Fiat Lux

Ah, California, land of the recall. It's still unreal to me that only a year after we elected a governor we're going to choose whether or not to un-elect him. Not that Grey Davis is the world's greatest governor, but he IS the duly elected man for the job and this recall is setting a terrible precedent.

Look at the small Sonoma town of Rohnert Park It seems that the City Council there decided to work with an Indian tribe in regards to their plan to build a new casino just outside the town limits. Rohnert Park residents who don't want to live near a casino have now launched a drive to recall the entire City Council. I suspect this is only the first in a long line of recall efforts.

A rare Saturday off. Scott and I went to a favorite local diner for breakfast and then I headed downtown to help out the SF4Dean team. Governor Howard Dean was in SF today to address health care workers SEIU Local 250. That event was not open to the general public, but the governor was scheduled to give a brief speech afterwards to Dean enthusiasts in adjoining Yerba Buena Garden - a rare patch of green on Mission Street.

I had decided to spend the extra $ for parking and drove down. This turned out to be a good idea, as immediately I met up with Dianne, the volunteer coordinator, who had parked a few cars away from me. I helped her carry some stuff up to the meeting spot and spent the next 2 hours standing behind a makeshift Dean table, greeting volunteers and suporters, handing out stickers, clipboards and flyers, telling people what the schedule was, and generally trying to be helpful. The table migrated down the block to Yerba Buena after the SEIU speech began and again when the exact location for the speech was determined.

Around 4:00 PM, Dean made his appearance and I climbed a convenient light pole to wave an American flag a supporter had dropped off and got a nice view of Dean and the crowd. Dean gave a short version of his stump speech and the crowd was very receptive. I'm a poor judge of crowds but my guess is 150-200 people were there.

My parents were active and enthisuastic Democrats when I was a kid, and politics is something I've cared about and tried to stay informed on pretty much my entire life. That said, this was the first time I've actually been a volunteer at a political event. I hope my schedule will allow it to not be the last. I had a great time, but more important, I hope that in a small way I did some good for a candidate I want to see in the White House.

I've also started a Dean Team to do some fundraising for Governor Dean. Cash is tight in our house, so I can't put my money where my mouth is the way I'd like to. You're invited to help out.

IANAL, but this smells like an impeachable offense to me. I doubt it will happen though, since there aren't enough Democratic votes in Congress to get articles of impeachment through.

Thanks to The Left Coaster for the following:

March 18, 2003

GEORGE W. BUSH

But on 9/17, Bush says that:

"There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties," the president said. But he also said, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11" attacks.

The failure to find any imminent WMD threat has now negated Article 1 of the rationale Bush used above. Today he says he has no evidence that Saddam was involved in September 11(when on March 18 he says he did have such evidence), which then negates Article 2 of his legislatively-required justification for war as outlined under PL 107-243.

The candidate I'm supporting for President of the USA, Howard Dean, is trying to do something that no other presidential candidate has done before. He intends to raise 5 million dollars in 10 days from average Americans - not special interest PACs or high-roller donors. Here's a regularly-updated view of how he's doing:

I've put both my money and my time where my mouth is on this issue. I urge you do to so as well. Please consider making a donation to Dean's campaign fund. We desperately need to get GW Bush and his cronies out of the White House in 2004.

Heard on the radio as I was driving home from work tonight.... the US occupation of Iraq was called "Compassionate Colonialism".

Unfortunately I don't know who originated the phrase, but I'll try to find out.

I don't have to be at the store until noon today, so I'm scanning the headlines today. And I found this howler of a quote on Yahoo!

Bush said he insulates himself from the "opinions" that seep into news coverage by getting his news from his own aides. He said he scans headlines, but rarely reads news stories.

"I appreciate people's opinions, but I'm more interested in news," the president said. "And the best way to get the news is from objective sources, and the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world."

Am I the only person who finds it scary that the President of the United States can't be bothered to read the news personally and make his own judgements on what's happening and what's important?

Lots of political posts lately. It's that time of year, I guess. I TiVoed the CA Governor's debate since I wouldn't get home from work early enough to watch it. Scott and I plopped down on the couch with some Chinese takeout and watched.

IMHO, Camejo and McClintock actually came out the best of all of them; Hufffington's attacks on Bustamante and Schwarzenegger drove things off topic and divided those candidates' attention from their answers. By staying out of Huffington's firing line, the other 2 had the chance to actually answer some questions and talk about issues. Bustamante did do some talking about issues, but I also noticed that he ducked at least one question to go off on unrelated issues. Schwarzenegger did OK considering how much he was getting sniped by Huffington, who didn't miss a chance to attack.

I wateched the debate hoping I would figure out who to vote for but have not come to any firm conclusions. Here's where I am now:

-Huffington's a joke.
-McClintock is too right wing.
-Camejo is too left wing.
-I don't like Bustamante and his $4 million Indian casino donation shell games.
-Then there's Schwarzenegger - but I think he doesn't really grok how different running a state is from running a company and his inexperience will cause problems. Plus I have a hard time voting for any Republican knowing that a Republican governor will make things harder for the Democratic nominee in next years's election.

I suppose I could vote for one of the no-names, but I don't want to waste my vote either.

According to this NY Daily News article, not only is retired General Wesley Clark not a registered Democrat, but he's not abiding by the rules of the Federal Elections Commission:

Wesley Clark was registered as a lobbyist when he jumped into the presidential race, but he has yet to actually register as a presidential candidate - or even enroll as a Democrat.

Clark announced his candidacy Sept. 17 - exactly 15 days ago - and his aides say they've already raised more than $2 million.

Maybe it's just an oversight, but IMHO not good news for the Clark campaign. And it's extremely stupid of them to not change Clark's registration before he launched his campaign. It makes the "carpetbagger' label seem all that much more plausible.

The Post is a Murdoch publication, with all that implies about their political leanings, but still, it looks like they've gotten their facts right on this one.

Election Days always remind me of the famous paradox of physics, Schroedinger's cat. The election results are already out there, we just don't know what they will be until we open the ballot boxes and find out.

And yes, I voted. No on the Recall, Yes on Camejo.

I know he won't win but he's the only one I feel OK about voting for. The actual act of voting was somewhat surreal. The volume of names on the ballot was a little overwhelming and it wasn't easy to find the candidate I wanted on the list. And actually holding that long list of names in my hand, after all the hue and cry in the press, was a strange feeling. Almost dizzying. A part of me still doesn't accept that this recall is an actual event, even though I've now voted in it. Hopefully tonight after the polls close it will all be just a bad dream.

Hubby & I are going over to Berkeley tonight to see some old friends and watch the election results. I hope it's not too depressing.

Best line on election after-shock come from Tim Goodman, the TV critic of the San Francisco Chronicle:

This can-you-believe-it-happened moment coalesced with Jay Leno, host of "The Tonight Show" -- where Schwarzenegger announced he was running -- introducing the governor-elect for his acceptance speech in a move that was simultaneously ludicrous and embarrassing, a shill-fest that gave the rest of the country and political reporters in Sacramento a taste of life ahead.

All I can say is, Ugh.

I hope for California's sake that Governor Schwarzenegger does a good job. But I fear the growing pains as he adjusts to the realities of politics are going to be ugly.

Oh, and Orrin Hatch has introduced a resolution to amend the Constitution's ban on non-American-born presidents by allowing people who have been U.S. citizens for at least 20 years to be elected to the White House.

Joy.

Way to go George Soros, for 1) proving that not everyone who is immensely wealthy is a Republican and 2) being willing to put his money where his mouth is.

Notable quotes from the Washington Post article:

"America, under Bush, is a danger to the world," Soros said.

and

Soros believes that a "supremacist ideology" guides this White House. He hears echoes in its rhetoric of his childhood in occupied Hungary. "When I hear Bush say, 'You're either with us or against us,' it reminds me of the Germans." It conjures up memories, he said, of Nazi slogans on the walls, Der Feind Hort mit ("The enemy is listening"). "My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me," he said in a soft Hungarian accent.

Not surprisingly, the Republicans have now accused Soros of buying the Democratic Party. Even if that were true, I'd rather have George Soros calling the shots than a bunch of Texas oil barons.

I wrote about this issue yesterday and here I am back at it again today - a post over at Blog For America set me off. According to The Club For Growth, people who support Howard Dean are part of a vast

latte-drinking,
sushi-eating,
Volvo-driving,
New York Times-reading,
body-piercing,
Hollywood-loving,
left-wing freak show

The Burnt Orange Report posted a nifty comeback. An excerpt:

Even when you work this out on a per-capita basis, there is one Starbucks location in Vermont for every 307,000 Vermonters, versus one Texas location for every 53,987 Texans. In other words, there are over five times as many Starbucks locations on a per-person basis in Texas than there are in Vermont.

Since the market would never lie to us, we can safely assume who the real latte-sippers are.

Although this sort of tit-for-tat admittedly brings a smile to my lips, the underlying issue is a serious one. It all gets back to that great cultural divide in America these days, and it worries me. We have become a nation of "Us" and "Them" and we seem to continually strive for more ways of dividing ourselves.

I am really, really tired of it. Sleazy, divisive, insulting, underhanded politics seems to be the name of the game these days - and not just in Republican circles - and I've had enough. I want my country back.

I hope from the bottom of my heart that Howard Dean is as good as we supporters believe him to be, because I don't think I could stand another letdown. If he turns out to be yet another slimy politician who's brillantly, yet cynically, manupulated himself into his current front-runner status, I'm going to give it up and look hard at moving to someplace nice and quiet like Tonga.

So Kerry took Iowa. That was quite a surprise. I was not too surprised that Gephardt faded - there never seemed to be much juice behind his candidacy. Edwards, I think, has floated towards the top becasue he's gotten enough name recognition to garner interest but not so much intense scrutiny as to increase his negatives. I'm not sure he can go all the way but he's looking mighty attractive as someone's VP.

Dean took third - disappointing. It puts the presure on and makes New Hampshire a real do-or-die scenario. Although if I recall correctly, Clinton placed 4th in Iowa and did not win New Hampshire, so all is not lost.

Oh boy. So many things that bothered me. Where to start? Every time he talked about America's "moral tradition" I kept wondering - whose tradition are you talking about? Some gonzo Christian perspctive, not mine.

I'm late for work, so I'll just hit a few high (or rather low) lights.

And because you acted to stimulate our economy with tax relief, this economy is strong and growing stronger

Yeah right. So where are all the jobs? India and China.

For the sake of job growth, the tax cuts you passed should be permanent.

And our ballooning budget deficits?

So tonight I propose an additional 23 millions for schools that want to use drug testing as a tool to save children's lives.

Great - make more children into criminals without doing anything about increasing funding for addiction treatment.

Even the good ideas got poisoned. A Prisoner Re-Entry Initiative is a great idea. Most ex-cons get little to no supoort once they leave prison, and recidivism rated are high. But then he just couldn't resist turning the proposal into part of his plan to ram Jesus down people's throats by making it part of his faith-based agenda.

Gotta get to work now. Blargh.

So, Dean came in 2nd, 12% behind Kerry. Not total victory, of course, but definitely enough to keep Dean a serious contender. I also seem to recall reading a statistic that nobody has ever become President of the US without finishing either first or second in New Hampshire. If true, then Dean is still well placed for victory. And as I recall, Clinton won niether NH or IA.

One neat thing that happened tonight - I was watching the election results come in over at the Plough and Stars with a bunch of the SF for Dean crew and during Dean's speech, about halfway through, he paused, looked down at some people, and said, "wow, there's people here all the way from San Francisco" (or words to that effect). The entire room went up in a big cheer at that. A reporter from the local ABC affiliate showed up about 10 minutes after Dean's speech had ended. He'd have gotten much better footage if he'd gotten there earlier, but he interviewed a few folks anyway.

I still have trouble understanding Kerry's appeal. I watched his victory speech tonight and I found him boring, full of platitudes -- in short, a typical politician, with no special fire. And I would really like to know how he can justify voting for both the Patriot Act and the war on Iraq when he did NOT vote for the first war on Iraq.

I'm not going to cut my nose off to spite my face. If Kerry wins the nomination then I of course will vote for him. I may not like the guy but I'll take any Democrat over the current occupant of the White House.

Still, I want Dean to be the nominee, not Kerry. I haven't been able to do much on the ground to promote Dean, since the majority of campaign activities take place on Saturdays when I'm at work. But I'm going to try harder to find some that I can do when I do have time off.

So last night I said that I needed to do more for my candidate, Howard Dean. This morning I wrote a personal letter to 10 Democrats in South Carolina, talking about why I'm for Dean and they should be too.

I excerpted most of it here at my Dean fundraising page, which I also worked on today.

And all this before my morning coffee!

I can't stand to watch President Bush speak, so as with the recent state of the union address, I waited for the audio transcript to see what he had to say. And what do I see but this new, improved rationale for making war on Iraq:

He [Hussein] had used weapons. He had manufactured weapons. He had funded suicide bombers into Israel. He had terrorist connections. In other words, all of those ingredients said to me: Threat.

This to me is NOT any kind of rationale for making war on a country that is more than 3000 miles away from the US border. Where is the clear and present danger? Hussein was, and is, not a nice guy by any means. But for us to go in and kick him out when we let any number of other dictators across the globe do what they want just makes us look bad.

Oh, and in the "unintended irony" department, we have this Bush quote:

See, free societies are societies that don't develop weapons of mass terror.

There are so many different ways to deconstruct that one, I could be posting all night. I'll just point out that there's either a tremendous double standard there, or that America is not truly a free society. Or possibly both.

Bah.

A sad day.

I still have trouble understanding why so many people like Kerry, but it's been painfully obvious that most Democrats do not think Dean is the man to take back the White House.

Not that there's anything short of a miracle that would keep me from voting for the Democrastic nominee come November. Anybody But Bush is the name of the game right now. But still, I would prefer to be enthusiastic about that nominee, as I was for Dean and for Clinton before him.

Maybe next time.

Followup: here's a transcript of Dean's excellent speech as he suspended his campaign today. Good stuff.

Well, maybe he's not fat. But he got nailed flat-out lying on "Face The Nation" this weekend. I've added some emphasis but this is a verbatim transcript.
Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/face_031404.pdf

Participants: BOB SCHIEFFER - CBS News, Secretary DONALD RUMSFELD - DOD, THOMAS FRIEDMAN - The New York Times

SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you this. If they [Iraq] did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though, granted all of that is true, why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, you're the--you and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase `immediate threat.' I didn't. The president didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's--that's what's happened. The president went...

SCHIEFFER: You're saying that nobody in the administration said that.

Sec. RUMSFELD: I--I can't speak for nobody--everybody in the administration and say nobody said that.

SCHIEFFER: Vice president didn't say that? The...

Sec. RUMSFELD: Not--if--if you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em.

Mr. FRIEDMAN: We have one here. It says `some have argued that the nu'--this is you speaking--`that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.'

Sec. RUMSFELD: And--and...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: It was close to imminent.

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, I've--I've tried to be precise, and I've tried to be accurate. I'm s--suppose I've...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: `No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.'

Sec. RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm. It--my view of--of the situation was that he--he had--we--we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that--that we believed and we still do not know--we will know.

Do people like Rumsfeld really think that people won't call them on what they said in the past, that people will only believe what they're told right now? How stupid do they think Americans are?

Well, most of them are, if Richard Clarke is to be believed, and it certainly sounds like he's credible. Anyone who read Bob Woodward's "Bush At War" will not be surprised by Clarke's charge that administration members wanted to invade Iraq as of September 12, 2001. Only now, the press seems more ready to pay attention to that fact.

There's a great article at the Center for American Progress' webaite detailing how Clarke is right and the Bushies are liars. Now, I'm well aware that this is a progressive website and there's the danger of bias, but unless they're lying in the quotes they cite, I'm pretty sure they've nailed this one. Here's a sample:

CLAIM #1: "Richard Clarke had plenty of opportunities to tell us in the administration that he thought the war on terrorism was moving in the wrong direction and he chose not to." – National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, 3/22/04

FACT: Clarke sent a memo to Rice principals on 1/24/01 marked "urgent" asking for a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with an impending Al Qaeda attack.

And just think, this is the 'leader of the Free World' and his closest cohorts doing all this lying.

I wasn't planning on blogging any more about the 9/11 inquiries and Richard Clarke this week. As I've said before, 9/11 is a painful subject for me so I try not to stir the embers too often. But a friend, we'll call her Patty, posted the following on a messageboard I frequent and she made a lot of sense.

i could give a rat's ass about whose party did what. i rarely if ever get into these political threads because i can't stand all the fingerpointing and nonsense. basically, what i'm trying to say is if you clear away all the bullshit on BOTH sides, what is happening in our government is frightening. unprecedented. everyone is too ****ing busy worrying about who did what to whom and what party is responsible to take a cold hard look at that shit. patriot act, no press conferences, no accountability whatsoever, staff jumping ship like there's no tomorrow and consistently telling horror stories, LIES LIES LIES that pretty soon no spin in the world is going to cover or hide.

this is much more serious than a blowjob

i ask again, WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE??? it doesn't matter whose SIDE you are on. any american should want answers. if they have nothing to hide, then they should be happy, no, PROUD to speak on the record re: their actions re: keeping america safe, blah blah blah. all his EFFORTS, all HE'S DONE. prove it then. let's hear it. i want to, don't YOU?

isn't that what bush is going on and on about? isn't that his bread and buttah stump speech? "i'll save you, i know what i'm doing!"

okay then. show me your track record. TELL US. we're listening.

hey, he was ELECTED. he is ACCOUNTABLE, as are his staff. to US.
put up or shut up. obviously they're afraid of something or they wouldn't be scurrying around like rats trying to dummy everyone the **** up.

Posted with permission. I bleeped out a bit of profanity.

No great surprise I suppose, but it's looking more and more obvious that Condoleezza Rice wasn't exactly truthful in her testimony before the 9/11 panel this week, if today's Washington Post report is to be believed. We'll know for sure if (when?) the White House does release the PDB in question, but from all the leaks coming out, it certainly doesn't sound like simply 'historical' material as it was described to the committee.

That said, I am by no means certain that 9/11 could have been prevented. It's possible that an increased focus on domestic terrorism in the months leading up to 9/11 could have shaken loose enough of the data we had to "connect the dots" but it is by no means a sure thing.

What upsets me is that this administration is trying to take an attitude of total blamelessness for 9/11. Failures were "systemic". Intellignece was not specific enough to be actionable. Principals were not asked to take actions. (Side note - maybe this is a Washington thing, but aren't principals supposed to be the ones who decide to take actions, instead of waiting for their staff to tell them what to do?). Instead of saying, as Richard Clarke did, "We screwed up, we're sorry." they are saying, "We couldn't have prevented it, so there's nothing to apologize for." That's not good enough.

Arrogance is nothing new for this administration. But this is a time when it rings particularly sour.

I was going to blog about President Bush's press conference last night -- his total unwillingness to give a straight answer to any question being just the least of it -- but as I reviewed a transcript this morning prior to posting, I decided why bother. It's too depressing and today's my day off, I want to enjoy myself.

I'll just link to a recent Paul Krugman column on the Iraq mess that I find particularly apt.

Found over at liberamediaconspiracy. Enjoy!

Truman: The buck stops here.

Bush: The buck stops anywhere but here.

Rumsfeld: The buck never made it to my desk.

Rice: The buck had no silver bullet.

Perle: The buck is the closest thing American politics has to a terrorist.

Ashcroft: The buck is under surveillance and may be seized at any time, without right to an attorney nor the right to hear the evidence against it.

Cheney: The buck is in a secure, undisclosed location.

Hughes: The buck, like the terrorists, does not value human life.

Limbaugh, Hannity, Fox News, et al: The buck stops with Clinton.

Little Green Fascists: Why does the buck hate America?

Ann Coulter: The buck is a traitor.

Michael Kelly: The buck is objectively pro-terrorist.

Ahmad Chalabi: The buck? So what? We are in Baghdad now.

PS - What exactly does 'snarky' mean?

To be honest, I couldn't finish reading Seymour Hersh's expose in the New Yorker. It's way too depressing.

One thing that does bother me a little is that in the tradition of Watergate, few sources cited in the article are identified by name. Not surprising, given the subject matter, but it does make me a bit uneasy. I'm going to give Hersh and the New Yorker the benefit of the doubt, though, and assume that if they're going to publish accusations like this, then their sources are multiple and significant.

The DOD, of course, put out a standard denial (thanks to Talking Points for the link). It's interesting, though, that although the spokesperson claims that the article is 'filled with error' she only cites one relatively minor point as an obvious error. One would think that if Hersh had truly made some 'dramatically false assertions' she'd have more specific corrections to make than just that one.

I'm not completely naive. I know that gathering intelligence is a hard business. But I think there are some lines a civilized nation should not cross unless under the most extreme of emergencies - and as far as I can tell, Abu Ghriab was not one of them. It wasn't even close.

Greetings from New York City. It's warm and muggy.

Quote of the day, from Senator Joseph Biden by way of the Guardian:

"With at least 82% of the Iraqis saying they oppose American and allied forces, how long do you think it will be before the Iraqi government asks our departure?"

Ouch.

Thought I was done with blogging for this day but found one last headline that makes me feel sick: Son mistreated to make father talk.

The analyst said the teenager was stripped naked, thrown in the back of an open truck, driven around in the cold night air, splattered with mud and then presented to his father at Abu Ghraib, the prison at the center of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi detainees.

Upon seeing his frail and frightened son, the prisoner broke down and cried and told interrogators he would tell them whatever they wanted, the analyst said.

And what would have happened to the son if the father had not broken down? We're supposed to be better than this.

Daily Kos catches the Bush team in another lie - this time, about why Bush did a face plant while out on a bicycle ride.

In short, when asked why Bush fell, White House spin control droid Trent Duffy said: "It's been raining a lot and the topsoil is loose."

There hasn't been significant rain in Crawford TX in 10 days.

It's so stupid and trivial, that on the one hand, you might think, 'Who cares?'. On the other hand, why would you lie about something so trivial, and so easy to catch as a lie, unless you have no respect whatsoever for the truth?

I know there's a war on and that there's a lot more to get upset about in this country than why our presidnet fell off his bicycle. But this is symptomatic of the crisis our country is in. If you can't trust the White House Press Office to tell the truth about something so trivial as this, how can you trust them about anything they say?

POTUS gives his latest speech in about 2 hours. I'll be out to dinner with some family members & will thankfully miss it. Given what's been proposed to the UN today, it's pretty easy to guess what will be in the speech tonight anyway.

Instead, here's a nice article by Carl Bernstein about why Bush must go, and why the GOP need to get off their collective butts and do the kicking. Not that they're likely to do so.

Kudos to Atrios (most days, my favorite blog) for pointing me to this Krugman Quote of the Day on jobs:

In April, the economy added 288,000 jobs. If you do the math, you discover that President Bush needs about four years of job growth at last month's rate to reach what his own economists consider full employment.

The bottom line, then, is that Mr. Bush's supporters have no right to complain about the public's failure to appreciate his economic leadership. Three years of lousy performance, followed by two months of good but not great job growth, is not a record to be proud of.

More or less right on schedule. Bush isn't looking too good in the polls, so what happens? The word starts to go out that a vote for Kerry is a vote for the terrorists.

[CNN reporter Kelli] ARENA: Neither John Kerry nor the president has said troops pulled out of Iraq any time soon. But there is some speculation that al Qaeda believes it has a better chance of winning in Iraq if John Kerry is in the White House.

BEN VENZKE, INTELCENTER: Al Qaeda feels that Bush is, even despite casualties, right or wrong for staying there is going to stay much longer than possibly what they might hope a Democratic administration would.

Source: CNN

Arena's quote particularly annoyed me. It would be nice to know who is speculating that sort of thing. Sounds like the kind of thing a Republican operative would say "in confidence" to a reporter, hoping that said shill would repeat it on the air. Heck, it worked for Judith Miller, why not here?

With examples like this happening on a daily basis, small wonder why so few people think the media is trustworthy these days.

Update: I sent an email to Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news exec. Not likely I'm going to get an answer, but at least I feel like I did something.

Dear Mr. Jordan,

During the '91 Iraq war, I had CNN on virtually non-stop. Through most of the 1990s, CNN was what I turned to for my news coverage. Over the last 2 or 3 years though, I've declined my viewership. These days, I scarcely watch CNN at all.

Want to know why? Comments like this one:

"ARENA: Neither John Kerry nor the president has said troops pulled out of Iraq any time soon. But there is some speculation that al Qaeda believes it has a better chance of winning in Iraq if John Kerry is in the White House."

Courtesy of http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0405/27/wbr.01.html

Arena is a CNN reporter, not a guest on that show. When she talks about what Al Qaeda is thinking, it would be nice to know her sources, assuming she actually had any. Who exactly is it that thinks Kerry as POTUS would somehow help Al Qaeda? Sounds like the kind of thing a Republican operative would say "in confidence" to a reporter, hoping that said reporter would repeat it on the air.

Isn't it CNN's job to actually report the news, not shill for the politicos? Oh wait, Judith Miller already answered that one. (Yes, I know she did not work for CNN. The point still stands.)

I wish this were an isolated incident, but it is not. Every day, journalists are doing less and less real reporting and more attending briefings and then parroting back what they're told. Sure, it's easier to get your story in when all you have to do is show up at a press photo op, upload a press release, and do a live intro to the package. But that's not news. It's PR.

You guys need to take a hard look at what you call news these days. If you did, you might actually get viewers like me back in front of the TV.

I found 2 reports online today (here and here) referring to the possibility that Iran is taking an active hand in Iraqi affairs by recruiting suicide bombers to go after US/British targets in Iraq and elsewhere.

I don't know whether the World Tribune is a reliable source, but MEMRI, although they do have a pro-Israel agenda, at least can be trusted to get its translations accurately.

What's disturbing is not that there are more threats being made to recruit and send out suicide bombers. That's hardly news. What I do find disturbing is the direct linkage of the threats to the US occupation of Iraq.

When people ask for proof that Bush's war is in fact not making the world safer for America and Democracy, this is the kind of thing we can point to. But since most of it is not happening in English-language news sources, it's going overlooked.

I frequently find that Atrios's perspective on events is similar to mine, but I think he's a little off base with his latest take on the Allawi situation. This may be one time where dislike of the Bush administration is coloring his analysis.

Looking at the Washington Post article he cited, as well as some of the extensive reporting on the issue over at Talking Points, it seems clear from all accounts that Allawi was a main, if not the top, candidate for the PM slot. Since this was known to the UN, the US, and to the Iraqi Governing Council, it's not so surprising that the Governing Council would use this information in an attempt to look relevant and/or independant by naming Allawi.

In other words, it's not that nobody was at the helm. It's that the Iraqi Governing Council - possibly egged on by Allawi himself - decided to try steering.

Whether Allawi is a good choice, I am undecided. Some of the info coming out about him - like his tie to now-disproven memos about Saddam's WMD capability - is troubling. I'd like to see some more information before making up my mind though.

Seen on MSNBC's site today:

A handgun that Saddam Hussein was clutching when U.S. forces captured him in a hole in Iraq last December is now kept by President Bush at the White House, Time magazine reported Sunday.

Aside from the obvious phallic subtext, there's nothing particularly bad about that. However, the article goes on to point out that said gun:

is kept in a small study off the Oval Office where Bush displays memorabilia. It is the same room where former President Clinton had some of his encounters with former intern Monica Lewinsky.

It's like some sort of sick reflex. No matter that our economy is shaky, millions of Americans are out of work, and our soldiers are dying in a nearly unwinnable war in Iraq. People just can't stop themselves from slipping in a comment about Clinton getting blowjobs.

I'm going to watch George Stephanopolis on TiVo and see if my mood improves.

Is there anyone left in the Bush administration that is not a proven liar?

Liar of the Day: Dick Cheney.

A Pentagon e-mail said Vice President Dick Cheney coordinated a huge Halliburton government contract for Iraq, despite Cheney's denial of interest in the company he ran until 2000.

In previous administrations, this would be the stuff of resignations and impeachments. Now it's just business as usual.

Morning tip of the hat to Rude Pundit for this followup on Bush's Saddam firearm:

Exactly how may laws, federal and D.C., might the President be breaking with his possession of that firearm? Did he receive a background check for the transfer of ownership? Is Bush licensed to possess a firearm in a federal facility? The District of Columbia prohibits firearms to be gifts. How many people are implicated in Bush's firearm possession?

It's like they think the laws don't apply to them.

It's been pretty well covered in the blogosphere already but I can't resist the Washington Post article on the Bush team's amazing run of negative campaign ads.

Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads -- or 27 percent of his total. The figures were compiled by The Washington Post using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group of the top 100 U.S. markets. Both campaigns said the figures are accurate.

Pandagon does the math for us (emphasis added):

An interesting thing about that number - if 13,336 is the number of negative ads Kerry has run and it's 27% of his total, then Bush has run about as many negative ads (49,050) as Kerry has ads total (49,392). By any standard, that's just ridiculous.

And it's only Memorial Day. What's the picture going to look like in September?

I have to think long and hard about whether the new "Spirit of America" program is one worth supporting. On the face of it, the idea has merit. Ordinary Americans set aside their differences on the war's merits and send Iraqis things to help rebuild their lives - items such as laptop computers, baseballs, and power tools. What's not to like? Iraqis learn that Americans are not all evil and Americans get to help the Iraqi society rebuild.

The problem is, nothing is ever that simple.

If the issue was sending food to people who were starving - life and death issues - that would be different. Jewish law requires that you help people in genuine need. But someone whose main need is a toy is not someone in danger of starving to death. In cases like that, other considerations can come into play.

Here's a what-if for you: What if 'Spirit of America' manages to make a significant improvement in Iraq between now and November? Enough so that swing voters who have been soured on Bush due to the war decide that they can still comfortably vote for Bush? We get 4 more years of liars who think laws don't apply to them running our country and ruining our economy.

Is 4 more years of Bush a price worth paying to send Iraqis 2 tons of Frisbees?

Maybe I'm selfish. Maybe I'm cynical. But I am not going to join the chorus on this one just yet.

To follow up to my earlier post on more Administration lies and how the Washington Post is calling them on it, blogger Joel Carris deconstructs the responding spin.

Bush's campaign released this statement on Monday rebutting the Washington Post article. It's absolutely brilliant. What the campaign does here is they take multiple assertions from the article and meticulously show through a series of quotes and references how the Washington Post was exactly right in calling the statements misleading.

