The Haze Filter

Formula 1 Running At Monaco Tomorrow Morning ::

Jenson Button is once again on pole which, if he has no mechanical problems, should insure another win. If Button continues with the pace he has set since the beginning of this season he should easily capture the F1 world championship in this strange year of racing. The Ferrari team has not performed well and Lewis Hamilton has had more than his share of what I would characterize as bad luck.

I was a Michael Schumacher fan as well as a fan of Lewis Hamilton when he came up as a youngster, but I am really pulling for Rubens Barrichello to win some this season in what is the twilight of his career!

The Ritual Defamation Of Nancy Pelosi ::

Thanks to Digby I followed her link over to Laird Wilcox and found this definition of ritual defamation:

Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. For the purposes of this essay, the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and "insensitivity" or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.

This sounds just about right regarding what the Republicans are doing to Pelosi and the shame of it all is that she has little help from her fellow Dems in answering the call for her resignation. Let me be clear at this point that I am by no means a fan of Pelosi and I consider her to be a walking disaster, but she certainly does not deserve to be pilloried over her claim that she was explicitly not told of waterboarding of detainees in 2002.

Wilcox posits 8 elements regarding ritual defamation, but this one jumped out at me:

An important rule in ritual defamation is to avoid engaging in any kind of debate over the truthfulness or reasonableness of what has been expressed, only condemn it. To debate opens the issue up for examination and discussion of its merits, and to consider the evidence that may support it, which is just what the ritual defamer is trying to avoid. The primary goal of a ritual defamation is censorship and repression.

Maybe someday the Democrats will come up with a response to the falsely demonizing thrusts from the Republicans, but I'm not holding my breath!

Reading "Family Of Secrets" (part 1) ::

A couple of weeks ago I ran across a blurb about Russ Baker's book "Family Of Secrets" on (I think) Suburban Guerilla and I was immediately intrigued given that the subject was the history of the extended Bush family and its machiavellian machinations so I stopped off at the local Books A Million and purchased a copy. I have not been disappointed.

The first portion of the book is given over to the Kennedy assassination and how interwoven George H. W. Bush was with all of the actors in that drama no matter how insignificant they may have been. I have never been much of a conspiracy theorist, but this book give me pause for thought. Here's an excerpt from Chapter 6:

Apparently Poppy (note: George H.W. Bush's family nickname) had secrets, and he kept them well. It seems that he had been involved in intelligence work for much of his adult life. He had been in and around hot spots of covert action. And, in the fall of 1963, he had for some unfathomable reason been worried that someone would discover he had been in Dallas on the evening of November 21 and seemingly the morning of November 22.

The cast of intertwined characters who were in Dallas around Nov. 22, 1962 is just far too large to write off as mere coincidence. I'll add more as I read more, but I recommend "Family of Secrets.

Servicing Hubble! ::

I'm really looking forward to new images from the updated Hubble Telescope. Here's a photograph of one of the astronauts working on Hubble in Atlantis' cargo bay.

S125-E-009194 (17 May 2009) --- With a mostly dark home planet behind him, astronaut Michael Good, STS-125 mission specialist, rides Atlantis' remote manipulator system arm to the exact position he needs to be to continue work on the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronaut Mike Massimino, who shared two spacewalks with Good during the last week, is out of frame.

Shuttle and ISS photographs can be found at NASA's Human Spaceflight web site.

Pelosi Under Fire ::

Let me say up front that I'm in no way a fan of Nancy Pelosi. I recall hearing her several years ago give the Dem rebuttal to one of George W. Bush's State of the Union address and I vividly remember what a terrible public speaker she was and surely someone else should have been tapped to give the Dem response. The Republicans are spinning this tempest in a teapot knowing full well that the truth is hidden within classified CIA documents which cannot be cited or released without authorization placing Pelosi, and by proxy the Democrats, in what is a very difficult position to defend. Pelosi's responses have been, at best, disjointed and she badly needs to clarify what she was told and when she was given the information.

I just heard David Gergen on CNN state that Pelosi has the political toughness of Margaret Thatcher. She may be a tough political fighter, but, in my mind, this analogy is way off base and, if true, she needs to be pushing back much harder against the calls for her to resign.

[update]

I just ran across this citation of Matt Yglesias over at TPM and it pretty much states how I view the calls for Pelosi to prove her case:

You know, Newt Gingrich knows a lot about saying stupid things and being forced out of the job as Speaker. ... But one way or the other -- I mean, I wasn't in the room, you weren't in the room, Newt Gingrich wasn't in the room. None of us know exactly what happened there. But whatever it is Nancy Pelosi knew about, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, they knew more. And ultimately, when we have a thorough investigation of what happened, the bulk of the blame has to lie with the architects of the policy, not with a member of the opposition party.

