Bark Bark Woof Woof

From the Washington Post:

The money was spent in the name of improving security at the nation's airports:

· $526.95 for one phone call from the Hyatt Regency O'Hare in Chicago to Iowa City.

· $1,180 for 20 gallons of Starbucks Coffee -- $3.69 a cup -- at the Santa Clara Marriott in California.

· $1,540 to rent 14 extension cords at $5 each per day for three weeks at the Wyndham Peaks Resort and Golden Door Spa in Telluride, Colo.

· $8,100 for elevator operators at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan.

· $5.4 million claimed for nine months' salary for the chief executive of an "event logistics" firm that received a contract before it was incorporated and went out of business after the contract ended.

Those details are contained in a federal audit that calls into question $303 million of the $741 million spent to assess and hire airport passenger screeners for the newly created Transportation Security Administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The audit, along with interviews with people involved in the passenger-screener contract, paints a rare and detailed portrait of how officials at the fledgling agency lost control of the spending in the pell-mell rush to hire 60,000 screeners to meet a one-year congressional deadline.

The audit, performed by the Defense Contract Audit Agency at the TSA's behest, spotlights scores of expenses: $20-an-hour temporary workers billed to the government at $48 per hour, subcontractors who signed out $5,000 in cash at a time with no supporting documents, $377,273.75 in unsubstantiated long-distance phone calls, $514,201 to rent tents that flooded in a rainstorm, $4.4 million in "no show" fees for job candidates who did not appear for tests.

I work in the public sector -- yeah, I'm a nameless faceless government bureaucrat -- and one of the things that slows down my work is the accountability factor. Nothing I do gets through my office without being checked by at least three other people, nothing gets out without reams of supporting documentation, and nothing goes through without being verified within an inch of its life. The two words that can ruin my day are "audit exception." That's like getting a subpeona. I'm rather proud of the work I do, too -- it makes the public schools here in South Florida better, and we are very careful with every dollar. This is why stories like this really piss me off. First, it's an incredible waste of my money because of this lack of accountability, and second, it gives people like me a black eye. I work my ass off trying to do the right thing for the kids in our schools and these bozos in the TSA -- an agency that's supposed to be protecting us in the global war on terror -- is blowing $1,180 on Starbucks. Sheesh.

From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Is the Internet breathing new life into democracy by empowering citizens to air political opinions, or will it morph into a zillion-gigabyte loophole that unravels campaign finance reform?

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) confronted those questions at hearings that concluded Wednesday. A judge has ordered the FEC to consider how the Internet should be treated under the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.

Bloggers and their readers are worried that the FEC's final answers, in the form of new regulations, will chill the free-wheeling atmosphere of the blogosphere.

What's the background?

The McCain-Feingold law was written without understanding how big e-mail and Internet politicking might become.

In 2004, the first presidential election under the new campaign-finance law, the FEC took a hands-off approach as the Internet emerged as a major force in politics -- and political fund-raising.

The law was designed to limit corporations, labor unions or millionaires from overwhelming elections with their wealth.

Unions and corporations can no longer contribute directly to campaigns. Individuals are limited to giving $2,000 per campaign.

They can give larger amounts to independent political groups, but those groups cannot coordinate their activities or messages with a candidate's campaign or buy ads directly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate.

The news media are an exception.

One exception to those rules: a news media corporation. A newspaper, television or radio network can spend as much as it wants on political coverage and broadcast or publish whatever they wish about politics. Its reporters' conversations with campaigns also are unregulated, and editorial writers can advocate the election or defeat of a candidate.

Bloggers of the left and right, who don't agree on much, testified this week that the FEC should rule that blogs are part of journalism.

[...]

Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, whose website dailykos.com averages 12 million visits per month, told the FEC:

"Those believing they could corrupt the political process through the Internet had every incentive to do so in 2004, and unlimited means at their disposal. But nothing of the sort happened. The free market of ideas policed itself. It worked. So I ask you to do the minimum necessary to comply with the court order, and go no further."

I was once a journalist. I worked for nine months as a news director for a radio station in Frankfort, Michigan in 1978-1979. My qualifications were that I could type and was willing to work for practically nothing. I got a press pass from the Michigan Associated Press and invited to the White House. Now I'm a blogger. My qualifications are that I have a computer and get paid nothing. The difference is that I worked for a media company in 1978, which was actually three guys that got together and put a radio station on the top of a hill in northern Michigan. Well, if that's all it takes to get by the FEC, maybe I should incorporate. How's this sound?

Bark Bark Woof Woof News Media On-Line Incorporated

Has a certain panache...

Tucker Carlson has a show on MSNBC. Here's a review of it.

Did you care?

An editorial in the Miami Herald -- not widely known as a left-wing rag -- gets to the heart of what President meant in Tuesday night's speech.

To win the war on terror, Mr. Bush said we will take the fight to the enemy, and right now, the enemy is in Iraq. Nevertheless, he said that the United States would quit the fight there -- not when the war on terrorism is won -- but when a reconstituted Iraqi government says it is strong enough to defend itself. Given that the president was wrong in his rationale for going to war in the first place, to recast the fight as the definitive battle against terrorism while admitting that Iraq will call the shots on how long we fight seems . . . well, odd.

By such contradictions did the president reveal the true purpose of his speech: to build up enough support for continuing the current level of war to allow the United States eventually to exit gracefully. All other options are politically unpalatable.

While many people have been calling Iraq Bush's version of Vietnam, another politically unpalatable conflict comes to mind: Somalia. The president saw what his father's administration got us into and left undone for the Clinton administration to clean up with disasterous results. As noted below, there is definitely a political angle to the administration's strategy in how it fights this war, and that's true of any administration, be it Republican or Democratic. It seems to me that what the president is now looking for is the quickest way out with the fewest casualties -- to his reputation, that is. It's no secret that Somalia destroyed Clinton's credibility with the military and labeled him in the world as weak and unwilling to put American lives in harms way. Bush is bound and determined not to let that happen to him, not just in the name of fighting terrorism, but in shoring up his base with the already-conservative military. (Of course, making sure that Congress didn't cut veterans benefits by a few billion dollars would be a nice gesture, too.)

The things we do for love...

Spain legalizes gay marriage.

Muy bien.

It started with Karl Rove implying that liberals were unappreciative of the impact of 9/11. The undercurrent that somehow the war in Iraq and 9/11 were connected, a connection denied by President Bush himself, began to come to the surface coincidentally or not when the Downing Street Memos and related stories began to get some traction and go from the realm of the "so-called" to the "now-famous." President Bush alluded to 9/11 five times last night at Fort Bragg. He did not make the direct link, but he folded it in neatly with the whole sprectrum of the global war on terror in the same way General Motors used to imply that a Chevrolet was as much a part of Americana as baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie.

Now we're getting it in the mainstream. This morning CNN had a Republican congressman from North Carolina, Robin Hayes: "I'm saying that Saddam Hussein ... and people like him were very much involved in 9/11." He offered no proof but hinted that he'd seen some information that makes the connection, and those who say Saddam Hussein was not involved "haven't looked in the right places."

I'm not sure what Rep. Hayes means by "people like him." People like Saddam; i.e. Middle East dictators? You can't turn a corner in the Middle East without running into "people like him," including the Saudi royal family -- after all, the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. The tangent to that is that Saddam Hussein harbored terrorists before 9/11. Actually, the place where the 9/11 hijackers did most of their training, got most of their money, and got their fake documents was in Florida. So I guess that makes Jeb Bush one of those "people like them."

Now there's a new twist to it. They've added the mantra that it's "people like you" -- liberal bloggers, pundits, and the occasional rogue Republican like Chuck Hagel or Lindsey Graham -- who are making the war hard to win because all this "defeatist" talk is bringing down the morale of our troops. Nice try. If Karl Rove is right, only conservatives are fighting this war -- there are no liberals in foxholes -- and they don't listen to us. And if last week's testimony in the Senate by General Abizaid et al is any guide, it's the generals at the Pentagon who aren't so sure they can win this war anytime soon.

I can't tell if the people behind this latest twist actually believe what they're saying and are doing this "secret information" bit for real, or this is just another round of ratfucking from Karl Rove, who's taken a look at the poll numbers and realized that Bush is getting into LBJ-in-1968 territory. Which is it? When President Bush said in 2003 that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected with 9/11, was he mistaken? Was his speech last night a backdoor confession that he got it wrong and that Saddam really did have something to do with 9/11? Have we finally broken Saddam Hussein's will in prison -- they switched out his Doritos for Pringles -- and he's finally owned up to plotting 9/11 with Osama bin Laden? (Give the interrogators another week and we'll find out where the Lindbergh baby is.) Is the White House that brazen to think that the country will now buy into the Saddam-and-9/11 connection, hoping that our attention span is so short from fretting about all the lost pretty women and shark attacks that we'll go for it like the second Darrin on Bewitched (the TV series, not the movie)? Are they warming us up the to possibility that they're now going to tell us that they've had the real mastermind for 9/11 in jail for a year and a half, and since we can't find Osama bin Laden, we'll blame it all on Saddam Hussein?

Either way, it smells like a red herring.

I was all set to watch President Bush's speech last night, but a few minutes into it, the lights blinked, I heard a loud bang outside, and then the lights went out. It turns out that a power line had broken down at the end of my street and my entire block was without power.

With nothing else to do and it being dark outside, I went to bed. (By the way, taking out contact lenses by the light of a flashlight is an interesting experience.) I woke up when the power was restored sometime after eleven and stumbled around resetting the clocks and making sure my computer, which I had unplugged from the power source, was hooked up again.

So I missed the speech and the punditocracy holding forth. (I also missed an episode of Entourage on HBO. Damn.) But from what I read in the papers, the president said nothing new, he didn't offer any new strategies or reasons for going to war, and he invoked 9/11 six times. No surprises.

What mystifies me is why he did the speech in the first place. Usually a president will use the opportunity to speak to the nation to advance some new agenda item, announce a shift in policy, or reassure the nation after a major event. But from what I gather, none of those things occurred last night. Catching clips and reading the transcript, there's no news there; nothing we haven't heard before except now the desperate tie-in with 9/11, which, in the case of Iraq, would be like Franklin Roosevelt demanding that the United States invade Italy in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor; after all, Italy had a brutal dictator, it had invaded helpless countries, and had a powerful alliance with strongly anti-democratic countries. But it had nothing to do with the attack and it would have been nothing more than a bloody and fruitless diversion to invade and conquer Rome when the true enemy was somewhere else.

So I guess I didn't miss a whole lot last night, sitting there in the dark. I probably got as much out of the speech as anyone else did who actually got to see it.

Isn't it slightly ironic that the night President Bush declares that "freedom is on the march" in the guise of a bloody war in Iraq, the Canadian Parliament has done more to advance the cause of freedom and equality for its own citizens and recognize the fact that it's more important to take care of those rights at home before you try and spread them somewhere else.

Canada is on its way to becoming the third country in the world to openly embrace homosexual marriage after the House of Commons gave its final approval last night to a bill that changes the definition to include same-sex couples.

The historic 158-133 vote capped an intense and divisive two-year Commons battle that maintained its political drama to the end, as Liberal minister Joe Comuzzi resigned from cabinet yesterday because he could not support his government's move.

Réal Ménard, a gay Bloc Québécois MP who has been one of the leading proponents of the bill within his party and within Parliament, said the vote was extremely important. "If you are gay, [no matter] who you are, whatever are your rights, you have the right to be in love," he said as his eyes welled with tears. "And I am very proud today for what we have done."

NDP Leader Jack Layton held a victory party with staff to celebrate both the same-sex vote and last week's final vote on the NDP budget amendment.

"I think Canada is now sending out a signal that it is possible to really provide full equality to people with different sexual orientations and to celebrate those relationships," Mr. Layton said. "I think it will sound a real clarion call around the world and perhaps reduce the hatred and the animosity and perhaps move toward a society where all are really considered equal."

[...]

All that remains for the same-sex bill to become law is debate in the Senate, where Liberals vastly outnumber the opposition Conservatives and are expected to pass the bill early next month.

Belgium and the Netherlands are the only two countries to have legalized same-sex marriage, but Spain is on the verge of passing a similar law that will soon be put to the King for final approval.

Alex Munter, of Canadians for Equal Marriage, praised last night's vote, as well as gay and lesbian Canadians who have long advocated for gay rights. "This is a proud and exciting day to be a Canadian."

The Liberals outnumber the opposition in the Senate nearly three to one, with 64 Liberals, 22 Conservatives, five Progressive Conservatives, five independents and one New Democrat.

The bill will be referred to the Senate's legal and constitutional affairs committee as early as today, where Conservatives are vowing to oppose it.

Stephen Harper, the Conservative Leader who has been consistent in his opposition to same-sex marriage, said last night's vote would not put the issue to rest.

"I think it will be an issue to come to Canadians in the next election and there will be a chance to revisit this in a future Parliament," he said.

Well, failing that, Mr. Harper, you could always move to Tampa (see below).

Bigotry is still alive and passing legislation in Tampa.

It was never the mild-mannered librarian's intention to spark such an almighty fuss.

Meagan Albright, 24, a graduate student in library sciences at the University of South Florida, says she simply wanted to bring her class project to the West Gate Regional Library, where she works part-time. Her boss liked the idea. Thus were the seeds of a tempest sown.

Albright, who is straight, had made a display for Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, celebrated in June. She fashioned a brightly colored poster depicting famous lesbians and gays, like Ellen DeGeneres, Truman Capote and Elton John, and included outreach pamphlets and books from the shelves of West Gate, near downtown Tampa.

The display went up across from West Gate's orange Formica circulation desk, and its life span was seven days. Three patrons complained, prompting supervisors to remove it on June 7.

But while the display is history -- Albright tossed the poster into her car trunk and the books went back on the shelves -- the fact that it ever existed incensed one Hillsborough county commissioner, Ronda Storms. She took umbrage at Albright's pamphlets, saying she never wanted to have to explain to her young daughter what "questioning one's sexuality" meant.

On June 15, Storms proposed that the county not acknowledge, support or participate in gay pride events. All but one commissioner backed Storms, then voted that only a super majority of five of the seven commissioners could render the policy obsolete.

In the days since, furor over Hillsborough's new policy has swiftly gained momentum and sweep, spiraling out from the newly invigorated local gay community to include state and national agencies like Equality Florida, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP.

Gay pride, which had recently languished in Tampa, was suddenly, wildly, in bloom. More than 500 protesters, angry and indignant, filled a municipal church last week. On Sunday, 2,000 marched against the county policy, holding pictures of Storms aloft.

According to Brian Winfield of Equality Florida, the policy is unique to Hillsborough County and, as far as he knows, is unmatched elsewhere in the state.

"What they said was we don't want your kind here," said Karen Doering, regional counsel for the National Center for Lesbian Rights. "But what they have done with this resolution is awaken a sleeping giant."

Supporters of the policy agreed with Storms' assertion that gay-themed displays promote a partisan agenda and have no place in public libraries. Storms, who represents the suburban enclave of Brandon, has a history of battling prurience, and previously tried to shut down a public access television show she felt was obscene.

"While our libraries regularly celebrate people and culture, the idea that our libraries should be used as a bully pulpit to promote a politicized sexual agenda is offensive to me," said Brian Blair, a commissioner who backed Storms, in a statement.

Storms also contested assertions that gays ought to be considered an oppressed minority like women or African Americans, saying gays were never denied access to education or enslaved. "To say otherwise is offensive to some in the civil rights movement," she said.

The only people who have politicized gay rights have been the bigots and homophobes of the Religious Reich, aided and abetted by the Republican Party who have never turned down a chance to cater to fearmongering for their own advancement and fatten up their direct-mail databases. For Ms. Storms to assert that gays have never been oppressed is contradicted not only by history -- perhaps she's forgetting or never knew about the pink triangles that were all the rage in Germany back in the 1940's -- not to mention the vast repetoire of laws on the books in Florida and across the country that deny basic rights to gay and lesbian Americans, including the right to get married or adopt children.

I can have a calm and civil discussion with my Republican friends over things like Social Security or education reform, and I can respect their views and their apparent logic for wanting smaller government and more freedom from regulation. What I cannot understand and what has never been explained to me by anyone is how these people -- these friends of mine, some of whom I've known for decades -- can support or even tolerate the tone of outright bigotry that comes from gay-bashers like Ronda Storms and how they can, with a straight face (pun intended), say that it is an American value to demonize an entire class of people. I just don't get it.

Now that Mr. Bush is poised to make the case once again for staying the course in Iraq, we're getting a great deal of chatter from the Republicans that those who oppose the present course are undermining the morale of the troops and that only the liberals are calling for a timetable for extricating ourselves from the quagmire. Ah, how soon we forget. Let's step into the Wayback machine:

Every time the United States goes into battle, anti-war activists blame the causes and casualties of the conflict on the U.S. government. They excuse the enemy regime's aggression and insist that it can be trusted to negotiate and honor a fair resolution. While doing everything they can to hamstring the American administration's ability to wage the war, they argue that the war can never be won, that the administration's claims to the contrary are lies, and that the United States should trim its absurd demands and bug out with whatever face-saving deal it can get. In past wars, Republicans accused these domestic opponents of sabotaging American morale and aiding the enemy. But in this war, Republicans aren't bashing the anti-war movement. They're leading it.

That's from the May 7, 1999 edition of Slate in an article by William Saletan, noting the strong opposition to President Clinton's involvement in the war in Kosovo.

Some Democrats call Republicans who make these arguments unpatriotic. Republicans reply that they're serving their country by debunking and thwarting a bad policy administered by a bad president. You can be sure of only two things: Each party is arguing exactly the opposite of what it argued the last time a Republican president led the nation into war, and exactly the opposite of what it will argue next time.

Wow, did he get that one right.

Hey, don't take my word for it. Here are the numbers.

The number of Americans disapproving of President Bush's job performance has risen to the highest level of his presidency, according to the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Monday.

According to the poll, 53 percent of respondents said they disapproved of Bush's performance, compared to 45 percent who approved.

The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The 53 percent figure was the highest disapproval rating recorded in the CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll since Bush became president in January 2001.

[...]

The president's worst numbers in the latest poll came on the issue of Social Security, with respondents disapproving of his performance by a margin of more than 2-to-1 -- 64 percent to 31 percent.

[...]

On the economy, only 41 percent of poll respondents said they approved of Bush's performance, compared to 55 percent who disapproved.

On energy policy, only 36 percent approved, while 53 percent disapproved; and on health care, 34 percent approved and 59 percent disapproved.

Meanwhile, Poppy Bush is entertaining a friend:

Former President Bill Clinton joined his one-time political foe, former President George H.W. Bush, for a boat ride on the Atlantic Ocean after attending a book-signing Monday.

Clinton was seen kneeling to pet a dog when he arrived at Walker's Point, the summer home of George and Barbara Bush on Maine's rocky coast.

Later, Clinton and Bush waved to onlookers as they boated up and down a river before roaring into the ocean for a short ride in Bush's three-engine boat.

The 1992 election rivals became good friends when they led fund-raising as part of the relief effort for victims of the tsunami that hit Asia in December.

If only Eugene O'Neill was alive to see the family dynamics going on here. Long Day's Journey Into Night indeed.

The Supreme Court rules that displaying the Ten Commandments is unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court rules that displaying the Ten Commandments is constitutional.

So is it "Damn those activist judges," or "Bless those strict constructionists"? Take your pick.

John Kerry -- remember him? -- has a few suggestions for what the president should say tonight in his "major speech" on Iraq tonight.

The first thing he should do is tell the truth to the American people. Happy talk about the insurgency being in "the last throes" leads to frustrated expectations at home. It also encourages reluctant, sidelined nations that know better to turn their backs on their common interest in keeping Iraq from becoming a failed state.

The president must also announce immediately that the United States will not have a permanent military presence in Iraq. Erasing suspicions that the occupation is indefinite is critical to eroding support for the insurgency.

He should also say that the United States will insist that the Iraqis establish a truly inclusive political process and meet the deadlines for finishing the Constitution and holding elections in December. We're doing our part: our huge military presence stands between the Iraqi people and chaos, and our special forces protect Iraqi leaders. The Iraqis must now do theirs.

He also needs to put the training of Iraqi troops on a true six-month wartime footing and ensure that the Iraqi government has the budget needed to deploy them. The administration and the Iraqi government must stop using the requirement that troops be trained in-country as an excuse for refusing offers made by Egypt, Jordan, France and Germany to do more.

The administration must immediately draw up a detailed plan with clear milestones and deadlines for the transfer of military and police responsibilities to Iraqis after the December elections. The plan should be shared with Congress. The guideposts should take into account political and security needs and objectives and be linked to specific tasks and accomplishments. If Iraqis adopt a constitution and hold elections as planned, support for the insurgency should fall and Iraqi security forces should be able to take on more responsibility. It will also set the stage for American forces to begin to come home.

[...]

The next months are critical to Iraq's future and our security. If Mr. Bush fails to take these steps, we will stumble along, our troops at greater risk, casualties rising, costs rising, the patience of the American people wearing thin, and the specter of quagmire staring us in the face. Our troops deserve better: they deserve leadership equal to their sacrifice.

I also think that the president should announce that all conservatives between the ages of 18 and 28 will be called up to immediate service in our armed forces. After all, according to Karl Rove, they're the ones who are willing to fight for our country in Iraq. Let them put their asses on the line if they're so much more gung-holier than thou.

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reports that while it was all smiles and solidarity out on stage, behind the scenes the British were nervous about going to war in Iraq, even to the point that the Foreign Minister thought the war might be illegal.

In the spring of 2002, two weeks before British Prime Minister Tony Blair journeyed to Crawford, Tex., to meet with President Bush at his ranch about the escalating confrontation with Iraq, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw sounded a prescient warning.

"The rewards from your visit to Crawford will be few," Straw wrote in a March 25 memo to Blair stamped "Secret and Personal." "The risks are high, both for you and for the Government."

In public, British officials were declaring their solidarity with the Bush administration's calls for elimination of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. But Straw's memo and seven other secret documents disclosed in recent months by British journalist Michael Smith together reveal a much different picture. Behind the scenes, British officials believed the U.S. administration was already committed to a war that they feared was ill-conceived and illegal and could lead to disaster.

The documents indicate that the officials foresaw a host of problems that later would haunt both governments -- including thin intelligence about the nature of the Iraqi threat, weak public support for war and a lack of planning for the aftermath of military action. British cabinet ministers, Foreign Office diplomats, senior generals and intelligence service officials all weighed in with concerns and reservations. Yet they could not dissuade their counterparts in the Bush administration -- nor, indeed, their own leader -- from going forward.

[...]

Critics of the Bush administration contend the documents -- including the now-famous Downing Street Memo of July 23, 2002 -- constitute proof that Bush made the decision to go to war at least eight months before it began, and that the subsequent diplomatic campaign at the United Nations was a charade, designed to convince the public that war was necessary, rather than an attempt to resolve the crisis peacefully. They contend the documents have not received the attention they deserve.

Supporters of the administration contend, by contrast, that the memos add little or nothing to what is already publicly known about the run-up to the war and even help show that the British officials genuinely believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They say that opponents of Bush and Blair are distorting the documents' meaning in order to attack both men politically.

But beyond the question of whether they constitute a so-called smoking gun of evidence against the White House, the memos offer an intriguing look at what the top officials of the United States' chief ally were thinking, doing and fearing in the months before the war.

So it's the "now-famous" Downing Street Memo. BFT.

Add to that this news from the ABC/Washington Post poll:

As President Bush prepares to address the nation about Iraq tonight, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that most Americans do not believe the administration's claims that impressive gains are being made against the insurgency, but a clear majority is willing to keep U.S. forces there for an extended time to stabilize the country.

The survey found that only one in eight Americans currently favors an immediate pullout of U.S. forces, while a solid majority continues to agree with Bush that the United States must remain in Iraq until civil order is restored -- a goal that most of those surveyed acknowledge is, at best, several years away.

[...]

So far, continuing spasms of violence in Iraq are competing with regular declarations of progress in Washington. Few people agree with Vice President Cheney's recent claim that the insurgency is in its "last throes." The survey found that 22 percent of Americans -- barely one in five -- say they believe that the insurgency is getting weaker, while 24 percent believe it is strengthening. More than half -- 53 percent -- say resistance to U.S. and Iraqi government forces has not changed, a view that matches the assessment offered last week in congressional testimony by the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. John P. Abizaid.

[...]

By a narrow margin, the public continues to think the war has not been worth the cost and bigger majorities fear that Iraq has crippled the ability of the United States to respond to conflicts elsewhere in the world and has damaged efforts to recruit young people into the military. A large majority, about six in 10 people, say the United States is "bogged down" in Iraq.

Overwhelming majorities of Americans think the Bush administration and U.S. military leaders fundamentally underestimated the difficulty of the war and failed to anticipate the tenacity of the insurgency in Iraq.

Part of the administration's apparently growing credibility problem may be the result of recent disclosures about prewar planning, including what has come to be known as the Downing Street memo, reflecting notes of a July 2002 meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers. The memo said that the Bush administration had decided to go to war and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Perhaps it is becoming clear to both the country and the administration that while they may not have known what they were getting into when they decided to go to war in the spring and summer of 2002, they are getting a very clear idea of what creek they are up now.

I've been making things up as I go along.

First Tigger, now Piglet.

Paul Winchell, the man who created the voice for Tigger in the Disney animated Winnie-the-Pooh films, died last Friday. He was also an accomplished ventriloquist and inventor.

Now we learn that John Fiedler, who did the voice of Piglet in the same film, has died. He was a great character actor, appearing as a gentle milquetoast-like character on shows like The Bob Newhart Show, but also played a creepy alien on an episode of the original Star Trek series.

Both Mr. Winchell and Mr. Fiedler were gentle souls and will be missed.

The Supreme Court will end its term this week, and chances are they won't go quietly.

The Supreme Court ends its work Monday with the highest of drama: an anticipated retirement, a ruling on the constitutionality of government Ten Commandments displays and decisions in other major cases.

Traditionally there is an air of suspense as the justices meet for the final time before breaking for three months. Justices usually wait until then to resolve blockbuster cases.

Added to that is the expectation that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist is presiding over the court for the last time. Rehnquist has thyroid cancer and many court experts believe his retirement is imminent.

[...]

"One or two justices may announce their retirement on Monday. Or none may," said Suzanna Sherry, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in the Supreme Court. "In the past there has not been this kind of anticipation."

Rehnquist could announce his decision at the Monday morning session. He could wait until later in the day after justices hold their last private meeting of the term. He could wait until later in the week, after the crowds have left the court.

On a seemingly unrelated note, wildlife seems to be on the attack. From CNN Headlines:

• Girl killed by shark in Florida Panhandle | Watch
• Grizzly kills couple at Alaska campsite

I really don't think the folks at CNN mean you can watch a girl get killed by a shark...but who knows? It's another story about a pretty white girl disappearing, and they're all the rage now.

Anyway, is it just me or are we moving into another one of those phases where nature seems to be getting a little ticked off? Daily earthquakes in California, a heat wave in northern Michigan, drought in Texas again and way too much rain in South Florida. To some it's a sign of God's wrath and that we're reaping the whirlwind for all the sinnin' that we're doing. Trust me, if a god that can create the entire universe in six days gets pissed off and wanted to show wrath, a heat wave and an earthquake wouldn't even register on the to-do list. Only human arrogance would think that we're so important as to attract the attention of a deity that has an entire universe to look out for, and we would probably do well to remember that we humans are barely visible specks on this planet. While we think we can control the world and its destiny -- and do a pretty good job of making a mess of it in the process -- things like the Ten Commandments carved into a block of marble on the lawn of a courthouse in East Jesus, Alabama, really don't make a huge dent in the overall scheme of things. Or, to quote the immortal Grace Slick, "it don't mean shit to a tree."

Why is it that our neighbors to the north are by and large the sensible ones when it comes to things like gun control and same sex marriage? Maybe it's the fact that they're just nice people. From CBC News:

The Liberal government's divisive bill legalizing same-sex marriage could come to a vote this week, Justice Minister Irwin Cotler says.

"We're now at the last stage of this democratic exercise," Cotler told CBC Newsworld on Sunday, and "it may well resolve itself this week."

But the government is willing to have Parliament sit longer to consider the bill, he said.

