Bark Bark Woof Woof

Back by popular demand:

What is the most annoying commercial on TV today?

My nominees, in no particular order:

HeadOn, applied directly to the forehead HeadOn, applied directly to the-- [click]

Jenny Craig: -- Kirstie Alley and the pool dude. Normally a hot guy in a swim suit gets my attention, but this is just plain dumb, and probably sexist.

GEICO: -- The lizard was annoying enough, even when he switched to the faux Cockney accent (or whatever accent they thought it was), but now the ones with the celebrities -- especially Bert Bacharach -- are just plain creepy.

Your turn.

Mel Gibson issued an apology for his arrest the other night, and in spite of some denials and allegations of a coverup, apparently the official police report substantiates claims that he made anti-Semitic remarks and threatened a deputy.

It's too bad he fell off the wagon, and it's good that he realizes he did. Having dealt with alcoholism and its effects on friends and family, I know how important that is, and I'm more than willing to cut him some slack. Not for driving drunk; he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for that, and I hope he will be. But perhaps he'll learn -- if he already hasn't -- what a shitheel he turns into when he drinks and it'll reinforce his resolve to get back into recovery. And maybe he'll figure out whatever it was that made him start up again. I wish him the best in that.

I can't help but notice, however, thanks to Pam, that some of our buddies over at the right wing are very sympathetic when one of their own trips over one of the twelve steps, but were positively giddy with delight when Patrick Kennedy had his own slip. No where in the police report at the time did it indicate that Mr. Kennedy abused the police, resisted arrest, or put the nasty on an entire religion. Early rumors of a coverup or "special treatment" were dispelled. In fact, Mr. Kennedy checked himself into rehab the next day, made full restitution, and took his punishment like the man that he is.

Time will tell if Mr. Gibson does the same -- he's already made a start -- but if his supporters on the right had any conscience or scruples, they'd have shown the same sympathy and understanding to Mr. Kennedy as they are doing now to Mr. Gibson.

Just sayin'.

Five years ago today I loaded Sam, several plants, and my computer into the Pontiac and left Albuquerque in a driving rainstorm, headed for Miami. The moving van with everything else had already left. It was exactly 6:30 p.m. MDT; I had to wait around for UPS to show up with my new Citibank card or it would be a real short trip. I left behind a pretty good job and a lot of friends, but I really wanted to get back into the education profession, and so I found a job teaching here and plunged headlong into it. We arrived in Miami exactly 48 hours later in a light rain shower, the Pontiac a little dirtier from the trek, and ready for yet another phase in the journey of life.

I'd like to think that things work out for the best. My return to teaching wasn't what I'd hoped it would be, but thanks to good friends and good guidance, I've found a way to both contribute to education and use skills that I'd learned in my years in business.

If I knew then -- at 6:30 p.m. on July 31, 2001 -- what lay ahead of me, I still would have turned the key and headed up Paseo del Norte and into the rain. I still have the Pontiac. Sam is still with me in spirit. And the adventure continues.

It's going to be light and variable blogging for the next couple of days; there are lots of things going on outside of the blogosphere (i.e. at work) that will cut in on my usual blogging schedule.

In the meantime, check out some of the links at The Liberal Coalition, and for your Florida politics fix, keep up with The Florida Progressive Coalition.

For entertainmant, catch up on your summer reading at The Practical Press.

The Democratic candidates for governor in Florida are beginning to notice that there are gay voters in the state.

When Rod Smith went to a recent Tallahassee conference of gay and lesbian activists, the Democratic candidate for governor cracked a joke alluding to Brokeback Mountain, the gay cowboy movie.

The crowd howled. That was a marked contrast to the lukewarm reception the state senator got at a Hollywood gathering a year earlier, when some of the same activists complained that he addressed them as "you homosexuals."

Smith's rival, U.S. Rep. Jim Davis, voted to bar same-sex couples in Washington from adopting children in 1998. "I'm just not convinced that it's appropriate to allow children to be raised in that environment," he said at the time. He changed his mind and voted against the adoption ban one year later.

"They've come a long way, baby," said Michael Albetta, president of the Florida Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Democratic Caucus. "It's refreshing."

The candidates' changes of heart and tone reflect the gay community's growing political influence in Democratic circles. More than 70 percent of gay and lesbian voters in Florida are Democrats, and their turnout is higher than the general population's, according to surveys cited by the caucus.

In a twist on the chant heard at gay-rights parades, the message is: We're here, we're queer -- and we vote.

And we care about things other than just gay marriage and adoption. Like anybody else, we care about things like health care, the budget deficit, defense spending, the envrionment -- all the things that every other citizen thinks about. We live here, too, and we're concerned about such mundane things as staying healthy, safe, and solvent. We don't all live on South Beach or Key West and spend our nights at Ozone, and we're not all Speedo-clad hunky numbers. In fact, the majority of the gay community are middle class people with mortgages, jobs, and we're not getting any younger; we're as much a part of the greying of America as the rest of the baby boomers. (We just do it with a little more style, that's all.)

As far as politics is concerned, we just want to be treated like every other citizen of the state, with equal rights, equal access to the legal system for us and our loved ones -- including our children -- and therefore bear the same responsibilities that every other citizen of the state has. The fact that we have to be treated as a "special interest" tells me that we still have a ways to go.

In case you missed it, here's Dan Savage's op-ed from yesterday's New York Times.

There were community meetings in Seattle on Wednesday. Some of the couples who had sued to overturn Washington’s ban on same-sex marriage, a case they lost before the state’s Supreme Court earlier that day, were going to appear. Gay and straight elected officials who support “marriage equality” were going to make speeches. I probably should have been there too.

But I had a previous engagement.

The Seattle Mariners were playing the Toronto Blue Jays at Safeco Field. My 8-year-old son — adopted at birth by my boyfriend and me — loves the M’s almost as much as he hates the way a breaking news story can keep me late at work. He would never have forgiven me for skipping the game.

I didn’t feel too bad about missing the meetings. Washington’s high court rejected same-sex marriage for much the same reason the New York Court of Appeals did earlier this month. The speeches in Seattle would no doubt be similar to those made in New York, and I didn’t need to hear them again.

Basically, both courts found that marriage is like a box of Trix: It’s for kids.

In New York, the court ruled in effect that irresponsible heterosexuals often have children by accident — we gay couples, in contrast, cannot get drunk and adopt in one night — so the state can reserve marriage rights for heterosexuals in order to coerce them into taking care of their offspring. Without the promise of gift registries and rehearsal dinners, it seems, many more newborns in New York would be found in trash cans.

At least the New York court acknowledged that many same-sex couples have children. Washington’s judges went out of their way to make ours disappear, finding that “limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples furthers procreation, essential to the survival of the human race, and furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents.” Children, the decision continues, “tend to thrive in families consisting of a father, mother and their biological children.’’

A concurring opinion gave the knife a few leisurely twists: due to the “binary biological nature of marriage,” it read, only opposite-sex couples are capable of “responsible child rearing.”

These stunning statements fly in the face of the evidence about gay and lesbian parents presented to the court. Similar evidence persuaded the high court in Arkansas to overturn that state’s ban on gay and lesbian foster parents.

What the New York and Washington opinions share — besides a willful disregard for equal protection clauses in both state Constitutions — is a heartless lack of concern for the rights of the hundreds of thousands of children being raised by same-sex couples.

Even if gay couples who adopt are more stable, as New York found, don’t their children need the security and protections that the court believes marriage affords children? And even if heterosexual sex is essential to the survival of the human race (a point I’m willing to concede), it’s hard to see how preventing gay couples from marrying increases heterosexual activity. (“Keep breeding, heterosexuals,” the Washington State Supreme Court in effect shouted, “To bed! To bed! To bed!”) Both courts have found that my son’s parents have no right to marry, but what of my son’s right to have married parents?

A perverse cruelty characterizes both decisions. The courts ruled, essentially, that making my child’s life less secure somehow makes the life of a child with straight parents more secure. Both courts found that making heterosexual couples stable requires keeping homosexual couples vulnerable. And the courts seemed to agree that heterosexuals can hardly be bothered to have children at all — or once they’ve had them, can hardly be bothered to care for them — unless marriage rights are reserved exclusively for heterosexuals. And the religious right accuses gays and lesbians of seeking “special rights.”

Even if you believe that marriage plays a special role in the lives of heterosexuals with children (another point I’m happy to concede), can it not play a similar role in the lives of homosexual couples, whether they’re parents or not? Marriage, after all, is not reserved for couples with children. (Perhaps it will be soon, if courts keep heading in this direction.)

When my widowed grandfather remarried in his 60’s, he wasn’t seeking to further the well-being of his children, who were grown and out of the house. He was seeking the security, companionship and legal rights that marriage provides. The survival of humankind was the furthest thing from his mind.

These defeats have demoralized supporters of gay marriage, but I see a silver lining. If heterosexual instability and the link between heterosexual sex and human reproduction are the best arguments opponents of same-sex marriage can muster, I can’t help but feel that our side must be winning. Insulting heterosexuals and discriminating against children with same-sex parents may score the other side a few runs, but these strategies won’t win the game.

So I’m confident that one day my son will live in a country that allows his parents to marry. His parents are already married, as far as he’s concerned, as my boyfriend and I tied the knot in Canada more than a year and a half ago. We recognize, even if the courts do not, that it’s in his best interest for us to be married.

And while Wednesday was a dark day, the M’s beat the Blue Jays 7 to 4, so it wasn’t a total loss.

He That Troubleth His Own House... Two pieces that point out that religion and politics are a volatile mix.

First is Frances Fitzgerald's article from The New Yorker on the Ohio governor's race between J. Kenneth Blackwell and Rep. Ted Strickland.

Pastor Rod Parsley stood on a flag-bedecked dais on the steps of Ohio’s Statehouse last October and, amid cheers from the crowd below, proclaimed the launch of “the largest evangelical campaign ever attempted in any state in America.” A nationally known televangelist and the leader of a twelve-thousand-member church on the outskirts of Columbus, Parsley had gathered a thousand people for the event, and attracted bystanders with a multimedia performance involving a video on a Jumbotron and music by Christian singers and rappers broadcast so loud that it reverberated off the tall buildings south of the Statehouse. TV crews from Parsley’s ministry taped the event. “Sound an alarm!” he boomed. “A Holy Ghost invasion is taking place. Man your battle stations, ready your weapons, lock and load!” In the course of the performance, Parsley promised that during the next four years his campaign, Reformation Ohio, would bring a hundred thousand Ohioans to Christ, register four hundred thousand new voters, serve the disadvantaged, and guide the state through “a culture-shaking revolutionary revival.”

Among those who spoke at the rally were Senator Sam Brownback, of Kansas, and Representative Walter B. Jones, of North Carolina, both Christian conservatives, and J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio’s secretary of state, who is now the Republican nominee for governor. All talked about the need to bring God and morality back into government. “We refuse to give up or back up or shut up until we’ve made a better world for all,” Blackwell said.

For the past two years, the religious right in Ohio has been on a victory march. In 2004, a coalition of conservative Christian organizations campaigned statewide for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, enlisting hundreds of pastors and collecting half a million signatures. The ballot initiative, known as Issue One, passed with sixty-three per cent of the vote, and many concluded that this effort to bring out “values voters” won the state for President Bush, and returned him to the White House. Parsley and another megachurch pastor, Russell Johnson, of the Fairfield Christian Church, campaigned hard for the initiative, as did Ken Blackwell, whose role in overseeing the election procedures caused a controversy of its own, and who was the only Republican leader in the state to join them. Subsequently, the two pastors formed organizations—Reformation Ohio and Johnson’s Ohio Restoration Project—to get out the vote in 2006 and beyond. This year, there is nothing like Issue One on the ballot, but Blackwell, who carries the standard of the religious right, could become governor of Ohio.

In Minnesota, an evangelical pastor has disowned the Religious Reich.

Like most pastors who lead thriving evangelical megachurches, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd was asked frequently to give his blessing — and the church’s — to conservative political candidates and causes.

The requests came from church members and visitors alike: Would he please announce a rally against gay marriage during services? Would he introduce a politician from the pulpit? Could members set up a table in the lobby promoting their anti-abortion work? Would the church distribute “voters’ guides” that all but endorsed Republican candidates? And with the country at war, please couldn’t the church hang an American flag in the sanctuary?

After refusing each time, Mr. Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

“When the church wins the culture wars, it inevitably loses,” Mr. Boyd preached. “When it conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share.

“Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.”

[...]

His congregation of about 4,000 is still digesting his message. Mr. Boyd arranged a forum on a recent Wednesday night to allow members to sound off on his new book. The reception was warm, but many of the 56 questions submitted in writing were pointed: Isn’t abortion an evil that Christians should prevent? Are you saying Christians should not join the military? How can Christians possibly have “power under” Osama bin Laden? Didn’t the church play an enormously positive role in the civil rights movement?

One woman asked: “So why NOT us? If we contain the wisdom and grace and love and creativity of Jesus, why shouldn’t we be the ones involved in politics and setting laws?”

Mr. Boyd responded: “I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”

Amen.

Bonus: The Toledo Blade has an editorial on the governor's race.

Remember Baghdad? Frank Rich wonders where the war coverage has gone.

As America fell into the quagmire of Vietnam, the comedian Milton Berle joked that the fastest way to end the war would be to put it on the last-place network, ABC, where it was certain to be canceled. Berle’s gallows humor lives on in the quagmire in Iraq. Americans want this war canceled too, and first- and last-place networks alike are more than happy to oblige.

CNN will surely remind us today that it is Day 19 of the Israel-Hezbollah war — now branded as Crisis in the Middle East — but you won’t catch anyone saying it’s Day 1,229 of the war in Iraq. On the Big Three networks’ evening newscasts, the time devoted to Iraq has fallen 60 percent between 2003 and this spring, as clocked by the television monitor, the Tyndall Report. On Thursday, Brian Williams of NBC read aloud a “shame on you” e-mail complaint from the parents of two military sons anguished that his broadcast had so little news about the war.

This is happening even as the casualties in Iraq, averaging more than 100 a day, easily surpass those in Israel and Lebanon combined. When Nouri al-Maliki, the latest Iraqi prime minister, visited Washington last week to address Congress, he too got short TV shrift — a mere five sentences about the speech on ABC’s “World News.” The networks know a rerun when they see it. Only 22 months earlier, one of Mr. Maliki’s short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi, had come to town during the 2004 campaign to give a similarly empty Congressional address laced with White House-scripted talking points about the war’s progress. Propaganda stunts, unlike “Law & Order” episodes, don’t hold up on a second viewing.

The steady falloff in Iraq coverage isn’t happenstance. It’s a barometer of the scope of the tragedy. For reporters, the already apocalyptic security situation in Baghdad keeps getting worse, simply making the war more difficult to cover than ever. The audience has its own phobia: Iraq is a bummer. “It is depressing to pay attention to this war on terror,” said Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly on July 18. “I mean, it’s summertime.” Americans don’t like to lose, whatever the season. They know defeat when they see it, no matter how many new plans for victory are trotted out to obscure that reality.

The specter of defeat is not the only reason Americans have switched off Iraq. The larger issue is that we don’t know what we — or, more specifically, 135,000 brave and vulnerable American troops — are fighting for. In contrast to the Israel-Hezbollah war, where the stakes for the combatants and American interests are clear, the war in Iraq has no rationale to keep it afloat on television or anywhere else. It’s a big, nightmarish story, all right, but one that lacks the thread of a coherent plot.

[...]

This history can’t be undone; there’s neither the American money nor the manpower to fulfill the mission left unaccomplished. The Iraqi people, whose collateral damage was so successfully hidden for so long by the Rumsfeld war plan, remain a sentimental abstraction to most Americans. Whether they are seen in agony after another Baghdad bombing or waving their inked fingers after an election or being used as props to frame Mrs. Bush during the State of the Union address, they have little more specificity than movie extras. Chalabi, Allawi, Jaafari, Maliki come and go, all graced with the same indistinguishable praise from the American president, all blurring into an endless loop of instability and crisis. We feel badly ... and change the channel.

Carl Hiaasen has an explanation as to why we'd rather forget about Iraq.

Polls say that, by a large majority, Americans are disillusioned with the president, his foreign policy and the grinding war in Iraq. It's hardly surprising.

So much of what we've been told has turned out to be bull, starting with the reason for the invasion. Who can forget these solemn declarations from the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld brain trust?

• Saddam Hussein is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

• Saddam's regime has secret connections to al Qaeda.

• U.S. troops will be ``welcomed as liberators.''

• Forget what experienced battle commanders say. We've got more than enough forces on the ground to assert control in Iraq.

• Major combat is over!

• The insurgents in Iraq are just pesky ''dead-enders'' who will be vanquished in short order.

• American soldiers have been issued the top-of-the-line body and vehicle armor for protection.

• The training of Iraqi military and police forces is progressing smoothly.

• The rebuilding of Iraq will be financed by revenues from its vast oil holdings, not by American taxpayers.

• Don't worry -- this isn't anything like Vietnam.

So far, the president and his team are batting .000 in Baghdad. They haven't been right yet.

Iraq finally has a new government on paper, but Washington is running the show. Without coalition forces patrolling the streets, Iraq could explode into open civil war. It may yet.

So we're stuck in a bad place with nothing but bad options. There simply is no good, swift way out.

[...]

The insurgency at which Donald Rumsfeld was scoffing two years ago remains aggressive and elusive today. The roadside bombings and rocket attacks have sapped the morale of many U.S. troops.

''It sucks. Honestly, it feels like we're driving around waiting to get blown up,'' Army Spec. Tim Ivey told The Washington Post last week in Baghdad.

A medic, Spec. David Fulcher, said that in World War II, ``the big picture was clear -- you know you're fighting because somebody was trying to take over the world, basically. This [Iraq] is like, what did we invade here for?''

It's a damn good question that millions of sane and patriotic people have been asking.

Especially when they see al Zawahri on TV, posing before a photograph of the smoking World Trade Center, beseeching Muslims everywhere to strike out against Israel and the United States.

Al Zawahri isn't hiding in Iraq. Neither is Osama bin Laden.

They're both still holed up in Afghanistan, along with a resurging Taliban that continues to do battle with the remaining coalition forces.

You remember Afghanistan? The place where George Bush was going to wipe out al Qaeda, before he brilliantly decided that Saddam Hussein was more important.

That Thing He Does! Tom Hanks turns to producing, proving that nice guys can make it in the movie business.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 8:24 AM  

According to the Bush administration, there's never a police state around when you need one.

U.S. citizens suspected of terror ties might be detained indefinitely and barred from access to civilian courts under legislation proposed by the Bush administration, say legal experts reviewing an early version of the bill.

A 32-page draft measure is intended to authorize the Pentagon's tribunal system, established shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks to detain and prosecute detainees captured in the war on terror. The tribunal system was thrown out last month by the Supreme Court.

[...]

According to the draft, the military would be allowed to detain all "enemy combatants" until hostilities cease. The bill defines enemy combatants as anyone "engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners who has committed an act that violates the law of war and this statute."

Legal experts said Friday that such language is dangerously broad and could authorize the military to detain indefinitely U.S. citizens who had only tenuous ties to terror networks like al Qaeda.

"That's the big question ... the definition of who can be detained," said Martin Lederman, a law professor at Georgetown University who posted a copy of the bill to a Web blog.

Scott L. Silliman, a retired Air Force Judge Advocate, said the broad definition of enemy combatants is alarming because a U.S. citizen loosely suspected of terror ties would lose access to a civilian court — and all the rights that come with it. Administration officials have said they want to establish a secret court to try enemy combatants that factor in realities of the battlefield and would protect classified information.

The administration's proposal, as considered at one point during discussions, would toss out several legal rights common in civilian and military courts, including barring hearsay evidence, guaranteeing "speedy trials" and granting a defendant access to evidence. The proposal also would allow defendants to be barred from their own trial and likely allow the submission of coerced testimony.

So, do you really want to take the chance that somehow the Senate and House will pass something odious like this and wait for the Supreme Court to toss it -- and that's a crap shoot -- or do we vote the bastards out in November and get our country back?

(HT to AMERICAblog and Daily Kos)

The House passed a hike in the minimum wage to $7.25 over the next three years. But there's a catch.

The House last night voted to boost the minimum wage for the first time in nearly a decade while also permanently slashing the estate tax, a coupling that GOP leaders calculated might garner enough Senate support to become law.

[...]

Democrats were incensed that the GOP leadership would couple the minimum wage hike, the first increase since 1997, with an estate tax cut that would reduce federal revenue by $268 billion over the next decade, to the overwhelming benefit of the country's richest families.

Well, it's about time. The rich have suffered enough under the current administration.

The Republicans all rant and roar about "class warfare" over shit like this. Who are they kidding? We haven't even had a "class hissy-fit" since the GOP came to power, and they're deathly afraid of it because they know they will lose. So they have become very adept at changing the subject away from increasing poverty, skyrocketing gas prices, 44 million people without health care, and the drought of trickle-down economics to such trivial pursuits as banning gay marriage, flag-burning, and interstate transportation of pregnant women. As if two men getting married is going to make a difference when you're filling up the tank on your car.

What's even more telling is the cynical approach the GOP takes to the whole issue of the minimum wage. The vote in the House was nothing but a big political game to them.

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) signaled he would try to scuttle the tax bill next week. "Republicans have made perfectly clear who they stand with and who they are willing to fight for: the privileged few," he said.

But Republicans believed they had found a way to snatch the minimum-wage issue away from Democrats, who had been using it as a cudgel, while securing passage of a central plank of their economic program: all but eliminating the estate tax.

"I know why you're mad," said Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.). "You've seen us really outfox you."

They don't give a damn about the people who would benefit from the increase; all they see it is as a political weapon. Well, Mr. Wamp, weapons like that have a tendency to backfire, and you might just find yourself out on your ass.

A lot of other bloggers have posted about the dismissal of Bleu Copas from the Army. In fact, I thought the story was old news; after 9/11 I remember several news reports about the lack of Arabic linguists, and one of the reasons given was that a number of them were gay and therefore discharged from military service by the Pentagon.

But the more I think about it, the stupider it seems. As we've seen in the recent past, the armed forces have resorted to recruiting white supremacists and petty criminals with rap sheets, but if the recruit shows an interest in community theatre, he's outed -- and out. So it's all right to fill our military ranks -- the greatest army the world has ever seen -- with people who choose to violate the laws of the nation they're sworn to protect, but not people who had no choice in their sexual orientation yet wish to serve of their own free will. One would think that if we truly were in a global war with our very existence at stake, we'd take every volunteer we could get, regardless of whether or not he, as Michael notes, likes cock.

The irony is that it has been proven time and time again that being gay doesn't have anything to do with whether or not you can be a soldier. The evidence -- both empirical and anecdotal -- is overwhelming that being gay is no more disruptive to unit cohesion or military discipline than being black or a Tigers fan is. (I'm not sure I buy the assertion of Col. Sherman Potter that Teddy Roosevelt had a transvesite who rode sidesaddle up San Juan Hill, but I wouldn't rule it out.) Many other countries -- including some of our staunchest allies -- do not discriminate against gays in the military, and they're probably all wondering what peculiarity there is about America that makes us such prigs about defending our nation. But when you put more importance on perpetuating mythology and superstition, fear and intolerance trump logic and reality every time. It is more important for some people to defend an old lie than it is to accept the truth.

Paul Krugman on the reign of error.

Amid everything else that’s going wrong in the world, here’s one more piece of depressing news: a few days ago the Harris Poll reported that 50 percent of Americans now believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when we invaded, up from 36 percent in February 2005. Meanwhile, 64 percent still believe that Saddam had strong links with Al Qaeda.

At one level, this shouldn’t be all that surprising. The people now running America never accept inconvenient truths. Long after facts they don’t like have been established, whether it’s the absence of any wrongdoing by the Clintons in the Whitewater affair or the absence of W.M.D. in Iraq, the propaganda machine that supports the current administration is still at work, seeking to flush those facts down the memory hole.

[...]

Whatever the reason, the fact is that the Bush administration continues to be remarkably successful at rewriting history. For example, Mr. Bush has repeatedly suggested that the United States had to invade Iraq because Saddam wouldn’t let U.N. inspectors in. His most recent statement to that effect was only a few weeks ago. And he gets away with it. If there have been reports by major news organizations pointing out that that’s not at all what happened, I’ve missed them.

