Bark Bark Woof Woof

From the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- ABC's broadcast last Veterans Day of the Oscar-winning war movie "Saving Private Ryan," which contains graphic violence and profanity, did not violate indecency guidelines, regulators ruled Monday.

The film contained "numerous expletives and other potentially offensive language generally as part of the soldiers' dialogue," the Federal Communications Commission said.

"In light of the overall context in which this material is presented, the commission determined it was not indecent or profane," the five-member FCC said in a unanimous decision in denying complaints over the movie.

"This film is a critically acclaimed artwork that tells a gritty story - one of bloody battles and supreme heroism," FCC chairman Michael Powell said in a statement. "The horror of war and the enormous personal sacrifice it draws on cannot be painted in airy pastels."

Some complaints also cited the movie's violence, but the FCC said its indecency and profanity guidelines were not applicable to violent programming.

A spokeswoman for ABC in New York declined comment.

Well, I'll comment: No fucking kidding!

Michael Tomasky in The American Prospect:

We’re just a month into George W. Bush’s second term, and already it’s becoming pretty clear what this country will look like four years from now if the Democrats don’t fight. Let’s just start, for example, with public television. The fate of the republic will not rise or fall on this question. We survived without it until 1965, and one supposes we will again, especially since public TV has pretty much been reduced to showing those pitiful Britcoms that even my mom is getting tired of.

If preventing mediocre programming were the impulse, yanking the subsidies from the Public Broadcasting Service would be fine. But we know that is not the impulse. As the recent attacks on PBS President and CEO Pat Mitchell show us, the impulse is one of enforcing cultural purity: The kind of people who work at PBS are the kind of people who think it’s all right for a cartoon character to pay a call on a lesbian couple, and a community that is run by people like that, to today’s right, is a community that has to be destroyed.

Amtrak, too, could be gone in four years, making the United States the only advanced country in the world without a subsidized public rail system (increasingly, if something will make America the only advanced country without X, that’s all the more incentive for these yahoos to undertake it). Again, Amtrak is a long way from perfect (the lighting on the Acela feels like an interrogation room); we survived without it until 1971, and one supposes we can do so again if we have to, although air and highway traffic along the East Coast would become abominable.

Amtrak, of course, has nothing to do with the culture wars. But funny thing: The vast majority of the people who depend on Amtrak live in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. I hardly need to say what they all have in common politically, but it has to do with the word “blue.”

Democrats will be tempted to think of these battles as fights over television and trains. They are not. They are part of a larger project of the Leninist right of remaking society to conform top to bottom with the goals and priorities of the right-wing state. Television that offers positive gay couples and foreign programming and artsy-fartsy symphonies is counterrevolutionary. Subsidized railroads that chiefly serve populations that voted incorrectly are dispensable.

[...]

This is a moment of truth for Democrats. The Social Security fight is symbolic of a larger struggle in which the ascendant right is trying to remake the nation in its own image. The nation, despite giving Bush 51 percent of its vote, is admirably resistant to this push in many ways. The Democrats had better represent this resistance.

Amen. Karl Rove does look a little like a Locutus of Borg... with frizzy hair.

Via the Lynchburg News & Advance via Corrente:

The Rev. Jerry Falwell is continuing to mend, and no longer needs the safeguard of a breathing tube in his throat, Jerry Falwell Jr. said Sunday.

Falwell Jr. said that the tubes were taken out Sunday morning. He’s a little tired “and his biggest problem now is boredom.”

Falwell, 71, chancellor of Liberty University, is expected to able to return home from Lynchburg General Hospital in the next two or three days.

He has been in Lynchburg General Hospital since Feb. 20.

Falwell Jr. said that because of the medication his father was given, he doesn’t seem to remember the time on the ventilator, although he was writing notes to his family at that time.

The big scare occurred Wednesday when Falwell was placed on a ventilator, his son said. However, it was “a big relief” to find out that the congestion and breathing problems were unrelated to problems with this heart.

The virus that caused the problem hasn’t been identified, but said his son “it was not the flu.”

I didn't even know Falwell was sick. Check that: I didn't even know Falwell had a medical problem.

The best thing about a ventilator is that while it's in place, the patient can't talk. Jerry Falwell should have been on a ventilator for the last thirty years.

From the Sun-Sentinel:

OK, teens, which is true?

A. Condoms will protect you. Or B. Condoms will fail you.

Palm Beach County middle- and high-school students are taught that both statements are correct, and the school district has decided it's time to stop confusing them.

Administrators are revising next year's middle-school health curriculum so students get the most up-to-date facts about safe sex. Revisions to the high-school curriculum are planned for 2006.

"There are problems with the statistics that are being given out," said Fred Barch, a science planner for the school district. "Everyone needs to get together and come to a conclusion."

To supplement the district's sex-education curriculum, teachers can choose one of two outside presenters: Be The One -- a sister organization to the anti-abortion First Care Centers, which discourages sex until marriage -- and Act SMART, sponsored by the American Red Cross, which encourages abstinence but also teaches that condoms can prevent sexually transmitted diseases.

Both provide their classes to the school district for free.

Most teachers invite only one into their classrooms, but some invite both. The contrasting approaches of the two groups have puzzled students, said Dayna Brook-Grober, a science teacher at Eagle's Landing Middle School west of Boca Raton.

Last year, Be The One came to her classroom first. The speaker emphasized the failure rate of condoms. A few days later, an Act SMART speaker talked of how condoms protect against sexually transmitted diseases.

"They were a little confused," Brook-Grober said of her students. "They were saying, `I thought condoms don't protect you,' because that's what Be The One had just told them."

Palm Beach County health planners are wading cautiously into this debate, known across the country as pitting "abstinence-only" vs. "abstinence-based" sex education programs.

President Bush has made his philosophy clear: He wants to increase funding for abstinence-only programs, which counsel that just saying no is the only way to avoid getting pregnant before marriage or contacting a sexually transmitted disease.

Anyone who thinks that abstinence-only works has either never been or has forgotten what it's like to be fifteen. If the adults can't figure out how to teach sex education to kids, rest assured the kids will find a way to learn on their own.

I haven't really paid much attention to the Academy Awards in the last few years, and this year I didn't see any of the nominated films. In fact, the only film I saw that had a contender for a top prize was Kinsey, with Laura Linney up for supporting actress. I went to sleep around 9:30 just as some band was on stage to sing one of the songs. I saw the summary of the results this morning, and here's my take on it.

Good News:

Morgan Freeman won for Million Dollar Baby. I think he should have won for every other time he was nominated, too.

Leonardo DiCaprio didn't win.

Bad News:

Alan Alda didn't win. I just like him.

Now I can start paying attention to the Tonys.

The Brits are taking over Broadway.

The annual armada of spring openings on Broadway almost always features a great old galleon of the American theater, one of those much-studied classics that are continually being revived and refreshed for new audiences and new eras.

But this spring there's an unusually rich crop of entries from American Theater 101. Opening in a span of less than two months are three of the American theater's best-known and best-loved classics: Tennessee Williams's "Glass Menagerie" and "A Streetcar Named Desire," and Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

This is noteworthy in itself - producers tend to get out of each other's way when it comes to name-brand, star-spangled revivals - but another phenomenon is even more intriguing: all three plays have been placed in the hands of British directors.

Conspiracy? Certainly not. Coincidence? Not exactly.

A strong British presence on Broadway is hardly new. The Great White Way has long suffered from a mild case of Anglophilia, and is, without a doubt, much healthier for it. But this striking confluence of British directors teamed with American classics suggests that American directors may not be equally esteemed by producers, at least when it comes to the classics - even the most American of classics. And that discomfort could have effects far beyond this season, jeopardizing the ability of American artists to develop the skills to interpret American masterworks in the American theater's greatest showcase.

The scorecard is as follows: David Leveaux, who has worked frequently in New York over the last decade, directs Tennessee Williams's "Glass Menagerie," with Jessica Lange as Amanda Wingfield. Anthony Page, who brought us last season's Williams entry on Broadway, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," is turning his hand to Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," starring Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin. And Edward Hall, son of the celebrated director Peter Hall, makes his Broadway debut with the Roundabout Theater Company's revival of Williams's "Streetcar Named Desire," starring Natasha Richardson and John C. Reilly....

Read on, Macduff.

The Oscars tonight bring attention to a documentary about one man's struggle with the clerical-abuse scandal. From the Toledo Blade.

As a child growing up in Toledo, Tony Comes would sit in the Showcase Cinemas, gaze up at the screen at the larger-than-life actors, and fantasize about someday being an actor.

"I wanted to see my name on the screen," said the 34-year-old Toledo firefighter.

Tonight, that dream will come true. But it's not the way he imagined.

Though Mr. Comes will don a tuxedo and walk onto a red carpet and down the aisle to sit among the movie elite, his role in an Oscar-nominated film is nothing glamorous.

He is the subject of one of the darkest documentaries ever considered for an Academy Award: sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church.

To Mr. Comes, Twist of Faith is more than a cinematic escape. It's his life and the pain he held inside for years.

Millions of television viewers watching tonight's 77th annual Academy Awards ceremony from the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood will hear about the man who's emerging as one of the most visible figures in the clerical-abuse scandal.

The documentary, which includes stark images of Toledo in the background, chronicles Mr. Comes' struggles as he comes to terms with his years of alleged rapes and molestation by a Toledo priest in the early 1980s.

Accompanying Mr. Comes to the Oscars will be his wife, Wendy, mother, Sandra, and the two veteran filmmakers, Kirby Dick and Eddie Schmidt, who were invited into the firefighter's life.

For two years, the cameras followed him to work at Station No. 15. Followed him around his home on Woodhurst Drive in South Toledo. Followed him to his church, Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

Nothing was off limits, from a gentle conversation with his 10-year-old daughter about his abuse to an outburst toward his mother over her donations to the church - money, he said, that will go to fight his lawsuit against the diocese and his alleged abuser: Dennis Gray....

Want to travel to Cuba without all the restrictions imposed by the Treasury Department? Simple. Convert to Santeria.

Religious groups can get licenses with little trouble. And the head of at least one group that says it practices the Afro-Cuban religion Santeria acknowledged that his congregation has exploded in size since the new travel restrictions kicked in.

Jose Montoya, head of the Sacerdocio Lucumi Shango Eyeife in Miami, said that between 1996 and July 2004, he took about 60 people to Cuba under his religious travel license. Since the restrictions took effect in July, he has taken about 2,500, he said.

"Before, people didn't have a necessity, and Afro Cubans who practice our religions could travel to Cuba without a license, but now they need a license," Montoya said. "This is a ticking time bomb. They will give a religious license to anyone."

Exiles who support the restrictions -- which cut exile trips to Cuba from once a year to once every three years -- say the Santeria groups are abusing their religious privilege.

The U.S. Treasury Department allows unimpeded travel to Cuba for legitimate religious reasons. The department has issued more than 200 licenses to religious groups for travel to Cuba, according to the office of U.S. Rep. Lincoln Díaz-Balart, R-Miami.

Díaz-Balart, a supporter of the new limits, has called for an investigation, which he said is being conducted by the Treasury Department.

"There is abuse and it needs to stop," he said. "It is wrong for someone to say that they are seeking a license for religious travel and then to use that license commercially to promote tourism, and I think it's happening."

Treasury Department spokeswoman Molly Millerwise and other department officials could not be reached for comment.

Tom Cooper, CEO and chairman of Gulf Stream International Airlines, one of the biggest companies still operating flights to Cuba, said he has also noticed a recent increase in the number of people coming to his airline with religious licenses.

Lea más aquí.

It's beginning to look like spring here in Florida - we got some real rain for the first time since November last night. That's fine...except it rained a little on our car show at the Shops at Sunset Place. But that didn't dampen the crowds, and it was more than the usual collection of teenaged mall rats. It coincided with the South Miami Art Show, which continues today. If you're in the area, stop by; it's on the corner of Red and Sunset. The car show is over, but there's some nice art to be seen.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 8:21 AM  

Jeffrey Dubner at TAPPED wonders why the SCLM is silent on Gannon/Guckert:

Eric Boehlert dresses down the major media outlets that have ignored the Jeff Gannon story. But here are a few more journalism heavyweights who have hardly touched it:

The New Republic (no coverage)
The Washington Monthly (two posts)
Slate.com (one post)
The Nation (two posts)
Mother Jones (nothing outside of its discussion groups)

Am I forgetting any? Oh, right:

The American Prospect (one post waaaaay back when this all started in January)

I count six leading liberal publications (indulge me for the moment with the "liberal" classification, Slate) and six blog posts, three of which are dismissive of the scandal. And not a single bona fide article. (The clear exception is Salon, which was to some degree born of full-throated, bare-knuckled online scandal wars and has always acknowledged their importance.)

This raises two points. One, that the mainstream media may be overlooking Gannongate because the established segment of the left-wing echo chamber is as well. Look, after all, at "Easongate" and "Rathergate;" how much were they propelled by independent bloggers and how much by The National Review? Having asked the question, though, I don't think it's really important; the size and volume of the right-wing echo chamber is just so much greater than the left-wing equivalent that we always have less sway.

But the other question is, why the silence from the actual liberal media, such as it is? The shame gap has been suggested, but I don't think that entirely explains it. I'd call the expendable resources gap just as big a factor. Partisan conservatives can assume that the country is being run in accordance with their wishes, freeing them up to focus on comments by piddlers like Ward Churchill. Liberals -- partisan or non- -- have a democracy to preserve, Social Security to save, momentous scandals to unravel, and so on. Add to that the fact that many conservatives think government is of limited usefulness in the first place, and thus don't care about many of its functions, and you get wildly different loci of attention.

I agree that the SCLM has been woefully silent on the Gannon/Guckert story. All this proves is that the SCLM is convinced that Gannon/Guckert isn't a real story like the Social Security debate, Iraq, and a certain legal issue being dealt with in California. How they got lulled into this is anybody's guess, right? No, it's not. They've bought into the White House line of what's news, and this story of a gay prostitute with an alias writing cut-and-paste stories for an on-line house organ of the RNC is clearly not news to them. Maybe they'd like some cookies to go along with the Kool-Aid.

But if you look at the blogosphere, it's alive and well, and while Salon and Slate and all the other big dogs of on-line journalism have been ignoring it, blogs like AMERICAblog, Atrios, and Daily Kos have been digging into it and making the revelations that garnered the slight attention it's received in the mainstream. It did make the tailpiece (no pun intended) on the NBC Nightly News on February 17th, and Howard Kurtz gave it his usual drivelly spin on Reliable Sources. Meanwhile, the blogosphere has kept the noise going, including Bark Bark Woof Woof to name one I can think of as well as just about everyone else in The Liberal Coalition. Bill Maher wove it through his opening act on Real Time. So while it may not immediately be catching up with the Dead Tree Society, it's become the buzz on the blogs, and both the left and the right have the hides on the wall to prove that that is something you ignore at your peril. As much as we would love to really know who passed Gannon/Guckert into the White House and make as big a stink out of it as Drudge did with the White House travel office and a $100,000 real estate deal, this may have to evolve at it own pace. And when it does... well, let's ask Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott what can happen.

Look who's thinking about running for the Senate in Florida:

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, the only Democrat to hold statewide office in Florida, knows he's "one of the main targets" of the Republican Party in next year's free-for-all elections.

And a new poll shows the GOP's best weapon to date: Katherine Harris, the Sarasota Republican congresswoman who gained worldwide attention for managing Florida's election machinery during the 2000 presidential election troubles.

Harris is almost within striking distance of Nelson, who has broad support and name recognition but has not clearly made the case to voters that he should be reelected, according to a poll by Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University of 1,007 Floridians.

[...]

Harris would capture 26 percent of the overall vote were she to run for the Senate, according to the poll. It says 37 percent of people want to reelect Nelson and 37 percent want "someone else."

Harris said the favorable poll results surprised her. She said she was "at least six months away" from deciding on whether to run for higher office. She said she's focusing on a "huge agenda" to help poor people pay for their first home and to crack down on crimes against children.

Thanks to her, uh, interesting fashion sense and hardbitten partisanship during the 2000 Florida recount, Harris earned the nickname Cruella De Vil. No surprise from the state that brought you Disney World. But lock up the Dalmatians.

You know the Republicans are getting a little desperate when the brightest spokesman for reforming Social Security has to be in bed by 8.

The battle over Social Security has been joined by an unusual lobbyist, a 9-year-old from Texas who has agreed to travel supporting President Bush's proposal.

The boy, Noah McCullough, made a splash with his encyclopedic command of presidential history, earning five appearances on the "Tonight" show and some unusual experiences in the presidential campaign last year. He beat Howard Dean in a trivia contest at the Democratic National Convention and wrote for his local newspaper about his trip to see the inauguration.

"He's very patriotic and very Republican," said Noah's mother, Donna McCullough, a former teacher and self-described Democrat. "It's the way he was born."

In a sign of how far groups go to carry their message on Social Security, Progress for America has signed up Noah, a fourth grader, as a volunteer spokesman. He starts on spring break from James Williams Elementary School in Katy, Tex.

[...]

Noah will travel to a handful of states ahead of visits by the president and will go on radio programs, answer trivia questions and say a few words about Social Security. Though he is obviously not an expert (and not really a lobbyist, either), officials say the effort is a lighthearted way to underline Mr. Bush's message.

"What I want to tell people about Social Security is to not be afraid of the new plan," Noah said. "It may be a change, but it's a good change."

The trip was a brainchild of Stuart Roy, a former aide to Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, who recently joined the DCI Group, a political consultancy here with ties to the Republican Party and Mr. Bush.

The firm is heavily involved in Progress for America's efforts. The president of the organization, Brian McCabe, is a partner at DCI, and the organization contracts with the firm. In the 2004 campaign, the Progress for America Voter Fund paid DCI about $800,000, records show. Mr. Roy knew Noah because the boy lives in suburban Houston, part of Mr. DeLay's district, and the House majority leader has met him. "We'll have Noah there as the face of Social Security reform," Mr. Roy said. "It's about the next generation."

Aha. I knew there had to be a herring in the pickle barrel; Tom DeLay rears his shiny head. Noah's mom had better be on the alert: if his head spins around and he spews pea soup, call a priest.

George W. Bush smote the ground with his boots and democracy sprang up everywhere.

Just don't try it at home.

From a friend:

You may be a teacher if:

1. You believe the playground should be equipped with a Ritalin salt lick.

2. You want to slap the next person who says, "Must be nice to work 8 to 3:20 and have summers free."

3. You can tell if it's a full moon without looking outside.

4. You believe "shallow gene pool" should have its own check box on a report card.

5. You believe that unspeakable evils will befall you if anyone says: "Boy, the kids sure are mellow today."

6. When out in public you feel the urge to snap your fingers at children you do not know and correct their behavior.

7. You have no social life between August and June.

8. Marking all A's on report cards would make your life SO easy.

9. You think people should be required to get a government permit before being allowed to reproduce.

10. You wonder how some parents ever MANAGED to reproduce.

11. You laugh uncontrollably when people refer to the staff room as the "lounge."

12. You encourage an obnoxious parent to check into charter schools or home schooling.

13. You can't have children because there's no name you could give a child that wouldn't bring on high blood pressure the moment you heard it.

14. You think caffeine should be available in intravenous form.

15. You know you are in for a major project when a parent says, "I have a great idea I'd like to discuss. I think it would be such fun."

16. Meeting a child's parent instantly answers the question, "Why is this kid like this?"

Now you know why I refer to myself as a "recovering" teacher.

Both Paul Krugman and Farhad Manjoo look at how the Republicans have snookered the Red States into voting for them by using the old carny game of distracting them with queer-fear and get-rich-quick Ponzi schemes for Social Security. But the red-staters might be catching on.

This is a playout of Thomas Frank's excellent book, What's The Matter With Kansas? Rural voters were once the backbone of the Democratic party thanks to the help they got from FDR and the New Deal. But beginning in the 1960's they got roped into the Republican camp with the fear-mongering of the right wing (Integration! Hippies!), and it was solidified by the feel-good empty calories of the Reagan years (Rugged individualism! Jesus is Lord!). The Democrats aided their own decline by sacrificing economic issues in exchange for championing cultural issues such as civil rights and it cost them dearly.

But the red-staters are beginning to see that "moral values" include such things as a secure retirement and affordable health care. A hot-button issue like gay marriage is put in perspective: there haven't been gay couples lined around the block at the Montgomery County courthouse in Independence, Kansas to try to get married, but plenty of people are wondering if they'll have enough money to pay for the rest of their lives, and that's the reality they care about. If the Republicans stick with the culture wars, they could be just like the Democrats in the 1960's. Heh.

Finally Friday, even if it was a short week.

Welcome Not Right About Anything, the blog of Ian McGibboney. Funny and quick-witted; my kinda writer.

Here's what's news in The Liberal Coalition.

archy, Pen-Elayne, rubber hose, and Rook's Rant discuss the hierarchy of blogging.

blogAmY on public convenience.

bloggg on NBC's autism series.

Chris reviews a book review.

Collective Sigh on evil Canada.

Corrente on big animals and fragile life.

NTodd on the photographer's exit.

Echidne on power, women, and fashion.

edwardpig on the PNAC.

First Draft on the nerve of gay couples having families.

The Fulcrum on the return to ANWR.

The Gamer's Nook remembers the Miracle on Ice.

Happy Furry on the perfect dating service.

iddybud on Hunter S. Thompson.

The Invisible Library chastises George Lucas.

Kick the Leftist drudges up news on the Pope.

Left Is Right urges you to march in March.

Make Me A Commentator on left-wing fashion.

Michael remembers Myrtle.

Republican Sinners names the NHL.

Scrutiny Hooligans on Venezuelan fuel and power.

SoonerThought on native sovereignty.

Speedkill on the origins of ideology.

Steve Gilliard on the similarities between rappers and bloggers.

T.Rex does a blogaround with a nod to the women.

Apropos of T.Rex, Trish Wilson takes on Howard Kurtz on his discussion of women blogging.

Wanda on the idiocy of assassination.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat on tasers.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to an antique car show in South Miami Saturday night at the Shops at Sunset Place; we're having our annual Sock Hop from 6 to 10. Bring your hula-hoops and rock around the '57 Chevys.

NTodd of Dohiyi Mir is a weekly contributor to the new on-line magazine Blue and Red. This week his column, Common Ground, takes on the debate about abortion.

A lot of the argument surrounding abortion rights rests on rhetorical framing and false dichotomies. Just look at the labels the passionate factions choose for themselves: ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’. The “other side” is usually condemned as being “against” all that is good—you’re ‘anti-choice’ and want women to be barefoot and pregnant, or you’re ‘anti-life’ and want immoral swingers to have access to abortions on demand. Right-to-life advocates have been especially good at using language to strike at the emotional core of this issue with phrases like ‘partial-birth abortion’, which immediately puts folks who favor reproductive freedom on the defensive. None of this is altogether useful when trying to resolve our differences, enact good policy, and balance the various rights that are at stake, but I guess it’s the nature of the beast. For the record, I’ve found it very difficult to write this article because the words I choose are clearly going to be loaded. I pondered for quite a while just how I was going to handle that last paragraph, for example. In the end I decided I can’t completely ignore my own filters and people are going to read into whatever I write, so I might as well not be too self-conscious about it.

That said, I should make my position perfectly clear just in case it’s not obvious from the outset. I consider myself pro-choice and think that a woman’s body is her domain. She has every right to make all decisions about sex and reproduction without the government and moralists judging her. Yet, while I don’t believe that life begins at conception (a debate for another day), like many Americans I want to reduce the number of abortions that are performed in our country.

