Bark Bark Woof Woof

I hold Terri and all her family in the Light (Quaker-speak for wishing them peace).

As for the vultures like Randall Terry and whomever else will seek to exploit her -- you can bet a Lifetime Movie of the Week with Markie Post is in the works -- I hope they stumble around in the dark and bang their shins bloody.

From the WaPo:

In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows "disturbingly little" about the threats posed by many of the nation's most dangerous adversaries.

The commission called for dramatic change to prevent future failures. It outlined 74 recommendations and said President Bush could implement most of them without action by Congress. It urged Bush to give broader powers to John Negroponte, the new director of national intelligence, to deal with challenges to his authority from the CIA, Defense Department or other elements of the nation's 15 spy agencies.

It also called for sweeping changes at the FBI to combine the bureau's counterterrorism and counterintelligence resources into a new office.

The report was the latest somber assessment of intelligence shortfalls that a series of investigative panels have made since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Numerous investigations have concluded that spy agencies had serious intelligence failures before the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks against the United States.

The report implicitly absolves the Bush administration of manipulating the intelligence used to launch the 2003 Iraq war, putting the blame for bad intelligence directly on the intelligence community.

"The daily intelligence briefings given to you before the Iraq war were flawed," the report said. "Through attention-grabbing headlines and repetition of questionable data, these briefings overstated the case that Iraq was rebuilding its WMD programs."

The unclassified version of the report does not go into significant detail on the intelligence community's abilities in Iran and North Korea because commissioners did not want to tip the U.S. hand to its leading adversaries. Those details are included in the classified version.

The Bush administration is working to see if they can find a "volunteer" to pin this on.

Jeff Danziger nails it.

Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit), in an essay in Salon.com (subscription/Day Pass), wonders if the Republicans are in trouble.

The Terri Schiavo story is a tragedy in the truest sense. It is a case in which there are no happy endings and in which the mighty fall. One thing that has fallen is the notion of the Republican Party as a bastion of federalism and limited government. Some might argue that this notion was already in doubt, in light of the Bush administration's less-than-parsimonious budgeting, but pork is part of politics, and you have to expect a certain amount of give in that department.

Widespread Republican support for legislation taking an individual case away from state judges and placing it in front of the federal judiciary is another thing. The "if it saves just one life, it's worth it" argument has more typically been associated with gun-control activists, and other groups that are generally looked down upon by Republicans, but now many in the GOP seem to have picked it up as a slogan. Indeed, the entire notion of the "rule of law" -- itself once a favored slogan of conservatives -- seems to have fallen into disrepute. Quite a few conservatives are unhappy about that state of affairs, and I wonder if it doesn't presage a realignment within the Republican Party, and the fracturing of some alliances on the right.

Schiavo hysteria certainly has some Republicans in its grip. Bill Bennett wrote that state law doesn't deserve our respect if it conflicts with natural law. Bennett went on to urge Florida Gov. Jeb Bush to risk impeachment by violating the orders of the Florida Supreme Court. Fox News' John Gibson was less measured. "Just to burnish my reputation as a bomb thrower," he wrote last Friday on the Fox News Web site, "I think Jeb Bush should give serious thought to storming the Bastille." In other words, Bush should consider sending police in to remove Schiavo from the hospice and reattach her feeding tube. "The point is, the temple of the law is so sacrosanct that an occasional chief executive cannot flaunt it once in a while, sort of drop his drawers on the courthouse steps and moon the judges, as a way to protest the complete disregard courts and judges have shown here, in this case, for facts outside the law," Gibson wrote.

[...]

Republicans like to point out that you have to stand for something, or you'll fall for anything. The leadership, at least, of the Republican Party has abandoned the principles of small government and federalism that it used to stand for. Trampling traditional limits on governmental power in an earnest desire to do good in high-profile cases has been a hallmark of a certain sort of liberalism, and it's the sort of thing that I thought conservatives eschewed. If I were in charge of making the decision, I might well put the tube back and turn Terri Schiavo over to her family. But I'm not, and the Florida courts are, and they seem to have done a conscientious job. Maybe they came to the right decision, and maybe they didn't; this is a hard case. But respecting the courts' role in the system, and not rushing to overturn all the rules because we don't like the outcome, seems to me to be part of being a member of civilized society rather than a mob. I thought conservatives knew this. Before things are over, they may wish they hadn't forgotten.

As the post below points out, there are all too many people willing to take up the mob mentality in pursuit of their agenda. That's one reason I am one of the few who is not upset that the Democrats by and large stayed out the Schiavo story -- things like this bring out the bats.

Forgive me for feeling a tad smug, but I love it when conservatives start second-guessing themselves. It makes them appear, oh, I don't know...what's the word...liberal.

Randall Terry has met his match in the nutsery factions trying to keep Terri Schiavo alive. From the Petoskey News-Review:

Norm Olson, senior adviser to the Michigan militia and pastor of a strong right-to-life church in Wolverine, said Tuesday he had put together an unarmed coalition of state militias that were prepared to storm the Florida hospice where Terri Schiavo has been left to die, and take her to a safe house.

Olson said he needed only the OK from Schiavo's father, Robert Schindler, either directly or through his attorney David Gibbs, to put the plan, called "Operation Resurrection," into action on Sunday.

But Olson said Gibbs contacted the FBI instead of passing his message on to Schindler.

Olson said the FBI had been monitoring e-mails within militia groups and on Tuesday, March 29, sent an agent from Traverse City to his home in Alanson and other agents to militia leaders in the South to question them about the plan.

The FBI was unavailable for comment.

Olson said that last Thursday he phoned Gibbs' secretary with a message that he had organized 1,500 to 2,000 militia members from Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia and Michigan, who were ready to remove Schiavo from the hospice and take her in a convoy to a safe house.

The rest of the article has a chronology of e-mails from Mr. Olson, referring to judges as "black-robed devils" and calling for the rest of the nation's militias to rise up and converge on Pinellas Pines, Florida. But apparently the rest of the Loony Brigade is on their way to Arizona to hold back the hordes of illegal immigrants from Mexico.

You may remember Norm Olson from the coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing. He was indirectly connected with Timothy McVeigh, and he spent a lot of time on the air on CNN and "Nightline" dressed in cammies and looking intensely at the camera -- which was offset by the fact that when he wears a cap his ears stick out like the open doors of '57 Chevy. He's seen as a bit of a crackpot by his neighbors, the very conservative folk of rural northern Michigan. The fact that the Schindler's lawyer called the FBI after Mr. Olson contacted them shows that even they have a touch of sanity left in them after this ordeal... or Randall Terry doesn't like to be upstaged by a bunch of people that are even nuttier than he is.

My nephew's Grade 5 class has a project that sent teddy bears on voyages around the country while the traveler kept a diary of his travels. I was privileged to have a bear named Charles come and visit me after going to California and three stops in Ohio. I'm sure he was relieved to get out of the cold and snow of the north. I introduced him to several other stuffed animals (Max the dachshund and Snowball the Siamese kitten have been with me since I was in Grade 5; feed them a little cotton and they're yours for life), took him to several events like the Sun Day on the Mile festival in Coral Gables, a ride around Miami in the Mustang with the top down, and then a visit to the Downtown Miami car show.

Now he's safely on his way back home across the country with a full diary and fond memories of his trip, including pictures like this one:

Mustang Bobby shows that Charles has no sand in his paws.

Thanks for coming by, Charles. Next time, bring the whole family.

From a friend:

Speaking of cars (see below), gas prices along Coral Way range between $2.17 to $2.25 for self-serve regular.

One of the reasons I'm glad I'm not in northern Michigan; it's $2.28 in Traverse City, and it usually runs five cents a gallon more in places further north like Petoskey.

What are you paying?

I'm driving the Pontiac this week while I prep the Mustang for its first show this weekend. It got a good wash and wax at the US 1 Finest Hand Wash last night, and today I bought some engine compartment cleaner, injector cleaner, and a fire extinguisher (required at a car show). Over the next couple of nights I'll get the details taken care of, like getting the tonneau cover clean and ready.

The show is sponsored by the Fort Lauderdale Mustang Club and is being held this Saturday, April 2 at the Bass Pro Shops at Griffin Road and I-95. It's an open marquee show, which means it will have classic Mustangs (1964-1/2 to 1973) as well as other Ford products. Come by and see if you can find me. (Hint: I'll be the guy in the red 1995 Mustang GT convertible with the 1969 Ohio 1995 Florida plate* on the front.)

I've been to a lot of car shows, but this is the first time I've ever had one of my own in one. It should be fun, and I'm sure I'll learn a lot.

[*My 1969 plate was showing signs of rust. In a happenstance that can only be considered blind luck, I found my collection of old license plates in the first box up in the garage storage area. I chose the 1995 plate because it matches the year of the car and the colors -- red letters on a white baseplate -- go with the car. Florida issues only a rear plate, so you can display what you like on the front. This adds a nice touch of authenticity.]

Robert Steinback in the Miami Herald:

If a 51.1 percent to 48.6 percent margin of election victory constitutes a "mandate," as President Bush claimed in November, anything above that should be an overwhelming mandate, right?

Not in Bushworld.

In the America of the Bush-led Republicans, it appears that public opinion only matters on Election Day. After that, we subjects apparently are supposed to shut up and let the rulers rule.

That, of course, hasn't been the nation's tradition. Until recently, the U.S. public has expected its voice -- whether expressed through referendum, poll, petition, public demonstration or letters and calls to congressmen -- to be heard and respected, regardless of the election cycle. We took seriously the idea of politicians as "public servants."

This has changed with the disturbingly imperial administrations of the Brothers Bush -- President George and Florida Gov. Jeb -- which have been marked by a pattern of disregarding or defying public sentiment, when those sentiments have run counter to the Bush agenda.

[...]

Many a pundit has speculated as to why the Bushes and the Republicans would fly into such a stiff headwind of public opinion. Some say it's the influence of the Religious Right, collecting on an election debt.

I say it's force of habit.

Consider the contempt the president showed for the millions of domestic and international demonstrators opposed to the invasion of Iraq, whom he dismissed as inconsequential "focus groups." Or his refusal to back off his plan to privatize a huge chunk of the Social Security program even though Americans disapprove of that idea by a 56-35 margin, according a Washington Post-ABC News poll in mid-March.

Jeb has been even more brazen in his scorn for public sentiment. One might quibble with the authoritativeness of polls or demonstrations, but how about referenda? Jeb Bush has declared war on at least three state initiatives approved by Florida voters.

He was once caught saying he had a ''devious plan'' to undermine a 2002 referendum to limit public-school class sizes, which he has plotted to repeal ever since. He succeeded in getting a bullet-train referendum back on the ballot and defeated. And he campaigned hard against two county slot-machine referenda -- one passed, one failed -- that were authorized by a statewide referendum he also opposed.

[...]

The president also has revealed his disrespect for public opinion through his administration's clandestine efforts to manipulate it: Using tax money to create political ads disguised as authentic television news segments, planting shills in the White House news pool and allowing only approved members of the public to attend "public" town hall meetings, so that the president isn't embarrassed by tough questions with the cameras rolling.

It's acceptable for elected officials to promote the policies in which they believe and to educate the public on important issues. But we should be leery of the politician who feels that it's his duty to defy the public when he doesn't like our choices.

We're the bosses. They're the servants. Or so we've always been told.

Many a dictator has ruled under the mantra of "I am the servant of the people" -- as long as they can define who the "people" are.

From the Rocky Mountain News:

A Republican Party staffer dressed like a Secret Service agent forcibly removed three people from President Bush's speech in Denver last week after they arrived in a car with a "No more blood for oil" bumper sticker.

The man's identity as a Republican staffer was confirmed to the Rocky Mountain News on Tuesday by Denver Secret Service agent in charge Lon Garner, who investigated the incident. He declined to identify the man.

The three people said the man wore a lapel pin and an earpiece, and they were told he was with the Secret Service. And they and their attorney quoted agent Garner as saying the staffer admitted forcing them out solely due to the bumper sticker.

"I think this is appalling," said Alex Young, one of the three people evicted from the White House-sponsored event at the Wings over the Rockies museum, even though they had done nothing.

"In my mind, it's a clear First Amendment violation. They are being punished for the speech on their bumper sticker," said Dan Recht, an attorney representing Young, 25, Leslie Weise, 39, and Karen Bauer, 38.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it a Federal offense to impersonate a Secret Service agent?

Pope John Paul II is on a feeding tube and Jerry Falwell is on a ventilator.

I wonder if Jesse Jackson will show up in Rome or Lynchburg.

I don't know a heck of a lot about health care, HMO's, and insurance. I have a little card in my wallet that has my insurance information on it, but since it's one of my fringe benefits and since I'm single and in pretty good health, I don't think about it very much. But in one of our recent lunchtime walks, Bob and I got to talking about it, and I came up with some questions:

Why does health insurance cost so much? The doctors blame the insurance companies for high malpractice rates, the insurance companies blame trial lawyers for high malpractice judgements, and both of them blame "the system." But if news reports are to be believed, malpractice claims and judgements are actually down, and they were never as high as the insurance companies claim.

Why shouldn't HMO's be non-profit corporations? That doesn't mean they can't make money; it would be that any money they make over their costs and salaries would go into paying for the health care for those who can't. It would also allow them to accept charitable donations, set up foundations, and pay fewer taxes. In return, they would be expected to contribute to the well-being of the citizens. Are there any HMO's that are currently using this model?

How much different would the Canadian model of single-payer health insurance be than what we already have in place? Contrary to popular mythology, Canadians do not have "national" health care per se; it's on a provincial basis, it doesn't cover everything, and there are still "private" medical practices for those who elect to use them. Canadian readers, this is your chance to explain the good and the bad of your systems.

The Schiavo case has raised the question as to whether health care is a right in this country. If it is, doesn't the government have a duty to insure that everyone has access to medical care when we're ill, just as we have a right to a lawyer when we're arrested?

Like I said, I don't know a lot about this issue. That's why I'm asking.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 6:32 AM  

Two former senators -- one Republican, one Democrat -- look at their respective parties and have warnings for them.

John Danforth on the Republicans:

By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.

Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond. But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party.

Christian activists, eager to take credit for recent electoral successes, would not be likely to concede that Republican adoption of their political agenda is merely the natural convergence of conservative religious and political values. Correctly, they would see a causal relationship between the activism of the churches and the responsiveness of Republican politicians. In turn, pragmatic Republicans would agree that motivating Christian conservatives has contributed to their successes.

[...]

I do not fault religious people for political action. Since Moses confronted the pharaoh, faithful people have heard God's call to political involvement. Nor has political action been unique to conservative Christians. Religious liberals have been politically active in support of gay rights and against nuclear weapons and the death penalty. In America, everyone has the right to try to influence political issues, regardless of his religious motivations.

The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.

[...]

But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.

The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.

Bill Bradley on the Democrats:

Five months after the presidential election Democrats are still pointing fingers at one another and trying to figure out why Republicans won. Was the problem the party's position on social issues or taxes or defense or what? Were there tactical errors made in the conduct of the campaign? Were the right advisers heard? Was the candidate flawed?

Before deciding what Democrats should do now, it's important to see what Republicans have done right over many years. When the Goldwater Republicans lost in 1964, they didn't try to become Democrats. They tried to figure out how to make their own ideas more appealing to the voters. As part of this effort, they turned to Lewis Powell, then a corporate lawyer and soon to become a member of the United States Supreme Court. In 1971 he wrote a landmark memo for the United States Chamber of Commerce in which he advocated a sweeping, coordinated and long-term effort to spread conservative ideas on college campuses, in academic journals and in the news media.

To further the party's ideological and political goals, Republicans in the 1970's and 1980's built a comprehensive structure based on Powell's blueprint. Visualize that structure as a pyramid.

You've probably heard some of this before, but let me run through it again. Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid.

The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate. That language is sometimes in the form of an assault on Democrats and at other times in the form of advocacy for a new policy position. The development process can take years. And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.

At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine.

[...]

To understand how the Democratic Party works, invert the pyramid. Imagine a pyramid balancing precariously on its point, which is the presidential candidate.

Democrats who run for president have to build their own pyramids all by themselves. There is no coherent, larger structure that they can rely on. Unlike Republicans, they don't simply have to assemble a campaign apparatus - they have to formulate ideas and a vision, too. Many Democratic fundraisers join a campaign only after assessing how well it has done in assembling its pyramid of political, media and idea people.

There is no clearly identifiable funding base for Democratic policy organizations, and in the frantic campaign rush there is no time for patient, long-term development of new ideas or of new ways to sell old ideas. Campaigns don't start thinking about a Democratic brand until halfway through the election year, by which time winning the daily news cycle takes precedence over building a consistent message. The closest that Democrats get to a brand is a catchy slogan.

Democrats choose this approach, I believe, because we are still hypnotized by Jack Kennedy, and the promise of a charismatic leader who can change America by the strength and style of his personality. The trouble is that every four years the party splits and rallies around several different individuals at once. Opponents in the primaries then exaggerate their differences and leave the public confused about what Democrats believe.

A party based on charisma has no long-term impact. Think of our last charismatic leader, Bill Clinton. He was president for eight years. He was the first Democrat to be re-elected since Franklin Roosevelt. He was smart, skilled and possessed great energy. But what happened? At the end of his tenure in the most powerful office in the world, there were fewer Democratic governors, fewer Democratic senators, members of Congress and state legislators and a national party that was deep in debt. The president did well. The party did not. Charisma didn't translate into structure.

If Democrats are serious about preparing for the next election or the next election after that, some influential Democrats will have to resist entrusting their dreams to individual candidates and instead make a commitment to build a stable pyramid from the base up. It will take at least a decade's commitment, and it won't come cheap. But there really is no other choice.

I think Sen. Bradley's point is well-taken, but it's not just an organizational chart that is the difference between the two parties. Republicans live and prosper by the corporate mentality because that's their way of viewing the world now; what's good for General Motors is good for the country, and everyone should get behind that model. At the same time the Democrats have been the party of the disparate and the disenfranchised and it's hard to organize a corporate model when you have so many groups with so many different agendas making up the foundation. Democrats and Progressives have spent the last century battling the corporate mentality and elitist model, and to expect them to follow the lead would be asking a lot. But we may not have a choice if we expect to see them in power again.

Sen. Danforth's warning to the Republicans about the Religious Reich should resonate, too. He knows something about religious fanatics -- his other title is the Reverend John Danforth of the Episcopal Church.

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

Johnnie Cochran is dead.

Jessie Jackson is hogging the camera at Terri Schiavo's hospice.

It's like the universe slipped its timing belt or something.

From the Toledo Blade:

Politics makes for some strange bedfellows, but odd unions are exactly what a newly formed left-right coalition hopes will work to its advantage in modifying the Patriot Act. It's worth a try to prevent some of the more objectionable provisions of the nation's premier anti-terrorism law from becoming permanent when they expire at the end of this year. Still, the coalition calling itself "Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances" will take some getting used to.

It's not every day that former Rep. Bob Barr, a conservative Georgia Republican, holds a joint press conference with the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, who is flanked by gun-rights supporters and left wing activists.

And that's the point. A group of people normally at each other's throats wants Washington to look past customary divides when hearings on renewing the Patriot Act begin later. In other words, they want the ensuing debate to be framed on its merit, not labeled a liberal or conservative cause - because it is neither.

[...]

It is disconcerting, say critics, that many in the administration have adopted an "absolutist" defense of the law in pushing for its complete renewal without change. The President campaigned to that end last year.

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft once insinuated that anyone raising concerns about the Patriot Act was "aiding and abetting" the enemy. His successor, Alberto Gonzales, has indicated that not only is he opposed to any changes in the law he wants to expand government powers therein.

This battle could be bruising. But it is commendable that an unusual alliance of old adversaries has agreed to work together on an issue critical to all Americans, whether they're to the right, left, or middle.

From Salon.com

Republicans in Washington would probably like the Terri Schiavo case to go away now, and quickly. The House committee that subpoenaed Schiavo to keep her alive a week ago has quietly dropped the matter, and the White House appears to be putting out the story that the president never wanted to get involved in the case in the first place.

Part of the pull-back stems from the poll numbers: Republicans thought they had a sure-fire winner in the Schiavo case, but nearly 70 percent of the public says that it was wrong for Congress and the president to intervene. But part of the distancing must relate to the ugly scenes still playing out in the streets near Schiavo's hospice bed. The situation there has grown so tense that even members of Schiavo's family have asked their supporters to start going home. Arrests have been made -- some hostile -- and police have been forced to close a school near the hospice. Having vilified Michael Schiavo, dehumanized the judges who had heard the case and all but deified Terri Schiavo, are Republicans beginning to think that they might be held responsible if those whose passions they have inflamed take the law into their own hands? ... - Tim Grieve

The Republicans are realizing that if you lie down with dogs...one of them is gonna hump your leg.

The people who say that religious extremism "can't happen here" are the first ones carted off when it happens.

From the Rocky Mountain News:

A convicted murderer who raped a woman for two hours, paralyzed a good Samaritan and left his victim's nude body under a remote bridge was spared execution Monday because jurors consulted the Bible when deciding his fate.

A divided Colorado Supreme Court ruled 3-2 that biblical passages considered by jurors who in 1995 condemned Robert Harlan to death may have unduly influenced their decision.

[...]

Adams County District Judge John Vigil overturned the death sentence in 2003 after learning that jurors consulted the Bible and discussed such passages as "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" during deliberations.

The high court concluded Monday that the "unauthorized introduction into the jury room of the Bible and its text commanding the death sentence for murder could influence a typical juror to vote for death instead of life imprisonment.

"Consequently, we must uphold the trial court's judgment vacating the death sentence and sentencing Harlan to life imprisonment without parole," the court said in the opinion, written by Justice Gregory Hobbs.

[...]

Gov. Bill Owens called the court's ruling a hair-splitting decision that was "demeaning to people of faith and prevents justice from being served.

"Even the justices who voted to overturn the penalty agreed that moral values and religious beliefs are important and can be part of the debate among jurors."

[...]Among the passages discussed during jury deliberations was one from Leviticus, which addresses the concept of an "eye for eye, tooth for tooth. As he has injured the other, so he is to be injured. Whoever kills an animal must make restitution, but whoever kills a man must be put to death."

Two jurors took notes on the passages and reported their findings to other jurors during the next day's deliberations, which concluded with a unanimous vote in favor of a death sentence.

Jurors were not specifically told not to consult the Bible but were repeatedly instructed to base their decision only on what was admitted into evidence during trial.

I'm sure the wingnuts will seize on this as yet another case of "activist" judges going soft on criminals and displaying anti-religious bigotry. But the Bible is a piss-poor legal text; Leviticus also condemns people for wearing two different kinds of cloth, planting two different kinds of crops in the same field, and touching the skin of a pig. (Wow, talk about your control freak...) So what about the polyester-clad TV preacher, the United States Department of Agriculture, and the good folks at Oscar Mayer; are they going to end up on death row, too?

The road to Damascus is paved with Cracker Jack. (Hey, it's springtime and baseball is an analogy for life, theology, and politics.)

Go Tigers.

One of my pet theories of theatre is that it is the only instinctive art form we humans have. Music performance, painting, sculpture, and other such crafts require skills that need to be learned and practiced; no one is born knowing how to play the piano, but the ability to act out and perform for an audience is hard-wired into the brain. (Plenty of actors make a very good career on the stage and screen with no formal training...more's the pity.) Watch small children at play and they are performing by playing roles in their games -- cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, whatever. They don't get that from just watching TV; it's instinctive. It crosses all cultural levels and continents. When I lived in New Mexico I saw some of the sacred dances and ceremonies at the Acoma pueblo and it struck me that this form of worship -- the circle of spectators, the lead dancer, the elaborate paint and dress, the chanting -- all reminded me of the ceremonies described to me by one of my fellow grad students in theatre who was studying the aboriginal customs of his native Australia. The connection between the two was the human instinct for performance.

Theatre is everywhere, and I don't just mean on the stage and screen. It is our method of interaction with our fellow man or woman. Our religious rites originated in theatre -- and vice versa -- and even our method of determining guilt or innocence in matters of law comes down to a performance by lawyers in front of an audience -- the jury. And certainly politics is all about performance.

