New Blog

You haven't been hearing from me for awhile- and there's a reason for that!  I have relocated and am now using my born name of Rice- major life changes, indeed .
I am now living, at least for awhile, in a beautiful condo on the Susquehanna on the upper Eastern Shore in Maryland.  As I write on my deck on an absolutely gorgeous day with a warm temp & low humidity, I am looking down on the boat docks, watching and listening to the Acela train pass by nosily on the r.r. trestle, and gazing on the town of Harve de Grace.  Oops, another train is coming announced by two quick whistle blasts.
Noisey, yup.  But since my dad, granddad, etc. were r.r. for a few generations (N.Y., N.H., & H and B&O), I am comfortable.  Although, in the evening in bed when suddenly that very small bright light hits me and then the loud, low, slow rumble of the freight train shuffles by- less so.
I lived in Balto. County for many years as a kid & young adult.  I then grew up and lived and worked on the Eastern Shore during and after college.  As I like to tell people here, I did live here more than a few years ago.  I understand the language, but the lingo sometimes trips me up.  LOL!
So please feel to visit me on my new blog.  If u are ever in the area, u have a friend here with a BIG condo and an extra bed!  However, my connections to the Newport area are NOT completely gone.  My house, my dog, my sons, my house are still there!  At least for now.
No, u can't go home again.  But visiting is certainly interesting!!!

How I Predicted the False Torture Confessions

Last month, we found out that the real reason the Bush administration tortured prisoners was the same reason that evil people always torture prisoners -- to extract false confessions. In particular, as we learned from Col. Lawrence Wilkerson yesterday, Vice President Richard "Dick" Cheney was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq, so he ordered interrogators to torture prisoners until they said that Saddam Hussein was helping Al-Qaeda. Well, who could have predicted such a thing?

Me, that's who.

Way back in the fall of 2006, as Congress was debating the Military Commissions Act, the Providence Journal ran a hideous editorial defending the use of torture. It was such an odious pile of excrement that I felt compelled to issue a line-by-line rebuttal (a fisking, as we bloggers say) on my old blog, Newport 9. The Newport 9 blog no longer exists, but I felt the ProJo's atrocity deserved a wider airing, so I cross-posted my piece to a Daily Kos diary. That diary is still there, so I'd like to take this opportunity to quote a section of it:

While experts disagree on whether torture works,

Major, major weaselness here. Whenever people want to muddy the waters on an issue, they always resort to the old "experts disagree" dodge: "experts disagree" about global warming, "experts disagree" about cigarettes causing cancer, "experts disagree" about evolution, and on and on and on.

Anyone who isn't a moral cripple knows that torture doesn't work. All torture lets you do is make somebody say what you want them to say. Here's how it goes:

INTERROGATOR: Was Saddam Hussein working with bin Laden to attack America?

CAPTIVE: Of course not, they hate each others' guts.

INTERROGATOR: Wrong answer.

CAPTIVE: AAAAAAAAAHHH!! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!! AAAAAAAAAHHH!! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!! AAAAAAAAAHHH!! AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!

INTERROGATOR: Now, I'm going to ask you again. Was Saddam Hussein working with bin Laden to attack America?

CAPTIVE: YES!! YES!! AAAAAHH!! AAAAAHH!! ANYTHING YOU SAY!! AAAAAHH!! AAAAAHH!! AAAAAHH!!

INTERROGATOR: Williams, contact the President, tell him we've confirmed the link between Saddam and bin Laden.

There you have it, folks, proof of my awesome powers of predictiveness. (And yes, it's true that my Daily Kos User ID is 2558, making me one of the Secret Masters of the Great Orange Satan. Bow down and worship me, you ignorant masses!)

So, how did I do it? Did I have a time machine that I used to travel to the year 2009 to learn the truth about Bush's torture regime? Sadly, no. I had to rely on that rarest of faculties, simple common sense. I knew that torture didn't work, and that a person being tortured will say whatever his interrogators want him to say. I knew that the Bushies were using the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq. Egro, logic suggested that the Bushies were using torture to gain a false link between 9/11 and Iraq.

QED.

(cross-posted to I Dreamed I Saw Grace P. Last Night)

Why We Fight

A couple weeks ago, I posted a rebuttal to Captain "Mike" Caldwell's latest guest editorial in the Newport Daily News, in which, among other things, I alluded to Eileen's questions about whether Cap'n "Mike" was a real person. In comments, Eileen pointed out that Cap'n "Mike" is actually named Warren, which was why she couldn't find any public information about him before.

