Bark Bark Woof Woof

This past week was a real lesson in how close we came to going over the cliff.

By a vote of 66 to 34 -- one less than the 2/3 supermajority required -- the Senate rejected the first attempt in the history of the country to limit the Bill of Rights. The flag amendment was nothing more than a blatant attempt by the Republicans to enshrine their re-election campaign into the U.S. Constitution. Fortunately there were enough senators who felt that freedom of expression included the right to burn a piece of cloth and that our country and its ideals could withstand this infrequent and inflammatory insult.

Then the Supreme Court ruled that the president's powers are not without limits; specifically, the president's war powers do not include setting up military tribunals, and in broader terms, that the president cannot supercede the rule of law or treaties simply because he thinks he can.

The vote was close -- 5 to 3, with Chief Justice Roberts abstaining because he had already ruled on the case in a lower court. In that ruling Mr. Roberts ruled in favor of the president, thereby ensuring that the vote on the Supreme Court ruling would have been 5-4.

In both cases the margins could not have been thinner. I suppose we could feel a sense of relief that common sense and the Constitution withstood these efforts, both of which were promulgated by a policitical party that ironically claims the high ground on patriotism and the rule of law.

But it also points out how close we came to tossing out two hundred-plus years of legal precedent and American tradition in order to score both political points and prop up a president's attempt to ignore the other branches of government. We dodged the bullet this time.

Next time, however, we may not be so fortunate, and it proves what I've said many times before; it comes down to one person deciding the fate of the country, and I don't mean the president or a senator or a justice of the Supreme Court. I mean the person who steps into the voting booth who chooses the president or the senator who chooses or confirms the Justice. So, yes, voting does matter...and so does counting the votes. Taking that privilege for granted -- or not being vigilant in ensuring a fair and accurate count of the vote -- is more an assault on America than any burning flag or terror suspect rotting in a cell in Gitmo.

Today marks the end of an era for a good friend. After thirty-three years as a teacher and administrator in the public schools, Bob is retiring and he is proud to say that he has no idea what he's going to do now that he doesn't have to get up at 5:45 every morning to be at the office. I have a feeling there will be some very happy orchids and plantings around the house that will now get some attention.

It takes a special kind of person with a dedication beyond that of the vast majority to devote a career to serving others, but that is what he has done. There are not a lot of material rewards in being a teacher; there is no big office, no expense account, and quite often you face a hostile envrionment of students who would rather be doing something else and parents who either do not participate in their child's education or who seem bound and determined to make your life miserable because you had the temerity to demand excellence from their child. And yet there are countless people who find the dedication and the drive and who spend the time, the effort, the sweat and the exasperation to give of themselves to the next generation. We owe them the gratitude they deserve, and there is a true sense of loss when they leave. My friend gave more than just the workweek to his students. He gave himself and he did it because he never forgot that through all the bureaucracy in both the schools and downtown, it was all for the kids. Nothing else mattered.

On a personal level, I will miss him as a colleague, confidante, teacher, and, best of all, comic partner in our often raucous stand-up routine here in Buzzard Central. We have perfected the art of comic timing to the point that people coming into our office know that they cannot leave without being made to laugh at something, even if it's us. Talk about a tough act to follow...

I'm going to miss the puns, the Mel Brooks film references, the frequent outbursts, and the sage advice that comes from knowing how the system really works. The good news is that he taught me well, and I know that I can rely on one thing that really works in this or any business: you make it up as you go along.

The end of the month, the end of the fiscal year for some, and the end of an era for at least one person who ventures off into a well-deserved retirement...

What does the Liberal Coalition have to share this week?

A Blog Around The Clock ties science to politics.

All Facts and Opinions celebrates the fact that the military catches up with the 1970's on some things.

archy on Rush's rush to judgement on drugs.

Bark Bark Woof Woof on an uncharitable priest.

blogAmY does her own little news cruise.

bloggg has some photos of new life crowding the nest.

Collective Sigh lists her holiday plans.

NTodd gets a new camera.

Echidne on Sen. Obama's advise on religion.

FDL on the limits of decency of certain Hardball guests.

First Draft on how some leaked news actually helped fight crime.

Happy Furry Puppy previews the summer movies.

iddybud on spirituality and the next election.

Left Is Right: You say you want a revolution...

Lefty on the latest comic cross-over.

Liberty Street on the Boston Globe's coverage of signing statements.

Make Me A Commentator offers a bit of theatre.

Musing's musings on flags and poles.

Pen-Elayne asks a comic geek some questions.

Respectful of Otters on pro-choice motherhood.

Rook's Rant addresses an oversight.

rubber hose on the Supreme Court ruling and FISA.

Scrutiny Hooligans on a Congressman who can't make up his mind.

Sooner Thought on the Kentucky governor's health advice.

Speedkill notes a step forward for tolerance in Arkansas.

Steve Gilliard braces for Willie Horton II in New Jersey.

T. Rex on the Supremes doing their job.

The Countess got some interesting comments on her blog.

WTF Is It Now?? on a Democrat striking back.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat and the active audience.

...You Are A Tree links to a great story about how to scam a Nigerian scammer.

It's a holiday weekend in North America. Have a great time!

Snowball celebrates Pride Week

Who could object to Warren Buffett's donation of $44 billion dollars to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for the purpose of ridding the world of disease and suffering? Well, to paraphrase the immortal Gilda Radner, there's always someone.

Warren Buffett's new philanthropic alliance with fellow billionaire Bill Gates won widespread praise this week, but anti-abortion activists did not join in, instead assailing the two donors for their longtime support of Planned Parenthood and international birth-control programs.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to which Buffett has pledged the bulk of his $44-billion fortune, devotes the vast majority of its funding to combating disease and poverty in developing countries. Less than 1 percent has gone to Planned Parenthood over the years. And the Gates Foundation does not permit its gifts to Planned Parenthood to be used for abortion services.

"The merger of Gates and Buffett may spell doom for the families of the developing world," said the Rev. Thomas Euteneuer, a Roman Catholic priest who is president of Human Life International.

Referring to Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi death camp doctor, Euteneuer said Buffett "will be known as the Dr. Mengele of philanthropy unless he repents." [CNN]

And to quote the immortal Woody Allen, "What an asshole."

With people like Euteneur, it makes you really wish there was such a thing as retroactive abortion.

Guess who James Dobson blames for the Senate's failure to pass the Gay-Bashing Amendment. The media, of course.

On June 7, the U.S. Senate voted for a second time on an amendment to define marriage in the U.S. Constitution as being exclusively between one man and one woman.

Again this year, the amendment failed to pass by a wide margin, falling 18 votes shy of a required two-thirds majority. The final tally was 49 in favor, 48 opposed.

Rarely has there been a greater disconnect between members of the Senate and the American people who put them in power. With the help of the media, which laid down "cover" by claiming voters didn't care about marriage, 40 Democrats, one Independent and seven Republicans turned their backs on this most basic social institution.

Isn't it amazing that a radio shrink and snakeoil salesman can claim with a straight face that he is the only one in the nation who really knows what the majority of Americans believe?

To prove his point, Dr. Dobson goes on to cite a number of statistics that he apparently pulled out of thin air or just made up to show that somehow the most important issue in the whole world to the American public is whether or not two people of the same sex can make a commitment to one another and have the same rights as everybody else. He blames "activist" judges appointed by Democratic presidents for striking down gay marriage bans, conveniently forgetting that most of the judges who have ruled on the cases, including those on the Masschusetts courts, were appointed by Republicans. (Meanwhile, Dobson's minions have no problem with filing lawsuits in favor of the Ten Commandments, hoping for their own kind of activism). He then goes on to say the fight isn't over: "It took William Wilberforce more than 30 years to bring about an end to Britain's slave trade in the 1800s. Unfortunately, we do not have the luxury of a protracted victory." So, to him, granting full civil rights to all people of this country, regardless of sexual orientation, is the same as slavery. This man is truly demented.

Unlike Shakespeare's Sister, I'm glad CNN granted this waste of skin a forum to shout his homophobic bigotry into the headlines. The more he rages, the more people will see that he is little more than Fred Phelps with money and his brand of Christianity is a perversion of the faith he so vehemently vows to protect.

A somber story about the death of a soldier in Iraq.

More bloviation and high dudgeon from the White House on the reporting of the bank records data mining:

Speaking at a fund-raising event in St. Louis for Senator Jim Talent, Mr. Bush made the news reports his central theme.

"This program has been a vital tool in the war on terror," Mr. Bush said. "Last week the details of this program appeared in the press."

Mr. Bush received a prolonged, standing ovation from the Republican crowd when he added, "There can be no excuse for anyone entrusted with vital intelligence to leak it — and no excuse for any newspaper to print it."

This would carry a lot more water if the program was truly a secret. But according to this article in the Boston Globe, it's old news.

...a search of public records -- government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2001 -- describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2001. That includes getting access to information about terrorist-linked wire transfers and other transactions, including those that travel through SWIFT.

"There have been public references to SWIFT before," said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. "The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before."

Victor D. Comras , a former US diplomat who oversaw efforts at the United Nations to improve international measures to combat terror financing, said it was common knowledge that worldwide financial transactions were being closely monitored for links to terrorists. "A lot of people were aware that this was going on," said Comras, one of a half-dozen financial experts UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recruited for the task.

"Unless they were pretty dumb, they had to assume" their transactions were being monitored, Comras said of terrorist groups. "We have spent the last four years bragging how effective we have been in tracking terrorist financing."

So the only excuse the righties have for going off on the New York Times is that they are desperate to divert attention away from the fact that they have completely bungled the job and are trying to find someone else to blame for their breathtaking incompetence.

Perhaps the reason the president is so upset is that it's the first time he's read a newspaper since they moved Mallard Fillmore to the back page.

President Bush goes full Rove.

Sharpening his rhetoric as the midterm congressional campaign season accelerates, Bush offered a robust defense of his decision to invade Iraq even though, ultimately, no weapons of mass destruction were found, and drew standing ovations for his attacks on those who question his leadership of the war or the fight against terrorists.

"There's a group in the opposition party who are willing to retreat before the mission is done," he said. "They're willing to wave the white flag of surrender. And if they succeed, the United States will be worse off, and the world will be worse off."

It's not even July and the president is already into the campaign bullshit mode. This sort of demonization is usually off the table until the end of October when it becomes obvious that the polls are showing that the the incumbent is in big trouble. So out comes the demagoguery.

Never mind the fact that the Republicans haven't got any plan to bring the war in Iraq to a close; all they offer is more of the same: more deaths, more insurgency, more enabling of the puppetry in the new government in Baghdad. All the president can do is challenge the patriotism of his opponents. It would be really ironic if it wasn't so pathetic.

Have you ever called in to a talk-radio show?

Having lost on gay marriage and the flag, the right wing is on the hunt for some more red meat it can toss at its slavering constituents.

House Republican leaders are expected to introduce a resolution today condemning The New York Times for publishing a story last week that exposed government monitoring of banking records.

The resolution is expected to condemn the leak and publication of classified documents, said one Republican aide with knowledge of the impending legislation.

The resolution comes as Republicans from the president on down condemn media organizations for reporting on the secret government program that tracked financial records overseas through the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), an international banking cooperative.

Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-Ariz.), working independently from his leadership, began circulating a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) during a late series of votes yesterday asking his leaders to revoke the Times’s congressional press credentials.

The White House is also specifically targeting the Times because, as Tony Snow told E&P, they had it first. Yeah, right. The Wall Street Journal gets a free pass because they published a completely independently-researched article with the same detail and depth as the Times because they posted it a couple of hours later? I don't think so. Could it have something to do with the fact that the WSJ is the editorial darling of the Bush White House while the Times is the paper they love to attack because it's the bastion of the liberal elitist MSM. Yeah, that's it. That ought to keep the Freepers happy.

I can't believe we're paying these people in excess of $160,000 a year to pull off this shit. We've got crumbling schools, melting ice caps, gas at $3 a gallon, the Gulf Coast still cleaning up after Katrina, no plan for Iraq, the Taliban on the rise again in Afghanistan, port security actually worse than it was on 9/11, and the best the Congress can come up with in their three-day work week is gay bashing, idol worship, and an exercise in kill-the-messenger. Sheesh.

On the other hand, given their propensity for coming up with truly monumental wastes of money and rubber-stamping their way into irrelevancy at the hands of the Bush administration, perhaps the best we can hope for is that Congress just spends their time not doing any more harm than they've already done.

This woman sounds like the kind of conservative I remember from the old days.

She's a lifelong Republican, a proud conservative who rails against big government and doesn't have time for whiny liberalism. Now she's siding with the ACLU.

Strange times indeed, Theresa Fortnash says.

The Hollywood [Florida] woman has filed a lawsuit in Miami seeking to stop the government from gathering records on virtually every telephone call made within the United States. She wants a federal judge to block AT&T from handing phone logs to the federal government, even though President Bush says the program is critical to national security.

"I know people are going to say I'm hurting our country, and that's why I thought a long, long time before doing this," said Fortnash, a computer database designer and mother of a 10-year-old daughter. "But I love my country, and this program goes against everything our country is about and everything my party has been about."

[...]

Her lawsuit, which is seeking class action status, says the government and AT&T have ignored existing laws that allow for phone records to be turned over when a warrant or subpoena is issued.

"A government that doesn't abide by its own laws is a government that's out of control," said Fortnash's attorney John Gillespie, of the law firm Broad and Cassel. He also dismissed Administration claims that in a time of war, presidents have historically had broad powers to protect the country's citizens.

"If you take that argument, that in a time of crisis the federal government can do what ever it wants, that's just outrageous," Gillespie said.

[...]

Fortnash said she filed the suit because of that potential for abuse.

"I'm extremely passionate about this, because I work with data and build databases every day, so I know how much the federal government can do with a person's telephone information," Fortnash said. "I've been a Republican my whole life, and that's why I think it bothers me more than it would any liberal Democrat, because this goes against everything I've ever believed in."

Give that lady a subscription to The Nation.

The Flag Amendment went down in flames.

Common sense prevailed by one vote, and the Bill of Rights remains intact.

Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) is presently speaking in favor of the flag amendment. His point seems to be that he doesn't like the idea that "five unelected judges" overturned 200 years of precedent in 1989 when the Supreme Court ruled that flag burning is protected speech.

So why was it was okay in 2000 when five unelected judges overturned 200 years of precedent and appointed George W. Bush as president?

The nutsery on the right has gone ballistic over the New York Times story about the administration's financial data-mining, including one radio host advocating bringing the paper up on charges of treason.

First, the New York Times wasn't the only paper to run with the story; the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal also had it. (Oddly enough, I don't hear anyone clamouring for the WSJ to be brought up on charges; perhaps since it is editorially a toady for the White House, what's sauce for the goose isn't sauce for the pander...)

Second, it wouldn't seem so hypocritical for the wingnuts to get all bent out of shape if they held the view that all leaking is bad, not just the stuff that makes it look like the administration is both incompetent in their intelligence searching and blatantly intolerant of the rights of privacy. Where was the outrage over the leaks that were engineered to embarrass the administration's opponents? Isn't outing a CIA operative and jeopardizing her life, the lives of her contacts, and possibly blowing up operations in places where we need them just for political revenge worthy of a right-wing rant?

What kind of magic spell does the Bush administration cast over its followers who by nature are suspicious of government intrusion into anything? Would they be so frothy at the Times if it was disclosed that the FBI was trolling through the records of gun registrations? I don't see a whole lot of righties getting worked up about the hits this administration has taken against the Bill of Rights, but then many of them have treated them as if they were situational; the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments are great when they agree with their motives and their agenda, but when they apply to people or things they don't like -- habeus corpus, flag-burning, queers -- well, not so fast.

The Nixon administration accused the Times and the Washington Post of treason over the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and went so far as to take them to court. I'll say this much for Nixon; he had the nerve and the drive to do it. I'm willing to bet that all this treason talk will die down in the next week or so and that once again we'll be left with just another bunch of bloviation by an administration that has the attention span of a sugared-up six-year-old.

Update: Glenn Greenwald brilliantly sums it all up for you.

From the Washington Post:

Many men are gay because of biological differences wrought by their mothers before the boys were born, according to a study that opens a new and contentious front in the same-sex marriage wars.

Anthony F. Bogaert of Brock University in Ontario had already documented that boys who have several older brothers are more likely than others to grow up gay -- a phenomenon known as the fraternal birth order effect.

But why? Some scientists have suspected social and environmental factors, such as the large amount of time such boys spend fraternizing with male siblings during their sexual development. Others have wondered whether, after carrying multiple male fetuses, women undergo biological changes that affect the development of brain areas related to sexual orientation in subsequent sons.

[...]

The mechanism behind this apparent maternal alchemy remains a mystery. But many scientists suspect that women mount a subtle immune system response against male fetuses that becomes stronger with each male pregnancy, ultimately affecting fetal brains in ways that influence sexual orientation.

As the FC noted with a sigh after she sent this on to me, "It's always the mother."

I'm the second son of three, and third in the birth order in the family (the oldest being my sister). So if it's true that the more older brothers a man has the more likely he is to be gay, I have some rather upsetting news for my ragingly heterosexual younger brother, the father of three kids.

So let's run an informal survey among the men out there: if you're gay, how many older brothers do you have? If you're straight, same question.

The Denver Post ran a letter to the editor that advocated beheadings for editors and commentators who dared to disagree with the administration's policies over Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

"Why have those who have continually howled at our treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo met the recent kidnapping and sadistic and brutal murders of our two young soldiers with deafening silence?" the letter began. "Where is your outrage now?" It then stated that the U.S. "should" behead 100 prisoners in retaliation, as well as " editors, commentators, college professors and left-wing congressmen who would suddenly break their silence to come out in support of these enemy jihadists. We need to stop listening to these sanctimonious hypocrites who apply the rules of war only to our side."

The question arises if the newspaper is doing a public service by running such a vitriolic piece.

According to Editorial Page Editor Jon Wolman, publishing such a letter is not out of bounds.

"Clearly, it is an extreme commentary and you might expect it reflects a strain of opinion that is out there," Wolman told E&P. "We make an editorial judgment. Is it too extreme for people to know that there is a strain of that commentary out there? Sadly, some people feel as strongly as the letter-writer."

The letter was written, ironically, by a resident of Littleton, Colo., site of the bloody Columbine High School shootings in 1999. It appeared to be in reaction to coverage of the recent kidnapping and murder of two U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

[...]

Wolman would not specifically state the paper's standards for publishing letters, but said, "the decision to publish a letter like that reflects the realization that those feelings are running very high. Readers benefit from an exchange of views that touch a full range."

He then hinted that printing the letter might help temper the discussion by showing how extreme some views are getting. "If a person takes from that a step back and says, 'Holy cow, let's bring this down to Earth' that would be a good thing."

What's the big deal? Newspapers have been running pieces like this under the heading of "Ann Coulter" for years.

From the New York Times:

Warren E. Buffett's $31 billion gift to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will help the foundation pursue its longstanding goal of curing the globe's most fatal diseases, Mr. Gates said yesterday, along with improving American education.

The foundation hopes to use the enormous gift, among other things, to find a vaccine for AIDS, Mrs. Gates said. And Mr. Gates went further, saying that while he might be "overly optimistic," he believed there was a real shot at finding cures for the 20 leading fatal diseases, as well as ensuring that every American has a chance at a decent education.

"Can that happen in our lifetime?" Mr. Gates said, sitting next to Mr. Buffett at the New York Public Library, where the gift was formally announced after news of it broke on Sunday. "I'll be optimistic and say, Absolutely."

This is an example of what good people can do with great wealth; recognize that with their good fortune comes an obligation to help others.

Not that I really want to know, but why would Rush Limbaugh want Viagra? (Sorry...I know that seeing the words "Rush Limbuagh" and "Viagra" in the same sentence is as disturbing as "zipper" and "penis.") I'm asking not for medical or any other reason, but I thought that conservatives didn't believe in sex outside of marriage, and Mr. Limbuagh is currently divorced from his third wife.

Could it be that Mr. Limbaugh is a hypocrite about such things as "traditional family values?" After all, his stand on such things as the morning-after pill are quite well-known -- he's against it -- but he hasn't got a problem with the medication that would lead to the need for such a prescription? Oh my.

Besides, I thought that all manly men like Rush didn't need Viagra; having the strong, bold, and powerful leadership of George W. Bush was enough to harden any red-blooded American male. Whew... is it hot in here or is it just me?

From CBS 4 in Miami:

Limbaugh Detained For Drugs At Airport

(CBS) MIAMI Sources have confirmed to WFOR-TV in Miami that conservative talk show host has been detained at Palm Beach International Airport for the possible possession of illegal prescription drugs.

Limbaugh was returning on a flight from the Dominican Republic when they found the drugs, among them Viagra.

Limbaugh entered a plea deal back in April in a previous case where his charge of fraud to conceal information to obtain prescriptions was dropped under the condition he continue undergoing treatment for addiction.

Limbaugh had admitted to being addicted to pain killers on his radio program and had entered a rehabilitation program prior to that arrest.

What an idiot. Why doesn't he just order the Viagra over the internet like everybody else?

Mr. Limbaugh could be in real legal trouble now. The plea agreement reached back at the end of April that kept him out of jail doesn't look kindly on recidivism.

A three-year investigation into drug use by Rush Limbaugh ended abruptly when the conservative commentator was booked on a single charge of prescription fraud in a deal his attorney says spares him a trial.

The charge will be dropped if Limbaugh continues treatment, attorney Roy Black said Friday.

[...]

Under the terms of the deal with prosecutors called a pretrial diversion, to be filed Monday, Limbaugh will be cleared of the charge if he stays clean for 18 months and doesn’t violate any laws, Black said.

Well, it's been three months, and trying to sneak illegal prescription drugs into the country violates a bunch of laws. Guess the deal's off.

This last weekend in St. Petersburg and Sarasota was a lot of fun, and not just because of spending time with a good friend and making at least one new one.


Boatboy the photographer (and tour guide and chauffer)

I've never spent much time on the west coast of Florida, but it's a whole different world than Miami. The pace is slower and the landscape isn't as "tropical;" there are a lot of trees that look like the trees up north like live oaks and not as many palm trees. There are even some rises and falls in the land that could be called "hills" in some places, but I wouldn't go that far.

There are definite signs of a Midwest influence in this part of Florida. Coming around a corner I saw a Bob Evans restaurant, something I haven't seen outside of the upper Midwest. In places like St. Armands Key, which is the winter home to a lot of well-off Midwesterners, there were shops whose names I'd last seen in places like Petoskey and Harbor Springs, Michigan: Kilwin's Fudge and The Mole Hole gift shop. My guess is that the people who spend their summers in Michigan spend their winters in Sarasota and they like the comforts of northern Michigan fudge in both places. (That also explains why tourists in Petoskey are privately referred to as "fudgies.") St. Armands is next to Longboat Key, home of Rep. Katherine Harris, the soon-to-be trounced Republican Senate candidate from Florida. Boatboy claims there is a portal to another reality when you cross the bridge. I did have a strange tingling sensation as we crossed over...I suddenly felt like supply-side economics wasn't such a bad idea. But it passed quickly, thank Dog.

Gas is twenty cents a gallon cheaper over there, too. But I was pleasantly surprised by the mileage I got on the Mustang. On the trip over and back I did better than 21 mpg. Not bad for a V-8.

Speaking of traveling, I chose my music as I was running out the door, but I was happy with the selections:

In the Digital Mood - The Glenn Miller Orchestra

Days of Future Passed - The Moody Blues

The Beatles (the white album)

Bookends - Simon and Garfunkel

Surrealistic Pillow - Jefferson Airplane

The Eagles' Greatest Hits, Vol. I

Sounds of Summer - The Beach Boys

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles

Yeah, my age and generation is showing, eh?

St. Petersburg is also home to the Salvador Dali Museum.



The place is amazing. The collection has more than just the works of Dali; there were pieces by other surrealists such as Joan Miro, and they're displayed in an intimate atmosphere where you can get close enough to the works to feel a connection to them. Unfortunately, photography inside isn't allowed, but the statue of the park bench in the front is a reminder of Dali's style.



I remember the first time I saw both a picture of Dali with the wild eyes and the upturned moustache and the famous paintings of the melted watches and the sculpture of the "lobster telephone."



I was in high school and I felt a twinge of identification with his slightly warped view of life. I think Dali viewed life as a dream -- sometimes as a nightmare, especially during the Spanish Civil War, but I also got a taste of his sense of humor; dark and sometimes adolescent.

So the next time you're in St. Pete, stop by the Dali museum and say Hello. (Think about it...)

I guess I missed out on yet another kerfuffle in the blogosphere this weekend involving prominent blogger Kos and some debate/discussion/hissy fits about things I didn't know were going on. It caught the attention of David Brooks who gleefully wrote about it in his Sunday column (you can practically hear him cackling with glee) and it gave him the chance to trot out his version of snarky humor and make fun of Kos's alleged role in being the dictator of all that goes on in the lefty blogosphere.

That shows just how out of the loop David Brooks is and how pathetic it makes him look to attack Kos as the "Cheneyesque" kingpin of the lockstep lefties. Yes, Kos is a big blog; probably the biggest on the left. Big whoop. Brooks and the dead-tree crowd seem to think that Kos and Atrios and the bloggers that get thousands of hits an hour are representative of the blogosphere.

To quote the immortal Pogo, "Bazz-fazz!" There are a lot of other blogs out there that are as well-written and as well-researched as anything that comes out of Daily Kos that won't get as many hits in a year as Kos gets in an hour, and each one is its own voice. Some are great and some are crap. Some aspire to be the next Kos, some are happy just to post once a week. It's all good, and the fact that some folks somewhere are having a tiff only means that we're not all alike. We don't all get an encrypted mass-mailing in the wee hours of the morning telling us what to write about, and even if we did, you can be sure that the bloggers I know would ignore it. From what I've observed, that applies to blogs of all stripes; as much as we'd like to think it, the rigthies can be as contrary to their own perceived party line as we of the left.

I have known since the day this blog started that it would never be a big dog in the blogosphere, and it didn't aspire to be one. Passing 100,000 hits in March was a big deal. I doubt that Kos or Atrios are worried about BBWW catching up to them; hell, I'll bet you they have no idea that this blog even exists. The longest thread of comments I've gotten has never topped 50. But with few exceptions, every comment has been a worthy addition to the discussion, something that makes the smaller readership all that much more worth it. Write about that, David Brooks.

Last week the Republicans got a lot of air time and rightie blogspace for saying the Democrats were for "cutting and running" in Iraq because they demanded the administration come up with a plan for a phased withdrawal from Iraq. They ran with that long enough to get some hot soundbites to cut and paste for their fall campaign commercials.

Now we find out the Pentagon is pushing a plan for phased withdrawal from Iraq.

According to a classified briefing at the Pentagon this week by the commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the number of American combat brigades in Iraq is projected to decrease to 5 or 6 from the current level of 14 by December 2007.

Under the plan, the first reductions would involve two combat brigades that would rotate out of Iraq in September without being replaced. Military officials do not typically characterize reductions by total troop numbers, but rather by brigades. Combat brigades, which generally have about 3,500 troops, do not make up the bulk of the 127,000-member American force in Iraq, and other kinds of units would not be pulled out as quickly.

