Bark Bark Woof Woof: September 2007

Sunday, September 30, 2007

Christian Conservatives Are Revolting

...and to complete the Mel Brooks homage, "You said it! They stink on ice!"

Actually, they are thinking of bolting from the Republican Party and backing a third-party candidate if Rudy Giuliani is the nominee.

The group making the threat, which came together Saturday in Salt Lake City during a break-away gathering during a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy, includes Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who is perhaps the most influential of the group, as well as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, the direct mail pioneer Richard Viguerie and dozens of other politically-oriented conservative Christians, participants said. Almost everyone present expressed support for a written resolution that “if the Republican Party nominates a pro-abortion candidate we will consider running a third party candidate.”

The question then becomes who would they pick? Who's out there they could rope in that thinks the way they do that isn't already either in the race (Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee) or is just too crazy for even them to back (Alan Keyes)?

I think it's hilarious that these blowhards are up the creek with Giuliani as the front-runner. After all their big talk about being the heart and soul of the base of the Republican Party, after all their threats, intimidation, coercion, and just plain bigotry and bullshit against gays, women, science, the law, the Constitution and anything else that doesn't fit into their exact measurement of right and wrong, they end up finding out that they can't even get the Republicans to do their bidding.

I do hope they run a third-party candidate, and I hope that whichever white bread right wing blowhard they pick sinks like a turd in well. Then we can finally give them the burial they so richly deserve.

Sunday Reading

- The Plans for Iran: Seymour Hersh reports that the Bush administration is coming up with the political and military rationale for attacking Iran.

In a series of public statements in recent months, President Bush and members of his Administration have redefined the war in Iraq, to an increasing degree, as a strategic battle between the United States and Iran. “Shia extremists, backed by Iran, are training Iraqis to carry out attacks on our forces and the Iraqi people,” Bush told the national convention of the American Legion in August. “The attacks on our bases and our troops by Iranian-supplied munitions have increased.... The Iranian regime must halt these actions. And, until it does, I will take actions necessary to protect our troops.” He then concluded, to applause, “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities.”

The President’s position, and its corollary—that, if many of America’s problems in Iraq are the responsibility of Tehran, then the solution to them is to confront the Iranians—have taken firm hold in the Administration. This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

The shift in targeting reflects three developments. First, the President and his senior advisers have concluded that their campaign to convince the American public that Iran poses an imminent nuclear threat has failed (unlike a similar campaign before the Iraq war), and that as a result there is not enough popular support for a major bombing campaign. The second development is that the White House has come to terms, in private, with the general consensus of the American intelligence community that Iran is at least five years away from obtaining a bomb. And, finally, there has been a growing recognition in Washington and throughout the Middle East that Iran is emerging as the geopolitical winner of the war in Iraq.

During a secure videoconference that took place early this summer, the President told Ryan Crocker, the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, that he was thinking of hitting Iranian targets across the border and that the British “were on board.” At that point, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interjected that there was a need to proceed carefully, because of the ongoing diplomatic track. Bush ended by instructing Crocker to tell Iran to stop interfering in Iraq or it would face American retribution.

At a White House meeting with Cheney this summer, according to a former senior intelligence official, it was agreed that, if limited strikes on Iran were carried out, the Administration could fend off criticism by arguing that they were a defensive action to save soldiers in Iraq. If Democrats objected, the Administration could say, “Bill Clinton did the same thing; he conducted limited strikes in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and in Baghdad to protect American lives.” The former intelligence official added, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, ‘You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.’ But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.”

Meanwhile, according to the Los Angeles Times, the Iraqis are doing their best to make nice with Iranians, hoping to avoid just such an attack.

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has secured a pledge from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to help cut off weapons, funding and other support to extremist militiamen in Iraq, U.S. and Iraqi officials said Saturday.

Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said there were signs of a slight drop in the types of attacks associated with Shiite militants since the deal was reached in August, and he raised the possibility that U.S. and Iraqi officials might be able to do something in return. But he said it was too early to tell whether there had been a real reduction in cross-border support.

"Honestly, and I really mean this, all of us would really welcome the opportunity to see this, confirm it and even -- in whatever way we could -- to reciprocate," Petraeus said during a visit to the Baghdad district of Karada. "But it really is wait-and-see time right now still."

Iranian officials have made no announcement of such a commitment and could not immediately be reached for comment. But they have consistently denied U.S. accusations that members of the elite Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard are supplying advanced weaponry and other help to Shiite militiamen attacking U.S. troops.

Maliki's aides characterized the agreement reached during a three-day visit to Iran as a promise to better police the long and porous border between the two countries.

"The agreement included a promise by the Iranian government to increase the number of Iranian forces on the border and to increase the efforts to guard the 1,000-kilometer-long [620-mile] frontier," said Farooq Abdullah, one of Maliki's political advisors.

Somehow I get the feeling that regardless of what the Iraqis do, the Bush administration will push for an attack on Iran and not, as noted in the Hersh article, give a rat's ass about the consequences. It goes along with everything they've done so far.

- Reporting While Black: What happens when a black reporter covers a story on crime in a black neighborhood in North Carolina: he becomes a part of the story.

The police officer had not asked my name or my business before grabbing my wrists, jerking my hands high behind my back and slamming my head into the hood of his cruiser.

“You have no right to put your hands on me!” I shouted lamely.

“This is a high-crime area,” said the officer as he expertly handcuffed me. “You were loitering. We have ordinances against loitering.”

Last month, while talking to a group of young black men standing on a sidewalk in Salisbury, N.C., about harsh antigang law enforcement tactics some states are using, I had discovered the main challenge to such measures: the police have great difficulty determining who is, and who is not, a gangster.

My reporting, however, was going well. I had gone to Salisbury to find someone who had firsthand experience with North Carolina’s tough antigang stance, and I had found that someone: me.

Except that I didn’t quite fit the type of person I was seeking. I am African-American, like the subjects of my reporting, but I’m not really cut out for the thug life. At 37 years old, I’m beyond the street-tough years. I suppose I could be taken for an “O.G.,” or “original gangster,” except that I don’t roll like that — I drive a Volvo station wagon and have two young homeys enrolled in youth soccer leagues.

As Patrick L. McCrory, the mayor of Charlotte and an advocate of tougher antigang measures in the state, told me a couple of days before my Salisbury encounter: “This ganglike culture is tough to separate out. Whether that’s fair or not, that’s the truth.”

Tough indeed. Street gangs rarely keep banker’s hours, rent office space or have exclusive dress codes. A gang member might hang out on a particular corner, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, but one is just as likely to be standing on that corner because he lives nearby and his shirt might be blue, not because he’s a member of the Crips, but because he’s a Dodgers fan.

The problem is that when the police focus on gangs rather than the crimes they commit, they are apt to sweep up innocent bystanders, who may dress like a gang member, talk like a gang member and even live in a gang neighborhood, but are not gang members.

- A Familiar Ring: Frank Rich reminds the Democrats that they've been down this road before of losing a sure win. (And so have the Republicans.)

The Democrats can't lose the White House in 2008, can they?

Some 13 months before Election Day, the race's dynamic seems immutable. Americans can't wait to evict the unpopular president and end his disastrous war. As the campaign's poll-tested phrasemaking constantly reminds us, voters crave change above all else. That means nearly any Democrat might do, even if the nominee isn't the first woman, black or Hispanic to lead a major party's ticket.

The Republican field of aging white guys, meanwhile, gets flakier by the day. The front-runner has taken to cooing to his third wife over a cellphone in the middle of campaign speeches. His hottest challenger, the new "new Reagan," may have learned his lines for "Law & Order," but clearly needs cue cards on the stump. In Florida, even the most rudimentary details of red-hot local issues (drilling in the Everglades, Terri Schiavo) eluded him. The party's fund-raising is anemic. Its snubs of Hispanic and African-American voters kissed off essential swing states in the Sun Belt and moderate swing voters farther north.

So nothing can go wrong for the Democrats. Can it?

Of course it can, and not just because of the party's perennial penchant for cutting off its nose to spite its face. (Witness the Democratic National Committee's zeal in shutting down primary campaigning in Florida because the state moved up the primary's date.) The biggest indicator of potential trouble ahead is that the already-codified Beltway narrative for the race so favors the Democrats. Given the track record of Washington's conventional wisdom, that's not good news. These are the same political pros who predicted that scandal would force an early end to the Clinton presidency and that "Mission Accomplished" augured victory in Iraq and long-lasting Republican rule.

[...]

Senator Clinton may well be the Democrats' most accomplished would-be president. But we won't know for certain until she's tested by events she can't control. Had Bill Bradley roughed up Mr. Gore in 2000, it might have jolted him into running a smarter race against George W. Bush.

In this context it's worth noting that Mr. Bush's desperate lame-duck campaign to brand himself as a reincarnation of Harry Truman is not 100 percent ludicrous. A tiny part of the analogy could yet pan out. In 1948, Washington's commentators and pollsters were convinced that Americans, tired of 15 years of Democratic rule, would vote in a Republican. Like today's G.O.P., the Democrats back then were saddled with both an unloved incumbent president and open divisions in the party's ranks on both its left and right flanks. Surely, the thinking went, the beleaguered Democrats couldn't possibly vanquish a presidential candidate from New York known for his experience, competence, uncontroversial stands and above-the-fray demeanor.

You don't want to push historical analogies too far, but it's hard not to add that the campaign slogan of that sure winner, Thomas Dewey, had a certain 2008 ring to it: "It's time for a change."

- I'm Here, President Ahmadinejad: A gay Iranian comes out.

I'm one of those people Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says don't exist. I'm a 25-year-old Iranian, and I'm gay.

I live in Tehran with my parents and younger brother and am studying to be a computer software engineer. I've known that I was different from my brother and other boys for as long as I can remember.

I was born in 1982, two years after the start of the Iran-Iraq War, and when I was growing up, most boys loved to play with toy guns, pretending to be soldiers in the war. I liked painting, and playing with dolls. My brother preferred to play with the other boys, so most of the time I was lonely.

I was 16 when I first realized that I was sexually attracted to some of the boys in my high school classes. I had no idea what I could do with that feeling. All I knew about homosexuals were the jokes and negative stories that people told about them. I thought a homosexual was someone who sexually abused children -- until I saw the word "homosexual" for the first time in an English encyclopedia, and found a definition of myself.

After that, I started searching the Internet for information about homosexuality. Eventually I came across two Iranian Web sites where I could communicate with other gays. I was 17. At first, I didn't want to give anyone my e-mail address because I was afraid that I could be abused or that my parents might find out, or that people on the site could be government spies. But I finally decided to exchange e-mails with one person, and after some correspondence, we spoke on the phone. I'll never forget the first time I heard the voice of another gay man. We arranged to meet at the home of a friend of his, and the three of us talked for hours. I felt so comfortable with them. The next day I learned that the friend was interested in me. His name was Omid, and we became boyfriends.

I also became interested in the gay social movement that started in 2000. Around that time, Iranian society became more open under President Mohammad Khatami's reformist government. The Internet became common, and everybody started talking about issues they couldn't even have thought about before.

Until then, the gay world had been underground and secret. Under the Islamic Republic, gays could face the death penalty; they could also lose their jobs and family support. Meetings and parties took place only in the most trusted private homes. Heterosexuals were almost never seen at these gatherings. Even fellow gays were only slowly accepted. It could take years for a homosexual to become known and trusted. Most older gays were married and even had children, and their family and friends had no idea of their sexuality.

There was a handful of gathering places for outcast homosexuals in Tehran, people who couldn't hide their sexuality and had lost their jobs, or people whose families had disowned them, and who had turned to selling sex for money. Those places were always being attacked by the paramilitaries.

My generation was the first to start the coming-out process. I decided to come out when I was 20. I thought that if I just talked to my parents about it, they would accept my reasoning. I was totally wrong. Their reaction was horrible. They started to restrict me -- I couldn't use the phone or invite any of my friends over, and they cut back on financial support. Part of their reaction was religious; part was their concern that I couldn't survive as a homosexual in Iran. They were also ashamed to tell the rest of our family and wanted to see me married to a woman.

We argued constantly; they insisted that I wasn't gay, that I only thought I was. It took me years to calm them down, but over time, they lost any hope of changing me, and they started to change themselves. Now they accept that I'm gay, but they're not happy about it.

Meanwhile, the gay community has worked to educate people via Web sites and dialogue with our friends and families. But we've found that the most effective way of changing people's minds is coming out. When people see us as reasonable humans, their negative views of homosexuality are shattered. I can honestly say there's been a change in the way Iranians view us now. Gay life in Iran isn't as underground as it used to be. We have gay parties with heterosexual guests -- and even our parents! We have places where we can congregate -- in coffee shops, special park areas and even certain offices. Many more homosexuals are willing to come out these days. Activists estimate that .5 percent of the Iranian population is homosexual, bisexual or transsexual.

But we weren't surprised by Ahmadinejad's comments about gays at Columbia University. What else could he say? We stone homosexuals in Iran because that's what God wants? It was a joke, but he gave the only answer he could.

I wish our president could learn to respect gays instead of denying us. But I'm not holding my breath. In the meantime, my only response to his remarks is this: Whatever he says, Ahmadinejad can't change the fact that we exist.

- Snark of the Day: Maureen Dowd on nepotism:

Without nepotism, Hillary would be running for the president of Vassar. But then, without nepotism, W. would be pumping gas in Midland — and not out of the ground.

- Doonesbury: That's heavy, man...

- Opus: The cold truth.

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Oh, Darn

From CNN:

Two days after hinting he wanted to try for the White House, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich decided he would not run for president, his spokesman said Saturday.

Rick Tyler said Gingrich realized he couldn't run a political action committee -- his American Solutions group -- and form an exploratory committee to run for president as well.

"He will continue to bring the American people solutions to the challenges America faces through American Solutions, not as a candidate for president," Tyler said in a telephone interview.

I guess having one thrice-married adulterer in the Republican field was enough.

To be honest, I would have loved to have Newt Gingrich in the race, if only for the amazing stuff he comes up with, such as men being better equipped to be soldiers because they can lie in a ditch and not get a yeast infection while they're hunting giraffes. Whereas Hillary Clinton wants to give every newborn a $5,000 savings bond, he wanted to give all the homeless people laptop computers. And don't forget his famous hissyfit about having to sit in coach on Air Force One while flying back from Rabin's funeral in Israel. He was so ticked off he shut down the government not once but twice. Talk about an ego; his latest ploy was that if people gave him $30 million, he'd run. Well, I guess that didn't work out so we're stuck with Rudy, Fred, Mitt, and John McCain. Drat.

Oh, speaking of campaign hijinks, John McCain says the Constitution establishes America as a Christian nation. (I didn't know that. Did you? Perhaps he means that other Constitution.) Meanwhile, a fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani's campaign was behind the initiative in California to attempt to change the state's counting of electoral votes from winner-take-all, as most other states do it, to proportional, which could be seen as an attempt to rig the election towards the GOP. Apparently they don't trust their own candidates to win fair and square, so they have to game the system. At any rate, the initiative died for lack of interest and money.

And you thought the 2008 campaign was going to be boring. Even without Newt Gingrich, it's already gone past that.

Tropical Update

There are two tropical events out there in the Atlantic: Tropical Depression Karen and Tropical Storm Melissa.

Neither of them are forecast to come near Florida. For now.

Carrying A Grudge

I haven't read Justice Clarence Thomas's memoir, My Grandfather's Son -- it goes on sale on Monday -- but according to a review in the Washington Post, he doesn't hold back.

Justice Clarence Thomas settles scores in an angry and vivid forthcoming memoir, scathingly condemning the media, the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination to the Supreme Court, and the "mob" of liberal elites and activist groups that he says desecrated his life.

[...]

They are the most extensive comments Thomas has made about Hill since his confirmation. Though he has given numerous speeches since he has been on the court, he has rarely mentioned Hill or spoken in detail about the nomination fight. In the book, Thomas writes that Hill was the tool of liberal activist groups "obsessed" with abortion and outraged because he did not fit their idea of what an African American should believe.

"The mob I now faced carried no ropes or guns," Thomas writes of his hearings. "Its weapons were smooth-tongued lies spoken into microphones and printed on the front pages of America's newspapers.... But it was a mob all the same, and its purpose -- to keep the black man in his place -- was unchanged."

Well, Justice Thomas is entitled to his opinions and his feelings, and I certainly agree that his confirmation hearings in 1991 were not the height of calm and deliberative advice and consent, but in the end Mr. Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court, which could probably be considered a vindication for him. Yet sixteen years later he's still seething, and I can't help but remember all that helpful advice the conservatives were so eager to dole out after a somewhat similar occurrence in 2000: "Move on, get over it, you lost, end of story." And, to his credit, the recipient of that advice, Al Gore, did put his humiliation and excoriation at the hands of the righties behind him. He didn't hole up in some dark garret and brood about the raw deal he got of winning the popular vote but losing the election, and the irony is that one of the people who had a hand in his loss was Clarence Thomas.

Not for nothing does Justice Thomas's continuing grudge make me wonder if somehow it might seep its way into the rulings and decisions he makes on the court. Does he vote with the conservative majority based on the law or does he allow his personal feelings of resentment play a part? Of course his defenders will say he is above that kind of ethical lapse, but he's human, and it's hard to believe that he can completely divorce himself from the simple fact that we are incapable of making decisions or seeing points without the color of our human strengths and failings. I hasten to say that that goes for everyone on the court, including the few remaining liberals. But such outspoken anger bordering on hatred makes you wonder.

It's a pattern among conservatives to carry their grudges forever regardless of whether they win or lose. Robert Bork, who was denied a seat on the Supreme Court in 1987, still makes a living off his contentious hearings and blaming his defeat on the same crowd Justice Thomas does, in spite of the fact that a number of Republicans, including Arlen Specter and John Warner, voted against him. He has since never failed to remind anyone who will listen that he was unfairly treated. Perhaps he was, but given his rather stark opinions on the rights of privacy and his minimalist view of the role of the judiciary (given the chance, it sounds like he would overturn Marbury vs. Madison), it's a very good thing he's not on the Court. But twenty years is a long time to grind an ax and perhaps he should just get over it. I'd give the same advice to Justice Thomas. It wasn't pretty, and I understand the hurt, but you got the job and you can't be fired.

