Another sleazy Republican ad during National Character Counts week

The Republican National Committee paid for this attack ad on Harold Ford (D-TN), which has prompted Ford's opponent, Bob Corker, to call on the RNC to pull the ad.

UPDATE (November 8, 2006): Corker defeated Ford, which isn't terribly disappointing given Ford's positions on the issues (he supported the invasion of Iraq, voted for the Military Commissions Act, and supported federal and state bans of same-sex marriage, while posing as a religious man but attending parties at the Playboy mansion). It was really a lose-lose race.

Sleazy Republican attack ad may be backfiring

The National Republican Congressional Committee is standing behind its ad attacking Democrat Michael Arcuri, who is running against Republican Ray Meier to replace retiring Republican Rep. Sherwood Boehlert in upstate New York.

Here's the content of the ad:

Woman's sultry voice: "Hi sexy. You've reached the live one-on-one fantasy line." (Soft music plays in the background.)

Announcer: "A phone number to an adult fantasy hot line appeared on Michael Arcuri's New York City hotel room bill while he was there on official business. And the call was charged to Oneida County taxpayers. Arcuri has denied it, but the facts are there. Who calls a fantasy hot line and then bills taxpayers? Michael Arcuri."

Woman's sultry voice: "Bad call."

The facts of the matter are that an Arcuri aide made a call to the number in question for less than a minute, which was in error. He then called a number with a different area code (instead of a toll-free number) but the rest of the digits the same, which is the number of the state Department of Criminal Justice Services. Arcuri is the district attorney in Oneida County.

At least seven television stations have refused to run the GOP's ad, for good reason--it's unbelievably misleading.

The NRCC, fully aware of the dishonesty of this advertisement, insists that their account is "totally true" (yes, but it uses true but incomplete information in a way specifically intended to mislead, which is a form of lying) and they say that they stand behind the message.

Upstate New York newspapers have been doing a good job of exposing the facts.

UPDATE (November 8, 2006): Arcuri defeated Meier in the election and will be the next Rep. from NY's 24th District.

Kevin Tillman speaks out

Kevin Tillman, the brother of Pat Tillman, who fought with him in the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, has spoken out about the Bush administration, the war on terror, and the war in Iraq, in a piece titled "After Pat's Birthday."

Kent Hovind on trial

Creationist Kent Hovind's trial for tax evasion is proving to be quite a hoot. Some highlights from the Pensacola News-Journal's coverage:

Hovind attempted to manipulate funds from the start of his ministry, she said. In 1996, he filed for bankruptcy, a move Heldmeyer said Hovind designed to prevent the IRS from collecting taxes. The IRS later determined Hovind filed under an "evil purpose," Heldmeyer said. She called Hovind a "very loud and vocal tax protester," recalling a number of lawsuits he filed against the IRS over the past decade. Each was deemed frivolous and was thrown out, she said. And on April 13, 2004, when IRS officials issued a search warrant for Hovind's property, he resisted.

Hovind has some interesting theories about corporate liability and government action:

Popp testified that Hovind warned employees not to accept mail addressed to "KENT HOVIND." He said Hovind told the workers the government created a corporation in his "all-caps name." Hovind said if he accepted the mail, he would be accepting the responsibilities associated with that corporation, Popp testified.

Hovind uses Scientology-style tactics against the IRS (though without their success--apparently 50 separate lawsuits against agents from a large criminal cult has more effect):

Hovind tried several bullying tactics against her, Powe testified. A recording that Hovind made of a phone conversation was then played. In the phone conversation, Hovind tried to make an appointment with Powe by 10 a.m. that day. When Powe said she couldn't meet him because she had a staff meeting, Hovind threatened to sue her, which he did. "Dr. Hovind sued me three times, maybe more," Powe testified. "It just seemed to be something he did often." She testified that the cases were dismissed.

Blog Coverage:

Panda's Thumb: Dr. Dino in the Dock (October 18)
Panda's Thumb: Workers testify in 'Dr. Dino' trial (October 19)
Pharyngula: Pensacola Hilarity (October 20)
Pharyngula: Hovind saga continues (October 21)
Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Hovind Trial Begins (October 18)
Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Hovind Trial, Day 2 (October 20)
Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Hovind Trial, Day 3 (October 21)
Dispatches from the Culture Wars: Hovind Trial, Day 4 (October 23)

Warning signs of the future

I like the "existential threat" and "cognitive hazard" signs. See the collection here.

(Via Bruce Schneier's blog).

