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Tuesday, June 10, 2003 There was a good story on NPR's Morning Edition today about new rules being proposed by the Bush administration: BOB EDWARDS: The Bush administration will allow states to seek exemptions from a policy that blocks road building in a national forest. Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Ray says the so-called roadless rule will be amended, and the nation's two largest national forests will be exempted altogether. NPR's Elizabeth Arnold has been following the story. Good morning. ELIZABETH ARNOLD: Good morning, Bob. EDWARDS: This roadless rule protects nearly 60 million acres of forest. What will this policy change mean? ARNOLD: Well, Bob, the Bush administration inherited this rule. They never really liked it, they never defended it in court, and they wanted to get rid of it, but the Clinton administration really bulletproofed it, with unprecedented public comment, they simply made it hard to get around, and this last December the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld it, so now the Bush administration is sayong, "OK, fine, we'll live with it, but in some amendments this fall we'll exempt the two largest national forests, both in Alaska, the Tongass and the Chugach, and we'll let the governors get around it, too, under exceptional circumstances, like to reduce the risk of wildfire." So, in short, they're gutting it, without really doing away with it, and what it really means is more access to forest that's been off limits to new roads and logging. EDWARDS: In Alaska, didn't Ray say that 95% of the forest will still remain roadless there? ARNOLD: Well, he did, Bob. He was talking about the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska. But to put that in context, you need to know that two thirds of the Tongass is actually rock and ice -- it's basically glacier. So, some thirty-plus timber sales that are already in the works there represent a pretty good portion of what's left of that forest.... Arnold went on to explain that the forests in question are far from populated areas, so it's not really necessary to prevent wildfires in them -- fires are appropriate in these forests and are allowed to happen, and as a result the forests aren't overgrown. So this isn't about dangerous wildfires at all. Arnold also pointed out that Undersecretary Ray is a former timber-industry lobbyist. It seems obvious what's going on. So how come the New York Times story on this rule change has the utterly misleading headline "Bush to Prohibit Building Roads Inside Forests"? posted by Steve M. | 11:46 PM | Tonight on ABC News, Peter Jennings reported on the two Israeli attacks in Gaza. What followed was this exchange with ABC's White House reporter, Terry Moran: JENNINGS: Terry, the president is the patron of this latest attempt to make peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Do you think he was somewhat surprised today? MORAN: Totally surprised, Peter. The White House was really taken aback by these attacks. Is this possible? Is it really possible that the president of the United States and his advisers are so ill-informed, so unable to comprehend the world around them, that they couldn't imagine that this would happen? Maybe it's just spin -- but I can't imagine why, if you were the White House, you'd want to feed the press a story that makes you look impossibly naive. So I think Moran is telling the truth -- and I find it rather astonishing. posted by Steve M. | 10:37 PM | Iraq had a weapons program. Intelligence throughout the decade showed they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced with time we'll find out that they did have a weapons program. --President Bush at a Monday Cabinet meeting Watch what he and his underlings say from now on. Watch how often they say Iraq had a weapons program. That fudges the issue: Of course the Iraqis had one when they gassed the Kurds. Did they have a weapons program after that? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they had one in recent years but it wasn't active, and wouldn't have been as long as the sanctions were in place. But if Bush and his subordinates know there was no active program in recent years, and they always say simply that Iraq had a weapons program, they're telling the strict truth but deceiving the public. It all depends on what the definition of had is. posted by Steve M. | 7:14 PM | The Associated Press tries to count civilian deaths in Iraq: At least 3,240 civilians died across Iraq during a month of war, including 1,896 in Baghdad, according to a five-week Associated Press investigation. The count is still fragmentary, and the complete toll — if it is ever tallied — is sure to be significantly higher.... Here's the methodology, which explains why the actual toll is almost certainly much higher: The AP count was based on records from 60 of Iraq's 124 hospitals — including almost all of the large ones — and covers the period between March 20, when the war began, and April 20, when fighting was dying down and coalition forces announced they would soon declare major combat over. AP journalists traveled to all of these hospitals, studying their logs, examining death certificates where available and interviewing officials about what they witnessed. Many of the other 64 hospitals are in small towns and were not visited because they are in dangerous or inaccessible areas. Some hospitals that were visited had incomplete or war-damaged casualty records. Even if hospital records were complete, they would not tell the full story. Many of the dead were never taken to hospitals, either buried quickly by their families in accordance with Islamic custom, or lost under rubble. The AP excluded all counts done by hospitals whose written records did not distinguish between civilian and military dead, which means hundreds, possibly thousands, of victims in Iraq's largest cities and most intense battles aren't reflected in the total.... Comment at the Free Republic thread devoted to the article, from someone who, presumably, was very, very far from the war zone: Sounds good. Small price to pay for freedom. Great job US Military. Thanks, pal. If a future president ever insists that blowing up your house and killing your whole family is necessary to preserve freedom, it's good to know you've given your OK. posted by Steve M. | 7:03 PM | About That Bridge They Are Buying: The media is swallowing the entire Hillary hype oyster in one gulp. Take the "million copy" claim. There is no way to prove such a number has been published. Take the "lines around the block for the book signing" report. In New York that many nutballs would turn out for Charles Manson.... --Catty comment posted this morning at Lucianne Goldberg's Lucianne.com (translation: "Please, God, pretty please, let Hillary's book be a failure!") Clinton Book Sets Barnes & Noble Record WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoirs set a Barnes & Noble sales record for nonfiction books on its first day on store shelves, the company said Tuesday. Clinton signed over a thousand copies of the book, "Living History," at a promotional event at a Barnes & Noble store in midtown Manhattan Monday, the first day the book was on sale. The company said the former first lady's White House memoirs sold more than 40,000 copies in the first 24 hours it was available, instantly making it an in-house best seller. Nationwide sales figures for other booksellers were not immediately available. Late Monday, publisher Simon & Schuster, which paid $8 million for the tome, announced it would print an additional 100,000 copies, on top of an extraordinary initial printing of 1 million copies.... --AP story posted at Yahoo News this afternoon Har-de-har-har. Barnes & Noble has no motivation to fake sales numbers (nobody in New York media wants to be caught telling stretchers these days) -- if B&N says Hillary broke a record, she broke a record. And S&S has no motivation to reprint the book unless it thinks its warehouses could be out of stock soon. So this baby is really selling. Forty thousand copies at one chain in one day is a nig number in book publishing. (Books that sell 50,000 or 60,000 copies in total routinely make the lower rungs of the New York Times bestseller list.) Like her or not, she did it. posted by Steve M. | 6:09 PM | Here's the lead story in this morning's print edition of USA Today: Guard, Reserve short on recruits ...The nation's largest auxiliary forces — the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve — are beginning to have trouble meeting their recruiting targets. As of April 30, the Guard was nearly 6,000 recruits short of where it needed to be on that date to meet its Sept. 30 target of enlisting 62,000 soldiers, Pentagon statistics show. If the Guard can't reverse the shortfall, it will mark the first time since 1998 that it has failed to fill its ranks. The Army Reserve is also lagging behind and was more than 700 soldiers short of where it needed to be in April to meet its Sept. 30 goal of 42,000. Defense officials and civilian analysts say the numbers demonstrate that the unusually intense use of part-time soldiers over the past year and a half is beginning to seriously affect the Guard and Reserve.... "I think it is reasonable to conclude that people are looking at the last 19 to 20 months of mobilization and they are voting with their feet," says Tom White, a former secretary of the Army. "I think we're seeing the leading edge of a problem." ...The demands on National Guard and Reserve troops, most of whom have full-time civilian jobs, have been unrelenting. Some units, including military police and nation-building soldiers known as civil affairs specialists, have been on active duty almost constantly since the Sept. 11 attacks.... Several thoughts come to mind: * This is typical of the contemporary management class, isn't it? They hire people at one level, dump the responsibilities of higher-level workers on them without actually promoting them or giving them raises, and assume enough of them will just grumble and take it. * Bush does this and still maintains the reputation as the commander-in-chief who's loved by his troops, in contrast to his evil peacenik predecessor. Did Clinton shortchange reservists? If he did, he didn't do it in a period of permanent war. And if recruitment of reservists fell short in 1998, remember that that was during a roaring economic boom. (And yet recruitment goals were met in 1999 and 2000, apparently.) Conditions for reservists are now alienating potential recruits despite lousy economic conditions. * This is really a disgrace. Bush wants massive simultaneous troop deployments in more countries than he himself can find on a map, yet he and Rumsfeld pretend that we can have domino wars (and the subsequent occupations) without the use of big, big numbers of full-time servicemembers. That requires lots of taxpayer money -- and maybe a draft -- but the administration won't say so. (America, of course, doesn't want a draft or higher taxes.) * The worst enemy of this administration is itself. Democrats are too pitiful to mount effective opposition, and the public is still largely pro-Bush -- but the administration's ability to carry out the neocons' mad imperialist plans is threatened by Bush's utter refusal to grasp the fact that things cost money, and by Rumsfeld's fixation on the idea that the military can do anything it wants with low troop strength. Sooner or later, this will all come crashing down on their -- and our -- heads. posted by Steve M. | 1:43 PM | So maybe the war wasn't about the oil -- at least not in the way you might expect: Employees of South Oil, Iraq's leading oil producer before the war, are now idle because looting has brought most of the company to a standstill. "The other day, there was looting and sabotage at the North Rumaila field," Mr. Leaby said. "The day before that, at the Zubayr field. For three months, I've been talking, talking, talking about this, and I'm sick of it." This is now the state of the Iraqi oil industry, custodian of the world's third largest oil reserves — an estimated 112 billion barrels — and the repository of hope for the United States-led alliance and the Iraqi people themselves. Money from oil, the Bush administration has said repeatedly, will drive Iraq's economic revival, which in turn will foster the country's political stability. Many Iraqis agree. Yet from the vast Kirkuk oil field in the north to the patchwork of rich southern fields around Basra, Iraq's oil industry, once among the best-run and most smartly equipped in the world, is in tatters. Looting, sabotage and the continued lack of security at oil facilities are the most recent problems the industry and its American overseers must address in order to get petroleum flowing again, especially for export.... --New York Times It sure seems as if no one's in a rush to turn this situation around: Last Tuesday, Halliburton workers at Garmat Ali tested for the first time the new pumps and filters they started to install a week earlier to send water to the refinery to wash the oil. A half-dozen burly Halliburton workers, some with ponytails and neon-bright bandanas, struggled to secure a large hose to a concrete platform using chains and ropes. Someone turned on the pump, and water gushed out of the open hose. "Now we're talking!" said Roger Davis, the Halliburton safety coordinator at the site. But the equipment the Americans have brought is only "5 percent of what we had before," said Adnan Hussein, a South Oil engineer who works at Garmat Ali. The other equipment still needed is for injecting water into the Rumaila fields. The Army Corps of Engineers has not set a date for starting that project.... At South Oil's headquarters, Mr. Leaby questioned how any repairs could hold when security was so threadbare. "Every minute, we have something missing," he said. "Every time we fix something, it gets looted." Is this yet another result of Donald Rumsfeld's obsession with keeping troop strength low? And do the high muckamucks at Halliburton not care because the contract to pump the oil is the real asset they wanted? Do they not care how much they pump, or how soon, because this contract is lucrative no matter what? posted by Steve M. | 9:47 AM | Yesterday, AARP ran a full-page ad in The New York Times asking Congress and the president to agree on a prescription-drug benefit under Medicare. One line from the ad jumped out at me: "Every effort should be made to reduce gap in coverage." As Robert Pear's story in yesterday's Times explains, the Republican proposal for prescription drugs "would leave a big gap for some people. Under the Senate bill, for example, Medicare would share drug costs up to $3,450 a year, but would not provide further coverage until a beneficiary's annual drug costs reached about $5,300." Why does the GOP plan in the Senate do that? I guess I understand the notion of covering both ordinary and extraordinary expenses, but why exclude what's in the middle? What's the logic behind that? Now, look at the wording of that line from the AARP ad: "Every effort should be made to reduce gap in coverage." It's almost as if the AARP thinks this gap is some sort of natural phenomenon, something like cancer or tornado damage that we simply can't eliminate but should do our best to minimize. It isn't. People made this gap. It doesn't have to exist at all. posted by Steve M. | 9:30 AM | Monday, June 09, 2003 More book news from Publishers Lunch: With all the announcements relating to books for conservatives, it’s worth noting the launch this fall of [Henry] Holt’s American Empire Project, a line of "short, argument-driven" books that will examine "the increasingly imperial cast of America’s government and policies." Developed by editors and historians Tom Engelhardt and Steve Fraser, the line from Metropolitan Books begins with Noam Chomsky’s HEGEMONY AND SURVIVAL, said to be his first "wholly new book in over 10 years." Henry Holt isn't huge, but it's part of Holtzbrinck, which also owns Farrar, Straus & Giroux and St. Martin's. (In the past, Holt has published, and paid big money to, the likes of Sue Grafton, Thomas Pynchon, and, yes, Al and Tipper Gore.) posted by Steve M. | 7:10 PM | You may have read about the Al Franken/Bill O'Reilly dust-up at BookExpo America on Saturday, May 31 (here's Newsday's account; here's some commentary from CalPundit and his readers) -- but Michael Moore was aapparently also quite entertaining the following day. Herean account of Moore's talk from an e-mail sent out June 1 from BEA by the folks at Publishers Lunch: Fireworks from Saturday’s political lunch still resonated at this morning’s author breakfast, as moderator Walter Isaacson told the audience, "There won’t be quite as much heat as there was at lunch, but hey it’s breakfast." But it did begin with a rousing ovation before anyone even said a word, and clearly much of that enthusiasm was directed towards speaker Michael Moore—as underscored when Madeline Albright took to the podium later and declared, "What a blast to be here with Michael Moore." More amusing than aggressive, Moore himself began by saying, "Now if you don’t mind I’d like to finish that Oscar speech…" He noted that "success has made me extremely grateful to Mr. Bush for the tax cut" and told the President he’s got a new plan "to spend my entire tax cut to help defeat you next year." (Interested candidates can go to spendmikestaxcut.com.) Moore’s fall book is tentatively titled, DUDE, WHERE’S MY COUNTRY? (given a chance a vote by applause, the audience favored that title heavily over the alternate, LEAVE NO MILLIONAIRE BEHIND), and includes such helpful chapters as "How to Talk to Your Conservative Brother-in-law." Moore’s thesis is that most people in the country aren’t really conservative in all their policies, but that "They just don’t want to give up their tax money." By his reckoning, the key for liberals in prevailing is to "quit trying the moral argument. When you’re a conservative it’s all me, me, me. How does it affect me?" His notion is that humane policies towards issues like health care and day care make for a happier, more prosperous work force, and in turn will help conservatives make more money. Other popular Moore one-liners included references to "the Fox Nuisance Channel" and a hunch that "Saddam found the same travel agent that Osama did." Later in the morning Moore drew long lines having his picture taken at the Warner booth, where at one point he was observed singing a duet of "O Canada." He quipped, "Just in case I have to move." And, from the same e-mail, here's an account of Franken/O'Reilly/Ivins: The MediaTalk lunch on Saturday was full of fireworks. Originally conceived as a "fair and balanced" presentation with two on the left, Molly Ivins and Al Franken, facing off against two on the right, Bill O'Reilly and Tucker Carlson, was thrown off-center by Carlson's absence. Former Democratic Congresswoman and AAP head Patricia Schroeder, who moderated, said, tongue in cheek, that it was perfectly fair and balanced to her. Ivins, whose "BUSHWHACKED" is coming soon from Random House, kicked off the conversation talking about her new tool to analyze the health of the US economy, the Doug Jones Average (reusing some of her material from the book awards the night before). Doug Jones is the symbol of the "average American." And, no surprise, she found the "Doug Jones Average" falling, citing a host of failures of the Bush government, often in the field of environmental protection, to take the side of the average American against the powerful. She closed with a powerful, and inflammatory, quote from Mussolini defining fascism as "corporatism," when corporations wield government's power. "The bottom line is that old Doug Jones is getting screwed." (Ivins also won over booksellers with a story about Barnes & Noble that had shelved her book SHRUB in the gardening section.) Bill O'Reilly, the fabulously successful author ("The O'Reilly Factor" and "The No-Spin Zone") and talk-show host whose "Who's Looking Out for You?" is coming soon from Doubleday Broadway, was greeted by smaller but still fervent pockets of applause. He said his book was "a very personal book, not a political book—I don’t really write political books…. It’s a personal book about you." He immediately claimed separation from Rush Limbaugh by saying "I'm a problem solver." O'Reilly's prescription for a better world is about individual responsibility. He disdains government help as ineffective and counterproductive. Baiting the next speaker a few times, O’Reilly said "We name names—we don’t call names." Al Franken was the last to speak. His new book, coming from Dutton, is "LIES, and the Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right". Franken started out, deadpan, saying "God asked me to write this book because he was so pissed off at George Bush" for claiming God was on HIS side. It turned out, though, that Franken had a very pointed agenda, and O'Reilly was the target, which is hinted at by the fact that O'Reilly is the cover image of "LIES..." Franken told a lengthy story, the gist of which was that O'Reilly lied on C-Span about awards his TV work had earned, and persisted in the lies in the face of questioning and evidence. Of course O'Reilly was operating at two distinct disadvantages. One was that the audience was, judging from the applause and outbursts, largely on the political side of Ivins and Franken. But, perhaps even more telling was the difference in skills and attitudes of the participants. Franken is a skilled comedian: quick with his wit and sure with his timing. Ivins is a political writer with a caustic and humorous edge. O'Reilly seems to have almost no sense of humor at all, and certainly none when he himself is involved, since that is the subject he seems to take MOST seriously. From this observer's point of view, that might for a very unfair fight, even before you get to who had the right side on the facts and merits. Congresswoman Schroeder had her hands full keeping things on a relatively civil plane. The direct attacks by Franken on O'Reilly, and his shrill defense of himself, left Ivins where she almost never would find herself -- the person in "the middle." To a plea from the last questioner from the audience that we find ways to "come together," not much hope came from the platform. Franken said, basically, it is time for liberals to fight back, although he said he considered himself a "nice guy" and wanted to "promote civility." This brought a harumph from O'Reilly and, mostly, cheers from the floor. Schroeder's closing appeal was that each of the speakers send their books to the others. I have a feeling that Ivins and Franken will enjoy the swap, Ivins will skip O'Reilly's and Franken will mine it for material for his next book. posted by Steve M. | 6:25 PM | Remember deficit hawks? Warren Rudman? Ross Perot? Lead or Leave? Whatever happened to those flinty folks, anyway? I've been thinking that they were all forcibly transported to one of Dick Cheney's undisclosed locations, but, lo and behold, one emerged in yesterday's New York Times Magazine -- Pete Peterson, railing against his fellow Republicans: Coming into power, the Republican leaders faced a choice between tax cuts and providing genuine financing for the future of Social Security. (What a landmark reform this would have been!) They chose tax cuts. After 9/11, they faced a choice between tax cuts and getting serious about the extensive measures needed to protect this nation against further terrorist attacks. They chose tax cuts. After war broke out in the Mideast, they faced a choice between tax cuts and galvanizing the nation behind a policy of future-oriented burden sharing. Again and again, they chose tax cuts. The recent $10 trillion deficit swing is the largest in American history other than during years of total war.... You might suppose that a reasoned debate over this deficit-happy policy would at least be admissible within the ''discussion tent'' of the Republican Party. Apparently, it is not. I've seen Republicans get blackballed for merely observing that national investment is limited by national savings; that large deficits typically reduce national savings; or that higher deficits eventually trigger higher interest rates. I've seen others get pilloried for picking on the wrong constituency -- for suggesting, say, that a tax loophole for a corporation or wealthy retiree is no better, ethically or economically, than a dubious welfare program. For some ''supply side'' Republicans, the pursuit of lower taxes has evolved into a religion, indeed a tax-cut theology that simply discards any objective evidence that violates the tenets of the faith. Peterson, like all deficit hawks, also whacks the Democrats (for "dubious" social programs -- presumably anything introduced or proposed after 1960). Still, his condemnation of GOP orthodoxy is a hell of a lot more full-throated than what most Democrats seem able to muster. (I wonder if Peterson's article helped inspire this John Kerry statement.) Elsewhere in the Times Magazine, this is not a bad explanation of why Bush tax policy is bad for you -- by all means share it with centrist friends who might not grasp that reduced federal taxes mean reduced federal revenues, which mean reduced money for state and, ultimately, local programs, which is why the local prison is turning away prisoners and the local roads are filled with potholes. What's missing from the article is what's missing from all refutations of right-wing tax orthodoxy: a challenge to the notion, implicit in all right-wing thinking, that we can have all the government services we need and lower taxes because there's just so much government waste. No conservative is ever expected to prove that this is so. Instead, we get dishonest proof-by-anecdote -- in this case, the vile Grover Norquist sneering at tax-sponsored sex-change operations. Look, I've heard of these operations being paid for out of government funds, and you can certainly argue against that, but does Wisconsin, say, fully fund 88 such operations a day, 365 days a year, at $100,000 a pop? Because that's how many sex-change operations would have to be dropped from Wisconsin's budget to close the $3.2 billion budget gap the Times article tells us it has. And I don't know that Wisconsin (ex-governor: Tommy Thompson) has ever funded even one such operation. But nobody ever calls a guy like Norquist on something like this. Nobody ever shoves a budget under his nose and says, "OK, show me all the cuts you'd make to balance this and pay for your wish list of tax cuts." Nobody ever does this to him, and it should be done to him as often as humanly possible. posted by Steve M. | 1:51 PM | Real life has intervened. I'm utterly swamped. I'll try to post soon. posted by Steve M. | 11:08 AM | Sunday, June 08, 2003 I saw this photo in USA Today while I was on vacation. I'm so glad the grown-ups are in charge now -- aren't you? posted by Steve M. | 11:35 PM | A couple of posts ago I cited this story, in which Judith Miller and William Broad quote skeptics who doubt that the alleged mobile weapons labs in Iraq really were meant to produce WMDs. Now I see that there's this, from The Observer: Tony Blair faces a fresh crisis over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, as evidence emerges that two vehicles that he has repeatedly claimed to be Iraqi mobile biological warfare production units are nothing of the sort.... The Observer has established that it is increasingly likely that the units were designed to be used for hydrogen production to fill artillery balloons, part of a system originally sold to Saddam by Britain in 1987. The article lists some reasons for skepticism about the WMD story. You've read some of these before, but not all of them: * The lack of any trace of pathogens found in the fermentation tanks. According to experts, when weapons inspectors checked tanks in the mid-Nineties that had been scoured to disguise their real use, traces of pathogens were still detectable. * The use of canvas sides on vehicles where technicians would be working with dangerous germ cultures. * A shortage of pumps required to create vacuum conditions required for working with germ cultures and other processes usually associated with making biological weapons. * The lack of an autoclave for steam sterilisation, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production. Its lack of availability between production runs would threaten to let in germ contaminants, resulting in failed weapons. * The lack of any easy way for technicians to remove germ fluids from the processing tank. Canvas sides? That's the one that strikes me as bizarre. (A British scientist quoted in the article feels the same way.) posted by Steve M. | 11:25 PM | One more story of note from Saturday's New York Times -- "As Budgets Shrink, Cities See an Impact on Criminal Justice" by Fox Butterfield: The Portland police budget has been cut by more than 10 percent in the last three years, and the strain is showing. Station houses now close at night, and the 960-member force is down 64 officers. With no money for overtime, undercover drug officers sometimes simply stop what they are doing — for instance, tailing suspects or executing search warrants — when their shifts end... Crime here is rising, and Chief Kroeker says he is not surprised. In the first four months of the year, shoplifting is up 10 percent from the same period in 2002, car break-ins have increased 12 percent, the number of stolen cars has risen 19 percent and home burglaries have jumped 21 percent, police figures show.... The police commissioner in Seattle, R. Gil Kerlikowske, said that because of budget cuts he had reduced his force by 24 officers and 50 civilians this year and put a freeze on the hiring and training of new officers. The city now has about 1,250 officers, a police spokeswoman said. Burglaries, car thefts and shoplifting are up 18 percent this year, Mr. Kerlikowske said, though violent crime has remained steady. In Minneapolis, Robert K. Olson, the police chief, has cut 118 officers from his 900-member force this year because much of the money for the city's police comes from the state, which is running a budget deficit. Chief Olson said he had lost another 81 police officers because President Bush had essentially eliminated a Clinton administration program that provided money to add 100,000 police around the country.... You know, if we actually had an opposition party in this country, this might become a political issue. posted by Steve M. | 10:54 PM | I was stunned when I read in yesterday's New York Times that Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas had given a speech "drafted by the Bush administration and amended in negotiation with Mr. Abbas's aides." Is this really how we expect to win peace in the Middle East -- by insisting that as many Arab and Muslim leaders in the region as possible are visibly lapdogs of the U.S.? posted by Steve M. | 10:51 PM | A little more about the L.A. Times story I just posted, about the Iraqi who said that Iraq's WMD program was essentially on hold prior to the war: According to the Times, The interview with the former senior Iraqi intelligence officer was arranged by a family member of Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel Majid, who was married to one of Hussein's daughters and who headed Iraq's secret weapons programs until he defected to Jordan in 1994. He was executed after he returned to Baghdad in 1995 under promises of safety. Recall what Seymour Hersh said about Hussein Kamel in his watershed New Yorker article "Selective Intelligence": In August, 1995, General Hussein Kamel, who was in charge of Iraq’s weapons program, defected to Jordan, with his brother, Colonel Saddam Kamel. They brought with them crates of documents containing detailed information about Iraqi efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction—much of which was unknown to the U.N. inspection teams that had been on the job since 1991—and were interviewed at length by the U.N. inspectors. In 1996, Saddam Hussein lured the brothers back with a promise of forgiveness, and then had them killed. The Kamels’ information became a major element in the Bush Administration’s campaign to convince the public of the failure of the U.N. inspections. Last October, in a speech in Cincinnati, the President cited the Kamel defections as the moment when Saddam’s regime “was forced to admit that it had produced more than thirty thousand liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents. . . . This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for, and is capable of killing millions.” A couple of weeks earlier, Vice-President Cheney had declared that Hussein Kamel’s story “should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself.” The full record of Hussein Kamel’s interview with the inspectors reveals, however, that he also said that Iraq’s stockpile of chemical and biological warheads, which were manufactured before the 1991 Gulf War, had been destroyed, in many cases in response to ongoing inspections. The interview, on August 22, 1995,was conducted by Rolf Ekeus, then the executive chairman of the U.N. inspection teams, and two of his senior associates—Nikita Smidovich and Maurizio Zifferaro. “You have an important role in Iraq,” Kamel said, according to the record, which was assembled from notes taken by Smidovich. “You should not underestimate yourself. You are very effective in Iraq.” When Smidovich noted that the U.N. teams had not found “any traces of destruction,” Kamel responded, “Yes, it was done before you came in.” He also said that Iraq had destroyed its arsenal of warheads. “We gave instructions not to produce chemical weapons,” Kamel explained later in the debriefing. “I don’t remember resumption of chemical-weapons production before the Gulf War. Maybe it was only minimal production and filling. . . . All chemical weapons were destroyed. I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons—biological, chemical, missile, nuclear—were destroyed.” I think Saddam wanted to make these weapons again, but never did so. posted by Steve M. | 10:41 PM | Hey, I'm back -- tanned, rested, and still disgruntled. Had a nice time, but I missed this.... Oh, where to start? Maybe the land of Lucianne. Today one of her "Must Reads of the Day" is "Iraq Had Secret Labs, Officer Says" from the L.A. Times. Here's the part of the story that gets posted at the top of the thread on her site: BAGHDAD -- Saddam Hussein's intelligence services set up a network of clandestine cells and small laboratories after 1996 with the goal of someday rebuilding illicit chemical and biological weapons, according to a former senior Iraqi intelligence officer. The officer, who held the rank of brigadier general, said each closely guarded weapons team had three or four scientists and other experts who were unknown to U.N. inspectors... Smoking gun? High fives in Bush country? Humiliation for liberal skeptics? Er, not quite. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the original story that Lucianne.com chose not to excerpt: The officer, who held the rank of brigadier general, ... insisted they did not produce any illegal arms and that none now exist in Iraq. But he said the teams met regularly and put plans on paper to quickly develop weapons of mass destruction if U.N. sanctions against Iraq were lifted. "We could start again anytime," said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he said he fears for his life. "It's very easy. Especially biological." "The point was, the Iraqis kept the knowledge," he explained during a lengthy interview Friday in which he offered tantalizing details of secret programs. But U.S. weapons hunters "will never find anything here. Only oil." ...He said that U.N. sanctions and inspections in the 1990s crippled Iraq's ability to build illegal weapons and that Hussein's chemical, biological and nuclear programs were effectively eliminated in the mid-1990s.... The Iraqi intelligence officer said that the secret weapons groups were created in late 1996 and 1997 because the regime's unconventional arms programs had been dismantled or destroyed by then and that U.N. inspectors knew most of those who had worked in them.... Kind of a comedown, no? The right was so ready to wave huge stockpiles of WMDs in our faces, and now they're crowing because one Iraqi says there used to be WMDs in Iraq -- and that the sanctions we said were an effective deterrent actually were an effective deterrent. (If you can't read the story, use "clipjoint" as both member name and password.) Oh, and, by the way, this guy might not even be telling the truth: It's possible that the officer's story contains falsehoods meant to deceive or confuse U.S. investigators. He refused to show the documents he said he had saved or to take a Los Angeles Times reporter to any of the safe houses where he said the weapons teams had operated.... The Iraqi officer agreed to speak to two reporters because he said he wanted them to provide a satellite telephone that would not be tapped by U.S. intelligence so he could call Iraqi spies hiding overseas. He said he also wanted to see if he could gain access to $600,000 he said is in a Chase Manhattan Bank account. The reporters refused.... A real Boy Scout, this one. Look, I don't think Saddam was a nice guy. As I said last month, I think it's quite plausible that Saddam had a WMD program and abandoned it in an attempt to get sanctions lifted -- and if that's what was going on, it means the sanctions were a very effective anti-proliferation tool. I think this source is telling a story that's reasonably close to the truth -- even if he's just making stuff up. ************ Meanwhile, Judith Miller took a small taste of crow yesterday, coauthoring this story: Some Analysts of Iraq Trailers Reject Germ Use American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs. In interviews over the last week, they said the mobile units were more likely intended for other purposes and charged that the evaluation process had been damaged by a rush to judgment. "Everyone has wanted to find the 'smoking gun' so much that they may have wanted to have reached this conclusion," said one intelligence expert who has seen the trailers and, like some others, spoke on condition that he not be identified. He added, "I am very upset with the process." ... The skeptical experts said the mobile plants lacked gear for steam sterilization, normally a prerequisite for any kind of biological production, peaceful or otherwise. Its lack of availability between production runs would threaten to let in germ contaminants, resulting in failed weapons. Second, if this shortcoming were somehow circumvented, each unit would still produce only a relatively small amount of germ-laden liquid, which would have to undergo further processing at some other factory unit to make it concentrated and prepare it for use as a weapon. Finally, they said, the trailers have no easy way for technicians to remove germ fluids from the processing tank.... One more story embarrassing to the administration that, alas, conveniently winds up in the Saturday paper.... posted by Steve M. | 7:53 PM | Friday, May 30, 2003 I'm going to be at a few undisclosed locations over the next week or so, so I won't be posting, but I'll be back around June 8 with lots of fresh vitriol. Thanks to everyone for reading (and linking).... posted by Steve M. | 10:57 AM | Next time we need troops for a war in the Gulf, can we please send these people first? LIKE most of the students at Hummer camp, Maria del Carmen Grimmelmann tends to gush. "It moves me," Mrs. Grimmelmann, 51, said of the supercharged Hummer H2 she and her husband, Frank, bought earlier this year. "You know when you go shopping and nothing moves you?" she asked. "Then there's the time you see something, and right away know it's perfect. It's like falling in love. When I'm driving it, I feel empowered. It's the car that opens the sea for me. Now I know how Moses felt."... WEDNESDAY, AFTER LUNCH Mark Mills and David Paschen, a 50-year-old recreational vehicle dealer from Chesterton, Ind., acquaintances for all of one day, are barreling up and down mud hills following a caravan of Hummers. Mr. Paschen is playing befuddled straight man while Mr. Mills doles out zingers. Why did you buy a Hummer, Dave? "I turned 50, and I decided if I was ever going to do it, this was the time," Mr. Paschen replied. Mr. Mills interjects, "His wife said he could." Mark, why did you buy a Hummer? Well, he had a BMW sports car and had considered an H1, but there were complications. "I don't want to say I'm a fat guy," he explains. "But I'm a fat guy. The seats in that H1 aren't very big." Besides, the H1 was twice the H2's price. "I only have so much money," Mr. Mills said. Kidding!... Mr. Chance, a man with the erect bearing and basso voice of a somewhat younger Charlton Heston, explained the Hummer appeal over dinner. "The last G.M. car I liked was a '57 Chevy," he said. "I think it's so important that car designers create passion. Europe does it — BMW, Mercedes, Ferrari. They create passion and make you willing to write a check. There's no logic. If I had sat down and done a cost-benefit analysis, I would have been, `No-o-o.' Of course, I took delivery in California, and gas went to $2.50. So that's a statement of passion or stupidity, I don't know which."... Yeah, I'm so dang proud to be an American after reading this.... posted by Steve M. | 10:05 AM | Is there anyone left who still hasn't seen "What a Tangled Web We Weave...," Billmon's compendium of WMD quotes? If you haven't, go to the link immediately. posted by Steve M. | 9:50 AM | Watch how fast Paul Bremer changes his story in this interview with Claire Shipman of ABC News: CLAIRE SHIPMAN: But still, no matter how quickly we won the war, wouldn't it have made sense for example to have an enormous police or military police operation ready to go here, to simply keep order? PAUL BREMER: Well, the police in a postwar period, the police are called the army. That's what the Army is here for. And we did have a pretty big one. Right? Today we had 54,000 troops here in Baghdad. That's a pretty big police force. We also have got an entire brigade of MPs that have been brought in. We've got a pretty good-sized police force. That's not a problem. CLAIRE SHIPMAN: But they certainly weren't operating the way they might have as soon as the war ended. PAUL BREMER: Look. Military men are not trained to be policeman. But in an immediate postwar period, that's the role that they have to assume. Hey, we didn't need cops -- we had soldiers! Lots of soldiers! Er ... but hey, you can't expect soldiers to be cops! posted by Steve M. | 8:51 AM | One more deck of non-Pentagon-approved playing cards. posted by Steve M. | 8:36 AM | Thursday, May 29, 2003 Media conservatives know how to keep the average right-wing Joe angry: When all else fails, just make stuff up. This morning, the first "must read of the day" at Lucianne Goldberg's Web site was a story about an incident on a Qantas flight: 2 flight attendants stabbed on plane A snarky comment followed on the site: Wonder where the hijacker could be from? Here’s some of what was said in the Lucianne.com discussion devoted to this story: Any bets that his name is Mohammad or Abu?! I also am expecting that the culprit's name is going to turn out to be something like Mohammed Abdullah, or Mustafa Jihadi, or Ahmed Intifada, or some such. The Austrailian news agency is reporting the highjacker is an Aussie. However, like Richard Reid, he could very well be an Aussie Mooslim. This is BOUND to be a Muslim terrorist wanna-be. If the liberals would unwad their panties and get on board with checking all Mooslim and Arab looking men between 17-50, we'd solve a lot of problems. While Americans and our allies boldly determine the course of the 21st Century, the Death Cult Horde (presuming this was in fact an Islamist savage) appears to have regressed from the stone age to the stick age. Yo ,, ye dang Leftist Media and Quantas you can't hide this stuff anymore We The People know Islamic Terrorist Savages are out there !!! Islamic raghead or Australian raghead, you can bet that he was one. Er, apparently not. Here’s the Sydney Morning Herald: Government sources said the assailant called out about "God's will or Armageddon when he was interrogated by federal police after the plane returned to Melbourne. He had been quiet but one source said that, during the attack and after he had been detained, he began talking about "God and the end of the world", saying that "God had spoken to him"…. Witnesses who saw the man after he was arrested, his hands bloodied and in handcuffs, described him as "just a normal looking Australian". It was believed he recently had resigned or been sacked from a job. Federal police said he would be charged under the Federal Aviation Act…. Qantas chief executive Geoff Dixon said: "We do not believe at this stage that this is terrorist-related in any way." If there’s any clarification of this at Lucianne.com, I haven’t seen it. posted by Steve M. | 6:51 PM | Someone at Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins Publishers actually got paid cash money to decide that the subtitle of Dick Morris's forthcoming book should not be Duplicity, Destruction, and Deception in American Politics, Media, and Business, but rather Traitors, Crooks & Obstructionists in American Politics, Media & Life. Or vice versa. From the link, I can't be sure. I guess we'll have to wait until the book comes out next month to find out what the final decision was. Isn't the suspense just killing you? I know it's killing me. posted by Steve M. | 5:18 PM | US troops firing a tank-mounted machine gun have killed two civilians and injured two others in the Iraqi town of Samarra after they tried to drive through a military checkpoint, US Central Command said. The news came as the US military announced it was investigating another incident in Samarra, about 60kms north of Baghdad, on Monday in which three young men were allegedly shot and killed by US troops.... ...Officials at the hospital where the three dead youths were taken said they had been firing in the air to celebrate a wedding, as is the Iraqi custom. --Herald-Sun (Australia) posted by Steve M. | 4:16 PM | There's nothing I can add to what TBOGG says here about privatization. posted by Steve M. | 2:06 PM | Bush Signs Tax Cut Bill, Dismissing All Criticism --headline in today's New York Times "Dismissing All Criticism" -- is it really necessary to add that? In Bush's case, isn't that a bit like adding "Continuing to Breathe Oxygen"? Has there ever been a millisecond in Bush's presidency when he wasn't "Dismissing All Criticism"? posted by Steve M. | 1:26 PM | It looks as if the Bush administration's lying disease, unlike SARS, may be communicable across an ocean... A dossier compiled by the government on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was rewritten to make it "sexier", a senior British official has told the BBC.... The intelligence official told the BBC the dossier had been "transformed" a week before it was published on the orders of Downing Street. He said: "The classic example was the statement that weapons of mass destruction were ready for use within 45 minutes. "That information was not in the original draft. It was included in the dossier against our wishes because it wasn't reliable. "Most things in the dossier were double source but that was single source and we believe that the source was wrong." ... --BBC posted by Steve M. | 12:24 PM | RIOTING IN IRAQ The police station in the tense Iraqi town of Hit smouldered on Thursday, a day after it was set alight in what residents said was a riot over intrusive weapons searches by Iraqi police and US soldiers.... ...24-year-old Amer Aziz, who said he represented the young men of Hit, said the trouble began when police and American troops began a house-to-house search for guns on Wednesday morning. "The Iraqi police were very rough with our women," he said. "They forced their way into houses without knocking, sometimes when women were sleeping. This is a very conservative town." Uproar ensued in the Sunni Muslim town of 155,000 as angry residents surged into the streets, burning police cars and throwing stones and handmade grenades at the Americans. Aziz said a parley had taken place in the afternoon, when townsfolk told the Americans to leave or face suicide attacks. "I convinced the young men to withdraw and then the Americans withdrew," he added. Another young man, 26-year-old Ahmed al-Mashhadawi, said a hand grenade had been thrown at a US tank as it left town. "We killed one soldier and wounded others," he said. The U.S. military said on Wednesday it was checking what happened in Hit, but has not confirmed any casualties.... --Reuters, via NZOOM.com (New Zealand) posted by Steve M. | 11:20 AM | You probably already know about the report, commissioned and then suppressed by the Bush administration, that (as Reuters says), "measured the present value of the federal deficit at over $44 trillion." Just in case you're not clear how much money that is, that's $160,000 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. (The U.S. population is roughly 275 million.) And, as Reuters notes, The study estimated that closing the budget gap would take an immediate and permanent across-the-board tax increase of 66 percent, the paper reported. Great. posted by Steve M. | 10:25 AM | PRIORITIES STRAIGHT I'm not breaking any news here -- this is a front-page story in both the print and online New York Times -- but this just makes me furious: A last-minute revision by House and Senate leaders in the tax bill that President Bush signed today will prevent millions of minimum-wage families from receiving the increased child credit that is in the measure, say Congressional officials and outside groups. ... after studying the bill approved on Friday, liberal and child advocacy groups discovered that a different group of families would also not benefit from the $400 increase — families who make just above the minimum wage. Because of the formula for calculating the credit, most families with incomes from $10,500 to $26,625 will not benefit. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal group, says those families include 11.9 million children, or one of every six children under 17. And in case you're not clear about what's important to our right-wing government, realize this: a provision to give these families the tax break was agreed on, but an important swing senator, George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said he could not approve any bill that exceeded $350 billion. To satisfy him and the Senate, Ms. Tinsworth [a Ways and Means Committee spokeswoman] said, the child credit provision was dropped, along with other costs. ...A spokeswoman for Mr. Voinovich said the senator would have been happy to extend the child credits, but believed that the entire package should not pass $350 billion. The tax writers were free to reduce the dividend tax cut, noted the spokeswoman, Marcie Ridgway. (emphasis mine) Free to reduce it? They were free to eliminate it. Hell, they were free not to do engage at all in another round of tax giveaways to the non-needy. But they know what's important, right? posted by Steve M. | 9:33 AM | Wednesday, May 28, 2003 The Baghdad bunker which the United States said it bombed on the opening night of the Iraq war in a bid to kill Saddam Hussein never existed, CBS Evening News reported Wednesday. The network quoted a U.S. Army colonel in charge of inspecting key sites in Baghdad as saying no trace of a bunker or of bodies had been found at the site on the southern outskirts of the Iraqi capital, known as Dora Farms. "When we came out here, the primary thing they were looking for was an underground facility, or bodies, forensics, and basically, what they saw was giant holes created. No underground facilities, no bodies," Col. Tim Madere said.... --Reuters So who said there was a bunker there? Ahmed "Tommy Flanagan" Chalabi? posted by Steve M. | 11:14 PM | A lot of Iranian citizens want to reach out to the U.S. and the West. As The Guardian points out, no good deed goes unpunished: The Pentagon's pronouncement that it would seek to "destabilise" Iran's Islamic republic has given the country's clerics ammunition to portray their liberal opponents as traitors. Hardly a day passes without warnings in the official press against reformists accused of sowing divisions. "America is trying to undermine our national unity by provoking chaos and political differences as well as creating a crisis," said Mohammed Baqer Zolqadr, the deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards. Washington's rhetoric could not have come at a more awkward time for President Mohammed Khatami and his allies in parliament. As the political and constitutional battle between reformists and Islamists comes to a head, the US intervention is a distraction and a pretext for muffling dissent.... Great. And these are people who want to be our friends. posted by Steve M. | 11:10 PM | In a little item about Hillary Clinton's forthcoming memoir, Matt Drudge says this: Clinton raised eyebrows in 1996 when she failed to acknowledge a single person in her bestseller, IT TAKES A VILLAGE. Here is the complete text of page 319 of It Takes a Village: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It takes a village to bring a book into the world, as anyone who has written one knows. Many people have helped me to complete this one, sometimes without even knowing it. They are so numerous that I will not even attempt to acknowledge them individually, for fear that I might leave someone out. Instead, I would like to thank those who encouraged and advised, read and reacted; those who typed and retyped, edited, copyedited, proofread, designed, set type, and printed; and those who kept the engines of daily life humming the whole time. The opinions expressed in this book are my own, as is the responsibility for any errors it may contain. Yet I am indebted for my ideas -- and for any contribution they make to public and private debates and agendas -- to a long line of family and friends, teachers and classmates, colleagues and mentors; to the many tireless and often unheralded experts whose work I have been privileged to know; and most of all, to the millions of families and children who are building tomorrow’s villages. No she didn't say, "I worked with a ghostwriter." (Most nonwriters who work with ghostwriters don't.) No, she didn't mention anyone by name. But she did thank people -- lots of people. posted by Steve M. | 11:01 PM | The left has its share of wackos, but the right has -- and takes very, very seriously -- people like Robert George, who defends Rick Santorum's recent remarks on sexual matters in this National Review Online piece. The problem with George isn't that he thinks that a Supreme Court endorsement of an absolute right to privacy would be open the door to legalization of consensual adult incest and other rare but nasty behaviors -- you can find centrists who've argued the same thing. No, the problem with George is that he considers any sexual act apart from intercourse to be "intrinsically non-marital" -- even if it takes place between a husband and wife. To George, the things lawfully wedded spouses do that aren't intercourse are “sexual misconduct,” “illicit sex acts,” and “immoral sex acts.” It's entirely likely that Senator Santorum agrees. You know, maybe we should spend a little less time wondering about what might happen if there's an expansion of the right to privacy -- and a little more time wondering what the limits on our private behavior would be if people like Robert George and Rick Santorum had their way. posted by Steve M. | 7:15 PM | Don't you just love the sheer glee with which this tells you how to get a huge tax deduction on the biggest frigging brontasaurus of an SUV you can possibly buy, including SUVs so fuel-inefficient "they fall outside the scope of the rating system"? Here's a sample passage: The deduction for SUV purchases was already pretty hefty, but it came in three parts: A $25,000 equipment deduction, plus 30% of the remaining price (courtesy of the 2002 economic stimulus bill), plus the standard five-year depreciation schedule on the remainder. On a $72,000 Range Rover, the deduction came to about $45,000 the first year, for a tax savings of more than $16,000. It's so much easier -- and cheaper -- to write the whole thing off. Simply multiply the purchase price by your tax rate. The tax savings on that same Range Rover? More than $25,000 in the top brackets. In contrast, those who buy ultra-efficient gas-electric hybrids for personal use get a tax deduction of $2,000, worth at most $700. What a country! Munch my dust, granola-eaters! The all-GOP federal government rocks! posted by Steve M. | 4:34 PM | How big was the tax cut Bush just signed? A hell of a lot bigger than $316 billion or $350 billion. Who says so? Some liberal? No -- Senator Bill Frist. The Daily Howler quotes Tony Snow's interview of Frist on last weekend's Fox News Sunday: FRIST: I’m very hopeful that they won’t be temporary, that this $350 billion tax plan will, indeed, be made permanent, will grow to what it really is, is an $800 billion tax relief package for the American people. SNOW: So, in effect, the president got a bigger tax cut than he requested in the first place? FRIST: He did. And they're not satisfied. They want even more: FRIST: Remember, the budget that we passed in the Senate and in the House had, not a $350 billion package, but a $1.2 trillion tax relief package. That is the goal. This is really the first iteration, that first step. If you're under 45, I think you can just kiss Social Security goodbye. (Partial transcript of the Fox News interview here.) posted by Steve M. | 2:46 PM | Somewhere, in a parallel universe, everything is hunky-dory. How do I know this? I know this because Donald Luskin of National Review Online apparently lives in that parallel universe. Here he is writing about Paul Krugman's forthcoming book: Think, for a moment, about how good things have been lately, and how hard a catastrophist like Krugman has to work to make them seem bad. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was a brilliant victory (Krugman: " ... it did the terrorists a favor ... "). President Bush signs into law today an historic pro-growth tax bill, enacted thanks to the support of cross-over Democrats (Krugman: " ... the administration ... actually wants a fiscal crisis ... "). Even the crisis in corporate malfeasance seems to have been overcome (Krugman: " ... they can get away with even more self-dealing than before ... "). No recession! No corporate crooks! And everyone in the Middle East loves us! What a cool universe! Wish I lived there.... posted by Steve M. | 10:53 AM | In Monday's Washington Post, Howard Kurtz reported that an internal New York Times e-mail had revealed the identity of the principal source for reporter Judith Miller's dubious claims of WMD "smoking guns" in Iraq -- Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, bosom friend of the D.C. neocons. ("She ... noted that the Army unit she was traveling with -- Mobile Exploration Team Alpha -- 'is using Chalabi's intell and document network for its own WMD work. . . .'") Now we learn from the New York Observer (scroll past the Jayson Blair story) that the Times's Kuwait bureau during Gulf War II employed Ahmed Chalabi's niece: The New York Times has quietly ended its relationship with Sarah Khalil, who helped set up the paper’s Kuwait bureau for the war—and who is also the niece of Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress.... In an e-mail exchange with Off the Record, chief Washington correspondent Patrick Tyler—currently reporting from Baghdad—explained that he hired Ms. Khalil, a former staffer with the AFP news agency in Cairo, in January, while setting up the Kuwait bureau for the war. Mr. Tyler said he met Ms. Khalil, the wife of a Kuwaiti-based businessman and the mother of two small children, while working for The Washington Post in the 1980’s and hired her as an assistant "whose work was confined to Kuwait." This, Mr. Tyler said, included arranging visas for war correspondents and directing supplies into war zones. "The politics of postwar Iraq were not even on the horizon," Mr. Tyler said. "I certainly didn’t expect to be covering them. Chalabi was not in the news or even in the region. When he came across the horizon after the war, Sarah and I had a discussion about Chalabi’s rising profile and the appearance of conflict." According to sources at The Times, editors and senior writers in The Times’ Washington bureau objected to Ms. Khalil’s presence and demanded that Mr. Tyler relieve her of her duties.... Curious. posted by Steve M. | 9:22 AM | Tuesday, May 27, 2003 When Ann Coulter steps over the line and says something so outrageous that even fellow conservatives can’t defend it, their usual response is to say, well, after all, Coulter is an entertainer -- her stock in trade is comic hyperbole. You’re not supposed to take her seriously, as you would a more sober-sided conservative essayist. One of those indefensible Coulter remarks came a few days after 9/11. Coulter said of Muslims in her weekly column, We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. An exaggeration, right? Bitter, angry hyperbole, not meant to be taken seriously -- right? So why was William F. Buckley -- the sort of conservative we’re all supposed to take seriously -- saying nearly the same thing in his National Review Online column today? Buckley had read a New York Times article about Islam-hating Evangelicals who want to preach Christianity to Muslims. The article makes clear that the goal of these people is conversion: On a recent Saturday in a church fellowship hall here, evangelical Christians from several states gathered for an all-day seminar on how to woo Muslims away from Islam. It also makes clear that they don’t have much respect for Islam: "The Koran's good verses are like the food an assassin adds to poison to disguise a deadly taste," writes Don Richardson, a well-known missionary who worked in Muslim countries, in "Secrets of the Koran" (Regal Books, 2003). "Better to find the same food, sans poison, in the Bible." This month, he is scheduled to speak on Islam at churches in five American cities. Buckley thinks what they’re doing is terrific: The program initiated by sundry evangelical Christian ministers to accost Islam by teaching the tenets of the Christian faith to those who seek to bring that faith to Muslims is very good stuff, overdue.... One evangelist, from Beirut, advocates assembling passages from the Koran that establish that Islam is "regressive, fraudulent, and violent," to quote the Times report by Laurie Goodstein. "Here in the Koran it says slay them, slay the infidels. In the Bible there are no words from Jesus saying we should kill innocent people."... Diplomacy is fine and is necessary but it sometimes demands politically correct professions of equality of faith, at the expense of right reason. Ronald Reagan saw through to this problem when he said that the Soviet Union was an evil empire and that Communism would end up on the ash heap of history. Something like that needs to be said about Muslims, to the extent that they are identifiable as agents of terrorism. We know William F. Buckley thinks we should invade Muslim countries and kill their leaders -- we’ve just invaded two of these countries and tried our damnedest to kill their leaders, and he was all for it. And now we know he wants the people left alive converted to Christianity -- or, at the very least, told how sick and vile and morally repugnant their religion is, in contrast to the moral glories of Christianity. So what’s the difference between him and Coulter? posted by Steve M. | 11:32 PM | Is there a Gulf War II Syndrome? The U.K.'s Evening Standard seems to think so: The Government was facing growing criticism over claims that four soldiers who received multiple vaccinations before the Iraq war could be suffering from a potential "Gulf War II Syndrome". Stephen Cartwright, 24, of Kidderminster, Worcestershire, and Tony Barker, 45, from Leeds, were among the four men threatening to sue the Ministry of Defence after suffering "severe physical and psychological symptoms". Their solicitor Mark McGhee said all four had received multiple inoculations in one day, contrary to Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon's statement to the Commons earlier this year. Mr McGhee, of Manchester-based law firm Linder Myers, said: "It is my understanding that specific guidance was given to medical officers that these inoculations were not to be administered on a multiple basis." Mr Hoon told MPs in January that "a key lesson" learnt from the 1991 Gulf War was the importance of ensuring that troops should not receive a number of different vaccinations in a short timeframe. Mr McGhee, who has dealt with more than 400 veterans from the first Gulf War, said the symptoms reported by the four soldiers were "identical" to those of so-called Gulf War Syndrome.... It'll be interesting to see whether the pro-war pundits in America who tell us to "support the troops" will change their tune if our soldiers begin to lodge similar complaints. posted by Steve M. | 4:55 PM | It occurs to me that the real-life GOP policy that most resembles Orwell's "We are not at war with Eurasia. We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia" isn't the one-war-after-another approach to international relations (addition isn't really the same as substitution), but the policy on budget deficits. USA Today points this out today to traveling salesmen all over America: The current president's tax cut also would have been impossible if the House Republican majority that arrived in 1995 had passed the first piece of legislation proposed in its ''Contract with America'' campaign document. Spurred by Newt Gingrich, the Georgia Republican who became speaker of the House for two terms, conservative House Republicans wanted to pass a constitutional amendment requiring that the president propose a balanced federal budget each year and that Congress enforce it. ...''If Newt Gingrich and friends had been successful in implementing their 'Contract with America,' everything they do this year would be illegal,' '' [Stan] Collender [of the Federal Budget Consulting Group] said. ''The president would have to submit a balanced budget. They couldn't increase the debt. That's a real turnabout. It's an abandonment of discipline.'' ...Republicans who wrote the tax-cut legislation acknowledged it will require more borrowing. House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas, R-Calif., said the borrowing is warranted by the costs of war and terrorism and the struggling economy. He called it ''an investment deficit.'' ''You can spend a deficit dollar in peace as an investment in national strength, (to) make sure the economy is strong,'' Thomas said. Thomas, of course, endorsed the Contract with America, including the "Fiscal Responsibility Act" (which called for "a balanced budget/tax limitation amendment ... to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses"). Can you think of any Repubs from that period who didn't? (UPDATE: When I first posted this, I omitted the USA Today link. It's there now.) posted by Steve M. | 1:55 PM | Don't even bother reading the newspaper over the next few months (or year-plus): Neal Pollack lists every possible future scenario and their likely outcomes (which are all the same). The only cloudy spot on his crystal ball, in my opinion: Wouldn't the U.S. government want the sham Iraq melodrama to last approximately a year and a half, so the 9/11 anniversary bash-cum-2004 Republican convention (and the subsequent campaign) can be conducted in an atmosphere of utter national terror? posted by Steve M. | 12:02 PM | A stray thought: It's obvious now that the Bush administration would like to turn the Iranians into our new Antichrists. Do you think the Bushies will have the gall to exploit the fact that the name of the man who's currently Iran's most powerful mullah, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is awfully similar to that of the now-deceased Ayatollah Khomeini? Will they suggest (without actually saying so) that Khomeini, America's #1 demon a generation ago, is the guy we need to fight? Oh, and another thing: A year from now, do you think most Americans will think Iran was behind 9/11? Do you think they'll think 9/11 was masterminded by Khomeini, a guy who died in 1989? posted by Steve M. | 11:07 AM | Remember this? In the mid-1980s, ... Congress tightened rules about how much money can be written off on luxury automobiles used for business -- but excluded vehicles with a gross weight of 6,000 pounds or more, partly an attempt to help farmers afford tractors, large trucks and other heavy equipment. But many SUVs, including the 6,400-pound [Hummer] H2, fall into that heavyweight category, and now a new class of small-business owners and the self-employed, such as construction company executives, doctors, real estate agents and lawyers, is qualifying for [a tax] deduction. Well, the deduction -- nearly $38,000 for a vehicle that costs $50,000 to $60,000 -- just cleared Congress: Congress on Friday substantially widened a tax break that has been used by small businesses as an incentive to purchase the largest sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks. Supporters including President Bush said the business equipment tax break, which was quadrupled to $100,000 in the $350 billion tax cut bill that narrowly cleared Congress, is good for the economy. It passed on Friday, when it was assumed that you wouldn't be paying attention. I see The New York Times is reporting today that respect for the military is extremely high right now among young people. I guess that's good, because if we're subsidizing Hummers, kids are going to have a lot of opportunities to see their heroes in action in the foreseeable future. ******* The article on young people's trust in the military, incidentally, includes yet more evidence of the success of Bush's Great Deception: In Mr. Sunderdick's class, Vietnam seemed very distant history. Even the teacher was born after Saigon fell. Several students said they thought that the Iraq war was much more like World War II, a war with a clear rationale waged by a country intent on defending itself, reflecting the effectiveness of the Bush administration's case for going to war. "We actually got attacked," a student, Jessica Cowman, said. "In Vietnam, it wasn't an attack on us. We got hit in World War II, at Pearl Harbor, and we got hit in New York and at the Pentagon. It wasn't like that with Vietnam." Another student, Stephanie Isberg, said: "People are more personally affected, especially by 9/11. My uncle almost died. So I have a more positive viewpoint about going in and taking out terrorists than I probably would have if nothing had happened." Saddam = Osama. 