All but four members of the Conservative caucus have opposed the bill. Between 30 and 35 Liberals say they're also against it, but the bill easily passed its first two votes.

The government will consider amendments proposed by Conservatives as long as they are consistent with the thrusts of "equality and religious protection," Cotler said.

Any MP who wants to has spoken on the bill, but some may want to talk a second or third time, he said. The first two votes on the bill were similar, so there's not much chance that MPs will change their minds now.

Some religious groups are concerned they could be penalized if they refuse to perform same-sex marriages, but Cotler said amendments have addressed that issue.

It's not going to pass by an overwhelming margin, and if you listen to CBC Radio, you'll hear the same kind of apoplectic and apocalyptic predictions of fire and brimstone from their collection of right-wing loons (not to be confused with the loonies, which are the one-dollar coins), but most Canadians are pretty mellow about issues that come under the category of live-and-let-live. Hey, any place that doesn't get upset about people putting gravy on French fries is okay with me.

The Ohio rare-coin scandal gets a little meshuggeh.

Risky investments by the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation didn't end with rare coins and a Bermuda hedge fund. Add bagels to the list. Bureau officials have more than $346 million in venture capital funds, which typically provide start-up financing or loans to firms that have had trouble borrowing from conventional sources.

The list of firms in which the bureau has an interest includes the Colorado parent of the Einstein Brothers bagel chain, which is struggling to emerge from years of red ink.

It's one thing to invest in non-traditional funds with your own money...it's your risk and your fortune on the line. But when it's the funds that are invested by taxpayers to pay for the medical and living expenses of injured workers in the state of Ohio, that's something else entirely. And if this is the kind of mentality that's behind the idea of private accounts for Social Security, well...

You remember them -- Leslie Weise, a lawyer; Karen Bauer, a temporary office worker; and Alex Young, a computer technician, three former Kerry volunteers who got the bum's rush from some guy impersonating a Secret Service agent at one of Bush's Social Security Kool-Aid parties last March in Denver. Well, they're not going quietly. From the New York Times:

Last week they were in Washington demanding to know the identity of the "mystery man" who ejected them, and they got some unlikely support from Republicans in the Colorado Congressional delegation. One of them was Representative Marilyn Musgrave, a reliable Bush ally.

"I really do believe in free speech, and if you try to quell people it just makes them more determined," Ms. Musgrave said in an interview after meeting with the trio. "So they just want to get to the bottom of this, and I think that's fair."

So does the Secret Service, which in a letter last week to Representatives Mark Udall and Dianna DeGette, both Colorado Democrats, said that it was continuing a criminal investigation into whether anyone had unlawfully impersonated a Secret Service agent, and that when the findings were concluded they would be sent, as is routine, to a federal prosecutor to see if charges should be filed.

The White House was having none of it.

"It's clear that these three protesters are trying to advance their own political agenda," Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said in an interview Friday. Asked who the mystery man was, Mr. McClellan did not respond and then said he had no interest in going over yet again the events in Denver on March 21.

Oh, Scott...Scott...when are you ever going to learn that in today's world of blogging and the internet, things like this just don't go away? Are you channeling Ron Ziegler?

[...]

In the meantime, the Denver Three's exploits are chronicled almost daily in the Colorado press. They have a Web site and pass out bumper stickers, playing on Mr. Bush's plan to add private accounts to Social Security, that say "Don't Privatize My Freedom." During their trip to Washington, the cameras were rolling when they tried, unsuccessfully, to hand-deliver a letter to the White House demanding answers from Mr. Bush.

Yes, it's one of those little stories that buzz around like a mosquito and won't really change the world, but it does kind of make you smile when you can irritate people like Scott McClellan. It's one of life's little pleasures.

Donald Rumsfeld says the insurgency in Iraq could last for twelve years.

Let's hope not. By then the warranty on the invasion will have expired and we'll have to pay for it out of our own pocket. Oh, wait...

The good news is that he says that it will be Iraqi forces, not U.S., who will be fighting them. I suppose that's a concession by him that by 2017 there might be a different administration in the White House. Whew.

Go read Frank Rich's column today. I know I say that every Sunday, but just do it, okay?

As the public broadcasting debate plays out, there will be the usual talk about how to wean it from federal subsidy and the usual complaints (which I share) about the redundancy, commerciality and declining quality of some PBS programming in a cable universe. But once Big Bird, like that White House Thanksgiving turkey, is again ritualistically saved from the chopping block and the Senate restores more of the House's budget cuts, the most crucial test of the damage will be what survives of public broadcasting's irreplaceable journalistic offerings.

One of the biggest hypocrises of the right has been the whining about so-called subsidy of "left-wing" broadcasting by tax dollars. As opposed to the tax breaks and tax cuts that Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes (the bad one, not the good blogger) get by being rich and the proprietors of FOX?

From those wonderful folks who broke the Downing Street Memo comes this latest bit of news. Is the U.S. negotiating with terrorists? According to this report in the Sunday Times of London, apparently so.

At a summer villa near Balad in the hills 40 miles north of Baghdad, a group of Iraqis and their American visitors recently sat down to tea. It looked like a pleasant social encounter far removed from the stresses of war, but the heavy US military presence around the isolated property signalled that an unusual meeting was taking place.

After weeks of delicate negotiation involving a former Iraqi minister and senior tribal leaders, a small group of insurgent commanders apparently came face to face with four American officials seeking to establish a dialogue with the men they regard as their enemies.

The talks on June 3 were followed by a second encounter 10 days later, according to an Iraqi who said that he had attended both meetings. Details provided to The Sunday Times by two Iraqi sources whose groups were involved indicate that further talks are planned in the hope of negotiating an eventual breakthrough that might reduce the violence in Iraq.

Despite months of American military assaults on supposed insurgent bases, General John Abizaid, the regional US commander, admitted to Congress last week that opposition strength was “about the same” as six months ago and that “there’s a lot of work to be done against the insurgency”.

That work now includes secret negotiations with rebel leaders, according to the Iraqi sources.

Washington seems to be gingerly probing for ways of defusing home-grown Iraqi opposition and of isolating the foreign Islamic militants who have flooded into Iraq to wage holy war against America under the command of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The talks appear to represent the first serious effort by Americans and Iraqi insurgents to find common ground since violence intensified in the spring. Earlier informal contacts were reported but produced no perceptible progress.

WTF?? I'm all for finding a way to end this war, and I hope we can bring this bloodshed to an end by any means possible, but after all the butch talk and accusations of treason from the White House about people who would rather do something other than go all Chuck Norris on Osama bin Laden, this is a little bit of a shock. After all, Bush got re-elected by suggesting -- hell, he wasn't just suggesting, he was screeching -- that John Kerry and the Democrats would rather sit down and talk things over with the terrorists rather than blow them all to Kingdom Come.

Oh, wait a second...these are the "insurgents." They're not called terrorists. In El Salvador, these guys would have been called "freedom fighters" by the Reagan administration. They're acutally fighting for their country...so I guess in some way it's okay to try to negotiate with them. Is that how it works?

Either that, or the Bush administration finally knows a stalemate when they see one.

My car club is taking a bucolic cruise this morning; to an orchid farm in Redlands, Florida, which is about the last piece of arable land in Miami-Dade County before you hit the Everglades.

I have one orchid: a phalaenopsis that my landlord gave me at Thanksgiving. It was in full bloom, and now that the blooms are gone I've been taking care to make sure that it's been fed and watered carefully with advice from people who know more about them than I do...which would be anybody. It's a good thing that the phalaenopsis is considered a good "beginner" orchid because my history with houseplants is problematic. I have a philodendron that my sister gave me on my thirtieth birthday, so you know that plant is now old enough to drink alcoholic beverages, and I have a geranium that is getting ready to bloom again. Neither of these are delicate plants -- a philodendron in Florida is also known as a "weed," and a geranium can spend an entire winter in complete darkness and come back like blazes. But I've also been known to kill spider plants and cacti -- something I've been told is impossible.

So maybe now that the orchid has made it this far and is even putting out a new leaf or two, I might be ready to try another variety. We'll see...

Update: This is the place we visited today: R.F. Orchids. It was amazing. They're open Tuesdays through Sundays and give tours of the grounds and the orchid houses twice a day. (Hint: if you go in the summer, take insect repellant.) I didn't buy anything, but I was sorely tempted.

Via Why Now I found a survey on blogs being done by a grad student at MIT.

Got something better to do?

Karl Rove knew exactly what he was doing.

His speech last Wednesday night to the New York Conservative party was booked months ago. The speech itself was drafted and vetted by the White House staff over the last few weeks, if not months. The timing was considered carefully, and the speech itself was delivered at a time and place where the White House was sure that it would get the maximum coverage. The loyalists were prepped so the RNC would have talking points at the ready when the reactions would start coming in Thursday morning.

They knew exactly what they were doing. And they knew exactly how the left and the right would react. And they were right. The left exploded with anger, calling Mr. Rove everything within our collective lexicon of wonderfully imaginative terms -- skank, whore, douchebag, pigfucker -- and demanded his resignation or apology or both. The right wing chortled with glee as they watched the left get all worked up, and then shook their head and sighed that such angry people who couldn't get their facts straight had no business being taken seriously, much less hold positions of power in office.

Karl Rove will not resign. He will not apologize. The press secretary will not come out to the press room to "clarify" what he said. He may express utter mystification that his remarks were "misconstrued," but he will stand by them and after one or two news cycles, it will be forgotten, and unless something extraordinary happens -- like monkeys fly out of his ass -- Mr. Rove will step back behind the curtain and go back to running the country.

That's because Karl Rove's job is politics. He does nothing else. He does not believe in bipartisanship any more than the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs believes in turning the Pentagon into a day-care center. Karl Rove believes that partisanship is good. It is what gets things done. It is what makes people talk. Not necessarily about the issues, but about what drives the issues and when you can control the talk, you can control the issue. For example, Social Security. Here was the perfect issue to throw out there to shake up the cages of the politicians and get some much-needed distraction from the images of burning cars and dead soldiers in Iraq. It was an audacious move that he knew would galvanize the nation. Social Security has been sacrosanct for over seventy years, and now the Bush administration was talking about making radical changes to it -- privatizing part of it, means-testing the recipients, raising the cap on taxes. Rove knew none of it would come to pass, and he doesn't care what happens to Social Security anyway; neither he or anyone he cares about will ever need to live on it, and if it goes bankrupt, it will happen long after he's passed from the scene, either literally or figuratively. But he did accomplish his goal -- he got Bush into the history books for daring to challenge the conventional wisdom that Social Security is the third rail of politics: he touched it yet survived. It doesn't matter that whatever changes wrought to Social Security by Congress will be cosmetic tweaks and do nothing to solve the far-off crisis, but that wasn't what he wanted to do anyway. He never gave a damn about it. It was just the stick to provoke the arguments and divert the attention away from the disaster in Iraq. (To be fair, Bill Clinton tried the same thing with health care. The difference, however, between Clinton and Bush is that Clinton actually wanted to provide health care to all the citizens of the country.)

So while it may feel good to rant about how Karl Rove is slandering an entire segment of the national political discussion, it's exactly what he is paid to do. The only startling revelation is that since he is widely regarded as being the brains of the outfit and therefore whatever he says is the true philosophy of the Bush administration, that he felt confident enough to speak publicly about what up until now has been a closely-guarded silent motivation for their actions; he can now speak freely about what their true intentions are and what the political lay of the land will be for the next few years. He believes that he can control the story and that his opposition is so weak that he can actually show them the playbook for the second half of the game. From now until the end, it's all politics and partisanship. Don't say they didn't warn you.

I have a good friend that I'll call Luke. I have known him for over twenty years. Luke is a Republican. Not only that, he has a job in Washington and works for someone who works in a large domed building on the top of a hill. He and I have been able to maintain our friendship in spite of our difference in politics. We exchanged e-mails this morning:

FROM: Mustang Bobby
TO: Luke
SUBJECT: A Couple of Questions

Do you think I’m a traitor? Do you think I want our troops dead?

Just curious.

He replied:

FROM: Luke
TO: Mustang Bobby

Okay, the democrats are soft on terror. The Clinton Administration was always more interested in indicting terrorists than killing them. So, I agree with Rove. I think it is a little disingenuous for the democrats - the same people who have spent the last couple of weeks denigrating our military - the same people led by MoveOn.org who called for moderation and restraint after 9/11 - to stand up and act shocked that someone paints an accurate portrait.

I replied:

FROM: Mustang Bobby
TO: Luke

Name me the Democrats who voted against the resolutions to give the president all the power to do what was needed to stomp on Al-qaida in Afghanistan after 9/11. Name me one mainstream Democrat who has ever said we shouldn’t take the terrorists out wherever we can find them.

Karl Rove is politicizing 9/11. This is going to be the Republican mantra from now until whenever. Ban flag-burning? 9/11. Ban gay marriage? 9/11. Anyone who questions anything? 9/11. It’s crap.

There was silence -- after all, he does have a job -- so I sent another e-mail:

FROM: Mustang Bobby
TO: Luke

Well, address my original question. Do you consider me personally to be a traitor or somehow un-American because I don’t agree with everything that’s been done to address the issue of terrorism? Leave the generic “Democrats” or “liberal” out of the equation. Do you honestly think I don’t support our troops in battle? Have you read anything ever in BBWW that would suggest such a thing? We’re not talking about a “difference of philosophy” here. Should my being a Quaker somehow make me less of an American?

He replied:

FROM: Luke
TO: Mustang Bobby

No to all questions.

At least I know one Republican who doesn't think I'm a danger to the country. It's the other 53 million we have to convince...

From an e-mail call for action from Shakespeare's Sister, queen of all she surveys:

Wednesday night on Hardball, guest host David Gregory asked Karl Rove about the Downing Street documents. The following is the relevant exchange:

GREGORY: As you well know, critics of this war have seized on what’s being called now the Downing Street Memo, based on meetings that Britain’s Chief of Intelligence had with American officials about the war. One issue that comes up in that memo and subsequent memos is British concerns about the fact that the White House in their view wasn’t adequately thinking about what happens after the regime falls.

ROVE: I'm glad you brought that up because I want to put that in context. First of all that is the British — a Brit making a comment about what he perceived to be U.S. policy. But remember the time frame, it is months and months and months before the balloon goes up in Iraq. And in those intervening months there was plenty of time planning for post-war efforts, vast amounts of planning. You never know exactly how a war is going to plan out. Napoleon once said, 'vast numbers of refugees enormous problems with food aid'- did not happen. Vast uprising- didn't happen. That we would see a vast uprising by hundreds of thousands of Iraqis- didn’t happen. War is ugly, but a lot went very well with this effort and in part it was because the United States government and our coalition partners used the months to plan for any eventuality.

GREGORY: But if you're talking about the number of troops necessary, the level of American casualties, the force and intensity of the insurgency…did the president mislead the American people about the cost of the war or was he just simply surprised by what happened?

ROVE: I would go back to the president’s statements over the last several years and I would defy you to find one speech which he talked about Iraq where he doesn’t say there would be difficult times ahead, that we had a long road to hope that a great deal of sacrifice was going to be called for by both the American people and by the Iraqis to achieve this goal. Look, we do not underestimate the ferocity and the anger and the viciousness of the people that we face. We are in a war. Some people may treat it as a law enforcement matter and be worried about indictments from the U.S. attorney from the southern district of New York. But we recognize this administration and the American people we are in a war and the only way you have a successful outcome in the war is to aim for a complete and total victory, which is exactly what we’re doing.

Clearly, he used questions about the Downing Street Documents to set himself up for his comments made in a speech Wednesday night:

"Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove said Wednesday night. "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."

Today, the RNC issued talking points in support of Rove’s statement, in addition to an attack ad against Dick Durbin based on his Gitmo comments.

We need to get on this big time, because this is their defensive play—deflect all interest in the Downing Street Documents by some controversy and forcing the Dems (and liberals of all stripes) to defend themselves…again.

Call this out for the subterfuge that it is. Demand Rove’s resignation. Don’t let them detract from this major issue with their usual disingenuous B.S. Draw the clear link between trying to refocus away from the Downing Street Documents. This is their last line of defense. Don’t let it work.

Also, Cheney has responded to questions about the Downing Street Documents:

Cheney said he had not read the so-called "Downing Street memo," a document written by a British official in the fall of 2002 suggesting that President Bush had already decided to remove Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, and that U.S. officials were over hyping intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to build support for the policy.

However, the vice president said the premise of the memo -- that a decision to go to war had been made months before the March 2003 invasion -- was "wrong."

"Remember what happened after the supposed memo was written. We went to the United Nations. We got a unanimous vote out of the Security Council for a resolution calling on Saddam Hussein to come clean," he said.

This response is, of course, utter crap. Considering the Memos indicate that going to the UN and backing Saddam into a corner would help “sell” the war, this hardly passes as a defense. He's basically trying to discredit the memos by saying, "How could they be true? We did exactly what they said we were planning to do." Illogical garbage. Call him out on it.

You heard the lady...get to it!

Would wrapping yourself in the flag be considered desecration under the proposed flag-burning amendment?

Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald:

Is Florida really such a paradise that the governor has time to indulge a vendetta against a single citizen? Did they clean up the Everglades without telling me? Fix the schools without issuing a memo?

Jeb Bush, if he has a shred of decency, should be ashamed of himself. He should apologize to Michael Schiavo. And he should leave the poor man alone.

Amen.

We welcome five new members to The Liberal Coalition:

Dodecahedron

firedoglake

Liberty Street

Science and Politics

Welcome to Gilead

Please stop by and welcome each one.

It's been an interesting week out there in the world. Let's see what our take on it is.

All Facts and Opinions tackles a burning issue.

archy explores just what it would mean if the flag-burning amendment is passed.

Bark Bark Woof Woof takes notes on how good the Republicans are at demonizing people.

blogAmY wants to know what you think.

bloggg goes to a radio show.

Chris has a reply for Karl.

Collective Sigh on what Dick Durbin should have said.

Corrente on getting good help to fight in Iraq.

Dodecahedron joins the ranks by pissing off a right-wing blogger.

NTodd checks the timetable.

Echidne recommends some Princely reading.

firedoglake says it's all in the timing.

First Draft defines "last throes."

The Gamer's Nook gets animated about Star Wars.

Happy Furry Puppy on the flag.

iddybud on the relevance of the DSM.

Jesse finds something Republicans and Saddam Hussein agree on.

Left Is Right has some gas pains.

Liberty Street has a compilation of comments on Herr Rove.

Bryant on eminent domain.

Michael on the joys of living in the Land of Lincoln.

Pen-Elayne is job-hunting.

Rivka at Respectful of Otters has some thoughts on men.

Rook's Rant has some strange growths.

rubber hose wonders what a queen is worth (don't start...)

Science and Politics shares a letter.

Scrutiny Hooligans waves the flag.

SoonerThought on who's for fighting.

Speedkill gets caught in the Vortex.

Steve Gilliard shares a letter from the front line.

T. Rex has a rhetorical suggestion.

The Invisible Library looks at a particular word.

Congratulations to Trish on her wedding!

Welcome to Gilead looks at theocracy in Ohio.

Wanda opens a can on hypocrites and gay-bashers. Go Wanda!

WTF Is It Now?? is pissed at Guess-Who.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat has some choice words for Gov. Perry.

Go read up on The Downing Street Memo and let your voice be heard.

The Republicans are always showing up the Democrats in everything...fund-raising, moral issues, and now they've shown just how pathetic we are in saying things that grab the headlines. Karl Rove makes Dick Durbin and Howard Dean look like pikers.

Speaking in a Manhattan ballroom just a few miles north of ground zero, Karl Rove said on Wednesday night that the Democratic party did not understand the consequences of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove said. "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war."

[...]

"Conservatives saw what happened to us on 9/11 and said we will defeat our enemies. Liberals saw what happened to us and said we must understand our enemies."

Rove also denounced Sen. Dick Durbin's comments comparing interrogation at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to the methods of Nazis and other repressive regimes. He said the statements have been broadcast throughout the Middle East, putting American troops in greater danger. Durbin has since apologized for the remarks.

"No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals," Rove said.

My friend Bob says that sometimes he wishes he was a conservative -- everything is black and white, no hard choices to make, just take your cue from your minder in the White House. La-de-da, la-de-da.

Yeah, that's a nice vision...but then I'm reminded of the old adage, "Not all conservative people are stupid, but all stupid people are conservatives."

Governor Bob Taft of Ohio is in deep trouble.

Facing an investigation by the Ohio Ethics Commission over whether he broke state law by failing to list golf outings on his financial disclosure statements, Gov. Bob Taft yesterday said he has “no intention of resigning.”

“I have a year and a half to go,” Mr. Taft told reporters after an event in downtown Mansfield. “I have a lot of work I want to get done.”

Ohio Democrats have been calling for the governor’s resignation since he disclosed Tuesday, after being questioned by The Blade, that he had “failed to include outings in which I participated” on his annual financial disclosure statements.

Bill Wilkinson, an attorney representing Tom Noe, a Toledo-area rare coin dealer and prominent Republican fund-raiser, confirmed yesterday that Mr. Noe had golfed with Mr. Taft “a couple of times.”

But Mr. Wilkinson would not disclose who paid for the golf outings that Mr. Taft participated in with Mr. Noe — whom Mr. Taft had reappointed to the Ohio Board of Regents and had appointed to the Ohio Turnpike Commission.

The Blade reported yesterday that a source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, ran into Mr. Noe in 2002 at Toledo’s Inverness Club and that Mr. Noe told him that he was playing golf with Mr. Taft. Mr. Noe is not listed as a source of a gift on Mr. Taft’s ethics statement.

State law requires officeholders to list each source of gifts over $75. A round of golf at Inverness for a guest is about $140.

It is a first-degree misdemeanor to knowingly falsify an ethics form, which carries a maximum penalty of six months in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.

You know that things are getting dicey when the subject of an investigation forcibly insists that he has "no intention of resigning" -- see Spiro Agnew's statement two days prior to his resignation in October 1973 -- and can count the amount of time he has left in his term -- in 1974 Richard Nixon trotted out a calendar that counted down to January 20, 1977.

What do you bet Taft's letter of resignation has been written and he's working on his statement that he's planning to "spend more time with his family"?

Once again David Brooks has to defend the indefensible, and he does it with the unmitigated gall to quote Franklin D. Roosevelt in support of staying the course in Iraq:

Your government has unmistakable confidence in your ability to hear the worst, without flinching or losing heart. You must, in turn, have complete confidence that your government is keeping nothing from you except information that will help the enemy in his attempt to destroy us. - FDR, February 23, 1942

That would be well and good if our present administration hadn't lied about why we got into the war in the first place, didn't shamelessly underestimate the amount of men and armor it would take to win the war, and had no plan whatsoever about what to do with the country once they were there.

Mr. Brooks seems to think that the reason the insurgents are causing such havoc is because the majority of Americans now see that its a disaster. But they're wrong! he cries:

Yet I can't believe majorities of Americans really want to pull out and accept defeat. I can't believe they want to abandon to the Zarqawis and the Baathists those 8.5 million Iraqis who held up purple fingers on Election Day. I can't believe they are yet ready to accept a terrorist-run state in the heart of the Middle East, a civil war in Iraq, the crushing of democratic hopes in places like Egypt and Iran, and the ruinous consequences for American power and prestige.

What they want to do, more likely, is somehow escape the current moment, which is discouraging and uncertain. One of the many problems with fighting an insurgency is that it is nearly impossible to know if we are winning or losing. It's like watching a football game with no goal lines and chaotic action all over the field.

Yeah, and who's fault is that, the players on the field or the fans in the stand?

In the end, Brooks himself doesn't even seem to buy his own argument.

Some of you will respond that this is easy for me to say, since I'm not over there. All I'd say is that we live in a democracy, where decisions are made by all. Besides, the vast majority of those serving in Iraq, and their families, said they voted to re-elect President Bush. They seem to want to finish the job.

Others will say we shouldn't be there in the first place. You may be right. Time will tell. But right now, this isn't about your personal vindication. It's about victory for the forces of decency and defeating those, like Zarqawi, who would be attacking us in any case.

In other words, well, the guys who are over there fighting the war are Republicans and we're never wrong about anything, so it's all about ego.

Well, Mr. Brooks, it isn't just the Democrats anymore.

Leading Republicans are increasingly expressing their frustration with the war effort -- and this may only be the beginning of Bush's problems within GOP ranks as Republicans assess whether they'll run as allies or critics of Bush's policy in 2006.

[...]

[K]ey Republicans do not see the same Iraq Bush sees, even if the GOP leadership remains lockstep behind the commander in chief. Over the weekend, Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska said in an interview with U.S. News & World Report that "the White House is completely disconnected from reality ... The reality is that we're losing in Iraq." On Sunday, Sen. John McCain was asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" whether Vice President Cheney's comments last week that Iraq is in the "last throes" of the insurgency were correct. "No," McCain tersely replied.

That frank sentiment comes on the heels of a well-publicized reversal from an early outspoken supporter of the war, Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., who coined the term "freedom fries" to express his outrage with France. Perhaps more than many of his colleagues, Jones faces potential electoral fallout from the war in Iraq: He has three major military bases in his district at the eastern end of the state, and counts tens of thousands of veterans among his constituency.

It looks like you have some work to do in your own house first, David.

Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again. - Country Joe and the Fish

It looks like the Pentagon is getting desperate.

The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches.

The program is provoking a furor among privacy advocates. The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying.

The data will be managed by BeNow Inc. of Wakefield, Mass., one of many marketing firms that use computers to analyze large amounts of data to target potential customers based on their personal profiles and habits.

[...]

Chris Jay Hoofnagle, West Coast director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the system "an audacious plan to target-market kids, as young as 16, for military solicitation."

This is disgusting on several levels. First, they are so desperate to get new recruits to fight an unpopular war that they have to hire a marketing firm to sell their story -- it's not enough anymore to appeal to the recruit's patriotism or offer help with college. Second, they're compiling information on ethnicity, as if that was somehow relevant...? And third, the last couple of weeks have shown that hiring outside vendors to handle sensitive information can be dangerous in terms of identity theft.

On the other hand, if some kid joins the Army based on this plan and ends up driving along the airport road in Baghdad and a bomb goes off, identity theft will be the least of his worries.

From my friend Bob:

Some people are like Slinkies...

Not really good for anything, but they still bring a smile to your face when you push them down a flight of stairs.

Good night.

Let's see, what's really important in the country's business today:

A multibillion dollar deficit growing bigger every day.

Over 45 million people without health care.

Crumbling schools and underpaid teachers.

A war that was started under fraudulent circumstances and so far has taken over 1,700 lives of American soldiers -- assuming that count is accurate -- and countless civilian lives and property losses incalculable not to mention the wholesale destruction of our national reputation.

Corporations buying their way into the halls of Congress so they can write the laws that regulate them.

Oil reaching $60 a barrel.

More children per capita in poverty than any other time in our history, including the Great Depression.

A Homeland Security department that is has left our borders less secure than before 9/11.

Laws that have chipped away at the Bill of Rights in the name of that "homeland security."

Yet what was the most important thing the United States House of Representatives voted on today? An amendment to the United States Constitution to prohibit the burning of the flag because our fine elected officials wouldn't be doing the nation's business unless they could demonstrate that we are a country that puts symbolism and idolatry above everything else.

What's worse are those who voted for this amendment out of fear of losing their next election. Now that's a really backassward priority.

From Raw Story:

GREENSBORO — The decision by local court officials to deny the use of the Quran for oaths has garnered national media attention and the scrutiny of a Washington-based Islamic civil rights group.

Officials with the Council on American-Islamic Relations said Tuesday that statements by Guilford County's top judge seem to endorse a particular religion and could be a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Guilford Senior Resident Superior Court Judge W. Douglas Albright told the News & Record last week that an oath taken on the Quran is not a lawful oath under state law. The law refers to laying one's hand on the "Holy Scriptures."

"Everybody understands what the holy scriptures are," Albright said then. "If they don't, we're in a mess."

No, the mess we're in is that bigots and xenophobes are sitting on the bench in the courthouses of America.

What I want to know is why does some idiot judge or law in North Carolina get to decide what's "holy scripture"? For some people that could be The Lord of the Rings. For others it could be The Collected Poems of Richard Brautigan or the shop manual for a 1959 Buick LeSabre, for that matter.

