Ok, so it’s one week until Christmas.  I think if I were to cave to my mood right now, give in and throw up like I want to, all that would come out would be sparkly ribbons with a snowflake motif (cause I DID eat quite a lot of snow last week).

Acting Christmassy is one of the many ways that I pretend everything is OK so that everyone who’s so worried about me will leave me alone.  Before you start worrying about me…there ARE people who I trust and who know better than to try to ‘fix’ everything for me who I can turn to when I need….I just like to keep a lot of the other ‘supporting characters’ in my life at arm’s length.  They’re well-meaning people who just don’t listen….how’s that for overly simplifying the entire matter??…  😉  ok…digress…NOW…

So, in order to maintain the illusion, I dutifully participate in all of the Christmas crap as before, though for the life of me I can’t remember an actual Christmas I’ve enjoyed.  I love picking out gifts for people….I love the idea of Christmas….I just happen to have one of those families that it’s a miracle haven’t been featured in one of those dark comedy movies I love so much…or on Dr. Phil…  😉

So, in the spirit of giving, I offer you one of my all-time favorite songs.  It was written by the members of Toad the Wet Sprocket, but there isn’t a YouTube video of their version.  So, here’s a cover by some random dude who needs to stick to the melody a little more…..just sayin’…  😉

Read Loaded, an essay by Garret Keizer.

I hope that I shall never have to confront anyone with my gun, but owning a gun has forced me to confront myself. Anyone who owns firearms for reasons other than hunting and sport shooting (neither of which I do) has admitted that he or she. is willing to kill another human being – as opposed to the more civilized course of allowing human beings to be killed by paid functionaries on his or her behalf. Owning a gun does not enhance my sense of power; it enhances my sense of compromise and contingency – a feeling curiously like that of holding down a job. In other words, it is one more glaring proof that I am not Mahatma Gandhi or even Che Guevara, just another soft-bellied schlimazel trying to keep the lawn mowed and the psychopaths off the lawn.

If the authorities attempted to confiscate my gun in a house-to-house search, I believe I would offer resistance. What I would not offer is a justifying argument; the argument is implicit in the ramifications of a house-to-house search. But all of this is so much fantasy, another example of the disingenuousness that tends to color our discussion of guns. The Day When All the Guns Are Gathered Up – what the paranoids regard as the end of the world and the Pollyannas as the Rapture – it’s never going to happen. There are nearly 1.4 million active troops in the US armed forces; there are an estimated 200 million guns in private hands. The war over the proper interpretation of the Second Amendment is effectively over. The most reasonable and decent thing that gun groups could do at this point is to declare victory and negotiate terms with the generosity that is so becoming in a victor. Five-day waiting periods? Agreed, but our sense of honor compels us to insist on ten. (Oh, to have been born in a time of so many guns and so little gallantry! Perhaps we ought not to have shot Sir Galahad after all.) No assault rifles owned by civilians – also agreed, so long as, no assault rifles are used on civilians.

Of course, none of this is going to happen either. It would require a confidence that scarcely exists. One need only peruse the ads and articles in gun magazines to see the evidence of its rarity – to see that poignant, ironic, and insatiable obsession with overwhelming force. That cry of impotence. The American Rifleman I recall from my boyhood was closer to Field & Stream than to Soldier of Fortune, more like Popular Mechanics than National Review. My father and my uncles were do-it-yourself guys; their guns were just something else to lube. When I was a kid, I thought a liberal was a person who couldn’t fix a car. But the cars aren’t so easy to take apart anymore; the “check engine” light comes on and only the dealership has all the codes. As in Detroit, so in Washington: the engineering works the same. I am not the first to point out the sleight of hand that bedevils us: the illusion of power and choice perpetuated to disguise a diminishing sphere of action, A person dry-fires his Ruger in the same reverie of preparedness as another aims her cursor at her favorite blog. What precision, what access, what an array of options! Something’s going to happen one of these days, and when it does, man, I’m going to be ready. In the meantime, just listen to that awesome sterile click.

Seriously, this is the best essay I’ve read in years.

As the 2008 Presidential Race heats up, one of the largest issues looming in front of all candidates is the question of healthcare: how much, how should it be implemented and funded, who should it cover, what will it cover, where will the money come from, who will provide oversight, yadda yadda yadda.