Hang on to your aspirin bottle, because there's a torrent of minutia involved in the deconstruction. The long and the short of it is, the Post was right. The Administration lied their butts off and not even a mountain of spin can get them out of it.

I didn't have much to add to the noise about George Tenet's retirement, but the news that a second senior CIA official is leaving makes you wonder what the heck is really going on...

James Pavitt, deputy director for operations, has announced his retirement. Apparently he was the guy in charge of human intelligence (AKA spies).

The repor insists that there's no coincidences here, that this was all planned in advance, but I have got to wonder - why these two? Why now? What's really going on here?

Courtesy of Kevin Drum:

CLANCY ON WOLFOWITZ....From ... Deborah Norville's segment with Anthony Zinni and Tom Clancy last night:

Deborah Norville: What's your impression of Paul Wolfowitz?

Tom Clancy: Is he working for our side?

As they say, ouch.

Update: Further reading of the Washington Monthly commentary on this item brought out that lovely (not!) meme, the "Jews Have Dual Loyalty" canard. Now I do not particularly like Wolfowitz, but I really hate it when people suggest that because someone is a Jew that their loyalties are questionable.

Despite this, I still think the original comment was funny in a snarky kind of way.

John Dean, of all people, ought to know a thing or two about Presidents who break the law. So when he writes an article about the serious implications of President Bush's consultation with a criminal defense attorney, it's time to sit up and take notice.

Here's the money quote:

Undoubtedly, those from the White House have been asked if they spoke with the president about the leak. It appears that one or more of them may indeed have done so.

Dean's take on the situation is that if the President did not know anything about the leak, he wouldn't need to call in outside counsel. The fact that he did so strongly suggests that he knew about the leak (emphasis added).

On this subject, I spoke with an experienced former federal prosecutor who works in Washington, specializing in white collar criminal defense (but who does not know Sharp). That attorney told me that he is baffled by Bush's move - unless Bush has knowledge of the leak. "It would not seem that the President needs to consult personal counsel, thereby preserving the attorney-client privilege, if he has no knowledge about the leak," he told me.

The question that remains to be answered is, in those immortal words: "What did he know and when did he know it?".

The other important question that needs an answer: is the Plame investigation going to get anywhere significant before November?

I voted against Ronald Reagan. I vigorously disagreed with many of his philosophies and was disgusted by Iran-Contra. But I did respect him and his passing lessens America.

Rest in peace, Mr President.

My father has developed the endearing(?) habit of labeling things "Commie Pinko" if he doesn't agree with them. As in, "That commie pinko rag the New York Times". Mom and I have both reminded him that he really need to come up with something a little more timely than "commie" but whatever, it makes him happy.

He still likes the Wall Street Journal, although today's edition might have gotten him mumbling a bit. You need to be a subscriber to get access to their website but here's a reprint (hopefully a legit one): Pentagon Report Set Framework For Use of Torture.

It looks to me that the lawyers who wrote this document took a conclusion and found whatever they could to try and justify it, without looking at whether their baseline assumptions were in fact correct. And their conclusions are worthy of Orwell, or maybe even Kafka.

For example:

Foremost, the lawyers rely on the "commander-in-chief authority," concluding that "without a clear statement otherwise, criminal statutes are not read as infringing on the president's ultimate authority" to wage war.

Now, I am not a lawyer, but if I read that right, it seems to say that unless something is explicitly illegal, the President can do it or order it to be done. That makes me a little nervous but whether that's the actual intent of the Constitution is something I'll leave to people who actually went to law school. Let's just say the point is arguable and move on.

And we come to the heart of the matter. Torture is illegal under both US law and international law that the US has signed onto, most notably the UN's Convention Against Torture. Ratified by the US in 1994, the Convention Against Torture states that

"no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture," and that orders from superiors "may not be invoked as a justification of torture."

Pretty straightforward, you'd think. But for 100 pages, the Bush administration lawyers tried to find their way around it, and of course came to the conclusion that despite the fact that torture is flat-out illegal there was a way out.

1) Torture should be redefined so that the US can do more to prisoners without actually having to call it torture:

"The infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture," the report advises. Such suffering must be "severe," the lawyers advise, and they rely on a dictionary definition to suggest it "must be of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure."

2) Even if it is actual torture, it's OK to do it if the President says so. See above, plus

Likewise, the lawyers found that "constitutional principles" make it impossible to "punish officials for aiding the president in exercising his exclusive constitutional authorities" and neither Congress nor the courts could "require or implement the prosecution of such an individual."

My father would probably say, "You're damn right it's OK!". Just because you really, really want to do something doesn't mean it's the right thing to do. Put the shoe on the other foot. Is it OK if Croatia adopts the same policy? What about Iran or North Korea? If we expect our people to be treated well, if we expect America to maintain respect in the world community, we have to follow the same set of rules we expect of others.

Now some might say that terrorists don't follow rules, so why should we? To which I say, we need to, because otherwise we lose the right to say we're any better than them. Just look at the quagmire of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Any time Israel has given in to its worse instincts, it gets creamed in the court of world opinion. The Bush administration has already started down that path. Of course, some might suggest that the administration doesn't care, because they can't envision a situation where they themselves will ever personally be at risk. I just wish I had a better way to say how wrong they are.

There's an excellent analysis of the legal issues here over at Intel Dump. Whiskey Bar also has a good take on the subject.

John Ashcroft today issued a classic non-denial denial in front of a pissed-off (and rightfully so) Senate Judiciary Committee today.

Responding to questions about the paper, Ashcroft said, “The president of the United States has not ordered any conduct that would violate the Constitution of the United States, that would violate not one of the laws enacted by the Congress or that would violate any of the various treaties.”

Ashcroft would not comment directly on the 2002 departmental memo that laid out a rationale in which the president was not necessarily bound by anti-torture laws or treaties because of his authority as commander in chief to protect national security.

As I said, a classic - especially the use of circular logic. He comes out with a nice strong soundbite yet avoids saying anything about the actual issue at hand. Since the policy paper in question lays out a rationale by which the Administration is not breaking any laws, Ashcroft can say that no laws are being broken. Bah.

November can't come soon enough. I want these liars out of office so bad I can taste it.

More analysis of the Torture Memo that hit the news yesterday, this time by noted legal scholar Michael Froomkin. It's well worth a read.

His conclusion is straightforward:

everyone who wrote or signed [the memo] strikes me as morally unfit to serve the United States.

If anyone in the higher levels of government acted in reliance on this advice, those persons should be impeached. If they authorized torture, it may be that they have committed, and should be tried for, war crimes. And, as we learned at Nuremberg, “I was just following orders” is NOT (and should not be) a defense.

And that's just what he has to say about the first 56 pages.

Mikhail Gorbachev got off a good shot at George W Bush tonight on Nightline. It's too soon for a transcript, but roughly here's what he said:

The desire to bring democracy to countries that have other customs and traditions ... it's a very primative form of thinking, like what the old-line Bolsheviks would do.

In other words, Gorbachev called W a commie.

I'll update tomorrow when a transcript is available.

Can anyone prove one way or the other whether Capitol Hill Blue is to be considered a reliable source or not?

If it turns out that it's just clever satire or wishful thinking, that's OK. I just want to know.

I let slide the recent report that the GOP is trying to get churches in PA more actively involved in politics, but taken together with this report about Bush's trip to the Vatican it's a disturbing trend.

It's no secret that regular church-goers are significantly more likely to vote Republican. And as the Times pointed out, African-American churches are frequently strongly involved in 'get out the vote' efforts for the Democrats. So in that sense, why should this matter?

It matters because this administration has tried in numerous ways to blur the line between religion and politics. And as a member of a minority religion I find that profoundly threatening. The more talk I hear about Jesus in the public sphere and from elected officials, the less I feel like this is my America too.

The Washington Post has published a copy of a second memo that says torture's OK, this one a DOJ product, and Froomkin's at it again. His summary says it all:

In the views of the author(s), there’s basically nothing Congress can do to constrain the President’s exercise of the war power. The Geneva Conventions are, by inevitable implications, not binding on the President, nor is any other international agreement if it impedes the war effort. I’m sure our allies will be just thrilled to hear that. And, although the memo nowhere treats this issue, presumably, also, the same applies in reverse, and our adversaries should feel unconstrained by any treaties against poison gas, torture, land mines, or anything else? Or is ignoring treaties a unique prerogative of the USA?

What I find particularly repellant is this (from the WaPo):

The 2002 memo, for example, included the interpretation that "it is difficult to take a specific act out of context and conclude that the act in isolation would constitute torture." The memo named seven techniques that courts have considered torture, including severe beatings with truncheons and clubs, threats of imminent death, burning with cigarettes, electric shocks to genitalia, rape or sexual assault, and forcing a prisoner to watch the torture of another person.

"While we cannot say with certainty that acts falling short of these seven would not constitute torture," the memo advised, ". . . we believe that interrogation techniques would have to be similar to these in their extreme nature and in the type of harm caused to violate law."

In other words, anything that's not part of the Seven Illegal Techniques is OK.

I can't find any new words to express my disgust.

What does it say about America that Newt Gingrich is now considered a wingnut that we can live with? Or so Ezra at Pandagon thinks:

So what do you do when you take on the throne and lose? Well some, like Lucifer, found a realm of eternal damnation and torture others for eternity. Others read a lot of spy novels and review so obsessively they crack Amazon's Top 500. Newt Gingrich is the latter.

As an addendum on Gingrich, he's an interesting case in the discussion Matt Stolelr and I have been having. As radical and poisonous as anyone our polity has ever been, he also presided over a GOP obsessed with policy. While the current group (DeLay, et al) have his bile they possess none of his wonkishness nor relative honesty about their agenda. To say this shows how far we've fallen, but Newt was the sort of wingnut I could live with. At least he stood for something beyond partisan politics and attempted to engage legislation in a meaningful way.

I checked Newt's review list on Amazon - the man has pretty lousy taste in spy novels.

Sometimes it feels like the Teflon coating so famously ascribed to Ronald Reagan sticks itself to every Republican administration. Per Atrios today:

I'm starting to wonder when the Bush administration will start receiving the label, "scandal plagued," as the Clinton administration does and did, even though most of those scandals were just made up scandals and not real ones.

How many CIA agents have to have their covers blown?

Maybe it's just that the Congress is also Republican led, hence no pesky panels of inquiry, special prosecutors, or impeachment articles.

Generally speaking I am highly skeptical of conspiracy theories unless there's some serious paper trail to back them up. But the one thing that the latest Al Qaeda beheading shows is that there may in fact be some truth to the rumors that the Nick Berg beheading is a little ... well ... suspicious.

Now, I must admit I did not actually watch the Berg video, but I did see some of the still photos. I wasn't planning on viewing the Paul Johnson photos but Drudge put them directly on his site instead of linking to them. And it struck me right off ... that is a lot of blood. Blood that is definitely missing from the Berg footage.

Something's not right here. It could be as simple as Berg's captors didn't have the nerve to behead a living man and killed him first. Or it could be much more complex. I don't know and I doubt the truth will come out any time in the near future.

This site has a pretty comprehensive list of the issues related to Nick Berg's death.

I find myself using the term 'Orwellian' more and more lately when it comes to the Bush administration. The latest spluttering over the 9/11 Commission is another good example of this. And over at the Whiskey Bar, Billmon has a great rundown of it. Here's one of the high points:

The panel has become "a tool for partisan politics," Rep. Eric I. Cantor (Va.), a member of the House Republican leadership, charged in an interview last week. "With the latest commission finding coming out that there were allegedly no ties between Hussein and al Qaeda, I think they are totally off their mission, and I think that's indicative of the political partisanship."

The RNC talking points on this must have gone out earlier last week, because Porter Goss, the intelligence committee chairman in our Chamber of People's Deputies, and Dennis Miller, the anti-intelligence chairman of late night television, have both been yammering about that same basic theme. But Cantor's quote is such a gem of non-logic, I'd like to look at it again more closely.

The 9/11 commission, Cantor argues, is partisan. Why? Because it went "off mission" by questioning the alleged relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Now since the 9/11 commission was specifically instructed by Congress to "make a full and complete accounting of the circumstances surrounding the [9/11] attacks," and to "investigate relevant facts and circumstances ... including intelligence agencies ... diplomacy ... the flow of assets to terrorist organizations ... and other areas of the public and private sectors determined relevant by the commission," it's fairly ridiculous to argue the commission exceeded its mandate by reviewing the evidence regarding Bin Ladin's alleged contacts with Iraq. What Cantor is really arguing is that the commission went "off mission" by arriving at conclusions that were extremely embarrassing to the administration, and possibly damaging to the Bush-Cheney campaign.

Emphasis added. And let us remember that the 9/11 Commission was created with an even split of Democrats and Republicans and is chaired by a Republican former governor picked by the White House. Not exactly a raving bunch of left-leaning wing nuts. But they came up with a conclusion that Bush/Cheney doesn't like, so they ipso facto must be partisan, and on the wrong side too.

It would be laughable if it weren't the Vice-President of the United States doing all this lying.

Transcript, CNBC’s “Capital Report,” June 17, 2004

Gloria Borger: “Well, let’s get to Mohammed Atta for a minute, because you mentioned him as well. You have said in the past that it was quote, “pretty well confirmed.”

Vice President Cheney: No, I never said that.

BORGER: OK.

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Never said that.

BORGER: I think that is...

Vice Pres. CHENEY: Absolutely not.

Transcript, NBC’s “Meet the Press,” December 9, 2001.

Vice-President Cheney: “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April.”

Courtesy of MSNBC. And a tip of the hat to Atrios for the link.

I voted for Camejo in the CA recall last fall, but if Nader's people think getting Camejo to agree to be his VP is going to get me to vote Nader, they have another think coming.

I thought about voting for Nader in 2000 but opted to vote for Gore. After what happened in 2000, there is no way in hell that I would vote for Nader. Camejo or not.

If anything, this lowers my opinion of Camejo and the Greens, that they would consider attaching their party to Nader's self-serving blather.

I have never liked Howard Stern. I thought his show was full of sexist crap and fart jokes, and so I chose not to listen to him. That doesn't mean I think he should be legislated off the air though.

Well, shame on me for not doing anything about it, but it might actually happen with the new indecency legislation that has now passed the House and Senate. Up to $3 million in fines a day can be levied if the FCC decides something said on the air is "indecent".

How did the Senate pass it? They attached it to a defense appropriations bill so that if you voted against it, you could be smeared as 'not supporting the troops'. Pretty nasty. Kudos to Sen. John Breaux, D-LA for having the balls to be the one vote against it. (And once the President signs this into law, you won't be able to say "having the balls" on the air anymore). Where was John Kerry?

Tip of the hat to Buzz Machine for the link.

This article from the Washington Post is almost a week old but it's well worth a read, especially if you read it alongside the excellent work Back to Iraq is doing.

The long and the short of it? It's not just the radical anti-war Left or Iraqi extremists that think our invasion of Iraq has been a miserable failure.

The American occupation of Iraq will formally end this month having failed to fulfill many of its goals and stated promises intended to transform the country into a stable democracy, according to a detailed examination drawing upon interviews with senior U.S. and Iraqi officials and internal documents of the occupation authority

There's blame aplenty to go around. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority blames the military. The military blames the CPA. The Iraqis blame us. We blame them. And around it goes. Then, another interesting fact.

Attacks on U.S.-led forces and foreign civilians now average more than 40 a day, a threefold increase since January.

Small wonder so-called "Green Zone," where the CPA and related US personnel live, is a fortress that few set foot beyond unless they're surrounded by security forces. And what are we getting for that attack rate, and for the 800+ American soldiers dead?

In an interview last week, Bremer maintained that "Iraq has been fundamentally changed for the better" by the occupation. The CPA, he said, has put Iraq on a path toward a democratic government and an open economy after more than three decades of a brutal socialist dictatorship. Among his biggest accomplishments, he said, were the lowering of Iraq's tax rate, the liberalization of foreign-investment laws and the reduction of import duties.

Emphasis added.

Let me get this right. We invaded a country 3,000 miles away from us, one that posed no clear threat to America. The country is a mess - the Post article goes into great detail on that point. Just one of many examples is that even in Baghdad itself, electrical power is available only 9 hours out of 24. It seems likely that the new Iraqi government will impose martial law after the June 30 handover. To name just one potential keg of worms, nobody seems to have any idea how the Kurds and the Shiites are going to resolve their differences. And Paul Bremer thinks it's an accomplishment that Iraqi taxes have been lowered.

Small wonder they hate us.

Tip of the hat to Fuzzy Puppy for the Post link.

I have a hard time viewing the US transfer of power to Iraq and Bremer's hasty departure as anything other than an admission that the situation is a big mess. I'm wondering how soon the current administration will start to spin it as a sign of success that they could hand over sovereignty two days early.

Enough teasing everyone that you know something the rest of us don't about the forged Niger uranium documents.

If you've got the story, run with it. If you don't, stop hinting that you do. In short, as the old saying goes, shit or get off the pot.

Call me a pessimist. Call me gun-shy after watching Howard Dean go from hero to zero inside of a month. You may be right. But still, I'm a little concerned this day, wondering whether the tides are swinging in Kerry's favor too soon.

As Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. points out,

How this election turns out will depend a great deal on how the situation in Iraq looks to voters on Election Day, and how many middle-class and blue-collar voters feel the economic recovery in their own lives by then.

The fact that Fahrenheit 9/11 did boffo box office not just in liberal enclaves, but nationwide, is a hopeful sign. Pollsters have been saying for some time now that the race is tight and could even be tipping in Kerry's favor. But this is a dangerous time too.

People are not happy with the way the country is going right now, but that doesn't necessarily translate to people thinking Kerry is the man to lead a change. Or so says the NY Times:

45 percent said they had an unfavorable opinion of Mr. Bush himself, again the most negative measure the Times/CBS Poll has found since he took office. And 57 percent say the country is going in the wrong direction, another measure used by pollsters as a barometer of discontent with an incumbent.

Yet the survey found little evidence that Mr. Kerry has been able to take advantage of the president's difficulties, even though Mr. Kerry has spent $60 million on television advertising over the past three months.

My feeling is, it's going to be a long slog to November, and the results are no means certain.

On June 10 2004, the IRS

sent a strongly worded letter to both the Republican and Democratic national committees, reminding them that tax-exempt charitable groups "are prohibited from directly or indirectly participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office."

So what does the Bush campaign do? They send out a detailed 22-point plan to volunteers about how to bring their chruch members into the Bush fold.

The instruction sheet circulated by the Bush-Cheney campaign to religious volunteers lists 22 "duties" to be performed by specific dates. By July 31, for example, volunteers are to "send your Church Directory to your State Bush-Cheney '04 Headquarters or give [it] to a BC04 Field Rep" and "Talk to your Pastor about holding a Citizenship Sunday and Voter Registration Drive."

By Aug. 15, they are to "talk to your Church's seniors or 20-30 something group about Bush/Cheney '04" and "recruit 5 more people in your church to volunteer for the Bush Cheney campaign."

By Sept. 17, they are to host at least two campaign-related potluck dinners with church members, and in October they are to "finish calling all Pro-Bush members of your church," "finish distributing Voter Guides in your church" and place notices on church bulletin boards or in Sunday programs "about all Christian citizens needing to vote."

Why don't they just take our ads that say, "Jesus wants Bush re-elected" and be done with it?

Source: Yahoo! News.

Per Daily Dish and the Washington Times, someone is trying to get John Kerry condemned by the Catholic Church for heresy. The Times is a right-wing news rag and so far seems to be the only paper going with the story, so take it with a grain of salt.

I wonder whether any of the hundreds of pedophile Catholic priests were charged with heresy?

One of the sections I didn't quite get about Fahrenheit 9/11 was the big deal Moore made over one name being blacked out of Bush's military records. It seemed to me that Moore was trying to go for the jugular but instead started chewing on a toenail. Fortunately, the excellent Dave Neiwert over at Orcinus helped fill in the blanks Moore left. Here's the summary:

Bush's military record should be a scandal not merely for what it contains (or rather, doesn't) but because of the extent to which it has been tampered with and lied about in the past eight years or so.

The full post is here, has links to lots of detail backing up his claims that Bush's records are a scandal, and is, like the rest of his blog, well worth reading.

Only 4 months left until Election Day!

All eyes are on the Kerry VP choice right now. I personally feel the VP candidate should be announced at the Convention if for no other reason than to make it something other than a big waste of time and money. I seem to be a minority view, though. Opinion seems to be the choice will be announced sometime this week.

I've mentioned it once or twice over on dKos but I want to say it one final time, because it's something a lot of people seem to be losing sight of (per Josh Marshall):

If you look back over recent American history you have to go back to Ronald Reagan's choice of George Bush in 1980 to find an instance in which a favorite or even prominent contender got picked. In fact, with the possible exception of Lloyd Bentsen in 1988, I think you might even argue that not since Reagan's choice of Bush has a presidential candidate chosen a vice-presidential candidate who anyone had even considered a serious contender for the VP slot.

and

Now, like everyone else did in 1984, 1988, 1992, 1996 and 2000, I certainly figure that it'll be one of the logical choices -- Edwards or Gephardt most likely. But if it is one of those two, it'll be a break from the trend of the last quarter century.

Not that my opinion matters, but I'd be happy with Edwards as the VP. Not so much with Gephardt, but he's no Dan Quayle either. But if Marshall is right, neither will be on the ticket. I know zero about Vilsack so have no opinion about him other than it might be a good idea to get someone outside of Congress on that ticket. But my hedge bet is on Wes Clark.

So Josh Marshall was wrong and the popular choice got chosen. And a good thing too.

More later after the formal announcement.

Overall, response to Kerry's naming of Edwards is as expected. The Swing States Project gets the honors for best or at least most original line so far:

Previously, I've called New Jersey a Jack Daniel's state. North Carolina is the exact opposite: A Dom Perignon state - if you see this state go blue on election night, break out the bubbly and start celebrating.

Naming Edwards to the ticket does, I think, increase that chance.

UPDATE: Digby also does an excellent job on Edwards, digging out a year-old analysis of the man that's worth a read.

It's not quite Wag the Dog but it's close...

A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Source: The New Republic. Thanks Josh Marshall for the pointer.

The LA Times (registration required, but Yahoo! reprints it) has a good piece about the Senate Intelligence Committee's report, in specific, a section devoted to the differences between two versions of a key report on Iraq's weapons capabilities used to help justify the US's attack - the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002. Not surprisingly:

The panel laid out numerous instances in which the unclassified version omitted key dissenting opinions about Iraqi weapons capabilities, overstated U.S. knowledge about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons and, in one case, inserted threatening language into the public document that was not contained in the classified version.

The changes made a qualified, nuanced document into one which laid out the case for war.

For example, the panel cited changes made in the section of the NIE dealing with chemical weapons:

"Although we have little specific information on Iraq's CW stockpile," the classified NIE read, "Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons" of such poisons.

In the unclassified version of the report, the phrase "although we have little specific information" was deleted. Instead, the public report said, "Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents."

Skipping over several other similar instances of changes made to the document, we get to the kicker: who made the changes and why. And here it gets even more infuriating.

Who made the changes:

During a briefing before the report was released, one committee aide said the Senate panel had asked Tenet and Stu Cohen — who, as acting chairman of the National Intelligence Council, oversaw production of the NIE — who was responsible for inserting those words into the unclassified document.

"They did not know and could not explain," said the aide, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Why:

According to the intelligence committee report, staffers asked intelligence officials why words like "we judge" and "we assess" were removed during the declassification process.

They were told that, because officials believed the white paper would be made public as representing the view of the entire U.S. government, not simply an intelligence community product, it was more appropriate to take references to "we" out of the document. This was done, committee staffers were told, "purely for stylistic reasons."

Stylistic reasons?!?! Who are they kidding?

Matt Yglesias gives a bunch of reasons why Nader voters should think again. Only thing it's missing is some links to back up his claims, but that's what Google is for.

Speaking of other bloggers who are better and/or funnier writers than I am, check out this great bit in fafblog:

In the meantime because I was tricked into believin in Joe Wilson, I also believed that Saddam Hussein's nuclear program didnt exist when in fact it must have because Joe Wilson got his job from his wife! Even now I am trembling in fear in the knowledge that somewhere out there Saddam Hussein is sittin on a giant pile of Nigerien yellowcake uranium. "Ho ho ho," laughs Saddam Hussein as he takes a bite of rich, creamy uranium. "Soon I will grow ten thousand times my current size, spewing radioactive fire breath across Mesopotamia, until as Nuculo-Saddam I shall control the Middle East!" "Oh no Saddam don't do that!" I say. "It is too late!" he laughs. "And I owe it all to you, Fafnir - to you and all the other hapless peaceniks deceived by the nepotism of Joseph and Valerie Plame-Wilson!"

Not that I've ever used the stuff, but if you do use SlimFast, you should know:

Slim-Fast has dropped Whoopi Goldberg from its advertising after the comedian made a sexual joke about George Bush.

Per Atrios. He has contact info if you want to give the SlimFast folks a piece of your mind.

You can not make stuff like this up even if you tried:

The US navy spokesman put up to answer journalists’ questions about the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is one Lieutenant Mike Kafka.

Tip of the hat to Discourse.net.

Per Atrios, a reminder of how good The West Wing used to be:

We all need some therapy, because somebody came along and said "liberal" means soft on crime, soft on drugs, soft on Communism, soft on defense, and we're gonna tax you back to the Stone Age because people shouldn't have to go to work if they don't want to. And instead of saying "Well, excuse me, you right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-eductaion, anti-choice, pro-gun, 'Leave it to Beaver' trip back to the fifties," we cowered in the corner and said "Please, don't hurt me." No more. —The West Wing

I wish I were half the writer Billmon is. Whiskey Bar puts the smack down on Ralph Nader. Go read it. It's even better than the smacking Matt Yglesias laid down on Nader not too long ago.

A sample:

If the robber baron economics, constitutional obscenity and foreign policy lunacies of the past four years haven't convinced progressives of the need for a united front against Bush and the authoritarian right, then nothing I can say now will, either.

But up until the past few weeks, I've never questioned Nader's motives or his sincerity. As destructive as I think his actions have been, and as much as I detest his stubborness and his increasingly bizarre egoism, I've taken it for granted that Ralph's objectives were exactly what he said they were: to give the voters a progressive alternative to the Republicrat political duopoly.

I may have thought he was wrong - disastrously wrong - but I always assumed Nader was basically an honest person, and a man of the left. And as high as I know the stakes are in this election, it still made me uncomfortable to see the Dems using hardball tactics to try to keep him off the ballot in as many of the key states as they could. In my book, the Democratic Party was (and still is) just an instrument, a tool - a weak one, but the only one we've got - for fighting the movement conservatives. Ralph, on the other hand, was more like a crazy uncle - a real pain in the ass, but still, when it comes right down to it, family.

But Nader's increasingly open and shameless alliance with the GOP - as demonstrated so flagrantly in Michigan - leaves me with the sinking feeling that I've misjudged him.

I know the 9/11 report is out today but I am not going to deal with it. The process has become too politicized to even remotely hope for good advice to come out of it; the best we can hope for is some tidbits of useful information.

Most people disn't even know he was still running, but in time for the convention, Kucinich has formally pulled out of the race for president. He had no chance, but he ran a classy race - as a Pandagon commenter suggests, the race Nader should have been running.

It would be nice if Kucinich can now be utilized to try to get some of the Nader supporters to come to their senses - but somehow I doubt they'll listen.

In a not unexpected move, an internal Army investigation has resulted in a whole lot of nothing - except for 94 reported cases of abuse and "at least" three dozen deaths.

Maybe I'm naive - I admit I know nothing about how jails are run - but I have a very hard time understanding how 36 people can die in custody and it can all be attributed to "unauthorized actions taken by a few individuals, and in some cases coupled with the failure of a few leaders to provide adequate supervision and leadership."

Other points that seem to indicate that this report is a bunch of hogwash - Lt. Gen. Paul Mikolashek, the Army's inspector general, seems to have decided to ignore some critical areas, such as the so-called 'ghost prisons'.

Mikolashek said he found "no evidence" of so-called ghost detainees, prisoners kept off the books by U.S. forces and hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

But he said he was not disputing either Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba's report on Abu Ghraib that exposed and criticized the practice, or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said he ordered the secret detention of an Iraqi prisoner held for more than seven months without notifying the ICRC.

"We did not go back and do a post mortem on that particular issue," Mikolashek said.

As I said, none of this is unexpected. And given the proximity of the 9/11 commission's report, this one is going to be buried.

The DNC allowed bloggers into the convention and it made waves - some good, some bad. Much of the convention blogging hasn't been terribly interesting so far, but Tom Tomorrow has a good account of his day's activities, mostly trailing around with Michael Moore. Worth a read.

Sometimes I wonder whether one morning I woke up in some alternate universe, because reading this sort of thing, I wonder whether the world has gone nuts, or just me to think this is a really BAD IDEA:

Cash has become the US military's first line of defense in some parts of Iraq, where US soldiers are distributing money to encourage goodwill and to counter their enemies' offers of money to unemployed Iraqis willing to attack Americans, according to officers here.

Even patrol leaders now carry envelopes of cash to spend in their areas. The money comes from brigade commanders, who get as much as $50,000 to $100,000 a month to distribute for local rehabilitation and emergency welfare projects through the Commanders Emergency Response Program.

There are few restrictions on the expenditures, and officers acknowledge they consider the money another weapon. The targets at which it is aimed are the restless legions of unemployed Iraqi men, many of them former soldiers, policemen, and low-level members of the Ba'ath Party of ousted president Saddam Hussein. They were put out of work when the US administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, ordered a de-Ba'athification of Iraq. US soldiers say those men are vulnerable to entreaties to carry out an attack on the Americans for pay.

So instead of using that money to rebuild Iraqi infrastructure or as small business startup funding, they just hand it out to people on the street? No tracking, no checking, no way to determine whether the money isn't going to buy more guns, more explosives? Obviously they're aware of that potential for abuse, so the article goes on to quote a couple of officers who have been giving their cash out to rebuild swimming pools and buy soccer uniforms. But still....

Even FDR didn't hand out cash to Americans to fight the Great Depression; he created jobs programs instead. Huge public works projects. Why aren't we doing that in Iraq? Is it because all the projects involving real jobs have been contracted to Halliburton?

This kind of thing literally makes my stomach hurt.

