No More Mister Nice Blog

Saturday, March 15, 2003   Europe is no longer Europe. It is a province of Islam, as Spain and Portugal were at the time of the Moors. It hosts almost 16 million Muslim immigrants and teems with mullahs, imams, mosques, burqas, chadors. It lodges thousands of Islamic terrorists whom governments don't know how to identify and control. People are afraid, and in waving the flag of pacifism--pacifism synonymous with anti-Americanism--they feel protected....Mr. Blair too leads a country which is invaded by the Moors. A country that hides that resentment. "Invaded by the Moors"?? That's Oriani Fallaci; the words can be found at OpinionJournal.com, the Web version of the allegedly respectable Wall Street Journal editorial page. Do I have to say the obvious -- that this is essentially what American bigots said about the immigrant generation of my great-grandparents -- my Italian great-grandparents, Oriana? That they couldn't be assimilated by "civilized" America? That the Italians were anarchists and the Jews were communists and they posed a danger to the Republic? And here I am, Oriana -- an American, an Italian-American. Here a lot of us are. And the quote above is merely the lite version of Fallaci's message these days -- for a stronger dose, read this January New York Observer interview of Fallaci (by George Gurley, who also interviewed Ann Coulter for the paper and thus apparently has its bigot beat): "It is a tyranny, a dictatorship -- the only religion on earth that has never committed a work of self-criticism .... It is immovable. It becomes worse and worse .... It is 1,400 years and these people never review themselves, and now they want to come impose it on me, on us?..." There's yet more of this in her current book, The Rage and the Pride. I haven't read it -- if you want to, be my guest. (By the way, I wonder what Fallaci would say in response tothis article from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine about a young Jordanian whose two dreams are jihad against the West and being a programmer at Microsoft. No, it's obvious -- she'd think it proves her point. She'd dismiss the fact that the young man's father thinks his son could get a job if he'd just shave the beard that makes him look too religious. Could the urge to jihad just be generational -- and if it varies from generation to generation, doesn't that demonstrate that it's not immutable?) posted by Steve M. | 9:29 AM | Friday, March 14, 2003   Know who showed up on The O'Reilly Factor a couple of nights ago bashing the French? David Bossie. Yup, that David Bossie -- the guy who worked with Floyd Brown when Brown produced the Willie Horton ad in 1988; the guy who put Gennifer Flowers in an anti-Clinton ad in 1992; the guy who worked for Congressman Dan Burton when Burton was calling Clinton a "scumbag" until the two of them released tapes of Webster Hubbell that were blatantly doctored and Bossie got fired. Bossie's operating under the Citizens United banner again, and CU is jumping on the French-bashing bandwagon. You've got to put a wooden stake into some of these guys to get rid of them. posted by Steve M. | 11:29 PM |   Free Republic's Dixie Chicks boycott coordination thread. Their career is over. This is not going to go away. posted by Steve M. | 4:49 PM |   Oh -- I forgot to link your summer movie guide. posted by Steve M. | 4:21 PM |   Here's a shopping list. It's courtesy of the grown-ups at FrogWeenies.com. These are tough times ... and when the going gets tough, the tough make anti-French pee-pee jokes in PhotoShop. These people really are les nincompoops. (Thanks to Andrea for the link to the list.) posted by Steve M. | 4:00 PM |   Why hasn't every able-bodied member of the NRA volunteered to fight Saddam? Gun fans love to quote the second part of the Second Amendment -- "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" -- but regularly gloss over the first part: The full text of the amendment is, of course, "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Curiously, this text, though it's revered by gun fans, doesn't seem to imbue them with the sense that they have an obligation to defend the security of this nation. And this war is about defending the security of this nation, isn't it? After all, the President has said so over and over again, most recently at his March 7 press conference ("But in the name of peace and the security of our people, if [Saddam] won't do so voluntarily, we will disarm him...."). So, NRA members, please head down to the local recruiting center and volunteer to fight Saddam. You do revere the Second Amendment, don't you? posted by Steve M. | 2:26 PM |   Why do we have to turn to a blogger/cartoonist (Barry at Alas, a Blog) for a detailed analysis of precisely what's banned by the abortion bill just passed by the Senate (potentially a lot of pre-viability abortions, Barry says), while The New York Times contents itself with this geez-I-dunno paragraph? Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said the description of the procedure used in the measure was vague and "could be construed to impact virtually any abortion." Officials at the Center for Reproductive Rights made a similar argument, saying the measure could prohibit the "safest and most common" procedures. posted by Steve M. | 1:52 PM |   Well, I saw this coming: San Antonio DJ Pulls The Plug On The Dixie Chicks A popular country music group has some San Antonians turning off their radios. A KJ 97 DJ pulled the plug on the trio's songs after lead singer Natalie Maines made a negative comment about President Bush. The trio is on tour overseas, but they're causing quite a stir back here at home. "Natalie Maines before a concert audience in London, England said, and I quote, ‘Just so you know, we're ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas,’" said Keith Montgomery with KJ 97. The comments prompted Montgomery to pull the Chicks music off the air Thursday "I would say the reaction is 99 percent in favor of what I have done," said Montgomery.... Over at Lucianne.com, they're calling the band "the Blix Chix." One Lucianne.com poster says, "Who do the DC's think back Bush? The people who listen to country music." Wonder how they'd feel knowing that, according to his daughter Rosanne, Johnny Cash "opposes this war more passionately than just about anyone I know." posted by Steve M. | 10:20 AM |   The Bias Against Guns by John Lott: #9 at Amazon #405,455 at Barnes & Noble Did the right-wing foundations forget to do one bulk buy? posted by Steve M. | 9:58 AM |   HOW (SOME) AMERICANS THINK A college professor I know was talking last night about a student she had in the 1980s. The student had been to France and had found the French unfriendly to Americans. Here's how the student put it: "They're so unpatriotic!" This reminds me of something that happened when my wife and I were in Germany a few years ago. Many of the menus we saw at restaurants there were bilingual or multilingual, but at one restaurant in the Bavarian Alps the menu was (understandably) in German only. As we struggled with the menu and I sneaked furtive looks at my pocket German-English dictionary and German phrasebook, we heard an American-accented voice voice from another table: "Do you have a regular menu?" posted by Steve M. | 9:29 AM |   OK, I'll be unserious and ask this question: Now that right-thinking, freedom-fry-eating Americans have concluded that the Pope is a scummy appeasenik, do you think maybe Sinead O'Connor could have her career back? posted by Steve M. | 7:46 AM | Thursday, March 13, 2003   From ABC News: U.S. officials fear that once President Bush signals the U.S. is headed to war, Saddam Hussein will strike pre-emptively, administration sources told ABCNEWS. But if the United States takes action to stop an Iraqi first strike, especially if they try to seize and protect the oil fields, U.S. officials admit they may end up starting the war itself.... Specific new evidence indicates that Iraqi activity in the Western desert shows the strong likelihood Scud missiles are hidden there... Detailed new intelligence from the southern Iraqi oil fields shows that many of the 700 wells have now been wired with explosives.... Near the border with Kuwait, where 135,000 U.S. troops are now stationed, recent surveillance indicates Iraqi artillery batteries have been moved dangerously close.... The United States is now considering moving against all three of these targets before any war begins in an effort to prevent Saddam from acting first, sources told ABCNEWS. So we may attack preemptively to stop Saddam from attacking preemptively in response to our decision to go to war preemptively. This is becoming rather Strangelovian. Oh, and we're afraid if we attack preemptively, we may start the war early. Excuse me: may? If we attack, isn't that, essentially, the start of the war? posted by Steve M. | 11:06 PM |   Earlier I mentioned that TBOGG has a link to a site advertising a "Golf and Prayer Walk." The site is for something called the "Presidential Prayer Team." Here's some copy from the elsewhere on the PPT site: Pray for the President and his advisors as they consider which course of action to take regarding Iraq. Pray that God's hand will continue to move in the timing of any decision to be made. "Timing"? Hey, maybe the delays we in the anti-war movement are causing are part of God's plan! Maybe God wants the war to be delayed -- or even prevented. Maybe we're instruments of God. Maybe you don't have to be a rich Texas Republican to be an instrument of God. Ever consider that possibility, smart guys? posted by Steve M. | 6:50 PM |   Below I have a post about Representative Ginny Brown-Waite (R - Fla.), who wants to spend your tax money to dig up the corpses of U.S. soldiers buried in France. I now see that MWO was already on this story, and has more information. Go here and scroll down -- but, on the way, be sure to read the story of a Washington Post reporter who let himself be a press agent for the White House -- and admits it. posted by Steve M. | 5:47 PM |   This could get ugly.... One of the Dixie Chicks is clarifying remarks she made about President George W. Bush during a concert in London earlier this week. Reporting on a Chicks' concert, the Web site for the United Kingdom paper The Guardian said singer Natalie Maines told the crowd, "Just so you know, we're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." The singer's barb got the audience cheering, the Guardian said.... "I feel the president is ignoring the opinions of many in the U.S. and alienating the rest of the world," Maines said in the statement. "My comments were made in frustration and one of the privileges of being an American is you are free to voice your own point of view." ... Hey, they're women -- and they play their own instruments! We shoulda known they were commies! Seriously, wasn't k. d. lang basically driven out of country music for saying she didn't eat meat? It makes me wonder what the hell they're going to do to the Chicks. posted by Steve M. | 5:01 PM |   More unseriousness, beamingly posted by Andrew Sullivan on his letters page: We are headed back to a state of nature with nukes. Where, I ask myself, has this situation been thoroughly thought through? Why, in The Road Warrior and other Mel movies. Forget the Bush Doctrine: The United States must cultivate the virtues of Mad Max! I would submit to you that a world that admires the statesmanship of Arafat, the steely determination of Saddam, and the sociopath's flare of Kim Jong Il is ripe for a righteous throat slitter like Max. He did not call meetings or wait for approval. He would just act and let others slip stream behind him, and they did. Is it just me, or does the use of the phrase "thoroughly thought through" in this letter make your jaw drop, too? posted by Steve M. | 4:25 PM |   They're falling all over themselves trying to out-moron one another.... WASHINGTON - In another swipe at the French, a Florida congresswoman has proposed that the government pay for families who might want to bring home from France the remains of Americans who fought and died in the world wars. "I, along with many other Americans, do not feel that the French government appreciates the sacrifices men and women in uniform have made to defend the freedom that the French enjoy today," Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite said in introducing legislation providing financial help for the reburial of veterans from the two world wars... --AP This won't surprise you: President Bush campaigned for Brown-Waite at a rally days before the election, and appeared in ads for her.... "It was very much a party-line vote," [political scientist Susan] MacManus said. "The president's endorsement probably put Ginny Brown-Waite over the top...." What was it that Peggy Noonan said to the Democrats last week? Ah, yes, here it is... You have grown profoundly unserious. The pot calling the refrigerator black. posted by Steve M. | 4:08 PM |   Nice one, from TBOGG. Not for the kiddies, but spot-on nonetheless. (Lots of good stuff if you keep scrolling, too -- "Golf and Prayer Walk"?? -- although T and I part ways on Everclear.) posted by Steve M. | 2:04 PM |   YIKES! It is time for a truly ethical foreign policy, based on true moral superiority. Of course, a half-century of war in Europe, followed by a half-century of peace in Europe, have entirely drained Britain’s own capacity for this sort of project. The responsibility rests with our imperial offspring, the United States. But she can take the earlier empire, which she once so rudely resiled from, as her guide. The British empire, said Queen Victoria, existed ‘to protect the poor natives and advance civilisation’. On one level this was a practical project — the irrigation of Egypt and the Indus, the laying of railways and founding of schools. But at a deeper level the empire was a moral project. Lurid tales of imperial savagery — the dumdum bullet and the Maxim gun, and the fate of the Indian mutineers, lashed to the muzzles of fieldpieces and blown to bits to the beat of drums — rather understandably obscure the fact that the empire was essentially a humanitarian undertaking. --Daniel Kruger in The Spectator posted by Steve M. | 2:00 PM |   I like these lines from Barry Crimmins: I am tired of people who set themselves up as the heroic opponents of the vague adversary that is 'political correctness.' Anyone beyond one block of the Smith College campus is in no real danger of running afoul of those prone to adding a few too many qualifying terms to descriptions.... When reactionaries want to alter public discourse they say they are fighting for community standards. But if I don't want some Klansman barking the 'n' word on the street corner, I'm with the politically correct mind police. OK, maybe that's unfair -- the righties do seem to have figured out that overt expressions of anti-black bigotry are bad. Overt anti-Muslim bigotry? Apparently, for some of them, that's a different story. Check out the ad for this book. The book says Islam is utterly vile in all ways -- and National Review's book club sells it proudly. Are the folks at National Review selling bigotry? Oh, no. The book isn't bigoted. The book is, as the ad says, "politically incorrect." posted by Steve M. | 1:38 PM |   More from that damn Frist article: Dr. Frist, who has represented Tennessee in the Senate since 1995, is also enjoying something of a honeymoon among moderate Republicans, the result of assiduous efforts not to isolate a group of senators who will play a vital role in shaping compromises on taxes and Medicare. Even as the leader steers the Senate's agenda rightward, moderate Republican senators say he meets far more often with them, soliciting their views and making them feel valued, than did Mr. Lott. "Last week, he met with several of us for an hour and let us raise questions about the size and the content of the administration's economic stimulus bill," said Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine and a centrist leader. "If senators feel they're consulted, even if they don't prevail in the end, it makes for a better feeling in the conference." Haven't we seen this movie before? Remember that really, really nice guy George W. Bush assiduously courting Democrats and moderate Republicans in his first few months in office -- while refusing to give an inch on any significant aspect of his extremely conservative agenda? But even some top Democrats find it hard not to like the 43rd president. He's courteous, hospitable and his words reflect unusual humility for one whose job makes him the most powerful man in the world. He has said one of his top goals is to change the tone of discourse in Washington. And he thinks he's succeeding. "There is a culture of respect that's beginning to emerge in Washington," he said Wednesday in Arkansas. "I'm beginning to notice that the rhetoric is toning down just a little bit." In pursuit of that goal, the president on Monday will mark his first 100 days in office by inviting all 535 members of Congress to lunch at the White House. In another stab at humility, a spokesman says Mr. Bush wants Congress to know he regards this period as "our" first hundred days and not "his" first hundred days.... That's Mark Knoller of CBS News on April 27, 2001. And remember Bush and dyed-in-the-wool-liberal Alexandra Pelosi, maker of the documentary Journeys with George? He found the loudmouthed girl and her camera amusing, and though he never forgot she was The Enemy, he charmed her back.... [Pelosi said,] "...The relationship I had with Bush was like the great … he was seducing me and I was luring him in, and he was trying to seduce me, and it was this beautiful dance...." Why do people fall for this crap? posted by Steve M. | 12:35 PM |   Ten weeks into his term, Senator Bill Frist has adopted a vastly different approach as majority leader, preferring the broad themes and political gestures favored by the White House and conservatives to the pragmatic, back-room tasks favored by his Republican predecessors. ... Dr. Frist is charting a different path as a committed conservative who says he does not intend to compromise his party's principles for momentum. ...His legislative agenda, disclosed last month, after a slow beginning, is packed with conservative or business-oriented medical proposals, like a ban on the type of late-term abortion that critics call partial-birth abortion, a limit on medical malpractice jury awards, and assistance to vaccine manufacturers — all issues that senators say he has moved to the top of the priority list. --New York Times, 3/13/03 OK, folks, it's flashback time.... "...I think Bill has a kind of a more moderate record and a more moderate approach toward things, and I think that it's going to be very difficult to criticize him." --Senator Orrin Hatch, quoted in WorldNetDaily, 12/23/02 "Bill Frist is not somebody conservatives would be comfortable with. He's a moderate Republican who's not really pro-life." --Paul Weyrich, to Family News in Focus, 12/20/02 "...the Tennessee moderate..." --CBS News, 12/23/02 "A wealthy moderate from a Southern state..." --Joe Johns, NBC News, 12/20/02 "We think he's a real pragmatist, that he understands that the party needs to get back on track of becoming Lincoln's party once again. We're hopeful we'll have a seat at the table to talk about everything from judgeships to legislation." --Jennifer Stockman, co-chairwoman of the Republican Pro-Choice Coalition, quoted in Salon, 12/21/02 "But Frist is also a pragmatist and a vote counter, and he knows that 50 senators, even adding the vice president's vote, don't add up to the 60 votes he would need to stop a filibuster." --Orlando Sentinel, 1/5/03 posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | Wednesday, March 12, 2003   A federal judge in Manhattan refused yesterday to reverse a ruling that Jose Padilla, who has been held for nine months in military custody, be allowed to meet with lawyers challenging his detention as an enemy combatant. --New York Times That judge must be a bleeding-heart, America-hating wimp, right? Well, it seems unlikely -- Judge Michael Mukasey is a longtime friend of Rudolph Giuliani who swore him in as mayor in 1998. Mukasey also presided over the trial in which Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and nine co-defendants were convicted. (Thanks to Janet for pointing this out to me. She says, by the way, that Giuliani asked Mukasey to swear him in at both of his inaugurals.) posted by Steve M. | 10:41 PM |   Accused of terrorism? Our terrorism defense lawyers will protect your rights. (800) 841-1881 This is an ad that's currently in the banner at the top of my blog -- on my browser, at least. This disturbs me. posted by Steve M. | 4:15 PM |   "...Speaking of champagne, there was some serious talk -- in 1918, I think it was, the second centenary of the first use of the name to designate the sparkling wines of Hautvillers -- some talk, as I say, of seeking canonisation for Dom Pérignon, champagne's inventor. Nothing came of it, and yet men have been canonised for less." "Very much less," said Hillier. "I would sooner seek intercession from Saint Pérignon than from Saint Paul." --Anthony Burgess, Tremor of Intent (1966) posted by Steve M. | 4:07 PM |   A senior intelligence analyst in Australia just resigned, expressing doubts about the wisdom of war with Iraq. ''I'm convinced a war against Iraq at this time would be wrong. For a start, Iraq does not pose a security threat to the U.S., or to the U.K. or Australia, or to any other country, at this point in time," former Office of National Assessments intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie said, announcing his resignation late on Wednesday evening.... A critical factor behind Wilkie's resignation was claims made by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council purporting that a link exists between al-Qaeda and Iraq. ''As far as I'm aware there was no hard evidence and there is still no hard evidence that there is any active cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaeda,'' Wilkie told Australia Broadcasting Corp (ABC) television.... Wilkie believes that a war on Iraq may well turn out to be counter-productive. ''In fact, a war is the exact course of action most likely to cause Saddam to do exactly what we're trying to prevent. I believe it's the course of action that is most likely to cause him to lash out recklessly, to use weapons of mass destruction and to possibly play a terrorism card,'' he said. Damn, and all those right-wingers just stocked up on