The one thing that conservatives excel at is being the victims and sore winners. It's not pretty, but it does sell books.

Clinchers

Congratulations to both the Red Sox and the Cubs in clinching their divisions.

If that turns out to be the final line-up for the World Series...wow.

Cage Match

Two liberal blogs react to the same story that Democrats in Congress will introduce a resolution condemning Rush Limbaugh for his "phony soldiers" comment.

AMERCIAblog:

Senate Democratic leaders demand Limbaugh apologize for dissing troops

by John Aravosis (DC) · 9/28/2007 09:13:00 PM ET

Good.

Talking Points Memo:

Here We Go Again

TPM Election Central has learned that Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO) will introduce a resolution Monday condemning Rush Limbaugh's remarks about "phony soldiers."

Sigh.

Your thoughts?

Friday, September 28, 2007

They Hate to Do It

The Senate passed the Matthew Shepard Act, which adds gays and lesbians to the list of those protected by hate crimes. That will make it interesting for President Bush to continue to threaten to veto it because he would also be vetoing the Defense Appropriations Act, which funds the Pentagon and the war in Iraq.

As Steve Reynolds at the All Spin Zone notes,

A few Republicans supported the Matthew Shepard Act, which protects gay and lesbian citizens from hate crimes, but Republicans like Lindsey Graham (suspected of being gay) say Bush will veto the bill. Larry Craig, of course, who is not gay, voted against the bill.

[...]

It may not be homophobia that drives the Republicans, anymore, but fear of the religious right. You gotta believe there’s going to be divine retribution from the Radical Religious Right against those Republicans who voted for the Matthew Shepard Act. In Larry Craig’s case, his motive appears to be a fear of losing power, or access to free travel and thus opportunities to visit restrooms all over the country.

The standard right wing objection to hate crime legislation is two-fold; all crimes are hate crimes and therefore the punishment should be the same for any assault and not more so because the victim is gay, black, Jewish, or whatever. The second complaint is that laws against hate crimes are really laws that punish people for holding odious opinions about the protected people. There's also the simple fact that the Republican party is pretty much anti-gay, and anything that gives the gay community any support is going to be voted down by them as a matter of course.

Hate crimes are not crimes against an individual but rather against an entire group of people. Gay-bashers or skinheads who beat up blacks or the homeless rarely know their victim personally; they pick them out because of the community they belong to, and it is an attempt to cower an entire group of people, regardless of their individuality. In other words, it's terrorism. And given the Republicans' embrace of the global war on terrorism, you would think that fighting terrorism, including protecting people from attacks for innate qualities such as sexual orientation would be on the top of their to-do list. After all, they have been screaming at us for the last six years that the highest priority in the country is fighting terrorism, and that should include terrorism of all stripes, including that which comes from the more outspoken and active members of the Religious Reich or just plain ignorant bigots. If President Bush vetoes this bill, as he has threatened to do, it will be because those frat boys who get drunk and stand outside gay bars and threaten patrons with pieces of one-by lumber, or the religious fanatics like Eric Rudolph who blow up abortion clinics, or David Koresh who impregnate eleven year old girls and murder ATF agents, or the all-American kids like Timothy McVeigh who blow up buildings aren't included in his definition of terrorism, nor is it by the people in the base of his party.

The idea that hate crimes are some sort of Orwellian attempt at thought control is bogus. No one is attempting to stop people from thinking bad thoughts about people, whether it's against a minority or queers or bimbos who talk on cell phones in their SUV's and don't use their turn signals. We are still free to think all the evil thoughts we want. The difference is when you turn a thought into an action and actually do something motivated by that thought. That removes it from the realm of idle musing and makes it a crime, and the law has recognized motive as a factor in both prosecution and sentencing for a very long time.

One final point: people who speak out against hate crime legislation have, strangely enough, rarely been the victim of a hate crime.

Please Stand By...

The Friday Blogaround is being held up because BlogRolling, the site that handles my blogroll lists, is having issues. It seems to be an ongoing problem with them, especially in the morning, and attempts to contact them have been frustrated by not being able to get to their Support site. So, until they get their act together, no Friday Blogroll.

And there's good stuff out there, too.

Update: It's fixed. Have at it, Rook.

Don't Bet on It

Do you think the Republicans in the Senate and the House will vote out resolutions condemning Rush Limbaugh for labeling soldiers who object to the war in Iraq as phony? Do you think the rest of the Orcosphere, including Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Neil Boortz, Bill O'Reilly, and the rest of Fox News will demand his head on a platter?

Somehow I don't think so.

Patrick Murphy, who served in Afghanistan and is now a member of Congress, put it this way.

Someone should tell chicken-hawk Rush Limbaugh that the only phonies are those who choose not to serve and then criticize those who do. I served proudly, so did two of my fellow paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne who spoke out and died just weeks ago. Generations of American veterans have worn the uniform with pride and we know it is no contradiction to serve your country and still disagree with the Bush-civilian leadership that mismanaged this war.

There is a real way to support the troops. Go here and make a contribution to Fisher House, a charity that helps the families of soldiers at the worst times of their lives. The link takes you to the site in support of the families of the soldiers in the 82nd Airborne that Rep. Murphy mentioned. This is a joint project of liberal and conservative bloggers. I already chipped in; go thou and do likewise if you can.

Friday Blogaround

Here's the picks of the week from The Liberal Coalition.

- A Blog Around The Clock: oxytocin and childbirth. (Corrected typo now that I have my contacts in...)
- archy: fun with right-wing crybabies.
- Bark Bark Woof Woof: God's law vs. UCMJ.
- Bloggg: Autism what?
- Collective Sigh: not your everyday war memorial.
- Dohiyi Mir on voting while you can.
- Echidne Of The Snakes on Chris Matthews and debating a woman.
- Grateful Dread Radio needs a hand.
- Iddybud Journal on native American peacemaking.
- Left Is Right: where's the ice?
- Lefty Side of the Dial: short shots.
- Liberty Street
- Make me a Commentator!!! with yet another Rush doozy.
- Musing's musings on the passing of Bill Wirtz. (Hockey fans remember him.)
- Pen-Elayne on the Web celebrates Google's ninth birthday and finds out what it thinks of her.
- Rook's Rant on the smuggling of cigarettes. (Can you bong tobacco?)
- rubber hose with thoughts on Blackwater.
- Scrutiny Hooligans: remember Daniel Ellsberg?
- SoonerThought on a different kind of Joementum.
- Speedkill on pun-ditry.
- Steve Bates: The site is having issues. Check back later.
- T. Rex's Guide to Life catches up with Florida politics.
- The Fulcrum on the Ken Burns affect.
- The Invisible Library on the perils of being a beliver.
- WTF Is It Now?? with Bill Clinton and MoveOn.org.
- ...You Are A Tree with photos from space.

Anyone want to come over to my house this weekend and help me stuff and label 200 envelopes?

Didn't think so.

Friday Catblogging

"Whew... I thought I'd lost my marbles."

Thursday, September 27, 2007

Craig Sits Tight

Senator Larry Craig won't leave the Senate until a court rules in Minneapolis on his motion to vacate his guilty plea to disorderly conduct for his attempted tryst in an airport biffy with an undercover cop.

I'm sure the GOP leadership is just tickled pink to have him hanging around as a daily reminder that he's not gay.

The End of the Season

In spite of beating the Minnesota Twins 9-4 last night in their last home game of the season, the Detroit Tigers were eliminated from the Wild Card race because the Yankees beat Tampa Bay. So there will be no post-season play for the boys.

They played pretty well during the first half of the seaon, but somehow the magic slipped away after the All-Star break and they lost their lead in the division in scenarios that reminded me of the Tigers of old, back in the 1970's when I listened to them almost every night, my heart breaking as they stranded three men on base, hit into double plays with amazing regularity, and suffered, as they have so often in recent years, with erratic pitching. But they will end with a record over .500, which is both respectable, and compared to how they've sometimes ended up (vide the 2001 season), nothing to be ashamed of.

Last year the Tigers played in the World Series and lost to St. Louis -- revenge for 1968, I suppose. I wish they were in the dance, but it's not to be. So good luck to the rest of the American League (except the Yankees) and win the Series.

Brandon Inge, 3B
As for the Tigers, they have three more games at Chicago and then it's over. Have a nice winter, guys; ya done good. See you in February.

Pace Out

General Peter Pace told the Senate that he thinks homosexual acts are immoral and don't belong in the military.

Pace, who retires next week, said he was seeking to clarify similar remarks he made in spring, which he said were misreported.

"Are there wonderful Americans who happen to be homosexual serving in the military? Yes," he told the Senate Appropriations Committee during a hearing focused on the Pentagon's 2008 war spending request.

"We need to be very precise then, about what I said wearing my stars and being very conscious of it," he added. "And that was very simply that we should respect those who want to serve the nation, but not through the law of the land condone activity in my upbringing is counter to God's law."

I'm not a lawyer, nor have I read the Uniform Code of Military Justice from cover to cover, but I'm pretty sure that God's law is not cited as the foundation of military jurisprudence. If it was, I think someone would have pointed that out by now.

I have, however, read the bible and I do recall several passages that condemn war and violence against our fellow man. In fact, I think one of the major characters in the bible has several imprecations against war and in favor of peace, including "Blessed are the peacemakers...." So it seems to be a tad disconcerting that General Pace would cite God's law to keep "immorality" out of the military, yet ignore it in order to have a job.

Once again General Pace is promoting the stereotype that the entire gay community is defined by what they do in the privacy of their bedrooms. As it stands, the current policy of Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) requires that gay military personnel not disclose their sexual orientation because if they do, presumably mass orgies of soldiers humping each other will break out in military installations all over the world. As fascinating as that may be to some (i.e. Jeff Gannon, right wing shill and male prostitute at hotmilitarystuds.com), it's laughably ridiculous. Just because someone is gay and out of the closet doesn't mean they're any more defined by their orientation than a straight person is, nor is it relevant to the job they're doing. But these generals with tremendous gay issues can't get beyond the adolescent fascination they have with gay sex, so regardless of the morality or personal scruples that any one person may have -- gay or straight -- they cannot see beyond that one thing.

If the UCMJ forbids sex between people who aren't married to each other, then that's fine, but let the law be applied equally. The assumption that just because a soldier is gay means he or she is prone to sexual immorality any more than some horny heterosexual private is just plain bigotry; it condemns an entire group of people based on something they have no control over and before they even get a chance to prove themselves to be fit to wear the uniform and serve in the military.

It isn't the gays who should be kicked out of the military, it's the people who, for whatever reason, cannot get over their pathological fixation with sex. They're the ones whose morality should be questioned.

The Glorious Fourth Amendment

A federal judge has ruled that parts of the USA PATRIOT Act are unconstitutional.

In a case brought by a Portland man who was wrongly detained as a terrorism suspect in 2004, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the Patriot Act violates the Constitution because it "permits the executive branch of government to conduct surveillance and searches of American citizens without satisfying the probable cause requirements of the Fourth Amendment."

"For over 200 years, this Nation has adhered to the rule of law -- with unparalleled success," Aiken wrote in a strongly worded 44-page opinion. "A shift to a Nation based on extra-constitutional authority is prohibited, as well as ill-advised."

The ruling in Oregon follows a separate finding on Sept. 6 by a federal judge in New York, who struck down provisions allowing the FBI to obtain e-mail and telephone data from private companies without a court-issued warrant. The decision also comes amid renewed congressional debate over the government's broad powers to conduct searches and surveillance in counterterrorism cases. Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said last night that the administration "will consider all our options" in responding to yesterday's ruling.

I'm curious as to what the Justice Department thinks those "options" might be. I'm not a lawyer, but I have read the Constitution and I'm pretty sure I'd remember if there was a part that said the Bill of Rights could be suspended without due process, and I'm also wondering how the government will now define "probable cause."

In this particular case, the government has basically conceded that they screwed up and have settled with the plaintiff.

Aiken's ruling came in the case of Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer who was arrested and jailed for two weeks in 2004 after the FBI bungled a fingerprint match and mistakenly linked him to a terrorist attack in Spain. The FBI used its expanded powers under the Patriot Act to secretly search Mayfield's house and law office, copy computer files and photos, tape his telephone conversations, and place surveillance bugs in his office using warrants issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

In a settlement announced in November 2006, the U.S. government agreed to pay $2 million to Mayfield and his family and it apologized for the "suffering" that the case caused him. But the pact allowed Mayfield to proceed with a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the Patriot Act, resulting in yesterday's ruling by Aiken, who was nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1997.

So while it's not a huge surprise that the court ruled against the PATRIOT Act, it is gratifying to know that there are still courts that recognize the power of the Constitution over the unitary executive.

I'm sure there will be the usual rants and carrying on from the righties about "activist judges" taking the law into their own hands. At the risk of reminding them of the blantantly obvious, the purpose of the judiciary system -- which is still a co-equal branch of the government -- is to interpret and enforce the laws. So unless you think that putting the Fourth Amendment to use in its intended purpose is somehow judicial "activism," in which case you really need to go back to high school and re-take that government class you slept through, the federal court and Judge Aiken did exactly what they were supposed to do.

And more chinks are going to be found in the armor of that odious law.

The House vs. MoveOn.org

The House voted to condemn the MoveOn.org ad by a margin of 341-79.

I'm so proud to see our elected representative fight so hard to make America safe from bad puns in print advertising.

Dems Debate: In Case You Missed It, So Did I

The Democrats had another joint press conference last night at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. I watched only bits and pieces of it; it was up against the season premiere of Criminal Minds, which has replaced Mandy Patinkin with Alberto Gonzales.

Michael Scherer of Salon.com covered it with comparisons to your favorite TV shows of the 1970's since the debate was up against NBC's resurrection of The Bionic Woman. Joe Sudbay of AMERICAblog has a thread as well.

From what I could see, nobody really cratered, nobody really surged, and Mike Gravel earned the vote of anyone who'd like to tell their credit card companies to go jump in the lake. Tim Russert pulled one of his famous "gotcha" questions by citing an unnamed source who said that under some circumstances torture was acceptable if lives were at stake. All of the candidates, including Hillary Clinton, condemned the sentiment. Then Mr. Russert revealed that the source of the quote was Bill Clinton. Hillary allowed as that she would have a talk with him.

Feel free to add your thoughts.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Hillary's Faith and Practice

Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President Bush, takes a look at Sen. Hillary Clinton's faith and practice.

Clinton is neither secular nor awkward about her faith. She cites her Methodist upbringing as a formative experience, with its emphasis on "preaching and practicing the social gospel." As a teenager in 1962, she heard and met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Chicago -- what would have been a profound experience for a spiritually alert youth -- and was later politically radicalized by his assassination. The likely Democratic nominee participates regularly in small-group Bible studies and is familiar with the works of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- the theological heroes of mainline Protestantism (and of some stray Evangelicals like myself).

In a nation obsessed by the influence of religious conservatives, it is easy to forget that liberal Protestants were once the dominant cultural influence in America. Beginning in the early 20th century, the social gospel advanced swiftly through most American denominations. Progressive presidents such as Woodrow Wilson spoke in the cadences of this movement: "Christianity was just as much intended to save society as to save the individual, and there is a sense in which it is more important that it should save society."

Of course his main obsession with Sen. Clinton is how she squares her stand for social equality with her stand on reproductive choice.

At the same time ... her defense of abortion rights has been strident, even radical. She has attacked pro-life people as enemies of "evidence," "science" and "the Constitution." And she has blamed pro-life "ideologues" for the prevalence of abortions because of their "silent war on contraception" -- a remarkable accusation that Roman Catholic opposition to birth control is somehow responsible for abortion in America.

At the risk of teaching biology without a license, lack of contraception is the leading cause of pregnancy, and people who become pregnant have been known to choose whether or not to carry the pregnancy to term. So, yes, opposition to contraception does lead to abortion.

It is interesting that Mr. Gerson is willing to give Senator Clinton the same credit for being a person of faith without accusing her of coldly calculating to garner votes from the religious voters, but he wonders if she can pull it off.

How are religious voters likely to respond to a religious believer who is also a social liberal? Roman Catholics, with their strong commitment to the poor, should be open to a Democratic message of economic justice. A majority of Christians, Catholic and Protestant, support the goals of broader health coverage and increased humanitarian aid abroad. But the most intensely religious Americans of both traditions also tend to be the most conservative on moral issues such as abortion. And it is hard to imagine that these voters will be successfully courted by the most comprehensively pro-choice presidential candidate in American history.

Not all religious voters are single-issue voters, and the Religious Reich weren't going to vote for Hillary Clinton regardless of her stand on abortion. And if they have trouble squaring her social views and religious views, at least she has been consistent compared with the Republicans; John McCain jumps between Baptist and Episcopalian depending on who he's pandering to (I was surprised to see he didn't wear a yarmulke last week for Yom Kippur); Rudy Giuliani, a nominal Roman Catholic, has been all over the map on choice and gay rights in between writing alimony checks; Mitt Romney's Mormonism is still seen as a cult by the True Believers, and Fred Thompson doesn't go to church at all. Yet the GOP is willing to give them all a pass while giving Hillary Clinton the third degree?

Perhaps I'm incredibly naive, but I've never cared what religion a candidate was when deciding whether or not to vote for them, and I really don't care whether or not their faith informs their public policy. I do care how they practice their public policy, and that's all that really matters anyway.

SCHIP Sails Through the House

From the Washington Post:

A broad House majority gave final approval last night to a $35 billion expansion of the popular children's health insurance program, with members from both parties brushing aside a stern veto threat from President Bush to vote their support, 265 to 159.

The Senate will take up the bill later this week and is expected to send it to the president with a veto-proof, bipartisan majority. But amid furious White House lobbying, even Republican advocates in the House ruefully conceded that they will probably fall short of the 290 votes they will need next week to override the promised veto.

"I think it's a heavy lift," said Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.), a perennial political target of the Democrats who worked hard for the bill's passage yesterday. "The administration has come to this debate very late, and, as a result, they're asking us to take one for the team here."

[...]

But Bush and GOP leaders said the measure would push children already covered by private health insurance into publicly financed health care, while creating an "entitlement" whose costs would ultimately outstrip the money raised by the bill's 61-cent increase in the federal tobacco tax.