2 + 2 = 5. posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | Here's how a couple of recent mountaineering events were reported on last night's broadcast of ABC's World News Tonight: In another part of the world, it is climbing season on Mount Everest, and records there are falling like never before. Today a Sherpa scaled the mountain in record speed -- ten hours and fifty-six minutes from base camp to peak. The previous record was set just three days ago. And then today another Sherpa reached the top of the mountain -- his thirteenth time there, also a record. What's wrong with this? Well, Sherpas aren't camping equipment. Sherpas are people. They have names. Reporting this story without giving the Sherpas' names is an insult. Damn "liberal" media. (The New York Times reports on these and other Everest events in today's edition and gives the names of the climbers. The speed champ is Lhakpa Gela and the thirteen-time climber has the single name Appa.) posted by Steve M. | 9:11 AM | Monday, May 26, 2003 In the middle of an article in yesterday's New York Times, I ran across this statistic: Medicaid, the nation's largest health insurance program, pays for one-third of all births, covers one-fourth of all children and finances care for two-thirds of nursing home residents. I knew about the nursing homes -- a lot of senior citizens spend down their assets to qualify for Medicaid. You'd think we'd have better, more direct ways of helping people pay for nursing-home care, but there it is. It's the other statistics that are really appalling, though: One out of every three births in this country is to a mother on Medicaid? One out every four children is on Medicaid? In a country with no nbational health-care system, we have that many young families that can't get coverage any other way? That's a disgrace. posted by Steve M. | 11:07 PM | It seems that fashionable Euro-bashing has made it to the arts pages of The New York Times. This is from an article in today's Times about the Eurovision Song Festival: The Eurovision performers are clad in overly self-conscious leisure wear, and their movements are choreographed with the accuracy of a Bavarian glockenspiel figurine; they smile with such unnatural intensity that they look as if they're on the verge of a manic episode. The singer seemingly becomes one with the song and can't get out. In short, a typical Eurovision broadcast looks like a cross between a chewing-gum commercial and a Leni Riefenstahl film. Look, I'm an American, and I'm proud of the amazing popular music we made in this country over the last hundred years -- but it sure doesn't look as if we're going to another century like the last one. We used to have a right in this country to sneer at European pop, but not anymore. "Choreographed with the accuracy of a Bavarian glockenspiel figurine"? "A cross between a chewing-gum commercial and a Leni Riefenstahl film"? These phrases could describe any video or live performance by Michael Jackson or any of the dozens of acts influenced by him in the past two decades, from his sister Janet through Britney Spears, Cristina Aguilera, and all the boy bands (and no, that music isn't completely dead -- the first solo album by Justin Timberlake of 'NSync went double platinum within the past year). "They smile with such unnatural intensity that they look as if they're on the verge of a manic episode"? Sounds like a good description of this guy, or any number of other American Idol contestants. And notice who came in third in this year's Eurovision contest -- t.A.T.u., the pop-music world's current champions of épater les bourgeois. Bob Dylan, Alice Cooper, Madonna, 2 Live Crew, Marilyn Manson -- not only did America make great pop music, but we regularly had pop stars who were the best in the world at shock (with a little competition from Brits like David Bowie). But now the shock crown has passed to two Russians -- they're not even from a country that was in the Coalition of the Willing! -- whose fake sapphic-schoolgirl act has made them superstars worldwide, even in America. So sneer no sneers at the Eurovision Song Festival -- we have Creed and Nickelback. (UPDATE: Yeah, sorry -- Nickleback is a Canadian band. OK -- Darryl Worley, then.) posted by Steve M. | 11:05 PM | "The Republican Party just agrees with the way I feel compared with the Democratic Party, which is right now almost a communist party...." --Richard Wibalda of Las Vegas, quoted in The New York Times yesterday I don't want to hear another Republican complaining about people who call Bush or other conservatives "fascists" or "Nazis." You have a problem with that? Well, I have a problem with idiots on your side who think the Democratic Party is "socialist" or, God help us, "communist." You repudiate these people and I'll repudiate the people who say Bush is a Nazi. posted by Steve M. | 10:16 PM | As you were reading Adam Clymer’s front-page story in yesterday’s New York Times on the GOP’s push for political dominance, did you get the feeling that Clymer doesn’t quite realize that the GOP already has political dominance in this country, at least on the national level, and has had it for a long time? Let’s review, class: In all but two of the twenty-two-plus years since Reagan’s inaugural, the GOP has controlled the White House, both houses of Congress, or both. In six of those years it controlled the White House and the Senate. GOP nominees have controlled the Supreme Court without interruption since the early 1970s. The GOP seems kinda dominant to me. But I guess Clymer’s point is that voter identification with the GOP still isn’t truly high and the GOP still doesn’t have big majorities in Congress and state legislatures. Yet at the national level, at least, it’s hard to imagine how much more the GOP could accomplish with a big majority. The complete elimination of taxes? Internment camps for Democrats? Clymer’s follow-up on the Democrats in today’s Times is dispiriting, but I don’t think he’s too far off the mark. He acknowledges a long period of GOP dominance -- duh -- and runs through the list of Democratic problems many of us complain about: too little money, no structure of think tanks, no coherent foreign-policy message. He does quote one idiot, though, whose message he seems to agree with: A veteran Democratic consultant looked at the 2004 presidential field and found it symptomatic of a basic party problem: "Sometimes we're so respectful of our diversity that we take completely preposterous people seriously. We always run the risk of the follies of the absurd when people want seriousness." In particular, he said Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio, the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York and former Senator Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois were not real potential nominees but "products of the silly season." Excuse me -- the presidential campaigns of ideological fringe-dwellers such as Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, and Alan Keyes don’t seem to have done much harm to the GOP, so why should we accept that these Democrats are hurting their party? Maybe the real problem here isn’t the candidates. Maybe it’s that Democrats like this idiot are so willing to speak ill of fellow Democrats into a reporter’s open mike. Oh, and Pat Moynihan, the spiritual father of all self-hating Democrats, is quoted here: One month before his death, apparently determined not to let the approach of the grave interrupt his long history of fragging, Moynihan bashed Democratic presidential candidates for agreeing to oppose the partial-birth abortion ban. Now, doesn’t the GOP platform call for a constitutional amendment to ban all abortions, including for victims of rape and incest? Does this ever seem to hurt Republicans? Think that lack of political fallout might be partly attributable to the GOP tradition of not stabbing fellow party members ion the back? Bob Shrum, the Democratic consultant, gets it right in Clymer’s second article: "It's probably a weakness that we're not real haters. We don't have a sense that it's a holy crusade. We don't have a sense that it's Armageddon." Line that up with what Clymer says about the Republicans’ comeback after Watergate: Mr. Reagan's nomination in 1980 (after his near-miss in 1976) was the biggest step on the road back. His success convinced suspicious conservatives that the political deck was not stacked against them, and they enlisted in the Republican Party and ultimately took it over. Nancy Sinnott Dwight, a Midwestern moderate who ran the Congressional campaign committee, said, "For us to prevail, the party was going to have to be hospitable to people far to our right." Democrats appealing to their base: bad. Republicans appealing to their base: a blueprint for dominance. Got it? ********** The Republican college students on the cover of the magazine in yesterday’s Times dream of GOP dominance, but it’s odd -- they’re not like earlier generations of hectoring young right-wingers. They reject racism. They don’t oppose immigration. They advocate the free-speech rights of Eminem. One young conservative woman rejects marriage and family; one young conservative man advocates gay marriage. Is it me, or are these people liberals? Ah, but no: They despise taxes, they love guns, and they want a strong and aggressive foreign policy. But didn’t our elected officials in D.C. just lower taxes, reject renewal of the assault weapons ban, and give us two snazzy wars? If these kids loathe liberalism, which they see everywhere around them on campus, why don’t they just get the hell off campus? Why don’t they get jobs and join the rest of us in the real America, where George Bush is considered a war hero and Max Cleland is considered a traitor? I sometimes wish a few of our better colleges would go solidly right-wing. Then these conservative kids could matriculate where they feel wanted -- and they wouldn’t have to annoy us for the rest of their lives with their permanent sense of grievance at having had to live for four years in the same geographic space with regular performances of The Vagina Monologues. ********** Six New York City firehouses were closed on Sunday. Remember New York City firefighters? America’s heroes? Remember Bush with a bullhorn telling them, “I can hear you”? Yup, those guys. Six of their firehouses were closed on the orders of Republican mayor Mike Bloomberg, The Republican president’s economy is hurting the city; he and the Republican Congress aren’t offering much serious help to “first responders,” even in New York City, and the Republican governor of New York isn’t much help either. You think maybe Democratic presidential candidates should be talking about this, or even showing up at the firehouses to meet with protesters? This is from a New York Times story: At Engine Company 212 in Williamsburg, there were about 100 protesters by 8 a.m., chanting in English, Polish and Spanish and setting up sidewalk barbecues to grill hamburgers. Two conga drummers arrived and began beating out rhythms. Suddenly, Paul Veneski, 38, of Williamsburg, an unemployed truck driver, slipped into the firehouse through an open cellar door and opened the garage's large red door. Other protesters — among them Bronislawa Hupalo, a rail-thin 80-year-old — charged in and struggled to jam it open with discarded lumber. . Mr. Veneski then chained himself to the fire truck. His 12-year-old daughter, Jennifer, cheered him on. Later in the three-hour standoff, she offered her father hamburgers through a small space in the door. Apparently, trying to save firehouses runs in the Veneski family. Mr. Veneski's father, Adam Veneski, a local grocer, stormed this very firehouse when it was threatened with closing in 1975, the family said. These aren't Hollywood liberals. These are ordinary Americans. But not even local boy Al Sharpton showed up, much less Kerry or Kucinich or Dean. Too bad. posted by Steve M. | 10:05 PM | Friday, May 23, 2003 I probably won't be posting till Monday night. Enjoy the weekend.... posted by Steve M. | 2:06 PM | So Texas will soon have, as this Reuters story points out, a new, remarkably restrictive abortion law: it limits the facilities in which some abortions can be performed (already only 6% of Texas counties have abortion facilities), mandates a 24-hour waiting period for all abortions, and requires state-sponsored counseling that, among other things, insists that there is a link between abortion and breast cancer -- even though this myth has been debunked by the National Cancer Institute and other researchers. Oh, and as an added screw-you to pro-choicers, there's this: The Texas legislature voted down an amendment that would have exempted women who became pregnant through rape or incest from going through the waiting period. Why? During debate in the Texas Senate, Bob Deuell, a Republican from Greenville, said the exemption would "undermine the reflection period," adding that some women who gave birth after being raped or through incest have considered their children a blessing. (Thanks to Kos for pointing this out.) posted by Steve M. | 2:01 PM | You think Bush's tax cut is less than half the size of the one he first proposed, but it's actually bigger than the one he first proposed. David Rosenbaum explains in today's New York Times: ...the $320 billion figure, which is expected to clear the Senate today, is artificial. No one expects that tax breaks for married couples and a bigger tax credit for children, popular features of the bill, will be allowed to expire after next year. This is what lawmakers call a sunset. It was put into the measure to hold down the 10-year cost. Nor, barring a political upheaval that puts Democrats in the White House and in control of Congress, is it likely that the lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains will be allowed to expire after 2008, another sunset in the bill. If these elements of the tax cut are calculated on a 10-year basis, the cost in lost revenue stands to be over $800 billion, more than what the president proposed, according to the first analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priority, a liberal research institute. More important, the tax reduction this year and next year under the Congressional agreement is significantly larger than what the president originally proposed. The Congressional tax staff estimated that the agreement would lead to a tax cut of $61 billion in the 2003 fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30, and $149 billion in 2004. The Congressional Budget Office reported that the president's plan would have lowered taxes by $35 billion in 2003 and $117 billion in 2004. I'm grateful to Rosenbaum for pointing that out, I'm grateful to him for making it his lead, I'm glad the Times put that on the front page (above the fold) and Web site title screen (big headline) ... but even in this article we get Bush as Mighty Hero: But even more, the president succeeded because of a set of tactics that involved remaining flexible in his goals, taking advantage of division among Democrats, campaigning vigorously in the states of crucial senators and knocking the heads of Congressional leaders who often seemed more interested in pride of authorship than in enactment of legislation.... The tax bill, said Senator Robert F. Bennett, Republican of Utah, was the latest example of Mr. Bush's talent as a political strategist. Mr. Bennett, chairman of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, continued: "The president looks at the economy and looks at the electorate and grasps that the electorate wants to see someone doing something. They don't care about the details. So here is Bush with the political smarts to understand that the best medicine is to be seen as a leader making bold strokes, moving out on an issue where others are temporizing." Oh, and there's an unrebutted cheap swipe at Bill Clinton: "By the force of his personality," Mr. Bennett said, "[Bush] stepped into the squabble between the House and the Senate and brought everyone into the room and said, `You're going to get this done before Memorial Day.' Clinton would have stood at a board with a Magic Marker and worked through the details. Bush was more interested in getting a bill than he was in what was in the bill." Let's see: Clinton presided over a recession-free eight-year presidency. He used the first budget cycle of what looked for a while as if it would be a de facto Gingrich presidency to begin the process of destroying Gingrich's credibility, turning Newt and his mighty Contract with America into national jokes. But he's the bumbler. Meanwhile, Bush is Top Gun: he drives the economy off a cliff, but he does it on time. posted by Steve M. | 9:50 AM | In the article Adam Nagourney published yesterday in The New York Times about John Edwards's effort to reach out to rural voters in his presidential campaign, was this necessary? The prepared text for Mr. Edwards's speech that was e-mailed to reporters included stage directions for the senator — instructing him to "point if you can see" windmills in the distance, as he talked about their potential to generate inexpensive power for farmers. President Bush's speeches, by contrast, are spontaneous outpourings of the soul, and contain no pre-planned bits of stage business whatsoever. Is that what Nagourney wants us to believe? Of course, the Times does tell us about Bush stage management -- there was, after all, that big front-page story last Friday about the crafting of Bush's image. But that article was meant to make you see Bush stage management as a mighty show of strength ("... using the powers of television and technology to promote a presidency like never before"), not as tawdry and dishonest image manipulation. We see the same skew in coverage of Democrats and Republicans as they raise funds: Clinton at a fund-raiser is a money-grubbing sleaze, whereas Bush ... well, note the first seven words of this Times article on a Bush fund-raiser, also from yesterday's paper: President Bush flexed his political muscles tonight.... And what's particularly dishonest about discussing windmills in a speech and choosing to gesture to windmills if some are visible? Does it change the truth value of any statement in the speech about wind power? Does it suggest something that's untrue about the presence or absence of windmills in rural areas? What the hell is wrong with doing this? The article also includes this cheap shot from a GOP operative: Jim Dyke, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, suggested that Mr. Edwards would have a tough time presenting himself as the candidate of rural America. "I guess they wrote that speech at John Edwards's Georgetown mansion," Mr. Dyke said. But ... but ... but I thought Americans didn't like "class warfare"! I thought we didn't resent rich people for being rich, as long as they "keep it real," like Jenny from the Block. Isn't that what Republican David Brooks told us only a few months ago? posted by Steve M. | 9:40 AM | A press release about Bookspan's new conservative book club points out that Brad Miner, who will head the club, wrote a book in 1995 called Good Order: Right Answers to Contemporary Questions. To paraphrase Molly Ivins, that title probably sounded better in the original German. posted by Steve M. | 9:08 AM | Thursday, May 22, 2003 LIBERAL MEDIA? Interesting point made by Bob Harris in Tom Tomorrow's blog: ...if the media really was in liberal hands, then centralization of that power would be absolutely terrifying to the right wing. It would be all you ever heard about. And yet those guys are strangely silent. On their websites, neither Bill O'Reilly nor Rush Limbaugh so much as mention the issue, even once, at least as far as I can find. Point this out to people with ears and brains. It really should be the end of the "liberal media" argument. posted by Steve M. | 11:37 PM | Can't decide what to do with your Bush tax cut? Maybe you ought to buy your hometown cops a hazmat suit. This is from a report by Brian Rooney on ABC News last night (it's not on the Web). You know this nonsense is going on, but here's another reminder of how absurdly skewed our priorities are: ROONEY: When the nation goes on higher alert, the Los Angeles Police Department increases patrols at the airport, the port, and the list of 605 potential targets. But they try to do it all without spending extra money, because it’s not in the budget, and the federal government has not delivered promised help. WILLIAM BRATTON, LOS ANGELES POLICE CHIEF: We’re now, what, almost two years away from 9/11, and we’ve still received almost nothing in the way of federal government reimbursement. ROONEY: Bratton says the added burden of training and staffing an antiterrorism squad costs tens of millions of dollars a year. It’s the same in San Francisco, where tighter security for the city’s landmarks and antiterrorism efforts have cost about $50 million, with no help from the federal government. The city of San Jose has spent $23 million. RUDY GONZALEZ, MAYOR OF SAN JOSE: ...The whole amount we’ve gotten back is about $207,000, and we just -- it befuddles us. We just don’t understand how the process works. ROONEY: They can’t look to the state for help, because the state of California is running a $30 billion deficit. The last time the country went on orange alert, during the Iraq war, it cost Los Angeles $4 million, all paid by a city in financial trouble.... posted by Steve M. | 11:13 PM | REGNERY VIRUS SPREADS From Publishers Lunch, more news about Random House/Crown's all-right-wing imprint: Crown has hired Jed Donahue, who has been working at Regnery Publishing since 1997, as an editor for their Forum imprint, starting next month. Prior to working with such authors as G. Gordon Liddy, William F. Buckley, Oliver North, and Pat Buchanan, Donahue was an assistant to George Will. posted by Steve M. | 3:28 PM | Some people think Saif Al-Adel is now al-Qaeda's military chief. Some people think he's the brains behind the Saudi Arabia bombings. And some people think Iran is giving him aid and comfort. I don't know what to make of this, but this ABC News story by Leela Jacinto sorts through some theories. (Warnings of an Iran/al-Qaeda connection are coming from the Bush administration, but these warnings, Jacinto says, have been "noticeably weak on details, with senior U.S. officials declining to go on record with concrete proof of the Iranian government's supposed support for the shadowy terrorist network." Surprised?) posted by Steve M. | 1:44 PM | Elifat Rusum Saber, 14, has been nauseated, tired and bleeding from the nose since her brother brought home metal and chemicals from the neighboring Tuwaitha nuclear research center two days after the fall of Baghdad. --Los Angeles Times U.S. military inspection teams have concluded that material looted from Iraq's main nuclear facility at Tuwaitha poses little or no danger to the people who stole it... --The Washington Times So, which one of these leads triggers your bullshit detector? posted by Steve M. | 12:54 PM | The thing that upsets me about this is that it won't work its way into conventional wisdom -- the conventional wisdom will still be that we took great pains to avoid harm to civilians, and that our efforts were successful.... Surveys pointing to high civilian death toll in Iraq Preliminary reports suggest casualties well above the Gulf War. Evidence is mounting to suggest that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civilians may have died during the recent war, according to researchers involved in independent surveys of the country.... Such a range would make the Iraq war the deadliest campaign for noncombatants that US forces have fought since Vietnam. Though it is still too early for anything like a definitive estimate, the surveyors warn, preliminary reports from hospitals, morgues, mosques, and homes point to a level of civilian casualties far exceeding the Gulf War, when 3,500 civilians are thought to have died.... "The biggest contrast between Afghanistan (where an estimated 1,800 civilians died during the US-led campaign there in 2001) and Iraq is that Afghanistan was predominantly an air war and this was a ground/air battle," says Reuben Brigety, a researcher for Human Rights Watch. "Air wars are not flawless, but if you have precision weapons you can do a lot to make them more accurate," he adds. "The same is not yet true of ground combat. It is clear the ground battle took a toll; ground war is nasty." Dr. Brigety and his colleagues in Baghdad say they are especially concerned by the wide use of cluster bombs during the war in Iraq.... --Christian Science Monitor (Link from Rational Enquirer and Cursor.) posted by Steve M. | 12:26 PM | Interesting point made by someone posting a comment to this item at the Daily Kos: ...when you look at the list of recessions since then, you'll see that it happens overwhelmingly during Republican adminsitrations! For example: Years: Dem/Repub Prez: Recession length: '45-'53 Dem (Truman) 11 months '53-'61 Rep (Ike) 27 months '61-'69 Dem (JFK/LBJ) 1 month (ended at start of JFK) '69-'77 Rep (Nixon/Ford) 27 months '77-'81 Dem (Carter) 6 months '81-'93 Rep (Reagan/Bush) 24 months '93-'01 Dem (Clinton) 0 months '01 - PT Rep (W) 6+ months Add them up and you get: 18 months/28 years for Democrats 84 months/29 years for Republicans Go here and scroll down to the "Tough Times" chart for the numbers being used here. (And how long is it, "officially," that the Bush economy was/has been in recession? Surely more than six months....) posted by Steve M. | 11:53 AM | Big drop in Bush's approval rating -- nine percentage points in five weeks: President Bush’s approval rating, which spiked during the war in Iraq, has dropped back to prewar levels and below, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that found that the economy was by far most Americans’ biggest concern. THE PRESIDENT still enjoys broad-based support, with 62 percent of those surveyed last Wednesday through Friday saying they approved of his performance. That was a drop, however, when compared to Bush’s support in the same poll a month ago, when 71 percent backed the president as the U.S. invasion of Iraq dominated news coverage. And it was below levels as high as 67 percent in surveys conducted before the war. Approval of Bush’s handling of the economy could not command even a majority. Forty-eight percent backed the president, compared with 44 percent who disapproved, a margin only slightly above the survey’s margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.... Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed, 64 percent, said there were better ways to boost the economy than tax cuts. Twenty-nine percent thought tax cuts were the answer.... Golly, I thought we were all so besotted with the man, especially after seeing him in a flight suit, that his approval rating would skyrocket. That's what we were told, wasn't it? What will be the conventional-wisdom explanation for this -- that more people would have expressed approval, but the manly sight of Bush gave them the vapors, and they still haven't recovered so they can't answer survey questions? posted by Steve M. | 10:02 AM | Men with men, men with dogs, married couples with birth control ... you know, Rick Santorum didn't include membership in the Democratic Party in the list of icky perversions he thinks Jesus hates and legislators could outlaw, but I'm sure a lot of other people would: The Texas Republican Party chief told colleagues last week that she was deliberately using language in public statements that connoted "criminal wrongdoing" in a Democratic walkout that shut down the state House. She acknowledged at another point in the conversation that the act was not criminal, but that it "probably should be," according to a tape of a conference call with party leaders obtained by the Chronicle. State GOP Chairwoman Susan Weddington also said she believed that "God will protect the work we're doing" in support of Republican efforts to seek major changes in state government, including cuts in health care and other services. Weddington, a Christian activist from San Antonio who has headed the state GOP since 1997, said in an interview Wednesday that she was referring to her own personal faith and not suggesting that God was taking sides in political battles. "I just have a trust that God will protect me from the people who attempt to malign," she said.... --Houston Chronicle (Link from BuzzFlash.) posted by Steve M. | 9:37 AM | Wednesday, May 21, 2003 Ken Auletta's New Yorker piece on Fox News isn't online, but you're not missing much -- it's endless, it's dull, and Ailes plays Auletta like a Stradivarius, feeding him details that make Ailes seem both bred for greatness (dad thickening Young Roger's skin by berating him after he falls in a manure pile while relearning to walk after being hit by a car) and, for all his pugnaciousness, a model of traditional GOP values ("Also on his desk are two Bibles -- 'They're old friends,' he says"). This is the noxious hero-in-a-suit journalism that was perfected at Tina Brown magazines throughout her heyday; the subject of the profile may be a son of a bitch or a nutjob -- and Ailes, with his petty acts of vengeance and permanent sense of grievance, is clearly both -- but his flaws are seen as part of what makes him, you know, larger than life. Feh. There's one detail in the profile that I find interesting, though: Auletta reports that last year Fox News had profits of $70 million, on revenues of $325 million; CNN's profits were $250 million, on revenues of $1 billion. If this is true, then why does CNN -- and why does anyone else -- give a damn that Fox's ratings are higher? CNN is obviously giving advertisers what they want -- perhaps an environment for their ads that doesn't bear a resemblance to a saloon brawl. Remember, we’re not talking about an evil cabal of liberals conspiring to make Fox less profitable -- we’re talking about the chieftains of big business voting with their wallets for CNN over Fox. If Roger Ailes is so smart -- and so pro-GOP -- why isn’t his network rich? (UPDATE: I suppose I'm missing the rather obvious point that CNN's reach is genuinely global, and the reach of Fox News isn't, or isn't yet. But it seems to me that a larger operation doesn't guarantee larger profits. And it also seems to me that The O'Reilly Factor and Hannity & Doormat aren't exactly what you want on your U.S. channel as a foundation for going global. CNN became an overseas presence years ago as it was giving Americans something that was more or less real news.) posted by Steve M. | 11:47 PM | I missed this story over the weekend. Good Lord, do we have to resort to the wooden stake? Senate GOP to resurrect Pickering nomination Republicans plan in coming weeks to take up the nomination of U.S. District Court Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. of Mississippi... --Washington Times OK, let's review... "The Racist Skeletons in Charles Pickering's Closet" People for the American Way on Pickering. Joe Conason on Pickering. Bob Herbert on Pickering. Enough already -- give him the hook. And if he ever does get approved, make him the de facto running mate of every Northern, Midwestern, and Western GOP senator who votes for him (and you know every single one of them will). Forget the South -- you'll just stir up Stars 'n' Bars pride if you attack a Southern Repub for voting for this guy. Everywhere else in the country, though, I think his history will tarnish the reputation of senators who voted for him. And yes, I think this is true even in states like Maine that have very small nonwhite populations -- people don't like racism anymore. posted by Steve M. | 4:37 PM | IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHAT THE DEFINITION OF "WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION" IS It's fascinating to be this far into the post-Saddam period and still to be arguing about weapons, about terror, and about Saddam. According to one school, the total effect of the whole thing has been to expose WMD claims as a sham, ratchet up the terror network, and give Saddam a chance at a populist comeback. I don't think that this can be quite right. I still want to reserve my position on whether anything will be found, but I did write before the war, and do state again (in my upcoming Slate/Penguin-Plume book) that obviously there couldn't have been very many weapons in Saddam's hands, nor can the coalition have believed there to be. --Christopher Hitchens in Slate, May 20, 2003 It must be obvious to anyone who can think at all that the charges against the Hussein regime are, as concerns arsenals of genocidal weaponry, true. Saddam has been willing to risk his whole system and his own life rather than relinquish this goal. --Christopher Hitchens in the Mirror, September 25, 2002 There is not the least doubt that [Saddam Hussein] has acquired some of the means of genocide and hopes to collect some more... --Christopher Hitchens in The Nation, September 26, 2002 (And I shall add that any "peace movement" that even pretends to care for human rights will be very shaken by what will be uncovered when the Saddam Hussein regime falls. Prisons, mass graves, weapon sites... just you wait.) --Christopher Hitchens in The Stranger, January 16 - 22, 2003 You can get through any conversation or chat show by pulling a solemn face or adopting a serious tone and saying: "Well, the government hasn't made its case on weapons of mass destruction and there's no clear link between Saddam and al-Qaeda and, anyway, we need another UN declaration." Those who have been getting through the past month by saying this are in danger of looking foolish in the extreme a few weeks from now.... On the weapons issue, for example, it is perfectly obvious that the Iraqi regime has something to hide.... --Christopher Hitchens in the Mirror, January 16, 2003 posted by Steve M. | 11:17 AM | "Eighty percent of the barrels are where they were before." --Colonel Tim Madere of the U.S. Army's V Corps, commenting on the fact that 20 percent of the known radioactive material stored at the Tuwaitha nuclear facility in Iraq isn't where it was before, and is in fact unaccounted for, as quoted in a Reuters story Yeah, colonel, the glass is half full, isn't it? posted by Steve M. | 10:11 AM | Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday low-yield nuclear weapons may be useful in destroying deadly chemical and biological weapons stocks as he pressed Congress to lift a 10-year ban on research and development of smaller nuclear arms. The Senate was debating whether to allow research on low-yield weapons with about one-third the force of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in World War II, which Democrats said would signal the United States was pursuing new battlefield weapons and would spur an arms race.... --Reuters I've been upset about this for months -- last fall, I linked this story (from Popular Mechanics) about the "tiny nukes." It cites a skeptic, who seems thoroughly reasonable in his doubts: Rob Nelson, a physicist with the Princeton University Program on Science and Global Security, and an expert on nuclear weapons design, has looked carefully at the relationship between the depth of a primary-powered explosion and geological damage. He argues that the sort of deep penetrator proposed by [Stephen] Younger [of the Defense Department] would, in fact, release rather than contain radioactive fallout. While it is true that most material would remain within the blast area, a radioactive cloud seeping from the crater would release a plume of gases that would irradiate anyone in its path. He has calculated that a weapon with a yield of about 0.1 kiloton--about one two-hundredth the energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima--would have to penetrate to a depth of 230 ft. to fully contain the explosion in the manner that Younger has described. Nelson cautions that if it were used to root out terrorists near a major Third World city such as Baghdad, the casualties could be in the hundreds of thousands. I'm grateful to Yahoo for pointing me to this Jane's report on the nuclear bunker-busters. It's actually rather sanguine about these weapons -- to the point of being Strangelovian: How much radiation is acceptable to release into the environment is, of course, debatable. During the era of US nuclear testing, explosions got progressively deeper as the acceptable amount of released radiation was continually reduced. Eventually, nuclear devices were only exploded at depths greater than 1,000 feet because of concerns over low-level seepage. Comparable depths for nuclear bombs dropped from airplanes can never be achieved. Some analysts, however, might argue that such tight standards are not required in a wartime setting. With that nod to the notion of an "acceptable" level of nuclear fallout in civilian areas, the report goes on to explain just what might happen if such a weapon were used: In the example above of attacking Tarhunah, a half-kiloton bomb would spread highly radioactive debris over a circle of 300m diameter. The 5kT bomb would do the same over a 700m diameter circle. Both bombs would also release significant fallout that could travel tens of miles before falling to earth. Of course, the crater walls as well as the immediate debris field have also trapped a significant amount of radioactivity that would otherwise land as fallout far from the explosion. If the fallout landed uniformly over a one square kilometre area, the radiation from the half-kiloton explosion would produce three rems per hour, 24-hours after the detonation, while the 5kT bomb would produce 50 rems per hour under the same conditions. These are significant amounts and threaten the health and safety of the populations far from the target. An eight-hour exposure to the larger bomb's fallout would kill about half the people exposed. It is also likely that the exposure levels would be higher from breathing in or otherwise ingesting the fallout, causing even greater harm. All these calculations assume that the nuclear weapon will survive being driven deep into the earth. In fact, a warhead will see, on average, forces well over 10,000 times the force of gravity as it ploughs through the earth. Yahoo also links a Federation of American Scientists report. I won't pretend to understand the science in either the Jane's report or this one, but here's the FAS's conclusion: ... the use of any nuclear weapon capable of destroying a buried target that is otherwise immune to conventional attack will necessarily produce enormous numbers of civilian casualties.... it is simply not possible for a kinetic energy weapon to penetrate deeply enough into the earth to contain a nuclear explosion. The FAS also makes a point that should be obvious: ...by seeking to produce usable low-yield nuclear weapons, we risk blurring the now sharp line separating nuclear and conventional warfare, and provide legitimacy for other nations to similarly consider using nuclear weapons in regional wars. posted by Steve M. | 9:52 AM | Tuesday, May 20, 2003 More than 300,000 Iraqi children face death from acute malnutrition, twice as many as before U.S. and British forces invaded the country in March, the United Nations UNICEF agency warned on Wednesday. --Reuters Aren't you proud? You can justify a war -- you can even justify civilian casualties -- if, ultimately, the suffering of innocents is diminished. The old Iraq regime was awful. It caused a lot of suffering. So why the hell can't we manage to improve on it? (Link from Rational Enquirer.) posted by Steve M. | 11:27 PM | HOW WE PROTEST, HOW THEY PROTEST Here's a Philadephia Inquirer report on protests at a Rick Santorum commencement speech. And here's a Rockford (Ill.) Register-Star report on protests at a commencement speech by reporter Chris Hedges. Let's compare and contrast: ...about 80 students and faculty paraded out of the celebration tent during yesterday's ceremony to protest the day's speaker, U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum. Dozens of other students hooked rainbow-colored tassels onto their mortarboards, along with the university's regular-issue crimson and gray tassels, as a silent protest of Santorum's recent controversial statements about homosexuals. Outside campus, along City Avenue, 15 more protesters, some St. Joseph's alumni, held up posters that read: "Just Say No To Rick" and "Republican, Catholic, Gay." Another read: "Stop! Fundamentalist Extremism," and had photos of Santorum and Osama bin Laden.... Just before Santorum received an honorary degree, the protesters stood and left. Some students jeered them. ******* Hedges began his abbreviated 18-minute speech comparing United States’ policy in Iraq to piranhas and a tyranny over the weak. His microphone was unplugged within three minutes. Voices of protest and the sound of foghorns grew. Some graduates and audience members turned their backs to the speaker in silent protest. Others rushed up the aisle to vocally protest the remarks, and one student tossed his cap and gown to the stage before leaving. Mary O’Neill of Capron, who earned a degree in elementary education, sat in her black cap and gown listening. She was stunned. She turned to Pribbenow and asked him why he was letting the speech continue.... After his microphone was again unplugged, Pribbenow told Hedges to wrap it up.... Spontaneous reaction led 66-year-old Gerald Kehoe of rural Boone County down the aisle in his first time to protest anything.... A student who rushed the stage could face reprimand although he still received his diploma. Maybe this is apples and oranges -- Santorum's speech, to judge from the reports, wasn't controversial, while the Hedges speech was unexpectedly controversial. The reaction to Santorum was planned, while the response to Hedges was spontaneous. But Santorum, however mild-mannered his presentation may have been, nevertheless despises harmless acts engaged in by many of the graduates he was asked to address, or acts engaged in by their friends and relatives. Yet the protest against him was polite. Hedges, by contrast, was silenced -- several ways. Some walked out on Hedges. Others turned their backs on him. But that wasn't good enough for the rest, was it? posted by Steve M. | 6:32 PM | I had a brain glitch a couple of posts down -- I should have referred to Sydny Miner as Brad Miner's wife, not his husband. Calm down, Senator Santorum. (Thanks to Phil for pointing this out.) posted by Steve M. | 3:56 PM | Many of the people I spoke to said that they hoped there would not be any killings in revenge for all the blood spilled in this country during the last thirty years. As far as I'm aware, these settlings of scores have not yet begun, at least not in Baghdad. But I suspect they will come. In Kosovo, after NATO troops arrived in June 1999, many Serbs who had done absolutely nothing wrong, and enjoyed good relations with their Albanian neighbors, also thought everything would be okay; and for the first few weeks at least, they were right. But later, of course, they were wrong. --Tim Judah, writing from Iraq in The New York Review of Books, April 30, 2003 Iraqis have begun tracking down and killing former members of the ruling Baath Party.... The killers appear to be working from lists looted from Iraq's bombed-out security service buildings, which kept records on informants and victims alike. But others are simply killing Baathist icons or irksome party officials identified with the Hussein government. The singer Daoud Qais, known for his odes to Hussein, was shot dead on Saturday. So was the president of the Iraqi Artists Union. --Washington Post, May 20, 2003 I suppose we'll be told that things could be worse -- or that this is actually a good thing. After all, the Iraqis are "just" killing people associated with the old regime. For now. posted by Steve M. | 2:12 PM | This is from Publishers Lunch: Bookspan has announced the planned launch later this year of a book club featuring books for political conservatives. Author and former literary editor for the National Review (as well as editor-in-chief of National Review Books) Brad Miner was named editor of the new club, and will serve as an executive editor at Bookspan as well, acquiring conservative books for the company's other clubs, too. The club doesn't have a name yet -- Bookspan will need a moniker that distinguishes it from the almost 40-year-old Conservative Book Club, part of Eagle Publishing (which also owns conservative publisher Regnery). According to the Eagle website, their club currently has an "all-time high" of 80,000 members. As this press release notes, Bookspan is a big name -- it runs the Book-of-the-Month Club, the Quality Paperback Book Club, the Literary Guild, the History Book Club, and a number of other clubs. Curiously, Miner's wife, Sydny, edited Hillary Clinton's books Dear Socks, Dear Buddy and An Invitation to the White House for Simon & Schuster. (This post originally referred to Sydny Miner as Brad Miner's husband. That was a dumb error -- I meant to say "wife." My apologies.) posted by Steve M. | 1:46 PM | You've got to read Bob Somerby's Daily Howler. Long before we were all blogging, Somerby was out there, fighting to record the rightward drift (and the drift to inanity) of American political discourse. Usually he preaches like an Old Testament prophet; today, by contrast, watch him go for the bullet points, with equally devastating results. posted by Steve M. | 1:18 PM | Barry (Ampersand) at Alas, a Blog points out this nice analysis of what happens to jobs under Democratic and Republican presidents, with a couple of very clear charts. Funny thing: under "pro-business" Republicans, there's more unemployment and there's less job growth. Surely you guessed that the Clinton years looked good economically, but you'll be pleasantly surprised to see some of the numbers for Carter.... Barry also points out the Web site of RAWA -- the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, the people who were trying to tell us about the horrors of women's lives under the Taliban long before Karl Rove taught George W. how to pronounce "burqa." RAWA is absolutely not pleased with what's going on in Afghanistan now; if you scroll down on the title page of RAWA's site you'll see a remarkable list of "recent reports from Afghanistan," garnered from the world press. As Barry says, if you don't want to read the articles, just read the headlines; they form a sort of lousy prose-poem of neglect and horror. Here's the current top ten headlines from RAWA's list: HRW: Sharp Rise in Press Attacks in Afghanistan An overview of the situation in Afghanistan after “liberation” "Climate of fear" rules Afghanistan UN reports serious rights violations in NW Afghanistan US Admits 11 Civilians Dead In Bombing Raid On E Afghanistan Afghanistan: the Taliban's smiling face Afghan Police Accused of Rights Abuses Afghanistan has been well and truly betrayed Afghan poor sell daughters as brides Afghan Warlords Killing at Will posted by Steve M. | 12:46 PM | Saturday's New York Times featured this Panglossian column by Bill Keller about Bush's religiosity. The letters column of today's Times has some nice replies, especially the first one: In "God and George W. Bush" (column, May 17), Bill Keller suggests that the president's faith is "highly subjective." Mr. Keller adds: "It enjoins him to try to do the right thing, but it doesn't tell him what the right thing might be. It is faith without a legislative agenda." This is the most disturbing aspect of Mr. Bush's moral crusade, because it absolves him of looking for guidance to any source other than his "heart." If Mr. Bush thinks that something is right, the argument goes, it must be simply because God would not steer him wrong. The religious right, whatever its hypocrisies, at least likes to work from a "playbook," the Bible, and thus operates on some recognizable and debatable set of principles. I am far more scared by the unwavering faith that George W. Bush maintains in his own moral judgment to the neglect of all else (save political expediency, of course). BILL FAGELSON Austin, Tex., May 17, 2003 posted by Steve M. | 9:34 AM | Yeah, I've disagreed with him on a number of things, but I like Chuck Schumer. This is from Jeffrey Toobin's (disappointing) New Yorker piece on judicial battles in the Senate: The hearing on Leon Holmes showed that the Democrats were willing to fight on lower-profile nominees, too. Feinstein said, “Let me begin, Mr. Chairman, by saying that I have never voted against a district judge, and, in reading this record and listening to the comments that this man has made, I do not see how anyone can divine from these comments that he has either the temperament or wisdom to be a judge.” ... Feinstein went on, “In 1980, he wrote a letter to the editor stating that abortion should not be available to rape victims because conceptions from rape occur with the same frequency as snow in Miami.” ... Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat, went next: “We checked the almanac. It snowed in Miami once in the last hundred years. Thirty-two thousand women became pregnant last year because of rape.” Touché. posted by Steve M. | 9:21 AM | Monday, May 19, 2003 Nancy Franklin's article in this week's New Yorker is a paean to PBS documentaries, which I do sometimes find admirable but not necessarily, you know, paean-worthy -- but I like what she says to start with: One day in mid-April, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, still overseas, said, “To our viewers, here’s your chance to weigh in on the war in Iraq. Our Web question of the day is this: Where do you think Saddam Hussein is?” We were given three choices—hiding in Iraq, dead, left the country—and were encouraged to log on and vote with our fingers. Cable news has a habit of treating viewers like children on a long car trip, giving us diverting, time-killing games to keep us focussed on the TV instead of thinking our own thoughts or punching our little brother. Count the out-of-state license plates; tell us where you think Saddam Hussein is. posted by Steve M. | 11:34 PM | I don't really understand why people hate Ari Fleischer so much. Getting angry at Ari is like blaming Goodyear if you're trapped under the wheels of a bus -- the blame lies with the idiot who's driving. Does Ari Fleischer dish out lies and abuse? Sure. That's his job. That's what Bush et al. hired him to do. His replacement will be just as bad, if not worse. He'll get in a little R&R over the summer and still have a year to crank out a book that will come out just in time for the '04 elections. Meanwhile, Fox News will hire him and he'll deliver "fair, balanced" coverage of the presidential campaign. Do I have links for this? No, I'm just making educated guesses. posted by Steve M. | 7:25 PM | The New York Times/Jayson Blair affair made the cover of Newsweek? For the love of God, why? Right-wing Times-haters must be beside themselves with glee, but why does Newsweek think the average American gives a damn? Consider the fact that, despite gobs of publicity, the new novel by that other plagiarist, Stephen Glass -- you know, the white one, the one whose compulsive dishonesty didn't lead to suggestions that fewer members of his ethnic group belong in newsrooms -- is, as I write this, #4,196 on the Amazon.com bestseller list. That means it's not selling much better than, say, Edgar A. Falk's 1,001 Ideas to Create Retail Excitement. In other words, the public isn't buying. I don't think the general public cares if one journalist and/or news organization screws up, beyond noting that it happened and expecting all concerned to try to get right what they got wrong -- and, really, the general public shouldn't care. posted by Steve M. | 4:00 PM | Remember the reverse domino theory? George Packer summarized it in The New York Times Magazine in March: Both the Arab world and official American attitudes toward it need to be jolted out of their rut. An invasion of Iraq would provide the necessary shock, and a democratic Iraq would become an example of change for the rest of the region. Political Islam would lose its hold on the imagination of young Arabs as they watched a more successful model rise up in their midst. The Middle East's center of political, economic and cultural gravity would shift from the region's theocracies and autocracies to its new, oil-rich democracy. And finally, the deadlock in which Israel and Palestine are trapped would end as Palestinians, realizing that their Arab backers were now tending their own democratic gardens, would accept compromise. By this way of thinking, the road to Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh and Jerusalem goes through Baghdad. Er, not quite: A suicide bomber attacked a northern Israel shopping center Monday, killing at least four other people and wounding 15, police