Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

The Reuters headline reads:

Wall Street bets on stimulus after job cuts

and all of a sudden the worrying thought occurs to me: Are we rewarding job cuts? Is it that corporations are learning that, if they’ll go on and cut enough jobs so that people believe in the reality of an economic crisis, the government will then come along and then give them lots of money?

Are we encouraging corporations to kick people to the curb?

Want to know what’s wrong with proposition 8? Ask Simon the Political Tiger.

It’s a matter of the Constitution, see. The Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law to all people. That means that the law has to give everyone equal status, without discrimination. That includes same-sex couples. If heteros get to marry, then homosexual couples need to be given that same right.

No state has the right, through its legislature or through an electoral proposition, to overrule the Constitution’s equal protection clause. Prop 8 tries to do just that – and that’s what makes it an insult not just to same-sex couples, but to all Americans who believe in the freedoms and rights that the Constitution guarantees.

Everybody is pouring love on Barack Obama now, like sugar on breakfast cereal. They’re talking about what might have been with Hillary Clinton. But what about the other ex-presidential candidates?

Where are they now?

Here’s what Dennis Kucinich has been up to this evening: He brought H. Res. 127: recognizing and celebrating the 50th anniversary of the entry of Alaska in the Union as the 49th State to the floor of the House of Representatives.

By gum, the resolution passed. Kucinich worked hard to defeat the powerful anti-Alaska lobby in Congress. That’s the kind of achievement that is not soon forgotten.

Just imagine what might have happened if Kucinich had been made the Democratic nominee. Why, Congress might have recognized Alaska and Hawaii in his honor.

It’s official. Terror has been identified by the President of the United States as one of the government’s tools in its supposed War on Terror.

Explaining why he vetoed legislation from Congress that would have explicitly outlawed waterboarding and other forms of torture, George W. Bush said that “The bill would take away one of the most valuable tools on the war on terror.” With that statement, President Bush is on the record as saying that torture is regarded by his White House as among the “most valuable tools” against terror.

Americans who know how to think will regard this statement as strange, given that the purpose of torture is to encourage compliance through the creation of terror.

So, the Bush White House is using terror as a tool in the War on Terror. That suggests to me that the War on Terror is not really a war against terror at all. We ought to call it a War For Terror or a War Of Terror instead.