ever happened. The reporter’s own story:

Here’s what happened. I showed up at the private home of developer, philanthropist and political contributor Alan Ginsburg Wednesday morning to file a pool report on the visit there by Biden and U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Orlando. When I arrived I was told I would not be able to speak with any of the people at the party, and that I was to wait in a room until Biden and Nelson arrived. I went in willingly, with the understanding that I was free to leave — but if I left I’d probably have to leave the house entirely, and not get to cover the speeches.

I called it a closet, because it was stuffed with shelves, boxes, baskets and other items in storage, and it felt like a closet. The vice president’s office called it a room used for storage. It had a light, a window somewhere in the back behind the shelves full of boxes, and a few square feet of open space in the front. They set up a small table and a chair for me. They offered me food, which I declined, and brought me a bottle of water. They closed the door.  I sat to wait, mistakenly thinking it would be only a few minutes. The door wasn’t locked, though every time I opened it and stepped out to see what was going on a staffer told me I couldn’t come out yet. He’d let me know.

So, this “closet” was a room with a window with enough space to set up a table. They offered him food and drinks and a place to sit. The only bad thing was that the room was also used for storage, and wasn’t roomy. The door was never locked, and the reporter was free to leave at any time.

From that, we get the story that Biden uses thugs to imprison reporters in closets. Compare this to last year when a private security agency hired by GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller handcuffed a reporter in a public area and held him for about half an hour against his will. No media headlines at that time used terms like “thugs” or “imprisoned.”

Damn that liberal media.

How the right wing is maintaining it’s all-out assault on labor is mystifying to me, in that labor is, essentially, what almost every American person who goes to work actually does. Somehow, people have started believing that labor only represents and benefits a selected few, people who are incompetent leeches who do little of value while receiving fat paychecks and exorbitant benefits packages.

That definition better describes corporate executives, not working stiffs. And yet conservatives have convinced a huge swath of laborers that “labor” describes only specific workers who are causing all their woes, and that the corporate fat cats are the ones who need protecting. “Labor” is people who work for a living. Not just teachers, not just union members. It’s anyone who works for a wage.

Labor laws which make sure your employer can’t abuse you, must pay you a minimum wage, must provide a safe workplace–these are what the labor movement, and yes, even those evil unions, have given us.

And yet somehow people are being led to believe that the laws that keep workers safe and free from abuse are actually damaging and destroying jobs because of how stifling and repressive they are, and that laws which guarantee a basic living wage are bad for the worker due to a superficial rationale that sounds correct but, strangely, has never been demonstrated in reality.

We know that conservatives have been doing this for quite some time, but now they have broken free from the constraints that previously held them in place. It is in part due to the rather notable swing to the right the country has taken, and the pathetic attempt by the left to stay relevant by swinging almost as much to the right. It is in part due to the drive to redefine almost everything in conservative terms, a movement propelled by Gingrich in the 1990’s and sustained by the non-stop conservative campaign in the media via the preponderance of conservative commentators and the juggernaut which is Fox News. It was given false legitimacy during the Bush administration, where all manner of illegalities could be committed and were rarely investigated or punished, to the point where people just take such things for granted now and don’t even blink when they see news about them. And now it has been given new fire by this nebulous Tea Party movement, which, like most conservative movements, is a small minority, and yet commands almost irresistible influence.

So we see the Republicans in Wisconsin coming up with a transparent lie that the budget is being busted by teachers unions, and so they unilaterally strip educators of their collective bargaining rights, a ploy being attempted in many Republican-held legislatures across the country. In its wake, we see the path littered with individual acts of malfeasance, from the Republican Party’s attempt to intimidate a professor for speaking out by demanding access to his emails, to an out-of-state Republican seriously proposing a “false flag” operation, where someone pretending to be in labor would make an assassination attempt against the Republican governor so as to stir public animosity against their opponents. All while Fox News heavily tilted coverage and faked their own news of union violence.

The governor of Maine, in an act far less serious but just as indicative of anti-union sentiment, actually had a mural depicting laborers removed from the lobby of the Labor Department for the state. Why? Because it wasn’t pro-business enough. Yes, god forbid the labor department be about labor instead of business. Have you ever heard a Democrat complaining that the Department of Commerce was too pro-business? Seriously?