I know it's not exactly a suspensful event, watching the roll call vote at the convention, but still, I really got a kick out of watching each state delegation cast their votes for the Kerry ticket tonight (excpt for the 40-some odd Kuchinich delegates who refused to switch to Kerry). It really makes you feel that there are people across the country who care about this election as much as you yourself do.

To be honest I felt better about it than I did about Edward's speech, which was pretty boring until the last third, when Edwards finally caught some fire and started getting the crowd genuinely enthused.

Cheney said terrorists are as determined to destroy America as the "Axis powers" of Germany, Italy and Japan during World War II. Borrowing a quote from the 9-11 Commission's report on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 2001, the vice president said the terrorists are "sophisticated, patient, disciplined and lethal."

"This enemy is perfectly prepared to slaughter anyone man, woman and child to achieve its ends," Cheney said. "This is not an enemy we can reason with. This is an enemy we must vanquish."

Although it may be true that al-Qaeda is as determined to destroy the US as the Axis Powers were in World War II, this observation is a Himalayan exaggeration if it is meant to suggest a parallel. Al-Qaeda is a few thousand fanatics mainly distributed in a handful of countries. If Zacharias Moussaoui and Richard Reid are any indication, a lot of them are one step away from from collecting old soda cans on the street in their grocery carts while mumbling about the radios the government implanted in their asses.

So while their determination may be impressive (or just creepy), they are not comparable to the might of three industrialized dictatorships with populations in the tens of millions. Some 13 million men served in the German army (Heer) alone between 1935 and 1945. (And WW II killed 55 million persons, not 3 thousand).

Juan Cole has a lot to say about Dick Cheney and this administration's approach to fighting terrorism. He is not a supporter of Israel, and I am, but other than that he has some very good points.

Reading around this morning, it seems the Kerry speech was well received just about everywhere (except for the Whiskey Bar and Matt Yglesias). It certainly was at the bar in downtown SF where I watched it with about 60 other SFers at a Kerry fundraiser.

Kerry's opening line, "I'm John Kerry, reporting for duty" was a risk but I think it went over well. In fact, Kerry did about the best job he possibly could have done last night. Not that I needed convincing who to vote for, but I did walk away with a shift in my feelings about Kerry. Before the speech, I was voting for Kerry because I had to. Now I actually want to vote for the man.

O, and per Kos, may Saxby Chambliss rot in hell for what he did to Max Cleland. He gave a great introduction speech and I hope we see more of Cleland in a Kerry administration.

I finally read Ron Reagan's piece in Esquire on why not to vote for Bush. It's a nice piece of writing, very lyrical in its outrage - RR definitely has gifts in that regard. But one small quibble I wanted to call out. Reagan says towards the end

I write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is plenty angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current administration.

If honesty is at the core of what Reagan does not like about Bush, then he needs to be honest about this too. The fact is, no matter how well-written his article, it's being published in Esquire and not some obscure blog because Ron Reagan is the son of a two-term US President. He should acknowledge that point.

In this case, the 2000 year old classic, Sun Tzu's "The Art Of War". In Chapter 13 Sun Tzu discusses spies:

There are five kinds of spies used: Local spies, internal spies, double spies, dead spies, and living spies.

When all five are used, and no one knows their Way, it is called the divine organization, and is the ruler's treasure.

This Administration, however, seeems to have created a 6th kind of spy - the spy that you burn to try to gain internal political benefit.

U.S. officials providing justification for anti-terrorism alerts revealed details about a Pakistani secret agent, and confirmed his name while he was working under cover in a sting operation, Pakistani sources say.

A Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters on Friday that Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was arrested in Lahore secretly last month, had been actively cooperating with intelligence agents to help catch al Qaeda operatives when his name appeared in U.S. newspapers.

And this isn't the first time - need I mention Valerie Plame?

Another lesson this administration should have learned about spies before invading Iraq but did not can also be found in Sun Tzu (emplhasis added) -

Only the wisest ruler can use spies; only the most benevolent and upright general can use spies, and only the most alert and observant person can get the truth using spies.

It is subtle, subtle!

This Modern World has a nice item about the upcoming "National Preparedness Month", scheduled to be kicked off by Tom Ridge on September 9th.

Per TMW:

Why September 9th? That's awfully late, if it's supposed to be the entire month. My guess, thinking like Karl Rove: this year's 9/11 anniversary falls on a Saturday, so an announcement on the date or even Friday would only get a burst of free media on a weekend. But by timing it for the 6 pm news on Thursday, it'll reach the Friday papers, and thus be fully-injected into all of the emotion-laden anniversary coverage, plus the Sunday morning talk shows.

The idea, obviously, is to throw a large amount of focus, possibly for weeks on end, on the only issue on which Bush outpolls Kerry. And of course this will come on the heels of the GOP convention. So where the Democrats' post-convention media got blitzed with terror warnings based on years-old intelligence, the Republicans' afterglow might well be favorably extended.

Indeed. But here's the real point of the whole thing (emphasis original):

It's three years after 9/11, and less than three months before an election, and now we get a National Preparedness Month.

And yes, let's ask Bush and Tom Ridge the simple question: what the hell do these people think the previous 35 months were?

It's a frequent criticism of President Bush that he's stupid, and this latest quote below is certainly a stupid thing to say. But I don't think it's actual lack of intelligence that's the problem. Rather, I think the problem is that he lives in a world completely cut off from the reality 99% of the rest of us live in.

Bush on taxing the rich:

[Bush said that] high taxes on the rich are a failed strategy because "the really rich people figure out how to dodge taxes anyway."

In BushWorld, any tax increase that Congress could come up with will have loopholes that their well-paid accountants will figure out how to exploit, so it's a waste of time even trying to increase taxes. They'll just offshore their corporation, or rewrite their compensation package, or shuffle the web of trusts, or something like that.

In short, in BushWorld, they can't conceive of a tax package that cannot be dodged or evaded. The rules are for suckers.

It would be nice if people in BushWorld took their obligations as seriously as they do their privileges, but that, I suppose, would be asking too much.

I was on the phone with my grandmother a little while ago. She's almost 80 but active as ever and is a dedicated Democrat, and we spent a lot of time talking about current events. I started reading through my blogroll after I got off the phone with her. Lots being said about the resigning New Jersey Governor, which I don't have much to say about right now, and then this little gem (hat tip - Sisyphus Shrugged) got me angry:

"The days when the chief Israeli puppeteer comes to the United States and meets with the puppet in the White House and then proceeds to Capitol Hill, where he meets with hundreds of other puppets, should be replaced," Nader said earlier this summer.

Source here.

The belief that Jews are secretly the puppet masters of international events and finance goes directly back to the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion".

Certainly American-Israeli relations and the whole godawful mess in Israel is something that everyone is entitled to have an opinion on. But to express your opinion using inflamatory language that suggests Jews secretly run the world is not fine.

Yet one more reason why Ralph Nader ought to go back to writing consumer protection guides.

Hat Tip: All Spin Zone for finding this beautiful quote:

Sen. Tom Harkin called Vice President Dick Cheney a "coward" for avoiding service in Vietnam and called on President Bush to end the "backdoor draft."

The Iowa Democrat was responding Friday to the call-up of a Des Moines police officer who has already completed his eight-year military commitment.

[snip]

"The part of the U.S. code that provides for this anticipates major wars, major national emergencies," Harkin said. "That is not what we're confronting right now. You think about using this law only in (extreme cases), only when we're really in dire, dire need."

Harkin also shot back at Cheney, who said in a visit to Iowa on Tuesday that presidential candidate John Kerry lacks a basic understanding of the war on terrorism and cannot make America safer.

He noted that Cheney had several student deferments that allowed him to skip serving in Vietnam.

"When I hear this coming from Dick Cheney, who was a coward, who would not serve during the Vietnam War, it makes my blood boil," Harkin said. "Those of us who served and those of us who went in the military don't like it when someone like a Dick Cheney comes out and he wants to be tough. Yeah, he'll be tough. He'll be tough with somebody else's blood, somebody else's kids. But not when it was his turn to go."

Nice to see a Democrat finally being blunt about Cheney's service record (or lack thereof). Let's hope it continues.

The Presidential / VP debate schedule for the fall has been announced: details here. It's interesting to note that 2 of the 3 of the debates are going to have candidates seated at a table (the 3rd debate doesn't specify). I have no idea why but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that Kerry is so much taller than Bush, and the more traditional podium debates show the height difference more clearly.

My problem with the whole debate format is it has become yet another way for candidates to get out their spin more than anything else. Nothing that's said there can be taken as either fact or serious policy proposal.

Here's an example:

I have a very clear recollection of one of the 2000 Presidential debate - I happened to be driving up Nob Hill at the time and for some reason Candiate Bush's comment about how he was completely uninterested in "nation building" (the buzzword of the time; considered a criticism of the USA's involvment in Bosina) stuck in my brain. Look what 4 years have brought.

Yet I'm sure I'll watch them all anyway.

Just when you think that this administration has been so screwed up for so long and has done so many heinous things that it's hard to tell them all apart or even care about them all anymore, along comes something that reminds you that the horror is not over and you can still be outraged.

Digby excerpts a long GQ article about Joseph and Bernadette Darby and what has happened to their lives since Joe was identifed as a whistleblower in the Abu Ghirab scandal.

Digby talks about the article as a window into red-state wingnut America and why nobody is supporting the Darbys in their home town. Which is true, and the fact that they have had to be moved into protective custody is sad, but as far as I am concerned, what's really appaling is why.

Abu Ghirab is in fact worse that we've heard. And it's getting lost in the outrage backwash. Nobody is talking about it. And we don't know why.

One thing Bernadette didn't know—because almost nobody knows it, because almost everybody who does know has either been lying or keeping it a secret—is the rest of the story, what really happened at Abu Ghraib. Oh, you hear allusions to the fact that certain things haven't been told, like Rumsfeld saying in May that the whole story is "a good deal more terrible" than what you've seen. But you don't hear Rumsfeld saying any more than that, or explaining what "more terrible" means.

[snip]

Seymour Hersh, the man who uncovered the Abu Ghraib scandal in The New Yorker, claims that video exists of young Iraqi boys being sodomized. But Hersh hasn't come forward with the video, and neither has anybody else. Even if he's not right, there's no question that other prisoners were sodomized by U.S. soldiers. There are pictures of at least one Iraqi man being raped with a light stick. You didn't see those pictures on the news though, didn't hear Rumsfeld talk about that. Just like nobody except Janis Karpinski is talking about the three military-intelligence officers who were sent home in January after the sexual assault of two female prisoners. That case is confidential, just like the roughly 5,950 pages of Major General Antonio Taguba's 6,000-page investigation of the Abu Ghraib scandal are "confidential."

Its obvious that there is indeed much more to tell, but it also seems obvious that we're not going to know the worst there is to know. And the longer we don't know the truth, stand up to it, punish the guilty, and apologize, we're going to have the spectre of what we did hovering over Iraq and elsewhere for a long time.

Haven't been in much of a mood for blogging this week but this is really something. Apparently - and of course nobody is quite sure why - Senator Ted Kennedy's name found itself onto the FAA's "Watch List" and Kennedy was barred from flying as a result.

Now, you may not like Ted Kennedy, but putting him on a list of people who are so much of a danger to the USA that they should not be allowed to fly smacks of deep wingnuttery. Except that this time the wingnut in question worked for the US Government.

Kennedy said it took three calls to Tom Ridge and several weeks before his name was removed from the list. Being a Senator, he has the kind of clout to make that happen. We average citizens, who would be lucky to talk to any human being ewith real clout at DHS, let alone Ridge, should be very very concerned.

The New Republic thinks Kerry should sue the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" for libel.

That is why if Bush should lose this November, there won't be any honeymoon for Kerry His first few months in office will look like the last years of the Clinton presidency: congressional inquiries, constant talk radio trash-talking, and book deals for anyone with a charge to make. Simply, Kerry can't afford to let the SBVT charges go unanswered if he wants to govern effectively.

I agree completely but I also think it's not going to happen.

Feeling a little paranoid this morning? Well if you like intrigue here's one for you.

The Pentagon has urged Congress to authorize $500 million for building a network of friendly militias around the world

Ostensibly this would allow the US to pay militia type forces to bring about law and order in "ungoverned" areas of the world (funny, I thought it was pretty much settled who got to govern just about all of the planet by now).

Of course, that leaves open the issue of whether said militias would have to even pretend to follow the Geneva Conventions or any other laws. Not that the US has been all too good at it, but this would be taking another page from the Nixon playbook - plausible deniability. "We were funding them, but no, we had no idea what they were going to do with those finds!" Political assassinations not legal? Leave it to the Militias!

Think I'm kidding?

In his testimony, Wolfowitz also suggested expanding the scope of the war on terror by including into the list of its possible targets radical Islamic clerics, who, in his words, provide "ideological sanctuary" to terrorism.

Hat tip to Larry for the link.

Even a new kitten high can only last so long. It's back to reality today. Not only is the Marine Corps cutting its training time for soldiers,

The exercise, called a CAX in Marine lingo, has been shortened from 23 to 11 days, Col. Blake Crowe, operations officer for the Marine Corps Training Command at Quantico, Va., said in an interview.

This was done, Crowe said, to "get more battalions through" in a shorter period of time. Until now, the Marine Corps trained 10 battalions in CAX every six months. Under the accelerated schedule, it will train eight battalions in two months.

but the trainees don't even get to actually fire some of the weapons they've been trained on due to lack of funding.

Staff Sgt. Don Allen, a combat instructor, said his trainees watch demonstrations of the M203 grenade launcher, the Squad Automatic Weapon and the .50-caliber machine gun, but not everyone gets to actually fire the weapons.

"It's financial," said Allen, a combat engineer who fought in Iraq last year with the 8th Marines. "I wish I had the money for them to shoot actual rounds. When I went through this training in 1995, we all shot every weapon."

Where the hell is all the money going?

Yet more proof that you don't need to make stuff up when - from their own mouths - you can have why God wants you to Vote Republican (not!)

Click here (must have Flash)

And even better, they have a source list for the quotes in the cartoon.

I thought it was hilarious, per Atrios:

I swear that I witnessed George W. Bush having carnal relations with a swine. I am willing to sign an affadavit stating so.

I can now appear in commercials stating. "I am a pig farmer. While at a campaign stop in Iowa. George Bush attacked one of my sows. George Bush is a pigfucker. I know, because I was there."

Soon I will appear on the cable news shows. The Washington Post will dutifully report on my claims, because, it will not judge my credibility. I will be appointed to be a federal judge by the Kerry administration. My career path is set. Bring it on.

So after months of hinting that something big was in the wind, Josh Marshall & friends have broken their story. The thesis?

The DoD-Ghorbanifar meetings suggest the possibility that a rogue faction at the Pentagon was trying to work outside normal US foreign policy channels to advance a "regime change" agenda not approved by the president's foreign policy principals or even the president himself.

I need to go dig into my library to confirm this (and it's late Saturday night so I'm not going to do it now) but I have a recollection that Ghorbanifar did in fact have some sort of Israeli connection as well as being a player in Iran-Contra way back when. If I'm remembering correctly, then it's quite possible that Mossad is involved in this whole DOD/intelligence passing mess and boy is that not good for the Jews.

All that said, this is not the "bombshell that's going to rock Washington" that Marshall was promising, unless there's more yet to come. Bummer.

I was never much of a Jack Kemp fan but TNR's blog has an interesting piece about Jack Kemp and Jewish voters among other things.

Not that even Giuliani has a good chance of getting a large piece of the Jewish vote for Bush, but it's an interesting story from the otherwise uninteresting RNC convention.

Thanks, Tommy Thompson, you're our winner!

I think Arnold Schwarzenegger's, Governor Schwarzenegger's speech last night was one of the finest I've ever seen at a convention, and I've been going to conventions for 28 years. his speech was outstanding, he gave a portrayal, he painted a picture of why people should be a Democrat, better and more ably than any person I've ever heard before.

Emphasis added. Thanks Atrios!

I know you wanted to just relax and enjoy life but I'm glad to see you back. Otherwise I might have missed this gem from the dirty tricks book:

It seems that a Republican polling firm is conducting push polls in Wisconsin that explicitly use the accusation of the Swift Boat Liars for Bush in their misleading questions.

Unfortunately for them, they called the wrong guy: A democratic activist who jotted down their questions, and signed an affidavit confirming all of it.

They also made a boo boo by trying that in Wisconsin, which has a state law requiring any polling firm to reveal who is paying for a poll if asked. Naturally, the gentleman asked the caller who was paying for the poll.

Just as naturally, they clammed up.

What really pisses me off is that the SCLM just lets this stuff slide 99.99999% of the time. Without the Blue Blogosphere we'd be in even deeper doo-doo than we already are.

I was wondering if Kerry was ever going to step up to the plate and do something about the vile smear campaign BushCo is running against him. Tonight he did:

"For the past week, they attacked my patriotism and my fitness to serve as commander in chief," Kerry said. "We'll, here's my answer. I'm not going to have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and by those who have misled the nation into Iraq."

Indeed.

This president sees America as we think about a 10-year-old child,

So said White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card.

I suspect Card was trying to express how much Bush loved America when he chose that phrase. But the way it came out, it sounded grossly paternalistic and insulting to the intelligence of Americans.

And to me, this is a classic example of what's wrong with the crew in the White House. They really do think they know better than the rest of us, and that this justifies their actions.

2 months to Election Day. Bring it on.

Once upon a time I wasn't so cynical, I like to remind myself. But the first thing that crossed my mind when I saw this headline on Yahoo news today was, "There's the October Surprise".

U.S. Official Says Close to Catching Bin Laden

Cofer Black, State Department coordinator for counter-terrorism, said in Islamabad the entire "infrastructure" was in place to capture bin Laden and his close lieutenants, Pakistan's English language Daily Times reported.

[snip]

"Success against people that you know about, Osama, could happen tomorrow, could happen the day after, a week from now, or a month from now," he added.

Of course. Right in time for the election run-up. How convenient.

I wasn't always this cynical. I don't LIKE being this cynical. But when it's this obvious, it's damn hard to NOT be cynical.

There's a strong feeling in some parts of the blogosphere that in this campaign season, Democrats need to pull out all the stops and start smearing Bush with as much mud as is being thrown at Kerry. My own preference is try to stay out of the mud as much as possible (except for the occasional snarky comment. I'm not perfect.)

Why? Some years ago, my mother told me something very wise. We were discussing some personal issues and the temptation to play 'tit for tat' with people who are being hurtful to you. She told me that she felt it was important to always take the high road, even if the other person doesn't, even if you really don't want to. And she was right.

So in keeping with the high road theme, here's The Decembrist on Why Bush Must Go:

Consider, for example, the domestic policy proposals that Bush unveiled in his convention acceptance speech. The charges against them were as obvious and as uninteresting as the proposals: They're recycled. There's not enough detail. They're going to be expensive. All true, but not every idea has to be new; I don't need details; and if Bush really has the will, then maybe he can find the money -- he seems to find it for everything else.

What seems to have gone unsaid about this laundry list was that these weren't proposals that were blocked by a hostile Congress or that he couldn't find the money to fund. It's that most of them died as a result of his own incompetence and that of his administration. Could Bush have partially privatized Social Security in his first term? Quite possibly, but the commission he appointed, and the hacks he had working for him, didn't understand the first thing about it, and treated the serious technical problems they were paid to solve ? mainly the huge transitional costs -- as PR problems to be obscured by patently dishonest claims such as that Social Security is a bad deal for African-Americans. His "ownership society" proposals for tax-free accounts for health and retirement were so transparently just cover for another tax cut for the rich that he backed off even offering them in the State of the Union this year. His two domestic accomplishments, No Child Left Behind and the Medicare prescription drug bill, are basically sound ideas marred by profound incompetence in design. Most of those who support or supported the Iraq War now have the same view of that misadventure. And then there's allowing North Korea and Iran to become nuclear powers. On the macroeconomic front, while a president is not necessarily responsible for every turn of the business cycle that takes place on his watch, Bush is wholly responsible for his total indifference to the distinction between tax cuts and deficit spending that might shorten the recession and generate demand, and those that would not. That indifference is incompetence.

Emphasis added. And the rest of his piece is well worth a read.

Like I said, I am not perfect and I don't expect other people to be. I know it is very hard to try to hold onto your values when you feel so much is at stake and you're scared of what might happen if you don't win. I also think that holding on to your values when the going gets tough is important because it defines what kind of a person you really are. We're all going to have to live with ourselves after November 2, win or lose.

All this is not to say that Kerry should not fight for the election. Of course he - and we all - should. I'm happy to hear that more of the Clinton team is joining the Kerry campaign. They fought hard but they fought clean - just what we need right now.

Josh Marshall has the text of a letter sent from former President Jimmy Carter to Zell Miller regarding his recent screech -- sorry, speech -- at the Republican convention. It's worth a read. Here's the conclusion.

Zell, I have known you for forty-two years and have, in the past, respected you as a trustworthy political leader and a personal friend. But now, there are many of us loyal Democrats who feel uncomfortable in seeing that you have chosen the rich over the poor, unilateral preemptive war over a strong nation united with others for peace, lies and obfuscation over the truth, and the political technique of personal character assassination as a way to win elections or to garner a few moments of applause. These are not the characteristics of great Democrats whose legacy you and I have inherited.

Atrios has another excellent one: Bush versus Jesus.

Read, laugh, cry.

Investivagtive reporter turned blogger Greg Palast is running with another aspect to the "Bush dodged his Vietnam responsilibilites" story that has nothing to do with memos that may or may not have been typed in 1972.

In 1968, former Congressman George Herbert Walker Bush of Texas, fresh from voting to send other men’s sons to Vietnam, enlisted his own son in a very special affirmative action program, the ‘champagne’ unit of the Texas Air National Guard. There, Top Gun fighter pilot George Dubya was assigned the dangerous job of protecting Houston from Vietcong air attack.

This week, former Lt. Governor Ben Barnes of Texas 'fessed up to pulling the strings to keep Little George out of the jungle. "I got a young man named George W. Bush into the Texas Air Guard - and I'm ashamed."

THE PAY-OFF

That’s far from the end of the story. In 1994, George W. Bush was elected governor of Texas by a whisker. By that time, Barnes had left office to become a big time corporate lobbyist. To an influence peddler like Barnes, having damning information on a sitting governor is worth its weight in gold – or, more precisely, there’s a value in keeping the info secret.

Barnes appears to have made lucrative use of his knowledge of our President’s slithering out of the draft as a lever to protect a multi-billion dollar contract for a client.

In short, Barnes kept silent about Bush and got a big payout - his client got a no-bid contract to run the Texas lottery and he got a hefty fee out of it all. I suppose that's just business as usual in politics.

I don't know which annoys me more: the mindless jingoism that assumes God is on the side of Republicans, or the offhand anti-semitism suggesting that Jews can't be Americans. Seen at a recent Republican campaign rally:

Most confusing sign of the day: "If Jesus weren't a Jew, he'd be an American."

Interesting factoid from this WaPo article ... 40% of the troops in Iraq are from the National Guard and Reserves. There is not a doubt in my mind that if Bush is reelected that this will only get worse.

The rest of the article is also interesting, looking at the stresses a Guard unit faces as it prepares to deploy, but I don't have much to say about it. More on that in another entry.

Joe Klein in Time this week:

There is only one significant question left in this presidential election year: Can John Kerry hold George Bush accountable for this mess? My guess is, probably not. The Republicans, with a strong assist from Kerry, have successfully painted the Democrat as a flip-flopping incompetent when it comes to national security. It will be hard for Kerry to change that impression. In fact, he has only one chance remaining, in the presidential debates.

And that won't be easy: I've never seen George Bush lose a debate. He is a brilliant minimalist. Kerry by contrast is all oratorical flab—although he did begin to show some signs of life last week in a solid speech to the National Guard convention, in which he blasted Bush's "fantasy of spin" about Iraq. It is a powerful fantasy, though. And it is easy to predict Bush's response to any Kerry criticism about Iraq: "My opponent is too pessimistic," the President will say. "See, what he doesn't understand is that the President of the United States has to stand firm. We can't show weakness. And we won't on my watch." Unless Kerry can come off with a succinct, and lethal, response to those vaporous but compelling platitudes, he will lose this election.

Pandagon this morning pointed to an article about leadership, to which I wanted to add some thoughts.

A personal anecdote - a few years ago, the department I was working in went to have an offsite team-building exercise. This one involved climbing "rock walls" in a warehouse in the Mission District. What was interesting was that the instructor/facilitator who was working with our team thought the wrong person was the manager of our group. The actual manager was no leader, and she picked up on that immediately. It really brought home my understanding of the difference between leading and just being in charge.

Leadership is one of those things that to be really good at it, it has to be inborn. Which is not to say that someone who is not a natural leader cannot lead effectively, but s/he generally has to work long and hard at it, and also should have some other positive attributes to help compensate. (This is pretty rampant in the technology industry - developers with good ideas rarely are good natural leaders, but some can work at it and become effective.) Less so in politics, although Al Gore is a good example of someone who has a lot going for him but is not a natural leader.

I don't claim to be a stellar natural leader, but I do know how to lead. For me, it's a feeling almost like being on stage -- when you are actively in the process of leading, you need to be putting out that extra energy necessary to carry everyone along with you. Not to get too Biblical, but the phrase "Let your light so shine before men" is pretty apt. You don't need to always be right or always have the right answer, but you must have a clear picture in your head of where you are going and you must able to effectively communicate why you need to reach that goal.

You don't need to be a genius to be a leader, although a total moron would have difficulty grasping the issues well enough to lead. You need enough self-confidence to know when you have enough information to make a decision, so that you don't fall prey to information paralysis. You also need enough humility to realize (and admit) when you're not right or when someone else's idea is better than yours. For a really good leader this not even a conscious process, it's just a part of who they are.

All this is true whether you're leading a backyard book club or the United States of America.

Digby, as he so often does, hits the nail on the head with a long piece about Bush v Gore 2000 and the likelihood of something similar happening in 2004. I agree with him that if the election is at all close then a raft of lawsuits will follow.

In 2000, the concept of waking up the morning after election day and not knowing who was elected was new and in a way a little exciting. It was uncharted waters, and back then, we didn't know how much the fix was in. Call it naive, call it willful blindness, call it an inability to accept that the other guy is less honorable than you are -- all true. We went to a rumble without a knife, and the whole world is paying for it.

Like Atrios, I can't quite bring myself to this point, but I can't say Digby's totally wrong either:

Foolishly, Gore thought that being modest and fair still meant something. He was not prepared for a streetfight. And, looking back I realize that I wasn't either. Like a green youth I didn't believe they'd actually go that far. Even after the impeachment sideshow, an event that solidified my belief in the lethal, fascistic nature of the modern Republican party, I was not fully prepared for the no holds barred approach they would take in this situation.

It is what led me to the point at which I am able to say without any sense of restraint or caution that I would put NOTHING past them --- even a staged terrorist attack. This is because every time I think they have some limits, they prove me wrong. As the old saying goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice...won't get fooled again....

No, I do not believe they would stage a terrorist attack. But when it comes to internal domestic matters, especially ones pertaining to winning elections, yeah, there's not much they wouldn't do or try to do. We just have to find a way to keep them from doing it again. Hopefully while still holding on to what makes us better than them.

At one time I would have been spitting outrage and venom. Right now I'm mostly numb, but know I have to move, to say something, to get the word out there. This is too important.

The Republican leadership of Congress is attempting to legalize extraordinary rendition. "Extraordinary rendition" is the euphemism we use for sending terrorism suspects to countries that practice torture for interrogation. As one intelligence official described it in the Washington Post, "We don't kick the sh*t out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the sh*t out of them.”

[snip]

As it stands now, "extraordinary rendition" is a clear violation of international law--specifically, the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Degrading and Inhuman Treatment. U.S. law is less clear. We signed and ratified the Convention Against Torture, but we ratified it with some reservations. They might create a loophole that allows us to send a prisoner to Egypt or Syria or Jordan if we get "assurances" that they will not torture a prisoner--even if these assurances are false and we know they are false.

Last month Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Congressman, introduced a bill that would clearly outlaw extraordinary rendition. But Markey only has 22 cosponsors, and now the House leadership is trying to legalize torture outsourcing--and hide it in the bill implementing the 9/11 Commission Report.

I've previously blogged my outrage on America's use of torture (see this link and the June archives for more). I'm not going to repeat myself other than to say that this is wrong. This is not who we are nor how we do things. And we need to make sure Congress knows it.

Hat tip: Froomkin pointed the way.

It was bad enough that it was just a proposal, but now it's looking more likely that the US is going to go forward with the godawful plan of sending people to other countries to be tortured so we don't have to dirty our hands with it.

The Bush administration is supporting a provision in the House leadership's intelligence reform bill that would allow U.S. authorities to deport certain foreigners to countries where they are likely to be tortured or abused, an action prohibited by the international laws against torture the United States signed 20 years ago.

The provision, part of the massive bill introduced Friday by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), would apply to non-U.S. citizens who are suspected of having links to terrorist organizations but have not been tried on or convicted of any charges. Democrats tried to strike the provision in a daylong House Judiciary Committee meeting, but it survived on a party-line vote.

The provision, human rights advocates said, contradicts pledges President Bush made after the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal erupted this spring that the United States would stand behind the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Hastert spokesman John Feehery said the Justice Department "really wants and supports" the provision.

And don't bring up that "known terrorist clock is ticking" freshman philosophy class canard, please. This isn't about that. This is broad permission to ship off anyone we want -- provided s/he is not a US citizen -- to some other country for torture.

It's wrong. No two ways around it.

A vote for Bush says that you think torturing possibly innocent people is a good idea.

I'll be at a friend's house for the debate, so will not be liveblogging or offering immediate post-debate comment. There's plenty of bloggers who will be doing that with or without me, so no great loss. I will post some comments once I get home though.

I tried to take some notes during the debate but my friends have 3 kids under 5, so we had frequent distracions. Still, I saw enough.

Obviously Kerry 'won'. Bush stared out OK but as the evening wore on he floundered more and more, seemed to run out of new material, looked flustered, and generally did not seem on top of things anymore.

A few bits that jumped out at me:

Kerry -- "He outsourced that job too" -- referring to how the US did not catch Osama Bin Laden. Also -- "You can have my plan in four points, which I can tell you about here or you can go to johnkerry.com and read about it. Or you can have the president's plan, which is four words: 'More of the same.'"