Is this a great country, or what?

Tom DeLay draws a comparison between a war zone and and American city.

When House Majority Leader Tom DeLay sat down with reporters on Tuesday on Capitol Hill, he was asked to assess President Bush's campaign in Iraq and to respond to criticism that the military mission is not going well and the White House needs to develop an exit strategy.

DeLay offered this response: "These things take time and they take a long time, and some people get weary of the constant barrage that we see in the media.

"You know, if Houston, Texas, was held to the same standard as Iraq is held to, nobody'd go to Houston, because all this reporting coming out of the local press in Houston is violence, murders, robberies, deaths on the highways," DeLay said.

"And if you took that as the image of what is a great city that has an incredible quality of life and an incredible economy, it's amazing to me. Go to Iraq. And see what's actually happening there.

"Everybody that comes from Iraq is amazed at the difference of what they see on the ground and what they see on the television set."

Well, I haven't heard that there have been a lot of roadside bombings in Houston. Perhaps Steve, our embedded blogger at Yellow Doggerel Democrat, can fill us in...

Go say hi to your village voice. Those of you who remember a certain mid-1960's British TV show will make the connection.

Here's another kink (pun intended) in Jeff Gannon / Jim Guckert's story.

Massachusetts newspaper reporter and her then-editor have accused former White House correspondent 'Jeff Gannon' of plagiarizing an article at which the reporter was the only media witness, RAW STORY has learned.

The alleged plagiarism was discovered by blogger Ron Brynaert, who has tracked other plagiarism by Gannon and various Talon News correspondents at his blog, WhyAreWeBackInIraq.

A Jun. 17, 2003 article published by Jim Guckert, who wrote under the pen name Jeff Gannon, contains numerous identical quotes and similar phrasing to an article written by Melissa Beecher for the Waltham Daily News Tribune five days earlier. A comparison of the two articles compiled by Brynaert follows.

In the article about a Massachusetts couple who refused to let their home-schooled children take a standardized test, Guckert used quotes identical to Beecher's article without attribution. Beecher was the only reporter in attendance at the couple's home the day the Department of Social Services came to collect the children.

Guckert did not respond to two email requests for comment. [RAW STORY]

This should get him back in good stead with the White House; he's now completed two of the requirements to become a certified press lackey -- sell yourself to the highest bidder and steal your work from someone else. It's only a matter of time before he gets his own show on MSNBC.

Bob Taft, the governor of Ohio, is finding out that even a round of golf can be a political liability.

As a widening scandal at the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation threatens his administration, Gov. Bob Taft last night admitted that he had failed to include golf outings on his annual financial disclosure statements filed with the Ohio Ethics Commission.

A source, speaking on the condition of anonymity, yesterday said that Tom Noe, a Toledo-area coin dealer at the heart of the state investment scandal, told him at Toledo’s Inverness Club in 2002 that he was playing golf there with Governor Taft.

The source, who had played golf in the morning, said Mr. Noe told him he would play golf with the governor that afternoon. The source told The Blade that he did not see Mr. Taft, but heard later there may have been other occasions when Ohio’s governor played the Inverness course with Mr. Noe.

Mark Rickel, Mr. Taft’s press secretary, refused to confirm or deny that Mr. Taft had failed to list one or more golf outings involving Mr. Noe on his financial disclosure statements.

He also would not say how many golf outings Mr. Taft had failed to disclose since taking office in 1999.

State law requires officeholders to list each source of gifts over $75. A round of golf at Inverness for a guest is about $140.

[...]

The governor attached to the statement a letter dated June 14 to Merom Brachman, chairman of the Ethics Commission.

“It has recently come to my attention that I failed to list a number of golf outings or events on my financial disclosure forms over the past several years,” he wrote.

It is a first-degree misdemeanor to knowingly falsify an ethics form, with a maximum penalty of six months in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.

Mr. Taft has hired an attorney to represent him on the matter.

[...]

State Sen. Teresa Fedor (D., Toledo) said Mr. Taft has done the “same thing he fired department heads over.”

“How many times do we have to forgive the blatant corruption?” Ms. Fedor said. “This is a serious indictment on how our state government is being run, and it is starting from the top.”

She said the governor notified the Ethics Commission only because he has been caught.

“It’s a cover-up. Obviously, he is covering his tracks,” she said.

Jason Mauk, a spokesman for the Ohio Republican Party, declined to comment last night.

It just keeps getting better...

Jerry Falwell says the church won the election in 2004 and says he's all set to defeat Hillary in 2008.

Just thought I'd remind you what an incredible sphincter Jerry Falwell is in case you forgot.

An aide to Tom DeLay had a hand in ditching contributions from an Indian tribe so that it would not appear that they were sending the money directly to the House Majority Leader's PAC. From Raw Story:

A casino-rich tribe wrote checks for at least $55,000 to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's political groups, but the donations were never publicly disclosed and the tribe was directed to divert the money to other groups that helped Republicans, tribal documents show.

Lobbyist Jack Abramoff, now under criminal investigation, told the Coushatta Indian tribe, a client, to cancel its checks to the DeLay groups in 2001 and 2002 and route the money to more obscure groups that helped Republicans on Medicare prescription drug legislation and Christian voter outreach.

DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority and Americans for a Republican Majority never reported receiving any checks from the Louisiana tribe to federal or state regulators, their reports show. The donations, however, are recorded in memos and ledgers kept by the tribe.

[...]

People familiar with Abramoff's transactions with the Coushattas, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because of ongoing grand jury and Senate probes, said Abramoff re-directed the checks at the request of one of DeLay's assistants.

The aide asked Abramoff to get the checks changed, expressing concern that donations from tribal casinos shouldn't appear on the rolls of DeLay's conservative political groups, the sources told the AP.

[...]

Tribal leaders who watched $32 million of their casino profits go to Abramoff's lobbying efforts now question why money they intended to benefit DeLay causes was often disguised or routed elsewhere.

"There's a pattern of trying to keep high profile entities out of the picture," Coushatta council member David Sickey said. "To me it tells me there's some effort at concealment."

There's a very simple reason for that, Mr. Sickey. You were being ripped off.

Now that Senator Durbin has apologized for telling the truth about Gitmo, wouldn't it be a good time for the Republicans to come clean as well?

I'm not holding my breath.

From the Washington Post:

President Bush, speaking after an historic meeting with Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai at the White House today, announced he will visit Vietnam in 2006 on the invitation of the communist leader.

I guess he couldn't get through to the Texas Air National Guard this time.

Senator Frist shows the dogged independence of the Senate -- a completely independent branch of our democracy.

Senator Bill Frist, the leader of the Senate's Republican majority, abruptly reversed himself after a meeting with President Bush today and said he would schedule another vote on the nomination of John R. Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations.

"The president made it very clear that he expects an up-or-down vote," Dr. Frist said at the White House, after lunching with the president.

"The decision in talking to the president is that he strongly supports John Bolton, as we know, and he asked that we to continue to work," Dr. Frist said. "And we'll continue to work."

Sources say that Dr. Frist began the lunch by asking, "What kind of sycophant would you like me to be, Mr. President?"

From the New York Times:

Edgar Ray Killen, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, was found guilty today of felony manslaughter in the killings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi four decades ago. The verdict, delivered on the 41st anniversary of the deaths, was less severe than the murder conviction that the state prosecutors had sought.

Well, at least it's a conviction. Good.

Every so often I agree with Andrew Sullivan. He may be a Republican and a supporter of George W. Bush, and his taste in men is certainly at odds with mine (that's another story,) but certainly I'm on the same page with him on gay rights. And in light of the article in the New York Times last Sunday that profiled the virulent anti-gay movement within the fundamentalist Christians, Mr. Sullivan's insight as to how gays are now seen by the Christian conservatives deserves consideration.

I think the arguments now made by some Christianists are replicas of the old anti-Semitism, peddled by so many Christians in the past: that Jews are to be loved, but loving them is dependent on their conversion to Christianity; that you can love individual Jews while disdaining Judaism; that Jews' stubbornness in resisting conversion is evidence of their inherent evil; that such evil, at some point, has to be segregated from mainstream society as much as possible. Gays are not the new blacks. They're the new Jews. And the Church, in both Catholic and Protestant variants, is dredging up its old anti-Semitism in new guises. The GOP is along for the ride.

I am wary of generalizations, but I have long seen similarities with how "polite" society has dealt with the issue of tolerating people of other faiths. I'm old enough to remember "restricted" country clubs and neighborhoods as the norm, and I remember elderly friends cautioning me when I moved to Miami in 1971 to attend the University of Miami that is was "full of Jews." As I noted last week, the virulent anti-Semitism that was part of our American culture was largely pushed underground by the Holocaust. So now that it's impolitic to pick on someone of faith, it's now gender orientation that becomes the target, and as Mr. Sullivan notes, it's picked up all the traits of the old anti-Semitism.

The difference is that no one is born Jewish. Faith is a conscious choice made by a person, handed down through the family or society, and someone born to a Jewish family can convert to Christianity without having to undergo a genetic makeover. Someone may "look Jewish" owing to their ethnic heritage, but the physical features ascribed to Jews are common to a lot of people from the eastern Mediterranean, and genetically you can't tell an Orthodox Jew in Tel Aviv from a Lebanese Druse Christian in Beirut any more than you can tell a English Quaker from a Scottish Presbyterian through DNA.

Being gay is not a choice. It's like being born left-handed; it's hard-wired at the factory. We can't convert, and those who say we can are deluding themselves. The sooner the Christianists accept this fact of life and learn to live with us, the better we will all be. I realize it will take a lot of wind out their sails, but have no fear -- they will find another group to pick on. Watch out, left-handed people!

Wow, this is good.

Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY), Ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee, told RAW STORY Tuesday morning that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has agreed to investigate possible contracts between various media and public relations entities and seven White House cabinet level departments.

"I am pleased to see the GAO has decided to move forward with my request for an investigation," Slaughter said in a release. "We deserve to know if the White House and its cabinet level departments have engaged in this outrageous abuse and manipulation of the free press."

The release, advanced to RAW STORY, follows, as does correspondence from the Government Accountability Office. The GAO says they will complete the report by October.

[...]

In a letter released by Rep. Slaughter, the GAO said that it would focus its review on seven different departments within the Executive Branch: Commerce, Defense, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Interior, Treasury and Veterans Affairs. Within each agency, the GAO will identify the contracts with media entities and what the purpose and type of work to be performed was in each contract.

So now Armstrong Williams and all the other ministers of White House propaganda are going under the GAO microscope. Leave it to the beancounters to dig out the truth -- we always do.

See, I told you my Sunday pastime isn't just for us bookish types.

They were once the exclusive purview of Mensa members, university literature professors and people who considered pocket protectors must-have fashion accessories.

But in the past few years, crossword puzzles have started getting out a bit, leaving the tweed-jacket set in the library and the bookstore for Major League Baseball clubhouses. And that's a good thing, says John F. Murray, a clinical and sports performance psychologist in West Palm Beach.

"It occupies the mind in a very constructive, challenging way," Murray said. "It's healthy. You're learning more about the nuances of vocabulary. It's a challenge."

On the other hand, maybe it's just a good way to kill time. Anyone who says baseball is a timeless game has never spent time inside a big-league clubhouse, where players and coaches can spend as many as seven hours a day sandwiched around a 150-minute game. That leaves a lot of time to fill, which is where crosswords come in for most.

"I'm just passing time. I don't do it for any other reason," said first baseman Darin Erstad who, along with outfielder Steve Finley, are the main crossword players on the Los Angeles Angels.

"That's the way I fight boredom," agreed Marlins reliever Jim Mecir, who works on three or four puzzles a week.

[...]

Murray said it's no surprise that most of baseball's crossword players are pitchers, especially relief pitchers, because they're the ones with the most free time. Unlike position players, relievers don't take daily batting practice -- especially in the American League -- and they might go a week or more without appearing in a game. But because they're always on call, they have to remain sharp, mentally as well as physically.

"The more the downtime, the more the sport has mental demands, [and] the more chance there is for any kind of distraction to empty your mind and throw you off," Murray said. "Relief pitchers are the perfect example of pressure performers. Everything is preparation. Everything is what you do in the downtime.

"Crosswords do wake you up. It's a creative endeavor, really."

And perhaps more important, Murray said, the mental skills used to do crossword puzzles might actually help players, both in their on-field performance and in off-the-field endeavors such as television interviews or public speaking.

"It's not just dead time," said Murray, acknowledging that athletes in most sports devote a lot of time to exercising their bodies but precious little to exercising their minds. "It's not like sitting around doing nothing. It might wake you up a little bit and get you thinking a little bit."

Yeah, but do they do the Sunday Times one in ink?

The cost of the war in Iraq is about to exceed the entire cost of the Korean War.

Lawmakers in the United States were scheduled to vote on Monday to approve $45 billion US in additional funding for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, making the recent Middle East foray more expensive than the entire Korean War.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress has approved $350 billion, mostly for combat and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The amount, which includes $82 billion approved last month, is equal to the total amount in today's dollars spent on the Korean conflict from 1950-53.

More than 54,000 U.S. troops were killed and 103,000 wounded in that conflict when the U.S.-led United Nations force pushed back a North Korean invasion into South Korea.

Monday's bill before the House of Representatives would give the Pentagon a total of $364 billion, about a three per cent increase, for its operations for the 2006 budget year that begins Oct. 1. [CBC News via Raw Story]

For that amount of money, you'd think we could have just bought the damn country.

Today's the launch of yet another anti-Hillary Rodham Clinton book, The Truth About Hillary by Edward Klein. (No link; if you want to find it, do it on your own time.)

You know when a book has to label itself as the "truth" in the title, the author is overcompensating for the fact that most of what passes for research is re-hashed rumor and innuendo.

The righties are all twitterpated that this tome will doom Senator Clinton's aspirations to run for president in 2008, and they're all a little too pre-occupied about the juicy stuff that alludes to Mrs. Clinton's sexual orientation. Apparently Rush is so excited he's on the verge of hurting himself. (What is it with straight guys and lesbians, anyway?)

Anyway, it sounds like another Swift-Boat-Veterans run skirting the edges of libel laws. I'm sure that if she wanted to, Mrs. Clinton could find something actionable in it, but I'm sure that she's got too much class to take this guy to court, and all it would do is push up sales.

As Dorothy Parker once said, "This is not a [book] to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

After last week's hue and cry by the Republicans over Senator Durbin's use of the "N-word" (in this case Nazis), you'd think they'd be simon-pure in their avoidance of any such odious comparisons. Ah, but you are forgetting that we're talking about Republicans, people to whom demonization (see below), hypocrisy and short-term memory loss are a way of life. John Byrne in Raw Story has a long list of Republicans and their allies using the Nazi / Fascist analogy for everything from stem-cell research to the heartbreak of psoriasis (well, not that, but you get the idea).

Last June, then-Bush campaign manager Mehlman defended an ad that contained footage of Adolf Hitler interspersed with images of Democratic leaders Al Gore, Dick Gephart and John Kerry. The campaign defended the images, saying they were taken from a video on MoveOn.org.

[...]

White House confidante Grover Norquist, known for his blistering attacks on U.S. taxes, likened the estate tax to the “morality of the Holocaust” in October 2003.

"The argument that some who play to the politics of hate and envy and class division will say is, 'Well, that's only 2 percent -- or, as people get richer, 5 percent, in the near future -- of Americans likely to have to pay [the estate tax],” he told NPR. “I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust: 'Oh, it's only a small percentage. It's not you; it's somebody else.’”

After being criticized for his remarks, Norquist expanded them in 2004 to include Democrats.

"The Nazis were for gun control, the Nazis were for high marginal tax rates.... Do you want to talk about who's closer politically to national socialism, the Right or the Left?" he told the Jewish newspaper The Forward. He also "told the Forward that he would not hesitate to use Holocaust comparisons in the future."

A Republican senator invoked Nazism when criticizing stem cell research last year.

"We certainly have all seen the rejections of Nazi Germany's abuses of science,” Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) declared regarding his opposition to stem cell research last October. “As a society and a nation, there ought to be some limit on what we can allow or should allow."

In response to a ruling on abortion last September, Congressman Steve King said following law on reproductive rights equivalent to a Nazi guard saying he was following orders.

“That, Mr. Speaker, is a ‘modern-day’ equivalent of the Nazi prison guard saying 'I was just following orders,’” he said on the House floor Sept. 8, 2004. “It was all legal in Nazi Germany at the time.”

Another senator even compared the Kyoto climate treaty to Nazism, repeating a quotation from a Russian official.

Sen. James Inhofe said Oct. 11, 2004 that Kyoto "would deal a powerful blow on the whole humanity similar to the one humanity experienced when Nazism and communism flourished."

The Oklahoma Republican added, "The world has certainly turned on its head that we Americans must look to Russians for speaking out strongly against irrational authoritarian ideologies."

Sen. Tom Cole (R-OK) dragged out Hitler to hit Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

"Cole Claims a Vote Against Bush Is a Vote For Hitler," KTOK radio in Oklahoma blared last year.

"Republican Congressman Tom Cole claims a vote against the ‘re-election’ of President Bush is like supporting Adolph Hitler during World War Two,” the station reported. “It's what he said recently before a meeting of Canadian County Republicans."

Cole later codified his statement, saying through a spokesperson: "What do you think Hitler would have thought if Roosevelt would've lost the election in 1944?”

Others, too, have likened Democratic policy to Nazism. Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX) compared a Democratic tax plan to Nazi law in 2002.

"Now, forgive me, but that is right out of Nazi Germany,” Gramm said. “I don't understand ... why all of a sudden we are passing laws that sound as if they are right out of Nazi Germany."

And just last month, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) compared Democrats with Adolf Hitler during the filibuster battle.

"Imagine, the rule that this is the way we confirm judges has been in place for 214 years, broken by the other side 2 years ago, and the audacity of some Members to stand up and say, How dare you break this rule, it is the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying: I'm in Paris, how dare you invade me, how dare you bomb my city. It's mine," Santorum said May 19. "This is no more the rule of the Senate than it was the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster."

But it's okay if you're a Republican...

Summer starts today in the Northern Hemisphere.

Happy Solstice!

From the Washington Post:

Business on the floor of the House was halted for 45 minutes yesterday after Rep. John N. Hostettler (R-Ind.) accused Democrats of "denigrating and demonizing Christians," prompting a furious protest from across the aisle.

The House was debating a Democratic amendment to the annual defense appropriations bill that would have required the Air Force Academy to develop a plan for preventing "coercive and abusive religious proselytizing."

Hostettler, speaking against the amendment, asserted that "the long war on Christianity in America continues today on the floor of the House of Representatives" and "continues unabated with aid and comfort to those who would eradicate any vestige of our Christian heritage being supplied by the usual suspects, the Democrats."

"Like a moth to a flame, Democrats can't help themselves when it comes to denigrating and demonizing Christians," he said.

Yes, that's true. Christians are such an oppressed minority here in America, and right-wing fundamentalist Jesus-shouters are banned from television, large buildings, and the halls of Congress.

Rep. David R. Obey (Wis.), ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, protested the statement, saying: "I move that the gentleman's words be taken down."

[...]

Yesterday, Hostettler had a choice: to agree to withdraw his words, or to stick by them and face a ruling from the chair that he had violated rules against disparaging another member on the floor. If the member's words are taken down, it is considered a serious offense and the lawmaker would not be able to speak for the rest of the day.

Eventually, Hostettler rose and read a sentence that had been written out for him in large block letters by a young Republican floor aide: "Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to withdraw the last sentence I spoke."

Dick Durbin and I will be waiting breathlessly to see if Vice President Cheney says that Mr. Hostettler's words were "over the top."

You might remember Mr. Hostettler -- he's the guy who tried to board an airplane in Louisville with a loaded Glock 9mm in his briefcase. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor and received a suspended sentence. Blessed are the peacemakers.

Matthew Yglesias is right on.

A little while ago Dick Durbin noted on the Senate floor that torturing prisoners was the sort of thing Nazis or Communists would do, and that the United States, trying to be one of the world's good guys, should hold itself to a higher standard of conduct. The right-wing noise machine, deploying some now familiar tactics, decided that the correct response would be to deliberately misrepresent what Durbin was saying and express a lot of outrage that someone would fail to understand that contemporary America is not, in fact, just like Nazi Germany. Hugh Hewitt and Bill Kristol, both of whom I firmly believe know perfectly well that Durbin said nothing objectionable, fall over each other in The Weekly Standard to see who can win Hack of the Year prize by demanding ever-harsher retribution against Durbin.

It's interesting as a case study in the operation of the smear machine, but really more telling as an instance of the ethical black hole into which the contemporary right has fallen. Nowadays, every time somebody raises the topic of immoral torture-related policies undertaken by the Bush administration the instant conservative reaction is to transform the conversation into a debate about the appropriateness of the critics' rhetoric. Every time, the point of the defense is not to defend the conduct in question, but simply to note that someone, somewhere, at some time has done worse things. We're better than Saddam Hussein! Our prisons aren't as bad as Auschwitz! People may be detained arbitrarily without hearings, appeal, due process, or POW status, but it's no Gulag!

So, in other words, as long as we're not doing things like systematically killing people in gas chambers, burning their bodies in massive ovens, or burying them in mass graves, hey, we're the beacon of freedom and democracy!

If Senator Durbin made a mistake in his speech on the Senate floor, it was in not knowing that no matter what he said when he broke Godwin's Law (the argument is over when a comparison to Hitler is made), the banshees of the right wing would come after him like he was in heat. But perhaps he was hoping that the FBI report would be accepted as an objective report and his commentary drawing from historical perspectives would have been taken as just that. And perhaps he assumed that his fellow Democrats would have stood with him against the howls from the disingenuous right wing. Well, Senator Durbin, look how the Democrats have stood with Howard Dean over the last couple of weeks. Uh huh.

From the AP:

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. (AP) -- A former mayor testified Monday for Edgar Ray Killen in the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers, standing up for the former Ku Klux Klansman and calling the white-supremacist group a "peaceful organization."

Harlan Majure, who was mayor of this rural Mississippi town in the 1990s, said Killen was a good man and that the part-time preacher's Klan membership would not change his opinion.

Majur said the Klan "did a lot of good up here" and said he was not personally aware of the organization's bloody past.

"As far as I know it's a peaceful organization," Majure said. His comment was met with murmurs in the packed courtroom.

Oh, that's what all those people were doing standing around a burning cross -- holding hands and singing Kum By Ya.

From the AP:

Iran's spy chief used just two words to respond to White House ridicule of last week's presidential election: "Thank you." His sarcasm was barely hidden. The backfire on Washington was more evident.

The sharp barbs from President Bush were widely seen in Iran as damaging to pro-reform groups because the comments appeared to have boosted turnout among hard-liners in Friday's election -- with the result being that an ultraconservative now is in a two-way showdown for the presidency.

"I say to Bush: 'Thank you,"' quipped Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi. "He motivated people to vote in retaliation."

Bush's comments -- blasting the ruling clerics for blocking "basic requirements of democracy" -- became a lively sideshow in Iran's closest election since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. And they highlighted again the United States' often crossed-wire efforts to isolate Iran.

[...]

At a news conference Sunday, Iran's foreign minister, Kamel Kharrazi, said Bush "should apologize to the people of Iran for his comments." He also extended another wry "thank you."

"Bush's statements brought out voters who didn't want to participate in the elections," Kharrazi said. "We have to thank him for this."

Across the Middle East, Bush's blast hit a fault line.

The president is trying to firm up the United States' pro-democracy credentials by encouraging gradual reforms in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

But at the same time, the White House often is seen as having double standards with the occupation of Iraq and alleged abuses of Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

The Bush comments are an example of "the kind of American intervention" that often boomerangs in the region, said Egyptian political analyst Salama Ahmed Salama.

"Bush meant to discourage the hard-liners," he said, "but instead he mobilized their supporters."

To quote the immortal Archie Bunker: "Dingbat!"

The New York Times ventures out of the bunker with this bit of analysis from Richard W. Stevenson:

Five months after President Bush was sworn in for another four years, his political authority appears to be ebbing, both within his own party, where members of Congress are increasingly if sporadically going their own way, and among Democrats, who have discovered that they pay little or no price for defying him.

In some cases, Mr. Bush is suffering mere political dings that can be patched up, like the votes by the House this past week to buck him on withholding dues to the United Nations and retaining a controversial provision of the USA Patriot Act.

In others, the damage is more than cosmetic, as in the case of stem cell research, an issue on which a good portion of his party is breaking with him. In a few instances - most notably the centerpiece of his second-term agenda, his call to reshape Social Security - he is dangerously close to a fiery wreck that could have lasting consequences for his standing and for the Republican Party.

[...]

The cumulative effect of his difficulties in the last few months has been to pierce the sense of dominance that he sought to project after his re-election and to heighten concerns among Republicans in Congress that voters will hold them, as the party in power, responsible for failure to address the issues of most concern to the public.

"The political capital he thought he had has dwindled to very little, and he overstated how much he had to begin with," said Allan J. Lichtman, a presidential historian at American University in Washington.

And Bush's answer to all of his troubles? Blame the Democrats.

It's nice to see that the press is finally beginning to come out from their shell and take a hard look at what we've got going on here: a colossal mess of a presidency.

From the AP:

The director of the CIA says he has an "excellent idea" where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but that the United States' respect for sovereign nations makes it more difficult to capture the al-Qaida chief.

Riiiight...respect for national sovereignty...that's a good one.

From the Washington Post:

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said yesterday he plans to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 unless he decides later this year that he has little chance of winning.

"My intention is to seek the nomination," Biden said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "I know I'm supposed to be more coy with you. I know I'm supposed to tell you, you know, that I'm not sure. But if, in fact, I think that I have a clear shot at winning the nomination by this November or December, then I'm going to seek the nomination."

I wish to announce that I'm going to be in the Mr. Universe contest this year. I have a clear shot -- I have a Speedo somewhere in my closet, and isn't that all you need?

Remember the War On Terror and how is was supposed to be the biggest threat to our nation since the fall of the Soviet Union? President Bush made it his highest priority and basically ran and won re-election on how he was the right person to guard the nation against terrorism. Well, then, you'd think that some passing knowledge of terrorism and its historical roots might have some bearing on choosing the people to fight it, wouldn't you? Ah, but you would be wrong.

The FBI vowed to build national expertise for fighting terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks, but the supervisors who crafted that war plan now say Middle East and terrorism experience haven't been important for choosing their agents.

"You need leadership. You don't need subject matter expertise," Executive Assistant Director Gary Bald recently testified in a little noticed employment case now catching the eye of Congress. "It is certainly not what I look for in selecting an official for a position in a counterterrorism position."

The lawsuit, brought against the FBI by one of its most accomplished pre-Sept. 11 terror-fighting agents, provides sharp contrasts between the bureau's public promises and the reality of how it has chosen the agents who run its war on terrorism.

In hundreds of pages of sworn testimony obtained by The Associated Press, senior FBI managers argued repeatedly that Middle East and anti-terrorism experience aren't required for promotion and that they see little difference between solving a traditional crime and a terror attack.

"A bombing case is a bombing case," said Dale Watson, the FBI's terrorism chief in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001. "A crime scene in a bank robbery case is the same as a crime scene, you know, across the board."

Watson couldn't describe the difference between Shiites and Sunnis, the two major groups of Muslims. "Not technically, no," Watson answered when asked the question.

Bald, the FBI's current anti-terrorism chief, said his first training in that area came "on the job" when he moved to headquarters to oversee anti-terrorism strategy two years ago. when asked about his grasp of Middle Eastern culture and history, he replied: "I wish that I had it. It would be nice."

[...]

Pat D'Amuro, one of the FBI's most-experienced senior terrorism managers, testified he didn't conduct a systematic search for the bureau's most talented Middle Eastern and terrorism agents worldwide after Sept. 11. Instead, he said, he brought to Washington the agents he personally knew had worked successfully on al-Qaida and other terrorism cases.

D'Amuro said that in later promotions, Middle East and terrorism experience was helpful but not mandatory. He noted the FBI also must deal with terrorism from domestic sources and the Irish Republican Army.

"It could be a benefit. When you look for managers, you're looking for people that can lead people, manage people, knows how to conduct an investigation, knows how to collect certain intelligence or information, you know," D'Amuro testified.