"The current bill goes too far toward federalizing health care and turns a program meant to help low-income children into one that covers children in some households with incomes of up to $83,000 a year," asserted the White House yesterday, continuing to push Bush's far more modest $5 billion expansion.

Backers of the congressional bill, including conservative Republican Sens. Orrin G. Hatch (Utah) and Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), have said repeatedly that Bush is dead wrong about the $83,000 figure. Only New York has sought to cover children from families with incomes that high, and the administration turned down the request.

Bush will veto the bill for two reasons. The first one is that SCHIP proves that a government-subsidized health care program can work, and they can't allow that to happen, both philosophically and in terms of keeping their pals in the insurance and HMO business happy.

Second, it would benefit poor children and keep them alive, and everyone knows that poor kids might grow up to be Democrats. Can't have that; and besides, the Republicans only care about children before they're born. After that, who cares?

Tropical Update

It's a busy -- and wet -- day down here in the subtropics. We have three areas of disturbed weather getting their acts together.

First up is Tropical Storm Karen, due way east of Trinidad and Tobago, who looks to be tracking off to the west and north, staying away from land. Then there's Tropical Depression Thirteen in the Gulf of Mexico between the Yucatan peninsula and the gulf coast of Mexico, due to make landfall as a tropical storm by Saturday. And finally there's Invest 97, a low pressure system that is forming just west of St. Kitts in the Leeward Islands and tracking, according to the computer models, up across Cuba or into the Bahamas.

Meanwhile, it's been raining here in Miami pretty steadily since Sunday afternoon with predictions of an inch or more today. I'm thinking that the drought we went through earlier this year is pretty well on its way to being over, depending on how Lake Okeechobee is refilling. My orchids and ferns are loving it, though. Can't say as much for the feral cats in the neighborhood.

The Context of the Past

A friend noted that I have been silent on the Jena 6 case. I admit that I came to it late, but when I did read up on it, thanks to some dogged reporting and blogging by colleagues over at Shakesville, I had a flashback to the early 1960's when racial politics was in the news every day and stories about unequal justice and betrayal of American values were a part of life. The march on Selma; Sheriff Clark and the police dogs, the murders by the Klansmen of the white people who supported civil rights, including the story of Viola Liuzzo, a housewife from Detroit. (I remember her because as a kid we listened to Detroit radio growing up, and her murder and the trial of the four Klansmen who were accused of it was all over the news in 1965.) So it was a bit of a trip down Memory Lane to hear the story of the Jena 6 and be reminded that we really haven't come very far in forty years.

If you want further proof, read what Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald has been getting in his e-mail after he wrote about the Jena 6.

Please indulge me as I answer an e-mail I received last week in response to a recent column decrying unequal justice as represented by the controversy in Jena, La. A fellow named John wrote:
Your columns usually merit reading. But this time, You sound like the typical Black guy crying ''victim.'' Leonard, you list instances of Black injustice and I'm sure there are many. However have you forgot about O.J.? He got away with murder Leonard. He killed his white wife! . . . Or how about Sharpton and the Brawley case? . . . Or the Duke case. . . . I could go on and on. You want more respect for you and your race? Stop sounding like a nigger and start sounding and acting like a Black man. You'll get respect and justice. Try being a Black man all the time, not just when it fits your agenda.
John, thank you for writing. Here are a few words in response.

That column you disliked argued that Jena, where six black kids were initially charged with attempted murder after they gave a white kid a black eye and knocked him out, is part of a long pattern of the justice system being used to keep African Americans in line. Indeed, black students at Jena High report that even before the fight, the DA warned them in an assembly that he could make their lives go away "with the stroke of a pen."

The students say he was looking directly at them when he said it. The DA has denied this, but I find the denial less than credible given the unfathomable charges he sought to file against the black kids while a white kid who attacked a black one got off with a comparative slap on the wrist.

Anyway, you were one of a number of readers who wrote to remind me of Simpson. If the point of your reference to him, Tawana Brawley and the Duke lacrosse case was that the justice system has repeatedly and historically mistreated whites, too, on the basis of race, I'm sorry, but that's absurd. Not that those cases were not travesties. They were. And if those travesties leave you outraged, well, I share that feeling.

But, here's what I want you to do. Take that sense of outrage, that sense of betrayal, of having been cheated by a system you once thought you could trust, and multiply it. Multiply it by Valdosta and Waco and Birmingham and Fort Lauderdale and Money and Marion and Omaha and thousands of other cities and towns where black men and women were lynched, burned, bombed, shot, with impunity. Multiply it by the thousands of cops and courts that refused to arrest or punish even when they held photographs of the perpetrators taken in the act. Multiply it by a million lesser outrages. Multiply it by L.A. cops planting evidence. Multiply it by the black drug defendant who is 48 times more likely to go to jail than the white one who commits the same crime and has the same record. Multiply it by Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo. Multiply it by 388 years.

And then come talk to me about O.J. Simpson.

You may call all that "playing victim." I call it providing context. Jena did not happen in a vacuum. It did not spring from nowhere. So this false equivalence, this pretense that the justice system as experienced by white people and black ones is in any way similar, is ignorant and obnoxious.

Much like your turning to a racial slur to describe how you think I "sound." I found that word interesting coming near the end of an e-mail whose tone, while critical, had, until that point, been reasonable. I suppose you just couldn't help yourself.

It says something about the intransigence, self-justification and retarded self-awareness of American racism that a man who uses the language you do would, in the same breath, offer advice to black folks seeking "respect and justice." Appreciate the effort, John, but I'm afraid you can't solve the problem.

See, you are the problem.

There's not a lot that I can add to Mr. Pitts's eloquence except to say that without a historical context, current events are meaningless. I've met any number of people who are, either through lack of education or delusional denial, completely unaware of the struggle for racial equality and how recently -- sometimes within their own lifetime -- that it occurred. They take it for granted that it's always been the way it is now and that things such as separate-but-equal schools, drinking fountains for "whites" and "colored" are remnants of the 19th century, and that it's no big deal if a white man is married to a black woman. (It's also no surprise that the people I know who are unaware of these facts are Republicans, which explains why 90% of the black electorate vote for Democrats.)

It's easy to say, oh, that was all in the past, get over it, let's move on. Yes, let's; but there really isn't much point in trying to move on if you don't know where you've been, or worse, are all too aware of the past, as the kids who hung the nooses from the tree in Jena seemed to be, without seeing it in the present. Their problem -- and that of a lot of other people -- is that they haven't learned anything.

Numbstruck

Rick Perlstein says we've become so paralyzed by fear that we've become literally numb.

[W]hat is conservative rule doing to our nation's soul? How is it rewiring our hearts and minds? What kind of damage are they doing to the American character? And can we ever recover?

[...]

How cowardly our conservative Republic of Fear has made us. How we tremble at the mere touch of a challenge. It's conservatives who started it, of course. Here's what they're reading in their own media: a letter from Human Events editor Tom Winter headlined "Are You Ready for a New Dark Ages?":
Dear Fellow Conservative:

Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a Muslim muezzin. Millions of Europeans already do.

And liberals will still tell you that "diversity is our strength" -- while Talibanic enforcers cruise our cities burning books and barber shops... the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn't violate the "separation of church and state" ... and the Hollywood Left gives up gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy.

If you think this can't happen, you haven't been paying attention, as the hilarious and brilliant Mark Steyn -- the most popular conservative columnist in the English-speaking world -- shows to devastating effect in his New York Times bestseller, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It....
This stuff is mind-numbingly hysterical—literally. Such rhetoric is literally calculated to numb the mind, to render any rational calculus impossible, to reduce democratic deliberation on the most subtle and difficult issues of our time to mere grunts and snorts, turning readers' minds to mush. That's what the conservative media is all about.

Good stuff. Go read the rest of it.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Question of the Day

I haven't done this one in a while. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever asked it. So now would be a good time.

Which comic strip character do you identify most with?

Note that I said comic strip. We'll save the cartoons for later.

For me it's pretty simple:

Do I really have to explain it?

Off Center

It's ironic that a conservative like David Brooks would think that he would know what makes up the "center" of either political party, and it's even more funny when he dismisses the progressive "netroots," which he seems to think consists solely of the readers of Daily Kos, as being self-righteous and bullying. Nothing like that happens on the right, you know.

Fear Factor

After all the fuss and fury over the president of Iran coming to New York and the chest-thumping of the right wing, including some bluster Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) (who coincidentally is running for president) about cutting off funding to Columbia University for having the temerity to exercise free speech, it turns out that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran is just another scruffy little pipsqueak with obnoxious and distorted opinions of history, and his sly smile lets the world know that he's getting exactly the reception and the reaction that he wanted.

What I have trouble getting past is that all this hue and cry does is prove that in spite of our tough talk about wiping out terrorism, "bring 'em on," and the Nuke Iran lobby making noise in the administration, we're really afraid of him to the point that some were willing to deny him the right to speak and answer questions. We've really lost something when we're that fearful of someone else's point of view, no matter how disgusting it may be. The best thing we can do to prove he's a petty and cruel dictator is let him talk.

It doesn't mean we don't take Iran seriously as a nation whose leadership is hostile to America. But all this hot air about denying him a visa and raising such a stink about the visit to Ground Zero -- which I'm convinced was a trial balloon floated for the express purpose of getting Bill O'Reilly's head to explode -- does is reinforce the image of the hypocritical paper tiger their propaganda says we are.

"No Way, Baby"

Bob Herbert on the ugly side of the GOP:

The G.O.P. has spent the last 40 years insulting, disenfranchising and otherwise stomping on the interests of black Americans. Last week, the residents of Washington, D.C., with its majority black population, came remarkably close to realizing a goal they have sought for decades — a voting member of Congress to represent them.

A majority in Congress favored the move, and the House had already approved it. But the Republican minority in the Senate — with the enthusiastic support of President Bush — rose up on Tuesday and said: “No way, baby.”

At least 57 senators favored the bill, a solid majority. But the Republicans prevented a key motion on the measure from receiving the 60 votes necessary to move it forward in the Senate. The bill died.

At the same time that the Republicans were killing Congressional representation for D.C. residents, the major G.O.P. candidates for president were offering a collective slap in the face to black voters nationally by refusing to participate in a long-scheduled, nationally televised debate focusing on issues important to minorities.

The radio and television personality Tavis Smiley worked for a year to have a pair of these debates televised on PBS, one for the Democratic candidates and the other for the Republicans. The Democratic debate was held in June, and all the major candidates participated.

The Republican debate is scheduled for Thursday. But Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson have all told Mr. Smiley: “No way, baby.”

They won’t be there. They can’t be bothered debating issues that might be of interest to black Americans. After all, they’re Republicans.

[...]

Blacks have been remarkably quiet about this sustained mistreatment by the Republican Party, which says a great deal about the quality of black leadership in the U.S. It’s time for that passive, masochistic posture to end.

Tropical Update

Jerry's gone, but Tropical Storm Karen is forming out in the Atlantic.

It looks as if it will stay away from land, which is just fine with me.

Birthday Greetings

Happy Birthday to my friend Randall.

ImageChef.com - Custom comment codes for MySpace, Hi5, Friendster and more

We've known each other for fifty years now, so here's to another fifty, at least.

And also...Happy Birthday to Iraida!

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Let's do lunch!

Monday, September 24, 2007

Oh, the Irony

According the War Room, the White House thinks Sen. Barack Obama wouldn't cut it as president.

A "senior official" in the White House of George W. Bush tells journalist Bill Sammon why Barack Obama won't be the next president of the United States: Obama is intellectually "capable" of the job, the official says, but he relies too much on easy charm. "It's sort of like, 'That's all I need to get by,' which bespeaks sort of a condescending attitude towards the voters ... and a laziness, an intellectual laziness."

I admire the "senior official" for getting through that without laughing. I know I couldn't.

The Next Big Thing

Steve Benen at TPM on the latest new thing: Newtmentum.

Sure, some of us may think of the former Speaker as the ethically-challenged, unhinged conservative who shut down the government (twice) and was driven from Congress by his caucus. Or who includes among his "big ideas" getting laptops for the the homeless. Or who raised concerns about women in combat roles because, "males are biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes." Or the man who was so outraged by President Clinton's personal indescretions that he sought impeachment during his own extramarital affair.

But that's apparently all in the past. Now he's the GOP Savior of the Week.

Run, Newt, run. It'll be like playing Whack-A-Mole with a 12-gauge shotgun.

Shorter Paul Krugman

Racial politics in the United States is like the line from Dixie:

"Old times there are not forgotten."

How Dare He!

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, lets loose in the Iranian president.

I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom of speech.

I hate Ahmadinejad for all the same reasons you do. For one thing, he said he wants to "wipe Israel off the map." Scholars tell us the correct translation is more along the lines of wanting a change in Israel's government toward something more democratic, with less gerrymandering. What an ass-muncher!

Ahmadinejad also called the holocaust a "myth." Fuck him! A myth is something a society uses to frame their understanding of their world, and act accordingly. It's not as if the world created a whole new country because of holocaust guilt and gives it a free pass no matter what it does. That's Iranian crazy talk. Ahmadinejad can blow me.

[...]

Those Iranians need to learn from the American example. In this country, if the clear majority of the public opposes the continuation of a war, our leaders will tell us we're terrorist-humping idiots and do whatever they damn well please. They might even increase our taxes to do it. That's called leadership.

If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him. Fucking idiot. I hate him.

Judging by the comments Mr. Adams received on his blog for this post, it's apparent to some that satire is lost on them, because he had to explain it to them later.

Tropical Update

There's some more tropical weather activity going on out in the Atlantic.

Forecasters tracked several weather disturbances in the tropics Sunday night, including one in the distant North Atlantic that developed into Tropical Storm Jerry.

Jerry was moving away from land, and none of the other disturbances caused any immediate concern, though local meteorologists said unrelated atmospheric conditions could propel more showers and thunderstorms across South Florida today.

Forecasters said Jerry, which developed early Sunday as a ''subtropical system,'' evolved into a more familiar tropical storm Sunday night.

[...]

Forecasters also watched a disturbance in the Gulf of Mexico near Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula and two systems in the eastern Atlantic that seemed likely to develop into tropical depressions or named storms.

One of those systems could bring squalls to the Windward Islands today.

Those would be Invest 96 and 97 out in the Atlantic, and 94 is still dithering about in the Gulf.

Sticking With It

The Florida Democratic Party has decided to hang tough with the January 29, 2008 primary election date in spite of the national party's threat to exclude the delegates at the convention next summer.

"We are not going to disenfranchise our people and take away the incentive to go to the polls," said Rep. Luis Garcia, a Miami Democrat and vice chairman of the party. "That's very dangerous for the state."

[...]

The state party has been polling its more than 200 executive committee members from around the state over the past two days and concluded that more than 75 percent support sticking with the primary as planned, another party official told The Miami Herald.

The goal, the source said, was to send a message to other states that Florida can't be ignored.

State officials have been scrambling for weeks to find a way to salvage the delegate selection process since the Democratic National Committee's rules committee told the state it would lose its 210 delegates if it conducted its primary prior to Feb. 5.

The GOP-dominated Legislature voted earlier this year to move the state's primary elections from March to Jan. 29 and Gov. Charlie Crist signed the bill into law.

Lawmakers and GOP leaders argued that a state as big and diverse as Florida should be in the mix with traditionally early states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, whose combined population could fit into Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

Gee, controversy over an election in Florida. There's something new.

The Fragile Peace Movement

It sounds like a blast from the past.

Here in Florida, outrage at the war often manifests itself in small, fragile, highly personal ways. And sometimes it's a lonely business.

A Unitarian preacher in Fort Myers spends his evenings marching and dodging pro-war insults; in Ocala, a former foreign-service officer sits home writing letters to newspapers against the war and protests on a busy highway; a former Iraq War soldier and conscientious objector in Sarasota meditates and marches to take away the pain of an unsettled world; a mother and daughter in Tampa whose son and brother once served in Iraq organize monthly protests; a sophomore at a small Miami university, new to activism, battles frustration as he tries to mobilize other students.

Though fewer than the hundreds of thousands who organized four decades ago during the mired conflict of Vietnam, today's peace advocates also are no longer content merely to worry about, pray for and support the young men and women whose lives now have been thrust into danger.

Other comparisons with Vietnam are inevitable. In that war and this one, the public was at first largely supportive, then grew weary as more and more money was spent, and more and more soldiers came home in boxes. In both cases, protesters campaigned against a government they felt was uncompromising in its stance.

But the contrasts are also stark.

The number of U.S. casualties in Iraq so far is less than 10 percent of those in Vietnam, which over 17 years topped out at 58,000.

Vietnam protesters, angered by the war and the draft, were a highly energized, highly dramatic group whose leaders took on rock-star qualities and whose demonstrations, often on college campuses, became the cause du jour. They burned draft cards, occupied public spaces, and, led by firebrand Abbie Hoffman, once unsuccessfully tried to levitate the Pentagon through psychic energy. The era's most tragic standoff was four days of demonstrations at Kent State University in 1970 that included the burning of an ROTC building and the shooting deaths of four students.

There are a couple of other differences that I've noticed between the anti-war movement of the Vietnam era and today. For one thing, there is no draft so that young men, regardless of their feelings about the military in general or the war in specific, were not being called up to serve involuntarily. That has removed the immediacy and the sometimes randomness of the question for some people about whether or not this is a just cause for which to go to war.

In a larger sense, though, the protests against the war in Vietnam were more passionate and widespread not just because of the higher number of deaths but because for the first time in our history, many Americans did not believe that the war we were fighting in Asia was worth our blood and treasure, and there was an overriding feeling that our own government had lied about the circumstances that got us into the war and exaggerated the threat to our own national interest to get us into the war. The outrage that many people felt about this was fresh in 1964, especially since we had, less than twenty years before, fought and won what was seen as a "good" war against Fascism. We felt as if we could not trust our own government to tell us the truth. And while skepticism about the government is inbred in the American psyche, to realize that it had happened on such a massive scale and at such a great cost resulted in the outrage that gave us the peace movement and the dissent that polarized the nation and led to the downfall of a president.

Today, more's the pity, we acknowledge this deception and shrug it off as just one more awful truth about the people we've chosen to lead us.

Sunday in the Keys

A bunch of my friends from the British Car Club here in Miami got together for a Sunday morning drive down to Key Largo yesterday.

