My statement of fact that Dick Gephardt had been tapped as Kerry's running mate has been exposed as so much blogosphere fiction, and frankly, I couldn't be happier to be wrong. The story came out of reports that Gep's top aid was being flown to the VP announcement via a chartered jet - something that no one could imagine would be done for any other reason than Gephardt getting the nod.

I'd imagine the real reason will be lost to the proverbial ether, but a part of me's convinced that it was deliberate misdirection on the part of the Kerry campaign. Until Sunday evening, I was only marginally more excited by the prospect of a Kerry/Edwards ticket than I was by Kerry/Gephardt or Kerry/Vilsack, but by convincing me that he'd chosen Gephardt, arguably the worst pick available, Kerry made his real choice seem inspired. I'm still unhappy about Edwards' vote for the IWR and the Patriot Act, but he is charismatic and affable, and should give Kerry a good 5% bounce in the next batch of polls. If Kerry can hold onto that, and if Bush's implosion continues, the odds of the Democrats taking the Whitehouse start looking pretty good.

Oh, and as evidence that I wasn't the only one who fell victim to the Gephardt snowjob, here's an (obviously unused) cover from the NY Post:

I went and saw Spiderman 2 last night instead of watching the tail end of the fireworks. Since most of downtown Portland was busy either playing with explosives and drinking PBR, or watching someone far more qualified play with much bigger explosives over the Willamette, the theater was fairly empty. It was a fun movie - certaainly the best of the big summer releases thus far, and far more entertaining than the first, but it was also schmaltzy - something that will undoubtedly annoy a lot of my friends but which fits perfectly with the Lee/Ditko tone that Raimi's been shooting for since the beginning.

I was in a pretty good mood when I got back home, logged into Daily KOS and started browsing the diaries. Then I read that Dick Gephardt would be Kerry's VP.

I could hardly contain my enthusiasm.

Gephardt was, after Joe Lieberman, the presidential candidate most supportive of the Iraq War. He stood with Bush and Cheney in the Rosegarden in a display of Partisan "unity" and proceeded to lead the Democrats to one of the party's biggest ass-whoopings in years. No matter what liberal credentials Gep may have won for himself through his opposition to NAFTA and his career long support of labor unions, it was erased by his craven support for neo-conservatism, multilateralism and global hegemony. The guy's not just a joke, he's a sleep-inducing joke.

But my opinion doesn't matter. Kerry knows that voters like me account for maybe 10 - 15% of the Democratic electorate, and that only the most idelogically strident of us will give Bush a proxy vote and vote for Nader or Cobb this year. Gephardt doesn't bring anything to the ticket except for the possibility of Missouri, but his selection fits Kerry's strategy perfectly. Kerry isn't playing political jiu-jitsu - he's playing political tai-chi, and Gephardt fits that as follows:

Gep represents virtually no net gain or loss for Kerry. Team Kerry decided months ago that winning the election wasn't about getting anyone excited about him, but rather, about letting Bush hang himself. By choosing Gephardt, Kerry continues that tactic, since very few people will switch sides because Dick Gephardt is on the ticket.

Gep's 65 - and as such, isn't going to run for the Presidency in 2012. Resultantly, he leaves the top spot open for people like Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean or John Edwards to run immediately after Kerry. Gep may have well been the intra-party compromise candidate.

So we're left with a Vice Presidential candidate who doesn't change the equations at all, which is exactly what the Kerry campaign wanted. The election remains a referendum on Shrub.

Posted by: Morgan / 10:31 AM

Although his first term hasn't even ended yet, Bush is already considered a failure by a vast majority of historians. A recent survey conducted by George Mason University's History News Network resulted in 338 out of 415 of those interviewed describing Bush's presidency unfavorably (for the mathematically challenged, that works out to 81.4 percent).

In the "worst president since..." category, 17% responded with Nixon, 14% with Harding, 12% with Hoover and 15% that no other president has ever been worse.

Great going George. I hope you live long enough to see your legacy in the history books.