Youssef, the agent suing the bureau, was credited with improving relations with Saudi Arabia during the late 1990s as bin Laden's threat grew and the bureau struggled to solve the case of the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing that killed 19 U.S. service personnel.

He received a special award from the intelligence community for meritorious work and was singled out by his managers for "continuous creativity and perseverance" in terrorism cases. Saudi officials said they regarded Youssef as the most skilled U.S. agent in conducting lie detector tests on Arabic-speaking suspects.

But after Sept. 11, Youssef repeatedly was passed over for top-level headquarters jobs in terrorism. Instead, he was offered same-rank positions in budgeting or exploiting intelligence from terrorism documents.

So the best criterion for choosing the top-level agents in the war on terrorism comes down to cronyism: "Hey, I know this guy..."

I feel so much safer.

The government is suborning perjury.

A top Justice Department official threatened to remove a government expert from its witness list if he did not water down his recommended penalties for the tobacco industry, the witness said in an interview yesterday.

Harvard University business professor Max H. Bazerman said a career trial lawyer told him senior Justice officials wanted him to change his recommendation that the court appoint a monitor to review whether it was appropriate to remove senior tobacco company management. Bazerman said the lawyer was passing along the "strong request" the week before Bazerman was to take the witness stand on May 4 in the government's landmark racketeering case against the industry.

The government says the tobacco industry engaged in a 50-year conspiracy to defraud the public about the dangers and addictiveness of smoking.

Bazerman said the lawyer told him the change -- opposed by the career lawyers on the case -- had come from Justice Department senior litigation counsel Frank J. Marine and Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum Jr.

Bazerman declined to name the lawyer, saying he was concerned the person could face retaliation from Justice Department superiors. Bazerman said the lawyer told him that McCallum had threatened removing Bazerman from the government's witness list and prohibiting him from testifying if Bazerman did not change his testimony. In the proposed change, Bazerman said he was expected to say that appointing a monitor to consider removing senior management would likely be legally inappropriate under certain circumstances. Bazerman said he refused to make the change and was ultimately allowed to testify May 4.

"I would have felt I was lying under oath, and I couldn't do that," Bazerman said. "I thought then, and I believe now, that it was inappropriate influence to weaken the government's case against the tobacco industry."

Remember the good old days when the idea was that government was supposed to protect and promote the safety and well-being of its citizens? Ah, those were the days.

This week all the talk in the papers and on broadcast news has been about the Downing Street Memo; who's covering it, who's talking about it on C-SPAN, why the mainstream media isn't covering it, why it took over a month for the skittish media to timorously bring it up in the White House briefing...but nothing about the contents or the implications of said memo and the subsequent memos that came to light other than "well, it's old news -- everyone knew that Bush was planning to go to war anyway."

So they've turned it into a story not about the memo but a story about the story...what they call a "process story." It's a very handy way to avoid the issue and get away not only from the details of what did the Bush administration plan in the summer of 2002, but the validity of the source of the news itself. Even those of use who have been blogging about it as a part of the Big Brass Alliance and other efforts have had to devote most of our energy just to get our voices -- and petitions -- heard. After all, there has been much more important news to cover, like the latest disappearance of yet another pretty woman, the autopsy of Terri Schiavo, or, so help me, the film rights over the story the runaway bride. Quick, get the Pulitzer Committee.

This is not a surpise. It's easier to write a process story. All you have to do is listen to your cohorts in the press room or read Howard Kurtz rather than actually get off your ass and do some digging or research. Even with the internet and the blogs it still requires tracking down sources, checking facts, and doing real journalism. So you crank out a story about how the story of the Downing Street Memo is slowly making its way onto the mainstream and you do a puff piece on how once again the bloggers are the ones making all the noise, but since they're not real journalists -- they're just people with cats who write in their pajamas (or whatever) -- it doesn't really matter anyway.

Well, as they say in PR, there's no such thing as bad publicity. As long as we keep up the story and keep making the points, we're going to get some kind of result. We've already begun to push the right wing's buttons; they're now spreading the word, according to Shakespeare's Sister, that the Downing Street Memo is a fake. Hey, it worked on Dan Rather, and since the public has the attention span of a mayfly, why not?

We must be getting to them. That means we're getting close. Press on.

PBU25

Thanks to my 60,000 visitor who came in at 3:37 p.m. from Level3.net. Whoever you are, I'm glad you came by, and don't forget to visit the gift shop while you're here.

Seriously, folks, I couldn't do it without you.

Two stories that have one common thread -- bigotry. One is a veteran lawmaker who attempts to come clean about his history with the Ku Klux Klan. Eric Pianin profiles Robert Byrd and his new book in the Washington Post.

In the early 1940s, a politically ambitious butcher from West Virginia named Bob Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. After Byrd had collected the $10 joining fee and $3 charge for a robe and hood from every applicant, the "Grand Dragon" for the mid-Atlantic states came down to tiny Crab Orchard, W.Va., to officially organize the chapter.

As Byrd recalls now, the Klan official, Joel L. Baskin of Arlington, Va., was so impressed with the young Byrd's organizational skills that he urged him to go into politics. "The country needs young men like you in the leadership of the nation," Baskin said.

The young Klan leader went on to become one of the most powerful and enduring figures in modern Senate history. Throughout a half-century on Capitol Hill, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) has twice held the premier leadership post in the Senate, helped win ratification of the Panama Canal treaty, squeezed billions from federal coffers to aid his home state, and won praise from liberals for his opposition to the war in Iraq and his defense of minority party rights in the Senate.

Despite his many achievements, however, the venerated Byrd has never been able to fully erase the stain of his association with one of the most reviled hate groups in the nation's history.

[...]

Byrd's indelible links to the Klan -- the "albatross around my neck," as he once described it -- shows the remarkable staying power of racial issues more than 40 years after the height of the civil rights movement. Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) learned that lesson the hard way at a birthday party in December 2002, when his nostalgic words about Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), who ran for president as a segregationist in 1948, caused a public uproar and cost Lott the majority leader's post.

[...]

By relentlessly serving his state's economic interests, Byrd has secured his place as West Virginia's preeminent politician. As a long-reigning chairman and ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, Byrd pumped billions of dollars worth of jobs, programs and projects into the state that did not have a single mile of divided four-lane highway when he began his political career. More than three dozen bridges, highways, schools and public buildings are named for him.

Still, says Ken Hechler, 90, a liberal Democratic former U.S. House member from West Virginia who served with Byrd in Congress, "It's impossible for anyone to try to whitewash the KKK and its overall symbolism."

"But at the same time," he added, "we honor those people who publicly admit the error of their ways."

Last week, Byrd said: "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times . . . and I don't mind apologizing over and over again. I can't erase what happened."

Senator Byrd may never be able to shake off his past with the KKK, but at least he is doing what he believes he can to atone for his sins.

On the other hand, contrast that with this story by Russell Shorto in the New York Times Sunday magazine about the rise of the anti-gay marriage movement.

Those at the center of the opposition are, almost to a person, motivated by their brand of Christian beliefs. That was apparent in conversations I had with activists around Maryland and in several other states, and it was much in evidence at a dinner that Laura Clark arranged for my benefit, to which she had invited six friends who were active in the cause, all of whom were eager to explain what drives them. Most were born and raised in Maryland, and all but one -- who is registered as an Independent -- are Republicans. We made our way around the buffet Laura laid out on the dining-room table -- sliced lunch meats, hamburger buns, tomato and onion slices, bowls of pretzels and chips, cookies and several two-quart plastic bottles of soda -- then sat down to chat.

[...]

Brian Racer is pastor to Laura and Dave Clark and a local opinion shaper on social issues. He is a tall, rangy 43-year-old man with a big mustache and a conversational style that is casual but enormously self-confident. Racer has a vigorous Christianity-in-society approach, which is illustrated by a recent move he made. When Mel Gibson's movie ''The Passion of the Christ'' came out in February 2004, he, like many ministers around the country, booked a whole theater in the local multiplex to accommodate the members of his church. But the venue itself -- comfortable seats, good acoustics, convenient location -- clicked for him. He worked out a rental arrangement with the manager of the theater. So now the Clarks and their fellow congregants worship at the Open Door Bible Church in Theater 24 in the Muvico multiplex at the Arundel Mills Mall. ''The teens think it's pretty cool,'' he said. ''After service they can go have lunch at the food court, then come back to the theater and see a movie.''

I found what Racer had to say on the subject of homosexuality a clear and direct summation of the views of the others Laura had invited over that night and of the other anti-gay-marriage activists with whom I spoke. ''The Hebrew words for male and female are actually the words for the male and female genital parts,'' he told me. ''The male is the piercer; the female is the pierced. That is the way God designed it. It's unfortunate that homosexuals have taken the moniker 'gay,' because their lifestyle and its consequences are anything but. Look what has happened in the decades since the sexual revolution and acceptance of the gay lifestyle as normal. Viruses have mutated. S.T.D.'s have spread. It shows that when we try to change the natural course of things, what comes out of that is not joy or gayness.''

The others in Laura Clark's living room, sitting with paper plates balanced on their laps, nodded and added supporting sentiments. Explaining how homosexuality resembles an insidious disease, Racer said, ''If you have a same-gendered union, you have no natural, biological way to propagate your philosophy.'' So, he explained, it seeks to spread itself by other means, including popular culture. Bryan Simonaire added: ''We have to recognize that they have a strategy to propagate their lifestyle. Think back 10 or 20 years ago, when you had the first openly homosexual person on TV. It was shocking to a lot of people. Now it's the norm on television, so you don't have the shock factor. Then they had two men with a passionate kiss on TV. That's the road they're heading down. They have a strategy.''

[...]

But, of course, the Christian activists aren't vague in their opposition. For them, the issue isn't one of civil rights, because the term implies something inherent in the individual -- being black, say, or a woman -- and they deny that homosexuality is inherent. It can't be, because that would mean God had created some people who are damned from birth, morally blackened. This really is the inescapable root of the whole issue, the key to understanding those working against gay marriage as well as the engine driving their vehicle in the larger culture war: the commitment, on the part of a growing number of people, to a variety of religious belief that is so thoroughgoing it permeates every facet of life and thought, that rejects the secular, pluralistic grounding of society and that answers all questions internally.

The only difference between the people gathered in Laura Clark's living room and the KKK is that the Klan wears a uniform. These people and their movement, hiding behind the safe shield of their so-called "religious beliefs," are bigots, plain and simple, no better than the raving Klansmen and White Power warriors that gather in the woods of northern Idaho. They may seek the respectability of the shopping malls and the cul de sacs of suburbia, and they may use the scriptures of Christianity to justify their hatred, but history has taught us that intolerance and inhumanity have made their greatest strides in our civilization by inculcating themselves into the mainstream and insinuating themselves into the power structures such as political parties and local government. These people have now spread their gospel into the seats of power in Washington and numerous state capitals, and they will not rest until they have achieved their vision of a "Christian" theme park writ large as a nation. Today Maryland -- tomorrow the world.

The time for tolerance is over. Those of us who have laughed off or mocked the anti-gay activists have enabled them by not taking their movement seriously. We know what they want. They have made it clear: the comments last week by a spokesman for the Christian Coalition suggesting that gays be equipped with warning labels was the latest shot in their attempt to marginalize and ostracize an entire class of people. They are no better than the Klan, and what they can't do with a lynch mob and a rope they will do with legislation and Constitutional amendments. I don't know about you, but I'm not going to let it happen, and I'm not going to let the shield of religion protect the propogation of hatred.

Happy Father's Day.

The Downing Street Memo was a question on Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!, the NPR news quiz show today, and the contestant got it right.

You know you're getting somewhere when you're common knowledge among NPR listeners...

Not only do we have a governor going to the limit on the Schiavo case (see below), now we have a school board going over the top on patriotism.

Students in Hernando County who want to show their patriotic pride may be limited to the stars and stripes.

The School Board is considering a proposal that would forbid them from wearing apparel that displays any flag other than the American flag.

The proposed ban, which would be unique in the Tampa Bay region, was drafted by a district committee examining changes to the student code of conduct. In addition to barring students from wearing the Confederate flag, the proposal would keep them from wearing the flag of any other country, unless there is "a designated ethnic recognition activity held at the school."

The scope of the flag ban could make it vulnerable to litigation. Becky Steele, director of the West Central Florida region of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was "overly broad" and would create "serious first amendment problems."

Barbara Renczkowski, president of the Hernando County council of PTAs and a member of the committee that proposed the change, said the ban had come up because officials wanted to head off students who might wear the Confederate flag to school. Members then decided to expand the ban rather than keep it narrow, Renczkowski said.

"It was an observation that it could possibly cause problems," Renczkowski said. "They just felt it would be easier to ban them all (except the American flag) instead of just one."

Has there been a rash of Confederate flag wearing going on in Hernando County? And is this the most newsworthy thing that the school board can come up with? Sheesh.

I know that Ricky at The Life of a Teenage Liberal is researching the impact of school uniforms on students and performance. I wonder what he thinks of this obvious assault on free speech.

Oh, great.

MasterCard International reported yesterday that more than 40 million credit card accounts of all brands might have been exposed to fraud through a computer security breach at a payment processing company, perhaps the largest case of stolen consumer data to date.

MasterCard said its analysts and law enforcement officials had identified a pattern of fraudulent charges that were traced to an intrusion at CardSystems Solutions of Tucson, Ariz., which processes more than $15 billion in payments for small to midsize merchants and financial institutions each year.

About 20 million Visa and 13.9 million MasterCard accounts were compromised; the other accounts belonged to American Express or Discover cardholders. The accounts affected included credit cards and certain kinds of debit cards. The F.B.I. said it was investigating.

A MasterCard spokeswoman, Sharon Gamsin, said an infiltrator had managed to place a computer code or script on the CardSystems network that made it possible to extract information. She would not elaborate on how long the breach might have lasted, on when the inquiry began or on whether any infiltrators had been identified. She did say that the breach occurred this year.

This year? I feel so much better knowing they're hot on the case.

Maybe I'd have been better off buying some rare coins...

The New York Times fashionistas are looking over the latest looks in clothing and saying that it's hard to tell who's straight and who's gay by how they dress.

Are you confused that the newly styled Backstreet Boys, hoping for a comeback, look an awful lot like the stars of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy"? Are you curious why Brad Pitt, to promote his new film, dyed his crew cut so blond that even his hairdresser is scratching his head?

Well, how about that guy you see in the locker room, changing out of his Prada lace-ups, Hugo Boss flat-front pants and Paul Smith dress shirt and cuff links into a muscle T-shirt and Adidas soccer shorts. Does he wear that wedding ring because he was married in New York - or in Massachusetts?

Or those two 40-something guys walking in the park in pastel oxford-cloth shirts and khakis, collars turned up and cuffs rolled, one of them pushing a stroller? Is that baby his - or theirs?

Confused? You are not alone. It is late June, when many cities across the country celebrate gay pride, and bare-chested he-men dressed in very little are out in the streets again. But look past them, and June is more confusing. As gay men grow more comfortable shrugging off gay-identified clothing and Schwarzeneggerian fitness standards, straight men are more at ease flaunting a degree of muscle tone seldom seen outside of a Men's Health cover shoot. And they are adopting looks - muscle shirts, fitted jeans, sandals and shoulder bags - that as recently as a year ago might have read as, well, gay.

Take it from a gay man who wouldn't know fashion trends from a weather front and whose idea of a clothing store is the aisle at Target where they sell Levi's: it isn't how a man dresses that marks him as gay or straight...it's how he undresses.

The term "jumped the shark" entered the popular lexicon about ten years ago. It means when someone has gone beyond their limit in terms of natural popular appeal and is now sucking wind in trying to stay on top. The term comes from the famous Happy Days episode where the Fonz, complete with leather jacket, jumped over a shark on water skis. It was a desperate attempt to keep the ratings for the show up, but it was clear the show was running on fumes. It was either jump the shark or re-run the Joanie Loves Chiachi in escrow episode.

Well, it seems that Florida Governor Jeb Bush is jumping the shark with his latest move in the Schiavo case.

One day after an exhaustive autopsy sought to end much of the controversy over Terri Schiavo's life, and eventual death, Gov. Jeb Bush said he plans to ask prosecutors to investigate whether her husband took too long to call for help on the night she collapsed in 1990.

[...]

Bush said Thursday that he had talked to Dr. Jon Thogmartin, the Pinellas-Pasco medical examiner, a day before Thogmartin publicly released the results of his autopsy on Terri Schiavo, who died on March 31 after a protracted legal and political battle.

Bush said Thogmartin told him he had gained access to information suggesting that there was a 70-minute delay between when Michael Schiavo first heard a ''bump'' in the early morning hours of Feb. 25, 1990 and when he eventually called 911.

Okay, I'm not that kind of doctor, but I took enough advanced first aid and CPR to know that if someone's heart stops beating and you wait for over an hour to get medical attention, the only thing the paramedics would be able to do is wait for the coroner because the patient will be dead. Not brain-damaged, not blind, not in a persistent vegetative state. DEAD.

So what is Jeb up to? Simple. He is trying to get as much political mileage as possible out of the story, and since he can't attack the autopsy report, all he has left is a 911 call made fifteen years ago. Which makes you wonder why no one mentioned this before, say when Ms. Schiavo was alive? It would have made a compelling argument in a guardianship hearing to show Michael Schiavo demonstrated depraved indifference in 1990, and Ms. Schiavo could still be "alive," so to speak. But no. He had to wait until there was nothing left but the husband to beat up on or risk the more of the wrath of the Religious Reich; he already pissed them off last March when he wouldn't send in a S.W.A.T. team to "rescue" her.

Give Jeb some water skis and a leather jacket; the sharks are circling.

Like Jeff at Speedkill, I get a kick out of reading some of the letters to the editor of the local paper. Here's a good one from today's Miami Herald that wraps up the concept of IOKIYAR (It's Okay If You're A Republican):

I trust Republicans

I trust the Patriot Act to do its job: Root out terrorists and their plots to destroy this great nation. However, that is only because I trust the Republicans and President Bush.

In the hands of Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi or, God forbid, Hillary Clinton, I fear that the law would be turned against the populace, and the Department of Homeland Security would become the new gestapo [sic].

The Patriot Act must be subject to the same checks and balances that run the country. This is why I fear the loss of the filibuster. Without these safeguards in place, the day that the Republicans lose control to the Democrats is the day that the country dies.

JIM KONONOFF, Coral Gables

Hey, Jim, I've got news for you: You're five years behind the times. Not only that, if it's okay with you that 1,700 American soldiers can be killed in the name of a fraud but a blowjob is an impeachable offense, you deserve whatever fresh hell the Republicans can poison you with.

Paul Krugman does a great job of summarizing the scandals of the Republicans. It all boils down to Tom Noe (the Ohio Coingate scandal) and Tom DeLay (Texas redistricting, TRMPAC, the Marianas, etc.)

How could such things happen? The answer, it has become clear, lies in a web of financial connections between state officials and the businessmen who got to play with state funds.

We're not just talking about campaign contributions, although Mr. Noe's contributions ranged so widely that five of the state's seven Supreme Court justices had to recuse themselves from cases associated with the scandal. (He's also under suspicion of using intermediaries to contribute large sums, illegally, to the Bush campaign.) We're talking about personal payoffs: bargain vacations for the governor's chief of staff at Mr. Noe's Florida home, the fact that MDL Capital employs the daughter of one of the members of the workers' compensation oversight board, and more.

Now, politicians and businessmen are always in a position to do each other lucrative favors. Government is relatively clean when politicians are sufficiently afraid of scandal to resist temptation. But when a political machine controls all branches of government, and those officials charged with oversight are also reliably partisan, politicians feel safe from investigation. Their inhibitions dissolve, and they take full advantage of their position, until the scandals become too big to hide.

In other words, Ohio's state government today is a lot like Boss Tweed's New York. Unfortunately, a lot of other state governments look similar - and so does Washington.

Since their 1994 takeover of Congress, and even more so since the 2000 election, Republican leaders have sought to make their political dominance permanent. They redistricted Texas to lock in their control of the House. Through the "K Street Project" they have put lobbying firms under partisan control, starving the Democrats of campaign funds. And they are, of course, trying to pack the courts with partisan loyalists.

[...]

It's a likely bet that the scandals we already know about, from Coingate to Tom DeLay's dealings with the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, are just the tip of the iceberg.

Now all we need is a press corps that isn't afraid of its own shadow to get out there and do the real digging. The Toledo Blade deserves all the credit for Coingate. But where's the rest of it going to come from when there's another Tom -- as in Tom Cruise -- taking up all the oxygen?

The Faithful Correspondent tipped me off to this transcript in Editor & Publisher of a little exchange between ABC's Terry Moran and Scott McClellan:

Q Scott, is the insurgency in Iraq in its 'last throes'?

McCLELLAN: Terry, you have a desperate group of terrorists in Iraq that are doing everything they can to try to derail the transition to democracy. The Iraqi people have made it clear that they want a free and democratic and peaceful future. And that's why we're doing everything we can, along with other countries, to support the Iraqi people as they move forward….

Q But the insurgency is in its last throes?

McCLELLAN: The Vice President talked about that the other day -- you have a desperate group of terrorists who recognize how high the stakes are in Iraq. A free Iraq will be a significant blow to their ambitions.

Q But they're killing more Americans, they're killing more Iraqis. That's the last throes?

McCLELLAN: Innocent -- I say innocent civilians. And it doesn't take a lot of people to cause mass damage when you're willing to strap a bomb onto yourself, get in a car and go and attack innocent civilians. That's the kind of people that we're dealing with. That's what I say when we're talking about a determined enemy.

Q Right. What is the evidence that the insurgency is in its last throes?

McCLELLAN: I think I just explained to you the desperation of terrorists and their tactics.

Q What's the evidence on the ground that it's being extinguished?

McCLELLAN: Terry, we're making great progress to defeat the terrorist and regime elements. You're seeing Iraqis now playing more of a role in addressing the security threats that they face. They're working side by side with our coalition forces. They're working on their own. There are a lot of special forces in Iraq that are taking the battle to the enemy in Iraq. And so this is a period when they are in a desperate mode.

Q Well, I'm just wondering what the metric is for measuring the defeat of the insurgency.

McCLELLAN: Well, you can go back and look at the Vice President's remarks. I think he talked about it.

Q Yes. Is there any idea how long a 'last throe' lasts for?

McCLELLAN: Go ahead, Steve....

Cue Abbott and Costello...

Former Senator John Danforth says that not all Christians are right-wing loons, but they're the ones who are getting all the attention, much to the dismay of the moderates who truly want to work for our common good.

People of faith have the right, and perhaps the obligation, to bring their values to bear in politics. Many conservative Christians approach politics with a certainty that they know God's truth, and that they can advance the kingdom of God through governmental action. So they have developed a political agenda that they believe advances God's kingdom, one that includes efforts to "put God back" into the public square and to pass a constitutional amendment intended to protect marriage from the perceived threat of homosexuality.

Moderate Christians are less certain about when and how our beliefs can be translated into statutory form, not because of a lack of faith in God but because of a healthy acknowledgement of the limitations of human beings. Like conservative Christians, we attend church, read the Bible and say our prayers.

But for us, the only absolute standard of behavior is the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. Repeatedly in the Gospels, we find that the Love Commandment takes precedence when it conflicts with laws. We struggle to follow that commandment as we face the realities of everyday living, and we do not agree that our responsibility to live as Christians can be codified by legislators.

When, on television, we see a person in a persistent vegetative state, one who will never recover, we believe that allowing the natural and merciful end to her ordeal is more loving than imposing government power to keep her hooked up to a feeding tube.

When we see an opportunity to save our neighbors' lives through stem cell research, we believe that it is our duty to pursue that research, and to oppose legislation that would impede us from doing so.

We think that efforts to haul references of God into the public square, into schools and courthouses, are far more apt to divide Americans than to advance faith.

Following a Lord who reached out in compassion to all human beings, we oppose amending the Constitution in a way that would humiliate homosexuals.

[...]

For us, religion should be inclusive, and it should seek to bridge the differences that separate people. We do not exclude from worship those whose opinions differ from ours. Following a Lord who sat at the table with tax collectors and sinners, we welcome to the Lord's table all who would come. Following a Lord who cited love of God and love of neighbor as encompassing all the commandments, we reject a political agenda that displaces that love. Christians who hold these convictions ought to add their clear voice of moderation to the debate on religion in politics.

Amen.

This is not the first time Senator Danforth has spoken out agains the Religious Reich; back on March 30, 2005 he wrote that the Republicans were under the thrall of conservative Christians. When Howard Dean said it a couple of weeks ago, he was stomped on. Watch your back, Father Jack.

Here's what the Liberal Coalition is looking at this week.

archy has a collection of stupid comments by other people.

Bark Bark Woof Woof wonders when the media will catch up to blogs.

BlogAmY wonders why the anti-lynching vote wasn't unanimous.

bloggg goes to bat for Dean.

Chris goes for the Superhero meme.

Collective Sigh brags on her kid...and why not?

Lambert at Corrente shows how a real reporter covers the Downing Street Memo.

NTodd tunes in to ESP. (I knew he was going to do that.)

Echidne on being easy.

First Draft stands up for Dick Durbin.

For Charles2 at The Fulcrum, a loss of life in Iraq hits home.

The Gamer's Nook quotes a famous discourse on American history.

Happy Furry Puppy reviews this summer's movies.

iddybud summarizes the Downing Street Memo "hearings."

Jesse finds an ally for peak oil in Atrios.

Left Is Right on angry teachers in California.

Bryant clears up the question of where liberals stand on torture.

Musing's musings likes Dick...Durbin, that is.

Pen-Elayne cleans up.

Rook's Rant on the name game in scandals.

rubber hose on what makes news today.

Scrutiny Hooligans goes sour on sweeteners.

SoonerThought has thoughts on the only Democrat to vote to keep the PATRIOT Act library snoop provision.

Jeff at Speedkill on the liberal conspiracy behind the Schiavo autopsy.

Steve Gilliard on the Mississippi Burning trial.

T. Rex does his own blogaround of good reading.

Who better than The Invisible Library to comment on the PATRIOT Act.

Trish Wilson on the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado...remember The Shining?

Wanda pays tribute to Old Glory.

WTF Is It Now?? on a Republican exit strategy.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat had a power struggle.

Read every post and report back here when you're done with a short essay on your findings.

This is good -- the Downing Street Memo might bring the Bolton nomination to a grinding halt.

U.S. Senate Democrats rejected a Republican compromise over John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador on Thursday and cited a British report backing their view that the Bush administration hyped intelligence on Iraq before the 2003 invasion.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, said the Senate would hold a procedural vote on Monday to try to break the deadlock on Bolton. Democrats said they had enough votes to block the nomination, but Republicans hoped they would be viewed as obstructionists.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid demanded a full accounting of whether Bolton exaggerated assessments of several countries' weapons programs, a key issue in the long-stalled nomination.

"All over the news the last few days has been concerns about weapons of mass destruction by virtue of the memo that was discovered," the Nevada Democrat said, referring to the so-called "Downing Street memo."

How about that -- two for the price of one: Bolton goes down and the DSM gets the credit.

In 1970 I left Perrysburg, Ohio, in my 1957 Chevrolet station wagon bound for a summer job in Plainfield, Vermont, where I spent about two months baling hay, milking cows, cleaning out barns, and doing other farm chores. I drove through Canada, entering in Windsor and taking the 401 up to Montreal. I spent the night in Kingston, and arrived in Plainfield the next afternoon. The number one song on the radio was Close to You by the Carpenters.

In 1948 my parents were married in St. Louis. They're still together and in good health and good spirits. Happy 57th, Mom and Dad.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 3:48 PM  

Sam used to sleep on a particular corner of my bed, and I used to accomodate him by making sure that I left him some room there. For the last month of his life he was at the vet's, but out of a thirteen-year habit, I left him room. After he died I still didn't stick my legs down into that corner of the bed. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night I swear that Sam is still sleeping on that corner and I can hear his gentle soft snore.

Of course in the cold light of day reality sets in and I know he's gone, but it doesn't mean I can change my habits that easily. Amputees often feel the pain or sensation of their missing limbs -- it's called phantom pain. It's not really there, but it still hurts.