American officials emphasized that any withdrawals would depend on continued progress, including the development of competent Iraqi security forces, a reduction in Sunni Arab hostility toward the new Iraqi government and the assumption that the insurgency will not expand beyond Iraq's six central provinces. Even so, the projected troop withdrawals in 2007 are more significant than many experts had expected.

General Casey's briefing has remained a closely held secret, and it was described by American officials who agreed to discuss the details only on condition of anonymity. Word of the plan comes after a week in which the American troop presence in Iraq was stridently debated in Congress, with Democratic initiatives to force troop withdrawals defeated in the Senate.

Needless to say, the Democrats are peeved.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said that the plan attributed to Gen. George W. Casey resembles the thinking of many Democrats who voted for a nonbinding resolution to begin a troop drawdown in December. That resolution was defeated Thursday on a largely party-line vote in the Senate.

"That means the only people who have fought us and fought us against the timetable, the only ones still saying there shouldn't be a timetable really are the Republicans in the United States Senate and in the Congress," Boxer said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "Now it turns out we're in sync with General Casey."

Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), one of the two sponsors of the nonbinding resolution, which offered no pace or completion date for a withdrawal, said the report is another sign of what he termed one of the "worst-kept secrets in town" -- that the administration intends to pull out troops before the midterm elections in November.

"It shouldn't be a political decision, but it is going to be with this administration," Levin said on "Fox News Sunday." "It's as clear as your face, which is mighty clear, that before this election, this November, there's going to be troop reductions in Iraq, and the president will then claim some kind of progress or victory."

This is an old trick of the Bush administration; they come out swinging against an idea because it's advocated by someone else -- i.e. the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 -- and make a lot of noise, get a bunch of soundbites and pundit points, then whip around 180 degrees and act like it was their idea all along. And they still had the chutzpah to call John Kerry a flip-flopper.

It may be politics as usual, but it's no way to run a country.

I'm back home again after a weekend on the west coast of Florida. Boatboy and I spent yesterday at the St. Petersburg Pride Parade and had a great time. The weather was perfect if a tad warm -- hey, it's Florida in June -- and the crowd was huge.

The Festival itself was a street fair taking up four city blocks on Central in St. Petersburg with vendor booths from every imaginable organization; banks, political parties, doctors, lawyers, artists, knick-knacks, posters, and even a celebrity or two. Margaret O'Brien, who played Judy Garland's little sister Tootie in Meet Me In St. Louis, was there, still with that mischievious grin of hers, signing autographed pictures of her and Judy. (I took over thirty pictures. Here are a few snapshots.)

The crowd was a cross-section of America. There were moms and dads, dads and dads, moms and moms, grandparents pushing strollers, teenagers on skateboards, folks in wheelchairs, rich, poor, all races, all creeds, all types, and from every occupation. It was as American as you can get with a good-natured atmosphere of a carefree summer day that would fit in any Norman Rockwell painting.

The parade came off without a hitch. There were floats from civic organizations, churches, bars, restaurants, and convertibles (including some nice classics) with politicians and local celebrities. The floats were manned (and womened) by enthusiastic folk who tossed Mardi Gras beads, candies, bags of goodies, and even on occasion playfully ran along and kissed the members of the crowd. The parade ended with the streaming of the rainbow flag that stretched the entire length of the parade route.

The only disruption, if you can call it that, was a straggly bunch of dyspeptic-looking Jesus-shouters protesting the event and the parade. They came along after, with their crudely hand-painted signs and bullhorns shouting dire threats of hellfire and damnation. If they thought they could effect the event or the mood of the day, they were sorely mistaken. The crowd greeting them with good-natured derision and catcalls, and many couples in the crowd marched along side them holding hands and occasionally kissing. The protesters, each one looking like they could use a high colonic, were stony-faced as they made their way down the street and back again. They were accompanied by several St. Petersburg police officers who looked both bored and pissed (makes you wonder how they drew this sad protective duty), but from what I saw, there was no need for protection from this crowd, whose attitude seemed to be live and let live...something these poor misguided people were not willing to afford to their fellow man, or even their fellow Christians. Some of the largest contingents of marchers were representatives of gay-friendly churches, including Catholics, Epsicopalians, evangelicals, and non-demoninational, along with the expected reprsentatives of the Metropolitan Community Church and the Unitarians. Being gay doesn't mean you can't be a person of faith; in fact, a lot of gay people find comfort in their affiliation with a faith community.

I've been to several different Gay Pride events throughout the country, and what struck me the most was how much this had in common with the ones in Santa Fe or Albuquerque or Ann Arbor or Toledo or Denver. Just a lot of people having a good time and united by something that isn't any different than the Irish festival I went to last year here in Coral Gables or the Greek Festival in Detroit: a sense of belonging and of community, and a shared experience through good times and bad times as members of a family and as citizens of a country.

After watching this parade, I wondered why the Republicans weren't there. Yes, there were plenty of Democratic candidates or their representatives in the parade; after all, we have a primary coming up. But why don't the Republicans see this as a part of their constituency? Here you have one of the most mainstream-looking demographics in the country; a group that knows no boundary of economics, ethnicity, culture, faith, nationality, or any of the yardsticks which politicians use to gauge the mood of the country. The gay community isn't just in San Francisco, Key West, Provincetown, Fire Island, or Saugatuck. It's in Longmont, Evansville, Little Rock, Roanoke, and every city or town or village in between. What more could you ask for in reaching out to a large segment of our society, and what brainless twit put it into the heads of the Republicans that shunning and demonizing the GLBT community was a good idea? Can't they see that the issues that matter to everyone -- security, a good economy, good schools, health care -- are issues that effect the gay community as well? We are parents, teachers, bankers, lawyers, service people, laborers, and we are a part of every family -- even that of ignorant tightasses, like a certain senator in Oklahoma.

Oh, well...as long as they're in the thrall of the Religious Reich, the Republicans are ignoring a lot of people who contribute to America in more ways than they can possibly imagine, and all because of fear, superstition, and the fact that it's politically expedient to make a demon out of something than try to bring them into the family.

It's their loss. They're missing out on a fabulous part of America.

(PS: If the placement of the pictures juxtaposed with the text looks odd, blame your browser, not me. I set it up in Firefox, and it looks fine there; the text runs down the right side of the column of photos very nicely. On IE it doesn't. Feh.)

Today's selections are studies in contrasts between people who see life through different lenses. In some cases the lessons learned are taken to heart and advance the human heart and understanding. In other cases, they point out the stark differences between talk and action and life and death.

The chickenhawks come to the House and get roasted.

Representative Patrick McHenry, a 30-year-old Republican from North Carolina, rose during the recent debate over Iraq in Congress and declared that the struggle against "Islamic extremists" was his generation's great challenge. Unlike the "white flag" crowd on the left, he vowed, he would not shrink from the fight.

That was a little too much for Representative John Murtha, the senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, an ex-marine and Vietnam vet and also — in the current debate — a leading advocate of a speedy withdrawal of the troops.

"It is easy to stay in an air-conditioned office and say, 'I am going to stay the course,' " he said, angrily, after Mr. McHenry, who never served in the military, was finished. "It is the troops that are doing the fighting, not the members of Congress that are doing the fighting."

Behind that exchange was a demographic reality: The debate, which has consumed the House and the Senate for the last two weeks, was largely conducted by men and women who have not served. Twenty-five percent of the House, and 31 percent of the Senate, are veterans, the lowest proportions since World War II, according to the Military Officers Association of America.

Does it make a difference? Clearly Mr. Murtha felt it did, sharply criticizing some nonveteran hawks — notably Karl Rove, the president's chief political strategist — for not understanding the reality in Iraq, the toll of "deploying people two or three times," the complexity of the mission.

"It's a very small segment that are making the sacrifices, and it's pretty easy to say, 'Let's keep them over there,' " Mr. Murtha said in an interview.

Some analysts have argued that there are clear differences between veterans and nonveterans in attitudes toward the use of American military power. Christopher Gelpi, associate professor of political science at Duke and co-author of "Choosing Your Battles," said his 1998-99 research showed that "veterans are very skeptical of the kind of mission that Iraq is: nation-building, a long commitment where our goals are really political more than military."

Moreover, Mr. Gelpi said, once the decision is made to intervene, veterans, like military officers, tend to lean toward using overwhelming force, an attitude of "let's do it right and do it large scale, or let's get out."

Still, there were vets in the recent debate who supported the idea of a timetable on troop withdrawal, and vets who endorsed President Bush's more open-ended commitment to American troops in Iraq (a debate that ended with votes beating back Democratic calls for withdrawal). For example, Mr. Murtha's Republican colleague, Representative Duncan Hunter, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, is also a decorated Vietnam vet, and led the charge for the Bush position.

In fact, partisanship might explain more about lawmakers' positions than military backgrounds. William Bianco, professor of political science at Indiana University, said his study on voting patterns showed that, "in the main, veterans look like nonveterans in Congress, on any dimension we can measure."

And some historians dismiss the notion that military experience, in and of itself, grants lawmakers wisdom concerning war and peace. "Just because somebody in the 50's got drafted for two years and spent 18 months as a typist at Fort Dix doesn't necessarily give you any particular insight into issues of national security," said Dennis Showalter, professor of history at Colorado College.

But David King, associate director at the Institute of Politics at Harvard, worries that there is, in today's politics, a shortage of people "with a background in the service who can speak truth to both military and political power." He cited Harry Truman, who served in France in World War I and rose to prominence as a senator in the early 1940's from investigating military procurement.

Indeed, men like Mr. Murtha derive much of their influence — on Capitol Hill and with the public at large — from their status as tough-minded combat veterans. Mr. Murtha transformed the debate over the war last fall when he called for a withdrawal.

Some veterans say that combat experience — even more rare in Congress than general military experience — does make them different. "The world is a lot bigger after you've been in a war," said Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator from Nebraska who lost a leg in Vietnam and won the Medal of Honor. "There's a lot less black and white, and a lot more gray."

Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican and another decorated Vietnam vet, said combat experience "doesn't mean we're right, but we do bring a frame of reference when it comes to war." He added, "When you've never experienced war it's a little easier to be more cavalier about committing troops and not understanding the consequences of war."

Mr. Hagel, who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq but has voiced many doubts, was one of several veterans who seemed dismayed by the sharply partisan campaign-style oratory many politicians took to the debate. "Our men and women doing the fighting — and dying — deserve better," he said on the Senate floor.

Charles Moskos, a military sociologist at Northwestern, calls this the era of "patriotism lite" on Capitol Hill — noting that not only are there few veterans, but also few lawmakers with children in the armed services. That first statistic, at least, might change — the war in Iraq has produced a wave of veterans running for office now.

Kramer v. Kramer -- the playwright and the lawyer, gay v. straight -- and two brothers who reconcile their differences.

In his wrenching autobiographical play about AIDS in New York in the 1980's, Larry Kramer made his brother the face of evil in an uncaring world.

The conflict between the brothers in that play, "The Normal Heart," was the consummate coming-out story, a tale reflected in many families. The straight brother couldn't find it in his heart to renounce his gay sibling, yet couldn't wholeheartedly accept him as normal, either.

Their story came to define an era for hundreds of thousands of theatergoers.

More than 20 years after the play opened, Larry and Arthur Kramer are talking again. Their lives have trumped art. Their relationship has gone through a series of changes, and in the last decade, the brothers have become close collaborators on gay rights issues.

Last month, Arthur Kramer's law firm was among those arguing for gay marriage before New York State's highest court, and a decision in that case could come as soon as this week. His firm has spent countless hours of overtime working on other gay causes across the country, from adopting children to serving as scoutmasters.

How true was the fictional account of Kramer v. Kramer? Have times changed at the same pace as the brothers? In some ways, the arc of their relationship is, writ small, the arc of the culture war raging across the stage of American life and politics.

The changes didn't happen overnight, like a religious awakening. They happened slowly, almost imperceptibly.

"It was me learning through my activism and growth that being gay wasn't bad, and I wasn't going to let it be bad," Larry said. "And having to convince him and the world it wasn't bad, and him coming around."

Now, he said, "He and my lover are the two most meaningful people in my life."

For Arthur, the reconciliation came as he accepted that his brother was not going to change, and that being gay was a matter of biology, not choice or family dysfunction. "I was persuaded over time that there was nothing you could do about it, and it was my problem," Arthur said. "That's the way he is."

Frank Rich looks at the world of the soldiers doing the nation-building in Iraq, the lobbyists who are doing it here, and the world of difference between the two.

AS the remains of two slaughtered American soldiers, Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker and Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, were discovered near Yusufiya, Iraq, on Tuesday, a former White House official named David Safavian was convicted in Washington on four charges of lying and obstruction of justice. The three men had something in common: all had enlisted in government service in a time of war. The similarities end there. The difference between Mr. Safavian's kind of public service and that of the soldiers says everything about the disconnect between the government that has sabotaged this war and the brave men and women who have volunteered in good faith to fight it.

Privates Tucker and Menchaca made the ultimate sacrifice. Their bodies were so mutilated that they could be identified only by DNA. Mr. Safavian, by contrast, can be readily identified by smell. His idea of wartime sacrifice overseas was to chew over government business with the Jack Abramoff gang while on a golfing junket in Scotland. But what's most indicative of Mr. Safavian's public service is not his felonies in the Abramoff-Tom DeLay axis of scandal, but his legal activities before his arrest. In his DNA you get a snapshot of the governmental philosophy that has guided the war effort both in Iraq and at home (that would be the Department of Homeland Security) and doomed it to failure.

[...]

In this favor-driven world of fat contracts awarded to the well-connected, Mr. Safavian was only an aspiring consigliere. He was not powerful enough or in government long enough to do much beyond petty reconnaissance for Mr. Abramoff and his lobbying clients. But the Bush brand of competitive sourcing, with its get-rich-quick schemes and do-little jobs for administration pals, spread like a cancer throughout the executive branch. It explains why tens of thousands of displaced victims of Katrina are still living in trailer shantytowns all these months later. It explains why New York City and Washington just lost 40 percent of their counterterrorism funds. It helps explain why American troops are more likely to be slaughtered than greeted with flowers more than three years after the American invasion of Iraq.

[...]

If we had honored our grand promises to the people we were liberating, Dick Cheney's prediction that we would be viewed as liberators might have had a chance of coming true. Greater loyalty from the civilian population would have helped reduce the threat to American soldiers, who are prey to insurgents in places like Yusufiya. But what we've wrought instead is a variation on Arthur Miller's post-World War II drama, "All My Sons." Working from a true story, Miller told the tragedy of a shoddy contractor whose defectively manufactured aircraft parts led directly to the deaths of a score of Army pilots and implicitly to the death of his own son.

Back then such a scandal was a shocking anomaly. Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, the very model of big government that the current administration vilifies, never would have trusted private contractors to run the show. Somehow that unwieldy, bloated government took less time to win World War II than George W. Bush's privatized government is taking to blow this one.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 7:43 AM  

Vice President Cheney is not a happy camper.

Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday vigorously defended a secret program that examines banking records of Americans and others in a vast international database, and harshly criticized the news media for disclosing an operation he said was legal and "absolutely essential" to fighting terrorism.

"What I find most disturbing about these stories is the fact that some of the news media take it upon themselves to disclose vital national security programs, thereby making it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks against the American people," Mr. Cheney said, in impromptu remarks at a fund-raising luncheon for a Republican Congressional candidate in Chicago. "That offends me."

[...]

...Mr. Cheney was emphatic on Friday in arguing the program is necessary, and predicted that the Bush administration might be criticized over it in much the same way that critics have assailed the National Security Agency eavesdropping, which has been done without warrants.

"The fact of the matter is that these are good, solid, sound programs," the vice president said at the fund-raiser in Chicago for David McSweeney, a Republican who is running against Representative Melissa Bean, a freshman Democrat.

"They are conducted in accordance with the laws of the land," Mr. Cheney continued, adding, "They're carried out in a manner that is fully consistent with the constitutional authority of the president of the United States. They are absolutely essential in terms of protecting us against attacks."

Those of you under the age of thirty might not remember another Vice President whose mission it was to attack the press for its coverage of distrust and unrest, and basically made it his mission to set the tone for the administration's view of how it wielded power. Spiro Agnew, the first vice president in the Nixon administration was the designated hitman. He made speech after speech attacking the liberals, the press, hippies, the counterculture; anything that did not comport to the idea of the mythic "Silent Majority" of Americans who hated the idea that someone out there could be having a good time and not like Richard Nixon. It could be said that Mr. Agnew's attacks were the beginning of our modern-day political dialogue of slash and burn that has dominated the arena since the 1970's. Certainly he didn't start it, but he did bring it back. (It should also be noted that Mr. Agnew resigned in disgrace in 1973 after pleading no contest to bribery. Thus began the renewed tradition of VP's with questionable business practices.)

Note that Mr. Cheney says that they are doing everything within the law...as they see it. It appears that the administration didn't consult Congress or the courts in going ahead with the program. Why?

Two reasons come to mind. First is that the White House thinks that if they had consulted anyone outside of the West Wing, they would have gotten their ears pinned back by both the lawmakers and the courts over privacy concerns, as well they should. They're also freaky about leaks -- unless, of course, they serve their own purposes -- and they were sure that if they told the Congress, some namby-pamby weak sister who thinks the Constitution and the Fourth Amendment are carved in stone would have blabbed to the New York Times.

The second reason is that the White House believed that they didn't have to consult with anybody. So far they've gotten by without doing it, so why should this be any different? The idea of balance of power to this administration is "We're going to do it and you're going to like it. So there."

By the way, not to brag, but did I call it or what?

You can expect a huge outcry from the right wing that once again the New York Times has revealed state secrets and are treasonable evil-doers by telling the terrorists that we are watching international banking transactions.

I'm just imagining what Michelle Malkin or the rest of the right-wing would be saying if it was revealed that the Clinton administration did something like this to hide their efforts to track down the bombers at Oklahoma City. Oh wait...

This is Gay Pride Weekend in a lot of places, including St. Petersburg, Florida, so I put the top down and cruised on over to join in the festivities with Boat Boy. We're going to watch the parade and also check out some of the other sights, like the Salvador Dali Museum.

I'll have pictures later.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein waved the red flag at Leonard Pitts.

Feinstein is co-sponsor of something called the Flag Protection Amendment, the latest congressional effort to amend the Constitution to protect the American flag from "desecration" -- an interesting word, given its connotations of religious devotion.

Her editorial in support of the amendment certainly hits all the patriotic sweet spots, invoking the image of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, reminding us that the flag is a symbol of "our democracy, our shared values, our commitment to justice and our eternal memory of those who have sacrificed to defend these principles."

But there's more. Feinstein notes that Congress has the power to protect the Lincoln Memorial from defilement, so surely it should have a similar power to protect the flag, "our monument in cloth." She denies the amendment would infringe free speech because "there is no idea or thought expressed by the burning of the American flag that cannot be expressed equally well in another manner."

As arguments go, this one has it all -- pathos, tears, drama. Everything except actual, you know, logic.

The comparison to the Lincoln Memorial, for example, might make sense if the flag were a single iconic structure housed on federal land instead of a banner that shows up on fanny packs, T-shirts, used car lots and suburban mailboxes.

As for the idea that anyone who wants to express an idea by burning the flag can express the same idea equally well through other means, that's not her call. Who is she to tell me -- or you, or anyone -- what means we may or may not use to express a political opinion? If someone loathes their country and wants to express that opinion, who is she to decide what words, methods or approach that person is allowed to use? If free speech means anything, it means that she doesn't have that right.

Feinstein, by the way, is reacting to a crisis that does not exist. You know how many flag "desecrations" there have been this year? Twenty-five, you think? A dozen?

There have been three. This is according to the Citizens Flag Alliance, a group that supports the proposed amendment. Three. More people were struck by lightning. Heck, I bet more people spontaneously combusted. So essentially what we have here is an effort to amend the Constitution and abridge the First Amendment in order to stop people from doing what people aren't doing. Am I the only one who finds this more than faintly ridiculous?

[...]

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. And to the republic for which it stands. But there's a big difference between honoring the flag and fetishizing it. Especially at the cost of doing violence to the Constitution.

Apparently nobody cares if we desecrate that.

Not really a surprise here.

The New York Times reports that the Bush administration has been spying on international bank transactions.

Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database.

Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said.

The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, "has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities," Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview on Thursday.

The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records.

The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift.

That access to large amounts of confidential data was highly unusual, several officials said, and stirred concerns inside the administration about legal and privacy issues.

"The capability here is awesome or, depending on where you're sitting, troubling," said one former senior counterterrorism official who considers the program valuable. While tight controls are in place, the official added, "the potential for abuse is enormous."

In theory, this is probably a logical and necessary step in ensuring national security, and like wiretapping, no one in their right mind could be against it as long as it is done within the law.

Ay, there's the rub. The revelations that the Bush administration has routinely skirted the laws on the books and taken it upon themselves to decide just how the laws they do observe apply -- or don't apply -- to them make this kind of story that used to be the stuff of the nightmares of the TFH brigade who saw silent black helicopters hovering over the World Trade Center, or the militiamen who romp around in their Elmer Fudd hats and cammie-jammies in the northern Idaho woods muttering about the "Zion Occupation Government" in Washington.

Paranoia about government spying has now become routine because we've seen that the people in charge of the government have no qualms about taking whatever liberties they wish with our liberties under the rubric of the war on terror. The mantra of "If you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to worry about" used to be the tag line in every bad Soviet-spy thriller, and ironically, we're getting it from people whose credo used to be that being a conservative meant smaller government, more freedoms, and a deep suspicion of Big Brother. And even more ironically, the Bush administration, rather than handle their powers in the true conservative fashion of respect for the Rule of Law -- at least they sure harped on it between 1993 and 2001 -- have treated the powers of secrecy and security like a kid with an AK-47; making the most routine meetings super-secret, and then turning around and using classified information as a weapon of political revenge.

You can expect a huge outcry from the right wing that once again the New York Times has revealed state secrets and are treasonable evil-doers by telling the terrorists that we are watching international banking transactions. Excuse me, but just how dumb are the terrorists who wouldn't have already figured that out? Like the phone tapping, it isn't the fact that the counterterrorism forces have been doing it; it's the extent to which they've been doing it and whether or not they are doing it within the law that matters.

The first full weekend of summer. What's going on in The Liberal Coalition?

A Blog Around the Clock gets used to the new quarters.

archy on amnesty for Iraqis who murder Americans.

Bark Bark Woof Woof has a little quiz.

blogAmY found an interesting site that posits some interesting biblical interpretations.

Moi at bloggg on the perils of trying to dump an internet stalker.

Collective Sigh on second-rate products.

NTodd has a primer on Quaker faith and practice.

Echidne on the weaker sex.

FDL on the movement of the Earth.

First Draft has a list of New Orleans bloggers to remind us of the work left to be done.

Happy Furry Puppy on more leftie perfidy.

iddybud catches up with John Edwards.

Left Is Right has had enough and girds for revolution.

Lefty defends liberals against the rants of Coulter.

Kathy at Liberty Street has a new and noble career.

Make Me a Commentator has a few rules on convention-attending and comic relief.

Michael on the minimum wage.

Pen-Elayne had a rough day but found a fun sign-generator to divert you.

Welcome back, Rivka (Respectful of Otters)!

Rook pops in for a short note on Bush in Baghdad.

rubber hose on sinkholes -- the metaphorical kind.

Scrutiny Hooligans reviews the news and invites you out for a drink.

Sooner Thought on the delay of the renewal of the Voting Rights Act.

Speedkill on the estate tax.

Steve Gilliard notes that the first casualty of war isn't just the truth but when it's told.

T. Rex paraphrases Tip O'Neill.

The Countess finds herself in a pickle. (I relish posts like that...)

At the Invisible Library, Stephen Hawking follows Galileo.

WTF Is It Now?? tells us that a woman in India married a snake. (Is the snake rich?)

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat links to the Abramoff report that has bad news for sanctimonious twits.

...You Are A Tree ends the week with a story that will make you smile.

Onward!

Snowball takes on a fierce tomato worm.

It's okay; the bug is as real as the cat.

From the Miami Herald:

FBI agents backed by state and local law enforcement cordoned off an area of Liberty City and made several arrests on Thursday as part of what U.S. officials called a significant terror-related investigation.

There was no immediate threat to Miami, officials said. Formal details on the raid, which apparently focused on a warehouse, were to be released by U.S. officials at news conferences set for Friday in Miami and Washington.

[...]

"The individuals arrested posed no immediate threat to our community," the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

One law enforcement source said authorities arrested seven people who allegedly were conspiring to conduct attacks in the United States -- but that there was no immediate threat.

Five of those arrested are U.S. residents, one is a resident alien and one is an illegal alien, the source told the Miami Herald on condition of anonymity.

Citing an investigation before Thursday's raid, the source said the group talked about an attack on the Sears Tower in Chicago and the FBI building in Miami -- but that they had no "overt explosives or other things."

The group thought that they "were doing (the attacks) in conjunction with al Qaeda" [sic] but were really dealing with" undercover law enforcement, the official said.

It was "pretty much talk, we were on top of them," the source said.

A man who lives across the street from the warehouse where the search warrant was served described the suspects as an unusual group of men, almost cultist, who wore military-style clothes and kept to themselves.

"They reminded me a lot of the followers of Yahweh Ben Yahweh," he said, referring to a cult of Muslim that flourished in Miami's Liberty City in the 1980. That group was led by a man known as Brother Love, who ordered followers to murder opponents and spawned a reign of terror in the neighborhood.

These guys don't sound especially swift. Parading around in military-style clothing kind of stands out in Liberty City, which is not what you want to do if you're going to be covert. But then again, a certain terrorist who is six-feet-five and on dialysis has been eluding capture in Afghanistan or Pakistan or wherever for five years, so, who knows.

Chapter 35 of Small Town Boys has been posted at Bobby Cramer. It's also mirrored at The Practical Press, which has some interesting new entries by our other members of the band of serial writers, including Shakespeare's Sister, oldwhitelady, and Kenneth Quinnell.

By the way, if you need to catch up with or start reading the adventures of Donny and the rest of the gang in Small Town Boys, here's the handy-dandy Chapter Guide to help you along.

Time for a little quiz, kiddies. Take out your pencils and paper and follow along. Ready? Okay, guess who said the following about America's role in a recent overseas conflict:

1. The atrocities are America's fault.

2. The failure of diplomacy to avert the war is America's fault.

3. Congress should not support the war.

4. We can't win.

5. Don't believe U.S. propaganda.

6. Give peace a chance.

7. We have no choice but to compromise.

8. We're eager to compromise.

9. We'll back off first.

Okay, pencils down. Did you get:

1. Rep. John Murtha (D-PA)
2. Sen. John Kerry (D-MA)
3. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA
4. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI)
5. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI)
6. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)
7. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY)
8. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA)
9. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)

Wrong on all counts. (If you said "John Lennon" for #6, give yourself a point.) They were said by, among others, Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), former Sen. Don Nickles (R-OK), and former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX). They were talking about Kosovo and Yugoslavia in 1999 when President Clinton, along with NATO, took out a brutal dictator and put an end to a horrific civil war. (Read the whole article by William Saletan in Slate here.)

The difference, of course, is that Mr. Clinton is a Democrat, which turned the Republicans instinctively into the anti-war party; anything Clinton did, the Republicans were against.