In other news, Tom Potter pulled an upset in Multnomah County's mayoral elections last Tuesday. Though he didn't earn more than 50% of the vote and as such, will have to face Francesconi in a run off, he did get 5% more of the vote with $30,000 than Francesconi did with $1,000,000.

Here's my favorite reason to vote for him:



The similarity in style had struck me before, but seeing Dean and Potter standing next to each other really brought the similarities home. If Potter's smart, he'll make good use of that image - Dean was huge here in Portland, invoking his legacy and directly appealing to his constituency could easily get Potter another 10,000 votes.

In light of the Abu Ghraib scandal, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the Bush administration doesn't give a shit about human rights. Yeah, they've payed lip service to them, but only as one of the weekly justifications for war, and even then, only after it became clear that Hussein's balyhooed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction was a complete and total farce.

The following report describes the human rights abuses going on in Uzbekistan, who are one of our "bestest" buddies in the "War on Terror" (the salient linked paragraph is the second to the last). Don't bother trying to dig through Google News to find it - the article in question was pulled from Yahoo News (and everywhere else) at the request of the federal government. Names and anything else that could identify either the author or the people who forwarded it to me have been omitted:

From: Unnamed Reporter in Moscow
> Date: Mon Apr 19, 2004 12:03:29 AM US/Central
> To: US editors of said unnamed reporter
> Cc: Unnamed Reporter in Moscow
> Subject: daily
>
>
>
>
>
> here's an unskedded daily that I told i had been chasing. I sent
> it Sunday via Yahoo but I see this morning that the government filter
> rejected it. Let's see if it gets thorugh via AOL. (I have added a
> separate insert I also had sent last night.) I arrive kyrgyz this
> afternoon (Monday) and I sent my foners there earlier. one foto of
> sharipov is in house for this piece.
>
> By Unnamed Reporter in Moscow
> Unnamed News Service
>
> TASHKENT, Uzbekistan ----- Security officials have responded to recent
> terror attacks in Uzbekistan with a harsh campaign of mass arrests and
> torture, according to opposition politicians and human rights
> activists here.
>
> Hundreds of people have reportedly been arrested or detained without
> being charged. Some say they have suffered severe beatings, electric
> shocks and anal rape with bottles.
>
> ""There's a trail of evidence here that's simply undeniable,'' said
> Allison Gill, head of the Human Rights Watch office in Tashkent.
> ""Mass arrests are one thing. Torture is another.''
>
> The alleged excesses come as the State Department is debating whether
> Uzbekistan, a strategic U.S. ally in Central Asia, is worthy of
> continued American aid. A decision is due in the coming weeks. Hanging
> in the balance is as much as $40 million in direct assistance to the
> authoritarian regime of president Islam Karimov.
>
> The government has blamed Islamist extremists for a series of
> explosions and suicide attacks that left 48 people dead in Uzbekistan
> three weeks ago. Police say they have arrested 54 people, including 15
> women.
>
> But a prominent opposition leader said he and other pro-democracy
> activists have documented more than 800 arrests nationwide, along with
> some 400 administrative detentions in which police may hold suspects
> without charges.
>
>
>
> ""They've been arresting everyone on their black list, and then some,
> especially young people,'' said Atanazar Aripov, secretary-general of
> the outlawed Erk (Free) Party. ""They're using the attacks as an
> excuse for this crackdown. They just want to repress democracy even
> more.''
>
> Uzbek police and government officials have refused repeated requests
> for comment about the allegations of torture and illegal arrests.
>
>
> Aripov, a retired physicist, said reports of arrests and abuses
> continue to pour in. They're being compiled by workers from the Erk
> Party and the Party of Free Farmers.
>
>
>
> He told the story of Surat Mirvaliev, a 31-year-old greenhouse
> attendant, whom police accused of being a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a
> banned Muslim group. His mother, who briefly saw him in jail, said he
> had been beaten so badly about the head that ""he was sitting in a
> corner, shaking and babbling like a madman.''
>
>
>
> In another case, a nursing mother, Khamida Karbaeva, told Human Rights
> Watch that she was detained on April 3 by plainclothes officers. She
> said she had been beaten by the officers; a week later, bruises were
> still obvious on her body.
>
>
>
> Karbaeva said the officers, who actually had been searching for her
> fugitive husband, pointed to a mattress in the corner of the