Jailed terror suspect helped National Association of Evangelicals draft school religion rules

The above headline is justified to the same extent as Stop the ACLU's headline, "Jailed Terror Suspect Helped ACLU Draft School Religion Rules," as the rules in question were drafted jointly and agreed to by 35 organizations which included the National Association of Evangelicals, the ACLU, the Christian Legal Society, the General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists, and numerous other religious groups.

The "jailed terror suspect" in question was a member of the American Muslim Council, one of the 35 groups involved in creating these rules for the Department of Education under Clinton. This led another conservative blogger to headline this story with the even more deceptively dishonest "Terrorist Wrote Clinton's School Religion Guidelines."

(Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, where Ed Brayton has been repeatedly responding to this same absurd charge for years.)

Dirty Politician: Rep. Jerry Lewis

House Appropriations Committee chairman Jerry Lewis (R-CA), under federal investigation himself, abruptly fired 60 contract investigators working for the Appropriations Committee to identify government fraud and waste. This stalls out all of the investigations, which have been saving billions of dollars and identified numerous instances of malfeasance.

Lewis spokesman John Scofield says "there is nothing sinister going on."

A bad argument in support of the Protect Marriage Arizona amendment

Gun rights advocate and "uninvited ombudsman" Alan Korwin has sent out a checklist of his recommendations on the Arizona ballot propositions. I disagree with him on several of the propositions, perhaps most significantly on his recommendation of a yes vote to amend the Arizona Constitution to ban same-sex marriage and any legal arrangements that are "similar to" marriage. Here's his argument for 107:

107 YES Protect marriage amendment. If people want gay unions, polygamy, bestiality or whatever, I say let them, but not under government sanction and funding. I'd like to see us return to "holy matrimony" without any government involvement. Getting married for tax breaks is so wrong.

But this argument presumes the effect of 107 is to get the government out of the marriage business, which it isn't. Rather, 107 has the effect of enshrining existing statutory prohibitions on a form (or multiple forms) of legal contract between consenting adults into the Constitution, and going further to restrict any such arrangement "similar to" marriage. It isn't pro-liberty, it's anti-liberty. It isn't eliminating special privileges, it is adding them to the Arizona Constitution.

It's perfectly reasonable to argue that nobody should have tax breaks or special privileges under the law, but it's not reasonable to say that because such privileges are wrong we should restrict them to a particular set of people. That's not only unfair, it's unconstitutional--a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. It's like arguing that the government shouldn't confer support on religion, so we should vote yes on an amendment that limits government support to the Christian religion, and keep it from supporting Islam or other religions. (No doubt there are many Americans who would, quite wrongly, support such a law.)

Now, some advocates of Proposition 107 have argued that there is no violation of the equal protection clause because a gay man has the same right to marry a woman as a heterosexual man does. But this is just like arguing that a prohibition on interracial marriage doesn't violate the equal protection clause because a black man has the same right to marry a black woman as a white man has to marry a white woman--the description of the right is being crafted to exclude the category of person who is being discriminated against.

As Ed Brayton has pointed out on numerous occasions, the arguments for the unconstitutionality of a ban on same-sex marriage are of the same form as the arguments for the unconstitutionality of a ban on miscegenation, just replacing "different race" with "same sex." If you think that the Supreme Court ruled correctly in Loving v. Virginia, you should also think that Arizona's Proposition 107 violates the U.S. Constitution for the same reasons.

See also my previous post on the Protect Marriage Arizona amendment. You may also find David Friedman's economic analysis of marriage arrangements to be of interest.

UPDATE (October 21, 2006): Just to make it clear, THeath has enumerated some specific examples of what opponents of gay marriage are actually endorsing (there are several more if you follow the link)--these aren't hypotheticals, these are real people:

• There was the friend I wrote about recently who was turned away from from the emergency room, where his partner had been taken after suddenly collapsing at work, and told he could not be given any information because he was not next of kin. He had to leave the hospital and retrieve their legal documents before he could gain admittance to see his partner when a married spouse would have been waved through without question.


• My friend was luckier than Bill Flanigan. When his partner Robert Daniel was hospitalized in Baltimore, the couple had their legal documents with them, including durable power of attorney and documentation that they were registered as domestic partners in California. But those documents were ignored by hospital staff and Flanigan was kept from seeing his partner until Daniel’s mother and sister arrived and by then Daniel was unconscious, with his eyes taped shut and hooked to a breathing tube; something Daniel had not wanted.


