Your Papers, Please

A brief, non-comprehensive history of Nat'l ID cards, the U. K. having decided to make non-subject residents carry them.

National ID cards are widely used for identification purposes in many European countries, although they are not used in the Nordic countries. Many people are able to cross Europe's inner borders without passports, if they have valid national ID cards. There have been few problems associated with card use, although there were protests in Greece after European Union officials forced Greeks to drop the religious classification that was part of the ID card system. The situation is very different from that in Latin America, where people have become accustomed to carrying identification papers with them and are less worried about privacy issues. Brazil's card includes a photo, fingerprint, bar-code, both parents' full names, nationality, country of birth and date of birth. These cards are necessary to for almost any economic transaction — Brazil's stores ask for it when consumers make purchases, even when they pay cash.

Yikes, it's the Mark of the Beast: "Ye can neither buy nor sell w/o it!!"

Britain's two prior experiences with national cards have not ended well. Cards were used in World War I in large part to establish the number of young men available for military service, but they were not well liked and were dropped in 1918, said Jon Agar, a science and technology professor at University College London. They were reintroduced in World War II and kept in place until 1952, when a court challenge spurred harsh judicial criticism of the use of the cards in peacetime.

That led Prime Minister Winston Churchill's government to scrap the system. The court challenge stemmed from a routine traffic stop in which a policeman asked the motorist to produce his ID card, Agar said. "That was not the intent of the card," he said. "It was originally for national security and food rationing, not for police using it as a routine form of identification." He predicted Britons will generally accept the new cards until their use becomes compulsory for everyone. That will spur resentment, he said.

But they'll doubtless submit, grumbling all the way.

Editorial Panels

Why We Fought

Gulf War A: Freedom for Kuwait.

The resignation of the 16-member government opened the door to speculation that the emir, the country's head of state, would dissolve parliament and call elections to defuse growing tension between the two branches of government in Kuwait's volatile democracy.

And democracy.

Showdown threatens democracy in Kuwait

Another Fuggin' Election Wrap-Up

A member of the biased liberal elite media takes a look at some two-faced weasels who were as likely as not to have voted Feudal in the last two presidential elections, but went for B. O. this time.

Nine of the 12 said McCain could have won their vote. Mark Parowski, who described himself as a "hard-core Republican," didn't pick Obama until the moment he was in the election booth. His wife had been to Obama's last rally in Manassas, Va., the night before, along with 90,000 others, and said it sounded as if Obama was talking right to her in her living room. His disgust with Republicans was a big factor in his vote, Parowski said, but he also saw backing Obama as a chance to make a generational change.

[...]

No one thought he was an elitist celebrity. Several mentioned that he'd once been so poor he owned a car with a hole in the floor. Two women (both of whom voted for Bush in the last two elections) had been impressed by Oprah's endorsement, which was when they first heard about Obama.

We'll satisfy ourselves w/ the semi-hopeful realization that those who hadn't heard of B. O. until Oprah endorsed him are, we hope, the only ones who would be influenced by her endorsement.

Vulgarity on the Interwebs

If the furry pelts of dead rodents draped across ideological hard-liners (female) are your idea of "hot," you may as well just lock the door now. You won't be leaving for a while, you pervert.

Our favorite so far? Mary Katharine Ham. Or is it Bill O'Reilly? (Read the caption & decide.)

A regular on the Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor, Mary Katharine Ham is the online editor of The Washington Examiner. Formerly the managing editor of Townhall.com, O'Reilly is wearing a green three-quarter length sheared mink coat with laser grooving from Miller's Furs. (Courtesy 2008 Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute/Photography by KochFoto)

Talk about lipstick on a pig. Ms. Ham doesn't usually look this bad when she's not tarted up. Maybe the stylist was having some fun.

Annals of Wilful Ignorance or Bestial Stupidity

Again from the Papist Imperialist. It sounds like an Onion story, but we think they mean it.

The National Black Republicans Association has called for president elect Obama to issue a formal apology for the Democratic Party’s 150 year history of racism.

Nope, no mention at all of any Democrats (LBJ, maybe?) who've done anything anti-racist. And not the slightest mention that the Republican Party has taken the mantle of Southern Racism right off the back of those Democrats & paraded it around w/out shame (but w/ a fair amount of success). About the only living Dixiecrat who didn't change parties, Robert Byrd, has apologized long, often & profusely for his youthful KKK involvement, not that that stopped the Black Republicans from dragging his name into it.

The patent absurdity of calling for the first less than 100% Anglo-Saxon President-elect to apologize for his party's past racism after it nominated & elected him is, well, typical. The spiral into the gravity well of Bizarro world is accelerating.

Keeping The Military on a Volunteer Basis

No Religious Test?