said. It was the fifth anti-Israeli suicide bombing in three days.... --AP posted by Steve M. | 1:21 PM | Newsday reports this: Well-informed court observers say that there could be two Supreme Court resignations next month, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, bringing the greatest upheaval on the court in 32 years. Rehnquist's resignation is considered likely, though not certain, while O'Connor's is considered likely by some court insiders and less so by others. The White House, however, is preparing for the possibility of two or three vacancies, because if Rehnquist is replaced by a sitting justice and O'Connor also goes, two seats but three positions will be open. Yet another seat could open up if Justice John Paul Stevens, who is 83, retires, but that is considered unlikely. Think things are going to get ugly? Consider this, and realize how ugly they could get: While the speculation in Washington is that Justice Antonin Scalia would be elevated to chief justice, objections are being raised within the administration because of his age. Though Scalia is a very youthful 67, some feel a younger person should become chief justice to ensure long-term impact. For some of the highly ideological conservatives who have, at least until now, held sway over President George W. Bush's court nominations, that person would be Justice Clarence Thomas, 54, who if anything has positioned himself to the right of Scalia. They say that despite his controversial background, the White House has not yet dismissed the idea. I really think this could happen -- followed by a massive Right-Wing Conspiracy Message Discipline Special in which GOP apparatchiks use every print and broadcast outlet available to denounce everyone who says a discouraging word about Thomas as a racist (or, if nonwhite, as a dweller on the Democrats' "plantation"). Oh, and, of course, if Thomas is nominated, I'd like a dollar for every media reference to the choice as "bold." The article lists possible nominees -- though I wonder if the Bushies are going to throw a curveball at us and nominate Viet Dinh for something. Dinh came to the U.S. as a refugee, which makes him the perfect human-interest story for the GOP. And he's ideologically perfect, too: He's a Federalist Society honcho who recently left the Justice Department, where he was, as AP notes, "a key author of laws increasing government enforcement and surveillance powers after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks." It's relatively easy for Democrats to find nonwhites who will denounce Clarence Thomas or Miguel Estrada. I don't think they could manage to fight off Dinh. (Dinh's really young, so maybe it's not his time yet, but choosing someone of his age would be "bold," too.) posted by Steve M. | 11:06 AM | More vandalized culture in Iraq? One of the greatest wonders of civilisation, and probably the world's most ancient structure - the Sumerian city of Ur in southern Iraq - has been vandalised by American soldiers and airmen, according to aid workers in the area. They claim that US forces have spray-painted the remains with graffiti and stolen kiln-baked bricks made millennia ago.... Ur is believed by many to be the birthplace of the prophet Abraham. It was the religious seat of the civilisation of Sumer at the dawn of the line of dynasties which ruled Mesopotamia starting about 4000 BC. Long before the rise of the Egyptian, Greek or Roman empires, it was here that the wheel was invented and the first mathematical system developed. Here, the first poetry was written, notably the epic Gilganesh, a classic of ancient literature.... --Observer (U.K.) (Thanks again to the Rational Enquirer.) posted by Steve M. | 9:55 AM | The Los Angeles Times reports this: At least 1,700 Iraqi civilians died and more than 8,000 were injured in the battle for the Iraqi capital, according to a Los Angeles Times survey of records from 27 hospitals in the capital and its outlying districts. In addition, undocumented civilian deaths in Baghdad number at least in the hundreds and could reach 1,000, according to Islamic burial societies and humanitarian groups that are trying to trace those missing in the conflict. Again, that's Baghdad alone. The article explains the survey methods used at hospitals and other care facilities, and the method for arriving at that figure of 1,700 seems careful. Meanwhile, an estimate of 1,000 additional undocumented deaths comes from the Red Crescent: Haidar Tari, director of tracing missing persons for the Iraqi Red Crescent, estimated there could have been up to 3,000 ... undocumented burials, perhaps one-third of them involving civilians. The Red Crescent has half a dozen teams working in districts where large numbers of dead were buried, but has not yet gained access to some areas under U.S. military control, including a large swath of land near the airport. Hardest to trace will be people who died while traveling, Tari said. Their relatives might not have known when they left home, or where they were headed, and thus have no idea where to look. "On one stretch of highway alone, there were more than 50 civilian cars, each with four or five people incinerated inside, that sat in the sun for 10 or 15 days before they were buried nearby by volunteers," Tari said. "That is what there will be for their relatives to come and find. War is bad, but its remnants are worse." (As usual, use "clipjoint" as both member name and password if you're not already registered.) (Thanks to Rational Enquirer for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 9:51 AM | EARTH TO SAFIRE ... EARTH TO SAFIRE .... Four Palestinian suicide bombings. Suicide bombings in Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Near-total societal breakdown in Iraq. Scary times, no? Not in whatever Cloud-Cuckooland William Safire is writing from. Here's the lead of the column he published today: Worried about having nothing new to worry about? Upset that Baghdad turned out to be a cakewalk and SARS didn't lay everybody low? Idiot. posted by Steve M. | 9:35 AM | Your pro-war friends who smugly remind you that not as many museum artifacts were lost or destroyed in Iraq as originally feared need to read this: ...Basra University remained one of the few things that seemed to function well here, according to students and teachers. It has long been a source of pride for Basra, a city of 1.5 million people. Now, a library that professors say contained two million volumes dating back to 1015 is a mess of twisted metal shelves atop ashes from the books set ablaze by looters. The blue dome that professors say housed the oldest astronomy department in the Middle East is still there, but inside there is nothing but rubble. The law school, the economics department, the art school, the Arabic studies wing — all are ruined. The damage goes beyond what would be caused in mere burglary, crossing over into wanton destruction.... Volumes dating back to 1015 -- gone. But hey, the oil is secure, right? posted by Steve M. | 9:24 AM | Sunday, May 18, 2003 Last month, I expressed skepticism about certain documents an ABC News correspondent found virtually undamaged in a Baghdad building, despite the fact that the building had been bombed and looted, and despite the fact that other documents in the building had been burned or shredded. Now Swopa at Needlenose sifts through some stories, including that one, and notes that you can often find the fingerprints of the Iraqi National Congress (and some of its U.S. pals) when a story from Iraq seems (from the Bush administration's point of view) too good to be true. Interesting. And let's not forget, of course, that Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that dramatic stories fed into the pipeline by the INC often don't pan out: With the Pentagon’s support, Chalabi’s group worked to put defectors with compelling stories in touch with reporters in the United States and Europe. The resulting articles had dramatic accounts of advances in weapons of mass destruction or told of ties to terrorist groups. In some cases, these stories were disputed in analyses by the C.I.A. Misstatements and inconsistencies in I.N.C. defector accounts were also discovered after the final series of U.N. weapons inspections, which ended a few days before the American assault. Dr. Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in political science at Cambridge University, compiled and examined the information that had been made public and concluded that the U.N. inspections had failed to find evidence to support the defectors’ claims.... posted by Steve M. | 7:36 PM | If you've read a lot of his work, it's fairly obvious that Christopher Hitchens is repulsed by women -- but is his peculiar misogyny so all-consuming that it would find its way into a review of a book on the writing of the King James Bible? Yup. Writing about Adam Nicolson's God's Secretaries in The New York Times Book Review, Hitchens says of the year 1604, The once refulgent reign of Queen Elizabeth had come to a stale and frustrated end in the preceding year, and a new monarch had been imported from Scotland, emerging from the rather questionable uterus of the old queen's former rival, the amorously notorious Mary, Queen of Scots. Excuse me? "Rather questionable uterus"? How can a uterus be questionable? And what on Earth does this have to do with the Bible? I suspect that, for Hitchens, all uteruses are questionable. Not content with merely critiquing tales of Mother Teresa's saintliness, he wanted (scroll down) to call his book about her Sacred Cow; it was ultimately published as The Missionary Position. Years ago, he appeared on U.S. television -- Nightline, as I recall -- and repeatedly denounced Princess Diana as "that loathsome Spencer woman." (Sorry -- I don't have a link for this, but it's a vivid memory, and I'm uncertain only of whether the adjective was "loathsome," "repulsive," or "vile.") Katha Pollitt can't quite remember whether he used to refer to women as "douchebags." And while he was not the only person to loathe Bill Clinton from the left, he was probably the only leftist (rather than liberal or liberal-centrist) to embrace the far right wholeheartedly, and the proximate cause was not Clinton's advocacy of welfare reform or NAFTA but his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Hitchens has, as they say, issues -- though I never expected them to surface in this context. posted by Steve M. | 9:34 AM | Saturday, May 17, 2003 OK, this is fairly trivial, but it annoys me: VENEZUELA: U.S. AMBASSADOR CRITICIZED The government sharply criticized the American ambassador, Charles Shapiro, for holding an event at his official Caracas residence during which a female impersonator used a puppet to ridicule President Hugo Chávez. "What we have here is an irresponsible U.S. ambassador," Vice President José Vicente Rangel told a news conference, adding that the incident could be interpreted as "a provocation." The event, to commemorate International Press Freedom Day, was broadcast on television and was attended by several anti-Chávez media personalities. It ended with the appearance of the female impersonator carrying a large puppet representing the Venezuelan president. Mr. Shapiro planted a mock kiss on the impersonator's cheek. This is one of our diplomats. Imagine if the French ambassador to the U.S. had an event scheduled that was, for some reason, slated to be broadcast live on U.S. TV. -- say, PBS. Now imagine if the guest list pointedly included Michael Moore, Janeane Garofalo, Martin Sheen, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, with music from the Dixie Chicks. Think anyone here would be a bit peeved? Think it would be considered a tad undiplomatic? posted by Steve M. | 1:15 PM | Dumb terrorists in Morocco. Don't they know that if you want to get the attention of Americans you don't launch a vicious, brutal suicide bombing on a Friday night? Friday night is when you do things you don't want Americans to notice. The Bush administration knows that, which is why this story is breaking now: In Reversal, Plan for Iraq Self-Rule Has Been Put Off In an abrupt reversal, the United States and Britain have indefinitely put off their plan to allow Iraqi opposition forces to form a national assembly and an interim government by the end of the month. Instead, top American and British diplomats leading reconstruction efforts here told exile leaders in a meeting tonight that allied officials would remain in charge of Iraq for an indefinite period, said Iraqis who attended the meeting. It was conducted by L. Paul Bremer, the new civilian administrator here. "It's quite clear that you cannot transfer all powers onto some interim body, because it will not have the strength or the resources to carry those responsibilities out," The Associated Press quoted Mr. Sawers as saying. "There was agreement that we should aim to have a national conference as soon as we reasonably could do so." ...Opposition leaders were "very respectful" to Mr. Bremer and Mr. Sawers, a participant said, "but I think everyone was also pretty forceful about the need to have full sovereignty for the Iraqis." A question they kept posing, he added, was, "Do you want to run this place, or should we?" No date was set for creating an interim authority, and no details about its powers and functions were discussed in the meeting, the Iraqis said.... posted by Steve M. | 10:56 AM | You probably read that article from yesterday's New York Times about the management of image in the Bush White House (this is the link, though as I type this the whole Times site seems to be down). I want to put up a couple of numbers, for comparison. First, there's this from a USA Today story about Bush's Top Gun stunt on the Abraham Lincoln: Staff members for Rep. David Obey of Wisconsin, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, calculated that the visit delayed the ship's arrival in San Diego by at least a day and cost as much as $1 million in extra fuel costs, plus $100,000 in additional sea duty pay for the crew. Now, from yesterday's Times article (I'm typing from the print edition): The president's image makers, Mr. Bartlett [White House communications director Dan Bartlett] said, work within a budget for White House events allotted by Congress, which for fiscal 2003 was $3.7 million. So if Obey is right, this stunt ate up 30 percent of the year's budget for events like this in one day. Lovely. posted by Steve M. | 10:46 AM | Friday, May 16, 2003 This (from The Independent) is just appalling: Statistics unpublished until today reveal the stark facts: 242 people have died in Baghdad in just over three weeks, almost all from bullet wounds. It is an epidemic, and it is getting worse.... Dr Fa'ak Amin Bakr, director of the city mortuary, says 242 people have died in the past 25 days, of whom more than nine out of 10 had been shot. He says that before the invasion Baghdad had an average of one death a day caused by gunshot wounds. Battles between looters and score-settling from the Saddam years have taken hold, fuelled by a security vacuum that owes much to a decision by Donald Rumsfeld, the American Defence Secretary, to invade and occupy Iraq with minimum troop numbers – two divisions short, say well- informed sources within the Allies' reconstruction team. They are the by-product, too, of the failure of the Allies to coax the Baghdad police to return to work in sufficient numbers. Most of the Iraqi officers who have returned have yet to come out of their police stations. And homicide figures are going up. The 124 who died from bullet wounds in the past 10 days is a rise of 60 per cent on the previous 10-day period.... I keep going back to what that smug bastard InstaPundit said near the end of the war in his MSNBC blog: The latest Iraqi claim I could find was for 500 civilian casualties and it’s almost surely inflated. Various antiwar groups are claiming to keep count, but their numbers, as several different commentators have observed, appear to be bogus. So I think it’s very possible that Iraqi civilian casualties, too, will turn out to be under 500. The casualties from gunshot wounds in the postwar period are nearly half that -- in Baghdad alone. And it's all because Donald Rumsfeld was determined to show off and fight this war with low troop numbers, just to show what a big stud he is. Call this apples and oranges if you want to -- I say these are casualties of war. posted by Steve M. | 4:47 PM | A lot of people (Josh Marshall, Paul Krugman, the Rational Enquirer, Cursor) are citing this New Republic article, for good reason -- it's pretty damn scary: Thus far violence in Baghdad has been limited to unorganized gangs of looters carrying Kalashnikovs. But Iraqi security experts and other sources in the capital say that, under the nose of the American forces, Iraq's nascent political groups are forming armed militias and storing weapons as they prepare for a potential civil war for control of the country. In fact, The New Republic has learned, several Iraqis say even Hezbollah has formed a branch in Baghdad. Ultimately, if Baghdad's power vacuum is not filled soon, the rise of organized armed factions could turn Iraq's capital into a twenty-first-century version of 1980s Beirut.... Though the armed wings of political parties already possess small arms, security sources say they are storing heavier weapons around Baghdad and other cities. In fact, says Sadoun Dulaimi, a one-time high-ranking Baghdad police official who recently returned to Iraq after fleeing the country in 1991 when Saddam sentenced him to death, what makes the militias so dangerous is their access to heavy weaponry, such as rocket-propelled grenades. ... Even tanks left around Baghdad by the retreating Iraqi army may have fallen into militias' hands.... I want to juxtapose an excerpt from this article with an excerpt from today's Paul Krugman column. First, The New Republic: In part, U.S. reluctance to take on the militias may be a product of the relative security of the part of Baghdad where most Americans are billeted. Though most of the capital remains highly unsafe, and militias are becoming increasingly prevalent, American officials and journalists do not often see the armed groups because they generally stay within the small area surrounding the U.S. compounds and the Palestine and Sheraton Hotels, an area protected by Abrams tanks and machine-gun-wielding soldiers. Now Krugman: The administration's antiterror campaign makes me think of the way television studios really look. The fancy set usually sits in the middle of a shabby room, full of cardboard and duct tape. Networks take great care with what viewers see on their TV screens; they spend as little as possible on anything off camera. I don't think the administration gives a damn what happens to the Iraqi people -- as long as they remain "off camera." posted by Steve M. | 1:30 PM | You know things are bad in Iraq when even the New York Post acknowledges it: ...soldiers see the reservoir of Iraqi goodwill draining away while bureaucrats take their time holding meetings and making plans as if time were somehow not an issue. They fear that their successors here will face an intifada in the summer if power, water, medicine, gasoline and food don't start reaching Iraqi civilians. "We ain't helping these people" says Sgt. Johnny Perdue of the 4/64 Scouts. It's just so f----ing frustrating. ORHA [the Organization for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid] say they're doing it. Well, they're not doing it in the places we go." "I'm no bleeding heart" says Sgt. Leon "Pete" Peters (who had more than his share of kills during the fighting south of the city). "I'll pull the trigger quick as anyone. But this place is going to go crazy if we don't find a way to help these people . . . I've been here for more than 30 days and I've yet to see a single yellow humanitarian food package." He asks why American companies aren't being brought over to fix the electricity here. "You could get a message out to real Americans like the company I used to work for, and they'd come over here and get the power back on in a week." ... The failure of ORHA and the Civil Affairs teams to have an impact in the street is particularly galling to men like Sgts. Peters and Perdue, who are working 19 hours a day, much of them spent walking through alleys ankle deep in uncollected trash. The bureaucrats, on the other hand, work civilian hours.... The Civil Affairs brigades are also notorious for failing to keep appointments with the locals. They'll put out a call for some kind of local professionals, telling candidates to turn up at the gate to the palace area at 9 a.m. on Tuesday. But when Tuesday comes, they'll forget to send anyone to get the 300 candidates through security, or cancel the recruiting session without telling anyone (as happened with interpreters in the third week of April). Sometimes important local officials or informants or even Shia mullahs will be left to stand waiting for hours in the sun.... There are articles like this in the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, the British press, and elsewhere on a regular basis -- Rational Enquirer regularly provides links to these. But I'm surprised to see an article like this in Murdoch's Post. posted by Steve M. | 12:42 PM | When I heard that Bush won again in the Senate on tax cuts, I started to wonder: What would happen if lefties began to fight for a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution? Remember the balanced budget amendment? As late as 1997, Republicans loved the idea; now, of course, they'd run from it like scared rabbits. Budget balancing is an issue that resonates in the heartland, or at least it used to. It could unite lefties with the people who reject what they see as baby-boomer irresponsibility, the people who liked Ross Perot and Paul Tsongas. It could drive the GOP nuts. Oh, I know: It's not a good idea; it's pretty much what's straitjacketing state governments now as tax revenues plummet. And if the movement were led, or partially led, by lefties, and it started to catch on, the right would discredit it by discrediting us ("During the war in Iraq, while our troops were in harm's way, this is someone who had the audacity to say..."). But I bet it's something Karl Rove hasn't war-gamed against. Maybe it could throw him off stride. (Something has to, someday, or we're screwed.) A stupid idea, probably, but I'm just thinking out loud here. posted by Steve M. | 10:50 AM | In the hours before U.S. bombs began falling on the Iraqi capital, one of Saddam Hussein's sons and a close adviser carried off nearly $1 billion in cash from the country's Central Bank, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.... Some Americans said they suspect the money may have been spirited across the border into Syria, in much the same way some senior officials in Saddam's government were believed to have fled Iraq. Col. Ted Seel, a U.S. Army Special Forces officer who said he knew about the seizure of money, said intelligence information at the time indicated that a group of tractor-trailers crossed the Iraqi border into Syria. --Dexter Filkins in The New York Times, May 6, 2003 The night after President Bush gave him 48 hours to surrender, Saddam Hussein sent his son Qusay to the vault of Iraq's Central Bank to make a modest withdrawal for the family's departure. It took three tractor-trailers to haul away nearly a billion dollars in cash — all in $100 U.S. greenbacks — plus $100 million worth of euros. Thus did Saddam & Sons bring off the grandest larceny in bank history.... The stolen billion was probably driven out of Iraq on March 18, the night before the war began. Across which of its borders? Iran, Saddam's enemy, is least likely; Turkey, which does not want further tensions with the U.S., unlikely; Jordan, possible; Syria, occupying Lebanon, with its corrupt Beirut banks, the most probable. --William Safire in The New York Times, May 8, 2003 American Treasury officials announced today that they had recovered $950 million in Iraqi assets that they believe constitutes the bulk of the $1 billion looted by Saddam Hussein's family hours before war began in mid-March. The money was found inside Iraq within the last week, they said, dispelling a theory proffered earlier by military officials in Baghdad that it might have been whisked into Syria aboard three tractor-trailers. --Timothy L. O'Brien in The New York Times, May 15, 2003 Apparently -- shocking as this may seem to conservatives -- you don't have to be an affirmative-action hire to publish articles in The New York Times that are utterly at odds with objective reality. And you don't have to black, either -- Safire's white, obviously, as is Dexter Filkins. posted by Steve M. | 9:25 AM | Thursday, May 15, 2003 The Republican Party regards