• Even having a will didn’t help Sam Beaumont when his partner of 23 years, Earl, died. Oklahoma requires a will to have two witnesses, but Earl didn’t know that and his will leaving everything to Sam had only one. So Earl's cousins, who disapproved of his relationship and most of whom never spoke to the couple or even came to Earl’s funeral, successfully sued to take away the home and ranch Sam an Earl had shared for 23 years. A married spouse, even in the event of a will lacking enough witnesses, would’ve had the right to automatically inherit at least some of the estate.

Further Update (October 22, 2006): Ed Brayton takes apart the Alliance Defense Fund's white paper on these marriage amendments here.

Matt Taibbi takes on 9/11 conspiracy theorists

Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone has an excellent article on 9/11 conspiracy theorists, pointing out the absurdity of their claims in the form of a dialogue among the plotters:

BUSH: So, what's the plan again?

CHENEY: Well, we need to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. So what we've decided to do is crash a whole bunch of remote-controlled planes into Wall Street and the Pentagon, say they're real hijacked commercial planes, and blame it on the towelheads; then we'll just blow up the buildings ourselves to make sure they actually fall down.

RUMSFELD: Right! And we'll make sure that some of the hijackers are agents of Saddam Hussein! That way we'll have no problem getting the public to buy the invasion.

CHENEY: No, Dick, we won't.

RUMSFELD: We won't?

CHENEY: No, that's too obvious. We'll make the hijackers Al Qaeda and then just imply a connection to Iraq.

RUMSFELD: But if we're just making up the whole thing, why not just put Saddam's fingerprints on the attack?

CHENEY: (sighing) It just has to be this way, Dick. Ups the ante, as it were. This way, we're not insulated if things go wrong in Iraq. Gives us incentive to get the invasion right the first time around.

BUSH: I'm a total idiot who can barely read, so I'll buy that. But I've got a question. Why do we need to crash planes into the Towers at all? Since everyone knows terrorists already tried to blow up that building complex from the ground up once, why don't we just blow it up like we plan to anyway, and blame the bombs on the terrorists?

RUMSFELD: Mr. President, you don't understand. It's much better to sneak into the buildings ourselves in the days before the attacks, plant the bombs and then make it look like it was exploding planes that brought the buildings down. That way, we involve more people in the plot, stand a much greater chance of being exposed and needlessly complicate everything!

CHENEY: Of course, just toppling the Twin Towers will never be enough. No one would give us the war mandate we need if we just blow up the Towers. Clearly, we also need to shoot a missile at a small corner of the Pentagon to create a mightily underpublicized additional symbol of international terrorism -- and then, obviously, we need to fake a plane crash in the middle of fucking nowhere in rural Pennsylvania.

RUMSFELD: Yeah, it goes without saying that the level of public outrage will not be sufficient without that crash in the middle of fucking nowhere.

There's lots more dialogue in the article... Taibbi summarizes:

None of this stuff makes any sense at all. If you just need an excuse to assume authoritarian powers, why fake a plane crash in Shanksville? What the hell does that accomplish? If you're using bombs, why fake a hijacking, why use remote-control planes? If the entire government apparatus is in on the scam, then why bother going to all this murderous trouble at all -- only to go to war a year later with a country no one even bothered to falsely blame for the attacks? You won't see any of this explored in 9/11 Truth lore, because the "conspiracy" they're describing is impossible everywhere outside a Zucker brothers movie -- unbelievably stupid in its conception, pointlessly baroque and excessive in its particulars, but flawless in its execution, with no concrete evidence left behind and tens of thousands keeping their roles a secret forever.

Check it out--highly recommended, along with these other 9/11 conspiracy debunking sites.

How planespotting uncovered CIA torture flights

The Village Voice has an excerpt from the book Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights, which is fascinating reading. The hobby of planespotting--watching and recording information about planes that take off and land--led a few individuals to deduce that planes spotted at "Base Camp" in Nevada were being used by the CIA to transport prisoners to locations in eastern Europe and the Middle East. Individuals correlating data with each other over the Internet and comparing to flight logs and testimony from released prisoners yielded very specific results. Civil Air Landing Permit data was used to identify obscure companies with clearance to land anywhere they want, including restricted military bases--such as One Leasing, Richmor Aviation, Stevens Express Leasing, Tepper Aviation, Path Corporation, Rapid Air Trans, Aviation Specialties, Devon Holding and Leasing, Crowell Aviation, and Premier Executive Transport Services. The planes owned by some of these companies were found to be visiting military bases, Guantanamo Bay, Morocco, Romania, Poland, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Jon Sifton of Human Rights Watch has conducted analysis of the resulting flight data to determine which stops were merely for refueling and which were for destinations--acute angles for inbound and outbound flights from a stop are indicative of a destination rather than a refueling stop, for example.