The Blog That Goes Ping

A polygamous community in Texas that follows the teaching of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints practices pedophilia, torture and child abuse under the guise of a religion, according to a woman who escaped the sect with her eight children five years ago.

“I think it’s a form of pedophilia hiding behind a religion as a protection,” Carolyn Jessop told TODAY’s Matt Lauer from Salt Lake City on Tuesday. “There’s just a desire to control and manipulate and torture people, and religion is just used as the cover.”

[From Woman describes ‘escape’ from polygamy - TODAY: People - MSNBC.com]

Man, wouldn’t it be interesting if Romney were the candidate right now?
If this stuff is all true as reported — not that I have reason to doubt it, but it’s always wise to be cautious about atrocity tales which accompany and justify government action — holy crap, this was a horrible, abusive hellhole.

“The method he would use with infants was a form of water torture,” Jessop said of her former husband. “He would spank the baby until it was screaming out of control, and then he would hold the baby faceup under a tap of running water so it couldn’t breathe. He would do this repeatedly. Sometimes, it would go on for an hour, until the baby was so exhausted it couldn’t cry anymore. This method he called ‘breaking them.’”

Via Rondam Ramblings.

Britain Drops ‘War on Terror’ Label

The words “war on terror” will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless “death cult.”

The Director of Public Prosecutions said: ‘We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language.”

London is not a battlefield, he said.

“The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,” Macdonald said. “They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.”

Nice.  I don’t see Bush and company admitting this in the near future.  War powers are too much fun.  But maybe under the next President….

Of course, Congress could declare that there is no War On Terror, but I don’t see them having the gumption to do that in the foreseeable future either.

Via BoingBoing.net.

Democracy Now! | Harvey Wasserman on New Ohio Voting Report: “The 2004 Election Was Stolen… Finally We Have Irrefutable Confirmation”:

AMY GOODMAN: Harvey Wasserman, I wanted to switch gears—

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —and ask you about voting. Ohio’s top election official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, announced on Friday the voting systems that decided the 2004 election in Ohio were rife with “critical security failures.” You and Bob Fitrakis have reported extensively on the 2004 presidential vote in Ohio, your most recent book, What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election. Your response to the report? What did you think was most important in her findings?

HARVEY WASSERMAN: Well, our initial response was “Yippee!” I mean, they finally, after all these years of us banging our—you know, we’re local boys. We live in Ohio, in Columbus. And we saw the election of 2004 stolen right in front of our faces. And we reported it extensively, and everybody laughed at us. And they said, “Oh, this couldn’t happen in America.” And we documented it in How the GOP Stole America’s 2004 Election and Is Rigging 2008. We documented scores of ways that this election was stolen. And we pointed out a myriad flaws that we saw right in our own neighborhoods, of what was done to keep people of color and young people from voting and to rig the vote count.

I mean, the servers for the computation of the Ohio vote count were in the same basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee that houses servers for the Republican National Committee. The programmers who did the stuff for Ken Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State, were Republicans who did websites for the Bush administration. I mean, it’s amazing.

[...]

But the 2004 election was stolen. There is absolutely no doubt about it. A 6.7% shift in exit polls does not happen by chance. And, you know, so finally, we have irrefutable confirmation that what we were saying was true and that every piece of the puzzle in the Ohio 2004 election was flawed.

Although the Democratic victories in ‘06 prove that whatever power corrupt Republicans have to steal elections is not nationwide, or is not significant enough to steal races that aren’t fairly close to begin with….

yet.

Thank you Chris Dodd!:
The first real Senate filibuster (as opposed to threatened filibuster) in 12 years starts today. It began because of an unprecedented decision by Harry Reid to ignore the hold placed on a bill by a member of his own party. It’s about granting huge corporations retroactive immunity for crimes committed against millions of American citizens.

Hear a peep about this on the news? No? Me neither.

UPDATE: (Thanks, ONT) — All but 10 Democratic Senators sided with President Bush on this one. I don’t know if my senators did but statistically they probably did.

People complain about having only a two-party system; I’d be happy if we actually had two full-fledged potent parties instead of one and a half, one and a pathetic shadow of a political party.

However, apparently the story’s not over yet — its future is just complicated and unclear. There is still some hope that we’ll find out exactly who was wiretapping whom and why, and that people in the telcos who knowingly committed crimes will be held accountable.

I’m grateful that Chris Dodd took a stand, and Reid, wherever he really stands, is being forced to talk about the issue and at least say that he realizes retroactive immunity is a bad thing.