I rode along with my friend Bob in his 1967 Austin Healey because I don't have a British car. (The closest I get is my 20-year-old Pontiac wagon; it was built in Canada.) After breakfast at a local IHOP we headed out, dodging the occasional rain shower.

We took Card Sound Road and enjoyed the scenery of the Keys.

We stopped at a roadside attraction -- Shell World. (Yes, I know that's a Volvo in the middle of the picture. Maybe the owner bought it in England...)

One of the cars developed engine trouble, and I found that the quickest way to draw a crowd was to pull over and raise the hood on a collectible car.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Fall Arrives

The Autumnal Equinox of 2007.

September 23, 2007
So long summer...at least in the Northern Hemisphere. It's spring in Australia and South America, and always summer here in Florida.

Marcel Marceau - 1923-2007

A great silence has been silenced. From the AP:

Marcel Marceau, who revived the art of mime and brought poetry to silence, has died, his former assistant said Sunday. He was 84.

Marceau died Saturday in Paris, French media reported. Former assistant Emmanuel Vacca announced the death on France-Info radio, but gave no details about the cause.

Wearing white face paint, soft shoes and a battered hat topped with a red flower, Marceau played the entire range of human emotions onstage for more than 50 years, never uttering a word. Offstage, however, he was famously chatty. "Never get a mime talking. He won't stop," he once said.

A French Jew, Marceau survived the Holocaust - and also worked with the French Resistance to protect Jewish children.

His biggest inspiration was Charlie Chaplin. Marceau, in turn, inspired countless young performers - Michael Jackson borrowed his famous "moonwalk" from a Marceau sketch, "Walking Against the Wind."

Marceau performed tirelessly around the world until late in life, never losing his agility, never going out of style. In one of his most poignant and philosophical acts, "Youth, Maturity, Old Age, Death," he wordlessly showed the passing of an entire life in just minutes.

"Do not the most moving moments of our lives find us without words?" he once said.

There was one time when he spoke in his act. In Mel Brooks's 1976 film Silent Movie, Mr. Marceau plays himself. He gets a phone call from the director Mel Funn asking him to appear in his movie. Marceau does a perfect mime double-take and shouts, "Non!" It's the only spoken line in the entire film, making it, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the film with the fewest spoken lines of any sound movie.

Sunday Reading

- On The War: Nancy Franklin of The New Yorker reviews Ken Burns' documentary The War that begins on PBS tonight (check local listings).

You have to work very hard, and take yourself very seriously as the keeper of the keys to America, to make a tedious documentary about the Second World War. But that is what Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have done with their fifteen-hour series “The War,” which will begin on September 23rd, on PBS. They’ve taken a subject that is inexhaustible and made it merely exhausting. Scene by scene, interview by interview, the series doesn’t bore, if you are of the school that believes that everyone’s experiences are at least somewhat interesting, and that the experiences of those who went through the Second World War are more interesting than most. What’s off-putting is Burns’s approach to the material, and by that I don’t mean what has come to be known over the years since his 1990 opus on the Civil War as “the Ken Burns effect”—the pan-and-zoom technique with which Burns creates a sense of life and movement in still images and squeezes emotional juice from them. During the months-long promotional run-up to “The War,” Burns emphasized that his documentary would be different from the usual treatment of the Second World War. It would highlight the experiences of people from four towns (Waterbury, Connecticut; Sacramento, California; Mobile, Alabama; and Luverne, Minnesota, a small farming community about thirty miles from Sioux Falls, South Dakota) and would be a “bottom-up” look at the war—concentrating on the people who actually did the fighting (and the waiting at home)—as opposed to a top-down perspective featuring generals and politicians. In addition, there would be no “experts”—no military analysts, no historians.

[...]

Burns said that one of the motivations for the project was hearing, in the late nineties, that something like a thousand veterans of the Second World War were dying every day. That gave him a sense of urgency, without giving him any good ideas. During the publicity juggernaut for “The War” (and let history record that the ten-million-dollar marketing campaign includes “commemorative” cans of Budweiser and, as I live and breathe, oranges and eggs branded with station and time-of-broadcast information), Burns talked about focussing on “ordinary” people, while adding that he came to realize that, as it says on the Bud can, “in extraordinary times there are no ordinary lives.” This kind of burbling fatuousness does not aid the cause of getting to the truths of war, and Burns should know better.

He does know better. As he did in “The Civil War,” Burns brings to the fore an uncannily gifted storyteller and synthesizer, someone who combines emotion and intelligence in seemingly perfect proportions. In fact, he brings two of them to light: Samuel Hynes, a fighter pilot from Minneapolis, and Quentin Aanenson, an Army pilot from Luverne. These two soft-spoken, thoughtful men anchor the series. Burns, coyly, never identifies them fully. Hynes is a distinguished professor (now emeritus) of literature at Princeton, and the author of a highly regarded memoir of the war. Aanenson made a documentary about his experiences in the Pacific, which was shown on PBS in the nineties; he was a panelist on Charlie Rose’s show on the fiftieth anniversary of D Day, and the airport in Luverne is named for him. Together, they are the Shelby Foote of “The War.”

- Spring Break 2017: On the beach at Las Vegas?

Rising seas in the next 100 years will likely swamp the first American settlement in Jamestown, Va., as well as the Florida launch pad that sent the first American into orbit, many climate scientists are predicting.

In about a century, some of the places that make America what it is may be gradually flooded.

Global warming -- through a combination of melting glaciers, disappearing ice sheets and expanding warmer waters -- is expected to cause oceans to rise by one meter, or about 39 inches. It will happen regardless of any future actions to curb greenhouse gases, several leading scientists say. And it will reshape the nation.

Rising waters will lap at the foundations of old-money Wall Street and the new-money towers of Silicon Valley. They will swamp big-city airports and major interstate highways.

Storm surges worsened by sea-level rise will flood the waterfront getaways of rich politicians -- the Bushes' Kennebunkport and John Edwards' place in the Outer Banks. And gone will be many of the beaches in Florida and Texas favored by budget-conscious students on spring break.

That's the troubling outlook projected by coastal maps reviewed by The Associated Press. The maps, created by scientists at the University of Arizona, are based on data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Few of the more than two dozen climate experts interviewed disagree with the one-meter projection. Some believe it could happen in 50 years, others say 100, and still others say 150.

Sea-level rise is ''the thing that I'm most concerned about as a scientist,'' said Benjamin Santer, a climate physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

''We're going to get a meter, and there's nothing we can do about it,'' said University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, a lead author of the February report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in Paris. '"It's going to happen no matter what -- the question is when.''

Sea-level rise ''has consequences about where people live and what they care about,'' said Donald Boesch, a University of Maryland scientist who has studied the issue. ``We're going to be into this big national debate about what we protect and at what cost.''

- Frank Rich: Free Larry Craig!

"I DID nothing wrong," said Larry Craig at the start of his long national nightmare as America's favorite running, or perhaps sitting, gag. That's the truth. Justice lovers of all sexual persuasions must rally to save the Idaho senator before he is forced to prematurely evacuate his seat.

Time's running out. The final reckoning may arrive this week. On Wednesday, a Minnesota court will hear Mr. Craig's argument to throw out the guilty plea he submitted by mail after being caught in a June sex sting in the Minneapolis airport. If he succeeds, there's a chance he might rescind his decision to resign from the Senate on Sept. 30. Either way, he should hold tight.

Not only did the senator do nothing wrong, but in scandal he has proved the national treasure that he never was in his salad days as a pork-seeking party hack. In the past month he has served as an invaluable human Geiger counter for hypocrisy on the left and right alike. He has been an unexpected boon not just to the nation's double-entendre comedy industry but to the imploding Republican Party. Gays, not all of them closeted, may be among the last minority groups with some representation in the increasingly monochromatic G.O.P. If it is to muster even a rainbow-lite coalition for 2008, it could use Larry Craig in the trenches.

On the legal front, Mr. Craig is not without his semi-spirited defenders, an eclectic group including Arlen Specter, the A.C.L.U., The Washington Post's editorial page and scattered Democrats. While there's widespread agreement that Mr. Craig was an idiot not to consult a lawyer before entering a guilty plea (for disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor carrying a $575 fine), idiocy is no more a federal offense than hypocrisy, especially in Washington.

What Mr. Craig did in that men's room isn't an offense either. He didn't have sex in a public place. He didn't expose himself. His toe tapping, hand signals and "wide stance" were at most a form of flirtation. As George Will has rightly argued, if deviancy can be defined down to "signaling an interest in sex," then deviancy is what "goes on in 10,000 bars every Saturday night in our country." It's free speech even if the toes and fingers do the talking.

And remember, you can now read the rest of Mr. Rich's column for free.

- Doonesbury: Remembering the good old days.

- Opus: Kiss and tell.

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Alice Ghostley - 1926-2007

From the New York Times:

Alice Ghostley, the Tony Award-winning actress best known on television for playing Esmeralda on ''Bewitched'' and Bernice on ''Designing Women,'' has died. She was 81.

[...]

In the 1960s, Ghostley received a Tony nomination for various characterizations in the Broadway comedy ''The Beauty Part'' and eventually won for best featured actress in ''The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window.''

From 1969 to 1972, she played the good witch and ditzy housekeeper Esmeralda on TV's ''Bewitched.'' She played Bernice Clifton on ''Designing Women'' from 1987 to 1993, for which she earned an Emmy nomination in 1992.

She proved that character actors are often the best part of a production, as this quote from Designing Women illustrates:

[Their Yuletide Homes design has been stolen]

Bernice: Well, I think we should get some bricks and some baseball bats and go over there and teach them the TRUE meaning of Christmas.

Thanks, Alice, for a lifetime of laughs.

Always the Victim

Cal Thomas is complaining -- again -- that he's the poor put-upon victim of the evil liberal media...even when they're trying to show that he's won.

In the never-ending contest for the minds (and votes) of those who still bother to think and vote, the disagreement over which side has the greatest influence in the media goes on, seemingly without end.

The latest salvo comes from the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, whose president, David Brock, once claimed to have been ''Blinded by the Right,'' but now says he has perfect liberal vision.

Media Matters says it has surveyed 96 percent of American newspapers and found that 60 percent of them ''print more conservative syndicated columnists. . . . Only 20 percent run more progressives than conservatives, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly balanced.'' It also claims that, ''nationally syndicated progressive columnists are published in newspapers with a combined circulation of 125 million'' while ''conservative columnists are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of more than 152 million.'' The organization's count is based on newspapers that carry columnists once a week, or at least once a month, which not all newspapers do.

Using that standard, George F. Will and I were named the top two columnists by a number of newspapers. Both of us were undercounted. More than 500 newspapers subscribe to this column. Most are dailies and a few are weeklies. Media Matters claims that just 306 carry mine (it says that 328 carry Will's), ignoring the real numbers by imposing the weekly or monthly frequency standard.

[...]

Numbers aside, the survey suggests that too many conservative ideas unduly influence readers. This apparently keeps the brainless robots from their natural state: liberalism. The number of liberal readers who have written and told me of their conversion to conservatism after reading my arguments is small. Most liberals who write to me question the legitimacy of my birth, disparage my looks, pledge a campaign to censor me and promise never to read the column again. They do. They can't help themselves.

[...]

One more point. Liberals have many outlets for their ideas. They have the three broadcast networks, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and most of the big newspapers. (Only one conservative columnist is employed and regularly carried by The New York Times, and he rarely challenges that newspaper's liberal social agenda.) In light of such ideological media imbalance, the liberal claim that Fox News Channel exists does not cancel their overwhelming media advantage.

The Media Matters survey is not only wrong about the number of newspapers that subscribe to Will's and my columns; it's also wrong in its presumption that we are overly ''influential'' (whatever that means).

Cal Thomas has made a very lucrative living out of being a professional victim. He weeps about America's decline in moral standards -- he made a killing during the Clinton administration -- all the while supporting a president who had no qualms about lying his way into a war, and he pisses and moans that the country isn't 100% Jesus-shouting queer-bashing fundamentalist crusaders for the Religious Reich; "eek! the Muslims are coming!" Now Media Matters has come out with this survey, and he's bitching that they're not showing him winning the syndicated ratings war by enough. As a dear friend of mine used to say, "He'd complain if he was hung with a new rope."

I especially like the part where he gets nasty mail from liberals and how mean they are to him. Contrast that with what passes for informed comment from conservatives in the letters to the editors and the conservative Orcosphere itself that made trashing the Clintons into a cottage industry. That's not to say that we on the liberal side -- especially in the blogosphere -- have given the current occupant of the Oval Office a free pass, but it's a little much when Cal Thomas whimpers that he's being picked on and using it as proof that conservatives are unfairly targeted as nothing but mindless Wormtongues and underrepresented in the the nation's newspapers. Perhaps he thinks that the writings of Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Neil Boortz, Jonah Goldberg, the entire editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal and Fox News -- and the backlash they cause -- don't count.

I don't have a problem with the Miami Herald running a columnist like Cal Thomas; he's always good for a giggle even when he's trying to be serious. I don't have a problem with him making a profession out of being, to paraphrase Lawrence and Lee in Inherit the Wind, the national tear duct. But I think it's a bit over the top to say that the fix was in by Media Matters to prove he's one of the leading conservative columnists. The poor guy can't even win graciously.

Blog Comments in Political Ads

You knew it would come to this.

A Republican state legislator from Fairfax County [Virginia] has launched an attack ad on cable TV against his Democratic opponent that features unidentified, unverified quotes from a blog.

The ad by Del. Timothy D. Hugo points to a new form of negative campaigning in which information for an attack ad is sourced to comments posted on the Internet instead of more authoritative sources such as news reports or public records.

Whatever happened to the good old days when candidates would just make up shit about their opponents? Now they have to outsource it to blog commenters? Sheesh; how lazy can you get?

Friday, September 21, 2007

Pink and Red -- Guidance for the Gay Republican

Salon.com has a helpful guide to the Republican candidates for those of you out there who are both gay and Republican.

Imagine this: You are a gay man or a lesbian woman who just can't stand Democrats. Maybe you are rich and you don't want anyone to raise your taxes. Perhaps you are just determined to stay the course in Iraq, privatize Social Security, and drop oil wells into the Alaskan wilderness. Jack Abramoff might even be an old drinking buddy.

It doesn't really matter. Whatever the cause, you are in a quandary. Your only viable choice in the coming presidential election is to vote for a Republican, and that means voting for a party that has spent much of the last decade casting you and your way of life as an assault on the wholesome goodness of the American family. "Homosexuality is incompatible with military service," declared the 2004 GOP platform. "Attempts to redefine marriage in a single state or city could have serious consequences throughout the country."

What is a right-leaning homosexual to do in this presidential election? Start by taking a closer look at the candidates in the Republican field. There is substantial variation, and not just in their positions on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Call it the Giuliani-Keyes Spectrum of Gay Friendliness. On one end, there is Rudy Giuliani, a former New York mayor who has lived with gay friends, favors gay domestic partnerships, and sometimes dresses in drag. At the other end, there is Alan Keyes, who calls lesbians "selfish hedonists," even though his only daughter is a lesbian. There exists, shall we say, a veritable rainbow of variation in between.

Next week: a guide to the great landmarks of Jewish history in Saudi Arabia.

Fetch the Smelling Salts

Michael Kinsley looks at the pearl-clutching by the righties over MoveOn.org.

Goodness gracious. oh, my paws and whiskers. Some of the meanest, most ornery hombres around are suddenly feeling faint. Notorious tough guys are swooning with the vapors. The biggest beasts in the barnyard are all aflutter over something they read in the New York Times. It's that ad from MoveOn.org — the one that calls General David Petraeus, the head of U.S. forces in Iraq, general betray us. All across the radio spectrum, right-wing shock jocks are themselves shocked. How could anybody say such a thing? It's horrifying. It's outrageous. It's disgraceful. It's just beyond the pale ... It's ... oh, my heavens ... say, is it a bit stuffy in here? ... I think I'm going to ... Could I have a glass of ... oh, dear [thud].

These, of course, are the same people who never shy away from saying all sorts of impolite things about the Democrats or who, like Ann Coulter, have no problem calling people "faggot" and thinking that's perfectly acceptable. They can certainly dish it out, but in true bully fashion, can't take it, so they end up wasting their time and the taxpayer's money on bullshit like the Senate resolution denouncing MoveOn.org -- and handing MoveOn.org priceless publicity in the process (and probably giving them a huge bump in their fundraising) -- or jerking off over outrage about the president of Iran's expressed desire to visit Ground Zero.

It's all phony, of course. The war's backers are obviously delighted to have this ad from which they can make an issue. They wouldn't trade it for a week in Anbar province (a formerly troubled area of Iraq that is now, thanks to us, an Eden of peace and tranquillity where barely a car bomb disturbs the perfumed silence — or so they say). These days, mock outrage is used by every side of every dispute. It's fair enough to criticize something your opponent said while secretly thanking your lucky stars that he said it. The fuss over this MoveOn.org ad is something else: it is the result of a desperate scavenging for umbrage material. When so many people are clamoring for a chance to swoon that they each have to take a number and when the landscape is so littered with folks lying prostrate and pretending to be dead that it starts to look like the end of a Civil War battle re-enactment, this isn't spontaneous mass outrage. This is choreography.

And it's all perfectly timed to distract the country's attention from the fact that the war is grinding on and people are still dying. Anything that draws attention away from that is a godsend to the president and his backers; it's much easier to condemn a newspaper ad at a press conference than to discuss the reason they ran the ad in the first place.

By the way, in all of this, I haven't heard a word of outrage or a tearful plea for mercy from General Petraeus himself. I'm pretty sure that he didn't get to be a general in the United States Army by letting a schoolyard name-calling taunt get to him.

Tropical Update

The area of disturbed weather known as Invest 93 -- still not a named storm -- is heading for land right aroung the big bend in the Florida peninsula and dumping over an inch of rain on Jacksonville.

They need the rain, but this is a bit much.

Friday Blogaround

This is the last Friday of the summer...but not the last blogaround of the picks of the week from the Liberal Coalition.