Bush -- "What kind of message does it send to our troops to tell them 'wrong war, wrong time?'" He said it several times. He seemed to be saying it is better to lie to our troops than to tell them that Iraq is a mess.

I thought Jim Lehrer did a very good job moderating, and except for one lame softball on character issues, asked good questions. I hope the other moderators are as good.

Time to go read the spin.

Some of the better morning-after commentary:

Josh Marshall:

What occured to me somewhat while I was watching the first time and even more on the second go through was just how long it's been since President Bush had to face someone who disagrees with him or is criticizing.

Every president gets tucked away into a cocoon to some degree. But President Bush does notoriously few press conferences or serious interviews. His townhall meetings are screened so that only supporters show up. And, of course, he hasn't debated anyone since almost exactly four years ago.

Frankly, I think it showed. It irked him to have to stand there and be criticized and not be able to repeat his talking points without contradiction.

Ezra from Pandagon:

Fact is, 9/11 didn't change Bush, it just changed his rhetoric. And while the smirk now floated above terra-fightin' and tyrant-smashin', it was still the same smirk that had accompanied social security privatization and medicare reform. But while we all knew and understood that he had been a lightweight in the days of domestic policy -- at least, we tittered, he hadn't been an atrocious dullard like that Gore -- we began pretending that something had snapped in George W. Bush and he was now a somber leader prepared to face down a time of grave danger.

But tonight the curtain lifted and Bush was back onstage with a competitor, without a teleprompter, and facing a barrage of unfamiliar and even unfriendly topics. But the way George debates -- rigid adherence to message, down-home charisma, a quick grin and general geniality -- was sadly unsuitable for the occasion. Past confrontations have been reasonably light, occurring in times of relative prosperity and in opposition to barely-liked incumbents whom the public liked seeing taken down a few pegs. But tonight, George was supposed to be serious, to be somber, to show himself the sort of timeless leader appropriate for such a crucial stage in history. Instead, he was like a glitchy boombox machine-gunning the phrase "mixed messages". Where Kerry had calm presentation and logical progressions, George jumped from story to quote, personal attack to platitude ("I know how the world works"). Where he was supposed to run on a record, he instead ran on an ethic ("It's hard work"). Where he was supposed to act dignified, he was draped over his podium. Where he was supposed to be the country's commander, he was instead a mediocre candidate.

Matt Yglesias:

The main thing that lends debates -- as opposed to normal speeches -- some interest is that even when the candidates aren't allowed to directly address one another, they still set up their charges in such a way as to clearly imply that the other guy ought to be responding to his opponents' attacks. In that light, it's worth highlighting one charge Kerry made several times that Bush never responded to directly -- namely that the reason Osama bin Laden is at large threatening the United States rather than dead on the battlefield was the Bush administration's decision to "outsource" the battle of Tora Bora.

I've never heard any of Bush's allies offer a convincing defense of this decision, and it's a critique Kerry's been leveling on-and-off ever since the day it happened. Tonight, Bush didn't even try. A tacit admission, perhaps, that Kerry was right. I think that means Kerry ought to press the assault forward and start bringing this up more often. Force the president to either admit he was wrong and puncture his self-cultivated mystique of infallibility or else offer some kind of defense. I don't see what he could possibly have to say for himself.

Finally, I can't find the quote now, but this is one other observation I saw that I found particularly apt -- Bush's loopy assertion that the simple act of saying "This is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" (an observation the majority of Americans currently agree wtih, by the way) somehow rendered him unfit to be Commander In Chief. I can't begin to understand the weird brain alchemy by which that is seen to be legitimate criticism of a candidate.

Does he seriously think that unless you are always right, always positive, you can't be in charge? That actually might explain Bush's inability to admit to a mistake.

Anyway, kitten blogging to follow.

There's a website that offers a substantial reward to the person who asks George W Bush "How many times have you been arrested?"but that is not the question I most want to ask Bush. Mine's pretty simple:

"Are there any cases when it is acceptable for the President of the United States to deliberately lie to the American public?"

To be honest I think the VP debate was at best a tie.

Cheney was playing hardball, and unlike Bush, he is capable of speaking in complete sentances and sounding like he knows what he is talking about. He hit hard and often, and of course since he doesn't care much about truth he had the advantage there. His line about "I've never met you before tonight," although a lie, was a particularly nasty shot that might have legs.

I don't think Edwards did badly, but I was annoyed a bit by how some of his foreign policy lines were almost verbatim repeats of what Kerry said last week - couldn't he at least have rephrased it a bit so he wasn't so obviously repeating talking points? I think he did better in the second half of the debate; he seemed more relaxed (it is not surprisng that he would be more comfortable discussing domestic policy issues). And his complementing Cheney for how his family has handled having a gay daughter was masterful. Cheney had absolutely nothing to say after it. Very nice.

Both sides will spin it as a win for their guy. We'll see what the CW says tomorrow.

Guy goes to attend a conference on terrorism, gets arrested -- THIS is why we 'freed' Iraq?

Meanwhile, a former leading figure in the Iraqi National Congress party - the party led by Ahmad Chalabi - remained defiant after an Iraqi court indicted him Sunday for visiting the "enemy state" of Israel.

Mithal al-Alusi attended a conference there on terrorism last month and was subsequently expelled from the party.

I'm in a pretty foul mood already, reading this didn't help me any.

In other news, my DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11 arrived today. Maybe this weekend I'll watch it again.

Closer than the first one, but I call it for Kerry.

Bush did a better job this time in his presentation. He seemed more relaxed, didn't make squinty faces as much, and although he obviously got excited a few times he did not whine. He fumbled badly the question about whether he had made any mistakes, his response to the environmant question was a joke, and most important - he is having trouble running from his record. Minor snarky side note -- he called it "the Internets" rather than "the Internet". I wonder if he's ever even used the Internet?

Kerry smacked down the "flip flop" charge at two different times and handed Bush his butt on jobs, the environment, and of course the war. He made a point of remembering questioner's names, referring back to them later in the event - as compared to Bush, who I think didn't mention anyone's name at all. And I think his answer to the pro-life woman about goverment funding of abortion was spot on.

What the audience thought of them both I don't know. Bush got more laughs than Kerry, especially when he put his "aw shucks" personna on. If they really can't see through that facade after all this time, then we're in deep doo-doo on November 2nd. However, not to bash the audience too much, I think the questions were overall very good -- as good as the ones Lehrer asked at the first debate and definitely better than Gwen Ifil's.

Now to see what the pundits have to say.

Kos doesn't usually indulge in snarkiness (the Diaries do it for him most of the time) but he had a funny bit tonight:

We know you have a choice in Internets, so thank you for choosing this one. Come back and see us again soon, we appreciate your business.

And if I may offer a little advise -- stay away from those Canadian Internets (damn third-world hellhole). They aren't safe.

Interesting meme out there today: Bush's citing of Dred Scott was not some odd piece of prose, but rather code to his anti-abortion followers.

Orcinus has a long historical overview of what "Strict Constructionists" really means. Worth a read.

I try to avoid the tit-for-tat aspects of politics but this one is so indicative of the dreamland you have to be living in to believe the right-wing spin, and so personally offensive, I had to mention it:

Sinclair vice president Mark Hyman just said on CNN that Kerry and the Democrats are like "holocaust deniers" and that if the Sinclair stunt is an "in-kind donation to George Bush" then "every suicide bomb that goes off in Iraq is an in-kind donation to John Kerry."

Presumably this was just down from on-air within the last hour. So I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the quotes. But a quite look at this morning's Post shows that yesterday Hyman said "the networks are acting like Holocaust deniers" for not showing the POWs' story. So I think there's every reason to believe that the quotes are accurate.

Per a Kos diary and Josh Marshall.

Last night, a classmate noted to our Statistics teacher that there's a class on Election Night, and would he consider cancelling class. Unfortunately the teacher refused, so now I get to decide whether to cut class or be incommunicado from roughly 5PM to 11PM PST that night.

I think it's very much up in the air whether we'll know who wins on Election Night or not. Given the rumblings in Ohio, Florida, Nevada, and elsewhere, it may well be that the morning after Election Day we'll see a tidal wave of lawsuits and accusations, and will not know who won for weeks. Again.

On the other hand, the poll numbers are starting to shift in Kerry's favor. It could happen that a Kerry win will be of sufficent numbers to make it clear that despite any shenanigans, real or attempted, Kerry's victory will be secure. I well remember how happy and relieved I felt in 1992 when Clinton won. If something similar happens again I want to be there for it in real time.

Or God forbid, the reverse could happen. In which case I will have to drink myself into oblivion for a while and then start trying to figure out how to survive the next 4 years.

Either way, I think I want to be at home, or with friends, watching the events unfold.

Sorry, Professor.

Wasn't really inspired to blog much about the last debate.

One comment though -- I think the most telling moment of the debate was when Bush was asked about what he would say to a person whose job had been sent overseas. His response? To talk about "No Child Left Behind". Again. As if the testing of grade school children has any bearing at all on the predicament an adult who is out of work today.

As if he eventually realized that the quality of public school education was not really appropriate as an answer, he belatedly mentionted that there is trade adjustment assistance money available to help people whose jobs have gone away retrain for new jobs.

Interesting, I though, I'll have to check into that. One quick Google later, I find that even the Heritage Foundation -- hardly a bastion of liberalism -- calls the TAA program inadequate and flawed.

Typical.

I really try to avoid the "tinfoil hat" stuff out there in Internet-land. But after 3 debates' worth of snapshots of the weird wrinkle on Bush's back, I really have to ask, what IS that thing?

I suspect it's a flak vest of some sort and the Secret Service won't let anyone confirm it ... but who knows?

Bush Today:

I made it very plain. We will not have an all-volunteer army.

The New York Times has a long, interesting analysis of President Bush today. Not that it's going to change anyone's minds, but I think it's pretty well-done.

The Decembrist more or less says what I was going to say, except that I felt from very early on this was all about religion and belief. I think being on the outside of the religious mainstream in the US helps sharpen your instincts on this point, but for all I know the Decembrist is Jewish, so maybe not.

I've felt for a while that September 11th took some otherwise normal people and turned them into rabid "get the Arabs" Bush supporters, but not many people have looked at what it did to Bush himself. This article doesn't make the point directly, but I think that change that Suskind points to, that of going from "a self-help Methodist" to "an American Calvinist" was very much a reaction to 9/11.

And then there's the people around Bush. This section pretty much sums it up:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Religious fervor, total arrogance, and dead-wrong political instincts. It would be hard to find a worse trifecta for the people running this country.

I just hope we start to find our way back to normalcy on Election Day.

Good News: The US Supreme Court told Tom Delay today that his redistricting scheme in Texas need to be reconsidered.

Bad News: By not summarily affirming the lower court's ruling and issuing their ruling two weeks before an election, chaos ensues.

The man who should have been President, Al Gore, gave a good speech recently about the problems with the Bush crew. Given the recent Suskind article this is worth a read.

There are many people in both political parties who worry that there is something deeply troubling about President Bush's relationship to reason, about his disdain for facts, his incuriosity about new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he wrestles with on behalf of the country.

One group mistakenly maligns the president as not being smart enough to have a normal active curiosity about separating fact from myth. A second group seems to be convinced that his personal religious conversion experience was so profound that he relies on religious faith in place of logical analysis. But I disagree with both of those groups and reject both of those cartoon images. I know President Bush is plenty smart, and while I have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine, and it's an important motivation for many things that he does in life, as it is for me, and for most of you, I'm convinced that most of the president's frequent departures from fact based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible. And it is crucially important to be precise in describing exactly what it is he believes in so strongly, and then insulates from any logical challenge or even debate. It is ideology, and not his religious faith that is the source of this troubling inflexibility.

Most of the problems President Bush has caused for this country stemmed not from his belief in God but his belief in the infallibility of the right-wing Republican ideology that exalts the interest of the wealthy, and of large corporations over and above the interests of the American people. It is love of power for its own sake that is the original sin of this presidency.

Good stuff.

You know things are seriously messed up when even Pat Robertson is telling President Bush "I told you so" about Iraq:

"I warned him about this war. I had deep misgivings about this war, deep misgivings. And I was trying to say, 'Mr. President, you had better prepare the American people for casualties.' "

Robertson said the president then told him, "Oh, no, we're not going to have any casualties."

[snip]

"I mean, the Lord told me it was going to be A, a disaster, and B, messy," Robertson said. "I warned him about casualties."

But I thought God talked to Bush too? I guess he got the message garbled.

UPDATE: WH spokesman Scott McClellan called Robertson a liar. Heh.

I ran across a well-written piece over at a blog I would not normally visit today. It's nice to see that at least a few people on the other side of the blogosphere grok why many Jews do not feel comfortable voting Republican.

In brief:

The first is that Jews tend to be very intimidated by evangelical Christians. Jews as a whole don't really try to convert people and evangelicals are all about evangelizing and converting. Big culture clash there.

[snip]

The second is that Jews are a minority culture. When Christians start talking about faith-based initiatives, Jews realize that anything they do is going to be overwhelmed by the vastly Christian majority.

Indeed. These are not the only reasons, of course, but they are very pertinent ones. (Yglesias offers a few more).

It would be nice if more folks in Red-State Blogville "got it". Volokh twice suggests that Jews have some racial or genetic predisposition to be liberals, a suggestion I find offensive and even potentially frightening. But expecting rationality from far-right wingnuts like him is probably too much to ask.

This is so good that I am also going to email it out to all my friends and family. How to make sure your vote counts:

1. If you are newly registered or if you have moved recently, call ahead of Nov. 2 and make sure that you are on the list of registered voters and make sure that you know where you are to vote.

2. Get a sample ballot. Call your county or state election official to request it. Or, check your state's election website to print one out - especially if your ballot is going to be complex (many referenda) or if you will be using a new voting technology/machine. Study the sample ballot beforehand. Complete the sample ballot with your choices - slowly, quietly and carefully in the privacy of your home or office.

3. Take your sample ballot with you to the polling place. You may bring it with you. This will help you assure that you are voting for whom/what you think you want to vote.

4. Do not vote early morning or evening hours at your polling place. Avoid long lines and crowds -- especially in battleground states. Vote mid-day: 10 AM - 4 PM.

5. Know your rights. Every state is required to provide a list of voter's rights on the sample ballot and at the polling place. If you need help with your voting machine or ballot at your polling place, ask for it You must be given help if you request it. If you have a paper ballot and you make a mistake, call for help immediately from a poll official. You have the right to receive another ballot and to destroy the ballot with the mistake.

6. If your name is not found on the registered voters list at your poll on Election Day or if anything else comes up that prevents you from being able to step into the voting booth, demand a Provisional Ballot. Demand it! You have this right! Your Provisional Ballot may be counted after your registration problem/voter challenge has been cleared up.

7. Take the time to check your ballot before completing your vote. Give a second reading to your ballot before you cast the ballot. If you spot a mistake, call for a poll official.

8. Carry this telephone number with you to the polls: (866) OUR-VOTE [(866) 687-8683]. If you have any problems at the polling place, call the Election Protection hotline at (866) 687-8683. Election Protection is a nationwide program to safeguard your right to cast a ballot on Election Day.

9. Mail or deliver your ballot personally. If you are voting by mail or using an absentee ballot, mail it yourself or hand it in yourself. Don't, under any circumstances, give it to someone else.

10. Bring valid photo ID with you.

UPDATE: added #10, which was suggested by a respondant after I e-mailed this list out to all and sundry.

This was probably not the kind of October Surprise the Bushies wanted to see.

Call it poor planning, call it arrogance, call it stupidity -- all or the above of none of the above. The long and the short of it is, there was a particularly large cache of very high-end explosives in Iraq that the US government left unguarded after the invasion. 370+ TONS of explosives have vanished.

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, produce missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no-man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished after the American invasion last year.

How much damage can that much explosive do?

The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the material of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa

There's much more. Go read it.

Hope it was good for Clinton's too.

I just wish I could have been there.

UPDATE: Atrios was there, lucky guy. So was Richard Cranium. This is one of those days I wish I still lived on the east coast.

I've shied away from making election predictions mostly out of superstition, and party out of a fear of looking like an idiot if I guess wrong. But I am cautiously optimistic about next Tuesday.

That said, here goes:

You know, I really wasn't sure how to vote on California's Proposition 72, but a NY Times article today really helped clarify my thinking on the process.

Here's a key point:

[Wal-Mart] says it spent about $1.3 billion of its $256 billion in revenue last year on employee health care to insure about 537,000 people, or about 45 percent of its work force. Wal-Mart says that 23 percent of its employees are not eligible for coverage, but that it covers 58 percent of those who are.

That compares with an insured rate of 96 percent of eligible full-time or part-time employees of Costco Wholesale, the discount retailer that is Wal-Mart's closest competitor nationwide. Costco employees - most of whom are not represented by a union - become eligible for health insurance after three months working full time, or six months part time.

I have my concerns about the possible negative imact on employers of forcing them to either offer health insurance tor pay into a state pool. The job market out here is still pretty tight and I would hate to see it get tighter. But if Costco can do it and still be profitable, then Wal-Mart's claims are obviously wrong. My "screw you, Wal-Mart" drive starts to kick in.

I'm going from being on the fence to voting "Yes" on 72.

Side note - I should get off my butt and shop at Costco more.

Woke up with Les Miserables - One Day More running through my head. I'm nervous but cautiously hopeful. I refuse to let the various reports of vote disruption and tinfoil hattery to get to me. I can't wait until tomorrow.

Digby has a good summation of where things stand - worth a read.

A point espeically worth noting:

I also heard Tucker Carlson on the Chris Matthews week-end show say that he thought Kerry would win because people don't stand in line for hours in the Florida sun to vote because they like a politician. People are willing to stand in line for hours because they are angry.

I read yesterday that an estimated 30% of the Florida vote has been cast in early voting. If true, it only goes to support Digby's point -- people are angry as hell about what was done to us in 2000 and we are not going to let it happen a second time.

I finally got Scott to watch the DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. I found it extremely depressing; in fact, I cried more waching it this time than I did when I first saw it. Scott, on the other hand, got angry.

Here's hoping we're both a lot happier 48 hours from now.

UPDATE: Found the link for the 30% info above. Here's the full newsbyte:

In Florida, 30% of registered voters said they already had cast their ballots, using early voting sites and absentee ballots. They supported Kerry 51%-43%.

Source: USA Today. Hardy a left-wing rag.

First thing this AM, coffee and a TiVo of the Kerry rally in OH that I missed last night. Then out to vote. The SF ballot is six pages long. Something really needs to be done about the proliferation of propositions out here -- isn't this sort of thing what we have a legislature for?

And of course Kerry-Edwards was the first thing I marked on the ballot.

We're going to watch the returns with some friends in Palo Alto. I have some concerns about the wisdom of driving 50 minutes to watch them, but I'm cautiously hopeful and feeling like company.

Apparently there are voter challengers going on in polling places across the country and I am a little concerned about it, but so far things seem to be under control.

The Swing State Project has a page with direct links to various swing states' official result websites. A useful link to have.

As much as it pains me to say it, it looks like Karl Rove was right with the rumored 4,000,000 right wing voters who sat on their hands last time, because as of this writing Bush has turned around a a 500,000 popular vote loss in 2000 to a 3,000,000 popular vote win in 2004.

How it happened despite all the dissatisfaction with the war, the economy, etc, I really don't know. I'm sure the soul searching will being in earnest once the hangovers wear off. Perosnally, I'm too depressed to drink.

All I know is, it's going to be a long 4 years.

So another four years of Smirky McChimp. This time there weren't many reports of voter disenfranchisement. And unless it's discovered that Diebold went and converted hundreds of thousands of votes from Democrat to Republican in the battleground states, then Bush had a leading margin and actually did win.

Rachel tells me that Karl Rove's plan of getting the evangelical Christians out to vote this time was what turned the trick, by putting a ban on gay marriages on the ballot in all of the major battleground states. "Oh, hey, while I'm here to vote against those sinners from being happy, I might as well vote for W." Why is it that people who vote for things like bans on gay marriage are not happy unless they're making everyone else miserable? Banning gay marriage isn't going to make them stop having gay sex, morons. When are these puritanical zealots going to let people live their own lives? Probably never.

Based on voter turnout, and the difference of the popular vote in the millions, I have come to the conclusion that the majority of Americans are fucking morons. Fat, lazy, stupid and willfully ignorant. What the hell happened to the concerned youth voter turnout? You kids really screwed up this time. I hope you like getting drafted for a war you don’t believe in, you apathetic little shits. And don’t even get me started on the fucked up mess called Gen-X, who apparently stayed away in droves this time around. Makes me sick to even be part of the same generation as you.

All you have to do is look at the voting map. Is it any wonder that with the exceptions of Texas and Florida (and they have always been anomalies) the most populous states vote Democrat? What is it about living in densely populated areas that make people choose Democrat over Republican? Better education, access to arts and sciences, more cosmopolitan interaction with people from outside their own closed, sheltered communities. It’s that closed mindset and introverted aspect of America’s heartland that breeds ignorance of the wide world outside their own borders. It’s why a guy from a rich New England town pretending to be a shitkicker good ole boy from Texas can become President.

But you know what? Bush isn’t the real problem. It’s the people with him that are the really dangerous ones. Because Bush on his own gets flustered and unintelligible when he’s not being prompted and coached. No, the real problem lies with people like Cheney, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld. Cheney is the modern day soulless war profiteer. Rumsfeld is the holdover from the old Republican guard who used to be friends with the people that are now supposed to be our enemies. He’s more dangerous than someone with evil intent – he’s completely incompetent. And Ashcroft is a true fascist. He hates the constitution and your civil rights. Just watch what happens now that the GOP took more seats in the house and senate. Watch Patriot Act II get pushed through, and then many more people can find out firsthand what it was like for the Jews in Europe being pushed onto cattle cars. And then there’s the ringleader – Karl Rove, behind the scenes, pulling all the strings. There’s only one positive thing I can say about Rove, which is that he is brilliant at what he does. Unfortunately, the things he does are pure evil.

Now I’m going to invoke Godwin’s law, and make some comparisons:

Karl Rove – Joseph Goebbels
Donald Rumsfeld – Hermann Goering
John Ashcroft – Heinrich Himmler

Dick Cheney could be squeezed into Hermann Goering, since Goering spent the entire war raping Europe of its priceless artwork and treasures. Bush doesn’t resemble anyone in the Nazi high command, because quite frankly he’s too inept to have been any of them, and Hitler was obviously more than a figurehead.

If you think I’m nuts making these comparisons, I suggest doing some research first. This current administration is doing everything in its power – along with a Republican majority in the house, senate and supreme court – to remove your rights and freedoms. And you know what? The majority of Americans are actually buying it, thinking it’s necessary to make us safer. Well guess what? You’re not safer. With the agenda of this administration, more and more people around the world with terrorist leanings now want us all dead. And by continuing down this path, they will keep trying to achieve that goal.

One of the most brilliant statesmen this country has ever seen had this to say about safety:

“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” - Benjamin Franklin

Congratulations, America. You got what you wanted. Now I’m probably going to get a visit from the gestapo just for airing my opinions. I hope you idiots are happy.

I'd like to thank Orcinus for his excellent series of articles on fascism in the current administration. I used to think that this sort of thing couldn't happen again after Huey Long in Louisiana in the 1930s, and especially after WWII. Apparently I was wrong.

The news from abroad is a little scary today. Christopher Allbritton reports:

Before, there was a distinction drawn between the American government and the American people. A few nights ago, one cabbie told me that he thinks American people are very nice, but the American government is “very bad.” Now, as one of my friends said, “The American people are the problem.”

This will translate into increased hostility against Americans, especially in the Middle East. (I'm in Beirut at the moment.) The American government is seen as hopelessly biased against Arabs and Palestinians, but now the American people are culpable as well.

And over a a blog I just came across, chez Nadezhda, these nervewracking observations:

Osama Bin Laden has garnered an enormous propaganda coup in the reelection of George Bush as president of the United States.

Why, you ask?

Because now he will make the argument that it is Islamically permissible to kill American civilians because, in his view, they are morally culpable for the actions of their government abroad. They have ratified George Bush and his policy, in Bin Laden's view, of killing Muslims and invading their lands.

It's disheartening.

I also got a rant from a die-hard Democrat pal who lives in DC.

What the hell, they have a governing majority, let's go. Bring it on. I want to see a 19% flat tax. My wife and I make good salaries and own a pile of high-value real estate. Screw the poor. My retirement's secure, let's eliminate Social Security. I've got a generous health plan from my employer, let's throw everyone who's not working either into the street or into the poor-clinics. I want to see Scalia as Chief Justice of a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe and I want a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. I want laws barring gay marriage, and if John "Der Fuhrer" Ashcroft wants to reinstate anti-sodomy laws and start wiretapping and arresting people in their bedrooms, Amen I say. Round up everyone who doesn't look like a "true American". I'm white, male and married, what do I care, I've got nothing to lose.

Bring It The **** On. I want to see the most intolerant, reactionary, knuckle-scraping, neanderthal social and economic policy these gun-totin', bible-thumpin' bigots can devise.

Cause when we do, I'm gonna sit back in my chair with a glass of wine and a wheel of brie and enjoy the revolution that will ensue.

"It has to get worse before it can get better" is a meme I've heard a few times since the election and I think it's got some validity. I'm just really scared how bad it has to get and how many people will die before it does get better.

Clever site I ran across today, and a good way to work out those lingering bad feelings from Tuesday:

Sorry Everybody

I sent a picture of the kitties in, in lieu of normal Friday cat blogging.

The Rude Pundit says it well about our new AG, Alberto Gonzales:

We get to be happy that the guy who feared marble breasts is gone and that the guy who thinks torture's okay is in as Attorney General.

Click through for the rest, but if you're reading this from work, remember that he's not called the Rude Pundit for nothing.

Balkinization give more in-depth reasons why this is not a good thing:

he has done something that is, in my mind, inexcusable. He commissioned and put his name on a series of despicable legal memos that justified torture and prisoner abuse and that tried to avoid America's obligations under international law

To be fair, though, the Washington Post points out some potential positives about his track record. However, given his longtime history as a loyal friend of President Bush, I seriously doubt we'll see any deviation from the administration party line on Gonzales' watch.

From Newsday:

The White House has ordered the new CIA director, Porter Goss, to purge the agency of officers believed to have been disloyal to President George W. Bush or of leaking damaging information to the media about the conduct of the Iraq war and the hunt for Osama bin Laden, according to knowledgeable sources.

"The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House," said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. "Goss was given instructions ... to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president's agenda."

4 more cabinet members resigned today, Colin Powell among them.

I used to respect the man; perhaps I will again some day. But I thought he had more integrity than to be a party to the tissue of lies that Iraq has turned out to be.

The Bull Moose gets an award for "most unintentionally funny" nomination for his successor. Lieberman? Not in a thousand years.

DH in MI, one of the Kos bloggers, has an interesting piece on another of the many disconnects between Republicans, Democrats, and the public. Worth a read.

In short, a lot of Democrats are great at creating good policies, but too few of them are good at creating appealing atmospheres. The former is essential to being a good legislator or executive, but you need to latter to get elected.

And yet again, Digby goes and posts something that makes me wonder why I even bother blogging. This time it is a long, excellent look at the rural/urban psychosocial divide in America. He's covering ground another of my favorite bloggers, Orcinus, covers, and it also ties in with what I taked about in my last post.

Here's a sample:

We cannot make a populist case to rural America as long as rural America continues to believe, as it has for centuries, that the government only takes their money and gives it to people they don't like. This belief is why people who should naturally support our programs instead vote for tax cuts. In the past, populists often shrewdly coupled their argument with nativist causes and were able to scapegoat either immigrants or blacks as part of their argument, thus partially nullifying this cultural resistence. Even FDR agreed to set aside the issue of civil rights for the duration. Needless to say, we aren't going to go down that path.

So, Democrats are left with a difficult problem of how to deal with a region that is in economic distress but whose culture traditionally believes that government only helps people unlike themselves.

[snip]

Yes, if people were rational about these things you could sit down and have a nice discussion with spreadsheets and diagrams showing that the rural red states benefit far more from federal redistributon of wealth than the metropolitan blue states. You could explain that many of the social changes that have happened have benefitted them in their own lives while acknowledging that there has been a cost and that changes of this magnitude can be frightening and destabilizing. You could show that the massive New Deal programs and the post war expansion benefitted primarily the middle class, not the poor. You could rally the people to the side of their own class instead of the corporations who benefit from the policies currently in place.

But, as we've seen, people are not rational.

Go read the rest. If Digby's not in your bookmark list yet, he should be.

Having a lovely time in cool, rainy NY. This triggered my pissed-off meter though:

Vietnam Vet, 53, Called for Duty in Iraq

A 53-year-old Vietnam veteran from western Pennsylvania has been called up for active service with the U.S. military in the Iraq war, The Tribune Review of Greensburg, Pennsylvania reported on Wednesday.

Paul Dunlap, a sergeant in the Army National Guard, will join an armored division next month as a telecommunications specialist in Kuwait, and expects to be there for at least a year.

They must be getting damn close to the bottom of the barrel. This guy has not been in combat since serving as a 19-year-old Marine in Vietnam. WTF is the DOD doing him calling him to go to Iraq?

I read things like this and it reminds me that one of the many things I am thankful for this Thnksgiving is that our friend the ex-Marine has not gotten a similar call. Yet. I fear that day.

I have not done much political blogging since the election. That's partly due to burnout and partly because the news in 'political' quarters these days seems so weird I don't quite know whether to slap on a tinfoil hat, pack my bags for Canada, or laugh my butt off. Here's a sample of what I mean:

Bush '04: it's not just about pursuing an agenda that Americans don't think you have a mandate for anymore. It's about punishing the people you *know* didn't support the mandate.

Some conservative activists are urging the Bush administration to scrap the federal deduction for state and local taxes as part of a broader plan to revamp the nation's tax system.

[...]

A proposal to eliminate the deduction for local and state taxes on federal tax returns would affect blue states more than it would red states. In 2002, two-thirds of the $184 billion claimed under the deduction was in states carried by Sen. John F. Kerry. About a third of the total was in just two states, New York and California.

We've stepped past the actual pursuit of a conservative (or whatever the hell they think they are today) agenda towards an agenda that's just punitive towards "liberals". And by "liberals", we mean people who live in blue states, regardless of their income. Think of all those poor Orange County conservatives, those upstate New York Republicans...hell, think of us poor bastards in Ohio - the lynchpin to Bush's reelection, and we still get reamed by his tax plans.