Australian wines to replace the French stuff they flushed down the toilet.... posted by Steve M. | 2:26 PM |   Take the recommendation of TAPPED and read this Washington Post article by Vernon Loeb and Thomas Ricks on likely problems in an occupation of postwar Iraq. For starters, Loeb and Ricks write, An occupation force of 45,000 to 60,000 Army troops -- the range under consideration by the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- could force an end to peace-time training and rotation cycles in a service already deployed in Germany, Korea, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo and the Sinai. And that range might drastically underestimate the real need: Retired Army Maj. Gen. William L. Nash[, who] commanded the first Army peacekeeping operation in the Balkans in 1995...said he believes 200,000 U.S. and allied forces will be necessary to stabilize Iraq.... Nash says that up to two divisions alone -- 25,000 to 50,000 troops -- could be required just to guard any chemical or biological weapons sites that are discovered until the weapons are disposed of properly. The Joint Chiefs want to use barely more troops than that for the entire occupation. Loeb and Ricks don't speculate on what might happen if the occupation force is too small, but what do you think's going to happen if we short-staff the job of guarding chem/bio sites? Think it's possible that some anthrax might go missing here and there? "There's going to be a power vacuum," said one senior defense official sympathetic to the Army. "How will that be filled? I'm not an expert in the region, but if you use the Balkans as a model, we may be getting into the middle of a civil war." If that happens, will we care? Or, with Iraq probably gone from the front pages, will essentially we blow it off? posted by Steve M. | 2:00 PM |   By the way, if the words "weapon," "mass," and "destruction" still mean what I think they mean, don't we logically have to include, on the list of "weapons of mass destruction," the MOAB? posted by Steve M. | 1:17 PM |   This was posted recently on a Web board by someone who works on surveys for a media-affiliated polling outfit: ... I have to say that what I found most interesting about the actual polling this time was the extraordinary increase in naked hostility I got from pro-war people, both the ones who consented to do the poll (sometimes while expressing disgust with the "obvious liberal slant" of such questions as "Do you approve or disapprove of using military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power?") and those--and they were legion--who called me a motherfucker or worse after I told them who I was working for and slammed down the phone. Perhaps surprisingly, I really haven't been getting that much of this sort of thing since 9/11, which perhaps reflects the mellow mood that finding themselves at one with the zeitgeist had put many arch-conservatives in. At the risk of reading too much into one (very big) change, I suspect that the Angry White Men have been seeing enough TV coverage of anti-war protesters and lily-livered UN'ers and reading enough squishy editorials to start to feel beleaguered again. I'm not sure whether this a good thing, a bad thing, or neither. I think it's a bad thing -- you have an honest debate in a free society and these guys think it's a personal attack on them. posted by Steve M. | 11:51 AM |   A blistering editorial in this week's New York Observer: Somehow, the Bush administration’s cowboys have done the unthinkable. They have alienated friends, ruined international relationships, squandered the good will and sympathy that the Sept. 11 atrocities inspired, and turned America into a global villain. All of this, while Saddam Hussein smiles and watches the world turn in his favor, inheriting the gusts of international opinion that Mr. Bush has mind-bogglingly forfeited. Rarely in modern times has such a blundering swap taken place. ... With its Reagan-era bluster and frat-house machismo, the Bush administration has played into the hands of terrorists, breaking apart NATO and fracturing half-century-old relations with Europe that have persevered through all the roilings of post–World War II history. And the administration did it at just the very moment when the West has been targeted—not by that wretched despot Saddam, but by the murderous followers of Osama bin Laden.... Osama bin Laden did not create this sad state of affairs. George W. Bush did. Rarely in the face of war has the leadership in this country—both the executive and the opposition—served it so badly. The opposition has cynically acquiesced; they have not challenged this intellectually challenged President.... Oh, just read it. posted by Steve M. | 9:19 AM | Tuesday, March 11, 2003   You know, of course, that they're now calling french fries "freedom fries" in the cafeterias at the House of Representatives. What do the French think? From The Boston Globe: ''We are at a very serious moment dealing with very serious issues and we are not focusing on the name you give to potatoes,'' said Nathalie Loisau, an embassy spokeswoman. Sometimes a sneer like that is exactly what's called for. posted by Steve M. | 10:56 PM |   You realize, of course, that they’re going to try to blame us for everything from now on. It doesn’t matter whether the war has been prevented or merely delayed. It doesn’t even matter that it may take place and be an easy rout. Afterward they’ll blame our resistance to the war for anything that goes wrong in America or the world. Another terrorist attack? More and scarier saber-rattling from North Korea, or possibly Iran? Difficulties in an Iraq war? They’ll say it’s because the administration had to deal with us, the naysayers, instead of focusing completely on terror or rogue states or war planning. (They’ll say we distracted them even though they’re saying now that Iraq isn’t distracting them from al-Qaeda.) More trouble between Israel and the Palestinians? They’ll say we encouraged it, with our “pro-terror” demonstrations, or that we delayed the peaceful resolution of the crisis that was simply inevitable after an Iraq war. A worsening economy? They’ll say the war cost more because we forced them to delay it. They’ll say oil prices stayed high for too long because they had to wait to fight. This won’t just be the same old right-wing line, that everything bad is the fault of liberals. This will essentially be an accusation of treason. Our “disloyalty,” not foolhardy tax cuts, will be blamed for hard times. Our “disloyalty,” not diplomatic ineptitude and the reckless “axis of evil” insult, will be blamed for a worsening Korean crisis. Our “disloyalty” will be blamed if too many GIs die in friendly fire in an Iraq war, if there are excessive civilian casualties, if Saddam uses chemical or biological weapons (they’ll say we gave him time to perfect his nefarious schemes). A lot of Americans really might buy this argument. And if they don’t do so spontaneously, they’ll certainly be encouraged to do so in 2004. Unless life is suddenly very, very good, the election that year will almost certainly be an “angry white male” election, and we’re going to be the targets of that anger. Damn, I hope I’m wrong about this. posted by Steve M. | 10:48 PM |   Andrew Sullivan, ex-wunderkind New Republic editor and alleged Really Smart Guy, writes this today: here's the economic expert, Krugman, on the looming deficit: "[R]ight now the deficit, while huge in absolute terms, is only 2 — make that 3, O.K., maybe 4 — percent of G.D.P." I take Krugman's broader point about the deficit, and agree with it. But why such contemptuous sloppiness? There's a critical difference between 2 and 4 percent of GNP. Isn't there? Um, Andrew? That's not sloppiness -- it's a joke. It's a wry joke about the fact that every few days the administration says, in effect, "Whoops, sorry -- it looks as if the deficit is going to be even bigger than we said it would be a few days ago." Get it, Andrew? (UPDATE: TBOGG beat me to the punch on this one.) posted by Steve M. | 3:36 PM |   Over the weekend, Bill Keller reported in The New York Times that Michael Drosnin, who believes that prophecies can be found in the Hebrew Bible if you lay its text out like a word-search puzzle, has apparently given a briefing on his nutball theory to officials of the Defense Department. Today, in a letter to the Times, Drosnin says, yes, he has briefed U.S. officials. If, even in a tiny corner of your brain, you wonder whether there might possibly be something to this Bible Code stuff, please go here immediately and let Brendan McKay, an Australian mathematician, reassure you that what Drosnin's trying to palm off is absolute bollocks. Drosnin insists that there's something magical and mystical about the Bible -- only there, he says, can so many references and allusions be found. McKay disproves this, with gusto. From the links on his page you can learn, for instance, that references to Chanukkah candles are secretly encoded in War and Peace, and that many assassinations are predicted by Moby Dick, as is the death of Princess Diana. (Others have also had at the Bible Code theory -- this gentleman, for instance; alas, the fellow who, according to this page, found prophecies in the Microsoft Access Developers Toolkit 2.0 license agreement seems not to have posted his results.) If you have a chance, go to a bookstore and look at Drosnin's book -- not the current book, The Bible Code II, which (conveniently) predicts recent cataclysms, but the first book, The Bible Code, published in 1997. You'll probably find it in the Religion section. Look for Osama bin Laden's name in the index -- not there. Look for a prediction of the 9/11 attacks -- not there either. A nuclear attack by Islamic terrorists is predicted, but its instigator is supposed to be Muammar Khaddafi (and, of course, no such thing has happened yet). Benjamin Netanyahu, elected prime minister of Israel shortly before Drosnin published his first book, figures prominently in its prophecies. Alas, he's no longer prime minister and he's not even foreign minister anymore; as Israel's new finance minister, maybe he'll bring about the Apocalypse by devaluing the shekel, but somehow I doubt it. posted by Steve M. | 1:59 PM |   Did I include Japan among the countries opposed to Bush's war last week? My bad. Japan is, in fact, part of the C.O.W. (coalition of the willing). posted by Steve M. | 9:55 AM |   Iraq: United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq recently discovered a new variety of rocket seemingly configured to strew bomblets filled with chemical or biological agents over large areas, United States officials say. The U.S.: U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf may be armed with radioactive bombs and missiles hundreds of times more potent than similar weapons used during the Gulf War and the U.N. military campaign in Bosnia. Iraq: The reconfigured rocket warheads appear to be cobbled together from Iraq's stockpiles of imported or home-built weapons, some [of] which Iraq had used with both conventional and chemical warheads. The U.S.: [British researcher Dai] Williams and others also claim that patents covering conversion or modification of earlier generation bombs for use as bunker-busters indicate that depleted uranium is being used in these weapons. Iraq: At first, [an American official] said, Iraq told the inspectors that it was designed as a conventional cluster bomb, which would scatter explosive submunitions over its target, and not as a chemical weapon. A few days later, he said, the Iraqis conceded that some might have been configured as chemical weapons. The U.S.: The Pentagon has not confirmed the use of uranium or depleted uranium in the bunker-busters, and it has refused to identify the composition of the dense-metal warheads that enable the missiles to penetrate structures deeply buried under earth, steel and reinforced concrete. Iraq: The distinctive appearance of the rockets' cluster munitions, heavy metal balls with holes in them, suggested their use as a way to disperse chemical or biological weapons, said the official. "If you take the kinds of fuses we know they have, and you screw them in there, when these things come out from the main frame and they explode inward, chemical agents come out," [the American official] said. "These can be used for biological weapons, too," he said. The U.S.: ...critics such as British researcher Dai Williams contend that only uranium -- in one form or another -- possesses the density and other characteristics necessary to achieve the penetration levels attributed to such weapons as the 2,000-pound AGM 130C air-to-ground cruise missile, and the guided bomb unit, or GBU, series of laser-guided hard-target penetrators intended to pierce bunkers and other reinforced structures. Iraq: "... they found Iraq could manufacture these indigenously, so who knows how many they have?" The U.S.: Depleted uranium ... is dirt cheap. Tons of it, over 500 million pounds the last time anyone counted, is lying around in various states of nuclear "decay" at government repositories throughout the country. Iraq: "When you look at page after page of what the Iraqis have done over the years to hide, to deceive, to cheat, to keep information away from the inspectors, to change facts to fit the latest issue, and once they put that set of facts before you, when you find you those facts are false, they come up with a new set of facts — it's a constant pattern," [Secretary of State Colin Powell] said on "Fox News Sunday." The U.S.: The Pentagon has not confirmed the use of uranium or depleted uranium in the bunker-busters, and it has refused to identify the composition of the dense-metal warheads that enable the missiles to penetrate structures deeply buried under earth, steel and reinforced concrete. ...the patent application for a narrow-profile version of the BLU-109B bomb (which is delivered by a GBU-24) specifically refers to penetrating bodies made of tungsten or depleted uranium. "If they're really using tungsten, why keep it classified?" Williams said. (Iraq rocket story: New York Times, 3/10/03. U.S. bomb story: Wired, 3/10/03. Thanks to BuzzFlash for the Wired link.) posted by Steve M. | 9:33 AM |   GOP GRATITUDE ALBANY — [Republican] Gov. Pataki [of New York] has set up a $1,000-a-member “Governor’s Trust” to help deliver his message of fiscal austerity “without distortion from the liberal media.” Announcement of the new organization was contained in a fund-raising letter sent earlier this month to former Pataki donors. A copy of the letter was obtained Monday by The Associated Press.... “With your financial support, I will be able to get my message out to New Yorkers directly — without distortion from the elite liberal media — and to fight on a level playing field with our opponents,” Pataki wrote.... --New York Daily News, 3/10/03 NEW YORK (AP) — The editorial board of the New York Times has endorsed Gov. George Pataki for a third term, calling him the most qualified candidate to lead the state during its ongoing financial troubles.... --USA Today, 10/27/02 posted by Steve M. | 7:36 AM | Monday, March 10, 2003   Why does Andrew Sullivan think Al Sharpton will be a major factor in the race for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination when Sharpton doesn't even crack double digits in his home state? posted by Steve M. | 6:12 PM |   Oh, and by the way, George W.'s job approval rating is down to 54%, according to Zogby. posted by Steve M. | 6:08 PM |   Let me make the obvious point about the kidnapping of Khalid Shaikh Mohammad's children (emphasis mine): Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan in September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi which their father had fled hours earlier. They were found cowering behind a wardrobe with a senior al-Qaeda member. The boys have been held in Pakistan, but this weekend they were flown to America to be questioned about their father. CIA interrogators confirmed on Saturday that the boys were staying at a secret address. "We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said an official. The interrogators are handling them with kid gloves, in America. But what about the six months when they weren't in America? Were they handled with kid gloves, do you think? In Pakistan? posted by Steve M. | 5:16 PM |   Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft on the seizure of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's kids: Isn't this kidnapping? How about a human rights violation? What kind of precedent does this set? Seven and nine years old -- has this Administration lost its mind? We didn't realize that enemy combatant status was hereditary. posted by Steve M. | 4:25 PM |   This was in last Saturday's Daily Mirror. Can this possibly be true? Can the leadership of this country possibly have degenerated this much? George Bush pulled out of a speech to the European Parliament when MEPs [members of the European Parliament] wouldn't guarantee a standing ovation. Senior White House officials said the President would only go to Strasbourg to talk about Iraq if he had a stage-managed welcome. A source close to negotiations said last night: "President Bush agreed to a speech but insisted he get a standing ovation like at the State of the Union address. "His people also insisted there were no protests, or heckling. "I believe it would be a crucial speech for Mr Bush to make in light of the opposition here to war. But unless he only gets adulation and praise, then it will never happen."... (Thanks to Susan M. for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 2:56 PM |   Your pro-war acquaintances think Hans Blix is a bumbling idiot (Dennis Miller calls him "Inspector Clouseau"). They think Blix is blind -- or willfully blind -- to evidence of Saddam's perfidy. Do they understand that this is simply not true? Do they understand that he seeks more time for inspections knowing that there is probably a lot of nasty stuff to be found? Hans Blix, head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, delivered the report Friday to the U.N. Security Council. It has not been released to the public, but the Los Angeles Times has obtained a copy. The U.N. report increases the estimate for Saddam's presumed stockpile of anthrax, for example, from 8,500 liters to 10,000. "Based on all the available evidence, the strong presumption is that about 10,000 liters of anthrax may still exist" and could still be viable, it said. U.N. inspectors also warned that they may have underestimated the danger of Saddam's aging supply of mustard gas, a systemic poison that blisters the skin and is lethal if inhaled. Recent tests confirmed the "high purity" of sulfur mustard stored in artillery shells for 12 years. In addition, previous U.N. reports stated that Iraq had not accounted for as many as 550 artillery shells and 450 aerial bombs filled with mustard gas. "However, based on a document recently received from Iraq, this quantity could be substantially higher," the report notes. Iraqi officials blame the discrepancy on faulty accounting. --Los Angeles Times, via the Newark Star-Ledger The UN report, according to the Times, says that Saddam planned to launch a chem/bio attack in the '91 war if Baghdad was nuked. Could the pro-war side, whether they agree or not, please at least make an effort to follow the logic of the pro-inspections argument -- that war may mean a chem-bio attack and continued inspections could well be a way to prevent one? posted by Steve M. | 1:42 PM |   Two young sons of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, are being used by the CIA to force their father to talk. Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan in September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi which their father had fled hours earlier. They were found cowering behind a wardrobe with a senior al-Qaeda member. The boys have been held in Pakistan, but this weekend they were flown to America to be questioned about their father. CIA interrogators confirmed on Saturday that the boys were staying at a secret address. "We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said an official. "But we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care." ... --Sydney Morning Herald Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's kids, Elián González -- I guess the U.S. is where all children really belong, regardless of where their so-called "homes" are, if it suits America's geostrategic interests. posted by Steve M. | 11:53 AM |   This was a joke: BUSH ON NORTH KOREA: "WE MUST INVADE IRAQ" WASHINGTON, DC - With concern over North Korea's nuclear capabilities growing, President Bush reassured the American people Monday that "extreme force" will be used to remove Saddam Hussein from power if the Iraqi president fails to give up suspected weapons of mass destruction. "For years, Kim Jong Il has acted in blatant disregard of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation Of Nuclear Weapons, and last week, he rejected it outright," Bush told reporters after a National Security Council meeting on North Korea. "We cannot allow weapons of mass destruction to remain in the hands of volatile, unpredictable leaders. Which is exactly why we must act quickly and decisively against Saddam Hussein." --The Onion, January 15, 2003 This is a real news story: Rice, Powell Say Reports of Iranian Nuclear Program Bolster Iraq Policy WASHINGTON (AP) - Top U.S. officials said Sunday that Iran had advanced its nuclear weapons program beyond what authorities had previously believed, and they used the reports to bolster the American case that Iraq must be disarmed. Time magazine reported Sunday that a nuclear power facility at Natanz in Iran is closer to enriching uranium than previously thought. The magazine reported that the plant has hundreds of gas centrifuges ready to produce enriched uranium that could be used in advanced nuclear weapons. "We have seen this week Iran has got a more aggressive nuclear program than the (International Atomic Energy Agency) thought it had," Secretary of State Colin Powell said on CNN. "Here we suddenly discover that Iran is much further along, with a far more robust nuclear weapons development program than anyone said it had," Powell said. "It shows you how a determined nation that has the intent to develop a nuclear weapon can keep that development process secret from inspectors and outsiders, if they really are determined to do it, and we know that Saddam Hussein has not lost his intent." --AP, March 9, 2003 posted by Steve M. | 9:54 AM |   In the process of doing an unrelated search, I just stumbled on this. Excuse me while I pull my jaw back up off the floor. If you can bear it, here's the full catalog. posted by Steve M. | 9:32 AM |   Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained -- by torturing children while their parents are made to watch....If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning. --State of the Union address, 2003 Mr. [Khalid Shaikh] Mohammed's two sons, 7 and 9, are reported to be in custody in Pakistan; threats against them, serious or not, might be far more persuasive than threats against Mr. Mohammed himself. --New York Times, 3/9/03 Why are these children in custody? What's going to be done to them? This is being done by our allies. We are the good guys, aren't we? posted by Steve M. | 7:34 AM | Sunday, March 09, 2003   Good cartoon. posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM |   SERENITY As war with Iraq draws inexorably closer, President Bush is described by friends as not just determined, but surprisingly serene about the most profound decision he will likely ever make. --New York Daily News People who have met with Mr. Bush have been struck by his tranquillity. "You would never have known that he was sitting on a powder keg," said Don Hewitt, the executive producer of "60 Minutes," who recently spent 15 minutes with Mr. Bush in the Oval Office. "He was amazingly calm and wanted to talk about Harry Truman and not Saddam Hussein." --New York Times "You may find this curious." Chilton took a strip of EKG tape from a drawer and unrolled it on his desk. He traced the spiky line with his forefinger. "Here, he's resting on the examining table. Pulse seventy-two. Here, he grabs the nurse's head and pulls her down to him. Here, he is subdued by the attendant. He didn't resist, by the way, though the attendant dislocated his shoulder. Do you notice the strange thing. His pulse never got over eighty-five. Even when he tore out her tongue." --Thomas Harris, from Red Dragon, the first novel about Hannibal Lecter posted by Steve M. | 9:29 AM |   The Central Intelligence Agency has warned that terrorists based in Iraq are planning attacks against American and allied forces inside the country after any invasion, government counterterrorism officials say. The agency's previously undisclosed assessment has circulated among senior Bush administration officials. It describes both the risks of terror attacks on American forces inside Iraq if an invasion occurs and the danger of similar attacks on troops already massing in the region. --Yahoo News, via The New York Times Two thoughts: (1) The sons of bitches found another way to get that "Saddam = al-Qaeda" nonsense back into print, disguised as fact. (2) Excuse me, but if the people being attacked are soldiers, it's not terrorism. It may be sneaky, it may be in violation of the rules of war, but it's guerrilla warfare, not terrorism. People who don't want you to think clearly keep blurring the distinction between "terrorism" and other forms of nastiness -- thus helping to blur the distinction between heads of state like Saddam and stateless terrorists like Osama. The same people use words like "democratic" and "free" when they merely mean "pro-Western," or now, perhaps, "pro-First World" (or "pro-American," or "pro-Bush-and-his-friends"). Don't get sucked in. posted by Steve M. | 9:22 AM | Saturday, March 08, 2003   You may have read in today's New York Times (or via Atrios) that people who are paid out of your tax dollars to keep you safe from harm are listening to presentations made by certifiable loons -- and claim to have no idea beforehand what those loons are going to say: Two weeks ago, a group of senior intelligence officials in the Defense Department sat for an hour listening to a briefing by a writer who claims — I am not making this up — that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. One of the officials told me that they had agreed to meet the writer, Michael Drosnin, author of a Nostradamus-style best seller, without understanding that he was promoting Biblical prophecy. Still, rather than shoo him away, they listened politely as he consumed several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time. This is strikingly similar to what we heard last year when the ex-Larouchenik Laurent Murawiec made that scarily imperialistic presentation to the Defense Policy Board, the one that said, "Iraq is the tactical pivot / Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot / Egypt the prize." According to Slate's second article on the Murawiec presentation, [Richard] Perle, who had invited Murawiec to speak to the Defense Policy Board, told Time magazine he didn't know what Murawiec was going to say before the talk. So which is it? Is the Bush defense establishment deliberately turning to nutjobs for enlightenment? Or is it running foreign policy, in part, by conducting a series of open-mike nights? posted by Steve M. | 3:07 PM |   Here's Tony Judt, writing in the current New York Review of Books: In World War I, which the French fought from start to finish, France lost three times as many fighting men as America has lost in all its wars combined. In World War II, the French armies holding off the Germans in May–June 1940 suffered 124,000 dead and 200,000 wounded in six weeks, more than America did in Korea and Vietnam combined. Until Hitler brought the US into the war against him in December 1941, Washington maintained correct diplomatic relations with the Nazi regime. Meanwhile the Einsatzgruppen had been at work for six months slaughtering Jews on the Eastern Front, and the Resistance was active in occupied France. Judt then makes a rather chilling point: Fortunately we shall never know how middle America would have responded if instructed by an occupying power to persecute racial minorities in its midst. Read Judt's article for its defense of an internationalism bratty neocons want to destroy, as well as for a devastating statistical debunking of the neocons' notion that America and the "new Europe" have now cornered the market on enlightenment (surely you didn't believe that the French are more anti-Semitic than the Poles -- did you?). posted by Steve M. | 2:27 PM |   This is from a review by Nixon biographer Richard Reeves of a new book by Henry Kissinger: But Mr. Kissinger does not really believe in democracy. Neither did Nixon. Their fatal flaw was the contempt they had for American institutions—and Americans. The real enemies in their many books are, routinely, not the totalitarians they publicly and militarily opposed, but the Congress, the press and that misguided electorate.... I worked on the Nixon Presidency for the better part of 10 years, and found some of what I just said difficult to understand, at least at first. If one thing brought that together for me—and it was what I thought of while reading this book—it was something told me by Winston Lord, who was Mr. Kissinger’s principal assistant at the National Security Council and was often part of conversations between the President and his National Security Advisor. "They deliberately mirrored adversaries who were secretive," said Lord. "In China, only two or three people were involved in decision-making." Not an exact parallel to the present day, but... posted by Steve M. | 9:21 AM | Friday, March 07, 2003   The most clear-eyed account of the Bush press conference is, naturally, written by a TV critic -- someone who doesn't give a damn about access, about that exclusive sit-down with 43 on Air Force One or Cheney in The Bunker. Read it, it's fun. I'll quote just one passage: There were brief interludes during the news conference -- especially the long languid pauses -- when some viewers might have flashed back to the presidency of Richard Nixon. That is, the Nixon Years at their most tumultuous and Twilight Zoney, when the old Trickster would come on TV and you'd sit there not just fascinated but a trifle terrified of what he might say, who he'd accuse of persecuting him, and whether he might come completely unglued or just melt into a hideous puddle right before your horrified eyes. He's right. I'm old enough to remember Nixon, and Bush absolutely shares Nixon's sneakiness, his paranoia, his free-floating resentment, his utter inability to relax as long as he knows that even one person, anywhere in the world, could possibly impede one of his goals in any way. They say we became more cynical as a nation after Watergate, but there was never a time in Nixon's presidency when his weirdness wasn't frankly discussed. Now, by contrast, if we talk about Bush's psyche at all we ascribe to him a praiseworthy Marlboro Man clarity of thought, utterly devoid of shadows and grays. This is utter nonsense. posted by Steve M. | 5:52 PM |   This gives me the creeps: Teenage sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo faced a disciplinary hearing in jail for allegedly scrawling the word "Muhammad" on the floor of his cell and writing on his shoes.... After Malvo was taken to a hearing Monday at the Fairfax courthouse, deputies searched his cell and saw the word scrawled on the floor with a blue felt-tip pen that had been issued to Malvo, Barry told The Washington Post. Muhammad is the last name of the second sniper suspect.... When I started this blog, I wrote a few times about my belief that Malvo, after effectively becoming an orphan in his mid-teens, was the victim of grievous psychological harm at John Muhammad's hands. Muhammad, I thought, took over Malvo's identity. Reports at the time said Malvo ate what Muhammad told him to eat, walked several paces behind Muhammad, and sat in cold cars shivering while waiting for Muhammad to finish odd jobs; Malvo also called himself John because that was Muhammad's first name. It seemed to me that Malvo's ego had somehow been destroyed and remade in Muhammad's image. Later, as I began to read more and more reports that said Malvo was the triggerman in the snipings, and also that Malvo bragged about the killings, I found it harder to feel sympathy for him. And the report today also mentions a casual death threat by Malvo. But graffiti-ing another man's name is weird. I still think Malvo underwent some sort of soul-murder at Muhammad's hands. I think on some level he was killed by the events of his life -- obviously not in the vicious way he's said to have killed others, but not in a nice way, either. We don't have to be bleeding hearts -- we don't have to hold him blameless. But we ought to want to know what happened to him, so we can prevent it from happening to others -- and for the sake of the people those others might harm. posted by Steve M. | 5:36 PM |   Does Ms. magazine still have that "No Comment" section? Does Ms. magazine still exist? Well, as Ms. says/used to say, no comment. posted by Steve M. | 3:35 PM |   A lot of people think France, Germany, and Russia are trying to prevent an Iraq war because they have oil deals with Iraq (France and Russia) or they're actually violating trade sanctions on Iraq (France and Germany). But surely these countries can see that war is all but inevitable. If they were afraid of postwar consequences (from a U.S. president who's obviously highly vindictive), wouldn't they want to cooperate with him as much as possible? Wouldn't lining up with him make it more likely that they'd get a piece of the postwar oil action, and that any shady deals would be swept under the rug? posted by Steve M. | 1:56 PM |   As I think about Bush's press conference last night, it occurs to me that what we were watching was a weird hybrid: a cold, contemptuous dad crossbred with a sullen teenager. Bush's message to the world certainly was that of a tyrant dad: "Why? Because I said so, that's why." But that was mixed with the attitude of a fifteen-year-old boy slumped in the backseat of Mom's SUV, consumed with exasperation because he isn't allowed to drive and isn't allowed to get a tattoo until he’s eighteen and isn't allowed to do anything. Old Europe, and Turkey, and protestors, and reporters, and Americans and Brits who support war only if there's a second resolution -- they all get to be at the wheel, singing those gross embarrassing hippie songs from the sixties and being totally lame. And Bush is not talking back, he's not raising his voice -- he's deliberately not raising his voice. He's explained a million times why he's right. But we're not listening. You know, as soon as he can, he's going to do exactly what he wants, and nobody's going to stop him. But for now, he can't. It's so unfair. posted by Steve M. | 12:24 PM |   Thousands of American soldiers are pouring into Saudi Arabia in preparation for an invasion of Iraq, independent sources say. --Daily Telegraph (U.K.) Oh, great -- isn't the fact that we based troops in Saudi Arabia for Gulf War I precisely what pissed al-Qaeda off in the first place? posted by Steve M. | 11:12 AM |   REPUBLICAN PUNDIT: APPEASEMENT IS OK In North Korea, that is. That's what Charles Krauthammer says here. That lack of sound you hear is fellow conservatives not rushing to their PCs to denounce Krauthammer as "objectively pro-Kim Jong Il." posted by Steve M. | 10:04 AM |   The New York Times has an article today about how the war is being discussed in schools: In Maine, for instance, Gov. John Baldacci, a Democrat, admonished teachers to maintain neutrality recently after the National Guard complained that teachers, in their classrooms, were calling the military "unethical." Yes, we knew that -- it was reported in the Times and elsewhere. In an Omaha district, students said in interviews that a teacher had been playing Rush Limbaugh tapes in class. Oh, really? We didn't know that. Your liberal media in action. Now, I think it makes sense to have war talk in classrooms. And at the risk of sounding hokey, I'll add that I also think balance and mutual respect are necessary in these discussions. Here's what some right-wingers think about the right to disagree with the president: A teacher in Colorado who wore a "Not My President, Not My War" button on her coat during a school field trip has had her name, e-mail address, and phone number published at Free Republic (scroll down to post #2), after a Colorado radio host revealed her name. Nice, huh? I want to give the Freepers their due: In the discussion, some of them acknowledge feeling the same way about Clinton for eight years, and some of them think no political opinions should be expressed in classrooms on either side (or that pro-Bush students should respond by wearing buttons and T-shirts of their own). In other words, rather than licking their lips at the thought of harassing this teacher, they're looking for a fair single standard on this issue. But that doesn't excuse the posting of the number and e-mail address. posted by Steve M. | 9:46 AM | Thursday, March 06, 2003   I gave up on the Bush press conference about halfway through. "As far as I can tell, it's all about war, war, war," Kos says. "And God tells him war is okay. And he's using a yoga voice -- perhaps to counter the 'foaming-at-the-mouth war-crazed' persona he's cultivated. But he sounds sedated." That basically sums it up. Instead, I decided to fisk Fred Barnes. I don't usually do this sort of thing, but Fred just made it so damn easy. He published a list of ten "peacenik" objections to Bush's war. He thinks he's got them well and truly debunked. I don't think so.... (1) Rush to war. ...President Bush has taken all the steps asked of him before going to war: getting the approval of Congress, getting another U.N. resolution (with perhaps yet another on the way), and building a coalition of supporters. He's hardly rushing. “All the steps asked of him”? Did he actually obtain that second UN resolution finding Saddam in material breach while I wasn’t looking? (2) It's a war for oil. The United States could buy all the oil it wants from Iraq by lifting the sanctions and helping to reconstruct the Iraqi oilfields. It's the French and Russians who have oil deals with Saddam and thus are fixated on that issue. They don't want a war that would upset those deals. Right -- obtaining oil from a country run by your own puppet regime is just as difficult as buying it from a megalomaniac dictator whose country you’ve bombed for a dozen years. (3) War with Iraq will bring more terrorism. This is a hardy perennial. It was claimed before the Gulf war and the Afghanistan campaign--and when bombs fell on al Qaeda and the Taliban during Ramadan.... The first Gulf War was followed by the first World Trade Center bombing, the attacks on the Khobar Towers and Cole, the African embassy bombings, the second World Trade Center bombing.... Rather than more terrorism, removing Saddam will bring more respect for the United States. Terrorists will be increasingly fearful. Right -- just like after the Afghan war. That disco in Bali? It bombed itself. (4) The Arab street will erupt. Another perennial. This is often predicted but rarely happens. A swift, decisive victory over Saddam will quiet the Arab street.... Sure -- just the way every swift, decisive Israeli retaliation for suicide bombings brings peace and harmony to the Palestinian street. (5) Bush is doing it for his dad. ... consider the source of this charge: Martin Sheen. No, Fred, you consider the source: George W. Bush. (6) Attacking Iraq would be unprovoked aggression. No, it wouldn't. Andrew Sullivan has pointed out a significant fact: There was no peace treaty, only the truce, so the state of war resumes when the conditions are violated.... There was no peace treaty after the Korean War, either. So if North Korea nukes Seoul in the next few months, shall we assume you’ll say it wasn’t unprovoked aggression, Fred? (7) Containment is working. The problem is the right threat is not being contained: the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Sure, with U.S. troops and U.N. inspectors in the area, Saddam won't attack Jordan or Syria or other neighbors. But he could slip chemical or biological agents to terrorists without anyone knowing. And that's the threat. Anyone with chem, bio, or nuclear weapons, or the capacity to make them, could slip them to terrorists. But what evidence do we have that this is Saddam’s M.O.? Why would a guy who is sitting on a fixed plot of land -- unlike bin Laden -- do that and risk a massive, possibly nuclear, retaliation? And by the way, when did all the GOP dictionaries start to redefine “could” and “might” and “almost certainly will”? (8) America doesn't have enough allies. What? Forty or so isn't enough? Is the case for war weakened in the slightest by the absence of the French or the Angolans? ... That’s not the question. The question is: In the post-Cold War world, is the case for a war to uphold the international order weakened by the absence of the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Japanese -- for starters? (9) Win without war. That's a nice goal. Unfortunately, it's Saddam's goal. With no war, he wins and emerges as the new strongman in the Middle East, forcing people to come to terms with him. Ringed by troops, dogged by inspectors, reined in by sanctions, able to control only the half of his own country that’s outside the no-fly zones -- this would make him a “strongman”? (10) Bush is seeking a new American empire. ... I'll let Secretary of State Colin Powell answer this one. When hectored by a former archbishop of Canterbury on this subject recently, he said: "We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last 100 years . . . and put wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives, and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in." Well said. All that was before we had a president named George W. Bush. posted by Steve M. | 11:26 PM |   Was the Churchill of our times outargued by a bunch of kids half his age? Prime Minister Tony Blair took the debate on Iraq Thursday to some of his youngest critics — a studio audience for MTV... Niklas Ergandt, 25, of Sweden set the tone early. "I'm able to produce anthrax in my bathroom," he said. "Why don't you bomb Sweden?" The audience accused Blair of showing "absolute disdain" for public opinion and the people of Iraq. He was also charged with potentially making terrorism worse by planning to attack Iraq and failing to provide sufficient evidence to support military action.... The encounter — due to air in Britain on Friday before it is broadcast in Europe, Australia, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and eventually the United States on Monday — won praise from some members of the audience, but most were not impressed. "I'm fairly pessimistic. I've heard it all before," said Juan Allos, 23, an Iraqi exile now living in London.... posted by Steve M. | 6:10 PM |   Around ten thousand Russian citizens have applied for entry visas into Iraq to defend this country against the planned aggression by the warmongering USA and UK, according to the Iraqi Embassy in Moscow.... The requests come from young males, some with combat experience, who describe themselves as “volunteers” who are willing to defend Iraq against the illegal armed aggression of the USA and the United Kingdom, two countries which continue to follow a belligerent stance on crisis management, wholly outside the generally accepted concepts of a New World Order based upon multilateralist approaches to problem solving, based upon the United Nations Organisation, a position championed by president Putin’s Russian Federation.... --Pravda I'm less concerned with the content of the story than with the rhetoric. Is Pravda still essentially in sync with the Russian government? And haven't we been assuming for a decade or so that these guys are now our friends? This sounds exactly like the Soviet rhetoric of my Cold War youth. Is this kind of talk just an ingrained habit at Pravda -- or is George Bush truly alienating a somewhat more powerful global ally than France? (Thanks to Susan M. for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 4:51 PM |   It looks as if this was planned a long time ago, but surely true patriots would try to do something about it: The itinerary for a May cruise sponsored by National Review, scourge of the Euro-appeaseniks, requires participants to spend a couple of nights at a hotel in ... Munich. What -- there aren't any good hotels in the "new Europe"? Then again, maybe the participants are planning to trash the place. I hear Jonah Goldberg spray-paints a mean weasel. posted by Steve M. | 2:05 PM |   Fred Kaplan in Slate reminds us that this isn't even going to be a preemptive war: ...the war that Bush II is pushing is a different sort of war, a war in which we launch