This need to assume another character, to act out, to ritualize, comes as a part of our need to make sense of nonsense; to understand that which we can't easily explain, and to put it in simple terms. We take a complex issue and try to frame it in a well-made form. Aristotle's definition of drama -- a unity of time and place, and the linear storyline of a rising action with conflict, crisis and resolution -- makes things seem straightforward in a world where none of the elements truly exist. A woman dying in a hospice in Florida with her family and the world drawn into the struggle is painted in simple terms of good and evil, black and white, life and death. It may not be right, but it is the way we have to see things in order to make sense of it.

There is another element of performance that plays an even greater role sometimes, and that is the audience's need to connect with the story being told and the people telling it. The strong sense of identification with the character and the conflict makes it compelling to watch and see what will happen. The audience tries to put itself in the action and make an emotional connection with the characters. They objectify it and make it simple to understand so that they can apply the lessons and feelings to their own lives. There but for the grace of God... So the private tragedies of families, be they the Schiavos, the Petersons, the Simpsons (take your pick; Homer or O.J.) become life lessons for all of us, and whether or not they chose it or like it, their lives become the stuff "of which dreams are made." I am willing to bet that there will be a TV movie of the Schiavo case on the air before this year is out, and we will see it ripped from the headlines on Law & Order.

It also explains why we have made performers -- and I mean all performers, including politicians -- our celebrities. They hold tremendous power over our rites and dictate social mores. They hold us with their every word and in some ways we wish we were them. It feels good to have people pay attention to you; it gives you a feeling of self-worth and power that you might not have if you were just another face in the crowd. For this sense of well-being, of entertainment, we are more than willing to grant them this power and elevate them above us. We forgive them their trespasses in some cases, but also hold them to higher standards and turn on them with a mob-like wrath should they show any signs of being somewhat less than a star -- and more like one of us.

Someone once said that politics is show business for ugly people. (Actually, given the current crop of "stars," I'd say that applies to show business as well, but...) If the first three months of this year is any proof, that adage is right on.

The Faithful Correspondent found this in the Sarasota Herald Tribune via TPM:

At the same time one of Florida's most visible television reporters brought the news to viewers around the state, he earned hundreds of thousands of dollars on the side from the government agencies he covered.

Mike Vasilinda, a 30-year veteran of the Tallahassee press corps, does public relations work and provides film editing services to more than a dozen state agencies.

His Tallahassee company, Mike Vasilinda Productions Inc., has earned more than $100,000 over the past four years through contracts with Gov. Jeb Bush's office, the Secretary of State, the Department of Education and other government entities that are routinely part of Vasilinda's stories.

Vasilinda also was paid to work on campaign ads for at least one politician and to create a promotional movie for Leon County. One of his biggest state contracts was a 1996 deal that paid nearly $900,000 to air the weekly drawing for the Florida Lottery.

Meanwhile, the freelance reporter's stories continued to air on CNN and most Florida NBC stations, including WFLA-Channel 8 in Tampa.

On Friday, Vasilinda told the Herald-Tribune that his business dealings with state government don't influence his reporting.

"I have processes in place to make sure the products we put out for our news clients are free from bias from any source," Vasilinda said. "We absolutely keep arm's length between the two divisions of our company."

But Bob Steele, a journalism ethics professor at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, said Vasilinda's state government work "certainly raises some red flags."

"Journalists should be guided by a principle of independence, and their primary loyalty should be to the public," Steele said. "When journalists have loyalties to a government office or government agencies, those competing loyalties can undermine journalistic independence."

[...]

Steele said Vasilinda's government contracts are the latest blow to media credibility following the revelation earlier this year that three journalists were accepting government contracts to promote certain programs.

In January, USA Today revealed that President George W. Bush's administration had paid conservative columnist Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote No Child Left Behind, the president's education reform law.

After the Williams flap went public, two more conservative columnists were exposed for accepting money to promote Bush's beliefs on marriage.

[...]

In January, a Herald-Tribune reporter left repeated messages with Gov. Bush spokeswoman Alia Faraj requesting information about whether any journalists have received money from state agencies.

Faraj, who worked for Vasilinda at Capitol News Service before she was hired by the Bush administration, never responded. Faraj also did not return calls Friday seeking comment for this story.

You'd think they'd come up with something the would go the White House one better, say like hiring a drag queen -- Helena Handbasket or Bertha Vanation -- to ask Jeb some easy questions at press conferences. This is Florida, after all. (Well, we do have Katherine Harris...) But no, just your plain old garden variety conflict-of-interest.

In case you missed it, there was a tempest in a blogspot this past week about a posting by Jesse at In Search of Telford on his view that Atrios seems to be "coasting;" now that he's a big dog in the blogosphere -- being quoted in the SCLM and doing radio shows, he's not working as hard as he used to back in the early days of blogging -- like a year ago -- and relying instead on his steady readership to keep the momentum going.

It seems to have become a full-fledged squabble, and a lot of other bloggers are getting into the discussion about the back-and-forth. A sample of this is Pam's posting at Big Brass Blog, and Dohiyi Mir puts a good little Easter spin on it. It's been fun to read the comments and the arguments...it's a distraction from the sad and scary news from Florida and Minnesota.

Here's my take on this whole kerfuffle, if I may. Atrios is the owner of his blog. He can do whatever he wants to do with it. He doesn't owe his readers anything more that what he gives them, and he has the right to do whatever the hell he wants. If all he wants to do is post open threads and do short links and it fulfills his blogger spirit, then fine. Like everything, blogs evolve and change just as their writers do (oh, please, let's not start an argument about the theory of evolution). And Jesse has the exact same rights. He can blog about whatever he wants to, and if that includes a shot at Atrios, well, fine. He, like every other blogger, takes the risk of incurring a response through his comments, and I assume that both of these people are mature enough to accept that. I think it's a little silly that it we've allowed it to get to this, but that's kind of hard to say that in a week where the entire nation has been turned over to the story of the United States Congress and the State of Florida putting on a macabre road-show production of Weekend at Bernie's with Terri Schiavo. For the record, I have no idea if Atrios has ever linked to this blog. I have no idea if he's ever read this blog. I really don't care. Or, to quote the immortal Hawkeye Pierce, "The instrument has yet to be invented that can measure my indifference..."

So now that we've had this diversion, can we get back to work now?

Billmon has some thoughts on the Passion of Terri Schiavo.

Why has Terri become such an icon? Part of it no doubt is simply a reflection of the normal human tendency to respond emotionally to specific examples, rather than abstract generalities (Stalin knew his audience.) As a nation, we've also been media trained to respond to what we see on the tube. Like Pavlov's dogs, who sailvated when they heard the bell even when there was no food in front of them, we're now conditioned to become emotionally involved with people we see on television, even when they're complete strangers -- or fictional characters. So millions of the conservative faithful now feel they know Terri and her family and (boo, hiss) her husband, in a way they don't know, and would never want to know, the hundreds of thousands of fetuses aborted each year.

But what's also clear is that the Terri Schiavo story has a uniquely high emotional appeal for religious conservatives because of the ease with which her personal tragedy can be turned into a collective passion play -- using the traditional Christian imagery of sin, crucifixion, death and even resurrection. And so we get comparisons of Jeb Bush to Pontius Pilate:

A flier being passed around outside the Pinellas Park hospice where Schiavo has gone without food and water for more than a week urges Bush: "Please Do Not Repeat Pontius Pilate's Mistake This Good Friday."

And Michael Schiavo to Judas Iscariot:

Just as Jesus was betrayed by Judas, Terri was betrayed by her husband.

And, inevitably, Terri to the Big Kahuna himself:

TOM DELAY: Terri Schiavo has survived her passion weekend and she has not been forsaken.

Now many of these allusions are simply self-serving political bullshit, not sincere religious parallels. (Unless perhaps one wants to argue that in running away from the bad polling numbers, the Republicans are emulating Peter -- who after all, denied his master thrice after the Roman heavies showed up.) When conservative fireeaters scream that Terri is "dying for our sins," they don't literally mean that her death will wipe clean the spiritual ledger sheets of the true believers, they mean she's being murdered by the sins of the heathen leftists and "tyrannical judges" -- the modern-day Pharisees.

But I have no doubt that for many members of the Cult of Terri, the religious fevour they feel when they picture her pitiful body wasting away on her Pinella County Golgotha is utterly sincere. They are, almost in a literal sense, reliving the Passion of the Christ (the book and the movie.)

And this is where things go deep, because in embracing Terri as a martyr, the followers are following in the footsteps of some of their earliest Christian forebearers -- that scraggly crowd of wayward Jews and searching gentiles that converted the wisdom school of Yeshua ben Joseph into the Cult of the Risen Christ.

[...]

Maybe it will all blow over once Terri Schiavo's poor brain-dead body is finally laid to rest. But the emotional intensity of the event -- and the depth of the self-righteous hatred it has stirred on the religious right -- will be hard to forget. It feels like we've passed another milestone in the descent of our deeply divided, culturally inflamed society towards . . . well, I'd rather not think about what.

Thanks to rubber hose for the lead.

Harold Myerson in the American Prospect on the circling vultures of politicial opportunism.

For Tom DeLay, Terri Schiavo came along just in the nick of time. "One thing that God brought to us is Terri Schiavo, to help elevate the visibility of what is going on in America," DeLay told a group of Christian conservatives last Friday.

And what, exactly, is going on in the United States? "Attacks against the conservative movement, against me and against many others," DeLay told his flock. So God has now thrown in with DeLay in his efforts to pack the House ethics committee with his allies so that he no longer need be the subject of the scrutiny and censure of his peers.

I don't think this is what Martin Buber meant when he referred to an "I-Thou" relationship with the Lord, but I could be mistaken.

[...]

At its topmost ranks, and not only there, the party of Lincoln has become the party of Elmer Gantry. It peddles miracle cures and elixirs of life, to the benefit of the preachers, not the patients. When it comes to promoting real cures, today's Republicans are nowhere to be found. The Medicaid cuts pushed by the White House and passed by House Republicans last week would, if enacted into law, shorten the lives of numerous poor Americans living in conscious, not vegetative states. But that's a topic of no demonstrable interest to Christian conservatives, though I've yet to come across the biblical passage that exempts them from such concerns.

[...]

In their haste to curry favor with the Christian right, the Republican leaders have run roughshod over some very deeply rooted American -- and conservative -- beliefs. Americans tend to believe in their doctors, and in the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship. They believe in spheres of privacy where the state cannot intrude. There's no more distinctly American belief than the right to be left alone by government. Liberals and conservatives differ over which great causes compel a suspension of that right, but both sides of the spectrum acknowledge it axiomatically.

That places a special burden on advocates for governmental activism in the United States. At a minimum, the consequences that the government's intervention will have on private lives -- and on the principle of the private life -- need to be weighed. And by intervening by fiat in the Schiavo tragedy, at the last minute, from on high, with no serious inspection of the particulars of the case and to clear political ends, the Republicans failed that test abysmally. In that sense, the Schiavo affair looks like their equivalent of what court-ordered busing was to liberals: an act of social engineering that runs counter to Americans' desire for control over their own, and their families', lives.

Garrison Keillor offers some words of hope, comfort, and renewal in springtime.

It is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. You can sense the days lengthening on the frozen tundra and start to notice colors again. So we dye some boiled eggs pale blue and yellow and green, and put on a pink shirt and shove the ham in the oven, and head for church where, on Friday night, the choir sang, bleakly, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Into thy hands I commend my spirit" and the service ended in silence. Today, there are banks of lilies, and old ladies in big hats, and little girls in spring outfits, and the sermon will be about New Beginnings, and the force of love that drives life to triumph over death. Often it is a sermon in which the minister, trying much too hard to be profound on a high holy day, loses us in the first couple of minutes and we turn our attention to the hairstyles of the people in front of us. And we are visited by the images of the week's sad news. The woman in the Florida hospice, unable to move or to speak for 15 years, exploited by politicians. The teenage boy with the devastated childhood who came to his high school on Monday afternoon, intent on killing.

The fate of Terri Schiavo is one that everybody over 50 has considered long ago. The particular hell of a living death is one our parents sought to avoid. They didn't ask us to suffocate them with a pillow, but they did make it clear that lying inert in a nursing home was not how they envisioned spending their twilight years. Twilight is supposed to be brief. They were crystal clear about this. The state courts of Florida, and now the federal courts, seem to be clear on this. What's not clear is the dramatic intervention of the president of the United States, striding into the White House after his last-minute flight from Texas, deciding to "err on the side of life." One hopes that he will go on to make even bigger mistakes in behalf of children who lack basic medical care, or in behalf of suicidal teenagers. All week the news was about lawyers and politicians and rhetorical flourishes and there was almost nothing about the woman herself or who she was, may she rest in peace.

[...]

So here we are at Easter. I can't speak for you but to me the gospel of the Lord is what makes this sad world of March comprehensible. And it relieves us of the need to be profound about Terri or Jeffrey or the innocents at Red Lake High School who suffered his rage. We come into the Lord's house and kneel and we believe, or we don't, or we sort of do, but nonetheless we place them -- all of them, along with ourselves -- in the Lord's hands, and then we come out, and it's spring, or almost spring, and something else happens.

Happy Easter to those of you who celebrate it. To the rest of you, enjoy a spring day -- the one natural sign that no matter how dreary things can be, they do get better.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 5:59 AM  

Thanks to my friend Bob, here's a look at the place where from all this comes from. Well, most of it. Certainly all of my work on Bobby Cramer.

I affirm that I did not tidy it up before Bob took the picture. The only thing I did was move the lamp to the other side of the desk to give a clear shot of the bookshelves. Okay, so I'm a bit of a neatnick. That part of the stereotype I live up to.

Here's further proof that sitting on the fence makes me talk like I've got a big old stick up my butt.

Today was my car club's fourth annual car show in downtown Miami. We blocked off three blocks of Flagler Street -- from the beautifully restored Olympia Theatre (aka Gusman Hall) on NE 2nd Avenue past the intersection of Miami Avenue, which marks the center of town (all the streets are numbered from this point) and Burdine's -- I mean Macy's -- to the Courthouse. We had over sixty classic and antique cars ranging from a 1929 Packard dual-cowl phaeton to a 1980 Corvette Indy Pace Car. We had a complete section of Pontiac GTO's and -- of course -- a very nice contingent of classic Mustangs. The winner of the best-of-show was a magnificent 1946 Chevrolet pick-up truck.

The weather was great, although we have switched from "winter" -- clear skies, low humidity, highs in the 70's -- to summer -- hazy skies, high humidity, and a high of about 89. Spring -- all twenty minutes of it -- was lovely this year. That did not stop the crowds, though, and we had a better turn-out than usual.

As is my role in being a member of the club's board, I spent a lot of time schmoozing with our club members and telling them how wonderful their car is -- which is most often true; we don't have very many lemons in the lot. One of our more prominent members has a large collection of some of the best classic cars in the region, and he makes a very comfortable living providing investment counseling to car enthusiasts. He attends the annual Barrett-Jackson auction in Scottsdale -- the automotive equivalent of Sotheby's -- and always brings home one or two new toys, like a mint condition 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible or Thunderbird. I got to talking to him, and in the course of the conversation I mentioned that I have a blog, and I gave him one of my cards. Assuming from his age, his background, his financial status, and his occupation, I figured him for a conservative Republican, so I told him with a grin that Bark Bark Woof Woof is a liberal blog. Well, you could have knocked me over with a feather when he grinned back and said that he used to be a Republican...until about four years ago. He said he's always been a believer in the separation of powers and he's very worried that the current crop of radicals in office who are already in charge of two branches of the government -- the executive and the legislative -- are through cases like Terri Schiavo and appointments to the bench like Judge Pryor trying to take over the judiciary. Then he said he came up with a new definition of a Republican. I wrote it down:

Talks like a Democrat, promises like a populist, and acts like a dictator.

Wow. I may add that to my Favorite Quotes.

The best surprise came at the end of the show. As Bob and I were packing up, a very attractive young lady came up to us and shyly asked us if "Bark Bark Woof Woof" meant anything to us. It was my fellow Miami blogger Misha-Pooh. We'd exchanged e-mails this week and I told her I'd be at the show and to look for me hanging around a 1967 Austin-Healey. We had a very nice visit, exchanged cards, and I'm really looking forward to getting together with her and her husband so we can share blog stories and get to know each other. Turns out we're practically neighbors, too.

So this year's show was better than all the rest -- and not just because we had great cars.

I've often thought the NRA was over the top and they couldn't be any nuttier. Well, I was wrong.

I saw this news on the CNN crawl last night, and thanks to a lead from Bryan at Why Now, we read that a spokesman for the NRA suggests that in order to prevent shootings in schools like what happened in Red Lake, Minnesota, the teachers should be given guns.

Sounds like something from The Onion, doesn't it?

The idea of giving a teacher a loaded weapon in a classroom boggles the mind, and not just from the safety issue of having a lethal weapon in proximity to kids or the question of the liability or training. I have been a teacher. The pressures in class to maintain discipline, keep to the lesson plan, follow through with the scope and sequence of a curriculum, and bear with the intense transference of emotional highs and lows from student to teacher and back again come together to create an amazing combination of forces that makes it dangerous to have a loose piece of chalk lying around, let alone a .38 caliber pistol. Teachers are too close to the edge as it is to leave them the option -- or even the glimmer of an idea -- that they could pull a gun on a misbehaving student. (In some schools, the teacher would be outgunned if they were carrying a .357 Magnum.)

The speed of light may be constant, but this proves that stupidity has no limits.

Bob Herbert notes that while the rest of the country was caught up in the Schiavo case, the Republicans have been quietly doing some skulduggery on the budget.

President Bush believes in an "ownership" society, which means that except for the wealthy, you're on your own. The president's budget would cut funding for Medicaid, food stamps, education, transportation, health care for veterans, law enforcement, medical research and safety inspections for food and drugs. And, of course, it contains big new tax cuts for the wealthy.

These are the new American priorities. Republicans will tell you they were ratified in the last presidential election. We may be locked in a long and costly war, and federal deficits may be spiraling toward the moon, but the era of shared sacrifices is over. This is the era of entrenched exploitation. All sacrifices will be made by working people and the poor, and the vast bulk of the benefits will accrue to the rich.

F.D.R. would have stared slack-jawed at this madness. Even his grand Social Security edifice is under assault by the vandals of the G.O.P.

[...]

Conservatives insist the cuts are necessary to get the roaring federal budget deficit under control. But they have trouble keeping a straight face when they tell that story. Laden with tax cuts, the president's proposal will result in an increase, not a decrease, in the deficit. Shared sacrifice is anathema to the big-money crowd.

[...]

The advances in areas like education, antipoverty programs, health services, environmental protection and food safety were achieved after struggles that, in some cases, took many decades. To slide backward now (hurting millions of people in the process) because of a desire to siphon funds from those programs and hand them over as tax cuts to the wealthiest members of our society, is obscene.

This is not a huge national story. It's just the way things are. It was Herbert Hoover who said: "You know, the only trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They're too damn greedy."

You can trust the Republicans...to be Republicans.

In Search of Telford joins the The Liberal Coalition blogroll. It's run by Jesse, who used to host the late Gotham City 13. Welcome back, Jesse.

Some new additions to the blogroll:

Big Brass Blog - "What liberal politics has been missing."

Shakespeare's Sister - "On the Far Left Bank of the Mainstream"

The Heretik - "Born to Burn"

Pensacola Beach Blog - "A view from the beach."

Oops! I forgot skippy the bush kangaroo - famed in song and story.

Welcome, all.

To some, today, Good Friday, is a holiday. To others, it's another Friday. Either way, take a moment and catch up with The Liberal Coalition.

All Facts and Opinions visits Boston.

archy on the passing of a pope.

Bark Bark Woof Woof does some Cat blogging.

blogAmY on the grassroots peace movement.

bloggg goes to the well.

Chris's top 20 albums includes records I know.

Collective Sigh on smart eating.

Riggsveda at Corrente on Bush's priorities.

NTodd wants to know what your favorite Monty Python sketch is. (Dead Parrot!)

Echidne talks of freedom.

edwardpig volunteers his views on volunteers.

First Draft on the trouble Tony Blair is in over the war in Iraq.

The Fulcrum offers a new ribbon -- this one is for a real worthwhile cause.

The Gamer's Nook plays The SIMS 2.

Happy Furry Norbizness comes up with the ultimate ad for any Democratic congressional candidate.

iddybud reports on the Onondaga Nation's land-rights battle.

In Search of Telford does the math on the bio-oil numbers.

The Invisible Library gets a make-over.

Left is Right cites the words of a veteran of many left/right battles.

Make Me a Commentator on the historical higher standards of warfare.

Michael at Musing's musings on a U.S. election reform commission.

Pen-Elayne continues her Estrogen Month listing of bloggers who happen to be women. Warning: you could spend all day going through her links.

Respectful of Otters points to a bit of brilliance.

Ugarte at Rick's sends birthday greetings.

Rook Rants about the difference between civil war and insurgency.

upyernoz at rubber hose has a story to tell.

Scrutiny Hooligans goes underground.

Sooner Thought reports on Bush's trip to Albuquerque. I'll bet he didn't have the combo platter at Barela's.

Speedkill on the truth behind Easter.

Steve Gilliard on the new clothes for the Republicans.

T. Rex defends Florida -- we're not all nuts here.

Trish completes another story.

Wanda takes on Tom DeLay.

WTF Is It Now? has more news on Gannon/Guckert and his fakery.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat gleefully points to Republican in-fighting in Texas.

My car club has a show on Flagler Street in downtown Miami tomorrow in conjunction with Dade Heritage Days. Come on down and check it out if you're in the area; we'll be between NE 2nd Avenue and the courthouse. I'll be the guy wearing the cap.

In the middle of the Gannon/Guckert hoo-ha, I wrote Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida) an e-mail voicing my concern that the White House had been lax in their security regarding press credentials. Well, I got his response today:

Dear [Mustang Bobby]:

Thank you for contacting me about media accreditations for the White House.

As you may know, members of Congress have made inquiries into James Guckert, also known as Jeff Gannon, being granted press access to the White House. Please know that I'll continue to monitor the situation.

If you have any other concerns, please do not hesitate to contact me in the future.

Boy, I sleep better knowing that Bill Nelson is going to continue to monitor the situation. I'm tired of getting my updates on it from Doonesbury.

From the Traverse City Record-Eagle:

Tom Czarny hates having to take an Xacto knife to his students' textbooks, and he'd like to see it change.

Czarny teaches advanced placement biology at Traverse City Central High School. Page 994 of the class textbook includes a brief passage about abortion, which he dutifully cuts out before students get the books.

It's a decision Czarny inherited and one Traverse City Area Public Schools officials said is influenced by state law that prohibits the teaching of abortion "as a method of reproductive health."

"It's just an unhappy reality," Czarny said. "I don't like anything involving censorship. It's counterproductive and counter-intuitive to the goal of education."

TCAPS Superintendent James Pavelka said he was unaware the district was removing anything from textbooks until the Record-Eagle inquired about the practice.

But Sue Wilson, a TCAPS school nurse who chairs the district's sex education advisory board, said the district's administration sought a legal opinion in the 1980s and decided to remove any textbook references to abortion in the context of reproductive health.

Assistant Superintendent Jayne Mohr said since the state law is subject to some interpretation, TCAPS chose to err on the side of caution. The district could not immediately provide a copy of the 1980s legal opinion.

One thing is certain: if the students don't learn all the facts about sex education and reproductive health in school, they're going to find out about it the hard way.

Fifty years ago tonight, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams opened on Broadway. It was the third smash hit for Williams following The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.

I can't tell you how many times I've read it, taught it, and gone through it line by line. I still think it's one of the best pieces of writing in the English language. Unfortunately, it's the last great play Williams wrote.

The sad fact is that the director, Elia Kazan, made Williams change the play, removing the overt allusion to Brick's sexual confusion. This interference bothered the playwright to the end of his life and led to his addiction to alcohol and drugs.

The story of Cat's production in 1954 [sic] and the disaster that followed upon its enormous success must be told now.