I definitely agree that eliminating the deductability of all state and local taxes is a bad idea. But is it really a deliberate attack at blue states and/or liberals? Have things become that politicized?

I tend to doubt it. I suspect that this is ideology driven (if you can call BushCo's belief in "screw the 95% for the benefit of the rich" an ideology) more than some kind of attack on the liberals. But who knows? These days I don't know what to believe.

So as I said, I'm not posting as much about politics until I can get a better sense of what the hell is going on.

Kevin Drum has been on a roll lately with a two-part look at various long-term scenarios for Social Security privitization. Today's post has some numbers which seem to show that SS is not in fact anywhere near broken. I'm not very well-informed on the details but it does look quite positive.

For what it's worth, I am against the current privatization push for Social Security. I voiced my concerns on the issue a few weeks ago.

The bigger question that needs to be asked, and this is where the Democrats are, as ususal, not doing their job framing a coherent opposition, is, Why do the Republicans hate Social Security?

Seen in the NY Times today:

State Representative Cynthia Davis of Missouri prefiled two bills for the next session of the Legislature that she said "reflect what people want." One ... would require publishers that sell biology textbooks to Missouri to include at least one chapter with alternative theories to evolution.

"These are common-sense, grass-roots ideas from the people I represent, and I'd be very surprised if a majority of legislators didn't feel they were the right solutions to these problems," Ms. Davis said.

"It's like when the hijackers took over those four planes on Sept. 11 and took people to a place where they didn't want to go," she added. "I think a lot of people feel that liberals have taken our country somewhere we don't want to go. I think a lot more people realize this is our country and we're going to take it back."

So ... people who promote evolution are terrorists? Teaching science is a place that people don't want to go?

QUESTION: Mr. President, on that point, there is already a lot of opposition to the idea of personal accounts, some of it fairly entrenched among the Democrats. I wonder what your strategy is to try to convince them to your view.

And specifically, they say that personal accounts would destroy Social Security. You argue they would help save the system. Can you explain how?

BUSH: If Saddam Hussein refuses to disarm, we will form a coalition of the willing and we will disarm Saddam Hussein. Next question?

Speaking of taking risks in pursuit of a better career -- all I can say is, bravo, Ezra. You hit the nail smack-dab on the head.

The modern job market has an overwhelming amount of risk in it. The government's job, then, should be to eliminate what risk it can so Americans are free to make occupational decisions unfettered by fears about health care or retirement benefits. That's why we need rock-solid Social Security protected from the fluctuations of the market. That's why we need government-guaranteed health care that can follow you from job to job. By reducing the risk in job switching, American workers are given increased occupational freedom, which means a higher chance of finding fulfilling, worthwhile, enjoyable and important work. It enables the free market to work better because we're removing the perverting, risk-increasing influence exerted by job-specific benefits. And Democrats are handed a coherent economic philosophy that has something to say about the modern workplace and renders our social programs natural extensions of that outlook.

Another move by BushCo that is just so wrong it's not even funny....

The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for those it was unwilling to set free or turn over to U.S. or foreign courts, the Washington Post said in a report that cited intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials.

Some detentions could potentially last a lifetime, the newspaper said.

OK, so there's no real evidence the people in question have done something bad, or even that they were planning on doing something bad. There's nothing that could be used in court to actually put them on trial for any actions they might have taken. But still, we should lock them up in a camp for the rest of their lives because somebody at the CIA thinks they MIGHT be a danger?

So, so wrong.

If we can't PROVE in a court of law, or even at a tribunal of some sort, they're a threat, we should not be holding them at all.

The WaPo has some actual numbers as to projected Social Security cuts. If you're under 35, better start planning now for alternate methods of funding your retirement; you can pretty much kiss being able to live on Social Security goodbye.

One of the reasons why I'm blogging less about politics these days is that I feel an overwhelming sense of my own uselessness. Nothing I say is going to make BushCo actually have to pay the price for the various outrages they've pereptrated.

Take the torture issue, for example. It will be no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, but the NY Times is runing an article today showing that, in fact, Abu Ghirab was not an isolated case of a few rogue soliders, but rather part of a broad pattern of abusive behavior that began at Guantanamo Bay in 2002 and spread from there. The FBI knew what was going on, and at least some cases was none to happy about it. But they were unable to have an impact on the process.

When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last spring, officials characterized the abuse as the aberrant acts of a small group of low-ranking reservists, limited to a few weeks in late 2003. But thousands of pages in military reports and documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to the American Civil Liberties Union in the past few months have demonstrated that the abuse involved multiple service branches in Afghanistan, Iraq and Cuba, beginning in 2002 and continuing after Congress and the military had begun investigating Abu Ghraib.

For example:

In late 2002, more than a year before a whistle-blower slipped military investigators the graphic photographs that would set off the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, an F.B.I. agent at the American detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, sent a colleague an e-mail message complaining about the military's "coercive tactics" with detainees, documents released yesterday show.

"You won't believe it!" the agent wrote.

Two years later, the frustration among F.B.I. agents had grown. Another agent sent a colleague an e-mail message saying he had seen reports that a general from Guantánamo had gone to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmo-ize" it. "If this refers to intell gathering as I suspect," he wrote, according to the documents, "it suggests he has continued to support interrogation strategies we not only advised against, but questioned in terms of effectiveness."

Read the rest of the article. It's an ugly, ugly story, but I am completely sure that the only people who will ever pay a price for this gross and unethical abuse of power will be low-ranking soliders and perhaps one or two mid-level officers. The people who formulated and approved this policy will never have to do anything worse that perhaps make a statement to the prress that any abuses were not intended and are regretted.

Of course, we ALL pay a price when terrible things are commited in the name of America. But BushCo doesn't seem to care about that.

So as I said, it's been harder for me to feel like blogging about politics. Why should I bother? Nothing I can say or do is going to change things. The best I can do is try to add one more small voice of outrage to the chorus and hope that somehow it's going to help.

Well, this is a nasty piece of work that Delegate John A. Cosgrove (R) of Chesapeake is trying to enact into law over in the Virginia legislature.

When a fetal death occurs without medical attendance, it shall be the woman's responsibility to report the death to the law-enforcement agency in the jurisdiction of which the delivery occurs within 12 hours after the delivery. A violation of this section shall be punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor.

As Democracy for Virginia graphically points out, this means if you live in Virginia and suffer a miscarriage, you're a criminal if you don't call the police to report that fact within the first 12 hours afterwards.

Adding insult to injury, as D4V puts it,

Suffering a miscarriage is no crime, but Delegate Cosgrove wants to make it a crime for a woman to fail to violate her own privacy in the first 12 hours after a miscarriage, so let’s look at his proposed penalty.

Cosgrove's bill says, "A violation of this section shall be punishable as a Class 1 misdemeanor."

Let's see. What other crimes are punishable as Class 1 misdemeanors in Virginia? A cursory Google search reveals just a few...
- A person 18 years of age or older engaging in consensual intercourse with a child 15 or older not his spouse, child or grandchild (more commonly known as "statutory rape")
- burning or destroying a building or structure if the property therein is valued at less than $200 (arson)
- a bomb threat made by someone younger than 15
- carrying a concealed weapon while under the influence of drugs or alcohol
- possession or distribution of fraudulent drivers’ licenses or official identification
- stalking
- threatening any public school employee while on a school bus, on school property, or at a school-sponsored activity
- purchasing or providing alcohol to minors

So, Delegate Cosgrove is basically saying that failing to violate your own privacy within 12 hours of a miscarriage is the criminal equivalent of statutory rape, arson, stalking, and other serious crimes.

The authorized punishments for convictions for a Class 1 misdemeanor in Virginia are "confinement in jail for not more than 12 months and a fine of not more than $2500, either or both."

If a state thinks it would be useful to have some sort of collection mechanism to gather information about miscarriages and abortions rates, I don't object to that basic concept. But this isn't the way to do it. It's a sledgehammer of a law, amazingly insensitive and far too intrusive. That 12 hour reporting window is ridiculous, and the amount of data they're asking for (again, see D4V's rundown for details) is too much. And the punishment does not even remotely fit the 'crime'.

In today's Republican America, though, it's just par for the course.

UPDATE: The bill was later withdrawn. Score one for the good fight.

More fodder for the tinfoil hat brigade -- but even so this is almost certainly unconstitutional and ought to be overturned if signed into law:

Usually, 218 lawmakers - a majority of the 435 members of Congress - are required to conduct House business, such as passing laws or declaring war. But under the new rule, a majority of living congressmen no longer will be needed to do business under "catastrophic circumstances.'' Instead, a majority of the congressmen able to show up at the House would be enough to conduct business, conceivably a dozen lawmakers or less. The House speaker would announce the number after a report by the House Sergeant at Arms. Any lawmaker unable to make it to the chamber would effectively not be counted as a congressman. The circumstances include "natural disaster, attack, contagion or similar calamity rendering Representatives incapable of attending the proceedings of the House.'' The House could be run by a small number of lawmakers for months, because House vacancies must be filled by special elections. Governors can make temporary appointments to the Senate. Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.), one of few lawmakers active on the issue, argued the rule change contradicts the U.S. Constitution, which states that "a majority of each (House) shall constitute a quorum to do business".

It's official - there are no WMDs in Iraq and the people sent to find them have come home.

Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring.

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.

But instead of saying, "we were wrong, there were no WMDs", you'll never hear a word of regret coming forth from BushCo.

So what's the answer? What should a responsible press do when faced with a president who baldly lies over and over about stuff like this [Social Security] in a blatant attempt to scare the hell out of people? Somebody needs to figure it out, because people like George Bush have no incentive to stop lying if the press lets them get away with it.

Edit - forgot to source this: Kevin Drum.

Who said this?

"For too long, too many people dependent on Social Security have been cruelly frightened by individuals seeking political gain through demagoguery and outright falsehood, and this must stop. The future of Social Security is much too important to be used as a political football."

If you guessed President Ronald Reagan, you'd be right.

The Gipper was right about that one.

The Rude Pundit has a really good take on the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. It's worth a read (unless you're at work and your employer has a profanity filter in place). Here's a snippet:

Democrats oughta take a look at King beyond his having had a dream and his having been to the mountaintop and his having been assassinated. Because King knew - he f---ing knew - that one thing that made him a leader of the disenfranchised is that he spoke their language. Even as those around him believed (and some still believe) that King made a mistake in his expansion of his movement, King knew that no one is truly free until we all are free. He had to bring whites into the movement on a broad basis or the fight was never going to end. He had to undercut the trump card of the powerful in their ability to divide the underclasses, and that meant owning the rhetorical God to the point that whenever God is mentioned, the automatic association is with the civil rights, economic justice, and anti-war movements (think of how successful the right is in the use of the word "Christian").

Supposedly it's the "hook 'em, horns" of the Texas Longhorns, but who knows for sure. It's definitely not a very Presidential thing to do.

Markos and the gang over at Daily Kos are taking a stand on Alberto Gonzales' nomination for the post of Attorney General. In light of my post earlier today about making a difference, sign me up, too.

Unprecedented times call for unprecedented actions. In this case, we, the undersigned bloggers, have decided to speak as one and collectively author a document of opposition. We oppose the nomination of Alberto Gonzales to the position of Attorney General of the United States, and we urge every United States Senator to vote against him.

As the prime legal architect for the policy of torture adopted by the Bush Administration, Gonzales's advice led directly to the abandonment of longstanding federal laws, the Geneva Convention, and the United States Constitution itself. Our country, in following Gonzales's legal opinions, has forsaken its commitment to human rights and the rule of law and shamed itself before the world with our conduct at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. The United States, a nation founded on respect for law and human rights, should not have as its Attorney General the architect of the law's undoing.

In January 2002, Gonzales advised the President that the United States Constitution does not apply to his actions as Commander in Chief, and thus the President could declare the Geneva Conventions inoperative. Gonzales's endorsement of the August 2002 Bybee/Yoo Memorandum approved a definition of torture so vague and evasive as to declare it nonexistent. Most shockingly, he has embraced the unacceptable view that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution, laws duly enacted by Congress and International treaties duly ratified by the United States. He has called the Geneva Conventions "quaint."

Legal opinions at the highest level have grave consequences. What were the consequences of Gonzales's actions? The policies for which Gonzales provided a cover of legality - views which he expressly reasserted in his Senate confirmation hearings - inexorably led to abuses that have undermined military discipline and the moral authority our nation once carried. His actions led directly to documented violations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and widespread abusive conduct in locales around the world.

Michael Posner of Human Rights First observed: "After the horrific images from Abu Ghraib became public last year, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the world should 'judge us by our actions [and] watch how a democracy deals with the wrongdoing and with scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes.'" We agree. It is because of this that we believe the only proper course of action is for the Senate to reject Alberto Gonzales's nomination for Attorney General. As Posner notes, "[t]he world is indeed watching." Will the Senate condone torture? Will the Senate condone the rejection of the rule of law?

With this nomination, we have arrived at a crossroads as a nation. Now is the time for all citizens of conscience to stand up and take responsibility for what the world saw, and, truly, much that we have not seen, at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. We oppose the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States, and we urge the Senate to reject him.

Signed,

Fiat Lux

Today's must-read link is Ezra Klein on the politics of branding.

Although Democrats have often been called the party of identity politics (in the sense that a significant part of Democratic party politics has been built around a coalition of 'identity blocs' such as women, gays, Latinos, etc), Ezra contends that actually it's the Republicans who have done a much more complete and successful job of it:

Over the past 30 years, Republicans have successfully merged identity with politics, the importance of which is almost impossible to overstate. When your party affiliation becomes enmeshed with your sense of self, attacks on your candidate become attacks on your person, and thus ends any hope of being convinced out of your position. No longer are you dealing with policy or evaluating arguments, now your personal defenses are up, your worth is being called into question, and the rightness of your original position is transcendentally important.

And he's got a really good point. One big problem with identity politics as practiced by Democrats has been that it has not yet managed to promote a sense of overall party unity.

In some ways the Republicans have had it easier. Their membership is not very diverse, so it's easier for them to create that feeling of commonality that has allowed so many republicans to feel their political identity is a part of their core self. Democrats have not done a very good job of convincing people that, say, a working-class Latino union member and a tenured gay university professor have a true common cause despite all the surface differences. It's certainly not an easy job, but it's more and more obvious that it is a vital one.

I had Accounting class last night, which gave me the perfect excuse to ignore the President's SOTU speech. Not that I would have watched it anyway.

Best morning-after quote goes to Jesse at Pandagon:

I honestly do think there was a typo in the propoganda sheet: this is the pwnership society, where we all get pwned by the government.

If that makes no sense to you, here's a translation. In the wonderful world of gaming, when you utterly and completely kick someone or something's ass, you 'pwn' it.

Seriously, though, what on earth is BushCo thinking with these proposed changes to Social Security? An 'ownership society' where you do not in fact own your own private account and any money left in it goes right back to the goverment when you die? If you're not going to make a real change in the structure of Social Security, then why do it at all?

On a personal note, the debate about Social Security has gotten Scott and I to talk a bit about retirement planning. We're going to have to ramp up our savings somehow, although how exactly we're going to do that with me in school and a bunch of debt already is unclear. We do have several 401ks already but haven't done much contributing the last 3 years or so due to our lowered incomes. Realistically we won't be able to save much of anything until I'm back in the workforce full-time, and that's 2 years off (and another student loan to pay off). It's a little scary when I think about how badly we're doing in retirement planning. So I try not to.

The one thing I do know is that should the BushCo plan come to pass, this family is not diverting one penny of their $ into a so-called 'private account'.

Is Al Franken going to run for the soon to be vacated Senate seat of Mark Dayton? I really hope not.

I have nothing against Franken. I enjoy his work and generally agree with his politics. But for him to seriously run for office would not be a good idea. I'm not up to speed on who might be an appropriate candidate (although the idea that David Wellstone might run sounded intriguing), but I'd definitely like to see someone less likely to be turned into fodder for a thousand fundrasing drives by the Right.

I could be wrong, of course. We shall see.

UPDATE: He's not running.

As Kevin Drum notes, Paul Krugman hits the nail on the head with regard to Howard Dean's election as DNC head.

For a while, Mr. Dean will be the public face of the Democrats, and the Republicans will try to portray him as the leftist he isn't. But Deanism isn't about turning to the left: it's about making a stand.

Indeed. On both counts.

When Republicans can lie and lie and nobody seems to ever actually call them on it .... heck, even so-called "reporters" can blatantly lie and nobody seems to care .... when it's OK to call even former US Presidents traitors because they don't agree with you .... when things that would have been a major scandal in the past are glossed over with hardly a peep in the press ... what on earth can one small blog do to make a difference?

Daniel Muntz takes a long time to get there, but he makes a really good point over at Ezra Klein's blog today.

In short:

It's not about whether we should be choosing big versus small government. It's about good government versus bad government.

And by that, I mean we should not be fixated on things like how many governemnt agencies there are, or whether Cato thinks we're doing a good job. Rather, we should consider whether the government is helping American citizens. If so, then it should keep on doing what it's doing. If not, then it's time for change.

Good stuff. I hope the meme spreads.

I was too young during the Vietnam War to understand who Robert McNamara was. I've learned more about him over the past several years (with a little help from The Fog of War and a few other good sources on Vietnam).

But nominating Wolfowitz to head the World Bank? It's an insult to the World Bank and the world community. In other words, just what you would expect from BushCo.

But still, better than nothing I suppose.

U.S. intelligence on Iraq was "dead wrong," dealing a blow to American credibility that will take years to undo, and spymasters still know disturbingly little about nuclear programs in countries like Iran and North Korea, a presidential commission reported on Thursday.

The commission's bluntly written report, based on more than a year of investigations, offered a damning assessment of the intelligence that President Bush used to launch the Iraq war two years ago and warned that flaws are still all too common throughout spy agencies.

"We conclude that the intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," the commissioners wrote.

James Wolcott is hilarious today. Here's an except, but go read the whole thing, especially if you're in the mood for a good snarky laugh to help cheer you up after filing your taxes:

Limbaugh seemed to be implying at the top of his voice that blowjobs are an integral part of the liberal agenda, an argument which he may want to rethink. The popularity of blowjobs is difficult to metric but undeniable; they cause little harm and zero unwanted pregnancies. If the plentitude of blowjobs is part of the Clinton legacy, millions owe the former president a debt of gratitude and an annual pilgrimage to the Clinton Memorial Library in Arkansas.

Yet, like so many products and pleasures, blowjobs aren't evenly distributed in society. It's a renewable natural resource not everyone gets to enjoy, and I was struck by the vehement tone of Limbaugh's tirade. He sounded bitter. I've seen this rancor inflict so many middle-aged men. Reading about all the oral sex young people are presumably having, they feel envious and resentful.

Time to remedy that. I'm swamped with classwork & haven't time for anything original right now. And Digby, as usual, hits the nail on the head. The day Ann Coulter makes the cover of Time magazine as anything other than an object of derision, is a day to worry.

Ann Coulter is not, as Howie Kurtz asserts today, the equivalent of Michael Moore. Michael Moore is is not advocating the murder of conservatives. He just isn't. For instance, he doesn't say that Eric Rudolph should be killed so that other conservatives will learn that they can be killed too. He doesn't say that he wishes that Tim McVeigh had blown up the Washington Times Bldg. He doesn't say that conservatives routinely commit the capital offense of treason. He certainly doesn't put up pictures of the fucking snoopy dance because one of his political opponents was killed. He doesn't, in other words, issue calls for violence and repression against his political enemies. That is what Ann Coulter does, in the most coarse, vulgar, reprehensible way possible.

Moore says conservatives are liars and they are corrupt and they are wrong. But he is not saying that they should die. There is a distinction. And it's a distinction that Time magazine and Howard Kurtz apparently cannot see.

Unbelievable. Apparently, per David Brooks, the entire poisonous political climate of today is all Justice Harry Blackmun's fault, for writing the Roe v Wade opinion.

His "logic" (word used advisedly) seems to be: If a court makes a decision that some people (read: right-wingers) don't like, then it's not a 'legitimate' ruling. SCOTUS should let the state legislatures decide these controversial issues, because of course nobody has ever disagreed with what a state legislature has tried to pass into law.

Orcinus also has a piece today on the rising tide of nastiness towards the court system. And it's getting scary. The judicial arm of government was created precisely to act as a check on the legislative and executive arms of government, and this all out assault on the courts strikes me as a sign that the other parts of the system don't want the inconveniences of balance.

Color me nervous.

A few days late, but Legal Fiction has a good, solid post showing how class and culture and economic all interrelated to produce the 2004 election results. It's worth a read. Here's a snippet:

I think national security is, unfortunately, increasingly thought of as a cultural issue (and like the others, it has class undertones). Whether it’s because wealthier people have abandoned military service, or because of Vietnam, or because nationalism (like religion) grows weaker with higher education, I think that national security has become a subset of the culture wars in the minds of many Americans, red and blue alike.

I don't know who was stupid enough to take or release those "Saddam in his underwear" photos, but it's bad for America. Saddam may not have had many friends in the Middle East, but I suspect plenty of people are going to be pissed off by those photos anyway.

About the only good thing that I see coming from this whole mess is at least it's driving the whole Newsweek Koran/flushing thing off the radar screen.

Given the power inequalities in the situation, and that fact that a number of right wingers seem to be extremely pissed off by the compromise, I think the Demcrats did about as well as could be expected in the Senate Showdown.

Josh Marshall has some good points on the matter:

[the] whole tenor of the Republican ultras on the Hill today is to demand unimpeded power, to push past conventions and limits, to go for everything. And here they got turned back. A sensible Republican party might be satisfied to have gotten three of its nominees -- numerically speaking, they did fairly well. But this whole enterprise was based on wanting it all, on not accepting limits, on rejecting government by even a modicum of consensus with a sizeable minority party. They got stopped short. And the senate Republican leadership is undermined.

So this isn't a pleasant compromise. But precisely because the Republicans -- or their leading players -- are absolutists in a way the Democrats are not, I think this compromise will batter them more than it will the minority party, which is after all a minority party which nonetheless managed to emerge from this having fought the stronger force to something like a draw.

No, I am not happy three unqualified judges get sent to the federal benches as part of the deal. But at least there is a compromise and there is still hope of more in the future.

So now we finally know for sure who Deep Throat was. It's about time.

UPDATE: I watched my DVD of "All The President's Men" tonight to celebrate. I know it's impossible to cram even a fraction of a full-length book into a 2 hour movie, but I always get really frustrated that the movie basically ends just when the story is starting to get good.

What was amusing was that in the DVD add-ons there's a list of possible suspects for "Who Is Deep Throat" and Mark Felt was the first name on the list. Heh.

Taken as a whole, the various Christian faiths comprise the vast majority of Americans today (77%, according to this source). Yet like manipulative children who cry "You don't love me!" to try to guilt Mommy into giving them yet another piece of candy, various US politicians like to try to pretend that American Christians are nothing more than another embattled minority. For example:

During a debate today surrounding an amendment by Rep. David Obey (D-WI) to fully examine allegations of proselytizing and religious intolerance at the United States Air Force Academy, six-term Republican Rep. John Hostettler (IN) rose to assert that "Democrats can't help denigrating and demonizing Christians." Rep. Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, interrupted Hostettler's deeply disturbing remarks and demanded that they be formally retracted; Hostettler ultimately agreed to retract one sentence from his diatribe.

Earlier in his remarks, Hostettler discussed the drive by Democrats to erase every "vestige" of Christianity from America; he also prefaced his remarks by noting that "The long war on Christianity today continues on the floor of the House of Representatives." During a meeting of the House Armed Services Committee on May 18th, while debating a similar amendment by Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY), Hostettler referred to "the mythical wall separation (sic) between church and state that's been erected by the courts."

It's insulting and infuriating to watch. These overprivileged asshats have never in their lives known what it's like to really be a member of a minority. They've never experienced discrimination or been demonized the way actual minorities have been. Their combination of ignorance and arrogance is astounding.

People like Rep. Hostettler need a good bitchslapping with the wet towel of reality. But these days, the likelihood of that happening is next to none.

What the hell were the so-called 'liberal justices' on SCOTUS thinking?

A divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday that local governments may seize people's homes and businesses against their will for private development

I understand the general concept that there are times when a government can seize private land for public projects. I'm not thrilled with it, but I think there are cases when it can be justified. However,

"Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random," O'Connor wrote. "The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms."

So Justice O'Connor warns us. She is right. How long will it be until Wal-Mart starts leaning on local governments to condemn choice pieces of real estate for minimal compensation because of the jobs they will bring to a town?

By way of the DNC Blog

Democrats
Believe capturing the person primarily responsible for the attack should be a top priority.

Republicans
It's been four years, and Osama bin Laden is still free, even though Bush's CIA chief says he knows where he is.

Democrats
Investigate the intelligence failures that led to 9/11.

Republicans
Do everything in their power to block the 9/11 Commission from doing its work.

Democrats
Propose creating the Department of Homeland Security.

Republicans
Push tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Democrats
Believe we should have stayed the course in Afghanistan, not allowing the Taliban to resurge, the warlords to take power, and the opium trade to skyrocket.

Republicans
Ignore Afghanistan as the situation worsens.

Democrats
Believe that we should be honest with our troops about the reasons we go to war, give them everything they need to be safe, and make sure we go in with an exit plan.

Republicans
Manipulate intelligence to trump up reasons to go to war, don't give our troops the support they need, constantly mislead the public about the direction the war is going, and fail to make an exit plan.

Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court and a swing vote on abortion as well as other contentious issues, announced her retirement Friday

And we all though it would be Rehnquist to go first.

Now, of course, the shit will truly start to hit the fan. It's not going to be pretty.

With the long holiday weekend upon us, those parts of the blogworld that have not taken off to enjoy some time away from their computers have settled in for a nice long spell of speculation about Karl Rove, the Plame leak, and the best question of all: Who told Rove? Digby in particular has been on a roll in the last day or so, but there's plenty of other good stuff out there as well if you want to spend time in front of your PC instead of out barbecuing this weekend.

As much as I would love to see Rove's career go down in flames and take the rest of the right wingers with him, I'm sceptical it will happen. The right wing machine has had a long time to study not only Watergate but l'affaire Clinton for "what not to do", and if nothing else, those guys are good at covering their tracks. I seriously doubt a legal case will be able to be successfully prosecuted, even assuming there's a DA willing to press charges.

Perhaps I'm too much of a pessamist here. I'd love to be proven wrong.

On this Independence Day, I give you the words of Nameless Soldier, currently on location somewhere in Iraq:

America doesn't maintain itself. It's corny, but Freedom isn't Free. I'm not talking about the military or anything like that. This isn't an effort to recruit anyone, it's just an acknowledgement that if we wan't to keep democracy fresh and real we have to keep working on it, otherwise we are bound to lose it. Unless we are active in our comunities, those in charge will think that they can treat us like door matts. Our freedoms are "use or lose" items. If you don't use your right to speak out, you may wake up one day to find out that you're not allowed to. The same goes for all of our other rights. Already, some of those have felt feet trying to trample on them.

One of the great things about America is that it represents something different to each person. I guarantee that George Bush sees America differently than a new immigrant, but that's only the beginning of the differences. Each of us uses a differnet mix of our liberties, each of us values certain things more than others. And by taking advantage of the unique experiences and knowledge that each of us has developed, we are a force to be reckoned with. In roughly 250 years our nation has risen to greatnes beyond anything that might have been imagined by the founding fathers, and we have done it because of our freedoms. Without the rule of law and civil liberties we would have nothing.

But some of those liberties are under attack. There are those in America who value corporations above individuals and profits over freedoms. And it is time for us as a nation to rise up and say that we will not except that option. "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." It is time to stand up and demand that those rights stop being chipped away at. It is time to remind those in power what America was founded on.

Since 9/11, there has been a lot of talk about what it means to be a "patriot." Is it someone who is willing to go to war? Maybe a patriot is someone who is willing to make hard decisions. I don't think so. To me, true patriotism lies in a willingness to remember what your nation is supposed to be about, and then acting on it. Patriotism is not about blind loyalty to your nations leaders or founders, it is about a willingness to always look for the truth. Patriotism is about making your nation better than it's ever been before, and making it better for everyone, not just the rich. I say that there is no better tribute to the last couple of centuries of progress than to continue to progress.

I haven't said much about the Wilson/Plame/Rove imbroglio, mostly because so many other people are doing such a great job of covering it. But I am following the events closely and hoping for some actual charges to be filed.

That said, the PoorMan has a really good and funny post on the defense of Karl Rove today, definitely not to be missed.

Washington Note guestblogger Leon Hadar called my attention to an interesting article in the NY Sun today. It's about some language in an upcoming congressional bill called the ADVANCE Democracy Act that would, among other things, require the US diplomatic corps abroad to

draw up democracy transition plans for unfree regimes, with input from nonviolent opposition movements in the various countries.

It would also

allow the State Department to "use all instruments of United States influence to support, promote, and strengthen democratic principles, practices, and values in foreign countries." It charges the CIA and Treasury Department with tracking the personal assets of dictators and their associates.

ADVANCE would require the secretary of state to approve an annual report designating nations as either democratic, undemocratic, or in transition.

This is one of those ideas that, if it were implemented by a competent government, is not objectionable. Promoting democracy and working with local organizations to help peacefully implement democracy in less-than-fully-democratic countries is a laudable goal. But a mandate like that in the hands of a self-serving bunch of incompetents who care more about the preservation of their own power and the interests of their buddies than about anything else -- in other words, BushCo -- it instead engenders feelings of concern and cynicism.

Do you really expect that if this becomes law, that the Bush administration would countenance a report officially designating their buddies in Saudi Arabia as undemocratic? If you do, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. But without impartiality, this act becomes just another way to politicize things like civil service promotions and foreign aid allocations. In other words, a big old mess.

I wasn't always this cynical. It would be really nice if there were some flickers of hope on the horizon, but it's a long time until the 2008 elections.

Why can't Democrats get "flip flopper" to stick against Republicans?

I was reading a transcript of the Santorum / Stephanopolis interview today and started to wonder. After all, here's a classic example of inconsistancy in a position. On the one hand, Senator Santorum says:

I believe my view is the view that’s held by most Americans, which means we need strong families and strong communities, and we don’t need government really dissembling those institutions.

