Bark Bark Woof Woof

A Deficit of $100 Million Is Confronting the N.R.A.

I've been getting a lot of spam about Paris Hilton, so I did some digging and came up with this. Looks nice, but I don't see what all the fuss is about. (But maybe I'll get more site-traffic.)

It's still cool here, so what better to do than sit around a cozy PC (or Mac) and catch up on some good reading?

Pen-Elayne, a woman after my own heart - if not waistline - posts a recipe for latkes. Can a goyisher Quaker enjoy potato pancakes? Of course!

NTodd takes us where no one has gone before via the long-range scanners of the Spitzer space telescope. A-mazing.

Lambert over at corrente has a couple of interesting posts (well, more than a couple, but these two caught my attention). The first is his take on how Bush has turned FDR's rallying cry, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" into his version of car parts: "Fear This." His second post of note is on a certain presidential candidate's "balls-out" approach to politics (plus a helpful explainer to the straight crowd in the "Comments" section by yours truly).

Scott at The Gamer's Nook writes about John Glenn, genuine American hero, my former senator and brief presidential candidate in 1988, and his reaction to the capture of Saddam Hussein: "But as far as, do I feel safer because he's been captured? Well, I'm glad he was captured. But do I feel safer? No, I guess I don't feel that much safer." Wow, and they reamed Dean a new one for the same thought...

...which leads to Scout's point at And Then... about OBL's latest threats.

Peter at Kick the Leftist uses the capture of the Al-Qaeda hash-dhow to point out that keeping drugs illegal actually helps terrorism.

SoonerThought's are on gated communities and their implications.

Keith takes The Invisible Library on the road and does some powerful thinking as he heads across the country for Christmas.

Welcome Collective Sigh to The Liberal Coalition. I linked the entire site so you can see what's there - all good stuff.

Just a little taste of my friends' offerings. Check all the sites, including Blogs of Note - the one's who aren't on hiatus.

As much as I enjoy living in a warm climate, the occasional cold front that brings overnight lows in the 40's doesn't bother me at all. All those years in Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Colorado (including ten summers up in the Rockies) have innured me to the cold. I'm just not a fan of the long-term grey skies and semi-darkness of winter up north. This morning it's 40 here in Miami (at Tamiami Airport, to be exact) with a wind chill of 35 - how often do you hear "Miami" and "wind chill" in the same sentence? But my apartment is comfortable and there's no need to turn on the heat; I'm not sure I know how to do that, anyway. I'll dig out a sweatshirt for the morning errands - groceries, post office, and a present-hunt for a friend at the used-book store.

As the sky lightens, it's a cloudless dawn and the sun will warm us up to the 60's today. It will be cold again tonight, but the front will pass and it will be back to the normal mid-70's and low 80's by Christmas Eve.

A haiku:

Winter in Miami

Biscayne Bay at noon;
Pelicans soar overhead.
Do I miss snow? No.

Which brings to mind a limerick from Ogden Nash:

What a wonderful bird is the pelican.
His bill can hold more than his belican.
He can keep in his beak
Enough food for a week
But I don't know how in the helican.

Steve Gilliard has an excellent post on Dean and religion. I recommend Steve's site in its entirety.

On a personal level, presidential candidates and religion have always made me queasy. I don't think a president should give up his religious beliefs when he takes the oath of office. After all, they are a part of who he is and cannot be put into a blind trust. But neither should he use his position to evangelize under the guise of policy. Jimmy Carter, who was labeled as a "born-again" Christian, certainly kept his faith in the forefront, but he rarely, if ever, spoke of it outwardly and certainly not as glibly as George W. Bush does who throws around evangelical phrases as if he was in a revival tent.

I do not begrudge Mr. Bush his faith. However, having been raised in the Episcopal church and then becoming a convinced Quaker, I am leery of evangelism. Spirituality is a deeply personal thing and goes far beyond rituals and iconography. To speak of "making Jesus Christ your personal saviour" sounds more like a pitch from an insurance salesman, and when people stop you on the street or ring your doorbell in an attempt to bring you to the Lord, it sounds more like they're doing out of desperation - like they're trying to meet a sales quota. (I have a friend who once emptied a revolver over the heads of some poor Jehovah's Witness who had the misfortune to ring his doorbell the morning after his house was burgled. My most memorable encounter with door-to-door evangelists was when a couple of neatly-pressed Mormon teenagers showed up when my partner and I were working in our front yard. When the "elders" asked if they could tell us about their church, my partner said, "Sure, as long as you let us tell you about being queer." They made a hasty exit.)