It doesn’t matter if you are not a union member. Unions and labor movements are why you have a halfway decent job–and if you don’t have a halfway decent job, the lack of labor protection is probably why. Labor movements are why you’re not being paid a dollar an hour to work in unsafe conditions with your employer having all the power and you having none. People take these conditions for granted, assume that they cannot regress or that if they can, it has nothing to do with labor organizations. And they will probably continue to believe so even as their work conditions continue to degrade to the point where they will feel it necessary to do something about it.

And even then, they will probably lack the will to start anything resembling a union, because unions are bad. Everyone knows that.

Nice article from two reporters in Tokyo on how TEPCO underestimated the possibility of a quake such as the one that hit two weeks ago. TEPCO engineers only predicted what could happen based on what has been observed in recent history, ignoring archaeological evidence that every thousand years or so Japan is hit by giant tsunamis which sweep miles inland–and the previous one hit only a bit over a thousand years ago. Many American nuclear plant scenarios take into account extreme situations, like a quakes and tsunamis more powerful than ever recorded, at time when storms drive waters even higher. TEPCO, however, lowballed their estimates:

A TEPCO reassessment presented only four months ago concluded that tsunami-driven water would push no higher than 18 feet (5.7 meters) once it hit the shore at the Fukushima Dai-ichi complex. The reactors sit up a small bluff, between 14 and 23 feet (4.3 and 6.3 meters) above TEPCO’s projected high-water mark, according to a presentation at a November seismic safety conference in Japan by TEPCO civil engineer Makoto Takao.

“We assessed and confirmed the safety of the nuclear plants,” Takao asserted.

However, the wall of water that thundered ashore two weeks ago reached about 27 feet (8.2 meters) above TEPCO’s prediction. The flooding disabled backup power generators, located in basements or on first floors, imperiling the nuclear reactors and their nearby spent fuel pools.

Scientists in Japan have been aware of this possibility since long before the TEPCO assessments:

As early as 2001, a group of scientists published a paper documenting the Jogan tsunami. They estimated waves of nearly 26 feet (8 meters) at Soma, about 25 miles north of the plant. North of there, they concluded that a surge from the sea swept sand more than 2 1/2 miles (4 kilometers) inland across the Sendai plain. The latest tsunami pushed water at least about 1 1/2 miles (2 kilometers) inland.

The scientists also found two additional layers of sand and concluded that two additional “gigantic tsunamis” had hit the region during the past 3,000 years, both presumably comparable to Jogan. Carbon dating couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the other two hit, but the study’s authors put the range of those layers of sand at between 140 B.C. and A.D. 150, and between 670 B.C. and 910 B.C.

While it may be satisfying to see reports that TEPCO may be held liable for the damage caused by the plant’s crisis, it doesn’t take any engineering reassessment or scientific study to figure out where that money will be coming from.

A new video has been released of the tsunami hitting the town of Kesennuma in Miyagi prefecture. This video has both good and bad points. The good point is that, more than any other video I have seen, it gives an excellent understanding of how high the tsunami swelled. Most people think of a tsunami as a wave, like surfers might ride–a wall of water–and so are confused when they see images of what looks to be a swift tide that seems shallow. The wave, in fact, appears very flat, a spillage more than a wave, but builds gradually but strongly. Note the building just at the (old) shore with the green roof and how it is eventually swamped. You can tell the person taking the video is on very high ground near the shore, but near the end it feels like the water might reach even them.

The bad point about the video is, as with most amateur videos of this length and scope, you become frustrated with where the person taking the video is pointing the camera, especially when you know the water is swamping a car lot and crushing a row of buildings just to the right, but the person filming stays focused on the area that has already been covered with water. So you miss a good sense of how the more central areas of the town were inundated and what the forces of the incoming water did to more than just the coast–but you do see enough to get an even greater deal of respect for exactly how powerful this wave was, and how deep it got.

After the whole Scott Walker affair in Wisconsin, we’re far from done with the spirit of that political conquest. In fact, it’s only getting dirtier.

Under the transparently false pretense of budget concerns, the Republicans (while doling out huge tax breaks for the wealthy) unilaterally obliterated the collective bargaining rights of educators in the state, in a blatantly political attack against the opposition party’s constituent base.

Well, they’re not stopping there. With the taste of victory still fresh, they are stepping over another line: launching inquisitions against people who criticize them.