On the other hand, he also would support a consitutional amendment banning abortion. Birth control is about as personal a family issue as it gets, and yet this man is willing to have the government control that aspect of your family life. It's a massive inconsistancy and yet nobody calls it that.

Just wondering.

Now back to the transcripts, since I cen't get my butt out of bed early enough on Sunday to watch this stuff live. *sigh* One of the not-so-good things about living on the West Coast.

I'd almost think this was a joke if the lawsuit weren't real, and if there weren't a more sinister prospect on the horizon. These guys may be anti-choice wingnuts but they are not stupid.

National anti-choice organizations have been filing lawsuits against California's stem cell institute to prevent them from doing anything with donated blastocysts. The lawsuits are being consolidated to be heard by one judge in one county in order to expedite the process. The latest legal salvo is a federal lawsuit filed by the "National Association for the Advancement of Preborn Children" claiming the civil rights of blastocysts are violated by stem cell research.

Side note -- Emphasis added for the NAAPC. *shakes head in disbelief*. Nice F-U to the civil rights movement there.

Back on topic -- As much as this whole thing sounds absurd, I suspect that the ultimate goal here is not just to delay the CA stem cell institute, but also to keep on filing suits and appeals until they get to the Supreme Court. It's not at all unrealistic to expect that in a year or two SCOTUS will have two new conservative Justices in place and presumably ready to cast a more favorable eye on suits like this.

The lawsuit claims the embryo is a person who should be given equal protection under the Constitution, and her destruction violates her right to freedom from slavery.

In decisions that have upheld the right of women to receive abortions, the Supreme Court has ruled that a woman's right to control her body outweighs the early-stage fetus's rights.

In his appeal of the initial federal case, lawyer R. Martin Palmer argues that Roe v. Wade does not apply in this case because the embryo is in deep freeze and not a mother's womb.

Note the avoidance of Roe as precedent. These guys are clearly angling for an approach that will get around the issue of stare decisis with regard to Roe.

As the Bard said, "Though this be madness, yet there is method in it." (Hamlet)

I'm trying to be openminded here and assume that for some people, this might actually be a way of taking the hell of 9/11 and trying to make a positive out of it. However, it makes me feel sick to my stomach.

The whole concept of 9/11 being "honored" by an overproduced parade and some cheesy country music is just so, so wrong. And of course since BushCo is involved, it's not even that. It's simply yet another pathetic attempt to milk 9/11 and boost support for their war machine. Just look at the title of the event: the "America Supports You Freedom Walk". Ugh. And it gets better:

The goal for next year's walk is to get each state to host its own Freedom Walk to provide an opportunity for as many citizens as possible to reflect on the importance of freedom.

Give me a freaking break! I can 'reflect on freedom' any time I want. I don't need to be reminded by the Pentagon to do it. And certainly not by some faux event like this.

dKos member AndyT came up with a good one today:

Hugo Black, the guy who used to run around in white robes and scare black people. Then he was appointed to the [Supreme] court and went around in black robes scaring white people.

... is that we're trying to preserve what the British put together in the 1920s with little thought to the actual people who lived there and their pre-existing tribal loyalties. That problem today is nicely encapsulated by Dexter Filkins:

When the Americans smashed Saddam Hussein's regime two and half years ago, what lay revealed was a country with no agreement on the most basic questions of national identity. The Sunnis, a minority in charge here for five centuries, have not, for the most part, accepted that they will no longer control the country. The Shiites, the long-suppressed majority, want to set up a theocracy. The Kurds don't want to be part of Iraq at all. There is only so much that language can do to paper over such differences.

Hat tip to Kevin (who appears to have either turned off or broken his trackbacks) for the link.

Digby offers the following, very fascinating, suggestion:

I've been thinking for a while that we might be seeing the beginning of a new trend in American politics --- the anti-military right. Rush is calling marines "pukes," veterans are being called cowards and fakers, disabled vets are mocked for not having the right wounds or getting them in the right way, GOP hags are wearing cute little "purple heart" bandaids on their cheeks. People are selling busts of the president using his lack of combat experience as a selling point saying outright that physical courage is no longer particularly worthy of conservative approbation. Being a veteran buys you no credibility and no respect in today's Real Murika.

This is how they transform Chickenhawkery into a badge of courage.

I suspect that what we are hearing (aside from the self-loathing fidgeting of those who loudly beat wardrums yet are too selfish to serve) is the distant rumblings of a massive rightwing frustration with the military's inability to just "win" this damned thing so we can move on to our next country. It was supposed to be a cakewalk.

UPDATE: Thinking some more about it this morning, I wonder whether a "we got stabbed in the back by our own military" right-wing meme couldn't emerge out of this line of thinking. Sadly, they'll probably find some way to blame this on Bill Clinton or at least "the liberals" instead.

Initially, when I read this, I was a bit annoyed. "He's only getting coverage for criticizing the war because he is a Republican," I though. But upon further reflection, I'm glad it's in the news. If even mainstream Republicans are ready to openly criticize our involvement in Iraq, that's a net positive.

No sooner do I put up a faintly hopeful post about things today than Atrios pointed me to something else that turned my mood right back around.

I think it's important to remember that in the year 1900, for example, in the United States, it was a democracy then. In 1900, women did not have the right to vote. If Iraqis could develop a democracy that resembled America in the 1900s, I think we'd all be thrilled. I mean, women's social rights are not critical to the evolution of democracy.

WTF?!?!

[rant mode = on]
I hope Reuel Marc Gerecht never, ever gets laid again for his insane supposition that it's OK to disenfranchise Iraqi women at the cost of some 1,800 American lives and god knows how many more wounded. What kind of a delusional sexist jerkoff thinks that's a good thing? What an egregious overprivileged f*cktard!

AARRGGHH! It makes me want to knock heads together.
[end rant]

For more substance and less ranting, go read what Digby has to say about this. I'm too annoyed.

Krugman today:

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans.

I think it's time to update the disaster preparedness supplies in the house.

He also makes a very good point:

I don't think this is a simple tale of incompetence. The reason the military wasn't rushed in to help along the Gulf Coast is, I believe, the same reason nothing was done to stop looting after the fall of Baghdad. Flood control was neglected for the same reason our troops in Iraq didn't get adequate armor.

At a fundamental level, I'd argue, our current leaders just aren't serious about some of the essential functions of government.

There's a lot being said in the blogosphere right now. There's a lot of anger, frustration, grief, and pain. But Ezra wrote something this morning that I particularly like. I'm quoting the majority of it here:

George W. Bush is not up to the task of leadership. That's not said as a criticism, actually -- I am not up to the task of dancing, or running marathons. We all have failings, and Bush's essential flaw is an inability to project himself, an inability to grow in dimension during a crisis, an inability to sense that catastrophes serve as opportunities for strengthening the American community. I dislike Bush for mean-spiritedness, for his incompetence, for his smugness. But I deplore him for his smallness. That the 2004 election was a 51-49 affair is shocking. Had John McCain won in 2000, his response to 9/11 would have toasted the Democratic party for the next 20 years. Had Al Gore been in office, his leadership in the moments after would've changed the world, or at least the international community. Both of them would have brought Americans together. But Bush simply invited us to malls, wedged us apart, snookered us into a disastrous war that didn't need to be fought. For a President to hold office during a crisis of that magnitude and do as little, both socially and politically, as Bush did is almost unprecedented.

I don't blame Bush for Katrina -- he does not control the weather. And I don't blame him for the levees -- even with full-funding, they weren't scheduled to be completed for years, the levee that broke was actually one of the renovated ones, and so on; his funding decisions were criminal, but they would only have been causal five years from now. I blame him for the national guard being absent, but that's a secondary problem. What I blame him for, what I hate him for, is for not stepping up to the job of President right now. For being a small man when a big one is required. For offering a laundry list of supplies-on-the-way when his job is uniting the American people and helping them give aid and comfort to their countrymen. A President can't stop a disaster, but he can coalesce the citizenry to ease its aftermath, he can take catastrophe and use it to reknit the nation's community.

Bush didn't. He didn't do it here and he didn't do it on 9/11. In America, great things can come out of great calamity. Bush has had two opportunities to create something lasting, he has failed both times. For most else, I forgive him. For that, I never will.

The federal official in charge of the bungled New Orleans rescue was fired from his last private-sector job overseeing horse shows.

And before joining the Federal Emergency Management Agency as a deputy director in 2001, GOP activist Mike Brown had no significant experience that would have qualified him for the position.

The Oklahoman got the job through an old college friend who at the time was heading up FEMA.

Source: the Boston Herald. I'm sitting here shaking my head. That's just ... wow. I mean, WOW. Exactly how is this man even remotely qualified to run FEMA?

It gets better.

Before joining the Bush administration in 2001, Brown spent 11 years as the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association, a breeders' and horse-show organization based in Colorado.

"We do disciplinary actions, certification of (show trial) judges. We hold classes to train people to become judges and stewards. And we keep records,'' explained a spokeswoman for the IAHA commissioner's office. "This was his full-time job . . . for 11 years,'' she added.

Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures.

Now, the calibre of the political appointees to a government agency do not necessarily reflect on the calibre of the agency's staff, but it does have an impact in terms of the ability to keep key members of that staff, as well as in policies, priorities, and planning. We're seeing that impact played out in excruciating detail this week on the Gulf Coast.

This guy need to be fired.

In his weekly radio adddress, President Bush said that Americans would come together and make the Gulf Coast "more vibrant than ever," just as they rebuilt after the devastation brought by terrorist attacks four years ago this weekend.

Last I checked, Ground Zero was still a big gaping hole, and plans for what's going to eventually go there are still very much in flux.

Oh, and Charles Krauthammer is a jerk.

In less enlightened times, there was no catastrophe independent of human agency. When the plague or some other natural disaster struck, witches were burned, Jews were massacred and all felt better (except the witches and Jews). A few centuries later, our progressive thinkers have progressed not an inch. No fall of a sparrow on this planet is not attributed to sin and human perfidy.

The three current favorites are: (1) global warming, (2) the war in Iraq and (3) tax cuts. Katrina hits and the unholy trinity is immediately invoked to damn sinner-in-chief George W. Bush.

Cricitism of the President is in no way, shape, or form even remotely similar to the slaughter of unknown thousands of innocent victims. It's an odious comparison and Krauthammer ought to be ashamed of himself for making it.

I can't believe the White House let this get out.

I've been meaning to link to this Digby gem for a few days now. Here's a snitppet:

For those who think that we are in a post racist world because George W. Bush appointed blacks to his cabinet, think again. The modern Republican Party was built on the back of an enduring national divide on the issue of race. George Bush may not personally be racist (or more likely not know he's racist) but the party he leads has depended on it for many years. The coded language that signals tribal ID has obscured it, but don't kid yourselves. It is a party that became dominant by exploiting the deep cultural fault of the mason dixon line.

Better late than never. It's long but well worth the read.

Here's another item I've been meaning to link to but didn't get around to; this time from the Washington Note: Osama bin Laden's public FBI file needs a serious updating.

The ensuing comments are also worth a read.

The Republican leadership in the Senate, House and White House are ALL officially under investigation.

Heh. dKos has the details.

We're flying out tonight and I've got laundry to do.

This will be fun...

A Texas grand jury on Wednesday charged Rep. Tom DeLay and two political associates with conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme.

Really nice profile of The Daily Show's Jon Stewart over in the Guardian today. Here's a snippet:

If the parties and the media serve the country so badly, why do Americans put up with it? "Because for the majority of Americans life is pretty tolerable," says Stewart. "It's very hard to organise reasonable people with moderate views. Reasonable people with moderate views don't usually light their torches and head out to town with pitchforks shouting, Be reasonable. Shit has to get really bad before people stand up and take notice."

There's a lot of folks on dKos and other left-leaning blogs who don't understand why most of America seems unwilling or unable to get angry the way they are angry. They tend to write those people off as "sheeple" -- too stupid or too cowed to take action. Stewart sees another aspect. I tend to agree with him.

Avedon Carol kindly responded in the Comments to yesterday's post citing Jon Stewart about why so many Americans are so uninvolved with politics. Her thoughts:

There's also the part where in an oppressive state, keeping your head down is the only protection you might have. Such a state will go after its enemies. If your first allegiance is to your family or to your own survival, the last thing you want to do is draw the government's attention to you by criticizing them.

Seems to me that this POV is part of the disconnect between many left-leaning bloggers and that vast swathe of America that gets them so riled up. If you buy into that point of view, you'd have to be a person who believes that America is today a neo-Fascist state with such tight command and control over our daily lives that the average citizen rightfully fears the repercussions should s/he speak out against the state. I seriously doubt that mindset pervades Middle America today. Hell, even I don't believe it.

Yes, I'm aware of Gitmo and situations like Jose Padilla's, and the super-secret monitoring devices the NSA has that can read all our emails, and the provisions of the Patriot Act, and I am concerned about the state of civil liberties in America today. And who knows? It might even be possible that somebody in a back room in Washington DC is putting me on an "Enemies of the State" list because I've expressed my opposition to the war in Iraq.

But it seems to me that a left-leaning blogger like me is much more likely to run into trouble in the workplace because of my blog than any other possible outcome. I don't see anything going on in America today that makes me feel that my own physical security is in any way at risk by the state for my point of view.

There's a passage in the William Gibson novel "Pattern Recognition" that bears repeating here:

Win, the Cold War security expert, ever watchful, had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained.... he wouldn’t allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lateralisms, frank anomalies.

Win's first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.

But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.

Per the WaPo:

Roy Moore, who became a hero to the religious right after being ousted as Alabama's chief justice for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse, announced Monday that he is running for governor in 2006.

I'm sure the candidate debates will be hysterical.

Apparently the BBC is doing a series on President Bush and the Middle East. From their press release:

[Palestinian Foreign Minister] Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

As we all know, hearsay testimony is generally not acceptable in a court of law. And it is not clear whether the comment was made through a translator or not. But still ... wow. If Bush really did say that, it explains a lot about Iraq.

It might also suggest we ask some serious questions about whether it's appropriate for the most powerful man in the world to be making critical decisions based on what God told him to do. At the very least, some psychological examination might be in order. I won't go so far as to say that everyone who thinks God told them to do something is nuts, but I do think that it bears close examination, especially when the person is the President of the United States.

Hat tip: AmericaBlog.

I saw an interesting piece of information over on dKos today, regarding Iraq war veterans who come home & run for Congress:

Democrats have five or six of those already on the line. Republicans, by the way, have zero.

Very interesting. I wonder why?

I haven't said much about the Fitzgerald Plame investigation because I don't want to count my chickens before they're frog-marched out of their offices ... but Jane Hamsher, Reddhedd and the rest of the gang over at firedoglake have a lot of excellent posts on the subject -- not just up to date info about what's going on, but also why it matters.

They're well worth bookmarking.

I need to start a new category called "WTF?" to cover those achingly jaw-dropping loads of garbage unloaded onto an unsuspecting public by key political figures. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pulled one this morning on Meet The Press. No, I was not awake for it, but (un)fortunately my East Coast blogger bretheren were.

The arrogance is astonishing:

The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda…or we could take a bolder approach.

An even bolder approach would be to roll down the hill onto the Middle East and smash everything in your path. Oh wait, we're trying that in Iraq. Too bad it's a horrible failure of a policy.

I'm guessing Markos isn't snowed under with his book anymore, because he made some excellent points over at dKos today:

I wrote above that most progressives "agree on most things", but there are probably few issues, if any, in which 100 percent of progressives agree. And such disagreements are not necessarily born of ignorance, or "using Rove's talking points", or being a "DINO". But disagreements born from research and exploration and each individual's varied life experiences. This is a reality in which we must operate and thrive, and it can't be by forcing a party line on every single issue. Because really, who will set the party line? Who will enforce it?

I don't necessarily agree with the characterization of Venezuela's leader but other than that this NY Times editorial is spot-on.

After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long.

In Argentina, Mr. Bush, who prides himself on his ability to relate to world leaders face to face, could barely summon the energy to chat with the 33 other leaders there, almost all of whom would be considered friendly to the United States under normal circumstances. He and his delegation failed to get even a minimally face-saving outcome at the collapsed trade talks and allowed a loudmouthed opportunist like the president of Venezuela to steal the show.

It's amazing to remember that when Mr. Bush first ran for president, he bragged about his understanding of Latin America, his ability to speak Spanish and his friendship with Mexico. But he also made fun of Al Gore for believing that nation-building was a job for the United States military.

Tristero has a nice roundup of the election results here.

Shorter version: We didn't win it all but we won quite a lot. I'm particuarly pleased by the Pennsylvania voters who threw out all 8 of the foolish school board members that had tried to get ID into the school curriculum.

It's a good day to be a Democrat. But let's not get cocky. The 2006 and 2008 elections will be much more important.

by way of KRON-4:

O'Reilly reacted to San Franciscans approval of Proposition I, which discourages military recruiters on public high school and college campuses.

He advised President George W. Bush to react by withdrawing any military protection for the city. "...If al-Qaida comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead," O'Reilly said.

On the one hand, jerky people are going to make jerky statements, and calling them out can make the jerks seem more important than they are.

On the other hand, it is important to call jerky people on their jerkiness, because silence can equal assent. And saying that it's OK to bomb San Francisco is not OK.

Coit Tower, for those unfamiliar with it, is a memorial honoring San Francisco firefighters.

Thanks Kevin, well put:

Torture should be flatly illegal because that's the message we want to send both to our own people and to the rest of the world. Legal torture should be reserved for regimes like Cuba and North Korea, not the United States of America.

However, in the fantastically unlikely 24-esque event that we capture a terrorist who knows the location of a ticking atomic bomb, he's going to get tortured regardless. The torturer will immediately get pardoned by the president for doing so, and would be unanimously acquitted by a jury even if he weren't. And I'm fine with that.

So please. Enough with the idiotic ticking time bomb already. If we're going to talk about torture, let's talk about how it's used in the real world.

Today is Howard Dean's birthday.

There's a birthday wishes thread over at dKos, if you feel inclided to leave the good doctor some birthday greetings.

"I'm from the Democratic wing of the Democratic party'' is still one of my favorite political quotes ever.

I managed to miss most of the House debate last night due to a cable box that seems to be flaking out (Comcast is coming Tuesday). But I did catch the last hour or so. I'm not exactly a CSPAN junkie, but it seems to me to be quite the piece of political theater. I had no idea who John Murtha was before 48 hours ago, but his gravitas and sincereity is fantastic. I wish we'd seen more of him in the past. All last night needed was some better scriptwriters, a few cute young House interns for jiggles, and a happy ending, and Hollywood would have loved it.

Seriously, though, what did it all mean? I don't know. Supposedly the Republicans introduced the 'get out now' resolution to embarrass the Democrats. True, now everyone can go into the 06 election cycle and say 'See, 400+ members of the House voted against getting out, so we must Stay The CourseTM'. Whether that's really worth anything is questionable.

NTodd has a good take on things, but I suspect we will not see Murtha's resolution coming to the floor anytime soon. The House leadership won't see any benefit in allowing debate over a proposal that's acutally reasonable, now that they've had their chance to make a calculated political gesture.

I saw the documentary 'The War Room' when it first came out. It was a fascinating look at how Presidential elections work. But ultimately, it was about politics, not policy. When the election was won, the war room disbanded.

Contrast that with this:

A war-room defense was "something we did well during the campaign," said Nicolle Wallace, Bush's communications director. "Maybe incorrectly, we had hoped or presumed that wouldn't be necessary after the election."

It is. The war room now is back, staffed with many of the same people who ran it in 2004, led by the Boy Genius himself, Karl Rove.

Campaigns are about selling a candidate. That's fine. After the election, especially after the re-election, is it too much to ask that the focus be on actually governing the country?

The problem facing Bush is not that he didn't sell well enough. It's that his policy on Iraq stinks and needs to be deep-sixed immediately. No matter how much the new "War Room" tries to spin and smear, it's not going to change the essential problem here.

I've seen posts here and there warning that immigration -- specifically over our southern border -- is going to be a hot-button issue for the next election cycle, and I have to say that I agree. Two stories today point the way.

In the first, I note a rising number of attempts to link not just the Mexican border, but Mexico itself, with terrorism.

For more than a year, the shirts and pants worn by agents and inspectors with U.S. Customs and Border Protection have been made in Mexico, and some complaints were made when they were initially distributed. The uniforms are supplied by VF Solutions of Nashville, Tenn., which subcontracts its work to plants in the United States, Mexico, Canada and the Dominican Republic.

Do people care about the huge amount of technology outflow from America and how that affects security, or our stunning lack of energy independence, or any number of other issues that have a long-term effect on national security? No. They care that the Border Patrol's uniforms are ... gasp ... MADE IN MEXICO. Why is "Made in Mexico" bad but "Made In Canada" or "Made in the Dominican Republic" not bad?

Agents and lawmakers are concerned about the consequences if the uniforms for agents charged with combating illegal immigration fall into the hands of criminals or terrorists.

I don't like pointing fingers and yelling "RACISM!" but more and more, it seems that's what's going on here. A concerted attempt is being made to make Americans scared of the hordes of short, swarthy, non-English speaking masses teeming below our borders.

The second article is actually about disarray in the Bush White House, but what I find notable is this bit:

Not ready to throw in the towel and declare the boss a lame duck, the Bushies are hoping two issues can help firm up their base and perhaps make inroads with centrists who voted for Bush: the anticipated confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito, and a plan to reinforce the border with Mexico to help stop illegal immigration.

This week Bush will begin to press the border security issue.

It seems to me that this administration is feeling the political tide turning against them, and in their increasingly-desperate attempts to staunch the flow, they are falling back on an old friend, the race card. And sadly, it will probably help shore up support, because although almost nobody will admit it, racism still lurks in many a heart in America.

I'll be thinking more about the issue of immegration and posting some more thoughts on it in the not-too-distant future.

UPDATE: looks like the plan is kicking into action.

President Bush is trying to build support for a comprehensive immigration strategy — and mollify conservatives wary of his guest worker plan for foreigners.

Apparently President Bush gave a speech about his Iraq policy this morning. I slept through it. But here's some salient commentary from one of the visitors to TWN:

The Israelis have pretty much proven for 50+ years they won't take any crap and won't back down in the face of terrorism and aggression. Has their toughness immunized them from car bombers? Has their consistency in not bowing to terrorism made it go away? You have to push back against enemies such as these but it means more than making them die or flee at the barrel of a gun. How you deal with the causes of their violence is beyond my understanding but somebody gets paid a lot of money to think about how to do it and get it done. We could have 250,000 troops in Iraq for the next 25 years and every day of the week, 365 days of every goddamn year there would be attacks and killings inflicted on them. Given that reality WTF is "victory"? What is "winning"? I won't hold my breath waiting for the Right to define either term and how to get there, they don't know the answer.

And speaking of Israel,what's going on over there today?

Veteran statesman Shimon Peres announced on Wednesday he was throwing his support behind Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Israel's March election and ending his own political activity in the Labor Party.

Peres, 82, told a news conference he was making the move in the interests of Middle East peace.

Both Israel and America are caught in some difficult situations and need to make some real changes to get out of them. Notice something different about what's going on in Israel? They're actually shaking up the established order and trying to do things differently. Whether they will succeed is anybody's guess, but I honor the fact that they're trying to break out of the current stasis.

Frankly, I'm starting to think there'll be peace in Jerusalem before there'll be peace in Baghdad.

So today, Howard Dean said this:

"This is the same situation we had in Vietnam ... Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

In response, wingnut ex-Presidential spawn Michael Reagan said this:

Howard Dean should be arrested and hung for treason.

Reagan is way, way off the deep end here. Did he forget his Prozac today? Because if he was serious, you might as well go ahead and hang me too; I've been saying similar things for the last 2 years.

Hat tip: AmericaBlog

It's gratifying to be snarky at Trent Lott's expense with regard to his apparent turnaround on tort reform, but the partisan sniping can obscure the real point, which is that tort "reform" is not necessary.

Just as freedom of speech means that even people whose opinions I abhor have a right to voice those opinions, freedom to sue means that some people are going to file wacky lawsuits. Having to deal with that is a fair price to pay for the ability to sue an insurer who refuses to rebuild your home or the hospital that botches your medical care.

Here's hoping that Lott is finally learning this important lesson.

There's a wave of outrage rolling across the lefty blogs right now regarding the NY TImes article reporting that for the last three years, President Bush has allowed government agencies to spy on Americans despite explicit laws against it. Honestly, as outrageous and disgusting as that behavior is, I can't find it in me to be angry about the whole thing. There have been so many outrages the past few years, and undoubtedly so many more to come, that it's really hard for me to get upset about any given one of them anymore. Call it "Bush Fatigue".

I AM unhappy about this. I'm disgusted that Bush thinks it's OK to ignore our laws and treat the Constitution like just a piece of paper. If you don't like a law, call your buddies in Congress get the law changed. It's not like Bush was having difficulty getting Congress to do what he wanted three years ago when this all started. (Which is NOT to say that spying on innocent Americans is OK, I'm just pointing out what a leader who cares about rule of law should do.)

But the bottom line is, I'm not surrpised by any of this. Seriously, you folks who are ranting and raving and calling for his impeachment -- is this at all a surprise? Or are you just surprised that it took so long for the news to come out?

And despite Arlen Spector's claims that his committee will hold investigations into these acts next year, somehow I suspect that by the time everyone gets back to Washington after the holidays, this will be old news and we'll just merrily roll along until the next time.

The inimitable Digby, as always, has taken outrage and turned it into art. If you're pissed off and havent read this post yet, it's worth a read. Here's a sampler:

Look, the problem here, again, is not one of just spying on Americans, as repulsively totalitarian as that is. It's that the administration adopted John Yoo's theory of presidential infallibility. But, of course, it wasn't really John Yoo's theory at all; it was Dick Cheney's muse, Richard Nixon who said, "when the President does it, that means it's not illegal."

Generally I think Digby's quite right about this. But one piece of the puzzle is missing here, and that's the fact that GW Bush is a recovering alcoholic. I think he has replaced the high he used to get from alcohol with the high of power. I truly believe he's become drunk on power, and since he is an addict, over time he needs ever-increasing doses to get the same high. Which might shed some light on why Bush didn't simply lobby to have the laws changed. Having to ask Congress to authorize these acts would lessen the sense of power he gets from ordering them.

I can't imagine that this can continue for three more years. But anyone who seriously thinks a Republican-dominated Congress is going to bring articles of impeachment against Bush is not thinking rationally. It was nice to see that a few Republican senators were not willing to vote to continue the Patriot Act, but that's a far cry from thinking they'll impeach Bush.

And on that downer note, I'm going to brew a pot of coffee and try to cheer myself up.

Over at Ezra's place today, Nicholas Beaudrot has a reality-based perspective on what should happen next regarding the President. Like it or not, the fact that Clinton was impeached does change the calculus as to whether or not Bush should be.

I think that the Clinton impeachment has raised the bar for what ought to be an impeachable offense. Politically, if the opposition party calls for every President's head, we will have turned what ought to have been a very solemn process into nothing more than a political tool.

The good news is, this bar hasn't been raised forever.

So right now, I'm inclined to think the best tactic is to call for a censure of the President and an end to warrantless domestic spying. Censure would show that the Democratic party is above the idea of turning impeachment into exercise in partisan sniping. It would still act as an effective wedge for Republican Congressional candidates in the 2006 elections, who will be forced to choose between standing by their man in the face of controversy on one hand, and admitting that he skirted the law on the other.

Sounds good to me.

I am no fan of PETA and their "everyone should be a vegan but having an 80% kill rate at our animal shelter is just fine" hypocricy. However, even I have to wonder how the war on terrorism is served by this (emphasis added):

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, John Ashcroft, who was then attorney general, loosened restrictions on the F.B.I.'s investigative powers, giving the bureau greater ability to visit and monitor Web sites, mosques and other public entities in developing terrorism leads. The bureau has used that authority to investigate not only groups with suspected ties to foreign terrorists, but also protest groups suspected of having links to violent or disruptive activities.

But the documents, coming after the Bush administration's confirmation that President Bush had authorized some spying without warrants in fighting terrorism, prompted charges from civil rights advocates that the government had improperly blurred the line between terrorism and acts of civil disobedience and lawful protest.

One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a "Vegan Community Project." Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's "semi-communistic ideology." A third indicates the bureau's interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

As seen on ACLU.com and in the New York Times today.

Next week, the Washington Post?

Hat tip, AMERICAblog.

Ezra:

Bush's actions were illegal. And that's all there is to that. You can argue that they were justified, or righteous, or that the legislative structure is outmoded and wrong, but none of that changes the fact that they were in flagrant violation of the law of the land, a law the White House could have attempted to amend or asked the Supreme Court to invalidate. Which means that not only were Bush's actions illegal, but he offered no attempt to make them legal. It wasn't simply that he thought the law outdated, it's that he believed it didn't, and shouldn't, apply to him.

Digby also indulges in some lovely irony, quoting some nice Rep. Henry Hyde rhetoric from the Clinton impeachment:

That none of us is above the law is a bedrock principle of democracy. To erode that bedrock is to risk even further injustice. To erode that bedrock is to subscribe, to a "divine right of kings" theory of governance, in which those who govern are absolved from adhering to the basic moral standards to which the governed are accountable.

I suppose this is another case of IOKIYAR, though.

Must be something in the water over in Indiana, this is the second time in the last 12 months that some wingnut legislator is trying to roll back the clock 100 years or so.

Abortion would be illegal for most women in Indiana, including victims of rape and incest, under a bill filed this week in the Indiana House. Indiana's legislators have chipped away at abortion for decades, imposing waiting periods and other restrictions, but the measure proposed by Rep. Troy A. Woodruff, R-Vincennes, is the first direct attempt in years to outlaw most abortions.

The only exception allowed under House Bill 1096 would be for women whose health or life would be permanently impaired if a pregnancy continued. The bill would define life as beginning at conception and make it a felony to perform all other abortions. Anyone convicted would face up to eight years in prison.

Nice catch by Political Wire ... but in what alternate reality do they really think the votes for impeachment exist?

"The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress," Insight magazine reports.

Could be a trial balloon, I suppose...

John Kerry to lead a filibuster against Alito? Interesting. Markos' assessment seems pretty reality-based.

This whole "be offline for 6 to 8 hours at a time" thing with school and/or work really messes up my ability to stay on top of the news. I need to slack more (just kidding!).