I think the American people are likewise circumspect when it comes to outward professions of faith. We may be the most church-going country in the world, but we have also - so far - been able to keep religion out of the halls of government and vice-versa. No serious presidential candidate has suggested that we repeal the Establishment clause of the First Amendment. The majority of Americans have rarely considered a man's faith in choosing their president; it wasn't even an issue since none but nominal Protestants ran for the office until 1928 when Catholic Al Smith ran against Quaker Herbert Hoover. By the time JFK ran in 1960 it hardly seemed to matter to most people, and Kennedy deflated the issue by taking it head-on, promising to resign if he ever faced a dilemma between his office and his faith.

As a nation, we have come to the conclusion that it is not what a person believes but how he puts his beliefs to action that are the true measure of his faith and his character. That is what makes him worthy of our trust and stewardship.

From Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo:

Ralph Nader's Exploratory Committee website says he's deciding now whether to run for president again in 2004 (aka, deciding whether to repeat his tragic error of 2000 by helping give George W. Bush another four years in office and thus at least doing his critics the favor of proving that he's fallen into a black hole of egomania, bad-faith, political solipsism, and crypto-conservatism.)

In any case, he's got an online survey now, asking you to tell him how much you want him to run.

Need I say more?

No, you don't. Let's nip this in the bud.

To quote the immortal Joe Pesci: "They always fuck you at the drive-through." Well, not always.

Customer gets bag of cash instead of bagel at Weston McDonald's
When Janice Meissner pulled into a McDonald's drive-thru in Weston for a quick breakfast of a bagel and Diet Coke, she noticed the food bag seemed "super heavy."

She immediately opened it up and discovered hundreds, if not thousands of dollars in a zippered bag. It turned out to be the restaurant's bank deposit money, served up like a Big Mac and an order of fries.

McDonald's officials, who wouldn't say exactly how much was involved, said the deposit was placed in a food bag as a security procedure to make it less conspicuous before it was taken to the bank.

Heck, I can't even get an extra ketchup out of them.

Eric Boehlert in Salon.com recalls The greatest week in rock history.

Thirty-four years ago this week, the Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, Temptations, Santana, Crosby Stills and Nash, and Creedence Clearwater all shared top billing on the Billboard album chart. There's never been another lineup quite like it -- and there will never be again.

[edit]

[J]ust imagine the mix tape possibilities from that single '69 week. "Come Together," "Whole Lotta Love," "The Weight," "It's Not Unusual," "Green River," "You Can't Always Get What You Want," "Wooden Ships," "Gimme Shelter," "I Can't Get Next to You," "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," "Here Comes the Sun," "Evil Ways," "And When I Die," "Bad Moon Rising," "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," and "Born to Be Wild."

Top that, Britney.

Paul Krugman continues to speak the truth:

The capture of Saddam Hussein has produced a great outpouring of relief among both Iraqis and Americans. He's no longer taunting us from hiding; he was a monster and deserves whatever fate awaits him. But we shouldn't let war supporters use the occasion of Saddam's capture to rewrite the recent history of U.S. foreign policy, to draw a veil over the way the nation was misled into war.

[edit]

As a practical matter, I suspect that they'll be disappointed: the only leaders in Iraq with genuine popular followings seem to be Shiite clerics. I also wonder how much real commitment to democracy lies behind the administration's stirring rhetoric. Does anyone remember that Dick Cheney voted against a resolution calling for Nelson Mandela's release from prison? As recently as 2000 he defended that vote, saying that the African National Congress "was then perceived as a terrorist organization."

Which brings me to this week's other famous prisoner. While the world celebrated the capture of Saddam, a federal appeals court ruled that Jose Padilla must be released from military custody. Mr. Padilla is a U.S. citizen, arrested on American soil, who has been held for 18 months without charges as an "enemy combatant." The ruling was a stark reminder that the Bush administration, which talks so much about promoting democracy abroad, doesn't seem very concerned about following democratic rules at home.

Expect shrill screeching from the wingers as they accuse Krugman of yet again being shrill.

From The New Republic &c:

THE NEXT SHOE TO DROP: The word from Iowa is that Senator Tom Harkin's long-rumored endorsement of Howard Dean is a done deal. Among party regulars, Harkin is the most beloved Democrat in the state, and his endorsement is considered the biggest prize. Harkin seems to know it, too. In Walter Shapiro's excellent new book, One Car Caravan, the senator tells the author, "I'm now the 900-pound gorilla. I have the best organization. I have the best list. I love Tom Vilsack, but he's never done the nuts and bolts of politics."
As for Governor Vilsack, we hear he has decided not to endorse any of the candidates. Dean got a bump in Iowa after the Gore endorsement. Expect another one after Harkin gives his blessing.

One more indicator that Gov. Dean is finding his way into the "mainstream," whatever that is.

A friend sent me this story from The Guardian.