How Will The Obama Healthcare Plan Shake Out? ::

TPM Cafe has a nice bit up by Robert Rubin about what may be a sell-out to the health insurance industry by both the Obama administration and our congressional representatives who are recipients of insurance and big pharma campaign contributions.

Many experts have long agreed that a so-called "single-payer" plan is the ideal, because competition among private insurers who pay health-care bills inevitably causes them to spend big bucks trying to find and market policies to healthy and younger people at relatively low risk of health problems while avoiding sicker and older people with higher risks (and rejecting those with pre-existing conditions altogether), and also contesting and litigating many claims. A single payer saves all this money and focuses on caring for sick people and preventing the healthy from becoming sick. The other advantage of a single payer is it can use its vast bargaining power to negotiate lower prices from pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and suppliers.

Not surprisingly, insurance and drug companies have been dead-set against a single payer for years. And they've so frightened the public into thinking that "single payer" means loss of choice of doctor (that's wrong -- many single payer plans in other nations allow choices of medical deliverers) that politicians no longer even mention it.

[snip]

But now the Medicare-like option is being taken off the table. Insurance and drug companies have thrown their weight around the Senate. And, sadly, the White House -- eager to get a bill enacted in 2009 rather than risk it during the mid-term election year of 2010 -- is signaling it's open to other approaches. What other approaches? One would create a public insurance plan run by multiple regional third-party administrators. In other words, the putative "public plan" would be broken into little pieces, none of which could exert much bargaining leverage on Big Pharma and Big Insurance. These pieces would also be so decentralized that the drug companies and private insurers could easily bully (or bribe) regional third-party administrators.

I e-mailed my house representative yesterday stating my support for a single payer system for health care, but, given his freshman blue-dog status, I have little hope that he will do what is best for his constituents. And did I mention that he is also a medical doctor?

Both of my Republican senators will be total sell-outs to the insurance and big pharma industry on the question of health care reform, but I will still pester them with e-mails and phone calls stating my views!

Pat Conroy ::

I got my new issue of Time a couple of days ago and it had the news that Pat Conroy has a new book due out August 11. Here's Time's short blurb:

South of Broad
Conroy's first novel in 14 years is a big, soapy, heartwarming love letter to Charleston, S.C., covering 30 years in the lives of its glamorous inhabitants.

I've been a fan of Pat Conroy's writing for years and I eagerly look forward to this new book.

Over 20 years ago I was working on 11th Street in Atlanta during a period that Conroy was living just a few blocks away as he was writing one of his books, I forget right now which book, but I always hoped that I would bump into him on the street at some time. Unfortunately that never happened. My loss!

Andrew Sullivan On The Crimes Of The Bush Administration ::

I have been reading Sullivan's blog more and more lately as he seems to be one of the few conservative voices making any sort of sense at all:

I don't believe we can move forward without accounting for the war crimes of the past. With every passing day, the evidence of real criminality in the past accumulates. But I also understand that so long as Cheney and his ship of macho, torturing fools get to posture as the only ruthless prosecutors of the terror war, they will have a card to play to get back into power. They have no shame and no ethical boundaries. And so the only truly profound way to defeat them and what they represent is to show that a humane ruthlessness is still possible in the fight against al Qaeda - which remains a threat rather than a phantom.

The added emphasis is mine. At least someone on the right understands that we citizens deserve the truth about what the Bush administration did in our names over the past 8 years!

Blog Layout Munged Up? ::

Looks like the blog layout is broken here on the laptop and I don't have a desktop to check it out 'til tomorrow at work. I like the laptop, but it's tough being without the desktop. It's a good thing that I backed up my really important stuff to my portable hard drive last week!

Has It Been So Long? ::

Since I put something up here? I guess it has, but it's been a bad few days. Last Friday the house got zapped by lightening knocking out my desktop computer, my clothes dryer, my answering machine, and either one of my DVD players or the RF modulater that it runs through.

I thought that the computer would only be a power supply problem, but I got a new one Saturday with no result so I yanked the motherboard a while ago to take in to get tested tomorrow. It's about time to build a new computer anyway, but I had hoped to put it off for a while.

I'll check my dryer tomorrow when I can pull it out and yank the bottom panel. I'm hoping that the only problem is the thermal fuse which will only cost about $10, or so. I've replaced my answering machine and I'll try to pick up a new RF modulator at the Radio Shack tomorrow. Come to think of it, this TV, an old CurtisMathes is dying anyway and needs replacing.

This whole lightening strike thing could have been much worse. For Christmas I had gotten the wife a new 32" plasma tv, but that came through ok. Oddly enough I think everything, other than the dryer, was on surge protectors!