Kazan immediately shared Audrey's [Audrey Woods, Williams's agent] enthusiasm for Cat but he said that it was faulty in one act. I assumed that he meant the first act, but no, it was the third act. He wanted a more admirable herioine than the Maggie offered in the original script.

Inwardly I disagreed. I thought that in Maggie I had presented a very true and moving portrait of a young woman whose frustration in love and whose practicality drove her to the literal seduction of an unwilling young man. Seduction is too soft a word. Brick was literally forced back to bed by Maggie, when she confiscated his booze. . .

Then I also had to violate my own intuition by having Big Daddy re-enter the stage in Act Three. I saw nothing for him to do in that act when he re-entered and I did not think that it was dramatically proper that he should re-enter. Consequently I had him tell "the elephant story." This was assaulted by censors. I was told it must be removed. The material which I then had to put in its place was always offensive to me.

I would not tell you this except for the consequences to me as a writer after Cat had received its Critics' Award and its Pulitzer.

Even though I always go crazy on opening nights, the New York opening of Cat was particularly dreadful. I thought it was a failure, a distortion of what I had intended. After the show was over I though I had heard coughs all during the performance. I suppose there weren't that many, probably the usual number. And it did become my longest-running play.

[...]

After that, I went to Italy with Frankie [Frankie Merlo, his lover] and for the first, no, the second time of prolonged duration, I was unable to write.

Strong coffee no longer sufficed to get the creative juices to flow.

For several weeks I endured this creative sterility, then I started to wash down a Seconal with a martini. And then I was "hooked" on that practice. - Memoirs by Tennesse Williams, 1975.

Williams never really recovered from the experience of Cat and the assault on his work by a well-meaning director and the uptight society of 1955. The script was softened up even more for the film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman -- no one in 1958 Hollywood was going to suggest that Newman's character might be gay.

The plays that followed -- works such as The Night of the Iguana, The Rose Tattoo, and Orpheus Descending -- are good, but I can't help wondering how much better they might have been if the battle in the first production of Cat had been left to Maggie and Brick.

Today this site will pass 50,000 visitors. (Update: according to Site Meter, it happened at 1:07 p.m.)

Wow.

I know that for some sites, 50,000 visitors is a weekly count, but for this humble little site that's been up for a little over 16 months, that's pretty good.

Thanks, everybody; I couldn't have done it without you, and I'm grateful for your comments and support.

(If you really want to make me happy, go here and pick out something nice for yourself.)

Via Talking Points Memo

It's not about Terri Schiavo. It's about me.

Maureen Dowd on the Holy Terror:

Oh my God, we really are in a theocracy.

Are the Republicans so obsessed with maintaining control over all branches of government, and are the Democrats so emasculated about not having any power, that they are willing to turn the nation into a wholly owned subsidiary of the church?

Frank Rich raises a Holy Racket:

...American moguls, snake-oil salesmen and politicians looking to score riches or power will stop at little if they feel it is in their interests to exploit God to achieve those ends. While sometimes God racketeers are guilty of the relatively minor sin of bad taste - witness the crucifixion-nail jewelry licensed by Mel Gibson - sometimes we get the demagoguery of Father Coughlin or the big-time cons of Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker.

[...]

It is a full-scale jihad that our government signed onto last weekend, and what's most scary about it is how little was heard from the political opposition. The Harvard Law School constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe pointed out this week that even Joe McCarthy did not go so far as this Congress and president did in conspiring to "try to undo the processes of a state court." But faced with McCarthyism in God's name, most Democratic leaders went into hiding and stayed silent. Prayers are no more likely to revive their spines than poor Terri Schiavo's brain.

The Democrats, wisely or not, have been largely silent in the Schiavo case itself. They have stood strongly against the overreach of Congress and the hypocrisy of the Republicans who want to extend universal health care to only one person, but they have probably learned their lesson that when your opponent is going out on a limb, the best thing to do is let him carry his own saw while you stand back and watch. That may draw the ire of some, but in the long term it may just work.

Margaret Talbot has a lengthy but fascinating profile of Justice Antonin Scalia in this week's The New Yorker. The article itself is not on-line, but you can get an appetizer of it in this Q&A with Amy Davidson.

Just how conservative is Scalia?

I think we can surmise that socially he’s pretty conservative—anti-abortion, pro-death penalty, anti-affirmative action, and so on. And that is how he votes on those issues on the Court. He would emphasize, though, that he does not reach these conclusions because they are the ones he’d prefer as a matter of policy—what he would prefer as a policy matter is, he would say, entirely irrelevant-but because, after reading the words of the Constitution or of a statute, that was the conclusion he had to reach. And it’s true that he sometimes comes to conclusions that don’t seem to comport with his own political or social beliefs. He likes to cite his vote in a flag-burning case, for instance, when he voted with liberals on the Court to protect flag desecration as symbolic political speech. “Scalia did not like to vote that way,” he said in a speech at the University of Michigan. “He does not like sandal-wearing, bearded weirdos who go around burning flags.”

It's worth a trip to the magazine stand to pick up a copy.

As a bonus, there's also John Lahr's rave review of Spamalot.

Via Shakespeare's Sister comes a link to What She Said! who is on the hunt for liberal male bloggers. Go there and see who's on the list and add to it if you can. I'm already there, thanks!

Personally, I'm all in favor of finding open-minded men...

From the Miami Herald:

PINELLAS PARK - Repeatedly rebuffed by the courts but armed with what they called a new diagnosis, top state officials pressured the Legislature today to act on behalf of Terri Schiavo's parents -- and they set the stage to take her into protective custody.

"Terri may have been misdiagnosed and is more likely she is in a state of minimal consciousness rather that in a persistent vegetative state," Gov. Jeb Bush said during an afternoon press conference. "I'm urging the Florida Senate to take up the bill . . . that will provide protection for Terri Schiavo and other vulnerable Floridians."

It didn't work. The Senate rejected the bill on a 21-18 vote.

Now, state officials said, they might attempt to place the brain-damaged woman under protective custody so her feeding tube can be reinserted. As a possible precursor of that event, they filed a new motion in state court in Tampa.

(According to the New York Times, that didn't work -- the state court turned down the motion to take Ms. Schiavo into protective custody. Okay, back to the Herald.)

The flurry of 11th-hour action included a dramatic press conference by Bush, in which he revealed a new and more optimistic diagnosis of Schiavo by a doctor who did not fully examine her.

He said that Dr. William Cheshire, a neurologist with the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, concluded that Schiavo may not be in a permanent vegetative state, as determined by many other doctors, but instead may be in a state of "minimal consciousness."

"This new information raises serious concerns warrants immediate attention . . .," the governor said. "It is imperative that she be stablized so that the adult protective services team can fulfill their statutory duty and review all the facts surrounding the case. If there is any uncertainty, we should err on the side of protecting her."

Other state officials said that Cheshire "made personal observations" of Schiavo at an undisclosed time in the past. He stood at her bedside observing her for less than an hour and, two days ago, watched two of the six videotapes in the court's possession, they said.

This is sick. How much many more hoops will they put the families through? How many more doctors watching videotapes will they consult? The fact that Dr. Cheshire is also a member of the Christian Medical Association, whose mission and beliefs seem to be more interested in church than in science, and whose Christian Physician's Oath reads, in part, "With God's blessing, I will respect the sanctity of human life. I will care for all my patients, rejecting those interventions which either intentionally destroy or actively end the lives of the unborn, the infirm, and the terminally ill" makes me wonder if Dr. Cheshire's diagnosis, regardless of how medically qualified he is, is entirely based on scientific fact.

Like I said, this is sick, but it's not a surprise. As we have seen time and again, the Bushes do not like to lose -- although President Bush seems only to happy at this point to walk away from it.

"This is an extraordinary and sad case," he said in Waco, Tex. "And I believe that in a case such as this, the legislative branch, the executive branch ought to err on the side of life, which we have. And now we'll watch the courts make its decisions. But we looked at all options from the executive branch perspective."

Later, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said that if the federal courts did not order the tube reinserted, "There really are not other legal options available to us." [NY Times again]

For once, Dubya seems to know better than Jeb when to let it go, but perhaps he's already reading the polls that show the vast majority of the country thinks Congress overreached with the Save Terri Schiavo bill. Jeb, on the other hand, is still considering his political future as the poster boy of the Christian Right. (Yes, he said he's not interested in running for the White House in 2008 -- yeah, right.)

Meanwhile, the Florida State legislature has spent more than 20 days of its annual 45-day session on this case. They've spent all of this time on one person while the rest of the state's business languishes. This is not how it's supposed to work, and even the Republicans are getting tired of it...so tired that they recessed for Easter Weekend today.

Stay tuned for further assaults on the law, logic, and more exploitation of the weak, the helpless, and the doomed.

Welcome another Friendly Business to the blogroll:

The Howling Pig

It's the home of "smelly soap and other stuff" offered by the clever wife of archy.

I needed a break from the throes of emotion and anger of the last couple of days, so I found something completely self-indulgent and -- with gas hovering at $2.15 a gallon -- completely irresponsible to drool over. The new four-hundred-and-fifty hp, six speed Ford Shelby Cobra GT500 pretty much fills the bill.

Excuse me while I daydream for a moment...

Sen. John McCain, sitting next to Bush at a rally for party loyalists and toadys in Albuquerque, took a few swipes at the AARP.

"Some of our friends, who are opposing this idea, say, `Oh, you don't have to worry until 2042.' We wait until 2042 when we stop paying people Social Security?" the Arizona Republican asked rhetorically at the Social Security event here.

[...]

"I want to say to our friends in AARP, and they are my friends in AARP, 'Come to the table with us,'" McCain said. "We not only have an obligation to seniors, but we have an obligation to future generations of Americans as well."

John, if you were planning on running for president in 2008, forget it.

Andrew Kohut says that while the country may vote for "moral values," we live our lives in the real world of pragmatism.

There's been a lot of speculation as to why the Democrats have been so tentative about taking a strong stand on the Schiavo case. Conventional wisdom has been that if they railed against the Republicans and their hypocritical trouncing of states' rights, they'd be viewed as insensitive to the plight of Ms. Schiavo -- basically using a Constitutional argument to let someone "starve to death," and many Republicans have said as much. Some conservatives have been gloating privately that this kind of issue is exactly what points out the difference between them and liberals. They -- the conservatives -- will go to any length to show compassion for a human life while the liberals only care that the law -- and trial lawyers -- is upheld, and Ms. Schiavo is nothing but a pawn.

But if what Mr. Kohut's survey shows is the true feelings of the country, the Republicans and right-wingers are skating on thin ice. Compassion in the abstract is all well and good -- every sperm is sacred, every child must be born, every life must be saved (well, as long as they have a good lawyer, and that doesn't include the death penalty). But when we are faced with the reality of watching a parent or child slip away until they are nothing more than a shell with a brain stem, no more cognizant of the world than an amoeba, the abstract ideal fades away. That's not life, and who wants to inflict that on anyone?

I got three Bark Bark Woof Woof shirts and a coffee mug from the Bark Bark Woof Woof Shop. I'll wear the golf shirt on Friday (we still have Casual Friday here) and drink my coffee out of the mug. There will be a new addition to the gallery this week, thanks to archy. Look for it soon.

I was genuinely and happily surprised with the high quality of the products. And the picture of Sam on the "ringer" t-shirt is adorable.

Now you have no excuse for not getting something from the shop.

The Republicans, who grasp at every chance to rail against "activist" judges, went to Federal Court in Tampa today in the matter of Terri Schiavo hoping that Judge Whittemore would be an activist and overturn seven years of Florida court rulings.

When two WASP boys shot up Columbine High School in suburban Denver, it was breaking-news/wall-to-wall live coverage on all the nets, the subject of national introspection by pundits and politicians, heroic stories on Larry King Live, a fund-raising plea by the NRA, and an Oscar-winning documentary. When it happened in Red Lake, Minnesota, it's a drop-in on the cable channels.

Why is that? Why do we care more about the angst-ridden teens in our suburbs than we do about the ones on the Indian reservations?

Happy birthday, baby brother. Wow; 49.

The Federal court has ruled in the Schiavo case.

TAMPA, Fla., March 22 - A federal judge here today refused to order the reinsertion of a feeding tube for the brain-damaged Terri Schiavo, despite the intervention of Congress and President Bush in the case, The Associated Press reported.

Judge Dames [sic] D. Whittemore of Federal District Court said the 41-year-old woman's parents had not established a "substantial likelihood of success" at trial on the merits of their arguments, the agency said.

The editors speak on the Schiavo case.

The New York Times has two editorials.

A Blow to the Rule of Law:

...Republicans have traditionally championed respect for the delicate balance the founders created. But in the Schiavo case, and in the battle to stop the Democratic filibusters of judicial nominations, President Bush and his Congressional allies have begun to enunciate a new principle: the rules of government are worth respecting only if they produce the result we want. It may be a formula for short-term political success, but it is no way to preserve and protect a great republic.

Congress's Midnight Frenzy:

The sight of Congress and President Bush intruding into the sufferings of the Schiavo family was appalling. Washington had years to properly consider the agonizing dilemmas that cases like this one raise for uncounted, less publicized American families. But the Republican leadership did nothing until the issue ripened to a maximum moment for simplistic political exploitation.

Most Americans appreciate the complicated and sensitive concerns at stake here far better than the politicians. Whatever the range of opinion on the underlying issue, polls show that the public recoiled at the sight of elected officials racing to make hay of this family's private pain. Those findings only underline the hubris of the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, and the other G.O.P. leaders. Their egregious pandering was directed not at the bulk of the populace, but at their base vote among the evangelical and fundamentalist conservatives who have been demanding greater deference since working to deliver Republican victories last year.

The political timidity of potential opponents was woeful. No one dared even demand debate in the Senate. In the House, many opponents seemed simply to prefer to stay away. Arguments against the bill were led by Florida Democrats, who had the most reason to be offended by Congress's crude overriding of state government.

Sanctimonious rhetoric rang out about the value of each individual life even as a strategy memo was reported circulating among G.O.P. lawmakers cynically relishing the points to be scored with the right-to-life political machine in next year's elections. The rush to save Terri Schiavo was mixed with the urge to get rid of Senator Bill Nelson, the Florida Democrat who faces re-election next year.

The Miami Herald:

Congress's intervention in the Terri Schiavo case is an extraordinary and probably unconstitutional intrusion into a personal family matter that traditionally has been the province of state courts. Simply put, Congress and the president didn't like the outcome of a case that already had been fully vetted in state court. So they challenged the case in federal court, alleging a violation of Ms. Schiavo's civil rights.

[...]

Congress' action is disturbing in many ways. We direct attention to just two areas of serious concern -- the government's incursion into a personal family matter and its possible violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Anyone even superficially aware of the Schiavo case knows that it involves a family's most difficult decision: When to terminate medical support to a loved one who cannot sustain life on their own. Today, science and medicine have advanced so much that people no longer simply get sick and die. But for most, the decision to stop or continue life-sustaining support is made without public fanfare by a surviving spouse, child, parent or relative. In fact, since Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube was removed Friday, hundreds of Floridians have been unhooked from ventilators, respirators and life-saving devices without one word from Congress.

[...]

No one in the congressional majority has directly observed Ms. Schiavo or listened to the testimony of experts. On its face, Congress' decision seems to violate a basic division of our governing structure, which assigns certain duties to the state and others to the federal government. The state court, not Congress, is empowered to hear family and probate matters. Yet Congress has passed a law, applicable to one person, without having considered the factual evidence on which the courts' decisions were based.

For Congress to intrude so wantonly in a family dispute is astonishing. For Congress to substitute its judgment -- unvarnished by the evidence and facts of the case -- for that of Florida's courts is wrong.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Oh, for the days when people just died. When a loved one who could no longer take soup from a spoon was known to have finished living. In those days, grieving families could quarrel with no one but fate. Heeding the sad fact that nothing can restore consciousness to a badly damaged brain, they studied the art of acceptance.

The world has since changed utterly, as the strange political kidnapping of Terri Schiavo makes plain. Perhaps the only gladness to be gleaned from this mad story is that the hostage herself is not really around to witness her exploitation. But Americans should be embarrassed on her behalf to see Washington's right-wing radicals seize this permanently unconscious woman for a totalitarian fibfest.

Totalitarian? What else can we call a government that elbows its way to a deathbed to dictate whether or not its occupant shall be allowed to die naturally? Where is the conservatism in insisting that a woman be interminably fed through a stomach tube -- despite her expressed wishes to the contrary? And how can America's chief champions of "the sanctity of marriage" justify their brazen intrusion into the personal lives of Terri Schiavo and husband Michael?

[...]

And so it is that House Majority Leader Tom Delay, R-Texas, has seen fit to call Michael Schiavo's attempt to honor his wife's wishes "an act of medical terrorism" and of "homicide" -- a characterization so vile it may qualify as slander. President Bush was so determined to "save Terri" that he winged his way back from vacation to sign a law tossing her destiny into the federal courts.

It's a silly obstructionist game, and if American liberty means anything, it will soon end. Federal court is the wrong place for reviewing state policy, and in any case this controversy raises no unresolved matter. But forget protocol: Thanks to Washington's bosses, the private business of a Florida man and his vegetative wife is headed for a trip through the federal court system. For Terri and Michael Schiavo, it's likely to be a victory tour: In ruling after ruling, the nation's courts have emphasized that individuals, not government, should make decisions about personal medical matters. How can the champions of "small government" -- the very authors of this vulgar, tyrannical escapade -- possibly disagree?

The St. Petersburg Times:

To justify federal intervention in the private tragedy of the Schiavo family, the White House has repeatedly extolled the president's belief that he should "err on the side of life." That is a contemptible hypocrisy.

On June 23, 2000, while still governor of Texas, George W. Bush allowed the execution of Gary Graham, a man whose claim to innocence was so strong that five members of his own, notoriously sanguinary parole board had argued to spare Graham's life. So had four justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Graham's murder conviction depended entirely on his identification by a stranger who said she had seen him briefly through a car windshield from more than 30 feet away. Two eyewitnesses who had been closer to the shooting said later that Graham wasn't the killer, but they had never been interviewed by his court-appointed counsel and were not called to testify at his trial.

Graham was 17 when arrested, making him one of the last juvenile offenders to be executed anywhere on this planet. The senior warden of Huntsville prison at the time wrote later that it was the worst execution he had commanded; that Graham "was extremely angry, and struggled until he was fully strapped down."

In washing his hands of Graham's innocence, Bush rationalized that Graham had committed other crimes. Indeed he had, and admitted them. But they did not justify his execution, given the shaky facts and the inherent unreliability of eyewitness identification. On that occasion, if not others, the policy of George W. Bush was to err on the side of death.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Haste often causes trouble. The congressional rush to throw itself into the Terri Schiavo case will lead to new difficulties in numerous situations.

Having spent decades unable to create a national health care system like those of other advanced nations, Congress suddenly took up one person's health care in an extraordinary Sunday session. The legislative and executive branches of government wanted so badly to intervene that they created a special, new jurisdiction for a federal court. Unavoidably, the measure's passage comes dangerously close to expressing a wish for specific judicial action.

[...]

Although the new law narrowly targets the Schiavo case, many backers indeed hope to create a general right for interventions. They would like nothing better than to see authorities able to force heroic medical interventions in any case. The aim would be to reverse the valuable progress society has made toward empowering individual and family decisions about the end of life.

We are certain that a Republican memo, given to The Washington Post and ABC News, made an astute judgment when it informed party lawmakers that intervening in the Schiavo case is "a great political issue." That makes it all the more impressive that the Eastside's new Republican member of Congress, U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert, voted against the ill-advised law, one of only five GOP House members to do so.

For most members, though, politics and a desire to play on voters' sympathies and ideologies dictated a rush to judgment. Now, America will have to sort out the consequences.

The Washington Post:

The prospect of a disabled person slowly dying by virtue of a court order issued over the strenuous objections of her parents is enough to trouble even the most ardent advocate of the "right to die." So Congress's lightning-fast passage of special legislation to force the federal courts to review Terri Schiavo's case might make a certain intuitive sense. Certainly one can feel only sympathy for the relatives torn apart by this case. But Congress has an obligation to rise above sympathy and intuition. Its precipitous action this weekend, supported by President Bush, was damaging and unprincipled.

[...]

The U.S. legal system is not supposed to be one of legislative "do-overs" in which Congress, if it doesn't like the outcome in a high-profile case, changes the rules on behalf of politically favored parties. It is supposed to be a system where litigants know the rules in advance and understand the jurisdictional boundaries of the courts that decide their cases. Lawmakers may believe that they acted this weekend to save a life, but they also took a step that diminishes the rule of law.

The Boston Globe:

The US Congress has no place at Terri Schiavo's bedside. Neither does the president of the United States.

[...]

ABC News and The Washington Post reported that a memo distributed to senators by Republican leaders over the weekend called the Schiavo case a "great political issue," adding that "the prolife base will be excited" by the debate. The memo also noted the vulnerability of Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who refused to support the effort to save Terri.

Using what is left of Schiavo's life to try to win votes is unconscionable, for it prolongs what medical experts have deemed hopeless. Turning her plight into an ideological circus with right-to-life protesters facing off against the right-to-die faction outside a hospice facility robs her of dignity and privacy -- which all human beings deserve, whether they are aware of what is happening or not.

Deciding to remove life support from someone in Schiavo's condition is an agonizing choice best made in consultation with doctors and clergy and one's own conscience. It is a decision that demands quiet thought, not the roar of demagogues framing sound bites.

Finally, the incomparable Pat Oliphant:

If there are any editorials out there that speak in favor of what the Congress and Bush did in this matter, I'd like to hear about them.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 6:01 AM  

David channels Claude Rains in Casablanca:

I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

Russell Jacoby has a great essay in The Nation about the newest fad on campus: conservatives whining that they are under-represented on the faculties of the nation's colleges and universities.

Conservatives complain relentlessly that they do not get a fair shake in the university, and they want parity--that is, more conservatives on faculties. Conservatives are lonely on American campuses as well as beleaguered and misunderstood. News that tenured poets vote Democratic or that Kerry received far more money from professors than Bush pains them. They want America's faculties to reflect America's political composition. Of course, they do not address such imbalances in the police force, Pentagon, FBI, CIA and other government outfits where the stakes seem far higher and where, presumably, followers of Michael Moore are in short supply. If life were a big game of Monopoly, one might suggest a trade to these conservatives: You give us one Pentagon, one Department of State, Justice and Education, plus throw in the Supreme Court, and we will give you every damned English department you want.

Conservatives claim that studies show an outrageous number of liberals on university faculties and increasing political indoctrination or harassment of conservative students. In fact, only a very few studies have been made, and each is transparently limited or flawed. The most publicized investigations amateurishly correlate faculty departmental directories with local voter registration lists to show a heavy preponderance of Democrats. What this demonstrates about campus life and politics is unclear. Yet these findings are endlessly cited and cross-referenced as if by now they confirm a tiresome truth: leftist domination of the universities. A column by George Will affects a world-weariness in commenting on a recent report. "The great secret is out: Liberals dominate campuses. Coming soon: 'Moon Implicated in Tides, Studies Find.'"

The most careful study is "How Politically Diverse Are the Social Sciences and Humanities?" Conducted by California economist Daniel Klein and Swedish social scientist Charlotta Stern, it has been trumpeted by many conservatives as a corrective to the hit-and-miss efforts of previous inquiries by going directly to the source. The researchers sent out almost 5,500 questionnaires to professors in six disciplines in order to tabulate their political orientation. A whopping 70 percent of the recipients did what any normal person would do when receiving an unsolicited fourteen-page survey over the signature of an assistant dean at a small California business school: They tossed it. With just 17 percent of their initial pool remaining after the researchers made additional exclusions, some unastounding findings emerged. Thirty times as many anthropologists voted Democratic as voted Republican; for sociologists the ratio was almost the same. For economists, however, it sank to three to one. On average these professors voted Democratic over Republican fifteen to one.

[...]