Also in comments was one by Bill Gauch of the Rhode Island Review Blog. Along with the standard right-wing talking points about the ARRA, Bill asked an interesting question: "If you know (or strongly believe) that this guy is either a crack-pot or make believe, why bother to respond here or in the paper?" That question, at least, merited a reasoned response, so this is it.

The answer is that even if Cap'n "Mike" wasn't a real person, the opinions he expresses are shared by a lot of people (including Bill Gauch). That makes it worth my while to respond, because right-wing talking points should never be allowed to go unanswered, no matter the source.

For instance, take my response to last year's Cap'n "Mike" two-part epic, in which Our Captain bashes Anderson Cooper for playing a videotape of Iraqi insurgents killing American troops. The roots of Cap'n "Mike"s fauxtrage go back to the 1960s, when another president from Texas got the United States stuck in another overseas military quagmire through another act of blatant dishonesty. Back then, it was LBJ using the Gulf of Tonkin Incident to justify sending American combat troops into South Vietnam. The Vietnam War was a bit of Cold War madness that was marked by nonstop misinformation and disinformation by the Johnson administration and the Pentagon, so it's no surprise that there was a lot of opposition to the war, especially as American casualties mounted and it became clear that the government was lying its collective ass off about the whole thing.

However, what conservatives like Cap'n "Mike" took from the Vietnam War was the odd conviction that if the TV networks hadn't broadcast images of the fighting, and of American casualties, everything would have been all right. They decided that the only way to prevent the public from opposing military action was to keep the public as ignorant as possible. That was the rationale behind the Poppy administration's tight control over information during the Noriega takedown and the Persian Gulf War, and the Dubya administration's equally tight restrictions on media coverage of the Iraq War (such as the policy prohibiting the display of images of flag-draped coffins). This is also the reason why Cap'n "Mike" and his fellow conservatives scream like angry babies whenever the media manages to show the public things like dead bodies, especially dead American bodies. And this is the reason Cap'n "Mike" accused Anderson Cooper of destroying America's cultural soul.

It would have been irresponsible of me to let Cap'n "Mike"s ridiculous and ahistorial World War 2 analogy to go unanswered, and it would have been equally irresponsible to let him get away with pretending that his own fake outrage over realistic war coverage was shared by the general public.

Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to point out to Cap'n "Mike" and his fellow conservatives that the Iraq War disproves their thesis that "negative" (ie realistic) media converage of combat drives public disapproval. The media has largely (and cravenly) knuckled under to government pressure to whitewash the Iraq War, but the public turned against the war anyway. And the reason they turned against the Iraq War was the real reason they turned against the Vietnam War: because it was an unnecessary war based on lies, and people naturally dislike that sort of thing.

Anyway, I hope this answers Bill Gauch's question about why I bother to respond to a possibly imaginary right-wing-talking-point-spewing person. However imaginary the person, the talking points are very real and malignant, and must be countered.

Nobody Reads my Blog

Ditto.

http://web.me.com/aaronandpatty/What_the_Duck/Comic_Strips/Comic_Strips.html

Towns & Cities Facing State Cuts

The Guv & the Lege are taking aim at state aid to towns & cities. The question is not "if" but "how much." Oddly enough with 60- 70% of school budgets eating up most of local property taxes (and about 90% of that in personnel costs- local gov't also), it rarely rates any coverage in the newspapers. Instead, focus is on the councils. Why is that?

Anyone interested in covering any of these meetings? Use your own name or alias- both work for me. How about Middletown's Senior Ctr. which doesn't even seem to abide by Open Meeting Laws? Anyone like to cover? I'm offering to proof or edit if you like. Heck, I don't want to keep all the fun.

You're also going to see a lot of State mandates going bye-bye which may or may not trump local employee contracts. Focus that spotlight on all elected officials- it's your government. Otherwise, don't complain later... Government does matter- unlike what many have been all too easily & too willingly to believe. Change is coming & don't buy into that malarkey of what great opporunities we are all afforded by all this. Sometimes bad news is just that- bad news.

Expect to see some changes on this blog also. Not in focus necessarily, but in format. I'm liking http://www.soapblox.com/ format (think RIFuture). For that I'll have to dig into Mr. Piggy, though.

