Good Reputation Sleeping

Sunday Outlook

Are We Really So Fearful? - washingtonpost.com.

"That is what stays with me -- that he was cold under the balmy afternoon sun of Santiago de Chile, trembling as though he would never be warm again, as though the electric current was still coursing through him. Still possessed, somehow still inhabited by his captors, still imprisoned in that cell in the National Stadium, his hands disobeying the orders from his brain to quell the shuddering, his body unable to forget what had been done to it just as, nearly 33 years later, I, too, cannot banish that devastated life from my memory." - Ariel Dorfman

Daring to question from a position of knowledge; fact, not theory, seen first hand.
A beautifully written look into the eyes of torture and into the heart of our collective, national soul.

Voices in the Wilderness

The Dixie Chicks: America Catches Up With Them - New York Times.

"We have video footage of this lady at one of the shows protesting, holding her 2-year-old son," Ms. Maines said. The woman commanded her son to shout along with an angry chant. "And I was just like, that's it right there. That's the moment that it's taught. She just taught her 2-year-old how to hate. And that broke my heart." - Jon Pareles, NYT, Photograph by J. Emilio Flores

I am not a big Dixie Chicks fan, but I will be buying this album because, damn, somebody has to say something!

Rosa Parks, At Rest

Civil Rights Icon, Dies at Age 92.

Rosa Parks, the dignified African American seamstress whose refusal to surrender a bus seat to a white man launched the modern civil rights movement and inspired generations of activists, died last night at her home in Detroit, the Wayne County medical examiner's office said. She was 92. - Patricia Sullivan, TWP

Supreme Court F.O.G. (Friend of George)

Strong Grounding in the Church Could Be a Clue to Miers's Priorities.

"One evening in the 1980s, several years after Harriet Miers dedicated her life to Jesus Christ, she attended a lecture at her Dallas evangelical church with Nathan Hecht, a colleague at her law firm and her on-again, off-again boyfriend. The speaker was Paul Brand, a surgeon and the author of "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made," a best-selling exploration of God and the human body.

When the lecture was over, Miers said words Hecht had never heard from her before. "I'm convinced that life begins at conception," Hecht recalled her saying. According to Hecht, now a Texas Supreme Court justice, Miers has believed ever since that abortion is "taking a life."

"I know she is pro-life," said Hecht, one of the most conservative judges in Texas. "She thinks that after conception, it's not a balancing act -- or if it is, it's a balancing of two equal lives." - Michael Grunwald, Jo Becker, John Pomfret, The Washington Post

The Best News Money Can Buy

Buying of News by Bush's Aides Is Ruled Illegal - The New York Times.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 - "Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party. In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban." - Robert Pear

The Avenging Angel

Global Voices Online Blog Archive The World Reacts to Robertson.

Indian blogger Harini Calamur writes at Point of View: "When Osama asks for Bush and Blair's head - he is a nasty terrorist. It would be interesting to see the Bush Administration bring charges of encouraging terrorism on Robertson." (Via Sabbah's Blog.)

Power Corrupting, Absolutely

The New York Times Editorial: The Judges Made Them Do It.

It was appalling when the House majority leader threatened political retribution against judges who did not toe his extremist political line. But when a second important Republican stands up and excuses murderous violence against judges as an understandable reaction to their decisions, then it is time to get really scared.

It happened on Monday, in a moment that was horrifying even by the rock-bottom standards of the campaign that Republican zealots are conducting against the nation's judiciary. Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, rose in the chamber and dared to argue that recent courthouse violence might be explained by distress about judges who "are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public." The frustration "builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in" violence, said Mr. Cornyn, a former member of the Texas Supreme Court who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which supposedly protects the Constitution and its guarantee of an independent judiciary.

Military Industrial Banking Complex

Link: Nomination Shocks, Worries Europeans.

President Bush's nomination of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz as the next president of the World Bank was met with much surprise, little enthusiasm and some outright opposition in Europe, where he is best known as a leading proponent of a conflict deeply unpopular here, the Iraq war.

"We were led to believe that the neoconservatives were losing ground," said Michael Cox, a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. "But clearly the revolution is alive and well." - Keith B. Richburg and Glenn Frankel, The Washington Post

Pattern Recognition

Writer Backing Bush Plan Had Gotten Federal Contract - Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post.

"In 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher repeatedly defended President Bush's push for a $300 million initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families.

"The Bush marriage initiative would emphasize the importance of marriage to poor couples" and "educate teens on the value of delaying childbearing until marriage," Gallagher wrote in National Review Online, for example, adding that this could "carry big payoffs down the road for taxpayers and children."

But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's proposal. Her work under the contract, which ran from January through October 2002, included drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials."

Large and In Charge

Worrisome Hubris.

"Here's the nub of my worry, as Bush & Co. begin their second term: If they confuse rigidity with resolve, and refuse to learn from their mistakes because they fear it would be a sign of weakness, they are going to get the country into real trouble. Because they have mostly been promoted from within, the members of the second-term team are especially in need of reality checks from outside -- even rude or awkward ones. If they take offense at such challenges and treat public scrutiny as a personal affront, they won't be successful. It's as simple as that." - David Ignatius, The Washington Post