an invasion, not in response to aggression and not even "pre-emptively" (to strike the first blow before the other country does) but "preventively" (to keep the other country from doing something that might let it pose an imminent threat someday). Then he makes what should be a thuddingly obvious point: There may be a case for preventive war, but if the aim of the war is protecting the international order, then that case should be acceptable to the agency that represents the international order. Specifically, if the war is supposed to enforce a U.N. resolution, then the case for war should be acceptable to the United Nations. A couple of paragraphs later, he makes another one: If the administration lacks the acumen or persuasive power to deal with such familiar institutions as the U.N. Security Council or the established governments of France, Germany, Turkey, Russia, China—even Canada—then how is it going to handle Iraq's feuding opposition groups, Kurdish separatists, and myriad ethno-religious factions, to say nothing of the turbulence throughout the region? posted by Steve M. | 11:12 AM |   I love this: Protest the Hollywood Left Elites Without Leaving Home "Sacrificing for the war effort? You bet I'm sacrificing for the war effort! I got carpal tunnel syndrome sending all those e-mails to CAA protesting the anti-war statements of Viggo Mortensen!" posted by Steve M. | 10:13 AM |   China closed ranks with France, Germany and Russia on Thursday, vowing to block a new UN resolution authorising war on Iraq as the pressure intensified on the United States. --news story Now China's part of the Axis of Weasels! Yet another soft, feminine country that became squeamish about the use of force in the latter half of the twentieth century? posted by Steve M. | 9:04 AM | Wednesday, March 05, 2003   It seems likely that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is has been undergoing torture. Does 9/11 justify torture? Does anything? The Economist addressed that question back in January and said this: Even if you allow, as many will not, that torture might be justified under the most extreme circumstances, it would be difficult to confine its use to those very rare cases. Any system that allowed torture in tightly controlled situations would risk eroding into wider use. To legalise is to encourage. Israel tried to limit use of physical coercion to extreme cases, but its security forces have ended up using such methods far more widely than was initially foreseen. If America were to sanction torture, to begin with in extremely rare cases, there might be some immediate gains in security. Much as one would like to believe that torture never succeeds in extracting vital information, history says otherwise. But, for the democratic West, any such gains would be outweighed by greater harm. The prohibition against torture expresses one of the West's most powerful taboos—and some taboos (like that against the use of nuclear weapons) are worth preserving even at heavy cost. Though many authoritarian regimes use torture, not one of even these openly admits it. A decision by the United States to employ some forms of torture, no matter how limited the circumstances, would shatter the taboo. The morale of the West in what may be a long war against terrorism would be gravely set back: to stay strong, the liberal democracies need to be certain that they are better than their enemies. George Bush has said that the fight against al-Qaeda is a battle for hearts and minds, not just a matter of military power. Though critics focus on his sabre-rattling, Mr Bush has been consistent in his claims to be defending human rights and democracy, and he has persisted in reaching out to Muslims, though he rarely gets credit for this. To keep the moral high ground, he needs to bolster public disavowals of torture by specifying the methods American interrogators can employ, by enforcing the limits, and by desisting from handing prisoners over to less scrupulous allies. I agree. It's clear that Bush has handed KSM over to nasty interrogators. It's also clear that the U.S. doesn't care who knows that. The Vietnam-era saying was "When you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow."  This seems to be the Bush administration's attitude toward everyone on the planet. (Thanks to Dock for pointing out the Economist editorial.) posted by Steve M. | 5:33 PM |   ...the Turks do not propose to help guarantee [the Turkey-Iraq] border or to protect those who live within it. Rather, they propose to cross the frontier for no better reason than to aggrandize themselves and to prolong the subjection of their own Kurdish population. This doesn't just disgrace the regime-change strategy. It actually destabilizes it. And it's humiliating to see the president begging and bribing the Turks to do the wrong thing and to see them in return reject his offer. --Christopher Hitchens in Slate Well, guess what, Hitchypoo? The process of begging and bribing the Turks to do the wrong thing is clearly still going on. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Hitch: You can't just support the war you wish Bush would fight. There's only one war -- his -- and either you have to support that war or you have to oppose it. There just isn't another choice. posted by Steve M. | 2:08 PM |   Sometimes pointing out the hypocrisy and shamelessness is just too easy: Frist: Veterans May Have to Sacrifice Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist pledged Tuesday to support veterans concerned about President Bush's health care proposals, but also said veterans and others will have to make sacrifices should the nation go to war with Iraq.... ...he later told reporters that the costs of the Iraq war would mean "we all have to sacrifice in various ways as we likely engage in military conflict, which we could not have anticipated a year ago, which is not fully budgeted and which ultimately will have to compete with what many of us want. "It applies to me in terms of domestic priorities and it applies to groups like the veterans today as they lobby," Frist said. ...Bush proposed a 7.7 percent increase, to $27.5 billion, for veterans' medical care in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. But the budget request also proposed fee increases and limits on access, which are unpopular with veterans and have been rejected by the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Bush's budget also proposed charging veterans who earn about $24,000 a year or more an annual enrollment fee of $250. And it proposed increasing copayments for higher-income patients, from $15 to $20 for outpatient primary care and $7 to $15 for prescription drugs.... --Newsday House Panel Enlists Military Bill In Cause of Business Tax Breaks Days before the House Ways and Means Committee took up an innocuous military bill last month, Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) made an offer to other Republican committee members at their weekly luncheon: prepare a wish list of tax breaks under $100 million each, and they could add them to the measure. "It was Mr. Thomas's idea," said panel member Jim McCrery (R-La.), adding that Democrats declined the same offer. "Everybody in the meeting agreed there were a lot of little tax items we had not [been able to enact] the last couple of years. This was something that was going to move." ...If the House accepts the committee's version, and it survives an eventual conference committee with senators, then racetrack owners and horse breeders would have an easier time enticing foreigners to bet on their races; an alternative type of diesel fuel would get a tax break, and U.S.-made bows and arrows would sell for less.... --Washington Post posted by Steve M. | 1:46 PM |   Let's slam, punch, kick, pummel. gouge, and otherwise cause the maximum hurt on Saddam. LET'S ROLL!!!!!! --comment in a Lucianne.com discussion TERRORISTS BEWARE -- RUGBY PLAYER ONBOARD --bumper sticker approvingly noted by InstaPundit I'm sorry -- these people are children. Either they don't know what war is or they just don't care to think about it. Support the damn war if you want, but grow up -- acknowledge the true nature of what you're supporting: "People are going to die. As hard as we try to limit civilian casualties, it will occur. We need to condition people that that is war. People get the idea this is going to be antiseptic. Well, it's not going to be." -- General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff posted by Steve M. | 12:18 PM |   In a serious challenge to the Bush administration, the foreign ministers of France, Germany and Russia said in a joint declaration today that they would not permit passage of a Security Council resolution authorizing the use of armed force against Iraq. -- New York Times Russia officially joins the Axis of Weasels! So does this mean that horny war boosters have to boycott t.A.T.u.? posted by Steve M. | 11:42 AM |   "Pro-war"? Bite your tongue! No one is pro-war. All those people you think are pro-war are actually pro-liberation. It's one thing to learn that political pros -- Newt Gingrich, say, or his pollster, Frank Luntz -- are urging fellow Republicans to play Orwellian word games like this. But now the amateurs are doing it. And the creepy thing is, they're proud of it. posted by Steve M. | 10:19 AM |   "This is all about the recognition that North Korea may decide that the next few weeks are their best shot at starting to build a nuclear arsenal and getting away with it," a senior official said today. "That's what we've got to stop — if we can figure out how." --New York Times "If we can figure out how." Well, that certainly inspires confidence, doesn't it? posted by Steve M. | 9:22 AM |   Boorish God-bothering American know-nothings with lapel flags? European denunciations of the new yokel hegemon? ’Twas ever thus. Read Simon Schama's history of European resentment of Americans in this week's New Yorker. Highly entertaining, and probably just what you need to confirm your nastiest stereotypes -- whether of sneering Euros or of overly self-satisfied Yanks. If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess.” -- Frances Trollope posted by Steve M. | 9:12 AM | Tuesday, March 04, 2003   Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is being tortured. According to Pakistani and U.S. officials, Mohammed is beginning to crack after three days of unspecified rough treatment by Pakistani interrogators. "If you are dealing with a terrorist you hardly go to them with a rose and a bowl of soup and say you come with good intentions," Pakistani Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat told ABCNEWS in Islamabad. "He is holding out, but I don't think he'll be able to hold out much longer," Hayat said. "There is always an end to human endurance." --ABC News Then again, maybe you don't have a problem with that. posted by Steve M. | 10:40 PM |   Right-Thinking from the Left Coast may be the right-wing blog for people who think Crank Yankers is too erudite, but I appreciate the fact that Right-Thinking linked this story from the Korea Times: NK Missile Warhead Found in Alaska The warhead of a long-range missile test-fired by North Korea was found in the U.S. state of Alaska, a report to the National Assembly revealed yesterday. ``According to a U.S. document, the last piece of a missile warhead fired by North Korea was found in Alaska,’’ former Japanese foreign minister Taro Nakayama was quoted as saying in the report. ``Washington, as well as Tokyo, has so far underrated Pyongyang’s missile capabilities.’’... Lee at Right-Thinking asks, "Firstly, how did the United States not detect this missile as it entered US airspace, and wipe North Korea off the face of the earth? And secondly, why is the first we are hearing of this in the Korea Times?" Interesting questions. What exactly is our plan to (a) deter North Korea and (b) avert a cataclysm? And does our press think this story is not credible or just not, on the administration's terms, "on message"? posted by Steve M. | 5:44 PM |   Janeane Garofalo is a smart anti-war entertainer; needless to say, this makes Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online nuts. Here's Goldberg trying to debunk one of Garofalo's arguments: So let us put aside the question of the messenger and take a look at Garofalo's message. On a recent edition of Fox News Sunday, Tony Snow asked her about Saddam Hussein: "Has he been a mass murderer? She responded, "Yes, there's been a lot of people who have been mass murderers. And I think Turkey also, who we've been negotiating with, has one of the worst human-rights records in the world. Also, the sanctions, you could say, have been responsible for mass murder." He asked, "Do you think he is eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction?" She responded, "Yes, I think lots of people are eager to obtain weapons of mass destruction." Sigh. This is the "Everybody does it" argument. According to this logic, we shouldn't stop any one serial killer if we aren't willing to stop all of them. I'm a bit confused. What's Goldberg saying here? Is he saying we don't try to stop all serial killers? Is he saying we are (to use his word) not willing to do so, as a matter of policy? Is he saying we practice police realpolitik and try to stop only the serial killers whose incarceration serves our criminologico-strategic ends, while sensibly letting others go on killing? posted by Steve M. | 3:19 PM |   If you can't bear to read Peggy Noonan's current column, let me just sum it up: Apparently she doesn't vote Democratic now, in 2003, because of what Democrats -- or some Democrats, or some people she assumed were Democrats -- believed or said in the disco era. Apparently she thinks Democrats hate Republicans but Republicans feel for Democrats nothing but the highest respect, a belief she has presumably sustained by placing her fingers in her ears every time a Republican in the past decade has uttered a sentence with the name "Clinton" in it. Apparently she believes only the Democratic Party has a preferred position on abortion -- a belief I will second when she (or anyone else) provides me with a complete list of powerful elected Republican in D.C. over the past two decades who have been pro-choice. posted by Steve M. | 1:43 PM |   LIES, DAMNED LIES, AND (REALLY SIMPLE) STATISTICS You have had only one two-term Democratic president in the 35 years since Vietnam. This is because in the end you looked extreme, bought and paid for, and weak. --Peggy Noonan, addressing Democrats in her latest column Quick quiz: How many Republican presidents have served two terms in the last 35 years? Answer: One. Just Ronald Reagan. posted by Steve M. | 11:58 AM |   Michael Savage's Savage Nation was #1 on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list. It just got knocked off the top of the chart by .... ...Michael Moore's Stupid White Men. Heh heh heh. posted by Steve M. | 11:19 AM |   UPDATE: I learn from Ted Barlow that the Drug Enforcement Administration's museum has a new exhibit: Target America: Traffickers, Terrorists & You. Um, guys, let's review that BBC story (based on a U.S. State Department report) once again: Afghanistan retook its place as the world's leading producer of heroin last year, after US-led forces overthrew the Taliban which had banned cultivation of opium poppies. I'd like to state for the record that I find the DEA museum's simulated World Trade Center debris display utterly tasteless. posted by Steve M. | 10:58 AM |   It's all about freedom ... it's all about doing right by the Iraqi people ... American forces will play the key role in the capture of Baghdad, with British troops being confined to the south of Iraq. “It won’t be the Union flag flying over Baghdad,” one British defence source said. ...if there has to be an assault on Baghdad to overcome resistance by Iraq’s Republican Guard, the mission will be carried out exclusively by American forces, the sources said. A senior British Army source said: “This decision is part political, part military, but the Americans have made it clear Baghdad is their prize.”... --Times of London posted by Steve M. | 9:44 AM |   Expensive war in the offing? Obviously there's only one possible response: even more corporate tax cuts! Corporate Gain, Treasury's Loss in Bush Plan The Bush administration's tax proposal on dividends has become more friendly to investors and to some companies that pay no taxes. The effect of the latest changes, if enacted by Congress, would probably be to reduce the government's tax revenue by even more than under the original plan. The changes, included in the legislative language last week when the bill was introduced by Senator Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma, mean that a number of companies whose dividends would have been taxable under the president's original proposal would now be tax exempt.... One change will benefit companies that in the past have been forced to pay the corporate alternative minimum tax. Such payments can in some cases allow companies to avoid paying corporate income taxes, but under the latest version of the Bush plan, those companies may be able to pay tax-exempt dividends even as they avoid paying taxes. So we're replacing what the conservatives call "double taxation" with ... what? Double lack of taxation? ...The other principal change would make it easier for companies to obtain refunds of taxes paid in previous years, and would make it easier for cyclical companies — companies that may make money in some years and lose money in others — to make all their dividends tax-exempt. That would not have been possible under the original Bush proposal.... Drunk on tax cutting.... posted by Steve M. | 9:25 AM |   From the BBC: Afghanistan retakes heroin crown Afghanistan retook its place as the world's leading producer of heroin last year, after US-led forces overthrew the Taliban which had banned cultivation of opium poppies. The finding was made in a key drug report, distributed in Kabul on Sunday by the US State Department, which supports almost identical findings by the United Nations last week. Low-grade heroin is refined in Afghanistan from opium, which is manufactured from the extract of poppies. "The size of the opium harvest in 2002 makes Afghanistan the world's leading opium producer," the report said.... Well, that puts a whole new spin on this Washington Post headline from last week: Now, It's Business That Booms: With Bombs Mostly Silenced, Commerce and Confidence Are Growing in Kabul posted by Steve M. | 8:04 AM | Monday, March 03, 2003   It's said that people in the oil business shrug off losing huge amounts of money -- they simply expect that sometimes there'll be big gains and sometimes there'll be big losses. Supposedly rich kids don't worry much about what can go wrong in their lives because they figure someone will help them out if things get too bad. Alcoholics lose the ability to assess the harm they're doing to themselves and others. And fervent believers in God regularly assume that God will protect them from danger. George W. Bush has been all of these things. No wonder he has no ability to judge risk. We've heard that Bush's tax plan is bold. His Iraq war plan is bold, too. His North Korea policy? Well, that seems to be nonexistent. But what they all have in common is the notion that nothing can really go wrong. Deliberately creating massive deficits won't really hurt us. Ignoring North Korea won't open the door to calamitous acts of aggression. Attacking Saddam won't lead to desperate chem/bio attacks. Pissing off the Arab/Muslim world won't lead to more terrorism in years to come. Alienating allies from France to Turkey, from Russia to Mexico, won't have disastrous long-term consequences. Easy come, easy go. Dad, get me out of this. Screw it -- let's have another drink. The Lord will provide. posted by Steve M. | 11:24 PM |   "HILLARY HAWKS UP WAR TALK," the headline in the New York Post headline says. But read the lead: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton "fully supports" President Bush's Iraq policy, her office said last night - on the eve of her visit today to an upstate arsenal that makes military hardware like mortars and howitzers for U.S. troops. "Sen. Clinton fully supports the steps the president has taken to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction," said Clinton spokesman Philippe Reines. Read it again carefully -- "Sen. Clinton fully supports the steps the president has taken...." That's an endorsement of military pressure and UN diplomacy. It's not an endorsement of war. It's also not an objection to war fever. It's a non-stance disguised as a stance. This is the kind of statement Clinton-haters call "Clintonesque"; alas, when it comes to this kind of thing they have a point. posted by Steve M. | 3:35 PM |   I said last night that The Sun was predicting a war this week. What The Sun is actually saying is that war my start as early as next week. My error. A disturbing prospect either way, of course. posted by Steve M. | 3:24 PM |   Seen "BushBlair.mpg" yet? It's a little music video about the special relationship that dare not speak its name. Go here and click on the link, or just click on this link or this one (which seems to be faster). Or just wait -- someone's bound to e-mail it to you, if that hasn't happened already. (Am I months behind the curve on this?) (UPDATE: Yes, I am.) posted by Steve M. | 1:40 PM |   What did Jesus think of people who boast of their piety the way George W. Bush does? Here's what the Man said: Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. (Luke 18:10-14, KJV) Now, here's Bush, as seen in Howard Fineman's Newsweek cover story "Bush and God": As he prepared to run, in 1999, Bush assembled leading pastors at the governor’s mansion for a “laying-on of hands,” and told them he’d been “called” to seek higher office. In the GOP primaries, he outmaneuvered the field by practicing what one rival, Gary Bauer, called “identity politics.” Others tried to woo evangelicals by pledging strict allegiance on issues such as abortion and gay rights. “Bush talked about his faith,” said Bauer, “and people just believed him—and believed in him.” You can't blame Bush, in a way -- even though Jesus urges humility and self-abnegation in Bible passage after Bible passage, an awful lot of American Bibles seem to be missing those passages. As a result, America is lousy with Pharisees, people who endlessly boast of their own godliness. Fineman's article makes clear that Bush and his döppelganger, Karl Rove, figured out how to appeal to these people many years ago. Of