Daily Reads and Outrages

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have articles on the White House involvement in the firing of US attorneys today. There is already a great deal of discussion going on which you can find over at memeorandum. None of this is the least bit surprising and I really don't have anything to add.
Update
Steve Soto has a must read post on this as usual.

What is surprising is that the White House is putting out the spin that Bush and Harriet Miers raised the possibility of sacking all of the prosecutors after the 2004 election because appointees weren’t pursuing Democratic voting fraud enough, which clearly shows that Bush and Miers wanted to not only ignore the voting fraud that has benefited this administration and the GOP, but wanted to turn the Department of Justice into a partisan prosecutor against political opponents. If we are to believe this new story that Bush was seriously concerned about voting fraud, then perhaps Democrats should convene hearings on the full range of voting fraud that has taken place over the last six years, to the benefit of both parties. Such an effort would yield far more landmines for the GOP and specifically Bush from the 2000 and 2004 elections, so Democrats should take this new spin from the White House and test it out. If Bush is so concerned about voting fraud that he wanted to sack his own attorneys and replace them with partisan hacks around the country, then Democrats should prepare a 2007 Voting Rights Act and hold hearings to uncover everything that needs to be fixed in our elections, and document the problems in Florida and Ohio.

Update
Barbara O'Brien does a great job of pulling it all together.


Over at LewRockwell.com Paul Craig Roberts had a good piece on how fiction is becoming non fiction, The Future Has Caught Up With Us. Dr Roberts takes a look at Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, first published in 1932, Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, published in 1925 and George Orwell’s novel, 1984, published in 1949. He points out they no longer seem like fiction but more like a description of life under the Bush/Cheney cabal.

• Brave New World:

  Huxley’s fearsome predictions of a 26th century world have all come true six centuries early – in vitro fertilization, genetically modified crops, stem-cell research, promiscuous recreational sex, the demise of marriage and families, and the epidemic use of prescription and illegal drugs to escape from anxiety, frustration and disappointment.

• The Trial:

  The Trial is the model for the Bush Regime’s Military Tribunals, which permit execution on the basis of hearsay, secret evidence unknown to the defendant, or confession extracted by torture.
  
  For the past five years, the Bush Regime has held people in secret prisons without warrants, charges, or access to an attorney. Most detainees have been tortured and abused. Bush’s real world victims suffer from more disorientation and hopelessness than Kafka’s character, Josef K.

• 1984:

  In Orwell’s 1984, people are subjected to relentless spying. A state or alleged state of war is used to maintain total control over everyone. Lies have replaced truth, and the media serves as propagandist for the Ministry of Truth. The meaning of words, such as "freedom" has been perverted. The attitude of 1984’s all-powerful government is "you are with us or against us."
  
  In the United States, each member elected to the House and Senate takes an oath to uphold the US Constitution, as does the president and vice president. Yet the Bush Regime drafted and Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, a constitutional monstrosity that denies the protection of law to everyone declared, without evidence, by the executive branch to be a suspected terrorist or enemy combatant.
  
  The Military Commissions Act became law in "the land of the free" in 2006. The Act strips detainees of protections provided by the Geneva Conventions. The Act declares that no person "subject to trial by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva Conventions as a source of rights."
  
  The Act also denies detainees the protections of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights: "No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of" a detainee. Some language in the Act refers to detainees as "aliens," but, ominously, other language does not limit the Act’s applicability to "aliens."
  
  In Orwell’s novel, Winston Smith commits a thought crime, is arrested by the Thought Police, and imprisoned in the Ministry of Love. Winston’s dearth of rights under Big Brother is comparable to the absence of rights of detainees under the Military Commissions Act.

Also at LewRockwell.com William Campbell Douglass II, MD tells us about Science Fiction Moving Into Reality.

The Guardian reports that neuroscientists have determined how to look inside a person’s brain and read their intentions before they act. The new brain scans allow them to identify patterns of brain activity showing what a person plans to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way.

This will certainly make 1984 a lot easier.