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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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?
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

Friday Catblogging

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

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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?
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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?
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

"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.

Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

Birthday Greetings

Happy Birthday to my friend Randall.


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

And also...Happy Birthday to Iraida!


Let's do lunch!
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

Shorter Paul Krugman

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

"Old times there are not forgotten."

Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!

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.
Fetch more...

Stop That Noise!