course, Fineman's article is part of that permanent campaign. posted by Steve M. | 1:37 PM |   An e-mailer from Brazil tells me that an e-mail is making the rounds urging people to buy European rather than American products. Yes, American right-wingers, it's true: people who don't agree with you can also express their political opinions at the checkout counter. Sorry to be the one to break this to you. The Brazilian correspondent says he's doing his bit to stand up for the right to disagree with the U.S. -- he spent quite a bit of money recently at Carrefour. Carrefour is a French supermarket chain with stores in many countries, including Brazil. Amazing, isn't it? French people actually work for a living. Some of them even run large, thriving businesses with global reach. They don't just sit around all day smoking Gauloises and sneering at Americans who aren't named Jerry Lewis. No one in the American media has ever reported such a thing. posted by Steve M. | 9:50 AM |   WHAT WE OBTAIN TOO CHEAP WE ESTEEM TOO LIGHTLY --from a sign seen at a pro-war rally in Washington, D.C., March 1, 2003 "The price of gasoline has gone up very little compared to other consumer goods," said Bill Hickman, a spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based trade group [the American Petroleum Institute].... When historic prices are adjusted for inflation, however, it turns out the average price for a gallon of gasoline in the United States was well above $1.80 per gallon for most of the 20th century. For example, a gallon of gasoline cost just 25 cents in 1918. In 2002 dollars, that would be the equivalent of $3 a gallon, according to federal statistics cited by the American Petroleum Institute. Until 1970, when the actual price for a gallon was 36 cents, the inflation-adjusted price never fell below $1.70. As the gas crisis and rapid inflation both hit in the 1970s and early 1980s, prices at the pump took off. By 1981, a gallon of gasoline cost $1.35 -- or $2.69 in adjusted dollars before easing back below $2 in the mid-1980s. The last decade has seen some of the lowest gasoline prices in U.S. history, when adjusted for inflation. They bottomed out in 1998, when the average price per gallon was $1.12, or $1.23 in adjusted dollars.... --news article posted by Steve M. | 8:07 AM | Sunday, March 02, 2003   It appears the U.S. government is spying on the phone calls and e-mails of the U.N. delegations of Security Council nations, looking for ways to get them to vote America's way on the Iraq resolution. And it appears the government is stupid or arrogant enough to let knowledge of the spy plan leak to the press (Britain's Observer). Here's the text of the memo. Is it real? If so, and if this is not merely appalling but typical U.N practice, you have to wonder whether Nixon is calling in plays to this White House from hell. posted by Steve M. | 11:53 PM |   Britain's Sun claims the war could start this week. Yikes! Wonder if The Sun will suspend publication of Page 3 girls for the duration. (Link from InstaPundit.) posted by Steve M. | 11:17 PM |   Cheering, chanting and waving flags, thousands jammed shoulder-to-shoulder into downtown Houston's Jones Plaza on Saturday to hear politicians, soldiers and entertainers praise God, America and President Bush's firm stand against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. The ostensibly nonpartisan "Rally for America," sponsored by talk radio station KPRC, quickly turned into a spirited affirmation of Bush's policies. Speakers included House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.... DeLay told the crowd that President Bush is "fighting principle battles and he's not backing down. He's a Texan." --Houston Chronicle Statements like that are really going to help us win that Security Council vote, aren't they? posted by Steve M. | 4:32 PM |   In the 11 years since the end of the gulf war, Kurds in northern Iraq have built their enclave into a surprisingly prosperous democracy.... the Kurds can argue that they have built the only democracy that has ever existed on Iraqi soil, one that could be a model for the rest of the country. --article in the New York Times Week in Review section. The Bush administration argues that a "liberated" Iraq will be a shining example to the Arab/Muslim world, a democratic city on a hill. But Iraq's Kurdish region already has democratic institutions, and is doing quite well. And Turkey is a real democracy. These cities-on-hills aren't inspiring the region to rise up and spontaneously throw off its shackles. Why should we believe that a post-Saddam Iraq will be any more inspirational? posted by Steve M. | 10:59 AM |   On Friday night, CNN's Aaron Briwn interviewed John Ferrugia, a Colorado reporter who's been investigation the rash of sexual assault allegations at the Air Force Academy. Ferrugia said this: The culture of the Air Force Academy, according to the women we've been talking to, and even women who have been there and are now officers -- we've even talked to many who have called us, e-mailed us. And they talk about the culture where sexual assault is accepted. It's within the culture. It just happens there. We've been told that, from the second or third week that women are there, they have upper-class trainers, juniors and seniors. Some of those are women. Women tell them and warn them, in the time you're here, this is going to happen to you. It's going to happen to many of you. Don't report it, because, if you do, your career is over. And yet The New York Times now reports this: Early last year, a panel created in part to help address the problem of sexual assault within the military found itself under fire. Five former chairwomen of the panel urged Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to resist pressure to disband it from conservative administration advisers, who said they thought the panel was fostering what one called "radical feminism" and was no longer needed because women had been fully integrated into the military. The former chairwomen of the embattled panel — which since 1951 had been weighing in on women's issues — emphasized the importance of its independent role in overseeing the military's handling of sex crimes.... The Pentagon responded by letting the panel's charter expire in February 2002, replacing its members and changing its agenda. Though still known as the Defense Department Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, it no longer advises the military on sexual assault.... Just a little more compassionate conservatism from the Bush administration. posted by Steve M. | 12:44 AM |   Now, It's Business That Booms: With Bombs Mostly Silenced, Commerce and Confidence Are Growing in Kabul --headline in The Washington Post, February 26, 2003 Abqel Khan, 2, smiles at his grandmother, but he cannot even crawl or walk because of severe malnutrition. In Kabul, the number of children suffering from malnutrition has increased to 11 percent in 2002 from 6 percent in 2001. --photo caption in the Week in Review section of the March 2 New York Times (print edition, page 2; online edition here). posted by Steve M. | 12:22 AM |   On Friday I chided Daniel Skinner of The Weekly Standard, who garbled the expression "the die is cast" even as he criticized Fred Durst for apparently making up the word "agreeance" in an anti-war statement at the Grammy Awards. Well, now Matthew Yglesias has interrupted work on his senior thesis to top that: He went to the OED and discovered that "agreeance" is actually a word. Nice work, Matthew. I got a rejection letter from Harvard many years ago, and all of a sudden I feel I deserved it. posted by Steve M. | 12:12 AM | Friday, February 28, 2003   Here's New York Times Metro section reporter Clyde Haberman defending New York City's reluctance to commit wholeheartedly to the anti-French holy war: ...give us a little credit. This isn't Beaufort, N.C., where a restaurant called Cubbie's replaced French fries with "freedom fries." It seems not to have dawned on the people of Beaufort that the very name of their town is French. posted by Steve M. | 11:48 PM |   One last thing about Andrew Sullivan's Al Sharpton article: Sullivan says of Sharpton, "He has amazing oratorical skills among blacks." Just what the hell is that supposed to mean? That Sharpton appeals to the half-savage sable hordes with their mysterious jungle music and their unbridled dancing? I'm putting words in Sullivan's mouth, but I don't how how else to interpret a statement like that. Whatever you think of him, Sharpton's a good speaker, period. He preaches when he makes a speech, and why not? He's been preaching since he was a kid. The techniques of black church oratory are pretty damn useful for getting a point across. Sharpton's not as good as Jesse Jackson in front a large crowd, but -- at least to my white, Northeastern ears -- he's a lot better than Jackson in, say, a small TV studio (Jackson in an intimate setting really sounds country). Sharpton can do irony and sarcasm. His one-liners can be quite barbed. He's no dummy, and you feel it when he talks. I wonder if Sullivan's ever heard the man speak at any greater length than an eight-second soundbite. posted by Steve M. | 11:38 PM |   Why did Andrew Sullivan send this article on Al Sharpton to London's Sunday Times? Was it because he knew no responsible U.S. periodical would publish it intact? SullyWatch correctly points out that Sharpton was not found criminally guilty of defaming Steven Pagones (he was found liable in a civil suit); SullyWatch also chides Sullivan for misstating Sharpton's role in the outcome of the last New York mayoral race. There's more to say on this subject, however: Mark Green probably lost the race not because of what Sharpton did but because of what Green did vis-à-vis Sharpton. Jesse Jackson and the black conservative pundit Armstrong Williams agree on this, and they don't agree on much. Jackson: [Green's] campaign took off the gloves, releasing negative ads against Ferrer. And white voters reported getting election eve calls urging them to vote for Green because Al Sharpton, the African American leader, "cannot be given the keys to City Hall." Flyers were distributed painting Ferrer as a pawn of Sharpton. Dennis Rivera, president of the health and hospital workers' union and a nationally respected political leader, accused Green of "using code words" to divide the city. The runoff vote split on racial lines: Green got 84% of the white vote; Ferrer 84% of the Latino vote and 71% of the black vote. Williams: On the other side was Mark Green, who attacked Ferrer for his association with Reverend Al Sharpton. In what seems a shameless attempt to court the white vote, some upper-class neighborhoods received cartoons depicting Ferrer smooching Sharpton's bloated rear end. The day of the runoff, Green henchmen cruised through predominantly white neighborhoods shouting through their Radio Shack megaphones, "Do you want Sharpton running City Hall?" Mike Bloomberg also, of course, benefited from a bit of unpleasantness in New York on September 11, 2001; Rudolph Giuliani, a 9/11 hero even to many who'd loathed him, endorsed Bloomberg, while Green made the ill-advised declaration that anyone could have handled the situation as well as Giuliani. Sullivan also blames Sharpton for the fact that there has been "a decade of Republican mayors and governors in one of the most liberal states in the country." Sharpton does have influence on mayor's races in New York City, but no observer of the New York political scene credits or blames Sharpton in any way for the three elections of George Pataki as governor of New York. Sullivan says that Sharpton's "gutter style of racial politics has won him a devoted following and considerable clout in New York City Democratic politics." Does Sullivan consider the peaceful, effective protests that arose in the wake of the torture of Abner Louima and the shootings of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond -- protests in which Sharpton was joined by, among others, Ed Koch, his longtime antagonist -- to be "gutter politics"? How about Sharpton's efforts to find justice in the Howard Beach murder of Michael Griffith in 1986? The maddening thing about Al Sharpton is that he deserves just about as much criticism as he gets -- and an awful lot of praise as well. He's done terrible things and noble things. He's a mountebank and a very good leader. I don't blame anyone who rejects him for the Tawana Brawley incident or the Freddy's incident or any number of other terrible judgments. But it's ignorant -- or dishonest -- to say that his appeal stems exclusively, or primarily, from his worst acts. posted by Steve M. | 6:17 PM |   Y'know that Ready.gov site the government set up to help you survive a terrorist attack? Well, some people who've seen it just show no respect for the fine work of Ready.gov's illustrators. (And they use naughty language, too.) I laughed at this disrespectful nonsense. I guess I'm a bad person. (Thanks to Phil F. for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 1:20 PM |   I’m mightily impressed that David Skinner of the right-wing Weekly Standard can shoot fish in a barrel. Too bad about the collateral damage he does to his own foot in the process. In a column called "Stardumb” -- gosh, I guess that’s a pun on “stardom,” isn’t it? -- Skinner critiques celebrities (left-leaners only) for having the temerity to express opinions despite the fact that they’re not Oxford-level debaters or Nobel-level intellects. Skinner chides Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst (whom he calls, ever so wittily, “Fred Dunce”) because Durst said at the Grammy Awards, “I hope we all are in agreeance that this war should go away as soon as possible." Muffy! He said “agreeance”! Yet how good is Skinner’s command of the language? He writes: The music awards remained relatively free of war-posing even after reports that the plug wouldn't be pulled on anyone for mouthing off. But, somehow, the dye was already set. First of all, David, that should be “die,” not “dye.” And the expression isn’t “the die is set” -- it’s “the die is cast.” Alia iacta est, as we used to say in Latin class. Scroll to the second entry here if you don’t know what a die is. By the way, I wonder if Skinner has any plans to parse the bon mots of Ted Nugent or Charlie Daniels. (Thanks to TAPPED for the Skinner link.) posted by Steve M. | 12:44 PM |   Here's a picture of Russia's foreign minister and China's president shaking hands. Yesterday Russia and China issued a joint resolution opposing America's plan for an Iraq war, and Russia has now said it may veto a war resolution in the U.N. The Sino-Soviet split has been ended -- by Bush. And the North Koreans, not content with restarting that nuclear reactor, are apparently going to test a ballistic missile and start reprocessing plutonium. 1964 Goldwater voters must be freaking. posted by Steve M. | 9:42 AM |   Let's see if I'm following Bush administration logic here: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. Saddam has the ability and also the desire to transport these weapons outside his own borders if doing so will advance his megalomaniacal goals. And Saddam supports Palestinian terrorists, a point the president reiterated in his speech on Wednesday night. The second Palestinian intifada began in September 2000 -- on the evil Bill Clinton's watch, and two years after U.N. weapons inspectors first left Iraq. So if all that's true, why didn't the evil Saddam give nukes or chemical weapons or biological weapons to Palestinian militants between the start of the second intifada and the day Sheriff Bush pulled on his cowboy boots? Why didn't he give these weapons to Palestinian militants even after September 11, 2001? Why isn't he handing the weapons over even now? After all, isn't the Bush administration's argument that inspections alone, even with 200,000 troops on Iraq's borders, don't deter Saddam's weapons program at all, that weapons development continues apace even as inspectors inspect? Just asking. posted by Steve M. | 7:57 AM | Thursday, February 27, 2003   More know-nothingism from MSNBC's newest hire, Michael Savage. And did I ever link this sampling of his hate-spew? Yes, by all means join GLAAD's e-mail campaign. While I'm talking about Savage again, I want to comment on this passage from his book, quoted in the first link above: You can have sex in public. You can masturbate in public. You can cross-dress in public. You can rub against a sheep in public. But you can't pray in public. This is utter bullshit. Look, I live and work in Manhattan. Ever see the guy who paces the streets just south of Columbus Circle, chanting "Je - sus! Je -sus! Love God! Love God! Hallelujah!"? It's cold now, so he's moved to the subway -- but nobody stops him. For decades nobody's stopped the preachers waving their Bibles and shouting the praises of the Lord in Times Square -- preachers who are still there, even though the peep shows and grindhouses have all been moved out of the Square and off the Deuce. You can pray on a public street. You just can't pray under the public's aegis, with government sponsorship. (Of course, you actually can -- the ACLU just might try to stop you, and a judge who understands the Constitution might agree.) The cops actually would stop you in Manhattan if you were having sex or masturbating, or rubbing up against a farm animal. Savage is right about one thing, though -- They'll let cross-dressing slide. posted by Steve M. | 6:03 PM |   Dolly the sheep is dead, but the political controversy she engendered lives in the House of Representatives, where lawmakers are expected on Thursday to pass a bill making human cloning a crime. The Republican-backed measure would outlaw cloning experiments — or, more precisely, the scientific procedure known as somatic cell nuclear transfer — either for baby making or medical research. Scientists who cloned human embryos would face up to 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine. The bill would also prohibit the importing of medical therapies derived from cloning research. --New York Times Read that last sentence again. If these guys get their way, it won't merely be illegal to do research of this kind in the U.S. It will be illegal in America to buy or sell drugs that were developed this way elsewhere. The world will have access to these drugs, but Americans will have to go overseas to get them, and importing them will be a crime. Surely this bill is too extreme to become law. Yet The bill is nearly identical to legislation that passed the House in the last Congress by more than 100 votes in July 2001, and it has the strong support of President Bush.... The Senate voted once, in 1998, to reject a broad cloning ban, and last year, the Democratic-controlled Senate would not take up the bill passed by the House. That will change now that Republicans are in charge. We're not a theocracy yet, not by a long shot. But it's not for lack of trying. posted by Steve M. | 2:29 PM |   It's being reported (here and here, for instance) that in some schools the children of military personnel are being harassed by anti-war teachers. I am more than willing to denounce any harassment of service members or their kids. This kind of thing was wrong and stupid in the Vietnam era, and I'd like to think most anti-war people know better now. The men and women in the military have no control over bad decisions being made in Washington. They're the workers. They want to do what's right. It's particularly wrong to take it out on their children. Having said that, I'd like to point out that this situation is roughly analogous to what happens to atheists and Jews and Buddhists and Muslims and non-Evangelical Christians in some classrooms when they're ostracized or marginalized for being unwilling to participate in sectarian prayers openly or sneakily sanctioned by public-school officials. Any conservative who's outraged at harassment of soldiers' kids ought to learn from that harassment some sympathy for people whose religious beliefs, or lack thereof, don't conform to those of the majority in certain towns. I don't think you should harass a kid for a Jesus T-shirt or a Satan T-shirt. I think war advocacy, war opposition, and everything in the middle should be respected. Conservatives will denounce harassment of soldiers' kids, rightly -- but I want to see them denounce harassment of people they strenuously disagree with as well. posted by Steve M. | 12:53 PM |   It is naive, however, to think that if Saddam had fallen [at the end of the Gulf War in 1991], he would necessarily have been replaced by a Jeffersonian in some sort of desert democracy where people read The Federalist Papers along with the Koran. Quite possibly, we would have wound up with a Saddam by another name. --Colin Powell, My American Journey, 1995 posted by Steve M. | 10:56 AM | Wednesday, February 26, 2003   RUTHERFORD B. HAYES IS NOW A MOONIE No, really, I mean it. The fine folks at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, to whom you should definitely give money, discovered this in Reverend Sun Myung Moon's newspaper late last year: Moon continues to convene conferences in the “spirit world” during which famous historical figures renounce their former faith and beliefs and swear fealty to Moon. The Washington Times on Dec. 28 ran an advertisement from the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification featuring three of these testimonies – from St. Anselm, Thomas Paine and President Rutherford B. Hayes. The Unification Church claims that during “spirit world” conferences last year, Jesus Christ, Confucius, Muhammad, St. Paul, Martin Luther, St. Augustine, the Buddha, several Hindu leaders and others pledged allegiance to Moon and offered personal testimonies. The new round of testimonies featured more of the same. Paine, for example, asserted, “If Americans do not want to become eternal wanderers they must follow the teachings of Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who is on earth. He possesses a fundamental philosophy to save not only America but also all humanity.” Paine, best known as the author of the pamphlet “Common Sense,” which helped spur revolutionary fervor, noted that there is “freedom of the press in this place but I am sad that the limitation of time prevents me from fully expressing my excitement.” Hayes, the 19th president of the United States, called out, “People of earth! People of America! I cannot record here everything that I have experienced. I can only say that the Unification Principle is a great truth and that it is unmistakable