Be ready to hear a lot of crap about B.O. not attending church on a daily basis. From comments at a Papist, imperialist web log. 

"President-elect Barack Obama has yet to attend church services since winning the White House earlier this month, a departure from the example of his two immediate predecessors.

Both President-elect George W. Bush and President-elect Bill Clinton managed to attend church in the weeks after they were elected.

In the weeks after the contested 2000 election, Bush regularly attended services at Tarrytown United Methodist Church in Austin, Texas, and Al Gore was frequently photographed arriving at and leaving church in Virginia.

"On his first day as president-elect, following weeks of Florida recounts and court hearings, Bush went to church with his wife, Laura. They attended an invite-only prayer service on Thursday, Dec. 14, at Tarrytown United Methodist Church. About 300 people attended, including top campaign staff and visiting clergy. During the service, the Rev. Mark Craig, senior pastor at Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, told Bush, "You have been chosen by God to lead the people."

Obama was an infrequent churchgoer on the campaign trail.... blah, blah"

Obama skips church, heads to gym JONATHAN MARTIN & CAROL E. LEE | 11/23/08 3:41 PM EST  http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15902.html

Bad Omen?

Working link to the Politico story. Is this why Obama should go to church more often, so he can be told he's gawd's personal choice? We were under the impression that B. O.'s ego was so swollen (due to his right wing-granted "messianic" status) that having his ass kissed in the name of gawd wouldn't be such a good idea. Nonetheless, we'll doubtless be hearing that he's a gawdless Muslim, & here's the proof: No church! This is going to be an ugly eight yrs. And since the Prez-elect is calm, cool, collected & too damn smart to make much of a fool of himself, we'll have to be looking to the rabid weasel assault on him for amusement/outrage, not the actions of the administration. Alright!!

Also:

Rev. Mark Craig, senior pastor at Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, told Bush, "You have been chosen by God to lead the people."

Really? We thought the fucking Supreme Court "chose" him. And we thought that the people were supposed to do the choosing, not the damn court. Not one word about Gawd making any choices in the Constitution.

Freedom's Botch

Didn't take too long for the wealthy rats to abandon their toys & leave the sinking ship, did it? Not much longer than a yr.

The group's dozens of staffers have been paid through the end of the year. After that, Freedom's Watch is likely to shut its doors permanently, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Technically an issue-advocacy group rather than a political campaign arm, Washington-based Freedom's Watch spent $30 million on television and radio ads in the general election, plus an undisclosed amount on mail and phone-call campaigns.

Golly gee willikers gosh, we hope that nice Mr. Fleischer ("People better start watching what they say.") won't have to do real work any time soon. But we don't know if the lecture circuit for disgraced losers is going to be as lucrative as previously. What w/ the economy & all.

Voice in The Wilderness

Dumb Luck

You of course realize that George Bush will always be remembered as the president who, once he allowed terrorists to attack us just that one itty-bitty time, really cracked down & made sure we were never attacked again. 

As so often happens, the truth, that it's sheer random luck we haven't been hit & hit hard, is not going to be as widely circulated as the legend. It seems as if the proverbial "Brownie" might as well have been running Defense as well as FEMA these last few yrs.

[A] stinging 400-page independent commission report ... concluded the military isn't ready for a catastrophic attack on the country, and that National Guard forces don't have the equipment or training they need for the job.

Gosh, once again the Pentagon is fighting the last century's wars w/ high-dollar contracts for useless hardware given to military-industrial corporations that donate to the Republican Party, rather than train & equip troops. That's only been happening since we became vaguely aware of events in the larger world, around the time JFK was murdered. No surprise there. Any serious changes to be made? Not by SecDef Gates.

The commission's report included 95 recommendations. But Gates did not order many of those changes urged by the commission to give National Guard and Reserve troops better access to promotions, military training and education programs and other benefits. Instead, in most cases he ordered leaders in the Defense Department and the military services to review their programs to determine whether changes are needed.

So we have a commission, followed by a "program review," followed by little or no action on any recommendations, and then sweet oblivion. Perhaps just as well. We're not at all enthusiastic about this:

Arnold L. Punaro, who was chairman of the commission, welcomed Gates' recommendations Monday, saying that improving the military's role in homeland defense and enhancing the clout of the reserves "represent a historic break with the past."

We don't like the idea of the military becoming more involved w/ homeland defense, this not being a banana republic.

'Scuse Us?

You know who has announced 14 pardons. Among the 14 convictions being pardoned: 

Unauthorized use of a pesticide and violating the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. Conspiracy to violate the Lacey Act, which prohibits importation into the country of wildlife taken in violation of conservation laws. Illegal treatment, storage and disposal of a hazardous waste without a permit.