It’s all very Orwellian, of course. But when Orwell wrote of “a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past,” he was thinking of totalitarian states. Who would have imagined that history would prove so easy to rewrite in a democratic nation with a free press?

As a friend noted on his high schoool yearbook page: "Reality? I only go there as a tourist."

This has been a hot week in all respects. Let's see how the Liberal Coalition sees it.

A Blog Around The Clock testifies that scientists are rock stars.

All Facts and Opinions on the small losses in Lebanon.

archy is in pursuit of the wiley wooly mammoth clone.

Bark Bark Woof Woof on interstate travel.

blogAmY reports on a sign of the apocalypse. (You want tartar sauce with that?)

bloggg on flagrant ignorance.

Collective Sigh offers a moment of tranquility.

NTodd on the rising tide and the foundering boats.

Echidne begins an exploration of divorce in Wingnuttia.

TRex at FDL on gay Republicans.

First Draft on Brown bagging.

Happy Furry Puppy on some imponderables.

iddybud on cross-faith spirituality.

Left Is Right lets us know how he really feels about the losses of war.

Lefty hates Best Buy. Find out why.

Liberty Street on collateral damage.

Make Me A Commentator on a horse making headlines...

Musing's musings on the outrage of DA/DT.

Pen-Elayne finds that car maintenance ain't cheap.

Rook's Rant on political shenanigans in Minnesota.

rubber hose has an interesting theory about Israel and Hezbollah.

Scrutiny Hooligans wonders if biofuels are really an alternative.

Sooner Thought wonders what tunes Condi will play as the ship sinks.

Speedkill on some local lunacy.

Steve Gilliard on the stealth supporters of Ken Blackwell.

Kenneth at T. Rex's Guide to Life on why some Arabs hate us.

The Countess on Intelligent Design.

The Invisible Library relays a first-hand account of life in Beirut.

WTF Is It Now?? on recreational sex for the elderly.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat on how the GOP hates young women.

...You Are A Tree has a movie that takes us almost into space.

Don't let the slithy toves gyre and gimbel in your wabe.

Hey, who wants a hot dog?

Snowball explores an urban myth. (Not to worry; I stopped him before he did anything to Max.)

What a pleasant surprise. I received a donation today via the link under Shameless Begging.

Thanks! I appreciate the support very much.

(And yes, I wrote a thank-you note. My mom raised me well.)

Molly Ivins has an idea.

Dear desperate Democrats,

Here's what we do. We run Bill Moyers for president. I am serious as a stroke about this. It's simple, cheap and effective, and it will move the entire spectrum of political discussion in this country. Moyers is the only public figure who can take the entire discussion and shove it toward moral clarity just by being there.

The poor man who is currently our president has reached such a point of befuddlement that he thinks stem-cell research is the same as taking human lives, but that 40,000 dead Iraqi civilians are progress toward democracy.

Moyers has been grappling with how to fit moral issues to political issues ever since he left Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and went to work for Lyndon Johnson in the teeth of the Vietnam War. Moyers worked for years in television, seriously addressing the most difficult issues of our day. He has studied all different kinds of religions and different approaches to spirituality.

[...]

I don't want to go through another presidential primary with everyone trying to figure out who has the best chance to win instead of who's right. I want to vote for somebody who's good and brave and who should win.

One time in the Johnson years, LBJ called on Moyers to say the blessing at a dinner. "Speak up, Bill!" Lyndon roared. "I can't hear you." Moyers replied, "I wasn't speaking to you, sir."

That's the point of a run by Moyers: He doesn't change to whom he is speaking just because some president is yelling at him.

Now there's a Texan I could vote for.

What's the biggest hit TV show you NEVER watched?

For me, I never saw Dallas, Dynasty, The Dukes of Hazzard, and I've yet to see an episode of Lost.

From Rolling Stone:

Even before the bombs fell on Baghdad, a group of senior Pentagon officials were plotting to invade another country. Their covert campaign once again relied on false intelligence and shady allies. But this time, the target was Iran.

The surprising thing is that no one seems to be surprised by this.

Contingency planning is one thing; we should always have plans for invading any hostile country, but to actively plot and come up with phony intelligence in order to justify it, well...

Welcome to Berlin. It's 1939.

So Lance Bass of 'N sync is gay.

I'm glad he feels comfortable about coming out, although I gotta say it's not a real shock; my gaydar went off the moment I saw a group picture.

Welcome to the club, Lance; but who gets the toaster oven?

From the Washington Post:

The federal government will need to either cut spending or raise taxes down the road to pay for extending President Bush's recent tax cuts, the Treasury Department said in a report released yesterday, dismissing the idea popular with many Republicans that such sacrifices can be avoided.

The Treasury report did not openly address the much-debated contention of many conservative analysts that the tax cuts will boost economic growth so much over time that the resulting increase in taxes paid will offset much or all of the initial loss in government revenue -- that tax cuts can essentially pay for themselves.

Stay tuned; tomorrow the Department of Agriculture will reveal that rain makes the corn grow.

Ann Coulter has a new gig -- she's a psychologist. Not only that, she's an expert in latent homosexuality.

A couple of small newspapers have dropped Ann Coulter's column over the past few weeks. Maybe those who haven't yet should check out Wonkette's transcript of Coulter's appearance this week on Donny Deutsch's show.

Under prodding from Deutsch, Coulter repeated on the air something she had told him just before the cameras went on: She thinks Bill Clinton is at least a little bit gay. Her evidence? Well, all those sexual relations he's had with women, of course. "I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality," Coulter explained.

Coulter, who said she was "glued" to the Kenneth Starr report about the president, claimed that Clinton didn't know Monica Lewinsky's name "until their sixth sexual encounter," and she finds something "of the bathhouse about that." "It's reminiscent of a bathhouse," she said. "It's just this obsession with your own -- with your own essence."

Deutsch -- the reasonable one in this particular conversation -- asked whether it's possible that Clinton might be "narcissistic" or a "nymphomaniac" without being gay. "Well," Coulter responded, "there is something narcissistic about homosexuality, right? Because you're in love with someone who looks like you. I'm not breaking new territory here. Why are you looking at me like that?"

He's looking at you like that because he's just figured out that you're as crazy as a boxful of birds.

What's the one song or piece of music that makes you smile and forget the cares of the day? Is there more than one?

I have several, but you go first.

Update: My number one is "Surfin' USA," followed by "Fun, Fun, Fun."

I'm so glad that with the Middle East going up in flames, hundreds of people dying in Iraq in what has evolved into a civil war, North Korea building missiles, Iran funding Hezbollah's rockets into Israel, gasoline over $3 a gallon, and FEMA still trying to explain why they bought a microbrewry as a part of Hurricane Katrina recovery, the United States Senate finds more important things to worry about than any of that.

The Senate passed legislation Tuesday that would make it a federal crime to help an under-age girl escape parental notification laws by crossing state lines to obtain an abortion.

The bill was approved on a 65-to-34 vote, with 14 Democrats joining 51 Republicans in favor.

A similar measure passed the House last year, and President Bush said he would sign the legislation if the two chambers could work out their differences and send a final bill to him.

In a statement, Mr. Bush said that “transporting minors across state lines to bypass parental consent laws regarding abortion undermines state law and jeopardizes the lives of young women.”

"Jeopardizes the lives of young women?" Explain that to me. Unless they're going to a back-alley abortionist in another state, I'm not sure how the life of the woman is endangered other than the chances she might get hurt in a car wreck on the way. All medical procedures carry some risk, but...?

Regardless of the pros or cons of this legislation, how is this, along with the gay-marriage and flag-burning amendments, not just another part of the Republican plan to attempt to pass laws to curry favor with the right wing?

How does this law not violate one of the fundamental tenets of conservatism -- trusting the states to enforce their own laws and reduce the interference of the federal government into the private lives of the citizenry? Or does that not matter if it means the RNC can rake in some cash?

And if it truly is a matter of being "pro-life," why is it that the president and the Senate can back this kind of legislation as yet another attempt to ban abortion, but they are not willing to shut down in-vitro fertilization clinics where hundreds of thousands of fertilized embryos are destroyed in the process? After all, if a fertilized egg is just as much a human being as a full-term fetus, as the president seemed to be saying last week when he vetoed the embryonic stem-cell research bill, why are the so-called pro-lifers not up in arms about that? Life is life, right?

The problem is that it's really hard to make a 30-second campaign spot with a Petri dish full of little snowflake blastocysts.

I'm passing this story along as purely informational. I have no actual experience in owning an iPod, and I've only used one once or twice. I hear they can be quite entertaining when they work properly.

The iPod is invaluable in the everyday lives of millions. We name our iPods, coddle them, buy cases for them, insure them and sing their praises—until they break down.

Then we curse them, throw them, mock them and spread the bad word—before buying our next one.

And the cycle repeats.

"When they're working, they're great," said Tim Vargo, an early adopter who is on his fourth iPod. "But I've had the Nano for four or five months, so now I'm really getting to the point where I'm waiting for it to screw up."

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence calling out Apple's portable media player as a faulty device on many counts. The company has acknowledged some problems, offering subsidized replacements for faulty batteries of certain-generation iPods and free replacements to the easily cracked and scratched screens of some Nanos.

However, based on anecdotal evidence and online forums of iPod users, other problems remain. Exact repair/replacement numbers are unknown; those are controlled by Apple.

But Apple maintains that failure rates are low.

An Apple spokeswoman, Natalie Kerris, said iPods have a failure rate of less than 5 percent, which she said is "fairly low" compared with other consumer electronics. "The vast majority of our customers are extremely happy with their iPods," she said, adding that an iPod is designed to last four years.

So, readers, what's your experience been with these gadgets? How long do they last before going kablooie?

Garrison Keillor blames homosexuality on global warming.

Cold weather stimulates a man. A little-known fact. The temperature drops and snow falls and men feel the primal urge to hurl themselves into the teeth of the storm and rescue the livestock, but after a week of temperatures in the 100s those same men become fascinated with fabrics and window treatments and recipes involving fava beans and minced scallions. A man who on a bitterly cold day would squat on the ice and fish through a hole now is wearing yellow shorts and flip-flops with rhinestones on the straps, and preparing a salad with endive and sliced pear and walnuts and gorgonzola, and when his wife puts her arms around him and blows in his ear, he thinks, "What is that supposed to mean?"

The rise in homosexuality coincided with global warming. Look it up. Back when winter was winter, gay guys lived in Key West and New Orleans and Santa Monica. They like to show off their legs and keep tan, that's why. It's a proven fact. Warming trends enabled the tribe to move into Massachusetts. The way to fend off gay marriage is to reduce carbon emissions. And also to reverse the flow of people to the Southwest.

Retirees head for the Arizona desert, and before you know it, you've got old coots in love relationships who, had they remained in Minnesota, would've sat in the Legion club drinking bourbon and Seven and griped about the cold and kept their hands off each other.

Northern blue states get less government spending than Southern reds. The more people receive from the government, the more anti-government they become. You have to wonder if some of that Southern Republican crankiness isn't the result of confusion about sexual orientation. Why so fixated on gays and gay marriage, if not because you're spending a lot of time on personal grooming and shopping for throw rugs and accent pieces, and you need to fend off the suspicions of your supporters?

And what is one to think of the Current Occupant spending his August break in Texas? Does his speech sound more sibilant these days? I am only asking a question. This is not meant to be negative in any way. It's not enough to outlaw gay marriage. We need to beat back the lavender tide by paying Americans to live in the Northern low-gay tier of states, a frost subsidy of, say, $10,000 per year. Plus generous disaster benefits for blizzards and cold snaps. If we give blizzards names (Astrid, Bjorn, Christina, Dagmar) and plump up the casualty list with the week's coronaries and get good TV coverage (sideways-blowing snow, people hunkered down at bus stops, raggedy girls selling matches on street corners), we could get FEMA to slip us a few billion. Grow North Dakota and gay rates go down. It's a fact.

Chapter 36 of Small Town Boys has been posted at Bobby Cramer and mirrored at The Practical Press.

Tony Snow backed off -- and apologized -- for putting words in the president and Chief of Staff Josh Bolten's mouths that embryonic stem-cell research is "murder".

Snow: I overstepped my brief there, and so I created a little trouble for Josh Bolten in the interview. And I feel bad about it. I think there's concern. The president has said that he believes that this is the destruction of human life ...

The president certainly does not oppose stem cell research. But he does find -- he does have objections with spending federal money on something that is morally objectionable to many Americans. I will go ahead and apologize for having overstated -- I guess, overstated the president's position.

Well, good for Tony Snow. I can't imagine Scott McClellan doing something like that. But then he steps into more uncharted -- or unbriefed -- waters:

Question: And the corollary question that's emerged on Capitol Hill and elsewhere is, if it is murder, do you then shut down in vitro fertilization clinics?

Snow: Well, as you know, they're not the recipients of federal money. We're talking about the use of federal money on things that are morally -- that some people consider morally objectionable and some do not. It's one of the reasons why, as you know, we've allowed states to make their own decisions. And a number of them have, in terms of assigning states' resources for use in embryonic stem cell research.

Hmm. As Tim Grieve wonders over at Salon.com, if it's wrong to outlaw some things that some people find morally objectionable, than what's up with advocating a federal ban on gay marriage or internet gambling? (Maybe they ought to check with Bill Bennett on that.) Or why do they think it's appropriate to interfere with states' rights over issues like medical marijuana or Oregon's assisted suicide laws?

My guess is that the White House knows that they're on the losing end of the stem-cell debate, and now they're trying to extricate themselves from it. Damned if they do -- the rumbles on the right are already being heard -- and damned if they don't because they come across as being heartless and cruel to the sick and the ill for the sake of an embryo that will end up in the dumpster anyway. They're finding out that defending an abstract moral idea is a lot harder when you have to look Nancy Reagan or Michael J. Fox in the face.

(PS: The last time I "overstepped my brief," I tripped and hit my head on the dresser. Hurt like hell.)

Former Vice President Dan ("Potatoe") Quayle made the news recently when he walked out of a John Mellencamp concert when Mr. Mellencamp made a derisive comment about the Bush administration.

Have you ever walked out of a live event like a play or a concert? Why?

In my case, the only thing I can ever remember leaving without seeing it through was a production of Hamlet with Dame Judith Anderson in the title role. (I'm not kidding -- she really did it in a touring production in the early 1970's.) I left at intermission; not sure that counts as "walking out."

Charlie Pierce notes that when the Republicans gave Sen. Bob Smith of New Hampshire the heave-ho back in 2002 after he had a hissy-fit about Republican orthodoxy, there wasn't all this talk about the earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting, defining-moment for the GOP that there is going on about the Democrats and Lieberman/Lamont primary race going on in Connecticut.

That may have more to do with the fact that Bob Smith was a bit of a whacko and an unapologetic opportunist. He briefly stomped out of the Republican party to run for president as an "independent" in the Pat Buchanan mold, but when Sen. John Chaffee of Rhode Island died in office and a seat opened up on an influential committee, Smith hurriedly rejoined the Republicans in order to get that place. When Mr. Smith lost his primary race to John Sununu, Jr., he moved to Florida and tried to run for the Senate in 2004.

As Mr. Pierce points out, the only difference between the two is that "Bob Smith was infinitely less insufferable, and manifestly more fun, than Joe Lieberman ever was." That and -- for me, at least -- there's no escaping the fact that Sen. Lieberman sounds exactly like the guy who played the dad on ALF.

From The Australian:

NOBEL peace laureate Betty Williams displayed a flash of her feisty Irish spirit yesterday, lashing out at US President George W.Bush during a speech to hundreds of schoolchildren.
Campaigning on the rights of young people at the Earth Dialogues forum, being held in Brisbane, Ms Williams spoke passionately about the deaths of innocent children during wartime, particularly in the Middle East, and lambasted Mr Bush.

"I have a very hard time with this word 'non-violence', because I don't believe that I am non-violent," said Ms Williams, 64.

"Right now, I would love to kill George Bush." Her young audience at the Brisbane City Hall clapped and cheered.

"I don't know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die the anger in me is just beyond belief. It's our duty as human beings, whatever age we are, to become the protectors of human life."

Ms Williams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize 30 years ago, when she circulated a petition to end violence in Northern Ireland after witnessing British soldiers shoot dead an IRA member who was driving a car. He veered on to the footpath, killing two children from one family instantly and fatally injuring a third.

As much as I wish Mr. Bush had stuck with the oil business or owning a baseball team, Ms. Williams goes beyond the pale. At some point extremism -- regardless of the nobility of the cause -- takes on a weird life of its own. As the old saying goes, killing for the sake of peace is like fucking for the sake of chastity.

On the other hand, she could always get a job as a newspaper columnist or talk-radio host.

E.J. Dionne notes that a number of Republicans in tight Senate races are showing how they bring home the bacon and seem to forget to mention what party they're in.

Okay, all incumbents brag. But from Craney Island, Va., to Cedarville, Ohio, to Pompey's Pillar in Montana, most Republican senators in tight races want to get your mind off that irrelevant stuff -- you know, President Bush, Iraq, the deficit, oil prices -- and on to those nice little things they've gotten that terrible, horrible, no good, very bad big government to do for you.

And if you can forget just this once that they're Republicans and instead see them as, say independent fighters, that would be nice, too.

The new Republican mantra is, "George W. Bush? Yeah, I've heard of the guy..."

From the Miami Herald:

A federal judge on Monday ordered all copies of Vamos a Cuba and 23 other children's books returned to Miami-Dade school libraries, hobbling the School Board's attempt to ban the controversial books.

In a sometimes scathing 89-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Alan Gold said the School Board "abused its discretion in a manner that violated the transcendent imperatives of the First Amendment."

His ruling was not final, but the preliminary injunction will apply while the American Civil Liberties Union and Student Government Association continue their lawsuit against the School Board. Depending on the board's response, that could be weeks or years.

"What the board did was so clearly wrong, factually and legally," said Randall Marshall, legal director for the ACLU of Florida, referring to the board's June vote to remove the 24 titles from all school libraries.

Gold said the books must be on shelves by Monday. District spokesman Joseph Garcia said most would be returned today and the rest by the end of this week.

Because Gold's ruling so strongly embraced the ACLU's arguments, the group's director urged the district to drop its defense and stop fighting for the ban.

"They can end this failed crusade," Executive Director Howard Simon said. "Any further pennies spent by the [district] would be irresponsible."

[...]

In his opinion, Gold rejected nearly every aspect of the district's defense. Quoting from transcripts of recent School Board meetings, he said the board members were more concerned with politics than pedagogy.

"The quintessential right of freedom of speech may not be sacrificed on the altar of beliefs no matter how firmly those beliefs are held," he wrote. "In this nation, we do not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because some in the community find it offensive or disagreeable."

Most of the six board members who voted to remove the books said inaccuracies, not ideology, drove their decision. One line of text they objected to reads: "People in Cuba eat, work and go to school like you do."

Board members said that statement ignores food shortages, forced labor and educational indoctrination.

Gold, however, rejected that explanation. "I conclude that the School Board's claim on 'inaccuracies' is a guise and pretext for 'political orthodoxy,' " he wrote.

[...]

But the broader issue of appropriate library books is likely to linger -- two complaints were filed last week about another book, Cuban Kids. If that book moves through the appeals process at the same speed Vamos a Cuba did, it would reach the School Board this fall, just weeks before some board members face reelection.

Simon said the board should adopt a policy of responding to controversial material by purchasing other material with different viewpoints, instead of imposing bans.

"This is a simple solution," he said. "Buy more books."

Basically this story is more about who can get more votes for the upcoming school board elections and the race for the state senate than is has to do with whether or not kids in Cuba eat, work, and go to school "like you do." (So far no one has been able to show that people in Cuba don't eat, work, or go to school "like you do." What, they suck food in through their ears?)

When someone says, "It's not the money, it's the principle of the thing," of course it's about the money. In this case it's rapidly becoming clear that to some members of the school board when they say "It's for the kids," they mean it's for them and their political ambitions.

This story has been followed closely by Herald education reporter Matthew I. Pinzur, who also writes the blog Miami Gradebook.

Sen. Arlen Specter defends his surveillance bill that he's proposing to legalize the warrantless wiretapping program put in place by the Bush administration, and in doing so basically admits that the United States Senate is irrelevant in the eyes of the Bush administration.

President Bush's electronic surveillance program has been a festering sore on our body politic since it was publicly disclosed last December. Civil libertarians, myself included, have insisted that the program must be subject to judicial review to ensure compliance with the Fourth Amendment.

The president has insisted that he was acting lawfully within his constitutional responsibilities. On its face, the program seems contrary to the plain text of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which regulates domestic national security wiretapping. The president argues, however, that his inherent constitutional powers supersede the statute. Without knowing the exact contours of the program, it's impossible to say whether he is right or wrong. But three federal appeals court decisions suggest the president may be right.

[...]

My bill, the result of months of negotiation with the administration, accomplishes this goal by authorizing consideration of the program by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), the court created under FISA to consider warrant applications. The FISC has the expertise to handle this question. Its closed proceedings and unblemished record for not leaking would make full consideration both possible and secure. Not only would the bill permit a determination of the program's legality but if it were found unlawful in whole or in part, a framework would exist for modifying the program.

[...]

The negotiations with administration officials and the president himself were fierce. The president understandably rejected a statutory mandate to submit his program to FISC, on the grounds that such a mandate could weaken the presidency institutionally by binding his successors. Indeed, such a mandate might not withstand a future president's contention that it unconstitutionally limited his Article II powers to conduct surveillance without court approval. The president, however, did personally commit to submitting this program for court review should the bill pass. Even without a legal mandate, his sending this program to the FISC would be a powerful precedent to be considered by future presidents.

President Bush's record of seeking to expand Article II power has been a hallmark of his administration. The president and vice president have vociferously argued that the administration had the authority for the program without any judicial review. Bush's personal commitment to submit his program to FISC is therefore a major breakthrough.

Yes, I guess you could consider it a breakthrough to get a president to actually obey the law.

There are two problems here as I see it. The first is idea of crafting legislation without a full investigation of the program that the legislation would regulate. The Bush administration has been uncooperative and contemptuous of the Senate's attempts to find out exactly what it was that the NSA was doing, and they have been disdainful to the point of mockery of the oversight role that the legislative branch is constitutionally empowered to do. "Trust us" has so far proven to be a problematic axiom for this administration. So how can the Senate be expected to come up with any kind of bill that would effectively protect the rights of the citizens and still produce the needed evidence against our enemies if they have no real idea of what the administration has done or has planned for the future?

The second problem is that it is no secret that the Bush administration would like to roll back the post-Watergate reforms that were put in place to reign in and monitor the powers that Richard Nixon assumed were his and which he abused to go after his political enemies. (Vice President Cheney especially has been chafing to get back into the imperial presidency business, which is ironic because if it wasn't for Watergate and Nixon's resignation, Dick Cheney wouldn't have had a post in the Ford administration, which launched his career.)

The Bush administration would like to take the most liberal view of Article II not just to fight the war on terra but to restore the glory of the president's supreme power over the rest of the government. Oddly, the post-Watergate reforms and oversight didn't seem to hinder two previous Republican administrations -- Reagan and Bush I -- in the faithful execution of their duties, and in yet another irony, the Republican party has always been the champion of smaller government and more freedom for the people. They also insist that the Senate and the House have a part to play in crafting laws carefully and wisely in order to insure that the rights of the people are not infringed. Remember what happened when the Clinton administration proposed changes to the anti-terror laws after Oklahoma City?

In the end, Sen. Specter says, hey, whatever they want is fine with me.

In my opinion, it is intolerable to let this matter drift indefinitely. If someone has a better idea for legislation that would resolve the program's legality or can negotiate a better compromise with the president, I will be glad to listen.

Which is a polite way of saying to the White House, "I'm your bitch."

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) is beating the crap out of the Republicans in terms of fundraising for his re-election campaign, but he's still going for the big bucks, knowing what the Republicans have done in the past.

"I take nothing for granted," Nelson said in an interview last week at the Capitol. "I run scared as a jack rabbit, and to use another colloquialism, I'm running loaded for bear. We want to be prepared for whatever is thrown at me."