Saletan concludes the article with an interesting -- and accurate -- predicition:

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.

(*Again with the "Some Democrats." Some things never change.)

Paul Begala on the Democrats and their differences.

The media are hyperventilating about “Democrats in disarray” over the war in Iraq. ABC’s “The Note” captures the stupidity, vapidity and gullibility of the mainstream media perfectly: “Democrats can deny it all they want (and not all do...), but they are on the precipice of self-immolating over the issue that has most crippled the Bush presidency and of making facts on the ground virtually meaningless. In other words, they are on the precipice of making Iraq a 2006 political winner for the Republican Party.”

I’m sure I’ve read a dopier statement of conventional wisdom, a more perfect transcription of Karl Rove’s ignorant talking points, but I really can’t remember when.

As usual, the Smart Guys have it backwards. Democrats can and will win the Iraq debate if they embrace the fact that they disagree and contrast it with the slavish, mindless rubber-stamp Republicans.

[...]

If anyone tells you the solution to Iraq is easy or obvious, they’re a liar or a fool (a false choice in the case of our president). So why not feature the debate? At least someone is debating what to do.

The fact is the American people want a new direction in Iraq, and the Democrats offer several. The Republicans, on the other hand, offer nothing more than a four-word strategy: more of the same.

[...]

Every time the GOP says “cut and run,” Democrats should say, “rubber stamp.” Every time they say we’re weak, we should say real strength is standing up to your president and your party when American lives are on the line. When they attack our patriotism, we should challenge them to sign their kids up for the military: “Since when did the sons and daughters of working people corner the market on patriotism, Senator? If this war is so wonderful, so noble, so vital, why the hell is your son throwing up on his date at Ivy League frat parties?”

In short, Democrats can and will win the debate over the war in Iraq not by playing defense (pleading “We’re NOT for cut and run!”) but on offense: the Republican Congress has blindly backed a failed strategy that has left 2,500 Americans dead, 20,000 wounded, and put us $2 trillion in the hole.

Being part of a party that has three or four different new approaches to Iraq beats the hell out of being part of a party that marches in lockstep off a cliff.

Not to brag or anything, but this blogger said pretty much the same thing. Begala does it better -- hey, that's why he get paid to do it. But the point is the same: the Republicans have offered nothing but more of the same. They call it "staying the course." What they really mean is that they have no plan, either, and they have neither the courage nor the integrity to admit it.

According to the Miami Herald, Friday is "Take Your Dog to Work Day."

Launched eight years ago by Pet Sitters International, a trade association representing 7,500 professional sitters, the day aims to promote the human/animal bond and focus on the plight of shelter pets.

"Take Your Dog to Work Day is about confronting the realities of pet overpopulation in a positive and proactive way," said Pet Sitters President Patti Moran. "People bringing their dogs to work," as well as businesses allowing shelters to bring in adoptable pets, "can make a huge difference in pet adoptions around the world."

Many studies have shown that animals make a huge difference in humans' moods by reducing tension and anxiety.

What a great idea. Every so often I used to take Sam to my office when I worked alone in Michigan, and he would greet customers with a bark and a wag.

I would bring him in tomorrow, but I think a little urn of ashes perched on my desk -- even if it is a hand-made Santa Fe blue urn with a little bear fetish on top made by Nancy Wirth -- would be a little creepy. I'll just settle for his picture.

Sen. Rick Santorum got FOX News and the right-wing blogosphere's attention by announcing that he had proof that there really were WMD's in Iraq after all.

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

The only problem is that the Department of Defense is denying the claim, saying that Mr. Santorum is citing an old report about out-of-date weapons that were left-overs from the first Gulf War.

While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG [Iraq Survey Group] judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible Indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter, a policy ISG attributes to Baghdad’s desire to see sanctions lifted, or rendered ineffectual, or its fear of force against it should WMD be discovered.

It should be noted that Mr. Santorum is in a desperate battle to retain his Senate seat -- recent polls show him far behind his Democratic oppoent, Robert Casey Jr. -- so next week, I fully expect him to launch an impeachment inquiry into the activities of President Clinton.

In a conversation with Boatboy, we were discussing the tightie-righties' defense of Ann Coulter by saying that she was no worse than Michael Moore.

Given that Mr. Moore is more likely to go for the funny bone and Ms. Coulter will go for the jugular, I said that comparing Michael Moore to Ann Coulter was like comparing Jonathan Winters to Charles Manson.

Boatboy suggested that it was more like comparing Garry Trudeau ("Doonesbury") to Josef Goebbels.

So I put it to you, dear reader. Come up with an apt comparison of your own.

Update: Ann just made it easier for you to decide. Take a look at her latest via Editor and Publisher. For my money, she's making Goebbels look like Little Mary Sunshine.

The New York Times reports that the Republicans have their playbook all ready for the Iraq war debate.

That emerging Republican approach reflects, at least for now, the success of a White House effort to bring a skittish party behind Mr. Bush on the war after months of political ambivalence in some vocal quarters. As President Bush offered another defense of his Iraq policy during a visit to Vienna on Wednesday, Republicans acknowledged that it was a strategy of necessity, an effort to turn what some party leaders had feared could become the party's greatest liability into an advantage in the midterm elections.

The approach might yet be upended by more problems in Iraq, as Republicans were reminded this week with reports about two American servicemen who were abducted, tortured and apparently killed. Some polls show a majority of Americans continue to think that entering Iraq was a mistake, and pollsters say independent voters are particularly open to the idea of setting some sort of timetable for withdrawal, the very policy Democrats have embraced and Republicans are now fighting.

[...]

But people who attended a series of high-level meetings this month between White House and Congressional officials say President Bush's aides argued that it could be a politically fatal mistake for Republicans to walk away from the war in an election year.

The meetings were followed by the distribution of a 74-page briefing book to Congressional offices from the Pentagon to provide ammunition for what White House officials say will be a central line of attack against Democrats from now through the midterm elections: that the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam.

To anyone who is old enough to remember the, um, last throes of the war in Vietnam, this all has an eerie sense of deja vu. Back then the Nixon administration had no plan for ending the war, but they sure knew how to throw the red meat. So what it comes down to is that the war that was started by a Republican administration based on a series of lies is now seen as a political ploy to attack their opponents and win more seats in Congress. The president's minions do not offer anything other than "stay the course," which, considering the last three years, means more deaths of American soldiers, more insurgents coming in from other places like Afghanistan (which has its own resurgent insurgency), and a hardening of the resolve of the citizenry to see the Americans get out. Even the new Iraqi government has said that the best way to prove that they are capable of self-rule is for the American troops to leave. If the administration had put as much energy into tracking down the real terrorists who attacked us as they did in trying to win elections, Osama bin Laden would have been caught or killed years ago.

The biggest mistake the Democrats made was thinking that they could have an honest debate about the future of the war with the Republicans. But as the 74-page playbook makes clear, the Republicans' tactics of calling into question the patriotism of anyone who opposes them and using the sound bites to run for office brings a new definition of "cutting and running."

Richard Cohen on paying attention.

Ever since Thomas Riley Marshall, Woodrow Wilson's vice president, uttered the immortal phrase, ''What this country needs is a really good 5-cent cigar,'' people have felt challenged to better it. So if you Google the phrase ''what this country needs,'' you will find that it needs many things, including a national architect, better infrastructure or this peach of an idea from Will Rogers: ''dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.'' Allow me, though, a suggestion that applies to the war in Iraq: Ritalin.

This drug for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is sorely needed. ADHD explains why few seem to challenge the call to continue the mission in Iraq, apparently forgetting that the mission has changed and no one is quite sure what it is now. It explains why after just 100 hours, the first President Bush concluded the Gulf War with Saddam Hussein still in power and his helicopters slaughtering rebellious Shiites and Kurds. And it explains why the Carter, Reagan and first Bush administrations so ardently supported Saddam and then -- an administration later -- made it U.S. policy to topple him. We were always forgetting the kind of guy he was.

ADHD also explains why we are still fighting in Afghanistan almost five years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that launched the war against the Taliban. It's because our attention got diverted from the Afghanistan-based al Qaeda, which had attacked us, to Iraq, which had not. Take two pills for this one.

[...]

The first rule of warfare is: Kill your enemy -- or make sure, in some way, that he can no longer do you any damage. The first Bush administration ignored that rule with Saddam, and now the second one has ignored it with Osama bin Laden. It allowed this mass murderer to escape, and he will come back to haunt us; it is what he lives for. Bin Laden does not suffer from ADHD.

As any ADHDer can tell you, it is the moment that counts. What comes next or before is over the horizon. This is particularly true in a sound-bite, bitterly partisan era in which it is possible to say ''cut and run'' and think (or pretend) you have actually said something. It's easy enough to say that America's leaders suffer from ADHD, but on the basis of all this, it's apparent that so do we all. We always forget to hold them accountable.

Pass the Ritalin, please.

Kate Zernike of the New York Times enlists the opinions of "some Democrats" to portray the party as weak and indecisive about their views on the war in Iraq.

When Senator John Kerry was their presidential nominee in 2004, Democrats fervently wished he would express himself firmly about the Iraq war.

Mr. Kerry has found his resolve. But it has not made his fellow Democrats any happier. They fear the latest evolution of Mr. Kerry's views on Iraq may now complicate their hopes of taking back a majority in Congress in 2006.

[...]

Senate Democrats have been loath to express their opinions publicly, determined to emphasize a united front. But interviews suggest a frustration with Mr. Kerry, never popular among the caucus, and still unpopular among many Democrats for failing to defeat a president they considered vulnerable. Privately, some of his Democratic peers complain that he is too focused on the next presidential campaign.

[...]

Some Democrats felt Mr. Kerry allowed Republicans to embarrass them in a vote last week, when the Republicans embraced Mr. Kerry's proposal, certain it would be defeated and allow them to declare themselves the party of unity and strength. [Emphasis added.]

"Some" people make me crazy. Give me a name. Give "some" an identity so it doesn't sound like this reporter is pulling them out of her hat and just adding to the story.

This alleged internal debate between Democrats already makes the Republicans look smug, in spite of the fact that they are all too happy to march in lockstep over the cliff with the administration. Their mantra is, "It really doesn't matter if we've royally screwed up everything we've touched; the important thing is that we did it together, as one united party, all drinking the Kool-Aid out of the same cup. Wouldn't you really rather have us in charge so we can keep on doing it?"

It also conveniently masks the fact that the Republicans have no plan for Iraq other than to keep pouring money into it and waiting fervently for January 21, 2009 when it will become some other president's problem. That's their own version of "cutting and running."

Sunrise over Miami - 6:30 a.m. - on the first day of summer.

The summer solstice occurs at 8:26 a.m. EDT. Hug a Druid.

Salon has a report that AT&T has a hush-hush facility in St. Louis.

In a pivotal network operations center in metropolitan St. Louis, AT&T has maintained a secret, highly secured room since 2002 where government work is being conducted, according to two former AT&T workers once employed at the center.

In interviews with Salon, the former AT&T workers said that only government officials or AT&T employees with top-secret security clearance are admitted to the room, located inside AT&T's facility in Bridgeton. The room's tight security includes a biometric "mantrap" or highly sophisticated double door, secured with retinal and fingerprint scanners. The former workers say company supervisors told them that employees working inside the room were "monitoring network traffic" and that the room was being used by "a government agency."

The details provided by the two former workers about the Bridgeton room bear the distinctive earmarks of an operation run by the National Security Agency, according to two intelligence experts with extensive knowledge of the NSA and its operations. In addition to the room's high-tech security, those intelligence experts told Salon, the exhaustive vetting process AT&T workers were put through before being granted top-secret security clearance points to the NSA, an agency known as much for its intense secrecy as its technological sophistication.

"It was very hush-hush," said one of the former AT&T workers. "We were told there was going to be some government personnel working in that room. We were told, 'Do not try to speak to them. Do not hamper their work. Do not impede anything that they're doing.'"

The importance of the Bridgeton facility is its role in managing the "common backbone" for all of AT&T's Internet operations. According to one of the former workers, Bridgeton serves as the technical command center from which the company manages all the routers and circuits carrying the company's domestic and international Internet traffic. Therefore, Bridgeton could be instrumental for conducting surveillance or collecting data.

[...]

Since last December, news reports have asserted that the NSA has conducted warrantless spying on the phone and e-mail communications of thousands of people inside the U.S., and has been secretly collecting the phone call records of millions of Americans, using data provided by major telecommunications companies, including AT&T. Such operations would represent a fundamental shift in the NSA's secretive mission, which over the last three decades is widely understood to have focused exclusively on collecting signals intelligence from abroad.

The reported operations have sparked fierce protest by lawmakers and civil liberties advocates, and have raised fundamental questions about the legality of Bush administration policies, including their consequences for the privacy rights of Americans. The Bush administration has acknowledged the use of domestic surveillance operations since Sept. 11, 2001, but maintains they are conducted within the legal authority of the presidency. Several cases challenging the legality of the alleged spying operations are now pending in federal court, including suits against the federal government, and AT&T, among other telecom companies.

In a statement provided to Salon, AT&T spokesman Walt Sharp said: "If and when AT&T is asked by government agencies for help, we do so strictly within the law and under the most stringent conditions. Beyond that, we can't comment on matters of national security."

I remember seeing a piece of junk mail from AT&T. It was a customer service survey, and on the envelope it said, "We're listening." No kidding.

Actually, this isn't really a surprise. I'm not a conspiracy theory TFH kind of person, but I've always suspected that some agency in some super-secret way has been attempting to monitor the traffic on the Internet, and I suspect that it goes farther back than the USA PATRIOT Act or 9/11. It probably goes back to the beginnings of the Internet itself; after all, it was originally created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to link military computer networks, so naturally you'd expect the military would have developed a way to monitor what goes on in cyberspace. Enlisting Ma Bell would make sense; who else but the company that has a monopoly on all the telephone lines in the country? Virtually all internet traffic travels at some point over AT&T.

As for what they're looking for, well, you can come to your own conclusions. Perhaps, like the NSA mining all the phone numbers in the country, they're looking for patterns that lead to terrorists, or they're monitoring anti-government sentiment in e-mails and web postings. (Bob is convinced that the Justice Department has a file somewhere chronicling the rants of Bark Bark Woof Woof. My response: "Really? Cool. That boosts my readership by one.")

(Meanwhile, the AP reports that local police agencies are finding their own way to do some warrantless snooping.)

Frankly, I'm not too worried; if the NSA can't track down the Nigerian bank scammers, I'm not too worried about them coming after me.

From the Miami Herald:

Dwyane Wade stopped in his tracks, grabbed a Wheaties box with him and Shaquille O'Neal on it and said, "Oh, I like this."

Udonis Haslem sat, soaked in champagne, crying with a hat covering his eyes.

Alonzo Mourning walked into the locker room preparing for a champagne shower, saying "Show me the bubbles, baby."

They are all snapshots of a plan executed to perfection.

Heat coach and president Pat Riley altered a team built around Wade and O'Neal for this very moment, for those embraces, for that celebration that he has waited 11 years to experience as the leader of the Miami Heat.

Behind 36 points from Wade, the Finals MVP, and double-doubles from Udonis Haslem and Antoine Walker, the Heat beat the Dallas Mavericks 95-92 to win its first NBA title in its first trip to the championship series.

That would explain why I heard car horns honking at 1:30 this morning.

Congratulations, men.

From the Miami Herald:

Tom Gallagher, the Republican state chief financial officer running for governor on a platform of family values, admitted Monday that he had an extramarital affair that led to his 1979 divorce and said he used marijuana before he was elected to public office ''many, many'' years ago.

Gallagher, 62, conducted an impromptu news conference with his wife, Laura, after The Tampa Tribune asked him about 26 pages excerpted from his 27-year-old divorce file, expunged from Miami-Dade court files years ago in a routine purging of dated records.

The revelations come as Gallagher courts religious conservatives, who have embraced him, in part, because he is married and has a 7-year-old son. They see him as more of a committed family man than his GOP primary opponent, Attorney General Charlie Crist, who remains single after a divorce in 1980 following seven months of marriage.

The divorce documents, as well as additional court records obtained by The Miami Herald, show that Gallagher's ex-wife, Ann Louise, kicked him out of their Miami home in 1979 when she discovered he had been having a yearlong affair with a Tallahassee legislative aide.

Hey, I'm all for the idea of "let he who is without sin" and all that; Mr. Gallagher isn't the first guy to have a little something on the side and go through a messy divorce. But it's especially delicious when he happens to be a right-winger running with the blessing of the Religious Reich. And you have to admire the family-values crowd for being so magnanimous in their support of their man:

"The crux of our faith is the cross, is repentance, is redemption," said John Stemberger, a leader in the Florida's Christian conservative movement. "I've been around awhile. I've known people who are what I call phony political conversions, but I've spent a lot of time with Tom and Laura and I think he's genuine."

Translation: we're pretty much stuck with him.

I'm waiting for the GOP to say it was a "youthful indiscretion" -- yeah, 35 is the new 18, I guess -- and a man's private life is just that -- private -- and we should respect his rights. All this nattering about privacy from the Right wouldn't sound so hypocritical if they'd have followed their own advice with everybody else's sex life.

Update: Steve Benen (The Carpetbagger Report) has a post up at The Washington Monthly about three Republicans mentioned as front-runners in 2008 who have their own family values issues.

Vice President Cheney spoke at the National Press Club about the continued insurgency in Iraq:

"I don't think anybody anticipated the level of violence that we've encountered," Cheney said. He said much of the continuing violence has its roots in "the devastation" that 30 years of Saddam Hussein's iron- fisted rule "had wrought on the psychology of the Iraqi people."

Is he kidding?

Before the war started, a lot of people both in the administration, including Secretary of State Colin Powell and General Eric Shinseki, and outside, including a number of conservatives and former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the invasion of Iraq would be a long and bloody struggle and that it would ignite an insurgency that wanted no part of any American "liberation." What happened to General Shinseki? Canned. What happened to Secretary Powell, who famously warned the president that we would "own" Iraq? Canned. What happened to the experts? Ignored.

It should be noted that after the Gulf War and the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 one of the reasons the first President Bush didn't order the army to march in to Baghdad was because the generals and the Joint Chiefs of Staff said that we would be getting into a long and bloody struggle if we overthrew Saddam Hussein; civil war would break out and we would be occupying the country for years. And guess who was the Secretary of Defense in the first Bush Administration?

So it's a little lame for the Vice President to claim that nobody anticipated the level of violence. A lot of people did. He just didn't listen to them.

Joe DiGenova, perpetual talking head and Bush administration trial balloonist, is putting out the word that Scooter Libby will be pardoned by President Bush.

"These are the kinds of cases in which historically presidents have given pardons," said the veteran Republican attorney.

The White House remains mum on the president's intentions. Spokeswoman Dana Perino declined to comment Friday.

Bush has powerful incentives to pardon Libby, however. They range from rewarding past loyalty to ending the awkward revelations emerging from pretrial motions, a flow that could worsen in his trial next year.

It would be in keeping with the mindset of this administration to pardon Mr. Libby; I'm actually surprised that it hasn't happened already. After all, the Rule of Law, which we heard so much about in 1999, applies to Everybody Else. But holding high-powered and connected Bush administration officials accountable for their misdeeds while in office? Not a chance. They never make mistakes, and when they do, they do it for the good of the nation, to preserve the status quo, to prevent evil-doers and prosecutors from digging into their lives.

As president, Bush has constitutional power to issue a pardon at any time -- even before a crime is charged. And presidents of both parties have pardoned political friends.

In 1974, for example, President Gerald Ford pardoned ex-President Richard Nixon for any crimes he might have committed. In 2001, President Bill Clinton pardoned convicted political friends as he left office.

You can be sure that if Bush pardons Libby, the righties will haul out their new best excuse for everything: Clinton Did It. The difference is that when Mr. Clinton pardoned such people as former Cabinet Secretary Henry Cisneros and Whitewater scapegoat Susan McDougal, they had already been through their trials; Ms. McDougal had even served time in shackles for refusing to commit perjury for Kenneth Starr. The Republicans have a tendency to act before the trial takes place -- Casper Weinberger was pardoned by the first President Bush just before he went on trial for Iran-Contra, and of course there's the famous example of President Ford pardoning Richard Nixon before charges were even brought up.

If Mr. Bush has any plans to pardon Scooter, chances are he will do it sometime in November, depending on the outcome of the mid-term elections.

If Republicans retain control of Congress, Bush could act swiftly. But if Democrats win control of the House or Senate, Bush might wait, and use Libby's trial as an excuse not to cooperate with any congressional investigations into the leak.

The counterargument to a pardon this year or next, however, is that it would be a political bombshell and distract from Bush's agenda.

What an interesting turn of events. The Republicans complain that the prosecution of Libby is the result of the "criminalization of policy differences," yet they have no problem with politicizing a criminal procedure.

IOKIYAR strikes again.

(HT to TPM.)

When President Bush came back from his surprise trip to Baghdad last week, he said he was "inspired."

Okay, whatever spins your hat (or your helmet, as the now-famous photo of Pvts. Snow and Bartlett attested). But according to a cable leaked to the Washington Post and detailed in Editor and Publsher, the situation on the ground in the Green Zone is anything but moonlight and roses.

A PDF copy of the cable shows that it was sent to the SecState in Washington, D.C. from "AMEmbassy Baghdad" on June 6. The typed name at the very bottom is Khalilzad -- the name of the U.S. Ambassador, though it is not known if this means he wrote the memo or merely approved it.

The subject of the memo is: "Snapshots from the Office -- Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord."

As a footnote in one of the 23 sections, the embassy relates, "An Arab newspaper editor told us he is preparing an extensive survey of ethnic cleansing, which he said is taking place in almost every Iraqi province, as political parties and their militiast are seemingly engaged in tit-for-tat reprisals all over Iraq."

[...]

The cable concludes that employees' "personal fears are reinforcing divisive sectarian or ethnic channels, despite talk of reconciliation by officials."

View the cable here.

I didn't expect the president to come back from Iraq and say to the press in the Rose Garden that we are in deep shit and that life inside the Green Zone is like a replay of Berlin in April 1945. Remember, we're dealing with an administration that scorns the idea of a reality-based community. But who does it serve to come back and put on this show when it's obvious that the situation there is anything but inspiring unless you're Dante working on a sequel? And what kind of confidence does it inspire in our troops, our allies, and the American public when they hear this?

All they really want to know is what the hell did they sprinkle on the brownies on Air Force One.

It's not even summer, but it is becoming abundantly clear what will be the subject of the 2006 election: it's all about George W. Bush.

The Republicans, of course, will not see it that way. They will make it about anything else but about the president and his administration. They cannot have the electorate going to the polls in November with the reminders of the administration's incompetence and mendacities -- Iraq, Katrina, $3 gasoline, a stagnating economy, Duke Cunningham -- on their mind. So they have to make the election about any demon they can find to distract the voter. We've already seen the opening acts: the anti-gay Constitutional amendment, the anti-alien immigration reform, meaningless patriotic idolatry and pandering with the flag-burning amendment, and the oldie-but-goodie threat of terrorism. (Is it just a coincidence that we're just now finding out about a three-year-old plan to gas the New York subway? You make the call.)

The fact that all these issues have a highly emotional appeal with very little to show in the way of substantial remedy for our current problems tells you that the Republicans have no plans other than to change the subject, find a scapegoat, blame their problems on it, and make people afraid. That's not leadership, but that is the only way that works for them. As Paul Krugman notes, the party "whose economic policies favor a narrow elite needs to focus the public's attention elsewhere. And there's no better way to do that than accusing the other party of being unpatriotic and godless."

All mid-term elections are a referendum on the current occupant of the White House, and it's been that way for the last century. Quite often it's been a sobering lesson to a president and party in power that they lose seats in the House and the Senate at the mid-terms, but it's also been seen as a way to balance the power in Washington and remind them that all glory is fleeting. Tip O'Neil's famous axiom that "all politics is local" seems to have been repeated by leaders of both parties when they see the tide turning against them.

So as much as the GOP would like to focus on the local elections and as much as the Democrats are in their typical mode of not having much more than a lame slogan ("Together, America Can Do Better"), the reality is that the Democrats, who have been effectively frozen out of any meaningful role in governing since 2003, don't really need to have to do anything more than ask the same question the Republicans asked in 1948 (and Newt Gingrich found and dusted off) when Harry Truman was polling at 29%: "Had Enough?"

On Meet The Press via Crooks and Liars, Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) opened a big ole can of whupass on Karl Rove after viewing a clip of Mr. Rove speaking at the New Hampshire Republican meeting and accusing the Democrats of "cutting and running" from the war in Iraq.

RUSSERT: Cutting and running?

MURTHA: He's in New Hampshire. He's making a political speech. He’s sitting in his air-conditioned office on his big, fat backside saying stay the course. That’s not a plan! We've got to change direction. You can't sit there in the air-conditioned office and tell troops carrying seventy pounds on their backs, inside these armored vessels - hit with IED's every day - seeing their friends blown up - their buddies blown up - and he says stay the course? Easy to say that from Washington, DC.

Yes, Karl; do tell us what life is like in the trenches of battle, and we don't mean just fighting to be the first in line at the buffet table in the White House mess.

Now, who will be the next Democrat to point out again that the only plan the Republicans have for the war in Iraq is to blame everything on the Democrats?

This article was first published in the New York Times back in May, but I thought I'd hang on to it until today -- Father's Day. I'll explain why later.

Ride of Passage

by Paul Hendrickson

The car was a newly purchased 1999 silver Mustang convertible -- so right for the incautious 22-year-old son, with his need for speed; so absurd for the fretful 61-year-old father, with his cache of cholesterol and stomach pills and orthotic devices for his achy right foot.

On a rainy Monday midday in January, at the start of a new semester, this stallion of a car pulled out of Philadelphia, headed south by southwest. Seven middays later, it pulled up in front of the Los Angeles airport with hardly a pant or snort, the warming Southern California sun glinting off its metal. That's where the old man, who might have been 22 himself in that instant, got out. That's where a father embraced a son and squashed money into his paw and said embarrassing things. That's where a flight took off to deliver him back East, to his deskbound realities.

Matt, who was finishing college a semester early and wanted some kind of adventure for himself, had driven the whole way; I had joined him on the night of the third day, in Houston, having just finished my teaching duties at my university for the week.

''C'mon, Dad, you have to go, you got to live just for once, please, let's do it together,'' he'd importuned me for weeks. I, of course, had been on the fence, saying things like: ''Nah, I don't really think so. I'd like to, Son, but you know I've got all this stuff to do, all these deadlines.'' Until one day I came awake and said, not to Matt, not to my spouse, who from the first had been urging me to go, but to myself: Are you out of your mind? Why wouldn't you take him up on this?

So we went, he ahead of me, but with me catching up soon enough. So we made it, all the way to the other ocean, the aging coot and his eternally optimistic boy-man, the two of us westward with the sun (the weather was almost miraculously fine the whole way), and not in a straight line, but rather with some planned detours. One of us wore a black cowboy hat and aviator shades, the other an old fishing cap and sunglasses purchased long ago at For Eyes.

