I expect some of you saw the Republican debate this past week – ten-strong G.O.P. hopefuls in a fiddling contest as Rome burns around them, sparked by an ember first coddled by the sainted Ronald Reagan, whose administration launched the resurgent America now being destroyed by his veep’s mutant spawn. 
Yes, it was a proud moment indeed when applause could be heard at the mere mention of torture (or “enhanced interrogation techniques”, as some put it). McCain, of course, gave his standard speech about torture – inspiring, until you recall that the “anti-torture” legislation he ultimately signed onto last year has holes big enough to pass a dozen waterboards through. To be certain, he was the only one there who’d ever experienced torture, and I imagine he and his fellow P.O.W.’s may have believed during their captivity, as McCain suggested, that America would never abuse prisoners in such a way. Just a ways south of the “Hanoi Hilton”, however, the C.I.A. and local allies were applying grisly and often lethal techniques on their captives with sickening regularity, particularly in connection with the Phoenix program, which left probably 20,000 dead (many of whom, like so many current detainees, may as well have been picked at random). Of course, how that is any worse than just dropping cluster bombs or jellied gasoline on people kind of escapes me.
So, yes… the FoxNews-sponsored event (hosted by correspondent Shit Fume… I mean, Brit Hume) turned into a pissing match over who was the bigger troglodyte on prisoner abuse. In all, I think Mitt Romney deserves a special prize for saying that Guantanamo should be “doubled.” Reasoning? We don’t want those terrorists to have access to our laws and equitable (ahem) justice system – to do so would only contribute to the collapse of western civilization and the universal values it represents. So… we can’t allow our western standard of human rights to apply to them because that would undermine our western standard of human rights. Well done, Mitt. Beautiful circularity. And that sort of sotto voce delivery (a la Reagan) is getting better every time I hear it. (Of course, Tom Tancredo gets a special prize for exclaiming, “We need Jack Bauer!” to deal with Shit Fume’s 24-esque straw man torture scenario.)
We were also treated this week to some of the actual real-world reasoning behind keeping terror suspects out of the courtroom. As with the Phoenix program, I’m certain many of these detainees were captured on the basis of an informant accusation – perhaps a disgruntled neighbor or the like – or some other questionable evidence that might not stand up in open court. At Jose Padilla’s trial, for instance, the prosecution presented a kind of Al Qaeda recruitment document that purportedly had Padilla’s fingerprints on it. Of course, the guy was held in an extra judicial hole for years and had his wits tortured out of him to the point where he cannot even aid in his own defense, so it’s just possible that during that long process he may have been presented with this document during “enhanced” interrogation. Fact is, it seems the real reason they don’t want to try terror suspects in open court is that they often don’t have much of a case against them.
Note to Mitt and colleagues (both Republican and Democrat): if you don’t have a case, you shouldn’t be holding people. That’s supposed to be one of our founding principles. Why are you all so afraid of that?
luv u,
jp
Whirl, whirl, twist and twirl… jump around like a flying squirrel. You pull my beard, I’ll pull your’n. Pick him up and hit ‘im in the head. Hit ‘im again, that critter ain’t dead!
Lincoln (our famous president), and anti-Lincoln (his evil twin) have all been released into the wild, there to do what nature commands. In my case, that’s sleeping in this alley. ‘Cause that’s the kind of fella that I am. (I’m biding my time….)
our return to the Mill and, if necessary, to raise the money for any fines levied against our account. So far no progress – in fact, he’s been sputtering and clanging in the same spot since I issued that command about a week ago. (Personally, I doubt he’s even started the assignment….) Bloody servo mechanisms! When do I get a proper robot? And where’s my jet pack!
Well… not entirely. This was also the week that Luis Posada Carriles was allowed to walk, his immigration-related charges having been thrown out by a federal judge. But this septuagenarian is not just somebody’s elderly uncle who entered the country illegally to visit a sick relative. A former C.I.A. operative, Posada is one of the alleged masterminds of the 1976 bombing of a civilian airliner that resulted in the deaths of all 73 people on board. He was jailed in connection with this charge by the Venezuelan government – not the current one, mind you, but a very pro-U.S. administration – based on an international investigation carried out by several Caribbean nations, including Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, and Cuba. (Check out this 
So… some terrorists get thrown into dark cells in client states; others go to a hero’s welcome in Miami or get their own T.V. show on Fox. It’s all about targeting. If they kill people who don’t count, there are no consequences… and there are often rewards, in fact. If they threaten our friends or ourselves, it’s a whole different story. Buy letting Posada walk, we’re saying it’s okay to blow up planes if the civilians on board happen to live in a country we have some dispute with. What the hell kind of “War on Terror” is that? I mean, doesn’t our government’s very definition of terrorism incorporate violence against innocents to achieve some political end? If Posada, Bosch, and their like are deemed not worthy of prosecution, doesn’t that serve to legitimize Bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center? I don’t know about you, but that disgusts the living hell out of me. Those of you who’ve been reading this column for a long time know that I am no fan of U.S. policy towards Cuba, but even if I supported the embargo, I’m sure I could distinguish between those committed to peaceful democratization of the island and those willing to blow ordinary people to bits to express their opposition to Castro.