Weblogs may not be as innovative as some claim but they do have real potential as a form of personal publishing, argues Rebecca Blood


Hugh MacLeod on the weblog phenomenon

It is becoming obvious that no one really understands weblogs. Lots of people know what they are; the number of these reverse-chronological collections of entries has grown exponentially since 1999, when the first automated blogging tools were released. These tools brought online publishing, once the province of the technophile, to the common web-surfer, and in 2003 they are functioning as desktop printing presses for an estimated 1.5 million people.

[edit]

A weblog is something fundamentally new. Something no one can quite put their finger on, not yet. And those who try to define the phenomenon in terms of current institutions are completely missing the point.

Consider the average weblog. Maintained by an unpaid enthusiast, this site will be updated perhaps a dozen times a day with links to interesting news stories and entries on other weblogs, accompanied by a few lines - or paragraphs - of commentary. A blogger interested in current events may include links to several accounts of one event, noting differences in tone or detail, another may post the occasional recipe or pictures from a recent trip. A blogger may have a thousand readers, but more likely a few hundred or a couple of dozen, some of whom will offer comments of their own, right on the site. The weblog is at once a scrapbook, news filter, chapbook, newsletter, and community.

[edit]

All this represents something new: participatory media. And it matters. Not because of its resemblance to familiar institutions, but because of its differences from them.

Weblogs are just too varied, too idiosyncratic, to fit into an existing box. Industry analysts might call this disruptive technology because weblogs have changed personal publishing so profoundly that the old rules no longer apply. We are at the beginning of a new age of online publishing - and I predict that this generation of online pamphleteers is just the first wave.

· Rebecca Blood is the author of The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog (Perseus, 2002). She has maintained her weblog, www.rebeccablood.net since 1999.

Wow...Who'd have thought that we'd be on the cutting edge of anything...much less a first wave? This is an amazing opportunity - and responsibility. Let's get it right this time. (By the way, where does your blog fit on Hugh MacLeod's pie chart? Be honest.)

Stradiotto has a great essay, The Parable of the Good Liberal. Go read it. Makes me proud to have him with us.

Take this LOTR quiz.

From the AP:

Bush Overruled on Enemy Combatant Case
NEW YORK (AP) -- President Bush does not have power to detain American citizen Jose Padilla seized on U.S. soil as an enemy combatant, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

The decision could force Padilla, held in a so-called "dirty bomb" plot, to be tried in civilian courts.

In a 2-to-1 ruling, a three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Padilla's detention was not authorized by Congress and that Bush could not designate him as an enemy combatant without the authorization.

From the Key West Citizen:

KEY WEST -- The city plans to begin rousting sleeping homeless people from Mallory Square and taking their fingerprints and pictures before handing them a 24-hour warning to leave the waterfront park.

I wonder if they'll do the same for the vomiting frat boys who litter Duval Street during Spring Break in March.

Nick Confessore at Tapped takes a good look at Democratic prospects next year, via an op-ed in Newsday by Amy Sullivan and Jake Rosenfeld that basically says the idea of an enduring GOP majority is bullshit.

Conservative writers David Brooks and Fred Barnes have recently compared contemporary Republicans to New Deal Democrats, declaring a national conservative realignment complete. House Republicans are pushing to replace the image of Franklin D. Roosevelt on the dime with Ronald Reagan, who is viewed as the first leader of this realignment. And following President George W. Bush's surprise Thanksgiving trip to Iraq, the capture of Saddam Hussein and the Medicare reform victory, even some very smart Democrats are starting to believe these arguments, bemoaning the inevitability of Republican control in the nation's capital for decades to come.

It is a brilliant display of political trash-talking.

While these aren't exactly rosy days for Democrats, the comparison of today's Republican Party to the New Deal coalition is simply absurd. In the 1937-38 Congress, Democrats enjoyed more than a three-to-one advantage in the House of Representatives; today the GOP holds exactly 24 more seats than Democrats. Given the growing power of incumbency in Congress - experts maintain that around 400 of the 435 seats are now effectively "safe seats" - even doubling Republicans' current advantage would take a pretty fantastic Democratic meltdown at the polls. Republicans currently have a three-seat margin in the Senate, a chamber they didn't even control as recently as one year ago.

In the states, Democrats are steadily making up losses they suffered in gubernatorial elections during the 1990s, while the control of state legislatures is fairly evenly divided - 17 are controlled by Democrats, 21 by Republicans, and 11 are split between the two parties.

In other words, it could go either way. The Republicans have been acting like they have had a mandate since Newtie and the "Contract With America" (remember that?), when in reality they can barely hang on by their fingernails. As we say in the theatre, perception is everything. It is time to change that, and if we don't we will have only ourselves to blame.