In a way, I imagine what's what Terri Schiavo's parents are going through with the final autopsy report that basically said their daughter died the night she collapsed. They still cannot accept that she's gone and that there had to be some hope left no matter what the doctors and the evidence proved. I understand their feelings.

The problem is that this is no way to go through life. Grieving isn't a way of life; it stagnates and leaves you vulnerable to more pain, which then becomes a vicious cycle. It also leaves you susceptible to the vultures and opportunists who will exploit your fear and loss for their own agenda. People like Randall Terry and the whole crowd who descended on the hospice in Florida didn't give a rat's ass about what the Schindlers were going through except for how they could use it to further their own ends. Senators pontificating and diagnosing from the floor of the Senate, the president interrupting his Easter vacation to sign a bill that cynically told the world he cared less about the laws he was sworn to uphold than the extortion he was under to a political movement, the chaos of the media around the courthouse and the threats of retribution and death to the judges by "pro-life" terrorists all piled on to these poor people who were enduring enough pain, phantom or otherwise.

I'd like to hope that this brings this sad story to a close, but I doubt it. No one ever lost an election or missed a fundraising goal by exploiting the fear and faith of the American public, and the Schindler's role in this grande guignol isn't over. All I can hope is that somehow, some way they will find the strength to move on and remember their daughter as she was when she was alive, not as the phantom the vultures picked over.

David goes to his basement and digs up his rose-colored glasses.

Ah, for the good old days when we had accessible culture in this country.

The reason that Time and Newsweek don't cover "middlebrow" culture any more is because now there are plenty of other outlets that cover it better and with more insight...like People and E! And if the 1950's and 1960's aspired to better things culturally, they had an odd way of showing it -- if anything our popular culture was just as much about personalities then as it is now: Elvis, Marilyn, The Rat Pack, et cetera. One thing they did better back then was automobile styling...except for the Edsel.

The Chicago Tribune wonders:

The U.S. Senate did something rare Monday night: It apologized for the past. The Senate apologized for its failure to enact anti-lynching legislation decades ago, apologized to lynching victims and their descendants.

No legislation, of course, can truly atone for the estimated 5,000 people who were lynched in the United States in the period after the Civil War and into the 20th Century. But the resolution was at least a long-delayed acknowledgment that the Senate should have acted to rid the country of violent acts designed to intimidate and control African-Americans. The U.S. House passed anti-lynching legislation three times during the 20th Century, but the Senate buckled under filibusters by Southern lawmakers. Back then, the South was solidly Democratic.

Now the Senate has attempted to rectify that. But even with its action Monday, there is something unsettling, something incomplete. The resolution was passed by a voice vote because some Southern senators didn't want to go on record apologizing for past sins of their people.

An expression of regret over lynching is controversial today?

By Wednesday, 90 senators were listed as supporters of the resolution, among them the impassioned driving forces behind the apology, Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and George Allen (R-Va.).

That left 10 senators, all Republicans, off the list. Among them, Thad Cochran and Trent Lott, who represent Mississippi, the state with the most recorded lynchings.

"I don't feel that I should apologize for the passage or the failure to pass any legislation by the U.S. Senate," Cochran said, according to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. "But I deplore and regret that lynchings occurred and that those committing them were not punished." Lott's office did not return calls to the newspaper.

Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) condemned lynching in a floor speech but didn't cosponsor the resolution, explaining, "rather than begin to catalog and apologize for all those times that some Americans have failed to reach our goals, I prefer to look ahead."

There's still time for all of the senators to acknowledge the historic wrong committed by their body. Supporters of the measure can still express their support. They can sign an oversize copy of the resolution, a copy that will be presented to the traveling exhibit, "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America."

The exhibit is on display at the Chicago Historical Society. It provides a record of the shameful past. The oversize resolution will provide another record, of sorts, a record of reconciliation by many and, perhaps, denial by a few.

Well, now, you know you just can't piss off the Confederate soldier veterans vote...

One of Rush Limbaugh's favorite targets is trial lawyers and activist judges. That is, until he needs them.

From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

Palm Beach County prosecutors told a judge Wednesday that they want to see all of Rush Limbaugh's seized medical records to determine whether he engaged in a long-term pattern of criminal prescription drug abuse.

For the first time, prosecutors said the records could provide a crucial link between allegations by Limbaugh's former housekeeper and later allegations that Limbaugh engaged in doctor shopping for prescriptions.

[...]

Assistant State Attorney James Martz told Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Thomas Barkdull that the records could show that the conservative radio host engaged in doctor shopping -- secretly obtaining overlapping prescriptions from different doctors in one month -- after the Clines stopped selling to him.

"There is a definitive start to the prescription medications. That definitive start may well coincide with the Clines withdrawing their willingness to do business with Mr. Limbaugh," Martz said.

More than a year and half after prosecutors seized records from four of Limbaugh's doctors in late 2003, they are still waiting to review them. Limbaugh's high-profile attorney, Roy Black, is waging an intense legal battle to keep the records secret. Barkdull will soon rule on which records, if any, prosecutors can review.

Limbaugh, 54, of Palm Beach, has not been charged with any crimes. He fought prosecutors from gaining access to the sealed records and lost all the way to the Florida Supreme Court.

Say, Rush, why don't you see if you can get Congress to pass a special "Rush's Bill" to have the federal government intercede in the state's right to prosecute you? Isn't that how it works?

The House knocks out one of the provisions of the "PATRIOT" Act.

The House voted Wednesday to block a provision of the USA Patriot Act that makes it easier for federal investigators to review the records of libraries and bookstores on national security grounds.

[...]

Those who challenged the provision, a coalition of liberals and conservatives, said the 238-to-187 House vote should send a message to the administration that lawmakers are leery of maintaining all elements of the law even as President Bush seeks to renew the act.

"Congress has begun to hear that civil liberties and privacy issues are important to Americans," said Representative Bernard Sanders, the independent from Vermont who led the effort to block the provision through a $57.5 billion spending measure. It covers the Justice, State and Commerce departments as well as federal science programs.

[...]

In a letter sent Tuesday to Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia, the Justice Department defended the library provision as a valuable terror-fighting tool. "Bookstores and libraries should not be carved out as safe havens for terrorists and spies, who have, in fact, used public libraries to do research and communicate with their co-conspirators," wrote William E. Moschella, assistant attorney general.

Yeah, I was in Barnes & Noble in Coral Gables last week and there were some real scruffy critters hanging out in the coffee bar reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

NPR's Morning Edition led off at 5 a.m. ET with a story by Mary Louise Kelly on the Downing Street memo, including clips from Rep. John Conyers and military families who want to know why their loved ones were sent into combat. Ms. Kelly noted that the story of the DSM has been lying around for about a month but is now beginning to pick up steam as the mainstream media like NBC begins to report stories on not just the memo but the inquiries into where it came from and who knew about it.

Finally...

Let's keep at it. As Smintheus at Downing Street Memo gently reminded me, there are lots of places that have this information if you'll only look for it. (Just so you know, I've had links to his site and After Downing Street for weeks now.)

And this just in from Raw Story/Yahoo! News: Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), who coined the term "freedom fries," is now co-sponsoring legislation calling for an investigation into the truth behind the Downing Street Memo. Pass the ketchup.

Aw, c'mon, you knew this was coming.

As funny as this may sound, President Bush misses John Kerry. In the 2004 campaign, Bush sought to make the election a referendum on the Democratic senator's character and leadership skills rather than his own record as president. Now that he has nobody to run against, every day is a referendum on Bush. And it's taking a toll.

Bush's approval ratings are among the lowest of his presidency. Voters are growing increasingly uneasy over the war in Iraq and the economy. His signature domestic issue, Social Security reform, was received coolly by Congress and the public. Some Republicans are raising the prospect that Bush could cost them control of Congress.

What happened in seven months? One explanation is that he lost his punching bag - a political rival who, once pummeled, helped make Bush look good by comparison.

[...]

Now, with nobody else to blame, Bush stands alone. He can't deflect voter concerns about the economy and other pressing domestic matters. With the death toll in Iraq pushed above 1,700, more than double the number of a year ago, it's no longer a choice between Bush and Kerry.

It's Bush's war. Period.

[...]

Bush seems to be warming to the idea of finding a new punching bag.

Addressing GOP donors on Tuesday night, the president said of Democratic lawmakers: "On issue after issue, they stand for nothing except obstruction, and this is not leadership. It is the philosophy of the stop sign, the agenda of the roadblock, and our country and our children deserve better."

Not that I'm in the habit of giving campaign advice to Republicans -- and like they'd listen, anyway -- I don't think it's a good idea to play the victim. "Oh, look, even though we're the majority party in both the House and the Senate and I'm getting regular blowjobs from the corporate media, I can't get anything done because the Democrats won't let me have my way and that big meanie Howard Dean are makin' fun of me!"

It looks to me like Bush has bet his much-vaunted political capital on lost causes like "reforming" Social Security, sucking up to the Religious Reich, and trying to convince the world that there's a light at the end of the tunnel in Iraq. All three of these efforts have cratered, so the only thing he has left is blame someone else for their own problems.

There's a twelve-step program for that.

One of the most frustrating things about covering a story like the Downing Street Memos -- now plural thanks to the reporting from the Los Angeles Times -- has been getting the "mainstream" media to pick up on the story. Bloggers like the gang at the Big Brass Alliance and After Downing Street have been working it since it broke in early May, but when you're not seeing it in the New York Times or on the broadcast newscasts, you not only feel frustrated but you run the range of emotions from tin-foil-hat paranoia -- "there's a cover-up of massive proportions going on!" -- to wondering if anyone who's reading the blogs actually gives a rat's ass -- "oh, yeah, another big blog blow-up about something about something -- hey, look at the kitty." Kinda makes you wonder if it's all worth it.

Then you find out that the reason the mainstream didn't pick up on it is that the wire services like Associated Press, which is their main source of news outside of their own newsrooms, didn't pick up on it, either. Eric Boelhert in Salon.com puts it this way.

Editors rely on the worldwide wire service to let them know what's worthy of attention, and that's particularly true for international events. In the case of the Downing Street memo out of London, they say the AP simply failed to cover the story.

AP certainly wasn't alone. An analysis conducted last week by Salon showed a shocking lack of mainstream media interest in the story during the entire month of May and into early June. There was a near blackout of the story on television, and just a handful of print outlets even reported the breaking news. Among the few media outlets with national reach to cover the story in real time was the Washington bureau of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain, which provided wire copy for the company's newspapers with a May 5 comprehensive story about the leaked memo.

Ordinarily, that's the type of function the AP provides for hundreds of U.S. news organizations. But Jim Cox, USA Today's senior assignment editor for foreign news, told Salon that when the story first broke last month, "we looked to wires for guidance" but for days didn't see anything. It was a month before the paper reported on the memo; Cox takes the blame for that omission. "I wish we'd had something in early on, and I wish we'd been able to move the memo story forward. I feel like we missed an opportunity, and that's my fault," he told Salon.

[...]

"The original story broke on a Sunday, so it was initially difficult to match without access to government officials and documents," said Nick Tatro, the AP's deputy international editor. Then, the AP editors who repeatedly considered doing a story, he said, didn't necessarily see the document as a clear-cut case of proving the manipulation of intelligence. Also, the demands of other important stories kept diverting them, he said. "Our people felt it wasn't a completely clear comment from the raw material," Tatro said. "It was our intent to do a story, and it just didn't happen."

In response to a request for comment, Deborah Seward, AP's international editor, conceded to Salon in an e-mail, "Yes, there is no question AP dropped the ball in not picking up on the Downing Street memo sooner."

Fuckin' duh.

I'm pretty sure the folks that were concerned about this news coming out -- the White House, 10 Downing Street, and the rest of the apologia on the right -- were waiting on tenterhooks for the uproar that would come from the news getting banner headlines in the U.S. after the story was broken by the Times of London, which isn't exactly a left-wing tabloid. I'm sure they had all the talking points memos ready to be handed out to the likes of Bob Novak and Kate O'Bierne, and Rush's fax machine was spinning out Karl's script before the break of day on Monday, May 2. When it exploded with the thud of a wet firecracker, they all breathed a huge sigh of relief and reveled in the fact that the AP, which bills itself as "the essential global news network" had dropped the ball and gave them a month or so to dismiss all the blogchat about DSM and demands for congressional hearings as the ravings of the lunatic left.

Well, as they say in sailing, they've got a lot of windward to make up, but it's also a vindication of the terrier-like efforts of the left blogosphere. And it proves we're not completely crazy...although you couldn't tell by the coverage of really important news:

Non-Sequitur

The final autopsy report is in.

An autopsy on Terri Schiavo backed her husband's contention that she was in a persistent vegetative state, finding that she had massive and irreversible brain damage and was blind, the medical examiner's office said Wednesday. It also found no evidence that she was strangled or otherwise abused.

But what caused her collapse 15 years remained a mystery. The autopsy and post-mortem investigation found no proof that she had an eating disorder, as was suspected at the time, Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin said.

Autopsy results on the 41-year-old brain-damaged woman were made public Wednesday, more than two months after Schiavo's death March 31 ended an internationally watched right-to-die battle between her husband and parents that engulfed the courts, Congress and the White House and divided the country.

Thogmartin also said she did not appear to have suffered a heart attack and there was no evidence that she was given harmful drugs or other substances prior to her death.

She died from dehydration, Thogmartin said.

He said she would not have been able to eat or drink if she had been given food by mouth as her parents' requested.

''Removal of her feeding tube would have resulted in her death whether she was fed or hydrated by mouth or not,'' Thogmartin told reporters.

He also said she was blind, because the ''vision centers of her brain were dead.''

Her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, had fought their son-in-law, Michael Schiavo, in court for seven years over her fate.

Thogmartin said that Schiavo's brain was about half of its expected size when she died 13 days after her feeding tube was removed.

Speaking of blind and brain-dead, I'm sure the next word out of the Religious Reich will be that the removal of the feeding tube was what shrank her brain and blinded her.

My adopted home town is in the forefront of modern technology.

Here's a new reason to keep your cellphone charged:

Parking in Coral Gables, home to 4,573 parking meters, has been made easier by the introduction this month of a park-and-pay-by-cellphone service -- touted as the first of its kind in the country.

That's right: Pay by phone. You pull up, dial a number, punch in a few keys and walk away without a worry. The meter won't expire until you call again to log off.

''You can do that? Wow,'' said an approving Kamran Saraf, a 25-year-old medical student at the University of Miami. He had already dropped a quarter in the lot behind the post office on Miracle Mile but subscribed to the service when he returned and was told about it by a Herald reporter.

It took him six-and-a-half minutes to enter his credit card, e-mail, license plate and telephone number.

''It's pretty cool,'' Saraf said, having a V8 moment and regretting the fortune he might have made had he invented this service. 'I actually thought of that a while ago, `Why don't they let you pay by phone?' ''

A subscriber's phone will even ring when the maximum time for the meter is about to pass -- and then the time can be extended without having to leave a meeting or interrupt shopping to feed more coins into the meter.

Mari Molina, the executive director of the Gables Business Improvement District, is thrilled to see something alleviate the one thing that keeps coming up as a deterrent for downtown shoppers: parking.

''It's innovative,'' Molina said. ``People come down and they start meandering and they forget about their parking meters, and we certainly don't want them to get parking tickets.''

Which raises a question: Won't the city lose revenue in having fewer violators?

''There could be some minor impact to the number of parking tickets we issue, but I think the service to the public far outweighs that,'' said William Carlson, the city's parking director.

The program has been offered in Europe and Canada, he added, but this is the first time it has been offered in a U.S. city.

Ironically, one of the biggest traffic hazards in Coral Gables is drivers who nearly run over pedestrians because they are too busy yakking on their cellphones in their behemoth SUV's to watch where they are going.

The New York Times picks up on the buzz of Al Franken's possible run for the Senate to replace Norm Coleman.

The swells who showed up before Al Franken's speech at a Democratic fund-raiser to down finger food and punch were thrilled to see him, all the more so because he continues to make threatening noises about running for the Senate here in 2008.

A former writer and performer for "Saturday Night Live" and more recently a radio host on Air America, Mr. Franken has used his outsider status to hurl humor-based invective and indignation at the powers that be, but he is considering becoming part of what he so frequently assails.

On Saturday evening he worked the crowd as if being accosted by strangers in a sweltering tent redolent of meatballs was his idea of a good time.

It can get mighty personal mighty fast for a native son whom everyone seems to know.

"I jumped ya twice in Thief River Falls," said a middle-age woman in greeting at the pre-speech party in a tent next to the Ted Mann Concert Hall at the University of Minnesota here. The seeming inference of long-ago sexual congress would cause deep blushing elsewhere, but it actually meant that Faith Rud and Mr. Franken had bonded in a far more profoundly Minnesotan way: she had used jumper cables to revive his Volkswagen bus on a cold night long ago after a college gig.

[...]

There would not seem to be much of a fit between Mr. Franken and his re-adopted home state. Minnesota Nice, as it is called, means that when the woman serving coffee at Caribou, the local doppelgänger of Starbucks, asks how you are doing, she really wants to know. Although Mr. Franken is affable and sports a backpack jammed with wonky articles and books, he is not exactly Minnesota Nice. His last book was titled "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them," and he spends enormous amounts of time on his three-hour radio show truth-squading and savaging various people on the right.

Then again, Minnesota is a place of enormous, and not easily explained, contradictions. A place where lions of the Democratic party - Hubert H. Humphrey and Eugene J. McCarthy - once strode the earth, it takes voting very seriously, with a 79 percent turnout in the 2004 general election. Yet in 1998 it elected a professional wrestler to run the state. Minnesotans, who show up in droves at the state fair to marvel at seed art and butter sculptures but also show up en masse at the legitimate theater, are their own darn thing. So frequently cast as droll practitioners of the art of common sense, they have displayed some fairly atavistic tendencies, electing Mr. Ventura out of nowhere as both a slap and a jolt to the system. In their own quiet way, they remain mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore.

On Saturday the crowd of about 500 Minnesotans was hungry for Grade A red meat with a side of invective, and Mr. Franken did not disappoint. He pointed out that he had been married for 30 years and said, "If I get in a debate with Norm Coleman, I plan on asking him, 'Don't you want two people to have what you and your wife have?' " He paused as the roar grew in acknowledgement of the fact that Senator Coleman and his wife, Laurie, spend significant amounts of time apart because of her acting career.

The laughter filled Mr. Franken with glee, but in the next moment, he choked up while talking about touring with the U.S.O. He is surprisingly raw, breaking down when he mentions his father and, minutes later, screaming with indignation when he talks about money that has gone missing that was intended for redevelopment in Iraq. In that sense he is not remarkably different from Senator Wellstone, known to rattle a lectern with his sheer volume.

[...]

Minnesotans, as Garrison Keillor has pointed out, are plenty smart in general, just not too fond of showing it off. They are more than willing to invite a prodigal back to the potluck supper that is life here, and to lampoon their own cartoonish dimensions at the same time. At the end of Mr. Franken's speech, he received a thunderous ovation - and a special gift from Margaret Anderson Kelliher, a Democratic state representative from Minneapolis.

She presented him with a Crock-Pot, along with some advice: "Nothing says 'I care' quite like wild-rice hot dish for the neighbors."

Having spent several years in Minneapolis and having one-half of my gene pool from there -- you betcha -- I think Al Franken would be a pretty good choice to run for the Senate. Minnesotan have made some interesting choices in the past: this is the state that sent Jesse Ventura to the governorship and Paul Wellstone to the Senate, all indicating that they maintain that stubborn independent streak. They've had their quirks, too -- Wellstone defeated a plaid-shirt-wearing plywood magnate named Rudy Boschwitz who redefined the word "dull." The only reason Boschwitz had a shot at the Senate was because when Walter Mondale was elected vice president in 1976, the governor at the time, Wendell Anderson, resigned so that he could have his successor appoint him to fill Mondale's seat. This bit of seat-shuffling went over like a lead lutefisk, and the voters retaliated by electing Boschwitz in 1978. Norm Coleman, who rose to political prominence as the Democratic mayor of St. Paul (and served as Bill Clinton's state chairman in 1996) only to switch parties when he saw the opportunity, is rapidly proving to the voters that he is not much more than a toady for the Bush administration. That's not what Minnesotans expect from their representatives, and I predict that if Franken runs, he'll win. Air America's loss would be America's gain.

Wow, go away for a day (see below) and look what happens:

NBC News verifies at least seven more documents corroborating the Downing Street Memo and the Bush administration's ramping up the drive to go to war as early as March 2002 -- a full year before the actual invasion. (In other words, NBC finally catches on to what the blogosphere has been talking about for weeks. Try to keep up, people.)

Via Raw Story and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Old Times There are Not Forgotten."

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) refused repeated requests for a roll call vote that would have put senators on the record on a resolution apologizing for past failures to pass anti-lynching laws, officials involved in the negotiations said Tuesday.

And there was disagreement Tuesday over whether Saxby Chambliss, one of Georgia's two Republican senators, had supported the measure when it was approved Monday night.

Bob Stevenson, Frist's chief spokesman, said Tuesday evening the procedure the majority leader established was "requested by the sponsors."

The chief sponsors of the resolution, Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and George Allen (R-Va.), disputed that assertion.

Landrieu said Monday before the resolution was adopted she would have preferred a roll call vote but had to accept the conditions set by Senate leaders.

When Stevenson was informed of Landrieu's statement, he amended his comments to say "at least one of the sponsors" had requested adoption on a voice vote and in combination with a resolution related to Black History Month.

Allen press secretary David Snepp took issue with Stevenson. "I don't know why Bob Stevenson would characterize it that way," he said.

I guess having a roll-call vote would have been dicey for some Southern senators, huh? And the Republicans were upset about being labelled as a "white, Christian party"?

From Raw Story and The Hill, there's just no end to the arrogance of power from the Republicans.

If the Financial Services Committee is the best in the House when it comes to bipartisan comity, then the Judiciary Committee may well be the worst.

In December, ranking Democrat John Conyers (Mich.) began holding “forums” — gatherings with all the trappings of official hearings — after Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) refused to hold hearings on topics Conyers requested. The forums have been held in smaller committee rooms, often with C-SPAN coverage and formal witness lists.

In a sign of how far relationships on the committee have soured, majority staff recently announced a new policy to deny any request from a committee Democrat for the use of a committee hearing room.

Majority spokesman Jeff Lungren said the Republicans have given Democrats three opportunities to make clear that the forums are not official committee business. Nevertheless, Lungren said, in at least one case, members were addressing Conyers as “Mr. Chairman.”

“They were unwilling or unable to make those changes,” Lungren said. “At this point, if they want to hold these forums, they’ll have to find some other place to do it.”

Sean McLaughlin, deputy chief of staff for Sensenbrenner, recently wrote to a minority staffer in more pointed language.

“I’m sitting here watching your ‘forum’ on C-SPAN,” McLaughlin wrote. “Just to let you know, it was your last. Don’t bother asking [for a room] again.”

A committee source said committee Democrats are still planning to hold the forums when they find other available space.

Geez, I can't go away for just one day without all hell breaking loose.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 6:13 AM  

For those of you who waited to hear what happened...

I arrived at the courthouse early -- about 7:45 a.m. -- which was fifteen minutes before the time on the summons. The bailiff led me and the others into the Jury Assembly Room with about two hundred chairs like you'd see in an airport waiting lounge. There were TV monitors showing a video of the history of the courthouse itself. It was built in 1925 and is famous for, among other things, being the place where Al Capone was put on trial in the 1930's. There's also a flock of turkey vultures that roost on the pyramid-shaped cupola.

At 8:30 a staff member went through the instructions: we would be called by summons number when a judge requested a panel of jurors. Meanwhile, we were to sit and wait. We could not leave the area. We could make phone calls, but basically we were stuck there until called. At 9:30 the first three panels were called. They did several numbers around me, but skipped me. At 9:45 they put a movie on the monitors: Bruce Almighty starring Jim Carrey and Morgan Freeman. They called another panel. Missed again. I read my book and occasionally nodded off. They interrupted the movie to call another panel. Missed me. When Bruce Almighty was over, they started another movie, and apparently someone on the jury pool staff has a sense of humor, because they chose The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks: the film about the guy trapped in the International Transit lounge at JFK.

At 11:30 they let us go to lunch, so after a stroll through downtown Miami looking at the shops and jewelry stores, I got something to eat and came back at 1:00 p.m. At 1:45 they called two more panels and BINGO! Finally!

My fellow jurors and I were led across the street to the new courthouse and up to the 20th floor where, after about fifteen minutes, we were led into a courtroom and went through the process of voire dire. It became clear that we were being looked at to sit on a civil case involving a physical therapy practice suing an auto insurance company over payment for services rendered for a client who had suffered back injuries. Through the questioning I learned a lot about my fellow jurors and also discovered that I knew one of my fellow jurors indirectly -- she was the widow of a man I'd taught with. After nearly an hour of questioning from both sides, we were escorted out. Several of us took lighthearted bets as to who would be chosen and who would be excused: we were sure that the doctor who had recently been sued for malpractice by an insurance comapny and the woman who had been through PT for a back injury would be excused. After about a half hour we returned to the courtroom where the final six jurors were chosen. I was excused, and they took the doctor and the woman. Go figure.

Anyway, it was a rather interesting experience. The wheels of justice may grind slow and exceedingly dull, but it seems to be the way things should work. Just take along a good book.

Here's the latest on the background to the real story about going to war in Iraq.

Raw Story has a timeline complete with links to the history of the run-up to the war, plus a collection of background documents, including memos, Condi Rice's commitment to regime change, and lots of other goodies.

The Big Brass Alliance is growing: there are over 450 blogs now keeping tabs on this story.

After Downing Street is prepping for a big Washington rally on June 16. If you're in the neighborhood, go.

This story is growing, and along the way it's gaining attention from people who have heretofore not really given it much space...like some of the big blogs. But as things go along, they're beginning to notice, and in one case, demonstrate a touch of class, too. Good going, Ezra.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 6:33 AM  

Via Raw Story and Yahoo! News:

ST. GEORGE, Utah — Abandoned by his family, faith and community, Gideon Barlow arrived here an orphan from another world.

At first, he played the tough guy, aloof and hard. But when no one was watching, he would cry.

The freckle-faced 17-year-old said he was left to fend for himself last year after being forced out of Colorado City, Ariz., a town about 40 miles east of here, just over the state line.

"I couldn't see how my mom would let them do what they did to me," he said.

When he tried to visit her on Mother's Day, he said, she told him to stay away. When he begged to give her a present, she said she wanted nothing.

"I am dead to her now," he said.

Gideon is one of the "Lost Boys," a group of more than 400 teenagers — some as young as 13 — who authorities in Utah and Arizona say have fled or been driven out of the polygamous enclaves of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City over the last four years.

His stated offenses: wearing short-sleeved shirts, listening to CDs and having a girlfriend. Other boys say they were booted out for going to movies, watching television and staying out past curfew.

Some say they were sometimes given as little as two hours' notice before being driven to St. George or nearby Hurricane, Utah, and left like unwanted pets along the road.

Authorities say the teens aren't really being expelled for what they watch or wear, but rather to reduce competition for women in places where men can have dozens of wives.

"It's a mathematical thing. If you are marrying all these girls to one man, what do you do with all the boys?" said Utah Atty. Gen. Mark Shurtleff, who has had boys in his office crying to see their mothers. "People have said to me: 'Why don't you prosecute the parents?' But the kids don't want their parents prosecuted; they want us to get the No. 1 bad guy — Warren Jeffs. He is chiefly responsible for kicking out these boys."

The 49-year-old Jeffs is the prophet, or leader, of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The FLDS, as it is known, controls Hildale and Colorado City.

The towns sit at the foot of the remote and majestic Vermillion Cliffs, a place of red rock isolation. Women walk the streets in bonnets and trousers under long dresses. Their hair is pinned high on their heads, often with a braided ponytail hanging in back.

Many of the boys said children didn't attend school past the eighth grade and that they were taught that blacks were inferior — the offspring of Cain and doomed to slavery. Such views have earned the FLDS a hate-group designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The children are told that dinosaurs came from another planet, and man never walked on the moon. More important, they learn the outside world is wicked and salvation comes through obedience to the prophet, who channels God's will.

According to those inside and outside the community, this way of life has become even stricter since Jeffs took over in 2002. Competitive sports — said to promote pride — have been curtailed or eliminated. Swimming is frowned upon, and talking to a girl can earn a boy a visit from the local police.