That’s one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready, now go, cat, go! Don’t you step on my… ah, what’s the use? Can’t do covers… even when I’m panhandling.
Matt, John, Mitch Macaphee, and the others (with the exception of the two Lincolns) think that the lawn-loving space people are just sticklers for the law, and when they took over the town government (by bribing our local officials all the way to Tahiti), they went on a good-government rampage. I personally think that this Gizmandiar character is taking revenge on us for complaining about the carpet-like lawn they established in our courtyard when they first arrived on this sorry planet. What the hell, I even cajoled Trevor James Constable into training his orgone generating device on their space craft. I’m sure even on their anemic planet, turnabout is fair play. (Though if they have negative gravitation, that may not be the case.) Whatever the truth may be, they have found an effective way to squelch criticism of their landscaping fetish…. and we’ve earned our one-way ticket to palookaville. (I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody… instead of a bum….)
to calculate the odds of these two events happening at the same time, and the results were astounding – seventy-three trillion to one against. (Of course, those are the same odds Marvin gave me when I asked him if it was going to rain last weekend…. and it rained last weekend. So yes, he could certainly be a meteorologist in this town.) So… is it true? Are the local aliens really from the strange rocky world known as “New Earth?” Can discarded lawn darts really be repurposed as inexpensive bottle openers? Is guar gum a vegetable? Is our children learning?
World Bank in particular and the “international community” in general have a pretty heinous record with regard to anti-poverty initiatives (if forcing corrupt or corruptible to cut social services can be thought of as “anti-poverty”). So, as Klein points out, that particular pirate ship should go down with Captain Neocon, rather than set him adrift, Bly-style, while they move on to further plunder. What has the international development finance system accomplished other than consigning uncounted millions of people to ever-deepening misery? Think Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, and pretty much anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa – those are the poster children. Argentina was the textbook neoliberal test case up until its total collapse a few years ago, and subsequent change of course. (There’s a success story!) Advocates of the system point with pride at Russia, where millions have lost their pensions and billions of dollars in public assets were ladled out to friends of the late Boris Yeltsin.
What’s their latest target? That country in the horn of Africa that we’ve helped out so much through the years (note: irony) – Somalia, now the subject of a massive U.S. supported occupation by neighboring Ethiopia, 
First there was day of the triffiids. Then there was night of the living dead. Now there’s week of the homeless virtual rock band. And what do they all have in common? Space people. Mother-fucking space people.
I suppose you’re wondering how in the world our elected officials could possibly have been coaxed away from their posts by large amounts of cash… how proffered piles of filthy lucre could convince them to abandon their constituents to other worlders… how the promise of permanent paid vacation could somehow outweigh their dedication to public service. Well, stop it. Of course they took the money and ran – that’s their job. Damnit, if our public officials weren’t corruptible, we would never have been able to remain in our adopted squat house for lo these many years. Our corporate label – Loathsome Prick Records – understood this very well. It’s thanks to them, in part, that we were able to keep Marvin (my personal robot assistant) under our leaky roof. Apparently there’s a local ordinance against harboring mechanical men. (You’d be surprised what kinds of Byzantine laws lurk in the dusty volumes stacked down at your local codes department.) Nothing a little palm grease couldn’t finesse. 
there was a loud knock on the door. It was some of Marvin’s old colleagues from the local constabulary, only they weren’t collecting quarters for the annual charity cotillion. They were putting us out on the street, in effect – a 10-day eviction notice, signed by someone named Gizmadiyar (apparently the acting mayor… and between you and me, I don’t think he’s acting). Even Marvin’s timely intervention seemed to have no effect – the constables seemed quite happy in their work…. almost… TOO… happy….
on any of his former selves that the public will buy – Mister Independent, Mister Inevitable, Mister Iraq Victory, etc. Pick your favorite McCain… or collect all three! At this stage, the Arizona senator’s flagging campaign appears to be centered on his dogged support for the Iraq project, albeit a “better managed” variant of that catastrophe. The calculation is a simple one – McCain supports the troop increase because he believes it’s right, even though it’s unpopular; a position that is supposed to lend him an aura of integrity and moral authority. Everyone else is playing politics with the war, but not McCain. That’s his card, and he’s playing it for all it’s worth, equating troop withdrawals with “surrender” and any war funding conditions with abandonment of our troops (mainstream G.O.P. positions, in essence).