It might be a good idea for him to take some of that money and hire a Director of Metaphors.

One speech to the NAACP doesn't make up for six years of neglect, unintended or otherwise.

Ken Blackwell, the Republican candidate for governor in Ohio, is in deep trouble. He's 20 points behind in the most recent polls, and he's driving away moderate and independent voters with his unabashed support of a strong dose of Christianist rhetoric in his campaign. Walter Shapiro interviews both Blackwell and his Democratic opponent, Rep. Ted Strickland, in Salon.

Not too long ago, Republicans had a dream of confounding the racial contours of American politics by electing conservative African-Americans as the governors of Ohio and Pennsylvania (former pro football great Lynn Swann, also trailing by double digits in most polls). Prejudice appears to have little to do with Blackwell's political problems, since as he proudly notes he soundly defeated his white primary challenger, Attorney General Jim Petro. Asked about Blackwell in an interview earlier this month, GOP national chairman Ken Mehlman said, "Voters want change in that state ... and Ken Blackwell, through his biography, his record of accomplishment and his platform, radiates change."

Strickland, who represents a sprawling Appalachian district that hugs Ohio's eastern border, comes into this race with two overwhelming advantages -- he is a Democrat in a state where the Republicans have become synonymous with corruption and, most of all, he is not Ken Blackwell. As Mike Curtin, the associate publisher of the Dispatch and an expert on Ohio politics, said, "I don't know when in modern Ohio history that we've elected someone as ideological as Ken Blackwell. Instead, we've elected dull, pragmatic governors."

But since he's the Secretary of State -- the office responsible for counting the votes in the state -- he may be counting on a miracle of a more secular kind.

...what makes Blackwell unusual among ideologues is that he has brought to the quotidian task of serving as Ohio's chief election official for the last eight years the thumb-on-the-scale partisanship of a Tom DeLay. Blackwell professed to see no inherent conflict during the 2004 election between simultaneously serving as secretary of state and co-chairman of Bush's Ohio campaign. As the arbiter of election rules, Blackwell issued a series of rulings that limited the use of provisional ballots, a tactic that undermined traditionally Democratic inner-city voters. At one point, until he finally rescinded it, Blackwell tried to maintain the absurd position that only voter-registration forms on heavyweight 80-pound paper would be accepted. And this year, Blackwell has interpreted an ambiguously worded state statute so that everyone registering new voters theoretically risks a felony conviction if they give the forms to any outside group to be handed in.

As Mr. Mehlman noted, the voters in Ohio do want change. The problem may be that since the Republicans have been running the state for the last decade or so, the change they have in mind is not exactly what he had in mind. Taking no chances, Blackwell's supporters are already ramping up the Swift Boat-style campaign against Mr. Strickland.

Ohio has always been a sort of bellwether state for national trends, and if the governorship and Senate seat switch to the Democrats -- polls also have incumbent GOP Mike DeWine in trouble -- that could be the canary in the mineshaft for the GOP.

Pick One: Florida Democrats have two candidates running for governor that would be the perfect candidate -- if they were one person.

The Democratic contest for governor pits a guy better suited for the Sept. 5 primary against a guy more cut out for the Nov. 7 general election.

Jim Davis is a U.S. Congressman from Tampa -- a populous and influential region that will boost his statewide tally among Democrats. He's got better poll numbers, more money and establishment Democrats such as former Gov. Bob Graham on his team.

"This is our government," Davis said last week when he qualified for the ballot in Republican-controlled Tallahassee. "This does not belong to a party. It does not belong to special interests. This is the year that we take back our state."

Rod Smith, a state senator from small-town, rural Alachua in northern Florida, may seem too country for liberal primary voters. But his law-and-order background, conservative roots and electric oratory could make him competitive against a Republican in a general election.

"I'll do what I did when I ran for state attorney and state senate," he told supporters during a statewide bus tour last week. "I'll take a Republican seat -- and this time it will be the governor's mansion."

[...]

Polls show education and insurance weigh on voters' minds, and both Democrats have put those issues at the forefront of their campaigns. Both pledge to raise teacher salaries by repealing Bush's tax cuts and to overhaul his plan that grades schools based on test scores.

"The FCAT [Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test] has become the be-all, end-all of the public-school system," Smith tells nearly every crowd. "The role of the public-school system is not to prepare you for one test. It's to prepare you for life."

They also decry the failure of the GOP-dominated state government to control insurance costs. Smith recently visited a disabled veteran in Pensacola whose home was wrecked nearly two years ago by Hurricane Ivan. Tarp still covers the roof; the windows remain boarded up.

[...]

The winner of the Democratic primary will face the Republican nominee -- either state Attorney General Charlie Crist or state Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher -- on Nov. 7.

May the best Democrat win...

Faith-Based Politics: Frank Rich notes that politics and religion mix it up in the summer heat.

Whatever else is to be said about the Decider, he’s consistent. Having dallied again this summer while terrorism upends the world, he has once more roused himself to take action — on stem cells. His first presidential veto may be bad news for the critically ill, but it was a twofer for the White House. It not only flattered the president’s base. It also drowned out some awkward news: the prime minister he installed in Baghdad, Nuri al-Maliki, and the fractious Parliament of Iraq’s marvelous new democracy had called a brief timeout from their civil war to endorse the sole cause that unites them, the condemnation of Israel.

The news is not all dire, however. While Mr. Bush’s Iraq project threatens to deliver the entire region to Iran’s ayatollahs, this month may also be remembered as a turning point in America’s own religious wars. The president’s politically self-destructive stem-cell veto and the simultaneous undoing of the religious right’s former golden boy, Ralph Reed, in a Republican primary for lieutenant governor in Georgia are landmark defeats for the faith-based politics enshrined by Mr. Bush’s presidency. If we can’t beat the ayatollahs over there, maybe we’re at least starting to rout them here.

Neoflipfloppers: Meanwhile, David Brooks explains that he's now a reformed neocon.

The conservative mansion has many rooms.

In one chamber there are the resurgent Burkeans. These conservatives, led by George F. Will, are suspicious of grand plans to transform regions. They know that societies are infinitely complex organisms, that our ability to understand reality is limited and that efforts to initiate change can produce unintended consequences.

In another chamber are the staunch Churchillians. They know that occasionally civilization is confronted by enemies so ideologically extreme and so greedy for domination that decent nations must use military power to confront and defeat them. So Bill Kristol argues the U.S. has no choice but to strike the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

And these days the conservative mansion is a fractious place. My friend George has decided to go after my friend Bill, and we all look forward to the day when his arguments catch up to his sarcasm.

But I wonder if amid all the din there might be a room, even just a utility closet, for those of us in yet another rightward sect, the neocon incrementalists. Those of us in this burgeoning movement — numbering so far in the low single digits — are squishy Solomons.

[...]

In short, the administration approach embodies a few principles we neoincrementalists hold dear. First, you create policies in accord with your basic values while fully understanding the downside risks — the downside risk in this case being that terrorists may have developed methods that make it nearly impossible for superior military forces to uproot them given the global media environment.

Second, you go to war with the world you have. Right now unilateral actions are politically unsustainable, so everything has to be done through a coalition. And third, statecraft is soulcraft. If you can create circumstances in which democrats win, you can change perceptions and create the momentum for future victories — incrementally.

Gee, he sounds a lot like a certain presidential candidate who got his ass whipped in 2004 for having the nerve to suggest that it might not be a good idea for America to go in guns blazing to every foreign policy decision, or a certain president who endured eight years of jeers for his "appeasement" of terrorists and rogue states. Welcome to the club, David; we're having jackets made.

Life of Brian: It's no secret that one of my favorite groups is The Beach Boys; the sun, the sand, the fun, the cars... you get the idea. Bruce Handy reviews Catch a Wave a new biography of Brian Wilson, one of the founding members, by Peter Ames Carlin.

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ producer and leading songwriter, took a much harder and longer tumble after abandoning “Smile,” the album he had begun working on in the summer of 1966 as a follow-up to the group’s melancholy masterpiece, “Pet Sounds.” As the sessions wore on into 1967, the record, intended as a kind of album-length suite, or, in Wilson’s famous description, “a teenage symphony to God,” began generating impossible-to-justify buzz — this was going to be the record that revolutionized pop, a 12-inch vinyl messiah. Even Leonard Bernstein genuflected, as host of a CBS special on rock. But Wilson, his head cluttered by drugs and blossoming mental illness, began to lose his way in the maze of his own ambition. At the same time, he was trying to fend off his angry band mates — among them his two brothers, Carl and Dennis, and his cousin Mike Love — who saw “Smile” as too sharp a detour from the surf and hot-rod songs that had made them rich. “Don’t mess with the formula” (or more colorful words to that effect) is how this perspective was summed up by Love, the story’s villain, during the recording of “Pet Sounds.” (His image is routinely booed at Wilson’s concerts, as if he were Snidely Whiplash.) Family versus ambition — not the easiest conflict to square, even for those of us who aren’t drug-addled. And so, with perfection still over the horizon, Wilson abandoned “Smile,” in the process becoming a shattered man who would spend the next 20-odd years in a wilderness of insanity and self-indulgence before righting himself and eventually reclaiming his visionary mantle with the triumphant version of “Smile” he finished with a new band in 2004.

Reality, of course, is less romantic than legend, though at times chewier and more interesting. The original “Smile” had some shiveringly beautiful passages, but a lot of the album, judging from bootlegs and official releases, would have been oddly hermetic, the musical equivalent of navel gazing — navel gazing of a high order, but still. The finished version has some nice moments, and presents itself with a veneer of coherence, but you wouldn’t trade it for your copies of “I Get Around” and “California Girls.” Was Mike Love right, then? Nah. But “Smile,” perhaps, is a better story than it is a listen. And as Carlin reminds us, Wilson in real life further muddied the myth of his tragic, spectacular ruin by making plenty of lovely, occasionally even ethereal music after his breakdown, music that was ignored by fans hungering for the history-changing masterwork they couldn’t have.

Sometimes it means something more to know what's behind the creation of art, but sometimes you just want to enjoy the art itself.

Today's our annual car club summer picnic. Here's hoping the rain holds off...

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 8:18 AM  

Howard Kurtz tried to defend himself against the charge that he and the Washington Post have been shocked by bad language from the left side of the blogosphere but blithely ignorant of the carpet-bombing and death threats from the right.

In an online chat the other day, someone got mad at me for saying that there was as much anger toward the media on the left these days as there has always been on the right.

After all, haven't a couple of conservative bomb-throwers said that journalists should be tried, convicted, hung, shot and otherwise disrespected for spilling national security secrets?

True, and I haven't come across any liberal opinion-mongers wishing quite the same fate on card-carrying journalists. But let's not make the mistake of confusing the views of a few extremists with those of everyone on their side of the spectrum.

That may be, but the "few extremists" Mr. Kurtz refers to are, as Glenn Greenwald notes, sites such as Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, and LGF; the A-list of the right-wing. So for Mr. Kurtz to say it's just a "few extremists" is like saying that only one newspaper ran the story about the Bush administration conducting warrantless wiretapping on Americans. The fact that it was The New York Times is, according to him, irrelevant. (But it does matter that "someone got mad" at him, apparently.)

Mr. Kurtz also seems to think that blog-think -- where all bloggers cut-and-paste the same articles and blindly follow their leader -- applies only to the lefties who are all in the thrall of Daily Kos and Atrios, whereas the righties are all independent thinkers; what Michelle Malkin rants about has no connection to the deep thinking of Glen Reynolds. Not only does that fly in the face of the Conventional Wisdom that the Left couldn't organize a one-car parade and the Right marches in lockstep according to Karl Rove (neither of which is reality-based), it indicates that Mr. Kurtz isn't too sure what kind of animal blogging is. He can't seem to decide if we're a swarm of annoying gnats buzzing around the ears of "real journalists" or an emerging force in the shaping of the political and social direction of the nation and the world, and so he avoids the question altogether by citing an article from The Nation that says the left and the right have different objectives when they attack the MSM: the right sees the press as biased against them and the left sees the press as sniveling enablers of the Bushies and therefore the press can't please anybody.

Ironically, Howard wrote all about his in his blog.

John Tierney compares the GOP to Enid Strict:

Republicans are looking like moral Grinches — or, more precisely, the Church Lady, the scold who makes even fellow congregants roll their eyes.

They’re the party whose leader defends the sanctity of embyronic stem cells against scientists trying to cure diseases. They’re the killjoy who stands up to object when a gay couple wants to marry. They’re so shocked by gambling — imagine, Americans betting money! — that the House has just passed a bill outlawing most online wagering, and federal agents have arrested a visiting British executive of a sports-betting operation that is perfectly legal in his country.

Even before there were lottery tickets at gas stations and casinos on reservations, savvy politicians realized that gambling was a vice to be denounced but mostly ignored. They generally didn’t raid bingo nights. They didn’t try to stop people from playing poker in the privacy of their homes, but that’s the hopeless mission undertaken by the righteous right.

[...]

As the baby boomers age, it’s not smart to be known as the party that won’t pay for medical research. It’s not smart to have Michael J. Fox and Nancy Reagan blaming you for blocking cures for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, or to be remembered as the party that ignored Christopher Reeve’s pleas before he died. No matter how moral the Church Lady tries to sound, she’ll never win an argument with Superman in a wheelchair.

Is that Karl Rove... or could it be SATAN?

Paul Krugman on the neocons' still-active role in deciding foreign policy.

Today we call them neoconservatives, but when the first George Bush was president, those who believed that America could remake the world to its liking with a series of splendid little wars — people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — were known within the administration as “the crazies.” Grown-ups in both parties rejected their vision as a dangerous fantasy.

[...]

Would the current crisis on the Israel-Lebanon border have happened even if the Bush administration had actually concentrated on fighting terrorism, rather than using 9/11 as an excuse to pursue the crazies’ agenda? Nobody knows. But it’s clear that the United States would have more options, more ability to influence the situation, if Mr. Bush hadn’t squandered both the nation’s credibility and its military might on his war of choice.

So what happens next?

Few if any of the crazies have the moral courage to admit that they were wrong. Vice President Cheney continues to insist that his two most famous pronouncements about Iraq — his declaration before the invasion that we would be “greeted as liberators” and his assertion a year ago that the insurgency was in its “last throes” — were “basically accurate.”

But if the premise of the Bush doctrine was right, why are things going so badly?

The crazies respond by retreating even further into their fantasies of omnipotence. The only problem, they assert, is a lack of will.

Thus William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, has called for a military strike — an airstrike, since we don’t have any spare ground troops — against Iran.

“Yes, there would be repercussions,” he wrote in his magazine, “and they would be healthy ones.” What would these healthy repercussions be? On Fox News he argued that “the right use of targeted military force” could cause the Iranian people “to reconsider whether they really want to have this regime in power.” Oh, boy.

Mr. Kristol is, of course, a pundit rather than a policymaker. But there’s every reason to suspect that what Mr. Kristol says in public is what Mr. Cheney says in private.

And what about The Decider himself?

For years the self-proclaimed “war president” basked in the adulation of the crazies. Now they’re accusing him of being a wimp. “We have been too weak,” writes Mr. Kristol, “and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak.”

It must taken a certain kind of madness -- or bunker mentality -- to portray this administration as "weak," and I shudder to think what kind of administration would make the crazies happy. It reminds me of the stories of the last days of World War II in Berlin. Hitler blamed the generals for being weak; never giving a thought to the possibility that perhaps there might be some other reason the world was collapsing around him. It was always someone else's fault.

Some new blogs of note here on the blogroll:

Goofyblog

Smashed Frog

Son of Timatollah

Check them out and say hi.

Here's the latest and greatest from The Liberal Coalition.

A Blog Around The Clock revisits a post on Ward Churchill.

All Facts and Opinions shows what's changed now that Massachusetts allows gay marriage.

John at archy pokes his head up to say he's still alive.

Bark Bark Woof Woof on Bush at the NAACP.

blogAmY on the recent heat wave in Boston.

bloggg on Republican tampering with an important piece of autism legislation.

Collective Sigh is in recuperation...best wishes!

NTodd on who blogs.

Echidne has a naive look at power.

FDL keeps up with the Lieberman/Lamont race.

First Draft looks into the NOLA Medical Center deaths.

Happy Furry Puppy has the latest leftie outrages.

iddybud has the podcast of Jimmy Carter and John Edwards.

Left Is Right has something to say about stem-cell research.

Lefty asks the question; are you better off?

Liberty Street on who started the fight in Lebanon.

Make Me a Commentator has been visiting the dark side.

Musing's musings sends in some vacation pictures.

Pen-Elayne discusses last Sunday's Doonesbury.

Rick catches us up with his show schedule.

Rook's Rant on compassion.

rubber hose analyzes our response to the conflict in Lebanon.

Scrutiny Hooligans notes the passing of the Taliban, according to Rumsfeld.

Sooner Thought on a moonlighting cop.

Speedkill on the Bush veto.

Steve Gilliard wonders where the anti-Semitic bloggers are.

T. Rex will interview Alex Sink, Democratic candidate for Florida's Chief Financial Officer today at 1 ET.

The Countess dives into the sex wars.

The Invisible Library celebrated the anniversary of the moon landing with some cool pic links.

WTF Is It Now?? on the DeWine ad.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat on the right's worst nightmare: liberals with money.

...You Are A Tree has a brief history of search engines.

Don't talk with your mouth full.

Now that I have my new passport, Snowball checks out where I could go next.

Update: The flags are from Montserrat, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, Luxembourg, France, Trinidad and Tobago, and Antigua. These were collected from trips that my ex and I took between 1984 and 1999.

I sent in my old passport for renewal back at the beginning of June -- I'm going to Canada this fall and want to be sure I can get across the Ambassador Bridge.

Some friends cautioned me that now that I'm out there in the public eye with a blog that at least five or six people read each day, and since I've made critical comments about the president, getting my passport renewed might lead to a visit from the FBI or someone from the government. (Hey, if he looks like Eric Close on Without a Trace, I'll serve cocktails.)

Well, I got my shiny new passport yesterday. And even the picture looks pretty good (considering the subject). So I guess I'm not on some watch list and I can check that little piece of paranoia off my list.

Of course, they may be just toying with me; letting me go out of the country, but not letting me back in...

President Bush addressed the NAACP today, avoiding the stigma of being the first sitting president since Warren Harding to not do so. He came with a message of apology and a promise to pay more attention to the concerns of the group...and a not-so-subtle plea for votes.

Acknowledging his administration's bumpy relations with black voters, Bush said he wants to change the Republican Party's relationship with African-Americans.

"I understand that racism still lingers in America," Bush said. "It's a lot easier to change a law than to change a human heart. And I understand that many African-Americans distrust my political party.

"I consider it a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historical ties with the African-American community. For too long, my party wrote off the African-American vote, and many African-Americans wrote off the Republican Party."

Bush, joined by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his chief political adviser Karl Rove, spoke as the Senate debated a bill to approve a 25-year extension of expiring provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The House has passed the bill, and the Senate was expected to pass it quickly, propelled by a Republican push to increase the party's credibility with minorities.

Well, wasn't that nice; he brought along Condi to show that he is really down with the black community, and he brought along Karl Rove so that he could get an idea of what a black voter looks like; it might be his only chance to talk to one.

As Tim Grieve notes over at Salon, the president's urging the Senate to renew the Voting Rights Act came just as the Senate started to debate it. Gee, you think there might be some connection between the speech and the vote? Nah... And isn't it interesting that the VRA renewal faced opposition in the House last week from Republicans from the South? So when the president says, "For too long..." he's talking about up until last week.

When I brought up Bush's failure to address the NAACP last year, one of my conservative pals told me that the president had no obligation to speak to a group that was openly "hostile" to him. How times change in a year. It's not that the NAACP has a new leader in the person of Bruce Gordon; it's the fact that the Republicans are polling in the sub-freezing range and they've already pissed off the Hispanic vote. So I wonder how black voters feel about being treated as the last best hope of a party that's floundering? Chances are they were not impressed. Saying "Gee, sorry I've snubbed you for the last five years and I'm desperate for votes" isn't going to cut it. And I'm not so sure they're going to buy into the sermonic assertion from the president that he believes in equal rights for all citizens.

"I come from a family committed to civil rights," Bush said. "My faith tells me that we are all children of God -- equally loved, equally cherished, equally entitled to the rights He grants us all."

(Unless you're gay. Then all bets are off.)

I certainly don't think President Bush is a racist. I just think he's indifferent to people who aren't of interest to him as political assets.

The GOP is having another BTYFO* moment.

Faced with almost daily reports of sectarian carnage in Iraq, congressional Republicans are shifting their message on the war from speaking optimistically of progress to acknowledging the difficulty of the mission and pointing up mistakes in planning and execution.

[...]

...[F]reshman Sen. John Thune (S.D.) told reporters at the National Press Club that if he were running for reelection this year, "you obviously don't embrace the president and his agenda."

"The first thing I'd do is acknowledge that there have been mistakes made," Thune said.

[...]

"It's like after Katrina, when the secretary of homeland security was saying all those people weren't really stranded when we were all watching it on TV," said Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-N.C.). "I still hear about that. We can't look like we won't face reality."

Yeah, but watch out; life in the Reality-Based community is pretty brutal. These guys going to have to explain to Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and the rest of the Bush Amen chorus why they're suddenly turning into traitors because they've figured out that -- horrors! -- the administration really screwed the pooch on the war and every other thing it touched.

C'mon; what's more important? Backing the president without question or winning an election?

*'Bout Time You Found Out.

The Chicago Tribune calls out Karl Rove for misstating the truth about stem-cell research.

When White House political adviser Karl Rove signaled last week that President Bush planned to veto the stem cell bill being considered by the Senate, the reasons he gave went beyond the president's moral qualms with research on human embryos.

In fact, Rove waded into deeply contentious scientific territory, telling the Denver Post's editorial board that researchers have found "far more promise from adult stem cells than from embryonic stem cells."

The administration's assessment of stem cell science has extra meaning in the wake of the Senate's 63-37 vote Tuesday to expand federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. The measure, which passed the House last year, will now head to Bush, who has vowed to veto it.

But Rove's negative appraisal of embryonic stem cell research--echoed by many opponents of funding for such research--is inaccurate, according to most stem cell research scientists, including a dozen contacted for this story.

The field of stem cell medicine is too young and unproven to make such judgments, experts say. Many of those researchers either specialize in adult stem cells or share Bush's moral reservations about embryonic stem cells.

"[Rove's] statement is just not true," said Dr. Michael Clarke, associate director of the stem cell institute at Stanford University, who in 2003 published the first study showing how adult stem cells replenish themselves.

If opponents of embryonic stem cell research object on moral grounds, "I'm willing to live with that," Clarke said, though he disagrees. But, he said, "I'm not willing to live with statements that are misleading."

I'm shocked -- SHOCKED -- to find that Karl Rove is making shit up about something he doesn't know anything about for the sake of political expediency. What's next? Why, the next thing you know, he'll be leaking classified information to the press to exact revenge for someone embarrassing the president in print.

Bravo TV (which is owned by NBC) has a site called Brilliant But Cancelled in honor of great TV shows that never found their market...while crap like Yes, Dear went on for six (!) seasons. In the catalogue include shows like EZ Streets starring Joe Pantoliano, and Delvecchio starring Judd Hirsch.

I have a couple of nominees to add to the list, including Bay City Blues by producer Steven Bochco ("Hill Street Blues"), the story of a minor league baseball team; Going to Extremes by Joshua Brand ("St. Elsewhere"), about a group of students at a medical school on a Caribbean island, and Buddy Faro, about a detective who is a throw-back to the Rat Pack. All of them were well-written, well-acted, and never found an audience; Bay City Blues lasted all of four episodes.

So, what's your nominee for the Brilliant-But-Cancelled list?

The two Republican candidates for governor in Florida disagree about stem-cell research.

State Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher aligned himself with President Bush and praised the decision of the president to veto a stem-cell research bill sent to him by the Republican-controlled Congress.

"I applaud the president for showing political courage today and following through on a promise he made to the millions of Americans who elected him, in part, because of his leadership on life issues," Gallagher said. "Embryonic stem-cell research is an unnecessary practice which results in the destruction of human embryos. It is wrong to use taxpayer dollars to fund scientific research which destroys human life."

