Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media and the host of Declaring Independence, a one hour weekly political talk show on WPRR in Grand Rapids, Michigan.(static)
Ed Brayton is a participant in the Center for Independent Media New Journalism Program. However, all of the statements, opinions, policies, and views expressed on this site are solely Ed Brayton's. This web site is not a production of the Center, and the Center does not support or endorse any of the contents on this site.
Any and all emails that I receive may be reprinted, in part or in full, on this blog with attribution. If this is not acceptable to you, do not send me e-mail - especially if you're going to end up being embarrassed when it's printed publicly for all to see.
Here's an absolutely mind-blowing clip of Rush Limbaugh arguing with William Shatner about health care. Okay, that's surreal enough as it is. But the argument Limbaugh makes is just astonishingly bankrupt morally. He actually argues that having access to health care is no different than having a house on the beach; the wealthy get the house on the beach and the poor don't, and the same is true of healthcare, and that's just fine.
And then he says he believes this just because he wants the country to be as good as it can be -- without poor people, presumably.
There seems to be a single story from mainstream media pundits when they consider the issue of blogs and other forms of new media. That story has become so commonly repeated that one must wonder if Microsoft Word has produced a template for the story that allows the byline to be changed and the simplistic arguments to remain the same. The thesis goes like this:
"Newspapers, that bastion of objectivity and rigorous investigation, are dying. They're being replaced by blogs and online news outlets that are all written by untrained interlopers sitting in their boxer shorts in their parents' basement, interlopers who do not hold to the deeply thought out and always followed ethical standards of Real Journalists. This is a national tragedy."
Rod Dreher has an interesting column at BeliefNet about his own support for gay adoption and how personal relationships with gay parents who adopted changed his mind on the issue despite his religious views on homosexuality. He starts by telling the story of a friend of his broaching the subject with him:
A conservative Catholic friend e-mails this morning with news of a gay couple she knows having adopted an orphan from overseas, and how she supports what they're doing. She says that she accepts the Church's teaching about homosexuality, but considering the life this orphaned child faced in his home country, and knowing her gay friends to be of sterling character, she believes the child ended up in the best possible situation for him.
Watching the reaction to Obama's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan has been very interesting. Personally, I don't have a strong opinion about it either way. I know less about such matters than I do about almost any other political issue and I must therefore rely more on the judgments of others, like Spencer Ackerman, who are far more knowledgeable about it.
But the spin from the right is quite fascinating to me. They support an escalation in troops, which Obama is giving them, but they still have to find some way to attack him for it. So no matter how much his policies are in line with their own, he must be attacked. Spencer nails the Wall Street Journal for this headline:
The ACLU of New Jersey announced that it has reached a settlement in a case to further its eternal quest to destroy Christianity in America. The settlement will allow a prisoner to continue to preach at weekly worship services and hold Bible study classes for his fellow inmates at the prison.
That damn ACLU is so clever. This is all a part of their cynical attempt to get Christianity related to crime in the public mind so that people will stop believing in God and start marrying their gay lovers and pets.
Rick Warren is once again in PR-speak mode when faced with his ties to the most barbaric elements in regressive Christianity. As I've written before, Warren has long had close ties to Martin Ssempa, an absolutely crazed anti-gay paster from Uganda who is one of the primary forces behind the push to make homosexuality even more illegal in that country than it already is (along with punishing anyone who advocates for gay rights as well).
Now that new proposed law has come to the attention of the American media and they are asking Warren about it. And despite the fact that he has long been involved in taking bold stands on political issues, he's suddenly decided that it's not his job to take a stance on the rightness or wrongness of the bill:
My colleague Spencer Ackerman has an interesting post at the Washington Independent asking an important question: Will Gen. McChrystal testify about a newly revealed "black jail" at Bagram?
I reported yesterday that Gen. Stanley McChrystal will probably testify next week about Afghanistan war strategy. It'll be interesting to see if he faces questions about the so-called "black jail."
Over the weekend, both The New York Times and The Washington Post reported on an apparently undisclosed adjunct to the prison facility at Bagram Air Field called the "black jail" by Afghans who told human-rights groups they were detained there. According to the papers, the black jail is run by Special Operations Forces, and accounts of it stretch back to early 2008 - back when McChrystal was in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command's (JSOC) operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This time the dumbass quote is actually an attempt to quote someone else. In her book Going Rogue, Sarah Palin begins the third chapter with the following epigram:
Our land is everything to us... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it--with their lives.
She attributes that quote to legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.
I'm sure you were all riveted to your TV sets watching the Montreal Alouettes and the Saskatchewan Roughriders play on Sunday for the Grey Cup in the Canadian equivalent of the Super Bowl. I wasn't, actually, but I did catch a brief report on ESPN while flipping channels and I had to laugh about how the game ended - and what was said afterward.
It was apparently a great game, with Montreal kicking a game-winning field goal with no time left on the clock to take the championship. But the kicker got two shots at it. He missed the first one, but the other team had an extra man on the field so there was a 10 yard penalty and a rekick. He made the second won and there was much joy in Mudville.