McCain talks as though he has the right to speak for everyone in uniform. Frankly, I don’t see why. He is not the only person who suffered during the Vietnam War, not by a long shot. Plenty of Americans had a rougher time of it than McCain, and something like 58,000 never came back at all. That’s to say nothing of what the Vietnamese and other southeast Asians endured during that war. From what I’ve seen, I doubt very many of those incarcerated by the Saigon regime or the U.S. military / C.I.A. during those years are now trotting around the countryside angling for votes. (Most are in unmarked graves or sleeping with the fishes, as they say.) Just this week 
Spacemen to the left of me. Spacemen to the right of me. Spacemen above my head. And beneath my soles? Astroturf. That’s right… astroturf.
You know, it wouldn’t be so bad to have all of these new neighbors if they had taken up residence the normal way: the way we got here… find an empty house and squat. No, that wasn’t good enough for them. They had to bring their own houses. And before you say anything, no, I don’t have a “problem” with space people. In fact, some of my best friends are from far beyond the confines of our little solar system. Did I mention Big Zamboola? I did. Okay. Well, there’s also sFshzenKlyrn, our perpetual sit-in guitarist. He, of course, is from the planet Zenon in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy far, far, away. sFshzenKlyrn and I go way back, so you can’t say I don’t like space people, even if they do keep me up all night with their smelly lawn mowers and their noisy stellar infrarometers running incessantly over the same measurements. (Ooooooh, I hate them, I hate them!) Don’t listen to Mr. Subliminal. I love those dang space people, I really do. (RRRRrrrrrr)
robot assistant) did serve with distinction in the local constabulary. And we have, in fact, generated a little bit of economic activity in the area with the occasional payout we receive from our new corporate label, Loathsome Prick Records, which has been willing to advance us a bit on our upcoming release (still in the mixing stage – arrrrrghhh). Yeah, we help keep the pizza joint and the pub in business, so that’s probably worth an ordinance or two from city hall about unauthorized extraterrestrial housing and landscaping. (Turns out, it isn’t even real grass. It’s like a freaking lawn toupee, man!) So one would expect a little cooperation from the authorities, eh?
The first problem is one experts, talking heads, journalists, psychologists, etc., will be grappling with on television and in print for years to come. The second is a bit simpler: mail order, gun shops, and Wal*Mart. Obviously if you haven’t yet killed anyone or committed a serious crime but are, in fact, dead set on annihilating a whole building full of people, it’s not so hard to procure military-grade weapons designed to mow down as many folks as possible in the least amount of time. And you can even buy your ammo within easy walking distance of campus in Virginia and elsewhere in our bullet-headed nation.
cowardly on this topic. I’ve heard some tepid discussion thus far of re-regulating assault weapons, but it seems like you can only hear that kind of talk when it’s balanced out by some right-wing nut job who wants to arm ALL students so that they can shoot back. (I’m not making this up. Hey dumbshit – Cho was an armed student.) And while boneheads on CNN and Fox debate the merits of facilitating schoolhouse shootouts, over in Iraq incidents like Virginia Tech happen on a daily basis. It’s hard to imagine how soul-crushing that must be.
Whoa – that didn’t take long. Is it Saturday already? Guess those orgone energy waves have an affect on your sense of time. As Dylan once sang, now things just keep getting uglier, and I have no sense of tiiiiiime…..
Next thing I knew, something hit me square on the back of the head. Youch! Everything went black (actually, it was kind of a midnight blue, really, with orange and yellow sparkles – very nice). Not sure how long I was out, but when I came to, I had a headache and something Mitch Macaphee calls “frontier accent syndrome” – a dreaded disorder that people in the mad scientist community have been grappling with for nigh onto a hundred ‘yar. Dag nabbed syndrome makes yuh talk like a gall dorn character actor at least every other sentence that festers outa’ yer gob. (I have a particularly strange variant that appears to incorporate some elements of archaic British slang… most curious… dash it all….) Mitch and others tell me that I was struck by the hull of the bouncing ship driven by our turf-obsessed space invaders – apparently the fucker busted through the roof and into my private study… and dang near knocked my fool head off. (Haw…)
upstate village. (Quiet though it may be, there is a lot of sewage that runs through this place – just ask the DEC… if you can catch them not hunting…) Though my head was, well, a bit more dented than before (dag nab it!), our little experiment appeared to be a success. But as you know… appearances can be deceiving. Within the next couple of days, similar mysterious space ships had appeared in the courtyards of many of our neighbors. Lawns were soon sprouting up all around us…. green, carpet-like landscaping. It was terrifying!