State Attorney General Charlie Crist, however, said he "would have voted" for the bill passed earlier this week by the U.S. Senate and said he "respectfully" disagreed with Bush's decision to veto the measure.

Asked by a reporter Wednesday if he applauded Bush's veto, Crist interjected: "I actually applaud Nancy Reagan," a reference to the former first lady's effort to promote embryonic stem-cell research.

[...]

Gallagher said he would never support the use of state money for embryonic stem-cell research. And a spokesman for Gallagher said Crist's backing of the bill vetoed by the president illustrates Gallagher's contention that Crist is not a real conservative, citing as an example Crist's support to keep intact the class size amendment that the governor wants repealed.

"It's just another example of Charlie Crist breaking ranks with Jeb Bush, the president and other Republicans," said Gallagher spokesman Alberto Martinez. "He absolutely wants to take the party in another direction."

Far be it from me to give advice to a Republican on how to run a winning campaign, but if Mr. Gallagher wants to line up with the 45% of the electorate who approve of President Bush, who am I to tell him different? Not to mention the fact that a lot of conservatives aren't too happy with the brand of "conservativism" Mr. Bush is practicing. Most of them are desperately seeking someone who wants to take the party in another direction.

Add to that the fact that a large number of Floridians are senior citizens who might be a little more concerned about finding treatments for Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and any number of other life-threatening ailments that could be treated or cured through the use of stem-cells than they are about a Petri dish of embryos that were destined to be thrown out anyway. Mr. Gallagher can talk in the abstract all he wants about the "sanctity of human life" (and in the process not understand the first thing about biology), but when it comes down to real life situations, he would rather suck up to the Christianists of Lower Alabama for their vote than do anything about the people who are literally dying because of the ignorance of people like him.

Not that Charlie Crist is any better, but I'll give him credit for at least having the courage -- in this case -- to consider doing the right thing in a purely hypothetical situation. Yeah, that takes real guts.

Today is July 20. Several things occurred on this date in history.

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong of Wapakoneta, Ohio, became the first man to step on the moon. He was followed a few moments later by Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. Command Module pilot Michael Collins remained in orbit.

So, where were you 37 years ago today? I was 16 and in up at my grandmother's house on the shore of Grand Traverse Bay where we watched the landing on her Zenith black-and-white TV.


(HT to Why Now.)

The Old Professor celebrates a birthday today and is doing so by seeing some shows on Broadway, including Jersey Boys. I won't be tacky and tell you outright how old he is, but if he was a fabled highway, he'd be getting his kicks.

On July 20, 2002, Sam died. I still miss the little guy, but he had a wonderful life and gave back unconditional love and companionship. What more can one ask?

I can't cut and paste this rant against the veto of the stem cell by President Bush. It's too good.

To echo what John at AMERICAblog says to the conservatives, it's *'bout time you found out that George W. Bush isn't a conservative.

Conservative intellectuals and commentators who once lauded Bush for what they saw as a willingness to aggressively confront threats and advance U.S. interests said in interviews that they perceive timidity and confusion about long-standing problems including Iran and North Korea, as well as urgent new ones such as the latest crisis between Israel and Hezbollah.

[...]

Most of the most scathing critiques of the administration from erstwhile supporters are being expressed within think tanks and in journals and op-ed pages followed by a foreign policy elite in Washington and New York.

But the Bush White House has always paid special attention to the conversation in these conservative circles. Many of the administration's signature ideas -- regime change in Iraq, and special emphasis on military "preemption" and democracy building around the globe -- first percolated within this intellectual community. In addition, these voices can be a leading indicator of how other conservatives from talk radio to Congress will react to policies.

As the White House listens to what one official called the "chattering classes," it hears a level of disdain from its own side of the ideological spectrum that would have been unthinkable a year ago. It is an odd irony for a president who has inflamed liberals and many allies around the world for what they see as an overly confrontational, go-it-alone approach. The discontent on the right could also color the 2008 presidential debate.

This must be especially galling to those conservatives who grew up in the 1950's and '60's who believed conservatives believed in smaller government, balanced budgets, keeping out of foreign entanglements, and were deeply suspicious of anything that looked like government intrusion into a citizen's privacy. They believed in state's rights and resented the idea of federal intrusion into local issues. They sneered at the idea of the "nanny state" and trusted citizens to police their own morals without cluttering up the Constitution; they had learned their lesson well after the Prohibition amendment. Religion was a private matter between a person and his God, not something to be waved around like a tacky boa at a drag show, and political debate was still a matter of civil discourse, not an invitation to a night of mud-wrestling. The true conservative didn't believe in a cult of personality, either; they put their country and its laws above the political fortunes of one president and knew that if they disagreed with him they could speak up.

Now the "conservative" label has been co-opted by a bunch of radicals who have expanded the government far beyond the dreams of any New Dealer, turned a budget surplus into a monstrous deficit, put a new face on international imperialism, and routinely taken liberties with the most cherished right of citizens; the right to be left alone. Anyone who disagrees with the president is a traitor and their lives and reputation are put at risk for the sake of political vengence. Anyone who doubts the infallibility of the president is viewed with suspicion. As we've recently learned, the president is always right.

No wonder the real conservatives are angry. Not only has their movement been hijacked, their well has been poisoned by this administration and its minions for the next generation of conservatives who will, like the Democrats after 1972, have to start all over again to earn the trust of the centrist voters who make up the vast majority of the electorate. And take it from someone who's been down it, it's a long and winding road. Happy trails.

Finally a touch -- but only a touch -- of sanity from the House on the matter of gay marriage.

House Republicans failed Tuesday in an effort to pass a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, part of a proposed “values agenda” that they hope will rally voters in midterm elections in November.

The vote was 237 to 187, with one member voting “present,” well short of the two-thirds majority needed to amend the Constitution.

The vote was largely symbolic because the Senate rejected a similar bill in May. But the amendment’s supporters said they were gaining in their efforts to define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman, a move necessary to “safeguard the American family” and block “radical” judges from promoting same-sex marriage.

Those "radical" judges have, in the last two weeks, reinstated the gay-marriage ban in Nebraska, allowed the Massachusetts Senate to consider a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in the only state that so far allows it, and allowed the ballot measure on the same issue in Tennessee to go forward. Some radicals.

But the bigots will not be dissuaded. In fact, they think that gay marriage is as important as the fight against terrorism.

The Democrats accused Republicans of raising the issue even as they ignored what the Democrats said were more pressing problems, including the war in Iraq, an expanding conflict in the Middle East, high gasoline prices and North Korean missile tests.

But Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, said the marriage issue was “just as important and a top-tier issue as any of those.”

Another Georgia Republican, Representative Phil Gingrey, said support for traditional marriage “is perhaps the best message we can give to the Middle East and all the trouble they’re having over there right now.”

Huh? The best message we can send to a bunch of theocratic terrorists is that there are a bunch of snivelling homophobic bigots in the United States House of Representatives? I'm sure that's a real morale booster to Hezbolllah and Osama bin Laden; we're just as nutsy-cuckoo about queers as they are.

According to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, President Bush blocked the Justice Department from investigating the warrantless wiretapping within the agency itself. From the National Journal:

The investigation, by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, was halted when lawyers who were going to conduct the investigation were denied the security clearances that would have allowed them to view classified documents related to the surveillance program. President Bush made the decision to deny the security clearances for the investigators, Gonzales said in his testimony today.

"The president of the United States makes the decision," Gonzales said in response to a question by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who wanted to know who denied the clearances to the investigators.

It's one thing when the White House doesn't want the Congress -- or the press -- to know about their secret activities, but when they try to keep it from their own people in their own Justice Department, we're skating into the wonderful world of Nixonian paranoia.

It will be interesting to hear the response from the righties who raised such a stink over the FBI files in the basement of the Clinton White House or the Travelgate episode. I'm sure they will be all over this, demanding that a special counsel be appointed to look into this blatant attempt to cover up illegal activities by the president. Right?

[crickets]

From Maureen Dowd:

“In many regards, the Bush I knew did not seem to be built for what lay ahead,’’ wrote Frank Bruni, the Times writer who covered W.’s ascent, in his book “Ambling Into History.” “The Bush I knew was part scamp and part bumbler, a timeless fraternity boy and heedless cutup, a weekday gym rat and weekend napster, an adult with an inner child that often brimmed to the surface or burst through.”

The open-microphone incident at the G-8 lunch in St. Petersburg on Monday illustrated once more that W. never made any effort to adapt. The president has enshrined his immaturity and insularity, turning every environment he inhabits — no matter how decorous or serious — into a comfortable frat house.

No matter what the trappings or the ceremonies require of the leader of the free world, he brings the same DKE bearing and cadences, the same insouciance and smart-alecky attitude, the same simplistic approach — swearing, swaggering, talking to Tony Blair with his mouth full of buttered roll, and giving a startled Angela Merkel an impromptu shoulder rub. He can make even a global summit meeting seem like a kegger.

So this is what Mr. Bush meant when he said he would "restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office?"

In true frat house fashion, Mr. Bush has risen to prominence not on his own merits but on his connections, and just as the frat house bully has a couple of well-muscled football player buddies around to intimidate his opponents and bribe the geeks to do his homework for him, the president leaves the hard work to them while he par-tays with the babes and dudes.

Why is anyone surprised at this? The president has always showed that he has the attention span of a sugared-up six year old -- "We must fight evil-doers! Oh, look at the kitty!" -- and we all knew that eventually he would get bored with the job. Just like every other job he's had -- failed oil company executive, baseball team partner, governor -- he'd wander off, leaving someone else to clean up after him.

The problem is that he still has two years left on his contract, and by the time he's done, there may not be much left to clean up.

How the mighty have fallen...

In the end, Ralph Reed couldn’t do for himself what he had helped Republicans do all the way up to the White House: Get elected.

Despite the backing of top conservatives including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Georgia Gov. Zell Miller, Reed failed to win Georgia’s GOP nomination for lieutenant governor Tuesday. He lost to little-known state Sen. Casey Cagle of Gainesville.

“I’m not focused on being a candidate in the future, but I’m glad I ran,” Reed, former head of the Christian Coalition, told supporters in conceding to Cagle before all of the votes had been counted.

The rest of the article has a very concise history of Reed's rise as the wunderkind of the Christian Coalition and his fall thanks to his greed and complicity with Jack Abramoff's illegal lobbying for gambling casinos.

Is this the last of Ralph Reed, at least as a political candidate? Well, hope springs eternal, but Richard Nixon came back from ignominy in 1968, so we can't just write him off until we're sure he's completely out of the picture...unless it's a mug shot.

Boatboy asks:

Given that the "pro-life" lobby is really about subjugating women, and given that their goal includes stay-at-home moms raising the kids...

How does the lobby propose handling employment and hiring? If women are 51%+ of the population, and we're at 4% unemployment, assuming that two thirds of the women are married means that we're looking at losing about 50-60 million workers from the labor force with no apparent replacement. Our manufacturing, middle management, tech and telesales-telesupport jobs have been sent overseas already, so there's little slack to be had taking that route, and immigration is already a hot button, so increasing quotas there cause them more problems, not less.

I haven't seen anything on this subject, but it occurred to me that this is one segment of the debate that hasn't been too public - even on the most progressive blogs.

Any thoughts, readers? I'd be especially interested in how the women feel about this.

Have you ever seen a talking sphincter? Exhibit A.

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) is leading the opposition to the H.R. 810, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. Yesterday, during debate on the bill, he held up a picture of an embryo drawn by a 7-year-old girl. Relaying a conversation with the girl’s mother, Brownback said the embryo was asking the Senate, “Are you going to kill me?” [Watch the video].

And guess what. This man is considering running for president in 2008.

It's pretty clear that the president is poised to issue his first-ever veto of a bill that would expand stem cell research for no other reason than to score political points with the theocratic base of his party.

Does anyone else find it incredibly ironic -- not to mention immensely tragic -- that the president and his party who both claim to be "pro-life" put more value on a pinpoint of subatomic goo that will never grow into any human being than the people who are already alive? Certainly any president who is willing to sacrifice lives in a war based on lies and deception would be willing to sacrifice a petri dish full of embryos for the sake of saving lives and curing diseases.

But Mr. Bush and the theocrats only seem to believe that life begins at conception; and responsibility to your fellow human being ends at birth.

That is one element I've never been able to understand with the so-called "Christian convservatives." They give all this lip service to love and fellowship and stewardship of mankind, yet they are willing to sacrifice the health, welfare and happiness of their neighbors and children on the altar of what they consider to be obedience to God. They will ostracize a gay child or allow an ill friend or relative die of a disease that could have been treated through stem-cell research because to do otherwise would not be in keeping with their tortured interpretation of a collection of myths and fables. These tea leaves, sacrifical rites, and medieval lines of poetry take more precedence than the living, breathing person standing in front of them.

What's worse is that we are allowing these people who have historically shown an aversion to scientific enlightenment (vis. Galileo and Charles Darwin) to formulate the policy of scientific research in this country. And while privately funded research will go forward, it requires government oversight and approval to get new treatments and therapies to the people who need them. Certainly any president or political force that can choke off federal funds to stem-cell research could have an influence on the FDA's approval of medicines that come from the research that the Religious Reich doesn't approve of.

As the Charles Schulz noted through one of his "Peanuts" characters, they love mankind; it's people they can't stand.

Gay marriage proposals will be popping up on state ballots this fall.

The safest bet in American politics in recent years has been a state ban on same-sex marriage. Since 1998, proposals to outlaw such unions have appeared on the ballot in 20 states, both red and blue, and they have passed everywhere by big margins.

Accordingly, opponents of same-sex marriage -- who prefer to call the issue "protection of marriage" -- are confident these days as they look ahead to the eight (or possibly nine) states in which the ban is expected to be on the ballot in November.

[...]

And yet, supporters of same-sex marriage -- who prefer to call the issue "marriage equality" -- are also optimistic as they look forward to this fall's campaigns. "Attitudes are changing, as people come to see this as a civil rights issue," said Brad Luna, of the Human Rights Campaign. "All the indicators show Americans are moving in the direction of marriage equality."

Among other things, proponents of same-sex marriage think they have a chance this November, for the first time, to defeat a ban on a state ballot. A nonpartisan poll in Wisconsin last month showed voters evenly split on the issue, with 49 percent favoring such a ban and 48 percent opposed. Gov. Jim Doyle (D) and four former governors from both parties have come out against the amendment.

The Religious Reich contends that they're trying to "protect marriage." Common sense dictates that if you're going to do that, these busybodies would be putting proposals on state ballots to ban divorce. After all, that seems to be the most destructive force against marriage these days; straight people who treat their marriage vows so cavalierly, not the gays and lesbians who actually want to get married.

Courtesy of John Boehner of Ohio:

House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-West Chester, called on Democrats last week to pull a TV ad that shows images of flag-draped caskets of U.S. soldiers, calling the spot "outrageous."

"To use those images to rally Democrats and to raise money is, I think, appalling," said Boehner.

But the outrage from Republicans comes after Democrats complained in 2004 about a campaign ad from President Bush that showed firefighters carrying a flag-draped coffin from the ruins of the World Trade Center.

Questioned by reporters on what the difference was, Boehner seemed tongue-tied. "These were American citizens killed by terrorists. That is a very different policy issue than American soldiers dying on the battlefield protecting the rights and freedoms of American people."

"How so?" a reporter asked.

"How so? You want me to describe the difference between men and women of the military out there defending the American people, and victims - victims - of terrorist activities?" Boehner asked.

"They were both killed by opponents, right? Terrorists or Islamic insurgents?" a reporter pressed.

An exasperated Boehner said: "The World Trade Center victims were victims of a terrorist act here on our shore and I think all Americans were appalled that this did in fact happen. But I think the differences, in terms of the images, are as clear as night and day." [HT to The Horse's Mouth]

The difference is that only Republicans get to exploit the 9/11 attacks for political gain. Karl Rove and the president said so, and remember, the president is always right.

The Chickenshit of the Day goes to the DCCC for pulling the ad. Rolled again because the righties had a hissy-fit. Wussies.

Those long international summits must get boring at some point, so it's not surprising that the participants would kick back and entertain their friends with some fun stuff. President Bush was caught on an open microphone doing his best Sylvester Stallone impression for Tony Blair:

The off-script moments began with Bush asking the PM casually, "Yo, Blair, how are you doing?"

Then he does his best Bruce Willis and using the S-word:

The much-reported expletive came when conversation turned to the situation in Lebanon and Israel. "You see," said the President. "The ironic thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over."

Then we skate into Brokeback Mountain territory:

Though it is unclear exactly who they were speaking about, the two had a curious exchange about another diplomat. "He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes the right way--" began Blair.

"Yeah, yeah," observed Bush. "He is sweet."

"He is honey," was Blair's reply.

[...]

At that point, Prime Minister Blair noticed something was afoot. "Is this--?" he asked, tapping the open microphone, which was promptly cut.

Mercifully they spared us the campfire scene from Blazing Saddles.

(HT to Raw Story.)

Sen. George Allen (R-VA) is running for re-election using the same tactics that worked for another George: portraying himself as a cowboy who stands -- in scuffed cowboy boots -- for "American values." However, according to Michael Scherer's portrait in Salon.com, he's running against a genuine war hero in the person of James Webb, who's wearing real combat boots.

Allen is that rare politician who can make his political role models, George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, look like sissies by comparison. He towers over crowds and speaks in folksy bullet points—"common-sense values," "secure the borders," "America won't back down." He seems to love campaigning more than governing. At a recent visit to the Hanover County tomato festival, Allen dodged swarming June bugs as admiring voters took a break from the Wissie Cakes and Confederate history booths to shake his hand and sing his praises. "Welcome back to red America," one particularly effusive voter said upon greeting the senator. "Red America," Allen replied, shaking the man's hand. "The real America."

Jim Webb, on the other hand, has never run for office before and has yet to develop much of a public personality. His name recognition rating in Virginia hovers at around 40 percent, compared to Allen's 90 percent. Unlike Allen, who is expected to raise about $20 million, Webb is far behind in the fundraising race and his campaign organization is still ironing out the kinks. But Democrats in Washington, looking for a long-shot race that would give them a Senate majority, have great hopes for the war hero's chances in a state filled with military bases. "Webb is in a great position to bring Bush voters and Reagan Democrats back into the fold," said New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, who is running the Senate reelection efforts for Democrats, the morning after the primary. "George Allen is sweating."

Democratic leaders hope that Webb has an X-factor that will force Allen to defeat this November -- a hero's story. Despite an unpolished image, his macho swagger and patriotic pose were earned on the battlefield, not the football field. To make his point, Webb campaigns in scuffed combat boots. "The boots thing were actually my son's idea," Webb says, referring to his boy, Jimmy, a Marine like his father and about to ship off to Iraq. "He said, ‘Why does this guy wear cowboy boots? Are there cowboys in Virginia?'"

[...]

It is a sign of our current political era that one of the most exciting Democratic Senate candidates this year is running on the legacy of Ronald Reagan. It is even more telling that he is trailing behind a Republican opponent who is lifting George W. Bush's country bumpkin act. But if the past is prologue, the Virginia Senate race will not turn on a sober analysis of the issues. It will be an all-out war, filled with the dirty tricks and nasty attacks.

Basically it proves that Sen. Allen can't run on anything other than the attack mode, and if he wins re-election in November, you can expect the same style of shitkicker campaigning when he runs for the White House in 2008.

From the Independent:

The Afghan government has alarmed human rights groups by approving a plan to reintroduce a Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the body which the Taliban used to enforce its extreme religious doctrine.

The proposal, which came from the country's Ulema council of clerics, has been passed by the cabinet of President Hamid Karzai and will now go before the Afghan parliament.

[...]

Under the Taliban the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice became notorious for its brutal imposition of the Taliban's codes of behaviour.

Religious police patrolled the streets, beating those without long enough beards and those failing to attend prayers five times a day. Widows suffered particular hardship because of the diktat that women be accompanied by a male relative when out of their homes, an impossibility for thousands of women widowed during decades of war.

The Ministry was also charged with the imposition of the Taliban's interpretation of sharia punishment. Executions at Kabul football stadium, which included female prisoners shot in the centre circle, did much to fuel the Taliban's international isolation.

[...]

Western diplomats have reacted with unease to the proposal. However, several told The Independent that they believed the move was partly designed to defuse Taliban propaganda which accuses the Karzai government of being un-Islamic.

"This is an Islamic republic and sharia is a part of the constitution," one diplomat said on condition of anonymity. "If it is constitutional and within the framework of the International Convention on Human Rights [to which Afghanistan is a signatory] then it could represent a public information victory for the government."

With the Taliban making considerable gains in the south the Karzai government has been keen to establish a more conservative Islamic profile and to appear more critical of Western military operations.

Okay, I thought the whole point of invading Afghanistan in 2001 was to get rid of the Taliban and the people who were responsible for harboring the folks that caused the attacks on 9/11. Now the new government is sucking up to them.

Yeah, freedom's on the march all right.

According to Thomas Mann in the Washington Post, the Democrats are poised to re-take the majority in the House and possibly the Senate in November.

Virtually every public opinion measure points to a Category 4 or 5 hurricane gathering. Bush's job-approval rating is below 40 percent, and congressional job approval is more than 10 percentage points lower. Only a quarter of the electorate thinks the country is moving in the right direction, and voters are unhappy with the economy under Bush. Finally, Democrats hold a double-digit lead as the party the public trusts to do a better job of tackling the nation's problems and the party it would like to see controlling Congress.

[...]

Public unhappiness with the Bush administration and Congress might diminish over the next several months if the economy and the situation in Iraq improve. Republicans may succeed to some extent in shifting public focus from their past performance to a choice about future directions and policy. Efforts to rally and turn out the Republican base may compensate for the Democrats' advantage in the intensity of public discontent. Extraordinary efforts to protect potentially vulnerable Republican incumbents may pay off. And the limited number of GOP seats at risk may prove an insurmountable obstacle for Democrats.

But my own reading is that the odds favor a Democratic takeover of the House. The 15 seats that the party needs for a bare majority is well below the range of minority-party gains in past tidal-wave elections. The national winds blowing against the GOP are strong and have not diminished over the past nine months. Credible progress on the ground in Iraq before November is implausible. The public's harsh evaluation of the president's performance on the economy is unlikely to be reversed by Election Day. Prospects for significant legislative achievements in the remaining months of this Congress are remote. Enough seats will be in play (including some that Republicans carried in 2004 with more than 60 percent of the vote) to allow Democrats to gain majority status in the House.

Prospects for a Democratic majority in the Senate are less bright, given the limited number of Republican seats in play. But even here, a national tide could tip all of the close races in the same direction, allowing the Democrats to hold all their threatened seats and to win the six Republican seats they need to take control.

Energized voters can hold their government accountable and throw the rascals out. Chances are good that, this fall, they will avail themselves of the opportunity.

However, this could all be for naught if the Democrats just sit back and let the Republicans flail away into the electoral abyss. The Rove Factor -- sliming, smearing, and Swift-boating outrages -- are all waiting in the wings, and the Democrats have proven all too often that they can let a perfectly good opportunity slip away. There needs to be a concerted effort from the Democrats at the state and local level to make sure that every issue is covered and voters who are fed up with the Republicans have more than just someone to vote against; we'll give them something to vote for.

Efforts like the Florida Progressive Coalition are just one example. Here is a group of bloggers scattered all across the state united by the singular idea that contrary to the perception, Florida is not a red state and are taking action to make sure that progressive candidates and ideas get out in front on issues that matter here. And while the Senate race between Bill Nelson vs. Katherine Harris may be a national joke, there are still competitive races that Democrats can win.

The Republicans' biggest fear is that the mid-term election of 2006 will become a national referendum on the Bush presidency, so their mantra is "every race is local." Unfortunately for them, every member of Congress who has backed the president on everything from Iraq to stem-cell research is finding themself on the losing end of the argument, and localizing the president comes down to the burial of another soldier in the local cemetary or the pain of a family dealing with skyrocketing health care and gasoline prices. Like it or not, George W. Bush is on every ballot in every state, and the Democrats have the opportunity to make the most of it. Let's make sure they do.