> interrogation room and threatened to rape her on it. They also said
> they would strip her, photograph her naked, then spread the nude
> pictures around her conservative Muslim neighborhood.
>
>
>
> She was held more than 24 hours --- without being allowed to nurse her
> baby --- before she was released. Meanwhile, officers had picked up
> her 10-year-old son for questioning and kept him overnight.
>
>
>
> Uzbekistan already has a notorious reputation on religious and human
> rights, a record that British ambassador Craig Murray calls
> ""appalling.''
>
>
> In a 2004 report, the U.S. State Department said the Karimov
> government had ""a very poor record on human rights.'' There is no
> free press or TV, police and government corruption is rampant, and the
> courts are wholly beholden to the regime.
>
>
> In its annual survey on religion, the State Department found that the
> government ""continues to commit numerous serious abuses of religious
> freedoms,'' including the harassment of Uzbek Christians. The report
> also said the police ""routinely"" plant drugs, ammunition and banned
> religious tracts on people they want to arrest.
>
>
> ""Uzbekistan is stifling civil society and has a horrendous human
> rights record,'' financier George Soros said Sunday in announcing the
> government had shut down his pro-democracy aid agency, the Open
> Society Institute. ""In the use of torture it's worse than Belarus,
> the only other country to force OSI to close...I call on the United
> States to re-examine its relationship with the Uzbek government.''
>
> Uzbekistan's track record on police torture is certainly dismal. A
> United Nations special investigator, Theo van Boven, visited
> Uzbekistan last year and concluded that official torture was
> ""systematic"" in the country.
>
>
> One case he examined was that of Muzafar Avazov, 35, who died while
> serving an 18-year sentence for religious extremism. Van Boven
> concluded that Avazov probably had been boiled to death.
>
>
> Avazov's mother got accounts of her son's torture from several of his
> fellow inmates. They told her prison officers had used burlap sacks
> full of nails to beat him in the head. They tore out his fingernails,
> broke his nose and shocked him with electrodes. They dipped him into a
> tank of boiling water, then poured disinfectant on his raw skin.
>
>
>
> Police officials said Avazov died in a prison melee when another
> inmate threw hot tea on him.
>
>
>
> When Avazov's mother, Fatima Mukadyrova, went public with her son's
> case, she was jailed for anti-government activity.
>
>
>
> In February, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld arrived to thank the
> Karimov government for its cooperation in the war on terrorism and for
> allowing the United States the use of an Uzbek airbase. Just hours
> before Rumsfeld's plane touched down, Mukadyrova was released.
>
>
>
> And now, with the State Department's aid decision looming, maverick
> journalist Ruslan Sharipov also has been released from prison. It
> remains to be seen if these token releases will be enough for
> Secretary of State Colin Powell to make a case before Congress for
> further aid.
>
>
>
> Sharipov remains under house arrest, and before a clandestine
> interview in Tashkent last week he took the battery out his cellular
> phone. ""They can listen to us through this, you know,'' he said.
>
>
>
> Sharipov made the government's black list for publishing highly
> detailed stories about official corruption. He named names and he got
> people fired.
>
>
> He assumed his contacts with human rights groups and foreign diplomats
> would give him a certain immunity. Those assumptions proved wrong,
> however, and he was arrested for sodomy.
>
>
> His jailers at the Interior Ministry began torturing him right away,
> he said. They placed electric wires on his earlobes and nipples, then
> gave him small jolts to scare him. They suffocated him with plastic
> bags and gas masks. They injected him with something, then held up
> another syringe.
>
>
> ""They said they'd inject me with the HIV virus if I didn't obey
> them,'' he said. Then they ordered him to write out a suicide note,
> which he assumed would be used if his torturers overdid things and
> killed him.
>
>
>
> ""Of course I wrote it!"" he said. ""They really frightened me. I
> signed everything they put me in front of me. I knew they tortured
> people to death in the basement where I was. They can do anything.''
>
>
> Sharipov worries that the U.S. government will certify Uzbekistan for
> more financial aid. If so, he believes, things will get worse for him
> and other pro-democracy voices.
>
>
>
> ""The U.S. government plays a very important role in Uzbekistan, but
> how can the Bush administration support this regime with all these
> human rights and press abuses?'' he said wearily. ""How can they keep
> giving them money? It's not right.''
>