Pro-lifers obviously disagree with me on when life begins, and whether a woman’s right to control her biological functions overrides rights they presume a fetus (or embryo or zygote or teeny mass of cells or whatever) has. Let’s face it: they’re not going to persuade me at this point, and I’m not going to change their minds either. So how can we find common ground on such an emotionally-charged, divisive issue?

Read the rest of the column here.

I join NTodd in hoping that there can be a point where reason and logic can play a part in this discussion. But if the last thirty years are any indication, I don't hold out much hope. Passion - from both sides - can be overwhelming. But in the end it comes down to the one thread that holds us together: the Constitution. In a comment discussion over at Dohiyi Mir, I threw in my own two cents, and I'm reprinting them here.

I have been aware of the debate and discussion about family planning all my life; my parents have been involved with Planned Parenthood for over forty years. I also think that as a gay man, I am the very last person to tell a woman what to do with her body - and I wouldn't even try - but my orientation isn't the point. My gender is, though. This has been a male-dominated issue when it has no right to be. It is the woman's body, it is her life, and the assumption that she is incapable of making the choice is beyond chauvinism. Yes, the father ideally has to participate in the choice, but the ultimate decision must be hers. Otherwise you've turned the woman into a human copier.

Not to be too quippy about this (who, me?), I usually have a short and quick answer to the "right-to-lifers" when they go off on the "every sperm is sacred" riff. That is to ask them if a fetus can get a passport.

"Huh?" is the usual response.

The Constitution is pretty clear that our rights are obtained when we are born. You get to vote when you're eighteen years of age, and that's counted from your birthday, not the day you were conceived. Therefore, you can't obtain a passport for a child that hasn't been born yet because they're not a citizen. Medical science may determine that there is a specific point of viability so that we can pin down when a fetus can survive outside the womb and therefore obtain the rights of citizenship, but, unlike birth, it's not a real specific point in the process of pregnancy. Birth, on the other hand, is well-documented. So unless there's some plan to re-write the definition of citizenship in the Constitution, a fetus is, until it can live on its own, a part of the woman's body and she should have the final say as to what should happen to it.

Perhaps it's too coldly logical to think of human reproduction in strictly constitutional terms, but what other choice have we? This cannot be a theocratic argument, and using terms like "the miracle of life" loads it up with emotional baggage. (If we value all life equally, then certainly it can't be applied only to humans; all means all, and Orkin would be out of business.) Certainly those on the "pro-life" side who argue for the strict interpretation of the Constitution in so many other cases should see that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applies to all citizens as defined in the Constitution, not to the "unborn," and any other interpretation would be as gross a distortion of the law as they claim Roe. vs. Wade is.

Tom Patterson, the founder of the Stratford Festival of Canada, has died.

Mr. Patterson was the man who in 1953 convinced Tyrone Guthrie to put on Richard III and All's Well That Ends Well on the banks of the Avon River in Stratford, Ontario, in an attempt to generate tourism for this little farming town 60 miles west of Toronto. It has now become one of the most important theatre companies in North America.

In some ways I owe my love of theatre to this man that I never met. I remember my first trip to Stratford in July 1970 to see three plays: Hedda Gabler, The School for Scandal, and The Merchant of Venice, and I was hooked. I've been back countless times since and seen more theatre there than any place else and with such luminaries as Peter Ustinov, Brian Bedford, Maggie Smith, Irene Worth, and the rest of the incomparable company of fine actors who have trod the boards there, including William Hutt, Barry McGregor, and Mervyn Blake.

When I go back in August, we're going to have a picnic on Tom Patterson Island in the middle of the river and raise a glass to his memory.

Robert Anderson, the playwright who wrote Tea and Sympathy and I Never Sang for My Father, wrote a TV movie in 1991 called Absolute Strangers, which tells the story of a husband who tries to keep his comatose wife alive by allowing doctors to terminate her pregnancy, but anti-abortion protesters start a legal campaign to gain custody of the fetus. I can't help but think of that film when I read about Teri Schiavo.

The parents of Terri Schiavo won another reprieve in their fight to keep the brain-damaged woman alive after a judge extended an emergency stay keeping her feeding tube in place.

The stay had been set to expire Wednesday afternoon, but Pinellas Circuit Judge George Greer extended it until 5 p.m. Friday.

A lawyer for the parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, had asked the judge to block the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube so the family can have more time to determine if she has greater mental capabilities than previously believed.

The Schindlers also want more time to try to remove Schiavo's husband as legal guardian.

They have been in a long, bitter struggle with Michael Schiavo, who said his wife never wanted to be kept alive artificially. She left no written directive.

Also Wednesday, the Florida Department of Children & Families moved to intervene in the case hours after Gov. Jeb Bush told reporters he was seeking a way to keep Terri Schiavo alive.

"I can assure you, I will do whatever I can within the means, within the laws, of our state to protect this woman's life," Bush said, adding that he has received thousands of e-mails and telephone calls from the Schindlers' supporters. [AP]

I can understand the parents' role in this. I can even understand (not agree with, however) their desperate attempts to cling to hope that somehow, someway, she might come out of it. But the intervention of leeches like Randall Terry of Operation Every Sperm Is Sacred and Gov. Bush is yet another example of the unmitigated gall of those who think they know how to run everyone else's lives because they believe they have a direct line to God. They certainly have one to hypocrisy; both of them have railed against "activist judges" yet they have no qualms about running to the courts when it serves their politics.

I cannot imagine anything worse than hordes of absolute strangers barging into the most intimate and wrenching decision a family has to make. If Teri Schiavo were to wake up, I would hope the first words out of her mouth would be, "Leave me alone."

From Salon.com:

An old friend of President Bush who secretly recorded their private conversations and released them to the media said he has regrets and is turning the tapes over to Bush.

Doug Wead allowed journalists to hear and broadcast the tapes in the past week as he promoted his new book on presidential parents. But he said he canceled plans to be on "Hardball" on MSNBC Tuesday night to talk about his regrets because "it would only add to the distraction I have caused to the president's important and historic work."

"Contrary to a statement that I made to the New York Times, I have come to realize that personal relationships are more important than history," Wead wrote in a letter to the show's host, Chris Matthews, that MSNBC released to the public on Wednesday. "I am asking my attorney to direct any future proceeds from the book to charity and to find the best way to vet these tapes and get them back to the president to whom they belong. History can wait."

Okay, Karl, you can take the gun out of his ear now.

Frank Rich on staying tuned.

The total box office for all five best-picture nominees on Sunday's Oscars is so small that their collective niche in the national cultural marketplace falls somewhere between square dancing and non-Grisham fiction. But if this year's Oscars are worthless as a barometer of the broad state of American pop culture, there's much to learn from the hype spun by ABC and the motion picture academy to seduce Americans to watch even if they can't distinguish Clive Owen from Catalina Sandino Moreno. The selling of the Oscar show is the latest indicator of the most telling disconnect in our politics: in the post-Janet Jackson era, "indecency" is gaining in popularity in direct proportion to Washington's campaign to shut indecency down.

[...]

This is why the people bringing you the Oscars have done everything possible to imply that Sunday's show will be so indecent that even the winner of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award may let loose with a Dick Cheney expletive. Rather than chase away MTV and its fans from the festivities as the National Football League did after the Jackson fracas, the academy hired as its host Chris Rock, a three-time MTV Music Video Awards M.C. Mr. Rock, as brilliant at P.R. as he is at comedy, ran around giving cheeky interviews making the outrageous charge that the Oscars might have a gay following. Matt Drudge took the bait and assailed the comedian for indecency. Mr. Rock was soiling "the classiest night in Hollywood," he said on Fox News, by taking "a lewd route ... to the gutter."

The motion picture academy's marketers couldn't have said it better themselves. They know a lewd route is the yellow brick road to Nielsen nirvana. Gilbert Cates, the Oscars producer, had already been putting out the message that he opposed the show's tape delay as "dangerous to society." The academy's executive director, Bruce Davis, elaborated to Lola Ogunnaike of The New York Times: "I like to hear that people are nervous, because that means you're more likely to watch." Last Sunday Mr. Rock was billed by Ed Bradley on "60 Minutes" as a "nontraditional host" who is "not afraid to offend" and whose "comedy is still as profane and uncut as ever." Two hours later came the pièce de résistance: Mr. Rock in an Oscar-show promo spot on "Desperate Housewives" fondling the Oscar statuette (in all its gold nudity) and declaring, "You won't believe the halftime show!"

Actually, the Oscar audience may be smaller this year than before now that you can get XX porn on Rupert Murdoch's Direct TV and XXX from Adelphia - both large contributors to the RNC. Why wait for a "wardrobe malfunction" or for Chris Rock to pull a cheney when you can watch "Babette Meets the Fleet."

Bush is being Swift again.

I got an e-mail petition from a friend who occasionally passes these along; to what end I'm not sure. He's on the right and he knows I'm not; perhaps he does it to provoke a response. This one did.

Presidential Petition

Please do NOT let this petition stop and lose all these names. If you do not want to sign it, please forward it to everyone you know. To add your name, click on "forward". You will be able to add your name at the bottom of the list and then forward it to your friends. Or, if necessary, you can copy and paste and then add your name to the bottom of the list. It will produce a cleaner email if you do copy & paste it in a new blankemail.

THE 2,000TH PERSON PLEASE SEND IT ON TO THE FOLLOWING E-MAILADDRESS: President@WhiteHouse.gov Thank you very much.

Dear President Bush:

Many of us were deeply touched to hear you recite a portion of Psalm 23 in your address to this great nation in the dark hours following the terrorists attacks. We, the people of America, are requesting that you lift the prohibition of prayer in schools. As the pledge of our great country states, we are to be "One nation, under God." Please allow the prayers and petitions of our children in and children in the schools are prohibited from mentioning God unless, ofcourse, His name is uttered as part of a curse or profanity. Madalyn Murray O'Hair is dead. Let her legacy of atheism in our schools die with her!

Sincerely, The People of America!

Mark 10:13-14 "People were bringing little children to Jesus to have Him touch them, but he his disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, He was indignant. He said to them, "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God".

There followed a list of names. I don't think there were anywhere close to 2,000.

My reply to my friend was the following:

Whose god? The god that tells Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson that queers caused 9/11? Or the god that tells Osama bin Laden to attack the infidels? Or could it be the god that gave mankind the sense to know that religion – an invention of man – is something far removed from spirituality; something that does not need a petition to touch the soul.

Worship however you want and to whomever you choose. Keep the government out of the church and the church out of the government. And then there’s the little matter of the First Amendment...

Grace be unto you and peace.

Thinking about it a little further, I noted that the authors of this petition know very little about how the Constitution of the United States works and what powers are vested in the President of the United States. The president cannot "lift the prohibition of prayer in schools." That would require amending the Constitution, and the executive branch is on the sidelines when it comes to that: the president has absolutely no role in the process. He cannot officially submit an amendment nor does he sign it into law. As much as the right wing worships the ground Bush walks on, even he would not be so arrogant as to propose changing the Bill of Rights.

Oh, wait...

From CNN:

Homosexual marriages are part of "a new ideology of evil" that is insidiously threatening society, Pope John Paul says in his newly published book.

[...]

The 84-year-old Pontiff's book, a highly philosophical and intricate work on the nature of good and evil, is based on conversations with philosopher friends in 1993 and later with some of his aides.

In one section about the role of lawmakers, the Pope takes another swipe at gay marriages when he refers to "pressures" on the European Parliament to allow them.

"It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man," he writes.

I hardly think the Roman Catholic Church is in a position to pass judgement on what qualifies as evil given their long, long, long history of ignorance, intolerance, and bigotry. But that has never stopped them before.

A New York Times editorial gives us the basics of Bush's "personal" retirement account plans. The short version is that the plan is hoping you'll die very soon after you retire.

Under the president's proposal, when you retired, your traditional Social Security retirement benefit would be cut by an amount equal to all the deposits you had made into your private account plus interest. (The interest would be three percentage points higher than the rate of inflation.) The benefit cut would be each person's contribution to repaying the huge debt the Bush administration would take on to "pay for" privatization.

But if you died before you retired, you would have already used some of that borrowed money to set up the private account and yet would never have made any contribution to repaying the debt. So in that case, how would the government recoup your share of the amount it had borrowed? Well, it could let your share of the debt go unpaid - in effect bequeathing to your heirs and their fellow citizens ever-higher deficits. Or your spouse could inherit your private account and the benefit cut that went with it. Or the government could take its cut from your private account before the money went to your survivors - a grab that could wipe out your stash.

Those may be the nuts and bolts of the plan, but you and your heirs are the ones getting screwed.

Even Charles Krauthammer thinks Bush's Social Security plan is bogus. How nutty does it have to be to get him off the reservation?

The Los Angeles Times profiles one of our own.

BUELS GORE, Vt. — When N. Todd Pritsky got up the other day, the thermometer was stuck at 11 degrees below zero. Pritsky thought: What a great day for an outing!

Then he added in the windchill factor, making the air more like minus 41. Hmm, he considered, maybe I should bring a hat.

So Pritsky, wife Stefanie Otterson and their dog Cairo piled into their black Subaru Forester and drove north toward this unincorporated community on a frozen mountainside.

First, they chugged into Jericho, where the town hall is housed in a barn, next to the nation's only snowflake museum. Both were shut tight. Click. Pritsky shot a family photo. They meandered into Richmond, where "Closed Til Spring" signs hung in darkened storefronts. Click. Pritsky photographed the three of them outside the town's round church.

They hurried back to the car, two towns closer to their goal of visiting every community in Vermont. Pritsky and Otterson are new to the 251 Club, an organization founded 50 years ago to encourage Vermonters to get to know their beautiful — and conveniently small — state. Vermont is the only state that claims a club devoted exclusively to exploring every city, town, village, gore and grant (the last two, forms of self-governance that in other states would be considered nongovernance).

Their stops in Jericho and Richmond brought their tally to 11, with 240 to go. For extra credit — and bragging rights among club members — Pritsky and Otterson headed to one of the state's three gores.

They passed fields filled with farm animals, standing still as statues. Too cold to move, speculated Otterson. They saw houses with chimneys puffing as they drew close to Buels Gore — pop. 12, according to the 2000 census. They encountered stalactite icicles gripping the green schist boulders that form the Green Mountains.

Pritsky parked on the lip of the mountain, with not one of the gore's six residences (and none of its residents) in sight. Otterson and Cairo were shivering as Pritsky adjusted his tripod in knee-deep snow. "Hurry up and take the picture," Otterson called out, as Pritsky clomped into the family photo. The instant the camera clicked, all three sped back to the car.

"The discovery of things like that is what it is all about," said Otterson, 36. "Like, what is a gore? Why do we have gores? Do other states have gores?"

The answer is no. Gores are unincorporated communities with limited self-government. Vermont also has the country's sole grant, a settlement with no governing body at all.

The 251 Club is as quirky as the state it celebrates: an association based entirely on curiosity, trust and an excuse to get out of the house. The club is noncompetitive; it has no rules or bylaws. Members just have to have a desire to visit all the inhabited places in Vermont, sometime in a lifetime.

By traveling to the 251 official communities, club members like Otterson and Pritsky take in more than mere geography. They see beyond the quaint church spires and into a way of life they fear is fast changing as development speeds up, threatening the rural tranquillity that long has been Vermont's hallmark.

Read the rest here (there's even a picture). Then go give NTodd, Stef, and Cairo a hand for promoting the good things about living in a beautiful - albeit sometimes cold - place. And how many of you knew what a "gore" was? (I did, but then I spent a summer in Vermont milking cows when I was seventeen.)

[Updated to use the link to the L.A. Times from NTodd's site. Who better?]

This Excel class is fun and I'm learning a lot of useful things (so if you're reading this, JMM, we're actually paying attention). But when Bob and I get into a classroom situation, it's a bit of a reversion back to high school for us.

Example:

OTHER STUDENT TO TEACHER: My cells are blue.

BOB (helpfully): So cheer them up.

You get the idea. And of course we think we're hilarious. Ironically, both of us were classroom teachers and neither of us would have espeically appreciated this sort of behavior from our students unless, of course, they were was as clever and witty as we think we are. (You should hear us in the office - it's a regular vaudeville act.) Some teachers have a low tolerance for such badinage - I remember getting booted out of Mrs. Hankins' English class when three of us in chorus intoned "Deep!" after a girl tearfully declaimed a poem by Emily Dickinson. Fortunately, our instructor today has the patience of Job and the good grace to appreciate good humor - assuming, of course, we display any.

So, NTodd, if you ever get us in a class...you have been warned.

I'm in training today as part of my in-service to learn more about Excel spreadsheets. It's fun; this is the second of three classes, and I'm learning a lot. I'm also having flashbacks to Grade 8 math class and Mrs. Burget (God rest her saintly soul) and remembering the mathematical order of operations: parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction, which we all memorized as "Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally." Excel is smart enough to know the order of operations - so they say.

Now if only I could find a use for "Kings play chess on fiber glass stools," but I don't think there's a whole lot of use for biological categorization in my job.

From the Miami Herald:

INDIANAPOLIS -- A lesbian who split with her partner after adopting the woman's biological children must pay child support, the Indiana Court of Appeals has ruled.

The woman adopted her partner's children in 1997. A few years after their breakup, she tried to vacate the adoption. Around the same time, the children's biological mother, who had remarried and divorced a man, filed for child support.

A three-judge panel ruled last week that the woman who adopted the children must contribute to the cost of raising them.

"Whether a parent is a man or a woman, homosexual or heterosexual, or adoptive or biological, in assuming that role, a person also assumes certain responsibilities, obligations, and duties," the decision said. "That person may not simply choose to shed the parental mantle because it becomes inconvenient. . . ."

This would be a simple matter of child support if the couple had been allowed to get married in the first place. But by forcing gay and lesbian couples into these Rube Goldberg arrangements just to acquire the basic appearances of a normal life as a couple, the maze gets crazier. Where's the moral value in that?

From the New York Times:

Five years after Britain lifted its ban on gays in the military, the Royal Navy has begun actively encouraging them to enlist and has pledged to make life easier when they do.

The navy announced Monday that it had asked Stonewall, a group that lobbies for gay rights, to help it develop better strategies for recruiting and retaining gay men and lesbians. It said, too, that one strategy may be to advertise for recruits in gay magazines and newspapers.

Commodore Paul Docherty, director of naval life management, said the service wanted to change the atmosphere so that gays would feel comfortable working there.

"While some gays were confident to come out, others didn't feel that the environment was necessarily accepting of them," Commodore Docherty said in an interview.

The partnership with Stonewall, Commodore Docherty said, will help "make more steps toward improving the culture and attitude within the service as a whole, so gays who are still in the closet feel that much more comfortable about coming out."

So that's what Gilbert and Sullivan meant by "the queen's navy..."

As Paul Krugman points out, when things go south for the Bush crowd, they change the subject. Well, the crusade to reform Social Security has taken on more water than the Titanic, so be on the lookout for a national security alert - Mars Attacks! - or something like that.

But that seems to be just one prong in their plan of attack. As they have proven so well in the past, the Bushies don't try to work with their opponents; they try to destroy them. The groundwork is already being laid for a slash-and-burn campaign against any and all who might dare to raise a question or a different approach to privatization. Josh Marshall at TPM has been all over this story, the most recent being the web of intrigue being spun by Rove's minions at USANext, a front group for a collection of astroturfers under the umbrella of everyone from Focus on the Family to Bill Bennett (bringing in his recovering whales from Gamblers Anonymous, I assume). These are people who really know how to handle seniors' money, right?

The one thing these groups have proven to be woefully adept at is changing the subject. This has worked in the Gannon/Guckert case, where they've worked manfully (pun intended) to get the issue off the possible breach of security at the White House to the violation of poor James Guckert because he's a gay hooker with a heart of conservative gold (and a dick of steel to match, eh?) The tactic of USANext will be to demonize AARP and paint them as a bunch of cranky old liberal queer fogeys allied with the NAACP and ACT UP - something akin to the Pink Panthers.

All this does is get us off the point, which is an intelligent and measured approach to reforming Social Security with the long-term goal of making adjustments to it that will give it perpetual motion. It requires some tough choices, such as perhaps raising the retirement age, removing the cap on income taxed, or even (horrors!)rolling back the Bush tax cut. But these folks do not make tough choices and they know our nation's collective attention span is roughly that of six-year-old: "Social Security is in crisis - oh, look at the kitty!" That combined with an orange alert about a sleeper cell in Toledo will make meaningful Social Security reform as likely as Hillary's health care was in 1993.

I've been a birder since I was a kid, and I still have my dog-chewed copy of Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds (1963 edition). Today I got to make an addition to the list of birds that I've spotted that is not in the guide: a mynah bird.

I heard it in my backyard this afternon with a bell-like call that I knew wasn't a mockingbird. When I saw it on the powerline leading from the back of the house I knew what it was immediately; there used to be a mynah bird in a cage at Norm's Appliances in Perrysburg when I was a kid, and this was a dead ringer for it - except this one didn't say "Next!" (Norm's was also the deputy registrar for Wood County, the place were you got your drivers license or license plates, and every March there'd be lines out the door as people waited to get their new plates.)

I'm sure that it's an escaped pet; I see flocks of parrots and the occasional budgie or parakeet flying around, too, and I don't think it counts as a legit sighting of what Peterson quaintly calls an "accidental." But it's still an exotic addition to life in the sub-tropical suburbs.

From The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

Gold Hat: Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges!

From AP:

Intent on securing the vulnerable Arizona border from illegal immigrant crossings, U.S. officials are bracing for what they call a potential new threat this spring: the Minutemen.

Nearly 500 volunteers have already joined the Minuteman Project, anointing themselves civilian border patrol agents determined to stop the immigration flow that routinely, and easily, seeps past federal authorities. They plan to patrol a 40-mile stretch of the southeast Arizona border throughout April when the tide of immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border peaks.

"I felt the only way to get something done was to do it yourself," said Jim Gilchrist, a retired accountant and decorated Vietnam War veteran who is helping recruit Minutemen across the country.

"We've been repeatedly accused of being people who are taking the law into our own hands," said Gilchrist, 56, of Aliso Viejo, Calif. "That is an outright bogus statement. We are going down there to assist law enforcement."

[...]

Officials fear the Minuteman patrols could cause more trouble than they prevent. At least some of the volunteers plan to arm themselves during the 24-hour desert patrols. Many are untrained and have little or no experience in confronting illegal border crossings.

"Any time there are firearms and you're out in the middle of no-man's land in difficult terrain, it's a dangerous setting," said Bonner, whose agency is keeping a close eye on the Minutemen plans.

[...]

It may also prove to be a magnet for what Glenn Spencer, president of the private American Border Patrol, described as camouflage-wearing, weapons-toting hard-liners who might get a little carried away with their assignments.

"How are they going to keep the nutcases out of there? They can't control that," said Spencer, whose 40-volunteer group, based in Hereford, Ariz., has used unmanned aerial vehicles and other high-tech equipment to track and report the number of border crossings for more than two years.

Great, just what we need - a bunch of Elmer Fudds keeping watch on the border. The biggest danger to the illegals will be that they will die from laughing.

From the New York Times / AP:

Same-sex partners in Britain will be able to enter into civil unions from December, joining gays in parts of Europe and the United States in obtaining many of the rights enjoyed by married people, the government said Monday.

The Civil Partnerships Bill passed by Parliament last year gives same-sex couples the right to form legally binding partnerships and entitles them to some of the same tax and pension rights married couples have.