A high-ranking Indonesian official says that the earthquake that hit his country in September, killing 1000 people, was caused by sinful TV programs and porn videos:
Communication and Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring said that there were many television programmes that destroyed morals.
Therefore, the minister said, natural disasters would continue to occur...
He also hit out at rising decadence - proven, he said, by the availability of Indonesia-made pornographic DVDs in local markets - and called for tougher laws.
Can't we, for once, have a God who punishes stupidity and fanaticism instead of arbitrary notions of sin?
My buddy DarkSyd catches Sean Hannity being a hypocrite on the subject of hacking emails. Yes, I know that catching Sean Hannity being a hypocrite is about as difficult as catching Sean Hannity being an idiot, but it's still funny to watch. Video below the fold.
Evangelical scholar John Mark Reynolds has a review of Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue in First Things and the results are not pretty (from Palin's perspective). Reynolds is a fan of Palin's, yet he absolutely blisters the book and finds that it rather dramatically diminished his ability to support her in the future.
He gives a list of ten things he learned from the book. Here are some samples:
The Economist has an interview with Radley Balko, most of which focuses on his work on the problems in our criminal justice system, which have so obviously informed my own writings on the subject. There's a lot of really good stuff here. Balko does a brilliant job of expressing -- briefly, concisely, accurately -- some of the key issues that are subverting the cause of justice in America. On the militarization of law enforcement:
This has led to a militaristic mindset among America's police departments, beyond just SWAT teams. Driven by "war on crime" and "war on drugs" rhetoric set by political leaders, police officers have increasingly taken on the psyche of soldiers. There's a pervasive and troubling "us versus them" attitude in policing today. Policing has become more reactionary, more aggressive, and it's poisoning the relationship between the police and the communities they serve.
I should add that I don't think police officers themselves are to blame for this, nor, obviously, are all police officers guilty of it. These are problems spawned by 35 years or so of bad policies set by politicians. That's really where any reform would need to start.
The United States is not the only country where the Catholic Church spent decades covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests. The government of Ireland has released a massive new report on the issue in their own country that shows the exact same behavior in that country by church officials. Though the church was notified of more than 300 complaints against 46 priests after 1975, it did not report a single case to the police, according to the New York Times:
That report in May sought to document the scale of abuse as well as the reasons why church and state authorities didn't stop it, whereas Thursday's 720-page report focused on why church leaders in the Dublin Archdiocese -- home to a quarter of Ireland's 4 million Catholics -- did not tell police about a single abuse complaint against a priest until 1995.
The administrative rules for implementing the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, passed in 2006, have been delayed for another six months because they are virtually impossible to write in a fair manner. AP reports on this while getting the point of the bill rather flagrantly wrong:
The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve are giving U.S. financial institutions an additional six months to comply with regulations designed to ban Internet gambling.
The two agencies said Friday that the new rules, which were to take effect on Dec. 1, would be delayed until June 1 of next year.
As I've written about before, Uganda is currently considering an incredibly brutal anti-gay law. Apparently it's not good enough to make homosexuality illegal and put people in prison for it for life, now they may go even further and put gays to death - along with anyone who advocates on their behalf. And now -- surprise, surprise -- it turns out that the people behind this in that country are members of The Family.
Jeff Sharlet, the foremost -- perhaps only -- expert on The Family (aka The Fellowship), did an interview with Terry Gross on NPR last week in which he pointed out the links between the Uganda politicians pushing this legislation and The Family:
Jeremy Scahill, who is the expert on Blackwater, has new revelations in The Nation about the paramilitary company now called Xe and its involvement in military and intelligence operations in Pakistan.
At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.
The New York Times has a rather strange article claiming that left and right are "joining forces" on criminal justice reform measures. And in some limited cases, there's a kernel of truth in that. When it comes to asset forfeiture, for example, conservative interest groups tend to be as opposed to such laws as liberal and libertarian groups (though elected officials from either party are unwilling to do anything to fix the problem, whether liberal or conservative).
In the next several months, the Supreme Court will decide at least a half-dozen cases about the rights of people accused of crimes involving drugs, sex and corruption. Civil liberties groups and associations of defense lawyers have lined up on the side of the accused.
But so have conservative, libertarian and business groups. Their briefs and public statements are signs of an emerging consensus on the right that the criminal justice system is an aspect of big government that must be contained.
As the Supreme Court considers the case of Pottawattamie v. McGhee and the notion of absolute prosecutorial immunity, here's a perfect example of why their ruling is so crucial to any notion of keeping "criminal justice system" a three-word phrase rather merely a criminal system. A federal judge has ruled that two judges who are accused of taking kickbacks to send juveniles to a privately-owned detention centers cannot even be taken to court on the matter.
Here's a video clip of Glenn Beck citing, of all people, Thomas Jefferson while claiming that there is no separation of church and state and that the First Amendment's religion clause was only meant to protect the churches from the state. This is standard religious right rhetoric but it is inaccurate - and not even close when one is trying to attribute it to Jefferson, for crying out loud.
Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