I recently came across a post with a link to a tool that apparently provides the capacity to compare candidate healthcare plans four-at-a-time; I’m not directly familiar with the plans supported by any of the candidates, nor with the ins and outs of each plan, so I’m posting this here for people to examine and respond to.

Below the jump, read an excerpt of the post I read, follow the link, and check out the tool. I’ve got four questions at the end that I’d like readers to answer in comments. (Hat-tip Delphooie)

This website allows you to compare, side by side, the healthcare plans up to four candidates are supporting.

Voters have identified health care as the leading domestic issue for the government to address and for the presidential candidates to discuss in the 2008 campaign. In particular, voters would like to hear the candidates’ positions on reducing the cost of health care and health insurance and expanding coverage to the 47 million uninsured Americans.

The presidential candidates vary greatly in the extent to which they have discussed health care issues to date. Some have issued detailed proposals or have indicated that proposals are forthcoming. Others have articulated positions on specific health care issues or critiqued the positions and plans of other candidates in response to questions but have not offered their own proposals.

This side-by-side comparison of the candidates’ positions on health care was prepared by the Kaiser Family Foundation with the assistance of Health Policy Alternatives, Inc. and is based on information appearing on the candidates’ websites as supplemented by information from candidate speeches, the campaign debates and news reports. The sources of information are identified for each candidate’s summary (with links to the Internet). The comparison highlights information on the candidates’ positions related to access to health care coverage, cost containment, improving the quality of care and financing. Information will be updated regularly as the campaign unfolds.

To create a custom side by side summary, select up to four candidates and click the “Compare” button.

My questions for the reader are as follows:

1. Do the plans represented by the tool appear to accurately reflect the candidate’s stated plan?

2. Do the comparisons drawn appear to be legitimate and clear?

3. Does this tool cover ~all~ the Presidential candidates (as known to date) for 2008?

4. Does this tool appear to be useful and valuable, in light of the above questions (and answers)?

Please answer in comments.

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Posted to ePluribus Media 2.0, DailyKos, BelowBoston, BooMan Tribune, My Left Wing and DocuDharma.

___________________________________________

(8 am – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Crossposted at Invictus

Blogger Deep Harm over at Daily Kos did a nice job of writing up a review on Mark Benjamin’s recent article at Salon.com, Inside the CIA’s notorious “black sites”. Benjamin’s article details the case of CIA Yemeni prisoner (now released), Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah.

Mr. Bashmilah was held for 19 months in a succession of prisons, trapped inside the CIA’s secret worldwide gulag. Now the one-time CIA torture victim has filed a declaration as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing Company, and implicated in secret CIA rendition flights.

According to Mark Benjamin, Mr. Bashmilah — a businessman who had travelled from his home in Indonesia to Jordan to help arrange a surgery for his mother — was subjected to extreme psychological torture and physical maltreatment, first by the Jordanians:

After his arrest, the Jordanians brutally beat him, peppering him with questions about al-Qaida. He was forced to jog around in a yard until he collapsed. Officers hung him upside down with a leather strap and his hands tied. They beat the soles of his feet and his sides. They threatened to electrocute him with wires. They told him they would rape his wife and mother.

It was too much. Bashmilah signed a confession multiple pages long, but he was disoriented and afraid even to read it.

Psychological Torture in Action

Apparently the confession wasn’t enough for the Americans, and the Jordanian interrogators dumped Bashmilah into the CIA gulag in October 2003. And, it was not waterboarding that the CIA in its black sites practiced upon their new prisoner, but, as I’ve been warning, severe psychological torture:

Flight records show Bashmilah was flown to Kabul….

He was then placed in a windowless, freezing-cold cell, roughly 6.5 feet by 10 feet. There was a foam mattress, one blanket, and a bucket for a toilet that was emptied once a day. A bare light bulb stayed on constantly. A camera was mounted above a solid metal door. For the first month, loud rap and Arabic music was piped into his cell, 24 hours a day, through a hole opposite the door. His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake….

“During the entire period of my detention there, I was held in solitary confinement and saw no one other than my guards, interrogators and other prison personnel,” he wrote in his declaration.