I don't know for certain if global warming is behind it, but it's hot up north. It seems that every summer we have a stretch like this with stories of people dying from the heat in places like Chicago and Detroit.

It's ironic, then, that people say how awful summers are here in Miami. Actually, the record high temperature is 98, and it's never gotten over 100 in Miami. The humidity is pretty thick, but we usually get a nice breeze off the ocean. It's not exactly ideal -- you can work up a sweat walking the dog -- but it beats the stifling temperatures in the Midwest.

Drink plenty of water if you're in the thick of it, and if you have the means, come on down to Miami; it's a lot cooler here.

Spencer Ackerman's much-linked essay from Harper's on the past and future of a right-wing myth.

Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies.

As the United States staggers past the third anniversary of its misadventure in Iraq, the dagger is already poised, the myth is already being perpetuated. To understand just how this strategy is likely to unfold—and why this time it may well fail—we must return to the birth of a legend.

It looks like Ralph Reed may be in trouble in Georgia.

It is curious enough to see Ralph Reed, a man who was on the cover of Time magazine at age 33, the man widely credited with galvanizing evangelical Christians into a national political force, putting everything he has into a race for the relatively low-profile job of lieutenant governor of Georgia.

But it is stranger still to see him losing ground. Because of Mr. Reed’s entanglement in a national lobbying scandal, a political contest that once seemed well within his grasp has turned into a battle for his personal and professional reputation, and it is not clear whether he will survive the Republican primary on Tuesday.

[...]

The lobbying scandal is not an easy one to boil down to a 30-second spot. According to the charges against Mr. Abramoff, Indian tribes with casinos paid Mr. Reed to drum up religion-based anti-gambling sentiment against competing casinos, using Mr. Abramoff as a go-between. Mr. Reed now says he believed Mr. Abramoff’s assurances that he was not being paid with gambling money.

“Had I known then what I know now,” he has said repeatedly, “I would not have undertaken the work.”

Actually, what he meant was "Had I known then that I would get caught..."

Frank Rich on the virtual leadership of the president.

Only if we remember that the core values of this White House are marketing and political expediency, not principle and substance, can we fully grasp its past errors and, more important, decipher the endgame to come. The Bush era has not been defined by big government or small government but by virtual government. Its enduring shrine will be a hollow Department of Homeland Security that finds more potential terrorist targets in Indiana than in New York.

[...]

The Bush doctrine was a doctrine in name only, a sales strategy contrived to dress up the single mission of regime change in Iraq with philosophical grandiosity worthy of F.D.R. There was never any serious intention of militarily pre-empting either Iran or North Korea, whose nuclear ambitions were as naked then as they are now, or of striking the countries that unlike Iraq were major enablers of Islamic terrorism. Axis of Evil was merely a clever brand name from the same sloganeering folks who gave us “compassionate conservatism” and “a uniter, not a divider” — so clever that the wife of a presidential speechwriter, David Frum, sent e-mails around Washington boasting that her husband was the “Axis of Evil” author. (Actually, only “axis” was his.)

Since then, the administration has fiddled in Iraq while Islamic radicalism has burned brighter and the rest of the Axis of Evil, not to mention Afghanistan and the Middle East, have grown into just the gathering threat that Saddam was not. And there’s still no policy. As Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution writes on his foreign-affairs blog, Mr. Bush isn’t pursuing diplomacy in his post-cowboy phase so much as “a foreign policy of empty gestures” consisting of “strong words here; a soothing telephone call and hasty meetings there.” The ambition is not to control events but “to kick the proverbial can down the road — far enough so the next president can deal with it.” There is no plan for victory in Iraq, only a wish and a prayer that the apocalypse won’t arrive before Mr. Bush retires to his ranch.

[...]

Another, equally significant, part of the Bush legacy is already evident throughout Washington, and not confined to foreign policy or the executive branch. Following the president’s leadership, Congress has also embraced the virtual governance of substituting publicity stunts for substance.

Instead of passing an immigration law, this Congress has entertained us with dueling immigration hearings. Instead of overseeing the war in Iraq or homeland security, its members have held press conferences announcing that they, if not the Pentagon, have at last found Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (degraded mustard gas and sarin canisters from the 1980’s). Instead of promised post-DeLay reforms, the House concocted a sham Lobbying Accountability and Transparency Act that won’t do away with the gifts and junkets politicians rake in from the Abramoffs of K Street. And let’s not forget all the days devoted to resolutions about same-sex marriage, flag burning, the patriotism of The New York Times and the Pledge of Allegiance.

“Before long, Congress will be leaving on its summer vacation,” Bob Schieffer of CBS News said two weeks ago. “My question is, how will we know they are gone?” By the calculation of USA Today, the current Congress is on track to spend fewer days in session than the “do-nothing Congress” Harry Truman gave hell to in 1948. No wonder its approval rating, for Republicans and Democrats together, is even lower than the president’s. It’s not only cowboy diplomacy that’s dead at this point in the Bush era, but also functioning democracy as we used to know it.

Case in point on Mr. Rich's piece; here is an article from the New York Times on stem-cell research that makes it clear that the president's opposition to it seems to be derived more from shoring up his political base with the Religious Reich than it does with science.

Before Sept. 11 changed everything, President Bush wrestled publicly with the issue of embryonic stem cell research, then opened the door to federal financing for the science in the first major decision of his nascent administration.

Now, five years later, the stem cell debate is about to thrust Mr. Bush into a decision that could lead to another first for him: a legislative veto.

On Monday, the Senate will take up a measure approved by the House that would loosen the carefully calibrated research restrictions that Mr. Bush outlined on Aug. 9, 2001, in his first prime-time television address to the nation. If the bill passes, as expected, Mr. Bush says he will veto it, making good on a promise he made five days after that televised speech from his ranch in Crawford, Tex.

“I spent a lot of time on the subject,” Mr. Bush said at the time. “I laid out the policy I think is right for America. And I’m not going to change my mind.”

The president’s mind has not changed; his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, reiterated the veto threat this week. That keeps Mr. Bush in good stead with the religious conservatives who make up an important part of his base, but at odds with other leading Republicans, including Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, who is a heart-lung surgeon and has pushed to bring the measure to a vote.

[...]

The coming week’s reprisal of a debate that Mr. Bush thought he had put to rest is exposing deep fissures among Republicans as the November elections draw near. Polls show that a majority of Americans support the research, and stem cells already figure prominently in several key races, among them a hard-fought re-election battle by Senator Jim Talent, Republican of Missouri, who opposes a state ballot initiative to protect the research and plans to vote against the Senate bill.

Nancy Reagan became an advocate for the research while caring for her husband, former President Ronald Reagan, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and died in 2004. Mrs. Reagan spent this week calling undecided senators to urge them to vote for the bill. While supporters say they have the 60 votes needed for approval, they are trying to secure 67, the number necessary to override a veto.

TPM Reader DK takes a trip back to the '80's.

If Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep under a cedar tree in Lebanon in 1982 and awoke today, you could hardly blame him for thinking he had snoozed for only a few minutes.

Israel is still in Lebanon. Iran is America's great nemesis. Russia-U.S. relations remain tense. An imperial power (Britain/U.S.) is conducting a military campaign in a farflung locale (Falkland Islands/Iraq) in what is maybe its last gasp of imperialism. There is a gathering threat in the East (Japanese economy/North Korea). The news even includes mention of the death of a popular princess (Grace Kelly/Diana) in a car accident.

The only things missing are Survivor, Toto, and Air Supply.

When critics of the Iraq War suggested it would set back progress in the Middle East for a generation, I didn't take it to mean we would revert to a generation ago.

Hey, what about The Police, The Vapors, and Devo?

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 7:19 AM  

Last week I got a rejection letter from a theatre company for submitting a play to a playwriting contest. Frankly, I'd forgotten I'd submitted it, but based on the letter, I'm kind of glad they didn't take it.

First, the return envelope was dated July 11, but the letter was dated May 20. So that means they either decided two months ago they weren't interested in the script but sat on it and deprived me of a copy of the play that could have been sent to other companies (copying and binding an 83-page script isn't cheap), or someone in their office doesn't know how to work the Mail Merge function on their word processor.

Second, they tried to soften the blow by saying, "we hasten to congratulate you on the completion of the arduous task of writing a play." I don't speak for every playwright, but if writing a play was an "arduous task," I wouldn't do it. It's not like cleaning out the gutters. For me it's a labor of love and exploration of characters and just plain fun with words and writing. That kind of patronizing and insincere reassurance tells me that this theatre company deals with a lot of people who don't know a hell of a lot about playwrights and playwriting and therefore aren't worth the hassle of trying to explain the wonder and joy of writing to them.

I can handle rejection; as a middle-aged gay man, I'm as accustomed to it as acid reflux and rosacea medication, and as a playwright, it is a part of the deal. (I have a friend who gleefully puts his rejection letters in his scrapbook.) So here's some tips for theatre companies and producers out there when you draft a rejection letter.

Don't patronize the playwright. Don't tell me your "selection committee enjoyed reading it." If you did, you wouldn't be sending it back.

Don't "enthusiasctically enourage" me to submit again next year. Chances are it will be the same play and you'll have the same selection committee, and we'll go through this all over again.

Better yet, don't write a form letter. Just put the script back in the SASE and stick it in the mail; I'll know what it is when I open the mailbox, and having a form letter that says more than "Thank you for submitting your work but it doesn't meet our present needs" is unnecessary.

It takes a while, but a writer gets to the point where rejection and criticism don't hurt; they actually help. If the writer truly loves his craft he will keep writing no matter what; it's the joy of the process and discovery that drives him, not the need for acceptance by others -- that's just the icing on the cake.

In a way, you have to feel a little sorry for this poor shlub.

It's the stuff of webby fantasy and urban legend: a reader who takes an Onion story seriously. Last week, a speedy and vicious blogosphere watched its collective wet dream made real when "Pete," proprietor of antiabortion blog March Together for Life, posted "Murder Without Conscience," a furious excoriation of a 7-year-old fake column in the Onion titled "I'm Totally Psyched About This Abortion!" [Ed. Note: The original "Murder Without Conscience" entry has been altered since its publication and now includes some graphic images.]

The Onion is a satirical newspaper founded in 1988 by University of Wisconsin students and is these days published weekly from New York. The piece that inspired Pete's July 6 extended smack-down was a 1999 Op-Ed by fictional columnist "Caroline Weber." Pete did not realize that the Onion traffics in satire, and that the piece was a send-up of the notion that pro-choice activists are actually "pro-abortion." Weber's outrageous claims that she "seriously cannot wait for all the hemorrhaging and the uterine contractions" and that "this abortion is going to be so amazing" did not tip off Pete. In an utterly unironic retort, he cited lines like, "It wasn't until now that I was lucky enough to be pregnant with a child I had no means to support," and "I just know it's going to be the best non-anesthetized invasive uterine surgery ever!" to illustrate his disgust with the author.

But not too sorry. He compounds his folly by later admitting that he now realizes it's a joke, but still uses it as as a cudgel against the pro-choice movement.

Four days after his initial Onion entry, Pete posted a follow-up, acknowledging that he now understood that the piece had been a joke. "Needless to say, a few people wanted to let me know that I was a dolt for thinking that her article was real," Pete wrote. "As a matter of fact, call me a dolt, because in the beginning I really did think it was real. Why? Because I meet women like her in the field all the time. Anyway, I wrote the blog in a way that was meant to point out how psychotic the pro-abortion movement is."

Nope. The way to extricate yourself with a shred of decency and dignity from something like this is to admit you've been royally had and laugh at yourself as hard as everyone else is.

Several friends have noted that the current Israel - Hezbollah conflict reminds them of Sarajevo. Not the civil war in the 1990's that tore apart the former Yugoslavia, but that day in August 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and World War I erupted.

All of the players are in place: small factions allied with larger nations, entangled alliances and muddy streams of communications; religious elements and tribal honor, and too many people with too many agendas looking out for their own interests without seeing the whole chess board. Not to mention an American president who believes in a robust foreign policy of pre-emptive intervention but finds himself unable to cope with a local conflict that involves his closest allies. George W. Bush, meet Woodrow Wilson.

World War I was "the war to end all wars." World War II was a direct result of the "peace" established by the first one, and the conflicts we see now are the result of the second one. Let's just hope that the solution we find to this war learns something from the past, but given our history -- and lack of understanding of it -- I don't hold out much hope.

James Dobson is on his high horse again, this time trying to butt into the sale of the Atlanta Braves to a company called Liberty Media because, according to Dr. Dobson, they are "pornographers."

The Colorado Springs-based religious group is organizing a grassroots effort to stop the man it calls a "porn magnate" from acquiring the ballclub from Time Warner in a stock swap, citing Liberty's ownership of hotel-room movie service On Command.

On Command, available at hotels including the Four Seasons and Starwood Hotels & Resorts, offers adult movies along with a menu of Hollywood blockbusters, Internet access and games. Liberty has been looking to unload its On Command business for months. The company has hired Lehman Brothers to find a buyer, according to a March report by Bloomberg News.

[...]

Liberty owns a tangle of assets and operating companies, ranging from stakes in News Corp. to home-shopping channel QVC, and rarely draws notice outside of business circles. The company came to Focus on the Family's attention when Stephen Adams, associate editor of the group's Citizen magazine, began working on an article about the biggest U.S. corporations involved in the porn industry. Liberty topped the yet-to-be published list, Adams said.

"They're going to sell a team to pornographers," he said. "This is a reach too far, and we've got to say something about it."

I'm getting tired of watching James Dobson and his collection of ignorant tightasses "try to paint the world the color of gooseshit." (Jacques Brel)

What's the buzz in the LC on this Bastille Day?

A Blog Around the Clock on the future for gay marriage.

All Facts and Opinions on the New York ruling against gay marriage.

archy celebrates the birthday of Nikola Tesla.

Bark Bark Woof Woof reminds righties of their role in the Wilson/Plame lawsuit.

blogAmY maps out the status of net neutrality.

bloggg reviews a blog.

Collective Sigh on education reform that works.

NTodd has the lowdown on loons... the avian variety.

Echidne on why we hate nerds.

FDL on where the disenchantment began with Joe Lieberman.

First Draft on some outside help for New Orleans.

Happy Furry Puppy on our national shame.

iddybud catches up with the Carters.

Left is Right on finding purpose in life.

Lefty reviews TV comic books this week (scroll down).

Liberty Street reveals what one red paper clip can get you.

Make Me a Commentator comments on celebrity interviews.

Musing's musings bets on internet gambling.

Pen-Elayne has her own blogaround.

Respectful of Otters is on the case of HIV discrimination.

Rook's Rant on the return of Pee-Wee's Playhouse.

rubber hose wonders why the left blogosphere is largely silent on Israel and Hizbollah.

Scrutiny Hooligans on the rise of oil prices.

Sooner Thought reports that a Chinese company will build the legendary British sports car, the MG, in a plant in Oklahoma. (Maybe one model will be the MSG...)

Speedkill on Brent Bozell's consternation over gays demanding a little respect and understanding.

Steve Gilliard on the renewal of the Voting Rights Act.

T. Rex reveals the second part of the plan for the Florida Progressive Coalition.

The Count gets Creative.

The Invisible Library has a request for the anonymous person who signed him up for the NCC newsletter.

WTF Is It Now?? on blog flame wars.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat on another use for duct tape.

...You Are A Tree bids farewell to Syd Barrett.

Aux barricades, mes amis!

According to the Miami Herald, it began when she went after Joe Scarborough and "the dead intern," and it's been going downhill ever since.

"That was the first clue that something wasn't right with Katherine Harris," Scarborough told The Miami Herald in a recent interview, noting that a medical examiner found his staff member's death was natural and not the result of foul play.

Harris, through a spokeswoman, denied Scarborough's account, saying she "would never insinuate publicly or privately" that he did anything untoward.

[...]

Scarborough said he was shocked Harris would cite "a bunch of hateful left-wing websites" and that she would repeat "the slanderous attacks of the same people who attacked her for years."

He said he thought of suing, but let it go after "a few heated days," and reflected on what he told incumbent Sen. Nelson.

Nelson, a Democrat, drew Clinton-attacking Bill McCollum as an opponent amid the Monica Lewinsky fatigue of 2000, and now faces Harris.

"He's the luckiest man in Washington," Scarborough said.

It also doesn't say a whole lot for the Florida GOP if the best person that they can scare up to run for office is a little bit meshugge.

Snowball wants out.

I'll say this much for him; in 45 years I've never had to change a litter box.

The Toledo Blade makes a good point about the recruitment of skinheads into the military.

HOMOSEXUALS in the military have long had to deal with Bill Clinton's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Gays and lesbians are shown the door the second their sexual orientation is known.

The military has been consistently ruthless in this regard, even when it meant thinning the ranks of capable translators and intelligence operators for an inconsequential factor like sexual identity.

But when it comes to the Pentagon's zero-tolerance policy for hate groups, recruiters appear more committed to making monthly quotas than ensuring the values of a racially diverse military. While the Iraq war grows more unpopular, recruiting shortfalls have allowed undesirables to fill the ranks.

Sensing an opportunity for mischief, white supremacists are enlisting and volunteering for battle assignments so they can get training in light infantry tactics they'll need for what they see as the coming race war in America.

Gee, I seem to remember making that same point a while ago.

Nevertheless, it points out how totally screwed up the priorities are. We spent a week arguing over a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, and about as long on one over flag-burning. Meanwhile, Iraq is mounting a civil war that would get General Grant a run for his money, Iran is aglow with nuclear technology, North Korea, a country that can't make bread, is firing missiles, and Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon are in full meltdown mode. But what's Congress debating? The horrors of internet gambling.

Why the hell are we spending all this time jacking off about stuff that doesn't matter when the world is going up Shit Creek? Why does the Department of Defense insist on hounding out of the service a gay man who wants to serve his country but recruit a Nazi who plans to become a terrorist as soon as we've finished paying for the training that will make him one?

It's really pretty simple, actually. Fag-bashing and flag-burning are sexy. The GOP can raise a million bucks on one ad alone showing a clip from the Gay Pride parade or some flaming flag; double that if they get a flaming fag to burn the flag. But talk about the things that really matter, like trying to talk to our allies and our adversaries into nuclear non-proliferation and you've got every remote control flipping over to watch the latest version of American Idol. If you can't sell it in a 30-second clip then you might as well forget about getting the country to care, much less change their minds about it.

Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame have filed a civil suit against Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, and Scooter Libby.

The lawsuit accuses Cheney, Libby, Rove and 10 unnamed administration officials or political operatives of putting the Wilsons and their children's lives at risk by exposing Plame.

"This lawsuit concerns the intentional and malicious exposure by senior officials of the federal government of ... (Plame), whose job it was to gather intelligence to make the nation safer and who risked her life for her country," the Wilsons' lawyers said in the lawsuit.

Specifically, the lawsuit accuses the White House officials of violating the Wilsons' constitutional rights to equal protection and freedom of speech. It also accuses the officials of violating the couple's privacy rights.

Of course the righties will heap scorn and mockery upon the Wilsons, accusing them of being publicity hounds or just being a nuisance, bent on preventing the president -- who is never wrong -- and the vice president from doing everything they can to fight the war on evil-doers.

I have two words for the righties: Paula Jones.

Ms. Jones sued Bill Clinton while he was president for sexual harassment that allegedly occurred when he was the governor of Arkansas. The righties lined up behind her and urged her to sue the president, paid her legal fees, got her a complete make-over, press agent, book deal, and fought all the way to the Supreme Court to ensure that a sitting president could be sued. They proclaimed it a great victory for the rule of law when the Supreme Court allowed the suit to go forward.

Oh, righties were ever so serious about ensuring that a lowly citizen like Ms. Jones had the right to have her day in court and seek redress for the grievous wrong done to her. It would prove that no man is above the law and, most importantly, it would prove that even the president is accountable for his actions. The fact that the alleged incident happened before Mr. Clinton was elected president apparently had no bearing on the case; Ms. Jones's complaint was so urgent that her backers insisted it be dealt with immediately. So thanks to the righties, including one eager lawyer named Ann Coulter, the suit went forward until it was finally tossed as groundless; the judge ruled that Ms. Jones couldn't prove any damages. Ms. Jones later settled out of court for $850,000.

The righties will say the Wilson/Plame case is different than the Jones case. Yes, it is. Rove, Cheney, and Libby conspired to discredit the Wilsons by leaking classified information to the press in retribution for Mr. Wilson embarrassing the White House. They did this in the course of their duties in the Bush administration, not while they were private citizens, and allegedly at the direction of the president himself. To be fair, there is no record of any of the respondents in the Wilson/Plame case having made sexual overtures (crude or otherwise) to the plaintiffs.

Whether or not the Wilsons can prove damages is up to the court to decide. But thanks to the right-wing noise machine -- and Ann Coulter -- the road to the courthouse was made a lot smoother. If the righties don't like it, they have only themselves to blame.

Maybe I'm incredibly naive, but I'm the kind of person who expects that the people we elect to Congress are somehow a bit more educated and intelligent than the average citizen. After all, that's why we elect them; to represent all of us and show leadership. We also expect them to be dedicated to the idea of using their wisdom and power to advance the ideals of our nation such as equal justice under the law, and to understand that a basic element of our form of government is that the Congress actually has an equal role in setting the policies and course of the nation and exercising their powers of oversight. (We certainly heard a lot about that last part from the Republicans during the Clinton administration.)

But apparently we have some members of Congress who scorn higher education and actually feel that it is in the best interest of the nation to just rubber stamp anything that the Bush administration does. From the Washington Post:

House Republicans signaled a coming clash with the Senate over the future of military tribunals yesterday when Armed Service Committee members indicated they were inclined to give the Bush administration largely what it wants in the conduct of terrorism trials.

The tone at the first House hearing since the Supreme Court tossed out President Bush's tribunals last month was markedly different from Tuesday's Senate hearing, where lawmakers from both parties said they wanted to make significant changes to the White House's plans.

"This could be easy," said Rep. Candice S. Miller (R-Mich.), who proudly announced she has neither a law degree nor a college degree as she denounced the high court's 5 to 3 decision against the tribunals as "incredibly counterintuitive." "We could just ratify what the executive branch and the [Department of Defense] have done and move on."

"That would be a very desirable way to proceed," said Daniel J. Dell'Orto, the Pentagon's principal deputy general counsel.

Fortunately for the country and the rule of law, the Senate's version is grounded more in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not some plan that the White House dug up from the left-behind files of Idi Amin.

And if there was ever a clearer call for improving our education system in this country, it's embodied in Rep. Miller who seems to think that bragging about a lack of higher education is something to aspire to. I shudder to think what this country would come to if everyone shared her thirst for knoweldge.

John in DC at AMERICAblog looks at the latest faux kerfuffle from the Republicans.

[T]he Republicans are now freaking out - meaning, they're running scared - over a new Democratic video highlighting Bush's many failures, and how America has taken a "turn for the worse" under Bush's and the Republicans' stewardship. And the video is of course, correct. It shows photos of pollution, the abysmal response to Hurricane Katrina, and the failed Iraq war, among other examples of Republican incompetence. The Iraq war photos in the video include that now-famous photo of the flag-draped coffins in the military jet coming back to the states from Iraq. Rightly suggesting that the deaths of nearly 3,000 US troops in a fiasco of a war is most certainly a "turn for the worse" that America has suffered under George Bush's presidency.

Now, you'll recall that George Bush has refused to attend even a single funeral of a US service member killed in Iraq.

And you'll recall that Bush has tried to stop the media from showing the arrival of the coffins of any US soldier who died in Iraq. Thousands of dead heroes are kind of a downer when you're trying to con the public into thinking everything is going swell.

So you won't be surprised to find out that the Republicans are now feigning freak out over the pictures of the coffins serving as a moving memorial to how sad and wrong it is that Bush and the Republicans are responsible for killing nearly 3,000 of our proud US troops.

[...]

Republicans sent our troops to Iraq to risk their lives for a lie. They sent our men and women into battle without the body armor they needed to stay alive. Republicans sent them in insufficient numbers to get the job done. They sent them with no plan for victory, no plan for exit. They sent them without even enough food.