The notion that faculties should politically mirror the US population derives from an affirmative action argument about the underrepresentation of African-Americans, Latinos or women in certain areas. Conservatives now add political orientation, based on voting behavior, to the mix. "In the U.S. population in general, Left and Right are roughly equal (1 to 1)," Klein and Stern lecture us, but in social science and humanities faculties "clearly the non-Left points of view have been marginalized." This is "clearly" not true, or at least it is not obvious what constitutes a "non-Left" point of view in art history or linguistics. In any event, why stop with left and right? Why not add religion to the underrepresentation violation? Perhaps Klein, the lead researcher, should explore Jewish and Christian affiliation among professors. A survey would probably show that Jews, 1.3 percent of the population, are seriously overrepresented in economics and sociology (as well as other fields). Isn't it likely that Jews marginalize Christianity in their classes? Shouldn't this be corrected? Shouldn't 76 percent of American faculty be Christian?

[...]

More leftists undoubtedly inhabit institutions of higher education than they do the FBI or the Pentagon or local police and fire departments, about which conservatives seem little concerned, but who or what says every corner of society should reflect the composition of the nation at large? Nothing has shown that higher education discriminates against conservatives, who probably apply in smaller numbers than liberals. Conservatives who pursue higher degrees may prefer to slog away as junior partners in law offices rather than as assistant professors in English departments. Does an "overrepresentation" of Democratic anthropologists mean Republican anthropologists have been shunted aside? Does an "overrepresentation" of Jewish lawyers and doctors mean non-Jews have been excluded?

Higher education in America is a vast enterprise boasting roughly a million professors. A certain portion of these teachers are incompetents and frauds; some are rabid patriots and fundamentalists--and some are ham-fisted leftists. All should be upbraided if they violate scholarly or teaching norms. At the same time, a certain portion of the 15 million students they teach are fanatics and crusaders. The effort, in the name of rights, to shift decisions about lectures and assignments from professors to students marks a backward step: the emergence of the thought police on skateboards. At its best, education is inherently controversial and tendentious. While this truth can serve as an excuse for gross violations, the remedy for unbalanced speech is not less speech but more. If college students can vote and go to war, they can also protest or drop courses without enlisting the new commissars of intellectual diversity.

I've never been able to fathom where the right-wingers get off crying about Political Correctness Run Amok when their solution seems to be a gerrymandered faculty that would conform to political correctness but on their terms.

The students at colleges and universities are, ostensibly, adults. Most of them are old enough to vote and therefore we assume that they're old enough to think for themselves and challenge different points of view. Where does the right-wing get off assuming that students who disagree with their professors -- whether they're liberal or conservative -- are too stupid or too weak in their convictions to stand up for what they believe? College is supposed to challenge your beliefs; how else are you going to learn something new?

This whole argument, as Mr. Jacoby points out, is based on the fact that conservatives, no matter how many branches of government they control (all of them at the present time), how many Wall Street firms they run (most of them), or how many SCLM outlets they own (all of them), they're still worried that somehow they're not really entitled to whatever it is they think they deserve, and it really bothers them. And well it should.

A friend of mine does great art with stained and fused glass. He's got a website, too:

High Pines Studio

Check out some of his amazing work.

I've added a link under Friendly Business Sites so if you're looking for something special later on, that's where to look.

Ed Wasserman on the lack of outrage over the whoring -- literal and figurative -- in the news media.

I can't believe it.

Not just that the Bush administration is spending tens of millions of dollars of public money -- the same tax dollars that it says it collects from us only with the greatest reluctance -- to produce self-congratulatory, news-like videos that are meant to be mistaken for independent reporting.

Not just that Bush's Justice Department, faced with a straight-up finding by Congress' nonpartisan Government Accountability Office that such propaganda is illegal, tells executive branch agencies to keep on doing it anyway.

Not just that make-believe news from both government and business is sneaking into what the public is encouraged to believe is honest reporting, and is welcomed by TV bosses, who are tickled that somebody else is picking up the tab to fill newscasts their overfed owners are too cheap to stock with real news.

That's plenty bad. But what leaves me sputtering in disbelief is that this unfathomably cynical attempt to subvert even the possibility of independent, truth-seeking media is being so abjectly, so supinely accepted.

Where is the outrage? We have Congressional hearings over doped-up outfielders and not this? We have regulators bleeding from the eyeballs over a naked breast but not over systematic deceit suckering millions of TV viewers? Why don't the same newspapers that pulp acres of woodland to carry Monday's weekend sports roundup and Thursday's Model Homes Bazaar devote some serious space to exposing this assault on the late, great media?

[...]

We already knew the Bush administration was covertly paying ostensibly independent commentators huge amounts of our money to drool over its policies in public. Now we learn that the administration spent $254 million in its first term -- double what the Clinton people spent, which was already way too much -- on outside public relations contracts. That has paid for hundreds of pre-packaged, ready-for-broadcast TV reports from at least 20 federal agencies, according to a lengthy report in The New York Times.

And that doesn't include the propaganda produced for foreign eyes, thanks to the miracle of the Wired World, blows back to penny-pinching TV news directors in the States. These dedicated professionals then routinely strip out evidence of governmental provenance and splice in their own staff voice-overs, creating cut-rate facsimiles of real journalism -- minus the critical judgment and independence of mind we expect of real journalists.

Maybe the administration's real aim is not so much to exploit news channels as to discredit them, finally and for good.

[...]

Time has come to get mad. Once, we had a regulatory system that insisted broadcast licenses be issued in accordance with the "public interest, convenience and necessity." Once, we had a two-party Republic that included an opposition party. Once, we had media that did what watchdogs customarily do -- bark. Sometimes even bite.

No longer. Now it's time we did our own snarling.

Way ahead of you, Ed. It's another layer behind the name of this blog.

Tim Grieve in Salon sums up the early-morning roughshod run over the Constitution in the name of scoring political points for the Religious Reich.

At 12:20 a.m. today, the House of Representatives passed emergency legislation to extend the life of Terry Schiavo. Schiavo's parents have run out of legal options in Florida courts, and there is no legal jurisdiction for a federal court to take the case. At least, there wasn't until now. Under the bill adopted by the Senate Sunday and the House this morning, a single federal court in Florida will be granted jurisdiction to hear a lawsuit "on behalf of Theresa Marie Schiavo for the alleged violation of any right of Theresa Marie Schiavo under the Constitution or the laws of the United States relating to the withholding or withdrawal of food, fluids, or medical treatment necessary to sustain her life."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist called the measure "a unique bill passed under unique circumstances that should not serve as a precedent for future legislation." Now, where have we heard that before? Oh, right, it was in another case from Florida in which Republicans chose political expediency over their oft-proclaimed faith in federalism. When Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the vote count in 2000 and handed the presidency to George W. Bush, they warned that their intrusion into a matter traditionally left to the states was based on legal reasoning "limited to the present circumstances." As in Bush v. Gore, Republicans backing federal intervention in the Schiavo case have to go out of their way to say they're not setting precedent because they're trapped by their own political interests into doing that which they would usually abhor. In Bush v. Gore, Republican Supreme Court justices anxious to put Bush in the White House had no choice but to embrace an equal protection argument they otherwise would have rejected out of hand. In the Schiavo case, Republicans in Congress anxious to appease the religious right have no choice but to ignore the tenets of federalism they usually trumpet. Their message in both instances: We're doing this now because we can, but don't expect to get away with it yourself if the shoe is ever on the other foot.

Bush will sign the legislation this morning, and the administration is eager to put its best "compassionate conservative" spin on it. "We ought to err on the side of life in a case like this," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said over the weekend. "I think most people recognize that this case involves some extraordinary circumstances."

Oh, yes. We're certain that George W. Bush and each and every one of the other Republicans who scrambled back to Washington from God-knows-where for this weekend's macabre political theater did so solely out of concern for the life of Terry Schiavo. We're sure there's no interest in scoring cheap political points or shoring up support from the religious right. But if you're one of those awful cynics who would raise a question about politics at a moment such as this, you might be interested in the memo that was distributed to Republican senators late last week -- the one that calls the Schiavo case a "great political issue" for the GOP. As ABC News and the Washington Post reported, the memo reminded senators that their "pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue."

We're glad someone is.

If you believe that this is an "extraordinary circumstance" and will set no precedent, I have a bridge to sell you. Your first clue is the fact that the spokesman for Terri Schiavo's parents is Randall Terry. Yes, that Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue and the darling of the Religious Reich. They see this as exactly the kind of case to bootstrap anti-abortion legislation and overturn assisted suicide laws in Oregon. Once they've done that, they will find other ways and means to get their pet legislation passed -- overturn Roe. v. Wade, ban gay marriage, ban stem cell research, outlaw sexy cheerleading, regulate cable TV speech, and they'll do it because they know they can roll the United States Congress. They're going to get their "culture of life," by God, if they have to stomp on every right in the Constitution to get it.

PS: Ed Kilgore, sitting in at TPM, finds a little more on Randall Terry's cynical motivations. Pure as the driven slush.

At the moment of the equinox:

7:34 Eastern Time, March 20, 2005

"Spring has sprung, the grass is ris!
I wonder where the flowers is?"

A New York Times editorial goes after Bambi.

Forgive us if you are among the millions of gardeners, farmers, bird-watchers, drivers, fence builders, claims adjusters, body-shop operators, roadkill scrapers, 911 dispatchers, physical therapists and chiropractors who know this already.

White-tailed deer are a plague.

In their overwhelming abundance, they are prime examples of an ecosystem badly out of balance. They denude forests, making life impossible for vulnerable native plants and birds while allowing invasive species to thrive. While deer profoundly vex suburban gardeners, that annoyance pales next to the lethal danger they pose to drivers.

Now, even bird lovers want the deer subdued. The New Jersey Audubon Society, in a report last week, urged the consideration of lethal means to solve the problem, arguing that fencing, contraception and other gentle tactics have proved largely ineffective. The group wants the government to rethink conservation policies it says are intended to maximize herds for hunters, and to consider - especially in the suburbs, where hunting is too dangerous - bringing in sharpshooters.

It may sound harsh, even strange coming from an organization whose mission is to foster "environmental awareness and a conservation ethic." But the group - which does not speak for the National Audubon Society - has it exactly right.

Deer are simply heeding the biological imperative to go forth and multiply. With no natural predators, and the suburbs a year-round salad bar, they have slipped out of their ecological niche - and it's our fault, not theirs. The deer did not ask human beings to create the kind of predator-free suburban landscapes in which they now thrive. But the mountain lion, gray wolf and bobcat are not about to return, and the houses and highways are staying put. People, therefore, must own up to their place in a compromised food chain, and assume the responsibility for managing it well.

Unfortunately, deer contradict our innate assumption that only ugly creatures can be vermin. As the recent release of the "Bambi" DVD reminds us, they seem miscast as villains. But wise conservation means looking at the environment as a whole - from the smallest wildflower on forest floor to the biggest brown-eyed herbivore. The whole system - not just the prettiest mammals - needs protection.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer takes the Bush administration to task for its energy policy.

If the Bush administration were serious about energy independence for the United States, Cabinet members would be hard at work on innovative ideas. They would come up with ways to encourage conservation, put alternative fuels on a fast track and increase U.S. refinery capacity immediately.

Instead, the administration last week won a Senate vote to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.

The vote was a narrow 51-49 victory. Environmentalists promised to keep resisting. It's not clear that the Republican-led House of Representatives will sign off on the parliamentary atrocity of treating the policy decision as a budget matter. The GOP Senate leadership employed the maneuver to avoid a filibuster.

As drilling opponents have pointed out all along, the refuge is unlikely to boost overall oil supplies. Even a bonanza would fail to make this country a significant contributor to the world's oil reserves.

The Arctic drilling will fail to contribute to independence from foreign energy sources. As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman pointed out in Friday's Post-Intelligencer, the oil mostly will go to meet demand from Japan and China.

Of course, if drilling occurs in the Arctic refuge, it may become the precedent that the energy industry and its advocate in residence, Vice President Dick Cheney, want to see for plundering environmentally sensitive public lands. Arctic drilling might well open the way to extracting oil from more public lands, especially in Western states, and off the coasts from Washington to Florida.

Despite the administration's desires, the public doesn't want coastal oil platforms along the Pacific Coast or any place else. What would serve the public is bolder thinking on three fronts: efficiency, new energy sources and smoothly making the transition from oil to more environmentally friendly alternatives.

Some of the answers have been obvious for years, such as higher vehicle mileage standards and other measures to encourage conservation. Even the Bush administration knows new energy sources have a place, though its narrow focus on hydrogen isn't promising.

Still, until alternative fuels become a larger factor, this country and the world are dependent on oil. As the Financial Times reported recently, one factor in rising oil prices is a lack of refinery capacity. There are no plans for new U.S. refineries, the paper noted.

Congress and the administration should be looking seriously at ways to encourage a new U.S. refinery with model environmental standards. Absent new commitments on that and other scores, though, their talk about energy independence is a pure pose.

Ed Kilgore, sitting in for the honeymooning Josh Marshall (Mazel tov!) at Talking Points Memo, echoes the sentiments of many -- including me -- on the Terri Schiavo case.

...I have been reluctant to wade into the Terri Schiavo case, given the comic-book biology and tabloid metaphysics that have dominated media treatment of this poor woman's fate.

But that was before Republicans called Congress into an emergency session this weekend to take jurisdiction over the case away from the Florida courts, and take control of Schiavo's body away from her husband.

During a long drive today, while trying to find a basketball broadcast on the boombox that provides radio in my very old car, I happened upon the voice of Tom DeLay pontificating on the Schiavo case, and it made me physically ill. His claim was that what's happening to Schiavo would be illegal if it happened to a dog.

The cynicism and hypocrisy of that line of reasoning is breathtaking, even coming from Tom DeLay. Untold tens of thousands of American families face the same agonizing decision--whether or not to continue mechanical life-support in terminal cases--every year. My own family faced it a few years ago. And very often, the issue is the same as in the Schiavo case: taking out the feeding tube, or continuing it indefinitely.

The only unique thing about this case, of course, is the extended legal battle between Shiavo's husband and parents, and the media notoriety that has made it so ripe for political opportunism.

Do DeLay, his supporters in Congress, and those Men of God so conspicuously on display down in Florida really propose to picket every intensive care unit, nursing home, and hospice in America to ensure that no family facing Schiavo's situation is allowed to let their loved one die? Is Congress really going to legislatively ban natural death so long as some theoretical means is available to continue it? Oh no, says James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and DeLay's prime enabler in this weekend's grandstand play: the "emergency" legislation is "narrowly targeted" and not designed to set a precedent.

In other words, this is pure political exploitation of a private family conflict that's become a media sensation, even though it involves a very common, if, for the people involved, agonizing event.

As such, the GOP's Schiavo intervention is of a piece with other cynical efforts by Bush and his supporters to signal support for a "culture of life" without much regard for logic and consistency. It's a whole lot like the Bush position on human embryo research, as a matter of fact. Many thousands of human embryos are created each year in fertility clinics; it's only when it is proposed that these certain-to-be-discarded embryos be used for life-saving research that the Hammer comes down and Congress is asked to take a stand for life. Wouldn't want to inconvenience or embarass possible Republican voters utlilizing those fertility clinics, right?

But this time, I suspect the transparent cynicism of the we're-absolutists-on-life-if-it's-in-the-news posture of the GOP may backfire. It is very hard to pose as a pro-family, pro-states-rights, anti-Washington political party when you call Congress into an "emergency session" to interfere with the laws of Florida and the prerogatives of one poor husband trying to respect his wife's wishes. If, as we are told, George W. Bush is about to lend his authority and signature to this disgraceful exhibit of overweening government power, the persistant media idea that he's just a genial well-meaning man who happens to preside over a party of loony extremists and corrupt hacks needs to die a natural death.

I hear there's some sort of basketball tournament going on. What's up with that?

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 7:12 AM  

John McKay at archy draws great sketches, and he's been turning his pen to his friends in The Liberal Coalition and coming up with logos for our blogs. Here's the one he did for me.

Mustang Bobby

Very cool. I especially like the touch of the little grin...just my style. Thanks, John.

NTodd had the guts to put up a picture of his home office space, and I commented that it looked "like a goat went through the buffet line at CompUSA and then exploded." Snarky, yes, but some people work well in a space like that. Considering the output NTodd gets from that Hell's Mouth of clutter, I'm doubly impressed.

It got me thinking about what kind of space people work in, so I wrote a long post describing my space here. When I finished it I thought it was better suited for Bobby Cramer, so I've posted it there; go read it. Then tell me what kind of space you work in and maybe what it says about you.

As readers and especially fellow bloggers using Blogger have noticed, there's been trouble in Blogland over the last few weeks. They promise to get it fixed "soon," and if you can read this, they've done something. As I write this, I have no idea when -- or even if -- this will get posted, but hey, it's a Saturday morning and I've not got much else to do. Therefore I'm going to cram several posts into this one and see if it will fly.

The Terri Schiavo case is all over the papers and the TV, and of course the blogosphere is at full throat on it. Several of my fellow TLC friends have picked up on the thread I started when the US Senate tried to subpeona not only Mr. Schiavo but Terri herself. Upyernoz, the keeper of rubber hose and an attorney, trackbacked to my post and started a long comment thread with his thesis on the abuse of the subpeona. Against my better judgement I jumped into the fray and proved that I made a good move when I started my own blog rather than just keep commenting on others because I know I will never win a Koufax for "Best Commenter." You, Dear Reader, on the other hand, are free to jump in over there (once you're done here, of course) and add your thoughts, and you'll probably do a better job than I did.

The one thing that really bothers me about this case is that once again we as a nation have found a made-for-media story that polarizes an issue, glosses over the feelings of those involved and gives very little thought to the past or the future. Since when do absolute strangers with nothing but a political agenda get to inject themselves into the most private aspects of our lives? The rank hypocrisy of those who rail about "imperial liberal judges making up laws" then running to the courts for relief would be funny as hell if it wasn't such an old joke. And if the State of Florida or the United States Senate says that all people in her condition and who didn't leave written instructions must be preserved and cared for, who is going to foot the bill to pay for maintaining these human Produce sections? Did we not decide this issue decades ago in the case of Karen Ann Quinlan, and at that time did we not say that such a thing should never happen again?

At some point this story will come to a sad end and the attention will move on to the next celebrity basket case. Such is life. (And my critics complain my novel is episodic. Gee, how lifelike.) I sure as hell don't have the answers, and neither do the ghouls in the U.S. Senate or the "right-to-life" crowd (who vow to kill abortion doctors), but one thing I do know: I'm going to update my will and make sure that if something happens to me and I end up like a brussel sprout, my family will pull the plug and dump my ashes off Longs Peak, accompanied by the strains of the Largo movement from the Dvorak Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" and Nether Lands by Dan Fogelberg. Don't call CNN. (Does that count as "written instructions"?)

Moving on: The Miami Herald has a cage match in the Opinion section on the future of Hillary Rodham Clinton. One is a laudatory piece by Cliff Schecter who says that "she's good but unelectable," and lists the liabilities that the right wing is holding in storage until she runs. Interesting to note that Mr. Schecter's byline notes he is "a political analyst for the Sinclair Broadcast Group." Yeah, those guys. Take that with a box of Morton's. The second piece is from Bogdan Kipling (there's a name right out of...Kipling) who is the Washington correspondent for the Halifax Chronicle Herald. Kipling says the Democrats would be fools not to run HRC in 2008 -- she tested, she's hugely popular overseas (as if that was a prerequisite), and she actually wants to run. Frankly, I hope she doesn't -- not because I have anything against her or her politics. I just don't want to be a part of the Full Employment Act for Wingnuts in 2008.

Shorter David Brooks

Politicians should learn to hold hands and sing "Kum By Ya" or the voters will get disgusted.

No, really?

Tomorrow morning at 7:34 Eastern Time the sun will be over the equator. It's the vernal equinox -- the beginning of Spring. I'll have pictures. Millions of people will try to stand an egg on its end at that time to test the theory that special gravitational forces apply when the sun is over the equator. The fact that it's bullshit will not dissuade people from trying...and later making an omelette.

The first play based on a blog hits the boards.

"Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog From Iraq" is not a very good play, but it's worth your attention for two reasons. It's the only political drama in New York written from the point of view of an Iraqi who lived through the American invasion, and, for better or worse, it inaugurates an entirely new (and seemingly inevitable) theatrical genre - the blog play.

Melding two chic cultural forms, the documentary drama and the blog, the Six Figures Theater Company has turned the online writings of Riverbend, the pseudonym of a 25-year-old Baghdad woman who has become something of an Internet celebrity, into a dramatically awkward series of readings.

Riverbend is a thoughtful writer whose articulate, even poetic, prose packs an emotional punch while exhibiting a journalist's eye for detail. She is decidedly antiwar and critical of the Bush administration, but not polemical. Judging from the play, the tone of her writing about the war is one of exasperated disappointment.

[...]

While Riverbend has a fascinating voice, this production, adapted by Kimberly I. Kefgen and Loren Ingrid Noveck, never makes the case for her blog as a piece of drama. What is lost is the sense of one singular, idiosyncratic personality, which, of course, is exactly what emerges so vividly from the blog. Instead of building a character, the show includes readings of her words from three women and one man, which adds to the muddled feel. [Jason Zinoman, New York Times]

I've been wondering when the first blog-based play would tread the boards, and I'm pretty sure that this won't be the last attempt at it. But theatre is the only art where you can fail and still succeed.

"O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention." Henry V, William Shakespeare.

From the Toledo Blade:

Senate Republicans embroiled in the life-or-death legal battle over the severely brain-damaged Terri Schiavo invited the Florida woman to testify to Congress in a procedural move intended to keep her on life support.

The Senate Health Committee has requested that Terri and her husband Michael appear at an official committee hearing on March 28. A statement from the office of House Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., today said the purpose of the hearing was to review health care policies and practices relevant to the care of non-ambulatory people.

Frist’s statement noted that it is a federal crime to harm or obstruct a person called to testify before Congress, thus stopping any action that could threaten the health of the woman.

Calling a brain-dead woman to testify before the Senate as a procedural move is both cruel and farcial.

She will, however, be testifying before people in her same condition, so I suppose it makes sense after all.

There are some new members to the Bark Bark Woof Woof blogroll:

Cutting to the Chase - film reviews and news from Oklahoma

firedoglake - where "bedlam is dreaming of rain"

Rugo's Ramblings - thoughts of a lawyer, mom, and keeper of a hound from hell.

There's a lot of outrage going on. Let's see what's rattling the cages in The Liberal Coalition this week.

Natalie at All Facts and Opinions could just spit.

archy is outraged at the new head of the EPA.

Bark Bark Woof Woof on the American agenda.

blogAmY is outraged at the slaughter of seal pups.

bloggg on the connection between autism and mercury.

Chris gets some interesting calling cards.

Collective Sigh welcomes Karen Hughes to the turd-polishing business.

Riggsveda at Corrente bids adieu to a cold Cold War warrior.

NTodd welcomes a conservative think-tank to Vermont.

Echidne on the idea of Professor Limbaugh.

edwardpig reports on corruption of a massive scale.

First Draft is gagging from the torturous gaggle.

The Fulcrum holds out hope for ANWR.

The Gamer's Nook celebrates a Demonic birthday.

Happy Furry Norbizness rages on about the movies.

iddybud raves about John Edwards.

The Invisible Library is quiet during spring break, but wait...

Left Is Right has a reminder on the freedom of the press.

Make Me A Commentator reviews a review of a book by a Ari Fleischer.

Michael's Musing's Musings on the outrage of the kidnapping of the Terri Schiavo case.

Pen-Elayne welcomes Spamalot and continues her highlighting women bloggers.

The Republican Sinner this and every week is Tom DeLay.

Respectful of Otters is back! Yea!

Rick on the intricacies of the game.

Guy at Rook's Rant had a very bad day.

rubber hose asks a St. Patrick's day question.

Scrutiny Hooligans on the threats against Hugo Chavez.

Sooner Thought on the secret plans for Iraqi oil.

Speedkill on the truth behind the news from the M15 cluster.

Steve Gilliard appeals to liberal bloggers.

T. Rex on the benefits of drilling in ANWR.

Trish Wilson enlightens us with the feminine technique.