So that's our ally Uzbekistan - a country that injects prisoners with HIV and boils them alive. Sadly, I'm not surprised that our administration supressed this story, especially now that it's been confirmed we're using state sanctioned torture ourselves, but the hypocrisy and sheer, calculating cynicism of it staggering. If I didn't know better, I'd guess that we'd eventually get around to "caring" about the plight of the Uzbekistani people (after deciding that we wanted their oil) but since Uzbekistan opened it's oil reserves to foreign investors back in April of 2000, we'll probably ignore these abuses for as long as any of the Bush junta stay in power.

I wish I could still be shocked by this shit.

Looks like I prematurely complained about Kerry not speaking out on the Abu Ghraib fiasco. CBS is reporting that he's joined the growing chorus of Democrats demanding Rumsfeld's ouster.

He's still no Dean, but it's nice to know he's willing to try to take the base out for a drink every so often.

Last week it looked like the US Press intended to wholly ignore the Abu Ghraib scandal.

What a difference a week makes.

Reuters reports that the scandal has now grown so large that some Democrats have started demanding Rumsfeld's resignation. Nancy Pelosi is leading the charge, and in the process, finally acting like the opposition leader I hoped she'd be when she replaced Dick Gephardt after the debacle of 2002.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi accused Rumsfeld of being "in denial about Iraq," and said U.S. soldiers "are suffering great casualties and injuries, and American taxpayers are paying an enormous price" because Rumsfeld "has done a poor job as secretary of defense."

"Secretary Rumsfeld must resign," she said.

Pelosi, of California, said Rumsfeld "must be held responsible for any cover-up" of the abuses that came to light last week with televised photographs showing sexual humiliation of Iraqi prisoners in a jail outside Baghdad

Comments from Sen. Tom Harkin and Rep. Charlie Rengel were even better, with the two using even stronger language than Pelosi did. Harkin was quoted as saying, "For the good of our country, the safety of our troops and our image around the globe, Secretary Rumsfeld should resign. If he does not resign forthwith, the president should fire him."

"Fire" is a nice, ballsy power verb, but Rengel went a step further, calling for Rumsfeld's impeachment if Bush didn't fire him. I like the word "impeachment" even better.

For their part, Bush and the rest of the Republican's End-of-Days Jesus Cult wing appear to be sticking by Rumsfeld, with DeLay making the most inadvertently funny comment yet, that "Calling for Secretary Rumsfeld's resignation is as bad a signal as saying the war in unwinnable." I realize that none of them can, but I'd love to see one of the Democrats point out to the hateful little troll that, in fact, it is fucking unwinnable.

Right now, I'd say there's a three in four chance this boils over and Rumsfeld gets to keep his job. If it doesn't though, the GOP may end up making the Trent Lott mistake all over again - standing by their man even while the country and the world call for his head on a platter. And since Kerry sure as hell isn't doing a god damned thing to win the Presidency on his own, everything that Bush and co. do to lose it is good news.

"Appalling" doesn't even begin to describe the tortures and abuses that occurred in Iraq's Abu Ghraib Prison last month. Already infamous for the human rights abuses that Saddam and the Bathists perpetrated there, CBS's 60 Minutes 2 has broken the story that a group of army reservists decided to carry on the tradition.

Images of the abuses are available here for anyone with a strong enough stomach. Among other things, prisoners were forced to sit on each other's backs in human pyramids, stand on boxes with electrodes hooked up to their genitalia, and fellate each other in front of troops - even more disturbing than the abuses are the smiling US soldiers who figure prominently in the pictures - giving the camera "thumbs up" signs and pointing at the prisoner's penises.