Republicans cut the funding for veterans back here in America, and have left scores of Iraq war vets now homeless. And Republicans refuse to even consider pulling our troops out of a failed Iraq war, even as our troops continue to die each and every day - and why? - because a withdrawal would be an embarrassment to our failed commander in chief George Bush. And in a Republican's mind, what's a few thousand dead US troops when compared to possibly embarrassing the worst president ever?

So, the Republicans are understandably freaking out. After all, George Bush and the Republicans are responsible for the biggest US military failure since Vietnam. (And Dick Cheney is responsible for cutting the US military budget far beyond what anyone ever even wanted.) The only way the Republicans know to react is not to fix the problem, but rather to attack the messenger and distract the public.

They're freaking out because the president is always right and anything that casts doubt on that is libelous, treasonous, and a sure sign of the Apocalypse.

Katherine Harris's Senate campaign in Florida continues to circle the drain.

The high command of Rep. Katherine Harris's FL Senate bid plans to resign by the end of the week, two people familiar with the campaign tell the Hotline.

The departing staff includes Glen Hodas, Harris's campaign manager, her spokesperson, Chris Ingram, and Pat Thomas, her field director. The status of Harris's chief fundraiser, Erin Delullo, is not clear.

The resignations will take effect by Friday, according to the sources. TooConservative, a Virginia-based blog, first reported this afternoon that several staffers would quit.

One person involved in the campaign said there was no single precipitating factor. "She's just very difficult to work with. It's all the same stuff. The more than we put her out there, the more she shot herself in the foot," this person said.

This slate of staff lasted just three and a half months; in April, Harris lost her campaign manager, Jamie Miller, and strategist Ed Rollins. Both have since become outspoken critics of Harris's.

Harris, one of several Republicans running for the GOP nomination, trails incumbent Bill Nelson by more than 20 points in the latest polls. She is mired in the federal investigation into defense contractor MZM, has claimed that several House Democrats in Florida want her to win, has called attention to an alleged illegal contribution to Nelson that also implicated her staff and has had what one staffer called "tantrums."

She began a two-week campaign swing through the state last week.

At this point, you have to decide whether it's hilarious or just plain pitiful.

What would you think of a party that came up with the following indictments of a president and his administration and offered some thoughts and ideas about how to run the country?

Humanity is tormented once again by an age-old issue—is man to live in dignity and freedom under God or be enslaved—are men in government to serve, or are they to master, their fellow men?

It befalls us now to resolve this issue anew—perhaps this time for centuries to come. Nor can we evade the issue here at home. Even in this Constitutional Republic, for two centuries the beacon of liberty the world over, individual freedom retreats under the mounting assault of expanding centralized power. Fiscal and economic excesses, too long indulged, already have eroded and threatened the greatest experiment in self-government mankind has known.

[...]

Dominant in their council are leaders whose words extol human liberty, but whose deeds have persistently delimited the scope of liberty and sapped its vitality. Year after year, in the name of benevolence, these leaders have sought the enlargement of Federal power. Year after year, in the guise of concern for others, they have lavishly expended the resources of their fellow citizens. And year after year freedom, diversity and individual, local and state responsibility have given way to regimentation, conformity and subservience to central power.

[...]

This Administration has neglected to consult with America's allies on critical matters at critical times, leading to lack of confidence, lack of respect and disintegrating alliances.

[...]

This Administration has failed to provide forceful, effective leadership in the United Nations.

It has weakened the power and influence of this world organization by failing to demand basic improvements in its procedures to guard against its becoming merely a forum of anti-Western insult and abuse.

It has refused to insist upon enforcement of the United Nations' rules governing financial support though such enforcement is supported by an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice.

[...]

This Administration has adopted the policies of news management and unjustifiable secrecy, in the guise of guarding the nation's security; it has shown a contempt of the right of the people to know the truth.

This Administration, while claiming major defense savings, has in fact raised defense spending by billions of dollars a year, and yet has short-changed critical areas.

[...]

We [...] shall first rely on the individual's right and capacity to advance his own economic well-being, to control the fruits of his efforts and to plan his own and his family's future; and, where government is rightly involved, we shall assist the individual in surmounting urgent problems beyond his own power and responsibility to control. For instance, we pledge:

—enlargement of employment opportunities for urban and rural citizens, with emphasis on training programs to equip them with needed skills; improved job information and placement services; and research and extension services channeled toward helping rural people improve their opportunities;

—tax credits and other methods of assistance to help needy senior citizens meet the costs of medical and hospital insurance;

—a strong, sound system of Social Security, with improved benefits to our people;

—continued Federal support for a sound research program aimed at both the prevention and cure of diseases, and intensified efforts to secure prompt and effective application of the results of research. This will include emphasis on mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, cancer, heart disease and other diseases of increasing incidence;

—revision of the Social Security laws to allow higher earnings, without loss of benefits, by our elderly people;

—full coverage of all medical and hospital costs for the needy elderly people, financed by general revenues through broader implementation of Federal-State plans, rather than the compulsory [...] scheme covering only a small percentage of such costs, for everyone regardless of need;

—adoption and implementation of a fair and adequate program for providing necessary supplemental farm labor for producing and harvesting agricultural commodities;

—tax credits for those burdened by the expenses of college education;

—vocational rehabilitation, through cooperation between government—Federal and State—and industry, for the mentally and physically handicapped, the chronically unemployed and the poverty-stricken.

These are just a few of the ideas put forth by this bunch of wild-eyed radicals, and their accusations of the misdeeds of the Administration sound like a bunch of disgruntled haters of the president. I'm pretty sure that if any party put out a plan like this, both they and their candidate for the presidency would go down in flames.

As a matter of fact, they did.

Tucker Carlson is a member of the Class of 1987 of St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island. It's a pretty good prep school; up there with places like Middlesex, Choate, and Exeter, and their graduates go to the best colleges and universities. Graduates include such illuminaries as Howard Dean ('66), poet and humorist Ogden Nash ('20), and actor Hunt Block ('71). (Oh, yeah -- I spent my freshman year there.)

So you would expect that Mr. Carlson would know that the people of Puerto Rico have been U.S. citizens since 1917. It's something they probably covered in his junior year (called "Fifth Form") history class.

He must have been out that day.

From the Washington Post:

As Congress opened hearings yesterday on the treatment of terrorism detainees, the Bush administration's view was neatly summarized by Steven Bradbury, the Justice Department lawyer serving as lead witness. "The president," Bradbury said, "is always right."

Any questions?

The Bush administration has agreed to apply the Geneva Convention to al-Qeada prisoners at Gitmo and other places.

It only took a ruling by the Supreme Court to force the administration's hand, and true to form, they're now saying they've been in compliance with the rules all along. Just a little misunderstanding, that's all.

I can sleep better at night knowing that my government is protecting vital interests and monuments of this nation. From the New York Times:

It reads like a tally of terrorist targets that a child might have written: Old MacDonald’s Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, the Mule Day Parade, the Sweetwater Flea Market and an unspecified “Beach at End of a Street.”

But the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, in a report released Tuesday, found that the list was not child’s play: all these “unusual or out-of-place” sites “whose criticality is not readily apparent” are inexplicably included in the federal antiterrorism database.

The National Asset Database, as it is known, is so flawed, the inspector general found, that as of January, Indiana, with 8,591 potential terrorist targets, had 50 percent more listed sites than New York (5,687) and more than twice as many as California (3,212), ranking the state the most target-rich place in the nation.

The database is used by the Homeland Security Department to help divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars in antiterrorism grants each year, including the program announced in May that cut money to New York City and Washington by 40 percent, while significantly increasing spending for cities including Louisville, Ky., and Omaha.

“We don’t find it embarrassing,” said the department’s deputy press secretary, Jarrod Agen. “The list is a valuable tool.”

[...]

One business owner who learned from a reporter that a company named Amish Country Popcorn was on the list was at first puzzled. The businessman, Brian Lehman, said he owned the only operation in the country with that name.

“I am out in the middle of nowhere,” said Mr. Lehman, whose business in Berne, Ind., has five employees and grows and distributes popcorn. “We are nothing but a bunch of Amish buggies and tractors out here. No one would care.”

But on second thought, he came up with an explanation: “Maybe because popcorn explodes?”

Don't you feel safer?

President Bush is all giddy that the budget deficit is lower than projected.

White House figures released Tuesday estimate the federal deficit for the 2006 budget year ending Sept. 30 will be $296 billion — much better than the $423 billion Bush predicted in February but only a slight improvement over last year's $318 billion.

[...]

The Bush White House has gained a reputation for overstating deficit figures early in the year in order to report better news later. Indeed, if recent patterns hold, this year's deficit should improve even more by the time final figures are announced in October.

Bush has had few opportunities to boast about the deficit during his presidency. In 2001, he inherited a surplus from the Clinton administration estimated by both White House and congressional forecasters at $5.6 trillion over the subsequent decade. It quickly turned into deficits.

Bragging about lowering the deficit is like a drunk saying, "Look, I only knocked off two bottles of vodka last night. I usually drink three."

Robert Novak says in a column that Karl Rove in the Bush administration confirmed his story that resulted in the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.

In a column to be published today, Novak said he told Fitzgerald in early 2004 that White House senior adviser Karl Rove and then-CIA spokesman Bill Harlow had confirmed for him, at his request, information about CIA operative Valerie Plame. Novak said he also told Fitzgerald about another senior administration official who originally provided him with the information about Plame, and whose identity he says he cannot reveal even now. [WaPo]

So of course Mr. Rove and Mr. Harlow will be fired from the Bush administration because that's what the president said he would do to those who leaked classified information. So, will he?

[Crickets]

And of course the right-wing noise machine will raise a huge hue and cry over the treasonous behavior of Mr. Rove and Mr. Harlow for exposing classified information. There will be calls for Mr. Rove to be put into a gas chamber or there will be mutterings such as "one tree, one rope, one White House Senior advisor. Some assembly required." Right?

[Crickets]

Some right-wingers will point out that Robert Novak found out that Joseph Wilson's wife's name was Valerie Plame because it was in Who's Who in America and thereofre ask how can she be a secret agent if she's listed in that? Well, I doubt that Who's Who had "CIA operative" next to her name. Two weeks ago the righties got all worked up about the New York Times and the bank data mining story, and that was public knowledge because it was discussed by the president and his financial advisors. So of course they're going to hold Robert Novak up to the same high patriotic standard they held the New York Times up to, right?

[Crickets]

It's old news that Rove leaked the name of Valerie Plame to Bob Novak, and it's very old news that the president said he would fire anyone found to be leaking classified information. It's old news that the right wing will do anything they can to justify the actions of this White House. Will the Republicans ever live up to the standards they set for everyone else?

[Crickets]

Laura Miller reviews Tanya Erzen's book Straight to Jesus: Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement and finds a world of purgatory.

I've known several people who claimed that they are "no longer gay" thanks to the Ex-Gay movement. They proclaimed that their faith in Jesus cleansed them of their "unnatural" desires and gave them a life of grace. In reality, though, they lived a haunted life, unwelcome in their rigid evangelical church because of their past life. One told me, "They say they forgive your past sins, but they never trust you around their teenaged sons," and he lived a life that resembled that of a cloistered monk; no social life, no worldly temptations such as movies or TV, and worst of all, unable to trust himself in developing a friendship with another man.

The Ex-Gay movement promises salvation in the form of sexual alchemy, and there are enough guilt-ridden gay men raised in the thrall of evangelical and homophobic Christianity to keep the scam going. The truth is that all these so-called "reparative therapies" do is scar these men for life by pitting the natural instincts of a gay man -- his desire to love and be loved in the way he knows how -- against the power and influence of his social structure. What that leaves you with is precious little hope for a normal life by any definition.

Mark Leibovich of the New York Times has a profile of Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI).

He is commonly described as “prickly,” “cantankerous” and “unpleasant.” And this is by his friends.

“I would describe Jim as — what’s a nice word — how about ‘idiosyncratic’?” says Representative Dan Lungren, a California Republican on the Judiciary Committee.

Mr. Lungren equates Mr. Sensenbrenner’s leadership to something the Green Bay Packer guard Jerry Kramer said about his coach Vince Lombardi. “He treats us all equally,” Mr. Lungren says of Mr. Sensenbrenner. “He treats us all like dogs.”

Mr. Sensenbrenner, 63, can be neutrally described as a Washington piece of work — a big-bellied curmudgeon with a taste for old Caddies, pontoon boats and enormous cigars. He is equally at home discussing policy minutiae or the details of his Dalmatian’s recent intestinal problems. His honking voice and Upper Midwestern enunciations make him one of the most mimicked politicians on Capitol Hill. (“Noooo interviews in the hallway” is a familiar refrain as he blows past reporters.)

One could dismiss him as something of a cartoon, except that Mr. Sensenbrenner has been a feared and vital character in some defining political dramas, like the Clinton impeachment, the passage of the USA Patriot Act and the current legislative donnybrook over immigration, an issue that he calls his toughest in nearly four decades of public life.

[...]

But he does not always suit the House Republican leadership, many Senate Republicans and the Bush White House. He has been the chief promoter of the House’s “enforcement first” approach to immigration overhaul, emphasizing border security, criminal penalties for illegal immigrants and sanctions against employers who hire them. The president and the Senate have favored a package that offers illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

In recent weeks, Mr. Sensenbrenner has refused to yield on anything, derided what he calls the “amnesty” of the Senate bill and warned that he is willing to walk away without a compromise. He says his views have been influenced by the flood of immigration-related cases coming through his office and what he sees as the failure of previous immigration reform efforts he has worked on.

He is known as one of the toughest negotiators in Congress, which invites another canine metaphor from a colleague. “Sensenbrenner is a pit bull,” says Representative Ric Keller, a Florida Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “And the Senate negotiators he’s up against are wearing Milk-Bone underwear.”

Do you get the feeling that most of the people who were interviewed for this piece added the last syllable to the word "prickly" as an afterthought?

He's just the kind of person the Democrats need for the Republicans to have out front on their immigration reform bills. Mr. Sensenbrenner could be the one guy who will guarantee not only that nothing resembling reform will pass this year, and at the same time drive the Hispanic vote -- in a big old Caddie -- over to the Democrats. Thanks, Jim.

Last week, Rev. O'Neal Dozier of Pompano Beach, Florida, said that Islam is a "cult" and a "dangerous religion." That got Jeb's attention.

The Rev. O'Neal Dozier, a controversial member of the Broward Judicial Nominating Committee, has resigned the post after he said Gov. Jeb Bush's office asked him to step down.

Dozier, whose recent comments about Islam in a news release and on a radio talk show sparked outrage among Muslims, said Monday he did not talk to Bush, but he said the governor's office was unhappy with his remarks. The committee, which Dozier has been on since 2001, nominates judges in South Florida.

"I was asked to resign," Dozier said, declining to say who specifically made the request. Dozier said he submitted his letter of resignation Sunday.

Dozier, 57, is a key figure in Republican Charlie Crist's effort to reach black voters in the attorney general's race for governor.

Neither Bush nor Crist could be reached for comment.

[...]

Dozier is a prominent black Republican who has recruited blacks to the GOP and advised President Bush. He was nominated to the judicial screening committee in 2001, and Gov. Bush reappointed him two years later. The governor also spoke at Dozier's church on Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2003.

When President Bush campaigned at the Office Depot Center in 2004, Dozier gave the invocation.

Rev. Dozier is also on the record as being anti-gay as well, but that won't get you fired from a Bush administration; if anything, that's your ticket in.

According to Editor and Publisher, Universal Press Syndicate thinks Ann Coulter didn't plagiarize.

In a statement sent to E&P, Universal President and Editor Lee Salem said: "Last week a software program company official ran Ann Coulter's columns through a 'match-text' program, frequently used by teachers to detect original work. The New York Post cited two columns in which some text matched other published materials and also mentioned three snippets in her book, 'Godless: The Church of Liberalism.'

"In addition to looking at the columns mentioned in the New York Post story, we also reviewed a sampling of other columns that have been mentioned in the media. Like her book publisher, Crown, Universal Press Syndicate finds no merits to the allegations of plagiarism brought by the software company executive. There are only so many ways you can rewrite a fact and minimal matching text is not plagiarism.

"Universal Press Syndicate is confident in the ability of Ms. Coulter, an attorney and frequent media target, to know when to make attribution and when not to. We also have confidence in our 35-year history of detecting fraudulent and unethical work, having represented conservatives and liberal commentators alike."

Did anyone think that Universal Press would actually fire Ann Coulter and give up one of their most lucrative franchises? Not a chance. When it comes down to the choice between the money or the principle of media ethics, the money wins every time.

Sara Miles has an essay in Salon about the impact of the New York court ruling on her family.

There's nothing like a judicial ruling -- in this case, the extremely tortured one written last week by Judge Robert S. Smith of the New York Court of Appeals against gay marriage -- to make me feel simultaneously all-powerful and helpless. On Friday, my family read the news over breakfast. I was on my way to volunteer at my church food pantry; my wife was finishing the endless paperwork for our 17-year-old daughter's college loan, and Katie -- one of the "children" in whose interest the court said it ruled -- was on her way out the door to her summer job.

Who knew we could have such a grandiose impact? Just by hanging out in our kitchen, the three of us challenge what Smith called the "accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived, in any society in which marriage existed, that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex." By asking for the legal benefits of marriage, we threaten the already unstable institution of the heterosexual family.

[...]

And this is where I feel powerless.

It's bad enough that the state treats me and my wife and Katie's father as unworthy to share in full citizenship. But it's unforgivable that our child, too, is penalized for our inability to marry. She can't claim Martha as a family member; she can't get insurance coverage through Martha or be treated as Martha's child for tax, probate or healthcare matters; she has no legal relationship with the woman who's helped raise her since she was in kindergarten and a boy made her cry. "You don't even exist," that boy told Katie, with Judge Smith's impeccable logic. "You have to be married to have a baby, and your parents aren't married, so you weren't even born, ha ha."

The fact is, lesbians and gays are not going to stop having kids because we can't marry. Our children are not going to disappear.

Which brings me back to feeling powerful -- seriously. As we've seen in South Africa and Eastern Europe and San Francisco, civil society in its richness is always greater than official codes about who is, and isn't, a full person. Katie and a million kids like her are here, and their families will continue to thrive. At some point, the courts will catch up.

A couple of articles are making the rounds about how Bush's foreign policy is being "made over." David E. Sanger reports for the New York Times.

President Bush has never made apologies for enshrining pre-emption as the defining doctrine of his first term. He has declared many times that in a post-9/11 world, presidents no longer have the luxury of waiting for the slow grinding of diplomatic give-and-take when unpredictable dictators are assembling arsenals that could threaten the United States.

But as he leaves for Europe and Russia this week, where the simultaneous nuclear standoffs in Iran and North Korea will top the agenda, Mr. Bush finds himself struggling to square his muscular declarations with the realpolitik of his second term after the invasion of Iraq. At every turn, and every provocation, he finds himself in an unaccustomed position: urging patience.

[...]

In short, Mr. Bush is discovering the limits of his own pre-emption doctrine — and the frustrations of its alternative. He knows, aides say, that even to hint at military action or deadlines if Iran refuses to suspend enriching uranium, or if North Korea continues to test missiles and make bomb fuel, would probably destroy any chance of getting China and Russia aboard on a common strategy.

But failing to lay out the consequences clearly — the kind of straight talk Mr. Bush used to say distinguished his administration's foreign policy — may embolden Iran and North Korea to try to run out the clock, produce more nuclear material and hope for a better deal with the next president.

The assumption here is that the Bush administration actually had a foreign policy to begin with other than to bounce out onto the stage and wave his, uh, gun around.

Time magazine calls it "the end of cowboy diplomacy" and portrays the president and the administration as recalcitrant in the face of the quagmire in Iraq, the Iranian nuclear plans going on unabated, Israel and Palestine about to go to war, and North Korea launching missiles just in time for the president's 60th birthday.

The approach fit with Bush's personal style, his self-professed proclivity to dispense with the nuances of geopolitics and go with his gut. "The Bush Doctrine is actually being defined by action, as opposed to by words," Bush told Tom Brokaw aboard Air Force One in 2003.

But in the span of four years, the administration has been forced to rethink the doctrine by which it hoped to remake the world. Bush's response to the North Korean missile test was revealing: Under the old Bush Doctrine, defiance by a dictator like Kim Jong Il would have merited threats of punitive U.S. action. Instead, the administration has mainly been talking up multilateralism and downplaying Pyongyang's provocation.

The Bush Doctrine foundered in the principal place the U.S. tried to apply it. Though no one in the White House openly questions Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, some aides now acknowledge that it has come at a steep cost in military resources, public support and credibility abroad.

It is ironic to the degree of a Greek tragedy that this President Bush, in the intense desire to separate himself from both his father's form of diplomacy, seen by the neocons as wimpy, and anything at all resembling that of the Clinton administration because it was, well, Clinton, has channeled the foreign policy pitfalls and tragedies of a previous president from Texas who got entangled in a wasteful and unnecessary war that cost thousands of lives and gained nothing but the animosity of the nation and emboldened our enemies.

By the way, anyone who is familiar with the work of real cowboys wouldn't slander them with the comparison to Bush's foreign policy. Real cowboys know that their work requires patience and compromise, especially if you're dealing with nearsighted animals that outweigh you by ten times and can kill you with one swift kick. Anyone who swaggers into a barn is more likely to leave a lot more bow-legged than they were when they arrived.

As if having the majority of Americans say they're nominally Christian isn't enough, here comes a gang of Christianist lawyers calling themselves the Alliance Defense Fund to make sure that every sperm is sacred, every tacky nativity scene is preserved, and no fag goes un-bashed.

Considering itself the antithesis of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Scottsdale-based organization has used money and moxie to become the leading player in a movement to tug the nation to the right by challenging decades of legal precedent. By stepping into the nation's most impassioned debates about religion in the public sphere, the group aims to bring law and society into alignment with conservative Christianity.

The group successfully challenged the issuance of same-sex marriage licenses in California and Oregon, and worked on statewide ballot initiatives prohibiting such unions. Its attorneys helped the Boy Scouts win approval of a policy barring gay Scout leaders.

The group has been battling embryonic stem cell research in Missouri and won a Supreme Court stay preventing the removal of California's 29-foot Mount Soledad cross. In Florida, where saving the life of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo became a crusade, the group supported efforts to nourish her.

"What we are really trying to protect are the things this country was founded on," said D. James Kennedy, leader of Florida's Coral Ridge Ministries and one of the prominent Christian conservatives who fashioned the alliance in 1993 as a sharp stick in the national culture debate.

Mr. Kennedy has a strange interpretation of American history, since most of the people who founded this country on the basis of religious freedom did it to get away from religious wingnuts like him.

Hey, if they think they can advance their cause by going to court, that's fine with me, although I can't help but note the irony of a group that constantly whines about how "activist judges" are destroying America is now relying on finding their own activist judges. Chances are the ADF is going to find out exactly how far they can push their theocratic agenda on the courts, and they're also going to discover to their horror that while 83% of the country may say they're Christians, it's not the pompous, arrogant, homophobic and medieval brand of puritanical "Christianity" they'd like to ram down our throats.

David Brooks tut-tuts the Democrats in Connecticut having the temerity to allow Ned Lamont to challenge Joe Lieberman in the Senate primary.

What's happening to Lieberman can only be described as a liberal inquisition. Whether you agree with him or not, he is transparently the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men. But over the past few years he has been subjected to a vituperation campaign that only experts in moral manias and mob psychology are really fit to explain. I can't reproduce the typical assaults that have been directed at him over the Internet, because they are so laced with profanity and ugliness, but they are ginned up by ideological masseurs who salve their followers' psychic wounds by arousing their rage at objects of mutual hate.

Next has come the effort to expel Lieberman from modern liberalism. In a dark parody of the old struggle between Eugene McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, the highly educated, highly affluent, highly Caucasian wing of the Democratic Party has turned liberalism from a philosophy into a secular religion, and then sought to purge a battle-scarred warhorse on the grounds of insufficient moral purity.

[...]

The big story out of the campaign last week was the aggressiveness Lieberman has finally brought to his side of the fight. Over the past few years, polarizers have dominated Congress because people who actually represent most Americans have been too timid or intellectually vacuous to stand up. Even today many Democrats who privately despise the netroots lie low, hoping the anger won't be directed at them.