Peter at Kick the Leftist links to an article in Yahoo! News about urban students scoring poorly on nation-wide tests. When he cross-posted this on The Liberal Coalition, I posted a long comment, which led a friend to suggest - gently - that I post it here as well. Okay.

WASHINGTON - Students in some of the nation's largest urban school districts score below the national average on federal math and reading tests, new scores show. Yet in these urban centers, where large numbers of disadvantaged kids live, students compete well when compared with peers elsewhere of the same race, ethnicity or economic level.

Ten school districts volunteered to set the city benchmark in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, regarded as the nation's report card on a range of subjects. The goal is to give these cities a valid way to compare themselves with areas that share problems and population trends, and to track their progress on a test known for its stringent scoring.

Education officials say the new scores reflect expanded efforts by urban districts to help children succeed despite language barriers, crowded conditions and poverty. The results, however, also underscore how much ground schools must gain in raising achievement for all.

I notice they left out Miami, which is the fourth-largest school district in the country with over 367,000 students. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that in Florida, school districts are county-wide, whereas in other states, they are by city. No matter - we're doing the best we can with the pittance we get from the state. It's a sorry thing when schools can only offer decent programs paid for by grants.

Last year the student population of Miami was over 60% Hispanic, with most of those kids coming from bilingual homes. Our test scores are going up - slowly - in the lower grades, where it counts the most - but that blasted No Child Left Behind (or "Nickelby," as we [sarcasm] fondly [/sarcasm] call it and its unfunded mandate to shape up or go broke) could screw the whole thing up. It doesn't take into account migrant/refugee populations who may flood a school with children that have no formal schooling, nor does it encourage states to spend money on F or double F schools; their solution is to offer "vouchers" and move the kids. Argh...don't get me started (too late...)

Education should be the magic bullet. Teachers should be making $100,000, not $44,000 a year so we can attract the best and the brightest. Schools should be gleaming palaces with computers in every classroom and libraries and science labs to rival the best universities. We are asking a system that is fifty years behind to teach our children to embrace the future - it's like going to the moon in the Spirit of St. Louis.

President Bush continues to move the goalposts in his constant struggle to justify the war. A year ago it was an "imminent threat" and "we're 45 minutes from Armageddon." Now it's "Well, Saddam Hussein was thinking about it. Same thing!" From the NY Times:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 — In the debate over the necessity for the war in Iraq, few issues have been more contentious than whether Saddam Hussein possessed arsenals of banned weapons, as the Bush administration repeatedly said, or instead was pursuing weapons programs that might one day constitute a threat. On Tuesday, with Mr. Hussein in American custody and polls showing support for the White House's Iraq policy rebounding, Mr. Bush suggested that he no longer saw much distinction between the possibilities. "So what's the difference?" he responded at one point as he was pressed on the topic during an interview by Diane Sawyer of ABC News.

What's the difference? How about that was the reason you started the war?

"This was a pre-emptive war, and the rationale was that there was an imminent threat," said Senator Bob Graham of Florida, a Democrat who has said that by elevating Iraq to the most dangerous menace facing the United States, the administration unwisely diverted resources from fighting Al Qaeda and other terrorists. The overwhelming vote in Congress last year to authorize the use of force against Iraq would have been closer "but for the fact that the president had so explicitly said that there were weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to citizens of the United States," Mr. Graham said in an interview on Wednesday.

Not to mention the entire raison d'etre in the State of the Union address and just about every other public appearance up until the invasion.

This week, at a news conference on Monday and in the ABC interview on Tuesday, Mr. Bush's answers to questions on the subject continued a gradual shift in the way he has addressed the topic, from the immediacy of the threat to an assertion that no matter what, the world is better off without Mr. Hussein in power. Where once Mr. Bush and his top officials asserted unambiguously that Mr. Hussein had the weapons at the ready, their statements now are often far more couched, reflecting the fact that no weapons have been found — "yet," as Mr. Bush was quick to interject during the interview.

This isn't just one more example of Bush's chronic ADD - "We must fight terra...oh, look at the kitty" - it's scrambling for a justification for a needless war that has killed hundreds of American soldiers, thousands of Iraqis, and plunged the Middle East into even more danger than it already had. How much more perfidy will it take before we rise up and throw the bastards out?

...goes to Chris "Lefty" Brown for his piece on What's so wrong about peace, love and higher taxes? Good post, Chris.