Wanda on how to discuss Social Security with a conservative (if you must).

WTF Is It Now?? on the fake news.

Steve at Yellow Doggerel Democrat adds his considerable writing talent to the discussion on same-gender marriage.

Spring break starts this weekend -- as does the season itself -- and the beaches and bars here in Florida are filled with vomiting frat boys. Ah, the rustle of spring.

Sidney Blumenthal in Salon.com adds some interesting notes to l'affaire DeLay.

The uncertain fate of the majority leader, known as "The Hammer," and to the Republican members and lobbyists in Washington as "the concierge of Capitol Hill," threatens to undermine the Bush administration's agenda; the political machine DeLay has built by allying special interests, lobbyists and Republicans; and the Republican dominance of Congress. Conservative leader Paul Weyrich pronounced that defending DeLay is nothing less than a life-or-death matter -- "spiritual warfare."

[...]

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has impaneled a federal grand jury to hear testimony into possible fraud and public corruption by one of the Washington lobbyists closest to DeLay, Jack Abramoff, and his business partner, public relations executive Michael Scanlon, DeLay's former press secretary. That investigation might yet encompass two other DeLay allies, former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed, another business partner of Abramoff's, and Grover Norquist, a lobbyist who organizes conservative groups behind DeLay's initiatives and who has also profited from his dealings with Abramoff. [Emphasis added.]

I would love to see Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist get busted. Ralph's pretty enough that you know he'd end up married to the guy in D-block with the most cigarettes, and Grover -- well, you saw The Shawshank Redemption.

As Frank Rich notes, just when Bush is promoting privatizing Social Security via Wall Street, up pops the poster boy for Ponzi schemes with retirement accounts, Ken Lay.

His trial is still months away, but there he was last Sunday on "60 Minutes," saying he knew nothin' 'bout nothin' that went down at Enron. This week he is heading toward the best-seller list, as an involuntary star of "Conspiracy of Fools," the New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald's epic account of the multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme anointed America's "most innovative company" (six years in a row by Fortune magazine). Coming soon, the feature film: Alex Gibney's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," a documentary seen at Sundance, goes into national release next month. As long as you're not among those whose 401(k)'s and pensions were wiped out, it's morbidly entertaining. In one surreal high point, Mr. Lay likens investigations of Enron to terrorist attacks on America. For farce, there's the sight of a beaming Alan Greenspan as he accepts the "Enron Award for Distinguished Public Service" only days after Enron has confessed to filing five years of bogus financial reports. Then again, given the implicit quid pro quo in this smarmy tableau, maybe that's the Enron drama's answer to a sex scene.

[...]

Americans do have short memories, but it's the administration's bad luck that not just Kenny Boy but a whole brigade of bubble plutocrats have lately been yanked back into the spotlight by their legal travails: WorldCom's Bernard J. Ebbers, Tyco's L. Dennis Kozlowski, HealthSouth's Richard M. Scrushy, Global Crossing's Gary Winnick. No one is glad to see them. The public knows that the economy has not fully mended, and that there remain different economic rules for insiders than for the panelists drafted for the presidential Social Security roadshow. The new bankruptcy bill embraced this month by Republicans and Democrats alike throws Americans paying usurious credit-card interest to the wolves even as wealthy debtors remain protected.

[...]

It's against this backdrop that the returning Mr. Lay - completely unrepentant, still purporting on "60 Minutes" that he's an innocent victim of others - could be the Democrats' new best friend. A Texas tycoon who helped create the political career of George W. Bush only to be discarded when scandal struck has re-emerged at just the precise moment when he might do his old buddy the most harm.

One thing that's always amazed me is that the richer some people become, the dumber they get and more prone to commit fraud. Speaking for myself, I'd be happy to make enough money to the point where I'm pleasantly dense and not under indictment.

In honor of my friends Brian, Derek and Judy, all of whom I know are direct descendants of Irish heritage:

And to all who share a touch of the Old Sod -- including, apparently, my own family -- Éireann go Brách

(A tip o' the lid to Bryan for the Gaelic greeting with all the right accents.)

My very first link from Jonah Goldberg:

Wisconsin is considering allowing the hunting of cats. Not cougars or mountain lions or tigers on the loose but putty-tats: Sylvester the cat. Morris the cat. Garfield.

The aim is to prevent the mass killing of birds by cats, mostly of the feral — i.e., wild — variety. In other words, some people want to give granny a shotgun so she can kill Sylvester before he gets Tweety Bird.

I'm more of a dog guy, but I like cats. Nonetheless, a cat massacre makes more sense than you might think.

I vote we turn Jonah into a scratching post.

Driving home last night I heard a piece on NPR about how President Lyndon Johnson worked behind the scenes with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to bring about the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On March 15, 1965, President Johnson went before a joint session of Congress to tell the assembled members and the nation "there is no 'Negro problem.' There is no 'white problem.' There is an 'American problem,'" and that the denial of civil rights to any part of the population is a denial of the American dream.

That got me thinking about the ruling in California about same-gender marriage. The ruling by Judge Richard A. Kramer is magnificent in its simplicity: the concept of equal protection under the law does not allow for exceptions simply because tradition or commonly-accepted mores has dictated them. Byran at Why Now has written a concise and logical piece on how exceptions have insidiously tampered with the progress of justice and freedom in this American experiment. Those exceptions have always been accompanied by dire predictions of death, doom, and destruction by those who are unable or unwilling to accept the fact that progress is not a freebie; it has to be paid for by giving up cherished but antiquated modes in favor of the scary and new -- like black people or women voting. The American Agenda has always been about the scary and new. That's why this country was founded in the first place.

The Religious Reich has raised millions of dollars by scaring their followers with dire predictions of what will happen if the "Homosexual Agenda" is allowed to infilrate our nation -- "traditional marriage" will be destroyed if gays and lesbians are allowed to marry people of their own gender, and there will be sodomy and acts of pornography in the high schools if gay teens are allowed to acknowledge their presence through the simple act of being themselves. Both of those points are laughable; traditional marriage is doing a fine job of destroying itself without any help from the gay community. Ironically, gays and lesbians want the traditional marriage -- a home, a family, and all the rights and responsibilites that come with it. How that can possibly impact straight people is beyond me, unless the gay couples are harvesting their spouses from mixed-gender couples. (It's been known to happen, but that's another story.) Teenagers struggle with their new-found sexuality regardless of whether they're straight or gay, and anything that can be done in the schools or family to help them deal with it, whether its a gay-straight alliance or just a sympathetic teacher, is lightyears beyond the shame and hazing that is rampant today thanks to the cultural and social stigma of being perceived as "different."

To paraphrase President Johnson, there is no "homosexual agenda;" there is just the American agenda. Gay and Lesbian Americans simply want the same things straight people do. We want the same rights and responsibilities as anybody else, and we want the full protection of the laws. Halfway measures like civil unions are a nice gesture, but to quote Benjamin Franklin, that's like calling an ox a bull: he's grateful for the compliment but he'd really like to have restored that which is rightfully his.

The fight for civil rights for African-Americans did not end with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Indeed the struggle went on and it wasn't pretty. The Watts riots, the summers of turmoil in 1967 and 1968 in Detroit, Newark, and other cities and the battle over school desegregation and bussing went on long after and some remanants still linger today. It goes without saying that the present occupant of the Oval Office will never stand in front of a joint session of Congress and advocate equal rights for gays and lesbians; indeed, he has done the opposite. The Vermont laws and the Masschusetts and California rulings are small steps that will be challenged just as the marchers from Selma were challenged on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, hopefully without the bloodshed. But to pick up their mantra, we shall overcome someday.

From the AP:

LANSING, Mich. (AP) -- Public schools would be required to set aside time each day for students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance under a bill unanimously approved Tuesday by the state Senate.

The legislation says students couldn't be forced to say the pledge if they or their parents objected.

[...]

Many schoolchildren in Michigan already recite the pledge, but some schools and teachers don't make time for it, said Republican Sen. Patricia Birkholz of Saugatuck, who sponsored the bill.

"It's very important that our schoolchildren have time to remember what our country is built on," she said. "It's less than a 30-second reminder every day."

When I taught school we had the pledge every morning as part of the homeroom ritual. It was as meaningful to my students as the announcement of the dance troupe's bake sale at recess, and making it a requirement isn't going to change that. But hey, it's just another reminder that the Republicans are the party of limited government and personal responsibility...

Robert Steinback points out the difference between liberals and conservatives as demonstrated by the Terri Schiavo case.

Liberals see an obligation to attend to the needs of the distressed while they're alive. Conservatives apply that obligation only before birth and after death -- brain death, in the case of Terri Schiavo. In between, they'd say, we're all on our own.

[...]

It's ironic that conservatives -- who usually argue vehemently for the sanctity of marriage -- would trust the state's judgment over that of a brain-damaged individual's spouse. But it's consistent with their preference for the state's judgment over that of a woman regarding the entity within her womb.

For all other decisions between birth and death -- except marriage; most conservatives believe the state has a right to limit an individual's choice of spouse -- the state's superior judgment mysteriously vanishes. The fate of the poor, the suffering, the disadvantaged, the young, the elderly and their ilk should, in the conservative view, rest entirely with their families and private enterprise. If those options fail any particular person -- well, tough break. There's always begging.

The contemporary American liberal, contrary to allegation, is not enamored of unlimited government and socialism. Rather, the modern liberal view attempts to apportion responsibility where it most logically should reside: Let families do what the family does best; let the marketplace sort out what competition does best; let government meet the needs government is best equipped to address; and let individuals be as free as possible to direct their own lives.

It's a balancing act, and not always an easy or obvious one. This innate complexity has hamstrung American liberalism in recent decades -- trumped by the conservative philosophy, which always seems to distill easily to pat sound-biteable phrases. Liberalism just gets too bogged down in -- dare I say it? -- nuance.

Which brings us back to Schiavo. One side says, "Life is sacred!" Quick, concise, easily packaged. The other side says, "But there are many complex, interlocking issues to consider."

As the Florida Legislature will prove again, simplicity almost always wins -- even when the logic is questionable.

I'll give you a simple liberal solution: if the Legislature wants to keep Ms. Schiavo in limbo for the rest of her natural life, let's move her from the nursing home and into the Governor's mansion and let him look after her every day and pay for her medical care. Let that be a reminder of what the sanctity of life really means.

From the New York Times:

At least 26 prisoners have died in American custody in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002 in what Army and Navy investigators have concluded or suspect were acts of criminal homicide, according to military officials.

The number of confirmed or suspected cases is much higher than any accounting the military has previously reported. A Pentagon report sent to Congress last week cited only six prisoner deaths caused by abuse, but that partial tally was limited to what the author, Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III of the Navy, called "closed, substantiated abuse cases" as of last September.

The new figure of 26 was provided by the Army and Navy this week after repeated inquiries. In 18 cases reviewed by the Army and Navy, investigators have now closed their inquiries and have recommended them for prosecution or referred them to other agencies for action, Army and Navy officials said. Eight cases are still under investigation but are listed by the Army as confirmed or suspected criminal homicides, the officials said.

Only one of the deaths occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, officials said, showing how broadly the most violent abuses extended beyond those prison walls and contradicting early impressions that the wrongdoing was confined to a handful of members of the military police on the prison's night shift.

Among the cases are at least four involving Central Intelligence Agency employees that are being reviewed by the Justice Department for possible prosecution. They include a killing in Afghanistan in June 2003 for which David Passaro, a contract worker for the C.I.A., is now facing trial in federal court in North Carolina.

Human rights groups expressed dismay at the number of criminal homicides and renewed their call for a Sept. 11-style inquiry into detention operations and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. "This number to me is quite astounding," said James D. Ross, senior legal adviser for Human Rights Watch in New York. "This just reflects an overall failure to take seriously the abuses that have occurred."

It sounds like the only Law & Order we've brought to Iraq and Afghanistan have been re-runs of the TV program.

Had enough of Tom DeLay and his questionable ethics and would prefer that he was back in Texas fumigating cockroaches? Sign the petition from the Public Campaign Action Fund to let them know.

Via Daily DeLay.

From the New York Times:

Premier Silvio Berlusconi, facing rising opposition to the war in Iraq and public outcry over the deadly U.S. shooting of an Italian agent in Baghdad, announced Tuesday that Italy will start withdrawing its 3,000 troops from Iraq beginning in September.

While taping a state TV talk show to air later Tuesday, Berlusconi said, "In September we will begin a gradual reduction of the number of our soldiers in Iraq."

Usciamo dal Dodge.

How much do you spend a week on gas?

Atrios posed this question, and having just stopped to fill the tank this morning, it was fresh in my mind when I saw it over there.

I spend between $20 to $22 about every ten days (depending on my travels) in the Mustang. I paid $2.05 a gallon for regular today in Miami.

Howard Kurtz reports that FOX News isn't fair and balanced.

In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says.

By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists' own views.

These findings -- the figures were similar for coverage of other stories -- "seem to challenge" Fox's slogan of "we report, you decide," says the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

In a 617-page report, the group also found that "Fox is more deeply sourced than its rivals," while CNN is "the least transparent about its sources of the three cable channels, but more likely to present multiple points of view."

Yeah, I know he wrote about this yesterday, but I'm still recovering from the shock.

Today he turns over most of his column to P.J. O'Rourke's take (and take-down) of John Kerry's analysis of the news coverage of the 2004 campaign and some other slightly related tidbits, including the level of awareness of the general population with the "phenomenon" of blogging. Gee, Howie, you're beginning to sound like a blogger yourself.

The White House defends their promulgation of propaganda.

In an opinion last week, the Justice Department concluded that the practice was appropriate as long as the videos presented factual information about government programs. The memo was sent to heads of federal departments and agencies.

"The prohibition does not apply where there is no advocacy of a particular viewpoint, and therefore it does not apply to the legitimate provision of information concerning the programs administered by an agency," according to the Justice Department memo.

The advice conflicts with the opinion of the Government Accountability Office, which is the investigative arm of Congress. The GAO says that video news releases amount to illegal "covert propaganda" when they fail to make plain that the government is behind the releases.

[...]

The video news releases -- from the Pentagon, Agriculture Department, Census Bureau and other agencies -- have the appearance of other segments in news programs and frequently are not identified by local stations as being produced by the government.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan suggested the lack of disclosure was the fault of the broadcasters, not the government.

"Many federal agencies have used this for quite some time as an informational tool to provide factual information to the American people," he said. "And my understanding is that when these informational releases are sent out that it's very clear to the TV stations where they are coming from." [Salon.com]

Yeah, right. C'mon, Scott -- you're busted. Just admit it, willya?

Paul Krugman:

The Republicans blew it on Social Security, but Joe Lieberman screwed it for the Democrats.

David Brooks:

The Republicans blew it on Social Security, but of course it's the Democrats' fault.

Once again the proponents of less government and more individual liberties strike a blow for government to barge in on the most intimate and delicate decisions a family has to make.

With just days left before Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is to be removed, the Florida Legislature moved once again to intervene in the case, rushing ahead Monday with a bill to keep the brain-damaged woman alive.

A vote on "Terri's Law II," put together by top Republicans in the House and Senate, is expected later this week and could go to Gov. Jeb Bush for his signature Friday, the same day the tube is scheduled to be removed.

In late 2003, after Schiavo's feeding tube had been taken out when a court order permitted it, Bush and lawmakers intervened in the long-running battle over her fate, passing a law that allowed the governor to have the tube reinserted. But that effort was ultimately struck down by the state Supreme Court, which ruled the law unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the governor's appeal.

In an effort to get around another legal challenge, legislators have crafted a much broader bill. It says that no patients in a persistent vegetative state -- Schiavo's diagnosis -- can have their feeding tubes removed unless they meet one of several conditions, including:

• They have left written instructions approving the denial of food and water.

• There is "clear and convincing evidence" that before becoming incapacitated, they "expressly" directed the withholding of food and water.

• Death is imminent and a feeding tube would not help.

"We as a state would have this position for this situation for these people," said Sen. Dan Webster, a Republican from Ocoee and one of the bill's sponsors. "The state would err on the side of life."

And to make sure that the new law would affect Schiavo, a bill provision states that it would apply to all Floridians in a persistent vegetative state who are still alive. [Miami Herald]

I don't want to sound churlish, but nowhere in this gesture of generosity to the right-to-life crowd do I see any mention of who's going to pay to keep people like Ms. Schiavo alive. Long-term care isn't cheap, and I'd feel as if there was some real intent behind this intrusion if the state was willing to assume the expense of maintaining these people for the rest of their so-called natural life. As it is, I don't see anything in this law other than foisting the burden of the law and morality back on the shoulders of the families, who are already carrying the burden of loss, and relieving the state of any responsibility. The Legislature is in effect saying, "You can't let them die and you have to pay to keep them alive. Good luck." That's cruel to both the victim and their family.

Update: Go see Jim Morin's cartoon in today's Miami Herald. He nails it.

That little phrase is the bulwark of bad business practices and just plain stubborness, and it has always made me crazy when I hear it, especially when the person who is saying it has run out of any rational excuse for changing whatever it is that they've always done a certain way.

It apparently has the same effect on Judge Richard A. Kramer of San Francisco Superior Court who ruled today that California's ban on same-gender marriage is a violation of the state constitution's equal protection clause.

While many aspects of history, culture and tradition are properly embedded in the law, Judge Kramer wrote, the prohibition against same-sex marriage is not. "The state's protracted denial of equal protection cannot be justified simply because such constitutional violation has become traditional," he wrote.

[...]

That law is contrary to the spirit of the state constitution, the plaintiffs argued, and today Judge Kramer agreed.

"Simply put, same-sex marriage cannot be prohibited solely because California has always done so before," the judge said. [New York Times]

You can read the text of the tentative ruling here (pdf).

I have no doubt that this ruling will be appealed and eventually this issue will make it to the U.S. Supreme Court in some form or another -- although this case won't be the source because it's a state, not a federal case. And I have no doubt whatsoever that there will be setbacks. But at last a court has finally said, "Hey, just because we've done it this way for so long doesn't make it right." We finally got around to saying that about slavery and segregation, and it's about time we said it about whom we want to marry.

An entry at Bobby Cramer on finding something I'd forgotten about and using it.

Blogger, the provider of this service, has been behaving badly the last couple of weeks to the frustration of not just a few people, myself included. Many's the time I've dashed off a pithy and witty piece of writing only to have it vanish with an electronic *pouf* like Wile E. Coyote at the bottom of a canyon. I've learned a few tricks, like copying the text and placing it in a text file or saving it as a draft, but a fat lot of good that does me when I can't even access the control panel.

Blogger, in its inevitably chirpy style, has a Blogger Help page and a "known issues" column which seems to have been updated about the same time that John Kerry was making his move in the Iowa caucus. The status page now says that as of last Friday, "we've had a bout of stability problems with Blogger. Yesterday morning, users were encountering errors when trying to login and access their blogs."

What causes this?

Most of these problems were caused by an increased amount of load on the blogger.com application servers. We have addressed this problem by increasing the number of machines that serve the site. However, there is more work to do. In addition to bringing on more machines and completing additional capacity planning, we are also working to identify and correct problematic database queries. These queries are poorly optimized and lead to the increased load that jeopardized the service in the past few days.

Oh. I hate it when my queries are poorly optimized, don't you? And they do feel our pain. Jason informs me "[a]s a Blogger user, I completely understand how unacceptable the performance has been in the past few days and it is the focus of the engineering team to fix these issues." I feel better already.

If you want to see a really hissy take on this, check out Lambert's screed over at Corrente.

Now let's see if this will load...

According to Mike Allen in the Washington Post, the wagons are circling around Tom DeLay, but so are the buzzards.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) has dismissed questions about his ethics as partisan attacks, but revelations last week about his overseas travel and ties to lobbyists under investigation have emboldened Democrats and provoked worry among Republicans.

With some members increasingly concerned that DeLay had left himself vulnerable to attack, several Republican aides and lobbyists said for the first time that they are worried about whether he will survive and what the consequences could be for the party's image.

"If death comes from a thousand cuts, Tom DeLay is into a couple hundred, and it's getting up there," said a Republican political consultant close to key lawmakers. "The situation is negatively fluid right now for the guy. You start hitting arteries, it only takes a couple." The consultant, who at times has been a DeLay ally, spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he could not be candid otherwise.

At least six Republicans expressed concern over the weekend about DeLay's situation. They said they do not think DeLay necessarily deserves the unwanted attention he is receiving. But they said that the volume of the revelations about his operation is becoming alarming and that they do not see how it will abate.

And amazingly, the Democrats are showing some backbone and even taking advantage of Mr. DeLay's problems.

Republican leaders had thought they had built a fortress against future trouble by changing House rules in January and by changing the House ethics committee's Republican membership in February to include members closer to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and DeLay. In one previously unreported example of the tight connections, Rep. Lamar S. Smith (R-Tex.), one of the committee's new members, was co-host of a 2002 fundraising breakfast to benefit the DeLay-founded political action committee that is now the subject of a grand jury investigation in Texas. The grand jury is looking into whether the PAC improperly used corporate funds to influence the outcome of state legislative races.

DeLay's legal defense fund received contributions from two of the new ethics committee members, Smith and Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). The committee admonished DeLay three times last year. Republican leaders later sought the rule changes that made it more difficult to bring new ethics charges against Republicans.

Democratic leaders have introduced a resolution to repeal the rules and said they plan to try to force Republicans to publicly defend the changes at a time when the news media are reporting about DeLay's relationship with lobbyists now under criminal and congressional investigation.

The rule changes require at least one member of each party to support an investigation before it is begun. Under the old rules, if the chairman and top Democrat did not agree on what to do with a complaint within 45 days after it was determined to be valid, an investigative subcommittee was automatically created. Now, a complaint is automatically dismissed if the committee does not act within 45 days.

Democrats opened their protest Thursday, at the ethics committee's first meeting under its new leadership, by preventing the panel from organizing. The committee must adopt rules to function, and those were voted down by a 5 to 5 party-line vote, leaving the House with no mechanism for investigating or punishing members.

Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (W.Va.), the committee's top Democrat, said in a telephone interview yesterday that he will not release his freeze on committee action unless the House undoes the rule changes, and he said he has begun recruiting Republicans to back him. He said he may use a tactic known as a discharge petition, which could force a bill to the floor if enough Republicans back him.

That's so partisan!

Ron Bonjean, Hastert's communications director, said the party's leaders have no intention of giving in. "It's very clear we're at an impasse caused by Democrat partisan politics," he said. "The House has already voted on rules for this Congress, and there is no credible reason to do it again."

Yeah, that's a Republican tactic. Work your own side of the street.

Dan Allen, DeLay's communications director, said his boss was a natural target for Democrats. "Congressman DeLay is a fixture of the conservative movement who's been a very effective leader that works with Republicans to get results," he said. "That alone makes him a target of the Democrats and their allies, but it is also the reason he enjoys the steadfast support of House Republicans."

Uh oh...that's just what they tell you right before they toss you overboard. Here, Tom, hang on to that anchor for just a moment, willya?

According to this report in the New York Times, all the money spent on upgrading security at the nation's airports still leaves vulnerabilities at places like general aviation fields, ports, and railroad stations.

Despite a huge investment in security, the American aviation system remains vulnerable to attack by Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorist groups, with noncommercial planes and helicopters offering terrorists particularly tempting targets, a confidential government report concludes.

Intelligence indicates that Al Qaeda may have discussed plans to hijack chartered planes, helicopters and other general aviation aircraft for attacks because they are less well-guarded than commercial airliners, according to a previously undisclosed 24-page special assessment on aviation security by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security two weeks ago.

But commercial airliners are also "likely to remain a target and a platform for terrorists," the report says, and members of Al Qaeda appear determined to study and test new American security measures to "uncover weaknesses."

[...]

The aviation sector has received the majority of domestic security investments since the Sept. 11 attacks, with more than $12 billion spent on upgrades like devices to detect explosives, armored cockpit doors, federalized air screeners and additional air marshals.

Indeed, some members of Congress and security experts now consider airplanes to be so well fortified that they say it is time to shift resources to other vulnerable sectors, like ports and power plants.