Does this have something to do with Dame Edna wanting to marry Prince William?

Some thoughts on going off on tangents.

I'd hammer about the Sixties...

From 42 and Quizilla:

You are a Folkie. Good for you.


What kind of Sixties Person are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I still have my guitars (a 6-string classical and a 12-string folk) and a lot of sheet music. They came in handy when I was camp counselor out in Colorado - or singing around the fires on the beach in Michigan while we passed around the bong.

I mean the real kind. I need to run the vacuum and dust, not to mention get rid of the various science experiments going on in the bathroom, refrigerator and garage. Then I can get some writing done.

Isn't that what days off are for?

Here's a brave kid.

Shelby Knox is tired. The 18-year-old Lubbock native just got into Park City, Utah, for the world premiere of the documentary The Education of Shelby Knox at the Sundance Film Festival. The interviews are piling up, and the sleep deprivation has her seeking a catnap in her publicist's suite.

But she should be able to handle the grind ahead. Her personal journey of the last few years, chronicled in Education, has steeled her for almost anything.

Just three years ago, she was a sophomore and conservative Southern Baptist at Lubbock's Coronado High School in Texas, in a district with a strict abstinence-only sex education policy. Now she's a self-described liberal Christian who underwent a baptism of fire by becoming an advocate for comprehensive sex ed in her hometown.

"I was 15, and in my high school I could see it was an issue that was affecting my contemporaries," says Knox, now a first-year sophomore political science major at the University of Texas in Austin.

[...]

The Education of Shelby Knox chronicles a teenager's path to adulthood, consciousness and political awakening. It's the story of a family that remains very close and mutually supportive despite vast political and ideological differences. Most of all, it's a story about becoming your own person, even when that means going against everything you've been taught. Or, in this case, everything you weren't taught.

Education, which will kick off the new season of the PBS documentary series POV on June 21, begins with a series of bracing facts. Lubbock has one of the highest teen-pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease rates in the nation. Teenage gonorrhea rates are twice the national average.

"Lubbock is known for three things," says Knox. "Buddy Holly, the Dixie Chicks and STDs."

[...]

So how did a nice Southern Baptist girl turn into a sex-ed crusader?

"As I came to see the world outside of Lubbock, I realized that my beliefs were more liberal than my parents'," she says. "I didn't make these decisions because I wanted to be the opposite of my parents. I made them because I read about the issues and figured out which side I wanted to be on."

Knox is still onboard with abstinence. "Kids must be taught that to be completely safe from STDs and teen pregnancy, the only way to do that is to abstain," she says. "However, kids know they can make that decision, and they need to make informed decisions. If they are going to have sex, they need to know the consequences. And they need to know how to protect themselves."

That's not how the Lubbock Independent School District sees it. It receives federal funding for its abstinence-only program, which has been in effect since 1995, and school officials would like to see the money continue to flow.

But the abstinence-only policy is not about cash. As depicted in the film, Lubbock is a proudly conservative and Christian city, with many residents and public officials who equate sex education with sexual provocation. The party line is that sex should be saved for marriage. Judging by the STD and pregnancy figures, that doesn't seem to be happening. The abstinence-only policy remains in place.

[...]

Knox is aware that her political beliefs have taken a sharp left turn from her family. She admits to guilt pangs.

"I think they might feel like they did something wrong," she says. "I feel bad, because in all ways it points to, I should have been a Republican. But my parents are so proud of me, and I love them for that . . . ."

Knox's father, Danny, agrees with his daughter that comprehensive sex education would be beneficial for Lubbock. A conservative Republican, he's not quite as comfortable with some of Shelby's other causes. In the film, he bristles a bit when Shelby teams up with student activists to support gay rights. To his credit, he offers her love and support.

Isn't it amazing how just plain old ordinary Real Life, not Hollywood or the "homosexual agenda," is the most coersive form of teaching kids the truth?

Edward Wasserman points out that two journalistic gaffes have made their impact.

The news media got an unusual bashing during last year's bitter electoral campaigns. They got slapped around from all sides, and everybody argued about how the media tried either to undermine Bush or discredit Kerry or both.

Still, it's never clear why some media wrongs are made into a big deal while others slip by. Take the CBS 60 Minutes report on Bush's military non-service: The story itself was old, the dubious evidence was of dubious importance, and the broadcast had no discernible effect. It became a major scandal anyway.

On the other end of the scale is an instance of clear-cut media wrongdoing that involved unquestionably fraudulent evidence and had dramatic consequences. This one, however, has gone largely unremarked. It is the famous incident involving Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean that is known as The Dean Scream.

And with Dean's recent appointment as Democratic Party chairman it's being hauled out as constituting the ceiling on whatever political ambitions he might still have, proof that he's shaky, unstable, unfit to serve -- Howard Dean's Chappaquiddick.

You've seen the clip. After Janet Jackson's ''wardrobe malfunction'' at the Super Bowl, it's the most famous news video of 2004. Dean is addressing campaign supporters after he lost the Iowa party caucuses in January. He's screaming for no apparent reason, practically shrieking, ticking off the states where he's vowing to continue the race. His face is red, his voice breaking. He looks deranged. It's a portrait of a man out of control. It's documentary evidence that Dean lacks the temperament for high office.

In fact the Dean Scream was a fraud, probably the clearest instance of media assassination in recent U.S. political history.

Last year, a young cable news producer attended one of our twice-yearly Ethics Institutes at Washington and Lee University, in which students and journalists gather to discuss newsroom wrongdoing. He brought two clips.

• The first was the familiar pool footage of Dean in Iowa. The candidate filled the screen, no supporters were visible. Crowd noise was silenced by the microphone he held, which deadened ambient sounds. You saw only him and heard only his inexplicable screaming.

• The second clip was the same speech taped by a supporter on the floor of the hall. The difference was stunning. The place was packed. The noise was deafening. Dean was on the podium, but you couldn't hear him. The roar from his supporters was drowning him out.

Dean was no longer scary, unhinged, volcanic, over the top. He was like the coach of a would-be championship NCAA football team at a pre-game rally, trying to be heard over a gym full of determined, wildly enthusiastic fans. I saw energy, not lunacy.

The difference was context. As psychiatrist R.D. Laing once wrote: We see a woman on her knees, eyes closed, muttering to someone who isn't there. Of course, she's praying. But if we deny her that context, we naturally conclude she's insane.

The Dean Scream footage that was repeatedly aired rests on a similar falsehood. It takes a man who in context was acting reasonably, and by stripping away that context transforms him into a lunatic.

But that clip was aired an estimated 700 times on various cable and broadcast channels in the week after the Iowa caucus. The people who showed that clip are far more technically sophisticated than I and had to understand how tight visual framing and noise-suppression hardware can distort reality.

True, some network news executives commented afterward that perhaps the footage was overplayed and offered the bureaucrat's favorite bromide, that hindsight is 20/20. But the media establishment has never acknowledged this as a burning matter of ethical harm.

That's because the Dean Scream incriminates the entire professional mission of television news, which is built around the primacy of the picture. TV producers don't profess to offer meaning and context; they get you the visuals, unless they're gory or obscene. The notion that great footage would be not shown just because it's profoundly misleading -- that's a possibility few TV news executives would entertain.

That's why they're not eager to see the Dean Scream enter the canon of journalistic sin. And if that leaves Howard Dean's political future hobbled by a lie, so be it.

Well, it's small comfort to know that it isn't political bias but just plain ego that's keeping reality at bay.

From the Sun-Sentinel:

Hunter S. Thompson, the hard-living writer who inserted himself into his accounts of America's underbelly and popularized a first-person form of journalism in books such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," has committed suicide.

Thompson was found dead Sunday in his Aspen-area home of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, sheriff's officials said. He was 67. Thompson's wife, Anita, had gone out before the shooting and was not home at the time....

It's sad, but I can't imagine him going out any other way.

Update: In one of those odd coincidences, Thompson's last article involves shotguns.

From the Miami Herald:

On a February afternoon, five high school students lounged patiently on a bus-stop bench in Westchester.

Lino Alvarado Jr. slowed his truck to a crawl, smiled and unleashed more than 150 decibels of sound from a dozen train horns attached to his truck's undercarriage.

"Did you see those kids flinch?" Alvarado, 20, said as he breezed through a stop sign. "But old people are even better."

The students were blasted by one of the area's hottest vehicle customization trends.

A good set of train horns costs about $1,000 and packs an audio punch that can reach hundreds of feet -- to the delight of people who buy them, and to the dismay of residents, who are complaining to police.

"It's outrageous and inconsiderate that people blow these horns, and the state should ban these things," said Morris Sunshine, who lives in South Beach. "This is merely a pitiful search for instant celebrity."

Police departments in some cities are stepping up efforts to track down and ticket those blowing the horns. In Miami Beach, police have even arrested one man for blasting his, and intend to arrest more.

Alvarado has received dozens of tickets, spending hundreds of dollars to pay them, but he believes it's worth it.

"It's competition on the street, like when a guy in a truck passes by, he honks his horn, and I honk mine back," he said. "The next time I see him, he doesn't honk his, because he knows mine are bigger and louder."...

Actually, what the little bastard probably needs is a bottle of Viagra. And I'm guessing "little" is the operative adjective here.

From the New York Times:

As George W. Bush was first moving onto the national political stage, he often turned for advice to an old friend who secretly taped some of their private conversations, creating a rare record of the future president as a politician and a personality.

In the last several weeks, that friend, Doug Wead, an author and former aide to Mr. Bush's father, disclosed the tapes' existence to a reporter and played about a dozen of them.

Variously earnest, confident or prickly in those conversations, Mr. Bush weighs the political risks and benefits of his religious faith, discusses campaign strategy and comments on rivals. John McCain "will wear thin," he predicted. John Ashcroft, he confided, would be a "very good Supreme Court pick" or a "fabulous" vice president. And in exchanges about his handling of questions from the news media about his past, Mr. Bush appears to have acknowledged trying marijuana.

Mr. Wead said he recorded the conversations because he viewed Mr. Bush as a historic figure, but he said he knew that the president might regard his actions as a betrayal. As the author of a new book about presidential childhoods, Mr. Wead could benefit from any publicity, but he said that was not a motive in disclosing the tapes.

The White House did not dispute the authenticity of the tapes or respond to their contents. Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said, "The governor was having casual conversations with someone he believed was his friend." Asked about drug use, Mr. Duffy said, "That has been asked and answered so many times there is nothing more to add."

The conversations Mr. Wead played offer insights into Mr. Bush's thinking from the time he was weighing a run for president in 1998 to shortly before he accepted the Republican nomination in 2000. Mr. Wead had been a liaison to evangelical Protestants for the president's father, and the intersection of religion and politics is a recurring theme in the talks.

Preparing to meet Christian leaders in September 1998, Mr. Bush told Mr. Wead, "As you said, there are some code words. There are some proper ways to say things, and some improper ways." He added, "I am going to say that I've accepted Christ into my life. And that's a true statement."

But Mr. Bush also repeatedly worried that prominent evangelical Christians would not like his refusal "to kick gays." At the same time, he was wary of unnerving secular voters by meeting publicly with evangelical leaders. When he thought his aides had agreed to such a meeting, Mr. Bush complained to Karl Rove, his political strategist, "What the hell is this about?"

Mr. Bush, who has acknowledged a drinking problem years ago, told Mr. Wead on the tapes that he could withstand scrutiny of his past. He said it involved nothing more than "just, you know, wild behavior." He worried, though, that allegations of cocaine use would surface in the campaign, and he blamed his opponents for stirring rumors. "If nobody shows up, there's no story," he told Mr. Wead, "and if somebody shows up, it is going to be made up." But when Mr. Wead said that Mr. Bush had in the past publicly denied using cocaine, Mr. Bush replied, "I haven't denied anything."

Snort, snort.

Sam Roberts in the New York Times Week in Review finds hope for Democrats in local politics.

It took 14 weeks of recounts and litigation before Nicholas A. Spano finally won re-election to the New York State Senate this month. By carrying his district in the Westchester suburbs of New York City - by all of 18 votes - Mr. Spano, now known as Landslide Nick, helped maintain the embattled Republican majority in the State Senate.

But he also achieved a more curious distinction: He broke a nationwide dead heat in state legislative seats. Counting Mr. Spano, the 2004 election made the count 3,657 Republicans and 3,656 Democrats; before last November, Republicans led by 64 seats.

That Mr. Spano was caught in such a squeaker illustrates an important truth: Republicans may be triumphant now at the national level, but that doesn't mean the party is doing well in the states, where all politics is local.

New York State has been something of an against-the-odds success story for Republicans. In national election-map parlance, it is obviously a blue state: it hasn't backed a Republican for president since Ronald Reagan in 1984 (though President Bush did better in New York against John Kerry than against Al Gore). Enrolled Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 5 to 3. In Congress, Democrats hold 19 of the 29 House seats, and they easily won both Senate seats.

Switch to local politics, though, and the state looks much redder. The state has had a Republican governor for all but 24 of the last 60 years, including George E. Pataki's three terms so far. The Democrats last controlled both houses of the Legislature in 1965. The last two mayors of solidly Democratic New York City have been Republicans. The state's small towns and rural counties have overwhelmingly been in Republican hands, and until recently, so were the suburbs.

But lately, even as Republicans have been gaining ground nationally they have been losing it in New York, and in some other states around the country as well. The reasons are many, ranging from population shifts to an erosion of party identification. But one thing it does not necessarily seem to be about is ideology.

Voters look at national and local candidates through very different lenses, and party labels can mean different things. The accommodations of day-to-day governing at state and local levels mean that elected officials must often run afoul of party oratory just to get things done...

Michael Kinsley on privilege and presumption

American democracy is a conspiracy of special interests against the general interest, but every special interest thinks that it is the general interest. Journalists often see this firsthand. They talk to a farmer about farm price supports and report back amazed at the ferocity and self-righteousness of the farmer's views. A farmer really believes that large government checks to farmers make America a better place, and can get very annoyed if you suggest otherwise.

How can they believe that their special interest in receiving large checks from the general taxpayer coincides with the general taxpayer's interest? Partly it's self-deception. Partly, though, it is self-selection. Farmers believe in the nobility of farming because people who believe in the nobility of farming become farmers.

And people who believe in journalism become journalists. Belief in journalism is not widespread in the general population these days. People think journalists are biased, that they make things up, that they are arrogant, self-involved and self-important. But the folks who become journalists (including me) are more likely to regard journalism as a noble calling that serves the nation, its values and the world. That is why, even at this low point in public esteem, many journalists are unembarrassed to assert that they are above the law.

That is essentially what the journalistic profession is claiming in the current controversy over the special prosecutor's investigation of White House leaks. Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time have refused to testify about their conversations with government officials that might have concerned who leaked the identity of an undercover intelligence agent to columnist Robert Novak. Last week a federal appeals court ruling upheld a lower-court order that Miller and Cooper must testify or go to jail.

That is a travesty. These two public-spirited journalists promised anonymity to sources at a time when the law about "journalists' privilege" was unclear. Having made that promise, they feel obligated to keep it. If they shouldn't have made that promise, society should have sent them a clearer message to that effect. The message is still a muddle. Why these two, who never published the secret name, and not others, including some who did? Before we start jailing journalists for keeping promises, we need to decide when such a promise should be made...

A touch of the poet, Michael Suib, in Key West.

Common sights, related by circumstance, waylay me every day, each as starkly incongruous as day and night.

In a city full of riches and wonders, an island paradise, there is a woman who walks along North Roosevelt Boulevard. She carries an assortment of black plastic bags, several in each hand. Her belongings overflow the bags, but somehow manage to be tucked in just well enough to stay in place.

Her hair, clothing, skin, all equally black, highlight her, stark and pronounced against the turquoise sea and pale blue horizon. The expression on her face is one of hopelessness, her eyes soulful and weary.

Above her, high in the Key West sky, are turkey vultures, hundreds of them, circling like black specks of pepper against a bleached mountain of white cotton clouds. Below, the woman slowly circles the island, and the birds swirl higher and higher, almost begging Icarus to take them home before their ache of hunger becomes too great.

A red convertible slides along the roadway, laughter and music blaring, lengths of hair streaming in the rush of air behind the four occupants whose faces are flushed from the wind, the sun and their exuberance, their luggage protruding from the vehicle's tied-down trunk.

Along tree-lined Truman Avenue, just past the entrance to St. Mary's Star of the Sea Catholic church, a man sits in a wheelchair, moving it, heliotropically, a few feet at a time to stake his claim to the warmth of the changing stations of the sun. He wears camouflage-style military pants and a sad story on his face, punctuated by draws from a bottle of clear alcohol.

His posture is taut and almost expectant. Waiting, always waiting. He will sit for hours along this stretch of avenue, the traffic buzzing by him, with only a thin ribbon of sky visible through the royal poinciana trees, his window to the light above him. The turkey vultures, obscure blurs, silently tumble past the tall trees, unannounced.

A couple walks by, their hands intertwined, beach towels draped around their necks, bulging backpacks slung over their shoulders. Two small children trail behind them, giggling and poking each other, perhaps trekking to their plot of sand and sunshine. Several blocks away, another man sits in a wheelchair.

He is slumped over, catching sleep on the corner of United and Duval streets where there is a broad band of sky that the street is open to. The man looks like he is in danger of tumbling out of his seat.

As he sleeps, bundled under several blankets that are wrapped around his huddled shoulders even on warm days, you can tell that he is not well.

A festering foot, face shining beet-red, his physical condition depleting each day, he, too, stakes his claim to a spot in the sun. As people walk by some give him a wide berth; others place dollar bills or change on his lap.

The man remains motionless. I stop to see if he is breathing, and see that he is, and I add some money to his lap.

I would like to ask if I can help, but can not push myself today to disrupt his sleep.

A Conch Tour Train glides by, filled with pale people enjoying the sites and sounds of Key West's sub-tropical nirvana, their cameras snapping, but paying little heed to the man so precariously perched in his wheelchair. Overhead the turkey vultures continue to circle.

Perhaps tomorrow, if tomorrow comes for the man, and the sun again shines, I'll try to wake him.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 6:08 AM  

"Jeff Gannon" granted Howard Kurtz an interview for the Washington Post.

Jeff Gannon, the former White House reporter whose naked pictures have appeared on a number of gay escort sites, says that he has "regrets" about his past but that White House officials knew nothing about his salacious activities.

"I've made mistakes in my past," he said yesterday. "Does my past mean I can't have a future? Does it disqualify me from being a journalist?"

Gannon chastised his critics, breaking a silence that began last week when liberal bloggers disclosed his real name, James Dale Guckert, and a Web page, which he paid for, featuring X-rated photos of himself. "Why would they be looking into a person's sexual history? Is that what we're going to do to reporters now? Is there some kind of litmus test for reporters? Is it right to hold someone's sexuality against them?"

You're kidding, right? There's a Constitutional amendment in the works that would do that very thing.

...John Aravosis, a gay activist who posted the pictures of Gannon on his Americablog.org, [sic] said the issue is not Gannon's right to be a journalist but his "White House access. . . . The White House wouldn't let him in the door right now, knowing of his background."

Aravosis said Gannon is guilty of "what I call family-values hypocrisy. Basically, he's asking the gay community to protect him when he attacks us."

In the gay shortand, that's what's known as being "versatile."

...Dismissing speculation that he had a permanent White House press pass, which requires a full-blown FBI background check that usually takes months, Gannon said he could not get one because he was required to first get a pass from the Senate press gallery, which did not consider him to be working for a legitimate news organization. Instead, he said he was admitted on a day-to-day basis after supplying his real name, date of birth and Social Security number. He said he did not use a pseudonym to hide his past but because his real last name is hard to spell and pronounce.

That's true. I heard Jim Miklaszewski, the NBC News correspondent, mispronounce "Guckert" just the other day.

...Despite the battering he has taken, Gannon hasn't abandoned plans to work in journalism and hopes to generate sympathy by speaking out.

Sympathy for what? He's a hypocritical self-loathing whore. Is there some sort of support group for that?

"People criticize me for being a Christian and having some of these questionable things in my past," he said. "I believe in a God of forgiveness."

He doesn't get it. God may forgive him. That's fine. But "Gannon" works for people who hate him and have no qualms whatsoever about denying him his basic rights as a human being and a gay man, yet he allows them to denigrate him and his very existence. Well, I hope he can find some comfort in knowing that there are probably websites for that kind of fetish, too.

Bush 41 and Bill Clinton are best buddies now.

Michelle Goldberg of Salon.com reports on the Conservative Political Action Conference.

It's a good thing I went to the Conservative Political Action Conference this year. Otherwise I never would have known that, despite the findings of the authoritative David Kay report and every reputable media outlet on earth, the United States actually discovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, vindicating all of George W. Bush's pre-war predictions. The revelation came not from some crank at Free Republic or hustler from Talon News, but from a congressman surrounded by men from the highest echelons of American government. No wonder the attendees all seemed to believe him.

The crowd at CPAC's Thursday night banquet, held at D.C.'s Ronald Reagan Building, was full of right-wing stars. Among those seated at the long presidential table at the head of the room were Henry Hyde, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, Kansas Sen. Sam Brownback, Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, Dore Gold, foreign policy advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and NRA president Kayne Robinson. Vice President Dick Cheney, a regular CPAC speaker, gave the keynote address. California Rep. Chris Cox had the honor of introducing him, and he took the opportunity to mock the Democrats whose hatred of America led them to get Iraq so horribly wrong.

"America's Operation Iraqi Freedom is still producing shock and awe, this time among the blame-America-first crowd," he crowed. Then he said, "We continue to discover biological and chemical weapons and facilities to make them inside Iraq." Apparently, most of the hundreds of people in attendance already knew about these remarkable, hitherto-unreported discoveries, because no one gasped at this startling revelation.

And why would they? Like comrades celebrating the success of Mao's Great Leap Forward, attendees at CPAC, the oldest and largest right-wing conference in the country, invest their leaders with the power to defy mere reality through force of insistent rhetoric. The triumphant recent election is all the proof they need that everything George W. Bush says is true. Sure, there's skepticism of the president's wonder-working power among some of the old movement hands -- including the leaders of the American Conservative Union, which puts CPAC on. For much of the rank and file, though, the thousands of blue-blazered students and local activists who come to CPAC each year to celebrate the völkisch virtues of nationalism, capitalism and heterosexuality, Bush is truth. They don rhinestone W brooches and buy mouse pads, posters and T-shirts showing the president as a kind of beefcake Uncle Sam, with flowing white hair and bulging muscles threatening to rend his red, white and blue garments.

It's not only liberals who have noticed that Bush's most committed followers are caught up in the fact-filtering force field of a personality cult. In January, Paul Craig Roberts, assistant secretary of the treasury during the Reagan administration and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal's far-right editorial page, published a damning column in the progressive Z Magazine about fascist tendencies in the conservative movement. "In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush," he wrote. "Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush … Like Brownshirts, the new conservatives take personally any criticism of their leader and his policies. To be a critic is to be an enemy."

This kind of ground-level devotion was key to the volunteer-driven get-out-the-vote campaign, and the administration sent important emissaries to convey the president's gratitude. Although the Republicans always have high-powered representatives at CPAC, this year the lineup at the three-day conference is particularly impressive. On the first day alone, attendees heard from Karl Rove and Sen. Rick Santorum as well as Cheney. Tonight, there will be a speech by Zell Miller, the former Democratic senator who delivered the vein-popping keynote address at this year's Republican National Convention. He'll be delivering a "Courage Under Fire" award to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Tomorrow, we'll hear from Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman and Newt Gingrich.