itself as "the party of ideas" -- and now those ideas are being articulated by a new voice. Joining such savants as Gary Aldrich, Paul Weyrich, and Tammy Bruce is a new pundit writing for the right-wing Web site NewsMax: Melrose Larry Green. Some of you know exactly who that is. The rest of you are fortunate. This site explains: While standing on the corner of Melrose and Vine in Los Angeles almost every morning with a sandwich board preaching the virtues of Howard Stern, Melrose Larry Green came to life. Melrose has traveled around the country with his signs being beaten, arrested and verbally abused while exclaiming "Baba Booey" to the world. Hated by most fans and Gary [Dell'Abate, producer of Howard Stern's show], Melrose endures due to Howard's fascination with him. Here's his vitae, from AmIAnnoying.com. You probably think a guy like this can't possibly be taken seriously as a political commentator. But consider: * Michael Savage, a self-proclamed "World Famous Herbal Expert," has a high-rated radio show, a TV show on MSNBC, and a #1 New York Times bestseller; * P.J. O'Rourke, who used to write articles for National Lampoon with titles such as "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink," is a best-selling author and is now considered a political philosopher; * Dr. Laura Schlessinger, a Ph.D. in physiology, is a successful radio host and author and is now considered a moral philosopher; * Dennis Miller, who once sang a song on Saturday Night Live the chorus of which consisted of the word "penis" repeated over and over, has now written his first Wall Street Journal op-ed piece. So it's entirely possible that in a few years we'll see Bill O'Reilly nodding sagely and agreeing with Melrose Larry's opinions about Ted Kennedy, while he tells Katrina vanden Heuvel that she's an idiot. One of Melrose Larry's NewsMax articles is "Moran's Remarks 'Insensitive, Irresponsible and Inaccurate,'" a response to anti-Semitic comments by the conservative Democratic congressman. Larry writes: As an American and a Jew, I was shocked to read the recent anti-Semitic comments of Rep. James P. Moran, D-Va. ... These remarks are insensitive, irresponsible and inaccurate. Here's an excerpt from Private Parts, the first book by Howard Stern, a man Larry deeply admires: Take the Mexicans. They're nice people. I got nothing against Mexicans, but if they're Mexicans, they should be in Mexico. And the ones that come here are so angry. Of course, I'd be confused and angry, too, if I had dark skin and white people's hair. Speaking of hair, how do you like those Hispanic chicks who dye their hair blond? That's an attractive look. No wonder some Spanish guys are ready to rape any white woman who comes along. Now that I think of it, I wonder why Stern isn't writing for NewsMax. posted by Steve M. | 11:43 PM | This is from The Times of London: BARONESS Thatcher returned to politics last night with an attack on the French, whom she accused of collaborating with “enemies of the West” for short-term gain.... She praised Tony Blair, but above all President Bush, for overriding the “rot” that “paralysed” the United Nations. A few paragraphs down, there's this: Lady Thatcher said that she had “drunk deep from the same well of ideas” as her great ally, the former US President Ronald Reagan. And there's also this: Lady Thatcher said: “For years, many governments played down the threats of Islamic revolution, turned a blind eye to international terrorism and accepted the development of weaponry of mass destruction. Indeed, some politicians were happy to go further, collaborating with the self-proclaimed enemies of the West for their own short-term gain — but enough about the French....” Yeah, coddling enemies of the West is such a French thing to do.... Washington, D.C., 25 February 2003 - The National Security Archive at George Washington University today published on the Web a series of declassified U.S. documents detailing the U.S. embrace of Saddam Hussein in the early 1980's, including the renewal of diplomatic relations that had been suspended since 1967. The documents show that during this period of renewed U.S. support for Saddam, he had invaded his neighbor (Iran), had long-range nuclear aspirations that would "probably" include "an eventual nuclear weapon capability," harbored known terrorists in Baghdad, abused the human rights of his citizens, and possessed and used chemical weapons on Iranians and his own people. The U.S. response was to renew ties, to provide intelligence and aid to ensure Iraq would not be defeated by Iran, and to send a high-level presidential envoy named Donald Rumsfeld to shake hands with Saddam (20 December 1983). The declassified documents posted today include the briefing materials and diplomatic reporting on two Rumsfeld trips to Baghdad, reports on Iraqi chemical weapons use concurrent with the Reagan administration's decision to support Iraq, and decision directives signed by President Reagan that reveal the specific U.S. priorities for the region: preserving access to oil, expanding U.S. ability to project military power in the region, and protecting local allies from internal and external threats.... posted by Steve M. | 4:23 PM | Chris Whittle promises profits soon, but I see that his "for-profit" company Edison Schools is still in the red, according to The New York Times: The company's net loss for its fiscal third quarter, which ended on March 30, was $6.4 million, exactly half the size of its loss in the same quarter last year, on revenue of $108.4 million. For the nine months that ended in March, the company lost $35.2 million on revenue of $291 million, down from a loss of $37.1 million on revenue of $327.3 million in the same period a year earlier.... Edison's effort to rein in its growth in pursuit of profitability was evident in the continuing shrinkage of its revenue, as it continued to close out unprofitable management contracts and it was unable to renew a few other contracts around the country. Net revenue in the third quarter fell more than 10 percent from the same period a year earlier.... Every year, all over the country, tax increases and bond issues are rejected as ways of dealing with school budget shortfalls; taxpayers, having heard decades of right-wing propaganda about "government waste," insist schools should "live within their means." So why can't Edison Schools live within its means? And if it can't, why do conservatives lavish it with praise? posted by Steve M. | 1:45 PM | Fox News, of course, calls itself "fair and balanced." It also posts billboards proclaiming that it delivers "real journalism." When you hear those phrases, what's the first thing that comes to mind? Perhaps something like this response from Fox's Neil Cavuto to comments in a recent Paul Krugman column? ...You're as phony as you are unprofessional. And you have the nerve to criticize me, or Fox News, and by extension, News Corporation? ...And by the way, you sanctimonious twit, no one -- no one -- tells me what to say. I say it. And I write it. And no one lectures me on it. Save you, you pretentious charlatan. ..Nowhere does it ever occur to you, one can legitimately not agree with you. That doesn't make me less of a journalist. But, Mr. Krugman, it does make you more of an ass.... Now may I suggest you take your column and shove it? Lovely. posted by Steve M. | 1:22 PM | Yeah, the Drudge Report can be obnoxious -- but give the guy his due: every so often he gives you a story that doesn't reflect well on his side. Like this one: Some Audience Members Told Not to Wear Ties for Bush Speech President Bush came to Indianapolis to send the message that his tax cut plan will help everyone and not just the wealthy. That's why all those people sitting behind him were instructed on what to wear.... George W. Bush came to Indianapolis for the picture. And in that picture, the White House wanted ordinary people. “These are V.I.P.'s right, ordinary people aren't up on stage behind the president of the United States when he's speaking but the trick is to make V.I.P.'s look like they're ordinary people,” said Bill Bloomquist, political scientist. That's why everyone sitting behind the president wearing a necktie was instructed to take it off. Exhibit A is Brian Bosma. He appeared onstage in a necktie, prior to the president's arrival. When the president got there the Indiana House minority leader had an open collar. In a News 8 interview immediately following the speech, the tie was back on. ...There were some other neckties in the crowd but most of them belonged to Secret Service agents. Representative Bosma told News 8, “When the guy from the White House tells you to take your tie off, you don't ask why.” But he also removed his pocket square.... Now, our side needs a media food chain that can turn this into ... Tiegate! posted by Steve M. | 12:17 PM | Howell Raines says Jews were responsible for the Holocaust! Outrageous! How can any decent person write for his paper? ...No, wait -- it wasn't the editor of The New York Times, it was the owner of The Washington Times, Sun Myung Moon, who said this in a speech on March 2 in Arlington, Virginia: "Who are the Jewish members here, raise your hands! Jewish people, you have to repent. Jesus was the King of Israel. Through the principle of indemnity Hitler killed six million Jews. That is why. God could not prevent Satan from doing that because Israel killed the True Parents." Wake me when a conservative denounces Moon for this, or refuses to write for Moon's Bush-friendly paper. (The quote is from the May issue of Church & State, the magazine of Americans United for Separation of Church & State. The story isn't online yet.) ***** UPDATE: It's nearly two years late, but here's the link. posted by Steve M. | 10:00 AM | Wednesday, May 14, 2003 Mere months after an endless round of right-wing whining about signs at peace demonstrations that compared Bush to Hitler, a conservative "thinker" seems to be crossing the Nazi name-calling line. Publishers Lunch reports that the following book will be published in 2005 by Doubleday: National Review editor Jonah Goldberg's LIBERAL FASCISM, arguing that "like the national socialists of old, today's liberal fascists care about ends more than means, politicize the personal, see citizens as representatives of their race and ethnicity and inject ideology into every aspect of our daily lives," and maintaining that "political correctness is merely the social etiquette of Liberal Fascism, the good manners of the New Age".... Lovely -- so now we're all Nazis. The editor of this book by the Spawn of Lucianne will be Adam Bellow, who used to edit right-wing swill at Free Press when Christopher Ruddy and the then-conservative David Brock were publishing there. But to give Bellow his due, he's also signed this book up: Jacob Heilbrunn's AMERICAN CAESARS: The Rise of the Neoconservatives, looking at the much-discussed group that includes Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Michael Rubin, Elliott Abrams, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, plus William Kristol, James Woolsey, David Frum, and Richard Perle, asserting that they aim for "nothing less than the destruction of the United Nations and its replacement with the U.S. as the arbiter of international relation," and showing "where these anti-totalitarian crusaders came from—and where they're taking the U.S."... Alas, that one will also be out in 2005, too late to influence the election. Since it's these guys we're really voting for, that's a pity. Heilbrunn wrote, among other things, "His Anti-Semitic Sources," a 1995 New York Review of Books article about the writings that inspired some of Pat Robertson's best-known books. (The article, alas, is pay-per-view online.) Gee, do you think Jonah Goldberg has ever compared Pat Robertson to "the national socialists of old"? In 2005, Crown Forum (Ann Coulter's imprint) will publish Norman Podhoretz's HATING AMERICA, on anti-Americanism, both its current incarnation and its historical and philosophical sources which, I guess, will be exactly like every other right-wing book, except polysyllabic. But there's also this about another Crown author: Film rights have sold to the David Brock's bestselling BLINDED BY THE RIGHT, to writer/producer David Hayter (X Men, X2)... Not really the guy you'd want making this movie, but still. Oh, and Thomas Nelson Books (the Bible publishers who also publish Michael Savage) will publish the latest Laurie Beth Jones book: Jesus, Coach. Jones is also the author of Jesus, CEO and Jesus, Entrepreneur. posted by Steve M. | 11:44 PM | Greetings to everyone who saw the Atrios/Eschaton link. What he's referring to is four posts down.... posted by Steve M. | 6:00 PM | Yikes! posted by Steve M. | 3:32 PM | This story says that the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, which has seized thirty-two European tourists in Algeria this year, is affiliated with al-Qaeda. Seventeen of the tourists were freed in a gun battle yesterday. The other fifteen are presumably still being held by the group -- which, apparently, has not been apprised of the fact that it cowers in fear at the sheer manliness and utter global dominance of President Flight Suit, the embodiment of freedom and Western values and the scourge of all the world's terrorists. posted by Steve M. | 3:10 PM | 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. Rather than more terrorism, removing Saddam will bring more respect for the United States. Terrorists will be increasingly fearful. --Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard, 3/6/03, shortly before the war started posted by Steve M. | 2:20 PM | Andrew Sullivan reviews Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars in this week's New York Observer. Blumenthal is a Democratic loyalist who doesn't much like Republicans, and his book reflects that. Apparently, this is utterly remarkable to Sullivan: It’s not a memoir, or a history. It’s a Gospel. Its facts are assembled, as the facts in the Gospels were assembled, for one purpose only: to affirm the faith, to rally the flock, to spread the further glory of the Church. It’s an allegory of eternal good and evil.... ...This is Sid’s utopia. A world run by Democrats, in which everyone is a Democrat, everything is a Democrat, and being a Democrat is being a member of the elect, the saved, the holy. Over and over, Sullivan shakes his head -- agog at the realization that someone in politics actually expressed his own partisan political beliefs in a book about a presidency. Apparently, in his travels, Sullivan has never once happened across this book. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. Or this one. ********* Ah, but poor Andrew: He goes on for nearly three thousand words about how awful Blumenthal's book is, and deals out one or two crumbs of praise to show that he, heaven forfend, isn't a partisan zealot -- and those crumbs will almost certainly make their way into ads for Blumenthal's book, and on the pages of reviewer praise that will go into the paperback edition: "The account Mr. Blumenthal gives of the haplessness and priggishness of Kenneth Starr is riveting stuff. ...The insane attempt to actually bring down a President over perjury in a civil suit has not yet been more vividly evoked. ... Brutally revealing about the stupidity, bigotry, malevolence and extremism of the right-wing forces that became obsessed with President Clinton." --Andrew Sullivan, New York Observer posted by Steve M. | 12:59 PM | Interesting detail from Joshua Micah Marshall: Several days ago a friend who is renowned for his expertise on al-Qaida and Islamist terrorism generally told me that there had been a wave of shootings of Westerners in Saudi Arabia recently. But the Saudis had dismissed them as simply criminal incidents arising out of disputes over the illicit trade in liquor. I don't know the precise numbers. I don't think we're talking about that many people. But it seemed to make him wonder whether these might actually be low-level terror attacks which the Saudis were simply covering up, by deceptively categorizing them. As I mentioned yesterday, CNN has noted two such recent incidents. Have there been more? How bad is it out there? How many such incidents did the White House know about when it ordered a "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED" banner hung behind Bush as he told sailors on the Abraham Lincoln that we'd essentially done what we set out to do in Iraq and Afghanistan? posted by Steve M. | 10:29 AM | The front-page headline in the print New York Times is: Bush Condemns Saudi Blasts; 7 Americans Are Dead. For the past year-plus Bush was distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and related groups, but's that's not the headline; the story is Bush, Our Avenger. And we wonder why his popularity persists. Maureen Dowd gets it: Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. "Al Qaeda is on the run," President Bush said last week. "That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. . . . They're not a problem anymore." Members of the U.S. intelligence community bragged to reporters that the terrorist band was crippled, noting that it hadn't attacked during the assault on Iraq. "This was the big game for them — you put up or shut up, and they have failed," Cofer Black, who heads the State Department's counterterrorism office, told The Washington Post last week. Of course, the other way of looking at it is that Al Qaeda works at its own pace and knows how to conduct operations on the run.... Buried in the rubble of Riyadh are some of the Bush administration's basic assumptions: that Al Qaeda was finished, that invading Iraq would bring regional stability and that a show of American superpower against Saddam would cow terrorists. Bob Graham, the Florida senator running for president, said at the Capitol yesterday that Iraq had been a diversion: "We essentially ended the war on terror about a year ago. And since that time, Al Qaeda has been allowed to regenerate." Doing a buddy routine with Rummy yesterday in Washington, as the defense secretary accepted an award, Vice President Dick Cheney was as implacable as ever. "The only way to deal with this threat ultimately is to destroy it," he said. So destroy it. posted by Steve M. | 9:48 AM | Drudge linked this story yesterday to try to demonstrate that Democratic complaints about Bush's Top Gun stunt were hypocritical: ‘Tailhook scandal’ finds congressmen in same boat Lost in the political firestorm over President Bush’s Top Gun landing on an aircraft carrier to proclaim the end of the Iraq war is the fact that lawmakers and congressional staff have routinely made similar forays. Navy records show that 25 congressional personnel, including 12 lawmakers, have flown to aircraft carriers in four separate instances since the beginning of the year.... The story enumerated ordinary trips to aircraft carriers by members of Congress and their staffs -- overlooking the fact that the complaints about the Top Gun stunt weren't about the fact that it happened but about the way it was done, with a showy and utterly unnecessary tailhook landing. The story listed the names of several others in government who'd made the same kind of tailhook landing Bush made: In late January, six congressional aides made a less publicized tailhook landing on the USS Nimitz as it also plied the waters off of Southern California, Navy records show. Aides to Republican Sens. Sam Brownback (Kan.), Michael Crapo (Idaho), Thad Cochran (Miss.), and Jeff Sessions (Ala.), and to Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.), made the tailhook landing on Jan. 24. The delegation stayed overnight and left the following day.... ... a group of lawmakers led by House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) made a tailhook landing on the USS Harry S Truman, deployed in the Mediterranean Sea. Traveling with Hastert to the carrier were Republican Reps. Judy Biggert (Ill.), Anne Northup (Ky.), Mike Pence (Ind.), John Portman (Ohio), John Shadegg (Ariz.) and Todd Tiahrt (Kan.). Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.) also made the landing. At least 16 press organizations reported on the trip to the carrier. Let's see -- one Republican president, seven Republican House members, six Republican senatorial aides, and one Democratic House member did this. Anyone see, y'know, a pattern here? posted by Steve M. | 9:34 AM | Drudge Report shock headline: EMERGENCY MEETING CALLED AT OLD GRAY LADY; NEWSROOM IN CRISIS Text of Howell, Gerald and Arthur request that you join your newsroom colleagues at an open forum at 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 14, to discuss the Jayson Blair matter and anything else you might have on your mind. The meeting will be held at the Loew's Astor Theater, the moviehouse just behind The Times on 44th Street at Broadway, across from Carmine's. Doors open at 2:15 p.m. Please be sure to bring your Times i.d. card. No one will be admitted to the theater without their Times i.d. You will be able to ask questions from the floor, or write them on cards that will be distributed at the door. In addition, we have set up an email address -- forum@nytimes.com -- where you can send questions, either in advance of the session or afterward. On Wednesday morning, we will send out a separate email advising correspondents and bureaus outside New York how they may dial into the forum and listen to the session. Unfortunately, because of the short time available to set up the forum, people listening from a remote location will not be able to ask live questions. You may, however, avail yourself of the email address above. If you get questions to us before 2 p.m. EDT tomorrow, we will put them into the hopper. Otherwise, they will be answered later. My company had a couple of high-profile dismissals in the past year, and we were summoned to several meetings like this. There was anxiety, but we heard reassurances, adjustments were made, and life went on. I actually find Drudge somewhat useful these days -- lately he's been more a source of links than a gossipmonger. But this is just idiotic. ****************** Equally idiotic, I think, is the fact that the Feds are wasting your tax dollars investigating possible criminal fraud charges against Jayson Blair. Excuse me -- his career is over, he's humiliated, and, well, I kind of suspect the Times could afford a lawyer or two if it wants to sue him. Nobody outside the media universe has any reason to give a damn about this story, which is why I didn't want to write about it, but the usual suspects have made it a political story (America-hating liberal paper publishes black affirmative-action liar!) and now Limbaughnistas in heartland America think it's relevant to them. Do I think this White House would try to keep the pot stirred, try to stretch the story out, by nudging federal prosecutors to investigate this guy? Yeah, I do. posted by Steve M. | 9:25 AM | Bomb Injures Several in Yemeni Court SAN'A, Yemen - A bomb exploded in a Yemeni court on Wednesday, wounding several people in the same place where a suspected al-Qaida militant was condemned to death last week for killing three U.S. missionaries, security officials said.... --AP This is in addition to the Saudi Arabia car bombings. Yeah, George Bush and His Mighty Flight Suit sure made all the world's evildoers cower with that Iraq war, didn't they? posted by Steve M. | 7:14 AM | Tuesday, May 13, 2003 I don't want to write about Jayson Blair and The New York Times. All I'd ever want to say about the subject has already been said by Kevin Drum and, in his May 12 post "A Victory for Diversity," Roger Ailes. One guy screwed up royally and his bosses didn't grasp the extent to which this was so. End of story. I do, however, want to stick a thumb in the eye of everyone on the right who has a Schadenfreude O.D. whenever something goes wrong at the Times. Andrew Sullivan, I gather, is so overstimulated by l'affaire Blair that he's practically levitating (I can't bring myself to read what he's written on the subject, which I'm given to understand is approaching the word count of Anna Karenina); earlier, Sullivan gloated about a recent decline in the Times's circulation. At Lucianne.com, whoever ghostwrites Ms. Goldberg's home page had a delusional fantasy this morningabout the Times: When the left loses the New York Times - and it's only a matter of time - a blow will be struck that even the most well engineered and financed coup from the right could never accomplish. The Old Grey Lady is dying from inner rot and congenital hubris. Er, no, it isn't. Here's the reality: The Times still has a huge circulation, as the Audit Bureau of Circulation notes; it's fat with ads and its readers are well heeled. And yesterday the print edition of the Times reported Nielsen/NetRatings