In the area of rail safety, for instance, Democrats are pushing a $1.1 billion plan to plug what they see as glaring vulnerabilities. "This is a disaster waiting to happen," Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, said last week at a Senate hearing marking the one-year anniversary of the deadly train bombings in Madrid.

[...]

The report, dated Feb. 25, was distributed internally to federal and state counterterrorism and aviation officials, and a copy was obtained by The Times. It warns that security upgrades since the Sept. 11 attacks have "reduced, but not eliminated" the prospect of similar attacks.

"Spectacular terrorist attacks can generate an outpouring of support for the perpetrators from sympathizers and terrorism sponsors with similar agendas," the report said. "The public fear resulting from a terrorist hijacking or aircraft bombing also serves as a powerful motivator for groups seeking to further their causes."

The report detailed particular vulnerabilities in what it called "the largely unregulated" area of general aviation, which includes corporate jets, private planes and other unscheduled aircraft.

"As security measures improve at large commercial airports, terrorists may choose to rent or steal general aviation aircraft housed at small airports with little or no security," the report said.

Speaking as someone who works less than a mile from one of the largest seaports in the country, not to mention the general aviation heliport just across the causeway, it kind of makes me wonder what good it does for me to get my nail clippers confiscated at MIA if I stand a chance of getting bombed (and not in a good way) at my desk.

Standing in the supermarket check-out line, I spot GQ. This month they're profiling The 10 Greatest Actors of Our Generation. Russell Crowe, Johnny Depp, and Leonardo DiCaprio top the list.

Next month I suppose they're going to list the "Ten Greatest Philosophers," leading off with Dr. Phil, Dr. Laura, and the guy on the corner of NE 15th and Biscayne with the Winn-Dixie shopping cart and his treatise on Calvinism in the post-modern era.

The New York Times on the Bush administration's aggressive efforts to control the news by starting their own Ministry of Propaganda:

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.

[...]

An examination of government-produced news reports offers a look inside a world where the traditional lines between public relations and journalism have become tangled, where local anchors introduce prepackaged segments with "suggested" lead-ins written by public relations experts. It is a world where government-produced reports disappear into a maze of satellite transmissions, Web portals, syndicated news programs and network feeds, only to emerge cleansed on the other side as "independent" journalism....

Read the rest here.

Sen. Barack Obama talks to Sandy Banks of the Los Angeles Times about the future -- his and the country's.

The junior senator from Illinois insists that he has no immediate designs on the White House. But even if Obama, 43, runs as an octogenarian — and even though he has been diplomatically dismantling racial and political boundaries since he became, in 1990, the first black president of the Harvard Law Review — his candidacy would make this country squirm and shudder and maybe even come unglued.

Obama, after all, is no Tiger Woods, cobbling together a treacly amalgam to represent each strain of his heritage. Never mind his biracial DNA. He considers himself a black man. His gene pool may be free from the taint of slavery, but his experience as an American is not.

[...]

Obama recounted his family's story in "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," first published 10 years ago, before he began his political career. The publisher reissued the autobiography last summer, during Obama's Senate race. The book reveals a man who is intellectually intense, emotionally honest and racially aware — qualities certain to strain the affections of a nation that prefers its leaders simple and self-righteous, no soul-searching allowed.

[...]

Question: Are you concerned that your image in the book will hurt you down the line if you run for higher office?

Obama: I'm always tickled by the idea that the book has these explosive revelations. It's me, as a 15-year-old. My observations about race were honest discussions of how I felt at that time, which doesn't reflect my current views on race or my wisdom about race.

Some of the problems that ail both Africa and African Americans are self-inflicted. [By the book's end] the values I end up ascertaining as most important are not black or white, but universal values — that all of us are woven into a tragic history and part of our job as human beings is to overcome the ailments of that tragic history. My father wasn't able to do that successfully…. I'm still in the process of trying to do it ….

The notion that you can't speak honestly without damaging yourself … that's the worst thing about politics….

We create such fear among our elected officials they can't be heartfelt without being punished…. If I sacrifice my ability to be honest, then I shouldn't aspire to these offices in the first place.

Maureen Dowd takes on the issue of women in the men's room -- that is, the editiorial column.

While a man writing a column taking on the powerful may be seen as authoritative, a woman doing the same thing may be seen as castrating. If a man writes a scathing piece about men in power, it's seen as his job; a woman can be cast as an emasculating man-hater. I'm often asked how I can be so "mean" - a question that Tom Friedman, who writes plenty of tough columns, doesn't get.

[...]

There's been a dearth of women writing serious opinion pieces for top news organizations, even as there's been growth in female sex columnists for college newspapers. Going from Tess Harding to Carrie Bradshaw, Dorothy Thompson to Candace Bushnell, is not progress.

This job has not come easily to me. But I have no doubt there are plenty of brilliant women who would bring grace and guts to our nation's op-ed pages, just as, Lawrence Summers notwithstanding, there are plenty of brilliant women out there who are great at math and science. We just need to find and nurture them.

There's been a lot of discussion recently about the role and presence of women in opinion-making in the media, and by that I am including the blogosphere. Frankly, I haven't paid a whole lot of attention to it because I think it is one of those arguments that could go on forever without any prospect of a satisfying resolution. I don't really pay attention to the gender of the writers I read, and I don't give more or less credence to someone's opinion based on their chromosonal make-up. If they're a good writer amd they make me think, I'll read them. If they're not, I won't.

I suppose it comes down to where you place the modifier: there are women writers, and writers who are women. In the first case, the assumption is that they write about "women's" issues; in the second they write and also happen to be women. There's a difference, and it's the writer herself who draws the distinction. I don't think we should prejudge their views based on that. I also don't think that the reader should forget that no one can write completely objectively and that regardless where they place the modifier, their life experiences will tint their writing. And well it should -- that's why they're writing. By the way, the same applies to gay and lesbian columnists or bloggers. There are gay bloggers who write about nothing but gay issues and who see everything in those terms. Speaking for myself, I'm a blogger who happens to be gay. I don't blog about exclusively gay issues, and I try not to let that part of my life overwhelm my writing here any more than I do the other aspects of my life, such as my job or my reading material. (I do, however, try to do it with a little taste and charm...)

For the record, roughly a third of The Liberal Coalition is populated by bloggers who are women. Granted, this ragtag group is a microbe in the firmament of the blogosphere, but even a cursory glance at the other blogs on blogrolls throughout the Coalition shows that there is a strong female presence and I've linked to a lot of them based solely on the merits of their writing, not their gender. That -- to me -- seems to be the simplest and most accurate measure of their contribution, and the only one that really matters.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 7:12 AM  

Last week's Sunday Reading pointed to an article in the New York Times on Hillary Rodham Clinton's ability to make nice with everybody, including Republicans, in her New York senate career. Eleanor Clift of Newsweek looks at it in terms of her chances in 2008.

What’s Hillary up to? She’s laying the groundwork for a presidential run in ’08, and she’s paying attention to the voters. Postelection focus groups revealed that what concerns parents is not the Jerry Falwell agenda of opposing gay marriage but how to raise children in a sex-and-violence-soaked culture. Hillary is not a newcomer to the issue. As First Lady, she sponsored a children’s television summit at the White House, and she was a big proponent of the V-chip to screen out unwelcome programming. In her book, “It Takes a Village,” she has a chapter called, “Seeing Is Believing,” where she blames the deadening effect of television for contributing to the alienation of young people.

Republicans ridiculed her book, accusing her of wanting to replace families with government, but now that media have exploded onto the Internet and spun off games like Grand Theft Auto, they’re with Hillary looking for a heavier federal hand. Keeping company with Hillary is frustrating for the right because she’s proving to be something different from the caricature they made of her. “She’s having a rebirth,” says Marshall Wittmann, a former McCain staffer who’s now with the centrist Democratic Leadership Conference. More than any other Democrat eyeing the presidency, Hillary understands the cultural weakness of the party. Her recent comments on wanting to find common ground on abortion and her appearance at a press conference with such avatars of the right as Santorum and Brownback show she has absorbed the lesson of the ’04 election more systematically than anyone else.

[...]

It’s widely assumed that Bush is not grooming anybody to succeed him. But that judgment could be misplaced. Watching Condoleezza Rice on the world stage last month made people look at her in a different light. She glowed with confidence. Maybe Bush is grooming somebody right under our eyes, and it’s Condi. It’s premature to draw conclusions, but clearly she’s evolved from the staff position she held at the White House to a personage in her own right. Depending on the state of the world three years from now, she has the potential to be at the top of the ticket. The current take on Condi is that any Republican paired with her in the second spot would double the GOP’s share of the African-American vote from 10 percent to 20 percent and win the election. If the Republicans make further inroads in the African-American community, it will be impossible for a Democrat to win the White House.

The question for any woman seeking the presidency in the post-9/11 era is whether she can be a credible commander in chief. Rice has the resume, but can she stare down the North Koreans and the mullahs in Iran? Clinton gets rave reviews from Republicans for her work on the Senate Armed Services Committee. She is confounding them on a daily basis by defying the caricature they created. The lamp-throwing, cursing, calculating Lady Macbeth is gone, if she ever really existed.

It pisses off some of the hard-core left to think that Hillary could drink beer and munch pork rinds with those who aren't true believers, but if there's to be any hope of a Democrat regaining the White House, two things have to happen. First, the Democrats have to shake off the mantle of wusshood that has been draped over their shoulders. They can do that by putting forth a candidate who truly wants to mix it up in the political arena -- someone with the combination of charm and steel to withstand the worst attacks that groups like the SBVT can mount. The second thing is to truly expand their base of appeal to more than just the liberals and minorities that have made up the core of the party since the 1970's.

Conventional wisdom informs us that a successful candidate runs toward the party base in the primaries and away from it in the general election. That makes sense in a party that has a strong base, but the argument becomes problematic with the Democrats in 2005 -- they have more bases than Fenway Park. Hillary may be doing the right thing by shoring up her already-solid base -- her Senate seat in New York -- and by doing what every successful candidate has done since FDR: reinventing themselves as often as needed to close the deal.

Nothing succeeds like excess.

Earlier this week some genius at the Federal Election Commission came up with the bright idea of requiring blogs to report their activities such as fund-raising or endorsements to the FEC. Well, in the true spirit of activism that is a hallmark of our nation, a group of people got together to oppose this hare-brained idea. Thanks to Michael at Musing's Musings, I found The On-Line Coalition, a multi-partisan group, and their petition to the FEC:

As bipartisan members of the online journalism, blogging, and advertising community, we ask that you grant blogs and online publications the same consideration and protection as broadcast media, newspapers, or periodicals by clearly including them under the Federal Election Commission’s “media exemption” rule.

In order to ensure that there are sufficient measures taken, we also request that the FEC promulgate a rule exempting unpaid political activity on the Internet from regulation, thereby guaranteeing every American’s right to speak freely and participate in our democratic process.

I signed it (see #882 on the list).

Take a look and see if you agree. If so, you know what to do.

From CNN Money:

Ford plans to again stop production of its Thunderbird sports car after the current model year ends production in July.

The company has sold more than 55,000 of the roadsters since it brought the storied car back into production with the 2002 model following a three-year gap in production. But sales have been slipping since its reintroduction resulted in sales of 19,085 in 2002.

[...]

The two-seater model brought back in 2002 was always seen as somewhat of a niche vehicle. But despite some good reviews for the reintroduction, even the best sales of the new model were seen as somewhat of a disappointment for Ford.

Ford said this is not the end of the line for its famous nameplate. Instead, its release referred to the decision as putting the name back in its "future-product vault."

"We promised all along that this Thunderbird would have a limited production run, and we're being true to our word," said Steve Lyons, Ford Division president. "Thunderbird was a terrific image builder for the Ford brand showroom at a time when we needed it."

I was a T-bird fan from afar. I liked to look at them but I could never afford one, and when they got big and bulbous in the '80's I lost interest. (My dad had two T-birds; a 1961 convertible in tobacco brown that was sleek and sharp, and a 1970 two-door in metallic mint green that looked like it had spent too much time in Palm Springs. I'd kill for the '61 today.) I had hoped that the new T-bird would do well, but I think it just missed the target in styling. It was trying for the retro look of the original 1955-1957 iteration, but with the sloping rear end and the complete lack of any homage to the chrome bumpers that gave the lines a beginning and an end it didn't cut it, and little touches like that can make or break a look. I hope that if they do bring the badge back in a few years they'll learn something from their success with the new Mustang: keep it simple and true to the original.

With any luck and Blogger staying stable...

Green Voicemail is back from a long break. About time... uh, I mean, Welcome Back!

Let's do the roll.

All Facts and Opinions reviews this coming summer's bestseller.

archy has seen the effects of Balkanization.

blogAmY on who cares where terrorists get their weapons.

bloggg channels Letterman for a school meeting.

Chris and his wife face a tough choice.

Collective Sigh collects a big mention.

Corrente welcomes Riggsveda, who does a number on Bush's treatment of justice abroad.

NTodd is back home.

Echidne alerts you to contact a congressman who would make criminals of women who suffer a miscarriage.

edwardpig details the lies behind the argument for Social Security privatization.

First Draft cites Jon Carrol's insight into the impact of bloggers.

The Fulcrum bids adieu to Scooter.

The Gamer's Nook finds someone with a drastic solution to the overabundance of subjects for Friday Catblogging.

Happy Furry Puppy on clean living according to the Koran.

iddybud sends best wishes and a poem to Elizabeth Edwards, who is recovering from breast cancer surgery (and I do the same for a colleague here).

Keith at The Invisible Library shares some software and some further thoughts on blogging in the library.

Jon at KTL on the future of the Wolfies.

Left is Right explains it all for you.

Bryant at MMAC says no one listens to liberals -- at least that's what AC says.

Michael muses on the difference between our Congress and the British Parliament.

Pen-Elayne continues her excellent series on blogging women.

Rick tells a fairy tale.

Rook's Rant honors one of the old guard.

rubber hose applies the Heisenberg principal to a blogger in the White House press gaggle.

Scrutiny Hooligans finds that nobody likes the bankruptcy bill.

SoonerThought finds more evidence that Tom DeLay is not a nice person.

Speedkill takes apart a post on just how "liberal" columnist Peter Beinart is.

Steve Gilliard on the future of TiVo.

T.Rex on a story you might have missed -- Saddam Hussein's capture was staged.

Trish Wilson uses Monty Python to get to the truth -- and it makes sense.

Wanda on the selective march of freedom.

WTF Is It Now?? found a cat who objected to not being blogged on Friday.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat takes on Texas's take on TAKS.

Happy Friday!

Anybody know who does the "Picture Books" song that HP is using for its photofinishing commercial?

And who does the jazz riff that Lincoln-Mercury has been using for the last couple of years?

Neither of these tunes sound like they were written for their respective commercials.

Just curious.

The House Democrats have released a scathing report called Broken Promises: The Death of Deliberative Democracy. It details the institutional abuse in the 108th Congress at the hands of the Republicans. The best part is that throughout the report they use the words of Republicans declaring their outrage at the abuses of the House rules -- at the hands of the Democratic majority before they lost power in 1994. As Rep. David Drier (R-CA) noted so well in 1993,

When Members are elected to Congress with the expectation that they will be exercising their rights as lawmakers on behalf of their constituents, only to be told they may not fully exercise those rights on the House floor, something has gone radically haywire with the constitutional scheme of things. While the majority party always has the right to establish the rules and legislative agenda for the House, it should recognize the need to place responsible limits on those powers which permit all Members to fully participate in the truly deliberative process and of all the people to be fully represented in their national legislature.

Read the rest here (PDF). It's 50 pages with another 100 or so of appendicies, and it's good reading, especially the parts where you get people like former congressman and now cable-TV talk show host Joe Scarborough to really open up.

Ten years ago, Republican congressional candidates like me were running as Washington outsiders promising to balance the budget and pay off the federal debt. We campaigned against the Imperial Congress and promised Americans that if we got elected, we would be different. We lied.

The report concludes with a list of demands -- well, in their case, suggestions -- from the Democrats on how to get things back on track. Nothing will happen, but at least they're making noise.

From the AP:

Tests show King Tut was not murdered

The Justice Department is still holding several Egyptians described as "anti-Pharoah enemy combatants" in custody on unspecified charges.

Frank Rich on the visceral need for us to explore our unvarnished truths through humor.

It was two and half weeks after 9/11 that I heard the dirtiest joke I'd ever heard in my life. New York was still tossing and turning under its blanket of grief back then. Almost no one was going out at night to have fun, a word that had been banished from the country's vocabulary. But desperately sad people will do desperate things. That's my excuse for making my way with my wife to the Hilton on Sixth Avenue, where the Friars Club was roasting Hugh Hefner.

[...]

The ensuing avalanche of Viagra jokes did not pull off the miracle of making everyone in the room forget the recent events. Restlessness had long since set in when the last comic on the bill, Gilbert Gottfried, took the stage. Mr. Gottfried, decked out in preposterously ill-fitting formal wear, has a manic voice so shrill he makes Jerry Lewis sound like Morgan Freeman. He grabbed the podium for dear life and started rocking back and forth like a hyperactive teenager trapped onstage in a school assembly. Soon he delivered what may have been the first public 9/11 gag: He couldn't get a direct flight to California, he said, because "they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first."

There were boos, but Mr. Gottfried moved right along to his act's crowning joke. "A talent agent is sitting in is office," he began. "A family walks in - a man, woman, two kids, and their little dog. And the talent agent goes, 'What kind of an act do you do?' " What followed was a marathon description of a vaudeville routine featuring incest, bestiality and almost every conceivable bodily function. The agent asks the couple the name of their unusual act, and their answer is the punch line: "The Aristocrats."

[...]

I bring up that night now because I've seen "The Aristocrats," a new documentary inspired in part by Mr. Gottfried's strange triumph. Unveiled in January at Sundance, it's coming to a theater near some of you this summer. (It could be the first movie to get an NC-17 rating for sex and nudity not depicted on screen.) But I also bring up that night for the shadow it casts on a culture that is now caught in the vise of the government war against "indecency." The chill cast by that war is taking new casualties each day, and with each one, the commissars of censorship are emboldened to extend their reach. When even the expletives of our soldiers in Iraq are censored on a public television documentary, Mr. Gottfried's unchecked indecency seems to belong to another age.

The latest scheme for broadening that censorship arrived the week after the Oscar show was reduced to colorless piffle on network television. Ted Stevens, the powerful chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, pronounced himself sick of "four-letter words with participles" on cable and satellite television. "I think we have the same power to deal with cable as over the air," he said, promising to carry the fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Never mind that anyone can keep pay TV at bay by not purchasing it, and that any parent who does subscribe can click on foolproof blocking devices to censor any channel. Senator Stevens's point is to intimidate MTV, Comedy Central, the satellite radio purveyors of Howard Stern and countless others from this moment on, whether he ultimately succeeds in exerting seemingly unconstitutional power over them or not.

[...]

I'm not a particular enthusiast for dirty jokes, but that freedom is exactly what I, and I suspect others, felt when a comic with a funny voice in a bad suit broke all the rules of propriety at that Friars Roast. But it was just three days earlier at the White House that Ari Fleischer, asked to respond to a politically incorrect remark about 9/11 by another comedian, Bill Maher, warned all Americans "to watch what they say." That last week in September 2001, I've come to realize, is as much a marker in our cultural history as two weeks earlier is a marker in the history of our relations with the world. Even as we're constantly told we're in a war for "freedom" abroad, freedom in our culture at home has been under attack ever since.

Anyone who knows me knows that I go to great lengths to find humor in everything. I do have my limits, such as avoiding intentional cruelty, but other than that, there are very few times where I won't look for the punchline or the bad pun. Nobody gets out of my office without laughing. (Admittedly I have a lot of help. I work in an office with a lot of straight men -- not in terms of their sexual preference but as in vaudeville. I also have a sidekick who shares the same view of the world that I do.) Nothing puts things in perspective more than the ability to laugh at something, and nothing deflates pomposity and faux gravitas than the poke of wit. It's not like we're starving for things to make fun of, either. As much as I wish John Kerry had won the election, the prospect of four more years of self-important horses' asses running the country and four more years of soft pitches right over the plate like Bernie Kerik and Gannon/Guckert is a slight comfort to ease the pain of defeat. It may be the only weapon we have in the face of the threats of ignorant tight-ass senators like Ted Stevens, but David slew Goliath with just a stone, and he wasn't even wearing a jockstrap when he did it. (Talk about putting your ass on the line....) As Lord Byron once noted, "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'tis that I may not weep."

I spotted this personal ad on a gay singles website.

I'm 19 and not into older guys so under 25 would be my best preference. I'm easy going and relatively simple minded.

I stopped reading right there.

This kid's gonna have them lined up around the block.

Ha, made you look. I don't have an IPOD. In fact, I don't even know where my Walkman is; I haven't used it since I worked the swing shift at Neodata in 1990 processing magazine subscriptions. (If you ever wondered why all your magazine renewals went to Boulder, Colorado, well, I used to work in the basement of an old Ford dealership from 3:45 to midnight scanning renewals for everything from Golf Digest to The New Yorker. But I digress.) But if I had an IPOD it would be playing:

1. Nether Lands by Dan Fogelberg
2. Surfin' USA by the Beach Boys
3. Theme from The Big Country by Jerome Moross
4. Claire de Lune by Claude Debussy
5. Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin
6. The White Album by the Beatles. Yeah, the whole thing.
7. Desperado by the Eagles
8. Take Five by Dave Brubeck
9. In the Mood by the Glenn Miller Orchestra
10. Symphony No. 9 (5) "From the New World" by Antonin Dvorak

Gee, no show tunes. Another stereotype shattered.

[Update at the request of the FC:

Any recording of Claire de Lune is fine with me as long as it's quiet, gentle but not too mushy.

In the early 1970's Michael Tilson Thomas recorded Rhapsody in Blue with the Columbia Jazz Band and the 1925 Duo-Art dynamic piano roll cut by Gershwin himself. Who better than the composer?

Yes, of course the original 1959 recording of Take Five by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, just like the one we had in the 8-track in the 1967 Ford Country Squire.

According to Edward Catton, the former director of programming for Interlochen Public Radio, the definitive recording of the Dvorak is the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by George Szell. It's not wise to argue with Ed.]

I saw this at Craigslist via ScaramoucheBlog:

Christian PI Attorney needed-

Personal Injury Attorney needed for trial-


Must be Christian with the obvious qualifications:
-Legally sound as well, intelligent, creative thinker, assertive and fair-
-Needs successful trial experience-
-To be available immediately for trial prep- and 4 day trial in about 6 weeks.

Simple case with a few kinks-

I was hit, I was injured, I’d like to be made whole again- I’m not greedy.

May even settle before trial.

Serious inquiries only-

So what is a "Christian with obvious qualifications"? Nail holes in the palms?

From the Toledo Blade:

Sorry it's so small, but I tried enlarging it and it got all pixelated. So squint.

Broward voters approved slot machines; Miami-Dade voters rejected them. But all is not lost for gamblers in Miami who don't want to schlepp up to Fort Lauderdale:

Under federal law, the state must allow the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes to upgrade to Las Vegas-style slots as well.

The Miccosukee Casino is just west of the Florida Turnpike on Tamiami Trail in Miami. Slots of fun!

At the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, there's a production of The Drawer Boy by Michael Healey starring John Mahoney. It gets a good review in today's New York Times.

I'd like to see it for several reasons. First, the play sounds like something I'd like. Second, John Mahoney is a great actor, and that's not just because of his years on "Frasier." He's been a part of the Steppenwolf Company in Chicago for years and has a great deal of good work to his credit. And third, because a friend of mine, John Lloyd Young, is in the production.

From the New York Times:

A lawyer for Matthew Hale, the white supremacist convicted last year of plotting to kill a federal judge whose husband and mother were slain last week, said on Tuesday that Mr. Hale's mother called him a few months ago and asked him to pass on an encoded message to one of Mr. Hale's supporters.

"She said she didn't know what the message meant, but she was going to read it to me verbatim because Matt made her write it down when she visited him," the lawyer, Glenn Greenwald, said in an interview. "It was two or three sentences that were very cryptic and impossible to understand in terms of what they were intended to convey."