Fuck w/ the environment, get a free pass, we guess. Silliest conviction?

Unlawful use of a telephone in a narcotics felony.

Silly-sounding, yes, but more apropos would be "most chickenshit." What's next, manslaughter charges if one calls a friend to meet at a bar & someone dies hours later due to drunk driving, say? And, obviously, the "PATRIOT" Act. or a secret executive order, enables them to listen to & record said 'phone call. Open & shut.

Annals of Dumb

Listen to this cretin babble on. These fools will have completely discredited themselves once it's seen that B. O. is a centrist wimp like the rest. In the meantime, thank you so much, Gov. Palin.

Those Who Do Not Learn The Lessons Of History Are Condemned to Summer School

A former Soviet general answers some questions.

In its invasion of Afghanistan, do you believe the United States benefited from the Soviet experience? Do you see any evidence of your lessons from the Soviet defeat? I can tell you which mistakes you made and which mistakes we made. They are the same mistakes.

[...]

We said, "Afghans, you are living according to the Soviet way of life, where religion is separated from the state, mullahs should be expelled, religion is the opiate of the people. You'll be living in collective farms. You will have pioneer camps, Comsomol [youth] organizations, and so on and so forth." The Soviet way of life in a country that still lives in the Dark Ages! And what did you say? You said, "We are giving you democracy." They cannot even translate the term properly. Under us there was a lot of corruption, and today there's a lot of corruption. Neither under you nor under us did an ordinary person get anything.

It seems to us that the less the United Snakes (especially the military) is involved in any activity overseas, the better.

Piracy

Not everyone is off for the entire wk. because it's Thanksgiving & they're lazy. Some are still plundering the webs for stuff. Not the staff here, mind you. 

Letter From Fantasyland

K-Lo gives thanks. It's impossible to excerpt any paragraph as more ridiculous than the next; it's all silly all the time. But she should be grateful she can live in her world of illusion w/o any obvious consequences.

End of The Aging Cracker

Will the Republican Party be able to pull itself, kicking & screaming all the way, into the 20th century? Obviously we can't expect the 21st yet, but they'd be in much better shape if they could get to 1970 or so.

What, for example, does Beltway Boy Mort Kondracke have to say?

But step 1 is to fire Limbaugh and his ilk as the intellectual bosses of the GOP. They shouldn't be muzzled, as some liberals want to do by reviving the "fairness doctrine" in broadcasting, just ignored more frequently. In recent years, Republicans have let right-wing talk-show hosts whip the GOP base into frenzies -- over immigration, brain-damage victim Terry Schiavo and same-sex marriage -- that have branded the party as troglodyte.

The result is that the demographic groups representing the future of American politics shifted decisively to the Democratic Party in 2008 -- Latinos, young people, the well-educated, moderates, working women, first-time voters, suburbanites and "seculars." As former White House political guru Karl Rove observed last week, "the GOP will find it hard to regain the majority" if it keeps losing Latinos. [...] At a briefing last week jointly sponsored by the "New Democrat" Progressive Policy Institute and Web site Democratic Strategist, author Ruy Teixeira said that the gist of his 2002 book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority," is now becoming reality. "Democrats are going where they're growing," he said, while Republicans are isolating themselves in a fading portion of the population -- old, white, less-educated, highly religious Southerners.

In other words, the people your grandparents moved to the city to get away from. And Mort neglects to mention rural. McCain didn't win any counties (or cities or some jurisdictional unit) w/ a population over 50,000.

Just as Mort is not a screeching loony, but a grizzled veteran of the Beltway interior & its cocktail parties, so are Cokie Roberts & her husband Steve, who have a wonderful, Parade magazine-style, easy to digest wrap-up of the election, & just which demographic groups Johnny Mac lost.

The lesson is clear: No party can win a national election depending mainly on voters who are pale, male and gray. As Jon Huntsman Jr., the Republican governor of Utah, puts it: "We're fundamentally staring down a demographic shift that we've never seen before in America."

One might almost say "The Party's over." Or even, "The Party's over, whitey!"

[W]ell-educated suburbanites [...] fault Republican leaders for overemphasizing some issues (abortion, same-sex marriage) while ignoring others (the environment, climate change).

Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, wrote recently in the Washington Post: "Unless the Republican Party ends its self-imposed captivity to social fundamentalists, it will spend a long time in the political wilderness."

[...]

YOUTH. Voters under 30 favored Obama by 66 percent to 32 percent, the biggest margin for any party since exit polling began in 1972. Underlying trends are even more threatening to Republicans. Younger voters are more racially diverse than their elders: Only 62 percent were white compared to 74 percent for the electorate as a whole. And they are more likely to be female and secular, both signs of Democratic tendencies.