We gorged our way across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. It was the chicken-fried steak at Threadgill's in Austin, the pork ribs at the Quarters Lounge in Albuquerque, the green-chili enchiladas at the Guadalupe Cafe in Santa Fe. Actually, I was the one who ordered the green chili atop my enchilada, knowing that the green would be milder than the red. Matt went right for the ''Christmas chili,'' once the server told him it was a firecracker-hot combo of both red and green.

One day we clocked 860 miles on the odometer. (We did it so that we could spend almost the entire next day at leisure.) When it was Matt's turn at the wheel during that marathon haul, he set the cruise-control at 89 miles per hour. I thought, well, if I'm going to go out, why not with the top down on Interstate 10 in West Texas with Mellencamp and Dire Straits and Dylan and Springsteen blasting out of the sound system?

We were two road-hounds shouting ''Born in the U.S.A.'' at each other. It's indefensibly corny, but we banged through Winslow, Ariz., on a Sunday afternoon, playing the Eagles at woofer-busting levels. You know, the one that goes, ''I was standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona .'' It was all so late-midlife crisis. I knew it. I loved it.

One night we treated ourselves to a ridiculously expensive massage and an outdoor communal hot tub, clothing optional, under a million New Mexico stars. That was pretty fine. One night we went to a famous country-music joint named the Broken Spoke and watched some Texas cowboys two-stepping their ladies around the dance floor. That was even finer. We drank long-necked Lone Stars and Shiner Bock beer that night and then stumbled out into the Spoke's dirt parking lot and found our way back to our Marriott, imagining ourselves a pair of lower-case authentic American heroes.

The old frets would come back by daylight and I kept believing we were going to break down at Fort Stockton or Truth or Consequences, that the car would start shooting geysers of oil, no tow truck in sight.

''Dad, you just can't let yourself think like that,'' laughed someone who's 39 years younger than I. At the university where I am employed, I often say to those who are also about 39 years younger than I, and to whom I am allegedly trying to impart something about writing, ''Let the students teach the teacher.'' Let the child instruct the parent.

Belted into the leather bucket seats of that car during those five days together on the road were two headstrong men who, if the truth be told, have always sought ways to tangle with each other. We got on each other's nerves and argued about some dumb things -- but not nearly as many or as often as I would have guessed. Neither of us once said it in those five days, but I believe we both understood to our toenails the central truth of what we were doing: having our last real shot together. I am losing my son to the world. Which is exactly as it should be, as it must be.

As I say, all this was more than three months ago. But he officially enters the world on Monday. Before the sun has drilled itself to noon, he'll have his shiny new degree.

Paul Hendrickson's "ride of passage" brings back one of my fondest memories that I shared with my dad; buying my first car when I was sixteen.

It was a silver 1965 Mustang 2+2 fastback with a 289 V-8 and a three-by-the-knee stick shift. We found it, after several weeks of looking, at Brondes Ford in Toledo, Ohio, and my dad paid $1,500 for it in April 1969. I hadn't driven a stick much before, and I remember Dad coaching me as we took it for a drive, then down the freeway back home with it. I remember setting the AM radio: WJR for Tiger baseball and CKLW, WOHO and WTTO for rock music. There was no A/C, but we didn't need it in Ohio.

We kept the car for four years, sharing it with my brother and sister, although I got to use it the most, and I took it to college in Miami. I later sold it for $300 to another kid. But I'll always remember that first ride in the Mustang with my dad.

And the best thing is that I have another Mustang and my dad can still go for a ride with me in it.

Joe Lauria trashes Jason Leopold of Truthout for the Rove-is-indicted story, and in doing so, goes overboard to prove his point.

The May 13 story on the Web site Truthout.org was explosive: Presidential adviser Karl Rove had been indicted by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald in connection with his role in leaking CIA officer Valerie Plame's name to the media, it blared. The report set off hysteria on the Internet, and the mainstream media scrambled to nail it down. Only... it wasn't true.

As we learned last week, Rove isn't being indicted, and the supposed Truthout scoop by reporter Jason Leopold was wildly off the mark. It was but the latest installment in the tale of a troubled young reporter with a history of drug addiction whose aggressive disregard for the rules ended up embroiling me in a bizarre escapade -- and raised serious questions about journalistic ethics.

[...]

Leopold says he gets the same rush from breaking a news story that he did from snorting cocaine. To get coke, he lied, cheated and stole. To get his scoops, he has done much the same. As long as it isn't illegal, he told me, he'll do whatever it takes to get a story, especially to nail a corrupt politician or businessman. "A scoop is a scoop," he trumpets in his memoir. "Other journalists all whine about ethics, but that's a load of crap."

[...]

Three days later, Leopold's Rove story appeared. I wrote him a congratulatory e-mail, wondering how long it would be before the establishment media caught up.

But by Monday there was no announcement. No one else published the story. The blogosphere went wild. Leopold said on the radio that he would out his unnamed sources if it turned out that they were wrong or had misled him.

[...]

Leopold still stubbornly stands by the story, claiming that something happened behind the scenes to overturn the indictment. Marc Ash, Truthout's executive director, said last week that his site will "defer to the nation's leading publications" on the Rove story, but he declared his continuing faith in Leopold.

We may never know what really happened. Most mainstream news organizations have dismissed the Leopold story as egregiously wrong. But even if he had gotten it right and scooped the world on a major story, his methods would still raise a huge question: What value does journalism have if it exposes unethical behavior unethically? Leopold seems to assume, as does much of the public, that all journalists practice deception to land a story. But that's not true. I know dozens of reporters, but Leopold is only the second one I've known (the first did it privately) to admit to doing something illegal or unethical on the job.

After reading his memoir -- and watching other journalists, such as Jayson Blair at the New York Times and Jack Kelley at USA Today, crash and burn for making up stories or breaking other rules of newsgathering -- I think there's something else at play here. Leopold is in too many ways a man of his times. These days it is about the reporter, not the story; the actor, not the play; the athlete, not the game. Leopold is a product of a narcissistic culture that has not stopped at journalism's door, a culture facilitated and expanded by the Internet.

Blaming the Internet, or more specifically, the blogosphere, is the new "the dog ate my homework." The blogosphere did not "go wild" after the Truthout story broke. In fact, only a few blogs picked it up, and some of the blogs that actually have a staff of reporters followed it up to find that there was no there there. (Yes, this blog did pick it up and post it. Just my luck; the one and only time I've picked up a lead from the mountains of Truthout e-mails that flood my in-box, it turns out to be wrong. Back to the Qurb folder with them.) It's quite a bit over the top for Mr. Lauria to blame it on the "narcissistic culture that has not stopped at journalism's door" for one man's mistake, especially since reporters have been making themselves part of the story since the days of William Randolph Hearst. And to throw in there the new kid on the block is just a lazy excuse; journalism is still journalism, ethics are still ethics, and they don't change because the method of getting the story out there is changing.

Could Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) be the Democrats' anti-Hillary dote?

Obama, a first-term Democratic senator from Illinois, seems to be hitting the right notes these days. During Senate recesses, he has been touring the country at breakneck pace, basking in the sudden fame of a politician turned pop star. Along the way, he has been drawing crowds and campaign cash from Democrats starved for a fresh face and ready to cheer what Obama touts as "a politics of hope instead of a politics of fear."

His office fields more than 300 requests a week for appearances. One Senate Democrat, curious about Obama's charisma, took notes when watching him perform at a recent political event. State parties report breaking fundraising records when Obama is the speaker.

The money he is bringing in for fellow Democrats is shaping up as an important influence on 2006. And the potential Obama is demonstrating as a political performer -- less than two years after his elevation from the Illinois state legislature -- is prompting some colleagues to urge him to turn his attention to 2008 and a race for the presidency. Obama has made plain he is at least listening.

[...]

At age 44, the former Harvard Law School standout has little baggage. But Obama also has a scant legislative record in the Senate, where some members privately say they view him as drawn to news conferences and speeches more than to the hard details of lawmaking.

He has yet to carve out a distinctive profile on the policy and ideological debates that are central to how Democrats will position themselves in a post-Bush era.

In his stump speech, he offers a standard Democratic criticism of President Bush's tax cuts as favoring the rich, and promotes energy independence with only modest detail about how to achieve it. Nor does he dwell on the Iraq war, assailing the administration's handling of the conflict but not addressing such questions as a timetable for troop withdrawal.

Instead, it is almost entirely Obama's biography, along with his gift for engaging people in large audiences and one-on-one encounters, that is driving interest.

[...]

Interviewed recently as he jetted between campaign appearances for Democrats in Massachusetts and New Jersey, Obama said he is flattered but so far unmoved by appeals that he seek the presidency in 2008: "It's gratifying to know that my message resonates enough that people are thinking in those terms. But at this stage, I haven't changed my mind from previous demurrals."

Obama, however, is not exactly standing still. He recently hired two nationally experienced political consultants, Anita Dunn in Washington and David Axelrod in Chicago. The senator suggested that a presidential bid is a matter of when, not if.

"We've visited 25 states since taking office," he said. "And in each of those states, we might have 2,000 people show up at a rally. And we'd get back to D.C. and we'd realize we didn't have e-mail addresses for any of those people. That might be a useful thing to have when, you know, I'm running for something and might be looking to raise some money."

What do you think? Is he for real, or is he just the flavor of the month, (just as Mark Warner was last month) and the next flurry of excitement will be around Bill Richardson or Matt Santos? (Oh, wait; he's fictional.)

Frank Rich on how in spite of the fact that Iraq is a total clusterfuck for the administration and has been the iceberg to the Republicans' Titanic poll numbers, Karl Rove will still be able to make a silk purse with his sow's ear and get away with it again at the mid-term elections

Polls last week showed scant movement in either the president's approval rating (37 percent in the NBC News-Wall Street Journal survey released on Wednesday night) or that of the war (53 percent deem it a mistake). On NBC Tim Russert listed Mr. Bush's woes: "Iraq, Iraq, Iraq." Americans pick Iraq as the most pressing national issue, 21 points ahead of immigration, the runner-up. They find the war so dispiriting that the networks spend less and less time covering it. Had the much-hyped Alberto roused itself from tropical storm to hurricane, Mr. Bush's Baghdad jaunt would have been bumped for the surefire Nielsen boost of tempest-tossed male anchors emoting in the great outdoors.

All of which makes it stupendously counterintuitive that the Republican campaign strategy for 2006 is to run on the war. But there was Karl Rove, freshly released from legal jeopardy, proposing exactly that in a speech just before the president's trip. In a drive-by Swift Boating, he portrayed John Kerry and John Murtha, two decorated Vietnam veterans calling for an expedited exit from Iraq, as cowards who exemplify their party's "old pattern of cutting and running."

[...]

Those who are most enraged about the administration's reckless misadventures are incredulous that it repeatedly gets away with the same stunts. Last week the president was still invoking 9/11 to justify the war in Iraq, which he again conflated with the war on Islamic jihadism — the war we are now losing, by the way, in Afghanistan and Somalia. But as long as the Democrats keep repeating their own mistakes, they will lose to the party whose mistakes are, if nothing else, packaged as one heckuva show. It's better to have the courage of bad convictions than no courage or convictions at all.

Happy Father's Day.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 7:03 AM  

Would someone please explain to me exactly how the House resolution supporting the troops actually supported the troops? Did it get them any more body armour or protection in the field? Did it get them any closer to finishing their mission? Did it enlighten them -- or their commanders -- as to what exactly they're doing other than fighting a guerrilla war against an enemy that we created out of a pack of lies?

All we got out of this monumental waste of time was a bunch of soundclips for the mid-term elections and a lot of backroom manipulation that had nothing whatsoever to do with the war. For all the gasbaggery about supporting our troops and freedom fighting, it's clear that the Republicans mounted this legislative circle-jerk for the sole purpose of playing "Gotcha" with the Democrats, and the Democrats, to their shame, fell for it. Meanwhile, the war goes on, and the putative subjects of this ignoble exercise are no closer to getting out or even knowing how long they will be there.

Here's an idea. Let's charter a 747 and fly every member of the House that voted for the resolution to Iraq and actually support the troops. Let them be the ones to dish out the food, maintain the vehicles, order in the equipment, and get their rear echelon in gear. And they wouldn't be put up in some hotel in the Green Zone. No, let them bivouac along with the troops out in the sand with the flies and the heat. Let's see how long they'd last, and let's see how quickly they'd get their asses back to DC and vote to really support the troops. Even if it's clowns like these two.

Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker looks at the president's recent attempt to get the country to look at something other than his own problems.

For five days last week, the White House and its Capitol Hill allies did urgent battle against what they perceive, or say they perceive, as an attack on the institution of marriage. It’s a strange sort of attack, to be sure: a wonderfully pacific attack, a supportive attack, an attack without the slightest intention or capacity to cause harm, consisting, as it does, of the earnest wish of certain loving couples to join themselves to that very institution and thus to feel themselves, and be accepted as, full members of the American (and human) family. The counterattack—beginning on Saturday with a radio address by President Bush, continuing on Monday with a nearly identical Presidential speech, this one to “religious leaders” and such, and climaxing on Wednesday with a Senate vote on a proposed constitutional amendment—was widely viewed, even by many of its nominal supporters, as a performance piece, a political pageant aimed at energizing the Christianist wing of the Republican “base” for the midterm elections while distracting public attention from the Iraq war, whose most recent numbing horror, the revelation of an apparent My Lai-like massacre of twenty-four civilians by American marines in the town of Haditha, had been dominating the news.

By the end of the week, quite unexpectedly, the second of these aims, at least, had been rendered politically (if not morally) moot. On Thursday came two pieces of genuinely good news from Iraq. After seven months of post-election paralysis, the country’s most sensitive Cabinet posts—the ministries of the interior, defense, and national security—were finally filled. And, equally important for the safety of Iraq’s citizens and more so for the morale of American troops, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian thug who had been the most brutal and nihilistic terrorist in the land, was killed by an American air strike on his hiding place north of Baghdad.

Bush, in his remarks on both subjects, gay marriage and Zarqawi, struck a restrained, almost subdued tone. On Saturday he said, “As this debate goes forward, we must remember that every American deserves to be treated with tolerance, respect, and dignity. All of us have a duty to conduct this discussion with civility and decency toward one another.” On Monday he said, “America is a free society which limits the role of government in the lives of our citizens. In this country, people are free to choose how they live their lives.” (Never mind that he was proposing to use the very taproot of American government, the Constitution, precisely to prevent people from choosing how to live their lives.) And on Thursday he said, “Zarqawi is dead, but the difficult and necessary mission in Iraq continues. We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him. We can expect the sectarian violence to continue.”

Bush’s sobriety on Iraq was simply what the realities of the situation called for. In this war, as even he now realizes, too many missions accomplished, too many turning points, too many decisive moments have ended in blood and mire for triumphalism to be warranted or believable. His tonal restraint on marriage was not so straightforwardly motivated. He wishes to placate certain overlapping constituencies (social conservatives, the religious right, anti-gay bigots) while not unnecessarily alienating others (libertarian conservatives, tolerant suburbanites, friends and families of gays and lesbians). And there is a possible additional explanation: perhaps his heart (the organ he most respects) just isn’t in it. Perhaps he is sincere in his insincerity.

The President may well believe, in a desultory way, that marriage—as distinct, apparently, from civil unions, which he is on record as approving—ought to be, as he said in both speeches, “the union of a man and a woman.” But a Constitutional amendment? There’s ample reason to doubt that Bush really means what he says about it. His Vice-President and mentor, Dick Cheney, a member of that families-of-gays-and-lesbians demographic, is against it. (Last month, ABC’s Diane Sawyer asked Cheney’s daughter Mary if she hopes to marry her partner of fourteen years, Heather Poe. “From my perspective, Heather and I already are married,” Cheney replied. “The way I look at it is, we’re just waiting for state and federal law to catch up with us.”) Laura Bush, politely but unmistakably, has made her displeasure clear. “I don’t think it should be used as a campaign tool, obviously,” the First Lady recently told Fox News. As for Bush himself, the current issue of Newsweek quotes “one of his old friends” as putting it this way: “I don’t think he gives a shit about it.”

“For more than forty years, the homosexual activist movement has sought to implement a master plan that has had as its centerpiece the utter destruction of the family,” James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family and a prominent guest at Bush’s Monday speech, has said. “Barring a miracle, the family as it has been known for more than five millennia will crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself.” Bush didn’t go that far. He didn’t even say that gay marriage, per se, would be a bad thing. He merely said that “changing the definition of marriage would undermine the family structure,” though he didn’t say why or how. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. The Constitution is not going to be defaced by the “Marriage Protection Amendment,” as its supporters style it. In Wednesday’s Senate vote, it failed to attract even a majority, let alone the sixty-seven votes that would be required for actual approval. But the President’s hypocrisy is not cost-free. He has stirred up prejudice. He has lent his imprimatur to an effort to make gays and lesbians—specifically, gays and lesbians who would like to formalize and solemnize their commitment to their partners and, in some cases, to their adopted or natural children—the scapegoats for the real troubles that afflict American families.

In the past forty years, the definition of marriage has indeed been changed, not by any homosexual master plan but by an epidemic of heterosexual divorce. Marriage is a social good—Bush is certainly right about that—but it has become a disposable good. The causes of divorce are manifold, and they do not include gay marriage. (The state with the nation’s lowest divorce rate, Massachusetts, is also the only state where gay marriage is legal.) The day after the Senate vote, USA Today reported that “the number of active-duty soldiers getting divorced has been rising sharply with deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq.” The divorce rate among Army enlisted personnel since 2003, the year of the invasion of Iraq, is up twenty-eight per cent. For officers the increase is seventy-eight per cent. Perhaps this, rather than the imaginary threat of same-sex marriage, is something that the President should look into.

The Washington Post has two articles about the inside doings of the Bush West Wing.

One is a fluffy blowjob by Jim VandeHei and Dan Balz about how Karl Rove is recovering from his year of screwing up (the Social Security debacle) and skating away from hard time for the Plame case, how ready he is to take on the November elections with his usual Soviet-style lies, propaganda, and character assassination, and how much can still be "acconplished" in the waning years of the Bush administration.

Beyond campaigns, Rove has put aides on notice that his focus is also Bush's presidential legacy. At a meeting of senior White House staffers this month, one official recalled, budget director Rob Portman suggested in the course of discussing some issues that time was limited. "We've only got so much time left," Portman said.

"Wait," Rove interrupted. "We've got a lot of time left. Jack Kennedy's whole presidency was 2 1/2 years."

Compare that to a piece by Peter Baker and Michael A. Fletcher on newly-installed Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten. They paint a nice Norman Rockwell portrait (including the mention of a real Rockwell painting) of how everything's all smooth sailing now that everyone in the West Wing knows what they're doing and what needs to be done in a very short period of time.

He has added few personal touches to his office, but one is a 1916 Norman Rockwell painting of a boy jumping from a moving car onto a runaway train to try to save the day. He first borrowed the painting from the Corcoran Gallery of Art when he was budget director and the runaway train in his mind was the federal deficit. Now he is trying to regain control of a White House that had slipped off track.

"Looking back over the past two months, I'm pleased with the progress we've made," he said. But he noted, "We are keenly aware of having just 2 1/2 years left to cram in a lot of agenda."

For one thing, it sounds like Rove and Bolten have to come to some kind of agreement about Einstein's theory of special relativity and the passage of time.

For someone who claims to have an "encyclopedic" knowledge of history and politics, it's strange that Karl Rove doesn't understand that the legacy of the Kennedy administration -- which was actually closer to three years long -- wasn't sealed by what it did but by how it ended. (But somehow I get the feeling that if Karl Rove could seal George W. Bush's legacy in history in some way that didn't involve violation of federal law and murder, he'd do it.) It should also be noted that the Kennedy administration was beset with internal party squabbles, a loose-cannon vice president, had several setbacks in foreign policy, and brought the world to the edge of a nuclear holocaust over a dictator's harboring of WMD's. The difference, of course, is that JFK knew he had to deal with a recalcitrant House and Senate, leery allies, and a tabloid press that was more interested in gossip than in news. And when it came to handling the Cuban missile crisis, Mr. Kennedy reached across the aisle and brought in his political opponents who had no fear of telling him things he didn't want to hear. (He also did it with grace, charm, and an eloquence of language that has yet to be equalled by any president since.)

Or, to paraphrase the late Lloyd Bentsen: I was around for the Kennedy administration. I remember the Kennedy administration. Dubya, you're no Kennedy administration.

Hey, don't take my word for it. That's what ABC News said.

Chapter 34 of Small Town Boys has been posted at Bobby Cramer and mirrored at The Practical Press.

Via Crooks and Liars, Stephen Colbert interviews a Congressman Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) who advocates posting the Ten Commandments in the U.S. Capitol.

Colbert: What are the Ten Commandments?

Westmoreland: You mean all of them?--Um... Don't murder. Don't lie. Don't steal Um... I can't name them all.

My guess is that he wants to post them so he can learn them.

He also wants to eliminate the Department of Education.

Well, yeah, it's too late for him.

Ann Coulter is advocating fragging John Murtha.

As I noted last week, she's gone from talking about the issues to being the issue, and in doing so has become some kind of freak show. People tune in to watch her just to see what she'll do next.

I guess her next step is to rent herself out to frat parties.

I've never met NTodd of Dohiyi Mir in person, even though we share some things in common; we both grew up in Perrysburg, Ohio, and we both attended the same school. We just did it about seventeen years apart. We're both Quakers, and we both have a very dry sense of humor and an appreciation for the simple things in life. He was instrumental in helping get this blog going, and his advice and guidance as both a technical and spiritual advisor have been invaluable. He's a good friend.

Today NTodd and his family face a catastrophic personal loss. I cannot imagine what he must be going through, so all I can do is, in the Quaker tradition, hold him in the Light.

Words fail me, but my arms and my heart embrace you and offer the comfort of knowing that I will always be here to listen, to hold, to care, to be silent when the noise is too much, and to speak softly when the silence is too much to bear.

Peace be with you, NTodd.

Karl Rove got away with it and Ann Coulter offended widows and children. Just another week in Paradise.

Here's how The Liberal Coalition sees it.

A Blog Around the Clock notes the president discovers wildlife.

All Facts and Opinions on Al Gore.

archy looks at the difference between belief and faith.

Bark Bark Woof Woof on censorship in Miami.

blogAmY hangs up on TPC's.

bloggg on the fight against breast cancer.

Collective Sigh on Rove's latest plot to win the election in November.

Echidne discusses the the inequities of a certain job.

FDL on the color of money.

First Draft on one of our "good allies."

Happy Furry Puppy on the craziness of the Left.

iddybud on "just a number."

Left is Right cites a passionate speech against the war.

Lefty Brown is sleep-deprived.

Liberty Street on the lack of rights of detainees.

Make Me a Commentator on comic relief.

Musing's musings on some really hot books and who's behind their torching.

Pen-Elayne is following the World Cup and meeting bloggers in New York.

Rook's Rant on the NY Times understated reporting.

rubber hose tries to fit a law school image into the real world of life in Somalia.

Help raise money for science teaching at Science and Politics.

Scrutiny Hooligans checks out your credit score.

Sooner Thought on how the Democrats deal with their own.

Speedkill on the newest Christianist scapegoat: Namaste!

Steve Gilliard has everything you ever wanted to know about the World Cup and more.

Kenneth at T. Rex's Guide to Life on losing the war on drugs.

The Countess on interpersonal relations and sex.

The Invisible Library on Stephen Hawking's lastest star trek.

Wanda reviews the news with skepticism.

WTF Is It Now?? wants to know where the outrage is.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat knocks the no-knock ruling.

...You Are a Tree has fun with science, candy, and carbonated beverages.

Have a good weekend.

On June 16, 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri, my parents were married.

Fifty-eight years later, four kids and memories beyond counting, they're still going strong.

The world would be a far different place without you.

Snowball waits for that little bird to pop out again. Any second now...

And I wonder how he got up there...

Bigotry can be found in the very communities that once battled it, as Fred Grimm points out in the Miami Herald.

The meeting evoked moldy memories of the Mississippi Delta, circa 1966, where civic affairs often were entangled in racist rancor. But this was Pompano Beach, four decades of enlightenment later.

"This sounds like bigotry," I told the Rev. Alonzo Neal.

"You're a bigot!" the Rev. Neal retorted. The pastor of Pompano Beach's Antioch Baptist Church proffered an uncivil notion of civil rights: minority protection as an exclusive franchise, only available to citizens who can claim an ethnic association with the historic struggles in Selma, Birmingham and Greensboro. Not to a bunch of Muslim interlopers.

"This is atrocious," the Rev. Neal declared, after the City Commission voted not to take up an appeal of a zoning change allowing a mosque on five empty acres in a northwest Pompano Beach neighborhood -- a black, Christian neighborhood -- Neal and others kept pointing out.

"They're taking my civil rights -- civil rights Martin Luther King and other blacks died for -- and using it to stab us in the back," he complained. Neal turned King's ethos topsy-turvy. "The country is about majority rule. And the majority don't want that mosque in their neighborhood."

Dozens of residents from northwest Pompano Beach came to City Hall Tuesday to oppose the zoning approval for the Islamic Center of South Florida, now on the east side of town, to build a 29,000-square foot mosque 20 blocks west. They applauded E. Pat Larkins, the city's lone black commissioner, as he reduced Muslims to a cult of rogue convenience store owners peddling beer after hours and to minors.

"We want them to be part of our community. We don't want them raping it," he said. But Larkins made it clear he didn't want Muslims to be part of his community. He failed to explain the peculiar leap in logic that took him from disparaging immigrant-owned grocery stores to banning a 250-member mosque. But the crowd wasn't looking for reasoned arguments. They punctuated his screed with "That's right!" and "Yes!"

Larkins stirred the crowd, but failed to persuade fellow commissioners, who voted 3-2 not to overturn the zoning board decision approving the mosque. Even if the mayor and other commissioners were sympathetic with Larkins' anti-Muslim bent, rejecting the mosque in a neighborhood already laden with Christian churches would have placed the city in certain legal jeopardy. The federal Religious Land Use Act prohibits local governments from discriminating against religious institutions.

[...]

The vote sent mosque-haters into the hall outside the City Commission chambers, where the Rev. Neal held court and Tom Mohorn warned that the mosque could bring Arab criminals and terrorists into his neighborhood and Sam Smith warned that young blacks in the neighborhood "will do what kids do" and cause trouble for the mosque and its worshipers. Another minister complained to reporters that these Muslims were bent on converting young black Christian innocents to their religion.

"This is not right," said Sami Cara, a member of the Islamic Center as the bigots talked. "I didn't think I would ever hear something like this in America." Not since Mississippi, anyway. Circa 1966.

You would think that of all people who would be most accutely attuned to the evils of racism, it would be the black community. But apparently one of the lessons they didn't learn was that forty years ago, the same arguments they're making against the Muslim community were the same we heard from the likes of George Wallace, Lester Maddox, and David Duke.

Not only does Ann Coulter write lousy books, she steals a lot of the content from other people. At least that's what Raw Story has documented.

In an attempt to counter a New York Times article, conservative pundit Ann Coulter appears to have inserted a list that was originally compiled by an anti-abortion group almost word-for-word into her new book, RAW STORY has found.

The seventh chapter of Godless: The Church of Liberalism is devoted to "the left's war on science," which - according to Coulter - includes lying about "the science that is working" so as "to elevate the science that has produced nothing."