that the Rev. Sun Myung Moon holds all the keys to human salvation and peace.” The mind reels. (Americans United also reports that President Charles Taylor of Liberia -- a business partner and pal of Pat Robertson -- may well have harbored al-Qaeda terrorists in the months before the September 11 attacks. God, presumably, told him to do this.) posted by Steve M. | 11:22 PM |   "We believe the vast majority of Iraqi officials are not part of Saddam Hussein's clique, and they've just been trying to do their jobs. We expect they'd be able to continue to do their jobs when Saddam and his cronies are gone," said [Ari] Fleischer. --Reuters "We share a belief that the reformed Iraqi army should continue to have an important role in a free Iraq," [U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad] said. --AP story on the conference of opposition leaders that opened in northern Iraq today Meet the new Iraq -- same as the old Iraq? posted by Steve M. | 5:07 PM |   Hey, folks, I have shopping lists for you: French stuff. German stuff. These aren't really shopping lists, of course. They're boycott lists. They come from the thoughtful grown-ups at FranceStinks.com/GermanyStinks.com. Here are some humorous photos from the FS/GS site. Included is, of course, a mock photo of a 9/11-style attack on the Eiffel Tower -- as we know from Ann Coulter ("My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building"), nothing makes right-wingers laugh harder than the thought of terrorists doing irreparable harm to their enemies. The FS/GS folks also have an event planned: On March 4, at midnight, they're going to flush Brie down the toilet. All at once, mind you. Not just Brie, of course -- whatever they can find that comes from filthy appeasenik countries. (Hey, maybe someone will try to flush an entire Mercedes!) And what better way to get in the mood for l'amour -- whoops! I meant luuuuve! -- than... ...a France Stinks thong? One million, four hundred thousand French soldiers were killed during World War I. As a result, there weren't many Frenchmen left to fight in World War II. Nevertheless, 100,000 French soldiers lost their lives trying to stop Adolf Hitler. ...They were out-manned, out-gunned, out-generaled and, above all, out-tanked. They got slaughtered, but they stood and they fought. Ha-ha, how funny. --Molly Ivins posted by Steve M. | 1:00 PM |   MOYERS ON MICHAEL SAVAGE You may have seen the show already, or read the transcript (Cursor wisely links it), but if not, here's Bill Moyers on Michael Savage, #1 bestselling author, radio host, and (soon) TV star, from the February 21 broadcast of Moyers's show NOW: A footnote to this conversation on how media use the public's airwaves. NBC is owned by General Electric; G.E. and Microsoft own the cable news network MSNBC; and MSNBC has just hired Michael Savage to do a new television program. Mr. Savage is the host of an ABC radio show called SAVAGE NATION. MSNBC says Michael Savage will provide "compelling opinion and analysis with edge." Now, what does that mean? Well, let's look at the record: Michael Savage is known to speak on the air of non-white countries as — you may want to cover your children's eyes — as "turd world nations." Open your door to immigrants, he has said, and "the next thing you know they are defecating on your country and breeding out of control." He has said that while Latinos, in particular, "breed like rabbits" and whites don't, homosexuals "are part of the grand plan to cut down on the white race." When student volunteers distributed food to San Francisco's homeless, Mr. Savage said "the girls can go in and maybe get raped because they seem to like the excitement of it. There's always the thrill and possibility they'll be raped in a dumpster while giving out a turkey sandwich." When the Million Mom March called for gun control, Mr. Savage said children killed by guns "are not kids, they're ghetto slime." Never mind. Apparently such ideas strengthen the arsenal of democracy. For Michael Savage says: "We need racist stereotypes right now of our enemy in order to encourage our warriors to kill the enemy." So a SAVAGE NATION is now safely nestled in the bosom of big media, courtesy of G.E. and Microsoft. I don't want this guy supressed, but what the hell is wrong with us as a society that we can't ignore him like a barroom drunk? Ask your conservative friends if they listen to Savage and like him. That will tell you a lot about them. And ask your Chistian friends if it bothers them that a leading publisher of Bibles and other Christian works is (through a subsidiary) publishing Savage's book. posted by Steve M. | 11:46 AM |   Will George Bush's actions in the Middle East alienate pro-U.S. moderates in the region? They already have: For Hamad Abdel-Aziz Kawari, a former Qatari ambassador to the United States, the disillusionment itself is enough. Sitting in his seaside office in Doha underneath two pictures of former president George Bush, he boasted that his three children were graduates of George Washington University. He straddles two worlds, he said, having served eight years in the United States. But the American ideals he respects, he said, are overshadowed by the foreign policy he sees. "You want to be friends. And to be friends you have to be convinced your friend is doing something good," he said. "Believe me and write this," he added. "Nobody hates America. America used to be a great example, it was not a colonial power in the region. Our sons and brothers work with American businesses. I am very sorry that American policy is threatening the human relations between the nations. The Americans are antagonizing their friends." That's from a Washington Post article titled "Old Arab Friends Turn Away From U.S.: Policies Toward Iraq and Palestinians Alienate Pro-American Generation." And this is before we've dropped a single "massive ordnance air burst" bomb on Iraq ("The MOAB's massive explosive punch, sources say, is similar to a small nuclear weapon"). posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | Tuesday, February 25, 2003   Transcript of the Bush-Saddam debate. posted by Steve M. | 5:58 PM |   TEHRAN, Iran, Feb. 25 —  The head of Iraq’s largest opposition group warned the United States on Tuesday that its military presence in post-war Iraq would not be welcome, and that any attempt to install a Pentagon general in Baghdad could be met with a “religious war.” Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim told MSNBC.com in an interview that Muslim fury over a long-term American occupation of Iraq would destabilize the Middle East. Hakim's warning will come as no surprise to the Pentagon, which has kept its plans for post-war Iraq under wraps for fear of increasing tensions in the region ahead of a showdown with Saddam Hussein. --MSNBC A "religious war"? So are these guys, even though they're the enemies of our enemies, the "evildoers" of the future? Which Bush do you think is going to start the war against them? President Jeb? President George P.? President Jenna? posted by Steve M. | 2:16 PM |   MAN COMMITS SUICIDE. CONSERVATIVES LAUGH. But you can't really blame them, can you? After all, the man was French. UPDATE: More conservative folks who think suicide is a laugh riot. posted by Steve M. | 11:38 AM |   Iraq? It seems to me it's basically a hostage situation. Spare me the Hitler analogies -- Saddam doesn't even control half his own country, for chrissakes. A better comparison for Saddam is David Koresh, or Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. Saddam is surrounded, but he can kill a lot of innocent people if we go in with guns blazing; he really might want to die gloriously and take a lot of people with him. How different is he from an armed bank robber holding a few dozen people at gunpoint, or a self-styled messiah in a compound with a group of followers, a small arsenal of weapons, and a messiah complex? In such a situation, nobody criticizes a police hostage team for failing to launch a huge frontal attack; if a hostage team continues to talk and negotiate with a bank robber, nobody says the team is willfully blind to the fact of the bank robber's guilt. And nobody expects negotiations to stop because a holder of hostages is playing cat-and-mouse games with the negotiators -- in such a situation, cat-and-mouse games are recognized as a given. Maybe what U.S. war planners have in mind really will minimize civilian casualties, both the ones caused by our weapons and the ones caused by Saddam’s. Maybe the planners really do have reason to believe that innocent civilians will suffer less as the result of a war than they would if we were to continue a containment/sanctions policy. But it’s immoral to support war right now and ignore the risk that Iraq might be on the verge of a Dresden from our weapons and a chem/bio Waco from Saddam’s. posted by Steve M. | 10:05 AM |   From a fine Nicholas Kristof column in today's New York Times: Eisenhower, who led the European Allies to victory in World War II and was president from 1953 to 1961, faced a crisis in Egypt similar to today's and effectively chose containment rather than invasion. Likewise, even when faced with the threat of weapons of mass destruction, President John F. Kennedy chose to contain Cuba rather than invade it, and President Ronald Reagan chose to contain Libya rather than invade it. I hope we have the courage and discipline to emulate such restraint by Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan today and choose containment over war for Iraq. Yes -- and Eisenhower also chose to avoid war in 1954 when China threatened Taiwan and then invaded Qemoy and Matsu, as surprise war opponent John McLaughlin has pointed out. It's nice to be reminded that a prudent decision to back away from war wasn't considered un-American in America's salad days after World War II. posted by Steve M. | 9:34 AM | Monday, February 24, 2003   This Washington Post profile of Jeb Bush might not have pleased Jeb's fans, but it does take seriously the notion that Jeb could be elected president in 2008, and it certainly leaves the impression that he is a serious, smart, driven, thoughtful man -- so those of us who aren't fans of Jeb should be afraid ... very afraid. Maybe now is a good time to read this article from last week's Village Voice about a Florida land deal that netted the wife of New York's GOP governor, George Pataki, a pretty penny, quite possibly as the result of Jeb's intervention: The Florida bonanza has all the earmarks of a politically wired transaction, orchestrated by land preservation officials in Jeb Bush's administration. A week after both Bush and Pataki were re-elected in November, the South Florida Water Management District, a state corporation whose members are appointed by the governor, voted to approve paying $15 million for the Pataki parcel, which Libby and her partners had acquired in 2000 for $4.4 million. The price was three times what the state offered in 1999 and $360 more per acre than it simultaneously paid for pristine wetlands next door, even though the adjacent parcel contained what government documents described as "the bulk of the environmentally sensitive portion of the tract." The financing was supposed to come primarily from the state's Department of Environmental Protection, but on December 12, the water district decided it could complete the deal quicker if it used its own money. "This is the most fast-tracked environmental land purchase we've ever had," crowed Michael DiTerlizzi, the top official in Martin County, which also participated in the acquisition.... Will anyone ever care about this deal? Would anyone care if Jeb's last name were, say, Clinton? posted by Steve M. | 11:06 PM |   So how successful is the endlessly self-congratulatory Fox News Channel? Not as successful as it wants you to believe, according to an article in today's New York Times business section: But Mr. Walton has argued that CNN is in a different business, one that is heavier in news compared with its rivals at Fox and even the third-place MSNBC. Fox News Channel may draw larger ratings than CNN, but not higher ad rates, the theory goes. CNN is estimated to draw 15 to 40 percent higher rates than Fox News, though both sides agree that the gap is closing fast. "The important thing for CNN is to understand who it is, and how it defines winning," Mr. Walton said. "It's not just about chasing the higher number. Quality matters." Back in the 1980s, a department-store mogul was asked why he didn't advertise in Rupert Murdoch's New York Post. He is said to have replied, "But, Rupert, your readers are my shoplifters." Maybe TV advertisers feel a bit that way about Fox News. (Incidentally, the linked article strongly suggests that the conventional wisdom at CNN is that Walter Isaacson's tenure there was a diaster, and that the saving grace is that CNN never quite succumbed completely to the tabloid tendencies Isaacson embraced. It's nice to see a well-deserved thrashing doled out to the guy who tried to hire Limbaugh and who approached GOP legislators on his knees, begging them to like him, even if the article doesn't mention those embarrassing moments.) posted by Steve M. | 10:45 PM |   Seen the government's terrorism-preparedness site, Ready.gov? Well, it's already being mocked. Rather deftly, I might add. posted by Steve M. | 7:43 PM |   Philly Cops Say Snowball Led to Shooting PHILADELPHIA -- A man whose daughter was hit with a snowball by a group of girls returned to the scene and opened fire with a gun, critically wounding a 10-year-old youngster, police said. Joseph Best, 32, was arrested Monday and jailed on charges including attempted murder. The victim was in critical condition with a head wound.... "An armed society is a polite society," the gun-lovers always say. What would they say in this case? That if the 10-year-old girl had also been packing heat, this wouldn't have happened? posted by Steve M. | 6:37 PM |   I could get upset about this, which is in response to something I posted this morning, but the thing just speaks for itself, doesn't it? Life's too short to argue with a grown man who still uses words like "fucktard," and whose most brilliant retort is "Your mom's a whore." posted by Steve M. | 5:23 PM |   Saddam Challenges Bush To Debate In an exclusive interview with CBS News Anchor Dan Rather, Saddam Hussein has challenged President George W. Bush to a live, international television and radio debate about the looming war. Saddam envisions it as being along the lines of U.S. presidential campaign debates.... I am so, so sorry that this will never happen. Talk about your Theater of the Absurd.... And maybe if it happened we could just lock the two idiots in the auditorium, the way Dabney Coleman is locked in the closet in 9 to 5, and take advantage of their absence to sort out the various messes the two of them have made. "Hey, what should we do with these nerve-gas canisters?" "Just put 'em in the burn bag on top of the paperwork for Bush's 2003 budget." posted by Steve M. | 4:04 PM |   I’m on the left, but I have no patience with academic leftism. I don’t really consider academic leftism to be progressive at all. Leftists and liberals concern themselves with actual abuses of power; academic leftists worry about menaces to society such as the general acclaim for Shakespeare -- excuse me, the “privileging” of Shakespeare’s “texts” -- or the very existence of the scientific method. And academic leftists sometimes seem to be working to undo what real leftists and liberals are trying to accomplish. The real left pursues DNA testing to free wrongly convicted inmates; the academy claims there’s no such thing as objective scientific truth. The real left defends the notion that homosexuality is innate and fights fundamentalist quacks who claim they can reverse it; the academy insists that all sexuality is “socially constructed.” This is a long way of saying that I’m very, very skeptical of “ethnomathematics,” an academic-lefty concept discussed in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. Ethnomathematics is not merely the study of overlooked mathematical practices in other cultures -- which certainly seems like a good idea -- but is an attempt to alter the teaching of math by making the math curriculum detour through those non-Western mathematical practices. This is somehow supposed to help minorities and women overcome math difficulties. The Times quotes the father of ethnomathematics, a Brazilian mathematician named Ubiratan D'Ambrosio, on why math teaching should go ethnic: “Mathematics is absolutely integrated with Western civilization, which conquered and dominated the entire world. The only possibility of building up a planetary civilization depends on restoring the dignity of the losers.” It sounds so much cooler and more mellifluous when a non-American says it, but what D’Ambrosio is talking about is teaching self-esteem. I hate the overemphasis on self-esteem in education almost as much as right-wing blowhards do; the right-wing blowhards, I think, are actually right when they rant about this. Let’s not teach a man to fish; let’s not even give him a fish; let’s just tell him he has dignity in spite of the fact that he doesn’t have a fish -- or perhaps because he doesn’t have a fish -- and leave him to figure out from himself how fish are obtained. Obviously I’m oversimplifying things. Ethnomathematicians apparently do believe that balkanizing math is a good way of getting math principles across. It’s not clear though, whether they believe that members of each ethnic group learn math best when exposed to practices from the continent of their ancestors or whether they feel that any reference to the Third World in the classroom just makes nonwhite youths feel mathematically empowered: Here’s a professor in Manitoba who points out that “the three fastest growing languages in Canada according to the census were: Chinese, Spanish, and Punjabi--reflecting immigration from Hong Kong, Latin America, Pakistan, and India” and that “in Winnipeg, the most prominent non-official languages were German, Ukranian, and Tagalog.” So through which culture does this professor teach math? Why, Aztec culture, naturally. That ought to make those Tagalog-speaking Filipinos feel much better about algebra than stinky old Western math does. The Times quotes a critic of ethnomathematics, a math professor named David Klein, “a self-described liberal who insists on separating his academic critique from any connection to a conservative political agenda.” ''The practical effect,'' Klein says, ''has been watered-down math books that overemphasize inductive reasoning (like continuing visual patterns), because this is supposed to be good for women and minorities, and de-emphasizing deductive reasoning and mathematical proofs, which is the heart of mathematics, because that supposedly favors white males. ''But mathematics is a worldwide monoculture. Look at the chalkboards in math departments at universities all around the world -- in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America. You will see the same symbols everywhere you go on this planet, except perhaps in colleges of education where fads reign supreme.'' Klein says he does spend some class time discussing the math of Mayans, Egyptians and other early civilizations. ''But ancient techniques and early discoveries in math will not take students very far who want to do something in the modern world with mathematics,'' he says. My kind of guy. It seems to me that ethnomathematicians are romanticizing the “primitive,” embracing the grooviness of nonwhites from distant lands and ancient cultures much the way New Agers embrace Native American or Asian practices in diluted form. And it also seems that ethnomath proceeds from some of the same principles as The Bell Curve and other eugenicist twaddle: that nonwhites require remedial education for reasons of race, and that only nonwhites and poor people ever struggle in school (I’d like to introduce some ethnomathematicians to the many literate, overeducated white people I know who hated math in school and still get the shakes at the prospect of balancing a checkbook). In addition, the idea that, generation after generation, descendants of non-Western cultures remain essentially the same as their ancestors is disturbingly similar to the arguments advanced by anti-immigration racists. Bash the First World for what it does wrong. Don’t bash it for math. And don’t feed nonwhite kids murky noble-savage idealizations of the Other while failing to see to it that the pipes are fixed when their classrooms have leaks. (Editor’s note: Many links in this post came from this site. The site’s address appeared in the print version of the Times article, but not in the online version. I guess the Times is still having trouble figuring out how this World Wide Whozywhatsy works.) posted by Steve M. | 2:08 PM |   To rap-metal semi-star Kid Rock, the solution is obvious. "We got to kill that mother-[bleeper] Saddam," he says. "Slit his throat. Kill him and the guy in North Korea." Oh, is that all we have to do? And all this time I thought these were complicated geopolitical crises in which every course of action had potentially nightmarish consequences. Silly me. Just kill two guys! It's that simple. posted by Steve M. | 10:40 AM |   In an interview published in yesterday's Guardian, Richard Perle said, "These five countries, the permanent members of the Security Council, are not a judicial body. They're not expected to make moral or legal judgments, but to advance the respective interests of their countries. "So if the French ambassador gets up and expresses the position of the government of France, what you are hearing is the moral authority of Jacques Chirac, whatever that may mean. "What you're hearing is what the French President perceives to be in the interests of France." Well, the U.S. is also one of the five permanent members of the Security Council. Isn't Perle saying that it's foolish to expect the U.S. to be making moral or legal judgments in the current situation? Isn't he implicitly saying that the U.S., too, is merely acting in its own interest? If so, then all this talk about ridding the world of terrible weapons and freeing enslaved people and advancing democracy and freedom is a crock. And Richard Perle said so. posted by Steve M. | 9:22 AM |   Here's a right-winger who looks back fondly to the time his sainted dad bound him to a chair at the dinner table with masking tape for the unforgivable offense of hooking his arm over the chair's back. Wait, it gets better: Not only does our right-wing friend