This may have nothing to do whatever with the Lefkow case, but it is a reminder that "terrorists" aren't just a bunch of guys from the Middle East; we've got our own bumper crop of nutjobs growing right here, and they are every bit as dedicated to the destruction of America as Osama bin Laden. As Nicholas Kristof notes,

After the Oklahoma City bombing, American law enforcement authorities cracked down quite effectively on domestic racists and militia leaders. But Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors 760 hate groups with about 100,000 members, notes that after 9/11, the law enforcement focus switched overwhelmingly to Arabs.

The Feds are right to be especially alarmed about Al Qaeda. But we also need to be more vigilant about the domestic white supremacists, neo-Nazis and militia members. After all, some have more W.M.D. than Saddam.

Two years ago, for example, a Texan in a militia, William Krar, was caught with 25 machine guns and other weapons, a quarter-million rounds of ammunition, 60 pipe bombs and enough sodium cyanide to kill hundreds of people.

We were too complacent about Al Qaeda and foreign terrorists before 9/11. And now we're too complacent about homegrown threats.

The noose is getting a little tighter for Tom DeLay.

Documents subpoenaed from an indicted fund-raiser for Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, suggest that Mr. DeLay was more actively involved than previously known in gathering corporate donations for a political committee that is the focus of a grand-jury investigation in Texas, his home state.

The documents, which were entered into evidence last week in a related civil trial in Austin, the state capital, suggest that Mr. DeLay personally forwarded at least one large corporate check to the committee, Texans for a Republican Majority, and that he was in direct contact with lobbyists for some of the nation's largest companies on the committee's behalf.

In an August 2002 document subpoenaed from the files of the indicted fund-raiser, Warren M. RoBold, Mr. RoBold asked for a list of 10 major donors to the committee, saying that "I would then decide from response who Tom DeLay" and others should call to help the committee in seeking a "large contribution."

Another document is a printout of a July 2002 e-mail message to Mr. RoBold from a political ally of Mr. Delay, requesting a list of corporate lobbyists who would attend a fund-raising event for the committee, adding that "DeLay will want to see a list of attendees" and that the list should be available "on the ground in Austin for T.D. upon his arrival."

Under Texas law, corporations are barred from donating money to state political candidates. The Texas committee acknowledged receiving large corporate donations during the 2002 campaign but always insisted that the money was used for administrative costs, which is legal. [New York Times]

It's only a matter of time before something breaks in this case, and it's finally getting some attention - 60 Minutes picked up on the story last week. Mr. DeLay, who was in the pest control business -- killing fleas and ticks -- before he was elected to Congress, may soon be feeling like he's on the business end of a ticking bomb.

If the Religious Reich and Justice Scalia are right in defending the placement of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse because "government derives its authority from God," then wouldn't they be committing heresy and blasphemy for also saying that "government is not the solution; government is the problem"? And wouldn't liberals who believe that government can provide for the common good of all the people be truly doing the Lord's work?

Republicans have been crowing that the "democracy dominoes" in the Middle East are a direct result of Bush's foreign policy and vindication of the neocon's philosophy. They're saying that the Democrats are on the losing end of history. Not so fast, says Matthew Yglesias in The American Prospect.

Freedom, it seems, is on the march, and it's giving many liberals mixed feelings. We had it pretty easy for the year or so in which the downward spiral of Iraq consistently disproved the administration's rosy predictions. But now the president's forward strategy of freedom has started racking up successes. This seems to present a quandary for liberals, who on the one hand want good things to happen in the world but on the other don’t want George W. Bush to get any credit for them. The result is cognitive dissonance.

But there’s no need for it. Mainstream liberals should be celebrating every step toward democracy that occurs in the world over the next three years, for two reasons.

The first is that recent democratic gains, such as those in Ukraine, Egypt, and Lebanon, are not the fruit of neoconservative policies but of liberal ones. The United States did not invade these countries, nor did we threaten to do so. Instead, our influence was exercised by liberal means -- foreign aid, coordination with allies, and subtle diplomatic pressure.

In Egypt, progress came about by America doing not much more than talking about political reform and speaking out when the security services clamped down on the opposition. This is precisely what those of us who've grown hoarse over the years denouncing Bush's hypocritically selective approach to democratization have been urging him to do.

And in Lebanon, the long-held neoconservative goal of reducing Syrian influence was achieved through a U.S. policy that the neocons would have laughed out of the room had it been proposed by John Kerry: support for a French-sponsored United Nations resolution! (It called on Syria to leave Lebanon, and the Bush administration initially resisted it.)

[...]

A president who achieves success by moving closer to his critics' views deserves credit, but his critics have nothing to be ashamed of. Serious liberals never denied that spreading liberty and attacking the root causes of Middle East discontent were good ideas. Rather, we questioned the administration's methods and seriousness of purpose. We observed that for all of Bush's fine words, he seemed remarkably uninterested in doing anything about political conditions in U.S.-aligned states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. We argued that the administration's policy was overly focused on the use of military force, and underappreciative of the power of multilateral diplomatic and economic actions.

I expect that at this point conservative readers are saying, “Maybe so, but what about the Iraq War? Wasn't it the necessary precursor to these positive developments?” Well, no. Bush first called for an elected leadership of the Palestinian Authority in 2002. We invaded Iraq in 2003. The election was not held until 2005. The difference-maker, obviously, was not the election but the death of Yasir Arafat, something that can in no way be attributed to the invasion of Iraq.

[...]

All of which brings us to the second reason that liberals should be dissonance-free. To put things in the crassest partisan terms: Stunning foreign-policy success breeds domestic failure. Ronald Reagan and George Bush Senior may have earned themselves a place in the history books for successfully managing the end of the Cold War. But in the realm of partisan politics, all they did was cost the Republican Party its best issue: anti-communism. The lack of the red menace took the issue off the table and enabled the Democrats to return to power on the strength of the slogan, "It's the economy, stupid."

Liberals still ought to address our decades-old inability to win national-security debates. But if the next three years go well enough, that may become unnecessary.

Ironic, isn't it, that Bush may be laying the groundwork for a Democratic resurgence. But then, the Republicans are not known for understanding the concept of irony.

Voters in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties here in South Florida get a chance to go to the polls today to vote on whether or not Vegas-style slot machines will be allowed in race tracks and jai-alai frontons. (For those of you outside of Florida, jai-alai - pronounced high-lie - is a game that looks like a mix of lacrosse and racquetball, played in a cage called a fronton. People bet on the players.) The proposal to allow the vote was approved last November, and if it passes today proponents say it will bring millions of dollars in to the state education budget.

The gaming industry has promised to devote hundreds of millions of dollars each year from their slots revenue to the state's education budget, and pay millions more to the governments of the counties where the slots would be installed, if either measure passes.

Opponents argue that slot machines would siphon money from other entertainment venues, hurting existing businesses. Critics also say that tax revenue from the slots could be eclipsed by social costs associated with problem gamblers, including increased crime and more personal bankruptcy filings.

Should the measure pass in either county, terms of the deal -- including how much the racetracks would pay in taxes and how that money would be spent -- will be hammered out by lawmakers in Tallahassee. [Miami Herald]

I plan to vote against it. Not that I am opposed to gambling; I've been to a few casinos in my time, mostly in northern Michigan and New Mexico where they're on Indian reservations, and I've donated my share of money to them. I have seen the good that they've done for their communities - Peshawbestown, Michigan, for example, went from a poverty-stricken slum to a vibrant town with full employment thanks to the casino built by the Ottawa/Chippewa band. I don't have a moral problem with gambling any more than I do with drinking; it's not harmful if it's done in moderation. (Full disclosure: after seeing my share of friends and family go through rehab, I haven't had a drink since 1992.) My problem with this proposal in Florida today is that there is no guarantee that the money they say it will generate will end up where they promise it will go and in the amounts that they predict it will bring in.

Proponents say the slots could bring in as much as $500 million a year for the state education budget. That sounds great until you realize that it would be spread over the 67 counties of Florida, bringing Miami-Dade's cut -- assuming it's spread equally -- to $7.46 million. That's a rounding error in the $6 billion Miami-Dade County Public School budget, and there's no guarantee that it would be spread equally. Notice that line about "terms of the deal -- including how much the racetracks would pay in taxes and how that money would be spent -- will be hammered out by lawmakers in Tallahassee." We've heard that before; when they set up the Florida Lottery the idea was that the money would go to education. But when the laws were written, lottery income was used to supplant state funding, not supplement it, and none of it went to primary and secondary education. In addition, the legislature has recently shown itself to be hostile to South Florida and the needs of education here. Last year they rammed through a revision to the state's district cost differential (DCD), the formula used to determine the amount of money sent to a county for the schools based on the cost of living. Miami-Dade and Broward Counties, home of Miami and Fort Lauderdale respectively, have the highest costs of living in the state and also have the largest number of schools in crisis both in terms of infrastructure and test scores. Yet Republican House Speaker Johnnie Bird saw fit to refigure the DCD so that South Florida got less money per student and other, smaller counties, got more. That would include Duval County, home of Jacksonville. Oh, did I happen to mention where Johnnie Bird is from? You guessed it.

If the deal was that all of the money generated by the slots in Miami-Dade or Broward County stayed in South Florida, I'd be all for it. If the rest of the state wants to make money off gambling, let them set up their own casinos. Until then, I say the idea is full of crap, and no dice.

The Bankruptcy Bill, brought to you by Visa. It's everything we want it to be!

Let us now praise famous neocons like Paul Wolfowitz before History finds out how much he really fucked things up.

Bryan at Why Now? has a good idea on the recent rumniations over at the FEC of requiring blogs to report their activities on behalf of candidates.

I would be more than happy to comply with any such regulation after I see the determined values for putting a sign in your yard, a sticker on your vehicle, wearing a t-shirt, wearing a hat, as well as posting a link.

[...]

Having been part of state and federal bureaucracies I would follow any requirements to the letter, doing my part to bury the FEC under an avalanche of paper from millions of bloggers. I mean, they do realize that there are millions who will be sending individual reports about their contributions of a few seconds at random intervals?

Folks, there is absolutely nothing that screws up a bureaucracy faster or more thoroughly than some smart ass following the regulations. We have computers, so paperwork is a mouse click away. It isn't a denial-of-service attack when the government requires people to submit forms.

I would also ask if the same rule would apply to a newspaper that endorses a candidate or has a columnist who writes in favor of a candidate...or against one, which would then be an indirect boost to his/her opponent.

Like Bryan, I'm a part of a bureaucracy and, boy do I know how to generate paperwork.

Via TAPPED:

The people at Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays (PFOX), the anti-Parents and Friends of Gays and Lesbians (PFLAG), are reaching out to high school students and urging them to counter gay/straight alliances in high school by starting Ex-Gay clubs. In text that sounds straight from the Onion: "Clubs can be started by students who have never been gay (everstraights), ex-gay students, and those struggling with unwanted same sex attraction."

Once they get that club started, they can start one for African-Americans who don't want to be black anymore.

William Raspberry on the perils of privatizing.

Remember the gag about "the three biggest lies"? They were: "The check is in the mail," "Of course I'll respect you in the morning" and -- the punch line -- "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you."

Maybe it's time to add a fourth: "We're from the private sector, so naturally we'll do it better."

This last "biggest lie" has become a conservative mantra, a mystical incantation repeated not so much to explain as to make explanations unnecessary. Of course the private market will do it better -- whether the "it" is cleaning city streets, funding Social Security or staffing prisons.

Somebody got the bright idea that the private sector would do a better job managing health care for prison inmates. The New York Times, which undertook a year-long examination of one such company, Prison Health Services, reported several cases of inadequate -- sometimes fatally inadequate -- medical treatment of inmates and detainees because the private company had cut staff and services in an effort to keep costs down and protect its multimillion-dollar contracts.

A jail medical director, for example, cut off all but a few of the 32 pills a Parkinson's sufferer had been taking to keep his tremors under control. The patient-inmate died.

Stories abound of similar abuses in prisons operated by private companies -- many of them the result of attempts to hold down costs and boost profits.

The point is not that public correctional facilities are perfect -- only the foolishness of imagining that privatizing improves them.

[...]

And yet people keep looking to privatization to improve everything from education (remember Chris Whittle's Edison Project?) to drug safety (leaving it to private lawsuits to drive dangerous medicines off the shelves).

Having worked in both the public and private sector, I find it ironic to see that governmantal agenices are trying to take on the best aspects of the private sector - improving customer service, for example - and the private sector trying to provide public services. At some point there will be a convergence and... we'll be back where we started.

Several readers have noticed a very long download time for the sidebar of BBWW once it gets past The Liberal Coalition logo. Well, it's not my fault. BlogRolling, the service that provides the listings for my blogrolls, is experiencing technical problems. They seem to be aware of it and they're trying to remedy it. Meanwhile, the rest of the blog is still functioning, so read on.

Update: Here's what BlogRolling posted on their website:

We're seeing a problem between 2 and 4am PST each day that is causing Blogrolling.com to serve your blogrolls slower than normal. This is a regular but very puzzling problem. We're actively looking into the issue, but so far - no easy answers. I just wanted to make a note of this because I hadn't followed up on the system performance notice that I posted last week.

I'll keep you in the loop with updates as we learn more.

So will I.

From the Anything for a buck file:

Over the last three years, the cryogenically frozen body of a Norwegian man has become the centerpoint of a quirky winter festival in a small Colorado mining town.

"Grandpa" Bredo Morstoel, who died in 1989, was frozen by his grandson and stored in a shed in Nederland, a town 35 miles northwest of Denver that began celebrating "Frozen Dead Guy Days" in 2002 to increase tourism.

Now the man's daughter, 75-year-old Aud Morstoel, is hoping Norway's King Harald V and Queen Sonja will help her secure a visa to attend the festival. The royal couple also have been invited by Nederland's Chamber of Commerce to visit and "partake in the fun and parody of the weekend."

Aud Morstoel was invited to serve as the parade marshal for the March 11-13 celebration, but her application for a visa has yet to be approved, her son said.

Trygve Bauge, who submitted the request to Norway's king and queen, said his mother's application has been held up in part because she was convicted for drunk driving in Colorado and she overstayed her last visa before returning to Norway.

"They should have given us this a long time ago," he said Thursday from Norway.

Bauge, who froze his 89-year-old grandfather in hopes he can someday be revived or cloned, was deported in 1994 for immigration violations. His mother returned shortly thereafter, four months after her visa expired.

A caretaker has replenished the ice when necessary since Bauge was deported.

This is in keeping with Colorado's trend of celebrating odd characters. For years the University of Colorado at Boulder's UMC Food Service held an Alferd Packer Festival in honor of the country's only convicted cannibal. Meanwhile, um...no ice in my drink, please.

G.B. Trudeau says goodbye to Hunter S. Thompson in his own way.

First Vermont, then Massachusetts, and now Connecticut is dipping its toe in the water of same-sex marriage.

The debate over a bill that would allow same-sex civil unions in Connecticut in some ways has been predictable: Some church groups and Republican lawmakers are opposed, calling the measure a slippery slope to gay marriage. Some Democrats are in favor, saying gays are being denied important rights and protections.

Yet in other ways, the debate may seem counterintuitive.

"I don't have any trouble with the concept," Gov. M. Jodi Rell, a Republican, said on Friday when asked about civil unions. "I've said all along I don't support any kind of discrimination and I don't believe in discrimination of any kind. If we can address those concerns without marriage, then I am open to the concept."

In fact, the governor, who emphasized that she wanted to read the bill closely before committing, may be more open to the idea than Anne Stanback, president of Love Makes a Family, the state's leading advocacy group for same-sex marriage.

"We don't support civil unions in concept," Ms. Stanback said. "We're saying that we don't think that Connecticut needs to take a half-step to marriage."

Given that 11 states voted on Election Day to ban gay marriage, central figures in Connecticut could seem to be out of sync with national developments. But lawmakers and gay activists say the shifting and relatively muted debate here reflects views that have evolved rapidly in response to historic changes in neighboring states.

[...]

But in Connecticut, the exit ramp to New England and its distinctive style of social liberalism, no court ruling has been necessary to push state-sanctioned civil unions toward what lawmakers in both parties say is likely passage. And while changes in neighboring states may have altered perspectives here, some say the state has long been known for tolerance, or at least pragmatic apathy.

"I think there's a broad consensus in Connecticut that what consenting adults do, the public doesn't question that," said Robert M. Ward, a Republican who is the State House minority leader.

[...]

Michael P. Lawlor, a Democrat who is the House co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee and who supports gay marriage, said adopting civil unions now would increase the chance for gay marriage in the future. He said other residents are becoming accustomed to gay couples as social peers - as neighbors who raise children, for example.

"Once you become comfortable with that, then it's hard to argue against civil unions," he said, "and it will be hard to argue against marriage." [New York Times]

The Religious Reich and the wing-nuts can dismiss Vermont as a bunch of old commune-living ice-cream-making hippies and Masschusetts as the home of the Kennedys, but it's hard to put the knock on a place that puts "Constitution State" on its license plates.

Carol Rosenberg investigates charges of religious abuse at Gitmo for the Miami Herald.

Captives at the Guantánamo Bay prison are alleging that guards kicked and stomped on Korans and cursed Allah, and that interrogators punished them by taking away their pants, knowing that would prevent them from praying.

Guards also mocked captives at prayer and censored Islamic books, the captives allege. And in one incident, they say, a prison barber cut a cross-shaped patch of hair on an inmate's head.

Most of the complaints come from the recently declassified notes of defense lawyers' interviews with prisoners, which Guantánamo officials initially stamped ''secret.'' Under a federal court procedure for due-process appeals by about 100 inmates, portions are now being declassified.

The allegations of religious abuses contradict Pentagon portrayals of the Guantánamo prison for Taliban and al Qaeda suspects as respectful of Islam. Commanders at the base in Cuba have showcased the presence of Muslim chaplains and the issuance of Korans, prayer rugs, caps and beads and religiously correct meals.

Army Col. David McWilliams, the spokesman for the Miami-based Southern Command, which supervises the prison, said he could not confirm or deny the specific complaints. They could not be independently investigated because the U.S. military bans reporters from interviewing detainees.

But McWilliams denied any policy of religious abuse.

"There's certainly no planned approach from guards to interrogators that pits Christianity against Islam," he told The Herald. "The policy has been to show respect for the Islamic religion -- and that runs the gamut from providing the items they need for prayer to making sure their diets are appropriate."

The accounts of religious indignities and abuses come from at least two dozen captives and a range of attorneys -- from U.S. military lawyers assigned to defend prisoners to activist law professors and private corporate lawyers who have sued since the Supreme Court ruled in June that the captives can contest their detention in U.S. courts....

Mister Roberts is back - as guerrilla theatre.

World War II is ending, and Lt. Douglas Roberts, the cargo officer of a beleaguered ship in a backwater of the South Pacific, wants just two things: a transfer to a destroyer in the thick of the action against the Japanese, and liberty for the 167 desperate men who have been kept aboard his ship for 18 straight months by their tyrannical captain.

In a confrontation that sums up the age-old gulf between the men who do the fighting and the men who merely send them off to fight, the captain tells Roberts that the only way he can get his second wish is to stop asking for the first. Roberts explodes: "How did you get in the Navy? How did you get on our side? You're what I joined to fight against."

That scene is the dramatic fulcrum of "Mister Roberts," Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan's dramatization of Heggen's best-selling novel, which took Broadway by storm in 1948 with Henry Fonda in the title role. It ran for more than 1,000 performances, won the first Tony Award for best play, and in 1955 became a smash, if sanitized movie, to which a young Princeton graduate named Donald H. Rumsfeld took his future wife on one of their first dates.

It is almost impossible to conjure up the emotions that this half-forgotten, seldom-revived comic drama must have stirred in an original cast and audience composed of veterans of the battle front and home front, including Fonda, who wore his own battered Navy lieutenant's cap onstage.

But Michael M. Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, saw a sweetly subversive opportunity to revive "Mister Roberts" in the middle of an altogether different war. Seeking a play for the center's current festival celebrating the 1940's, Mr. Kaiser realized that this old warhorse could have unexpected, even provocative new meaning at a moment when overstretched supply companies find themselves in harm's way in Iraq, reservists face extended tours of duty, and the self-same Mr. Rumsfeld squabbles with the troops over a shortage of body armor.

Mr. Kaiser did not want a radical reinterpretation of a work first noted for its understated realism. "This is not a lesbian version on the moon," he said. Instead, he said, he believed a faithful reintroduction of a play about the pain, boredom and sacrifice of even a popular war might just make audiences think, ever so gently, about a far more contentious one.

"The whole notion of what is patriotism - I think it's a subject that bears investigation," Mr. Kaiser said. "What kind of military do you have, and want?"...

Hillary Rodham Clinton is winning friends and influencing Republicans.

The intimate gathering at a private home in Corning, N.Y., was pretty typical for an upstate fund-raiser featuring Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton: dozens of donors clustered in the terrace, listening to her speak, as they sipped wine and nibbled on hors d'oeuvres.

But one thing made the event unusual: The host was a prominent Republican businessman whose brother Amo Houghton was the popular nine-term Republican congressman from the area who, it turns out, gives Mrs. Clinton, a Democrat, an "A-plus" for the job she is doing.

His brother James, chairman of Corning Inc., agreed. "When I introduced Hillary, I told the crowd that the last time a Houghton had a fund-raiser for a Democrat was about 1812," he said.

With her 2006 re-election campaign approaching, New York Republican leaders vow to rally party loyalists in a broad effort to topple Mrs. Clinton, who has long engendered deep antipathy on the right.

But as the fund-raiser last year in the heavily Republican town of Corning illustrated, the party may have a bit of a problem on its hands.

In the four years since taking office, Mrs. Clinton has managed to cultivate a bipartisan, above-the-fray image that has made her a surprisingly welcome figure in some New York Republican circles, even as she remains exceedingly popular with her liberal base.

[...]

...Representative Peter T. King of Nassau County, struck a similar note in recent interview. He described Mrs. Clinton as a celebrity senator who is willing to take a subordinate role on an issue she cares about, rather than allowing her involvement to become a distraction.

For instance, Mr. King recalled an occasion when Mrs. Clinton suggested that he find another senator to be a co-sponsor of legislation that would benefit New York, because she figured that her presence on the bill would fire up the opposition. "There are very few politicians in public life who have the composure to step back, knowing that they will win in the end," he said.

Mr. King also said that Mrs. Clinton had been anything but the liberal extremist that her conservative critics accused her of being. "I'm not going to vote for her and probably disagree with her on 70 percent of the issues," he said. "But I think that too many Republicans who criticize Hillary Clinton sound like Michael Moore criticizing George Bush."

If you want a fun – almost addictive – website to play with, check out The Great Circle Mapper. It’s used by pilots to chart their long distance flights. Under Paths, for instance, type in the codes for airports, eg ABQ-HKG and hit display and it will show you the great circle route from Albuquerque to Hong Kong. I futzed around with it for hours and found that the route from New York (JFK) to Hanoi (HAN) goes directly over the North Pole, and the most direct route from Rio de Janeiro (GIG) to Sydney (SYD) goes over Antarctica. There’s lots of other cool features; say you want to find the farthest airport from a place – like you REALLY want to get the hell out of Dodge - type Dodge City into the Location, and when it brings up the airport details, it will show you the “Farthest” – as in the opposite side of the world. In this case it’s Plaine Corail, Rodrigues Island, Mauritius. Hat tip to Patrick Smith of Salon.com's Ask The Pilot for hooking me on to it.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 6:59 AM  

There's a taste of the novel posted over at Bobby Cramer. Take a look.

The right wing was shocked, shocked to hear Sen. Harry Reid call Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan a "political hack" the other day, but now that it's been said, folks are beginning to at least look at the record and venture to say that while Mr. Reid - heretofore described as "mild-mannered" (some say meek) - may have been intemperate in his remarks, he hit the nail on the head.

Questioning the wisdom of Alan Greenspan in political Washington is akin to challenging the integrity of the pope in Rome, so figures in both parties agreed yesterday that the top Senate Democrat's description of the Federal Reserve Board chairman as a "political hack" was a blunder.