Neither Cheney nor Rove said anything very interesting. As he does most years, the vice president essentially rehashed Bush's State of the Union, although he mercifully omitted any reference to the Federal Marriage Amendment. Rove's speech was about the growth of the right from "a small principled opposition" to "a broad and inclusive movement that is self-assured, confident and optimistic, and forward leading, and most important of all, dominant in American politics today."

Their mere presence was more significant than their words, putting the White House imprimatur on an event that featured, in addition to the Swift Boat Veterans, venomous CPAC regulars like Ann Coulter, Oliver North and Michelle "In Defense of Internment" Malkin. It was yet more evidence that this administration puts little distance between itself and the most reactionary forces in the Republican Party.

The people who come to CPAC range from very conservative to proto-fascist. Within that grouping, though, are a host of different concerns. Some of CPACers hate taxes and love guns but are basically social libertarians. Others, like the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property, a far-right Catholic outfit, support the criminalization of homosexuality and oppose legalized birth control. A few have very specific grievances, like the man who stood after Santorum's talk to rant about judges who discriminate against fathers during custody disputes and women who won't let their ex-husbands see their children more than twice a month.

In his speech, Santorum tried to unite the various constituencies behind the anti-gay marriage amendment with the Orwellian argument that such an amendment is actually necessary to keep government out of people's private lives.

"I know there are some people who may be economic conservatives and not consider themselves cultural conservatives," he said. Addressing himself to them, he tried to explain how banning gay marriage is crucial to laissez-faire governing. "Think about those communities where marriage does not exist," he said, invoking their poverty and illegitimacy. "What you see is a model of what life would look like in a country that has fathers and mothers not wedded together in strong relationships to raise children." In poor neighborhoods, he said, there's a strong government presence, "because if Mom and Dad isn't there to raise the child, someone else has to bridge the gap, and that someone else is always the government."

Santorum didn't quite explain how proscribing gay unions would strengthen families in poor communities. The assumption seemed to be that homosexuality would make a travesty of matrimony. Like a suburban block where undesirables insist on moving in, its worth would go down. "If we deconstruct marriage in society, if we say marriage is whatever you want it to be, then marriage loses its intrinsic value," he said.

"I'm talking at a very protective level about what is important to our society if we are to be a free people," he said. "The less virtue we have in our society, the more the need for government to control our lives, to govern our lives." In other words, government needs to enforce virtue in order to keep government out of our lives.

This argument seemed to make sense to his audience.

Who needs logic when you've got power?

Meanwhile some Democrats are wringing their hands over putting Howard Dean in the chairmanship of the DNC - "he's a divisive force - he comes on too strong - he'll say mean things." Given what we're up against with CPAC, I'd say that anything Howard Dean will do pales in comparison to the Right. This is not just a small part of the Republican party, the type they keep hidden in the attic like a crazy aunt. This is their front line.

The fascinating aspect of this is how they use the seige mentality. They control all three branches of government, but to hear them tell it, there are great mobs of liberals, queers, and women who don't shave their legs forming outside the gates of their citadel. In order to stay in power, they rouse their rabble with the fear of the outside, and they gather all the wingnuts to their side. It's an old trick - it's how dictators take over (vis. Berlin 1933) - but the problem is that once you're in power, the wingnuts want their cut, and these are not people who know how to compromise or would even consider yielding an inch. That makes things hard to do in a democracy. But that assumes you are still in one.

Someone got here by searching Dogpile for "jeff gannon nude."

Sorry to disappoint you, but this ain't that kind of blog. Besides, my experience is that buzz-cut conservative military-type gay men have real issues, if you know what I mean.

Via PSoTD from Redd Turtle:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t search around and look for the “coolest” book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

"When in doubt about the principal parts of a verb, consult a dictionary, in which you will find any irregular forms listed."

From English Grammar and Composition - Fifth Course by John E. Warriner et al. copyright 1973.

From the Sun-Sentinel:

A luxury hotel will open next month on the site of Adolf Hitler's Alpine retreat, which served as a part-time seat of government where he and other Nazi leaders often met to plan Germany's assault on Europe and the Holocaust.

The new hotel, the Intercontinental Resort Berchtesgaden, will open on the Obersalzberg mountaintop to guests on March 1, the Bavarian Finance Ministry said Thursday.

The decision to build a hotel on the site angered many Jewish groups.

Officials have tried to address their concerns with a documentation center opened in 1999 to detail the area's Nazi past.

In another concession, the hotel vetoed the idea for all the bellhops to have little toothbrush mustaches.

The Religious Reich moves a lot of air and raises a lot of money decrying "activist judges" who use the courts to interpret the laws about the separation of church and state. But as soon as they feel they're the ones whose rights are being violated, where do they go? You guessed it.

Rossford [Ohio] Superintendent Luci Gernot said she prohibited the Christian rock band Pawn from playing during a school anti-drug assembly Dec. 21 because of concerns about potentially being sued for promoting religion in a public school.

Yesterday, the district was sued - by the band.

The lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Toledo claims the Rossford Exempted Village School District and Ms. Gernot violated the band's constitutional free speech rights under the First Amendment.

The suit also contends that Pawn - whose song lyrics make various references to God - was discriminated against for religious purposes even though they planned to keep on-stage talk between songs nonreligious and focused on the assembly's anti-drug theme. Student attendance at the assembly, held during school hours, was optional.

The band is asking U.S. District Judge David A. Katz to rule that Pawn should have been allowed to play at the assembly, said Tom Condit, an affiliate attorney for The Rutherford Institute - a nonprofit religious and human rights organization that is representing the band in the lawsuit.

"We're asking for the court to declare that a band like Pawn is entitled to perform a secular performance in a public school," Mr. Condit said. "Just because they're Christian does not disqualify them from participating in a public forum."

John Whitehead, president and founder of The Rutherford Institute and a lawyer who has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, said the lawsuit was filed because it involves an important constitutional issue.

"There is this illusion around the country that anything having to do with religion is automatically unconstitutional, it shouldn't be in the schools, and it's treated as if it were something dirty," he said. "I think it's courageous for groups like Pawn to stand up and say, 'This is illegal.'"

[...]

The superintendent rejected the request to allow Pawn to perform after receiving an inquiry from a concerned parent and the district's law firm, Whalen & Compton of Akron, advised against the performance. The decision provoked an outcry from supporters of the band and quickly drew national attention from those for and against the right to religious presence in public schools.

After discussing the matter with its attorneys, the school board backed Ms. Gernot's decision and offered to allow the band to play after school hours at an event sponsored by local businesses.

Because the school board did not overrule the decision, the Rev. Mark Montgomery, who is the father of two band members, called the Texas-based Rutherford Institute to begin negotiations with school officials.

But Rossford school board President Joseph Minarcin, Jr., said the school board has already resolved to support Ms. Gernot's decision.

"We're still standing behind her just as we stated earlier," he said. "We're not there to negotiate. This is what our decision is."

When negotiations failed, the band and The Rutherford Institute moved toward litigation. Travis Montgomery, a 1995 Rossford High graduate, said yesterday that he wished the issue could have been resolved another way.

"We have to stand up for our rights," he said, "because otherwise they may not be there."

I would like them to explain to me with a straight face how it's perfectly all right for a group of students to sue to get a religious message into a school program, but it's not all right for another group of students to sue to keep one out.

Three weeks later, I'm still waiting for a good explanation of what Jeff Gannon was doing in the White House. And for you to be upset about it.

Here's what's up in The Liberal Coalition this week.

All Facts and Opinions on the Buy Blue movement.

archy on the history of the environmental movement.

blogAmy on Rapture in Florida.

bloggg on Special Education and the frustrations thereof.

Chris on torture.

Collective Sigh on staying healthy.

Leah at Corrente goes to great lengths to cover the Eason Jordan story.

NTodd arises from his sickbed and looks to recognize some native Americans.

Echidne on the difficulties of women in Iraq and Afghanistan.

edwardpig on decent TV.

First Draft on who was really behind the oil-for-food scandal.

The Fulcrum on Condi abroad and nukes in Korea.

Gamer's Nook mourns the NHL season.

Happy Furry plays Hollywood reporter.

iddybud on another White House press secretary's reaction to Gannon/Guckert.

Invisible Library on literary standards in Kansas.

Kick the Leftist on gay marriage in Canada.

Left is Right offers a number-cruncher for your Social Security benefits.

MMAC covers the Bush press conference yesterday.

Michael on great legal minds in Tennessee.

Pen-Elayne won an award!

Ugarte at Rick's debates labor and Wal-Mart.

Rook's Rant thinks about the power of linkage.

rubber hose on taking off the cap.

Scrutiny Hooligans on dissent.

SoonerThought on Negroponte.

Speedkill on teaching sex ed.

Steve Gilliard on going north.

T. Rex on old news.

Trish Wilson has some chuckles.

Wanda on rising threats.

WTF Is It Now?? summarizes Gannon/Guckert.

Steve finds humor in David Horowitz. Who knew?

There's an all-British classic car show in West Palm Beach's Bryant Park this Sunday. I'll be there with my friend Bob and his 1967 Austin-Healey. To get there, just follow the trail of oil. (There's an old joke about why the British were never good at designing computers; it's because they couldn't get them to leak oil.) Anyway, have a good weekend and a nice holiday if you've got it.

Well, we knew that Gannon/Guckert was good at turning tricks...

Long before "Jeff Gannon" became a household pseudonym in the nation's capital, he had earned considerable recognition among the political elites of South Dakota. During that state's closely contested Senate race last year, the Talon News writer -- whose real name is now known to be James Dale Guckert -- dug his claws deep into Tom Daschle, the former Senate minority leader narrowly defeated by Republican John Thune.

In 2004 Republican leaders placed no higher price on any head, besides John Kerry's, than on the Senate Democratic leader's. For years, conservative organizations had attacked Daschle with campaigns that included notorious ads that paired the Army veteran with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. The smear efforts damaged Daschle's standing with the state's voters, and as the election grew nearer, Republican blogs and Web sites took up the dirty work. In what has now been exposed as a blatant Republican strategy, the seemingly independent bloggers had in fact been paid by the Thune campaign.

Gannon took up the Republicans' dirty work with great gusto, beginning more than a year before the election, in the summer of 2003. Working with two local South Dakota bloggers, both of whom later turned out to be secretly paid operatives of the Thune campaign, he targeted Daschle and discredited mainstream journalists. Among Gannon's direct hits was an embarrassing story that revealed that the three-term senator and his lobbyist wife, Linda, had applied for a "homestead exemption" on their costly Washington, D.C., residence, claiming it as their primary residence.

Gannon went much further, however, in accusing reporters at the state's most important newspaper, the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, of shilling for Daschle and, worse still, of colluding with the senator in the intimidation of his political adversaries. Such wild attacks were then played back on the Thune-financed Web logs, which attracted substantial attention in the Senate race and influenced coverage in the South Dakota media. As the National Journal explained in a post-election analysis, the blog assault "opened a new and potentially powerful front in the war over public opinion." The National Journal and local journalists agreed that the blog campaign against Daschle was "crucial." A top Argus Leader editor conceded, "I don't think there's any way to say [the blogs] didn't" affect the paper's coverage.

Daschle's defeat is old news by now, of course. Yet to understand who "Gannon" really was -- and why he obtained such special treatment from Karl Rove's White House communications operation -- one useful exercise may be what intelligence analysts call "walking back the cat." In essence, this means running the movie in reverse slow-motion to see where the suspect came from and what he did along the way.

Looking back at the special role played by Talon and Gannon in the South Dakota Senate campaign may provide clues in the mystery of the male-escort-cum-journalist's extraordinary access to the Bush White House.

The cooperation between the Talon News writer and Daschle's Republican challenger dates back to the early weeks of the South Dakota campaign, when Thune showed up as a guest on "Jeff Gannon's Washington," the writer's Internet radio program on Rightalk.com. It might have seemed unusual for a Midwestern Senate candidate to show up on an Internet radio show in Washington, where he would reach almost no listeners in his home state. But Gannon didn't waste Thune's time. His friendly questioning allowed the Republican candidate to lay out the themes of his campaign to unseat the incumbent: Daschle was an obstructionist opponent of the president, out of touch with the home folks, and married to a rich pharmaceutical lobbyist.

On Feb. 8, 2004, Gannon's interview with Thune was the subject of an article in the Argus-Leader, and immediately got picked up by "DaschlevThune," a Web blog operated by history professor and Republican activist Jon Lauck, and South Dakota Politics.com, run by a lawyer named Jason Van Beek. Lauck promoted a series of Talon News articles by Gannon, which charged that Dave Kranz, the Argus-Leader's chief political correspondent, and a three-decade veteran reporter, was in essence nothing more than a hit man for Daschle.

While promoting Talon and Gannon as credible journalistic sources, Lauck's blog reprinted sensational paragraphs posted by Gannon on the Talon News Web site, urging readers to take special note of the Talon reporter's "quite interesting article" about Daschle's "Sopranos-style" tactics. The story contained no actual evidence of misconduct by either the Democratic senator or the Sioux Falls newspaperman, beyond anonymous quotes that accused them of Mafia-like intimidation of "small business owners" and other beleaguered anti-Daschle dissidents. (The "Sopranos" story, like all of Gannon's other works, has been scrubbed by Talon's Republican owners from their Web site.)

The bloggers promoted dozens of Talon News attacks on Daschle, under the false flag of journalistic independence. They proclaimed themselves the paladins of truth, battling against South Dakota's "liberal media." Nobody in South Dakota would know until months after Nov. 2, when Daschle was so narrowly defeated, that those "independent" bloggers dogging him had been subsidized by the Thune campaign. But there, on the final post-election filings, were the names Lauck and Van Beek, who had been paid $27,000 and $8,000, respectively.

And nobody in South Dakota could know, until now, the true identity and purpose of "Jeff Gannon" and his employers at Talon News. - Joe Conason, Salon.com

Back in the days of Watergate, such tactics were known as "ratfucking." I wonder if Gannon/Guckert has a website for that.

Jimmy Carter may not have been the greatest president of the 20th century, but for Power Line to suggest that he is somehow a traitor goes way over the top. Matthew Yglesias nails it.

I don't think it's at all unreasonable to say that Hindrocket owes Carter a serious apology. Flinging this sort of totally unsubstantiated allegation is disgusting and utterly destructive of any effort to have serious debate about anything. Is Jimmy Carter really in league with the jihadist forces responsible for the murder of thousands of Americas? Is this what Power Line's fans and those who link to them believe? That a jihadist agent managed to get himself elected president? That an ex-president turned traitor?

Yeah, I know that the Left can get vitriolic and playground-silly, but even Michael Moore in all his glory never went that far.

It may be that the buzz over Gannon/Guckert is picking up some steam. Take a look at what Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, and Joe Conason have to say (nice to see that Joe picked up on my meme).

According to the SCLM, Jim Guckert AKA Jeff Gannon got a fake ID so he could sit with the WHPC and question the POTUS just like the rest of the MSM, but in reality he worked for GOPUSA instead of MSNBC or CNN. It was all on the QT until he turned up on M4M sites on AOL; sites where you can find a GWM between 18-30 (UB2) ISO PNP, B&D, and WS but will consider an LTR with an S&S guy who's HIV- .

Now Scott McClellan, WHPS, is UTC in his daily Q&A with the AP, UPI, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR, and everyone else except FOX because the rules state you can't get past the USSS without a legit SSN or authentic DL.

Do I have to spell it out for you?

Robert Steinback in the Miami Herald on how it's now okay to be a flip-flopper...if you're a Republican.

Darn it! I must have missed the memo. When did it become OK to be nice to Europeans again?

Wasn't it just two years ago that the French and Germans were targets of the meanest scorn among President Bush's supporters for refusing to endorse his plan to invade Iraq? Conservative pundits dusted off 60-year-old insults about France succumbing to the Nazi war machine in World War II. We poured French wine down drains and called them "cheese-eating surrender monkeys." We depicted them as jaded champions of an "Old Europe" teetering on the edge of irrelevancy. Even fried potatoes lost their Gallic prénom in a show of patriotic defiance.

But there was newly minted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week in Paris describing how much the United States and France have in common.

"The history of the United States and that of France are intertwined," Rice said during her speech at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris. "Our history is a history of shared values, of shared sacrifice and of shared successes. So, too, will be our shared future."

But what about . . . . aren't they cheese-eating . . . . what do you mean you don't serve Freedom Fries?

[...]

Conservatives in the 1990s told us balancing the federal budget was so important, they included it in the very first principle of the 1994 "Contract with America" -- and we accepted that. Now, the conservative government is running the largest deficits in history, and we've accepted that. And Bush now wants to sell us a plan to overhaul Social Security that could force America to borrow another $2 trillion -- and he's counting on us to accept this as well.

Contradictions -- even outright, 180-degree reversals of position -- now glide by the American consciousness without provoking even the faintest suspicion of irony, never mind hypocrisy. Conservatives crowed three months ago that Democrats lost the election because the Left didn't address issues of religion and morality. I tuned in to conservative pundit Sean Hannity's radio program this week and heard a segment entitled, "Are Democrats using religion for political expediency?" I wonder if his audience noticed that this would make Democrats fools if they don't talk about religion and insincere if they do.

A conservative friend of mine has long railed about liberal bias in the mainstream media. Since learning that the Bush administration paid conservative talk-show hosts, gave credentials to phony White House journalists and circulated bogus newscasts for air as legitimate news, he now argues that only mainstream journalists have an obligation to be ethical, and that it's OK for "personalities and pundits" to "lie and spin."

It's hard to reason with people for whom grounded, unyielding truth can change so swiftly. But I figure I'd better go grab an order of French fries and a good Chablis while the coast is clear.

Mr. Steinback is learning the fine art of IOKIYAR. Welcome to the club.

Blogger was being beastly this morning - it always happens when I'm in a hurry - so if you saw three versions of the post below, it's not my fault.

Anyway, if you can read this, it's working now.

The Miami Herald editorializes about a proposed amendment to the Florida state constitution.

The drive to ban gay marriages with a state constitutional amendment, announced Monday by a coalition of conservative groups, is wrong-headed by every measure of reason. The Florida Legislature has already banned such unions between gays and lesbians by state statute.

We strongly disagreed with the Legislature's action, which made it legal to deny rights to people based on their sexual orientation. But the law does exist, thus making any initiative to institutionalize such discrimination in our Constitution repugnant and offensive as well as wasteful. Citing the state law, Gov. Jeb Bush said on Monday that he currently sees no reason for a constitutional ban on gay marriages.

As we said in recommending No votes for six of the eight constitutional amendments on the Nov. 2 election ballot last year, Florida's Constitution should be a document that lays out the basic tenets of state government and that codifies our highest ideals. It should not be larded up with frivolous amendments protecting pregnant pigs or laden with mean-spirited rules that target people rather than empower them.

Unfortunately, none of these arguments likely will deter those pushing to ob tain the required signatures to get this awful amendment on the 2006 ballot. In fact, supporters are confident that Floridians will do as voters in 11 states have done and approve the measure in large numbers. Only a vigorous resistance by fair-minded Floridians who respect our Constitution will repel this call to further institutionalize a hateful form of discrimination.

Let's see..."hateful," "wrong-headed," "mean-spirited"... I think that about covers it.

There are some people who have no business trying to be hip, but it's kind of fun to watch them try.

Michael Barone is trying it by figuring out how blogs work, and from his point of view, which is from Karl Rove's knee, the left side of the blogosphere is full of frothing Bush haters while the right side is made up of courageous crusaders for truth, justice, and the Patriot Act.

The Democratic Internet constituency was and is motivated by one thing more than anything else: hatred of George W. Bush. To see that you only have to take a look at dailykos.com, run by Democratic consultant Markos Moulitsas, which gets 400,000 page views a day--far more than any other political weblog--and which received funding from the Dean campaign (which Moulitsas disclosed). It seethes with hatred of Bush, constantly attacks Republicans, and excoriates Democrats who don't oppose Bush root and branch. When four American contractors were killed in Iraq in April 2004, dailykos.com wrote, "I feel nothing over the death of the mercenaries. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them." This repulsive comment produced no drop-off in page views. This was what the left blogosphere wanted. Kos was an early enthusiast for Dean's campaign for Democratic chairman and disparaged other candidates.

For 12 years, Democratic chairmen were chosen by Bill Clinton. He built a new generation of fundraisers who relished contact with the Clintons. Now the big money comes from the left blogosphere and Bush-hating billionaires like George Soros. Dean gives them what they want. As Dean says, "I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for." Hate. But Bush hatred was not enough to beat Bush in 2004--while Democratic turnout was up, Republican turnout was up more--and doesn't seem likely to beat Republicans in 2006 and 2008. The left blogosphere has driven the Democrats into an electoral cul de sac.

[...]

The Bush campaign, quietly, used the Internet to build an E-mail list of 7.5 million names and a corps of 1.4 million volunteers who produced more new votes than the Democrats. But the right blogosphere was different from the left. There was no one dominant website and no one orthodoxy. Glenn Reynolds, the University of Tennessee law professor whose instapundit.com gets 200,000 page hits a day, supports Bush on Iraq but disagrees with him on abortion, stem-cell research, and same-sex marriage. The focus of hatred in the right blogosphere is not Kerry or the Democrats but what these bloggers call Mainstream Media, or MSM. They argue, correctly in my view, that the New York Times, CBS News, and others distorted the news in an attempt to defeat Bush in 2004.

The right blogosphere's greatest triumph came after CBS's Dan Rather on September 8 reported that Bush had shirked duty in the National Guard and the network posted its 1972-dated documents on the Web. Within four hours, a blogger on freerepublic.com pointed out that they looked as though they had been created in Microsoft Word; the next morning, Scott Johnson of powerlineblog.com relayed the comment and asked for expert views. Charles Johnson of littlegreenfootballs.com showed that the documents exactly matched one he produced in Word using default settings. CBS defended the documents for 11 days but finally confessed error and eased Rather out as anchor. MSM tried to defeat Bush but instead only discredited itself. The Pew Center's post-election poll showed a sharp decline in the credibility of newspapers and broadcast TV and a sharp increase in reliance on cable news, especially Fox News, and radio.

So what hath the blogosphere wrought? The left blogosphere has moved the Democrats off to the left, and the right blogosphere has undermined the credibility of the Republicans' adversaries in Old Media. Both changes help Bush and the Republicans.

It's interesting that Barone passes over the rabid hatred in the Freeper comments when anything left of the Third Reich comes up while Kos took his share of lumps from the left for his intemperate posting on mercenaries. Interesting also that Barone seems to have forgotten that dirt-digging and hate-monger blogging didn't start with the campaign of 2004 but back in the the ancient days of 1999 and the Drudge Report. As for there being "no one orthodoxy" on the right, well, fine; just stay off Free Republic or Town Hall. Assuming there is on the left and assuming it's Kos ignores the hundreds of other voices on the left such as Eschaton, Corrente, Talking Points Memo, James Wolcott, Trish Wilson, iddybud, T.Rex, Dohiyi Mir, Pandagon, Collective Sigh, BlondeSense, Ezra Klein, and dare I even say it, Bark Bark Woof Woof. Try and tell anyone that all of those bloggers agree about everything on the left. Good luck, fella.

Or perhaps Barone is trying to prove his hipness by going against the conventional wisdom that the Republicans are the ones who are disciplined and on-message with a unified front while the Democrats couldn't organize a one-car parade. Barone's got the real inside scoop; the Republicans are the adventurous ones while the Democrats all march lockstep in hatred. See, he is hip after all.