William Cronon, Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin, wrote a blog post on the Republican campaign against educators, studying the motives and history behind the legislation.

Two days later, the Republican Party of Wisconsin demanded access to view all of Cronon’s emails issued from his university account.

Only peripheral to the issue is whether it is legal for the Republican party to do that.

Much more central is the surprisingly open threat. After all, only a fool would believe they are making this request for any purpose other than to try to find dirt on Cronon and then do anything from smearing him publicly to getting him fired. The message is frighteningly clear: if you criticize what we do, we will crawl up your back end with a microscope and do everything we can to destroy you.

One can only hope that the flagrantly shameless attempt at character assassination for political purposes is given the response it deserves: refusal at minimum, censure at best.

Keep in mind who these people are, what they claim to stand for, who they claim are the intrusive government fascists, and what liberties and freedoms they so falsely espouse but at the same time ruthlessly destroy.

Cronon, in the meantime, subsequently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times against the actions of Walker and the Republicans. One can only imagine that they’re trying to get access to his tax records after that.

UPDATE: In true Republican form, their response to criticisms about this shameless political attack strategy are a mixture of hypocrisy, outrageous hyperbole, and playing the victim:

“I have never seen such a concerted effort to intimidate someone from lawfully seeking information about their government,” [GOP executive director Mark] Jefferson writes. “Further, it is chilling to see that so many members of the media would take up the cause of a professor who seeks to quash a lawful open records request. Taxpayers have a right to accountable government and a right to know if public officials are conducting themselves in an ethical manner.”

Had the FOI request come from parents of students in his classes after viable accusations of misconduct, that would be a legitimate claim. But coming from a political party after someone simply criticized them in an open forum, their response is as disingenuous as the original action was viciously unethical. Shamelessness upon shamelessness. These people are thugs in the worst sense: that they are not only brazenly ruthless, but are endlessly slick and slimy in their PR portrayals of themselves as heroes who are victimized unfairly by the very people they attempt to crush.

Here we go again. Bryan Fischer, writing for Renew America (you can usually tell it’s some hard-right conservative Christian Tea Party publication when the name of the site includes words like “America,” “freedom,” “liberty,” “patriot,” etc.), argues that the First Amendment does not apply to non-Christians. Especially not Muslims.

Fischer used to be a director for the “Idaho Values Alliance” (another code word there, “values,” as in “we want to impose ours on you by force of law”; whenever you see words like “values” or “family,” especially preceding the word “first,” it’s a good bet it’s conservative Christian), and now hosts a radio show called Focal Point. Fischer is vehemently anti-Muslim.

He begins:

The First Amendment was written by the Founders to protect the free exercise of Christianity. They were making no effort to give special protections to Islam. Quite the contrary. We actually at the time were dealing with our first encounters with jihad in the form of the Barbary Pirates, which is why Jefferson bought a copy of the Koran.

That’s nice. Via his fortuitous name-dropping non-sequitur, we’re supposed the believe that the founders, especially Jefferson, were specifically excluding those barbarous Muslims. Except, not really. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, seen as a precursor to the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, set the tone when conservative Christians of the day tried to hijack that document and make it about Christianity alone. From Thomas Jefferson’s autobiography:

Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed by inserting ‘Jesus Christ,’ so that it would read ‘A departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion;’ the insertion was rejected by the great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mohammedan, the Hindoo and Infidel of every denomination.

So, right there, Fischer’s whole thesis is kinda shot to hell. He continues:

Islam has no fundamental First Amendment claims, for the simple reason that it was not written to protect the religion of Islam. Islam is entitled only to the religious liberty we extend to it out of courtesy. While there certainly ought to be a presumption of religious liberty for non-Christian religious traditions in America, the Founders were not writing a suicide pact when they wrote the First Amendment.

Here’s where he tries to explain why Islam and other religions have enjoyed protection up until now: we’re doing it as a courtesy. It’s not law, mind you; we have no obligation to allow Hindus or Muslims or even Jews to practice their religion. We’re just letting them because we’re polite. But we’re not crazy. We know that giving Jews and Muslims and Hindus and all those other nasty people the same religious protections that Christians enjoy would destroy the nation.

Fischer then gets to his point:

From a constitutional point of view, Muslims have no First Amendment right to build mosques in America. They have that privilege at the moment, but it is a privilege that can be revoked if, as is in fact the case, Islam is a totalitarian ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States.