"In the August 24, 2004, New York Times, science writer Gina Kolata claimed that no one had succeeded in using adult stem cells 'to treat diseases,'" writes Coulter.

To prove the Times science writer wrong, Coulter then provides a "short list" of sixteen "successful treatments achieved by adult stem cell research."

But fifteen of Coulter's examples (listed at the end of this story) are nearly identical to items in a longer list of seventeen compiled by the Illinois Right To Life website, that has been available since at least September of 2003.

This isn't the only incident of Ms. Coulter being accused of literary thievery.

Last week, a blogger known as The Rude Pundit accused Coulter of "possible plagiarism" after identifying lines from the first chapter of Coulter's book that were "strangely similiar" to sources not cited in the endnotes.

In one example, Coulter wrote: "The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River in Maine, was halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant previously believed to be extinct."

"Here's the Portland Press Herald, from the year 2000, in its list of the 'Maine Stories of the Century': 'The massive Dickey-Lincoln Dam, a $227 million hydroelectric project proposed on upper St. John River, is halted by the discovery of the Furbish lousewort, a plant believed to be extinct," offered The Rude Pundit.

Nearly a year ago, The Rude Pundit caught Coulter apparently lifting passages from various texts "without attribution" for a column on controversial examples of "speech that has been funded in whole or in part by taxpayers." Shortly after, a RAW STORY investigation turned up even more examples from that same column.

So, not only does Ann Coulter just make shit up, she's not even creative enough to make up her own shit; she has to steal it from someone else.

With apologies to one-celled acquatic life everywhere, the woman is pond-scum.

The slogan of Miami-Dade County Public Schools is "giving our students the world." But yesterday they voted 6-3 to amend that somewhat to add, "only if we can do it without ticking off a vocal minority of political hacks."

A controversial children's book about Cuba -- and similar books from the same series about other countries -- will be removed from all Miami-Dade school libraries after a School Board vote Wednesday that split Hispanic and non-Hispanic members in an incendiary political atmosphere.

Only the Cuba book, Vamos a Cuba, and its English-language counterpart, A Visit to Cuba, were reviewed through the district's lengthy appeals process. Some board members who voted for the ban admitted they had never seen other books in the series, which features 24 nations including Greece, Mexico and Vietnam -- none of which had been formally objected to by anyone.

"Basically it paints life in those 24 countries with the same brush, with the same words," said board chairman Agustín Barrera, who said he read most of the books.

As part of the 6-3 vote, the board overruled two review committees and Superintendent Rudy Crew, all of whom had decided to keep the book. The decision directed Crew to replace the series with more detailed books.

Even longtime district officials could not remember any previous banning of a book by the School Board. And the American Civil Liberties Union said it was prepared to file a lawsuit challenging the decision, which the School Board's own attorney said would be "costly."

[...]

[The book] became the target of controversy earlier this year when the father of a Marjory Stoneman Douglas Elementary student complained about the book's rosy portrayal of life in Fidel Castro's Cuba.

"The Cuban people have been paying a dear price for 47 years for the reality to be known," said Juan Amador Rodriguez, a former political prisoner in Cuba who filed the original complaint, which was denied, and subsequent appeals. "A 32-page book cannot silence that."

But in his final appeal to the School Board, the majority of members decided its inaccuracies and omissions made it inappropriate for its intended kindergarten-to-second-grade audience.

"A book that misleads, confounds or confuses has no part in the education of our students, most especially elementary students who are most impressionable and vulnerable," said board member Perla Tabares Hantman.

Opponents of the ban said it was tantamount to censorship of politically unsavory speech -- something specifically barred by the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Next week we will have another complaint about another book from another group," said board member Evelyn Greer. "If this standard is applied, we will go through every book in the system."

Legal experts said the board's action appeared to be unconstitutional. A 1982 Supreme Court case ruled that school boards have wide discretion to determine which books go on shelves, but "that discretion may not be exercised in a narrowly partisan or political manner."

Apparently one of the things the opponents of the book failed to take into account was a sense of irony.

One of the inconvenient realities of living in a nominally free country is that censorship is not acceptable. You may not like what someone says, you may disagree with what they publish, and you may not want to hear ideas that you don't like, but you don't get to tell other people what they can or cannot say, write, or think. Within obvious limits for pornography or incitement (i.e. the old adage of shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theatre), the freedom of the press and expression is sacrosanct in this country, and there's a good reason it's in the First Amendment: it's the most important and cherished right that we have. Without it, the rest of the rights we have are meaningless. The Cuban exile community that came here to escape the Castro regime seems to have brought with them the doctrine that freedom of expression is fine as long as you agree with what they have to say.

The exile community says, "You don't know what we went through. You have no idea what it's like to be oppressed." That's an emotional plea, but it's also irrelevant. The Cubans aren't unique in being the only political refugees in this country; they just happen to be the loudest and most politically connected. And even if life is hell in Cuba under Castro, that is no excuse for imposing censorship on others; it doesn't exactly engender sympathy for their cause when they are resorting to dictatorial methods to get their point across.

It should also be noted that life in pre-Castro Cuba wasn't exactly an exercise in Jeffersonian democracy. President Fulgencio Bautista was as intolerant of dissent as his successor, and the people who fled Cuba at the beginning of the Castro regime were the upper-crustacean supporters of Bautista's corrupt and mob-riddled government. They are the ones who established the anti-Castro movement here in Miami and bludgeoned the American administration into the embargo in the first place. Their goal isn't necessarily a free and democratic Cuba; they just want it back the way they left it. To this day there are aging warriors who believe with all their heart that the minute Castro keels over, they will be able to sail into Havana harbor, move back into their old homes, and pick up right where they left off in 1958.

As for the books themselves, the opponents claim they are either inaccurate or gloss over the flaws of the countries they write about, including Greece, Mexico, and Vietnam as well as Cuba. In the first place, it's not exactly the place for a book geared toward six-year-olds to explain the intricacies of geopolitical history. It's hard to do it in one-syllable words that heretofore explored the sibling rivalries between Dick and Jane. (By the way, how come the "Fun with Dick and Jane" books didn't explain exactly where Dick and Jane and Baby Sally came from? Should they be banned for leaving children to think the stork brought them?) Does the book about Germany explore the first half of the last century, or does it just have nice pictures of people dancing in lederhosen at the hofbrau? Does the book about France have a chapter on the Vichy government during World War II, and does the book on Greece explain that the first Olympics were held in the nude and that it was perfectly acceptable in classical Greece for boys to date each other? I don't think so.

Second, if the books are lacking in content or are incorrect, that provides what we in the education business call a "teachable" moment; a chance for a teacher -- or better yet, a parent -- to explain what life really is like in Cuba. Certainly if Ms. Tabares Hantman believes children are "most vulnerable and impressionable" at that age, the impression we should give them is that there is more than just one way to look at a subject and that the key to learning is exploring different points of view. It should also be noted that children at that age have a highly developed sense of skepticism and they also have a pretty sophisticated bullshit detector. They know when something is left out, and they have a way of finding out the truth.

Ironically, these books teach a lesson that is a lot more than about what life is or isn't like in Cuba. It is precisely because there is no political content whatsoever in these books that they have become a political football. We've all seen the footage of what elementary school kids learn in school in Castro's Cuba. We've seen them in their uniforms and their red kerchiefs, all reciting allegiance to the revolution and to Castro, and we've all heard the complaints from the exile community how these kids are being brainwashed. They say that children shouldn't be indoctrinated in politics at the age of six. Exactly. So why are they doing that here in Miami?

Back in April during the 25th annual William Inge Theatre Festival, there was a film crew from The Newshour with Jim Lehrer doing a feature on the festival, its history, and the people who make it happen.

It was on Monday night...and I missed it. But thanks to modern technology, you can catch up with it here.

There are a lot of familiar faces for me and great memories. Check it out.

It sounds like FEMA is still doing a heckuva job.

Houston divorce lawyer Mark Lipkin says he can't recall anyone paying for his services with a FEMA debit card, but congressional investigators say one of his clients did just that.

The $1,000 payment was just one example cited in an audit that concluded that up to $1.4 billion - perhaps as much as 16 percent of the billions of dollars in assistance expended after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita - was spent for bogus reasons.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency also was hoodwinked to pay for season football tickets, a tropical vacation and a sex change operation, the audit found. Prison inmates, a supposed victim who used a New Orleans cemetery for a home address and a person who spent 70 days at a Hawaiian hotel all were able to get taxpayer help, according to evidence that gives a new black eye to the nation's disaster relief agency.

[...]

Among the items purchased with the cards:

An all-inclusive, one-week Caribbean vacation in the Punta Cana resort in the Dominican Republic.

Five season tickets to New Orleans Saints professional football games.

Adult erotica products in Houston and "Girls Gone Wild" videos in Santa Monica, Calif.

Dom Perignon champagne and other alcoholic beverages in San Antonio.

"Our forensic audit and investigative work showed that improper and potentially fraudulent payments occurred mainly because FEMA did not validate the identity of the registrant, the physical location of the damaged address, and ownership and occupancy of all registrants at the time of registration," GAO officials said.

It's human nature that where's there's a catastrophe, there's going to be someone with a scheme to take advantage of it. And it goes without saying that the real crime here isn't just the fraud, it's that people who really needed the money didn't get it. But a sex-change operation? Just how do you fill out a requisition and a purchase order for a FEMA-approved addadicktome?

Forget it... I don't want to know.

NTodd, proprietor of Dohiyi Mir, marks his third anniversary of blogging, photography, podcasting, travel, and life.

Congratulations. Commodore Perry, in all his granite glory, is smiling from his perch at the north end of Louisiana Avenue.

From the AP/Yahoo and a HT to TPM:

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, left, and White House Counselor Dan Barlett, ride in a military helicopter wearing helmets and flak jackets for a trip from Baghdad International Airport to U.S. Embassy in the Greenzone.

"Here's another fine mess you've gotten me into!"

Feel free to add your own caption.

The road to the White House for Sen. George Allen (R-VA) just got a little bumpier. From the Washington Post.

Virginia Democrats yesterday chose Vietnam War hero James Webb to challenge Sen. George Allen (R), siding with their party's national leadership, which had declared the former Republican to be the only candidate with a chance to beat Allen in November.

Webb's support from Democratic senators such as 2004 presidential nominee John F. Kerry (Mass.) swamped the textbook campaign of his opponent, former lobbyist Harris Miller, who used $1 million of his own money to question Webb's commitment to the Democratic Party's core principles.

[...]

Webb now faces the challenge of raising millions of dollars in an attempt to oust Allen, a popular ex-governor who is considering a bid for the presidency in 2008. Allen has more than $7.5 million in the bank and a long history of winning in a state that usually votes for Republicans in federal contests.

Mr. Webb, a recovering Republican, was the Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and earned several medals for valor as a Marine in Vietnam. Let's hope he remembers what the chickenhawks of the RNC did to genuine war heroes like John McCain and John Kerry when they had the nerve to run against a Republican right-wing darling. It could get bloody.

Josh Marshall nails it.

Jonah Goldberg has this one line post up at The Corner.

So where does Karl Rove report to get his reputation back?

It occurs to me that this may be meant in jest. Jonah is not without a sense of humor. But I'll assume for the sake of discussion that he's being serious.

As Andrew Sullivan aptly quips, maybe Rove can go look for it in South Carolina. More to the point, let's not forget the salient facts here. The question going back three years ago now is whether Karl Rove knowingly participated in leaking the identity of a covert CIA operative for the purpose of discrediting a political opponent who was revealing information about the White House's use of intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

That was the issue. From the beginning, Rove, through Scott McClellan, denied that he did any of that. There weren't even any clever circumlocutions. He just lied. From admissions from Rove, filings in the Libby case, and uncontradicted reportage, we know as clearly as we ever can that Rove did do each of those things.

So he did do what he was suspected of and he did lie about it.

Now, I'm happy to take Patrick Fitzgerald's word for it, his evaluation of the evidence, that there's not enough evidence to indict Rove on any criminal charge. As Rove's defenders have long made clear, the underlying statute dealing with revealing the identities of covert operatives is very hard to bring a charge with. Same goes for making false statements or perjury. Hard to prove and you need lots of evidence as to intent and so forth.

In fact, not only am I happy to take Fitzgerald's word for it, if this is in fact the case, good for Fitzgerald. A prosecutor's role is not to punish people for malicious acts. It is to ascertain whether they've committed specific criminal acts and determine whether there is sufficient evidence to sustain a charge.

But none of this changes the fact, for which there is abundant evidence, even admissions from Rove himself, that he did the malicious act. And he lied about doing it. Indeed, on top of that, President Bush welched on his promise to can anyone who was involved.

So, what reputation is it exactly that Rove wants back? I think this development leaves Rove's reputation quite intact.

Karl Rove will be enshrined in the pantheon of the right wing's vast Monument to Victimhood, next to the poor maligned Christians who are such martyrs because only 80% of the country identifies themselves as nominally Christian, or maybe next to the beleaguered traditional family values heterosexuals whose marriages are threatened every time two boys hold hands.

All he did was leak classified information to a reporter in order to exact political revenge against someone who had the temerity to embarrass the president. And for that he gets to keep his taxpayer-funded White House job as the political adviser, and he gets to keep his security clearance.

Oh, the shame, the shame.

Not that we're not or don't have a perfectly good right to be pissed off, but let's not hear any more tut-tutting from the righties about how unseemly it is for the left to be blunt -- or sharp -- with our words.

The White House's new domestic policy adviser doesn't mince words... at least not once he's gotten over re-editing his own quotes.

Bill Clinton is a "virtuoso deceiver" and Hillary Rodham Clinton a "true chameleon" guilty of "self-serving behavior, comparative radicalism, and dubious personal morality."

Al Gore is a "mad dog" known to "foam at the mouth." John McCain is given to "showboating." And Jacques Chirac, Nelson Mandela, Gerhard Schroeder and Kofi Annan are all "feckless fools."

Says who? President Bush's new chief domestic policy adviser. While most White House aides carefully trim their public commentary, they can't take back what they said before arriving in the West Wing, and few in this day and age arrive with a more provocative paper trail than Karl Zinsmeister, who started his new job yesterday.

[...]

In fact, his antipathy for Washington got him in trouble when he was appointed. In a 2004 profile by the Syracuse New Times, Zinsmeister was quoted as saying, "People in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings." But the New York Sun discovered last month that he doctored that and other quotes when he posted the profile on the AEI Web site. The edited quote said, "I learned in Washington that there is an 'overclass' in this country stocked with cheating, shifty human beings that's just as morally repugnant as our 'underclass.' "

Zinsmeister later said he was "foolish" to change the quotes and did so only because he had been misquoted. The New Times disputed that and denounced him for altering its account. White House spokesman Tony Snow defended him and described Zinsmeister as someone with "sharp elbows" who "expresses himself with a certain amount of piquancy."

[...]

Foreign policy won't fall under his new portfolio, but he has written extensively on social issues that will, such as race, class and culture. He has condemned "feminist absolutism," "Green irrationality," "limousine leftists" and "the dreary left-wing, homophilic P.C. propaganda that has dominated Broadway."

This is how it works in Bushland: when a liberal speaks out against the Bush administration, he's "foaming at the mouth." But when a Republican trashes gays, environmentalists, and just about anybody else that he can look down on, it's "piquancy." And Rush Limbaugh is Little Mary Sunshine.

Gee, I wonder why they hired this guy, especially after he was busted for altering his resume and some quotes therein. Could it have anything to do with the upcoming election? Nah...

Firedoglake has been on the Rove case since the beginning. So naturally that's the place to turn to see if the letter from Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is really the end-all and be-all of the case.

I’ve said this before, and I will say it again: unless and until I hear it from Patrick Fitzgerald, the investigation continues to be ongoing. Which means that there are still potential developments down the road, should the evidence (like handwritten marching orders on the Wilson op-ed in Dick Cheney’s handwriting) lead there.

And I’ve also said this, and it is worth a reminder: Patrick Fitzgerald and his team are career professionals. You do not charge someone with a criminal indictment merely because they are scum. You have to have the evidence to back up any charges — not just that may indicate that something may have happened, but you must have evidence that criminal conduct occurred and that you can prove it. You charge the evidence you have, you try the case you can make, and you don’t go down a road that will ultimately be a waste of the public’s money and time once you have ascertained that the case is simply not there. It doesn’t mean that you don’t think the SOB that you can’t charge isn’t a weasel or guilty as hell, it just means that you can’t prove it. (And, fwiw, those times are the worst of your career, because you truly hate to let someone go when you know in your gut they’ve done something wrong.)

[...]

Jeralyn has been saying all along that she thinks that Rove cut some sort of cooperation deal. I really want to see whatever wording was in (Luskin’s words) the letter from Fitzgerald before I get too far down this road on the what’s going on speculation.

On the other hand, if the investigation into Mr. Rove is truly over, I wonder if that means that the White House will now feel any obligation to answer all those questions they've been putting off about the case because of an "ongoing investigation." [snort] Oh, silly me.

Fred Grimm reports in the Miami Herald that the man charged with certifying Florida's voting machines is unqualified for the job...at least according to the Secretary of State.

For a county supervisor of elections needing someone to test the vulnerabilities of his voting system, Dan Wallach's the man.

Wallach, who runs the security computer lab at Rice University, is a nationally regarded expert on computer network security and voting system vulnerabilities. He's associate director of ACCURATE (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections). Besides, his parents live in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea.

He is a perfect choice. But not in Florida.

Wallach and his associates at ACCURATE may represent academia's leading experts on voting system security, but under the new rules promulgated by the Florida Secretary of State, they don't qualify.

Any security test, the secretary of state's office insists, must be performed by someone certified by the American Software Testing Qualifications Board, the American Society for Quality or the EC (E-Commerce) Council.

Not only is Wallach not certified by the three organizations, "I've never heard of them," he says.

Actually, the first two organizations are concerned with the overall quality of manufactured software, not security. The EC Council website offers a five-day training course into something called "ethical hacking." Five days of training, under the new rules, would trump the most sophisticated résumés in computer science.

[...]

Of course, the new rules aren't really about protecting the integrity of elections. Only one Florida supervisor of elections allowed outside experts to test his voting system security. And when Ion Sancho's hackers discovered they could alter the outcome of an election and wipe out all trace of the tampering last year, it was a huge embarrassment to the Secretary of State's office. Instead of trying to fix the flaws, state officials and Diebold -- a maker of voting machines -- went after Sancho, disparaging his findings and suggested that he ought to be tossed from office.

Then California -- not Florida -- directed a panel of computer science experts to look into the Leon County findings. The panel found the same flaws and more. Florida election bureaucrats were humiliated.

"The new rules are designed to make sure that they're never embarrassed again," Sancho said Monday.

Florida first priority is to protect the vendors. We'll let California worry about the damn voters.

How do you expect to fix the election system in Florida if the fix is already in?

According to the New York Times, the previous post just became, as Nixon White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler once said, "inoperative."

The prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case on Monday advised Karl Rove, the senior White House adviser, that he would not be charged with any wrongdoing, effectively ending the nearly three-year criminal investigation that had at times focused intensely on Mr. Rove.

The decision by the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, announced in a letter to Mr. Rove's lawyer, Robert D. Luskin, lifted a pall that had hung over Mr. Rove who testified on five occasions to a federal grand jury about his involvement in the disclosure of an intelligence officer's identity.

In a statement, Mr. Luskin said, "On June 12, 2006, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald formally advised us that he does not anticipate seeking charges against Karl Rove."

[...]

In his statement Mr. Luskin said he would not address other legal questions surrounding Mr. Fitzgerald's decision. He added, "In deference to the pending case, we will not make any further public statements about the subject matter of the investigation. We believe that the Special Counsel's decision should put an end to the baseless speculation about Mr. Rove's conduct."

Well, there you are.

If it is any consolation, Scooter Libby is still going on trial for his involvement in the Plame case, and that should make life a tad uncomfortable for the White House. And if Karl Rove is off the hook in terms of his legal status, it means that he will still be working in the White House, and with Tom DeLay gone, he is the most visible symbol of right-wing political manipulation and skulduggery around. It will not be hard to lay all of the mischief, miscreancy, and arrogance of the 2006 mid-term elections at his feet. And it will make our victories that much sweeter.

By the way, any bets on who will be the first right-winger to holler "Neener neener!" and claim that Mr. Rove was the innocent victim of the left-wing lib'rul MSM rush to judgement and that we all owe him a humble apology, the more humiliating the better?

Given the climate, I doubt that will happen. Dodging bullets is the newest sport in D.C., and seeing as how there weren't a whole lot of mea culpas and apologies when the Clinton impeachment failed -- if anything, it got worse -- I'm not holding my breath.

Karl Rove is still indicted. Well, at least that's what some are saying.

Update: Not any more. See above.

Four weeks ago some of us got led down that road by Jason Leopold of truthout.org when he reported that Mr. Rove's indictment was a done deal. Several news organizations, including liberal publications like Salon, expressed skepticism, and after a week of hanging out there and obviously nothing of the sort coming down the road, Mr. Leopold backed off, leaving a lot of people -- including me -- more than a little peeved at having been over-eager to go with the story.

Now truthout has another story that claims an indictment labeled "Sealed vs. Sealed" on the docket of the U.S. District Court in Washington is the one and that the extra layer of secrecy (most sealed indictments are labeled "US vs. Sealed") is to really keep the lid on.

Salon's War Room does a pretty good job of picking this latest theory apart here and here.

I am all ready to do the Happy Dance should Mr. Rove be indicted for his role in the Plame case. This country doesn't need a tax-payer supported political operative working in the West Wing who has no qualms about leaking classified information to his favorite Wormtongue. The longer Mr. Rove is in the White House, the longer he has to plot his mischief; his fine hand was all over last week's orgy of gay-bashing bigotry with the Marriage Protection Amendment.

But these little flashes of tin-foil about indictments that may or may not be sealed under super-secret seal are not helping. All it does is feed the image that we who would like to see Mr. Rove remanded to custody are grasping -- and gasping -- at straws, and our only interest is in his personal destruction rather than the administration of justice.

Tropical Storm Alberto moves off to the north.

At 5 a.m., Alberto was centered about 65 miles west of Cedar Key, and was moving northeast at about 9 mph, the National Hurricane Center said. Its top sustained winds were at 65 mph; The minimum for a hurricane is 74 mph. Forecasters said the likelihood that Alberto will become a hurricane prior to landfall is decreasing.

A hurricane warning was posted for the Gulf Coast and a tropical storm warning was extended from Flagler Beach northward to South Santee River, S.C.

That's good for us down here. All we got was a lot of humidity and grey skies. But friends to the west and north -- Sarasota, St. Pete, Tallahassee, Fort Walton Beach, and points in between -- are in my thoughts and I hope that they are home and dry.

Andrew Sullivan found a rather interesting e-mail at WorldNet Daily.

"Don't you know that you are aiding the enemy when you speak against President Bush? I will bet you that of all the presidents since 1950, with the exception of President Ronald Reagan, President Bush is by far the best. We and hundreds of thousands of Americans stand by the president. Of course, he is not perfect, but he is a man of God. If you are a born-again Christian, you will support him and pray for him every day. We are called, no, commanded, to pray for our president," - an email to WorldNet Daily. Its title? "Born Again? Then Support The President." It would be hard to find a more candid expression of Christianism.

It makes it pretty hard for there to be compromise and civil discourse when you have attitudes like that.

As the post below suggests, not all evangelicals are goose-steppers, but they're being drowned out by those who are.

Mr. Krugman has Some thing to say.

Back in 1971, Russell Baker, the legendary Times columnist, devoted one of his Op-Ed columns to an interview with Those Who — as in "Those Who snivel and sneer whenever something good is said about America." Back then, Those Who played a major role in politicians' speeches.

Times are different now, of course. There are those who say that Iraq is another Vietnam. But Iraq is a desert, not a jungle, so there. And we rarely hear about Those Who these days. But the Republic faces an even more insidious threat: the Some.

The Some take anti-American positions on a variety of issues. For example, they want to hurt the economy: "Some say, well, maybe the recession should have been deeper," said President Bush in 2003. "That bothers me when people say that."

Mainly, however, the Some are weak on national security. "There's Some in America who say, 'Well, this can't be true there are still people willing to attack,' " said Mr. Bush during a visit to the National Security Agency.

The Some appear to be an important faction within the Democratic Party — a faction that has come out in force since the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Last week the online edition of The Washington Times claimed that "Some Democrats" were calling Zarqawi's killing a "stunt."

Joe Klein, the Time magazine columnist, went further, declaring that the Democratic Party's "left wing" has a "hate America tendency."

[...]

But here's the strange thing: it's hard to figure out who those Some Democrats are.

For example, none of the Democrats quoted by The Washington Times actually called the killing of Zarqawi a stunt, or said anything to that effect. Mr. Klein's examples of people with a "hate America tendency" were "Michael Moore and many writers at The Nation." That's a grossly unfair characterization, but in any case, since when do a filmmaker who supported Ralph Nader and a magazine's opinion writers constitute a wing of the Democratic Party?

And which Democrats are "allergic to the use of force"? Some prominent Democrats opposed the Iraq war, but few if any of these figures oppose all military action. Howard Dean supported both the first gulf war and the invasion of Afghanistan. So did Al Gore. To all appearances, both men opposed the Iraq war only because they thought this particular use of force was ill advised and was being sold on false pretenses.

[...]

Some might also suggest that Democrats who accuse other Democrats of closet pacifism are motivated in part by careerism — that they're trying to sustain the peculiar rule, which still prevails in Washington, that you have to have been wrong about Iraq to be considered credible on national security. And they're doing this by misrepresenting the views and motives of those who had the good sense and courage to oppose this war.

But that's just what Some Democrats might say. And everyone knows that Some Democrats hate America.

Some times you feel like a straw man; sometimes you don't.

From ABC/AP:

President Fidel Castro called the U.S. airstrike that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi a "barbarity," saying he should have been put on trial.

The United States acted as "judge and jury" against the leader of the al-Qaida in Iraq, Castro said late Friday.

"They bragged, they were practically drunk with happiness."

"The accused cannot just be eliminated," he told a literacy conference. "This barbarity cannot be done."

Getting a lecture from Castro on the rule of law is like getting a lesson from Michael Jackson on child care.

From the Miami Herald:

Yards from the scantily clad beach on Ocean Drive, the young mothers sat outside a closed Starbucks on Sunday, some with tank tops raised and breasts exposed as they nursed their babies.

About 15 women gathered in South Beach to show their support for breast-feeding after they heard that a nursing mother was kicked out of the coffeehouse last month.

Nicole Coombs, 22, says she was discreetly nursing 4-month-old Brahm at the Starbucks at 1451 Ocean Dr. when a manager ordered her out May 18.

But Starbucks spokesman Alan Hilowitz described a different sequence of events. He said Sunday that a store manager asked Coombs to leave when she refused to stop changing her baby's diapers on a table inside the coffeehouse.

"She continued to change her baby and then she was asked to leave. There was no mention of breast-feeding whatsoever," Hilowitz said. "We welcome nursing mothers in all of our stores. We always have."

Coombs maintains that the reason for her ouster was breast-feeding, not diaper-changing.

"Yes. I did change him inside after I breast-fed him, of course," Coombs said Sunday. "But that's not why he asked me to leave. There's going to be speculation. But I was there, and I was the person it happened to."