So, for the first time in the Bush administration, there's a bill in play - the "Deficit Reduction Act" - that actually cuts Federal spending. Typically, it does so by screwing the poor. The CBO has weighed in on this bill, currently awating House approval. It's not a pretty picture, according to the NY Times:

The budget office predicted that 13 million low-income people, about a fifth of Medicaid recipients, would face new or higher co-payments for medical services like doctor's visits and hospital care.

It said that by 2010 about 13 million low-income people would have to pay more for prescription drugs, and that this number would rise to 20 million by 2015.

"About one-third of those affected would be children, and almost half would be individuals with income below the poverty level," the report said in addressing co-payments for prescription drugs.

Under the bill, states could end Medicaid coverage for people who failed to pay premiums for 60 days or more. Doctors and hospitals could deny services to Medicaid beneficiaries who did not make the required co-payments.

The budget office said the new co-payments would save money by reducing the use of medical services.

"About 80 percent of the savings from higher cost-sharing would be due to decreased use of services," the report said.

That last line is the money quote. This plan is pathetic.

Let's say a company is losing money. One easy way to get the bottom line under control is to fire a bunch of employees. However, if you don't look at why you're not making enough money and take steps to change that, the layoffs won't really solve anything. You'll just be a smaller money-losing company. The same holds true for Medicaid. If you don't fix the system, then forcing people off the rolls isn't really going to solve anything.

Oh, and no, HSAs are not a good solution.

My initial response on seeing this story was that it had to be some sort of bad joke. Apparently not.

Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

The article goes on to note that this is essentially the Oliver North defense, and that it more or less worked for North.

In the North case, the Iran-Contra independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, was forced to dismiss many of the central charges against North, including the most serious ones-that North defrauded taxpayers by diverting proceeds from arms sales to Iran to finance the Nicaraguan Contras-because intelligence agencies and the Reagan administration refused to declassify documents necessary for a trial on those charges.

Given this administration's penchane for secrecy, I would not at all be surprised if it worked again.

UPDATE: Shakes is POed too, but also feeling apathetic:

Every day, there are new stories emerging about which I should feel outraged, and yet five years of no accountability is making me weary. How many hundreds incidents of unethical or flatly illegal behavior am I meant to read without having the slightest bloody ability to do a damn thing about it?

Indeed. I feel the same way.

So now the US has two Vice-Presidents who shot someone while in office. At least Cheney didn't kill his guy.

A friend of mine with some actual experience hunting had this to say about the whole thing:

As a hunter, this perhaps one of the WORST POSSIBLE THINGS you can ever ever EVER do.

Quail hunting is dangerous. From what I read the lawyer was hidden from Cheney's sight and then another covey flushed into the Veep's direction.

RULE 1 of hunting: NEVER EVER EVER have 2 groups of hunters who aren't parallel with each other in some fashion. Draw a line and don't cross it. Better yet, stay spread out and never deviate.

The Veep is a f*cking asshole...but his hunting companion is none too bright either. Cheney's actions would have him banned from most hunting clubs in my area for life.

Snark on Cheney aside, both Josh Marshall and ReddHedd at firedoglake have more from people with actual hunting experience on why something really stinks about the Vice President's shooting accident.

There's a piece on the AP wires today with a long list of all the discrepencies around last weekend's Cheney shooting. I do think this story is going to fall off the news cycle soon, but it's a nice summary for those who're interested.

Three states have ruled that a Federal law banning late-term abortions is unconstitutional, but SCOTUS has decided they need to look at the case as well. Uh oh. That doesn't bode well.

And Shakes delivers a nice smackdown in response:

The big question, of course, is what is the point of ramming through this legislation [that restricts abortion] without a provision that allows it in cases where the mother’s life it as risk? And the obvious answer is that anti-choicers don’t trust women and their doctors to make that decision honestly—a position which pulls back the curtain on their “pro-life” Emerald City and reveals the contempt for life they actually have, in spite of their claims to the contrary. Only a person who has no respect whatsoever for human life could assume that women would invoke this rationale to terminate a pregnancy for no good reason, that expectant mothers who carry a pregnancy nearly to term would suddenly and randomly change their minds, with as much forethought as one might give to rearranging the living room furniture.

I might suggest that perhaps it's a specific contempt for women's rights and autonomy rather than a lack of respect for life in general, but she could be right. Either way, who cares? The net result is no good at all for women, regardless of the motivation.

Still, this is worth posting:

Scott and I were talking about Iraq in the context of Lebanon instead of Vietnam the other day. What bothers me is that it took less than 300 US casualties of Marines to get the US out of Lebanon, yet with this set of jokers in Washington, the kind of attack that killed 241 Marines in one day in Lebanon will be seen in the context of Iraq as a reason to throw even more members of the US armed forces into harm's way.

Civil war in Iraq, should it come, is not a good thing for anybody. Not for us, and definitely not for them. Whether it can even be stopped is the question at hand. And I really have no idea. I'd like to hope that a full-out civil war in Iraq is not inevitable, but the cynic in me says that cooler heads generally don't prevail until after a lot of blood has been shed.

Each game of chess means there's one less Variation left to be played Each day got through means one or two Less mistakes remain to be made...

Chess (Anderson, Ulvaeus, Rice)

Today's actions were just one early move in the bigger chess match that is abortion rights in America today. I'm not surprised at the latest burst of outrage around the blogs, but remember the big picture here, gang. South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds' signing the bill was a forgone conclusion. It doesn't start to get interesting until someone -- presumably Planned Parenthood -- files their challenge to the law and the courts get into gear.

This is chess -- think a few moves ahead. Not only is this law on the fast track to SCOTUS, but in addition, it's also nicely timed for the 2006 congressional election cycle. You can bet your bootie that congressional candidates all across the country are going to be asked to weigh in on their beliefs about women's reproductive rights by way of their comments on this case.

So, vent your spleen all you like, but save some energy for the battles to come, becasue come they will. And if you can, consider tossing some $ to Planned Parenthood; they're going to need it.

Time, by the way, has an interesting look at this issue. It's worth a read, here's a snippet:

In a country where two thirds of the public does not want to see Roe vs. Wade overturned, but nearly as many favor stricter limits on abortion, pragmatic abortion opponents have pushed for parental notification laws, waiting periods, restrictions on late-term abortions: The strategy was to chip away at Roe to try to shrink it, change its shape, and over time promote a “culture of life” that would view abortion less as a right than a tragedy, perhaps eventually a crime. That gradual approach requires a certain level of hypocrisy—or at least a willing suspension of moral belief—because if you truly equate abortion with murder, it’s hard to settle for slowing it down rather than stopping it altogether, right away: the Purist approach.

Nice to see an article that take a real look at this issue outside of the typical platitudes.

I've said this before, but something in a comment thread over at Shakes' place got me going enough to want to say it again.

Thread commenter Eric said:

once Roe is overturned, you are going to see a profound shift in the political landscape as women realize that their own civil, and reproductive, rights are being supressed by male legislatures. The Democrats will then have a strong rallying cry, and perhaps an infusion of support by women as they realize the difficulties, hardships, and dangers of back ally abortions.

Overturning Roe will be the turning point in the destruction of the religious wing-nut's power over the Republican Party.

This attitude infuriates me. It is just as odious an argument for progressives to make as it is for the wingnuts who sit safely behind their keyboards, cheering on the Iraq war. The bottom line for both types is: It's all good as long as someone else does the dying.

Progressive who argue this line of reasoning are generally sitting safely in deep-blue states or are financially well-off in red states. The only reason they consider the overturn of Roe to be an acceptable turn of events is because they assume that they will be able to insulate themselves from the casualties.

My question to them is: How many deaths do you consider to be "acceptable losses" before it happens?

And a few follow-ups: What if it was not some anonymous women in Red states who had to do the dying for Roe? Are you willing to let your wife / daughters / sisters / cousins / friends be the ones who have to bleed out on their kitchen floors or die from massive infections? And if you're not, then why are those other women's lives expendable?

In short, isn't that the exact thing we're fighting against?

Scott and I were chatting tonight, and he must have noticed the distinct lack of happiness in my voice, because he asked me what was wrong.

"This", I said.

"I can't believe we have to do this all over again. It's one thing to fight for rights you don't already have, but I hate it that now we have to go out and fight for rights we've already got," I said.

"They don't consider it over until they've won, honey," he said. "They started fighting with Roe and they've kept on fighting, and they're going to keep it up until they've gotten rid of Roe."

"Yeah," I sighed. "You're right. But I still hate it."

Digby is of a similar mind.

They really mean it. This is no bullshit. There is no downside to overturning Roe for them --- and if there is, they don't care. If they want to overturn Griswald, they'll do that too. They fought the gun control fight when people were freaking out over crime in the streets and political assassinations. Conservative absolutists don't give up just because liberals get up-in-arms.

[snip]

But more than anything else we must accept the fact that these people are serious. They want to outlaw abortion and they want to curtail people's access to birth control. They aren't lying. And as they've shown with gun rights, they are in it for the long haul. We must be just a stubborn as they are and seek to wear them down rather than let them wear us down.

Digby and Scott are right. We need to fight. The Right is smelling blood in the water on all aspects of women's reproductive self-determination, and they think they are closing in for the kill. We cannot let that happen.

Still, I want to note how much it completely sucks that we have to go back and fight this battle All. Over. Again.

Once should have been enough.

Usually, the bloviating on Sunday morning talk shows is uninspiring enough that sleeping in seems the better option. Today was one of the days when I woke up and found I should have gotten up early after all. Senator Russ Feingold announced on George Stephanopolis' show that he will be introducing a resolution to censure President Bush.

Although a censure of Bush would definitely gladden my heart, I found myself wondering more about the timing than anything else. Why now? Is it just to put an issue on the table for the fall elections, or is this part of a plan to raise his profile for 2008? Or is something else going on?

It might also be that the nose counts have been done behind the scenes and the Democrats have determined that they might actually be able to push through a censure whereas impeachment doesn't even remotely have a chance.

We need more George Clooneys in the world. Cute, smart, and not afraid to call bullshit:

This is an incredibly polarized time (wonder how that happened?). But I find that, more and more, people are trying to find things we can agree on. And, for me, one of the things we absolutely need to agree on is the idea that we're all allowed to question authority. We have to agree that it's not unpatriotic to hold our leaders accountable and to speak out.

That's one of the things that drew me to making a film about Murrow. When you hear Murrow say, "We mustn't confuse dissent with disloyalty" and "We can't defend freedom at home by deserting it at home," it's like he's commenting on today's headlines.

The fear of been criticized can be paralyzing. Just look at the way so many Democrats caved in the run up to the war. In 2003, a lot of us were saying, where is the link between Saddam and bin Laden? What does Iraq have to do with 9/11? We knew it was bullshit. Which is why it drives me crazy to hear all these Democrats saying, "We were misled." It makes me want to shout, "Fuck you, you weren't misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic."

Scott and I caught Markos' appearance on Olbermann tonight. All in all, he did a good job. However:

1) Damn, dude, SHAVE before you go to the studio. Either that or let them put some more makeup on. Your 5:00 shadow was really obvious.

2) A cotton sweater over a t-shirt is too dressed down for MSNBC.

It's not just what you say and how you say it. It's also how you look. Image counts. Daily Kos has already been painted as the home of scruffy liberal elites. The least you can do is not look the part.

Via Orcinus:

Quote of the day:

"Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You didn't place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible."

Jamie Raskin, March 1, 2006, in Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee testimony responding to Republican Sen. Nancy Jacobs' suggestion that discriminating against gays and lesbians regarding marriage is required by "God's Law."

As I puttered around on the Internet this afternoon I had iTunes going, with the full MP3 collection in rotation. All of a sudden something jumped out at me:

John Dickinson: ... Be careful, sir. History will brand him [John Adams] and his followers as traitors!

John Hancock: Traitors to what, Mr. Dickinson -- the British Crown, or the British half-crown? Fortunately there are not enough men of property in America to dictate policy.

Dickinson: Perhaps not, but don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor. And that is why they will follow us ...

Chorus of Conservatives:
... to the right
ever to the right
Never to the left
Forever to the right.

"Cool Cool Considerate Men" is a song I've heard many times in the almost 30 years since I first saw 1776 but hearing it today gave me goosebumps and made me realize something.

This isn't a new battle we fight in America today. Some of the terms of engagement have changed, but it's been going on some 230 years already, and I suspect it will continue long after today's actors have exited the stage and themselves entered history.

That's the frustrating part. Nobody wants to think that they won't get to see the fruit of their labors. Even Moses complained when G-d told him that he would not be allowed to enter the Promised Land. Especially today, when so much has speeded up, we expect that we'll get everything faster than we have before, including social change. It took roughly 100 years to go from the Declaration of Independence to the Emancipation Proclamation, and then another 100 years to get to the Civil Rights Act. And we can see how far we still have to go on issues of racial equality.

But if you think about it, although the pace of change has been painfully slow, over the long haul movement has definitely been in our favor. Things may look dark now, but history is on our side. The regressive set that wants nothing more than to preserve their own property and a way of life that only existed in their minds will not win. It's just a matter of time.

In other words, all this is not to say that we shouldn't keep fighting for the things we care about. We just need to keep in mind that this is a long struggle we're engaged in. We owe it to those who've come before, as well as those who will follow us, to play our part. If history is any guide, we're not going to get everything we want in our own lifetimes. This is real life, not a stage play where everything gets neatly resolved inside of three hours.But over the long haul, change will come.

History is on our side.

---

And while I have my copy of 1776 out, I thought I'd share a favorite funny bit as well:

Stephen Hopkins: Ben, I want y'to see some cards I've gone 'n had printed up that ought t'save everybody here a whole lot of time 'n effort, considering the epidemic of bad disposition that's been going around lately. [He reads:] "Dear Sir: You are without any doubt a rogue, a rascal, a villain, a thief, a scoundrel, and a mean, dirty, stinking, sniveling, sneaking, pimping, pocket-picking, thrice double-damned, no good son-of-a-bitch" -- and y'sign y'r name. What do you think?

Ben Franklin: Stephen, I'll take a dozen right now!

Me too.

Wow. Strong words coming from the Washington Post this Sunday:

Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before -- in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews.

I'm not enough of an expert on 19th century American history to make a firm call on whether the extent to which today's Republican party has become dominated by religionists is unprecedented or not. You can definitely argue that other American political movements and parties have been deeply influenced by religion. Even if it is not unprecedented, though, it's still troubling.

I'm amazed that the Post had the testicular fortitude to say so, though.

What he said:

There are well established processes for declassifying information which, in part, involve running the documents by people who supposedly should know whether revealing the information could harm national security or harm intelligence assets or whatever. So, whatever legal right the president has to declassify information at will is separate from the issue of whether any competent president would go about doing such a thing.

Whatever the legal issues, the president bypassed normal declassification procedures - put in place to ensure that revealing information does not threaten national security - in order to wage a political battle. Whether strictly legal or not, it's an act of a man who puts himself above the country. For shame.

Who cares?

Bush gets rids of his spokesman? Ooh, big deal. The guy who is ordered to lie for him is going to be replaced by another guy who is ordered to lie for him. And this will significantly change the direction of this disaster of an administration how?

Bush also changed the head of the Office of Management and Budget - that would be his accountant, for all intents and purposes.

So, we now have a new accountant, and a new mouthpiece who simply parrots what Bush tells him.

So President Bush has weighed in on soaring gas prices. His ideas?

- Stop adding to the Strategic Oil Reserve
- Encourage DAs to go after price gouging
- Relax environmental regulations
and
- Tell oil companies to build more refineries

None of which even remotely begins to address the real underlying issues -- increased demand, reduced supply and price speculation due to global insecurity. (Gee, I wonder why people are feeling so concerned about the global situation. Could it be his warmongering about Iran?)

As usual, a completely incompetent response to a situation his own incompetence helped create.

Bear being lazy.

The news about a sex scandal in Congress might wake him up though.

Or maybe not.

Yes, I too saw the C&L video of Colbert at the White House Correspondant's Dinner last night. I think I annoyed Scott a bit when I went so far as to say, 'I want to have this man's baby,' but WOW did he kick ass.

Shakes & co came up with a bunch more ways to say how much Colbert rocks, and even granted him the coveted "Brass Balls" award.

The plot thickens...

The U.S. prosecutor in the CIA leak case has told a court he plans to use as evidence a newspaper article with notes that he says were hand-written by Vice President Dick Cheney referring to Valerie Plame shortly before she was exposed as a CIA operative.

My guess: we will soon be told that Cheney's health is worsening, which is why he's been photographed nodding off in meetings recently. He will step down "for health reasons" and then when he is put on trial we'll be told that the medications he's been taking have messed with his memory and he can't remember anything having to do with l'affaire Plame.

It would be funny if it weren't so sad .... but actually, the bit about California was just funny, period.

I so, SO hope he runs again in 2008. Gore / Obama? Mmmmm.....

Although anyone who knows me (or reads this blog) will tell you that I am not shy about my opinions, I do try not to leap to conclusions about people's motivations. Given the choice between calling something "evil" or "stupid" I'll gravitate to "stupid" until there is good reason to move to "evil".

That said, this "Vox Day" person is either supremely unaware of the subtext in this passage (and therefore deeply stupid), or he's one sick, evil fuck. In this case, I'm leaning towards the latter.

[President Bush] will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: "Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it's just not going to work."

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

This is exactly the kind of eliminationist rhetoric that Orcinus regularly reports on. No wonder WorldNetDaily is publishing it. (And no, I am not giving them a free link. If you must, AmericaBlog has the link.)

In the "how can this be serious??!?!?" department:

New York has no national monuments or icons, according to the Department of Homeland Security form obtained by ABC News. (Click here for the actual document.) That was a key factor used to determine that New York City should have its anti-terror funds slashed by 40 percent--from $207.5 million in 2005 to $124.4 million in 2006.

The formula did not consider as landmarks or icons: The Empire State Building, The United Nations, The Statue of Liberty and others found on several terror target hit lists. It also left off notable landmarks, such as the New York Public Library, Times Square, City Hall and at least three of the nation's most renowned museums: The Guggenheim, The Metropolitan and The Museum of Natural History.

What kind of dreamworld are those people at DHS living in?

UPDATE: More here.

The Washington Note has a long and very interesting piece today on Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth.

It doesn't lend itself to easy exerpts, so just click through. It's worth a read.

Thw Washington Note has been flooded with guest posts this week, and this afternoon another excellent one went up: If Jack, Bobby, and Kenny Had Breakfast Today. Here's a taste:

Thinking about the results in the California House seat this week, if the Kennedys and [Kenny] O'Donnell were having breakfast the morning after, does anybody believe they would be saying anything like this: OK guys, Kerry got 44% in that District, and we got all the way up to 45%, and forced the Republicans to spend twice as much as us, to win the seat again?

In fact, if Jack, Bobby and Kenny had breakfast the day after that result, the FCC would not permit me on talk radio to use the exact words they would have used, but the word would go forth to Democrats everywhere: do not let this happen again.

Side note -- "13 Days" is easily my favorite Kevin Costner film.

Ah Digby, how well you put it:

Here's the plan. First, the Democratic terrorists are going to kick Lieberman's ass. After that, they are going to kick the Republican party's ass. And finally they will kick bin Laden's ass. We didn't create this hard core political environment, the Republicans did, with the help of self-serving Dems like Lieberman. Now somebody has to clean up all these messes. The crazed Democratic terrorists who are willing to cast aside all morality by ruthlessly supporting a primary challenger (who is not a travelling Deadhead, but rather a middle of the road self made millionaire) seem to be the only ones who are willing to do it.

I just hope you're right.

Nice to know that some things are too egregious even for this Supreme Court. Per the WaPo:

The Supreme Court today delivered a stunning rebuke to the Bush administration over its plans to try Guantanamo detainees before military commissions, ruling that the commissions violate U.S. law and the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of war prisoners.

In a 5-3 decision, the court said the trials were not authorized by any act of Congress and that their structure and procedures violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the four Geneva Conventions signed in 1949.

Now comes the fun part. Will the Bush adminsitration actually listen to the Supreme Court?

The guy who got me to start a weblog doesn't blog all that regularly these days, but he put up a post recently that I liked, not least because purple is one of my favorite colors. His "Can I Choose Purple?" is a rant about his frustration with the whole blue state / red state thing and expressing a wish that people could spend their time looking for the purple areas of agreement instead of the things that divide Americans.

Here's a sample:

It’s only when you force someone to pick sides that you start to polarize the issue. “Well gee, I guess if I have to choose between a rock and a hard place, I’ll go with that team.”

I don’t care what color you choose, but by putting up the context that you have to choose, you’re forcing people to go to one extreme, or another. Then with everyone entrenched on being either liberal, or conservative, you’ve created extremists for both sides and isn’t that what the whole War On Terror is about stopping?

Sure, America is divided when you force the artificial constructs of liberal or conservative, but for that matter, you might as well do a program about north versus south, because there are just as many differences there. The simple fact is that America is a diverse nation and whatever type of American you’re looking for, if you look hard enough, you’ll find it.

By and large, I agree with him. If you look hard enough, you can find common ground on at least some issues with people whom you utterly disagree with on other issues. And that's a good thing. It fosters communication and a sense that we are all in this together.

But here's the problem: what happens when not everyone feels that way? What happens when people crank up their fervent rhetoric higher and higher to the point that there is simply no way to deal rationally with them?

There are unfortunately way too many examples of the kind of behavior I'm talking about. But the one that got me posting about this issue today was something Glenn Greenwald looked at in extensive detail this weekend: how an article in the New York Times Travel section can be so completely misconstrued by people firmly settled into the " Us / Them" mindset.

The short version of the story is that the Times did an article about the vacation possibilities in a Maryland town, and happened to mention that two top Bush administration officials have vacation homes there.

If you read any newspaper's travel section, you'll notice that articles about 'new' vacation spots are very often capped by mentioning which famous person happens to go there or own a house there. This is utterly normal stuff. Yet somehow, the fact that the Times dared mention Cheney and Rumsfeld in the article transformed it from a typical piece of travel journalism into ... I am not kidding about this ... an instruction manual for al Qaeda on how to assassinate those men, planted in the Travel section by Times editors who are pissed off that the Bush administration is not happy with their recent reporting in other sections of the paper.

No, I'm not kidding. Go read Greenwald's piece.

So, how do you start to find common ground when people can look at the same thing and come away with such completely different responses?

Anybody?

Members of a party abide by primary results. There is no such thing as an "petitioning Democrat." If there was, [Lieberman] could accept the Republican endorsement and run as a "Republican Democrat."

Indeed.

UPDATE: Funny comment in the Atrios thread on this topic:

"What the hell is a "petitioning Democrat?"

It's kinda like a compassionate conservative.

Well said, Josh:

And along those lines, I wanted to finish this post by flagging something ominous that keeps coming up in the Israeli press. There's a mix of public and private communications going on between Jerusalem and Damascus. Israel is trying to assure Damascus that they don't plan or want to expand the war to include Syria. Syria is clearly worried that they will and has their troops on full alert. Israel is also warning in no uncertain terms that Syria getting involved will spark massive retaliation.

But there are persistent signs that the US is egging Israel on to bring the war to Damascus.

...

The world has sat by for six years and let Hizbullah's anamolous position in south Lebanon be Israel's problem. Whether their response was wise or just, I'll set aside for the moment. It's not about totalitarianism or Afghanistan or Iraq, at least not in an operational sense, or dingbat fantasies about Freedom and Terror. But there do appear to be forces in Washington -- seemingly the stronger ones, with Rice just a facade -- who see this whole thing as an opportunity for a grand call of double or nothing to get out of the disaster they've created in the region. Go into Syria, maybe Iran. Try to roll the table once and for all. No failed war that a new war can't solve.

I really hope Josh is wrong about the US's motives, but I fear he just might be right.

It's not an issue I'm very vocal about, but I definitely think that the presidential primary system needs some serious reworking. Shakes today has a pointer to some interesting facts on this issue and how the current system may be skewing the results in unexpected ways; it's definitely worth a read.

I hate it that we have to start thinking about this stuff 2+ years before the next presidential elections, but I suppose we need to.

Oh, and if you're talking about things that skew the system, you cannot ignore the fact that running for President is a multi-year enterprise costing hundreds of millions of dollars. I'd really love to see public financing of elections, but nobody in power would ever vote for that particular change; it's too threatening to the status quo.

On a private web board I belong to, one of the members said about the Lieberman / Lamont primary results tonight:

"i'm undecided on whether this is a great example of being a sore loser.
surely three viable choices is better than two? question, not a statement."

It's an interesting question. But ultimately, I think the answer is yes, this IS a good example of someone being a sore loser.

If an incumbent officeholder is defeated in his/her primary by a challenger, it sends a strong message that the members of that party do not want said person to hold that office anymore. The question then becomes, does that mean the incumbent should not have any opportunity to represent the entire electorate, based on the decision of the members of one party?

Of course not.

But that's not what's happening in Connecticut. Lieberman is trying to have his cake and eat it too. He wants the privileges of being an incumbent Democrat, with the attendant seniority and benefits that confers on him, but he also wants the freedom to blow off the will of the members of the Democratic party when it suits him.

That pisses me off.

The way I see it, if you're a Democrat, then you should accept the judgment of Democratic voters. If you're not a Democrat, then say so, and accept the consequences (no financial support from the party, no endorsements from high-profile Democrats, no access to other Democrats' fund-raising lists, etc). But to reject the will of Democratic voters while simultaneously expecting to be treated like any other Democrat is arrogant, gutless, and just plain wrong.

Today seems to be one of those days where I spend more time admiring what other people wrote instead of coming up with something of my own to say. Bad me. But still, this paragraph of Digby's is too good to pass up:

But when it came to the war there is one blindingly obvious fact that nobody seems to think is significant: the Vietnam War split the Democrats because it was run by Democrats. The Pentagon papers didn't indict a bunch of Republicans, after all. It was Lieberman-Lamont writ very, very large and with much bigger consequences.

The fact is that most Democrats, not being natural authoritarians, don't put up with this crap from their leaders, of either party. They hold them accountable. Now I realize that for some twisted illogical reason that means they are seen as unserious and irresponsible in American politics, but it doesn't change the fact that it's the right thing to do. When your country is engaged in dangerous wars based on lies and obscure reasoning, it is immoral to say nothing simply because you are afraid it will make you look bad.

Read the rest. To the people who stop by this corner of the Internet, it's preaching to the choir, but a well-written sermon is worth it.

I know that in left-leaning circles, it's not really fashionable to talk about politics and marketing in the same breath, but sometimes I get really frustrated when I see people forgetting one of the principal rules of marketing. You are not your customer, and as such, you need to tailor your message to them if you want to have a real impact.

It usually pops up on a blog in the form of an angry rant along the lines of, "Why doesn't Joe/Jane Sixpack WAKE UP and get outraged about The War / The Bush Administration / Global Warming / [insert latest outrage here]?". And I sympathize, I really do. I'm amazed at the capacity of people to rationalize and accept things that go against their own self-interest. But the fact of the matter is, they do. Ranting about it might let off some steam and help you feel better, but it's not going to change the facts on the ground.

The question then becomes, what do you do about it? And this is where a lot of people go off-track. They either write off those people as "sheeple" too stupid to know their own minds, burn out and stop trying, or (if you're a blogger) write long venting blog posts. What they rarely seem to do is take a good long look in the mirror at why they're not making any headway.

Let's say you're an activist with an Important Issue, and you want to raise awareness about that issue and move people towards taking action on your issue. You can write a blog, and issue press releases, and send mailings to targeted lists, and lobby Congress, and do a LOT of other stuff to try to raise awareness. And if you're good at your job, sooner or later, you get a group of people who are in your corner, and you feel good. But then, eventually, you seem to hit a plateau. You're doing OK with your core group, but there's large numbers of other people you just can't seem to reach. You get frustrated. Your issue is Important. You're doing everything right. Why do so few people seem to care?

Good question. This is where the marketing comes in. This is what you might call a market segmentation chart for political action:

In looking at the overall possible audience for your mission, there's four basic groups aligned along two spectrums: Interest / Non-Interest and Belief / Disbelief. Your initial success is going to be in that group of people who both are inclined to believe you, and are interested in the issue -- the Simpaticos. At a certain point, though, you're going to run out of Simpaticos and need to reach out beyond them. Your next choices are the Skeptics, who are interested in your issue, but for whatever reason, they are not inclined to listen to what you have to say about it, and the So Whats, who have no reason to distrust you but are just not interested in your particular mission. (The Skips are people who don't trust you and don't care about your issue. Skip them, they're not worth the time until you've gotten the others on board.)

The problem is, what worked for the Simpaticos is not going to work for the So Whats or the Skeptics. Yet, especially in politics or policy work, many people seem to feel that changing their approach or their message in order to reach out to new groups is somehow tantamount to "selling out" and hurting their original mission.

At which point, I have to ask, what are you really trying to achieve? Do you want to be right, or do you want to actually get something done? If you want to change the world, you have to change THIS world, not the idealized one in your head. And that means accepting the fact that not everyone thinks like you do and cares about what you care about. If you want to reach out beyond the Simpaticos, you need to stop getting frustrated that the Skeptics and the So Whats aren't listening to you and figure out how to communicate with them effectively.

It's not easy. Going beyond your comfort zone rarely is. But it beats losing.

Per Shakespeare's Sister:

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney: “The court focused on adult rights—they said if heterosexual couples can marry, then to have equal rights homosexuals have to also be able to marry. That court's mistake was they should have focused on the rights of children—because marriage is primarily about the development and nurturing of children.”

I'd really like to see someone ask Romney if that means he'd require fertility testing before issuance of a mariage license. What about automatic termination of the license after 7 years if the marriage is still childless? After all, we can't have people thinking marriage is about a LIFETIME COMMITTMENT TO THE PERSON YOU LOVE. Think about the children!

As you may (or may not) have noticed, I've been more than a little silent on what's going on in Washington DC lately. That's been a deliberate choice.

Basically, I've come to the conclusion that this Congress is utterly incapable of doing anything that substantively goes agains what the Bush White House wants. Nothing I can say or do is going to change that. And I'm tired of shouting down an empty well.

Let's see what happens after the elections. If there is some real change in the makeup of Congress, then we can talk about things like unconstitutional torture bills and all the other travesties that this Congress is pushing down our throats. But for now I'm going to hold my fire and reserve my ire.

2008 isn't all that far off. If we all burn out now, we won't have any resources to fall back on for that battle. So consider me a member of the reserves for now.