For their part, the reservists claim that they were actively encouraged by people in military intelligence and the CIA, and that they were never shown sections of the Geneva Convention that dealt with the handling of prisoners. If that's true they're hardly exonerated; instead, the story just becomes that much more horrific - no longer a matter of some poorly trained and uneducated reservists getting off on torture, but a widely disseminated plan, approved by a brigadier general, to spit in the face of human rights in the interest of intelligence gathering.

And it's the 99.9% of our troops who wouldn't behave like this are that will end up paying for it. The soldiers who perpetrated these crimes are facing court martials, and as such, their time in Iraq is over, but the 149,983 soldiers still there aren't so lucky. Once the pictures of the abuses start circulating through the Arabic world (and as of this afternoon, Al Jazeera was reporting on the story but not showing pictures) future American prisoners will become fair game and that many more Iraqis will decide that it's time to make America pay. I'm a bleeding heart liberal, but if I saw someone treating my son, or brother, or father, or friend like that, I'd want bloody fucking vengeance, and I don't expect the Iraqi people to react any differently.

The petty little bullies who did this and the smiling officers who encouraged them haven't just failed as basic human beings - they've also undone months of "progress" in Iraq, and have probably set back the clock on their precious "war on terror" by years, even if one figures that only 1 in 1000 Middle Easterners who sees the pictures will pick up a gun and start advocating militant radicalism, that's still an extra 200 - 300 thousand people left abhoring the United States and wishing death on everyone on it.

That's eleven-thousand more hijacked airplanes or one-hundred thousand more suicide bombings, all occurring because of seventeen "civilized" humans who get off on torture and humiliation.

It's one of those instances where my citizenship makes me feel like I need a shower.

Canada's Globe and Mail and Australia's Big News Network are both reporting that the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Comission (CRTTC) has decided against granting FOX News a Canadian broadcasting license. Although I wasn't able to find a rationale for the decision on FOX specifically, I'd imagine that the CRTTC's decision was based on FOX's failure to meet this clause from their rule about Election Campaign and Political Advertising:

Broadcasters' Obligations

As part of their service to the public, broadcasters in Canada have always been obliged to cover elections. During a campaign, they must provide equitable treatment of issues, candidates and parties. "Equitable" means that all candidates and parties are entitled to some coverage that will give them the opportunity to expose their ideas to the public. Although treatment must be fair and just, "equitable" does not necessarily mean "equal".

So in a nutshell, the CRTTC has called bullshit on FOX's "fair and balanced" charade and recognized them for exactly what they are - the largest entity in the GOP's propaganda machine. Predictably, O'Reilly and company are apopolectic, and their supporters have been flooding inboxes at both the Globe and Mail and the the CRTTC with the mispelled and vaguely profane rants that pass for logical argument among the GOP's grassroots (complete with the "Shut up or we'll nuke you commie fags!!" thesis that the Freepers, Dittoheads and other conservative trolls trot out whenever any foreign entity has the audacity to question anything American.)

The whole thing's eminently satisfying, and if nothing else, energy that the right puts into defending FOX's, uhmmm, honor, is energy that they can't spend trying to rationalize Bush's meeting the 9-11 comission with Cheney's hand up his ass, his lawyers at his side and no one recording any of it.

Wired News and Slashdot are both reporting that Forgent Technologies have decided to start suing companies ranging from Apple to IBM to Kodak over rights to the JPEG compression format. I haven't done enough research yet to determine whether there's any merit to it or not, and the extent of my legal knowledge is basically nil, but my first thought is that Forgent's behaving like a mini Microsoft. JPEGs are so ubiquitous at this point that a company trying to shake down every developer who's written code around the algorithm are going to get laughed out of court. Unless Forgent intends to start suing all 1.3 million porn sites for intellectual copyright (good luck on that one guys) they'll be selectively picking who they're enforcing their patents again, which (again, IANAL) can be used as evidence in an antitrust case.

It's all sort of moot though - if Forgent really goes down this route they'll only end up screwing themselves out of revenue, since at this point, nobody's going to pay for an image compression algorithm. If they start collecting they'll be lucky to get a week's worth of profits out of it - after that, someone will have developed an open source format that'll be moved to en masse.

I'd suggest getting a .png viewer now.