[...]

In an effort to ensure that nursing mothers aren't discouraged in the future, Coombs put together Sunday's "nurse-in" to promote awareness and educate the public.

The Starbucks in South Beach was closed Sunday for temporary renovations, but the mothers sat outside with their babies for about two hours.

Among them was Liza Samuel, 33, of South Beach and her 14-month-old son, Caleb. She could not believe the practice continues to be controversial even in South Beach, where topless women in thong bikinis reign.

"People walk around on Miami Beach in a thong and topless, and that's OK," Samuel said. "But if you're feeding your baby, forget it. People freak out when they see a nipple. I don't know why."

That reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Murphy Brown:

Oh my god, I have milk coming out of my breasts. This is like having bacon come out of your elbow.

Go for it, moms, especially on South Beach where they have no problem with 300 lb. guys going around in Speedos. Talk about an assault on nature...

Kirsten A. Powers of The American Prospect reviews a new documentary Jesus Camp that shows where hard-core Pentecostal kids gather around the campfire and pledge their faith. But is it the true face of all evangelicals?

The film, by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the duo who also directed the critically-acclaimed The Boys of Baraka, opened to an appreciative and flabbergasted audience at the 2006 TriBeca Film Festival, where it received the Special Jury Award. The directors skillfully captured the daily interactions of a world that would be foreign to most viewers: children speaking in tongues and talking of being “born again” at age 5.

The star of the film is Pastor Becky Fischer, who explains the startling mission of her “Kids on Fire” camp: “I want young people to be as committed to laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are in Pakistan.” At the camp, the children are asked: “How many of you want to be those who will give up your life for Jesus?” Little hands shoot up from every direction. They are told: “We have to break the power of the enemy over the government.” At one point, Becky yells: “This means war! Are you a part of it or not?” More little hands.

The directors take us into the homes of the children, where we see them “pledge allegiance to the Christian flag” and play a video game called “Creation Adventure” that debunks evolution. A mother helps her children with homework and informs them that, “Global warming is not going to happen. Science doesn’t prove anything.”

The film takes us back to the camp, where the children are gathered for their daily teaching. Suddenly, a camp counselor places a life-size cardboard cutout before the group. No, it’s not Jesus. It’s George Bush. Clapping erupts and Becky encourages them to “say hello to the President.” Becky claims that “President Bush has added credibility to being a Christian.”

[...]

While it’s never disclosed in the movie, Jesus Camp is in fact a Pentecostal camp, which puts it far to the right theologically and politically, even within the evangelical movement. The directors explained that they didn’t want to confuse audiences by disclosing this and instead referred to the camp only as “evangelical.” Unfortunately, they unwittingly added to the enormous confusion that people like Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It, has been trying to clear up for years.

Wallis, who is the founder and editor of Sojourners, a progressive Christian magazine, spends much of his time traveling the country talking to students and meeting with evangelical leaders. Wallis believes the future of the country is in the hands of moderate evangelical voters. He estimates, based on polls and personal experience, that about half of evangelicals are the immovable Religious Right but the other half are open to, if not hungry for, progressive leadership.

“The facts on the ground are changing,” says Wallis. He reports a marked increase in attendance of his speeches on Christian campuses and the issues he gets asked about the most are not gay marriage or abortion. Wallis says abortion will naturally remain important issue to the moderate evangelical voter, but it is not a litmus test. They want leaders who will acknowledge their moral concerns about this issue and who are committed to decreasing the number of abortions, a position that puts them well within the mainstream of Democratic voters.

And it’s no different if Wallis is meeting with the leader of an evangelical mega-church. One such leader recently told Wallis, “I’m a conservative on Jesus, the Bible and the Resurrection, but I’m becoming a social liberal.” When Wallis asked why, he heard what has become a familiar refrain: evangelicals are increasingly despairing over the neglect of the poor, the environment, and the U.S. inaction on fighting the genocide in Darfur.

[...]

These concerns sounds pretty progressive. So, why are so few white evangelicals voting Democratic? Wallis believes Democrats have ceded the territory of religion to the Republican side, allowing them to use it to divide the electorate. Or, as Wallis has said, “I think this idea that all the Christians, all the religious people are jammed in the red states and the blue states are full of agnostics is a bit overblown in the media. It's more complicated than that.”

Much, much more complicated.

No wonder evangelicals are against sodomy. They're finally realizing that they got screwed by the Republicans.

It's not even two weeks old, but the tropical storm season is already beginning.

A tropical storm warning has been issued for Florida's west coast from Englewood to Indian Pass as Alberto began to become better organized over the central Gulf of Mexico early this morning.

At 5 a.m., Alberto was 320 miles southwest of Cedar Key and moving north-northeast at 8 mph with top winds of 50 mph, the National Hurricane Center said.

Little change in strength is expected as it turns to the northeast -- and toward central and northern Florida -- later today. Tropical storm winds extend outward for 230 miles, and a tropical storm watch extended south to Bonita Beach.

[...]

Alberto, the first named storm of the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season, drenched the streets of Cuba and caused thousands there to flee Sunday, as South Floridians braced for heavy rains.

Meteorologists warned residents in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties to prepare for flooding conditions.

We're expecting what's called a "rain event" down here in South Florida, with most of the effects to the north and the upper west coast of the state, where they actually need the rain.

We're already feeling the effects to one extent: stepping outside the house this morning on the way to work, there was enough humidity in the air that it felt like I was mugged by a wet towel.

From the New York Times:

Despite the carping about jukebox musicals and a contest that seemed to gain heat by the minute, "Jersey Boys," the surprise hit about the Four Seasons as told through their songs, won the big prize — best musical — at last night's Tony Awards, as well as three more, including best actor for John Lloyd Young [left] and, in one of the night's several upsets, best featured actor for Christian Hoff.

"On behalf of the entire and most jubilant 'Jersey Boys' family, our profound thanks for this honor," said Michael David, president of Dodger Theatricals, a producer of the musical. Mr. David also thanked the three living members of the Four Seasons, onstage with him, who "actually lived the story we told."

"Many of you fought in the trenches with us this season fighting for your own dreams," Mr. David said to the audience. "We are most happy."

[...]

Mr. Young, who plays Frankie Valli — and, yes, he hits all those notes — came out on top in a tough category that included a major Broadway player in Michael Cerveris ("Sweeney Todd") and a concert star in Harry Connick Jr. ("The Pajama Game"). He also won over Stephen Lynch ("The Wedding Singer") and Bob Martin ("Drowsy"), who, like everyone in the category but Mr. Cerveris, were making their Broadway debuts.

Yip yah!

John Lloyd Young - 2006 Best Actor in a Musical

Dreams really do come true.

And to the entire cast and crew of the 2006 Best Musical Jersey Boys...

Who loves ya, baby?

The reason I'm not at Yearly Kos is that someone had to stay home and keep their eye on the news. Besides, the last time I was in Vegas I lost $200 at Slots 'o' Fun.

What Would Jesus Watch?

Evangelical Christians are on the front lines in the battle over indecency on cable television, calling for a pick-and-choose pricing plan that would allow viewers to keep certain channels out of their homes.

But on the opposite end of the battlefield is an opponent familiar to and even respected by evangelicals: Christian cable stations.

The fear among Christian broadcasters is that a proposal to allow consumers to reject MTV or Comedy Central would also allow them to drop the Trinity Broadcasting Network or Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network. Cutting off that access could hurt religious broadcasters.

"We do not believe that 'a la carte' is the cure for the disease," said Colby May, attorney for the Faith and Family Broadcasting Coalition, which represents Trinity and CBN, in addition to other stations. "In fact, it is a cure that may very well kill the patient."

[...]

But such Christian groups as Concerned Women for America say lives would be better with the a la carte plan.

"Unfortunately, the number of inappropriate programs far outweighs the number of good," said Lanier Swann, the group's director of government relations. "Our issue is to protect families."

No, actually, their "issue" is that they want to stick their blue noses into everybody else's business and they hate it when someone else is living their own life as they see fit. Talk about "issues..."

Every cable system offers the option of deselecting certain channels that come into your home by programming the remote and password-protecting it. The truth may be that it's so complicated for some adults that only their kids could do it, but am I the only one who sees the irony in a group of conservatives, who by definition hate the idea of government interference in our private lives, is turning to the government to regulate their TV watching habits?

I think it's a hoot that the televangelists are worried that if a la carte passes, they'll be banished from the home as quickly as the Playboy Channel. I guess it all depends on how you define "indecent" programming.

A soldier who was at Haditha says through his attorney that they followed the rules of engagement.

Staff Sgt. Frank D. Wuterich, 26, told his attorney that several civilians were killed Nov. 19 when his squad went after insurgents who were firing at them from inside a house. The Marine said there was no vengeful massacre, but he described a house-to-house hunt that went tragically awry in the middle of a chaotic battlefield.

"It will forever be his position that everything they did that day was following their rules of engagement and to protect the lives of Marines," said Neal A. Puckett, who represents Wuterich in the ongoing investigations into the incident. "He's really upset that people believe that he and his Marines are even capable of intentionally killing innocent civilians."

Let us hope that the truth comes out and let the chips fall where they may. I have a feeling that "rules of engagement" will become a catch-phrase that will define this case and the conduct of the war.

Frank Rich: Hispanics are this year's chosen pariahs.

Mr. Bush prides himself on being tolerant — and has hundreds of photos of himself posing with black schoolkids to prove it. But his latest marriage maneuver is yet another example of how his presidency has been an enabler of bigots, and not just those of the "pro-family" breed.

The stars are in alignment for a new national orgy of rancor because Americans are angry. The government has failed to alleviate gas prices, the economic anxieties of globalization or turmoil in Iraq. Two-thirds of Americans believe their country is on the wrong track. The historical response to that plight is a witch hunt for scapegoats on whom we can project our rage and impotence. Gay people, though traditionally handy for that role, aren't the surefire scapegoats they once were; support for a constitutional marriage amendment, ABC News found, fell to 42 percent just before the Senate vote. Hence the rise of a juicier target: Hispanics. They are the new gays, the foremost political piñata in the election year of 2006.

[...]

The practitioners of such scare politics know what they're up to. That's why they so often share the strange psychological tic of framing their arguments in civil-rights speak. The Minuteman Project, the vigilante brigade stoking fears of an immigration Armageddon, quotes Gandhi on its Web site; its founder, Jim Gilchrist, has referred to his group as "predominantly white Martin Luther Kings." On a Focus on the Family radio show, James Dobson and the White House press secretary, Tony Snow, positioned the campaign to deny gay civil rights as the moral equivalent of L.B.J.'s campaign to extend civil rights. James Sensenbrenner, the leading House Republican voice on immigration policy, likened those who employ illegal immigrants to "the 19th-century slave masters" that "we had to fight a civil war to get rid of." For that historical analogy to add up, you'd have to believe that Africans voluntarily sought to immigrate to America to be slaves. Whether Mr. Sensenbrenner is out to insult African-Americans or is merely a fool is a distinction without a difference in this volatile political climate.

Mr. Bush is a lame duck, but he still has a bully pulpit. Here is a cause he has professed to believe in since he first ran for office in Texas, and it's threatening to boil over in an election year. Imagine if he exercised leadership and called out those who trash immigrants rather than merely mouthing homilies about tolerance and dignity.

Tolerance and dignity are already on life-support in this debate. If the president doesn't lead, he will have helped relegate Hispanics to the same second-class status he has encouraged for gay Americans. Compassionate conservatism, R.I.P.

There's a Mexican slang expression I picked up in my travels: No se deje dar gato por liebre. That literally means "Don't let them give you a cat for a rabbit," an old ploy at an open-air market. Its closest equivalent in English is "Don't take any wooden nickels." Well, it sounds like the Republicans, in all their cozying up to the Hispanic vote in 2004, are delivering up a scrawny cat to them in this latest round of scapegoating dressed up in the nice juicy rabbit of immigration reform.

The other reason I'm not in Vegas is that tonight is the 60th annual Tony awards, and I didn't want to be on a plane flying back to Miami when John Lloyd Young picks up his Tony for Best Actor in a Musical for Jersey Boys. Go get it, JLY. And yes, you can bet I'll celebrate.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 7:54 AM  

John Tierney has a good op-ed (TimesSelect) this morning in the New York Times that addressed the issue of exploiting personal tragedy for political gain. This has been brought out into the public by the adventures of Ann Coulter, but as Mr. Tierney is quick to point out, it's not just the left that does it.

Coulter faults liberals for exploiting victims and their relatives as human shields for their arguments against the war and in favor of gun control. But conservatives use these tactics too. President Bush had the parents of a slain Iraqi soldier stand up during the State of the Union address as a tacit endorsement of his policy. Republican widows of Sept. 11 victims have been exploiting their status to oppose the Democratic widows.

Let's not also forget that the right wing has exploited the grief of families before; most notoriously the Terri Schiavo agony where they enacted federal legislation for the purpose of trying to preserve the life of the Republican hard-right voting bloc.

Aside from writing the first line of her obituary this week ("Ann Coulter, conservative pundit and author who once compared the 9/11 widows to 'harpies,' died in a freak hunting accident with former Vice President Dick Cheney"), Ms. Coulter has made the transcendental move from writing about the story to becoming the story herself. The reaction has for the most part been not about what she said but how she said it -- and in what kind of outfit she said it (who wears a cocktail dress for an interview on the Today show?). The condemnation from all sides has been swift and pretty much unanimous, and it overwhelms the point of the original story which, as Mr. Tierney points out, is a valid one: what is achieved when grief overwhelms considered thought in enacting laws and policy?

By making herself the story, Ms. Coulter has done exactly what she accuses the 9/11 widows of doing: exploiting personal feelings for political and material gain. The left now has a highly-visible punching bag for the right, and the right now has to find a way to distance themselves from her without completely repudiating their own philosophies that they share with her. (To be fair, the left has also found themselves in these situations before; Jesse Jackson comes to mind.) Some conservatives have speculated that Ms. Coulter isn't really a conservative; she's an opportunist who is exploiting a ready market for right-wing paranoia. That sounds like wistful and wishful thinking -- she's not really one of us and we're being used.

Whether or not it's all an act and she's the Andrew Dice Clay of punditry, Ms. Coulter and others like her run the risk of reaching the same point Sen. Joseph McCarthy did in his hunt for the Red Menace in the 1950's. As Edward R. Murrow noted in his famous See It Now piece in 1954, "he didn't create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it, and rather successfully."

Demagogues have a short life span and the issues they exploit have a way of fading away with them. The Red Scare died with the same whimper as its chief enabler. It became a joke to some and a horrible memory for those who were harmed by it through no fault of their own. It should have served as an object lesson that it is dangerous to exploit the fear and paranoia of a shell-shocked America for political gain at the expense of the real issue at hand.

Sound familiar?

John Cloud of Time magazine delivers a bunch of softballs (pun intended) to Ann Coulter. It goes something like this:

Q: Gee, Ann, you've just written a book that smears the widows of 9/11, raises right-wing hypocrisy to a new level only dreamed of by Bill Bennett and Newt Gingrich, and compared to you, Eva Braun was the Singing Nun. What are you going to do next?

A: I'm going to Disney World!

I'm not sure which is worse; the subject of the interview or the fauning interviewer.

This is just dumb.

Republican U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave's re-election campaign was already heated, and it just got smelly as well: Her staff accused a Democratic activist Thursday of leaving an envelope full of dog feces at Musgrave's Greeley office.

Musgrave spokesman Shaun Kenney said someone stuffed the envelope through the mail slot in the door on May 31 and then sped away in a car. Kenney said most of the preprinted return address was blacked out, but staffers used the nine-digit ZIP code to trace it to Kathleen Ensz, a Weld County Democratic volunteer.

Ensz told The Associated Press she left the envelope at Musgrave's office but said it "wasn't in the office doors, it was in the foyer." Asked what she meant by the act, she declined comment.

Kenney demanded an apology from Musgrave's likely Democratic opponent, state Rep. Angela Paccione of Fort Collins.

Paccione spokesman James Thompson denied the campaign had anything to do with it.

"We find that kind of act to be completely deplorable," he said. "We're not in the business of dirty tricks like that. This type of thing is really out of our control, but of course we'll do anything that we can to discourage this."

Okay, I grant you that Ms. Musgrave is a moonbat of the first order -- she's the one behind the Marriage Protection Amendment and other lunacies -- but come on. Grow up, for Dog's sake.

Besides, everyone knows you're supposed to put it in a bag and set it on fire so the victim will stomp on it to put it out.

From CNN:

Al-Zarqawi Is Still Dead.

From the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel:

The Sunrise Police Department on Thursday began investigating misconduct allegations against officers accused of ridiculing volunteers collecting signatures for a petition to prohibit same-sex marriage.

The volunteers were collecting signatures for the Florida Marriage Protection Amendment during a Promise Keepers convention at the Bank Atlantic Center on Saturday.

The complaint says the officers threatened them with arrest. The officers removed the petitions from a table at the conference, and two male officers "mocked the volunteers by appearing to kiss each other," according to the complaint.

A photograph of an officer kissing another on the cheek was posted on the organization's Web site.

The group accused one of the officers of berating John Stemberger, an Orlando lawyer who heads the Family Policy Council, with "abusive ... remarks," according to the complaint.

"I felt like I was talking to a guy on the street who was just a hothead and disagreed with what we were doing," Stemberger said by phone Thursday. "He wanted to talk about theology ... I kept pressing him on our legal authority" to be there.

Stemberger said he mailed the complaint to the police department on Wednesday.

The cops -- even though they were off-duty -- were wrong to harrass the petitioners, if that's what they did.

But it's a little ironic for a group of people to complain about their rights being violated when they were collecting signatures for a law that would deprive gay people of their rights.

Coturnix, TLC member and keeper of Science and Politics, has a new site called A Blog Around The Clock. Go pay a visit, give him a welcome, and don't forget to adjust your blogroll.

Rep. John Hostettler (R-IN), not content with being just a home-grown tightie-rightie, manages to offend about the only ally we have left.

A U.S. congressman warned yesterday that Canada, and in particular the enclave of "South Toronto," was a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists and that the United States will be under threat as long as passports are not required of all Canadians crossing the border.

"South Toronto, like those parts of London that are host to the radical imams who influenced the 9/11 terrorists and the shoe bomber, has people who adhere to a militant understanding of Islam," said John Hostettler, chairman of the House of Representatives subcommittee on immigration and border security, noting that Toronto has a very large South Asian community.

Later, when asked by reporters to describe "South Toronto" in greater detail, Mr. Hostettler said it was "a location which I understand is the type of enclave that allows for this radical type of discussion to go on."

The Indiana Republican painted a picture of Canada as a hotbed of Islamic extremists intent on inflicting their terrorist damage on their southern neighbours while Canadians sat in blissful ignorance of the danger in their midst.

"It is fair to say that the Canadian border is virtually unguarded," Mr. Hostettler said. "Canadians, as well as those [who are] imposters pretending to be Canadians or returning American tourists, roll through our border ports of entry with little or no document inspections."

[...]

Mr. Hostettler, a 44-year-old engineer who was first elected in 1995, is a stalwart of the Christian right and a fierce opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. Last year, he accused Democratic members of Congress of "demonizing Christians" after a Wisconsin Democrat alleged that there was "abusive religious proselytizing" at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado.

He was arrested in 2004 when he was caught carrying a loaded handgun at Louisville, Ky., airport. He later pleaded guilty to carrying a concealed weapon and received a 60-day sentence, which he will not have to serve if he keeps out of trouble before August of this year.

The RCMP managed to arrest those seventeen suspects after keeping them under surveillance for over two years without violating Canadian law or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and without demonizing the substantial Muslim community in Canada. Yet that's not good enough for a gun-totin' Jesus-shouter from Indiana.

The Canadians are not amused. CBC Radio referred to Mr. Hostettler as a "little-known guy from a far-flung district you'll never visit," and chalked it up to election-year politics, while pointing out that Canada has been a strong ally in the war on terror, including cooperating on border security.

I hope the next time Mr. Hostettler decides to visit Canada, they give him a full body-cavity search at Customs. I have a fishing pole they can borrow.

What a week: gay marriage, a dead terrorist, and Tom DeLay's last day in the House. But wait, there's more. The Liberal Coalition takes a look.

All Facts and Opinion shares a letter with the Human Rights Commission on the gay rights vote.

archy on the departure of al-Zarqawi and who's left.

Bark Bark Woof Woof gets dramatic over the battle between fathers and sons.

blogAmY on the tiff between Bolton and the U.N.

bloggg notes a resemblance between Frank N Furter and a well-known haridan.

Collective Sigh on the latest way cats can torture their staff.

NTodd on the on-going battle over outing anonymous bloggers.

Echidne on the new HPV vaccine.

the farmer signs off again.

FDL charts the demise of a loose pundit.

First Draft says goodbye to Tom DeLay.

Happy Furry Puppy remembers the golden days of vinyl.

iddybud on the reaction to al-Zarqawi's death by Nick Berg's father.

Left is Right with a comment from Cindy Sheehan.

Lefty Brown gets down with the Boss.

Liberty Street tracks the substantial revulsion from the right for Ann Coulter.

Make Me a Commentator responds to an argument against gay marriage.

MercuryX23 speaks out on how gay marriage effects his marriage.

Musing's musings on the Mary Poppins party.

Pen-Elayne engages in a little inner dialogue.

Rick on the power of prayer... ZAP!

Rook defines "indefinite."

rubber hose gets personal about the death of a terrorist.

Coturnix recaps a North Carolina blogger meet-up.

Scrutiny Hooligans handicaps a race for Congress that is getting national attention.

Sooner Thought on a real nutjob running for state senate in Oklahoma.

Speedkill on another real nutjob losing in Alabama.

Steve Gilliard on the World Cup (with a lot of posts and a bracket).

Kenneth at T. Rex's Guide to Life, someone who knows something about history, speaks on Florida's revisionist history curriculum.

The Countess keeps you up to date and offers some goodies.

The Invisible Library on the Mark of the Beast.

Wanda is back!

WTF Is It Now?? on the Cheney/Specter tiff.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat on clearing the air in Houston.

...You Are A Tree on re-enacting history -- as if the first time around wasn't enough -- with superheroes.

This Sunday night is the Tony Awards ceremony. You can bet I'll be watching for a certain person to win...

Tom DeLay left the House yesterday, but not without a few parting shots.

"Given the chance to do it all again, there's only one thing I'd change," DeLay said in a defiant retirement speech on the House floor. "I'd fight even harder."

[...]

In the end, DeLay probably achieved more for conservative politics than conservative government; he attacked big-government liberalism in his farewell address, but the growth of government and special-interest spending accelerated under Republican rule.

DeLay will be remembered for transforming the worlds of fundraising and lobbying, for shutting the minority party out of the decision-making process, for raising arm-twisting and intimidation to an art form.

For him and people like him, it's always about the means, not the end. And for Tom DeLay, it was always about him.

In the garden

Snowball is inspecting my fayleanopsis pheyleanopsis ... whaddayacallit... my orchid.

Peering through the blogosphere, I'm seeing that some folks were expecting a bigger reaction to the killing of al-Zarqawi:

As the Blogometer hits deadline, blogosphere reaction to the death of Abu Musa'ab al-Zarqawi grows faster than can possibly be read, let alone commented on. So far though, some quick generalizations can be made. Like last week's arrest of the Toronto terror suspects, this is by and large a righty blogosphere story. Lefty comments are perfunctory, if they exist at all. If this changes we'll note it tomorrow.

Well, I haven't read every blog, but most of the sites I visit -- left and right -- are unanimous in their approval, but none of them are dancing in the streets. In fact, most of them seem to agree with President Bush: it's good news, but the war isn't over. The death of one man isn't going to change that.

I certainly haven't read or heard of any lefty blog that was sorry that al-Zarqawi is taking a dirt nap.

I can't imagine that anyone would try to make political hay out of it. Oh, wait...

Sidney Blumenthal reports that the Poppy Bush tried to get Rumsfeld ousted.

Former President George H.W. Bush waged a secret campaign over several months early this year to remove Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The elder Bush went so far as to recruit Rumsfeld's potential replacement, personally asking a retired four-star general if he would accept the position, a reliable source close to the general told me. But the former president's effort failed, apparently rebuffed by the current president. When seven retired generals who had been commanders in Iraq demanded Rumsfeld's resignation in April, the younger Bush leapt to his defense. "I'm the decider and I decide what's best. And what's best is for Don Rumsfeld to remain," he said. His endorsement of Rumsfeld was a rebuke not only to the generals but also to his father.

The elder Bush's intervention was an extraordinary attempt to rescue simultaneously his son, the family legacy and the country. The current president had previously rejected entreaties from party establishment figures to revamp his administration with new appointments. There was no one left to approach him except his father. This effort to pluck George W. from his troubles is the latest episode in a recurrent drama -- from the drunken young man challenging his father to go "mano a mano" on the front lawn of the family home in Kennebunkport, Maine, to the father pulling strings to get the son into the Texas Air National Guard and helping salvage his finances from George W.'s mismanagement of Harken Energy. For the father, parental responsibility never ends. But for the son, rebellion continues. When journalist Bob Woodward asked George W. Bush if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq, he replied, "He is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to."

I don't believe in psychoanalysis from afar, but I'll certainly indulge in dramaturgy.

All ten people who have read my plays, short stories, or novel-in-progress know that I concentrate more on the characters than I do on the plot. Therefore I'm much more interested in the relationship between the father and son in this story than I am in the politics.

This has all the makings of a good drama in the manner of Shakespeare's Henry V or Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, and it has all the Freudian overtones of the son trying to prove to his father that he is worthy of his attention and respect. In Miller's works, the son never feels that he meets the standards his father has set for him, and the father can never feel completely sure that he has done everything he can to help his child. Add to that the impossibly high standards that George Bush Sr. set for his son without even trying: war hero, successful businessman and politician, dutiful vice president, and average president but still president nonetheless. What a burden to put on your first-born son and namesake. Given all of that, it's not surprising that George W. Bush turned out to be a Biff Loman; constantly at war with his father, constantly trying to beat him, and still trying with adolescent clumsiness to win his approval: "Look, Dad, I won!"

This struggle between Bush father and son would make a fascinating play. Unfortunately, this drama is taking place on the real stage of life and death, and unlike Shakespeare's Henry V, when the young king sends the warriors off to battle, they don't go off stage and into the green room. Even Prince Hal grew up.

Mr. Brooks apparently thinks that all wars are noble crusades, fought in black and white by John Wayne and Gary Cooper. He is therefore disillusioned to find out that's not the case.

All wars are savage.

Gee, ya think?

From the New York Times and AP:

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida-linked militant who led a bloody campaign of suicide bombings, kidnappings and hostage beheadings in Iraq, has been killed in a U.S. air raid north of Baghdad, Iraq's prime minister said Thursday.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said al-Zarqawi was killed Wednesday evening along with seven aides.

That's good; I'm glad he's gone, but I don't have any delusions that the insurgents will suddenly surrender, that there won't be someone else who will try to take his place, or that there won't be some attempt by his followers to seek revenge.

That said, it's still very good news.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) reacts to a statement by Sen. Kennedy on the same-sex marriage ban amendment:

"The Republican leadership is asking us to spend time writing bigotry into the Constitution," said Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage in 2003. "A vote for it is a vote against civil unions, against domestic partnership, against all other efforts for states to treat gays and lesbians fairly under the law."