think his dad did a fine thing, he thinks this explains why we need to invade Iraq. You can't make this stuff up. posted by Steve M. | 7:17 AM |   In his proposed budget for 2004, President Bush pledged $2 billion for global AIDS, including $450 million in new money for the initiative he announced last month in his State of the Union address. But advocates, who met Friday in Washington, say Mr. Bush is inflating his total by including $260 million for AIDS research and money for tuberculosis and malaria. --from yesterday's New York Times The conservatism seems less and less compassionate every time you look at it. posted by Steve M. | 7:08 AM | Sunday, February 23, 2003   Last week, when he was asked about anti-war protestors, President Bush said of their arguments, "I respectfully disagree." But that statement is completely untrue, isn't it? Isn't this Bush's problem -- that he never respectfully disagrees with anyone, whether it's Jacques Chirac or James Jeffords? posted by Steve M. | 9:16 AM |   Ms. Gratz argues that her life would probably be better had she been admitted.... After her rejection, she said, she lost so much confidence in herself that she gave up her intention to become a doctor, even before she had enrolled as a college freshman. "To me, this was a failure," said Ms. Gratz.... Damn liberal culture -- why can't people take responsibility for their own lives? And this one is suing! It's the liberal lawsuit culture! If something goes wrong in your life, you take somebody to court! ...Whoops! Sorry -- Ms. Gratz is complaining about the University of Michigan's affirmative action policy. So I guess filing a lawsuit and blaming the university for the course of her entire life is OK. posted by Steve M. | 8:59 AM | Saturday, February 22, 2003   Jonathan Alter writes about what might happen to GIs subjected to chem/bio attacks in Iraq: ...a huge batch of gas masks turned out to be defective. After that got fixed, the Pentagon admitted that 250,000 defective [nuclear/biological/chemical] suits were unaccounted for somewhere in the system. These aren’t the first suits sent into combat but the replacements. The problem is that under a biological or chemical attack, each suit only lasts a couple of days. Which means that four or five days into a war, it’s time to play Russian roulette with the NBC suits.... The GAO found in 1996 that the United States was luckier than we knew during the first gulf war. Not only were far fewer killed and wounded than expected, but the system wasn’t prepared to handle significant casualties.... But that was then. They’ve fixed the problem, right? Lots of drills and exercises? Well, not really. A 2001 GAO report found that “no realistic field exercise of medical support for a CB [chemical-biological] attack has been concluded.” An October 2002 report found that the Pentagon was slow to respond to the lessons of the gulf war and had made few improvements since the 1996 reports, which also found medical training for treating biological and chemical attacks to be insufficient. More recently, the Pentagon simply failed to provide the GAO enough information to prove its assertions of progress in these areas.... Let me remind you that the Bush administration has been thinking seriously about going after Iraq since September 2001. That's seventeen months in which the Bushies could have seen to it that our troops are ready for whatever Saddam might unleash when we invade. posted by Steve M. | 4:09 PM | Friday, February 21, 2003   This is ominous: Turkey is seeking to impose a blackout on reporting events in northern Iraq by banning journalists from crossing the border between the two states, Turkish journalists charged Friday.... Western analysts said the Turkish ban sought to achieve two goals. One was to deny the Iraqi Kurds favorable reporting in the world media.... The other reason, the analysts say, is to prevent the media from observing whatever actions the Turkish military may take in the region.... --UPI Is our bribe money going toward the protection of Turkey? Or is going to pay for whatever the Turks do to the Kurds? Turkey is looking to send thousands of its own soldiers into northern Iraq if there is a war. Turkish officials say this will guarantee stability. Iraqi Kurds fear that the Turks are looking to crack down on Kurdish nationalism that is strong in the autonomous Kurdish areas of northern Iraq. Turks are also insisting that Iraqi Kurdish groups in northern Iraq are disarmed after a war under Turkish supervision, the daily Hurriyet reported. --The Guardian posted by Steve M. | 5:48 PM |   The Staten Island explosdion wasn't terrorism, apparently. posted by Steve M. | 3:58 PM |   There's a fire at an oil refinery in Staten Island. I'm telling you this not because I have any idea what's going on -- I'm telling you this just to give you a snapshot of one guy's brain at this moment in history: My first thought was terrorism; my second thought was an attempt to fake terrorism in order to get us pumped up for a war. Or maybe it was the other way around. That's a horribly irresponsible statement for me to make, but there you go. No injuries are reported so far, and the fire isn't expected to spread to residential areas of Staten Island. I do think this is precisely the sort of target terrorists might attack. And forty years ago, at least, allegedly rational men who worked in the U.S. government actually contemplated phony attacks on the U.S. that could be blamed on an enemy (in that case Cuba). But, of course, refinery fires happen all the time. Malicious intent is not a prerequisite. Sorry if I'm going over the top with conspiratorial thinking. I don't like it. I think virtually everything the Bush adminisration has done in the run-up to this war has been in bad faith, but I think even the Bushies have limits. As for terrorists, I certainly wouldn't put this past them (though I'll be deeply suspicious if Saddam gets the blame). And, of course, accidents happen. posted by Steve M. | 11:21 AM |   Surely it doesn't surprise you that the U.S. "plans to take complete, unilateral control of a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq," according to a story in today's Washington Post -- only an impossibly naive GOP cultist could have imagined otherwise. But here's my favorite part of the Post story: In the early days of military action, U.S. forces following behind those in combat would distribute food and other relief items and begin needed reconstruction. The goal, officials said, would be to make sure the Iraqi people "immediately" consider themselves better off than they were the day before war, and attribute their improved circumstances directly to the United States. So we're going to elbow aside established relief organizations that actually know how to distribute aid in order to make our boys appear to be angels of mercy for a few days in Ashleigh Banfield's MSNBC stories. Think about this: Postwar Iraq is going to be a humanitarian nightmare, and these guys are worried about controlling the news cycle. This is incredibly cynical; I think Karl Rove's fingerprints are all over this plan. And it's naive -- the Bush administration apparently assumes that the world's attention span is as short as the attention span of Americans. It apparently hasn't occurred to the Bushies that the world -- certainly the Arab/Muslim world -- will continue to follow this story tenanciously, unlike Americans, who will begin to lose interest the next time Michael Jackson does something stupid. Or maybe the Bushies just don't care, as long as Bush gets the spike in the polls he needs going into the presidential election cycle. Paul Krugman's column today is also about what the U.S. will do in a postwar Iraq; understandably, Krugman assumes the effort will be the cynical and halfhearted. Krugman's column and the Post complement each other nicely. (Andrew Sullivan thinks the two pieces contradict each other, a conclusion that baffles me. Krugman predicts, "Saddam Hussein and a few top officials will be replaced, but the rest will stay." The Post says, "A large number of current officials would be retained." Where's the contradiction?) posted by Steve M. | 9:57 AM | Thursday, February 20, 2003   A short war with Iraq could cost the world one percent of its economic output over the next few years and more than $1 trillion by 2010, Australian researchers said in a report Thursday. The compounding effects of rising oil prices, extra budget spending and economic uncertainty could cut $173 billion from the world economy in 2003 alone, said the researchers, Reserve Bank of Australia board member Warwick McKibbin and Center for International Economics executive director Andrew Stoeckel.... ..."Altogether, there could be a drop of investment in the United States of over eight percent below baseline in 2003 and 2004. The fall is less for Japan and Europe, given the assumptions for their contribution to a war and rebuilding." --Reuters I've got an idea: Let's give Saddam half a tril to just vamoose. We'll throw in a few (exiled-)presidential palaces, plus he can keep his personal painter. Sounds to me as if that would be a bargain. posted by Steve M. | 11:00 PM |   Last week it appeared that the government was withholding information that could help weapons inspectors find weapons. Well, it looks as if they're not withholding information anymore. It looks as if they're passing on plenty of information now -- utterly erroneous information: Inspectors Call U.S. Tips 'Garbage' While diplomatic maneuvering continues over Turkish bases and a new United Nations resolution, inside Iraq, U.N. arms inspectors are privately complaining about the quality of U.S. intelligence and accusing the United States of sending them on wild-goose chases. ...the U.S. claim that Iraq is developing missiles that could hit its neighbors – or U.S. troops in the region, or even Israel – is just one of the claims coming from Washington that inspectors here are finding increasingly unbelievable. The inspectors have become so frustrated trying to chase down unspecific or ambiguous U.S. leads that they've begun to express that anger privately in no uncertain terms.... So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they've been getting as "garbage after garbage after garbage."...The inspectors find themselves caught between the Iraqis, who are masters at the weapons-hiding shell game, and the United States, whose intelligence they've found to be circumstantial, outdated or just plain wrong.... Gee, do you think nonsense like this might possibly be part of the reason why people from other countries hesitate before deferring to the vastly superior judgment of their betters in the U.S.? And right-wingers have the nerve to accuse peace protestors of being impediments to the disarmament process. ("Garbage" link via Atrios.) posted by Steve M. | 10:51 PM |   Sometimes it's just too easy. This week's Ann Coulter column is about plans for a liberal radio network. She writes: It's difficult to imagine a world in which people voluntarily choose to listen to liberals. There is no evidence that it has ever happened. Ever heard of this guy, Ann? posted by Steve M. | 6:15 PM |   So the right-wingers are now pissed off at us appeaser peacenik scum for, as they see it, encouraging the Butcher of Baghdad to dig in his heels. But wait a minute -- I thought the pro-war crowd wanted the inspections to fail. I thought they wanted Saddam to demonstrate intransigence, because that would be a casus belli. Does this mean they actually believe in the inspections process now and would like Saddam to be disarmed without war? If so, I'm delighted to take the credit for their sudden change of heart, on behalf of the millions who demonstrated last weekend. posted by Steve M. | 6:09 PM |   Bulgarian-language media reports this week said that the US Embassy in Sofia, as well as trade attaches, have been instructed to co-operate in increasing Bulgarian wines' market share in the US. "France and Germany are losing credibility by the day, and they are losing, I think, status in the world," House of Representatives Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay said, quoted by the Post. --The Sofia Echo, Sofia, Bulgaria Childish, spiteful, vindictive, and contrary to the free-market principles these hypocrites claim to worship. posted by Steve M. | 4:45 PM |   QUOTE OF THE DAY ...the idea that America now wears the badge of Mars (the willingness to use military force, to assert itself with manly vigor and bear loss of life like other great powers in the past)—in contrast to the feminine loss of will in Europe—strikes Europeans as an astonishing case of memory loss and saturation in fantasy. Is this the same country that has a collective fainting fit at the sight of one body bag? That has been careful to fight its recent wars from 50,000 feet up? Whose tourists have so little sense of fortitude that mass cancellations follow after even the slightest hint of danger? --Will Hutton, former editor in chief of the London Observer, in the New York Observer posted by Steve M. | 12:38 PM |   Iraq has that guy who does all the paintings of Saddam. America has Howard Fineman of Newsweek. This Fineman column may be the most sycophantic tribute to a sitting head of state ever produced in a country that does not regularly practice torture of journalists. posted by Steve M. | 7:18 AM | Wednesday, February 19, 2003   The best critique of the Bush tax plan ever, disguised as a critique of the even more irresponsible tax cut announced by the fictional Republicans on tonight's West Wing: PRESIDENT BARTLET: Will it stimulate the economy, Josh? JOSH LYMAN: It'll stimulate the Swiss economy. posted by Steve M. | 11:28 PM |   WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY'S SON: FILTHY APPEASENIK? For what it's worth, I do not support a war with Iraq unless we all — defined as a clear majority of the American people, plus New Europe and good "Old Europe," as feckless and posturing as they are — ultimately agree that it is the only way to make the world safer. If we can't agree, I say: contain Saddam Hussein with all means at our disposal. Indeed, contain him with extreme prejudice. --from a New York Times op-ed piece by Christopher Buckley, 2/19/03 posted by Steve M. | 11:25 PM |   The return of "duck and cover," courtesy of the fine folks at the Department of Homeland Security. Here's the same set of advice in picture format. Note that you can just take a leisurely stroll away from a nuclear blast site, according to the graphics. Here's the main site. Here's USA Today's story on the site and the accompanying media campaign. And remember... ... if you're trapped under debris, avoid unnecessary movement so that you don't kick up dust. posted by Steve M. | 6:01 PM |   Bush approval rating drops to 52% in latest Harris poll. That's the first time it's been below 60% in the Harris poll since before 9/11/01. posted by Steve M. | 5:34 PM |   WE ARE ALL FROM FRANCE Nation after nation from all parts of the globe demanded weapons inspectors have a chance to disarm Iraq peacefully, defying intentions by the United States and Britain to seek a resolution authorizing war. Only Australia, Japan, Argentina and Peru, in varying degrees, supported the tough U.S.-British position during 27 presentations on Tuesday by U.N. members who do not have seats on the 15-nation Security Council. Another 29 ambassadors address the council on Wednesday. But most speakers, many from developing nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America as well as Iraq's neighbors in the Middle East, spoke out against war and backed France's position to let arms inspectors have more time to account for Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction programs. So did Greece, New Zealand, Ukraine and Belarus. South Africa's U.N. ambassador, Dumisani Kumalo, head of the 115-member Non-Aligned movement, which called for the meeting, said that "Resorting to war without fully exhausting all other options represents an admission of failure by the Security Council in carrying out its mandate." Iran's ambassador, Javad Zarif, whose country was invaded by neighboring Iraq in 1980, said "the prospect of another destabilizing war in our immediate vicinity is a nightmare scenario of death and destruction."... --Reuters posted by Steve M. | 4:15 PM |   Great -- now Colin Powell thinks international diplomacy is third-grade recess. Don't agree with him? You're a fraidy-cat: PARIS - Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday said countries like France that oppose swift military action against Iraq are afraid of upholding their responsibility to disarm Baghdad by force. Powell's comments, in an interview broadcast on France-Inter radio and translated into French, were clearly directed at French President Jacques Chirac, who believes that U.N. weapons inspectors should be given more time and muscle to complete their job. "It is not a satisfactory solution to continue inspections indefinitely because certain countries are afraid of upholding their responsibility to impose the will of the international community," Powell said.... Screw it -- let's just fire Kofi Annan, make Vince McMahon the UN secretary-general, and let these overgrown boys trash-talk to their hearts' content. Meanwhile, let's find some grown-ups to actually run the world. posted by Steve M. | 10:49 AM |   I am not altogether convinced that conquering Iraq will stop Islamic terrorism against the U.S., but I think it will help. Serious terrorism — the kind with access to weapons of mass destruction — cannot exist without state sponsorship. --Bruce Bartlett at National Review Online Gosh -- all this time I thought September 11 qualified as "serious terrorism." But the hijackers didn't have weapons of mass destruction, so I guess 9/11 wasn't serious after all. posted by Steve M. | 9:58 AM |   DID I SAY "DEWY-EYED PRO-WAR NAIFS"? Yup -- folks like Michael Kelly: These people [the people of Iraq] could be liberated from this horror -- relatively easily and quickly. There is every reason to think that a U.S. invasion would swiftly vanquish the few elite units that can be counted on to defend the detested Saddam Hussein; and that the victory would come at the cost of few -- likely hundreds, not thousands -- Iraqi and American lives. There is risk; and if things go terribly wrong it is a risk that could result in terrible suffering. But that is an equation that is present in any just war, and in this case any rational expectation has to consider the probable cost to humanity to be low.... A scorched-earth chem/bio campaign from Saddam? Devastation of Iraqi population centers by U.S. bombing? A widening of the war to involve Israel? Is that what you're worried about? Don't be such a gloomy Gus! It'll be a piece of cake! posted by Steve M. | 9:50 AM | Tuesday, February 18, 2003   Many bloggers (CalPundit, Thomas Spencer, the Goblin Queen) are linking this story from the U.K.'s Independent: Kurdish leaders enraged by 'undemocratic' American plan to occupy Iraq The US is abandoning plans to introduce democracy in Iraq after a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, according to Kurdish leaders who recently met American officials. The Kurds say the decision resulted from pressure from US allies in the Middle East who fear a war will lead to radical political change in the region. The Kurdish leaders are enraged by an American plan to occupy Iraq but largely retain the government in Baghdad. The only changes would be the replacement of President Saddam and his lieutenants with senior US military officers.... The US appears to be returning to the policy it pursued at the end of the Gulf War in 1991. It did seek to get rid of President Saddam but wanted to avoid a radical change in Iraq. The US did not support the uprisings of Shia Muslims and Kurds because it feared a transformation in Iraqi politics that might have destabilised its allies in the Middle East or benefited Iran.... If you're pro-war, remember that you can't just support the war you hope the Bushies will fight. You don't have a choice in what they'll do, so you have to either support their war or oppose war altogether in this case. What they do during and after the war will almost certainly be a cynical exercise that will appall dewy-eyed pro-war naifs. posted by Steve M. | 11:37 PM |   BELLESILES, DEFIANT The (subscription-only) newsletter PublishersLunch announces this book deal today: Former Emory professor Michael Bellesiles' ARMING AMERICA: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, withdrawn from its original publication by Knopf, now including "several clarifications concerning research" from Bellesiles, a new introduction, and a new version of one of the most-questioned data tables (Bellesiles says, "I challenge anyone to show how the revised paragraphs addressing probate materials undermine in any way the thesis or logical structure of this book"), to Richard Nash at Soft Skull Press for republication in October 2003. I had a feeling Soft Skull would do this. posted by Steve M. | 5:59 PM |   POOR HELPLESS TURKEY Like many Americans and all Turks, I am in despair right now over the Germans, the French, and the Belgians and their NATO machinations. Here are the Turks, facing Saddam Hussein across the border with his terrifying weapons. And, through no fault of their own, the Turks, members in good standing of NATO, might well end up under the most ghastly of attacks. NATO ought to be rushing to Turkey's defense, right? What can those Europeans be thinking in refusing to do any such thing? --Paul Berman in Slate last Friday SORRY, DID I SAY "HELPLESS"? The Turkish parliament had been expected to vote Tuesday on whether to allow tens of thousands of U.S. combat troops in Turkey, which would be necessary for a northern front in any war against Iraq. Instead, officials gave U.S. Ambassador Robert Pearson a new proposal late Monday for a beefed-up economic aid package that would provide compensation for any losses in an Iraq war. Top politician Recep Tayyip Erdogan said authorization for U.S. combat troops to be deployed in Turkey depended on Washington meeting Turkish demands. "The other side must meet our demands, and if they do, we shall see. After this is finalized, the authorization will come to parliament," Erdogan was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency. --AP story today posted by Steve M. | 2:20 PM |   Oh well -- now Jacques Chirac's trash-talking. I guess he has more in common with Americans than we realize. posted by Steve M. | 7:20 AM | Monday, February 17, 2003   Party of Spain's