Thanks to a tip from fellow TLC member, edwardpig, I went to visit The American Family Association, "America's Pro-Family Online Activism Organization," and took their little poll:

America's Poll on Homosexual Marriage

o I oppose legalization of homosexual marriage and "civil unions"

o I favor legalization of homosexual marriage

o I favor a "civil union" with the full benefits of marriage except for the name

What say we let them know exactly how we feel about this issue, as well as their co-opting the "Pro-Family" label. Oh, that's right - liberals don't have families - we're all just a bunch commie pinko fag hippy-types.

Obligatory Cat Picture, courtesy of Cat Fanciers' Association. When I was a kid we had two Siamese cats.

Thanks for the idea, Stradiotto.

Sometimes it does get cool here.

South Florida's weather roller coaster is taking another plunge tonight. Though today's high temperature is expected to be comfortably in the 70s, a cold front moving across the state, accompanied by high winds and rain, should drop temperatures to the mid-40s tonight, even in coastal areas, National Weather Service meteorologist Bob Pifer said. Winds of about 10 miles per hour tonight could push the wind chill to the mid-30s to low 40s. It might be the coldest weather of the season thus far, he said. Thursday's high is expected to be only in the mid-60s, with lows Thursday night in the mid-50s near the coast and in the 40s inland. ''By Friday, on into Saturday, we should be just slowly starting to recover,'' Pifer said.

This is a little rehearsal for my trip to Ohio after Christmas.

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- The Material Girl has stepped onto the political stage and endorsed Democratic presidential hopeful Wesley Clark.

"I think he has a good handle on foreign policy, I think he's good with people, and I think he has a heart and a consciousness," pop singer Madonna said. "He's interested in spirituality -- I mean, those things mean a lot to me."

Ha.

DETROIT -- A federal judge has admonished Attorney General John Ashcroft for violating a court order by making remarks about defendants in the nation's first major terror trial after Sept. 11.

U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen said Ashcroft's statements could have compromised defendants' rights to a fair trial, but that the violations did not warrant contempt charges or require Ashcroft to appear in the Detroit court to explain himself.

"The attorney general's office exhibited a distressing lack of care in issuing potentially prejudicial statements about this case," Rosen wrote in an opinion released Tuesday.

Watch out, Your Honor...you may be trading those robes for an orange jumpsuit.

One hundred years ago today, Wilbur and Orville Wright demonstrated powered flight, and today The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King opens. The only link I can find between those two events is that in June 1971 I took my first solo flight on the same day I finished my first reading of the trilogy.

William Safire turns 74 today and to celebrate he spanks Bush and Cheney for their secrecy over the energy panel meetings and the lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch. The administration has lost at every step and now it's going to the Supreme Court next year - just in time for a ruling before the Democratic convention.

Are Republicans out of their collective mind? Why the hots to hide? A decade ago, Hillary Clinton tried to pull the same kind of wool over the people's eyes about her health care task force, but the D.C. appeals court ruled that her consultants were "de facto members" of the official group and stripped away the secrecy.

Remember how we raised the roof about all those phony executive privilege claims as Clinton lawyers tried to jam a cone of silence on top of Secret Service agents? Remember how we fought for the right of Paula Jones to subject the high and mighty to discovery? What is sauce for the Clintons is sauce for the Bushies.

Every now and then Bill has a moment of lucidity. Many happy returns.

As Lambert noted yesterday in corrente, a shady group of Democrats have put together an ad to counter the Dean surge, and they're using the 21st century version of Willie Horton - Osama bin Laden. ABC News did a little digging and found out that operatives associated with Dick Gephardt and John Kerry are behind this crap. The NY Times has this to say about it, but all I can say is that if we really wanted four more years of Bush, we'd nominate one of those clowns to run against him.

Upyernoz at Rubber Hose tells about his journey to learn Arabic. He's faced a lot of roadblocks, but his efforts to learn this complex and fascinating language is a lesson in determination. I admire his drive and I hope he gets the chance to keep at it. Learning a language is the way to learn about the culture, and that leads to understanding.

C.I.A. Will Lead Interrogation of Hussein, Rumsfeld Says

Maybe they think he knows who leaked Valerie Plame's name to Bob Novak.

Respectful of Otters joins TLC. The blog's mission statement says why it will be a valuable addition to our little world:

Politics, psychology, HIV, feminism, et cetera.
"Psychologists have a duty to be fair and respectful of otters." - noble charge from a student paper.

Look for the permanent link, coming to a sidebar near you.

First, old business: Let's lend moral support to Lilith at A Rational Animal as she packs and moves across the country from the Land of the Encumbered (DC) to the Land of Enchantment (New Mexico). I wish her calm seas and a prosperous voyage.

Pen-Elayne explores the fascinating world of comic books with a biblical twist (no, not those creepy Left Behind ones).

Over at corrente, Tresy weighs in on everyone chiming in on the capture of Saddam, Lambert lambasts the Dems(!) forming a "Stop Dean" coalition, and the farmer does takes care of some technical issues that have plagued the site.