Or maybe he's just a dingbat.

[Updated to activate some links.]

Howard Kurtz discusses the Gannon/Jordan stories in light of the blogosphere's impact on the coverage in the press. He gives Jonah Goldberg a long quote wherein Jonah says, true to right-wing form (see below), that Gannon/Guckert is no big deal, then lays out this little bit of insight:

While I don't necessarily think Gannon should have been credentialed, even with a day pass, at the end of the day this is one of the ho-hummiest media 'scandals' to come down the pike in a while. If the guy hadn't changed his name and registered on gay porn sites, this would have been one of the dullest hullabaloos of all time. And besides, let he who has never registered with a gay military porn site under a different name cast the first stone. Actually, someone will have to explain to me why conservative opinion journalists can be literally outed out of the White House press room while liberal ones get lifetime achievement awards from the National Press Club. [Emphasis added.]

Okay, that's just way more than I really wanted to know about Jonah's internet peccadilloes.

The answer to Jonah's second question is that liberal opinion journalists don't engage in the kind of hypocrisy the conservatives do - slamming gay marriage and railing about the "homosexual agenda" on one screen while cruising Manhunt.net on the other.

From CNN:

The daughter of conservative Republican Alan Keyes referred to herself Monday as a "liberal queer" and urged support for gay and lesbian young people who have been deserted by their families.

Maya Marcel-Keyes, 19, addressed a rally sponsored by the gay-rights group Equality Maryland, saying she was motivated to speak out because of her rocky relationship with her parents and the recent death of a friend who had fallen ill after being thrown out of the house by his family.

Marcel-Keyes told several hundred supporters that her sexuality had created a rift in her relationship with her parents.

"Things just came to a head. Liberal queer plus conservative Republican just doesn't mesh well," she said. "That was making my life a little bit turbulent."

Later, Marcel-Keyes told CNN her parents "were not too pleased" when they learned she was a lesbian, but she said she loves them "very much, and they love me. They can't support my activities."

She joins the pantheon of gay children of gay bashers including the son of Phyllis Schlafly and Mary Cheney, daughter of Dick. (Go ahead; giggle.) There are others, but I'm too busy enjoying the karmic kosmos to list them. Feel free to add to the list.

[Thanks to NTodd for the tip.]

Forty years ago today, this flag first flew over Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

From the Sun-Sentinel:

A campaign by conservative and religious activists to amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriage used Valentine's Day to launch its petition drive.

At County Hall in Miami-Dade County, the Christian Family Coalition and other religious and community groups said that although Florida law already prevents two men or two women from getting married, an amendment to the state Constitution would prevent the courts from overturning those restrictions.

"This state law is being targeted for defeat," said Anthony Verdugo, executive director of the Christian Family Coalition.

Joined by other groups throughout the state, the anti-gay marriage activists hope to collect more than 600,000 valid signatures by February 2006. That could set the stage for a statewide vote the following November.

[...]

Nathaniel Wilcox, executive director of People United to Lead the Struggle for Equality, said gay marriage would open the door to polygamy and other non-traditional marriages.

"We must protect the institution of marriage against the counterfeits," he said. "It's going to open up a Pandora's box [if gay marriage is allowed]."

Oh yeah? If they really want to protect the institution of marriage, where the hell were these people last night when the straight couple that lives across the street from me had yet another in their long-running series of domestic battles that woke me up and set off car alarms when the wife drove off screaming "asshole!" at the top of her lungs?

AMERICAblog is all over the Gannon/Guckert story with links to the sites that show in graphic detail Mr. G's, uh, positions on a variety of subjects. (WARNING: not work-safe.)

Other than the thrill of a sex scandal, though, the question comes up as to why it's relevant to examine the private life of Gannon/Guckert. After all, when President Clinton was on the spit for Monica Lewinski, his defenders - including me - said that what a person did in their private life was nobody else's business. John Aravosis, the author of AMERICAblog replies:

Why does it matter that Jeff Gannon may have been a gay hooker named James Guckert with a $20,000 defaulted court judgment against him? So he somehow got a job lobbing softball questions to the White House. Big deal. If he was already a prostitute, why not be one in the White House briefing room as well?

This is the Conservative Republican Bush White House we're talking about. It's looking increasingly like they made a decision to allow a hooker to ask the President of the United States questions. They made a decision to give a man with an alias and no journalistic experience access to the West Wing of the White House on a "daily basis." They reportedly made a decision to give him - one of only six - access to documents, or information in those documents, that exposed a clandestine CIA operative. Say what you will about Monika Lewinsky [sic] - a tasteless episode, "inappropriate," whatever. Monika wasn't a gay prostitute running around the West Wing. What kind of leadership would let prostitutes roam the halls of the West Wing? What kind of war-time leadership can't find the same information that took bloggers only days to find?

None of this is by accident.

Someone had to make a decision to let all this happen. Who? Someone committed a crime in exposing Valerie Plame and now it appears a gay hooker may be right in the middle of all of it? Who?

Ultimately, it is the hypocrisy that is such a challenge to grasp in this story. This is the same White House that ran for office on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. While they are surrounded by gay hookers? While they use a gay hooker to write articles for their gay-hating political base? While they use a gay hooker to destroy a political enemy? Not to mention the hypocrisy of a "reporter" who chooses to publish article after article defending the anti-gay religious-right point of view on gay civil rights issue.

Who in the White House is at the center of all of this? Who allowed this to go on in the People's House? Who committed the crime of exposing Valerie Plame? Jeff Gannon has the answers to these questions, and boy we know he loves to talk.

Let him talk to Patrick Fitzgerald.

Or to put it in terms that Republicans can understand, if a pro-Democratic reporter named Heather Fielding was planted in the White House press room during the Clinton Administration, given a nod at the gate, and asked mushball questions of Joe Lockhart until Matt Drudge found out that her real name was Heidi Fleiss and that her other job was running a high-priced hook shop in Georgetown, don't you think the right-wing blowhards would be all over it and that Congress would be drafting articles of impeachment?

Of course they would. But let it happen to them and they shrug it off, as Eric Boehlert notes in an excellent wrap-up of AMERICAblog's story in Salon.com.

Writing for the right-wing media advocacy group, Accuracy in Media, Cliff Kincaid dismissed the controversy as "laughable," insisting Guckert's only "crimes" were "that he was too pro-Republican, attended White House briefings, and asked questions unfair to Democrats." And at Power Line, the conservative outpost that wrote relentlessly about CBS's troubles with its Bush National Guard story last year, the site has confessed bewilderment about the Guckert controversy. "I can't figure out what the story is," wrote one of Power Line's contributors.

Whether news that Guckert was able to go from posting his gay male escort services online to being ushered into the White House under a phony name on behalf of a fake news organization -- and was never asked to pass an FBI background check -- constitutes a real "story" among the Republican Party faithful, or the mainstream press corps, remains to be seen.

If the last four years are any guide, the mainstream press corps will ignore it until, just as what happened with Trent Lott / Strom Thurmond, the bloggers make it happen.

By the way, I'll bet the Log Cabin Republicans were just thrilled to find out that there is such a thing as a conservative gay Republican in the White House.

Howard Dean is as much of a liberal Democrat as George W. Bush is a moderate Republican. No wonder the Republicans are worried - we've got their game.

I occasionally get spam in a foreign language; Russian or some language in the Cyrillic alphabet, and even Japanese, but this is my first in what I guess is a Scandanavian tongue.

Vi har ett helt nykonstruerat system som garderar alla 7 loppen!
Ett toppsystem som ger vinst även svåra omgångar när favoriterna sviker!
Alla 7 loppen är garderade.
Radantalet bestämmer du själv, men för en kostnad på 432 kronor får man 43 hästar att placera ut över de 7 loppen.
Lättare omgångar som du kan tippa ett lopp säkert med en spik drar systemet bara halva kostnaden, 216 kr i inlämning. Fantastiskt? Ja systemet är så bra att det garanterar 7 rätt + sexor och femmor eller absolut lägst 1 sexa + femmor.
Chansen till 7 rätt är hela 25%. Otroligt men sant!. Systemet är dessutom mycket lätt att skriva ut.
Systemet som kostar 249 kronor levereras komplett med garantitabell och mycket lättfattade anvisningar.

I'm pretty sure they're not trying to sell me lutefisk unless it's the newest natural form of Viagra. Anybody want to hazard a guess as to what it's saying and in what language?

See how you do with this.

This can be more difficult than it looks - it just shows how little most of us really see. These are 25 questions about things that we see every day or have known about all our lives. How many can you get right? Can you beat 20? (The average is 7.) Write down your answers and then check your results here.

1. On a standard traffic light, is the green on the top or bottom?

2. How many states are there in the USA? (Don't laugh, some people don't know)

3. In which hand is the Statue of Liberty's torch?

4. What six colors are on the classic Campbell's soup label?

5. What two numbers on the telephone dial don't have letters by them?

6. When you walk does your left arm swing with your right or left leg?

7. How many matches are in a standard pack?

8. On the United States flag is the top stripe red or white?

9. What is the lowest number on the FM dial?

10. Which way does water go down the drain, counter or clockwise?

11. Which way does a "no smoking" sign's slash run?

12. How many channels on a VHF TV dial?

13. On which side of a women's blouse are the buttons?

14. Which way do fans rotate?

15. How many sides does a stop sign have?

16. Do books have even-numbered pages on the right or left side?

17. How many lug nuts are on a standard car wheel?

18. How many sides are there on a standard pencil?

19. Sleepy, Happy, Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Doc. Who's missing?

20. How many hot dog buns are in a standard package?

21. On which playing card is the card maker's trademark?

22. On which side of a Venetian blind is the cord that adjusts the opening between the slats?

23. There are 12 buttons on a touch tone phone. What 2 symbols bear no digits?

24. How many curves are there in the standard paper clip?

25. Does a merry-go-round turn counter or clockwise?

I got 20 right.

I found out that Bark Bark Woof Woof is linked on Liberal Oasis. I visit there regularly, and so should you.

My humble attempt to honor Arthur Miller is posted at Bobby Cramer.

This is more the pervue of Pen-Elayne, but I thought it was interesting to see that comic books are taking up topics that could be considered more mundane than your average superhero stopping the destruction of the world by an evil genius.

The mayor of New York City comes out in support of gay marriage and political fallout ensues. This may sound like the dilemma now faced by Michael R. Bloomberg, but the mayor in this case is Mitchell Hundred, the fictional protagonist of Ex Machina, a monthly comic book from WildStorm/DC Comics, a division of Warner Brothers.

The series, written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Tony Harris, follows Mayor Hundred as he retires from crime-fighting to pursue public office. While Ex Machina retains some superhero elements, the stories draw heavily on politics. Unlike Green Lantern, this hero has to worry about budgets, controversial art in public museums and debates over school vouchers. "I've always been interested in politics, especially local politics, which I think are a lot sexier" than national politics, said Mr. Vaughan. "Mayors are the equivalent of beat cops - you never know what to expect that day on the street."

The gay marriage storyline, which began in November, was developed early last year, shortly before dozens of gay couples started marrying in San Francisco last February but long before Mayor Bloomberg entered the fray last week. New York, Mr. Vaughan said, has brought the issue back into focus on the municipal level. "I just lucked out or I was eerily prescient," he added. (DC Comics has not yet released sales figures for the series.)

While the New York City in Ex Machina closely mirrors the real one, Sept. 11 plays out a bit differently. Mr. Vaughan, who was living in Brooklyn at the time, watched from the roof of his apartment as the towers fell. In Ex Machina, the hero stops the second plane from hitting the World Trade Center. "I wanted to write about 9/11, but it is uncomfortable territory," Mr. Vaughan said. "I knew I had something to say. I figured if I told it well and respectfully, I would be O.K."

Very cool.

Howard Kurtz on Reliable Sources in a discussion with Bill Press, former host of Crossfire, on Gannongate:

PRESS:... I think this guy is a phony. And let's call him by his real name, James Dale Guckert. And you know what he was? He was in there for two years, Howie, every day getting a daily pass under a pseudonym by the White House.

KURTZ: But there are lots of people that change their names. Woody Allen isn't his real name. What's the big deal about that?

PRESS: Big deal? After 9/11, you try to get into the White House not using your real name. I mean, it would not work for anybody else. They let this guy in, clearly, as a lifeline to Scott McClellan, who is -- and so whenever he got in trouble, he'd call on old James Dale Guckert, who would bail him out with a softball question, Howie. Nobody else would be able to get in like that. And you know what I really want to know? Is not only why did the White House let him in, but why didn't the other so-called mainstream press, who knew this guy was a phony all those years, why didn't they do something about it?

Okay, two questions: Can Kurtz name another White House reporter who uses a pseudonym? And if you can be as dense as Howard Kurtz and still get a job as a writer for the Washington Post and have a show on CNN, who can't get a gig like that?

[Updated to add copy from the transcript of the program.]

Joining the throng of bloggers who've been putting their money where their keyboard is, here's a link to contribute to the DNC via ActBlue.

Contribution amount:
$

Let's get Dr. Dean's chairmanship off to a good start.

The last group of finalists for the 2004 Koufax Awards has been posted at Wampum.

Best Single Issue Blog

Most Deserving of Wider Recognition

Most Humorous Post

Best New Blog

Best Blog - Pro Division

Best Commentor

I'm happy to see that The Liberal Coalition is well-represented in all of the Koufax finalist categories (okay, so for me there's always next year...). Go and vote, and thank you to everyone who put Bark Bark Woof Woof into the semi's. I'll try to keep living up to your confidence and support.

If you really want to console me, buy something.

John W. Dean on Deep Throat (the anonymous source, not the porno-flick).

I have little doubt that one of my former Nixon White House colleagues is history's best-known anonymous source -- Deep Throat. But I'll be darned if I can figure out exactly which one.

We'll all know one day very soon, however. Bob Woodward, a reporter on the team that covered the Watergate story, has advised his executive editor at The Washington Post that Throat is ill. [Editor's note: Executive Editor Len Downie has denied this, according to The Post's media reporter.] And Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of The Post and one of the few people to whom Woodward confided his source's identity, has publicly acknowledged that he has written Throat's obituary.

When that posthumous profile reveals the secret name, it will be flash powder on the long-simmering debate about reporters' use of anonymous sources -- an issue much in the news lately because my former law school classmate, Thomas F. Hogan, now the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, has been holding journalists in contempt of court for refusing to reveal their sources to a grand jury investigating the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.

I'm caught in the middle on this discussion. As a columnist, occasional freelancer and author of six nonfiction books, I use unidentified sources myself. In fact, I just used one. The source who informed me that Woodward leaked the news of Throat's illness to the executive editor of The Post gave me that information either on "deep background" or "off the record" (I never could get the distinction of those rules straightened out). So I apologize to my source if this information was never meant to be public, but it is a tidbit too hot to keep sitting on.

Read the rest here.

Tim Grieve on the chairmanship of the DNC.

Just before Howard Dean appeared for his first press conference as the Democrats' new leader, a reporter asked a DNC aide to make sure that Dean spoke loudly so that he could be heard in the back of the over-crowded briefing room. "Thanks a lot," Tom Ochs shot back. "I've spent the last two months trying to get him not to do that."

Ochs ran Dean's campaign for the DNC chairmanship -- quietly, and not just in the avoiding-another-scream sense. While other DNC candidates courted the press, Dean never needed the national exposure that a thousand interviews will bring. In a way, he needed the opposite -- he needed to persuade the 447 voting members of the DNC that the man who made so much noise in the presidential race could also do the quieter work of reforming the Democratic party.

That's why Ochs had Dean focus almost obsessively on a single task: talking with voting members of the DNC. It worked. As John Patrick, a DNC member from Texas, told us, those one-on-one conversations left him seeing Dean "through different eyes." During the Iowa caucuses, Patrick campaigned for Dick Gephardt -- which is to say, against Howard Dean -- and he initially backed former Texas Rep. Martin Frost in the DNC race. But when Frost dropped out, Dean was an easy second choice. "I don't think he's a different person than he was in Iowa, but I think I have a different perspective on him now," Patrick said. "I'm not saying that I made the wrong choice then, but I'm certainly looking at Gov. Dean -- Chairman Dean -- differently now."

For Ochs, that was exactly the plan. Backstage at the DNC Winter meeting just after Dean won the chairmanship, Ochs told us that he signed on with the Dean campaign knowing that he had an uphill race ahead of him. "People were saying, 'Howard Dean?' People -- probably half the people in this room -- people were saying, 'Dean's running for president!' 'Dean's too liberal.' We knew that. We knew it." But from early on, Ochs said, "what these voting members wanted, the most important thing they wanted, was somebody who is going to stand up for them."

Ochs said that the voters' desire made Dean's biggest perceived negative -- his outspoken opposition to both Bush and Bush-lites -- a positive in the DNC race. "After all," Ochs said, "we were running to be the chairman of the Democratic Party. It's OK to be a partisan." Again and again, DNC members told us this weekend that Dean sealed the deal when he talked with them, either one-on-one or in the small regional caucus meetings around the country. Sober and subdued, Dean persuaded voters that he could be not just a fighter who stands up to George Bush but also a listener who will carry their concerns to the national party headquarters. Once voters had taken their own measure of Dean up close and in person, it was harder for anti-Dean forces to succeed with the kind of broad-brushed smears that might have worked on a larger, less involved electorate.

Here is the rest of the article from Salon.com (subscription/Day Pass required).

John Leland on the golden oldies.

The universal fantasy about being a rock star, at least the G-rated part, goes something like this: you make wildly popular new music, see your likeness splashed across magazine covers and MTV, and worry occasionally about becoming over the hill. You have great hair.

But according to a new list of the 50 top-earning pop stars published in Rolling Stone, over the hill is the new golden pasture. Half the top 10 headliners are older than 50, and two are over 60. Only one act, Linkin Park, has members under 30.

The annual list, which entails some guesswork, reverses the common perception of pop music. Not only is it not the province of youth; it's also not the province of CD sales, hit songs and smutty videos.

While sexy young stars take their turn strutting on the Billboard charts or MTV - or on the cover of Rolling Stone - the real pop pantheon, it seems, is an older group, no longer producing new hits, but re-enacting songs that are older than many of today's pop idols.

In other words, pop music may seem to be about Gwen Stefani, Ashlee Simpson and Ashanti, but its bottom line is about Celine Dion (No. 21 on the list), Bette Midler (No. 24) and Cher (No. 43).

Consider the singer Usher, 26. He sold the most albums, flashed the hottest abs and caused the most swoons in 2004. But Usher ranked only No. 16 - well below the rumpled Phil Collins, 54, who ranked No. 8, or Jimmy Buffett, 59, who keeps his abs comfortable and safe behind Hawaiian shirts, and who ranked No. 5.

Mr. Collins and Mr. Buffett, like fellow rock plutocrats Elton John, No. 4, Simon and Garfunkel, No. 10, and Sting, No. 15, are all of an age when hair is no longer a statement. It is a losing battle.

The song plays on here.

David Mamet pays attention to Arthur Miller.

Dustin Hoffman was playing Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman." I met Arthur Miller backstage after a performance. "Arthur," I said, "it's the oddest thing, but in the scene between Biff and Willy, it was as if I was listening to a play about my own relationship with my father."

I went on a bit, and looked over to see a small, distracted smile on his face. Of course, I thought. He's not only heard this comment thousands of times, he has probably heard it from every man who ever saw the play.

It is the great American Domestic Tragedy.

And "The Crucible" is the American Political Tragedy.

He wrote it to protest the horror of the McCarthy era. The plays are tragedies as each reasoned step brings the protagonists closer to their inevitable doom. We pity them as they are powerless to escape their fate. We feel fear because we recognize, in them, our own dilemmas. This is the purpose of drama, and particularly of tragedy: to allow us to participate in the repressed.

We are freed, at the end of these two dramas, not because the playwright has arrived at a solution, but because he has reconciled us to the notion that there is no solution - that it is the human lot to try and fail, and that no one is immune from self-deception. We have, through following the course of the drama, laid aside, for two hours, the delusion that we are powerful and wise, and we leave the theater better for the rest.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 7:17 AM  

From the AP:

Professors would have to include diverse opinions in classrooms under legislation being pushed in Ohio and several other states by conservatives who fear too many professors indoctrinate young minds with liberal propaganda. Such measures have had little success getting approval in the other states.

"I see students coming out having gone in without any ideological leanings one way or another, coming out with an indoctrination of a lot of left-wing issues," said bill sponsor Sen. Larry Mumper, a former high school teacher whose Republican party controls the Legislature.

The proposal in Ohio to create an academic "bill of rights" would prohibit public and private college professors from presenting opinions as fact or penalizing students for expressing their views. Professors would not be allowed to introduce controversial material unrelated to the course.

Professors dismissed the bill as unnecessary and questioned whether its supporters had ulterior motives, such as wanting more conservative professors.

Similar legislation failed in California and Colorado last year, while the Georgia Senate passed a resolution, which is less binding than a bill, that suggests adoption. The California bill, which would affect only public schools, has been reintroduced and faces opposition from professors and student groups. An Indiana bill is nearly identical to Ohio's.

This is the handiwork of David Horowitz, the well-known activist who went maniacally from the looney left (he was a hanger-on with the Black Panthers in the '60's) to the radical right. He apparently thinks that college students are too stupid to figure out the difference between fact and opinion or are too lazy to look up divergent points of view on their own. Somehow this exposure to points of view and opinions will poison their precious little minds.

I'm not sure how much time Mr. Horowitz has spent on a college campus, but my experiences over a total of eleven years as a student between undergrad and grad school tells me that college students in general know bullshit when they hear it, and if they don't, they have no business being in college in the first place. There is a presumption that when you get to college you are an adult and capable of discernment. I had a professor who knowingly misled his students in a theatre history class on matters of fact and challenged them to find out the real from the fictional. (I was disappointed to learn that the legendary 19th century American actress Fannie "Fire" Ferguson, who performed in several productions where the theatre later burned to the ground, did not exist.) By the way, not all college students are fresh out of high school; many are people well beyond the typical college age, such as my mom who finished her bachelor's degree in 2001. Does Sen. Mumper really believe that these grown-ups are in need of protection from opinions? I would like to know how Mr. Horowitz or Sen. Mumper propose that professors teach classes where "facts" are not at the core of the coursework, such as English literature, dramatic criticism, psychology, or philosophy. That should make for some interesting graduate seminars.

Mr. Horowitz claims that colleges and universities are overwhelmingly run by people who are Democrats or hold left-leaning sympathies. He's probably right; liberals are far more likely to go into professions such as education where the goal is to improve society, whereas Republicans are far more likely to go into professions such as banking, business, or the military where they can make a lot of money, boss people around, or play with guns. I don't hear a lot of squawking about how the Fortune 500 and the Pentagon are dominated by conservatives. Which is going to have a more immediate impact on your day-to-day life; the US Army or the University of Colorado?

There are two overriding issues here. The most obvious one is academic freedom. We expect totalitarian states such as North Korea or China to dictate college syllabi and indoctrinate their students because they know that an unfettered mind is a dangerous weapon against the state. The second one is the supreme irony of seeing Republicans who claim to be champions of limited government and libertarian freedom and who accuse the Democrats of creating the "nanny-state" because we promote environmental protection, have no qualms whatsoever about riding roughshod over the spirit and the letter of the First Amendment of the Constitution and injecting their political agenda into education - the very thing they accuse the Left of doing.