- A Blog Around The Clock on Facebook and breast-feeding.
- archy: want to buy a country?
- Bark Bark Woof Woof pokes a stick.
- Bloggg: Moi goes to Bug's first parade.
- Collective Sigh: Andante doesn't think much of HillaryCare 2.0.
- Dohiyi Mir: NTodd is not happy with the Senate.
- Echidne Of The Snakes on the MoveOn.org ad.
- Grateful Dread Radio on the Jena 6 rally.
- Happy Furry Puppy Story Time takes a break. Come back soon, Norbizness.
- Iddybud Journal with a picture of an Edwards supporter.
- Left Is Right: Friday fun.
- Lefty Side of the Dial: in light of "Talk Like a Pirate Day," Lefty has some suggestions for some other days.
- Liberty Street on (gasp!) right-wing outrage.
- Make me a Commentator!!! takes on Cal Thomas.
- Musing's musings on meaningless resolutions.
- Pen-Elayne on the Web does a great blogaround.
- Rook's Rant on who the Democrats should go after.
- rubber hose: Hey, Rudy, what does NATO stand for?
- Scrutiny Hooligans likes Sally Field.
- SoonerThought: lost weight now; ask him how.
- Speedkill: oh, the horror.
- Steve Bates welcomes a switch hitter.
- T. Rex's Guide to Life catches up on Florida news.
- WTF Is It Now?? on the threat by Bush to veto health care for children.
- ...You Are A Tree with Pet Peeve #26.

Where did the summer go? (Strange question for someone from Florida to ask...)

Friday Catblogging Classic

Snowball checks out my new computer.

I just hope he's not downloading kitty porn...

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Get Back to Work

MEMORANDUM

TO: The United States Senate

FROM: Mustang Bobby

RE: PRIORITIES

More of you voted for a meaningless resolution to condemn a newspaper ad than voted to end a filibuster against an amendment to allow our soldiers fighting a war time home to rest and recuperate.

This is not what we are paying you for.

cc: the American electorate

Rather Sues CBS

From the New York Times:

Dan Rather, whose career at CBS News ground to an inglorious end 15 months ago over his role in an unsubstantiated report questioning President Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service, filed a lawsuit this afternoon against the network, its corporate parent and three of his former superiors.

Mr. Rather, 75, asserts that the network violated his contract by giving him insufficient airtime on “60 Minutes” after forcing him to step down as anchor of the “CBS Evening News” in March 2005. He also contends that the network committed fraud by commissioning a “biased” and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast and, in the process, “seriously damaged his reputation.”

As expected, the Orcosphere is having a field day with this story.

I just wonder if he and Don Imus have the same attorney.

No Rest

The Senate Republicans filibustered the Webb amendment to the Defense Authorization that would have granted soldiers as much leave time at home that they spent over in Iraq.

The proposal, sponsored by Sens. James Webb (D-Va.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), failed on a 56 to 44 vote, with 60 votes needed for passage -- a tally that was virtually identical to a previous vote in July. A last-minute campaign by the Defense Department and the White House to kill the measure won over Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), an influential voice on defense policy who had voted with Webb and Hagel in July.

Warner's defection deflated any momentum that had been building and effectively ensured the legislation's demise. Just six Republicans supported the proposal, one fewer than the previous count.

The vote offered the most vivid evidence yet that the Bush administration still controls Iraq war policy, despite months of congressional debate, the war's persistent unpopularity and a summer-long effort by activists to pressure Republicans. Unless other options with broad appeal emerge soon -- a prospect both parties now say is unlikely -- Bush's plan to keep most troops in Iraq through next summer will remain intact.

"Our Republican colleagues are more interested in protecting our president than our troops," Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) said moments before the vote, when defeat appeared certain. "This is Bush's war. Don't make it also the Republican senators' war."

While I agree with Bryan that this was more a bit of drama than genuine legislation -- he notes that if you really want to get something attached to a bill, do it to the House appropriations bill and force it to a vote in conference -- it does bring home the point that the Democrats are willing to put up a measure that would in turn measure the Republicans as far as their loyalty to the president is concerned. What this filibuster and the one before it on the reinstatement of habeas corpus make abundantly clear is that as far as the Republicans are concerned, political considerations -- i.e. don't embarrass the president -- take precedence.

There are those who say that the Democrats are wasting valuable time by putting up amendments and proposals that they know will lose. When you have an evenly-split Senate, it seems academic to try to pass something that will not get ten Republicans to go along with you and defeat a filibuster. You fight the fights you know you can win, they say. But you also fight the fights that need fighting, even if you know you will lose. At some point it's going to become breathtakingly clear that the Republicans are on the wrong side of this battle. Until then, the opponents of this tragedy should not rest.

Tropical Update

Invest 93 has kinda sorta fizzled out over central Florida, but the thing to watch is now this cluster of clouds and circulation off to the west of Cape Coral.

It will probably head west and north towards the Gulf Coast, and if it develops into a tropical storm, it would be named Jerry.

Ahmadinejad Plays NYC

Some people just know how to piss people off. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, will be in New York next week and he asked to visit Ground Zero. After a bit of confusion among the city officials, they turned down his request on the basis of security issues and that it's a construction site.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s request came to light today in a discussion that [Police] Commissioner [Patrick] Kelly had with reporters from several news organizations.

Mr. Kelly, apparently relying on outdated information, said that Iranian officials had made a “formal request” that the police and Secret Service were discussing the matter with the Iranian Mission. The commissioner had said that the concerns had more to do with the logistics of dealing with the Iranian president’s large security detail than with his right, like any foreign visitor, to travel freely in the city. But Mr. Kelly had ruled out a trip into the pit. “Construction is in full swing, and it would not be possible for him to go where other people don’t go,” Mr. Kelly said.

A short while later, around 4:15 p.m., the Police Department’s spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said that Mr. Kelly misspoke and that police commanders had already decided that a visit to ground zero by Mr. Ahmadinejad was not feasible.

Of course this set off a ceaseless round of news releases from all the presidential candidates. Mitt Romney called it "shockingly audacious," Rudy Giuliani called it "outrageous," and Hillary Clinton said it was "unacceptable."

Well, duh. Ahmadinejad may be all of the things they say about him -- an anti-Semite, a Holocause denier, and not exactly wrapped too tight -- but he knows how to play to a crowd and just what to do to provoke the predictable responses from the Americans. He knew going into it that he wouldn't be allowed to visit the site and yet he went ahead and requested it. Now the denial will be played up in the Tehran media as yet another slap at the dignity of Iran; Mr. Ahmadinejad's gesture will be portrayed as an olive branch of peace and reconciliation coldly rebuffed by the arrogant and decadent Americans.

He's not the first foreign leader who learned early on how to play the Americans. When Fidel Castro first came to New York in 1960 to address the UN, he eschewed the fancy digs of a mid-town hotel like the Waldorf Astoria and stayed in the Hotel Theresa in Harlem to prove that he was a man of the people...and score points against the uptight Eisenhower administration that was still trying to figure out whether or not Castro was a commie. More recently Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has provoked the Bush administration, calling President Bush el diablo (the devil) in a speech at the UN.

It's obvious that people like Ahmadinejad and Chavez know exactly what buttons to push, and they get a charge out of it -- it's like poking a stick at a caged animal. It's a win-win for them; they get sympathetic press from their supporters, and as long as they can get the predictable responses of outrage out of their targets, they'll continue to do it.

Birthday Greetings

To my niece Cary, who is now the same age as her mother was when she was born.

ImageChef.com - Custom comment codes for MySpace, Hi5, Friendster and more

No O.J. Here

This post is just to let you know that this will be the only post here about O.J. Simpson.

To paraphrase the immortal Hawkeye Pierce, "The instrument has yet to be invented that can measure my indifference to him."

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Slinking Back

Maureen Dowd, now sprung from behind the firewall of the late TimesSelect, notes the latest fashion trend in Washington: making a comeback after a dose of ignominy.

Nobody wants to simply admit they made a mistake and disappear for awhile. Nobody even wants to use the weasel words: “Mistakes were made.” No, far better to pop right back up and get in the face of those who were savoring your absence.

We should think of a name for this appalling modern phenomenon. Kissingering, perhaps.

In Las Vegas, there’s the loathsome O.J., a proper candidate for shunning and stun-gunning, barging back into the picture.

And on Capitol Hill, Larry Craig shocked mortified Republicans by bounding into their weekly lunch. You’d think the conservative 62-year-old Idaho senator would have some shame, going from fervently opposing gay rights to provocatively tapping his toe in a Minneapolis airport toilet. (The toilet stall, now known as the Larry Craig bathroom, has become a hot local tourist attraction.)

But no.

As though Republicans don’t have enough problems, Mr. Craig said he is ready to go back to work while the legal hotshots he hired appeal his case. He even cast a couple votes, one against D.C. voting rights. (This creep gets to decide about my representation?)

Even if President Bush is “the cockiest guy” around, as the former Mexican President Vicente Fox writes in a new memoir critical of W.’s “grade-school-level” Spanish and his grade-school-level Iraq policy, he can’t be feeling good about the barbs being hurled his way by former supporters and enablers.

Rummy’s back in the news, giving interviews about a planned memoir and foundation designed to encourage “reasoned and civil debate” about global challenges and to spur more young people to go into government.

It’s rich. Maybe more young people would go into government if they didn’t have to work for devious bullies like Rummy who make huge life-and-death mistakes and then don’t apologize.

Some people just don't know when to stay the hell away.

Tropical Update

It looks like Invest 93 will dump a lot of rain in central Florida -- where they really do need it -- and not much else for now.

Once it crosses the state and hits the Gulf of Mexico, it could pick up some power, so let's keep an eye on it.

Bend Them to Our Will

As if the Iraqi people -- and the rest of the Arab world -- aren't already suspicious of our motives, here comes the next phase in the "hearts and minds" campaign to win them over.

The U.S. military has introduced "religious enlightenment" and other education programs for Iraqi detainees, some of whom are as young as 11, Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, the commander of U.S. detention facilities in Iraq, said yesterday.

Stone said such efforts, aimed mainly at Iraqis who have been held for more than a year, are intended to "bend them back to our will" and are part of waging war in what he called "the battlefield of the mind." Most of the younger detainees are held in a facility that the military calls the "House of Wisdom."

The religious courses are led by Muslim clerics who "teach out of a moderate doctrine," Stone said, according to the transcript of a conference call he held from Baghdad with a group of defense bloggers. Such schooling "tears apart" the arguments of al-Qaeda, such as "Let's kill innocents," and helps to "bring some of the edge off" the detainees, he said.

Why do I get the feeling that the Pentagon will do for religous education what Abu Ghraib did for prison reform?

Shiver Me Timbers

Today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

To help you get along, here's some select pirate lingo:

Master them, and you can face Talk Like a Pirate Day with a smile on your face and a parrot on your shoulder, if that's your thing.

Ahoy! - "Hello!"

Avast! - Stop and give attention. It can be used in a sense of surprise, "Whoa! Get a load of that!" which today makes it more of a "Check it out" or "No way!" or "Get off!"

Aye! - "Why yes, I agree most heartily with everything you just said or did."

Aye aye! - "I'll get right on that sir, as soon as my break is over."

Arrr! - This one is often confused with arrrgh, which is of course the sound you make when you sit on a belaying pin. "Arrr!" can mean, variously, "yes," "I agree," "I'm happy," "I'm enjoying this beer," "My team is going to win it all," "I saw that television show, it sucked!" and "That was a clever remark you or I just made." And those are just a few of the myriad possibilities of Arrr!

There's lots more here, including the Top Ten pick-up lines for pirates...and the ladies, too.

I suggest that you use your pirate talk judiciously at work and be sure to scrape the parrot crap off your shoulder before you go to that meeting or you might find yourself scuppered with a belaying pin lodged fast in your bunghole.

Maryland Court Upholds Gay Marriage Ban

From the Washington Post:

Maryland's highest court yesterday upheld a 34-year-old state law banning same-sex marriage, rejecting an attempt by 19 gay men and lesbians to win the right to marry.

In reversing a lower court's decision, the divided Court of Appeals ruled that limiting marriage to a man and a woman does not discriminate against gay couples or deny them constitutional rights. Although the judges acknowledged that gay men and lesbians have been targets of discrimination, they said the prohibition on same-sex marriage promotes the state's interest in heterosexual marriage as a means of having and protecting children.

Once again the old "save the children" routine; the same old crap about straight marriage being the only way to have and protect children, and that it's the only reason people get married in the first place. It's just another red herring to cover their ass against the anticipated backlash from the Religious Reich, and it smacks of the old excuses racists used to come up with in their fight against mixed marriages: it would destroy all the other marriages, and what about the children?

I get tired of repeating the same old arguments, but it seems that every so often it has to be said again until it sinks in: not everyone -- straight or gay -- gets married for the express purpose of having children; no one has shown that gay marriage has an impact on straight marriage (unless you count people like Larry Craig and Ted Haggard who, given the choice, might have dumped their wives and gone with their instincts); no one has proven that children raised in same-sex households are any more disadvantaged than those raised in straight households, and if the state was so adamant in protecting children, perhaps it would do a better job of taking care of the children it already has by providing them with decent health care and education. But it's a lot easier to talk about protecting them than it is to actually do it.

Chief Judge Robert M. Bell issued a sharp dissent, accusing the majority of failing to recognize gay people as a "suspect class," a group that warrants special protection from discrimination. Bell dismissed the majority view that gays are politically empowered and should not be viewed as such a class.

If gay people were truly politically empowered, then there wouldn't be any laws on the books that discriminate against them, now would there?

The 4 to 3 decision cannot be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court because the lawsuit relied solely on state law. But the judges appeared to invite gay rights advocates to pursue their goals through the political system: "Our opinion should by no means be read to imply that the General Assembly may not grant and recognize for homosexual persons civil unions or the right to marry a person of the same sex," Judge Glenn T. Harrell Jr. wrote for the majority.

I agree; it is time for the state legislatures to step up to plate and pass the laws. That has been effective in the nine states that now recognize some form of gay marriage or civil unions. It will require facing down groups like Focus on the Family and the rest of the finger-wagging jowl-shaking busybodies, but it would be worth it just to force them into the position of having to come out and say, "Hey, we're just a bunch of snivelling bigots." As if that isn't already patently obvious.

Good Ole Fred

How do you think the righties would react if the news got out that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama lobbied for an abortion rights group or gave legal advice to an another lawyer who was representing the defendants in the Pan Am 103 bombing? I'm pretty sure you could hear the screams of Michelle Malkin, John Gibson, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh from the middle of Kansas.

But if it's a Republican, not a peep.

Fred Thompson works hard to come across as a good ole boy and Washington outsider, but the truth is that he's just as much an insider as anyone else in the race, and he's got the lobbying record to prove it. He just doesn't like to talk about it.

For more than 20 years before and after he was a senator, the Republican presidential candidate has lobbied or consulted for a range of clients, some of whom were controversial: two Libyan airline-bombing suspects; an abortion rights group; toppled Haitian leader Jean-Bertrand Aristide; an insurance firm; a chemical company and some members of the savings and loan industry.

Asked why he omits public mention of his long and lucrative career, Thompson chuckled Tuesday: "Nobody asked me the question." Pressed for an answer as he walked out of a meeting with [Florida] Gov. Charlie Crist, Thompson declined to comment, saying, "Good to see you."

[...]

During a three-day, eight-city trip, Florida voters flocked and gushed over Thompson's folksy swagger and up-from-the-bootstraps biography. Even the music he closed his speeches with -- Johnny Cash's I've Been Everywhere -- hit the right note with the crowds.

"A man who plays Johnny Cash can't be bad," Fredrica Speir, a Republican retiree from Celebration, said, laughing, after a Thompson speech near her home that peeled her somewhat away from supporting Giuliani. "I liked his commanding presence, laid-back yet forceful.... I saw shades in him of Ronald Reagan."

Speir said she liked that Thompson, as he said, "put term limits on myself" by leaving office after 2002, and said she didn't mind that he lobbied.

None of Thompson's Republican opponents have publicly questioned his role as a lobbyist, a paid advocate position that's a must for virtually anyone doing business with state or federal government.

There is a certain segment of the electorate that doesn't seem to mind being bamboozled by appearances and campaign songs, and they fall for it every time. The term for them is "sucker," and to the GOP they're known as "the base."

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Where'd This Come From?

All of a sudden there's a tropical depression forming off the coast of south Florida. And I do mean all of a sudden; it wasn't there this morning.

I'm hoping that by the time it builds up to something, it will have passed us by.

Federal Prosecutor Gets Stung

Updated

From WDIV in Detroit:

A U.S. Justice Department official has been arrested on suspicion of traveling to Detroit over the weekend to have sex with a minor.

John David R. Atchison, 53, an assistant U.S. attorney from the northern district of Florida, was arraigned in U.S. District Court in Detroit Monday afternoon.

An undercover officer posed as a mother offering her child to Atchison for sex, according to police.

[...]

In deposition, detectives said Atchison suggested the mother tell her daughter that "you found her a sweet boyfriend who will bring her presents."

The undercover detective expressed concern about physical injury to the 5-year-old girl as a result of the sexual activity. Detectives said Atchison responded, "I am always gentle and loving; not to worry, no damage ever, no rough stuff ever. I only like it soft and nice."

The undercover detective asked how Atchison can be certain of no injury. He responded, "Just gotta go slow and very easy. I've done it plenty," according to detectives.

First, there's no such thing as "having sex with a minor." It's rape, pure and simple. Second, if he's "done it plenty," the authorities in Florida had better get on the job and find out just what this guy, who "is president of the Gulf Breeze Sports Association, a youth athletics organization," has been doing for the last few years. And since he describes himself online as "a family man," my guess is that he's a strong supporter of "family values." And since he's an assistant U.S. attorney in the Justice Department, I'm guessing that he's a registered Republican who passed all the right tests in being politically correct in his views on the law, terrorism, and the majesty of George W. Bush in order to get and keep his job.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure there are perverts in the Democratic party, too, and we'll find them. But it's a lot more pungent when it's someone in the Party of Family Values who flies all the way across the country to rape a five-year-old.

Update: According to this source, Mr. Atchison is a registered Republican.

Send in the Squirrels

The so-called "values voter" debate was held last night in Fort Lauderdale. The top four GOP candidates -- Giuliani, Thompson, McCain, and Romney -- declined the invitation, so that left it open to the second tier -- and apparently the whackiest -- of the Republican field to come down to South Florida and pander to the ignorant tight-ass base.