But Lieberman has had no choice but to fight, and he will probably prevail. If he doesn't, and if his opponents go from statewide victory in Connecticut to a national primary assault in 2008, then I hope the Republicans will be smart enough to scoop up what is sure to come — yet another wave of disaffected Democrats looking for a political home. (PDF here.)

Selective amnesia is a wonderful thing. Mr. Brooks has completely forgotten the trash job the Republicans did on John McCain in 2000 when he had the nerve to challenge George W. Bush. The Lieberman/Lamont debate is a cocktail party disagreement compared to the guerrilla warfare that is standard operating procedure for the GOP. And notice how he tries to raise the spectre of the evil "netroots" as the Robespierre of the left; the force that determines with the click of the mouse who is in favor and who is to be banished to the recycling bin of history. I assume Mr. Brooks prefers talk radio as the great populist determiner of public opinion.

Frank Rich takes a look at the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the rest of the hypocritical right-wing bullies and finds them lacking.

Two weeks and counting, and the editor of The New York Times still has not been sentenced to the gas chamber. What a bummer for one California radio talk-show host, Melanie Morgan, who pronounced The Times guilty of treason and expressly endorsed that punishment. She and the rest of the get-the-press lynch mob are growing restless, wondering why newspapers haven't been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. "If Bush believes what he is saying," taunted Pat Buchanan, "why does he not do his duty as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States?"

Here's why. First, there is no evidence that the Times article on tracking terrorist finances either breached national security or revealed any "secrets" that had not already been publicized by either the administration or Swift, the Belgian financial clearinghouse enlisted in the effort. Second, the legal bar would be insurmountable: even Gabriel Schoenfeld, who first floated the idea of prosecuting The Times under the Espionage Act in an essay in Commentary, told The Nation this month that the chance of it happening was .05 percent.

But the third and most important explanation has nothing to do with the facts of the case or the law and everything to do with politics. For all the lynch mob's efforts to single out The Times — "It's the old trick, go after New York, go after big, ethnic New York," as Chris Matthews put it — three papers broke Swift stories on their front pages. Even in this bash-the-press environment, the last spectacle needed by a president with an approval rating in the 30's is the national firestorm that would greet a doomed Justice Department prosecution of The Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times.

The administration has a more insidious game plan instead: it has manufactured and milked this controversy to reboot its intimidation of the press, hoping journalists will pull punches in an election year. There are momentous stories far more worrisome to the White House than the less-than-shocking Swift program, whether in the chaos of Anbar Province or the ruins of New Orleans. If the press muzzles itself, its under-the-radar self-censorship will be far more valuable than a Nixonesque frontal assault that ends up as a 24/7 hurricane veering toward the Supreme Court.

Will this plan work? It did after 9/11. The chilling words articulated at the get-go by Ari Fleischer (Americans must "watch what they say") carried over to the run-up to the Iraq war, when the administration's W.M.D. claims went unchallenged by most news organizations. That this strategy may work again can be seen in the fascinating escalation in tactics by the Bush White House's most powerful not-so-secret agent in the press itself, the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The Journal is not Fox News or an idle blogger or radio bloviator. It's the establishment voice of the party in power. The infamous editorial it ran on June 30 ("Fit and Unfit to Print"), an instant classic, doesn't just confer its imprimatur on the administration's latest crusade to conflate aggressive journalism with treason, but also ups the ante.

[...]

By any standard, The Journal is one of the great newspapers in the world, whether you agree with its editorials or not. As befits a great newspaper, its journalists are fearless in pursuit of news, as tragically exemplified by Daniel Pearl. Like reporters at The Times, those at The Journal operate independently of the paper's opinion pages. Witness The Journal's schism during the Enron scandal. Its editorial page belittled the scandal's significance most of the way, resisting even mild criticisms of Enron (it was "partly a victim of its own success") until it filed for bankruptcy. The dearly departed Ken Lay, after all, was the leading Bush financial patron; to the Journal editorialists, the "Clintonian moral climate" of the 1990's was a root cause of Enron's problems. Meanwhile, The Journal's investigative reporters had gone their own way months earlier, helping unearth the scandal. So much so that Mr. Lay tried to argue his innocence in the spring by testifying that a "witch hunt" by the paper's reporters had more to do with his company's demise than he did.

It was a similarly top-flight Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, who wrote his paper's Swift story. But the Journal editorial page couldn't ignore him if it was attacking The Times for publishing its Swift scoop on the same day. So instead it maligned him by echoing Tony Snow's official White House line: The Journal was merely following The Times once it knew that The Times would publish anyway. As if this weren't insulting enough, the editorial suggested that the Treasury Department leaked much of the story to The Journal and that a Journal reporter could be relied upon to write a "straighter" account more to the government's liking than that of a Times reporter.

[...]

Any fan of The Journal's news operation expects it to stand up to this bullying. But the nastiness of the Journal editorial is a preview of what we can expect from the administration and all of its surrogates this year. In "The One Percent Doctrine," the revelatory book about wartime successes and failures now (happily) outpacing Ann Coulter at Amazon.com, the former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind explains just how tough it is for a reporter in this climate: "to report about national affairs and, especially, national security in this contentious period demands at least a spoonful of disobedience — a countermeasure to strong assurances by those in power that the obedient will be rewarded or, at the very least, have nothing to worry about."

The trouble is we have plenty to worry about. For all the airy talk about the First Amendment, civil liberties and Thomas Jefferson in the debate over the Swift story and the National Security Agency surveillance story before it, there's an urgent practical matter at stake, too. Now more than ever, after years of false reports of missions accomplished, the voters need to do what Congress has failed to do and hold those who mismanage America's ever-expanding war accountable for their performance in real time. (PDF here.)

Grover Norquist is finding out that Harry Truman's advice about Washington D.C. is true: "If you want a friend in this town, get a dog."

For more than a decade, Grover G. Norquist has been at the nexus of conservative activism in Washington, becoming a Bush administration insider whose weekly strategy sessions at his Americans for Tax Reform have drawn ever-larger crowds of lawmakers, lobbyists and even White House political adviser Karl Rove.

Over the past six years, Norquist has been a key cheerleader and strategist for successive White House tax cuts, extracting ironclad oaths from congressional Republicans not to even think about tax increases. And even before President Bush's election, he positioned himself as a gatekeeper for supplicants seeking access to Bush's inner circle.

But in the aftermath of reports that Norquist served as a cash conduit for disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the irascible, combative activist is struggling to maintain his stature as some GOP lawmakers distance themselves and as enemies in the conservative movement seek to diminish his position.

"People were willing to cut him a lot of slack because he's done a lot of favors for a lot of people," said J. Michael Waller, a vice president of the right-leaning Center for Security Policy who for several years was an occasional participant at Norquist's Wednesday meetings. "But Grover's not that likable."

To paraphrase Mr. Norquist himself, it would be supremely ironic to see that his influence shrinks so that it is small enough to be drowned in the bathtub.

I haven't got a dog in the hunt at the World Cup, but it is fun to watch.

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 7:41 AM  

Rev. Dozier is at it again.

The Rev. O'Neal Dozier, a Broward clergyman who has advised President Bush and is a political appointee of Gov. Jeb Bush, took to the air waves Friday to criticize Islam as a "cult" religion.

The radio appearance by Dozier, who serves on the governor's committee that screens Broward judicial nominees, startled a local Muslim leader, and prompted the governor to immediately distance himself from the statements.

Reached later in the day by The Miami Herald, a contrite Dozier said he was "concerned" his comments could jeopardize his position on Broward's Judicial Nominating Commission. But he did not disavow those comments.

"The Islamic religion in my view is a cult," Dozier said Friday, when asked to recap the controversial comments he made earlier on The Steve Kane Radio Show on WNN-AM 1470. "On the show I said that Islam is a dangerous religion."

[...]

On Friday, Gov. Bush's office issued a statement distancing him from Dozier.

"Gov. Bush in no way shares Rev. Dozier's views on Islam," said Alia Faraj, Bush's spokeswoman. "Florida's greatest strength is its diverse population, which is bolstered by the many faiths of our residents."

Did you know that Rev. Dozier and Ann Coulter have the same answering service?

This is the same minister who back in May had a revelation from God that one of the Republican candidates for governor, Charlie Crist, would be the next governor of Florida. I'm sure Mr. Crist is delighted with this latest pronouncement from one of his staunchest supporters.

A recent couple of postings about the kerfuffle here in Miami regarding the school board's banning of the children's book Vamos a Cuba caught the attention of one of the participants. A verbatim copy of a Miami Herald guest editorial by Frank Bolaños, a member of the school board and defender of the ban (as well as a candidate for the state senate) was inserted twice as a comment here at Bark Bark Woof Woof, apparently by one of his campaign staff or pressmongers.

I suppose I should take it as a compliment that this humble blog should attract that kind of attention, but my rule on comments is that you get one bite at the apple; duplicate postings, especially when they're wholesale lifts of material published elsewhere, are not allowed. It has nothing to do with the content of the comment or whether or not I disagree with it -- I'm not into censorship, like some people. Therefore, the second posting of the editorial has been deleted and so noted on that thread.

As we approach the silly season of campaigning, I expect to see a growing interest in blogs from the candidates, and I will be participating as an observer and promoter of ideas that I think are important. But if a candidate for a local office wants to enlist my support or debate some of their points with me and the readers of this blog, they can do so through original comments, direct contact via e-mail, or, as is the current fashion in politics back in my hometown of Toledo, they can drop off a large stash of rare coins.

We're getting to the bottom of the barrel here.

Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists have increasingly been able to infiltrate the U.S. military due to recruitment pressures created by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a watchdog group said Friday.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist activities in the United States, said thousands of hate group members are now in the armed forces, especially in the Army, increasing the threat of domestic terrorism.

"There is mounting evidence that military recruiters and commanders, under intense pressure to meet manpower goals with the country at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, have relaxed standards designed to prohibit racist extremists from serving in the armed forces," the center's Chief Executive Richard Cohen told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a letter.

Cohen asked Rumsfeld to appoint a task force to determine the full extent of the problem and to adopt a "zero-tolerance" policy toward racist extremists in the military that could be rigorously enforced.

"The Army's dealing with that," Defense Department spokesman Bryan Whitman said when asked to comment on the issue.

He added that it was incumbent on individual commanders to address any activities that are inconsistent with "good order and discipline."

[...]

We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the report quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying.

The center said young civilian extremists are encouraged by adult leaders to enlist in the military to gain access to weapons and training and to recruit other military personnel.

"The reasons are obvious: soldiers are trained to be proficient with weapons, combat tactics and explosives, to train others in their use, and to operate in a highly disciplined culture that is focused on the organized violence of war," the center said.

Its report cited examples of military personnel belonging to groups such as the National Alliance, whose founder William Pierce wrote the race war fantasy novel "Turner Diaries."

So what we're doing is recruiting terrorists here so we can train them over there so we can then fight them when they get back here.

As I noted over at Shakespeare's Sister, where I first saw this story, I know I'm speaking anecdotally, but most of the skinheads I've seen are either really skinny kids or obese guys who look like Weebles. Let's see what six weeks of basic training will do to them. And since a lot of our volunteers are minorities, I suppose the first time one of these pathetic Nazis opens his mouth he'll be eating the business end of a brick.

But it's still scary shit nevertheless.

From the New York Daily News:

The FBI has uncovered what officials consider a serious plot by jihadists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in hopes of causing a torrent of water to deluge lower Manhattan, the Daily News has learned.

The terrorists sought to drown the Financial District as New Orleans was by Hurricane Katrina, sources said. They also wanted to attack subways and other tunnels.

[...]

The plotters wanted to detonate a massive amount of explosives inside the Holland Tunnel to blast a hole that would destroy the tunnel, everyone in it, and send a devastating flood shooting through the streets of lower Manhattan.

It is assumed by officials the thugs would try to use vehicles packed with explosives.

Sources said that New York City officials believed the plan could conceivably work with enough explosives placed in the middle of the tunnel, which runs underneath the river bed, a source said.

But others doubted the plot was feasible.

"You are talking major, major explosives and knowledge of blast effect to make this happen," said another senior counterterrorism source.

Besides bedrock, the tunnel is protected by concrete and cast-iron steel.

Experts also said that even if the tunnel cracked, the Financial District would not be flooded because it is above the level of the river.

The FBI discovered the plot by monitoring Internet chat rooms, where the aspiring terrorists discussed striking the U.S. economy, rather than causing mass casualties, a source said.

Sounds pretty serious, doesn't it, until you realize that these guys were not especially bright.

First, as the article points out, to achieve their goal they'd have to change the laws of physics since the Holland Tunnel is buried in bedrock and the worst that could happen to the tunnel itself would be a cascade of rocks and mud. Second, water doesn't run uphill, so lower Manhattan has a better chance of being flooded if everyone living in Greenwich Village let their bathtub overflow. Third, these guys were discussing this in an internet chat room; not exactly an encrypted form of communication unless the FBI can't figure out what "VGL SWM looking for NOW" means.

These guys sound about as dangerous as the guys they rounded up last month here in Miami or the guy who was going to knock down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch; which is to say not exactly Osama bin Laden. (You remember him; tall guy, beard, ordered the murder of 3,000 people. He was in all the papers.) But the media -- and especially the righties -- are making a big hoo-ha out of them because they're "jihadists." Okay, fine. But I'm wondering if they would be making such a hugga-mugga if it had been a plot by a bunch of white supremacists from Carp Lake (whom I can testify first-hand barely have enough collective brain-power to toast bread).

And another thing: where's the outrage from the right about this being leaked to the New York Daily News? Maybe it's cynical to think that perhaps this was a nice little leak on the part of the White House bump up the polls for the president's birthday. Beats getting him another tie.

There's no doubt that the ruling from the New York Court of Appeals is a setback for gay rights, and the logic used in the opinion shows that at least one of the judges, specifically Judge Smith, has a rather antiquated view of homosexuality, referring to it as a "preferance" -- as if you like your coffee with sugar in it -- rather than the term "orientation," which is more accurate. As for their venturing into the speculation that somehow gay marriage has an impact on straight marriage and the raising of children, that's like saying the Giant Red Spot on Jupiter is responsible for Gene Shalit's perpetual bad-hair days. Note that they did not cite any specific cases to prove this point.

The court basically said that the New York State Assembly did not intend to sanction gay marriage in establishing matrimonial law, and therefore the remedy is through the state legislature, not through the courts. So while it would have been nice if they had said that there was an inherent right to equal protection under the laws in the state of New York regardless of one's gender, it now becomes a matter for the state legislature to decide if marriage in the state can be open to all people. And if they should see the wisdom of changing the law, it would make it a lot harder for the bigots and homophobes to blame "activist judges."

No one said that obtaining equal protection for gays and lesbians would be easy. If the struggle for civil rights in this country is any guide, it look nearly one hundred years from the adoption of the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution to the passage of the Voting Rights Act to ensure that people of all races had the opportunity to participate in our government through the simple act of voting, and there were setbacks all along the way. The struggle for simple equality under the law for the LGBT community will require a constant effort, and for every Massachusetts there will be a New York.

It's also a matter of fairness. If we as gay Americans are expected to live up to the responsibilities and duties of citizenship -- paying taxes, serving on juries, and so forth -- it might be nice if we were accommodated all of the privileges of citizenship as well, such as serving in the military if we so choose or simply living our lives with the one we love. Is that too much to ask?

Lots going on at The Liberal Coalition.

A Blog Around The Clock learns how to talk Right.

All Facts and Opinions on Joe Lieberman.

archy on the hunt for the stupidest politician out there.

Bark Bark Woof Woof on the symbolic battle at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

blogAmY would like some time alone with a mean bastard.

bloggg catches Jeff Daniels looking freaked.

Collective Sigh is back in the live bait business.

NTodd on new words in the dictionary. Google that.

Echidne with news from the world of religious wingnuttery.

FDL has a Lieberman-Lamont debate wrap-up.

First Draft on extremists infiltrating the U.S. military.

Happy Furry Puppy has a picture of Don Rumsfeld serving in the military...

iddybud has several short takes, including Barney Frank on Grover Norquist.

Left Is Right rages against the machine.

Lefty discovers David Bowie.

Liberty Street takes a trip on the Wayback machine to 1971.

Make Me a Commentator goes after reporters.

Musing's musings on the push for "simplifying" English.

Pen-Elayne has a clip of The Beatles performing Shakespeare. No kidding.

Respectful of Otters on the health care crisis.

Rook on the mess left after Bush.

rubber hose finds a site that thinks Superman is a dick.

Scrutiny Hooligans on who's got nukes.

Sooner Thought reminds us of how liberals have ruined the life of the average Joe Republican.

Speedkill on some funny news.

Steve Gilliard analyzes the Lamont-Lieberman debate.

T. Rex's Guide to Life lays out the plan for the Florida Progressive Coalition. More about that in the next couple of days.

The Countess on Prairie Muffins.

The Invisible Library on Superman.

WTF Is It Now?? on the Coulter-kampf.

The Yellow Doggerel Democrat on the DeLaying tactics.

...You Are A Tree has fun with a parody of a classic.

Have a nice trip, Conchita.

Snowball gets ready to pounce.

From the Washington Post:

At the Veterans Memorial Cemetery in the small town of Fernley, Nev., there is a wall of brass plaques for local heroes. But one space is blank. There is no memorial for Sgt. Patrick D. Stewart.

That's because Stewart was a Wiccan, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has refused to allow a symbol of the Wicca religion -- a five-pointed star within a circle, called a pentacle -- to be inscribed on U.S. military memorials or grave markers.

The department has approved the symbols of 38 other faiths; about half of are versions of the Christian cross. It also allows the Jewish Star of David, the Muslim crescent, the Buddhist wheel, the Mormon angel, the nine-pointed star of Bahai and something that looks like an atomic symbol for atheists.

Stewart, 34, is believed to be the first Wiccan killed in combat. He was serving in the Nevada National Guard when the helicopter in which he was riding was shot down in Afghanistan last September. He previously had served in the Army in Korea and Operation Desert Storm. He was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

[...]

Wicca is one of the fastest-growing faiths in the country. Its adherents have increased almost 17-fold from 8,000 in 1990 to 134,000 in 2001, according to the American Religious Identification Survey. The Pentagon says that more than 1,800 Wiccans are on active duty in the armed forces.

Wiccans still suffer, however, from the misconception that they are devil worshipers. Some Wiccans call themselves witches, pagans or neopagans. Most of their rituals revolve around the cycles of nature, such as equinoxes and phases of the moon. Wiccans often pick and choose among religious traditions, blending belief in reincarnation and feminine gods with ritual dancing, chanting and herbal medicine.

Federal courts have recognized Wicca as a religion since 1986. Prisons across the country treat it as a legitimate faith, as do the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. military, which allows Wiccan ceremonies on its bases.

"My husband's dog tags said 'Wiccan' on them," Stewart noted.

What the hell is the Department of Veterans Affairs doing in the religious symbols business? I say if a veteran's family wants a particular symbol on his marker, let him have it, even if it's the Vulcan IDIC from Star Trek. But no, they cave into ignorance and the Religious Reich:

But letters printed by Nevada newspapers indicate how much hostility Wiccans face. "I don't see how anything that supports witchcraft and satanism can legitimately be called a religion," one reader wrote to the Reno Gazette-Journal.

We tell ourselves that our soldiers are fighting -- and dying -- for the things we believe in, including Wicca and the First Amendment. Someone needs to let the Department of Veterans Affairs know that.

If it is perfectly acceptable for a fundamentalist church in Memphis to desecrate the Statue of Liberty with religious symbols, then what is wrong with acknowledging the faith of a fallen soldier with the symbol of it? He's done a lot more to advance the cause of freedom than all the religious wingnuts put together.

I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for this.

A government consultant, using computer programs easily found on the Internet, managed to crack the FBI's classified computer system and gain the passwords of 38,000 employees, including that of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.

The break-ins, which occurred four times in 2004, gave the consultant access to records in the Witness Protection Program and details on counterespionage activity, according to documents filed in U.S. District Court in Washington. As a direct result, the bureau said it was forced to temporarily shut down its network and commit thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars to ensure no sensitive information was lost or misused.

The government does not allege that the consultant, Joseph Thomas Colon, intended to harm national security. But prosecutors said Colon's "curiosity hacks" nonetheless exposed sensitive information.

Colon, 28, an employee of BAE Systems who was assigned to the FBI field office in Springfield, Ill., said in court filings that he used the passwords and other information to bypass bureaucratic obstacles and better help the FBI install its new computer system. And he said agents in the Springfield office approved his actions.

The incident is only the latest in a long string of foul-ups, delays and embarrassments that have plagued the FBI as it tries to update its computer systems to better share tips and information. Its computer technology is frequently identified as one of the key obstacles to the bureau's attempt to sharpen its focus on intelligence and terrorism.

What that tells us is that the biggest threat to American security isn't Osama bin Laden; it's a bored teenager with a computer who could hack into the FBI faster than he could download the latest edition of Girls Gone Wild.

Don't you feel safer?

From the Sun-Sentinel:

Saying Rush Limbaugh's Viagra prescription was legally prescribed, the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office announced on Wednesday that it would not file charges against the conservative radio talk show host for possessing medication in someone else's name.

But Miami-Dade prosecutors will review the file and decide whether charges are warranted against the two Miami doctors involved, according to Assistant State Attorney Paul Zacks. To protect Limbaugh's privacy, his medical doctor prescribed the erectile dysfunction drug to Limbaugh's psychologist, according to Limbaugh's affidavit.

[...]

Upon returning from a trip to the Dominican Republic on June 26, customs officials detained Limbaugh on his private plane for several hours after finding three prescription medication bottles in his luggage. One of the bottles - Viagra - was labeled in the name of Limbaugh's North Miami psychologist, Steven Strumwasser, "to avoid potentially embarrassing publicity for the suspect," according to a memo from the Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office.

Perhaps next time he'll think twice before he attempts to commit an assault with a dead weapon.

Justin Rood at TPMmuckraker has been hot on the trail of journalism's latest iteration of Milli Vanilli.

Start here and follow up here.

Update: Coulter lashes out at the New York Post, calling it a "tabloid." Duh. According to Editor and Publisher, "Of course, the Post could hardly be 'reduced to tabloid status' since it is, in fact, a tabloid." Snort.

The Old Professor pointed me to this site. Check it out if you want a good laugh -- or a good scare.

The Judicial Accountability Initiative Law, J.A.I.L., is a single-issue national grassroots organization designed to end the rampant and pervasive judicial corruption in the legal system of the United States. J.A.I.L. recognizes this can be achieved only through making the Judicial Branch of government answerable and accountable to an entity other than itself. At this time it isn't, resulting in the judiciary's arbitrary abuse of the doctrine of judicial immunity, leaving the People without recourse when their inherent rights are violated by judges.

Check out the bio of the leader of this gang. Spooky.

I leave it to the lawyers to discuss the finer points, but from what I can glean from the frantic writings on the site, they really don't grasp the concept of separation of powers and judicial immunity -- or representative democracy, for that matter. If anything, it sounds like a new edition of the French Revolution without the charm.

It would be easy to laugh these people off as just another bunch of whackos, but there are chapters all over the country, and the last "grassroots" group that we ignored was the Christian Coalition.

From the Washington Post:

HOUSTON -- Enron Corp. founder Ken Lay, who was convicted last month of fraud and conspiracy for his part in the Houston-based company's collapse into bankruptcy in 2001, has died of a heart attack at his vacation home in Colorado, a Houston television station reported on Wednesday.

KHOU-TV, a CBS affiliate, said Lay suffered a massive heart attack. He was awaiting sentencing later this year and was expected to face a lengthy prison term for his convictions in the Enron collapse.

Some people will do anything to stay out of jail.

I'm sorry for his family's loss; I'm sure it was a shock. But I have a feeling a lot of his former employees and pensioners won't be shedding too many tears.

I leave the poetic justice for others to ponder.

The Miami-Dade County Democratic Party is running on fumes.

One by one, Democratic politicians and candidates took to the stage at a recent Coral Gables fundraiser for U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, firing up the crowd about the party's prospects for the November election.