The second group of finalists for the 2004 Koufax Awards has been posted at Wampum.

Best Post

Best Expert

The first round of finalists are summed up here. Go vote.

Colbert I. King writes about marriage, society, and the law.

In 1905, when the Niagara Movement -- forerunner to the NAACP -- was born, nowhere was the color line more heat-tempered and rock-hard than when it came to sex. The prohibition against interracial marriage was a national obsession, enshrined in both law and tradition.

Consider this: As early as 1664, Maryland earned the distinction of becoming the first colony to ban marriages between blacks and whites. The other southern colonies played catch-up in the decades that followed. They weren't alone. Pennsylvania and Massachusetts also joined the pack.

In the 19th century, interracial marriage was illegal in most states. As the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund noted in a brief in a New Jersey case, "by the 1960s, at least 41 states had enacted anti-miscegenation statutes."

The arguments mounted against interracial marriage also had a familiar ring. Fact and God played heavily in the judgments.

The Georgia Supreme Court in 1869 based its interracial marriage ban on natural law, observing that "the God of nature made it otherwise, and no human law can produce it, and no human tribunal can enforce it."

Hear the 1871 Indiana Supreme Court quoting an 1867 Pennsylvania decision: Racial separation is enacted not because of "prejudice, nor caste, nor injustice of any kind, but simply to suffer men to follow the law of races established by the Creator himself, and not to compel them to intermix contrary to their instincts."

The North Carolina Supreme Court in 1869 upheld the state's anti-race mixing law, stating that "the policy of prohibiting the intermarriage of the two races is so well established, and the wishes of both races so well known."

[...]

Now fast-forward past today to 100 years from now. How will future generations view our present-day fight against allowing monogamous couples with life commitments to each other to marry? What will they think of our rush to enact state laws prohibiting same-sex life partners from joining the same institution shared by different-sex couples? How will they regard our assertion that there is a public interest in promoting discrimination in the marriage statute?

Courts do not rule in a vacuum. None of these courts would have made these rulings if there had not been people - black and white - who put their lives and fortune in jeopardy by challenging these laws and the social structure of the time. It is they, not "activist judges," who changed the laws and brought us forward.

The Note points out the perceived differences between two political parties.

One party has political elites who revere and respect its recent presidential candidates; one party can't even be bothered to stop chatting and, err, partying to listen to its candidates speak.

One party has a clear programmatic agenda that has been relentlessly pursued in a well-organized fashion for five years; one party is still trying to build a credible war room (both materially and culturally).

One party never apologizes and never shows weakness; one party is on its fourth day of cry-babyish "defense" of its Senate Leader, after a run-of-the-mill GOP "attack."

One party is already organizing for 2005/6/7/8; one party is still trying to figure out what changes a yet-to-be-elected chair will make on the Wisteria Lane of politics — Ivy Street, SE.

One party would know that electing a national chair with a net negative approval rating is at a minimum problematic; one party thinks it's a virtue.

One party can whenever it wishes take off-the-shelf opposition research (video and text) and turn it into talking points that drive the friendly and (sometimes) mainstream media; one party considers 36 hours to be "rapid response."

One party will air its dirty laundry to whatever lowest-common-denominator media outlet comes a-sniffin'; one party engages in cock-fight-style drag-'em-outs in their headquarters' basement.

One party is on offense; one party is on . . . something else.

On party learned the lessons of the '90s; one party unlearned them.

One party knows the press is its "enemy"; one party mistakenly thinks the press is its "friend."

One party is expending resources to expand the base and broaden the tent; one party says it is planning to do those things, but is distracted defending demographic and geographic turf.

One party owns national security; one party can't figure out how to own health care or the environment in a way that would help win elections.

One party figured out how to keep its "extreme" party platform on abortion and still make electoral gains; one party hasn't.

One party is trying to use its general unity to hold together and pass Social Security reform; one party is trying to figure out how to extend and build on its unity over opposing personal accounts to a general strategy.

One party has been taking the long view for a long time; one party can't see past yesterday.

One party has members who will take these words to be gospel; one party is dominated by people will quickly dismiss it as mean-spirited.

One party would agree with what we wrote above; so would the other one.

This is the landscape as the DNC winter meeting continues today at the Reagan Hilton.

Which is which? You have thirty seconds.

According to a report in the New York Times, Condoleezza Rice was told in January 2001 that Al-Qaeda had cells in the U.S. and that they were seeking unconventional weapons, and she was offered a plan that outlined proposals to deal with the terrorists. Evidence suggests that she and the incoming Bush administration did not view the plan as significant and none of the steps were taken.

So...

Start the Revolution; I want box seats.

Arthur Miller has died at the age of 89.

Along with Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, and Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller defined American playwriting and gave it a place in the world. His works such as Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and The Crucible gave insight to more than just the interactions of characters. He put the psyche of the American Dream on the stage and examined it carefully and critically, and the characters he created were both personal reflections on his own life and our society.

I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Miller at the 1995 William Inge Theatre Festival and talking to him late into the evening in the lobby of the Apple Tree Inn. I am humbled to have been in the same vocation as this gracious and gifted writer.

Eric Alterman in The Nation:

The United States government is currently run by a group of people for whom verifiable truth holds no particular privilege over ideologically inspired nonsense. For members of the mainstream media, trying to maintain a sense of self-importance and solemnity and to keep the wing nuts from crowing for more scalps, this requires a series of stratagems to keep up the scripted charade, no matter how foolish it makes them look or feel while doing so.

The easiest of these stratagems is simply to stack the coverage with political partisans and give them free rein to spout GOP propaganda. That's what the cable news networks do, as Media Matters for America demonstrated. Consistent with cable inauguration coverage, for example, MSNBC offered viewers of its State of the Union commentary eleven right-wing pundits and just two Democrats or liberals in response.

[...]

The standard for this kind of contentless coverage is set, per usual, by the reporting of the New York Times. If the lead reporter of the newspaper of record can ditch the substance part, well then, so can everybody else. Reporter Todd Purdum marveled at Bush's "penchant for thinking big, or speaking grandly." He then referred to Bush's "first State of the Union address three years ago...he stunned the world with his denunciation of Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an 'axis of evil,' and his warning that he would 'not wait on events while dangers gather.'" Purdum failed to note what was obvious to any "reality based" observer: that the "axis" idea was logically incoherent, and the arguments vis-à-vis Iraq were based on evidence later deemed imaginary. Instead, Purdum explained that Bush "has long since proved both the extent, and the limits, of his ability to match his actions to his words," which is an awfully nice way of saying that the man is full of it.

Times editors might have taken a lesson from the Boston Globe, a paper with whom they share a common owner, which provided a presidential "fact check" demonstrating Bush's willingness to mislead the nation in the service of his ideological obsessions. In the Knight Ridder newspapers--a chain whose coverage of the leadup to war, by the way, puts to shame that of almost every other paper, particularly that of the Times's credulous correspondent Judith Miller--Kevin G. Hall had the honor and honesty to report that the President was seeking to destroy Social Security on the basis of calculations that were transparently phony. He wrote, "President Bush's warning that Social Security faces a looming financial crisis is based on the assumption that the U.S. economy will grow by only 1.8 percent each year, on average, for most of the next 75 years. Since 1950, the U.S. economy has grown, on average, by 3.5 percent per year." However, he noted, "If the economy continued to grow over the next 50 years at a rate anywhere near the past pace, Social Security wouldn't face a financial crisis, though it would require small adjustments to balance its income and costs." (Perhaps this is the kind of reporting of which the oh-so-smart folks at ABC's The Note complain, "Can we stop reading those repetitive, boring, and incomplete journalistic Q&A's on how private accounts would work, blah blah blah, how the system is currently funded, blah blah blah, what the President is proposing, blah blah blah?")

[...]

Of course, journalism is by definition a process of selection and omission, so it can be a little unfair to single out what reporters failed to report about Bush's speech. But the unhappy fact is that almost everything this Administration tries to sell to Americans is snake oil, and the mere act of reporting it without comment implicates the media in the fundamental dishonesty that is this President's modus operandi. When he says "freedom," he means the freedom of the United States and its allies to jail and torture anyone they choose. When he says "liberty," he means the liberty of other governments to profess to share the alleged aims of US foreign policy and then--like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Egypt--jail and silence all critics without inconvenient criticism from the United States. (If you play the game right, you can even provide weapons to anti-American terrorists and fund anti-American and anti-Semitic propaganda on behalf of the terrorists, all the while remaining a close friend of Bush & Co.)

This is apparently what NBC's Andrea Mitchell had in mind when she spoke of the Administration's "democracy agenda that Condi Rice is going to be bringing to Europe and the Middle East." Or perhaps she meant an American invasion of Iran; or the destruction of Social Security. It's hard to know in a post-truth society what anything means anymore, except more nonsense and lies, dutifully reported.

Perhaps that would explain why the story of "Jeff Gannon" caused barely a ripple with the mainstream press; he was just another stenographer.

The first group of finalists for the 2004 Koufax Awards has been posted at Wampum. The categories are:

Best Blog

Best Group Blog

Most Humorous Blog

Best Writing

Best Series

The Liberal Coalition is well-represented in these selections, and I hope you'll go and vote for your favorite. A word of warning: the choices are tough.

From the WaPo:

Under the pseudonym of Sarcastic Journalist, Rachel Mosteller wrote this entry on her personal Web log one day last April:

"I really hate my place of employment. Seriously. Okay, first off. They have these stupid little awards that are supposed to boost company morale. So you go and do something 'spectacular' (most likely, you're doing your JOB) and then someone says 'Why golly, that was spectacular.' then they sign your name on some paper, they bring you chocolate and some balloons.

"Okay two people in the newsroom just got it. FOR DOING THEIR JOB."

This post, like all entries in Mosteller's online diary, did not name her company or the writer. It did not name co-workers or bosses. It did not say where the company was based. But apparently, Mosteller's supervisors and co-workers at the Durham (N.C.) Herald-Sun were well aware of her Web log.

The day after that posting, she was fired.

For what it's worth, I really like my boss, I really like my co-workers, and I really believe in the job I'm doing and the mission we're on. And I'm not just saying that.

Bush's plan: What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine. Cake, anyone?

It's a cool morning here in Miami; every couple of weeks we get a cold front on the tail end of a big winter storm up north and it reminds us that we're not completely tropical here. It clears out the high humidity and I get to pull out a long-sleeved shirt. The best part is that it's Friday.

There are a couple of new additions to the blogroll: Velvel on National Affairs and the Progressive Bloggers Union.

So North Korea has nukes and Al Franken won't run for the Senate. What else? Let's see what The Liberal Coalition is up to.

All Facts and Opinions takes up the torch for Don't Amend.com.

archy challenges you to come up with a concise piece on why we must defeat Bush's plan for screwing up Social Security.

BlogAmy goes after Coulter.

bloggg on the next Princess Consort.

Chris battles it out between satellite channels.

Collective Sigh celebrates a birthday and does some math.

Tom at Corrente corrects Atrios.

NTodd has been sick, but not too ill to snap a photo or two.

Echidne on the new revelations of the 9/11 commission.

edwardpig on senseless liberals.

First Draft transcribes "Gannon."

The Fulcrum is back.

The Gamer's Nook is grumpy.

Happy Furry Puppy has papal tales.

iddybud on outsourcing torture.

The Invisible Library reviews The End of Faith.

Jon at KTL gets down in the mud.

Left Is Right takes on the "forced savings" argument.

Make Me a Commentator comments on the immigration "reform" law being considered.

Michael reviews the news. It pretty much bites.

Pen-Elayne on "Gannon" and other violence against journalism.

Republican Sinners profiles Sen. Lindsey Graham (who looks to me like he could play Robin in a school play).

Ugarte at Rick's plays poker on-line.

Rook's Rant pokes holes in Bush's plan to kill Even Start.

Rubber Hose apologizes for not writing and hopes to stay healthy.

Scrutiny Hooligans listened to Ward Churchill.

SoonerThought on the Reagan stamp.

Speedkill on the Constitution.

Steve Gilliard starts the Fast Boat Crusade.

T.Rex doesn't feel much safer.

Trish Wilson on the difference between "nice guys" and "jerks." (Believe me, I can relate.)

Wanda on our safer world.

WTF Is It Now?? gets on the Gannongate parade.

Steve at The Yellow Doggerel Democrat is a musician, and he is hearing the percussion section warming up.

That's it for now, and to quote the late Karl Haas, have a good weekend.

From KSTP via the FC:

WASHINGTON - Just one day after U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton decided not to run for a second term, comedian Al Franken may be throwing his hat into the ring.

Last year, Franken said he wanted to run for the Senate in 2008. But last night he told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that he is now considering his candidacy for next year.

Franken, a Minnesota native, plans to make an announcement live on his national radio show in Washington D.C. 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS will be in the studio with Franken for that announcement.

The announcement is expected to come near the end of the broadcast, which will be around 1:45 p.m. [Central Time].

Film at 11...

Update: No, he's not running.

After much fanfare and radio hoopla, comedian and talk-radio host Al Franken announced on the air today that he will not run for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Mark Dayton next year, saying he was committed to his radio show for two more years.

"I believe in honoring my commitments," Franken said. "I agreed to do two more years on Air America radio."

Franken, a veteran of "Saturday Night Live," was born in New York City and lives there now, but grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis.

"I am not running for Senate in 2006. Minnesotans are serious about politics and it would be silly," Franken said today.

Well, it would have been fun to watch.

LONDON - Prince Charles announced Thursday that he will marry his lover Camilla Parker Bowles, putting an official seal on a long romance that Princess Diana blamed for the breakdown of her tempestuous marriage to the heir to the throne. The announcement ruled out the possibility that she would become queen.

The Prince of Wales and Parker Bowles, both divorced, will marry on Friday, April 8, at Windsor Castle, said Clarence House, Charles' residence and office.

They will be married in a largely private civil ceremony at the palace, not in a Church of England service. "There will subsequently be a service of prayer and dedication in St. George's Chapel at which the Archbishop of Canterbury will preside," said Clarence House. [AP]

Ask me if I care.

Tim Roemer exits gracefully from the DNC chair race with this piece in the Washington Post:

We Democrats are famous for having lively debates inside our party. Our proud tradition is that we represent the full breadth of the American experience and that we welcome clashes in perspective that ultimately lead to greater understanding. Think back to the mid-20th century, when a young mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, had the courage to stir a backlash from the entrenched party leadership. He ultimately brought the party -- and the nation -- to a new era of civil rights and social justice.

Now we are faced with a choice. Will the party open its tent to people of differing views -- be they views on abortion or other pressing national issues -- or will it exclude those who may have different views but agree with us on many of our core principles? I believe that, to be successful, we must focus not on what divides us but what unites us. When we unite around our common Democratic values and welcome more Americans to our fold, we will be better -- and stronger -- for the effort.

Eric Boehlert of Salon.com (subscription/Day Pass required) digs up the background on "Jeff Gannon" of "Talon News."

When President Bush bypassed dozens of eager reporters from nationally and internationally recognized news outlets and selected Jeff Gannon to pose a question at his Jan. 26 news conference, Bush's recognition bestowed instant credibility on the apparently novice reporter, as well as the little-known conservative organization he worked for at the time, called Talon News. That attention only intensified when Gannon used his nationally televised press conference time to ask Bush a loaded, partisan question -- featuring a manufactured quote that mocked Democrats for being "divorced from reality."

Gannon's star turn quickly piqued the interest of many online commentators, who wondered how an obvious Republican operative had been granted access to daily White House press briefings normally reserved for accredited journalists. Two weeks later, a swarming investigation inside the blogosphere into Gannon and Talon News had produced all sorts of damning revelations about how Talon is connected at the hip to a right-wing activist organization called GOPUSA, how its "news" staff consists largely of volunteer Republican activists with no journalism experience, how Gannon often simply rewrote GOP press releases when filing his Talon dispatches. It also uncovered embarrassing information about Gannon's past as well as his fake identity. When Gannon himself this week confirmed to the Washington Post that his name was a pseudonym, it only added to the sense of a bizarre hoax waiting to be exposed.

On Tuesday night, the reporter who apparently saw himself as a trailblazing conservative "embedded with the liberal Washington press corps" abruptly quit his post as Washington bureau chief and White House correspondent for Talon News, that after earlier taunting those digging into his past that he was "hiding in plain sight." Contacted by e-mail for a comment, Gannon referred Salon to the message posted on his Web site: "Because of the attention being paid to me I find it is no longer possible to effectively be a reporter for Talon News. In consideration of the welfare of me and my family I have decided to return to private life. Thank you to all those who supported me."

Salon.com is way behind breaking the news on this; that honor goes to AMERICAblog, who has been all over the story, and Atrios and World O'Crap, and there's a link to "Gannon" posing in his tighty-whiteys for a Men 4 Men-style website; apparently "Jeff Gannon" also has a stable of hot military-type guys available for hire. As Hubris points out in his comment discussion with NTodd et al at Dohiyi Mir, there's no evidence that "Gannon" broke any laws, and other than perpetrating a fraud on the White House Press Office and the rest of the media, what harm has he done? Actually, I think the question answers itself, but if there's no harm/no foul, then I wonder how long will it be before the White House issues press credentials to people with blogonyms? Will we get dogtags with Bobby Cramer or Upyernoz or Folkbum on them? And can we choose the pictures?

Frank Rich says that because Hollywood and the Oscars passed over both Michael Moore and Mel Gibson for the Oscars, the righties have to blame somebody for the death of moral values in Hollywood.

So what do you do? Imagine SpongeBob tendencies in the carefully sanitized J. M. Barrie of "Finding Neverland"? Attack a recently deceased American legend, Ray Charles, for demanding that his mistress get an abortion in "Ray"? No, only a counterintuitive route could work. Hence, the campaign against Clint Eastwood, a former Republican officeholder (Mayor of Carmel, Calif., in the late 1980's), Nixon appointee to the National Council of the Arts and action hero whose breakthrough role in the Vietnam era was as a vigilante cop, Dirty Harry, whom Pauline Kael famously called "fascist." There hasn't been a Hollywood subversive this preposterous since the then 10-year-old Shirley Temple's name surfaced at a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in 1938.

No matter. Rush Limbaugh used his radio megaphone to inveigh against the "liberal propaganda" of "Million Dollar Baby," in which Mr. Eastwood plays a crusty old fight trainer who takes on a fledgling "girl" boxer (Hilary Swank) desperate to be a champ. Mr. Limbaugh charged that the film was a subversively encoded endorsement of euthanasia, and the usual gang of ayotallahs chimed in. Michael Medved, the conservative radio host, has said that "hate is not too strong a word" to characterize his opinion of "Million Dollar Baby." Rabbi Daniel Lapin, a longtime ally of the Christian right, went on MSNBC to accuse Mr. Eastwood of a cultural crime comparable to Bill Clinton having "brought the term 'oral sex' to America's dinner tables."

"What do you have to give these people to make them happy?" Mr. Eastwood asked when I phoned to get his reaction to his new status as a radical leftist. He is baffled that those "who expound from the right on American values" could reject a movie about a heroine who is "willing to pull herself up by the bootstraps, to work hard and persevere no matter what" to realize her dream. "That all sounds like Americana to me, like something out of Wendell Willkie," he says. "And the villains in the movie include people who are participating in welfare fraud."

Spoiler alert: If you haven't seen Million Dollar Baby or don't want to know what happens in it, stop here. Otherwise, read on, Macduff.

Here is what so scandalously intrudes in the final third of Mr. Eastwood's movie: real life. A character we love - and we love all three principals, including the narrator, an old boxing hand played by Morgan Freeman - ends up in the hospital with a spinal-cord injury and wants to die. Whether that wish will be granted, and if so, how, is the question that confronts not just the leading characters but also a young and orthodox Roman Catholic priest (Brian F. O'Byrne). The script, adapted by Paul Haggis from stories by F. X. Toole, has a resolution, as it must. But the movie has a powerful afterlife precisely because it is not an endorsement of any position on assisted suicide - or, for that matter, of any position on the disabled, as some disability-rights advocates have charged in a separate protest. The characters of "Million Dollar Baby" are complex and fictional, not monochromatic position papers outfitted in costumes, and the film no more endorses their fallible behavior and attitudes than "Ray" approves of its similarly sympathetic real-life hero's heroin addiction and compulsive womanizing.

[...]

There's no dream team, either in the boxing arena or in the emergency room, in "Million Dollar Baby." While there is much to admire in the year's other Oscar-nominated movies - the full-bodied writing in "Sideways," the cinematic bravura of "The Aviator," the awesome Jamie Foxx in "Ray" - Mr. Eastwood's film, while also boasting great acting, is the only one that challenges America's current triumphalist daydream. It does so not because it has any politics or takes a stand on assisted suicide but because it has the temerity to suggest that fights can have consequences, that some crises do not have black-and-white solutions and that even the pure of heart are not guaranteed a Hollywood ending. What makes some feel betrayed and angry after seeing "Million Dollar Baby" is exactly what makes many more stop and think: one of Hollywood's most durable cowboys is saying that it's not always morning in America, and that it may take more than faith to get us through the night.

Some headlines to greet the dawn:

North Korea Says It Has Nuclear Weapons and Rejects Talks

9/11 Report Cites Many Warnings About Hijackings

The White House is already working diligently to see how they can blame both of these items on the Clinton Administration.

Today would have been my grandmother's 102nd birthday. She didn't know it, but she played a very important part in my life as a writer and as a person. At her memorial service I wrote something for her. Read it here.

From the Globe and Mail:

A racy TV ad for a vendor of Web site names was pulled before a second showing during the Super Bowl after NFL executives objected that the spot made light of Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" in last year's halftime show.

The ad for GoDaddy.com Inc. featured a woman appearing before a "broadcast censorship" hearing. She makes her case that she wants to appear in a commercial, when suddenly a strap breaks on her already skimpy top.

[...]

Although the spot was approved by Fox executives and aired once during the telecast Sunday, a decision was made during the broadcast not to air it again later in the game. NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said that the league's chief operating officer, Roger Godell, expressed his "disappointment" to Fox executives after seeing the first airing of the ad.

McCarthy said the NFL had not reviewed the ad before its airing, and was not aware that it had been scheduled to be repeated later in the game. "We questioned why a spot of that nature was in the game," McCarthy said, noting its "inappropriateness" and the fact that it referred to last year's Jackson episode.

[...]

Warren Adelman, chief operating officer of GoDaddy.com, said the company was "very disappointed" that the ad was pulled and received no advance warning from Fox. The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company is still in discussions with Fox about what kind of restitution would be made, he said.

"The irony is that a parody of censorship was itself censored," Adelman said.

All together now: LIGHTEN UP! Sheesh.

Full disclosure: GoDaddy.com is the vendor of domain names for Bark Bark Woof Woof and Bobby Cramer

How's this shake up your spinal cord?

Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove.

Followed by Director of Communications Crusty the Clown.

From the Sun-Sentinel:

There are different kinds of "love" in tennis, but Miami Beach police said the type Bill Lepeska had for Russian tennis player Anna Kournikova got him arrested for stalking.

Police said Lepeska, a homeless day laborer from Illinois, swam naked about 200 yards across Biscayne Bay to reach Kournikova's home on Sunset Island.

While Lepeska had Kournikova's first name tattooed on his right bicep, he apparently didn't have a map to her home and missed the $5 million mansion by an entire island.

Police arrested Lepeska, 40, at an island home across a tiny stretch of bay from the 23-year-old's mansion. According to a police report, a neighbor spotted Lepeska nude "laid spread eagle in a very lewd manner" on a lawn chair near a pool. Lepeska told police he looked up Kournikova's address on the Internet and that she had left the door unlocked for him. He also told police that he was in love with the racquet model and was "desperate to meet her."