In response, Hatch fumed: "Does he really want to suggest that over half of the United States Senate is a crew of bigots?"

Yeah, pretty much. What else would you call it?

From the Washington Post:

Victory in California Calms GOP

From the New York Times:

Narrow Victory by G.O.P. Signals Fall Problems

I'm glad they cleared that up.

The opponents of same-sex marriage have come up with some interesting reasons for amending the Constitution. Dana Milbank reports:

"The gays are aggressive! Gays have called war! Gays are attacking traditional marriage!"

Bishop Harry Jackson was shouting these words outside the Capitol yesterday morning, at a rally for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Gays are aggressive? Sure, some are. And some are submissive. It depends on what you're into. Seriously, though, Bishop, when you try to reduce an entire class of people to second class, you bet we're going to fight for our rights.

"Marriage is under attack!" cried out Sen. Wayne Allard (R-Colo.), also at the rally.

Yes, the 50% divorce rate is sad, as are the frivolous marriages of people like Britney Spears, and deadbeat dads.

"We can have anarchy!" warned Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.).

And if you order before midnight, you also can have a set of matching steak knives.

Here's the best one:

"If we didn't believe in miracles, we wouldn't have spent our vacation money to come here," said Sandra Rodrigues of Utah, who with her family has been standing outside the Russell Senate Office Building all week, shouting at senators and displaying signs urging "Stop Same Sex Marriage: It Endorses Masturbation." "If same-sex marriage is endorsed," she explained, "then you're going to have children think it's just another option to have pleasure."

Same-sex marriage endorses masturbation? Okay, I don't even want to go there except to say that being married to someone who carries a sign like that would probably encourage masturbation. As for "another option to have pleasure," well, it sounds like the Rodrigues house is just one little love nest of marital bliss. Frankly, if that's her idea of marriage, who'd want it?

The big hang-up for the opponents of same-sex marriage isn't the marriage itself. It's the idea of gay sex, which, in their minds, is icky. That says a lot about these peoples' ideas of sex, period, which they see as something evil and dirty. It also tells me that their focus isn't on the commitment and support people give each other in marriage. This adolescent obsession with the physical aspects of a relationship indicates they are the ones with arrested development and a seriously unhealthy attitude about one of the most wonderful things about being human.

My guess is that it comes from their puritanical religious upbringing and misreading of the Bible, which is filled with a lot of begatting, not to mention some pretty hot writing: check out the "Song of Solomon" sometime; he apparently had a lot to sing about. Whatever the cause, it is sad that these ignorant tightasses are taken seriously by anybody in Congress except for those who have their own little fetishes and dysfunctions. Instead of having an intelligent conversation about ensuring the rights of all Americans -- as the president says, the "right of everyone to live their lives as they see fit" -- they're hung up on something that they obviously lack: a loving, caring, and healthy life in every aspect.

So, who are the perverts here?

From the Miami Herald about gay marriage.

First, one with tongue firmly planted in cheek:

I am as liberal as they come, but now that President Bush has announced his unqualified support for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, I, too, will support it.

Why? My happily married son and daughter-in-law have told me that each time they hear of a gay couple marrying, they feel a grave threat to their own marriage. In fact if this amendment does not pass, they say that they will have to divorce in order to protect the sanctity of their marriage. A threat as grave as gay marriage deserves no less than a constitutional amendment.

MARTIN BEST, Boca Raton

Then one completely clueless:

I have been dismayed that the courts imposed gay marriage in my state. Massachusetts should have followed the example of Vermont, which chose gay civil unions with full rights as the best solution.

The real problem with gay marriage is the message that it conveys to young kids. If we support gay marriage, then surely we also support gay dating. As our kids develop through childhood into adolescence, we'll be endorsing and promoting ''loving relationships'' with their same-sex peers, with all that this implies.

There is nothing sacred about the U.S. Constitution. Amending it is just a process. As we know from the example of Prohibition, an amendment can always be rescinded. If senators give a damn about our kids, they need to support the amendment that would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

JOHN FOUNTAIN, Needham, Mass.

Actually, Mr. Fountain, if adolescents learn that it is okay to date same-sex peers with all the social customs and mores that go with growing up, perhaps it might be a lot easier for them. Being a teenager is tough enough, and take it from one who has been there and done that, being a closeted gay teenager is a hell of a lot worse.

If you think there is "nothing sacred" about the U.S. Constitution, I really don't want people like you telling the Senate what rights people do and don't have.

Even Republicans are admitting that the same-sex marriage amendment debate is doing them little good except reveal that they're just sucking up to the Religious Reich.

Senator Rick Santorum, Republican of Pennsylvania and a chief proponent of the marriage ban, conceded that the issue was one many Republicans could do without.

"I know in many meetings of our colleagues when the issue of marriage comes up, heads drop," Mr. Santorum said in a floor speech. "It is just an issue that people just feel uncomfortable talking about. It's something that maybe in some respects they feel like, why do we even have to? Why is this even an issue?"

Dismissing the idea that politics had played a role in the timing, he said Senate Republicans had decided to act because the institution of marriage was under threat, and court decisions were slow in coming.

But one Republican strategist, Ed Rollins, said it was a mistake for the president and Senate leaders to focus attention on a marriage ban now, in what could look like a panicked reaction to shrinking public support.

"What the president needs to do is look like a leader, not be somebody who looks like a politician who is overreacting to polls," Mr. Rollins said. "If anything, he is reminding people of what they don't like about the Republican Party."

As if we've forgotten about Tom DeLay, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, a budget deficit and a faltering economy, Iraq, Terri Schiavo, warrantless wiretapping, stem cell research, $3 gasoline, FEMA, Hurricane Katrina, Harriet Miers, health care, port security, No Child Left Behind.... Gay-bashing or idol-worship is just one of the things people don't like.

Jim Morin's cartoon from the Miami Herald is particularly appropriate:

Ann Coulter was on the Today Show yesterday pushing her new book in which she slanders the widows of 9/11 victims.

"These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9-11 was an attack on our nation and acted like as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was part of the closure process."

[...]

"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much."

The widows, who have formed a group called the September 11th Advocates, released a statement.

We did not choose to become widowed on September 11, 2001. The attack, which tore our families apart and destroyed our former lives, caused us to ask some serious questions regarding the systems that our country has in place to protect its citizens. Through our constant research, we came to learn how the protocols were supposed to have worked. Thus, we asked for an independent commission to investigate the loopholes which obviously existed and allowed us to be so utterly vulnerable to terrorists. Our only motivation ever was to make our Nation safer. Could we learn from this tragedy so that it would not be repeated?

We are forced to respond to Ms. Coulter’s accusations to set the record straight because we have been slandered.

Contrary to Ms. Coulter’s statements, there was no joy in watching men that we loved burn alive. There was no happiness in telling our children that their fathers were never coming home again. We adored these men and miss them every day. [HT to Crooks and Liars]

I know that giving Ms. Coulter any more attention than she already gets for her pronouncements that make Eva Braun sound like the Singing Nun could be seen as giving her more than she deserves (Don Hazen at AlterNet begs us to ignore her), but when she goes completely around the bend like this, you have to watch; it's like watching someone swallow a live igauana (something not outside the realm of possibility with her). You're horrified yet enthralled.

The righties like to say that if they have Ann Coulter, the left has Michael Moore. I'm sorry, but it's no contest. Michael Moore is a scruffy guy in a baseball cap with a frat-boy sense of humor and a penchant for embarrassing people. That's a far cry from saying the New York Times building should have been blown up or advocating wholesale slaughter in the name of Christianity. Michael Moore may be snarky, but he's not dangerous, and he doesn't appear on network television to slander widows and orphans by name.

It's interesting to see that some conservatives are distancing themselves from her, perhaps out of fear that she's going to become the poster child for everything that is toxic about right-wing nutsery. It's a little late for that, folks; she's all yours and we'll be all too happy to remind you of that.

Garrison Keillor on the Republicans' campaign against the whippersnappers.

I see by the papers that the Republicans want to make an issue of Nancy Pelosi in the congressional races this fall: Would you want a San Francisco woman to be Speaker of the House? Will the podium be repainted in lavender stripes with a disco ball overhead? Will she be borne into the chamber by male dancers with glistening torsos and wearing pink tutus? After all, in the unique worldview of old elephants, San Francisco is a code word for g-a-y, and after assembling a record of government lies, incompetence and disaster, the party in power hopes that the fear of g-a-y-s will pull it through in November.

[...]

People who want to take a swing at San Francisco should think twice. Yes, the Irish coffee at Fisherman's Wharf is overpriced, and the bus tour of Haight-Ashbury is disappointing (where are the hippies?), but the Bay Area is the cradle of the computer and software industry, which continues to create jobs for our children. The iPod was not developed by Baptists in Waco, Texas. There may be a reason for this. Creative people thrive in a climate of openness and tolerance, since some great ideas start out sounding ridiculous. Creativity is a key to economic progress. Authoritarianism is stifling. I don't believe that Mr. Hewlett and Mr. Packard were gay, but what's important is: In San Francisco, it doesn't matter so much. When the cultural Sturmbannfuhrers try to marshal everyone into straight lines, it has consequences for the economic future of this country.

[...]

You might not have always liked Republicans, but you could count on them to manage the bank. They might be lousy tippers, act snooty, talk through their noses, wear spats and splash mud on you as they race their Pierce-Arrows through the village, but you knew they could do the math. To see them produce a ninny and then follow him loyally into the swamp for five years is disconcerting, like seeing the Rolling Stones take up lite jazz. So here we are at an uneasy point in our history, mired in a costly war and getting nowhere, a supine Congress granting absolute power to a president who seems to get smaller and dimmer, and the best the Republicans can offer is San Franciscophobia? This is beyond pitiful. This is violently stupid.

It is painful to look at your father and realize the old man should not be allowed to manage his own money anymore. This is the discovery the country has made about the party in power. They are inept. The checkbook needs to be taken away. They will rant, they will screech, they will wave their canes at you and call you all sorts of names, but you have to do what you have to do.

Harrumph!

Well, there's nothing like being called a "pariah" on the front page of the New York Times to boost your Senate campaign.

Undaunted by a run of horrific poll numbers, staff turmoil and public doubts from leaders of her party, Representative Katherine Harris is thinking confidently beyond November.

[...]

In her insistence on running, Ms. Harris has become something of a pariah among many of the people whose power she indirectly helped ensure five and a half years ago, as overseer of the recount that sealed George W. Bush's victory.

Top White House officials, Republican operatives and Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida have urged her not to run. When Ms. Harris ignored those entreaties, a Who's Who of national Republicans begged a Who's Who of Florida Republicans to oppose her in the primary, to no avail.

Her campaign has been marked by aides leaving en masse, disclosures of her ties to a contractor caught up in a lobbying scandal and the fund-raising handicaps inherent to any enterprise perceived as a lost cause or, worse, a joke.

Ed Rollins, one of Ms. Harris's many former campaign consultants, claimed she had told him that God wanted her to stay in the race. (Ms. Harris denies making the statement.)

She promised to finance her campaign with $10 million of her own money. Popular wisdom says that will not matter. Mr. Nelson led Ms. Harris by more than 30 points in recent polls.

[...]

The belief among top Republicans was that Ms. Harris's presence in 2006 would galvanize Democrats still eager for revenge after 2000.

"The campaign can't be about her," Governor Bush told reporters last month. "I gave her that exact advice. Since then, it's gotten worse."

Actually, it depends on your point of view; as far as I'm concerned, it's getting better all the time.

Jon Stewart had fun last night skewering Bill Bennett, the moralistic moralist and well-known Las Vegas whale on The Daily Show. Via Crooks and Liars:

(rough transcript)

Stewart: So why not encourage gay people to join in in that family arrangement if that is what provides stability to a society?

Bennett: Well I think if gay.. gay people are already members of families...

Stewart: What? (almost spitting out his drink)

Bennett: They're sons and they're daughters...

Stewart: So that's where the buck stops, that's the gay ceiling.

Bennett: Look, it's a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man and a women.

Stewart: I disagree, I think it's a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.

Check out the video. It's worth the download.

Some people are all freaked out that today's date matches up to 666, allegedly "The Mark of the Beast," according to some scriptural interpretation. (I actually once had a boss who, while not particularly religious, had a phobia about 666 and would adjust a quote or an invoice that had those numbers in sequence. He also skipped any job numbers with that combination, much like buildings that skip the 13th floor.) I don't hold any stock in superstition or go for any of that stuff -- knock wood.

But it's been recently reported that the book of Revelations was misinterpreted and that the number of the Mark of the Beast is really 616, the area code for Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is, among other things, the home of Amway, the Michigan Republican Party and the Gerald Ford Museum. It is not, unfortunately, the area code for Hell, Michigan, which is playing along with the numerical opportunity to make some publicity for the hamlet 60 miles west of Detroit.

Go figure.

E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post:

This month's offensive by President Bush and his allies in Congress against gay marriage and flag burning proves one thing: The Republican Party thinks its base of social conservatives is a nest of dummies who have no memories and respond like bulls whenever red flags are waved in their faces.

The people who should be angry this week are not liberals or gays or lesbians, but the president's most loyal supporters. After using the gay-marriage issue shamelessly in the 2004 campaign, Bush and Republican leaders left opponents of gay marriage out in the cold as they concentrated on the party's real priorities: privatizing Social Security and cutting taxes on rich people.

[...]

Social conservatives, who are a lot smarter than their leaders think, should watch the Senate closely this month. My bet is that their so-called champions will fight much harder on behalf of the interests of the affluent than for the "values" that conservative politicians proclaim with such pious urgency whenever they're in danger of losing an election.

As a wise sage once noted, "Who's the bigger fool; the fool or the foolish who follow the fool?"

Last week after I posted the Rolling Stone article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the 2004 election, I was chided by one of my more thoughtful conservative fellow bloggers for taking Mr. Kennedy at his word and that there were a lot of articles, including some from liberal publications, who did not accept the facts of the Mr. Kennedy's claims.

Having already been burned on the Rove-is-indicted and the Iranian Jewish-star stories last month, I am certainly willing to read and discuss alternate points of view on this story, ratchet up my healthy skepticism, and I am more than happy to do it in a civil discourse as opposed to some of the more energetic methods at other blogs and sites wherein the writer's parentage is called into question and accusations of indecent conduct with certain barnyard creatures are levelled.

To that end, I offer a sampling from Salon, which published one of the more cogent rebuttals to Mr. Kennedy's article by Farhad Manjoo, and has now posted a face-off between Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Manjoo.

Mr. Kennedy gets the first turn.

It was good to see Farhad Manjoo weigh in on my article in Rolling Stone about the 2004 election. Unlike reporters in the mainstream media, Manjoo has displayed a willingness to actually read the published reports that document the electoral travesty that occurred in Ohio. It is a shame, however, that in his attempt to debunk my article, he commits precisely the sins of omission and distortion that he accuses me of having perpetrated.

The key example of this is Manjoo's flatly inaccurate claim that the Democratic National Committee report identifies only 129,543 voters, or 2 percent of the electorate, who were disenfranchised by the long lines in Ohio. I can only point to the executive summary of the DNC report, which states:

"Scarcity of voting machines caused long lines that deterred many people from voting. Three percent of voters who went to the polls left their polling places and did not return due to the long lines."

Manjoo seizes on one line in the 204-page report and then attempts to play a clumsy game of gotcha. But if he had read more carefully he would have understood that the 129,543 votes he refers to were only a subset of those disenfranchised by the long lines. Had Manjoo read a mere paragraph further in the report, he would have seen that it identifies a second group, comprising roughly 48,000 citizens, or 0.83 percent of Ohio's electorate, whose votes were also suppressed because of the lines and other factors.

The authors of the DNC report aggregate these totals to arrive at the 3 percent figure that I cited. Does Manjoo pretend to have a better grasp on the data than the DNC's own experts? If so, his beef is with them, not me.

[...]

Manjoo has made a cottage industry for himself in attempting to debunk concerns about the validity of the 2004 election. Given that he has staked his professional reputation on the thesis that Bush beat Kerry fair and square, it's unsurprising that he should be eager to attack my piece. But it is a shame that his faith in the election results has blinded him to the point that he can dismiss the widespread and uncontested evidence of vote suppression as nothing more than a "hit parade" of irrelevant facts and figures. He also remains strangely silent on the transparently crooked recount process, which has kept this debate alive by preventing us from knowing the actual outcome of the vote in Ohio.

Manjoo's outrage and professional energy would be better directed at those who mounted a concerted campaign to obstruct hundreds of thousands of American voters from going to the poll and having their vote counted in 2004. The nation still needs a thorough and honest exploration of what happened across the country, so we can begin the urgent work of instituting real reforms -- ensuring that such abuses do not continue to undermine democracy and cast doubt on the integrity of our entire electoral system.

Mr. Manjoo replies:

I appreciate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s response to my article, and I'd like to first note that I agree with him on one main point -- that we should urgently begin the work of honest election reform. We differ on how to go about that effort, however. Kennedy believes that any such reform effort must begin with an examination of whether Republicans stole the 2004 race. I disagree for many reasons, but mainly because the evidence that John Kerry actually won Ohio is so slight that any such effort is, in my view, doomed to failure -- and such a failure would damage the entire reform movement.

Kennedy says that I've made a "cottage industry" of attempts to debunk the concerns surrounding the 2004 election. But as my reporting history at Salon shows, I've been exploring the various threats to honest elections for several years, and I thoroughly covered the threats to the 2004 race. He's right that I've criticized some who've been quick to claim that the race was stolen. But this is not because I think elections in America are perfect -- in fact, just the opposite is the case.

We'll only improve the process if we begin by honestly reviewing the facts -- and once again, I've got to disagree with the ways in which Kennedy interprets some of the key sources he cites to arrive at his conclusions.

Read the entire article (endure the ad if you're not a Salon subscriber) and decide for yourself. Having now read a lot of the articles (and having flashbacks to growing up in Ohio politics), I am inclined to believe that if anything nefarious occurred in the 2004 election in Ohio, those evil plots were overwhelmed by incompetence, miscommunication, and just plain human error.

Salon also did a lot of javelin catching for their troubles in printing Mr. Manjoo's rebuttal. Joan Walsh answers the critics.

Farhad Manjoo's article criticizing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Rolling Stone piece "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" generated hundreds of letters, most of them critical, and hot debate in the blogosphere (with most but not all lefty voices raised to criticize Salon). [...] But with people denouncing Manjoo, and Salon, as pawns of Karl Rove, it's worth taking a minute to place this debate in its proper political context.

Salon has aggressively covered Republican efforts to suppress Democratic voter participation going back to December 2000, when we revealed how Florida's program to purge supposed felons and other people allegedly ineligible to vote prevented thousands of eligible voters, most of them African-American, from casting ballots -- just one example of the many GOP maneuvers that suppressed votes for Vice President Al Gore. (Writer Greg Palast brought us the story, and a team of Salon reporters contacted county election officials in Florida to report it out with him.) Just a few days later, we followed up with a feature on the Republican-connected firm that carried out the purge, ChoicePoint, along with a history of GOP efforts at voter suppression. (The storyline is old and simple and continues through today: Republicans tend to back efforts to aggressively "purge" voter rolls of those who've moved or who vote infrequently, while Democrats tend to oppose them, since they usually scrub low-income voters who move more, vote less, fail to work the system adequately and -- surprise -- happen to favor Democrats.) We've followed the story doggedly ever since.

[...]

Salon will continue to try to get to the bottom of charges of election theft in Ohio, but we don't think the available facts prove the election was stolen. We also think unproven claims of theft weaken Democrats' credibility and keep them from the work needed to build an electoral majority, as well as to reform the broken voting system that is at least one obstacle to that majority. While the blog posts below display a range of opinion about whether Kennedy or Manjoo makes the most effective case, they also show an increasing weariness of battles about the "theft" claim, when both sides agree there were serious problems in Ohio. As Chris Bowers of MyDD puts it, "Simply rehashing these old arguments is not going to get us very far in creating the sort of electoral reform we need ... From what I can tell, there are only two things that will allow us to move forward with unity and hope. First, we need a lot more on the ground activism to try and retake control of our electoral infrastructure. Second, we need a national agenda for election reform that people on all sides of this issue can get behind."

We couldn't agree more.

I also think that if both sides would trade in their tin-foil-hats for thinking caps and not look for ways to play "gotcha" but instead rationally explore the elements of the events, we might not only get the real answers, we might also be able to actually do something about fixing the system.

Wow, what a concept.

Josh Marshall Talking Points Memo finds that Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard has gone completely ga-ga over Jeb Bush.

IF ONLY HIS LAST NAME WERE SMITH. He'd not only attract national attention as the popular and successful governor of a difficult-to-govern state. He'd be viewed sympathetically as a leader who had dealt with family issues--his wife's aversion to politics, his daughter's bouts with drug addiction--without losing his grip on the governorship. And he'd be the prohibitive frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

But his last name is Bush. So Jeb Bush, nearing the end of his eight years as governor of Florida, has to settle for being the best governor in America. Not proclaimed the best governor by the media and the political community. But recognized as the best by a smaller group: governors who served with him and experts and think-tank and conservative policy wonks who regard state government as something other than a machine for taxing and spending.

Why is Jeb Bush the best? It's very simple. His record is the best. No other governor, Republican or Democrat, comes close.

As Josh notes, "Why is Jeb the best? Because he is the best! No one rocks as hard as Jeb, bitch!"

In next week's issue, Fred has a detailed study on how to tell if your Republican boyfriend is truly in love with you or just playing along, and Ann Coulter offers beauty tips.

The Columbia Journalism Review stopped by here yesterday:

In other news, it looks as if the president is trolling for a bump in the opinion polls, and is set to propose a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Bark Bark Woof Woof (sigh, yes, we're quoting something called Bark Bark, Woof Woof), comes out swinging, arguing that the proposed amendment would "violate the Establishment clause, it would demolish the intent of the ritual itself, turning marriage from a private matter into a weapon of social change. Isn't that something that the conservative movement has accused the liberals of doing all these years?"

BBWW continues by arguing that in proposing the amendment, "It would seem to me that again Mr. Bush is making the very anti-conservative argument of using the federal government and the Constitution as an instrument of social change."

Well, they may think the name of the blog is odd, but it's nice to get noticed nonetheless. Hey, aren't these the same folks who award the Pulitzer?

The folks over at AMERICAblog are having fun calling up Republican members of the House and Senate who are in favor of the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and asking if they're also in favor of the rest of the Religious Reich's Guide to Sexual and Marital Purity: no adultery, no masturbation, no sodomy (which is defined as sex that involves any other part of the body other than the genitalia), and no divorce. Apparently they're getting some interesting responses.

I won't take part in it. It's not that I have any problem asking a member of Congress about their sex life. What I'm afraid of is that they'll tell me.

On this date, June 5, 1968, Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles after celebrating his win in the California primary. He died three days later.

Slate recalls his life in pictures.

Bobby Kennedy was fond of quoting Bernard Shaw:

Some men see things and say "why?" I look at things and say "Why not?"

Indeed.

With all the hoo-ha about the vote in the Senate to legalize gay-bashing (see below), Paul Krugman reminds us of another flim-flam they're trying to pull off.

The Senate almost voted to repeal the estate tax last fall, but Republican leaders postponed the vote after Hurricane Katrina. It's easy to see why: the public might have made the connection between scenes of Americans abandoned in the Superdome and scenes of well-heeled senators voting huge tax breaks for their even wealthier campaign contributors.

But memories of Katrina have faded, and they're about to try again. The Senate will probably vote this week. So it's important to realize that there's still a clear connection between tax breaks for the rich and failure to help Americans in need.

Any senator who votes to repeal the estate tax, or votes for a "compromise" that goes most of the way toward repeal, is in effect saying that increasing the wealth of people who are already in line to inherit millions or tens of millions is more important than taking care of fellow citizens who need a helping hand.

[...]

You may have heard tales of family farms and small businesses broken up to pay taxes, but those stories are pure propaganda without any basis in fact. In particular, advocates of estate tax repeal have never been able to provide a single real example of a family farm sold to pay estate taxes.

[...]

In the interest of stiffening those spines, let me remind senators that this isn't just a fiscal issue, it's also a moral issue. Congress has already declared that the budget deficit is serious enough to warrant depriving children of health care; how can it now say that it's worth enlarging the deficit to give Paris Hilton a tax break?

I guess when it comes to helping out the people of this country, the Republicans are only interested in ensuring the survival of the twittest.

Salon.com's Walter Shapiro takes a look at the early try-outs in New Hampshire as Sen. Russ Feingold and former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner hand out their face shots and run through their monologues.

More than 17 months before the primary, the 2008 Democratic presidential race has already become a major New Hampshire cottage industry, even with Hillary Clinton doggedly maintaining the comic pretense that she is solely interested in her lopsided Senate reelection campaign. In just the next two weeks, four other Democratic presidential dreamers (Sens. Evan Bayh and Joe Biden, Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle) will be popping up in New Hampshire to selflessly aid local candidates.

Hillary and probable non-candidate Al Gore aside, the two Democrats who have had the best run of it in 2006 are unquestionably Feingold and Warner, representing the purist and pragmatic wings of the party. Feingold has made other Democrats look timorous by championing withdrawal from Iraq and a Senate resolution censuring the president. Warner has emerged as the party's latest Southern white knight, the red-state dragon slayer who combines a sterling record as governor with an appealing business background as a mega-rich cellphone entrepreneur who helped found Nextel.

Feingold and Warner have, in effect, become the book ends surrounding a hefty, but potentially unreadable, tome called, "It Takes a Village of Consultants: The Cautious Political Career of Hillary Clinton." As New Hampshire Democratic chairwoman Kathy Sullivan put it, describing Feingold and Warner in advance of the state convention, "They represent two divergent views of the direction that the Democratic Party should go in."

I'm going to boldly predict that a year from now we will be seeing roughly the same candidates espousing the same positions, and the people of New Hampshire will be so tired of seeing them and their entourage that they will appeal to the Canadians to accept the state as the next province. And by then we will all be so tired of the Jackie Onassisification of Hillary Clinton that we might just elect her to get her off Page Six.

Let's get the election of 2006 over with, shall we? Then we can debate who among the wide range of Democrats has the least annoying and most durable political consultant.

Today President Bush urged Congress, just as he did in his Saturday morning radio address, to pass an amendment to the Constitution that would ban gay marriage.

As a gay American, I would like to have him explain a few things.

Explain it to me why, for the first time since 1919 and the ratification of the 18th Amendment that prohibited the manufacture and sale of liquor, we should change the Constitution to restrict the rights of citizens rather than expand them. It wasn’t a good idea then – it was repealed in less than fifteen years – and it’s not a good idea now. The Constitution should be an affirmative mandate for the rights of the people, not a bludgeon against them.

Explain to me why this amendment would not violate the First Amendment of the Constitution; specifically the Establishment of Religion clause. Marriage is, after all, a religious rite; according to the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, it was

established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.

So right there we have the Constitution defining a religious ceremony. The fact that our laws recognize civil marriage is merely an outgrowth of what is a religious sacrament.

And while we’re on the subject of using the Constitution to define marriage, perhaps we should consider what else the Book of Common Prayer has to say about it:

The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God’s will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord. Therefore marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God.