But Democrats said the accusation by Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) reflected a real frustration in the minority party with Greenspan. Even before Reid's attack, Democrats say, they have been changing their view of Greenspan from one of an above-politics wise man to the Republican partisan he had been in the 1960s and '70s.

[...]

Democratic strategists say Greenspan, who turns 79 on Sunday and plans to retire in January, is newly vulnerable. "It is about time Democrats stopped treating him like he was an untouchable," said Chris Lehane, a campaign adviser to Democratic presidential nominees Al Gore and John F. Kerry. And Marshall Wittmann of the Democratic Leadership Council said Greenspan has "returned to his Ayn Rand roots" in recent times, referring to his work for a publication affiliated with the libertarian philosopher in the 1960s. "The Fed chairman is the closest thing in Washington to a deity. At least with Democrats, he no longer has that deity status. He's now viewed as a partisan figure."

It was not always this way. Democrats were grateful to Greenspan in 1992, when Republicans blamed the defeat of President George H.W. Bush on the Fed's refusal to drop interest rates more quickly. Greenspan's support was critical to winning passage of President Bill Clinton's 1993 deficit-reduction budget proposal, which included tax increases, with no GOP votes.

[...]

Even some of Greenspan's colleagues at the central bank have long complained that he should stay out of debates over federal tax and spending decisions, or fiscal policy. They say the Fed's independence from political pressure is key to its credibility in financial markets. "I believe the chairman shouldn't insert himself and the Fed into political debates over the direction of fiscal policy," former Fed board member Laurence H. Meyer, who served under Greenspan, wrote in a recent book about his time at the central bank.

Greenspan still enjoys broad respect. Last April, a Gallup poll found that the public had more confidence in Greenspan's economic advice than in that of Bush or congressional Democrats.

It may be a sign of waning influence that Greenspan's remarks about Social Security accounts have not transformed the debate the way his endorsement of tax cuts did in 2001. A GOP leadership aide said that "it was helpful to our side" but added that "it was not dynamic-changing." [Washington Post]

Tom Toles gets it:

Take away the mystery and a guru is just an old guy in a loincloth talking to himself.

Kirstie Alley has a new series on Showtime: Fat Actress.

I've always liked her; she is an actor who doesn't mind taking chances - even putting on Vulcan ears for Star Trek II - and even now she's demonstrating a good sense of awareness and self-deprecating humor that is a refreshing change from some of the self-important and humor-deprived examples we have on the stage and screen. I wish her well with the new series.

It's no surprise to me that any country that finds someone like David Spade funny would elect someone like George W. Bush as president.

Four Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers were murdered yesterday in Alberta.

Canada is a country that is unaccustomed to such violence, and the nation is stunned. Compared to the US, Canada has rather strict gun-control laws. They don't prevent tragedies like this - just as speed limits don't control high-speed wrecks on I-95 - but perhaps if we took the same common-sense approach to guns, we might see a reduction in the wholesale slaughter that goes on.

The NRA has a stranglehold on the House and Senate. They have an absolutist attitude about the Second Amendment: it is the Word of the Lord. Ironically, they trample all over several other amendments to get to that interpretation, but as long as they get to play with their toys...

I have an idea: let's get everyone who believes in gun control to join the NRA. Then the next time they have a national convention we swarm the place and elect officers who think that the Second Amendment is as subject to interpretation and constriction as the rest of the Bill of Rights (after all, a strict interpretation of the First Amendment would allow child pornography and X-rated movies on over-the-air prime time TV). They wouldn't know what hit them.

There seems to be some technical issues going on in the blogosphere - at least from this vantage point - so while the Friday Blogaround is mostly complete and in draft form, there are some sites that will not open, and Bloglines keeps running into a DNS error. I have a feeling it might have something to do with the hourlong system crash that occurred here... or not.

Anyway, as soon as I feel confident that things are back up to speed, it will be posted.

Update: Okay, it's working. Thanks to Dohiyi Mir for serving as my source for the links while Bloglines was in the ditch. (That would explain the large number of hits from me this morning, NTodd.)

The latest edition to the blogroll is Suburban Guerrilla.

Here's my picks to click from the The Liberal Coalition.

Natalie has a review of Michael Frayn's Democracy, now playing in Japan.

Chris reviews satellite radio.

Collective Sigh on the sneezin' season and remedies for it.

The Farmer at Corrente replaces Friday Cat Blogging with something entirely different. And I mean entirely different.

Echidne on the limits of conscience.

The Gamer's Nook says that timing is everything at ChoicePoint.

Happy Furry Puppy cares about apathy.

iddybud on the mirage of the democracy dominoes in the Middle East.

Kick the Leftist on the lastest road rage.

Make Me A Commentator recalls the legend of blog creation.

Michael with the lowdown on downloads.

Pen-Elayne is celebrating the writing of women bloggers. Or is it bloggers who are women?

Rick goes to dinner.

Rook's Rant finds that experience teacheth naught.

upyernoz promotes hiring one of our own (see below).

Scrutiny Hooligans profiles Frank Luntz, the Republican purveyor of snake oil.

Sooner Thought on how the bankruptcy law could screw the seniors.

Speedkill has more on sex-ed silliness.

Steve Gilliard on the Republican attempt to capture Kos.

T.Rex on the outrage of federal footwear.

First Draft on the return of the O-Man.

The Fulcrum notes the passing of 1,500.

The Invisible Library on the crushing of creativity.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat deconstructs Scalia.

Trish Wilson joins me in the writing zone.

Wanda on the future of Social Security.

archy opens the Carnival of Bad History.

blogAmy joins the CafePress society and opens up a shop of Geek Chic stuff. (By the way, she's not the only one...)

Bloggg blushes.

edwardpig on the coming crackdown on blogging. (PS: He's looking for a job...)

NTodd has some kool pics to sell you.

This will be my first weekend in a long time where I will have nothing scheduled other than to join Trish in listening to the writing muse. Bobby Cramer awaits.

From Bryan at Why Now?

Bold the states you've been to, underline the states you've lived in and italicize the state you're in now...

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

I have a large collection of license plates.

Note to commenters: HaloScan doesn't allow the underline HTML tag, so maybe you can insert an asterisk (*) or something to indicate where you should underline. Rugo, just cut-and-paste the HTML output into the Comment field.

Apparently there's some internal issues with Blogger and italics tags; I can't see it in my browser, which is IE, but those of you with Firefox are seeing italic text running amok. Apologies all around, and I'm getting good advice from Steve at Yellow Doggerel Democrat to try to repair it, and I redid the post where the whole thing started. It wasn't something I did on purpose. I blame Blogger; I know enough about computer languages to know that I don't know enough about HTML to know enough to know how to break it or fix it. (Good grief, I'm channeling Rummy!)

I've also activated the Preview feature in the Comments software. No more typos? Ha.

It's barely March and already Bush is in trouble, not just with the Democrats but his own party. Howard Dean is getting the Democratic grassroots growing by doing his Red States tour, Tom DeLay is losing support in his own district in Texas, and a new poll from the New York Times finds that a majority of Americans "say President Bush does not share the priorities of most of the country on either domestic or foreign issues, are increasingly resistant to his proposal to revamp Social Security and say they are uneasy with Mr. Bush's ability to make the right decisions about the retirement program...."

Sidney Blumenthal predicts the demise of Bush's reform of Social Security, and with it goes his second term agenda, his legacy, and the hopes of the Republican majority.

The coming defeat of President Bush on Social Security will be the defining moment in domestic policy and politics for his second term and for the future of the Republican Party. It will be a central, clarifying event because Bush alone chose to make this fight.

Campaigning in 2004 on the trauma of Sept. 11, he won by the smallest margin of any incumbent president in American history. The Electoral College map was little changed from the deadlock of 2000. While Bush barely took two states he had lost before (Iowa and New Mexico), he lost one to John Kerry -- New Hampshire. Bush's political advisor, Karl Rove, had forecast a fundamental realignment that would establish Republican dominance, but Bush's desperate political position required a series of tactics of character assassination against the Democratic candidate and culture war gambits on gay marriage, atmospherically organized around the fear factor of Sept. 11. The outcome was a strategic victory but not a structural one, and Bush's campaign further polarized the country.

In the chasm between his meager win and his grandiose ambition, Bush might have decided to form a government containing some moderate Republican and Democratic Cabinet members, claiming that the gravity of foreign crisis demanded national unity. But the thought never occurred to him. Instead, he bulled ahead in the hope of realizing the realignment that eluded him in the election.

[...]

And yet the more the public has learned of Bush's plan, the more it has buckled. Poll after poll reveals that increased information leads to heightened resistance. Growing majorities oppose Bush's program, Bush's favorability rating has plunged to the lowest level of any president at this point in his second term, and trust in the Democrats has steadily risen.

In the face of public rejection, Bush retreats and attacks at the same time. He has announced that he is uncertain when or even if he will propose his own bill before Congress, while the White House says that the president will stage new rallies for the Social Security initiative that has yet to take any practical form.

[...]

Bush's impending defeat on Social Security is no minor affair. He has made this the centerpiece of domestic policy of his second term. It is the decades-long culmination of the conservative wing's hostility against Social Security and the Democratic Party. Projecting images of Roosevelt and Kennedy cannot distract from Bush's intent to undermine the accomplishments of Democratic presidents. The repudiation of Bush on Social Security will be fundamental and profound and will shake the foundations of conservative Republicanism. Bush's agony is only beginning, if the Democrats in the Senate can maintain their discipline.

Now is not the time to sit back and watch. It's one thing to let someone self-destruct on his own, but when there's an opportunity to help them, by all means let's do it.

Frank Rich mourns the passing of Hunter S. Thompson, notes the retirement of Dan Rather, and agrees with me that journalism has gone from hard rock to easy-listening.

President George W. Bush many times: "We have no plans to stay in Iraq more than one day longer than necessary."

President George W. Bush today at a speech in Maryland to Syria about their occupation of Lebanon: "You get your troops and your secret services out of Lebanon so that good democracy has a chance to flourish."

Syrian Ambassador to the United States Imad Moustapha today on The Newshour: "We have no plans to stay in Lebanon more than one day longer than necessary."

Indulge my cut-and-paste of Robert Steinback in the Miami Herald. I can't do it justice if I cut it, and even though it's free, registering for the Herald is an inconvenience. So here's the whole thing. It's worth it to risk fair-use abuse for this.

There are only a few elementary forces capable of naturally binding a people together as a society or nation. Unrestrained, across-the-board privatization attacks the only desirable bonding agent the people of the United States have -- our sense of shared social commitment.

I fear that the relentless, unabated push for privatization will eventually turn America into a nation of dog-eat-dog, every-person-for-himself competitors, shredding our sense of shared national destiny -- which has been the strength of all Western nations. How, after all, can you bond with someone you are conditioned at every turn to view as a rival to be bested?

Make no mistake: The wall-to-wall privatization of American society is the goal of Bushian economic strategy. Both President George Bush and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush view every government revenue stream as ripe for diversion to the private sector -- Social Security, Medicare, public schools, prisons, child safety and welfare, health-insurance coverage, even military operations and more.

Not all privatization is bad. Free-market competition is the best choice where profit, efficiency, capital distribution and innovation are the goals. The breakup of AT&T's government-protected monopoly in 1984 unleashed healthy market forces to sort out rightful winners and losers in the telecommunications industry. I can envision a day when the U.S. Postal Service is privatized.

Sometimes, though, society properly wants everyone to succeed. Do we really want some children to win while others lose? Is it desirable for some elderly people get adequate food and medical care while others don't? Should competition determine who gets mental-health or drug-addiction treatment, the chance to go to college or proper prenatal care?

Free-market competition works fine for those capable of competing. But children, the elderly, the mentally ill, the unemployed and other groups can't effectively compete for their own prosperity. A true nation frees capable individuals to be productive, yet joins together to support and encourage those who aren't productive yet, are no longer productive or who need help in order to regain productivity. You are free to rise as far as you want individually, but we should unite as a nation to mitigate the worst of life's ills: uneducated and exploited children, desperate and suffering elderly, abandonment of the mentally and physically ill, hunger and destitution for the able-bodied but unfortunate.

This concept of shared national goals and sacrifices emerged only in the 20th century as the industrial revolution progressed. From it came universal public education, labor unions, child labor laws, food safety standards, Social Security, welfare and unemployment insurance among many other government policies.

In its extreme forms -- communism and pure socialism -- this philosophy morphs into tyranny. But in its milder Western form, social welfare consciousness is just a safety net for those unable to compete.

There are two other natural forces -- ancient ones -- that bind people together as nations. One is a shared tribal or cultural history, which the United States, as a nation of immigrants, never had. The other is war -- the threat of an external enemy.

Prior to the 20th century, America struggled for its national identity. Rivalries among the states finally erupted in the Civil War in 1861.

What finally put the ''united'' in U.S.A. were World Wars I and II, and in between, the Great Depression. All Americans suffered through all three, and the nation triumphed together. But this cohesion is threatened by Bushian privatization -- of which the governor's proposed expanded school-voucher program, and the president's proposals for Social Security modifications are the latest volleys.

I see an ominous link between the president's economic and international policies.

Bushian philosophy overtly encourages us, as a national mission, to concern ourselves only with our families, not our fellow citizens. Save for your own retirement. Educate your own kids. Worry about your own productivity. Let your fellow Americans fend for themselves.

With no common tribal history, and no sense of shared social commitment post-privatization, what generator of national unity will remain for us as Americans?

Ah, yes. War. War in Iraq. War in Syria. War in Iran. War against terrorists. Never-ending war.

One day soon, it may be all that unites us Americans.

From Reuters via AMERICAblog:

Two top U.S. Republican lawmakers on Tuesday said they want to apply broadcast decency standards to cable television and satellite television and radio to protect children from explicit content.

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens said he would push legislation this year to accomplish that goal and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton said he would back it if it does not violate free speech rights.

"Cable is a much greater violator in the indecency area," Stevens, from Alaska, told the National Association of Broadcasters, which represents hundreds of local television and radio affiliates. "I think we have the same power to deal with cable as over-the-air" broadcasters.

"There has to be some standard of decency," he said, but noted that "no one wants censorship."

Stevens cited the discussion of masturbation and sex toys during prime time television as one example of content that bothered him. He told reporters he would extend the restrictions to premium channels like HBO as well.

"If we can work out the constitutional questions, I'd be supportive of that," Barton of Texas told reporters later at the conference. "I think they ought to play, to the extent possible, by the same rules." [Emphasis added.]

So he wants to throw the entire weight of the Constitution behind an argument to prevent people from seeing TV shows about masturbation and sex toys? Where would Clarence Thomas come down on that argument?

Cable TV is not the same as over-the-air. One's a public commodity, the other is a private utility paid for by a subscriber and controlled at the receiving end by the subscriber. It's the argument they used in their attempts control content on the internet, and the courts have come down flatly against it time and again.

Once again the proponents of "limited government" and "personal accountability" want to dictate to citizens what they can or can't do in private. And they accuse the Democrats of being the control freaks. Heavy sigh.

Eric Boehlert in Salon.com (subscription/Day Pass required) examines the Bush administration's determination to manage the news and influence the media.

For the last four years the persistent story line about the White House's relationship with the press has focused on the administration's discipline, denial of access, and ability to stay on message. The Bush administration, according to this account, is expert at managing information, using secrecy, carrots and sticks, and carefully crafted talking points to control the news.

But in the wake of revelations about the aggressive and unprecedented tactics employed by the White House to manipulate the news, that relatively benign interpretation is being reexamined. Recent headlines about paid-off pundits, video press releases disguised as news telecasts, and the remarkable press access granted to a right-wing psuedo-journalist working under a phony name, have led some to conclude that the White House is not simply aggressively managing the news, but is out to sabotage the press corps from within, to undermine the integrity and reputation of journalism itself.

"Republicans have a clear, agreed-upon plan how to diminish the mainstream press," says Ron Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who was granted unique access inside the White House in 2002 to report on the administration's communication strategy. "For them, essentially the way to handle the press is the same as how to handle the federal government; you starve the beast. When it's in a weakened and undernourished condition, then you're able to effect a variety of subtle partisan and political attacks. Armstrong Williams and others are examples of that."

[...]

The most egregious example of this almost metaphysical chutzpah appears in an October 2004 article for the New York Times Magazine, in which Suskind quotes a senior Bush advisor who dismissed reporters for living in the "the reality-based community." The advisor said, "That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality."...

To make matters worse, the press, out of both timidity and the natural desire by humans to be liked, has done little or nothing to stop this resculpture of journalism, and in some cases it has helped the White House, either consciously or not, by damaging itself. The CBS/Bush TANG memo story, Jayson Blair, and Eason Jordan's resignation from CNN have all served to prove to the right wing that the beast is vulnerable, and the one thing they're good at is exploiting the weaknesses of their opponents. In addition, they have allowed themselves to be pre-empted by the new kids on the blog. The pajamadeen, as one wag tagged us, armed with Google has taken up the cause of investigative journalism and doing the digging into the story; Woodward and Bernstein with a laptop. This gets gasps of horror from the ink-stained wretches of dead tree journalism: "where's the accountability and the integrity of objective journalism?" they demand...until they're caught staring at pictures of one of their colleagues from Talon News splayed in all his butch glory across gay escort websites.

Not that I have any objection to the blogosphere picking up the torch of agressive and investigative journalism in a free-wheeling and sometimes over-the-top style; after all, that's the kind of journalism we had when this country was founded and carried on by the likes of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. If the SCLM has a problem with that, let them join the fight.

The Supreme Court takes up the question of displaying the Ten Commandments in public places today. It's a hot-button issue, as noted in this editorial in today's New York Times.

The wall between church and state dates proudly to the earliest days of the republic. The founders may not have anticipated a country with many Hindu and Buddhist Americans, but they were wise enough to write a document that protects their rights. Our increasingly diverse nation must not appear to prefer some religions, and some citizens, over others.

That's a good point. But as a friend suggested to me the other day, why do we have to accept the premise that the commandments are holy scripture and therefore worthy of debate? If it was just a passage from a novel, who would care? By conceding the point that the commandments are sacred texts, we separate them from the rest of literature and elevate to a status of a religious icon without the help of the courts. Why don't we post the commandments along side of other worthy quotes from literature? After all, "The Bible is a book. It's a good book, but it's not the only book." (Inherit the Wind, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee). So I suggest that we allow the Ten Commandments to be posted in any courthouse or public building along with other quotes from writings that could serve as inspiration - or warning - to all who enter.

The first thing we do is kill all the lawyers - William Shakespeare

Lawyers, I suppose, were children once - Charles Lamb

One Ring to rule them all; One Ring to find them. One Ring to bring them all, And in the darkness bind them. - J.R.R. Tolkien

Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win. - Victor Laslo, Casablanca

Hope is my greatest weakness. - Bobby Cramer

I am sure that there are plenty of other pieces of literature that are worthy of being carved in stone over our courts. Any suggestions?

Bernie Ebbers portrays himself as a loser in order to get off.

Bernard J. Ebbers, the former WorldCom chief executive once hailed as one of the most brilliant telecommunications entrepreneurs ever, told a packed courtroom yesterday, "I don't know about technology and I don't know about finance and accounting."

In taking the stand in his own defense, Mr. Ebbers displayed a folksy innocence that was part of the defense's effort to cast him as someone who relied on others with greater expertise to handle the details of running WorldCom as it grew from a small regional reseller of phone services to one of the largest companies in American industry. Under questioning by his lawyer, Reid Weingarten, Mr. Ebbers also disputed the prosecution's star witness, Scott D. Sullivan, WorldCom's former chief financial officer, who testified that Mr. Ebbers directed the fraud. Mr. Ebbers said over and over that Mr. Sullivan never told him that his accounting changes "weren't right" and that he did not recall conversations that Mr. Sullivan said they had.

"He has never told me he made an entry that wasn't right," Mr. Ebbers said. "If he had, we wouldn't be here today."

Mr. Ebbers also said he was ignorant about accounting in general. "I know what I don't know," he said, referring to his lack of understanding of the technology WorldCom sold as well as its finances.

He testified that he did poorly in college, where his "marks weren't too good," and that he bounced from one job to another, working as a milkman, basketball coach and warehouse manager, before he and a small group of investors started the predecessor of WorldCom in 1983.

Ain't America great? Where else can you become a multimillionaire by claiming to be too dumb to play dead in a cowboy movie?

Sorry for the grammatical gnashing, but it makes the point, and so does this editorial in the Miami Herald:

The Pentagon policy on gays in the military, known as "don't ask, don't tell," isn't working. It hurts recruitment, impedes retention and costs too much. That's the conclusion of last week's Government Accountability Office report that underlines the need to rethink this 12-year-old policy.

The report found that the Pentagon had to spend at least $191 million to recruit and train replacements for some 9,500 soldiers discharged for their sexual orientation. Of that number, the GAO said, 750 held critical occupations in the military, including translators with skills in languages such as Arabic and Korean that are vital to existing U.S. security concerns.

This is happening at a time when the services are having difficulty fulfilling their manpower requirements. For the first time since the 1991 Gulf War, the Marines failed to meet their recruitment goals in January, and the Army National Guard is 24 percent below its recruitment goal for the last four months.

Most of the discharged personnel wanted to remain in the service. More important, there is no evidence that they were causing problems. They ran afoul of the service rules because their sexual orientation became known, which, under the policy, is forbidden.

The dire predictions of those who said any relaxation of the old, anti-gay rules would cause serious disciplinary and morale problems haven't come to pass. Moreover, U.S. troops now serve alongside allies who permit gays to serve, including Britain, Australia, Italy and Spain. Five years ago, Britain ended its prohibition of gays, and today the Royal Navy encourages them to enlist.

Perhaps "don't ask, don't tell" made sense at one time, relaxing the rule that banned homosexuality altogether. It makes no sense today. The policy should be repealed, and men and women who want to serve their country in the armed forces should be allowed to do so without regard to sexual orientation.

There's also a bit of dialogue from an episode of The West Wing that makes the point as well. The White House is having a meeting with officers from the Pentagon who are opposed to lifting the ban on gays in the military. Admiral Percy Fitzwallace, who is black, drops in on the meeting.

Major Tate: Sir, we're not prejudiced toward homosexuals.

Admiral Percy Fitzwallace: You just don't want to see them serving in the Armed Forces?

Major Tate: No sir, I don't.

Admiral Percy Fitzwallace: 'Cause they pose a threat to unit discipline and cohesion.

Major Tate: Yes, sir.

Admiral Percy Fitzwallace: That's what I think, too. I also think the military wasn't designed to be an instrument of social change.

Major Tate: Yes, sir.

Admiral Percy Fitzwallace: The problem with that is that what they were saying to me 50 years ago. Blacks shouldn't serve with whites. It would disrupt the unit. You know what? It did disrupt the unit. The unit got over it. The unit changed. I'm an admiral in the U.S. Navy and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff... Beat that with a stick.

Maybe that should be "tail winds..." but anyway, good luck to Steve Fossett.

From the New York Times:

The State Department on Monday detailed an array of human rights abuses last year by the Iraqi government, including torture, rape and illegal detentions by police officers and functionaries of the interim administration that took power in June.

In the Bush administration's bluntest description of human rights transgressions by the American-supported government, the report said the Iraqis "generally respected human rights, but serious problems remained" as the government and American-led foreign forces fought a violent insurgency. It cited "reports of arbitrary deprivation of life, torture, impunity, poor prison conditions - particularly in pretrial detention facilities - and arbitrary arrest and detention."...

They had very good teachers.

First gay marriage! Now separate checking accounts threaten traditional family values! Oh, the humanity!

The Welsh flag

The title is a literal translation of "Long live Wales!" courtesy of an on-line English to Welsh translation service. I don't speak Welsh (obviously), but it's my ancestral homeland on at least on one side of the family. For those of you who do speak Welsh, check out the BBC Newyddion.

March 1 is St. David's Day, the patron saint of Wales. There's a debate going on as to whether or not Ddydd Dewi should be an official holiday in the UK. Hey, any holiday I can get I'll take, although I don't think I could sell it here in Florida.