What? The Sixties have come true at last? Young people are more intelligent than they act & appear? We're not holding our breath in anticipation.

As Republicans plot their return to power, one stark fact emerges from the 2008 election: They can't count on the white guys anymore. There are just not enough of them. And their influence will continue to diminish in the years ahead.

Well, that's a relief, for us & the nation. By the time the editor here, as an aging white male, is too old to wield any power there won't be any left for him to wield.

Once a Huckster, Always a Huckster

Pastor Ted, one ugly & vicious-looking sumbitch, in the 2006 documentary Jesus Camp.You can't keep a good man down, they say, & you sure as hell can't keep Ted Haggard down either. Persistent, non-stop assholery is a large part of the bizarre human defect that is sales, whether it's hoodwinking people w/ fairy stories, or the "insurance" scam. And so, Ted is back. 

While his exact plans remain unclear, Haggard is unmistakably making himself a public figure again, nine months after his former church said he walked away from an oversight process meant to restore him. [...] Haggard's Nov. 2 return to the pulpit was set in motion by the Rev. Chris Byrd, a college classmate from Oral Roberts University. Byrd said he first invited Haggard to speak at his church last summer to offer the Haggard family support, help them heal and teach his own flock about sin and forgiveness.

Both alums of Oral Roberts are they? How does that happen?

Byrd said he was not restoring Haggard to Christian ministry and introduced him as a businessman — hinting at a possible future speaking to churches and civic groups. "You could make a career out of your reformed fallen Christian life," said David Edward Harrell, a retired Auburn University history professor who studies charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity. "What you can't do is go back and do the same thing. Once you've lost that clientele, it's lost."

Fortunately for Pastor Ted, there's another born each minute.

[Haggard] had moved his family back to Colorado Springs and was selling life insurance at their $700,000 home down the road from New Life Church, angering some who thought he should stay away.

Life insurance! There oughta be a law.

And there should be a law about calling a "house" a "home," but that's another story, for another time.

Columnist Who Cried "Wolf!": This Time It's Serious, Really

Thomas L. Friedman, self-styled prophet in the wilderness, is now wandering wild-eyed in restaurants telling the patrons to repent of their wasteful ways & go home w/ their steak in a doggie bag. Or he thinks he should be. We'd love to see that. "Sure, Friedman, you show us the Iraqi WMDs, we'll pack up, go home, & live on tuna 'til the crisis is over. Jerk!"

Tom's really not kidding this time. He sounds worried & desperate. And he, too, is calling for Bush to get out & Obama to get in there. 

If I had my druthers right now we would convene a special session of Congress, amend the Constitution and move up the inauguration from Jan. 20 to Thanksgiving Day. Forget the inaugural balls; we can’t afford them. Forget the grandstands; we don’t need them. Just get me a Supreme Court justice and a Bible, and let’s swear in Barack Obama right now — by choice — with the same haste we did — by necessity — with L.B.J. in the back of Air Force One.

Why the rush? Because we're in the hand basket & hell is right around the corner.

Right now there is something deeply dysfunctional, bordering on scandalously irresponsible, in the fractious way our political elite are behaving — with business as usual in the most unusual economic moment of our lifetimes. They don’t seem to understand: Our financial system is imperiled.

As if that would be the end of the universe or something. 

The stock and credit markets haven’t been fooled. They have started to price financial stocks at Great Depression levels, not just recession levels. With $5, you can now buy one share of Citigroup and have enough left over for a bite at McDonalds.

Tom obviously doesn't get out much, as that $5.00 he's talking about is barely enough for a "bite" at Mickey D's. Who knows what Citigroup is worth today? And it is possible we should be worried. It's not just Mr. "I Married an Heiress" whose knickers are bunched tightly.

“A great judgment has to be made now as to just how big and bad the situation is,” says Jeffrey Garten, the Yale School of Management professor of international finance. “This is a crucial judgment. Do we think that a couple of hundred billion more and couple of bad quarters will take care of this problem, or do we think that despite everything that we have done so far — despite the $700 billion fund to rescue banks, the lowering of interest rates and the way the Fed has stepped in directly to shore up certain markets — the bottom is nowhere in sight and we are staring at a deep hole that the entire world could fall into?”

If it’s the latter, then we need a huge catalyst of confidence and capital to turn this thing around. Only the new president and his team, synchronizing with the world’s other big economies, can provide it.

“The biggest mistake Obama could make,” added Garten, “is thinking this problem is smaller than it is. On the other hand, there is far less danger in overestimating what will be necessary to solve it.”

We just want to know when we'll see the real suffering, the bread-lines & food riots, the suicides of the wealthy, the abandoned & burned-out storefronts, the empty malls, the cars being pulled by teams of horses, etc. We don't have forever, let's get a move on here!