A lot of people have suggested that Bob Woodward is nothing but a White House stooge, but according to the New York Times, his newest book isn't quite as much a peaen to Bush as the last couple were.

I couldn't finish "Bush At War" and ignored the next one, but this appears interesting:

Mr. Woodward’s first two books about the Bush administration, “Bush at War” and “Plan of Attack,” portrayed a president firmly in command and a loyal, well-run team responding to a surprise attack and the retaliation that followed. As its title indicates, “State of Denial” follows a very different storyline, of an administration that seemed to have only a foggy notion that early military success in Iraq had given way to resentment of the occupiers.

The 537-page book describes tensions among senior officials from the very beginning of the administration. Mr. Woodward writes that in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Tenet believed that Mr. Rumsfeld was impeding the effort to develop a coherent strategy to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Mr. Rumsfeld questioned the electronic signals from terrorism suspects that the National Security Agency had been intercepting, wondering whether they might be part of an elaborate deception plan by Al Qaeda.

On July 10, 2001, the book says, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice at the White House to impress upon her the seriousness of the intelligence the agency was collecting about an impending attack. But both men came away from the meeting feeling that Ms. Rice had not taken the warnings seriously.

In the weeks before the Iraq war began, President Bush’s parents did not share his confidence that the invasion of Iraq was the right step, the book recounts. Mr. Woodward writes about a private exchange in January 2003 between Mr. Bush’s mother, Barbara Bush, the former first lady, and David L. Boren, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Bush family friend.

The book says Mrs. Bush asked Mr. Boren whether it was right to be worried about a possible invasion of Iraq, and then to have confided that the president’s father, former President George H. W. Bush, “is certainly worried and is losing sleep over it; he’s up at night worried.”

The book describes an exchange in early 2003 between Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the retired officer Mr. Bush appointed to administer postwar Iraq, and President Bush and others in the White House situation room. It describes senior war planners as having been thoroughly uninterested in the details of the postwar mission.

I can't say I'm surprised by any of this, but it's good to see it confirmed.

There will be a reckoning and a price to pay for this. And it all could have been avoided.

"We estimate that as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2003, about 655,000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation," said Gilbert Burnham of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States.

That means 2.5 percent of the Iraqi population have died because of the invasion and ensuing strife, he said.

The team's study, published online by the medical journal The Lancet, estimated pre-war deaths in Iraq at 143,000 a year, and said Iraq's death rate is now 2-1/2 times that of the pre-war period.

"Although such death rates might be common in times of war, the combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century," Burnham said.

U.S. says Iraq agrees on a timeline to peace. 2 weeks before the elections. Funny how that happens:

Iraqi leaders have assured the United States they will stick to a timetable of measures over the next year to curb violence and allow U.S. troops to go home, Washington's top officials in Iraq said on Tuesday.

Two weeks ahead of U.S. congressional elections that have put
President George W. Bush's Republicans on the defensive over their Iraq strategy, the U.S. ambassador and military commander in Baghdad told voters directly via a rare joint news conference that success was still possible, and on a "realistic timetable."

Insisting sectarian bloodshed had not caused Washington to water down its goal of a stable, democratic Iraq, envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said he expected Iraqi leaders to make "significant progress in the coming 12 months" in meeting "benchmarks."

We got a phone call a couple of hours ago from a real live person, reminding us to go vote tomorrow and making sure we knew where to go. I forgot to ask if the caller was from MoveOn or not, though. My bad.

And yes, we're all set for tomorrow. We're walking distance from the polling place, which is a plus. Coming from NYC, driving to go vote feels a little unnatural to me. (So does driving to synagogue, but that's a different issue).

San Mateo uses electronic voting machines, apparently. This will be my first experience with them, and I can't say I'm happy about it. I don't think this deep-Blue county is likely to be subject to Republican shenanigans, but I may ask for a paper ballot anyway.

One of the many tasks I dealt with this weekend was going over the various state and county propositions on the ballot. When we first moved to California, I would approach each one with an open mind and weigh them carefully to decide whether each was an idea worth my approval or not, but in the ensuing years, I've come to believe that the whole proposition system is deeply flawed. These days, I approach all ballot propositions from a default position of "No" unless I think that there's a damn good reason to vote otherwise.

Four propositions made the cut this year -- 1E, 86, 87, and 89 -- although in two cases (87 and 89) my support is pretty soft. I still might switch to "No" when in the voting booth. The rest of the ballot goes straight Democratic, although I'll be holding my nose when I get to Bustamante's name.

I do not know what the House and Senate will look like this time tomorrow. I'm reasonably confident we'll finally have Speaker Pelosi, but only barely. I do not think the Dems will take the Senate. We most definitely will not have the veto-proof majorities in both houses necessary to push through much of what we want to accomplish. But so long as we can at least take one chamber of the Congress, we'll be in a position to put the brakes on some of the worst impulses of this administration and start implementing some oversight onto past excesses.

That's a good start.

And 2008 is not all that far off anymore. I just hope that the Hillary juggernaut doesn't suck the life out of the process. We need more debate, more voices, and more options, not less.

Our local polling place was doing steady business but no long lines.

Interstingly, there was only one electronic machine per precinct, and most people were opting for paper ballots. I asked one of the poll workers why only one machine was available, and he said, "There were supposed to be five, but they had some problems, so we only got one."

Anyhow, our votes are cast. I hope the polling place doesn't run out of paper ballots!

MovableType's internal post count says that this will be entry #1000 into my blog. A rolling over of the counter, as it were.

How fitting. Because this is all I have to say to you tonight:

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you:
the next Speaker of the House of Representatives, the honorable Nancy Pelosi!

YEE EFFING HA!!!!!

WOOO HOOO!!!!!!

It's nice to actually win one for a change.

It's so very, very nice to actually feel good the day after Election Day! I didn't get a heck of a lot of work done today, but I'm smiling a lot. I wonder if I'll feel this happy in 2008?

Glenn Greenwald has a lengthy "day after" piece that is worth a read. Here's an excerpt:

The basic mechanics of American democracy, imperfect and defective though they may be, still function. Chronic defeatists and conspiracy theorists -- well-intentioned though they may be -- need to re-evaluate their defeatism and conspiracy theories in light of this rather compelling evidence which undermines them (a refusal to re-evaluate one's beliefs in light of conflicting evidence is a defining attribute of the Bush movement that shouldn't be replicated).

Karl Rove isn't all-powerful; today, he is a rejected loser. Republicans don't possess the power to dictate the outcome of elections with secret Diebold software. They can't magically produce Osama bin Laden the day before the election. They don't have the power to snap their fingers and hypnotize zombified Americans by exploiting a New Jersey court ruling on civil unions, or a John Kerry comment, or moronic buzzphrases and slogans designed to hide the truth (Americans heard all about how Democrats would bring their "San Francisco values" and their love of The Terrorists to Washington, and that moved nobody).

All of the hurdles and problems that are unquestionably present and serious -- a dysfunctional and corrupt national media, apathy on the part of Americans, the potent use of propaganda by the Bush administration, voter suppression tactics, gerrymandering and fundraising games -- can all be overcome. They just were.

Indeed.

Now, onward and upward!

The 2008 campaign season, I mean.

Vilsack's in.
Feingold's out.

I'm sad about Feingold. I'm not sure he could have won, but I really wanted to see him try.

Who's next?

From yesterday, but still worth quoting:

With the minimum wage in the air, I see the Econ 101 trolls are out in force. Look, unless you believe that the labor market is accurately characterized as perfectly competitive then not only is it the case that the minimum wage doesn't necessarily, reduce employment, it's actually quite possible that small increases in the minimum wage will increase it. To the extent that firms have market power, and there's plenty of reason do think they do, the impact of small minimum wage increases can potentially be either "paradoxically" to increase employment or to just basically be a wash. You can read Alan Manning's book if you're interested in more, or if I'm extra inspired later I'll given you the Econ101 version of monopsony (sadly, not always actually taught in Econ101) so that even smart Ph.D economists can understand.

The real point is that if the minimum wage has small or negligible employment effects, and there is both theoretical and empirical support for this idea, then it's a pretty effective and inexpensive poverty reduction program. Obviously if poverty reduction programs for poor people interest you less than, say, poverty reduction programs for oil executives then you don't much care about that.

By way of Paul the Spud, this bit of news is worth spreading around:

Rep.-elect Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, found himself under attack last month when he announced he'd take his oath of office on the Koran -- especially from Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, who called it a threat to American values.

Yet the holy book at tomorrow's ceremony has an unassailably all-American provenance. We've learned that the new congressman -- in a savvy bit of political symbolism -- will hold the personal copy once owned by Thomas Jefferson.

"He wanted to use a Koran that was special," said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare book and special collections division at the Library of Congress, who was contacted by the Minnesota Dem early in December. Dimunation, who grew up in Ellison's 5th District, was happy to help.

Jefferson's copy is an English translation by George Sale published in the 1750s; it survived the 1851 fire that destroyed most of Jefferson's collection and has his customary initialing on the pages. This isn't the first historic book used for swearing-in ceremonies -- the Library has allowed VIPs to use rare Bibles for inaugurations and other special occasions.

Very nice touch, linking to Koran to the author of the Declaration of Independence. I like it.

Starting off the morning, I noticed that Glenn Greenwald links to an NPR audiocast wherein longtime conservative Rod Dreher expereinces a crisis in his political faith.

As President Bush marched the country to war with Iraq, even some voices on the Right warned that this was a fool's errand. I dismissed them angrily. I thought them unpatriotic. But almost four years later, I see that I was the fool.

In Iraq, this Republican President for whom I voted twice has shamed our country with weakness and incompetence, and the consequences of his failure will be far, far worse than anything Carter did. The fraud, the mendacity, the utter haplessness of our government's conduct of the Iraq war have been shattering to me.

It wasn't supposed to turn out like this. Not under a Republican President.

I turn 40 next month -- middle aged at last -- a time of discovering limits, finitude. I expected that. But what I did not expect was to see the limits of finitude of American power revealed so painfully. I did not expect Vietnam.

As I sat in my office last night watching President Bush deliver his big speech, I seethed over the waste, the folly, the stupidity of this war.

I had a heretical thought for a conservative - that I have got to teach my kids that they must never, ever take Presidents and Generals at their word - that their government will send them to kill and die for noble-sounding rot - that they have to question authority.

On the walk to the parking garage, it hit me. Hadn't the hippies tried to tell my generation that? Why had we scorned them so blithely?

Powerful stuff, and I feel for the guy. It is not easy to admit that you were wrong and question yourself after so many years of believing you were right.

The Mahablog, picking up on the theme, muses:

The problem is, as it is with so many of his fellow travelers, that his understanding of politics remained childish. He seems to have retained a child’s simple faith that Democrats (and liberals) are “bad” and Republicans (and conservatives) are “good,” so one does not have to think real hard to know who’s right or wrong.

Something made me wonder about the implied one-sidedness of her analyisis. I am the same age as Dreher. However, my earliest political memories are not of the 1979 hostage crisis, but rather of Watergate and Vietnam. If a 13-year-old can be imprinted by the vision of Ronald Reagan triumphing over Iran and Jimmy Carter, how much more imprinting must it be for an 8-year-old to be told that the President was a crook and that Daddy was helping to organize a rally againt Vietnam?

It's easy to score points off the opposition by accusing them of being immature, but frankly, I don't think this particular line of argument is a particularly solid one. Being politically liberal does not grant you immunity from the influences of your childhood.

Over at No More Mister Nice Blog this week, Steve's been giving full coverage to recent nasty rumors about Barak Obama that have been circulating through the Internet and various right-wing news outlets. Based on information about where Obama went to school when he was 6 years old, the intent is to plant the seeds of fear in people and thereby scuttle his potential presidential run in 2008. To borrow a techie phrase, it's classic FUD.

I find the whole thing despicable, not least because the real fear-mongering part of this crap is based on the concept that all Muslims are somehow part of a vast, evil, and powerful worldwide conspiracy. Replace the word "Jew" for "Muslim" and this is the exact same horrible lie that's been lobbed against the Jews for centuries.

The sad part is, it was a highly effective lie. People still believe it today. And at least some of them will believe this too.

The 'silly season,' as Atrios likes to call it, has begun in earnest. One of my favorite bloggers, Shakespeare's Sister, has been hired by the John Edwards campaign, and she's not the only one. Undoubtedly other campaigns will start lining up to recruit other bloggers in the near future.

Although I'm pleased that Shakes got the gig, my happiness is not unalloyed with a little sadness. Although things are very nice and collegial around the left blogosphere so far, a day will inevitably come when the picture won't be so pretty.

My crystal ball is too cloudy for me to see who will be involved or exactly what will cause it, but the time will come when loud accusations of backstabbing, lying, and bad faith will start to fly. People will choose sides, write long, passionate denouncements, pick fights in comment threads, bring out the sock puppets, and rearrange their blogrolls, all because they're backing different candidates.

It will happen, and it will suck. Mark my words. I hope I'm proved wrong, but somehow, I doubt I will be.

As for me, it is way, way too early in the race for me to pick a horse. For one thing, so far, there doesn't seem to be any significant difference between the various Democratic candidates in the field. Six months from now, maybe, the distinctions will be more obvious and I will be ready to make a choice.

It's been a long, busy week. Today was a gorgeous, warm, springlike day, though, which was a very nice way to wrap the week up.

And this is some very welcome news too:

The U.S. House of Representatives denounced President George W. Bush's Iraq troop buildup on Friday in a symbolic challenge to his unpopular war strategy that is expected to lead to a mighty struggle over financing the extra troops.

The Democratic-led House voted 246-182 for a resolution that voices support for U.S. forces but opposes the Republican president's decision to send 21,500 more troops to bolster security in Baghdad and violent Anbar province.

[snip]

The resolution passed with support of all but two of the House's 233 Democrats and 17 of its 201 Republicans, many worried about their political fate should they stick with Bush. Polls say most Americans oppose adding troops in Iraq.

That's a very nice way to start the weekend.

In other news, I am going to take advantage of the three-day weekend upcoming to try upgrading the blog to a more recent version of Movable Type. Three+ years on version 2.6x is long enough. With luck, all will go well and I'll finally get some new features and a new look to the blog.

One possible outcome is that I utterly hose the site and get stuck starting from scratch, althought I dearly hope that's not the case. Either way, if you stop by over the weekend and things look a little odd, that's probably why.

The news this morning that Britain's Prince Harry is heading to Iraq does raise the question -- what do the Bush twins do with their days? They don't seem to have jobs or post-college academic commitments. I don't expect them to follow Harry's lead here, but (as Joe from AmericaBlog points out) you'd think they could at least get off their butts and volunteer at Walter Reed once in a while.

Jury finds Libby guilty.

Four of five counts of lying, perjury and obstructing justice, to be precise.

A tip of the hat to Discourse.net for this bit of news:

Halliburton, the big energy services company, said today that it would open a corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai and move its chairman and chief executive, David J. Lesar, there.

[snip]

The announcement about the Dubai move, which Halliburton made at a regional energy conference in Bahrain, comes at a time when the company is being investigated by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission for allegations of improper dealings in Iraq, Kuwait and Nigeria. Halliburton has also paid out billions in settlements in asbestos litigation.

Halliburton officials did not elaborate today on what the shift of its top executive might mean. The move seemed to raise questions about whether Halliburton might gain tax advantages or other benefits from shifting into a foreign country with pro-business regulations.

One might also wonder what the extradition treaties with Dubai are like.....

Josh Marshall has the details. More, undoubtedly, to follow:

We now know that Gonzales, McNulty and Moschella each lied to Congress. We know that the purge was a plan that began at the White House -- and it was overseen by two of President Bush's closest lieutenants in Washington -- [former White House Counsel Harriet] Miers and Gonzales. [AG Gonzales' Chief of Staff Kyle] Sampson is the second resignation. There will certainly be more.

I IMed a link to a friend earlier today about the news that Karl Rove was, unsurprisingly, more involved than the White House originally admitted in the current US attorney firing scandal. Her response was (more or less): "I wonder if this is what it felt like during Watergate".

I grew up with two highly politically aware parents and am old enough to remember Watergate. I don't remember the story unfolding piece by piece -- I mostly remember odd details like the "Impeach Nixon" buttons -- but I do know exactly where I was the day Nixon resigned, becasue we were on an airplane to Hawaii when it happened, and the captain got onto the intercom to announce the news.

All of which is a long way of saying, I don't know if this is like Watergate, or just another three-day scandal. Even if it is, I doubt we'll have the same outcome. If Gonzales and Rove get booted from their jobs, well, that's at least a step in the right direction. We'll know more next week, maybe, at Senator Schumer's hearings.

Just in case you missed it:

As the Senate limits Gonzales' hiring authority, the step-by-step process of fixing this god-awful mess continues. A banal observation, but it's the best I can do right now.

I really haven't had the time to follow the Gonzales firestorm with anything near the attention necessary to offer intelligent or useful commentary. I am a bad blogger.

I posted a somewhat shorter version of these thoughts on a private web board tonight, then decided I might as well expand my thoughts into a blog post. It's in response to an ongoing discussion of when, if ever, the Congress will impeach President Bush:

I'm quite sure that even some Republicans heartily wish Bush were out of office, although probably not for the same reasons as we Democrats. Even so, that doesn't increase the likelihood of impeachment.

It feels really good to say "Impeach him!" and visualize the humiliating trial and spectacle that Bush deserves. Hell, I'd love to see it too. I'd love to see Cheney go down, and Rove led away in handcuffs, and all of these assclowns get the punishment they so richly deserve. Don't think that because I disagree with [the people waiting impatiently for impeachment] that I don't want those things too.

But this is real life, and real life is very, very rarely that neat and clean. If I've learned anything in my years on this planet, I've learned that human beings are drawn to the extremes. We love drama, we love showdowns, we love big, exciting finishes. We love vengeance and payback and bad people getting what they deserve. And in situations like this one, we want to think that that's what we're going to get. We want it so badly we convince ourselves that it's the only possible course of action.

The other side of the coin is that inertia is a powerful motivator too. People are very much in love with the status quo, and they deeply fear change. There's also that fact that despite all the crap that this administration does, we still have a country to run, and only so may hours in the day to get things done. Is payback for past offenses more important that that? Not everyone thinks so. After all, Bush is termed out, and there's less than 2 years to go until Election Day 2008. Perhaps it would be better to just get through these next two years as best we can, minimize the damage as much as possible, and then move on with some other President.

The end result of any event is hardly ever as good or as bad as people predict. Usually, what you get is something that's more nuanced, more towards the middle of the possible range of results. What does that mean for the current Gonzales / Rove / US Attorney scandal? I don't know, but I strongly suspect that what will happen will end up looking a lot more like the Libbey trial than like the Nixon impeachment.

Two things that jumped out at me this morning:

1) Glenn Greenwald's piece on the new WMD conspiracy theory currently making the right-wing rounds. Here's a hint: any theory which requires the complicity of hundreds if not thousands of government workers on all parts of the political spectrum is utter BS. Doesn't matter what theory you're talking about, that's just basic human nature.

2) This excellent video (slightly NSFW, profanity):

And the melamine contamination problem spreads to more parts of the American food chain: More animals got tainted food.

What irks me is that the only thing the politicians seem to be responding to is that "OMG terrorists might put something in our food". Which is true, but it's not the immediate threat. How about the fact that potentially lethal industrial-grade chemicals are being dumped into our food supply RIGHT NOW? Shouldn't that be enough of a reason to take action?

This is a start:

[Congressional] Democrats say they will introduce legislation that would permit the FDA to force mandatory food recalls -- a power it now lacks -- and increase funding to hire more inspectors.

Hopefully this President will actually sign such legislation.

One thing we did this weekend was to head over to Whole Foods and attempt to do all our weekly grocery shopping there. We've gone there before for specialty items, but never tried to do our 'normal' grocery shopping. And with the exception of one item (some Aquafina flavored water that Scott really likes) we were able to do so, and we came home with several bags full of organic, non-big-brand food for the house. A few items matched the prices we would pay at a conventional grocery store (like pasta and tomato paste), but most items were a little more. Some few were double the price of their 'conventional' alternatives. For example, we skipped buying and meat or chicken -- with boneless chicken breasts going for more than $6 a pound in the "sale" bin, the price was too high.

Although we have a bunch of nice, "safe" food in the house, I don't feel particularly good about our shopping trip. It's no secret that the food shopping options for poor people are worse than the ones for more well-off ones, but Whole Foods and their higher prices seems to raise the bar even further. As amazing as Whole Foods is, the people who really need the added benefits of a healthy diet are the people least able to afford their prices.

You shouldn't have to be well-off to be able to have access to safe food. And you shouldn't have to scare the government with the terrorism bogeyman in order to get them to do something about the safety of the nation's food supply.

This caught my eye today: Barack Obama is getting a Secret Service detail.

The Secret Service said Thursday that Democratic Sen. Barack Obama was being placed under its protection, the earliest ever for a presidential candidate.

Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren said Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff authorized Obama's protection after consultations with the congressional advisory committee.

With more than 9 months to go before the first primary, the death threats he's getting must be pretty bad for them to start protecting him now.

While double checking a definition this morning, I noticed something funny about the Google AdWords on the page. Click through for a bigger version of the image, if you can't see it here.

Yes, that's right. When you look up "Disingenuous" the first two Google AdWords that come up are for George W Bush and Ann Coulter.

Heeheehee.

Not sure about that "Are you gay?" item for #3 though.

Skippy:

you know things are bad in wingerville when they are so desperate for good news about conservatives, they cheer france.

Heh, indeed.

Time has an excerpt. It's worth a read, and will likely make you wonder yet again why this man is not our President.

Here's a favorite graf or two to whet your whistle:

Many Americans now feel that our government is unresponsive and that no one in power listens to or cares what they think. They feel disconnected from democracy. They feel that one vote makes no difference, and that they, as individuals, have no practical means of participating in America's self-government. Unfortunately, they are not entirely wrong. Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for easy manipulation by those seeking their "consent" to exercise power. By using focus groups and elaborate polling techniques, those who design these messages are able to derive the only information they're interested in receiving from citizens—feedback useful in fine-tuning their efforts at manipulation. Over time, the lack of authenticity becomes obvious and takes its toll in the form of cynicism and alienation. And the more Americans disconnect from the democratic process, the less legitimate it becomes.

[snip]

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

In short, the Internet. Well, so far it's not getting taken all that seriously by the 'real world' of politics except as a means of raising money (and yes, that is the cynicism Gore referred to talking), but perhaps that will change with time.

PS: Welcome, Buzzfeed visitors!

I've been following the immigration reform bill as it slowly winds it way through the legislation process. It's starting to look like the bill's final form is settling into place, but since there have been no formal votes nor a bill sent to the President, it's a little early to start an in-depth dissection.

That said, I'm pretty much with Ezra on this one.

The worth of the new bill hinges on whether you think an effective amnesty for the country's 12 million undocumented immigrants is worth a 400,000 to 600,000 person guest worker program. That's the trade-off: A bad guest-worker program set against a broader path-to-citizenship program. My sense is that the system we've got right now is so bad, that even a regulated guest worker program is better than what we're living with. And bringing the 12 million undocumented immigrants who currently live in this country into the light would be a huge boon. So my snap reaction is that the guest worker program is problematic, but this might nevertheless be a deal worth making.

I really don't like guest worker programs: they've been problematic in other countries, and given the proclivities of many US employers, I don't see that we'd be able to avoid similar problems.

I'm also a bit dubious about the whole "go back to where you came from to apply" part of the process for moving current illegals onto "the path to citizenship". Why should someone have to make a multi-thousand mile round-trip just to file some papers? That seems wildly counterproductive and even a bit punitive.

And I know that some of my friends currently on the path towards citizenship are disappointed that they may not be able to bring their parents to America as easily, if at all.

At any rate, I'm reserving the right to change my mind on this issue if the final bill changes significantly and/or when more details emerge.

It's about time somebody in Congress proposed something like this: the Food Safety Act of 2007.

Currently, 12 federal agencies and 35 laws govern food safety, often with overlapping jurisdictions and different priorities.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration play the biggest roles in making sure the food Americans eat is safe. The USDA oversees meat and poultry, while the FDA is responsible for eggs and produce.

The lines are not always clear-cut. For example, cheese pizzas fall under the FDA, while pepperoni pizzas fall under the Department of Agriculture.

In January, the Government Accountability Office added federal oversight of food safety to its list of "high risk" programs in need of "broad-based transformation." The GAO urged Congress to consider "a fundamental re-examination of the system ... before public health and safety is compromised."

Critics point to the FDA, in particular, as needing reform. The FDA oversees 80 percent of the food supply but receives only 20 percent of the funding.

But would Bush sign it?

I'd be a lot more outraged by shenanigans like this: White House won't rule out Libby pardon if they were not so utterly predictable from this administration.

I've definitely got outrage fatigue. And it's showing in my blogroll too; in recent months, the balance has tipped from "mostly political blogs with a few others thrown in" to "business and tech blogs, food blogs, and a few political blogs too". Six years of this administration has taken its toll: I am tired of being angry, and reading the same rants by the same people over and over again isn't interesting anymore.

This might be related to why Obama seems to be doing so well lately. I can't be the only person out there who is sick of the anger, the divisiveness, and the screaming. A Presidential candidate whose unique selling point is a passionate call to positive action can seem mighty attractive when you're burned out on the other emotions.

We spent last night down on Stanford campus with some friends, picnicking, enjoying a concert, and finally, a fireworks display. Great weather, good friends, good food, and a good time.

Except at the end. The soundtrack for the fireworks was a standard Boston Pops set of classic American war music. The glorification of war and of American armed might in the music struck me as both ironic and sad, given how badly the war in Iraq is going. Usually, when I see fireworks, I find myself thinking about John Adams and how he though the 4th should be celebrated, and wondering what he would think of the America of today. This year, though, I mostly though about the soldiers over in Iraq, and what they might be thinking of today.

The sooner they all come home, the better.

Here's a news item I didn't want to see this Sunday:

Cindy Sheehan, the soldier's mother who galvanized the anti-war movement, said Sunday that she plans to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unless she introduces articles of impeachment against President Bush in the next two weeks.

Sheehan said she will run against the San Francisco Democrat in 2008 as an independent if Pelosi does not seek by July 23 to impeach Bush.

On the one hand, part of being an effective activist is being able to take extreme action that will draw notice to your cause (PETA is particularly good at this) and Sheehan is certainly attracting attention. People are listening, people are taking, and the issue is getting more light shone on it. In that regards, the threat is effective.

On the other hand, I think it's a terrible idea. It's bad for Pelosi, it's bad for the Democrats, and most important, it's bad for Sheehan herself. It was only some six weeks ago that she announced that she was retiring from the anti-war movement. Some retirement -- launching a career in electoral politics with a third-party attempt to try to take down the Speaker of the House?

It sounds more like a recipe for additional personal and financial heartache for a woman who has already suffered quite enough. She won't win, and she'll probably further hurt her reputation (and her emotional stability) by trying.

The pain, grief, and anguish that Cindy Sheehan feels over the loss of her child, and the extent to which those demons drives her, is not something I can begin to wrap my brain around. But surely, there's other ways to expunge that pain and those demons than by an action so destructive to herself and to the cause she is trying to fight for?

Kevin Drum Has a good post up today about the difference between a potential Obama foreign policy as compared to a Clinton foreign policy. I agree with his take, and even better, he has a nice summation of why all this actually matters:

It's rare to have a discussion about foreign policy that actually revolves around a concrete point, and by foreign policy standards this one counts as at least a mud brick point. Basically, do you think the United States should, as a routine part of its foreign policy, say that it's willing to talk to any country that's willing to talk to us? That the mere act of talking isn't a tacit capitulation to a rogue regime's demands?

I sure think so, and not just for the obvious reason that talking can sometimes lead to actual results. The bigger reason is that if you talk routinely, then the mere act of talking isn't a tacit capitulation to a rogue regime's demands and can't possibly be spun that way. It's just something we do.

Emphasis added. Good one, Kevin.

I don't read Andrew Sullivan regularly, but Ezra called this piece on Clinton and Obama to my attention today, and it's quite interesting, especially this bit:

Clinton has internalized to her bones the 1990s sense that conservatism is ascendant, that what she really believes is unpopular, that the Republicans have structural, latent power of having a majority of Americans on their side. Hence the fact that she reeks of fear, of calculation, of focus groups, of triangulation. She might once have had ideals keenly felt; she might once have actually relished fighting for them and arguing in their defense. But she has not been like that for a very long time. She has political post-traumatic stress disorder. She saw her view of feminism gutted in the 1992 campaign; she saw her healthcare plan destroyed by what she saw as a VRWC; she remains among the most risk-averse of Democrats on foreign policy and in the culture wars.

It's an insightful take on Clinton and who know, Sullivan might even be right. He goes on to compare her with Obama:

The traumatized Democrats fear the majority of Americans are bigoted, know-nothing, racist rubes from whom they need to conceal their true feelings and views. The non-traumatized Democrats are able to say what they think, make their case to potential supporters and act, well, like Republicans acted in the 1980s and 1990s. The choice between Clinton and Obama is the choice between a defensive crouch and a confident engagement. It is the choice between someone who lost their beliefs in a welter of fear; and someone who has faith that his worldview can persuade a majority.

Traumatic events will have an impact, that's a given. The real question is, what lessons do you learn from the past, and how do you choose to respond to it as you move on in life? I understand Clinton's risk-aversion, but given that significant repair job that the next President is going to have on their hands, I'm not sure that someone whose impulse response is to be cautious is necessarily the right person for the job at this point in time.

It's amazing that in a world with ever-increasing amounts of available information, people can still fall prey to flat-out incorrect conspiracy theories, but they do. This article in the Nation about the so-called NAFTA Superhighway is a prime example.

I particularly liked this graf, which attempts to explain why so many people are willing to accept rumor over reality:

The myth of the NAFTA Superhighway persists and grows because it taps into deeply felt anxieties about the dizzying dislocations of twenty-first-century global capitalism: a nativist suspicion of Mexico's designs on US sovereignty, a longing for national identity, the fear of terrorism and porous borders, a growing distrust of the privatizing agenda of a government happy to sell off the people's assets to the highest bidder and a contempt for the postnational agenda of Davos-style neoliberalism. Indeed, the image of the highway, with its Chinese goods whizzing across the border borne by Mexican truckers on a privatized, foreign-operated road, is almost mundane in its plausibility.

Although apparently there is an effort underway in Texas to build a bunch of new highways there.