Which way to Jonestown?

E.J. Dionne sounds like he's been channeling The West Wing for his tea-leaf reading this morning.

That would be John and Jeb, the most logical Republican ticket if the party remains in the polling doldrums. If President Bush and his political maestro, Karl Rove, decide that the only way to create a political legacy is to nod toward the Arizona senator with whom they have battled and feuded, they will go for the guy who can win.

[...]

Bush has been battling, with Rove's help, for a long-term political realignment in favor of the Republicans. The president could well come to see McCain as the only Republican with a chance to push a Republican era forward. McCain, in turn, knows that his only way around the Republican right is to run with Bush's open blessing, if not his outright endorsement.

And here is where Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, could be the deal-closer. Jeb Bush has said he will not run in 2008. But that does not rule him out as a vice presidential candidate. If McCain won, Jeb would be the No. 2 to a president who will turn 72 on Aug. 29, 2008, and might well serve only a single term. If McCain lost, Jeb would have enhanced national recognition for a run in 2012. If picking Jeb is the price of winning over George W., McCain will pay it.

George W. Bush and John McCain may prefer not to need each other. But by 2008, they could well become codependent. American politics has produced stranger alliances.

Maybe it's more The Odd Couple than anything else.

I report this morning at 8:00. I'm taking along a book to read -- they suggest that on the recorded message -- while I wait to see if I'm selected. I'll take notes, too.

That might make blogging a little light and variable today, but I'm sure you'll understand as I do my duty as a citizen...

From 365gay.com via Raw Story:

The leader of a conservative Christian lobby group appears to suggest that gays should be required to wear warning labels, although he denies that was his intention.

"We put warning labels on cigarette packs because we know that smoking takes one to two years off the average life span, yet we 'celebrate' a lifestyle that we know spreads every kind of sexually transmitted disease and takes at least 20 years off the average life span according to the 2005 issue of the revered scientific journal Psychological Reports," Rev. Bill Banuchi, executive director of the New York Christian Coalition told the Mid Hudson News.

The journal regularly publishes articles described by many mainstream psychologists as misleading and faulty. The homosexuality morbidity study was conducted by the conservative anti-gay Family Research Institute.

Banuchi called LGBT Pride celebrations held in New Paltz, north of New York City, and other areas of the country on the weekend "sad".

He called on people to "pray for those who are deceived by the lies of popular culture, who are caught up in a destructive lifestyle, and for the children who are being zealously evangelized by radical homosexuals."

Despite using the analogy of cigarette labels, Banuchi tells 365Gay.com that he is not advocating gays specifically be labeled.

Banuchi also alleges that he has received hate mail since his remarks were published.

The issue of labels is particularly sensitive to gays. In Nazi Germany they were forced to wear the pink triangle to differentiate them from other internees at concentration camps.

He alleges he's received hate mail? Ya think?

Actually, I think it's a good idea. After all, gaydar doesn't work for everybody, and I've forgotten the secret handshake I learned during my graduate studies in advanced fagology at Comoniwannalaya College. Assuming that every muscle stud that "accidentally" brushed my arm last night with their bulging biceps as I strolled down South Beach last night was actually cruising me would have been presumptuous. So yeah, putting on a big sign that says "HEY I'M GAY" would probably help.

Seriously folks...these people need help. What's going to happen to the Christian Coalition when the last vestige of tolerable bigotry is finally crushed? Where will they turn? The 1960's and Martin Luther King made racism outre (that means out of fashion for you straight people), and World War II took all the fun out of anti-Semitism. So why not label the queers? But when you pack us up and ship us off, don't come running to me when you can't get a decent hair style or you need someone to redecorate your deluxe double-wide, or all the Broadway musicals are reduced to Bob Jones University's theatre department doing The Passion of the Christ On Skates. Then you'll be sorry.

I choose JIF Extra Crunchy over Peter Pan.




Made you look.

Via Why Now? comes the conclusion to the career of the White House toady who fudged the data on global warming documents.

A senior White House official has resigned days after he was criticised for allegedly playing down global warming in US government documents.

The White House said Philip Cooney's sudden departure was totally unrelated to the allegations.

He was chief of staff at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Critics say his alterations cast doubt on the link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, accepted by most scientists.

"[Mr Cooney] had accumulated many weeks on leave, and so he decided to resign and take the summer off to spend some time with his family," presidential spokeswoman Erin Healy told AFP news agency.

"Spending time with his/her family" has become the new euphemism for "fired his ass." It's like the story that some parents used to tell their kids about what happened to the dog: "He's gone to live on a farm where he can run and play," when it reality they had him put to sleep. Nobody's buying it, least of all the dog...

Alan Ehrenhalt has a review of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House by John F. Harris in the New York Times. It sounds like a fascinating book about the most interesting American political figure since Nixon; perhaps since FDR.

Millions of Americans despise Bill Clinton. They have done so since he became a presence in national politics in the early 1990's, and they continue to do so today, more than four years after his retirement from public office.

The passion of the Clinton haters is a phenomenon without equal in recent American politics. It is not based on any specific policies that Clinton promoted or implemented during his years in office. It is almost entirely personal. In its persistence and intensity, it goes far beyond anything that comparable numbers of people have felt about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or either of the presidents Bush. It surpasses even the liberals' longstanding detestation of Richard Nixon. The only political obsession comparable to it in the past century is the hatred that a significant minority of Americans felt for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.


In this respect the phenomenon is all the more puzzling. Roosevelt made enormous and sometimes reckless changes in the American government and economy, and when his critics loathed him for it, he loathed them back. "They are unanimous in their hate for me" he said of them in his 1936 re-election campaign, "and I welcome their hatred." Clinton, on the other hand, was a centrist who undertook no dramatic transformations of society or government and, what was more, showed himself to be an instinctive conciliator who believed in compromise almost to a fault.

[...]

Most presidents -- most public leaders -- are complex human beings, and that is certainly true in Clinton's case. But as Harris makes clear, he was more than that: he was a man who appreciated complexities and pondered them endlessly; who saw the ambiguity in nearly any policy situation; who loved to tease out the subtleties and distinctions that lesser minds found uninteresting. Occasionally during the Clinton presidency, writers dredged up Scott Fitzgerald's definition of a first-rate intelligence: that of someone who could hold two opposed ideas in his head at the same time and still function. No one in the past century of American politics met that test better than Clinton.

Sometimes it brought him serious trouble, as when he labored to tell the literal but not the contextual truth to prosecutors in the Lewinsky case, and left much of the public angry at him. Sometimes it made him maddeningly slow to make up his mind. Erskine Bowles once marveled at Clinton's ability to ''analyze all the factors, all the risks and opportunities, and weigh them brilliantly.'' On those occasions, Bowles said, all the president needed was someone who could make sure he wasn't influenced to change his mind by the last old friend whom he happened to talk to on the phone. Such is the hazardous life of any politician blessed -- or cursed -- by the ability to see all sides of a difficult question.

But if Clinton was indecisive, he was also supremely resilient. This is the quality that seems most to impress Harris, and the one the title of his book emphasizes. Clinton may have been a man plagued by uncertainties, but he was also a man who never gave up. Not when the Republicans humiliated him in the 1994 election; not when they seemed to have him cornered in budget negotiations the following year; not when the Lewinsky case seemed as if it would force him out of office in disgrace. "I'm the big rubber clown you had as a kid," he told Newt Gingrich, his Republican nemesis, in 1995. "The harder you hit me, the faster I come back up." That very trait -- documented by Harris in situation after situation -- portrays a strength of character seldom acknowledged by Clinton's many critics.

[...]

The debate about Bill Clinton, about his character and achievements and moral worth, will go on long after the subject himself has departed from the scene. Clinton "was too vital and too vexing a character to be easily forgotten or dismissed," Harris writes. This is a complex, interesting and subtle book about a complex, interesting and subtle man.

I look forward to reading it...and hearing once again from the wing-nuts who will make millions by demonizing him again. Bill will just keep laughing at them.

From the New York Times:

MAHMUDIYA, Iraq - A small but telling test of Iraq's fledgling army came recently in this troubled farm town south of Baghdad, when a group of Iraqi soldiers, ending a house raid and rushing to board pickups they use as troop carriers, abandoned the blindfolded, handcuffed man they had come to arrest.

"They left the detainee," an astonished American soldier said, spotting the man squatting in the dust along a residential street. "They just left him there. Sweet."

The Iraqi troops were on their seventh house raid of the morning, part of a cordon-and-search operation in an area of towns and farmland so dangerous that American soldiers call it the Triangle of Death. Prompted by the soldier, the Iraqis ran back for the detainee, and managed much of the rest of their mission effectively, rounding up 13 insurgent suspects in three hours without having to call for direct involvement of the watching American troops.

Such limited successes stand against a backdrop of American disappointment with many of the Iraqi units, whose effectiveness is crucial to a future American troop withdrawal.

Despite the Bush administration's insistent optimism, Americans working with the Iraqis in the field believe that it could be several years, at least, before the new Iraqi forces will be ready to stand alone against the insurgents.

To those of us of a certain age, this whole scenario has a decidedly familiar ring. They used to call it "Vietnamization;" the U.S. military training the home-grown troops to defend their own country so we wouldn't have to. How did it work? Well, just ask the residents of Ho Chi Minh City. It used to be called Saigon before the North Vietnamese army rolled into town and swept away the newly-minted South Vietnam army like Sherman rode through Georgia.

Via Dohiyi Mir and some raggedy-ass news outfit:

Howard Dean is "over the top," Vice President Dick Cheney says, calling the Democrats' chairman "not the kind of individual you want to have representing your political party."

"I've never been able to understand his appeal. Maybe his mother loved him, but I've never met anybody who does. He's never won anything, as best I can tell," Cheney said in an interview to be aired Monday on Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes."

His mother? Okay, Howard Dean threw the red meat to the base with the talk about the Republicans, but I'm pretty sure he didn't go after Barbara Bush. (Full disclosure: I've met Howard Dean's mother. She's very nice, but she doesn't take shit from anybody.) As for the "never won anything" crack, let's let the facts speak for themselves:

[Dean] began his political career in the early 1980's as the Chittenden County (Vermont) Democratic Party chair. In 1983, Dean was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives. He was then elected lieutenant governor in 1986 and was re-elected in 1988 and 1990. He became Vermont's governor upon the death of Governor Richard A. Snelling on August 14, 1991.

Elected to a full term in November 1992, Governor Dean was re-elected four more times.

Even Fox News catches that little boo-boo.

So we've had three weeks of right-wing screeching and pundit jowl-shaking about Howard Dean's "over the top" comments. What do you think will be the reaction to Vice President Cheney's rather personal -- if not a little odd -- comments about Mrs. Dean and the fact that he doesn't know his political history from a load of hay?

Cue the crickets...

My summons number didn't get called up today. I'm going to work. I have to check again tonight after five.

Last night on The Capital Gang, Bob Novak and Kate O'Bierne read their Rove-scripts very well, dismissing the Downing Street Memo as just liberal propaganda. Well, good morning, Bob and Kate -- there's another British memo, another embarrassment for the Bush administration, and another chance to ask the hard questions.

A briefing paper prepared for British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers eight months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the British memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of that country.

The eight-page memo, written in advance of a July 23, 2002, Downing Street meeting on Iraq, provides new insights into how senior British officials saw a Bush administration decision to go to war as inevitable, and realized more clearly than their American counterparts the potential for the post-invasion instability that continues to plague Iraq.

In its introduction, the memo "Iraq: Conditions for Military Action" notes that U.S. "military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace," but adds that "little thought" has been given to, among other things, "the aftermath and how to shape it."

The July 21 memo was produced by Blair's staff in preparation for a meeting with his national security team two days later that has become controversial on both sides of the Atlantic since last month's disclosure of official notes summarizing the session.

In those meeting minutes -- which have come to be known as the Downing Street Memo -- British officials who had just returned from Washington said Bush and his aides believed war was inevitable and were determined to use intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his relations with terrorists to justify invasion of Iraq.

The "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy," said the memo -- an assertion attributed to the then-chief of British intelligence, and denied by U.S. officials and by Blair at a news conference with Bush last week in Washington. Democrats in Congress led by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), however, have scheduled an unofficial hearing on the matter for Thursday.

Now, disclosure of the memo written in advance of that meeting -- and other British documents recently made public -- show that Blair's aides were not just concerned about Washington's justifications for invasion but also believed the Bush team lacked understanding of what could happen in the aftermath.

Well, hindsight is 20/20, and we know all too well now.

Frank Rich says that the revelation of Deep Throat reminds us that it wasn't the story of Watergate -- The Movie that was important -- it was what the people who did it tried to do to the country. Don't Follow the Money.

This confusion of Hollywood's version of history with the genuine article would quickly prove symptomatic of the overall unreality of the Deep Throat coverage. Was Mr. Felt a hero or a villain? Should he "follow the money" into a book deal, and if so, how would a 91-year-old showing signs of dementia either write a book or schmooze about it with Larry King? How did Vanity Fair scoop The Post? How does Robert Redford feel about it all? Such were the questions that killed time for a nation awaiting the much-heralded feature mediathon, the Michael Jackson verdict.

Richard Nixon and Watergate itself, meanwhile, were often reduced to footnotes. Three years ago, on Watergate's 30th anniversary, an ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans couldn't explain what the scandal was, and no one was racing to enlighten them this time around. Vanity Fair may have taken the trouble to remind us that Watergate was a web of crime yielding the convictions and guilty pleas of more than 30 White House and Nixon campaign officials, but few others did. Watergate has gone back to being the "third-rate burglary" of Nixon administration spin. It is once again being covered up.

Not without reason. Had the scandal been vividly resuscitated as the long national nightmare it actually was, it would dampen all the Felt fun by casting harsh light on our own present nightmare. "The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before" was how the former Nixon speech writer William Safire put it on this page almost nine months ago. The current administration, a second-term imperial presidency that outstrips Nixon's in hubris by the day, leads the attack, trying to intimidate and snuff out any Woodwards or Bernsteins that might challenge it, any media proprietor like Katharine Graham or editor like Ben Bradlee who might support them and any anonymous source like Deep Throat who might enable them to find what Carl Bernstein calls "the best obtainable version of the truth."

The attacks continue to be so successful that even now, long after many news organizations, including The Times, have been found guilty of failing to puncture the administration's prewar W.M.D. hype, new details on that same story are still being ignored or left uninvestigated. The July 2002 "Downing Street memo," the minutes of a meeting in which Tony Blair and his advisers learned of a White House effort to fix "the intelligence and facts" to justify the war in Iraq, was published by The London Sunday Times on May 1. Yet in the 19 daily Scott McClellan briefings that followed, the memo was the subject of only 2 out of the approximately 940 questions asked by the White House press corps, according to Eric Boehlert of Salon.

This is the kind of lapdog news media the Nixon White House cherished. To foster it, Nixon's special counsel, Charles W. Colson, embarked on a ruthless program of intimidation that included threatening antitrust action against the networks if they didn't run pro-Nixon stories. Watergate tapes and memos make Mr. Colson, who boasted of "destroying the old establishment," sound like the founding father of today's blogging lynch mobs. He exulted in bullying CBS to cut back its Watergate reports before the '72 election. He enlisted NBC in pro-administration propaganda by browbeating it to repackage 10-day-old coverage of Tricia Nixon's wedding as a prime-time special. It was the Colson office as well that compiled a White House enemies list that included journalists who had the audacity to question administration policies.

Such is the equivalently supine state of much of the news media today that Mr. Colson was repeatedly trotted out, without irony, to pass moral judgment on Mr. Felt - and not just on Fox News, the cable channel that is actually run by the former Nixon media maven, Roger Ailes. "I want kids to look up to heroes," Mr. Colson said, oh so sorrowfully, on NBC's "Today" show, condemning Mr. Felt for dishonoring "the confidence of the president of the United States." Never mind that Mr. Colson dishonored the law, proposed bombing the Brookings Institution and went to prison for his role in the break-in to steal the psychiatric records of The Times's Deep Throat on Vietnam, Daniel Ellsberg. The "Today" host, Matt Lauer, didn't mention any of this - or even that his guest had done jail time. None of the other TV anchors who interviewed Mr. Colson - and he was ubiquitous - ever specified his criminal actions in the Nixon years. Some identified him onscreen only as a "former White House counsel."

Had anyone been so rude (or professional) as to recount Mr. Colson's sordid past, or to raise the question of whether he was a hero or a traitor, the genealogical line between his Watergate-era machinations and those of his present-day successors would have been all too painfully clear. The main difference is that in the Nixon White House, the president's men plotted behind closed doors. The current administration is now so brazen it does its dirty work in plain sight.

[...]

Only once during the Deep Throat rollout did I see a palpable, if perhaps unconscious, effort to link the White House of 1972 with that of 2005. It occurred at the start, when ABC News, with the first comprehensive report on Vanity Fair's scoop, interrupted President Bush's post-Memorial Day Rose Garden news conference to break the story. Suddenly the image of the current president blathering on about how hunky-dory everything is in Iraq was usurped by repeated showings of the scene in which the newly resigned Nixon walked across the adjacent White House lawn to the helicopter that would carry him into exile.

But in the days that followed, Nixon and his history and the long shadows they cast largely vanished from the TV screen. In their place were constant nostalgic replays of young Redford and flinty Holbrook. Follow the bait-and-switch.

Howard Dean takes on the moral values issue.

Unrepentant after a week of controversy over his inflammatory remarks, Democratic Chairman Howard Dean told party leaders yesterday that casting traditionally liberal issues in moral terms is a key to breaking Republicans' eight-year hold on the White House.

Dean acknowledged that he sees his party's national campaign apparatus as being "30 years behind" the one fielded in November by the Bush-Cheney campaign, and said the solution is for Democrats to be tough, describe themselves boldly and get organized in all 50 states.

"People want us to fight, and we are here to fight," Dean said during a quarterly meeting of the party's 64-member executive committee. "We are not going to lie down in front of the Republican machine anymore."

Dean's aides said he now realizes he needs to choose his words more carefully but plans to keep the pressure on Republicans.

Several key Democrats had said early last week that Dean should resign but concluded by week's end that there was no viable movement to oust him. Dean yesterday embraced his reputation for volatility, saying he is being buoyed by activists and donors. At one point, Chicago alderman Joseph A. Moore had trouble getting recognized and joked that next time he would "jump up and down."

"That's my job!" Dean said, and the room shook with applause.

The Democratic National Committee's lead pollster, Cornell Belcher, said that religious people who have been stymied economically represent a huge opportunity for the party, and that the challenge is to portray moral values as "not just gay marriage and abortion."

It amounted to a call for the party to reclaim Reagan Democrats, the blue-collar social conservatives who have voted largely Republican for the past 20 years. In a possible future play for President Bush's voters, the party announced the creation of a Veterans and Military Families Council.

The party, determined to compete in what Dean called "the Mississippis and the Kansases," has vowed to put paid organizers with four-year commitments in every state, and is starting a monthly donation program for small givers.

Dean and the pollster provided the most specific blueprint yet for a party where a multitude of factions and potential candidates are competing to point the way back from Sen. John F. Kerry's (D-Mass.) loss to Bush, 19 states to 31 states. "We have not spoken about moral values in this party for a long time," Dean said. "The truth is, we're Democrats because of our moral values. It's a moral value to make sure that kids don't go to bed hungry at night. . . . It is a moral value not to go out on golf trips paid for by lobbyists."

Michael Kinsley has some fun with the Downing Street Memo.

After about the 200th e-mail from a stranger demanding that I cease my personal coverup of something called the Downing Street Memo, I decided to read it. It's all over the blogosphere and Air America, the left-wing talk radio network: This is the smoking gun of the Iraq war. It is proof positive that President Bush was determined to invade Iraq the year before he did so. The whole "weapons of mass destruction" concern was phony from the start, and the drama about inspections was just kabuki: going through the motions.

Although it is flattering to be thought personally responsible for allowing a proven war criminal to remain in office, in the end I don't buy the fuss. Nevertheless, I am enjoying it, as an encouraging sign of the revival of the left. Developing a paranoid theory and promoting it to the very edge of national respectability takes a certain amount of ideological self-confidence. It takes a critical mass of citizens with extreme views and the time and energy to obsess about them. It takes a promotional infrastructure and the widely shared self-discipline to settle on a story line, disseminate it and stick to it.

It takes, in short, what Hillary Clinton once called a vast conspiracy. The right has enjoyed one for years. Even moderate and reasonable right-wingers have enjoyed the presence of a mass of angry people even further right. This overhang of extremists makes the moderates appear more reasonable. It pulls the center of politics, where the media try to be and where compromises on particular issues end up, in a rightward direction. Listening to extreme views on your own side is soothing even if you would never express them and may not even believe them yourself.

So, cheers for the Downing Street Memo....

Cheers, indeed. Even if the DSM leads nowhere, it's been a tonic for reviving the dispirited and the doomed on the left and been a unifying force for a lot of bloggers left wandering after November.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 6:30 AM  

Somebody asked when I was going to do some writing at Bobby Cramer. Well, go there and see my latest entry: thoughts on writing in a cooperative adventure known as The Practical Press.

Also I've put up chapters from my serialized short novel, Small Town Boys, at Bobby Cramer. To quote the immortal Shakespeare's Sister -- and she's been quoted by so many-- "cross-posting is a good thing."

The latest scoop on Coingate takes us to that well-known center of tax-sheltered capitalism, Bermuda.

Bermuda is where some American companies and foreign investors go to shield profits from taxes and to save money, but the state of Ohio did the reverse and lost $215 million in the inviting tax haven.

The Bureau of Workers’ Compensation lost $215 million in what it says was an unauthorized hedge-fund investment with MDL Capital Management, which is actually based in Pittsburgh.

Even so, the hedge fund, called the Active Duration Fund, is listed with a Bermuda address. And the contract signed by the bureau’s former chief financial officer, Terry Gasper, specifies that any disputes have to be decided in a Bermuda court. The wording of the contract also appears to hold MDL free from liability for losses.

Bureau officials yesterday said the Bermuda provisions were “extremely out of the ordinary and that Mr. Gasper acted alone and without authority of the agency’s Oversight Commission.

“It was one of the first things that came to our attention,” said bureau spokesman Jeremy Jackson, referring to when the bureau said it learned about the losses in the fall. By that time, the fund was a year old and $215 million in the red.

Attorney General Jim Petro announced yesterday he had sued MDL and several of its principals because of the failed investment. The suit alleges fraud and breach of contract.

[...]

Several government entities have said they lost millions with MDL, including the Illinois and Chicago public school teacher pension funds and the government of Bermuda, which said it lost $70 million with MDL.

[...]

Founded by shipwrecked English colonists in 1609, Bermuda has recently acquired a reputation for attracting troubled companies. The British territory is the center for many of America’s recent financial scandals, including conglomerate Tyco’s accounting shenanigans and a financial scandal that knocked $2.7 billion off the value of American Insurance Group.

Theatre scholars believe that Shakespeare set his play The Tempest in Bermuda. How appropriate: this scandal has, to quote the immortal Bard, "A very ancient and fish-like smell." (The Tempest, Act II, scene 2)

There are still Kerry-Edwards signs on lampposts and on bumpers, but the first campaign staff of the 2008 has been formed.

Virginia Gov. Mark R. Warner (D) is forming a federal political action committee and has hired a former top aide to then-Vice President Al Gore to advise him on national politics, the governor's top political aide in Virginia said.

The new PAC, which has not been named, will allow Warner to begin raising money for a possible run at the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 while he finishes his term in Virginia. The PAC will be announced formally in July or August, said Mary A. "Mame" Reiley, director of Warner's One Virginia PAC.

[...]

Warner had no national profile for the first three years of his administration as he struggled initially with soaring deficits and later spent six months battling with lawmakers over what he termed tax reform. In 2004, the Republican-controlled legislature approved a $1.5 billion tax increase for the state's two-year budget over the objections of Virginia's top GOP leadership. The state later was declared the best-managed in the nation by Governing Magazine.

The tax victory -- and Sen. John F. Kerry's loss in states such as Virginia in the presidential race -- helped propel Warner to national prominence. He is often mentioned along with Sens. Kerry (Mass.) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), former senator John Edwards (N.C.) and Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico as possible Democratic contenders.

"Mark is seen as one of the most thoughtful, promising leaders we have in the party," said Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democrat Network, a centrist group.

Okay, come on...when was the last time the Democrats nominated a Southern governor that nobody's heard of outside his state and won?

Science fiction, horror, romance, drama, love songs, heartbreak, cute kittens... it's all at The Practical Press.

My latest chapter in my short novel, Small Town Boys, is posted there today.

James Sensenbrenner, not a congressman known for comity or reasoned debate, has become another in a line of power-mad my-way-or-the-highway Republicans. And it's a long line.

The Republican chairman walked off with the gavel, leaving Democrats shouting into turned-off microphones at a raucous hearing Friday on the Patriot Act.

The House Judiciary Committee hearing, with the two sides accusing each other of being irresponsible and undemocratic, came as President Bush was urging Congress to renew those sections of the post-Sept. 11 counterterrorism law set to expire in September.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., chairman of the panel, abruptly gaveled the meeting to an end and walked out, followed by other Republicans. Sensenbrenner declared that much of the testimony, which veered into debate over the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, was irrelevant.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., protested, raising his voice as his microphone went off, came back on, and went off again.

''We are not besmirching the honor of the United States, we are trying to uphold it,'' he said.

Democrats asked for the hearing, the 11th the committee has held on the act since April, saying past hearings had been too slanted toward witnesses who supported the law. The four witnesses were from groups, including Amnesty International USA and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, that have questioned the constitutionality of some aspects of the act, which allows law enforcement greater authority to investigate suspected terrorists.

Nadler said Sensenbrenner, one of the authors of the Patriot Act, was ''rather rude, cutting everybody off in mid-sentence with an attitude of total hostility.''

Tempers flared when Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., accused Amnesty International of endangering the lives of Americans in uniform by referring to the prison at Guantanamo Bay as a "gulag." Sensenbrenner didn't allow the Amnesty representative, Chip Pitts, to respond until Nadler raised a "point of decency."

Sensenbrenner's spokesman, Jeff Lungren, said the hearing had lasted two hours and ''the chairman was very accommodating, giving members extra time.''

James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, speaking immediately after Sensenbrenner left, voiced dismay over the proceedings. "I'm troubled about what kind of lesson this gives" to the rest of the world, he told the Democrats remaining in the room.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, in a statement, said the hearing was an example of Republican abuse of power and she would ask House Speaker Dennis Hastert to order an apology from Sensenbrenner. [New York Times]

Well, maybe -- just maybe -- this will knock all the talk about Howard Dean being rude off the front pages.

The Toledo Blade nails the governor of Ohio for Coingate, and while they're at it, they go after the one-party rule in the state.

After two months of staggering revelations in the "Coingate" scandal, Ohioans now must cope with one more remarkable and disgusting example of arrogant, out-of-control, one-party rule.

In a confession stunning in its scope, the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation admitted this week that the taxpayers lost $215 million in just a few months last year in a high-risk hedge fund that went south almost as fast as the state bought in.

A memo to Gov. Bob Taft's office last October from then-BWC Director James Conrad reported that the hedge-fund manager, MDL Capital Management of Pittsburgh, adopted an investment strategy that went far beyond the bureau's established risk limits.

Only now, seven months later, is the massive loss uncovered, and yet the governor's press secretary insists that Mr. Taft never saw Mr. Conrad's e-mail, never was told about it, never talked to Mr. Conrad about it, and only learned the extent of the loss this week.

That's beyond belief, but why should the citizens of Ohio believe anything this governor or his minions utter any more?

Frankly, I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to this story when it first broke back in April. Having grown up in Toledo and knowing Ohio's history of corrupt politics that goes back to the age of McKinley, I figured it was just one more story that wouldn't get much mileage in the national press. Well, thanks to the persistence of bloggers -- mainly AMERICAblog -- this story is getting legs, and it may reach further than just the Ohio statehouse...it's reaching out to the RNC and the Bush campaign of 2004. Tangentially, the engineer of the Ohio vote last fall, Kenneth Blackwell, has plans to run for governor in 2006, but the tentacles of not just the rare-coins but his own tactics in the vote count may cost him.