numbers for online viewership of newspapers. Number 1? The Times, with 9,546,000 visitors in March '03, up 24% from the previous March, and nearly 2,500,000 ahead of the #2 Washington Post. For whatever it's worth, the Times will endure; Sullivan and Goldberg and their ilk just need to deal with it. posted by Steve M. | 11:55 PM | Remember ScrappleFace? The blogger who first called France and German the Axis of Weasels? Well, here's a new ’Face "joke" that might have made Hitler chuckle: Rep. Waxman Amputates Nose After Jet Incident (2003-05-09) -- Just a week after climber Aron Ralston had to cut off his own arm to save his life, Rep. Henry Waxman cut off his nose to spite his face. The California Democrat amputated his prodigious proboscis during the aftermath of an incident involving a jet plane, an aircraft carrier and President Bush. Details of the incident are sketchy, but Congressional insiders say it appears that Rep. Waxman thought he could make himself look better by self-amputation. The Congressman has already been fitted with a prosthesis. Yeah, we love jokes about those hook-nosed ... er, liberals.... posted by Steve M. | 6:25 PM | This story, if I remember right, made the front page of The New York Times last week: President Bush and the National Rifle Association, long regarded as staunch allies, find themselves unlikely adversaries over one of the most significant pieces of gun-control legislation in the last decade, a ban on semiautomatic assault weapons. ...the White House says Mr. Bush supports the extension of the current law — a position that has put him in opposition to the N.R.A. and left many gun owners angry and dumbfounded. The Times played this straight, but to me it looks like a con -- getting prominent placement in the Newspaper of Record for a story about Compassionate Conservative Bush (as opposed to Top Gun Bush) distancing himself from those bad old wingnuts. A prominent D.C. strategist, apparently bucking for a Best Supporting Actor nomination, was shocked, shocked, at Bush's betrayal: "This is a president who has been so good on the Second Amendment that it's just unbelievable to gun owners that he would really sign the ban," said Grover G. Norquist, a leading conservative and an N.R.A. board member who opposes the weapons ban. "I don't think it's sunk in for a lot of people yet." And in case you wondered what the message of this was, the Times delivered it almost as if Karl Rove's fingers were on the keyboard: Advocates on both sides of the issue say the White House appears to have made a bold political calculation: --"bold"! The Bushies' favorite word to describe Bush! -- that the risk of alienating a core constituency is outweighed by appearing independent of the gun lobby, sticking to a campaign promise and supporting a measure that has broad popular appeal.... I say that this looks like a con because now there's this, from Reuters: Delay Sees Assault Gun Ban Expiring in Congress House Majority Leader Tom Delay, a proudly pro-gun Texas Republican, predicted on Tuesday the House will allow a 1994 assault weapons ban to expire next year. "The votes in the House are not there to reauthorize (renew) it," DeLay told reporters. If DeLay's right and the reauthorization dies in the House, this looks like triangulation Bush style -- instead of staking out a centrist position and genuinely advocating it, Bush fakes centrism while letting the hard right do what it wants (which is what he wants). And the Times fell for it. posted by Steve M. | 6:11 PM | Now the death toll is said to be "at least 29 people" at MSNBC, "20 people, plus nine suspected bombers" at CNN. posted by Steve M. | 4:21 PM | I think Bush is going to benefit from the Saudi car bombings. I've seen a number of politicians attain Man on a White Horse status -- President Reagan, Mayors Koch and Giuliani -- and the public admires them even when the very evil they oppose has a moment of triumph. If a horrible, headline-grabbing crime happened on David Dinkins's watch, it was his fault; if it happened while Koch or Giuliani was mayor, the focus was on the strongman mayor's inspirational outrage, not on what might have been done to prevent the crime in the first place. The terrorists Reagan never vanquished and the budget deficits he worsened were never considered a black mark on his presidency because America knew he was on his steed and riding to the rescue, even if the rescue never came. Bush is on the white horse now. I think the more terrorism there is, the more popular he's likely to become, at least in the immediate future. Fox News reports on a speech he gave today in Indiana: "The ruthless murder" of American citizens and others "remind us that the war on terror continues," Bush told a rousing crowd. "These despicable acts were committed by killers whose only faith is hate and the United States will find the killers and they will learn the meanings of American justice … We will be patient. We will be relentless." And he added this, secure in the knowledge that his audience had no idea how absurd his bravado was: "Anytime anyone attacks our fellow citizen, we'll be on the hunt and we'll find them and they'll be brought to justice. Just ask the Taliban." Yeah -- just ask them. posted by Steve M. | 1:51 PM | A small ray of hope, from this Ipsos-Reid poll conducted in mid-April (just after the Great Patriotic Saddam-Spanking War ended) and early May: Attitudes toward reelection [of George W. Bush] have stayed the same among Republicans and Democrats. Among swing-voting Independents, however, attitudes change significantly after the conclusion of the shooting war in Iraq. The net change for those who would definitely vote to reelect George W. Bush is -6, and those who would consider someone else is +8.... A similar pattern exists with regard to generic Congressional vote.... Among Independents, the net change among those who would want to see the Republicans win control of Congress is -6 and among those who would want to see the Democrats win control of Congress, the gap is +4. The percentage of Independents who currently would like to see the Republicans win control of Congress is roughly comparable with early March (18% versus 21% in early March). However, the proportion of Independents who would like to see the Democrats win control of Congress has increased 10 points since early March, when 21% of Independents favored the Democrats winning control of Congress. posted by Steve M. | 1:22 PM | Update: More than ninety dead in Saudi Arabia. posted by Steve M. | 12:12 PM | Andrew Sullivan writes this morning: It's clear now that we have seriously under-estimated the difficulties of imposing order on post-totalitarian Iraq. "We"? What do you mean "we"? Going into the war, the left knew -- and said repeatedly -- that the postwar period would be a huge challenge, in all likelihood a bigger challenge than winning the war. We were watching Afghanistan and we expected the administration to cut corners on nation-building because there are no Top Gun moments in nation-building. By contrast, the possibility of this apparently just occurred to the clueless Sullivan: It's hard to read stories about continued looting in Baghdad or dangerous chaos in the hinterlands, without wondering if the administration is as committed to the difficult task of reconstruction as they need to be. As did the possibility that the war would inspire more terrorism: The papers don't tell us who was responsible for last night's bombings in Saudi Arabia, but we can be sure they aren't friends of the United States. Islamist anti-semitism has not abated; in Britain, it may be capturing a new generation of young immigrants. Duh! Idiot. posted by Steve M. | 10:11 AM | What's the death toll up to in the Saudi Arabia car bombings as I type this? Twenty? Good thing we spent all that time, money, and blood depriving Saddam Hussein of weapons he either didn't have or did have but never intended to use against Western targets. The standard right-wing line, as you know, is that terrorism went on its merry way during 1990s while Clinton ignored it and focused on diddling interns. Right-wingers love to produce lists of what they see as unavenged terrorist attacks from the Clinton years. But here's a list of untoward events that have taken place on George W.'s watch, courtesy of CNN and The Guardian. You probably didn't even know most of these took place, because they don't fit into the Bush-rode-in-and-cleaned-up-Dodge master narrative: 2003 May 1: A U.S. citizen was shot at a ship-repair facility in eastern Saudi Arabia by an unknown assailant, U.S. military officials said.... February 20: A Briton working for BAE Systems, Robert Dent, 37, was killed by a gunman who pulled up alongside his vehicle at a traffic light in Riyadh.... 2002 September 29: A car bomb in Riyadh killed a German man living in Saudi Arabia.... June 20: British banker Simon John Veness died in Saudi Arabia when a bomb exploded in the car he had borrowed from a friend, British and Saudi officials said.... October 6 2001, Khobar A pedestrian explodes a bomb at a shopping centre on the eve of US bombing strikes against Afghanistan. Michael Gerald, a US oil engineer, is killed. Another American, a Briton and two Filipinos are injured.... May 2 2001, Khobar US chiropractor Gary Hatch is badly injured at a medical centre by a parcel bomb delivered by a courier. He loses his left arm and an eye. March 15 2001 Riyadh Accountant Ron Jones from Hamilton, Lanarkshire, and an Egyptian man suffer minor injuries from a bomb in a bin near a KFC outlet. And now the car bombings. Funny, I thought the point was that our devastating victory in Baghdad had scared the crap out of everyone who's ever considered messing with us. posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | In case you missed it, this ran in The Washington Post on Sunday: GOP Eyes Tax Cuts as Annual Events ...White House officials have told allies they will attempt a new tax cut every year Bush remains in office, and there is already talk of another round. The ultimate target -- overhauling the tax code and sharply reducing the size of the government -- may never be achieved. But the incremental steps in that direction help to keep the Republican Party unified and the president in an unending debate with Democrats over the tax burden on Americans. Coupled with the war on terrorism, which also is likely to continue indefinitely, the constant pursuit of tax reductions has the potential to give U.S. politics a new rhythm.... Paul Weyrich, a conservative with ties to Bush, said he was told at a White House meeting that "we intend to try to offer a new tax cut every year" -- a view top Bush aides have expressed to a number of business lobbyists. Grover Norquist, an anti-tax advocate who works closely with Bush aides, predicts: "You'll have a tax cut each year. I state it that way in all of the (White House) meetings, and I never get an argument."... This presidency's sheer will is astounding -- and I don't see much evidence an effective countervailing force, now or in the near future. Be afraid. Be very afraid. posted by Steve M. | 9:05 AM | Monday, May 12, 2003 Judith Miller told us today that cobalt-60 was apparently found just west of Baghdad at a test range by the MET-Alpha team. Miller talked to "Drew," the MET-Alpha team's nuclear weapons expert. Drew was somewhat less than reassuring: He said that, as far as he knew, neither his team nor the United States Central Command had a specific policy for handling radioactive material. Some of the material uncovered at former weapons sites in Iraq could be used to make "dirty bombs" designed to expose people to radiation, and some poses a health hazard to Iraqis and others exposed to it over time. Despite such threats, he said, nothing has been decided about what to do with the material. Prior to the MET-Alpha team's arrival at the site where the cobalt-60 was apparently found, it was being subjected to the level of security the U.S. generally applies to anything in Iraq that doesn't involve oil: There was no American security force when the inspection team members arrived at the sprawling test range, though they had been told there would be. And afterward? Well, pretty much the same: ...the team recommended, as did the International Atomic Energy Agency when it surveyed the site, that the nuclear source in the area be secured, which has not happened yet. Sleep tight now. posted by Steve M. | 11:04 PM | This makes me nuts: Villagers suffer radiation sickness after looting nuclear power plants Doctors fear that hundreds of Iraqis may be suffering from radiation poisoning, following the widespread looting of the country's nuclear facilities. Seven nuclear facilities have been damaged or effectively destroyed by ransackers since the end of the war. Technical documents, sensitive equipment and barrels containing radioactive material are believed to have been stolen. Many residents in villages close to the huge Tuwaitha Nuclear Facility, about seven miles south of Baghdad, were showing signs of radiation illness last week, including rashes, acute vomiting and severe nosebleeds. As Saddam Hussein's regime collapsed last month villagers began looting barrels of the uranium oxide, known as "yellowcake", from the site, which they then emptied to use to store water, milk and yoghurt.... --Telegraph Hundreds! Allowing this to happen is like dropping a huge bomb in a crowded neighborhood. Mohammed Zaidan, the former chief agricultural engineer at Tuwaitha, said he had visited the nuclear site with Dr Hamid Al Bahli, a nuclear scientist, on April 7 when American troops were approaching from the south. The soldiers, he said, assured the men they would secure Tuwaitha, but two weeks later they returned to find there were no American soldiers, only hundreds of people looting the facility and dogs rolling around in the contaminated uranium oxide. "The soldiers had promised us they would secure the site but they did not and we wonder why," he said. "Perhaps it was because they always knew there were no real weapons there, despite all their claims. But, nevertheless, these materials represent a major health hazard and before long we may start to see people developing cancer and deformed babies because they did not stop the looting." Saddam gassed people out of evil intent. Leadfooted America overthrew him with, we're told, good intent, then let chaos reign afterward, out of clumsiness or stupidity or calculation. Maybe the right-wingers are right and Bush's heart is pure, but funny thing -- people who die or become severely ill from being deliberately gassed are no deader and no sicker than people who nuked themselves as a result of "benign" neglect. (Link from Cursor.) posted by Steve M. | 5:22 PM | I've posted some silly sex stuff today, but what Bob Herbert is writing about in this op-ed piece is no joke: A chemotherapy patient goes in for a breast examination and her doctor tells her another man will observe the exam; she later learns the man is not a doctor but a salesman, sues, and her case his dismissed because the judge claims she waived her right to privacy by not immediately objecting -- a judge now nominated to the federal bench by President Bush. You know, Joycelyn Elders resigned late in 1994 and she's still a punchline in America. Why were Republicans able to make her a household name -- as well as Lani Guinier, whose alleged violation of American values involved abstruse voting schemes, not sex -- but most people, including most liberals, still don't know the name of this judge, Carolyn Kuhl? What the hell is wrong with the Democratic Party? posted by Steve M. | 2:14 PM | The L.A. Times noted last week that the tax-cut obsessives at the right-wing Club for Growth are running an ad in favor of the Bush economic "plan" linking Bush to JFK: John F. Kennedy would be appalled at the company his name is keeping, his relatives have concluded. The former president is mentioned and pictured in a television ad backing President Bush's efforts to persuade Congress to enact a large tax cut. "President Kennedy cut income taxes and the economy soared," notes the ad, paid for by the Club for Growth, a tax cut advocacy group. Maybe this was not the best timing: President John F. Kennedy had an affair with a 19-year-old intern who traveled with him on official trips, according to a new biography of Kennedy. "She had no skills. She could answer the phone," Robert Dallek, author of "An Unfinished Life," told "Dateline NBC" in an interview that aired Sunday. "Apparently, her only skill was to provide sexual release for JFK on those trips and maybe in the White House." --AP You know, we cut taxes once in the current administration and it did no good for the economy. However, the economy did wonderfully well during the Clinton years. Maybe there's a cause-and-effect relationship between a soaring economy and Democratic presidents who fool around with young interns. posted by Steve M. | 12:56 PM | Yikes! Maureen Dowd cited it yesterday, but if you haven't read it, here's Lisa Schiffren's Wall Street Journal article about Sex God Bush. A condensed version: ...really hot...."hot," as in virile, sexy and powerful....I was mesmerized....stunning ..."He's a hottie. No doubt about it. Really a hottie. ... "Hot? SO HOT!!!!! THAT UNIFORM!" ..."Oh God, yes,"... "I mean, that swagger. George Bush in a pair of jeans is a treat to watch." ...all this heat ... I'm so glad these people have, y'know, values, unlike us sickos on the left. Oh, and by the way, this comes from The Wall Street Journal's "Taste" page. **** In the Sex God Bush article, Schiffren sniffs that women on the snooty East Side of Manhattan get Bush's hunkitude, but on the liberal/nerd/pinko West Side, where she lives (as do I), the juices aren't flowing in sync with hers -- as she puts it, using wording that seems more appropriate for a Stalinist show trial, when she tried to discuss Bush's alleged attractiveness with Upper West Side women, "there was dissent." Many of them still cite Bill Clinton and his allegedly penetrating intellect as more appealing. Liberals make such a fetish of intellect. It's impossible to respond to this -- especially from a former speechwriter for Dan Quayle. But I do find myself thinking back to The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- specifically to Susan Sarandon saying, "I don't like men with too many muscles." Maybe we need to (partially) recast the movie, with George Bush as the dumb, lab-built macho man Rocky and Karl Rove as his creator, the transvestite mad scientist, who snaps at Sarandon in reply, "I DIDN'T MAKE HIM FOR YOU!" posted by Steve M. | 12:21 PM | In a post last week I forgot to include a link to the L.A. Times op-ed piece "Karl Rove: Counting Votes While the Bombs Drop" by James Moore, author of the Rove biography Bush's Brain. Here's the link. (I've also added it to the original post.) My apologies -- and thanks to the reader who pointed this out. (Use "clipjoint" as user name and password if you can't read the article.) posted by Steve M. | 11:37 AM | The Willie Horton ad did as much damage to Michael Dukakis and the Democratic Party as it was intended to do, but after the fact, at least, Democrats still had enough fight in them to denounce the ad and make its use a mark of shame. That's what should have happened with the ad used in the 2002 Georgia governor's race that linked Osama bin Laden and Saddam Huseein to then-Senator Max Cleland -- who, of course, lost three limbs in Vietnam and should never have had his patriotism questioned. The ad has been frequently denounced out here in Lefty Blogosphere Land, yet even out here I don't think I've ever seen anyone blamed by name for it, except, of course, Saxby Chambliss, the man it helped elect. I learned from yesterday's New York Times Magazine that the man responsible for the ad is a GOP consultant named Tom Perdue -- the guy who got current Senate majority leader and likely future presidential candidate Bill Frist elected to the Senate for the first time in 1994 -- and that Frist had a hand in it, too: Frist decided in 2000 to take the largest political gamble since he ran for office and to assume the chairmanship of the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, which controls every race across the country by recruiting candidates and disbursing millions of dollars... While some Democrats claimed that Frist was calling into question their patriotism, Frist relied again on Perdue, who unleashed what was considered the most devastating ad of the cycle: it showed a picture of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein that eventually faded into the Democratic incumbent, Max Cleland, a Vietnam war hero who lost both his legs and his right arm in battle. Perdue told me that he sent each commercial he made to Frist and his staff to "let them be another focus group," and "they never told us not to do anything." In '94, Frist and Perdue ran a fairly nasty campaign against Democrat Bill Sasser: [Frist] dispatched Perdue to unleash a barrage of negative attacks.... His campaign ... tried to link Sasser to Joycelyn Elders, the black surgeon general who had spoken controversially about masturbation, and Marion Barry, the black mayor of Washington who had been caught smoking crack cocaine with a former girlfriend. ''We'd never seen anything like it,'' Sasser told me. ''I'd been in the Senate 18 years, and I'd never seen a campaign so vicious. Handbills would mysteriously appear in redneck areas showing me with Joycelyn Elders. He'd say while he was saving lives as a heart surgeon, I was busy sending Tennessee dollars to Marion Barry. It was clearly a racist attack. The slanders went on and on and on.'' The Democrats should have made the Cleland ads a national scandal, even after the election -- they could have, and should have, demounced them until the ads made the news and everyone in America saw them. Hell, if I were the Democratic presidential nominee in '04, I'd seriously consider picking Max Cleland as my vice presidential candidate. And it was the saintly Dr. Frist and his longtime hatchetman Perdue who were responsible. They should be held to account for them. posted by Steve M. | 7:11 AM | If you like conspiracy theories, go nuts now: A couple of weeks ago I pointed out the bizarre fact that Texas A&M University is building a campus in Qatar, where the U.S. has recently moved some military operations that used to be based in Saudi Arabia. Now I learn, from this New York Times article, that the president of Texas A&M is ... Robert Gates, former head of the CIA (under Bush the Elder). I might find this truly ominous if the dominant people in the Bush II administration didn't seem to loathe Bush I. Nevertheless, it does seem worth noting.... posted by Steve M. | 6:37 AM | Sunday, May 11, 2003 "Tonight we're gonna party like it's Teheran '79." posted by Steve M. | 11:46 PM | There still aren't nearly enough cops in Iraq to protect Iraqi citizens, or even to direct traffic, but Peter Maass reports this in The New York Times: I was at the Oil Ministry on Thursday and noticed a convoy of a Bradley fighting vehicle and several armored Humvees with .50-caliber machine guns. They were escorting an S.U.V. with two civilians who work for KBR, an American oil-services company. That's how the Americans who are supposed to fix Iraq travel around — in cumbersome convoys insulating them from the people they are supposed to help. Lovely. posted by Steve M. | 11:16 PM | Here's something I didn't know: On January 9, two days after Rumsfeld lyricized about [the volunteer military’s] virtues and got snooty about a peacetime draft, the Marine Corps, which reports to him, froze its entire active duty complement of 175,000 men and women in place for the next year; Marines who had completed their enlistments or who sought to retire after twenty years would be unable to do so. The Air Force has put a “stop-loss” order in effect that prohibits its officers and enlisted personnel from leaving active service. In the Army, the freeze is called “involuntary extension.” ...As of late March, over 212,000 reservists and Guard men and women had been activated. Though official Defense Department policy limits call-ups to twelve months, the Pentagon’s manpower demands have forced it to extend their tours for a second year. Did we do this in other wars -- turn volunteer service into involuntary servitude? And remember, we're doing this while fielding an inadequate force to maintain stability in Iraq and Afghanistan, while we're also casting about for new wars to fight. (I found this in John Gregory Dunne's review of Anthony Swofford's book Jarhead in the New York Review of Books. The review, unfortunately, is available online only to subscribers.) posted by Steve M. | 10:52 PM | |
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