The loud music, the isolation, the temperature extremes… all these are hallmarks of CIA psychological torture, and meant to break down prisoners’ will and psyche. At some point Mr. Bashmilah was moved to another cell. This time there were two video cameras, another stock staple of CIA torture, as photography of prisoners was mentioned as far back as the early 1960s in CIA interrogation manuals. Think of that while you follow the ongoing controversy over CIA destruction of videos of interrogations of two of their more famous prisoners. No congressional committee to my knowledge is calling for the release of Mr. Bashmilah’s tapes.

At the new prison, it was more of the same:

It was another tiny cell, new or refurbished with a stainless steel sink and toilet. Until clothes arrived several days later, Bashmilah huddled in a blanket. In this cell there were two video cameras, one mounted above the door and the other in a wall. Also above the door was a speaker. White noise, like static, was pumped in constantly, day and night. He spent the first month in handcuffs. In this cell his ankle was attached to a 110-link chain attached to a bolt on the floor.

The door had a small opening in the bottom through which food would appear: boiled rice, sliced meat and bread, triangles of cheese, boiled potato, slices of tomato and olives, served on a plastic plate.

Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. “I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me,” Bashmilah wrote in his declaration.

One of the more revealing aspects of the Bashmilah case is the appearance of mental health professionals, either psychologists or psychiatrists, or both, in the CIA prisons. Their job appeared to be one of patching up the psyche/emotional state of the prisoner so they didn’t break down too much. Or conversely, it was part of a perverse good cop/bad cop regime that contributed to the prisoner’s despair and confusion.

Here’s what Benjamin reports:

It may seem bizarre for the agency to provide counseling to a prisoner while simultaneously cracking him mentally — as if revealing a humanitarian aspect to a program otherwise calibrated to exploit systematic psychological abuse. But it could also be that mental healthcare professionals were enlisted to help bring back from the edge prisoners who seemed precariously damaged, whose frayed minds were no longer as pliable for interrogation. “My understanding is that the purpose of having psychiatrists there is that if the prisoner feels better, then he would be able to talk more to the interrogators,” said Bashmilah….

He said the doctors told him to “hope that one day you will prove your innocence or that you will one day return to your family.” The psychiatrists also gave him some pills, likely tranquilizers. They analyzed his dreams. But there wasn’t much else they could do. “They also gave me a Rubik’s Cube so I could pass the time, and some jigsaw puzzles,” Bashmilah recalled.

PHR Noodges APA

Stephen Soldz reports that Physicians for Human Rights has recently circulated an email highlighting a renewed call for the American Psychological Association to call for a moratorium of psychologists working at national security interrogation sites like Guantanamo’s Camp Delta, or CIA “black sites”. Signed by Frank Donaghue, PHR’s new Chief Executive Officer, it reads in part:

You have probably seen recent news reports about the CIA’s destruction of video recordings of interrogations allegedly showing the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques. Last week, PHR released a statement, calling on the Attorney General and Congress to immediately launch independent investigations into both the alleged destruction of evidence of torture and the “enhanced” interrogation program itself. As PHR noted in our report Leave No Marks, waterboarding and other techniques can constitute war crimes.

Recent statements on ABC News and the Today Show by former CIA operative John Kiriakou allege that doctors were present during the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, which involved the use of sleep deprivation and waterboarding. PHR is calling for the Department of Justice, Congress and major health professional associations to conduct legal and ethical investigations. Those investigations must determine how physicians and psychologists participated in harsh interrogations as monitors and interrogators.

We continue to urge the American Psychological Association (APA) to place a moratorium on the participation of its members in all national security interrogations. Though PHR applauded the APA’s passage of a resolution this August stating that the tactics used by the CIA are unethical, the APA can take more steps to protect detainees from harm and US personnel from engaging in illegal abuse. PHR is asking the APA to follow the examples of the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association in refusing to allow its members to engage in abusive interrogations.

Finally, the House yesterday passed a bill which would make the Army Field Manual the unified standard for detainee treatment, prohibiting the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program. Now it must go before the full Senate.

Reformism and Nihilism in the Fight Against Torture

Well, the House bill passed, but then was blocked on a procedural motion by GOP representatives. But, I’ve been leery about the whole House bill, and any “reform” that outlaws waterboarding and other atrocities, but leaves intact the kind of psychological torture performed on Mr. Bashmilah — like sensory deprivation and sensory overload, sleep deprivation, and solitary confinement, not to mention other kinds of psychological manipulations. The Army Field Manual allows manipulation of fear in prisoners, along with isolation, sleep deprivation, and forms of sensory deprivation. And that’s what’s “legal“.