Ohio Democrats shouldn't count themselves as a shoo-in if the Republicans wind up in trouble; they have their own skeletons in the closet. This is Ohio, after all, and their history with some unsavory characters is well-known by the voters, as The Blade points out. But what this does illustrate all too well is that one-party rule -- no matter who is in charge -- is an invitation to disaster and public mistrust.

I've been keeping my eye on this in the background, but it's time to move it to the front and keep on it. Stay tuned.

A photo op / press conference with Sen. Harry Reid and Howard Dean turned into a press free-for-all on Capitol Hill.

The madness began at 10:30 a.m. when the media horde was invited to enter Reid's office. Photographers poured in first, equipment slamming into the sides of a narrow doorway and -- in one case -- the temple of a female staffer. Reporters were invited in next, but roughly 20 reporters were unable to crowd in and were left to shout objections through the bottleneck. "You can't start yet," one yelled from the back. "The reporters aren't in."

Dean said he rather liked the idea of starting without the reporters. He meant this as a joke, sort of.

[...]

"You know," Dean interjected, "I think a lot of this is exactly what Republicans want, and that's a diversion." He bemoaned the "media circus" of the last two weeks and said that he and Reid were not concerning themselves with that -- only with vital things like Social Security, national defense and jobs.

"And all this other stuff is all fine and good, and we understand how exciting it all is to you," Dean said, shaking his head.

The press chorus then devolved into a cacophony of competing screams. (And Dean knows screams!) After several seconds, a booming voice cut through the noise. It belonged to Brian Wilson, a Fox News correspondent who was standing in the middle of the crowd. He asked Dean "if people are focused on the other things that you've said about hating Republicans, about Republicans being dishonest and then this latest comment about the Republican Party is full of white Christians. You say you hate Republicans -- does that mean you also" hate white Christians?

[...]

Someone asked whether Dean would "change his ways," or if he planned to be "less confrontational in the future" or whether he "regrets" anything he has said. An aide to Reid announced that the photo op was over.

"We'll decide when we're ready," Wilson said. Later, Durbin would recount the scene with some exasperation. He chided the media for avoiding important issues in favor of trivial matters. "Please, for a minute, get to the substance," he said to a group of reporters. "You guys should be ashamed of yourselves."

For the record, Howard Dean was not the first politico to refer to the Republicans as being an enclave of white Christians. That honor belongs to former Sen. John Danforth, Republican and Episcopal priest.

My advice to the Democrats who are backing water on Dr. Dean: you knew what you were getting, and there's nothing in what he's said that comes close to what the Republicans said about the Democrats in the past. There's no point in playing tit-for-tat, but at least get back some short-term memory...and some balls while you're at it.

MoveOn.org is getting on the Downing Street memo bandwagon. Rep. John Conyers is holding a hearing this morning on it. It's getting more attention from the SCLM. Keep up to date at The Big Brass Alliance.

Welcome some new additions to the blogroll, including The Life of a Teenage Liberal, who is here in the Florida, and Badtux the Snarky Penguin, who is somewhere near the South Pole. Both bring unique views to the blogosphere; it's nice to see a young man with insight beyond his years share his views, and I've always had a soft spot for a smart-mouth bird.

Here's a quick look at what's making the news in The Liberal Coalition.

archy shares his view of his lawn.

Bark Bark Woof Woof on being gay in high school.

BlogAmY is back from the zoo.

bloggg welcomes summer.

Chris Brown saw Tim Robbins embedded.

Collective Sigh takes on OneMillionDads.

The Farmer at Corrente corrects Lynne Cheney on the truth behind history and lesbian cowboys.

NTodd has some choice words for meddlers with WiFi.

Echidne has a question.

First Draft channels the Beatles.

The Fulcrum asks who's comfortable in the middle class.

The Gamer's Nook hints at the next Indiana Jones adventure.

Happy Furry Puppy lists the cool tunes.

iddybud on the moral responsibility for Abu Ghraib.

Jesse at In Search of Telford takes on the "A-list" bloggers.

Left Is Right on helping to eliminate Africa's debt.

Byrant looks at the dark side of the Rebellion.

Musing's musings on the future of the economy--with caveats.

Pen-Elayne has something to say about women getting the attention they are entitled to, so listen.

Catch a star at Rick's.

Rook compares coffee mugs.

rubber hose looks for sympathy.

Scrutiny Hooligans tells us what "peak oil" is. (Hint: it's not a song by the Moody Blues.)

SoonerThought has a little list of peeves.

Steve Gilliard on rebuilding Iraq's army.

T. Rex on Father's Day Don'ts.

The Invisible Library on the rise of Shinto.

Trish Wilson has a series on Fathers4Justice.

Wanda covers Bush at the OAS meeting.

WTF Is It Now?? tells Dean hand-wringers to can it.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat wants to know how well you did last year.

We're getting gusty winds and rain from the outer bands of Tropical Storm Arlene here in South Florida. My lawn needs it, but I hope it doesn't beat the crap out of Pensacola.

From the Washington Blade via Raw Story:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry suggested that gay veterans unhappy with the proposed anti-gay constitutional amendment should move elsewhere.

"I'm going to say Texas has made a decision on marriage and if there's a state with more lenient views than Texas, then maybe that's where they should live," the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported Perry said Sunday.

Perry's comments were in response to a question during a news conference about what he would tell gay war veterans returning from Iraq.

Wow, Rick, a double-whammy right there in one answer: slandering gays and war veterans. Want to go for defending lynching while you're at it?

Thanks, Texas, for temporarily taking over the title of Most Intolerant State. The competition has been fierce, but this takes the cake.

Why is it that the cars whose alarms that go off for no apparent reason are on beaters that no one would steal in the first place?

From Pam's House Blend comes the latest in fashion tips for students at uber-fundie Bob Jones University in South Carolina.

Men:
* Hair must be cut in a traditional, conservative style–not shaved, spiked, tangled, or shelved. It may not be colored or highlighted.
* Sideburns should not extend past the middle of the ear. Men are expected to remain clean-shaven.
* Necklaces, earrings, and bracelets are not permitted.
* Hats may not be worn indoors except in the gym.
* Men are not permitted to get tattoos or wear body piercings.

So I guess Jesus Christ himself could not be a student at BJU: he had long hair, a beard, and he got some body piercings over Easter break.

Jesse Helms has written his memoirs, and he's just as much a bigoted old bastard as he was when he was in the Senate.

Helms, 83, was one of the state's leading voices of segregation as a TV commentator in Raleigh in the 1960s and opposed nearly every civil rights bill while in the Senate. He has never retracted his views on race or said segregation was wrong.

In the book, Helms suggests he believed voluntary racial integration would come about without pressure from the federal government or from civil rights protests that he said sharpened racial antagonisms.

"We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance," according to the uncorrected proof. "We certainly do know the price paid by the stirring of hatred, the encouragement of violence, the suspicion and distrust." [Emphasis added by MB]

I wasn't sure I wanted to waste precious pixels on him, but that last line was just too much. Jesse, who do you think was doing the stirring of hatred and the encouragement of violence, the suspicion and distrust? Let me give you a hint: it was sheet-wearing cross-burning bungholes like you, you miserable excuse for a human being.

Feh.

Tropical Storm Arlene is born. Here's the tracking map.

Only nine days into the hurricane season. Well, why wait?

Few of my fellow bloggers can get up as good a rant as Michael at Musing's musings. Check out his take on the midnight ride of Axel Cobb, the kid who got shanghaied by the USMC in Seattle.

At least a draftee gets a formal notice of when and where to appear, at a designated time and place, and knows what s/he's getting into. If this is what our "all-volunteer" military looks like, no wonder nobody is busting down the doors to join.

I'm reminded of the line from Private Benjamin: "See, I did join the army, but I joined a different army. I joined the one with the condos and the private rooms."

The New York Times reports on the march of the bigots into the public schools.

Emboldened by the political right's growing influence on public policy, opponents of school activities aimed at educating students about homosexuality or promoting acceptance of gay people are mounting challenges to such programs, at individual schools, at statehouses and in Congress.

Chief among the targets are sex education programs that include discussions of homosexuality, and after-school clubs that bring gay and straight students together, two initiatives that gained assent in numerous schools over the last decade.

In many cases, the opponents have been successful. In Montgomery County, Md., for example, parents went to court to block a health education course that offered a discussion of homosexuality, while in Cleveland, Ga., gay and lesbian students were barred from forming a high school club of gay and straight youths.

Leading figures on both sides of the fight say they have never seen passions about public school activities run so high. They agree that much of the reason is conservative groups' eagerness to meet their adversaries with a forcefulness more common to modern-day election campaigns.

"The intensity of the culture wars has heated up over the last few years," said J. Michael Johnson, a lawyer with the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative group that specializes in issues involving religion. "People are becoming more aware that they have rights, and they're feeling more emboldened to defend them. Across the country, people are saying enough is enough."

Mathew D. Staver, president and general counsel of another conservative group, Liberty Counsel, said: "We're concerned about the effort to capture youth through indoctrination into the homosexual lifestyle. Students are a captive audience, and they are being targeted by groups with that as an agenda."

Yes, Mr. Staver, there's a whole slew of us out there waiting in Speedos and Birkenstocks just dying to convert your little darlings over to our side. There are toaster ovens and steak knife sets at stake here!

After-school clubs known as Gay-Straight Alliances, which draw together students to share common experiences and concerns, have become a particular source of conflict. The issue has roiled a number of communities, including Ashland, Ky.; Klein, Tex.; Hanford, Calif.; and Cleveland, Ga., where a small group of gay and lesbian students were denied permission this year to form an alliance at White County High School.

Federal law often frowns on administrators' barring some clubs while allowing others, but Cleveland school officials told the students that they would abolish all after-school organizations before allowing a gay-straight alliance.

"They're just scared of change," said Kerry Pacer, 17, who is leading the students' effort. "We live in the Bible Belt. Anything that threatens change, people here don't want that."

Complaints over the students' endeavor led State Senator Nancy Schaefer to introduce a bill that would have required a parent's written permission before a student could join any after-school club. The legislature later deferred to the Georgia Department of Education, which is now considering a modified approach allowing each local school board to develop its own policy.

Ms. Schaefer dismisses the compromise as too weak.

"I just don't feel like homosexual clubs have anything to do with readin', writin' and 'rithmetic," she said.

No, you blithering idiot, they have to do with life and living, which is what education is all about.

What's most telling about this battle is that it was started not by "outside agitators" -- a phrase that should ring familiar with those of us old enough to remember the civil rights battles of the 1960's -- but the students themselves who have once again proved that they are far more tolerant and willing to learn about other people and what matters in their lives than their parents or the real outside agitators like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. Both of these groups have a rather peculiar fixation on gays (Dr. Freud, call on line 1) and they have channeled their energy into outright promotion of bigotry. (If you think "bigotry" is too harsh a word, check out what AMERICAblog has found out in terms of the connection between Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, and David Duke, the Louisiana Klansman who crawls out from under a rock every so often to run for office.)

Speaking from first-hand experience, a kid knows by the time he hits Grade 8 whether or not he is gay. He may not acknowledge it to his family, friends, or himself, but he knows. (Yes, a lot of people know earlier, but I'm slow on the uptake, okay?) He doesn't need to "learn" anything about it other than he's not alone, that it's a part of who he is by the grace of genetic hardwiring at the factory, and that if society has a hard time accepting it, it's not his fault. These sanctimonious bible-thumpers don't care about the kids anyway -- all they want is to make noise and money. No one ever went broke by underestimating the fear and bigotry of the American public.

Bush's plans to reform Social Security are going over like a wet dog at a wedding, according to an ABC/Washington Post poll.

The poll found that 56 percent said the president's plan to couple new personal retirement accounts with a reduction in guaranteed benefits for most Americans would cut the overall retirement income of seniors. About a third -- 32 percent -- said Bush's proposals would result in future retirees receiving more money.

More troubling for a president who took a political risk by advocating reductions in future guaranteed benefits for all but the poorest Americans is that an even larger majority said the Bush plan would not fix the system's financial problems. More than six in 10 -- 63 percent -- said the proposals would not improve the long-term financial stability of the Social Security system, while 32 percent said it would.

But that doesn't stop Bush from dreaming.

"I'm confident we can get something done. I really am," Bush said. "I don't care what all the naysayers say, or the people that are so political they can't . . . get out of their current mind-set here in Washington."

It must be really nice to bop through life without a clue as to what is really going on.

Eric Boehlert reports on the under-reporting of the Downing Street Memo.

Halfway through Sunday's "Meet the Press," host Tim Russert, interviewing Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, asked about a secret, top-level British government memorandum. Consisting of minutes from a July 23, 2002, meeting attended by Prime Minister Tony Blair and his closest advisors, the memo revealed their impression that the Bush administration, eight months before the start of the Iraq war in 2003, had already decided to invade and that Washington seemed more concerned with justifying a war than preventing one.

The memo was leaked this year to the Times of London, which printed it on May 1. The story, coming on the eve of Blair's reelection, generated extensive press coverage in Britain. In setting up his question to Mehlman on Sunday, Russert said, "Let me turn to the now famous Downing Street memo" (emphasis added).

Famous? It would be famous in America if the D.C. press corps functioned the way it's supposed to.

[...]

The fact that it took five weeks for more than a handful of Washington reporters to focus on the memo highlights a striking disconnect between some news consumers and mainstream news producers. The memo story epitomizes a mainstream press corps that is genuinely afraid to ask tough questions and write tough stories about the Bush administration. Worse, in the case of the Downing Street memo, it simply refuses to report on the existence of a plainly newsworthy document.

"This is where all the work conservatives and the administration have done in terms of bullying the press, making it less willing to write confrontational pieces -- this is where it's paid off," says David Brock, CEO of Media Matters for America, a liberal media advocacy group. "It's a glaring example of omission."

[...]

If the mainstream media showed little interest in the memo and its ramifications, those outside elite newsrooms did. On Tuesday, a query on the blog search engine Technorati retrieved 3,039 sites on which the Downing Street memo was being discussed.

"It's something that's struck a chord among NPR listeners and newspaper readers," Dvorkin says. "It may have been blog-induced in the beginning, but now it has legs of its own."

Across the country readers have been badgering their local newspapers to examine the memo story. None of the published correspondence appears to be form letters or so-called Astroturf letters designed to mimic grass-roots support for a particular issue. The letters have appeared in the Sunday Oregonian (Portland), Los Angeles Times, Raleigh News and Observer, Arizona Republic, Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Anchorage Daily News, Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal, Greensboro (N.C.) News and Record, Berkshire (Mass.) Eagle, Newport (Va.) News Daily Press, Allentown (Pa.) Morning Call, Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph Herald, Bangor (Maine) Daily News, Springfield (Ill.) State Journal-Register, Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, Modesto (Calif.) Bee and Tulsa World, among others.

With the exception of the Los Angeles Times, at the time the letters were published not one of the newspapers, according to the LexisNexis database, had reported on the memo.

[...]

Playing catch-up this week has produced some awkward moments for reporters, such as Russert's referring to the memo as "famous" even though nobody at NBC News had ever bothered to report on it. On Monday, Fox News' online site reported that the memo "has received little attention in the mainstream media, frustrating opponents of the Iraq war," while failing to mention that Fox itself had effectively boycotted the memo story for five weeks. On Tuesday, Fox News finally reported that "there's been a lot of controversy recently about a memo that suggests British officials warned well before the war in July of 2002 that the Bush administration felt war was inevitable." Again, Fox failed to explain why the news organization had ignored a controversial story for more than a month.

If history is any guide, stories like this take a long time to get up a head of steam, but once they get rolling, they are very hard to stop. It looks like we of the Big Brass Alliance have overcome a little of the inertia, but we still have a long way to go.

Meanwhile, some legal scholars have looked into the idea of impeaching Bush over the Downing Street memo. As is the case with most lawyers, if you ask four of them for an opinion, you get five -- or six -- different answers depending on when you gave them the retainer. The consensus seems to be that in spite of the abuse of the impeachment clause by the Republicans in the Clinton case, the bar is still very high for proving "high crimes and misdemeanors," and it would be very hard to get a Congress where the majority of the members agree with the Bush foreign policy and the results of the invasion to turn and indict the President. In other words, politics trumps the law. But that doesn't mean we should stop asking questions -- after all, over 1,600 American soldiers and untold thousands of others have died in this war. Knowing whether or not we fought based on a pretext of lies is important. Does it rise to the level of impeachment? We don't know -- that's what we want to find out.

Some of my more ardent colleagues in the blogosphere are calling for Bush's head on a platter, and I admit to a somewhat visceral urge to go along with them on several levels. But having lived through two impeachments -- one entirely legitimate, the other entirely not -- I come down on the side of pursuing the truth regardless of where it leads. That is what we -- and the victims of this war -- deserve.

The House ethics committee is stuck in neutral.

A dispute between the parties has shut down the House ethics committee for the second time this year, and lawmakers said that it could be months -- and perhaps next year -- before the panel will decide whether to examine the activities of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) or others accused of violating restrictions on lobbying and travel.

[...]

The ethics committee, the House's mechanism for enforcing rules for members, has operated for exactly one day since the 109th Congress convened in early January. In May, after Republicans broke an impasse with Democrats by backing off an effort to change the rules for investigations, the committee voted to organize for the year.


But it has not met since then. No session is scheduled, and both parties say any investigation is months off. The latest logjam relates to a decision by Chairman Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) to try to name his 10-year chief of staff, Ed Cassidy, as a co-director of the committee staff. But the panel's top Democrat, Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (W.Va.), said the rules give Democrats a say in the appointment, and they oppose Cassidy. Democrats and Republicans each hold five of the committee's 10 seats, making it the only House panel on which Democrats can block majority-party actions.

In a sign that both parties are leery of the outcome of an ethics war, not a single complaint has been filed with the ethics committee by either side despite a torrent of revelations about questionable conduct by lawmakers.

Take as long as you need, guys. No need to rush to judgement -- we could wait until, oh, say, the middle of the midterm election campaign...

A few Democrats are getting all twitterpated about Howard Dean making a few unvarnished comments about the Republicans.

While even prominent Democrats in recent days have distanced themselves from some of his comments, the outspoken Dean, appearing on NBC"s "Today" show, said criticism of him is meant by Republicans to divert attention from the country's problems and make him the issue instead.

Dean told a forum of journalists and minority leaders Monday that Republicans are "not very friendly to different kinds of people, they are a pretty monolithic party ... it's pretty much a white, Christian party."

Challenged on that during the NBC interview, Dean said "unfortunately, by and large it is. And they have the agenda of the conservative Christians."

Horrors! How indecorous! In their coverage of the story on ABC World News Tonight, Linda Douglas had clips from prominent Republicans -- Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, who is white but Mormon, and Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, who is white but Jewish -- to show just how wrong Dr. Dean is. I guess Ms. Douglas couldn't find a non-white Republican to speak up... there's never a token around when you need one.

Asked about it on the "Fox & Friends" show, GOP Party Chairman Ken Mehlman joked that "a lot of folks who attended my Bar Mitzvah would be surprised" he heads a Christian party.

"We gotta get ourselves beyond this point where when we disagree about politics, we call the other guy names," he said.

Oh, that's wonderful advice, Mr. Mehlman. Why don't you start with your own party?

The Democrats in the Capitol building get up every morning knowing that to survive they need to do only two things: They lie regularly and they cheat. - Newt Gingrich

Over to you, Ken.

Via Why Now? and several others... Check out this story.

The haircut alone is enough to frighten children and small animals.

From the New York Times:

A White House official who once led the oil industry's fight against limits on greenhouse gases has repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between such emissions and global warming, according to internal documents.

In handwritten notes on drafts of several reports issued in 2002 and 2003, the official, Philip A. Cooney, removed or adjusted descriptions of climate research that government scientists and their supervisors, including some senior Bush administration officials, had already approved. In many cases, the changes appeared in the final reports.

The dozens of changes, while sometimes as subtle as the insertion of the phrase "significant and fundamental" before the word "uncertainties," tend to produce an air of doubt about findings that most climate experts say are robust.

Mr. Cooney is chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the office that helps devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues.

Before going to the White House in 2001, he was the "climate team leader" and a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, the largest trade group representing the interests of the oil industry. A lawyer with a bachelor's degree in economics, he has no scientific training.

I was at a complete loss for how to respond to this amazing bit of news until Bob suggested today's Non Sequitur:



Pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

And the hits just keep on comin':

Nearly three-quarters of Americans say the number of casualties in Iraq is unacceptable, while two-thirds say the U.S. military there is bogged down and nearly six in 10 say the war was not worth fighting -- in all three cases matching or exceeding the highest levels of pessimism yet recorded. More than four in 10 believe the U.S. presence in Iraq is becoming analogous to the experience in Vietnam.

Perhaps most ominous for President Bush, 52 percent said war in Iraq has not contributed to the long-term security of the United States, while 47 percent said it has. It was the first time a majority of Americans disagreed with the central notion Bush has offered to build support for war: that the fight there will make Americans safer from terrorists at home. In late 2003, 62 percent thought the Iraq war aided U.S. security, and three months ago 52 percent thought so.

Overall, more than half -- 52 percent -- disapprove of how Bush is handling his job, the highest of his presidency. A somewhat larger majority -- 56 percent -- disapproved of Republicans in Congress, and an identical proportion disapproved of Democrats.

There were signs, however, that Bush and Republicans in Congress were receiving more of the blame for the recent standoffs over such issues as Bush's judicial nominees and Social Security. Six in 10 respondents said Bush and GOP leaders are not making good progress on the nation's problems; of those, 67 percent blamed the president and Republicans while 13 percent blamed congressional Democrats. For the first time, a majority, 55 percent, also said Bush has done more to divide the country than to unite it.

At some point in every presidency there comes this disconnection with reality. The president, either by design or sheer isolation, loses contact with the ability to see himself, his administration, and the world objectively -- in the third person, if you will. No matter what the facts are or what the polls say, they refuse to believe the bad news and only look for the silver linings. This has been going on for generations: Lyndon Johnson had to win in Vietnam at all costs. Richard Nixon didn't resign because he realized he had lied and committed felonies in the Watergate scandal; he was confronted by his fellow Republicans like Barry Goldwater who told him they wouldn't support him against impeachment. Ronald Reagan had no clue as to what was really going on five blocks from the White House, and even Bill Clinton didn't really believe the Republicans were that intent on getting him out of office. When you look at Bush, you can tell just by the look on his face that he's getting his news from Karl Rove and Nick at Nite. That's why polls like this will have no effect on him or the Republicans in Congress. They probably see that as a distraction from their mission, and in truth it's not a good idea to be slaves to opinion -- after all, a recent poll found that most Americans in a blind test would repeal the First Amendment. But to blunder on with nothing but a smile and an intense grip on the belief that you are right and everyone else is wrong is the mentality that led to things like the fall of Saigon and forced retirement at San Clemente.

It does, however, make things pretty clear to the Democrats -- if they can get their shit together -- on what to run on in the next campaign or two.

Hey, how's the investigation of Tom DeLay coming along? Well, funny you should ask.... From the New York Times:

Newly disclosed lobbying records and other documents show that the chairman of the House ethics committee, Doc Hastings, a Washington State Republican, has had a close relationship for years with lobbyists at the Seattle-based law firm that is at the center of ethics accusations involving Tom DeLay, the House majority leader.

The records from the law firm, Preston Gates & Ellis, show that the firm's former star lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, a close friend of Mr. DeLay who is now the focus of a federal corruption investigation, boasted to a client in the mid-1990's that the firm had "excellent" ties to Mr. Hastings. The firm repeatedly billed the client for meetings and telephone conversations between Mr. Abramoff's lobbying team and Mr. Hastings's staff.

The records do not show any direct contact between Mr. Hastings and Mr. Abramoff; the contacts were always with others in Mr. Abramoff's lobbying operation. The billing records, which were obtained by The New York Times from the Northern Marianas government, do not show that Mr. Hastings introduced any legislation or cast any vote requested by Preston Gates.

But they do show that Preston Gates pressed Mr. Hastings and his staff several years ago for help on behalf of Mr. Abramoff's most important lobbying client at the time, the government of the Northern Mariana Islands, a small American commonwealth in the Pacific, in blocking the imposition of the federal minimum wage on the islands' clothing factories; human rights groups have long described the factories as sweatshops.

[...]

Ethics watchdog groups said they were surprised to learn of how closely and for how long Mr. Hastings and his staff had worked with Preston Gates, which reaped millions of dollars in fees from the Northern Marianas and other lobbying clients brought to the firm by Mr. Abramoff.

"This totally reaffirms the need for an outside counsel in the case against DeLay," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a group that has called on the ethics committee to appoint an outside investigator for the majority leader. "At a minimum there are several potential conflicts of interest here, given Representative Hastings's relationship with both the law firm and, possibly, with Abramoff."

Last month, two other Republican members of the ethics committee recused themselves from any investigation of Mr. DeLay because they had contributed to the majority leader's legal defense fund.

Last week we learned that Abramoff was spreading his love all over Capitol Hill; to Democrats as well as Republicans. Is there anyone besides me who hasn't wondered who Jack Abramoff didn't try to buy off?

Yeah, we knew this was coming.

Democrats generally cheered, and Republicans groused, when a bipartisan group of senators crafted a compromise on judicial nominations last month. But with the Senate now confirming several conservative nominees whom Democrats had blocked for years, some liberals are questioning the wisdom of the deal and fretting about what comes next.

"Our problem with the compromise is the price that was paid," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said yesterday. She and other Congressional Black Caucus members plan to march into the Senate today to protest the impending confirmation of Janice Rogers Brown.

[...]

The Senate voted 65 to 32 yesterday to end a nearly two-year Democratic filibuster of Brown. The vote stemmed from last month's deal in which seven Democrats agreed to drop filibusters of Brown and four other long-contested nominees, and to refrain from future judicial filibusters except in "extraordinary circumstances." In return, seven GOP senators agreed to scuttle Majority Leader Bill Frist's proposed rule change banning judicial filibusters.

[...]

Nan Aron, head of the liberal Alliance for Justice, said the accord reached by the 14 senators "is very mixed. Like all compromises, it had some really good and some really bad. . . . It was a bright day for the Senate and a dark day for the judiciary." [Washington Post]

Keep your eyes on the prize, people. They're already talking up Texas Senator John ("Lets Kill Some Judges!") Cornyn for the Supreme Court.

Two stories that demonstrate the priorities of the Bush administration and the Republicans in the Senate:

After eight months of courtroom argument, Justice Department lawyers abruptly upset a landmark civil racketeering case against the tobacco industry yesterday by asking for less than 8 percent of the expected penalty.

As he concluded closing arguments in the six-year-old lawsuit, Justice Department lawyer Stephen D. Brody shocked tobacco company representatives and anti-tobacco activists by announcing that the government will not seek the $130 billion that a government expert had testified was necessary to fund smoking-cessation programs. Instead, Brody said, the Justice Department will ask tobacco companies to pay $10 billion over five years to help millions of Americans quit smoking.

[...]

"We were very surprised," said Dan Webb, lawyer for Altria Group's Philip Morris USA and the coordinating attorney in the case. "They've gone down from $130 billion to $10 billion with absolutely no explanation. It's clear the government hasn't thought through what it's doing."

The Justice Department offered little explanation for the figure. Associate Attorney General Robert D. McCallum Jr. and members of the trial team declined to answer questions as the court session ended. In 2001, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft tried to settle or shelve the government's racketeering case against the industry before a public outcry forced its revival.

"It feels like a political decision to take into consideration the tobacco companies' financial interest rather than health interests of 45 million addicted smokers," said William V. Corr, director of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. "The government proved its case, but the levels of funding are a shadow of the cessation treatment program that the government's own expert witness recommended." [Washington Post, Page A1]

The Senate Finance Committee issued a report yesterday raising questions about a range of financial practices at the Arlington-based Nature Conservancy and recommending regulatory changes that would affect many of the nation's nonprofit organizations.

The report, the result of a two-year investigation into the world's largest environmental organization, questions whether the charity's actions at times may have been "inconsistent" with the policy underlying federal tax laws. The committee raises concerns about the size of tax breaks claimed by the Conservancy's supporters, about the group's shortcomings in monitoring development restrictions on some land under its supervision, and about private "side deals" with Conservancy "insiders." [Washington Post, Page A3]

So let me see if I have this right: the Justice Department cuts their demand for judgement against Big Tobacco, a conglomarate of criminal conspirators who have lied and obfuscated their culpability in killing millions of people for over fifty years, by 92%. But those folks over at The Nature Conservancy, a group dedicated to preserving endangered land and species and who might have pushed the limits of the tax code, well, bust their ass!