Jeff Fecke, fellow Shakesville contributor and keeper of The Blog of the Moderate Left live-blogged it. Suffice it to say that it was full of fear and loathing for gays, women, reproductive choice, and a lot of odd non-sequiturs about bringing America back to God before he brings fire and brimstone down from the Heavens.

I admire Jeff for being able to keep up with it and not bring up his dinner in the process. He summarized it well.

So first, who’s the winner of the debate? First off, the clear loser is the American people. That any of these people is even a potential candidate for the nomination of a major political party is truly a terrible thing to contemplate.

As for the candidates themselves? Well, taking into account audience, I’d say your winner is Ambassador Alan Keyes. Oh, sure, he was bizarre and insane, but he was bizarre and insane in the exact same way that his audience was. Huckabee acquitted himself well, and was far more memorable than Sam Brownback — Huckabee clearly is best positioned at this point to win the votes of the crazy wing of the silly party.

But the biggest winners, by far, were Freddie of Hollywood, Multiple Choice Mitt, Mayor 9/11, and John the Baptist. By not showing up, they managed to avoid a litany of answers that will get them branded insane should they get to the general election. And if Huckabee somehow gets the nomination, this debate will come back to bite him, hard. Good night, and good luck.

The comeback to this debate from the righties will be to point out that last month most of the Democratic candidates sat down for a forum with the LGBT community. Same thing, right? Pandering to a voting bloc with an agenda, and a "radical" one at that? Well, no, not exactly. The difference is that the LGBT community is about inclusion and diversity, welcoming more people into the process, not demonizing an entire class of people or proposing Constitutional amendments that would, for the first time in almost 90 years, restrict the rights of those citizens to live their lives and make their own choices. The men on the stage last night were appealing not just to the base of the Republican party but to the primal instincts of human nature that makes you afraid of those who are not exactly like you, who don't worship the way you do, and who think that exploitation of the foolish and the weak is a road to the White House.

So, other than the entertainment value of watching these losers assert their version of American Talibangelism, all last night's vaudeville routine did was affirm the fact that none of them are worthy of holding any position of power above being the night manager at a greasy-spoon diner. If that.

HillaryCare 2.0

Ezra Klein has a concise analysis of Sen. Hillary Clinton's proposal for universal health care.

Here's the thumbnail: Clinton's plan is of the "individual mandate" variety, in which universal coverage is achieved by mandating that every American purchase health care. In order to ensure that that's both possible and affordable, the Clinton plan creates a few new coverage options, reform the insurance industry, limits coverage costs to a percentage of income, and washes your car.

Okay, it doesn't wash your car. It does open the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program to everybody, ensuring that anyone can access the same menu of regulated private options that federal employees get. FEHBP is the program that already insures millions of current government employees, including the members of Congress, by offering a variety of regulated private options to choose from. Throwing the doors to that program wide open is the most basic and ubiquitous of coverage solutions.

More importantly, the plan also creates a new public insurance option, modeled off, but distinct from, Medicare. That's a big deal: The public insurer offers full coverage and is open to all Americans without restriction. Public insurance is what I feared her plan would avoid, and instead, she embraced it wholeheartedly. The concern with a plan like this (as with the Edwards plan), is that insurers will market coverage to the young and healthy and subtly tilt the public plan's risk pool towards the old and sick (the check is that governmental plans are, for reasons related to administration costs and care incentives, cheaper). At the end of the day, there's not much that can be done about that, unless you want to tax insurers with overly healthy pools, as they do in Germany. Come to think of it, that's exactly what they should do -- it was even in the 1994 bill.

Regardless of the merits or shortcomings of the plan, the Republicans will go ballistic and rip it to shreds because it's proposed by Hillary Clinton, and they're still paying residuals to the actors who played "Harry and Louise" in the commercials the insurance companies ran back in 1993 that defeated Ms. Clinton's first attempt to reform health care. They will seek out the tiniest flaw ("Look! There's a split infinitive in this paragraph!") pronounce it as totally unworkable, socialized medicine, and that it will lead to man-on-dog sex in the streets of Philadelphia. It does put Mitt Romney in the uncomfortable position of having to attack a plan that is remarkably similar to the plan that he signed into law when he was the governor of Massachusetts ("They made me do it!"), but for the most part it will provide a distraction from the fact that none of the Republicans have put forth any sort of health care reform other than to suggest that there are always emergency rooms that will provide for the truly needy. That certainly doesn't obligate them from not attacking the plan as the slippery slope to "Canadian-style" (i.e. single-payer) health care. Guess what; we've had that in some form or another for generations. It's called Medicare. And it works. (What's ironic is that when I was in Canada in August I saw campaign commercials for the Liberal Party in the upcoming provincial election in Ontario. One of their themes was telling voters to reject the Conservatives who wanted to bring in "U.S. style" health care.)

As David Brooks notes, the plan isn't perfect and it will require a change in the political lay of the land because, as Sen. Clinton's plan envisions, the disparate groups that make up the health care industry -- insurance companies, governments, doctors, big pharma, the patients -- will have to get together and try to achieve a common goal. Forget the actual points of the plan; it's the politics and the profits that are at stake here, not the actual health and well-being of both the citizens of the United States and the economy.

Free At Last

The New York Times is throwing in the towel on "TimesSelect," their two-year experiment with pay-per-view for their opinion pages.

According to a "Dear NYTimes.com Readers" letter on the (free) opinion page, Vivian Schiller, Senior Vice President & General Manager for NYTimes.com wrote,

Since we launched TimesSelect in 2005, the online landscape has altered significantly. Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism. We encourage everyone to read our news and opinion – as well as share it, link to it and comment on it.

In reality, for every subscriber to TimesSelect, there was probably one reader or blogger who went around the gate and posted the material for free on other websites or excerpted enough of the articles for blog commenting as to render the pay site pointless.

So starting tomorrow, Maureen Dowd, Thomas L. Friedman, Frank Rich, Gail Collins, Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Bob Herbert and Nicholas D. Kristof and all the rest will be liberated from their purgatory and will no longer rely on the kindness of strangers for getting their word out to the electronic masses.

Monday, September 17, 2007

America's Crack Problem

Here's the latest thing that states and municipalities are worrying about.

It's a fashion that started in prison, and now the saggy pants craze has come full circle -- low-slung street strutting in some cities may soon mean run-ins with the law, including a stint in jail.

Proposals to ban saggy pants are starting to ride up in several places. At the extreme end, wearing pants low enough to show boxers or bare buttocks in one small Louisiana town means six months in jail and a $500 fine.

A crackdown also is being pushed in Atlanta, Georgia. And in Trenton, New Jersey, getting caught with your pants down may soon result in not only a fine, but a city worker assessing where your life is headed.

"Are they employed? Do they have a high school diploma? It's a wonderful way to redirect at that point," said Trenton Councilwoman Annette Lartigue, who is drafting a law to outlaw saggy pants. "The message is clear: We don't want to see your backside."

The bare-your-britches fashion is believed to have started in prisons, where inmates aren't given belts with their baggy uniform pants to prevent hangings and beatings. By the late 80s, the trend had made it to gangster rap videos, then went on to skateboarders in the suburbs and high school hallways.

"For young people, it's a form of rebellion and identity," Adrian "Easy A.D." Harris, 43, a founding member of the Bronx's legendary rap group Cold Crush Brothers. "The young people think it's fashionable. They don't think it's negative."

But for those who want to stop them see it as an indecent, sloppy trend that is a bad influence on children.

"It has the potential to catch on with elementary school kids, and we want to stop it before it gets there," said C.T. Martin, an Atlanta councilman. "Teachers have raised questions about what a distraction it is."

Where have these people been? The low-riding pants fashion has been around for years, and these folks are just catching up? Hand these people a copy Rolling Stone, somebody.

It's also extremely old news that the whole point of teen fashion is to drive the parents and older generation nuts. My grandmother scandalized her parents with the flapper look in the 1920's, the bobbysoxers did it to theirs in the 1940's, and kids faced expulsion from school in the 1960's for refusing to cut their hair. This gangsta look is just the latest, and who knows what the kids will come up twenty years from now. (With any luck, it'll be bell-bottoms and wide lapels. I still have some of those in the closet.) I just wonder what the hell the kids use to hold the pants up? Velcro? Thumbtacks?

Frankly, I think the people in these towns who are coming up with these laws and fines are just jealous that they can't wear the hippest (sorry) fashion... and thank Dog they can't; I'd hate to see some middle-aged guy going around with his butt-crack showing. That kind of fashion statement is below the belt.

Ad This

So when Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) says on Real Time with Bill Maher that it's "dishonest" and "hypocritical" for General Petraeus to be the lead sales rep for the Bush administration's war policy, how come Rudy Giuliani and the rest of the Orcosphere aren't all over his ass?

Maher: Isn’t a dirty trick on the American people when you send a military man out there to basically do a political sell-job?”

Hagel: It’s not only a dirty trick, but it’s dishonest, it’s hypocritical, it’s dangerous and irresponsible. The fact is this is not Petraeus’ policy, it’s the Bush’s policy. The military is — certainly very clear in the Constitution — is subservient to the elected public officials of this country.. but to put our military in a position that this administration has put them in is just wrong, and it’s dangerous.”

The difference is that Sen. Hagel is attacking the White House for putting up General Petraeus, but not attacking the general himself, as MoveOn.org did with their full-page ad in the New York Times.

But I'm not sure there's a heck of a lot of difference here. For one thing, as Sen Hagel notes, the military is subservient to the elected officials, and the White House putting the general out there as if he is the person responsible for the failed war policy makes him the apparent figurehead... and the scapegoat. That's a cowardly way to deflect the criticism of the war policy: let the critics kill the messenger and then get all outraged when they go overboard.

So whatever you may think of General Petraeus and whether or not he was conned, duped, or ordered to go before Congress and shovel the bullshit for Bush, or whether or not MoveOn.org crossed the line with their ad (and got a kick out of the fireworks that it caused), it still comes down to the simple fact that the White House and the loyal Bushies don't really seem to care what it was that the general said; they were just in it for the political fall-out, and Sen. Hagel called them on it. Why doesn't someone run a full-page ad in the Times about that?

Tech Question Follow Up

I found an answer to the tech question I posed last week:

Anybody out there know how to get "Adobe PDF" as a printer option on a Windows Vista computer?

There is shareware called CutePDF (hey, I don't make up the names, okay?) that works with Vista and does exactly what I want.

It downloaded quickly and though it also requires a PS2PDF converter (Ghostwriter), there's a prompt as CutePDF is downloading it so basically it comes all in one.

Thanks, boatboy!

We the People

Today is the 220th anniversary of the adoption of the United States Constitution in its original form by the Constitutional Convetnion in Philadelphia.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Celebrate it, cherish it, honor it, and don't let anyone tell you that the first three words -- We the People -- aren't the most important words in that entire document.

Who Is This Guy

Glenn Greenwald provides a little background on Michael Mukasey, the apparent front-runner to be the next Attorney General.

There is no question that Judge Mukasey, a Reagan appointee who served as the Chief Judge for the Southern District of New York before retiring recently, is close to the far right on the judicial spectrum. He undoubtedly holds many legal and political views which most Democrats would find objectionable, perhaps even intolerable. But that will be true of any nominee Bush selects, and it is true of the current Acting Attorney General, Paul Clement, who will remain in place if no nominee is confirmed.

I want to highlight one extremely relevant consideration concerning Judge Mukasey -- the impressive role he played in presiding over the Jose Padilla case in its earliest stages. After Padilla was first detained in April 2002 and declared an "enemy combatant," he was held incommunicado, denied all access to the outside the world, including counsel, and the Bush administration refused to charge him with any crimes. A lawsuit was filed on Padilla's behalf by a New York criminal defense lawyer, Donna Newman, demanding that Padilla be accorded the right to petition for habeas corpus and that, first, he be allowed access to a lawyer. That lawsuit was assigned to Judge Mukasey, which almost certainly made the Bush DOJ happy.

But any such happiness proved to be unwarranted. Judge Mukasey repeatedly defied the demands of the Bush administration, ruled against them, excoriated them on multiple occasions for failing to comply with his legally issued orders, and ruled that Padilla was entitled to contest the factual claims of the government and to have access to lawyers. He issued these rulings in 2002 and 2003, when virtually nobody was defying the Bush administration on anything, let alone on assertions of executive power to combat the Terrorists. And he made these rulings in the face of what was became the standard Bush claim that unless there was complete acquiescence to all claimed powers by the President, a Terrorist attack would occur and the blood would be on the hands of those who impeded the President.

The only impediment to Judge Mukasey's appointment and confirmation is that his name was first suggested last spring by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and that he's not Ted Olson. The righties will not be happy... which is just fine with me.

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes yesterday here and at Shakespeare's Sister.

I had a very nice day; I got some yard work done, got some work done on Small Town Boys, finished the crossword, and the both the Tigers won...the baseball Tigers and the golf Tiger.

I got presents from my parents: a Krups toaster oven that has an on-board computer, and a new shirt to wear to work. My siblings also sent gifts, and Friday night I was treated to dinner by Bob and The Old Professor. It's very nice to have people think of you on your birthday, and I appreciate it very much.

Sunday, September 16, 2007

Sunday Reading

- Running Against The Clinton Administration: Ryan Lizza takes a look at one of the hurdles Hillary Clinton has to overcome in her race for the White House.

Though Bill is a more loquacious politician and a more vigorous campaigner than Hillary, her aides have decided that his popularity among Democrats outweighs the considerable risk that he will overshadow her. He has become suddenly ubiquitous, especially in New Hampshire, which is set to hold the season’s first Presidential primary, in January, and where Clinton nostalgia is a potent force. (Clinton’s surprise second-place showing in 1992, behind Paul Tsongas, propelled him toward his party’s nomination.) When he’s not introducing his wife at rallies or sitting down for interviews with Oprah and Larry King, as he did last week, he is wooing old friends on her behalf. In June, Clinton met with ten Democratic activists whose endorsement Hillary covets. Kathy Sullivan, the former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair, who hosted the gathering, told me that after the meeting Clinton had just one question for her: “Do you think I helped Hillary?”

Although Hillary Clinton’s candidacy insures that her husband’s eight years as President will be central to the 2008 campaign, he also hovered over the two previous primary seasons, in each of which the field narrowed to a Clinton candidate and an anti-Clinton candidate. In 2000, Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator, characterized the Clinton Presidency as timid and accommodationist, while Vice-President Al Gore ran on Clinton’s record. In 2004, Howard Dean ran on an antiwar message, but he tried to rally Democrats who believed that Clintonism was fundamentally unprincipled; John Kerry recruited people from the Clinton White House and associated himself with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Hillary’s advisers argue that the obvious lesson of those two campaigns is that invoking Democratic resentment about Clinton’s ideological and personal failings does not work. But his prominence this time makes the strategy irresistible. “The whole race is going to end up there,” a spokesman for one of Hillary’s rivals told me. “It has to, because that’s what she’s running on. She’s running on Bill Clinton. If she were running on her Senate record or some new ideas for the future, rather than the nineties, it would be different. But her biggest strength is Bill Clinton, so the only way to attack her is to take that head on.”

- Who Really Wins? Helene Cooper looks at how the president's stand on Iraq may actually be beneficial to the Democrats.

The consensus here is that President Bush was the winner this week in the battle with the Democrats over reducing the number of American troops in Iraq.

But Mr. Bush’s tactical victory in holding off pressure from Congressional Democrats and the Democratic party’s presidential candidates to begin withdrawing from Iraq left open the question of which party would benefit most politically from the outcome heading into the 2008 election.

Mr. Bush stared down the troop-withdrawal crowd that populates the Democratic field these days. In his own prime time speech to the nation, following two days of testimony from Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the president managed to paint an optimistic enough picture of the state of play in Iraq to stem a feared stampede of Congressional Republicans joining Democrats trying to head for the exit doors.

Congressional Democrats, visibly disappointed, now talk of looking for ways to attach conditions to coming Pentagon spending requests. But they have been reluctant to limit money for the war unilaterally, because of fears that they will be painted as weak on national security and that such moves could leave American servicemen without proper equipment and support in Iraq.

So many political observers believe that funding requests for troops in Iraq will go through, and Mr. Bush will continue to steer the wheel on Iraq policy. A political victory for Republicans, right?

Wrong, says Christopher Gelpi, a political science professor at Duke University.

“This sets the stage for really bad Republican losses in 2008,” Mr. Gelpi said. “It’s bad for the Republicans who are running for president. It’s bad for the Republicans who are running for the Senate. It’s bad for the Republicans who are running for the House.”

- Frank Rich: If the Democrats can take advantage of the country's feelings about the war, they have a funny way of showing it.

Americans are looking for leadership, somewhere, anywhere. At least one of the Democratic presidential contenders might have shown the guts to soundly slap the "General Betray-Us" headline on the ad placed by MoveOn.org in The Times, if only to deflate a counterproductive distraction. This left-wing brand of juvenile name-calling is as witless as the "Defeatocrats" and "cut and run" McCarthyism from the right; it at once undermined the serious charges against the data in the Petraeus progress report (including those charges in the same MoveOn ad) and allowed the war's cheerleaders to hyperventilate about a sideshow. "General Betray-Us" gave Republicans a furlough to avoid ownership of an Iraq policy that now has us supporting both sides of the Shiite-vs.-Sunni blood bath while simultaneously shutting America's doors on the millions of Iraqi refugees the blood bath has so far created.

It's also past time for the Democratic presidential candidates to stop getting bogged down in bickering about who has the faster timeline for withdrawal or the more enforceable deadline. Every one of these plans is academic anyway as long as Mr. Bush has a veto pen. The security of America is more important — dare one say it? — than trying to outpander one another in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate need all the unity and focus they can muster to move this story forward, and that starts with the two marquee draws, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It's essential to turn up the heat full time in Washington for any and every legislative roadblock to administration policy that they and their peers can induce principled or frightened Republicans to endorse.

They should summon the new chief of central command (and General Petraeus's boss), Adm. William Fallon, for tough questioning; he is reportedly concerned about our lapsed military readiness should trouble strike beyond Iraq. And why not grill the Joint Chiefs and those half-dozen or so generals who turned down the White House post of "war czar" last fall? The war should be front and center in Congress every day.