Additionallly, it is a truism by now that all actors and organizations involved in these by now multitudinous stories on torture deny they torture. While the American Psychiatric Association and American Medical Association have enacted their own kind of moratorium of doctor participation in interrogations, it’s not clear this ever really stopped. The situation with the American Psycological Association is, if anything, even murkier.

What’s left for us critics of U.S. use of torture amounts to a kind of activist nihilism. It’s not clear to me that anything has changed in U.S. prisons and GWOT interrogation centers. The recent revelations over the Standard Operation Procedure manuals for Guantanamo got a little play in the press, before dropping like a stone out of sight into the dark pond that is U.S. media coverage (and that includes the bloggers).

Fifty years or more of torture, human rights abuses, covert wars, and hidden histories, have amounted to very little change. There was the UN Convention Against Torture. But then, there was were the Geneva Conventions, too. And the Magna Carta. And this country has chosen to abrogate them all.

It seems to me that only serious political change will bring about an end to the practice of torture. Lawyers will not do it. Doctors and psychologists will not do it. Even Congress will not do it. Only when humanity seizes the reins of history again and steers it back onto the road of progress will we see again appreciable movement against the evils that confront us in the form of torture, repression, and inequality.

This doesn’t mean it’s not worth fighting. The ACLU, PHR, Amnesty International, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, Human Rights First, etc., all are holding the line against the barbarism of untrammelled militarism and political repression. All of them deserve your support.

Recently, there was something of a scandal that took place on several blogs.  Accusations were made that Oprah Winfrey, a major supporter of Barack Obama’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President, was an anti-union employer.  This was in rather short order, proved untrue, although many people voiced concern that the creative staff of Oprah’s talk show are not members of the Writers Guild of America, as is common for the staffs of most talk shows.

This was of particular concern to me.  I am a member of the WGA, but for a longer time and more importantly, I am a member of the International Association of Theatrical Stage Engineers, or IATSE.  It has been demonstrated by others that Oprah does employ members of the IATSE, but I called the offices of IATSE Local 2, which represents stagehands in Chicago, and IATSE Local 476, which represents studio mechanics there.  Both offices confirmed that Oprah employs members of both unions.

Another major issue regarding the WGA and the strike happened yesterday, as The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and Late Night with Conan O’Brian announced that they would resume airing, without writing staffs, this January.

As this is a major issue, for pretty much everyone, since whether or not you are a supporter of unions (and if you read this site, you almost certainly are) you are probably a consumer of television and film.  To do this, I must explain some basic things about unions in my industry, film and television.

The major unions which service my industry are the Directors Guild of America (DGA), the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), the WGA, the International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and the Teamsters, some of whose locals are also part of the IATSE (both unions are in the AFL-CIO).  Other unions, such as the American Society of Cinematographers have smaller involvement.  

First, I need to explain an important distinction.  Every television show employs one or more head writers, who are known as the “showrunner”.  This person is nearly always a member of the WGA, but their contract is not made under the auspices of the WGA.  Showrunners have their contracts through the PGA, since their duties are part of their role as an executive producer.  As such, they are not on strike, nor do they have the freedom of action that striking writers have.  The PGA contract is valid and in force; should Leno or Conan refuse to go on air, they are in violation of their contract.  Nonetheless, many showrunners, perhaps most notably Joel Surnow of “24”, have refused to work while the WGA is on strike.

But I also want to take a moment and talk about the IATSE, who we are, and what our situation is in the strike, and why people on the left need to be concious of the impact it is having on us.  For most of the last four years, I worked for a one-hour television drama.  We employed seven members of the WGA.  We also employed twelve members of the Producers Guild of America, and about twenty members of the Directors Guild of America.  We employed over one hundred members of IATSE, and over thirty Teamsters full-time.

Members of my union are not famous names.  We don’t win Emmys or Oscars.  We earn, by and large, less than $100,000 a year.  We work twelve to eighteen hours a day.   A lot of the people I work with barely see their spouses and children, and often, when we’re working on location, we don’t see them at all.