prime minister now trails Socialists, for the first time in three years. Tony Blair's approval rating drops to 35%, a 14% drop in a month. Australian prime minister's approval rating plummets. It looks as if Bush's war might result in a lot of "regime change." posted by Steve M. | 11:44 PM |   "Our hopes betrayed: How a US blueprint for post-Saddam government quashed the hopes of democratic Iraqis" by Kanan Makiya A blistering critique of America's plans for Saddam's future, by the man who told us a few months ago that we had to invade if there was a 5% or 10% chance that democracy would result. "[The U.S. plan's] driving force is appeasement of the existing bankrupt Arab order, and ultimately the retention under a different guise of the repressive institutions of the Baath and the army. Hence its point of departure is, and has got to be, use of direct military rule to deny Iraqis their legitimate right to self-determine their future," Makiya writes now. posted by Steve M. | 10:50 PM |   It’s hard to imagine President Bush rejecting war in Iraq for any reason now -- possibly, I guess, if the head of every male in the Hussein clan were personally presented to him mounted on a pike. Nevertheless, many pundits have felt the need to ask whether Bush could back down now without losing face. Virtually all of them insist he couldn’t. John McLaughlin disagrees. Yes, that John McLaughlin. If you haven’t watched his talk show recently, you may be surprised to learn that the braying conservative is, in the case of Iraq, a surprise peacenik. Over the weekend, he found parallels to the Iraq crisis in some Cold War history. Here are excerpts and a summary of what McLaughlin said; the transcript is mine: American policy towards Communist China under Mao Zedong was regime change. To keep pressure on Mao’s rogue regime, the U.S. backed exile Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek on the island of Taiwan, then known as Formosa, with guns, money, and political support. Late in 1954, China threatened to invade Taiwan, then invaded the nearby islands of Qemoy and Matsu. President Eisenhower sent the 7th Fleet to rescue Nationalist soldiers on Taiwan. Eisenhower then went to Congress for a resolution preapproving the use of military force against China at a time and place of his choosing. Within a month, he got the resolution. Next he dispatched Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to Europe’s capitals to rally NATO support. Eisenhower told British prime minister Winston Churchill that he knew Europeans considered America “reckless, impulsive, and immature,” but he wanted NATO backing in the event of a U.S. war with China. NATO said no. Churchill said no. Churchill dismissed Zhou [Enlai]’s inflammatory rhetoric as “just talk.” In mid-March, Eisenhower told reporters he would consider using nuclear weapons in a war with China. Pentagon officials said the U.S. would “destroy Red China’s military potential” and promised a war within weeks. However, Eisenhower changed his mind. He called his top advisors into the Oval Office on the first of April and told them he wanted a diplomatic resolution. Secretary of State Dulles balked, citing psychological effects -- U.S. credibility. Eisenhower persevered. When Zhou Enlai gave a conciliatory speech three weeks later, Eisenhower seized the opportunity to stand down from war and start negotiations. He did so, and he preserved credibility with our allies in Taiwan and Japan, and he preserved NATO unity -- and no war. Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, in his classic book Eisenhower the President, called this “one of the great triumphs of his long career,” adding that one of the keys to Eisenhower’s success was flexibility, keeping his options open at every stage. “Eisenhower wanted options within options,” wrote Ambrose. McLaughlin’s panelists were, to put it mildly, skeptical about whether this was an appropriate analogy; none of them thought Bush could pull back from war without losing face. However, Gerard Baker of the Financial Times noted, correctly, that Eisenhower decided, against the wishes of many people in his administration over time, that the right policy was containment and deterrence whereas the Bushies are siding with those in the -- the same people, same kind of people who were saying fifty years ago that what you need to do is regime change, preemptive action. Preemptive action is what Eisenhower is being asked to do and he decided not to do it. McLaughlin asked, “What was the professional background of Mr. Eisenhower?” He used the word “chickenhawks” in his next sentence. But, regrettably, what’s important about the Eisenhower example -- that war is hell, that the wiser course may be to refrain from unleashing hell even if restraint means that an enemy remains in place, and that those who have fought in wars often understand this far better than those who haven’t -- was generally lost on McLaughlin’s panel. (Thanks to Jim for bringing this to my attention.) posted by Steve M. | 6:11 PM |   Conservative pundit Rod Dreher talks about the anti-war demonstrations in The Washington Times: "I also saw a woman carrying a poster that had an image of President Bush with a Hitler mustache drawn on. "I nearly lost it over that. What kind of decent person would have anything to do with a movement that likened the president of the United States to a genocidal mass murderer?..." I don't know, Rod ... maybe Jackie Mason can explain it to you. Or some of these people. And don't forget these folks. (Thanks to the good Roger Ailes for the link.) (UPDATE: Why do I bother? Atrios beat me to the punch -- and he has even more examples.) posted by Steve M. | 5:46 PM |   Is the Bush administration’s policy on overseas AIDS prevention good or bad for pro-choice groups that provide AIDS services? It’s no surprise if you can’t tell -- even The New York Times doesn’t seem able to make up its mind: On the Times Web site there’s a Times-originated story with the headline “Bush to Allow AIDS Money to Supporters of Abortion” and an AP story headlined “Bush May Deny Some Overseas AIDS Money.” It’s clear that groups that provide abortions must separate their reproductive services from their AIDS services if they want to receive funding from the Bush administration -- which, if it means that pro-choice organizations can under some circumstances receive some funding, may be a slight improvement over the outright ban on funding that was imposed on these organizations in the early days of the Bush administration. However, please note the reactions of pro- and anti-choice groups: As the AP story notes, the National Right to Life Committee is pleased by the plan, while Planned Parenthood considers it unworkable. Surely these people know how the rules will work in practice. If they both agree that this isn’t a victory for the pro-choice side, I think that settles the matter. That’s why I’m deeply suspicious of the internal State Department that oh-so-conveniently found its way into the AP story -- the one that says moderate and liberal members of Congress will be pleased by the compromise and “Hill conservatives” will be dismayed. Undoubtedly this was spoon-fed to the AP reporter in order to spin the story. I simply don’t buy it. posted by Steve M. | 5:21 PM |   Condoleezza Rice appeared on two talk shows yesterday. On Meet the Press, her criticism of anti-war nations was sharp but, in time-honored fashion, carefully worded: The French are carrying out their views. I think that we are in discussions with them. We’re in conversations with them. We don’t need to allow this to become a street fight between the United States and France and the United States and Germany. But we do need to remind everybody that tyrants don’t respond to any kind of appeasement. On Fox News Sunday, she was similarly circumspect, and never once used the "a" word. Yet the headline in The Washington Post was "Rice Calls Security Council's Actions 'Appeasement.'" That's inaccurate. But the belief that the Bushies are verbal bullies is now so deeply ingrained that they are accused of trash talk even when they take some pains to avoid giving offense. This is a problem this administration would work to correct -- if grown-ups were running it. posted by Steve M. | 11:13 AM |   ...Ultimately, opposition to war seems to have been ineffectual, to the intense frustration of many who share it. ...In the modern context, says Alan Brinkley, a history professor at Columbia, a political opposition can be truly effective only in specific circumstances: When the opposition reflects a large popular movement (anti-war sentiment in the late 1960s and early '70s); when it controls levers of power (the Republican Congress in the Clinton years); when it has a clear and compelling message with which to answer its opponents (presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1980, Rep. Newt Gingrich in 1994); or when the leadership discredits itself and is ripe for the picking (Winston Churchill becoming Britain's prime minister in 1939 after the failure of his appeasing Tory colleagues). "At the moment," said Brinkley, "... Bush opponents ... have none of those things." --Robert G. Kaiser, "There's a Reason Why There Hasn't Been Much of a Fight," Washington Post, February 16, 2003 The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion. In his campaign to disarm Iraq, by war if necessary, President Bush appears to be eyeball to eyeball with a tenacious new adversary: millions of people who flooded the streets of New York and dozens of other world cities to say they are against war based on the evidence at hand. ...The fresh outpouring of antiwar sentiment may not be enough to dissuade Mr. Bush or his advisers from their resolute preparations for war. But the sheer number of protesters offers a potent message that any rush to war may have political consequences for nations that support Mr. Bush's march into the Tigris and Euphrates valleys. --Patrick E. Tyler, "A New Power in the Streets," New York Times, February 17, 2003 posted by Steve M. | 8:59 AM | Sunday, February 16, 2003   At the risk of repeating something I wrote here Friday, I'd like to post an e-mail I just sent to Glenn Reynolds, Herr Dr. Dr. InstaPundit, in response to this post in his blog. "I'd like to see the 'peace' movement take some responsibility for the likely consequences of its views, and the deaths that may come from doing nothing." And I'd like to see the war movement take some responsibility for the likely consequences of *its* views, and the deaths that may come from its own testosterone overload: "New York, February 13, 2003--A US-led military intervention in Iraq will trigger the collapse of Iraq's public health and food distribution system, leading to a humanitarian crisis that far exceeds the capacity of the United Nations and relief agencies, according to a report released at the U.N. by the New York-based Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR). At the same time of the release, Secretary-General Kofi Annan will address a closed session of the Security Council on the potential humanitarian consequences of war in Iraq. "CESR will also release a set of confidential U.N. planning documents that warn of a "humanitarian emergency of exceptional scale and magnitude" based on the expected collapse of Iraq's civilian infrastructure following attacks on Iraq's electricity and transportation systems. One document estimates that 'in the event of a crisis, 30 percent of children under five would be at risk of death from malnutrition.' ..." http://www.cesr.org/index.cfm?bay=content.view&catid=538&cpid=397&pressview=1 Is that what you rightists prefer? It certainly seems that way. I'll admit that it's certainly efficient to kill much of the Iraqi population all at once -- and I know the right greatly admires efficiency. Steve M. No More Mister Nice Blog nomoremister.blogspot.com posted by Steve M. | 4:11 PM |   Jacques Chirac, a grown-up, unfortunately feels the need to defend himself against verbal spitballs from overgrown schoolboys in the U.S. government and media. Do I even need to excerpt the interview? Chirac says what any rational adult would about Iraq: I simply don't analyze the situation as [Bush and Blair] do. Among the negative fallout [from a war] would be inevitably a strong reaction from Arab and Islamic public opinion. It may not be justified, and it may be, but it's a fact. A war of this kind cannot help giving a big lift to terrorism. It would create a large number of little bin Ladens. Muslims and Christians have a lot to say to one another, but war isn't going to facilitate that dialogue. I'm against the clash of civilizations; that plays into the hands of extremists. There is a problem—the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is right to be disturbed by this situation, and it's right in having decided Iraq should be disarmed. The inspections began, and naturally it is a long and difficult job. We have to give the inspectors time to do it. And probably—and this is France's view—we have to reinforce their capacities, especially those of aerial surveillance. For the moment, nothing allows us to say inspections don't work. ...Are there other weapons of mass destruction? That's probable. We have to find and destroy them. In its current situation, does Iraq—controlled and inspected as it is—pose a clear and present danger to the region? I don't believe so. Given that, I prefer to continue along the path laid out by the Security Council. Then we'll see. Chirac says he likes the U.S., too: I've known the U.S. for a long time. I visit often, I've studied there, worked as a forklift operator for Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis and as a soda jerk at Howard Johnson's. The obvious point is that he's more familiar with the U.S. than George W. is with Europe. The less obvious point is that he's worked at crummy jobs in America -- and I wonder how many of his antagonists who actually live here can say the same. posted by Steve M. | 2:33 PM |   HELLO, HONEY, GET ME REWRITE Opposition to President Bush's campaign against Iraq has been ineffectual for a reason. The U.S. public supports Bush. Bush is willing to wield his presidential power. And the anti-war movement has lacked the key element of all great political opponents -- a clear "communications strategy." --paragraph still posted front and center on The Washington Post's "Confronting Iraq" page a day after the anti-war movement's "clear strategy" of staging hundreds of simultaneous demonstrations brought out four million protestors worldwide posted by Steve M. | 10:33 AM |   This is amazing. How did we get to this point? Rattled by an outpouring of anti-war sentiment, the United States and Britain began reworking a draft resolution Saturday to authorize force against Saddam Hussein. Diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the final product may be a softer text that does not explicitly call for war. Before Friday's dramatic Security Council meeting, where weapons inspectors gave a relatively favorable accounting of Iraq's recent cooperation, U.S. and British diplomats said they had been preparing a toughly worded resolution that would give them U.N. backing for military action.... But the measured reports by inspectors, in addition to massive global opposition to war — expressed both in the council and in the streets — came as a blow to their plans. The two English-speaking allies had hoped to push through a new resolution quickly, and there had even been talk of a Saturday council meeting to introduce it. But their plans were put on hold Friday after staunch opposition — led by France, Russia and China — drew rare applause inside the council chamber.... --AP The Washington Post now asks: Should we blame Rummy? In an article provocatively titled "Did Rumsfeld Impede Iraq Coalition?," the Post recalls some of Rumsfeld's most boorish statements and draws the obvious conclusion that his professional-wrestling-style trash talk may have actually impeded Bush's war drive. Of course, it's not clear why the blame should all fall on Rumsfeld when Richard Perle is running around loose, calling France "our erstwhile ally" and insisting that Jacques Chirac believes "deep in his soul that Saddam Hussein is preferable to any likely successor." And the problem is hardly limirted to intemperate talk. Here's the administration's latest tantrum, as reported in today's London Observer: US to punish German 'treachery' America is to punish Germany for leading international opposition to a war against Iraq. The US will withdraw all its troops and bases from there and end military and industrial co-operation between the two countries - moves that could cost the Germans billions of euros. The plan - discussed by Pentagon officials and military chiefs last week on the orders of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - is designed 'to harm' the German economy to make an example of the country for what US hawks see as Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's 'treachery'.... 'We are doing this for one reason only: to harm the German economy,' one source told The Observer last week.... Unbelievable. Of course Dominique de Villepin was applauded in the UN Security Council last week -- he was saying, in effect, that people who disagree with the Bush administration are sick of having take this kind of guff. posted by Steve M. | 10:08 AM |   THIS IS YOUR BRAIN. THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON TESTOSTERONE Declare the U.N. irrelevant, go to war, then set up a parallel organization of, you know, legitimate governments. Will Bush have the balls? It's riskier not to, isn't it? --mature, highly respected professor/blogger InstaPundit, nearly giddy at the prospect of global chaos posted by Steve M. | 9:15 AM |

archives October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 links MAIN PAGE E-MAIL NO MORE MISTER NICE BLOG ATOM FEED * Spencer Ackerman (Attackerman) * (the other) Roger Ailes * Alas, a Blog * Alicublog (Roy Edroso) * Alterdestiny * Eric Alterman's Altercation * AlterNet PEEK * AMERICAblog * The American Street * Americans United for Separation of Church and State * Annie's Annals * Applesauce * Atrios (Eschaton) * Attytood (Will Bunch's Philadelphia Daily News blog) * Bad Attitudes * BAGnewsNotes * Balloon Juice * Bark Bark Woof Woof * bastard.logic * Steve Benen (Washington Monthly) * Michael Berube * Bill's Big Diamond Blog * Birmingham Blues * bjkeefe * Blue Gal * Blue Wren * Break the Terror (now at a new address) * Bulworth * BuzzFlash * A Cautious Man * Ta-Nehisi Coates * Juan Cole (Informed Comment) * Comments from Left Field * Cormulley.com * Betty Cracker * Crooked Timber * Crooks and Liars * Cup O' Joe (formerly PSoTD) * Daai Tou Laam Diary * The Daily Howler * Daily Kos * Scoobie Davis * D-Day * Dear Leader Blog * Dependable Renegade * distributorcap NY * Doghouse Riley (Bats Left Throws Right) * Donkey Mountain * Kevin Drum (Mother Jones) * Eccentricity * David Ehrenstein's Fablog * Emptywheel * Fafblog * Feministe * Feministing * Firedoglake * First Draft * FiveThirtyEight * Freedom Camp * The Garlic * ginandtacos.com * Glenn Greenwald * The Heretik * The Huffington Post * Hullabaloo * If I Ran the Zoo * The Impolitic * Instaputz * Interesting Times * Isebrand * Jack & Jill Politics * Jesus' General * Lady Insignificant (D. Sidhe) * Lawyers, Guns and Money * Leftblogistan * Left I on the News * L'ennui melodieux * Liberal Oasis * Liberal Values (Ron Chusid) * Liberty Street * A Lie a Day * The Mahablog * Making Light * Lance Mannion * Media Matters * Memeorandum * Mojo (Mother Jones blog) * MyDD * MyRightWingDad.net * Needlenose * Newshoggers * News Hounds * The New York Crank * Norwegianity (now at Wordpress) * The November Blog * The Phil Nugent Experience * Nur al-Cubicle * Online Blogintegrity * Operation Yellow Elephant * Opinions You Should Have * Orcinus * Pam's House Blend * Pandagon * Paperwight's Fair Shot * Pere Ubu's Debraining Machine * PERRspectives * pesky'apostrophe * The Plum Line (Greg Sargent) * Polling Report * The Poor Man * The Raw Story * The Reaction * The Republic of T. * Right Wing Watch (People for the American Way blog) * Rising Hegemon * The Rude Pundit * Rumproast * Runnin' Scared (Roy Edroso at Village Voice) * The Ruth Group * Sadly, No! * salto mortale * Seeing the Forest * Shakesville * ShortsandPants * The Sideshow * Situation Vacant * Skimble * skippy the bush kangaroo * Slacktivist * Something to Consider * Stoutdem * Suburban Guerrilla * Talking Points Memo * TalkLeft * TAPPED (American Prospect) * TBogg * Think Progress * This Modern World * Tome of the Unknown Writer * uggabugga * The United States of Jamerica * Vagabond Scholar * Very Early 3rd Millennium * Wampum * War and Piece (Laura Rozen) * The Washington Independent * Welcome Back to Pottersville * Whiskey Fire * Why Now? * Oliver Willis * James Wolcott * Wonkette * World O'Crap * Matthew Yglesias * You Forgot Poland! * The Zen Cabin "The Manipulator" (New Yorker article on Chalabi) "How Chalabi Played the Press" (Columbia Journalism Review article) "Defectors' Reports on Iraq Arms Were Embellished, Exile Asserts" (New York Times article on Chalabi and Iraqi National Congress) Ann Coulter's original New York Observer interview ("My only regret with Timothy McVeigh...") (also here) "Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President" (from Scotland's Sunday Herald) "Yankee Go Home: Who's leading the anti-war movement? Congressional Republicans" (1999 Slate compilation of GOP antiwar quotes) "The Press vs. Al Gore: How lazy reporting, pack journalism and GOP spin cost him the election" by Eric Boehlert (from Rolling Stone) America's Taliban (Coulter, Falwell, etc.) in their own words Language: A Key Mechanism of Control (Gingrich's guidelines, still in use today) John Scalzi's "I Hate Your Politics" Column IS IT ANN COULTER -- OR IS IT DAVID DUKE? IS IT CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -- OR IS IT DWIGHT SCHRUTE? SORELY MISSED: * Americans Are Dumb * Anti-Coulter * Billmon (Whiskey Bar) * The Blog Report at Salon * Busy, Busy, Busy * Cursor * Greg T. * Happy Furry Puppy Story Time with Norbizness * The Jed Report * Little Green Fascists * Main and Cenral * Martini Republic * MaxSpeak * mfinley * Mykeru * Nathan Newman * The News Blog (R.I.P. Steve Gilliard) * Nitpicker * The Rational Enquirer * Rittenhouse Review (R.I.P. Jim Capozzola) * Tristram Shandy (now at Instaputz?) * Slannder (anti-Ann Coulter) * SullyWatch * Jon Swift * Too Sense (but Adam "dnA" Serwer is now at TAPPED) * wastedirony.com * Cintra Wilson