Weekend Tids and Bits

Gracious to the End: The Newark Star-Ledger is winning praise for the way it is handling salary cuts, kind of like cheering the headsman for a sharp axe and good follow-through.

For the record, the cuts go on a progressive scale --  five percent of the first $40,000, ten percent of the next $40,000 and 15 percent beyond that. This comes after bigtime buyouts, mandatory ten-day unpaid leave, and no more pension plan contributions. Plus, employees will be picking up a quarter of their health plan costs, taking another $80.11 a week from employees on the family plan.

My hometown paper for more than three decades, the Ledger has that thin, wasting look you usually see not long before the end.

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TANJ! (There Ain’t No Justice):  The United States Department of Justice say’s it will save $6.7 million over the next five years by moving legal notices about property forfeiture from newspapers to http://forfeiture.gov. That’s probably only the beginning across, federal, state and local governments and is just one more nail in a newspapering coffin already having more nails than wood.

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You Can Flu Some of the People All of The Time. . . Media outlets and authorities fond of seeing themselves mentioned completed the Swine Flu (Sorry Mr. President, H1N1 virus) cycle last week, moving from Prepare For The End to a much milder Prepare For The End (but it’s not coming for the forseeable future). The good: countries got to practice the drill they’ll need for a major threat. The bad: over-reaction, especially in Mexico, that caused far more economic damage than it prevented disease. The silly: Afghanistan taking the sole pig in the Muslim Country’s zoo off exhibition and into quarantine, lest it infect the faithful who have more to worry about with their bullet epidemic than a possible virus.

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JP Morgan Chase was one of the financial institutions that passed the government stress test. That’s probably because of the conservative financial policies found at the branch, where I tried to pay for a Mothers Day Visa gift card with a Chase Visa debit card. Sorry, the kind teller said, only checks or cash are accepted.

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Satan’s Pride and Joy

 

Satan must be so damned proud.

 

The debate over Central Intelligence Agency torture of suspected terrorists now centers not on whether it was right or wrong, but on whether or not it was effective.

 

Since time began, turning our attention from issues of good or evil to procedural details has been high on Hell’s agenda. And at no time has success been as spectacular as in the last 100 years.

 

The debate in Nazi Germany was not over whether the execution camps were wrong, but whether the Final Solution functioned efficiently. Stalin’s artificial famines, forced collectivization and endless Gulags were criticized less for being wrong than for being economically inefficient.

 

And now the heirs of those who so proudly wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” are treated to an August 1, 2002 memo from the ironically named U.S. Department of Justice that says:

 

·        It’s okay to grab a suspect’s head, slap them in the face and throw them against specially-built walls.

·        There’s no problem with putting a suspect into a box for 18 hours at a stretch.

·        Sleep deprivation for 72 hours is fine, as is forcing suspects to assume and hold body positions that bring intense muscle fatigue pain.

·        Putting feared insects into the box with the subject presents no issues.

·        Water-boarding, aka near-drowning, is perfectly legal, even if you do it to one suspect 183 times in a single month, and give another suspect a break with only 83 episodes.

 

We prosecuted folks in Germany and Japan who did things like that to detainees in World War II, but we have it on no less authority than former Vice President Dick Cheney that these things were necessary to keep us safe. Or as he told ABC News in a December 2008 interview”

“. . .So, it's been a remarkably successful effort. I think the results speak for themselves.

“And I think those who allege that we've been involved in torture, or that somehow we violated the Constitution or laws with the terrorist surveillance program, simply don't know what they're talking about.”

So a “remarkably successful” wrong is right, and therefore only a failed wrong is wrong, which opens the question of whether a failed right is wrong or a wrong right is failed, and. . .and the howls of laughter in Hell rise in unending crescendo.

 

Some have made so bold as to suggest that doing these things constituted crimes, both by those who ordered and did them and by those who blessed the whole stinking mess in pages of BureauLawerSpeak.

 

That must also amuse the Hell out of Satan, who has watched our concern as a nation slip from a mutual pledge of “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” to a more convenient pledge of “your life to protect my fortune -- and honor be damned.”

 

Damned it will be, and Satan gets his amusement with little effort. Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and the rest of the goose-brained goose-stepping Right are doing all the heavy lifting here, and the Prince of Darkness has no doubt prepared appropriate rewards.

 

Rewards in which we’ll all share unless we stop nattering about how effective a criminal act was in nabbing the loot and start prosecuting those who in the guise of protecting us from harm exposed us to a far greater evil.

 

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