Mr. Bush, confident that he got away with repackaging the same bankrupt policies with a nonsensical new slogan ("Return on Success") Thursday night, is counting on the public's continued apathy as he kicks the can down the road and bides his time until Jan. 20, 2009; he, after all, has nothing more to lose. The job for real leaders is to wake up America to the urgent reality. We can't afford to punt until Inauguration Day in a war that each day drains America of resources and will. Our national security can't be held hostage indefinitely to a president's narcissistic need to compound his errors rather than admit them.

Read the rest here.

- On This Date:

• 1400 - Owain Glyndŵr declared Prince of Wales by his followers.
• 1630 - The Massachusetts village of Shawmut changed its name to Boston.
• 1887 - The first game of softball was played in Chicago, Illinois
• 1908 - General Motors is founded.
• 1949 - First Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote episode - The Fast and the Furry-ous - is aired.
• 1952 - I was born in Dallas, Texas. (Thanks, Melissa!)

- Doonesbury: The closest she ever came to justice.

- Opus: The flying penguin.

This Is Insanity

From the Sunday Telegraph:

Senior American intelligence and defence officials believe that President George W Bush and his inner circle are taking steps to place America on the path to war with Iran, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.

Pentagon planners have developed a list of up to 2,000 bombing targets in Iran, amid growing fears among serving officers that diplomatic efforts to slow Iran's nuclear weapons programme are doomed to fail.

Pentagon and CIA officers say they believe that the White House has begun a carefully calibrated programme of escalation that could lead to a military showdown with Iran.

Now it has emerged that Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, who has been pushing for a diplomatic solution, is prepared to settle her differences with Vice-President Dick Cheney and sanction military action.

The mind boggles.

This isn't the first time this week this news has bounced around, and all it does is reaffirm that this administration is bound and determined to leave this nation as a smoking ruin of our former self; at least figuratively.

It's also clear that the administration has no intention whatsoever of consulting Congress, and even if they did, there's not a whole lot that the Congress could do to stop this insanity.

The president thinks we're running out of options in dealing with Iran. I sure hope we're not running out of options in dealing with this president, short of something that violates federal law and draws the attention of the Secret Service. It's time to put impeachment back on the table, or at least the 25th Amendment.

Another Dimension Heard From

Updated

And you thought the Republican field was just a bunch of boring white guys who were a rehash of tired old Reagan/Bush and Bush II talking points or whose conservative creds were in doubt...Giuliani and his serial marriages, his support of gay rights, Mitt Romney, who's rarely gone a week without changing his position on something, or Fred Thompson, who's about to become the corporate spokesman for Sominex. Obviously they weren't reaching out to the full dimension of the Republican base; the bull-goose loony religious nuts and the token nod to the minorities. Well, guess what; they now have a candidate who can reach out to the both the real Republican base -- the nutjob wing, and he's black. Yep: Alan Keyes is back.

Keyes told Janet Parshall, host of a nationally syndicated radio show, that he's "unmoved" by the lack of moral courage shown by the other candidates, among whom he sees no standout who articulates the "key kernel of truth that must, with courage, be presented to our people."

He added, "The one thing I've always been called to do is to raise the standard... of our allegiance to God and His authority that has been the foundation stone of our nation's life"--and he decried the lack of "forthright, clear, and clarion declaration" from the other candidates concerning this issue.

[...]

As a prelude to running, prior to making up his mind to announce, Keyes has been writing a series of essays on the 2008 election titled "The Crisis of the Republic"--published at RenewAmerica and disseminated by several other outlets. A common theme of the articles is the need to restore personal sovereignty that is based in religious premises and self-discipline, if American society is to survive in liberty.

Mr. Keyes, once an ambassador in the Reagan administration, ran for president in 1996 and 2000, and in 2004 barged his way into Illinois to run as the last-minute sub in the Senate race against Barack Obama when the GOP nominee had to drop out because of a messy divorce. In case you've forgotten, Steve Benen at The Carpetbagger Report has a reminder of some of Mr. Keyes's more interesting statements:

* upon earning his GOP Senate nomination in 2004, announced, “The victory is for God.”

* said a Republican senator who admitted to listening to Nine Inch Nails was “aiding and abetting cultural murder.”

* likened his Senate opponent to a “terrorist” because of his positions on abortion.

* said that Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter is participating in “selfish hedonism” because she is a lesbian.

In other words, he's a full-fledged whack job.

The only saving grace he will provide for the rest of the GOP field is that he will make even loons like Tom Tancredo look like a moderate by comparison.

Update: Josh Marshall wins the prize for the best line: "Alan Keyes throws his straight jacket into the ring."

Saturday, September 15, 2007

The Oracle Speaks

Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman and keeper of the Sacred Scrolls of the American economy, is out with his memoirs.

In a withering critique of his fellow Republicans, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan says in his memoir that the party to which he has belonged all his life deserved to lose power last year for forsaking its small-government principles.

In "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World," published by Penguin Press, Mr. Greenspan criticizes both congressional Republicans and President George W. Bush for abandoning fiscal discipline.

The book is scheduled for public release Monday. The Wall Street Journal bought a copy at a bookstore in the New York area.

Mr. Greenspan, who calls himself a "lifelong libertarian Republican," writes that he advised the White House to veto some bills to curb "out-of-control" spending while the Republicans controlled Congress. He says President Bush's failure to do so "was a major mistake." Republicans in Congress, he writes, "swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose."

Yeowch.

Not Ready for Prime Time

Updated

Both Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson made fools of themselves this week in their campaigns for president. In other words, just another week.

Fred Thompson showed, to use theatre terms, that he's not off-book yet, and he doesn't do improv well.

"It's one thing to give a stump speech and project your theme, and he accomplished that with a conservative populist message," said Greg Mueller, a former aide to conservative Republican presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan in 1992. "Now, his next challenge is to really hone his answers to questions — and that's a challenge all candidates have faced."

In the unscripted moments, Thompson has faltered in the last week with several unforced errors.

Among them, he has:

• Referred to Osama bin Laden as "more symbolism than anything else" and was dismissive about whether it mattered if he were caught. Thompson made the remarks following the release of a new video from the terrorist leader and five days before the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Democrats pounced, and Thompson then took a harder line, saying bin Laden "ought to be caught and killed."

• Declined to "pass judgment" on the appropriateness of Congress' intervention to save the life of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo two years ago. "That's going back in history. I don't remember the details of it," he said of the case that bitterly divided the nation, still energizes conservatives and helped sink the presidential aspirations of his former Tennessee colleague Bill Frist.

• Given an answer on his personal religious practices while campaigning in South Carolina, where Christian evangelicals dominate the GOP electorate. "I attend church when I'm in Tennessee. I'm in McLean (Va.), right now," he said, adding, "I don't attend regularly when I'm up there."

Mr. Thompson doesn't seem to get the point that religious symbolism is key to the base of the GOP, and Osama bin Laden, Teri Schiavo, and Jesus are the Holy Trinity of the GOP. Thompson flubbed all three. Even if President Bush dismisses bin Laden as "irrelevant," he's not running for president, and the righties still get a lot of mileage out of demonizing anyone who bears even an alliterative resemblance to OBL or Islam: remember what they did when it was discovered that Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein? Saying he doesn't remember the details of the Schiavo case and therefore doesn't have anything to say about it is, for the Religious Reich, like telling the Jewish community that he doesn't remember the details of the Holocaust, and matter-of-factly announcing that he's not a regular church-goer also raises some suspicions -- even if their late messiah, Ronald Reagan, was also indifferent to zealous church attendance. If Mr. Thompson thinks he can shuffle through the nomination so that he can be the point man on the 2008 GOP death march, it might be a good idea for him to bone up on the things that really matter to his base.

Rudy Giuliani went after Hillary Clinton full-tilt with his first campaign ad, denouncing her for not denouncing MoveOn.org for their full-page ad in The New York Times attacking General Petraeus.

"Clinton stood silently by when MoveOn.org ran this venomous ad in the New York Times," the ad states. “The same general she called an expert not long ago. Now she is questioning his honesty.”

It would be one thing if Sen. Clinton had voiced support for the ad, but she didn't. In fact, she didn't say anything about the ad, but apparently that's not good enough for Mr. Giuliani: not denouncing MoveOn.org is tantamount to supporting it. This, by the way, is a typical GOP double standard; I have yet to hear Mr. Giuliani say anything about Rep. John Boehner's "small price to pay" comment about the war in Iraq. Does that mean he agrees with him? I also haven't heard Rudy Giuliani denounce Fred Phelps and his band of whacky gay-bashers; does that mean he endorses them?

Mr. Giuliani also chastises Sen. Clinton for changing her views on the war in Iraq, noting that she voted for the war and is now opposed to it. Well, that puts her in good company with such flip-floppers as Republicans John Warner, Chuck Hagel, and a majority of the American electorate. And as my friend Bob pointed out, anyone who looks at how we got into the war, the lies and exaggerations that led up to it, and who doesn't have the sense to reconsider their point of view but blindly follow the Dear Leader is in no position to be running for president. Even Newt Gingrich knows that.

Update: Brian makes a point in his comment about Hillary responding...or not. Just in from Election Central at TPM:

The war between the two New York frontrunners is heating up today. Rudy -- who took out a full page ad in The New York Times today blasting Hillary and MoveOn for questioning Scholar-Warrior Petraeus -- has just posted a new Web ad with lots of pictures of Petraeus hitting her yet again on this front.

In response, the Hillary campaign is charging that Rudy is attacking her to halt his slide in recent polls. Hillary spokesperson Phil Singer sends over the following:
Rudy Giuliani is dropping in the polls and is unable to defend his own support for George Bush's failed war. Instead of distorting Senator Clinton’s record in the campaign's first attack ad, the Mayor should tell voters why he thinks sticking with the Bush Iraq strategy makes sense. The country wants change and while Hillary Clinton is focused on ending the war, Mayor Giuliani is playing politics.
We'd like to see these responses contain references to the fact that Rudy's 9/11 performance is now being questioned by his own hero firefighters, but that's just us.

Same here.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Here's Your Hat...

Today's the last day on the government payroll for Alberto Gonzales and Tony Snow.

One was the Attorney General, the other was the White House Press Secretary, but both of them had pretty much the same job description: do whatever it took to obfuscate the president's policies, demonize his opponents, and use the powers of the government and their offices to politicize everything from hiring lawyers in the Justice Department to the White House Easter Egg Roll.

To be fair, they did exactly what their boss told them to do, and for that they at least lived up to the standards that he set -- which are roughly equivalent to those of a dress code at a cockfight.

Question of the Day

I used this one over at Shakespeare's Sister the other day, but what the heck; let's try it among the readers over here and see what we get: Writing about the Bryan case below reminded me of Anita Bryant, who in the mid-1970's scared the bejesus out of Florida with her anti-gay campaign in Dade County. During the campaign, Newsweek ran a profile of the former beauty pageant maven, including the tidbit of news that, because of the backlash against her from the sizable gay community here, she had her security guards refuse to allow "unmarried men" to approach or interview her. I wrote a letter to the editor of Newsweek saying that if Jesus Christ came back, he'd have trouble getting through her gate: he wasn't married, either. They published the letter...and the seeds of my career as a blogger were planted.

So the question is: What was your first act of public advocacy?

Tropical Update

Ingrid is the next tropical storm that's making her way across the Atlantic.

As Humphrey Bogart said to another famous Ingrid, "Here's looking at you, kid."

SSDD

No, I didn't watch the speech or any of the follow-up. I knew it would be the same exaggerations, half-truths, platitudes, nostrums, and stern resolve we've been getting since this whole thing began; just rearrange the paragraphs. Same shit, different day. So I read a good book and fell asleep before 9:01.

What amazes, or actually saddens me is that anyone out there on either side of this story would think that it would be any different. We all know that President Bush will never change his course of action; he'll just get new players, and General Petraeus is just the latest in a long string. And the Democrats keep up the toothless howling, knowing that they don't have the power to do anything other than that. Keep shakin' that rock, Sisyphus.

Friday Blogaround

Here's the weekly wrap-up from the Liberal Coalition.

- A Blog Around The Clock: a dose of science for the week.
- archy is over being outraged.
- Bark Bark Woof Woof on the Democrats' ineffectiveness.
- Bloggg: your money's worth.
- Collective Sigh shares good news.
- Dohiyi Mir: NTodd on his Vermont senators.
- Echidne Of The Snakes: a primer on how to interview Laura Ingraham.
- First Draft: let them have it.
- Grateful Dread Radio: tree hugging.
- Happy Furry Puppy Story Time: some good movies to watch.
- Iddybud Journal: John Edwards's response to the president's speech on Iraq.
- Left Is Right on a brave soldier.
- Lefty Side of the Dial: Lefty's guilty pleasure music list (including Neil Diamond...)
- Liberty Street on pushing the veto.
- Make me a Commentator!!! on Cal Thomas's standard of faith.
- Musing's musings on landmarks in Washington and landmark ideas to live by.
- Pen-Elayne on the Web shares the joy of her husband's artistic success.
- Rick's Cafe Americain: an observation on disasters being the new mission.
- Rook's Rant on New York Times ad rates and the free market.
- rubber hose on another rightie blogger who can't read.
- Scrutiny Hooligans: Drama Queen has the lowdown on Patrick McHenry's posse.
- SoonerThought has moved to Blogger. Please update your links.
- Speedkill on the war.
- Steve Bates made it through Hurricane Humberto.
- T. Rex's Guide to Life: get your fill of Florida politics. It's fun in the sun!
- The Fulcrum on the anniversary of September 11, 2001.
- The Invisible Library and the Endless Library.
- WTF Is It Now?? Oops...
- ...You Are A Tree: don't read this!

Read on.

Friday Catblogging

Snowball has a new toy.

"Who cares about a new computer? I've got boxes to play in."

Cop-Shooting Suspect Killed

The man suspected of killing one Miami-Dade cop and wounding three others in a shootout Thursday morning was cornered and shot dead in a Pembroke Pines condo complex sometime before midnight, authorities said.

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez and Police Director Robert Parker, speaking at a news conference at about 12:30 a.m. today, told reporters police had shot Shawn Sherwin LaBeet at the Heron Pond Condos, 305 SW 85th Ave.

"He was armed with a loaded weapon and had additional ammunition," said Parker, who said LaBeet was wearing "body armor."

The officer killed in the the shootout used to be a cop for the Miami-Dade School Police Force.

Officer Jose Somohano was a former schools police officer who became a hard-charging Miami-Dade cop dedicated to doing his job well, his colleagues said.

He was gunned down Thursday at age 37 on the streets he was sworn to protect. He leaves behind a wife and two children.

''He's an awesome guy, great cop. Not a bad word I can say about him. I'm lost for words, I'm hurting that bad,'' said Miami-Dade schools Detective J.T. Messenger, who worked with Somohano in the schools police department. "It's a sad, sad day."

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Police Shooting in Miami - 1 Dead, 3 Wounded

Updates Below

From the Miami Herald:

One Miami-Dade police officer was shot dead and three others wounded late Thursday morning after they stopped a man driving erratically through a Southwest Miami-Dade County neighborhood.

The man opened fire on the officers with a high-powered weapon before fleeing, police said. Law enforcement officers from across South Florida swarmed to the scene to assist in the search for the suspect, identified as Kevin Wehner, 30. Streets and local highway exits were closed to seal off escate [sic] routes. Police warned Wehner may be armed.

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez confirmed the unidentified officer's death shortly before 2 p.m.

''This is a very sad day for us. We need to get this guy,'' Alvarez said, holding up a photo of the suspect.

Police did not disclose the names of the officers, citing the need to notify their families first. The extent of the injuries of the three wounded officers was not clear.

The shooting happened a little after 11 a.m., when officers working on a burglary detail spotted the suspicious car in an apartment complex at Southwest 280th Street and 143rd Court, said Miami-Dade Police Cmdr. Linda O'Brien. The man inside stepped out of the car and opened fire on the officers with a high-powered firearm -- possibly an AK-47 -- striking four, then fled in the auto.

One of the wounded was a female officer whose leg was shattered by a bullet. She was undergoing surgery at Jackson Memorial Hospital.

WTVJ Channel 6 in Miami is streaming live video here.

More later.

4:15 PM EDT From the Miami Herald: Miami-Dade Police now say the suspect's name is Shawn Sherwin Labeet, not Kevin Wehner, and that was last seen in central Broward County.

One Miami-Dade police officer was shot dead and three others wounded late Thursday morning after they stopped a man driving erratically through a Southwest Miami-Dade County neighborhood.

The man opened fire on the officers with a high-powered weapon before fleeing, police said. Law enforcement officers from across South Florida swarmed to the scene to assist in the search for the suspect. Streets and local highway exits were closed to seal off escape routes. Cars were stopped and trunks searched.

The search for the culprit was complicated when police initially released an erroneous identification and photograph for the suspect. Almost four hours after the 11 a.m. shooting, police identified another man, 25-year-old Shawn Sherwin LaBeet, as the correct suspect. They said a second photograph they released was the correct one.

Miami-Dade Cdr. Linda O'Brien said the man earlier identified as the alleged shooter, Kevin Wehner, 30, was not involved and was in his hometown of Jacksonville on Thursday.

''It's a case of mistaken identity,'' John Wehner, Kevin Wehner's uncle in New York, told The Miami Herald earlier.

He said that his nephew contacted Jacksonville police Thursday afternoon to tell them of the mixup. The uncle said his nephew had recently reported to authorities that his wallet, containing his driver's license, had been stolen.

''It appears we have been misled about (the suspect's) initial identity,'' Miami-Dade's O'Brien said. She said she was glad Wehner stepped forward quickly.

Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez confirmed the unidentified officer's death shortly before 2 p.m. The slain officer was shot in the neck.

''This is a very sad day for us. We need to get this guy,'' Alvarez said, holding up a photo of the suspect.

Police did not disclose the names of the officers, citing the need to notify their families first. The extent of the injuries of the three wounded officers was not clear.

The shooting happened a little after 11 a.m., when officers working on a burglary detail spotted the suspicious car in an apartment complex at Southwest 280th Street and 143rd Court, said Miami-Dade Police Cmdr. Linda O'Brien. The man inside stepped out of the car and opened fire on the officers with a high-powered firearm -- possibly an AK-47 -- striking four, then fled in the auto.

6:47 PM EDT More from the Miami Herald: The sighting of the suspect in central Broward County turned out to be a false lead.