But no one bothered to call up Miami-Dade Democratic Party Chairman Jimmy Morales, whose efforts to revive the local party could use a hand from the hundreds of partisans gathered at the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave.

The oversight spoke volumes about the near-invisibility of the local party. Cindy Lerner, Miami-Dade Democratic state committeewoman, resorted to recruiting phone bank volunteers in the ladies' room.

"There's a tremendous wealth in Miami-Dade, and it's all going out of town," Lerner said. "We're only going to win the presidential race in 2008 and the governor's race in 2006 if we carry Miami-Dade in a big way. The people that write these fat checks to candidates without shoring up the get-out-the-vote effort at the local level don't understand how politics work."

I gotta tell ya, they've done it to themselves. I've tried several times over the last year, especially since joining the Florida Progressive Coaltion, to get in touch with local Dems and got bupkus as both a private citizen interested in GOTV efforts during local campaigns, or as a blogger for material to blog about. I've had more contacts from the state level and governor's campaigns than I have from the local party.

I'll keep at it, but if you expect to get people to come to the party, you have to let them know that you're home.

President Bush indicates that he is considering changing his mind on immigration.

On the eve of nationwide hearings that could determine the fate of his immigration bill, President Bush is signaling a new willingness to negotiate with House Republicans in an effort to revise the stalled legislation before Election Day.

Republicans both inside and outside the White House say Mr. Bush, who has long insisted on comprehensive reform, is now open to a so-called enforcement-first approach that would put new border security programs in place before creating a guest worker program or path to citizenship for people living in the United States illegally.

"He thinks that this notion that you can have triggers is something we should take a close look at, and we are," said Candi Wolff, the White House director of legislative affairs, referring to the idea that guest worker and citizenship programs would be triggered when specific border security goals had been met, a process that could take two years.

The shift is significant because Mr. Bush has repeatedly said he favors legislation like the Senate's immigration bill, which establishes border security, guest worker and citizenship programs all at once. The enforcement-first approach puts Mr. Bush one step closer to the House, where Republicans are demanding an enforcement-only measure.

Not a big surprise here; the operative words in the story are "before Election Day." Having screwed the pooch on the two hot-button issues for his right-wing nutsery base -- gay-bashing and flag-burning -- he has to go back to them with something more than just "trust me." So sniffing around the hard-core round-em-up and ship-em-out plan put forward by some members of the House is his way of saying he's really one of them.

Of course this would put him at odds with the legislation being put forth by the Senate, but since when did this administration ever really give a rat's ass about comprehensive and bipartisan legislation in exchange for a good campaign sound bite? And it's not a flip-flop; only Democrats do that.

North Korea reminds us that they're still around.

North Korea test-fired a long-range missile and five shorter-range rockets early Wednesday, but the closely watched long-range test failed within a minute, U.S. officials said.

The tests began shortly after 3:30 a.m. local time (2:30 p.m. Tuesday ET) and lasted for about five hours.

The Taepodong-2 missile, which some analysts believed capable of hitting the western United States, failed after about 40 seconds, U.S. officials said.

The U.N. Security Council planned to meet Wednesday morning to discuss North Korea's actions.

I suppose in the long run there was some method in the madness of going to war in Iraq; of the batshit crazies that run countries in the world, Saddam Hussein was the one of the "axis of evil" that didn't have nuclear weapons. On the other hand, it left the two loons who did have them or were a lot closer to acquiring them -- Iran and North Korea -- to happily go about their business of setting off Geiger counters and missiles.

You have to think that Kim Jong Il, the egomaniacal and high-heel wearing dictator of a country that makes Albania look like Disneyworld, has to feel a little left out that the other crazy guy in Iran is getting all the attention. So he shoots off his rockets on the same day the space shuttle goes up as well as every other bottle rocket in the U.S. It's his way of throwing a temper tantrum and saying, "Hey! I'm still here!"

President Clinton got some concessions and progress in talks with North Korea. As Billy Joel once noted, "You should never argue with a crazy man," but you shouldn't ignore him, either. President Bush has been doing both.

Meanwhile, according to Orrin Hatch, the most important issue facing America is flag burning and queers. Nice to see that the U.S. Senate has its priorities straight.

Anything's possible with a little taste and charm. - Kenneth Talley, Jr., Fifth of July

I'm a huge fan of the work of playwright Lanford Wilson. One of his best plays is 5th of July (1978), which was re-written and re-staged in 1980 with a slight change of title to Fifth of July. (I directed a production of it in 1985.) It is the first in the "Talley triology" of plays revolving around the Talley family of Lebanon, Missouri; the other plays are Talley's Folly (1979 Pulitzer Prize) and Talley & Son (1985). He was the 2001 William Inge Theatre Festival honoree.

His style of playwrighting is lyrical and character-driven; the interaction between his mix of odd and ordinary people is fascinating (to me, at least), and a lot of his works rely on the strength of the ensemble cast rather than one outstanding star.

Anyway, I always remember today as Lanford Wilson's Day because of Fifth of July.

The Fourth of July over Coral Gables

From CNN:

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida (CNN) -- The space shuttle Discovery and its seven-member crew roared into space Tuesday afternoon -- NASA's first manned launch on Independence Day and its second shuttle flight since the Columbia accident of 2003.

"And liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery returning to the space station, paving the way for future missions and beyond," said NASA launch commentator Bruce Buckingham.

There were hugs and handshakes in NASA's Mission Control as Discovery made its way into orbit.

One of the advantages of living in Florida is getting to actually see launches of spacecraft; I remember seeing the nighttime launch of Apollo 17 in December 1972; it was clearly visible from the balcony of my apartment in Coconut Grove. Well, this time I was ready, camera in hand, so right after the shuttle lifted off I went out to my front porch, pointed my camera in the direction of Cape Canaveral, and snapped this photo:

Stupid clouds. Oh well, you get the idea.

Good luck, Discovery, and happy landings.

I started to write a post this morning about how liberals and progressives seem to shy away from overt displays of patriotism, especially on a national holiday that celebrates our independence, and how I felt it was somehow necessary to explain why we don't join in the right-wing's overt and overblown displays of national pride by wearing red, white, and blue socks, hats, and little flag lapel pins; how we don't get all gooey with waving the flag as if it was a censer, and how somehow we are ashamed about feeling a sense of pride in being an American.

And then I stopped. I don't have to explain anything to anyone or apologize for how I display -- or don't display -- my feelings of patriotism any more than I have to explain my feelings about my faith -- or lack of it -- in a certain religion or ritual to show anyone else how I feel. My actions as a citizen, including writing and voting and working for the election of people I believe in, speak a lot louder than some display of bunting or clothing, and whether or not that meets other peoples' imagined level of patriotic duty is not my concern.

Patriotism has been seized by a certain segment of our society as the shibboleth of true citizenship; anyone who does not fit into their narrow measure of what they think it means to be an American -- white, rich, straight, Christian, Republican -- is suspected of being less of an American. I find that mindset to be as repugnant to the idea of what founded this country as any tyranny we have stood against for the last 230 years. That some people would attempt to mold a society that conforms to their bigoted and quasi-theocratic vision of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is the risk we took when we established the Constitution. But it has been the dissenters who have kept alive the promise -- and the threat -- laid out in the Declaration of Independence; that when a government goes too far in imposing its rule or, conversely, fails to provide for the welfare of the people, it is our duty to stand up and object; strenuously, if need be, and risk the wrath of those who are all too quick to demonize us as traitors because we don't go along with the crowd. (By the way, read through the Declaration of Independence and see how many, if any, of the complaints brought up by the Continental Congress still apply today.)

The men who signed their names in Philadelphia in 1776 were committing an act of treason against the lawful government of the nation. That took genuine sacrifice and courage, not a lapel pin. Those of us who truly want to make this a better nation -- to improve this work in progress -- by battling the narrow-minded and sanctimonious pieties of the flag-wavers don't just stop on one day a year to watch fireworks and stand for the national anthem. We shoot off fireworks and write the new verses of our national dialogue every day.

And if that's not good enough for some of the sunshine patriots and show-offs, then they know what they can do with their sparklers.

IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

From Murray Waas in the National Journal:

President Bush told the special prosecutor in the CIA leak case that he directed Vice President Dick Cheney to personally lead an effort to counter allegations made by former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV that his administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Iraq, according to people familiar with the president's statement.

Bush also told federal prosecutors during his June 24, 2004, interview in the Oval Office that he had directed Cheney, as part of that broader effort, to disclose highly classified intelligence information that would not only defend his administration but also discredit Wilson, the sources said.

[...]

One senior government official familiar with the discussions between Bush and Cheney -- but who does not have firsthand knowledge of Bush's interview with prosecutors -- said that Bush told the vice president to "Get it out," or "Let's get this out," regarding information that administration officials believed would rebut Wilson's allegations and would discredit him.

So it's perfectly all right for the president to order a leak of highly classified intelligence to discredit a political opponent, but it's treasonous and "disgraceful" for newspapers to release details of a program that the president and his administration bragged about three years ago.

Yeah, right.

Dana Priest of the Washington Post got under Bill Bennett's skin yesterday with a nice little dig at one of his peccadilloes, namely the fact that he's fond of casino gambling. Watch the video from Crooks and Liars.

Bill Bennett, as you recall, was the Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration. He has now taken on the role of chief jowl-shaker and finger-wagger of all that is immoral in everybody else's life except that of his own (he's blown millions at the slots in Vegas and Atlantic City) or anyone who isn't a Republican; they all get a free pass on their behavior because IOKIYAR.

On Meet the Press Mr. Bennett acted like he was the only conservative in the bunch, despite the presence of John Harwood of the Wall Street Journal and William Safire, formerly of the New York Times and speechwriter for the Nixon administration. What Mr. Bennett was actually complaining about was that he was the only one on the panel that was toeing the Bush administration's line that the New York Times -- and only the Times -- was treasonable for printing the story about the Swift bank account mining. Nobody else, including substitute moderator Andrea Mitchell, went along with him.

After the little shot by Ms. Priest, the best one was when Mr. Bennett pompously asserted that no one elected the New York Times to reveal the "secrets" of the war on terror. Mr. Safire shot back that indeed someone did elect the press; a little group known as the Founding Fathers when they inserted that little inconvenience known as the First Amendment. You could hear Mr. Bennett's pathetic little whimper even off-camera, and he was quite the grumble-bunny for the rest of the show. Harrumph.

Do you get today off as well as tomorrow? Lucky you. Some of us have to work.

It's "sort of Canada Day" up north since the rule is that if Canada Day falls on a weekend, they take the following Monday as a holiday. All that will ensure is that the 401 will be as crowded as ever this afternoon between Toronto and Windsor.

From the Washington Post:

Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Felipe Calderón each claimed victory in Mexico's presidential election late Sunday night, even though the country's electoral commission said the race was so close it might not be able to announce the winner until Wednesday.

The dramatic announcements by López Obrador and Calderón shortly before midnight in Mexico City set up what is sure to be a furiously emotional battle over voting results in a nation that had spent tens of millions of dollars to ensure a fair and efficient election. Both candidates appeared on national television within minutes after Luis Carlos Ugalde, the head of the Federal Electoral Institute, announced that the difference between the two "was too narrow" for him to call the race.

López Obrador, a populist beloved by Mexico's poor, struck first, appearing before a bank of microphones and forcefully saying that "according to our information, we have won the presidency of Mexico." He said he would respect Mexico's institutions, but he also called on Mexico's institutions to respect the results. "We triumphed, we won," he said.

Calderón, a free-trade booster who promised continuity with President Vicente Fox's policies, appeared on television screens across Mexico moments later.

"The quick counts signal that we have won the presidential election," said Calderón, whose face was dappled with sweat.

Look out, amigos; if it goes to the Supreme Court, the next president of Mexico could be George W. Bush.

The New York Post reports on Ann Coulter's plagiarism.

Conservative scribe Ann Coulter cribbed liberally in her latest book, "Godless," according to a plagiarism expert.

John Barrie, the creator of a leading plagiarism-recognition system, claimed he found at least three instances of what he calls "textbook plagiarism" in the leggy blond pundit's "Godless: the Church of Liberalism" after he ran the book's text through the company's digital iThenticate program.

He also says he discovered verbatim lifts in Coulter's weekly column, which is syndicated to more than 100 newspapers, including the Fort Lauderdale (Fla.) Sun-Sentinel and Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle.

Barrie, CEO of iParadigms, told The Post that one 25-word passage from the "Godless" chapter titled "The Holiest Sacrament: Abortion" appears to have been lifted nearly word for word from Planned Parenthood literature published at least 18 months before Coulter's 281-page book was released.

[...]

Barrie says he also ran Coulter's Universal Press columns from the past 12 months through iThenticate and found similar patterns of cribbing.

Her Aug. 3, 2005, column, "Read My Lips: No New Liberals," about U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter, includes six passages, ranging from 10 to 48 words each, that appeared 15 years earlier in the same order in an L.A. Times article, headlined "Liberals Leery as New Clues Surface on Souter's Views."

But nowhere in that column does she mention the L.A. Times or the story's writer, David G. Savage.

This follows up on stories printed in Raw Story and The Rude Pundit.

The New York Post is not an outlet of the "librul media," so it will be interesting to see how Ms. Coulter spins this revelation. Who's she gonna blame this one on? James Wolcott has this to say:

Confronted with a serial plagiarist, commentators often attempt a jackknife dive into the murky motives of the offender, trying to untangle the nagging compulsions that made the copycat risk his or her career by taking a heaping helping of other people's work. (Thomas Mallon's Stolen Words is probably the definitive book on the psychodynamics of plagiarism.) In Coulter's case, no dive is necessary, no onion-peeling of motives required. She is so devoid of character and psychology that any investigation would be superfluous. She's swiping other people's work not because she's trying to slip something past us but because she's sloppy, lazy, and arrogant. She just doesn't give a fuck. She's learned that the rules of journalism and public discourse don't apply to her, having cheerfully violated them so many times before only to be rewarded with the cover of Time, countless cable-news appearances, and bestselling success.

And with any luck, it will be the last thing anyone hears from her as a columnist; if this isn't grounds for the termination of her contract with Universal Press, I don't know what is.

Writing on writing on writing.

Carl Hiaasen on how to pump up books sales.

The publisher of Vamos a Cuba should send a bottle of champagne to Frank Bolaños, the Miami-Dade School Board member who led the push to ban the harmless little travel tome from the county's public schools.

Nothing attracts attention -- and new readers -- like a banned book.

[...]

Book bans often fail in the United States because our courts, like the framers of our Constitution, take a dim view of government censorship. That hasn't stopped grandstanding politicians, small-minded bureaucrats and rabid religious groups from declaring war on written works that they find offensive.

Such crusades usually backfire. The controversy over a book invariably generates more publicity than a publisher could ever buy, and attracts readers who might otherwise have never picked up the disputed volume.

[...]

Vamos a Cuba is different from most banned titles. It doesn't have any serious social issues, off-color language, precocious wizards or demon dogs. It's only 32 pages long, a simply written book designed to tell kids what a visit to Cuba is like.

Understandably, some Cuban Americans are unhappy because the book doesn't mention the hardships and oppression that exist under Castro's leadership. The photo on the cover shows smiling children in the uniforms of Pioneers, a Communist Party organization to which all students on the island must belong.

The picture itself isn't inaccurate; there are smiling kids in Cuba, just as there is also hardship.

Vamos wasn't meant to be a history book or a social studies text. All the other countries profiled in the series have their own problems, and the books consistently avoid addressing them.

That's not surprising, since the target age of their readers is 4 to 8 years old.

Ironically, the author's neutrality is what got Vamos into trouble with the Miami-Dade School Board. If only Schreier had added a sentence or two bashing Castro, Bolaños would've had to dream up a different vote-grubbing stunt in his upcoming run for state Senate.

That he chose book banning, a favored tactic of suppression in communist nations, is the ultimate hypocrisy -- a fact noted by some in the exile community.

The courts will probably put a quick end to this case, but Bolaños already got the headlines and TV time he wanted. Meanwhile, thousands of kids who'd never heard of Vamos a Cuba now have a reason to check it out for themselves.

Whether young or old, readers tend to be both curious and independent. That's why self-righteous censorship campaigns usually flop.

There's no better way to make sure that a book gets read than to tell people they shouldn't read it.

And, as Leonard Pitts pointed out the other day, the school district will spend upwards of $300,000 to defend themselves in this suit. That's a lot of money for a school district that can ill afford it to spend on a political statement.

To be or not to be? Rumors, fed by the author herself, have swirled around whether or not J.K. Rowlings will kill off Harry Potter in the last book of the series. What is gained or lost when an author kills off a beloved character?

When Dumbledore, the beloved headmaster of Hogwarts, was murdered in Volume 6 of the series, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," deniers immediately created a Web site called "Dumbledore Is Not Dead," where they argued that he had merely contrived his own disappearance and would eventually be back.

Readers overwhelmingly prefer happy endings to sad ones, according to a survey taken in England in March, and they particularly mind it when a beloved character — a Tess, a Beth March, an Anna Karenina, a Harry, for that matter — has to die. A number of those surveyed said that if they could, they would rewrite their favorite books and make them turn out differently.

And yet characters die all the time, of course — even recurring characters — and for all kinds of reasons. Trollope killed off Mrs. Proudie, the henpecking bishop's wife in the Barsetshire Chronicles and one of his greatest creations, simply because he overheard two men complaining at his club about how he made a habit of carrying over characters from one book to another.

Arthur Conan Doyle famously plunged Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls because he had grown so weary of the great detective he felt "towards him as I do towards paté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day." When he resurrected Holmes eight years later, it was partly in response to readers' clamor (even the royal family was said to be upset over Holmes's demise) and partly because he needed the money.

[...]

A similar wish for closure, for sweeping up loose ends, seems to be on the mind of Ms. Rowling, who said she understood "the mentality of an author who thinks, 'Well, I'm going to kill them off because that means there can be no non-author-written sequels.' " She also said that she wrote the final chapter of the series years ago, and has never been tempted to deviate much from the original plan.

[...]

In novels, moreover — though this may be hard to accept for Harry's younger readers, who are accustomed to a world of endless sequels and reruns — poignant, untimely deaths are often better than long, drawn-out ones.

Would we even remember Little Nell if she hadn't died in such spectacularly mawkish fashion? Would we prefer that Emma Bovary didn't swallow the poison and instead became a clochard, cadging francs at the agricultural fair? And do we really want to contemplate Harry, now bald and grizzled, the lightning-shaped scar faded into an age spot, retired from magic and, pint in hand, prattling on about old quidditch matches? Surely it makes more sense to employ the other kind of magic, and go back to Volume 1 and start over.

Frank Rich on the dangers of a free press and a government that doesn't want the world to know how badly they've screwed things up.

OLD GLORY lost today," Bill Frist declaimed last week when his second attempt to rewrite the Constitution in a single month went the way of his happy prognosis for Terri Schiavo. Of course it isn't Old Glory that lost when the flag-burning amendment flamed out. The flag always survives the politicians who wrap themselves in it. What really provoked Mr. Frist's crocodile tears was the foiling of yet another ruse to distract Americans from the wreckage in Iraq. He and his party, eager to change the subject in an election year, just can't let go of their scapegoat strategy. It's illegal Hispanic immigrants, gay couples seeking marital rights, cut-and-run Democrats and rampaging flag burners who have betrayed America's values, not those who bungled a war.

No sooner were the flag burners hustled offstage than a new traitor was unveiled for the Fourth: the press. Public enemy No. 1 is The New York Times, which was accused of a "disgraceful" compromise of national security (by President Bush) and treason (by Representative Peter King of New York and the Coulter amen chorus). The Times's offense was to publish a front-page article about a comprehensive American effort to track terrorists with the aid of a Belgian consortium, Swift, which serves as a clearinghouse for some 7,800 financial institutions in 200 countries.

It was a solid piece of journalism. But if you want to learn the truly dirty secrets of how our government prosecutes this war, the story of how it vilified The Times is more damning than anything in the article that caused the uproar.

[...]

Such ravings make it hard not to think of the official assault on The Times and The Washington Post over the Pentagon Papers. In 1972, on the first anniversary of the publication of that classified Pentagon history of the Vietnam War, The Times's managing editor then, A. M. Rosenthal, reminisced in print about the hyperbolic predictions that had been made by the Nixon White House and its supporters: "Codes would be broken. Military security endangered. Foreign governments would be afraid to deal with us. There would be nothing secret left." None of that happened. What did happen was that Americans learned "how secrecy had become a way of life" for a government whose clandestine policy decisions had fomented a disaster.

The assault on a free press during our own wartime should be recognized for what it is: another desperate ploy by officials trying to hide their own lethal mistakes in the shadows. It's the antithesis of everything we celebrate with the blazing lights of Independence Day.

Speaking of writing, I'll be working on Small Town Boys this week. Will I kill off a character? Wait and see...

Link to this post | posted by Mustang Bobby @ 8:24 AM  

Today marks the 139th anniversary of Canada's confederation.

Canada's a really nice place; they have friendly people, they support the arts, they have a singable national anthem, and being a liberal isn't a label, it's a party.

My only problem with it is that winter thing. Been there, done that. But don't let that harsh the buzz, eh? Happy Birthday!

It didn't take long for Karl Rove to come up with his newest campaign strategy: equate the basic idea of American jurisprudence with sympathy for terrorism.

Republicans yesterday looked to wrest a political victory from a legal defeat in the Supreme Court, serving notice to Democrats that they must back President Bush on how to try suspects at Guantanamo Bay or risk being branded as weak on terrorism.

[...]

House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) criticized House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's comment Thursday that the court decision "affirms the American ideal that all are entitled to the basic guarantees of our justice system." That statement, Boehner said, amounted to Pelosi's advocating "special privileges for terrorists."

Similar views ricocheted around conservative talk radio -- Rush Limbaugh called Pelosi's comments "deranged" on his show Thursday -- and Republican strategists said they believed that the decision presented Bush a chance to put Democrats on the spot while uniting a Republican coalition that lately has been splintered on immigration, spending and other issues.

[...]

Mindful of this thinking, Democrats were measured in their comments about how to respond to the ruling, which held that Bush's policy was not authorized by law and violated the Geneva Conventions.

Brendan Daly, Pelosi's spokesman, said Democrats "want to work with" the administration in fashioning new rules for terrorism suspects, and he dismissed Boehner's comments as a sign of desperation. "[Bush] is not a king -- he has to follow the law," Daly said. "That's all we're saying."

The GOP is sure that they can get away with this because they know that the Democrats' response will be "measured." They can bloviate and screech and foam at the mouth -- and get all the headlines -- while the Democrats try to actually come up with something.

Jesus H. Christ in a birchbark canoe; have the Democrats learned nothing in the last six years? How many times has Karl Rove come up with an outrageous line that is so over the top that no one believes he could get away with it only to have the slavering packs (and PACS) pick it up and run with it? How many times did Charlie Brown try to kick the football only to have Lucy yank it away at the last second?

It's way past time to call bullshit on this perfidy. The gay-marriage amendment, the attempt to privatize Social Security, and the Supreme Court ruling on Gitmo provide the Democrats with the perfect opportunity to show America who the Republicans really are. Let the word go forth that to the Republicans the idea of Equal Justice Under Law, which is carved in stone over the doors to the Supreme Court, applies to rich white straight people only. The rest of us can just rot. They don't give a rat's ass about the basic foundation of the laws of this country unless they can use them to their own political advantage. They don't want to govern; they want to rule.

I say it's time we blow the doors off the Republican strategy. I say we tell the American people that they really do have a choice: you can live in a country where your phone records and bank accounts are scanned, where you can be declared an "enemy combatant" and picked up and tossed into jail in a tropical concentration camp without hope of seeing a lawyer, where covert intelligence agents risk exposure for political revenge, where lies and cooked intelligence start a war, where gays and lesbians can be denied the basic human right of making a legal commitment to their partner, where an entire city can be literally blown off the map by a hurricane and all they get are empty promises and incompetence, where the minimum wage for a full-time job guarantees you poverty while Senators and Congressman whine about their pitiful $165,000 annual salary, and where your pension can be stolen by a multibillion dollar company that cheated millions of others... or you can live in America.