The neighbor was carrying a 3-year-old girl at the time, so police charged Lepeska with exposing himself in front of a minor.

The report said that as police led him away, Lepeska screamed, "Anna! Save Me!"

Later, at Miami Beach police headquarters, Lepeska refused to have his mug shot taken and demanded a psychological evaluation, a police report said. Lepeska became hostile, posing in a boxer's stance and attacking officers, biting one on the thumb, it said.

Police used pepper spray on Lepeska twice to help subdue him, then added a charge of battery on a law enforcement officer.

Lepeska is being held at the psychiatric division of the Miami-Dade County Jail on $26,000 bail and is expected in court today for a bail reduction hearing.

Why can't people meet their true love in the old-fashioned way...like in a chat room?

Nicholas Lehmann writes in The New Yorker that everyone - left, right, and the entire blogosphere - carries a grudge against the mainstream media.

Just before last fall’s Presidential election, Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, and Philip Taubman, the paper’s Washington bureau chief, went on the road to inspect the candidates’ campaigns. In Florida, on October 22nd, they arranged to have drinks with Karl Rove, the White House’s chief political strategist, and Dan Bartlett, its head of communications. It was supposed to be a friendly get-together, and that’s how it went for the first few minutes, until Keller asked Rove what he thought of the Times’ coverage. It’s the sort of question that editors often ask important people, in the same spirit that a politician asks, “How’m I doing?,” usually hoping for an answer somewhere in the lower-middle range of politeness and candor. But Rove, Keller told me not long ago, “pounded on us for two cocktails’ worth of conversation.” Saying what? “It was three kinds of things,” Keller explained. “It was Bush accomplishments we had ignored, flaws in the Kerry record that we had put inside the paper, and a number of pieces we had done looking hard at the Bush record. In their view, that all amounted to arming the Kerry campaign.”

[...]

Since the election, the mainstream media—tagged as the M.S.M. by bloggers—have conceded a couple of points to Rove: that they failed to appreciate fully the dimensions of the Republican organizing effort; and that they misunderstood the way that the Republican Party’s religious base lives and thinks. But the idea that the M.S.M. made these mistakes intentionally, because they had taken sides in the election, makes mainstream-media organizations indignant, and worries them—at a time when there is much else to feel indignant, and worried, about.

[...]

I spoke to the heads of several large news organizations, and all of them maintained that they get attacked from both political sides, and agreed that both the amplitude and the frequency of the attacks seem to be increasing. Bill Keller wrote, in an e-mail, “There is a significant liberal antipathy toward the, pardon the expression, mainstream press. . . . Liberals perceive us, or claim to perceive us, as lapdogs of the Bush Administration, instigators of the war in Iraq, sellouts to big business and panderers to red-state prejudices. Some of this is probably disingenuous—calculated Mau-Mauing.” But, if the question is which side is more full-throated, the only editor I spoke to who thought he heard more criticism from the left than from the right in 2004—and that was because of complaints about coverage of the Iraq war—was Leonard Downie, Jr., the executive editor of the Washington Post. Downie had one sit-down meeting with people concerned about the Post’s reporting—a group from the Kerry campaign, who had come to try, unsuccessfully, to influence a story that Michael Dobbs was working on about the claims made by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They had sensed in advance what the piece, which appeared in August, suggested: that Kerry and the pro-Bush group had been less than candid about Kerry’s military service. The other editors seemed more aware of critics on the right—partly because there are more of them, and partly because they represent the winning team in American politics—and they insisted that they try to present the news without bias. Some said that they don’t even know the political views of their colleagues. That raises the question of how, if the reality is what the editors say it is, the perception can be so different.

[...]

Most mainstream-media organizations, worried at being culturally and politically out of synch with many Americans, are making an effort to reach out—I frequently heard a promise to cover religion more seriously and sympathetically. For many, that’s a business imperative, an attempt to broaden the audience, especially among conservatives. Neal Shapiro, the president of NBC News, whose variegated domain includes cable television, and even blogs, plainly felt that the nightly news broadcast needs to have its red-state credentials in order. He said of NBC’s new anchor, Brian Williams, “He’s a great journalist, a great reporter. Having said that, he’s a huge nascar fan, has been since his father took him to the track when he was a kid. He cares a lot about his faith. He wants to take the broadcast on the road a lot. He was on the road the whole week before the inauguration. Brian does get it. He once did a story on Cabela’s”—the superstore chain for hunters. “A lot of the people in the newsroom said, ‘Gee I didn’t know about that.’ But he did. And many of our bureaus did. We’re not just the Northeast Corridor.” One doesn’t get the sense that Shapiro worries about the possibility that NBC’s anchor might be out of touch with the values and concerns of residents on the Upper West Side.

A better understanding of conservatives seems manageable, but there is another possibility, which is much more worrisome, at least to journalists who work in the mainstream media. It is that during the years of heavy shelling—through impeachment and the Florida recount and then the rough 2004 campaign—what they consider their compact with the public has been seriously damaged. Journalism that is inquisitive and intellectually honest, that surprises and unsettles, didn’t always exist. There is no law saying that it must exist forever, and there are political and business interests that would be better off if it didn’t exist and that have worked hard to undermine it. This is what journalists in the mainstream media are starting to worry about: what if people don’t believe in us, don’t want us, anymore?

Perhaps the MSM wouldn't be in such a situation if they hadn't tried so hard to be so obliginingly "balanced;" a blind acceptance of what one side said in a calculated press release and posting an equally calculated response from the other side. We saw that throughout the run-up to the war in Iraq and the presidential campaign. That's not reporting, it's stenography.

Lab Kat posted in full the text of President Bush's explanation on how he will reform Social Security when he was in Tampa on February 4. I read it over twice, and it makes about as much sense as this does.

Mae'n brydgell ac mae'r brochgim stwd
Yn gimblo a gyrian yn y mhello:
Pob cólomrws yn féddabwd,
A'r hoch oma'n chwibruo.

'Gwylia'r hen Siaberwoc, fy mab!
Y brathiad llym a'r crafanc tynn!
A rhed pan weli'r Gwbigab
A'r ofnynllyd Barllyn!'

Cym'rodd ei gleddyf yn ei law
I geisio ei fanawaidd brae--
A gorffwys ger y goeden Taw,
I feddwl--fel pe tae.

A thra pendronai ymhlith y coed
Y Siaberwoc a'i lygaid fflam
A ddaeth, mor wallgof ag erioed
Gan ffrwtian gam a cham!

Un, dau! Un, dau! drwy'r awyr oer
Aeth min y cledd ysgiw, ysgôl!
Fe'i lladdodd, a chan gludo'i ben
Hwblamodd yn ei ôl.

'A lleddaist ti y Siaberwoc?
Tyrd yma, hapllon fachgen!
O jiwblus ddydd! Hwrê! Hwroc!'
Gan wenu arno'n llawen.

Mae'n brydgell ac mae'r brochgim stwd
Yn gimblo a gyrian yn y mhello:
Pob cólomrws yn féddabwd,
A'r hoch oma'n chwibruo.

That actually makes more sense - and is a lot more fun - if you speak Welsh. Callooh! Callay!

And then there's NTodd's version.

Tim Grieve sums up how Howard Dean took over the race for the DNC chair.

Howard Dean's ascension in the DNC race has been so steady, so seemingly inevitable, that there will be a ho-hum quality to the proceedings when he's actually elected this weekend in Washington. It's easy to forget what a revolution this actually is.

Ryan Lizza reminds us in The New Republic. "The DNC chair race has exposed deep fissures within the Democratic Party," Lizza writes. "Some of these are ideological, but the real story of the race is the diffusion of power away from Washington and to new people and entities that have rushed to fill the power vacuum at the top of the party. When the Democrats control the White House, the president can simply pick the chair of the party. But, even when out of power, Democratic pooh-bahs traditionally rally around a consensus figure and present him to the DNC members as a fait accompli. An open process with all the trappings of a modern political campaign--including a seven-candidate field, fund-raising, regional debates, and smear campaigns in the press--is unprecedented in the party's history."

Not everyone is thrilled with the revolution, of course. James Carville says that "somebody should have fixed this damn thing in November" to avoid the embarrassment of a party looking disorganized and weak. But as Lizza explains, "every attempt to rig the race failed, revealing that the levers of power in the Democratic Party have shifted out of Washington's hands."

That's certainly true where the DNC is concerned. As Lizza notes, the 447 members of the DNC are generally local party operatives and activists, frequently frustrated that the national party gives their states neither the time nor the money they deserve. Howard Dean promised to send money to state parties and compete against the Republicans everywhere. Establishment Democrats tried to cut Dean off at the pass; Bill Clinton tried to recruit Wes Clark, Chuck Schumer urged Terry McAuliffe to stay on, Nancy Pelosi pushed pro-lifer Tim Roemer. Guess which approach spoke to the local-minded DNC members more?

Whether Dean's rise signals a shift in Democratic power more generally is open to debate. True, as Lizza writes, big party donors like Leo Hindery can no longer drop into a DNC meeting and expect that the endorsements of people like Dick Gephardt will give them the DNC chairmanship by acclamation. (Lizza says that Hindery's aides were so thunderstruck by the blog-enduced animosity toward their man at a DNC meet-and-greet in Orlando that they sent him home before he appeared, leaving some Democratic operatives to salute him in absentia with drinks from his hotel mini-bar.) But there's a difference between controlling the 447 members of the DNC and controlling the party, a difference between winning the DNC chairmanship and winning the Democratic nomination for the presidency or the White House itself. Dean has climbed the first hurdle. The real work -- for him and for his party -- begins now.

Given the Wally Cox/Underdog approach that Harry Reid has taken so far (see below) as the most prominent voice of the Democrats, Dr. Dean does indeed have his work cut out for him.

To those of us who backed Howard Dean in the run-up to the primaries last year and in 2003, now it's our turn. (And James Carville can kiss my squirrel.)

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) is really growing a pair.

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid on Monday urged President Bush to stop the Republican National Committee from calling him an obstructionist and criticizing his Senate record, a tactic the GOP used to help defeat Reid's predecessor.

Bush repeatedly has said he wants work with Democrats, most recently during his State of the Union speech last week, Reid noted in a speech on the Senate floor.

"Why didn't he stand and tell the American people last Wednesday that one of the first items of business we were going to do in Washington is send out a hit piece on the Democratic leader?" Reid said.

Wow, Harry really knows how to talk to meanies. I can't wait to see him get into a smack-down with Tom DeLay.

The budget in a nutshell: cut the taxes on the rich and kill off the assistance to the neediest. And the war? What war?

Even LBJ, the most manipulative and politically savvy president since FDR, didn't screw the poor the way Bush wants to.

Why don't the Republicans just come out and admit that they want to kill off Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid...and while they're at it, replace FDR with Ronald Reagan on the dime?

Okay, I made up the part about the dime.

The folks over at The American Prospect are running a little contest to find out "What does liberalism stand for?"

I already put in my thirty words. Take a shot at it and then come back here and tell me what you submitted.

According to ABC News, one of the most conervative members of the Senate and one of the biggest mouths flapping about "moral values," Rick Santorum, gets campaign contributions from cable companies that broadcast pornography.

While its previous owners considered adult entertainment "immoral," Adelphia Communications Corp., the country's fifth-largest cable television provider, last week became the first to offer hard-core adult films on pay-per-view to its subscribers.

"It's a very lucrative source of funds," said Dennis McAlpine, a media and entertainment industry analyst. "The cable companies and the satellite companies are programming agnostics in the sense that they don't care what the programming is. It's what the viewers want to see."

Viewers can watch such sexually explicit movies in the Hilton and Marriott hotel chains on video services like LodgeNet or on "On Command," which is owned by Liberty Media, formerly a part of AT&T; at home via DirecTV, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp; or via virtually every cable company, including Cox, Time Warner and Comcast.

[...]

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Comcast Cable has given millions in political donations since 1998. The national Republican Party committees are its biggest organizational recipient, with donations totaling $851,000. President Bush is its biggest individual recipient with $109,000 in donations.

Adelphia has given $166,000 to Republican committees, $17,000 to conservative Rep. John Peterson, R-Pa., and $12,000 to Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., one of the most conservative members of the Senate.

[...]

Santorum would not comment on Adelphia's decision.

Maybe that's where he learned about man-on-dog.

In the spirit of Mardi Gras, let's invoke the spirit of the Louisiana Kingfish, Senator Huey P. Long, and Share The Wealth!

So much for the idea of the Rugged Individual. But it isn't Socialism if it's done by Republicans.

Karl Haas, the host of the radio program Adventures in Good Music, has died at the age of 91.

I grew up listening to the program; it started out on WJR in Detroit in 1959, and it was through him that I learned the fundamentals and a life-long appreciation of classical music. Dr. Haas also knew the audience he was playing to - mostly people who knew very little about classical music - so he did it in a way that was both educational yet not too pedantic. He also had a great sense of humor, making fun of the pompous, and he had no qualms about mixing popular music of today with classical; he was one of the first to praise the Beatles for their musicology.

AGM was syndicated to stations around the country so I was able to listen to it no matter where I lived, and the opening notes of the program - the second movement of Beethoven's Pathetique sonata - were a welcome reminder of home, as was his sonorous greeting, "Hello, everyone!"

I got to meet Dr. Haas a couple of times; once at the WJR studios when I was being interviewed for a job there, and later at a book-signing in Petoskey. He was unfailingly polite to his audience and gracious to his fans.

He was also infamous for his bad puns: "We leave no tone unstirred" or "Welcome to the din of inequity." Anyone who can pull that off gets my admiration.

I posted an entry at Bobby Cramer about getting back to work on the novel.

Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald has a warning for black voters being wooed by the GOP:

Let me point out something that ought to be obvious: Social conservatism has never been a friend to black people. And here, I am not talking about the conservatism of small government, low taxes and strong defense. Rather, I refer to the self-appointed defenders of so-called traditional values.

Once upon a time, those folks called themselves Southern Democrats. These days, they are Republican religious conservatives. Not that it matters. What's important is the simple fact that the traditional values position on matters of specific importance to African Americans has never once been validated by history. Whether the issue was slavery, segregation, lynching, voting rights or housing discrimination, social conservatives have always taken a postion that history later judged to be ignorant and flat-out wrong. They have a similarly abysmal track record with regard to women's rights and anti-Semitism.

Which leaves me at a loss to understand why any African American possessed of a functioning brain would give this atavistic bunch the time of day.

Because the Bible tells them to?

Would this be the same Bible that once told social conservatives they had a divine duty to kidnap and enslave Africans? The same one that justified them in hacking to pieces any black man who cast a stray glance toward a white woman?

Give me a break.

Read the rest here.

Joseph Galloway says the time will come when we'll know everything there is to know about Alberto Gonzales and his role in Abu Ghraib.

We have not yet gotten to the bottom, or the top, of the prisoner abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or the extra-legal or illegal status of the foreigners imprisoned without charges or legal protection at America's own Devil's Island at Guantánamo, Cuba.

Despite his faulty memory and his denials in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales' fingerprints, and his legal advice, are all over the administration's papers that sought to turn both the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions on their heads.

[...]

Gonzales is the first person of Hispanic heritage to serve as our country's chief law-enforcement officer. Normally that would be something for all of us to be proud of, something that speaks loudly about who were are and what we cherish.

But these are hardly normal times. The president and his men, including Gonzales, tell us that we are at war, the global war on terror. They have decided that some of those we take prisoner are outside the protection of law -- either U.S. law or international law.

No doubt some future Congress, 30 or 40 years from now, will pass a resolution apologizing for this unseemly and undemocratic and un-American behavior.

Better late than never, I suppose.

From the New York Times:

President Bush's budget would more than double the co-payment charged to many veterans for prescription drugs and would require some to pay a new fee of $250 a year for the privilege of using government health care, administration officials said Sunday.

The proposals, they said, are in the $2.5 trillion budget that Mr. Bush plans to unveil on Monday. White House officials said the budget advanced his goal of cutting the deficit, which hit a record last year.

"We are being tight," Vice President Dick Cheney said on "Fox News Sunday." "This is the tightest budget that has been submitted since we got here."

The proposals to increase charges to veterans face stiff opposition from veterans organizations, Democratic members of Congress and some Republicans.

Mr. Cheney said the White House had judiciously identified scores of domestic programs to be cut or eliminated. "It's not something we've done with a meat ax, nor are we suddenly turning our backs on the most needy people in our society."

The proposals could provoke months of furious debate on Capitol Hill. Democrats have already indicated that they are poised to pounce on any sign that the Bush administration is stinting on veterans' benefits.

[...]

In recent years, Democrats have been trying to emphasize their support of veterans programs, taking aim at a constituency that has been seen as reliably Republican. The administration's effort has caused some discomfort for Republicans.

In early January, House leaders ousted the chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee, Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey, who was seen as a strong advocate of veterans programs and higher spending. Mr. Smith was replaced by Representative Steve Buyer, Republican of Indiana.

Jim Nicholson, the new secretary of veterans affairs, heard many concerns about veterans' health care when he had his confirmation hearing before a Senate committee last month.

Senator Larry E. Craig, Republican of Idaho, chairman of the panel, the Committee on Veterans Affairs, told Mr. Nicholson, "The fiscal environment that you inherit will be considerably less friendly than the relatively flush times the V.A. has enjoyed over the last four years."

It's ironic that the Bush administration will spend billions to start a war, throwing thousands of soldiers into battle, but once the soldiers return, all of a sudden they become fiscal conservatives. Don't you just love that Cheney quote: "It's not something we've done with a meat ax, nor are we suddenly turning our backs on the most needy people in our society." Well, yeah, you are, and if I had my way, every veteran would be entitled to the same insurance the president, Congress, and Senate get. After all, they served their country.

So New England won the Super Bowl. To some it was a study in foregone conclusions in spite of the running commentary and betting pool that went on between Dohiyi Mir and Atrios. (I did not participate for two reasons: I don't bet, and I didn't have a favorite in the match-up anyway.)

But the big question on everyone's mind was how would the commercials come off after last year's boorish and borderline obscenities? Seth Sutel from the AP has a review.

There were plenty of tried-and-true techniques used in this year's Super Bowl ads -- talking animals, Clydesdale horses, celebrity cameos. But then came Gladys Knight as a rugby player, an airborne '72 Impala and a "Mama's Boy" action figure who was somehow plugging anti-perspirant.

If last year's flatulent horses and crotch-biting dogs tested the limits of good taste, a number of this year's crop tested the limits of credulity.

Granted, this is where the advertising industry makes big plays and takes big chances. Advertisers expect to get a bang for each one of the 2.4 million bucks that they splash out for a 30-second spot, the most expensive TV ad time by far. But with an audience of nearly 90 million, plenty of companies think it's worth it.

This year, a number of newcomers took out their first-ever Super Bowl ads, including Volvo, with a clever spot featuring Richard Branson going into space in a rocket. A sticker on the side of the rocket boasts that his other vehicle is a Volvo. This ad even comes with its own promotion, giving viewers a chance to sign up to win a trip into space on commercial space flights Branson is planning.

Other first-timers included GoDaddy.com, a vendor of Web site names, which took a chance with a racy ad poking fun at the uproar over Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" of last year; and Ameriquest Mortgage Co., which ran a fun but slightly quizzical spot in which a shopper gets maced, whacked with a bat and then zapped with a cattle prod after the shop owners mistakenly think he's holding them up.

[...]

Other ads made clever references to pop culture. Pepsi, a perennial Super Bowl advertiser, even referred to one of its own classic ads by showing Cindy Crawford ogling a plain-dressed but hunky guy walking along and sipping on a can of Diet Pepsi as the theme from "Saturday Night Fever" plays in the background. Crawford herself was the star of a 1992 Pepsi ad where two young boys ogled her as she pulled into a dusty gas station and quaffed a Pepsi in slow motion.

But this being 2005, after Crawford and numerous other women are stopped in their tracks by the hunkalicious Diet Pepsi drinker, there's one more pair of eyes caught by the passing stud: those of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" host Carson Kressley.

I caught a few of the spots, but not until I had finished watching October Sky on Starz.

I think the supermarkets would do the shopping public a great service if they had signs over the check-out lanes like the ones they have over the turnpike to warn you of upcoming road hazards.

CAUTION: The person ahead of you has 45 coupons, most of which have expired. She will argue with the checker over each one. The checker doesn't speak much English. The shopper will also pay with a check using an out-of-state driver's license. All of the reading material in the check-out lanes are tabloids in Spanish. The good-looking guy who grinned at you in the Produce section is in Lane #4.

Just a thought.

Now that he's in his last term, Bush figures he'll stick it to the farmers.

President Bush will seek deep cuts in farm and commodity programs in his new budget and in a major policy shift will propose overall limits on subsidy payments to farmers, administration officials said Saturday.

Such limits would help reduce the federal budget deficit and would inject market forces into the farm economy, the officials said.

The proposal puts Mr. Bush at odds with some of his most ardent supporters in the rural South, including cotton and rice growers in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.

The new chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, and more than 100 farm groups are gearing up to fight the White House proposal. The administration's willingness to push the proposal, despite such protests, suggests how tight the new budget will be.

Most of the subsidies are paid to large farm operators growing cotton and rice and, to a lesser degree, corn, soybeans and wheat.

Soldiers returning from Iraq have mixed reviews of the mission and the future of the country.

KIRKUK, Iraq -- As he walked through the mud surrounding his temporary barracks, 1st Sgt. Ken Agueda carried an M-4 assault rifle without its essential lethal components: bullets. Earlier in the day, Agueda had turned in his ammunition -- cartridges, assorted grenades -- in preparation for his journey home after nearly 13 months in Iraq.

"It's like walking around without your pants," said Agueda, a 17-year U.S. Army veteran from Bayamon, Puerto Rico.

With their departure just days away, Agueda and his unit, the 1st Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment of the 25th Infantry Division, were euphoric and reflective. In more than a dozen interviews over three days this past week, soldiers with combat experience in all corners of Iraq offered up a mixed final assessment of a conflict that is burned into them forever. Its ultimate outcome, all agreed, remains highly uncertain and far away.

Soldiers ranging from privates to senior officers described last Sunday's national elections as vindication for over a year of hard service. The unexpectedly strong turnout, they said, altered their perception about the willingness of Iraqis to embrace the American mission here and helped project a rare positive image of the U.S. military following such stains as the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal last year.

"This was the opposite of Abu Ghraib," Agueda said. "I think it's safe to say that this is the biggest thing that anyone of us has ever done. I mean, in our humble positions, we helped make history. We did something that could have a positive effect on the entire world."

Spec. Andrew Field, 31, of Tallahassee, described the elections as "the culminating event for our whole deployment. If it hadn't gone well, it would have been incredibly demoralizing to everyone. It gave meaning to everything we were doing."

But the soldiers were reluctant to say that the elections were a turning point in the war. "Leaving with the elections will definitely be a positive in our minds, but I don't know if I'm optimistic or pessimistic," said Capt. John Hussey, 26, of Uvalde, Tex. "I wouldn't be surprised if the entire country descends into chaos. But I wouldn't be surprised if it flourishes, either."

Asked how long he thought U.S. troops would remain in Iraq, Hussey said: "Probably 10 or 15 years, if we want to do it right. I don't think there's going to be 135,000 Americans in Baghdad 10 years from now, but there are going to be Americans in Iraq for a long, long time."