Granted, the Episcopal Church is still struggling with their own issues about gay marriage, but nowhere in this sacred rite does it say anything about marriage being the bulwark of American civilized society, nor is it envisioned by the church as anything other than a covenant between two people. So not only would this amendment violate the Establishment clause, it would demolish the intent of the ritual itself, turning marriage from a private matter into a weapon of social change. Isn’t that something that the conservative movement has accused the liberals of doing all these years?

Explain it to me why the Constitution should be used as an instrument of discrimination against an entire group of people based solely on something that they have no control over – their sexual orientation – any more than they have over their ethnicity. That would violate the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the United States Supreme Court said so when it ruled in 1967 in the case of Loving v. Virginia that overturned state laws that banned interracial marriage. The Court also said,

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

It would seem to me that again Mr. Bush is making the very anti-conservative argument of using the federal government and the Constitution as an instrument of social change. However, instead of providing more freedoms, such as the ruling of Roe v. Wade, Mr. Bush and the Republicans would use it to hold back the movement toward equal rights for people regardless of their sexual orientation.

Explain to me how “activist” it is for a judge to interpret the Constitution on its face as providing equal rights for all citizens? It is all too hypocritical for the president to decry judicial activism when it goes in favor of something he doesn't like, yet applaud it when it is applied to a politically-motivated attempt to raise the dead and score points with his political base. (And while we’re on the subject of activist judges, if it weren’t for at least five of them Mr. Bush would most likely today be collecting his pension as the former governor of the state of Texas.)

Explain to me how two men or two women falling in love and making a legal commitment to each other threatens someone else's marriage or the institution itself. As it is, marriage between heterosexuals is already in enough trouble -- anyone who listens to country music could tell you that -- so perhaps the idea of "marriage protection" ought to start there. And who are straight people to say that couples of the same sex aren't as serious about marriage as they are? Ask Britney Spears, Mickey Rooney, Elizabeth Taylor, or any number of the Republican House and Senate who are writing multiple alimony checks how they can consider their multiple trips down the aisle or up to Reno to be paragons of marital solemnity. I'm not saying that homosexuals are any more virtuous than straight people, but at least don't hold up heterosexual marriage as something that gay people could possibly tarnish any more than it already is.

Explain to me how anybody can stand up in front of the nation, advocate the passage of this amendment, and not sound like a homophobic bigot? How can the president stand up in front of members of his own party and his own administration who are homosexual and not sound like he isn’t singling them out for discrimination and reducing them to the rank of second-class citizenship? How can he stand up in front of Vice President Dick Cheney and tell him that his own daughter isn’t entitled to the same rights as the straight people in America?

The rights that we enjoy as American citizens are binary: we either have them or we do not. If you take away one of them, you take away all of them. A citizen may lose his rights through due process of law, but to deny the attainment of these rights at the outset based on something as innate as sexual orientation and without due process is an assault on the very idea of liberty and the foundation of law that defines us not just as a nation but as a civilization.

What’s even worse is that there is no other purpose behind this fatuous “Marriage Protection Amendment” than politics. It is no secret that the right wing and the Religious Reich are not happy with the president at the moment, so he is doing this just to fan the bonfire of their sanctimonious bigotry in the hope of re-electing Republicans next fall. What’s even more disturbing is that everyone from both parties knows that this amendment will never get enough votes to be sent to the states for ratification. So why, with a war of their own making dissolving beyond chaos, with gasoline prices soaring, with a budget deficit soaring to the moon, is the president and his party wasting our time by engaging in an act of political masturbation? (Or more correctly, an act of sodomy against the Constitution.)

It’s simple. Nothing matters more to this president than being president; nothing matters more to the Republicans than being in office, and if sacrificing the rights of a several million queer people to do it, it’s a small price to pay for their grip on power.

That explains a great deal.

[Updated with minor edits.]

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 4:21 AM  

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrest 17 in terror plot.

The arrests represented one of the largest counterterrorism sweeps in North America since the attacks of September 2001. American officials said that the plot did not involve any targets in the United States, but added that the full dimension of the plan for attacks was unknown.

At a news conference in Toronto, police and intelligence officials said they had been monitoring the group for some time and moved in to make the arrests on Friday after the group arranged to take delivery of three tons of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that can be made into an explosive when combined with fuel oil.

"It was their intent to use it for a terrorist attack," said Mike McDonell, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police assistant commissioner. He said that by comparison the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people, was carried out "with only one ton of ammonium nitrate."

The 17 men were mainly of South Asian descent and most were in their teens or early 20's. One of the men was 30 years old and the oldest was 43 years old, police officials said. None of them had any known affiliation with Al Qaeda.

"They represent the broad strata of our society," Mr. McDonell said. "Some are students, some are employed, some are unemployed."

Bad guys plotting bad things should be arrested. What will be interesting is to see if the Canadian public goes all xenophobic against all Muslims or people of Southeast Asian descent because that's who some of these were. Somehow I doubt it, but we'll see. In retrospect, we in America didn't get all sketchy about white Anglo-Saxon Protestant men after a couple of them bombed Oklahoma City.

Several rightie blogs are chortling over how the leftie blogs will respond to this event, one going so far as to anticipate how we'll respond to the "shredding of the Constitution." Guess what: the events took place in Canada and the Constitution doesn't have any jurisdiction there. Duh. I expect the RCMP did, however, follow the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Jonathan Rauch on how adversity in the form of AIDS in the gay community turned us from fun-loving boys into caring and committed men, and worthy of marriage.

We feared for our lives; we prayed for a remedy. What none of us in the gay world imagined, when word of a mysterious affliction surfaced 25 years ago, was what proved to be the epidemic's most important moral legacy: AIDS transformed the gay-marriage movement from implausible to inevitable.

In May 1970, two men applied for a marriage license in Minnesota and then filed suit after being refused. The gay world hardly noticed. "Support for marriage was a distinctly minority position in the gay and lesbian movement," wrote the historian George Chauncey. "After an initial flurry of activity, marriage virtually disappeared as a goal of the movement."

Marriage, after all, hardly seemed relevant. The master narrative for gay life was: come out, leave home, gorge at the banquet of sexual liberation. Gay men celebrated their image as sexual rebels; straight America was happy to consign them to that role. After 1981, the master narrative changed from ubiquitous sex to ubiquitous death. Death became, as the writer Andrew Sullivan noted at the height of the epidemic, not just an event in gay America but "an environment." For the stricken there were lesions, chills, wasting, death; for friends and lovers, there was grief compounded by despair.

But there was also an epidemic of care giving. Lovers, friends and AIDS "buddies" were spooning food, emptying bedpans, holding wracked bodies through the night. They were assuming the burdens of marriage at its hardest. They were also showing that no relative, government program or charity is as dependable or consoling as a dedicated partner.

[...]

Watching gays become family to each other, the public saw nobility. AIDS reminded the country that a good marriage is the best public-health measure known to man. "Gay marriage," so recently an oxymoron, began to make sense.

Yes, the idea of same-sex marriage predated AIDS. But would gay America have internalized as deeply the need for marriage if it had not first internalized H.I.V.? Would straight America have been as willing to consider gay marriage if not for AIDS? Impossible. In gay cultural history, marriage is to AIDS much as Israel is to the Holocaust in Jewish cultural history. It offers a safer shore, a better life, and a promise: never again.

Let's take a look at a place where the president still draws favorable poll numbers: Utah. Even there he only manages to pull a 51% approval rating.

This core group is a highly concentrated version of the Bush base, one that appears to be motivated more by general principles and a comfort level with the president than by specific issues or political trends. They tend to be impressed by Mr. Bush's faith and convinced that he understands their lives and values. They like what they see as his muscular foreign policy.

These supporters are mostly clustered in places like Utah, Idaho and Wyoming, the only three states where Mr. Bush's job approval rating is at or above 50 percent, and in smaller pockets in areas like the suburbs of Birmingham, Ala.; northwest Georgia; and the Florida Panhandle.

"I'm against the war in Iraq — and what happened with Hurricane Katrina, well, it was a failure by everybody," said Ron Craft, a sales manager in Provo who said he was a devout Mormon and a strong conservative who considered himself independent politically. "I tend to judge a person by their character. And President Bush reminds me of President Reagan. He's a man of principle."

[...]

Another student at Brigham Young, Danielle Pulsipher, a junior, offered blanket approval of the president. Asked to name which of his actions as president she liked most, she was hard-pressed to answer.

"I'm not sure of anything he's done, but I like that he's religious — that's really important," Ms. Pulsipher said.

It is disturbing that the people who were interviewed are such deeply religious people who espouse very high standards of morality, and yet they're completely bamboozled by the smoke and mirrors that have been the hallmark of this administration. As for Ms. Pulsipher's statement, if this is the state of curiosity and education among the students at one of the leading universities in the nation, we're in for a lot of trouble with our next generation.

Frank Rich:

The marriage-amendment campaign will be kicked off tomorrow with a Rose Garden benediction by the president. Though the amendment has no chance of passing, Mr. Bush apparently still thinks, as he did in 2004, that gay-baiting remains just the diversion to distract from a war gone south.

So much for the troops. For all the politicians' talk about honoring those who serve, Washington's record is derelict: chronic shortages in body and Humvee armor; a back-door draft forcing troops with expired contracts into repeated deployments; inadequate postwar health care and veterans' benefits. And that's just the short list. Now a war without end is running off the rails and putting an undermanned army in still greater jeopardy. "Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy," Nir Rosen, who has covered Iraq since the invasion, wrote in The Washington Post last weekend.

We can't pretend we don't know this is happening. It's happening in broad daylight. We know that "as the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down" is fiction, not reality. We know from the Pentagon's own report to Congress last week that attacks on Americans and Iraqis alike are at their highest since American commanders started keeping count in 2004. We know that even as coalition partners like Italy and South Korea bail out, we are planning an indefinite stay of undefined parameters: the 104-acre embassy complex rising in the Green Zone is the largest in the world, and the Decider himself has said that it's up to "future presidents and future governments of Iraq" to decide our exit strategy.

Actually, the current government of Iraq already is. On Thursday the latest American-backed Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whom Mr. Bush is "proud to call" his "ally and friend," invited open warfare on American forces by accusing them of conducting Haditha-like killing sprees against civilians as a "regular" phenomenon. If this is the ally and friend we are fighting for, a country that truly supports the troops has no choice but to start bringing them home.

Hey, Detroit, sorry about the Pistons, but at least the Tigers are still winning (sorry, Beantown Girl...)

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 7:13 AM  

Somebody's going to have to take the rap for what has happened in Haditha. If history is any guide, it will be the soldiers who have been accused of the incident and perhaps the commanding officer on the scene, but that's it. It won't go much further up the chain of command and certainly won't be laid on the people who are truly responsible for what happened in that town last November.

Of course the soldiers are entitled to a presumption of innocence, but in a sense they're also entitled to an accounting from the people who sent them to war unprepared for what they would face once they got there. Nothing can truly prepare someone for the battlefield and it is dangerous to try to predict how an individual will respond, including what will happen when that individual changes from a man alone into a soldier in a platoon. But given all that, there is still the responsibility that lies not in the understanding of what goes on in the metaphor-laden world of the fog of war and the heat of battle; some of it must be placed at the feet of the men who sent them there in the first place.

Maureen Dowd notes,

American troops are under spectacular emotional pressure. They go out every day, not knowing Arabic, not understanding the culture, not knowing who the insurgents are, not knowing when they can go home or which of their buddies will be blown up before their eyes by an unseen enemy.

The troops were not trained for a counterinsurgency, because Bush hawks ignored the intelligence reports that predicted an insurgency and civil war. These kids were turned into sitting ducks because the neocon con to sell the war needed a gauzy prediction of Iraqi gratitude and a quick exit.

It is admirable that the Marine commanders want to morally sensitize the troops while they are in such a hostile environment, but it also seems a bit absurd, sending them to summer school in "core values."

There's no way to teach someone not to shoot an unarmed woman or child. If somebody doesn't already know why they shouldn't murder a baby, it's not clear that a refresher course will help.

The problem with brushing up on core values is that if you don't know them by a certain point you can't learn them. You can't teach remedial decency, any more than you can teach remedial ethics to White House officials who vindictively leak information about critics of the war after vowing not to leak.

So if the men of this unit are to be tried for the crimes of Haditha, one of the charges should be dereliction of duty. Not against them but against the people who used them as their pawns in a game of politics to win elections, chasten the world, and ensure that every nation became freedom-loving democracies, even if we had to blow them up to do it.

President Bush plans to speak out in support of the "Marriage Protection Amendment" this week (which makes you wonder if he's talking about protecting it from this guy). I'll have more on Mr. Bush's appeal to bigotry as the story unfolds, but here's a tidbit plucked from today's Washington Post that should give you an idea of what this is really about:

The issue has already emerged in some of this year's races.

In one North Carolina congressional district, for instance, Republican challenger Vernon Robinson has aired a radio ad attacking Democratic Rep. Brad Miller with mariachi music playing in the background: "Brad Miller supports gay marriage and sponsored a bill to let American homosexuals bring their foreign homosexual lovers to this country on a marriage visa. If Miller had his way, America would be nothing but one big fiesta for illegal aliens and homosexuals."

Miller voted against the Marriage Protection Amendment in 2004, saying the matter should be left to the states. "The republic has survived pretty well for 220 years with marriage based on state law," he said yesterday. "I don't think we ought to amend the constitution every time a politician wants to campaign on an issue." Miller said he supports North Carolina law banning same-sex marriage but is open to civil unions between gay partners.

How about that? You get both gay-bashing and anti-immigration rhetoric in one campaign commercial: the horrifying vision that hordes of queer brown guys are going to sashay over the border from Mexico, pick tomatoes, and steal your teenage son.

Mr. Robinson is a perennial candidate who makes news by his outrageousness, but the message that he's delivering isn't too far off the mark of what the Republicans and the president are up to.

Here's another story that is sure to get Bill O'Reilly riled up.

A federal judge has declared a state law requiring students to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Ryskamp also declared students do not need a parent's permission to be excused from reciting the pledge, citing previous federal cases.

"It is a long-standing rule of constitutional law that a student may remain quietly seated during the pledge on grounds of personal or political belief," Ryskamp stated in his ruling based on a lawsuit filed by a Boynton Beach High School student who had refused to stand for the pledge.

Cameron Frazier, then a 17-year-old junior, was told by teacher Cynthia Alexandre that he was "so ungrateful and so un-American" after he twice refused to stand for the pledge in her classroom on Nov. 8, the lawsuit said.

Frazier's lawsuit did not challenge the recital of the pledge in Florida classrooms, only students' right not to participate.

[...]

But the American Civil Liberties Union sued the state Board of Education and state Education Commissioner John Winn, challenging a state law that says the pledge needs to be recited at the beginning of the day at all elementary, middle and high schools.

"This is a decision about freedom and freedom in America means your right to not recite the Pledge of Allegiance or your right to recite the Pledge of Allegiance," said Howard Simon, executive director of the Florida ACLU. "The impact that we hope this decision will have is that school officials begin to respect the conscience and dignity of young people."

The Pledge of Allegiance is recited every morning at all Miami-Dade County elementary and secondary schools.

However, students have a choice. They can stand or sit in silence if they choose not to recite it for religious or personal convictions, said Joseph Garcia, a spokesman for Miami Dade Public Schools.

[...]

Simon said that was in line with what the Supreme Court ruled in 1943.

"The Supreme Court ruled that a person can't be compelled to professing allegiance," he said. "Their rule respects the right of the student."

During my last tenure as a teacher, I got called on the carpet by the principal for not putting my hand over my heart and reciting the pledge out loud. I explained that I was on firm legal and moral ground by exercising my choice not to engage in coerced patriotism, that as a Quaker I didn't believe in ritualistic idol worship, and if the seniors in my homeroom hadn't already formulated an opinion that the morning pledge is a true affirmation of their patriotism or a mindless recitation of a ritual learned in kindergarten, seeing me participate in my own way wasn't going to irreparably harm them.

What I want to know is why do some people think it is somehow more patriotic to show you're an American then to actually exercise the rights that are granted to us by the Constitution?

To quote Rodgers and Hammerstein, June is bustin' out all over. Let's catch up with the Liberal Coalition and see what they're writing about.

All Facts and Opinions mourns Desmond Dekker.

archy has fun writing a parody of right-wing crap.

Bark Bark Woof Woof on the Rolling Stone article about the 2004 election.

blogAmY on discrimination.

Everything's coming up roses at bloggg.

Collective Sigh on the high cost of emergency medicine.

Speaking of emergency medicine, Horatio at Dodecahedron has had a run of bad luck.

NTodd deals with a painful loss.

Echidne on Haditha.

the farmer went morel hunting. (Morels are mushrooms.)

FDL opens the book salon.

First Draft writing on writing.

Happy Furry Puppy on catching up with domestic news.

iddybud on spiritual progressives.

Left is Right with fun Friday video links.

Lefty's weekly top ten starts off with a comic (52).

Liberty Street on life in liberated Iraq.

Make Me a Commentator on X-Men and the queer factor.

MercuryX23 on an unknown music star.

Michael sends best wishes for the hurricane season.

Pen-Elayne on the outrage of tea packaging.

Rick chokes on some legislation.

Rook's Rant deals with a family loss.

rubber hose on truth-telling.

Coturnix provides a link to prove that feminists cause global warming.

Scrutiny Hooligans -- if you knew sushi...

Sooner Thought on the best/worst presidents of the modern era.

Speedkill on teaching Islam in the classroom in California.

Steve Gilliard rattles the cup and thanks his donors.

T. Rex on sex.

The Countess asks for some help.

The Invisible Library on the evils of Microsoft.

WTF Is It Now?? on Homeland Security funding priorities.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat reports on his term on jury duty.

...You Are a Tree on Kimberly Dozier, the CBS correspondent injured in Iraq.

We're two days into hurricane season and there are no tropical depressions in the Atlantic...yet.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr in Rolling Stone makes the case that there were enough irregularities in vote count in Ohio alone to give the 2004 election to George W. Bush. But he also says it wasn't just in Ohio were things went strangely Republican.

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election.

If Mr. Kennedy's allegations are true -- and he has over 200 footnotes to back up his claims -- it presents a rather frightful usurpation of the election process. And in spite of the fact that nothing can be done to alter the outcome of the election now and this article will provide a feeding frenzy for the righties as they prepare to demolish another Kennedy, both on his research ("Look! A comma splice! The whole thing is flawed!") and on his person ("Heh, his cousin's in rehab"), the article does raise enough questions through enough objective sources that it should be taken seriously.

The report centers on the election in Ohio. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, the official in charge of the state's election system, is a hard-right conservative Republican. He is presently running for governor to succeed disgraced and term-limited Gov. Bob Taft. And it was in Ohio where voter registration forms from Democrats were destroyed, precincts were reduced, voting machines misallocated to provide for too few in large precincts and cause long lines, and a variety of irregularities that even if you give Sec. Blackwell and his office the benefit of the doubt and say that shit just happens during an election, it hardly serves as a recommendation for him to be elected to higher office.

Vast government conspiracy theories usually fall apart because they depend on two axioms: 1) the government is competent enough to pull something off on a massive scale that requires precise timing and elaborate manipulation, and 2) that such a large conspiracy can have so many people involved who can keep a secret. So the idea that Karl Rove sits in his West Wing office doing his Dr. Evil act (with Mini-Me down the hall in the oval one) is a little over the top. But all it takes is one state -- like Ohio -- with an official who makes no secret about who he would like to win the election, and you have a lot of questions left unanswered.

Frankly, I expect there to be dirty tricks and vicious campaigning in any election. I don't like it, but I expect it. But to mess around with an election is an assault on the idea of what this country stands for, far more than flag burning or singing the national anthem in Spanish. An election should be the one thing we can count on that is fair and honest because it is the source of all the power in this country. Election fraud is the same as jury tampering.

The right wing has already begun to spin this as just another case of lefty sour grapes or tin-foil-hat VRWC worthy of Oliver Stone. In one of the more circular dismissals, Tucker Carlson told Mr. Kennedy that it couldn't possibly be true because the media hasn't said anything about it. (Who wants to hit that one out of the park?) But they said the same thing about Valerie Plame, Abu Ghraib, and the NSA warrantless wiretapping. If this doesn't get people wondering what the hell happened, perhaps we deserve what we got.

Hey, Snowball is on the radio!

I've figured out why President Bush let Treasury Secretary John Snow resign.

The White House had just hired Tony Snow as the press secretary, and the president was confused by having two guys named Snow working for him, and he couldn't remember which one went by the nickname "Snowman." So one had to go.

From the Toledo Blade:

More than two years after investigators began probing Tom Noe’s vaunted political fund-raising ability, he admitted yesterday that he used friends and colleagues to illegally pour thousands of dollars into the effort to re-elect President Bush.

Noe, whose fund-raising acumen earned him star status as a Bush “Pioneer” and helped him secure coveted federal and state political appointments, pleaded guilty to all three felony counts he faced.

[...]

His guilty plea also acknowledged implicitly that he illegally obtained the cachet typically bestowed upon the biggest political fund-raisers. Hundreds of the Bush “Pioneers” and “Rangers” — those who raised more than $100,000 and $200,000 respectively — were rewarded with coveted ambassadorships, favorable policy changes, and friendly legislation. Noe himself was appointed to a key committee of the U.S. Mint.

[...]

Noe still faces more than four dozen other felony counts in Lucas County Common Pleas Court on allegations that he stole millions of dollars from two rare-coin funds totaling $50 million he managed for the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation. An August trial has been set in that case.

Noe is the second Bush "Pioneer" to run afoul of the law. The other one is Jack Abramoff.

*HT to Willa Cather. I couldn't resist.

Paul Kiel has more on the AP's John Solomon once again making it sound like Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) did something wrong in attending a boxing match as a guest of the Nevada boxing commission.

...the AP released a new story on Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV). It purports to show Reid admitting that Solomon was right all along, that Reid mistated senate ethics rules when he initially defended himself against Solomon's piece -- and now he's coming clean.

We were pretty surprised to see Reid admit that. And as it turns out, he didn't.

Solomon just arranges the lead in such a way as to mislead readers into thinking Reid said something he didn't.

[...]

Solomon's piece begins with the following lead:

Reversing course, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid's office acknowledged Wednesday night he misstated the ethics rules governing his acceptance of free boxing tickets and has decided to avoid taking such gifts in the future.

99% of readers - and the AP has many, many readers - will read that lead paragraph and interpret it to mean that Reid has admitted that he misstated Senate ethics rules when he said they allowed him to accept the tickets. He's chastened and he's agreed not to do it again.

[...]

Reid's argument has been that Senate ethics rules provide an exception for accepting stuff from state agencies as opposed to private entities.

In an interview that appeared in Wednesday's The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Reid said that the exception for state agencies only applied to Senators from the state in question. Therefore, the exception applied to him and not Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who paid for his seat, because he was from out of state.

That's wrong.

It has nothing to do with what state you're from. The AP caught that and brought it to Reid's people. They admitted the AP was right on this point and Reid was wrong. And that's how Solomon can write that Reid "acknowledged Wednesday night he misstated the ethics rules governing his acceptance of free boxing tickets."

[...]

But let's be clear: What Reid was wrong about wasn't whether he was allowed to take the tickets. He was wrong about whether McCain was allowed to because he was from out of state. On the larger question, whether he was permitted to accept the tickets, Reid didn't admit to being wrong because he wasn't. Zinging Reid on his error would certainly be in order.

But for Solomon, what Reid actually goofed on wasn't good enough. So he takes Reid's incorrect statement about McCain and twirls it a lead which has Reid saying what Solomon really wants him to say: that Solomon was right all along. Reid was wrong. And he won't do it again.

You're probably wondering why I and several other bloggers are making such a big deal over this seemingly innocent and innocuous event. So the Senate Minority Leader is accused of taking a gift from a group over which he was considering legislation. Big deal. Just another politician getting a special deal. Happens all the time, right?

The righties are all chortling because now the Democrats can't campaign on the Republicans and their "culture of corruption" because they'd be hypocrites. But this is exactly how the truth gets distorted and the Republicans or the Religious Reich get away with their shit. On the surface it sounds like Sen. Reid did something underhanded, especially if you have read nothing but what the AP's John Solomon has written. But the facts are that Sen. Reid not only complied with the rules at the time of the event, he ended up voting against the interests of the people who got him the credentials to the boxing match in the first place. So it is time to call them on it and not, as has happened so many times in the past, let it go because we naively thought it would go away. Just ask John Kerry about the Swift Boaters or Bill and Hillary Clinton about Whitewater.

It's time -- actaully long past time -- to stand up to the lies and distortions that are the tools of the trade of the campaigns of personal destruction, and we're not going to take it any more. As Josh Marshall notes,

If you're going to take a berm on the mountain range of congressional ethics and cut corners, omit key facts and get other facts wrong to manufacture a false appearance of balance, we think it's right to call you on every single distortion and error. And we're going to keep on doing just that.

From the New York Times:

After 27 years in which the United States has refused substantive talks with Iran, President Bush reversed course on Wednesday because it was made clear to him — by his allies, by the Russians, by the Chinese, and eventually by some of his advisers — that he no longer had a choice.

During the past month, according to European officials and some current and former members of the Bush administration, it became obvious to Mr. Bush that he could not hope to hold together a fractious coalition of nations to enforce sanctions — or consider military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites — unless he first showed a willingness to engage Iran's leadership directly over its nuclear program and exhaust every nonmilitary option.

Few of his aides expect that Iran's leaders will meet Mr. Bush's main condition: that Iran first re-suspend all of its nuclear activities, including shutting down every centrifuge that could add to its small stockpile of enriched uranium. Administration officials characterized their offer as a test of whether the Iranians want engagement with the West more than they want the option to build a nuclear bomb some day.

And while the Europeans and the Japanese said they were elated by Mr. Bush's turnaround, some participants in the drawn-out nuclear drama questioned whether this was an offer intended to fail, devised to show the extent of Iran's intransigence.

It also comes down to the fact that this administration has pretty much destroyed any trust our allies had in us and they weren't about to take us at our word about anything. So what else is there for us to do but try diplomacy?

Of course we had to throw up a qualifier that was designed to be a deal-breaker with Iran: give up your nuclear enrichment plans so we can talk about you giving up your nuclear enrichment plans. Whether or not this was the plan from the outset, knowing that Iran would, for the sake of their pride, refuse to accept the terms and thus give the administration the excuse to say, "See, we made a reasonable offer and they turned us down; we have no choice but to bomb the shit out of them" remains to be seen, but you can be sure that there are some neocons who are thinking it is totally uncool to have talk to the Iranians.

Seeing the administration being backed into the corner and made to try diplomacy versus sabre-rattling tells you a lot about how far we've gone in poisoning our own influence on our friends. In October 1962 as the Cuban missile crisis was developing, President Kennedy sent an envoy to brief French president Charles de Gaulle on the plans for US military blockade of Cuba. The envoy told the notably prickly French leader of what our intelligence had found and offered to send photographic evidence to back up the claim. President de Gaulle shook his head and said, "If the United States believes it, that's good enough for me."

Those were the days.

June 1: the beginning of the hurricane season.

Hurricane Katrina, 3 pm, August 25, 2005

Just a little reminder of what was and what will be.