In another apparently erroneus lead, Miami-Dade police at about 4 p.m. reported a sighting of LaBeet behind the wheel of a black Pontiac Vibe accompanied by a woman and two children in Central Broward County. The auto soon after was located, empty, at a Target parking lot in Oakland Park, where it was roped off with yellow tape. But after locating the occupants, police then said the man driving the car was not LaBeet.

''We are no longer looking for the vehicle,'' said Miami-Dade Police Cdr. Linda O'Brien.

Investigators are checking whether there is any connection between the people in the car and LaBeet, she said. The car was found by Broward Sheriff's Office deputies.

[...]

A white Honda Accord believed to be driven by the shooter, its windshield shattered, was later found abandoned along a fence lining the bank of Black Creek Canal at Southwest 129th Avenue and 203rd Street in an unincorporated area west of Cutler Bay.

A weapon was recovered, O'Brien said. But the fugitive is believed to still be armed and may be wearing a bulletproof vest.

Police officers were being advised over radio that the suspect had possibly purchased three assault rifles and a handgun in March.

Law enforcement helicopters hovered over a nearby wooded area bordering the canal. Scores of police in cars and on foot scoured the neighborhood of the shooting.

The hunt goes on.

Nerf Vibrator

It looks like President Bush is close to nominating Ted Olson as the replacement for outgoing Attorney General Alberto Gonazales.

Not so fast, says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid vowed on Wednesday to block former Solicitor General Theodore Olson from becoming attorney general if President George W. Bush nominates him to replace Alberto Gonzales.

Congressional and administration officials have described Olson as a leading contender for the job as the nation's chief U.S. law enforcement officer, but Reid declared: "Ted Olson will not be confirmed" by the Senate.

"He's a partisan, and the last thing we need as an attorney general is a partisan," Reid told Reuters in a brief hallway interview on Capitol Hill.

Yeah, well, excuse me if I'm a tad skeptical about the Democrats' resolve to hold firm against the Republicans and the president. Think back to how firmly they stood up to them on renewing the PATRIOT Act, funding the Iraq war, and revising the FISA Act. Heretofore Democratic resoluteness has been about as ineffective and frustrating as a Nerf vibrator.

That's to be expected, though. As David Neiwert at FDL notes, the Democrats are the only ones in Washington who are expected to behave nicely.

For some reason, Democrats must be the model of decorum and civility and moderation and bipartisanship when it comes to governing; any deviance from this script brings on fainting spells and finger-wagging. Meanwhile Republicans can be as vicious and nasty and ruthless and nakedly partisan as they please, and their “toughness” is merely celebrated.

[...]

We’ll see if Olson is indeed the nominee; but even if he isn’t, the fact that he’s one of the favorites sends a message. The White House’s response to Leahy and the Democrats is loud and clear, and one we’ve heard before: Go fuck yourselves. You want us to replace Gonzales, a reliable right-wing lackey? Fine; we’ll give you a right-wing consigliere.

If Olson is nominated, watch for the Beltway media in the following days to briefly wring their hands about this rather naked poke in the eye but eventually come around to the conclusion that Bush’s nomination is “bold” and represents his “resoluteness” or some such nonsense. Then the right-wing Wurlitzer will kick in and start reminding us what a swell fellow Ted Olson really is (I think you can hear Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing winding up their grinders even as we speak).

Compare this, if you will, to the mass tut-tut coming from the Beltway over MoveOn.org’s tough treatment of Gen. Petraeus for his report to Congress. And even more pointedly, it’s worth noting Democrats’ response to the assault — namely, to cower and run from their own best advocates.

These, then, are the Bush Rules in action: Only Democrats have to be civil. “Bipartisanship” means acceding to the conservative agenda. And Republicans can be as vicious as they like, because then we’ll just call it “toughness” or, if it’s really ugly, “just a joke.”

So it doesn't matter that Mr. Olson has been as partisan and hypocritical as they come in Washington; you'll recall that he represented the Bush campaign before the Supreme Court in the 2000 Florida election fight and that he was instrumental in the Arkansas Project, the right-wing hunt to dig up dirt on the Clintons. The president will nominate him, the press will fawn, the Democrats will squawk, they'll cave, and everyone will say how nice it is that everyone gets along so well in doing the country's business.

Pile On Fred Day

Poor ole Fred Thompson; he can't even get off the porch without people sniping at him.

Today three op-ed columnists, including two whom you'd think would be happy to have yet another conservative in the race, are taking him down for his cranky staff, his stumbling start, and his sonambulance.

First is Bob Novak, who complains that the gatekeepers at the Thompson shop are keeping the best and the brightest of the right-wing campaign gurus from getting past them to make their pitch to the candidate.

Thompson's late start is not in itself a fatal flaw. Still, it had been conceded in party circles that when Thompson finally became a candidate, his beginning needed to be memorable. It was not. While Thompson offered obligatory conservative slogans in New Hampshire, Iowa and South Carolina, he was not the white knight whom worried Republican loyalists desperately desire. His debut might have been more blood-stirring had his gatekeepers not turned away talented helpers.

Staffing issues have dogged Thompson since he started; he hired and fired more people before he officially announced than some candidates use in the entire run from the primaries to the inauguration. Not a good sign.

Second is George F. Will, again someone who should be delighted to have no-nonsense conservative in the race. But he compares Mr. Thompson to New Coke:

Fred Thompson's plunge into the presidential pool -- more belly-flop than swan dive -- was the strangest product launch since that of New Coke in 1985. Then, the question was: Is this product necessary? A similar question stumped Thompson the day he plunged.

Sean Hannity, who is no Torquemada conducting inquisitions of conservatives, asked Thompson: "When you look at the other current crop of candidates -- Republicans -- where is the distinction between your positions and what you view as theirs?" Thompson replied: "Well, to tell you the truth, I haven't spent a whole lot of time going into the details of their positions."

Mr. Will also takes Fred to task for not even being sure of his own positions, including campaign finance reform. When asked by Laura Ingraham about certain provisions of the law, he gave a rambling answer that was contradictory to his own positions and sections of the law that he co-sponsored when he was in the Senate.

Thompson, contrary to his current memories, was deeply involved in expanding government restrictions on political speech generally and the ban on issue ads specifically. Yet he told Ingraham, "I voted for all of it," meaning McCain-Feingold, but said "I don't support that" provision of it.

Oh? Why, then, did he file his own brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold McCain-Feingold, stressing Congress's especially "compelling interest" in squelching issue ads that "influence" elections?

Mr. Will reminds me of one of those stern old-style professors I occasionally had in college and grad school who let you know in no uncertain terms how unimpressed they were by unprepared students and rambling bullshit in seminar discussions. One scene from The Paper Chase comes to mind: "Mister Hart, here is a dime. Take it, call your mother, and tell her there is serious doubt about you ever becoming a lawyer." I can imagine George F. Will saying that to Fred Thompson.

Gail Collins looks at the candidate and sees the need for a dose of caffeine...and a strange resonance with another one-time GOP candidate who tried the "aw-shucks" folksy routine.

He’s here. He’s tanned. He’s ready.

He looks like he needs a nap.

When it comes to overhyped underperformers, Fred Thompson’s entry into the presidential race was right up there with Britney Spears at the MTV awards.

The Republican Party’s great tall hope announced his intentions on Jay Leno’s show, and timed it to coincide with his avoidance of the candidate debate in New Hampshire. That was supposed to send the message of — what? A fear of crowds? A preference for answering questions only while seated? His performance certainly could not have been more low-key. You do not often hear somebody say “I’m running for president” in the same tone Jay’s guests use to announce that they’ve signed on for the next season of “Dancing With the Stars.”

Not exactly Mr. Excitement, and not exactly what the GOP needs right now.

This was supposed to be the answer to the Republican core’s primal pain. Find us somebody to nominate! Someone slightly less smarmy than Mitt and slightly less strange than Rudy. “My story is an American story ... a small-town kid of modest means and modest goals,” Thompson tells the voters on his Fred08 Web site. Viewers can feel free to recall that Mitt Romney’s dad was a business tycoon and governor. And you can be sure that Fred was not spending his teens founding a high-school opera club like some former New York City mayors we could name.

Thompson, by all accounts, was indeed an underachiever who rose to fame and fortune mainly through powerful friends and good luck. The perfect answer for a country reeling from two terms with an underachiever who rose to fame and fortune mainly through powerful friends and good genes. And so far at least, it’s working in the polls. An affable guy who doesn’t try hard — what could be more refreshing?

It would be all too easy to dismiss Fred Thompson as just another GOP candidate who shuffles through the campaign as a with his big toe in the sand and bland nostrums as solutions for the problems facing the country: "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet." The problem with that is that we've fallen for it time and again, which tells you just how clever they are...or how gullible and forgetful we are.

Hurricane Humberto

Where did this one come from? Yesterday it was a cluster of storms off the Gulf coast of Texas. Now it's a minimal hurricane making landfall just east of Houston. (Note: "minimal" doesn't mean we're talking about a little zephyr and a shower.)

Steve Bates at The Yellow Doggerel Democrat is keeping tabs on it. As of midnight last night, he's home and dry.

The next disturbance is TD Eight, which is spinning up out in the Atlantic with a path that could bring it close to home.

For what it's worth, two years ago we were keeping track of TD 18, which became Hurricane Rita.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

The Last Throes

Just because the world doesn't hate us enough...

A recent decision by German officials to withhold support for any new sanctions against Iran has pushed a broad spectrum of officials in Washington to develop potential scenarios for a military attack on the Islamic regime, FOX News confirmed Tuesday.

[...]

Consequently, according to a well-placed Bush administration source, "everyone in town" is now participating in a broad discussion about the costs and benefits of military action against Iran, with the likely timeframe for any such course of action being over the next eight to 10 months, after the presidential primaries have probably been decided, but well before the November 2008 elections.

All this because, according to one foreign diplomat, "'...[t]here are a number of people in the administration who do not want their legacy to be leaving behind an Iran that is nuclear armed, so they are looking at what are the alternatives? They are looking at other options,' the diplomat said."

So for all those who have been saying that all we have to do is just wait out the next year and a half until the Bushies leave town, their going-away present could be a nuclear war with a country that's led by a crazy man.

Crooks and Liars has put out an action alert if you're motivated to let Congress know that the last thing we need is to further inflame the Islamic world -- if that's possible -- and give in to every neocon's wet dream of going out in a blaze of glory.

The Right to Publish

Media Matters has a study out that shows that syndicated conservative columnists get a lot more space than liberals do in newspapers across the country. For example:

- Sixty percent of the nation's daily newspapers print more conservative syndicated columnists every week than progressive syndicated columnists. Only 20 percent run more progressives than conservatives, while the remaining 20 percent are evenly balanced.

- In a given week, nationally syndicated progressive columnists are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of 125 million. Conservative columnists, on the other hand, are published in newspapers with a combined total circulation of more than 152 million.

I'm guessing the reason publishers choose to run more right-wingers is two-fold: they are more likely to get bellicose and ranting letters from righties in the "Letters to the Editor" column and this is one way to feed the beast. Also, it's possible that newspaper publishers actually prefer to publish people like Cal Thomas and Jonah Goldberg. So much for the "liberal media."

Tech Question

Anybody out there know how to get "Adobe PDF" as a printer option on a Windows Vista computer?

My late Toshiba with Windows XP was able to print to an Adobe file as an option when choosing printer properties, but that seems to have gone away with my new HP. I was under the impression that being able to print to a PDF file was an option with the free Adobe Reader program. Maybe not...?

Lessons Learned

Gary Kamiya looks at what we have become since September 11, 2001 and how we got here.

Six years ago, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, killing almost 3,000 people. President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his "war on terror." He has incessantly linked the words "al-Qaida" and "Iraq," a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. It's no surprise that Gen. David Petraeus' "anxiously awaited" evaluation of the war is to be given on the 10th and 11th of September. The not-so-subliminal message: We must do what Bush and Petraeus say or risk another 9/11.

Petraeus' evaluation can only be "anxiously awaited" by people who are still anxiously waiting for Godot. We know what will happen next because we've been watching this movie for eight months. Gen. Petraeus, Bush's mighty-me, will insist that we're making guarded progress. Bush, whose keen grasp of military reality is reflected in his recent boast that "we're kicking ass" in Iraq, will promise that he will reassess the situation in April. The Democrats will flail their puny arms, the zombie Republicans will keep following orders, and the troops will stay.

So let's forget the absurd debate about "progress" and whether a bullet in the front of the head is better than one in the back, and how much we can trust our new friends from Saddam's Fedayeen. On the anniversary of 9/11, we need to ask more basic questions -- not just about why we can't bring ourselves to pull out of Iraq, but why we invaded it in the first place. Those questions lead directly to 9/11, and the ideas and assumptions behind our response to it.

The real reason that Congress cannot bring itself to end the war in Iraq, and incredibly, may be prepared to start another one in Iran, has little to do with benchmarks or body counts. The real reason is that even after the Iraq debacle, the American establishment -- meaning the government and the mainstream media -- has not questioned the emotions and ideology that drove Bush's crusade.

[...]

Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by "extremists," demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.

Like a vibration that causes a bridge to collapse, the 9/11 attacks exposed grave weaknesses in our nation's defenses, our national institutions and ultimately our national character. Many more Americans have now died in a needless war in Iraq than were killed in the terror attacks, and tens of thousands more grievously wounded. Billions of dollars have been wasted. America's moral authority, more precious than gold, has been tarnished by torture and lies and the erosion of our liberties. The world despises us to an unprecedented degree. An entire country has been wrecked. The Middle East is ready to explode. And the threat of terrorism, which the war was intended to remove, is much greater than it was.

All of this flowed from our response to 9/11. And so, six years later, we need to do more than mourn the dead. We need to acknowledge the blindness and bigotry that drove our response. Until we do, not only will the stalemate over Iraq persist, but our entire Middle Eastern policy will continue down the road to ruin.

Don't forget the politics: there's no doubt that Mr. Bush's advisers -- Dick Cheney and Karl Rove -- saw the attacks as a means to exploit their political position and achieve their goal of a permanent Republican majority. That has been the guiding force to their response ever since.

What an Honor

The Kennedy Center Awards have been announced for this year. The list includes some of the icons of my generation, and it's a blend of cool, hot, courageous, and just plain wonderful.

Diana Ross and Brian Wilson are at the top of the charts again, but this time it's the list of Kennedy Center Honorees.

Apparently, when this year's awards were decided, someone at the center was channeling the '60s, when Ross's Supremes and Wilson's Beach Boys were blasting on the radio.

Director Martin Scorsese, pianist Leon Fleisher and actor-writer Steve Martin (who also won the center's 2005 Mark Twain Prize for humor) completed the list.

Martin, who is filming "Pink Panther Deux" in Boston, said in a statement: "I am grateful to the Kennedy Center for finally alleviating in me years of covetousness and trophy envy."

Kennedy Center Chairman Stephen A. Schwarzman said the five 2007 honorees had "transformed the way we, as Americans, see, hear and feel the performing arts."

It's great to see these five people honored for their work and for their contribution to the fabric of our culture.

(Not to mention that Surfin' USA is one of the great top-down driving songs of all time.)

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

September 11, 2001

9/11/01 by by Art Spiegelman for The New Yorker
The true crime is that the man who caused this is still alive and free, and the people most responsible for the effort to capture him and bring him to justice don't really care.

Some Outrage

The righties got all bent out of shape over the full-page ad that MoveOn.org ran in yesterday's New York Times labeling General Petraeus as "General Betray-Us." OMG! MoveOn.org is treasonous! (This despite the fact that the nickname came from fellow officers in the military.)

The talking point got picked up by the Republicans in the House committee where the general was testifying and used as a distraction so that they could yet again draw attention away from the fact that things really do suck in Iraq. As much as he tried to, the general really couldn't polish a turd.

The New York Times put it more delicately:

The headline out of General Petraeus’s testimony was a prediction that the United States should be able to reduce its forces from 160,000 to 130,000 by next summer. That sounds like a big number, but it would only bring American troops to the level that were in Iraq when Mr. Bush announced his “surge” last January. And it’s the rough equivalent of dropping an object and taking credit for gravity. The military does not have the troops to sustain these high levels without further weakening the overstretched Army and denying soldiers their 15 months of home leave before going back to war.

Not everyone on the right is buying the bill of goods. George F. Will, not exactly a fan of MoveOn.org, says that by President Bush's own standards the surge has failed.

Many of those who insist that the surge is a harbinger of U.S. victory in Iraq are making the same mistake they made in 1991 when they urged an advance on Baghdad, and in 2003 when they underestimated the challenge of building democracy there. The mistake is exaggerating the relevance of U.S. military power to achieve political progress in a society riven by ethnic and sectarian hatreds. America's military leaders, who are professional realists, do not make this mistake.

The progress that Petraeus reports in improving security in portions of Iraq is real. It might, however, have two sinister aspects.

First, measuring sectarian violence is problematic: The Washington Post reports that a body with a bullet hole in the front of the skull is considered a victim of criminality; a hole in the back of the skull is evidence of sectarian violence. But even if violence is declining, that might be partly because violent sectarian cleansing has separated Sunni and Shiite communities. This homogenization of hostile factions -- trained and armed by U.S. forces -- may bear poisonous fruit in a full-blown civil war.

Second, brutalities by al-Qaeda in Iraq have indeed provoked some Sunni leaders to collaborate with U.S. forces. But these alliances of convenience might be inconvenient when Shiites again become the Sunnis' principal enemy.

[...]

What "forced" America to go to war in 2003 -- the "gathering danger" of weapons of mass destruction -- was fictitious. That is one reason why this war will not be fought, at least not by Americans, to the bitter end. The end of the war will, however, be bitter for Americans, partly because the president's decision to visit Iraq without visiting its capital confirmed the flimsiness of the fallback rationale for the war -- the creation of a unified, pluralist Iraq.

After more than four years of war, two questions persist: Is there an Iraq? Are there Iraqis?

MoveOn.org did the Bush apologists, the neocons, and the rest of the warmongers a favor: they provided them with a distraction: the Republicans in the House are introducing a resolution to condemn MoveOn.org.

It's another "Oh, look at the kitty!" moment. What more proof do you need that they will do anything to give themselves something to be outraged a