It's Craptastic! won the New Weblog Showcase for last week. Stop by and congratulate him and then take the SelectSmart poll like I did.

Speedkill has some CD recommendations for the Top 10 of the year. Safe to say I haven't heard of any of 'em except Radiohead. Yeah, I guess I'm a geezer.

Peter at Kick the Leftist wonders if a certain Republican congressman knew too much before last Sunday.

And Then...discovers we're all under scrutiny from the wingnuts for not being all twitterpated about Bush's Glorious Victory over Evil.

And SoonerThought tells us about yet another Halliburton contract. And he also puts in a good word for a certain blog. Thanks!

Happy reading!

NTodd hits the streets of Philadelphia!

Thanks to Atrios for this lead to perhaps how the guy in the booth at CNN who runs the caption generator really feels about our Dear Leader:

Limbaugh wants privacy for seized medical records detailing his drug abuse

"No citizen would wish these highly personal details to be held by minions of the state to finger through at their leisure. Nor would any sane person wish his medical diagnosis and medical prescriptions to be widely published on television shows, tabloid newspapers, Web sites and the like," the motion says.

Does anyone remember Rush making the same demand for the Clintons when Ken Starr was issuing subpeonas? I don't think so.

Thanks to a lead from clonecone at It's Craptastic, I took the SelectSmart.com poll for my presidential preference. Here's how my results came out:

1. Your ideal theoretical candidate. (100%)
2. Sharpton, Reverend Al - Democrat (86%)
3. Dean, Gov. Howard, VT - Democrat (82%)
4. Clark, Retired General Wesley K., AR - Democrat (80%)
5. Kucinich, Rep. Dennis, OH - Democrat (78%)
6. Moseley-Braun, Former Senator Carol, IL - Democrat (71%)
7. Edwards, Senator John, NC - Democrat (70%)
8. Kerry, Senator John, MA - Democrat (66%)
9. Gephardt, Rep. Dick, MO - Democrat (62%)
10. Lieberman, Senator Joe, CT - Democrat (49%)
11. Libertarian Candidate (35%)
12. Bush, President George W. - Republican (9%)
13. Phillips, Howard - Constitution (7%)

Surprised the hell out of me. I mean, I like Al Sharpton - he's always got great lines - but I take him about as seriously as I did Pat Paulsen back in the 1970's. And who the hell is Howard Phillips?

David Brooks gets the chance to compare the foreign policy visions of George W. Bush and Howard Dean. Guess who wins.

George Bush fundamentally sees the war on terror as a moral and ideological confrontation between the forces of democracy and the forces of tyranny. Howard Dean fundamentally sees the war on terror as a law and order issue.

[edit]

Bush believes that God has endowed all human beings with certain inalienable rights, the most important of which is liberty. Every time he is called upon to utter an unrehearsed thought, he speaks of the war on terror as a conflict between those who seek to advance liberty to realize justice, and those who oppose the advance of liberty: radical Islamists who fear religious liberty, dictators who fear political liberty and reactionaries who fear liberty for women.

Furthermore, Bush believes the U.S. has a unique role to play in this struggle to complete democracy's triumph over tyranny and so drain the swamp of terror.

In other words, screw NATO, screw the United Nations, screw our allies who dare to offer a word of caution. We have the arm of the Lord on our side, and woe betide anyone who stands in our way. Windmills of the world, beware!

Dean does not believe the U.S. has an exceptional role to play in world history. Dean did not argue that the U.S. should aggressively promote democracy in the Middle East and around the world. Instead, he emphasized that the U.S. should strive to strengthen global institutions. He argued that the war on terror would be won when international alliances worked together to choke off funds for terrorists and enforce a global arms control regime to keep nuclear, chemical and biological materials away from terror groups.

Dean is not a modern-day Woodrow Wilson. He is not a mushy idealist who dreams of a world government. Instead, he spoke of international institutions as if they were big versions of the National Governors Association, as places where pragmatic leaders can go to leverage their own resources and solve problems.

The world Dean described is largely devoid of grand conflicts or moral, cultural and ideological divides. It is a world without passionate nationalism, a world in which Europe and the United States are not riven by any serious cultural differences, in which sensible people from around the globe would find common solutions, if only Bush weren't so unilateral.

No one - least of all Dean - denies that there are serious issues, including nationalism, religious intolerance, and cultural egotism, in the world. But it doesn't do any good when the United States indulges in and exploits its own nationalism, religious intolerance, and cultural egotism in order to re-shape the world to meet the biblical and apocalyptic vision of the world as seen by George Bush, knight errant, on a crusade. It is the stuff of dreams, of fantasy, of good vs. evil. Not's not reality - that's why we have fiction.