Is it just a coincidence that Big Tobacco has been one of the biggest donors to the Republicans while The Nature Conservancy attracts the attention of people who actually care about preserving the environment and is therefore seen by some as a bastion for Democrats? Hmmm...

[Hat tip to Rachel Maddow.]

Anne Bancroft -- aka Mrs. Robinson as well as Mrs. Mel Brooks -- has died. Here's the obituary notice from the New York Times.

I remember her from The Graduate (1967), of course -- my first R-rated movie -- and also in The Miracle Worker (1962) and The Slender Thread (1965). She had the most amazing presence in those films, and to this day I think that she was about the only actor who could take my breath away with her steely gaze as she confronted Dustin Hoffman and then seduced him. The dining room scene with Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker is still one of the most heart-stopping scenes in film.

And yet she could play a complete goof, too, which isn't surprising for the woman who married Mel Brooks. She also had fun poking fun at herself and her persona in Brooks' re-make of the Jack Benny / Carole Lombard classic To Be or Not To Be (1983). She was an amazing talent, and I hold her and her family in the Light.

From the state that brought you Disney World and Florida Election 2000, and after her long run in 101 Dalmatians, the villainess with a penchant for fur makes a run for the Senate. From the Miami Herald:

U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris, the Republican star of the 2000 recount, said Tuesday she plans to challenge Democrat U.S. Senator Bill Nelson for re-election.

"Get me those puppies!"

Her decision sets up a costly and high-profile race, with Republicans eager to knock out Nelson -- the last Democrat in Florida to hold statewide office.

Harris, who had flirted with the idea of running for Senate in 2004, said Tuesday that after ''months of encouragement'' from supporters, she had decided to risk her congressional seat and run against Nelson, who has already stockpiled millions for a potential challenge.

"Humbled by the task ahead, but knowing in my heart that one of the greatest honors in life is having a chance to make a difference in the lives of others, I am confident I can accomplish more for the people of Florida, and experience reminds me I've always done best when I've started out as the underdog," Harris said in a statement released by her longtime political consultants.

Granted, Nelson's vulnerable, but this could be fun.

Yesterday and this morning I put the knock on John Edwards for what sounded like him taking Howard Dean to task for his harsh words for the Republicans. Well, turns out he says he was taken out of context. Wow -- that never happens! Thanks to dK at A Silent Cacophony (who atones for his sin as well), there's a link to what John Edwards really said via DailyKos.

What a flap has arisen over a disagreement about the way something is said! I was in Nashville over the weekend, thanking the good people of Tennessee who supported the Democratic presidential ticket this year, when I was asked whether I thought that it was fair to say that people who were Republican hadn’t done a good day’s work. Of course, I didn’t think so, and I said that. I don’t think our DNC chair, Howard Dean, would put it that way again if asked either. I disagreed with him, and I said so. And, I want to be clear, I would have to say so again if I were asked again. I said a lot of good things about Howard’s outreach program and invigoration of the internet as a communication and fundraising tool, but no one wrote about that. Instead the headlines blared that I disagreed with Howard. And then the flap arose: A chasm! A split! A revolt!

Instead, how about: Nonsense!

We are both talking about the Republicans and their failure to address the needs of working people. We both agree with this basic truth: This Republican president and this Republican majority are not doing what they should be doing for working people in this country. That’s a core belief we need to fight for. And what’s more, we agree that we - all Democrats and all working people - should be complaining, criticizing, and generally speaking out about this critical failure of the Republican party and offering our positive vision for America. And we have.

Howard and I have been saying the same thing about this for years. Hear that? The same thing. For years. Have I ever put it some way that Howard wouldn't agree with? Probably. And he put it in a way, once, just the other day, that I can’t agree with, since I come from a place where hard-working people, who are better served by the agenda and passion of the Democrats, somehow still vote Republican. But Howard and I are committed to a 50-state strategy that will reach out to those voters, in North Carolina, and in Kansas, and in Tennessee, across this country and tell the truth about what is happening in this country to their jobs, to their health care, to their forests and streams, to their vision of what this country is and should be.

Glad we could clear that up.

Ask Bush about the Downing Street Memo and win a grand.

Tony Blair is in Washington today to talk with George W. Bush about aid for Africa, but it might be an opportune moment for the White House press corps to talk about something else: The 2002 Downing Street memo which shows that Blair was told that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed" to support Bush's plan to depose Saddam Hussein through military force.

Bush held a press conference last week, but no one in the White House press corps bothered to ask him about the memo then. Reporters will probably get another chance to ask today, this time with Blair sitting right there in the room, too. They can even get paid for asking. Democrats.com has posted a $1,000 reward for any reporter who gets Bush to give a "yes or no" answer to the question, "In July 2002, did you and your administration 'fix' the intelligence and facts about non-existent Iraqi WMD's and ties to terrorism -- which were disputed by U.S. intelligence officials -- to sell your decision to invade Iraq to Congress, the American people, and the world -- as quoted in the Downing Street Minutes?" Hell, they'll get a hundred bucks if they just ask the question without getting an answer. [Tim Grieve in Salon.com]

Please, please, call on me! A thousand bucks would get the woodgrain repaired on my Pontiac, and even a hundred would pay for the new headliner. And even more important, it might get something out of the administration on the whole bloody mess. Even an absurd obfuscation would be a start.

President Bush is open to new ideas to reform Social Security and help people supplement their retirement income. Well, here's one way:

LINDENWOLD, N.J. - Police made a surprising discovery when they busted the alleged madam of a prostitution ring called "August Playmates": The woman running the show was an 80-year-old grandmother.

Authorities arrested Vera Tursi last month during a sting operation to crack down on prostitution rings posing as legal escort services. Police say Tursi ran the business from her two-bedroom apartment, taking $60 of every $160 she charged clients for one hour with a call girl.

Law enforcement officials say Tursi admitted her role in the business, saying she took it over a few years ago from her daughter, who had died. Police say Tursi told them she needed money to subsidize her Social Security checks.

Undercover police first began to wonder about the age of their suspect when they called the escort service as part of their sting operation. They said she seemed to have difficulty breathing.

"You get a feel for how old someone is when you talk to them," State Police Detective Sgt. Thomas Cornely told The Sunday Star-Ledger of Newark. "She sounded like an 80-year-old woman."

There's a first: a streetwalker using a walker.

Theodore Sorenson knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of his. Mr. Bush and all your cronies, you're no Jack Kennedy.

John F. Kennedy would have been 88 years old on May 29. Were he still alive, I have no doubt that, with his customary idealism and commitment to country, he would still be offering advice to our current leaders in Washington. Based upon his words of more than 40 years ago, he might well offer the following:

To President Bush on Iraq, Iran, and North Korea: "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. This generation of Americans has had enough -- more than enough -- of war." (American University commencement, 1963)

To President Bush on stem-cell research: "For those of us who are not expert . . . we must turn, in the last resort, to objective, disinterested scientists who bring a strong sense of public responsibility and public obligation." (National Academy of Sciences, 1961)

To Vice President Cheney on international organizations, alliances, and consultations: "The United States is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. We are only 6 percent of the world's population. . . . We cannot impose our will upon the other 94 percent of mankind." (University of Washington, 1961)

To Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on terrorism: "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich." (inaugural address, 1961)

To United Nations ambassador-designate John Bolton on diplomacy: "Civility is not a sign of weakness. The U.N. [is] our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace." (inaugural address, 1961)

To Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on space: "We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding. This new ocean must be a sea of peace, [not] a new terrifying theater of war." (Rice University, 1962)

To Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on judges: "To maintain the constitutional principle, we should support Supreme Court decisions, even when we may not agree with them." (News conference, 1962)

To White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan on negative news media: "It is never pleasant to be reading things that are not agreeable news, but it is an invaluable arm to the presidency as a check on what is going on . . . [e]ven though we never like it . . . and wish they didn't write it. . . . We could not do the job at all in a free society without a very, very active press." (Television interview, 1962)

To pastor-in-chief Pat Robertson on church-state separation: "I believe in an America where no [clergyman] would tell his parishioners for whom to vote, where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the public acts of our officials, where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference. The presidency must not be the instrument of any one religious group." (Houston ministers, 1960)

To Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes on propaganda: "The United States is a peaceful nation. Where our strength and determination are clear, our words need merely to convey conviction not belligerence." (undelivered Dallas speech, 1963)

How I miss his friendship. How our nation misses his wisdom.

Me too, Mr. Sorenson...me too.

Washington Governor Christine Gregoire can breathe a little easier today.

The 2004 governor's race is finally over.

Republican Dino Rossi said yesterday he would not appeal a Chelan County judge's decision that upheld Gov. Christine Gregoire's slim victory, acknowledging that after Judge John Bridges rejected all of the GOP arguments, he had little chance of prevailing.

"With today's decision, and because of the political makeup of the Washington state Supreme Court, which makes it almost impossible to overturn this ruling, I am ending the election contest," Rossi said at a news conference at his campaign headquarters in Bellevue.

Nice little parting shot there at the Supreme Court -- "they're just a bunch of Democrat activist judges" or something like that.

And to pour a little lemon juice on the paper cut, when the final votes were tallied based on the evidence submitted to the court, it turned out that five convicted felons voted in the November 2004 gubernatorial election...and four of those votes were for Rossi. The fifth was for a Libertarian candidate. So Mr. Rossi spent six months and millions of dollars to lose...again.

From Salon/AP:

Oregon stopped issuing medical marijuana cards after Monday's Supreme Court ruling, but people could apparently still get pot with a doctor's prescription there and in nine other states, and nobody in law enforcement appeared eager to make headlines arresting ailing patients.

"People shouldn't panic. There aren't going to be many changes," California Attorney General Bill Lockyer said. "Nothing is different today than it was two days ago, in terms of real-world impact."

[...]

It was "business as usual" at the San Francisco health department, spokeswoman Eileen Shields said. The county issues medical marijuana identification cards, valid for two years, to residents with a doctor's prescription.

The city has at least 43 medical cannabis dispensaries, far more than any other city in California, and makes no effort to collect data that federal authorities could use against them. "No one wants to create a nice, neat database" of pot users, she said.

They are, however, keeping a close eye on those buying Pop-Tarts, cookie dough, and Twinkies.

The Detroit Pistons beat the Miami Heat last night 88-82 to win the Eastern Conference Finals.

My mom and dad are very happy this morning.

Finally a Democrat with some stature other than Howard Dean speaks out. From the New York Times comes this narrative of how Hillary Clinton kicks some ass.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton castigated President Bush and Congressional Republicans yesterday as being mad with power and self-righteousness, complained that the news media have been timid in taking on the administration, and suggested that some Washington Republicans have a God complex.

[...]

"There has never been an administration, I don't believe in our history, more intent upon consolidating and abusing power to further their own agenda," Mrs. Clinton told the gathering.

"I know it's frustrating for many of you, it's frustrating for me. Why can't the Democrats do more to stop them?" she continued to growing applause. "I can tell you this: It's very hard to stop people who have no shame about what they're doing. It is very hard to tell people that they are making decisions that will undermine our checks and balances and constitutional system of government who don't care. It is very hard to stop people who have never been acquainted with the truth."

[...]

"We can't ever, ever give in to the Republican agenda," she said. "It isn't good for New York and it isn't good for America."

[...]

Referring to the Congressional leadership, she said, "Some honestly believe they are motivated by the truth, they are motivated by a higher calling, they are motivated by, I guess, a direct line to the heavens."

Then, lightening the moment a bit, she referred to reports during her husband's two terms as president that she would try to channel a favorite first lady of the past. "Now, I talk to Eleanor Roosevelt all the time, and she has never said there is any reason to only have one point of view. But apparently they have a different direct line."

[...]

In some of her sharpest language, Mrs. Clinton said that abetting Republicans was a Washington press corps that has become a pale imitation of the Watergate-era reporters who are being celebrated amid the identification of the Washington Post source Deep Throat.

"It's shocking when you see how easily they fold in the media today," Mrs. Clinton said, again to strong applause. "They don't stand their ground. If they're criticized by the White House, they just fall apart.

"I mean, c'mon, toughen up, guys, it's only our Constitution and country at stake."

Oh, you can expect some really harsh reaction to this...from Joe Biden and John Edwards.

The Supreme Court -- damned activist judges! -- trumps states rights again.

The Supreme Court ruled today that federal authorities may prosecute sick people who use marijuana under their doctors' supervision, a bitter defeat for advocates of the medical use of the drug.

The 6-to-3 decision, arising from a case in California, concluded that state laws cannot override a federal ban on the substance. The ruling ran counter to the wishes of voters and lawmakers who had adopted "compassionate use" marijuana statutes in California and 10 other states.

The case decided today involved an array of issues that included the United States Constitution's Commerce Clause, a 1942 Supreme Court ruling on home-grown wheat and Congress's intentions in passing anti-drug laws in 1970. On a far more personal level, the focus was on two California women, Diana Monson and Angel McClary Raich, who have used marijuana to gain relief from excruciating pain.

Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, said the case was made difficult by the women's "strong arguments that they will suffer irreparable harm" without marijuana. However, the justice wrote, "well-settled law controls our answer."

"The Controlled Substances Act is a valid exercise of federal power, even as applied to the troubling facts of this case," he explained.

So it sounds like we have to get the Congress to change the Controlled Substances Act. Yeah, that'll happen only after we take them out and get them stoned.

My (revised) shot at the Church Sign Generator:

Get yours here.

Congratulations to the last class of students that I will ever teach who are graduating tonight.

Christopher, Dani, Tom, Kristine, Marion, and all the others from Drama II: you made me proud back then, and I wish you the best of luck in your careers. Call me when you win a Tony.

Doc

The only thing I miss about teaching is the kids.

It's not exactly all about the Downing Street Memo, but nonetheless Tim Grieve points to it as another chink in the Bush administration's armor.

The mainstream press has a lot to answer for when it comes to Iraq. How did reporters and editors at the nation's major newspapers fall so hard for the Bush's administration's pre-war spin on Iraq? Why has the press all but ignored the Downing Street memo? And why can't somebody ask George W. Bush about the memo's allegation that he and his administration "fixed" the facts and intelligence to make a case for war that wasn't there otherwise?

But we take a break from the drum-beating today to salute Jim VandeHei and Peter Baker for their report on Iraq in Sunday's Washington Post. Get past the "he said, she said headline" -- "Bush's Optimism On Iraq Debated" -- and you'll find in the VandeHei/Baker piece a fine bit of "emperor has no clothes" reporting.

"President Bush's portrayal of a wilting insurgency in Iraq at a time of escalating violence and insecurity throughout the country is reviving the debate over the administration's Iraq strategy and the accuracy of its upbeat claims," VandeHie and Baker report. And in the next 1,300 words or so, the two reporters make it clear that there's not really much of a debate at all: What there is is a "disconnect" between the administration's "Rose Garden optimism" and the reality on the ground.

On a tangential note, I was alerted by the Faithful Correspondent to the summary in Liberal Oasis of the can of whup-ass that William Schulz of Amnesty International opened on Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. (Oh, Chris, does your father know how you make your living...?) The FC also suggests that if you'd like to join AI, it would be a good way to spend $25.

I was trolling through some referrals to this site and found one I hadn't heard about. In Slate, no less, pointing out this little posting back on March 22.

Cool. Slate was one of the first on-line sites I read way back when, and I'm flattered to have been cited. I suppose it would have been nicer if I'd known about it back when it happened, but dems da berries.

Hey, if you see me cited anywhere else, let me know. I promise not to become insufferable.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. gets in a few good swats at Spokane Mayor Jim West:

West, who in the privacy of the gay chat room referred to social conservatives as "sex Nazis," seemed at pains to burnish his conservative bona fides. "I'm not a closet liberal pretending to be a conservative," he insisted. "I'm a conservative. And what's wrong with somebody who has what's called an alternative lifestyle or an alternative sexual orientation being a conservative?"

Well, golly.

Me, I've always thought being a gay social conservative was not unlike being a black Klansman. Even if you could get away with it, why in the world would you want to?

I'm sure Mary Cheney is holding on Line 2, but the point stands. It eludes me how anyone can support a political philosophy that is defined in large part by its open hostility toward people like oneself.

I suspect West belongs to that school of conservative thought which holds that being gay isn't the problem; "flaunting" it is. The reasoning, such as it is, always breaks down when you try to get them to define "flaunting." Does it mean the flamboyant character Jack from Will and Grace, whose gayness is evident at 50 paces? Or does it mean, well . . . Will from Will and Grace, whose sexuality you don't know until or unless you first get to know him?

Trick question. Social conservatives draw no such distinction. For them, even a modest indication of gayness is a nuclear attack upon "family values." When they say "flaunting," what they really mean is "existing."

[...]

Maybe now some of us will stop pretending the conservative-approved model of being gay makes any sense. I mean, granted, West didn't flaunt his sexuality. But his hypocrisy is something else entirely.

Perhaps if society didn't place such a stigma on being gay in the first place we wouldn't have to suffer the insufferables like Mayor West. But then, who would the bigots have to pick on?

This is nice.

After enlarging their majority in the past two elections, House Republicans have begun to fear that public attention to members' travel and relations with lobbyists will make ethics a potent issue that could cost the party seats in next year's midterm races.

[...]

Among those endangered are at least two committee chairmen and several other senior members. Congressional districts that traditionally have been safe for Republicans could become more competitive, according to party officials.

[...]

Democrats said they plan to capitalize on the junkets issue the same way Republicans leveraged the House bank check-bouncing scandal when they won control of Congress in 1994: as a vivid symbol, understandable to the average voter, of a majority party that has lost touch with voters. A series of polls in the past two months has shown broad dissatisfaction with Congress in general and the Republican leadership in particular, causing the party's strategists to fret that conditions are ripe for change.

Across the country, lawmakers are being peppered with unwelcome questions from news organizations that are digging into the travel records of their own congressional delegations.

"Join Congress, See the World," stated a front-page report in the Chicago Tribune. "There's no locale too exotic or destination too far for Illinois' delegation to visit in service of its constituents." The Times-Picayune of New Orleans cracked on its front page, "State's politicos like to travel -- And they like other people to pay for it." The front page of the May 29 Hartford Courant trumpeted, "Public Trips, Private Funding -- State Delegation Frequent Travelers."

Gee, those papers are beginning to sound like bloggers.

One point I'll concede to the Republicans: they know how to unify their message. Sometimes I think the Democrats' biggest problem is that they don't. For example:

Democrats Joseph Biden and John Edwards are criticizing party chairman Howard Dean, saying his rhetorical attacks on Republicans have gone too far.

Dean has said Republicans never made an honest living in their lives and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay ought to go back to Houston where he can serve his jail sentence. DeLay has not been accused of any crime.

Dean "doesn't speak for me with that kind of rhetoric and I don't think he speaks for the majority of Democrats," Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

While discussing the hardship of working Americans standing in long lines to vote, Dean said Thursday, "Republicans, I guess, can do that because a lot of them have never made an honest living in their lives."

Edwards responded that Dean "is not the spokesman for the party."

With all due respect, Mr. Edwards, but since Dr. Dean is the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, that does make him the de facto spokesman for the party. And Senator Biden, why don't you get that big old stick out of your ass and stop running for president?

Dr. Dean is known for his dry sense of humor and his ability to get a rise out of people -- qualities that are not much appreciated by far too many people -- and anybody that listens to him for any length of time would know that. And it's not like we didn't know that when he got the job back in February. My advice to the Democrats who go on TV and get asked about it should just chuckle and say something along the lines of "Oh, that Howard Dean -- he's quite a caution, isn't he?" and then get back to the real things that matter, like the wholesale destruction of our economy at the hands of the Republicans.

Secretary of State Rice to the OAS meeting in Fort Lauderdale:

"We in the OAS cannot rest, we must not rest, we cannot tire, we must not tire and we can never declare victory until freedom, prosperity, and security enrich the lives of all people," Rice said, echoing words of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. "This is the great calling of our democratic nations. And it is the legacy that we must leave to posterity."

[...]

In a thinly veiled reference to oil-rich Venezuela, which is engaged in escalating tensions with the United States, Rice said the OAS "must insist that leaders who are elected democratically have a responsibility to govern democratically."

Are you getting this down, amigos? Don't you just love it when the United States lectures everybody else on democracy, especially after seeing how we exercise it for detainees in Gitmo? Rule of law? Presumption of innocence? The right to confront witness? Habeus corpus? But we're at war...

From the Miami Herald:

Washington Redskins safety Sean Taylor was released on bond from Miami-Dade County Jail late Saturday, 30 minutes after turning himself in for allegedly brandishing a gun and throwing a punch during a dispute over allegedly stolen property last week.

Taylor, a former University of Miami star, is charged with aggravated assault with a firearm and simple battery following an incident Wednesday night in Southwest Miami-Dade.

He was released on a $16,500 bond. A court hearing is tentatively set for June 24.

Taylor's mother, Donna Junor, and his agent, Drew Rosenhaus, both declined to comment on Sunday. Taylor's father, Pedro W. Taylor, Florida City's police chief, could not be reached at work.

A couple of interesting notes to this story. First, as the story points out, Mr. Taylor's father is the chief of police in Florida City. Second, Mr. Taylor is a graduate of that bastion of South Florida sportsmanship, Gulliver Prep. I'm sure they're going to offer him a coaching job once he's canned from the Redskins.

PS: Michael Wilbon, a sports columnist for the Washington Post, has some thoughts on Mr. Taylor.

Well, Ralph Nader did okay on C-SPAN this morning -- he was on point, he didn't get distracted by the nutsery that called in, and he didn't stand on the desk and scream for impeachment.

The Faithful Correspondent notes that Editor & Publisher is doing some digging, as has the Associated Press.

Smintheus at Downing Street Memo is providing information and links to sources and petitions for following up on the demand for a congressional inquiry.

One rather disturbing trend I've noticed in the last week has been the attitude of some of the Bush supporters who seem to think that even if it's true that Bush was planning the war in Iraq in the summer of 2002, Saddam was a bad guy -- he had weapons of mass destruction and he was implicated in 9/11 -- so whatever we could do to get rid of him was justifiable. (Neither of which was true, but never mind...) And even if Bush committed an impeachable offense, Bill Clinton got a blowjob in the White House and lied about it. So there.

Does anybody really think that the Downing Street Memo will bring about the immediate inquiry into how and why we went to war in Iraq and possibly lead to the House drawing up articles of impeachment? Did someone just see a pig fly? The Republicans get a great deal of mileage out of accusing liberals of moral relativism -- having a sliding scale for what's right and what's wrong, and they bunch all of their bete noires -- abortion, gay rights, fluoridated water -- in with the cultural decline of our society. However, they never seem to include with that outrage over their own examples of moral lapses. Tom DeLay and Trent Lott made a lot of noise when the United States helped in the Bosnian conflict and assured America that it was their patriotic duty to speak out against a war that they felt was unjustifiable and unwinnable. Five years later when Democrats spoke out against the war in Iraq, Mr. DeLay and Mr. Lott accused them of treason. When Bill Clinton had his moral failings, William Bennett, author of the Book of Virtues, shook his jowls on national television and said that this was a horrible example for a leader to convey to our children. The TV cameras didn't show Mr. Bennett's arm in a sling from the tendonitis he developed while pulling the lever on the slots in Vegas. Perhaps the capper of it all is Arthur Finkelstein, who made a very good living working for Jesse Helms and campaigning against any form of recognition of gay rights, gay marriage, or promotion of the fictional "homosexual agenda." He took some time out from his gay-bashing last winter to go to Massachusetts and get married -- the only place he and his boyfriend could do so. So these people will seize every opportunity to debunk, derail, and deflect any questions about the validity of their pursuit of war, and they will to anything it takes to put a stop to any inquiry, and they'll demonize anyone who asks for one because they cannot accept the fact that they ever do anything illegal, immoral, or fattening. And that is why we must insist on one.

It won't happen overnight. The recent unmasking of Deep Throat and the nostalgic look back at Watergate reminds us that it took over two years -- from June 17, 1972 to August 9, 1974 -- to move from a "third-rate burglary" to the inauguration of Gerald Ford. The investigation by the House and Senate didn't begin until ten months after the burglary, and that was when the Democrats ran them both. Woodward and Bernstein were ignored by every other news outlet, and it was not until the summmer of 1973 when John Dean testified before the Ervin committee and Alexander Butterfield revealed the the existence of the White House tapes that the ball begin to get rolling.

Thirty years later, twenty-five years after the advent of 24/7 news and barely five years into the invention of the blog, we expect instant answers because we can't wait for the slow inexorable exposure to work its way up. We can't cat-blog forever, you know. But if this story is to be held to the highest standards of finding the irrefutable truth, it must be done with the care and tenacity that will leave no questions unaddressed. We may not have a Deep Throat, and every blogger is not Woodward and Bernstein. The resistance will be strong because the people who are the focal point of it are masters of the straw man and situational morality. They will accuse us of having an agenda. They're right -- we do have one. To find out the truth.

You know what I'd really like to see? I'd like to find out that it didn't happen -- that the Downing Street Memo is a fake and that George W. Bush didn't conspire with his allies to perpetrate a massive fraud on the citizens of the United States to get us into a war. Because if he did, it would mean that he really does lack the moral leadership to be in office beyond any acceptable level of tolerance of this nation, which in the last forty years has been sorely tested, and that we as a nation have fallen down as far as he has in order to allow him to be our leader. That says more about us than is does about him, and that really bothers me.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 12:57 PM  

From the Miami Herald, the story of Mark Dardis, who thinks he got the short end of the Deep Throat schtick.

The great investigator's anger stubbornly endures, 33 years after he showed a longhaired, insolent reporter named Carl Bernstein copies of a Watergate burglar's bank checks.

In 1972, Martin Dardis, the hardheaded chief investigator for Dade County State Attorney Richard Gerstein, was tipped off that crisp $100 bills found stuffed in the pockets of the Watergate burglars were issued by a Miami bank. History would pivot on what Dardis did next. His investigation led to the discovery that money found on the Watergate burglars came from the Committee to Reelect the President, known as CRP or Creep. The connection helped unearth further misdeeds that, once brought to light, forced the resignation of Richard Nixon.

But Dardis insists the rendition of history recorded in Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book and subsequent movie, All The President's Men, grossly misrepresents him. His crucial role in unraveling Watergate was unfairly diminished, Dardis says, and, just as vexing, he was portrayed as "a buffoon" by Bernstein, whose account said he wore a threadbare sports coat. Dardis, who considered himself a natty dresser, was also portrayed in the movie by a stocky, rumpled Ned Beatty.

"I don't want any credit; I don't want any plaques or any damn thing," said Dardis, now 82, still crusty and feisty, though age has begun to erode his mind. "I just don't want it to appear that I didn't know what the hell was going on. I showed him where the damn money came from. I knew exactly what was going on. Normally, what the hell would I care? But in this case, we're talking about history."

The unmasking last week of the FBI's Mark Felt as Deep Throat, Woodward's famous clandestine Watergate source, stirred up lingering resentments for Dardis, a much decorated World War II veteran who became an investigator, then an undercover agent and finally a writer for Sports Illustrated. Dardis always had a gnawing sense that Deep Throat's importance was somewhat over-exaggerated, and that bothered him, since he felt his own role was underplayed.

[...]

In a 1997 interview with The Herald, Woodward called the Dahlberg check the "connective tissue" linking the Watergate burglars with the Nixon campaign. Barry Sussman, a Washington Post city editor who worked with Bernstein and Woodward, wrote in his 1974 book, The Great Cover Up, that "without the work of Dardis and his cooperation with newspapermen, there might have been no Dahlberg check story." And without the Dahlberg check story, Sussman wrote, there might have been "little pressure exerted to force those who knew of the coverup to come forward."

But Dardis felt All the President's Men, the most famous account of Watergate, depicted him as easily flustered, thick headed and evasive as well as a shabby dresser. Beatty's portrayal of him in the film only deepened his ire. "He made me look like a buffoon," Dardis said.

[...]

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