It is tough getting people to only hire workers from my union.  Lots of people want to work in show business, thinking it glamorous.  They’ll spend a year or two working as a grip or electrician or script supervisor for nothing wages, before learning the truth and moving on.  But it is easy for producers to do this.  Mostly, our value is hidden.  People notice great acting, writing, or direction.  They don’t notice good lighting, costumes, or well-driven equipment trucks.

I’ve worked on over sixty television shows and movies in the past decade, union and non-union jobs.  In his famous book, On Directing, a man I worked for, director Sydney Lumet, makes a joke out of how the Teamsters never took a pay cut to get a worthy movie made, although directors and actors do.  Because no actor or director ever got a big payday out of doing a low-budget prestige movie of course.  And, naturally, no Teamster ever got a raise to work on “Stuart Little 2”.  But the big difference is that there has been one vehicle accident by a Teamster on all the jobs I’ve ever worked.  Non-union drivers beat that count on the first feature I ever worked.

Unions matter, but when it comes to work like the IATSE does, they really matter.  They make sure that working people make a decent wage.  They make sure that genuinely dangerous work is as safe as possible, and in the decade I’ve been in the business, that work has been dangerous enough that two union electricians and one union grip have died on set in electrical accidents.  When I joined the union, it wasn’t just my quality of life that improved, but my safety in my workplace.  Even so, I have stories of filming on soundstages with fake snow that was both flammable and toxic, of overnight shoots doing driving stunts in snow so bad the director went home, of location shoots where we tied in our electric package to an opened fuse box.  The skill of the union workers on those shoots kept us unharmed.

But our work is generally uncelebrated and unvalued.  Good “progressives” don’t concern themselves with the union-busting entailed in watching shows filmed in Canada, or wonder why so many big budget films are being made in “right-to-work” states like Florida.  Hell, public leftists like Susan Sarandon are happy to shoot in Toronto, and come to New York for a day of location shooting.  I should know; I was happy to get the single day her movie “Noel” shot in Manhattan.

Generally speaking, we don’t complain.  We don’t oppose the WGA strike, even though it has led to the layoffs of thousands of IATSE members, who will gain no reward from their potential success.  We don’t begrudge much that while there are daily blog updates about the writers strike, IATSE Local One walked out for two weeks beginning last month and were bereft of outside supporters.  

But I don’t think it is too much to ask that when it comes down to the question of who does and doesn’t support unions, that we judge first and foremost based on who supports the workers at the bottom of the food chain.  Those union grips and electricians and scenics who Oprah hires, they are the ones who need it most.  The union camerapeople and props whose jobs were at stake if Conan refused to go back on the air include many people I know and have worked with for years.  They are union workers honoring union contracts, not scabs.  Their employers are friends of unions.  And understanding that matters.  I enjoy that Democrats want to be the party of union workers.  So be it.  

I was probably the world’s worst scout.  I was with 2 troops, each more horrible than the other and was never anything but a Tenderfoot, though I did earn some merit badges.

The first was full of the grossest reprobates and drunks at the Methodist Church (also home of the teen sex club youth group) the kind of guys who would fart in a glass and try and light it on fire at patrol meetings.

They were in fact a bunch of rip roaring pyromaniacs who would try and light just about any damn thing on fire, the bigger the better.

We were winter camping in a state park.  Not such a bad experience if you have a decent sleeping bag.  I will warn you that if there’s any snow pack at all (and this site had about 8 inches) you better watch your first step out of the tent in the morning because the residual heat from a small cook fire can melt a crater 20 feet across.  My peg was dangling when I woke up.

It was a small fire because it was put together by responsible sane adults since earlier in the day my dad had to drive one of the older wise ass patrol leaders to the hospital.

They had gone off to get wood and this rocket scientist thought it would be just as easy to hack up a picnic table.  He  was some surprised when his ax bounced off it and bit him in the leg I betcha.

It was pretty late in the day and we were all set up so they didn’t pack us all in the cars and drag us home, though I imagine they were sorely tempted.

(9 am – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Such a catchy title. Gotta work on that.

Lots of politickery today, and stories about late-night shows returning after the new year. Leno and Conan seem to be being forced back writer-less, and Letterman (who owns his production company) is negotiating his own interim agreement with the WGA. No word on the Daily Show/Colbert Report yet. Plus some action links, below.

Crossposted from dKos, where we’re chatting while desperately missing Jon & Stephen.