Howard Dean's vision may not be built on a Quixotic quest - but neither is the real world. This country may have high and lofty goals and ideals, but it is the real and everyday duties, alliances, and trust built between nations and people that truly make this world work.

Faithful Mentor NTodd has been nominated for a 2003 Koufax Award as "Best New Blog."

And in the Best Group Blog, The Liberal Coalition has been nominated by Faithful Commenter lea-p. Thanks, and it's an honor to be part of the nomination.

Now I gotta find something to wear to the ceremony...

Tired of All Saddam All The Time? Here's a story that will warm the cockles of your heart (what is a "cockle," anyway?).

Shoe plant hands 200 soles big holiday bonuses

PITTSFIELD, Maine - Workers at a shoe plant were feeling more than a little tickled when they got their Christmas bonuses that, for some, totaled nearly $20,000.

Instead of receiving typical end-of-year frozen turkeys, the 200 employees of the SAS Shoemakers plant here were handed envelopes when they were called together Friday afternoon.

When Lawrence Wyman opened his, he found a check for $19,000. His wife, Charlene, got a check for the same amount.

The company this year awarded its employees with bonuses of $1,000 for every year worked at the company. Even those who had worked less than a year got $500 each.

The bonuses were particularly uplifting given that most news in the manufacturing sector this year has been about plants closing and employees being laid off.

"They called us all together and said we would each get $1,000," Lawrence Wyman said. "Everyone started clapping and then they said it would be $1,000 for each year worked."

And that's when the tears flowed. Some estimated that the bonuses totaled $200,000 or more.

SAS Pittsfield is a division of SAS Shoemakers in San Antonio. The corporate offices were closed Friday afternoon and company officials could not be reached for comment.

It's nice to see a company take care of its workers like this. The only sad part is that the story was filed under the Strange But True column of the Sun-Sentinel.

I know I'm a little slow on the up-take sometimes, but it occurs to me that all this celebration and praise for capturing Saddam Hussein is a little like praising a student for finally turning in a homework assignment that was due three weeks ago.

So now everyone's saying what a great job we did in hunting him down and how this will break the back of the insurgents. Wrong again. The bloom is already off the rose, according to a report linked by Jesse at The Gotham City 13 (thanks, NTodd for the heads-up), and there are already conflicting stories about how much "cooperation" the Army interrogation team is getting from their prisoner.

The primary goal of the DoD and the military should have been to catch SH on the first day of the invasion, and that they shouldn't have even gone in unless they had a 99.9% certainty that they knew where he was and where he would be going when the bombs started to fall. (Heaving a bunker-buster into a restaurant and crossing your fingers doesn't count.)

One of my colleagues said that we caught him just out of sheer dumb luck. That may be, but that doesn't bolster confidence that we're counting on much more to get this over with.

Steve at The Yellow Doggerel Democrat tries his hand at my favorite rhyme scheme and scores a hit.

Or Fugard. Time (via TPM) has the story of Saddam's first hours in captivity.

After his capture, Saddam was taken to a holding cell at the Baghdad Airport. He didn’t answer any of the initial questions directly, the official said, and at times seemed less than fully coherent. The transcript was full of “Saddam rhetoric type stuff,” said the official who paraphrased Saddam’s answers to some of the questions. When asked “How are you?” said the official, Saddam responded, “I am sad because my people are in bondage.” When offered a glass of water by his interrogators, Saddam replied, “If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?”

This guy's gonna be a real hit on Leno or Letterman.

Apropos of the previous quote on our collective short memory, Edward Wasserman reminds us.

Wilson and Plame were last seen posing for Vanity Fair. Apparently, they're not suffering too badly from this affair. It's the media that deserve the biggest hit. They've become complicit in the very intrigues that they should be exposing. For the sake of a news morsel, they've been turned from watch dog to lap dog.

Shame on them, and shame on us.

William Saletan, famous for predicting in September 2000 that George W. Bush was "toast," looks at Howard Dean's chances now that Saddam Hussein is in the joint.

Is Howard Dean toast?

That's what pundits are suggesting, Republicans are hoping, and Democrats are fretting in the wake of Saddam Hussein's capture. Dean surged to the front of the Democratic presidential pack by opposing the war in Iraq. As the postwar turned bloody, expensive, and stagnant, it looked like a brilliant bet. But this morning, reporters and analysts seem convinced that the latest card drawn from the deck leaves him with a losing hand.