He backs this up by going back to Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who, in the early 19th century, wrote:

The real object of the amendment was, not to countenance, much less to advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity, by prostrating Christianity; but to exclude all rivalry among Christian sects…

Well, pretty ironclad right there, huh? Almost two centuries ago, a Supreme Court justice, in a commentary not part of any law, once opined that the First Amendment was intended for Christians only. That trumps just about everything, right? After all, there’s probably been no further commentary on the idea since then, and Story was, after all, the final arbiter on how we interpret the First Amendment. </sarcasm>

In the 1984 Supreme Court decision Wallace v. Jaffree, which ruled against prayer in public schools, Stevens wrote (directly citing Story’s statement in the footnotes) that:

At one time, it was thought that this right merely proscribed the preference of one Christian sect over another, but would not require equal respect for the conscience of the infidel, the atheist, or the adherent of a non-Christian faith such as Islam or Judaism. But when the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all.

Not that any of this would matter to Fischer. He’s pretty far out there, holding that the Nazis were gay (ergo homosexuality leads to such things), that the genocide against native Americans was okay because the natives were not morally “qualified” to control the continent, and, convinced that Muslims are bent on overthrowing the United States, advocates the forced expulsion of all Muslims from the country.

Fischer’s writing serves as an excellent example of exactly why the First Amendment is so vital: those who are convinced that their religious views are morally superior will, inevitably, attempt to rob all others of their own freedom to think and choose as they wish. Not satisfied with simply applying their moral code to their own actions, they will feel compelled to force others into their mold or else suppress or evict them.

Fortunately, the First Amendment denies people like Fischer the ability to carry out the acts which, in their First Amendment freedoms, they so passionately advance.

Just in case you forgot how essentially dishonest the opposition to Obama is, here’s a reminder.

Newt Gingrich on Fox News, March 7th:

Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. … All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we’re intervening. And we don’t have to send troops. All we have to do is suppress his air force, which we could do in minutes. … This is a moment to get rid of him. Do it. Get it over with.

So, Obama went the no-fly-zone route, bombed to defend Libyan rebels, and did not commit ground troops. All good, right?

Newt on the Today Show , March 23:

I would not have intervened. I think there are a lot of other ways to affect Gaddafi. I think there are a lot of other allies in the region that we could have worked with. … Having decided to go there, if Qaddafi does not leave power it will be a defeat for the U.S., it will lengthen our engagement, it will increase our costs.

Criticism of Obama from the right wing is, and never has been, about anything he has actually done. Obama doesn’t bomb Libya, he’s wrong. Obama does bomb Libya, he’s wrong. Nor is this the only example; half the stuff Obama has done is stuff that Republicans used to support, not too long ago. They don’t oppose ideas, or policy, or very much at all, in fact. If Obama does anything, it’s wrong and will harm the country. And if Obama were to do something they could not possibly oppose–like advocate for a ban on abortion, for example–they would simply switch to criticizing how and why he’d do it while the goal posts much farther down the field and criticizing him for not going that far.

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By the way, a little aside: right-wingers are now saying that the presidency is “beneath” Sarah Palin, and that it would be a “step down” for her. (Didn’t you know? Palin is the new Oprah.)

And liberals, in case you forgot, are elitists.

Last March–exactly a year ago today, in fact–we laid a claim to the apartment we’re now occupying, so we could move into the place in early May. Well, less than a year later, we’re moving out, unless Fukushima erupts in a manner that would shock even Troy. (My guest, not the ancient city.) This morning, we went to the bank to sign papers for the house loan. We will close the deal in one week, barring something catastrophic, which, by my reckoning, will happen about 15 minutes after we close the deal.

If all goes well, we will be moving house in mid-April, moving into the new place–hopefully the last move in a long time.

The shortest time I have stayed in one place in Japan was when I rented an apartment in Tachikawa for one year back in 1989. The longest was my stay in Inagi, from 2000 to 2007. Our stay in Hibarigaoka will be the shortest yet, followed by the longest to be–also in Hibarigaoka, but to the north of the station. Close enough that we can almost walk our belongings over. Well, not quite, but I figure I can get some smaller stuff over in a series of quick scooter rides–I haven’t timed it, but I bet I could make the run in less than five minutes.