The Blade opines that while the SOTU speech was a nice sales pitch, reality seemed to be the last thing on the president's mind.

Stylistically, Mr. Bush's speech was effective, delivered with sincerity and clarity. Optimism is infectious, of course, but taken to Pollyanna-ish extremes it invites skepticism. Much of this speech was like a meringue - sweet to the taste, but more froth than substance.

[...]

The President was his most disingenuous about Social Security, an issue that also bears on the deficit. He described the so-called crisis apocalyptically and his version of reform was very rosy. But he never answered the question of how the system will be able to absorb losing the contributions of younger workers - who would get to choose private accounts - without having to borrow to make up for those funds, thus further adding to the deficit.

With this speech, Mr. Bush at the very least banished the notion that he is a lame duck. What the American people have, for good or ill, is an assertive, formidable presence in the White House - one who may very well get his way, especially if the lame response of the Democratic leadership in Congress continues.

The Democrats may be lame for now, but with the likely election of Howard Dean as DNC chairman, that will not be the case much longer. Bob Novak was frothing at the mouth even more last night on Capital Gang (the man needs to find a new dentist and get those plates refitted) about the Dean selection which means that he's truly frightened by the choice, especially knowing that the Republicans will be going head-to-head against Dr. Dean with Ken Mehlman. No question that Mr. Mehlman is a fine manager and skilled political operative, but his stage presence needs work. Dr. Dean has also been the true uniter in the Democratic party; no small accomplishment given the party's history of attempting to teach cats to march. What other comparison can we come up with? Well, it's almost spring - let's get bucolic.

The Democratic Party, to my way of thinking, has been like a giant, overgrown rose bush, full of thorns and dead leaves and branches tangled up with each other. During each recent election it has been pruned by the electorate, cut back to its strongest, thickest boughs. I'm not convinced this process is done yet; I suspect more pruning lies ahead. But I also think that Dean's supporters, the blogosphere, and MoveOn represent the first fragile shoots of something new. They are not yet strong enough for anything to perch on, and they have their own sharp, new thorns. But they are fresh, green, and new, and that's important for a party that too often seems old and dessicated.

Dean has an uncanny ability to find talent in odd places, and bring new people into the fold. More importantly, he's willing to work with anyone, and will, I suspect, bring that spirit of openess with him to Washington. In his race for DNC chair, he brought in Clintonites and former campaign enemies. His Democracy for America group has been far less chaotic than was his presidential campaign, and even its blog looks to be a more controlled, professional operation than was Dean for America's. (Indeed, that blog was compulsively readable partly because it was so very unfettered.)

One of the smartest centrists I know recently noted that Dean will be operating, in Washington, under "Hillary Rules." This is certainly true; anything Dean says will be subjected to tremendous scrutiny, and he will be operating with no room for error. And so perhaps the best choice for Dean would to be follow Hillary Clinton's lead by putting his head to the grindstone, staying off television, and quietly going to work. Already, there is some indication that he recognizes this may be his best course of action.

Tough choice in the Super Bowl today. Having no regional affiliation with either team, I'm going to rely on the truly trivial for making a selection: I would like Philadelphia to win just to completely humiliate Rush Limbaugh for his racist reasoning on the success of Donovan McNabb, and I'd like the Patriots to do well because Tom Brady is a hottie. So it's a toss-up between liberal revenge and queer sex appeal. What, you were expecting true sports insight at this time of the morning? Maybe I'll just rent a movie.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 6:58 AM  

Yesterday's car show in Homestead was great. The weather was perfect - not too hot with just a few clouds - and we had a great turn-out. We have seventy cars pre-registered and another thirty or so that came in on the day-of-show. We had everything from a 1913 Detroiter to a 1976 Chevrolet Corvette. And Mustangs - lots of Mustangs - including a couple of Shelby GT's.

This is our only officially judged show, and we give awards for each of our sixteen classes, plus a Best Pre-War and Best Post-War. (In car club lingo, World War II is the "war" we use as the break since auto production stopped for the four years of the duration.) The Best Pre-War was a 1936 Cord 810/812. The Cord is a magnificent example of automotive ingenuity; it was the first American car with front wheel drive, hidden headlights, and a rudimentary automatic transmission. The Best Post-War was a tie between a beautiful 1955 Buick Roadmaster convertible and a 1947 Morgan three-wheeler.

The best part, though, was having a good time and seeing a lot of really cool cars, most of which had been restored to factory specs. There were some interesting entries, too, including a 1953 Meteor Victoria. Meteors were built by Ford of Canada and combined elements of both Fords and Mercurys - Ford bodies, Mercury trim, and Meteor badging.

All in all, we had a great time. It was a good way to kick off the fiftieth anniversary year of the club.

Just because children need to be educated doesn't mean they are stupid or naive. Anyone who has worked in education or just raised kids knows all too well that most of the time you really have to be quick to keep ahead of how quickly kids learn things and figure out what's really going on. Education is not about acquiring information, it's about mastering the processes of life, and wisdom is not measured by degrees.

So what kind of lessons are kids picking up from the recent fights over SpongeBob SquarePants and Buster Bunny? They're probably thinking that it's okay to stigmatize a group of people for no good reason other than how their lives are judged by others. They're seeing the President of the United States encourage the lawmakers of this land to set aside the basic human rights of gay Americans so that a group of insecure bigots will send him and his political cronies more money. They're learning that some children should be ashamed of their parents because they both happen to be women or men. And, in the simple black and white logic of children, if it's okay to do it to gays, it must be okay to do it to other people, too. What about that black kid over there? Or the girl with the funny accent?

The learning process is continuous. That's good. We can learn - or unlearn - things as we go through life, and whoever came up with the line about not being able to teach an old dog new tricks never had an old dog... or for that matter, a mom in her sixties who learned how to use a computer. But those are skills. The important learning takes place when knowledge is applied to life. Children need to learn not just how things work but why things are, and that while there are a few absolutes in life such as murder is bad and nothing works "as seen on TV," life is about change, growth and learning, and accepting them is the greatest lesson learned.

There's a word for that. It's called "evolution." And there are those who will resist it even as they themselves change. At some point they're going to wonder why everyone else has moved away from them. But as Henry Drummond observed in Inherit the Wind, "All motion is relative. Perhaps it is you who have changed - by standing still."

The Democrats are going to be locked in the Ivory Tower thanks to their elite university/city brie-eating grassroots organizers like MoveOn.org and Howard Dean.

As opposed to the Republicans who rose to power and majority status by hooking up with the evangelical talk-radio NASCAR gay-bashing grassroots groups. Gotcha.

From the New York Times:

A judge declared Friday that a law banning same-sex marriage violates the state constitution, a first-of-its-kind ruling in New York that would clear the way for gay couples to wed if it survives on appeal.

Gay rights activists hailed the ruling as a historic victory that "delivers the state Constitution's promise of equality to all New Yorkers."

"The court recognized that unless gay people can marry, they are not being treated equally under the law," said Susan Sommer, a Lambda Legal Defense Fund lawyer who presented the case for five couples who brought the lawsuit. "Same-sex couples need the protections and security marriage provides, and this ruling says they're entitled to get them the same way straight couples do."

State Supreme Court Justice Doris Ling-Cohan ruled that the New York City clerk could not deny a license to any couple solely on the ground that the two are of the same sex.

What's next? Letting women vote?

Ossie Davis. A class act all the way on and off the stage. His work in every medium - including the stage of politics and civil rights - were inspirational to many generations.

John Vernon. To some he'll always be Dean Wormer in Animal House or the villain in a bunch of Mission: Impossible episodes, but he also made his mark on the stage in Canada, including several seasons at Stratford.

R.I.P.

Well, we made it through January and the SOTU without too much loss of blood. But we at The Liberal Coalition are still on alert.

Natalie at All Facts and Opinions has a playlist of good music to listen to.

In honor of his new blog Carnival of Bad History, archy debunks some history himself.

BlogAmy has her own blogaround.

bloggg has a response to the Democratic response.

Chris has had a rough week.

Collective Sigh on fearing the fear from the fearmonger.

RDF at Corrente on another address - the State of the Indian Nation.

NTodd has the roll of the senators with a conscience.

Echidne is on vacation, but she left some wonderful posts for us.

edwardpig on the shame of the junior senator from Florida.

First Draft has an interview with a soldier of conscience.

The Gamer's Nook has a new invention that's perfect for technically-minded paranoids.

Happy Furry rocks the 80's.

iddybud writes about the immorality of the Bush foreign policy.

Keith is a little under the weather.

Peter at Kick the Leftist on war games and toys.

Left Is Right on a not-so-new idea for our own elections.

Bryant picks over Michelle Malkin.

Michael is Musing (and spamming) over Secretary Spellings and her attack on cute bunnies.

Pen-Elayne on self-important journalists.

This week's Republican Sinner is J. Grant Swank. Who? Read and find out.

Ugarte at Rick's proves that some people will sell anything.

Rook's Rant lets it all out.

Upyernoz is off to Las Vegas. I assume by the post that he means the one in Nevada, not the one in New Mexico.

Scrutiny Hooligans finds a cool site.

SoonerThought on the real meaning of "pro-life."

Speedkill has fund with fundies.

Steve Gilliard on blazing paths.

T. Rex responds to the SOTU.

Trish Wilson is writing erotic supernatural fiction.

Wanda joins in on the Save the Buster Bunny brigade.

WTF Is It Now reports Citizens Project wants to have the IRS investigate James Dobson.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat on Texas politics.

This Saturday, February 5, is my car club's annual judged show at Harris Field in Homestead on the corner of US 1 and Campbell Drive. The show is open to the public from 11 to 3 and is free of charge. We have over 75 antique cars signed up already; everything from a 1929 Ford Model A to classic Mustangs. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by.

From the New York Times:

In an evening marked by emotional responses and the waving of fingers stained with purple ink in a gesture of solidarity with the millions of Iraqis who defied the threat of violence to vote on Sunday, Mr. Bush won hearty applause throughout much of his 53-minute speech.

I'd like to show him a finger, but it wouldn't be purple.

Josh Marshall reports in Talking Points Memo that the House "Ethics" Committee has been re-made in the image of Tom DeLay.

It's been known for some time that the now-outgoing Chairman of the House Ethics Committee, Rep. Joel Hefley (R) of Colorado was going to get canned for his various offenses related to the Ethics Committee's handling, be it ever so gentle, of Rep. Tom DeLay (R) of Texas. The only mystery was just when the ax would fall.

But in this case, Speaker Hastert seemed to be channeling Michael Corleone in one of his less appealing moments.

As we noted back on November 19th, three of the five Republican members of the House Ethics Committee turned out to be in the Shays Handful. Or putting it more prosaically, three of them voted against the DeLay Rule.

The three were Hefley, Rep. Kenny Hulshof (R) of Missouri and Rep. Steven LaTourette (R) of Ohio.

Hastert axed all three.

The two who toed the DeLay line -- Rep. Judy Biggert (R) of Illinois and Rep. Doc Hastings (R) of Washington -- stay. And Hastings becomes Chairman.

Speaker Hastert's spokesman said, "It's not personal. It's strictly business. Why, next week Mr. Hastert is going to take Mr. Hefley fishing in a little rowboat out on Lake Tahoe."

Is it progress to go back to the way things used to be?

Maureen Dowd in the New York Times:

I misunderestimated this ambitious president. His social engineering schemes in the Middle East and America are breathtakingly brazen.

He doesn't just want to dismantle the 60's. He wants to dismantle the whole century - from the Scopes trial to Social Security. He can shred one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal and then go after other big safety-net Democratic programs, reversing the prevailing philosophy of many decades that our tax and social welfare systems should equalize the distribution of wealth, just a little bit. Barry Goldwater wouldn't have had the brass to take a jackhammer to that edifice.

The White House seems to think Social Security was corrupt from the moment it was enacted in 1935. It wants to replace it with private accounts that will fatten the wallets of stockbrokers and put the savings of Americans who didn't inherit vast fortunes at risk.

Mr. Bush and his crew not only want to scrap the New Deal. By weakening environmental and safety protections and trying to flatten the progressive income tax, they're trying to eradicate not just one Roosevelt but two, going after the progressive legacy of Theodore.

Bush wants to build a powerful legacy for "A New Century." Unfortunately the one he has in mind is the 19th.

Frank Rich chimes in on the backlash against culture being waged by the new bluenoses; specifically Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' campaign against lesbians who have the gall to appear as extras in the background of a children's travelogue.

What makes this story more insidious still is the glaring reality that the most prominent Republican lesbians in America are Mary Cheney, a former gay and lesbian marketing liaison for Coors beer, and her partner, Heather Poe, who appeared as a couple in public and on TV during the presidential campaign. That Ms. Spellings would gratuitously go after this specific "lifestyle" right after taking office is so provocative it smells like payback specifically pitched at those "pro-family" watchdogs who snarled at the mention of Ms. Cheney's sexual orientation during the campaign whether it was by John Kerry or anyone else. Surely Ms. Spellings doesn't believe in discrimination against nontraditional families: by her own account, she was a single mother who had to park her 13-year-old and 8-year-old children in Austin when she first went to work at the White House. Then again, President Bush went on record last month as saying that "studies have shown that the ideal is where a child is being raised by a man and a woman" (even though, as The New York Times reported, "there is no scientific evidence that children raised by gay couples do any worse").

That our government is now both intimidating PBS and awarding public money to pundits to enforce "moral values" agendas demonizing certain families is the ugliest fallout of the campaign against indecency. That campaign cannot really banish salaciousness from pop culture, a rank impossibility in a market economy where red and blue customers are united in their infatuation with "Desperate Housewives." But it can create public policy that discriminates against anyone on the hit list of moral values zealots. Inane as it may seem that Ms. Spellings is conducting a witch hunt against Buster or that James Dobson has taken aim at SpongeBob SquarePants, there's a method to their seeming idiocy: the cartoon surrogates are deliberately chosen to camouflage the harshness of their assault on nonanimated, flesh-and-blood people.

It's all well and good to get sentimental about the past and "traditional family values." The capper is that ABC has put together a reunion of the cast of Happy Days so that we can get nostalgic about a TV show that was about nostalgia. But the problem with that is that it is selective; we don't remember the bad times along with the good, and it was the bad things - Fascism, poverty, segregation, and Communism that drove us to pursue progress and even celebrate it. And, like anything else, progress comes at a price. The only alternative is to stand still, and when you do that, you get run over.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 6:02 AM  

I watched the Bravo re-run of the episode of The West Wing where John Goodman was a Republican filling in as the acting president for 48 hours and his staff was already plotting how to wrest control of the government from the Bartlet administration. When that was over I switched to a tape of the A&E special about Savannah and the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

Consider it counterprogramming.

From the AP via Salon.com:

The monitors at the Parents Television Council have been busy again. The group has just released the results of a study in which it closely surveyed one week of programming on MTV -- "Spring Break" week, to be precise -- and counted 3,056 flashes of nudity or sexual situations and 2,881 verbal references to sex. "MTV has clearly chosen to cater to the lowest common denominator, to offer the cheapest form of programming to entice young boys ... dangling forbidden fruit before their eyes," the group's president, Brent Bozell, commented. Among the content in question: an episode of "One Bad Trip" featuring a "human sundae competition" in which men licked whipped cream and ate cherries off women's bodies.

Okay, Brent Bozell has always struck me as one of those guys who's a little too interested in "dangling forbidden fruit before [young boys] eyes." He's just creepy.

Andrew Sullivan is closing down his blog for a while because, well, you know, he's got so many other demands on his time and his assistant was just so overworked.

Ah, the price of stardom.

Who says terrorists don't have a sense of humor? From CNN:

A photograph posted on an Islamist Web site appears to be that of an action figure and not a U.S. soldier being held hostage.

Liam Cusack, the marketing coordinator for Dragon Models USA, said the figure pictured on the Web site is believed to be "Special Ops Cody," a military action figure the company manufactured in late 2003.

[...]

"Cody" is an action figure the company made for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which supplies U.S. military bases worldwide with various items. The doll was meant to look like a U.S. soldier who might be serving in Iraq, Cusack said.

On the Islamist Web site, a group calling itself the Al Mujahedeen Brigade, posted a photograph of a man it claimed was a captured U.S. soldier named John Adam, and it threatened to behead him if Iraqi prisoners are not released by U.S. forces.

Maybe we'd better be on the alert for H.O. scale car bombs.

Back when this story broke, I said that Ward Churchill had a propensity for being a rabble-rouser and that rather than make a cogent point about the global power structure and the role the United States and other first-world nations play in dictating the lives of smaller and poor countries, he just wanted to raise a stink.

Well, he proved my point. Thanks, Professor.

Wampum has posted a summary link for all the categories of the 2004 Koufax Awards. There are a lot of good blogs up for consideration, including Bark Bark Woof Woof for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition and Best Series for The Convention Diary. If you haven't done so already, go and take a look at the choices and let your barks... uh, voice be heard.

This story on NPR's Morning Edition got my attention yesterday - and pissed me off.

Parents at a Catholic school in Orange County, Calif., are challenging a gay couple that has put their adopted twin sons into a Catholic kindergarten. The parents are concerned that the children may be part of a broader strategy to create greater tolerance for homosexuality within the church.

You can listen here.

I wrote about this place a while back and said pretty much what I had to say then, but hearing one more sanctimonious ass fret that two boys in kindergarten were the first wave of the Homosexual Agenda to spread tolerance and acceptance made me shout at the radio. In light of some recent news stories, I really think the Catholic Church is in no position - missionary or otherwise - to be saying "you have to choose between being a Christian and a homosexual."

Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard says that the right to dissent applies only to the pure of heart - Republicans circa 1994.

On the eve of the election in Iraq, Democratic senator Edward Kennedy called President Bush's Iraq policy "a catastrophic failure." He demanded that American troops immediately begin to withdraw. "We have no choice," he declared, "but to make the best we can of the disaster we have created in Iraq." Kennedy said the retreat of American forces should be completed "as early as possible in 2006," and suggested that, in Iraq, American troops are a bigger problem than terrorists.

Though appalling, Kennedy's statement was not out of character for Democrats these days. "I don't like to impugn anyone's integrity," said Democratic senator Mark Dayton, before impugning the integrity of Condoleezza Rice. "But I really don't like being lied to, repeatedly, flagrantly, intentionally. It is wrong, it is undemocratic, it is un-American, and it is dangerous." After Rice took exception to being called untruthful by Democratic senator Barbara Boxer, Boxer complained on TV: "She turned and attacked me."

This is madness, but there is method in it. The talk among congressional Democrats is about the tactics Newt Gingrich used as House minority whip in 1993 and 1994. As they remember it, Gingrich opposed, blocked, attacked, zinged, or at least criticized everything President Clinton and Democratic leaders proposed. It was a scorched-earth approach, Democrats believe. And it worked, crippling Clinton and resulting in the 1994 election that gave Republicans control--lasting control, it turned out--of the House and Senate. Now Democrats, after losing three straight elections, hope brutal tactics will work for them.

[...]

The media tolerate or even encourage Democratic rage. But the White House can't afford to. Senate Democrats have enough votes to block major Bush initiatives like Social Security reform and to reject Bush appointees, including Supreme Court nominees. They may be suicidal, but they could undermine the president's entire second term agenda. At his news conference last week, Bush reacted calmly to their vitriolic attacks, suggesting only a few Democrats are involved. Stronger countermeasures will be needed, including an unequivocal White House response to obstructionism, curbs on filibusters, and a clear delineation of what's permissible and what's out of bounds in dissent on Iraq. Too much is at stake to wait for another Democratic defeat in 2006. [Emphasis added.]

So, Fred, it's okay to do everything possible to subvert a president's agenda as long as it's Bill Clinton. But if the Democrats try it on Bush, they're traitors and their dissent cannot be tolerated. Kevin Drum does a very nice take-down on Mr. Barnes in the Washington Monthly and Washington Post. However, I prefer what young Alvy Singer said in Annie Hall: "What an asshole."

Andante at Collective Sigh put her Grade Three picture up on her website, which prompted me to dig out my ID picture from my freshman year at the University of Miami.

Mustang Bobby, September 1971, age 18

I kept the long hair until November 1971 when I had to cut it for a production of The Boy Friend. I still have the mustache.

The EU is putting diplomatic and political pressure on Cuba to lighten up on dissidents by lifting sanctions. It sounds counterproductive, but it actually might work.

European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday approved a six-month suspension of EU diplomatic sanctions on Cuba, in hopes of winning more releases of jailed dissidents and propelling political reforms.

The widely expected decision meant that top EU officials will no longer be banned from visiting the island, and that Cuban dissidents will no longer be invited to European embassy functions in Havana -- a practice in fact stopped in December.

The 25-nation bloc also, as expected, pledged to increase contacts with the dissidents and did not alter restrictions that deny Cuba access to tens of millions in EU foreign aid.

An EU statement said the decision taken by foreign ministers at their meeting in Belgium was intended to foster "a constructive dialogue with the Cuban authorities aiming at tangible results in the political, economic, human rights and cooperation sphere."

[...]

Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn of Luxembourg, which holds the rotating EU presidency, told reporters in Brussels that the decision Monday would be reviewed by July with an eye toward "developments and progress" in Cuba.

"We highlighted the need to support a process leading to democratic pluralism, respect for human rights and basic freedoms," Asselborn said.

Cuba remains blocked out of billions of dollars in EU development and trade assistance to foreign countries, however, because the communist-ruled island cannot meet criteria such as human rights improvements.

One of the reasons Castro has been able to maintain a tight grip on power for nearly half a century is because the United States insists - at the behest of a small group of politically powerful Cuban exile hardliners - on maintaining the trade embargo with Cuba that was imposed in 1961. Castro has held that act up as his sword of defiance ever since and it has been a great benefit to him. It's his excuse to his people for the daily hardships they face: no food in the stores? Blame the Americans and their embargo. (This ignores the fact that the only other country in the world that maintains such a tight embargo on Cuba is Israel. Canada and the rest of the Western Hemisphere trades with Cuba; drive down the 401 in Toronto and you'll see Cuba SI! billboards for $699-a-week vacation packages.) Meanwhile los historicos on Calle Ocho in Miami still dream of returning to their beloved Havana and reclaiming their land, their business, and their 1959 Buick LeSabre - but not until Castro falls. Until then, no tiene nada de que ver con Cuba, and ten US presidents have followed along.

The EU has the right idea and the bargaining chips. The embargo has taken away any leverage the US might have in bringing democracy to Cuba, and the longer we maintain it, the further behind we'll be when time and nature catch up with Fidel.

This would have been Sam's sixteenth birthday.

Actually, we're not exactly certain what his real birthdate was. He came from a litter in Oklahoma and was bought by Allen's sister as a companion for her and her husband who were long-haul truckers at the time. But they couldn't keep him, and so they gave him to us in April 1989 when he was about eleven weeks old, and we backtracked to February 1, conicidentally the same day I broke my ankle when I slipped on some ice in the driveway. (We figured Sam's ying made up for my yang.) He was so small I could hold him in the palm of my hand; even when he was fully grown he never tipped the scale at more than seventeen pounds. But he made up for it by being a good friend and a happy dog, and he's been immortalized as the Bark Bark Woof Woof mascot with his picture on t-shirts, sweatshirts, and wall calendars (hint, hint).

Happy Birthday, Sammy!

Do the math on privatizing Social Security, and no matter what scenario you come up with, Bush's plan doesn't make sense. Go on - try it.

On the Iraqi elections:

The glass is half-full of Kool-Aid.