I haven't seen such certainty about an incumbent party keeping the White House since September 2000, when I called George W. Bush "toast." I was overconfident then for the same reason others are overconfident now: We forget how quickly people forget. Problems, once solved, disappear. Voters take for granted what has been accomplished. Each success, initially framed by the president as an end in itself, is reframed by the challenger as a means to a further, unfulfilled end. Bush ought to know that this can be done to him in 2004. It's what he did to Al Gore in 2000.

[edit]

It's clear from interviews Dean gave to reporters Saturday (written up in Sunday's Washington Post and New York Times) that he's repositioning himself as a more hawkish candidate in the general election. He was planning to claim that position tomorrow in a major foreign policy speech. Now he'll have maximum attention as he does so. Bush's aides would be unwise to assume that Dean can't make their latest triumph vanish into history. They should know.

And remember, in 1991, George H.W. Bush polled at 91% after Gulf War I. One of the reasons Bill Clinton got the nomination was becuase a lot of the other Democratic candidates figured he would be a good sacrificial lamb and they could wait until the race would be open in 1996. Where are they now?

General Wesley Clark has - for the moment - thrown cold water on the idea of a Dean/Clark presidential ticket. In a blunt interview with Salon.com, the retired general told reporter Josh Benson that Dean lacks national security credibility.

With the presidential campaign of Howard Dean building strong momentum even before the primary elections, the idea has returned to fashion in Democratic political circles that retired Gen. Wesley Clark is in the race primarily to become Dean's running mate. As a hypothetical scenario, it makes good sense: Dean is a charismatic former governor from New England with strong progressive backing, but he lacks foreign policy experience; Clark is an accomplished warrior who has negotiated on behalf of America and its allies at the highest international levels, and he is expected to have strong appeal in more conservative Southern and Western states.

And so, the thinking goes, Howard Dean and Wes Clark would make a Democratic dream date in November 2004.

But just 48 hours before before the capture of Saddam Hussein outside of Tikrit, Clark made his strongest statement to date about why a Dean-Clark ticket is a bad idea. Clark, who says that he's uniquely qualified to go "toe-to-toe" with President Bush on security issues in 2004, said that whether he's on the ticket or not, the Democrats can't win with Dean as their presidential candidate.

"I don't think the Democratic Party can win without carrying a heavy experience in national security affairs into the campaign," he told Salon in a phone interview last week. "And that experience can't be in a vice president."

Asked if he was referring specifically to the much-discussed possibility of a Dean-Clark ticket, he said: "It's no substitute. It won't work, and it won't carry the election for this party."

Read the rest here.

For a little historical context, in 1960 John F. Kennedy chose his primary opponent and political opposite Lyndon B. Johnson as his veep. LBJ accepted less than 24 hours after swearing (literally and figuratively) that he wouldn't consider it. Ah, politics.

From the NY Times:

President Sees 'a Hopeful Day' for Iraqi People

Also from the same edition:

Car Bomb West of Baghdad Kills at Least 17

Don't forget, fellow bloggers - TLC and otherwise - to vote in The Truth Laid Bear New Weblog Showcase. I'm promoting my fellow TLC members, It's Craptastic! and Kick the Leftist and I strongly urge you to read their entries (see sidebar for direct links) and link them in a post.

A couple of questions popped into my head as I got my coffee this morning and listened to the news coverage on the capture of Saddam Hussein. While I agree wholeheartedly that this is good news for Iraq, for the soldiers, and eventually for peace, I don't think this brings this misadventure to a close. (And neither does Gen. Sanchez or Amb. Bremer.) So:

Who's going to prosecute Saddam Hussein? Will he be represented by counsel, or will it be a military tribunal?

If Saddam Hussein is "cooperating fully" with his captors, will he tell them where the WMD's are? ("Ha! Made you look.")

Will he detail out his acquistions of materials and weapons from previous US administrations? Will he name names to try and work out a plea bargain? (Rumors that tapes of old episodes of Law & Order were found in the spider-hole have yet to be confirmed.)

Will his loyalists lay down their arms, or can we expect continued attacks? (News reports since the capture indicate that the insurgents are not giving up. And remember, there were Japanese soldiers holed up on islands in the Pacific until the 1970's.)

How long will it take before Karl Rove exploits this for Bush/Cheney '04? (You can bet they've had a series of spots in the can for any eventaulity.)

Red Dawn? "Wolverine 1" and "Wolverine 2"? You had to go back to a cheesey and jingoistic Patrick Swayze movie from 1984? Well, I suppose it was better than "Dirty Dancing."

I tend to think Saddam's capture is more symbolic than tactical. A very big symbol, granted, but these insurgencies tend to go off on their own. To answer my own question in the previous post: No, we can't go home quite yet.

From the NY Times:

American military officials confirmed today that Saddam Hussein had been captured alive in Tikrit on Saturday night.

Good. Came we go home now?