Metaphor Policy

Bloggers, inevitably, tend to use a lot of metaphorical language. Given that this blog is primarily concerned with politics here in Rhode Island, aka the Ocean State, it will be my policy, when using metaphors, to always choose a nautical metaphor (eg "learn the ropes", "weigh anchor", "in the doldrums") over a non-nautical metaphor of similar meaning (eg "get up to speed", "hit the road", "in a rut"). The same, of course, will apply to similes, where necessary.

Fair Warning

The blog is a hungry beast. It has an insatiable need for new posts. That being the case, any email sent to me in my capacity as a political blogger is fair game, and I hereby reserve the right to quote it in full on this blog, and, if necessary, mock it cruelly.

You have been warned.

"Fame! I'm Gonna Live Forever!"

"Baby, remember my name." Ah, sweet memories. I loved that show.

So check out Newport This Week and see what I'm talking about. It must have been a slow week as they did an article on me. Where they ever got my grandmother's pic, is beyond me.

I like this little weekly. The writing is well-done, ads are CHEAP, & it's packed full of info that forces you to keep it hanging around. There are other papers besides the Newport one that I check regularly like the Sakonnet Times. East Bay Newspapers publishes 8 weeklies. They are everywhere & cost zilch. Can't beat that. They planning to expand & revamp their web site to make it more interactive & useful. I look forward to it. Will my pic stay?

I had a delightful interviewer and he didn't make one error! Tom Shevlin of RI Reports is the reporter. It's always somewhat of a surprise when I am mentioned in a news article & don't come out sounding like a complete idiot. Tom USED TO BE a Republican. Now he's an independent. That means he's had it with Republicans but not yet willing to go all the way & become a Democrat. LOL!

He had some interesting, unexpected questions. Like what do I think is the future of newspapers, blogs, the Internet, etc. I am a lousy predictor. Hey, I ran for election & actually thought that I would win- TWICE! I do think that you will start to see even more of a merging of newspapers, websites, blogs, & interactivity. Tom thinks daily newspapers are on their way out. I'm not so sure. People still like to have that paper in their hands. The demise of print, books, libraries, etc. was predicted not that long ago. In fact, quite the opposite seems to have resulted.

I'd be remiss if I also did not mention that I am most appreciative for the articles of my other two writers- Newport's Sandra Flowers & Tom Kalinowski who help me look good.

PS. I am MUCH BETTER LOOKING in person. Photos add, hmm, about 50 lbs. & 30 yrs. to me. Go figure.

New Rhode Island blogs

Natural News Network is one new R.I. website along with blogger RIslander. The former is an environmental site with lots of info & local links. Evidently it's been around for about a year & I missed it. Thanks to Mary for putting me wise. The latter blog features pithy commentary, although he's been rather quiet lately.

Another new favorite is Regulating Health Insurance. This one is written by John Aloysius Cogan Jr. (a fine Italian name) who is the Executive Assistant for Policy and Program Review for the Rhode Island Office of the Health Insurance.

Check them out!

Bloggers Rule!

Blogging has now reached the mainstream with 80% Americans knowing what one is and almost 50% having visited one according to a new study.

Of those who visit blogs, about half visit the same ones regularly and almost half of older Americans have read one. Most bloggers are women & readers tend to visit once a month. Almost half of bloggers click on ads on these blogs.

Yet these readers have not deserted other sources of information which makes me wonder why some newspapers still hold them anathema.

"When asked about the types of information they get from blogs, 65% said they get opinions, while 39% get news and 38% get entertainment."

8% of Americans have their own blogs.

Blogging (not to mention bloggers) are just plain cool!

**Thanks to my reader who sent me the link!

Speak up, District 12!

Any secret muckrackers out there? Got an opinion? Something to say (well, write - at least for now). Want to write under an alias like our Founding Fathers in the Federal Papers (thanks to a friend for reminding me of this). "Daily News" or "Projo" not print your letter/article?

Come on down! Say it! I believe in the First Amendment. I won't reveal my sources (you'd be suprised at the things people tell me because they want it to get out there). Haul me in front of a judge, send me to jail. Sounds like a vacation to me. I laugh in the face of adversity!

Keep it clean, be ready to back up your facts, if it's opinion, say so! I'll edit if you like (I'm a great speller). I'll even write it if you send me the info (hello, Deep Throat). I'm in the book under Francis Spillane, & my contact e-mail is listed at the top left of the blog.

As Adlai Stevenson once said, "Eggheads of the world unite! We have nothing to lose but our yolks!"

Heh, heh.