"No Outcome but Victory"?

Eventually, I guess, but certainly not now.

(This link came from a banner ad at the top of my blog.)

Not much to report, I'm afraid. I was traveling today and I'm not as caught up as I'd like to be.

While in upstate New York I did hear part of an interview with a reporter for a western Massachusetts newspaper, The Recorder. The reporter was talking about the multiple increases in ambulance fees imposed in Massachusetts this year; the fees should be relatively easy for the populous cities and towns of eastern Massachusetts to absorb, but are, the reporter said, a real burden on the sparsely populated towns in the western part of the state. The reason ambulance fees are being raised is that a raised fee isn't a raised tax, and Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachusetts, being a Republican, doesn't wantany taxes raised, even in a fiscal crisis.

I hoped to link a story from The Recorder, but the paper's Web site is pretty sparse -- go here and scroll down for what the site offers on this subject. This page, from the Massachusetts Call/Volunteer Firefighters Association, lists some of the fee increases. (It's an old page, but scroll down and you'll see they all passed.)

To Republicans, this is infinitely better than raising taxes.

I probably won't be able to do much posting tomorrow. See you tomorrow night.

David Brooks is really getting on my nerves these days. And I actually liked Bobos in Paradise. The David Brooks who wrote that book seemed to have affection for those who like hardwood floors and locally produced jams with hand-lettered labels -- he acknowledged that being one of these people doesn’t make you a bad person, or even, necessarily, a Democrat -- in fact, he counted himself among the Bobos.

But now he never misses an opportunity to portray well-educated coast-dwellers -- a cohort to which he belongs -- as morally rudderless hedonists with false, shallow values. In Brooks’s eyes, Bobos and like-minded coastal scum are clearly the worst people in America, and virtually everyone else is more virtuous and more genuine, from the Millionaire Next Door to Jenny from the Block.

It’s no surprise, then, that Brooks would wangle the opportunity to review Absolutely American: Four Years at West Point by David Lipsky, a Rolling Stone editor, for The New York Times Book Review and would use life at West Point as a stick with which to bash those awful Bobos: Here’s Brooks’s snotty summation of the book:

It essentially describes a contest between two competing values systems. There is first the ... value system of the military, emphasizing discipline, self-sacrifice, duty, honor, courage and controlled but savage violence. Then there is the value system of society at large (and of Rolling Stone in particular), emphasizing freedom, self-expression, pleasure and commerce.

Submitted for your edification is a story told in the book of Lieutenat Colonel Hank Keirsey, a much-admired member of the West Point faculty. At one point a subordinate of Keisey’s, Dan Dent,

produces a parody PowerPoint presentation slide headlined, ''Class of 2000 Homo Factor Report,'' a crude stab at humor.

The slide made it into the e-mail circles, and before long there was talk of court-martial for the instructor. Keirsey decided it was his duty to take responsibility for his subordinate, both as a matter of loyalty and because he thought his stature was such that he could take the hit without being tossed out of the Army. He was wrong. Keirsey was relieved of command of military training and dismissed from the Army.

Lipsky concludes: ''For me, what Hank Keirsey did for Dan Dent was one of the clearest examples I have of West Point values. When I tell civilian friends Keirsey's story, I have to go over it twice, because they keep asking, 'Wait, didn't the other guy make the slide?' A leader takes care of his soldiers. He puts their concerns ahead of his own.''

Sitting over our Sunday brunches, we were all supposed to wince at this, ashamed of the moral flabbiness of the civilian world. Me, I was thinking: What’s so great about an honor code that gets a well-respected instructor fired and preserves the military career of a callow bigot, who isn’t held accountable for his own actions?

Brooks also recounts the story of a “loser” cadet who struggled to stay at West Point, even though administrators

tell him he will be loathed everywhere he goes in the Army by officers who prey on the physically weak. ''That's reality. This is not your niche,'' one says.

We learn that he managed to graduate, and, well, good for him. But Brooks’s implication is that nothing in the civilian value system inculcates character like this sort of toughness. He ignores the fact that in many highly competitive situations in the civilian world people have to discover that they’re not making the grade -- and they have grasp this fact on their own., and redouble their efforts to gain respect, or else change course and start fresh. Sure, a military academy smacks you around -- but civilian life can smack you around, too, in a different way, and discounting this sort of struggle, while romanticizing military life, is short-sighted and insulting.

But Brooks doesn’t care, because he’s seen that insulting a culture perceived as liberal wins you a wide a readership, wider even than the one for Bobos. And that’s what he clearly wants now.

The campaign to kill [Saddam Hussein], frankly admitted and discussed by high officials in the White House, Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency, has committed the United States for the first time to public, personalized, open-ended warfare in the classic mode of Middle Eastern violence — an eye for an eye, a life for a life.

--Thomas Powers in the Week in Review in today’s New York Times

What is Powers talking about? What life? What eye? Saddam didn’t kill Bush and didn’t succeed in killing his father. And let’s hope Powers doesn’t think that the death of Saddam would be vengeance for the loss of life on 9/11. So is it the deaths of American troops Powers thinks the U.S. wants to avenge? If so, haven’t we killed several thousand Iraqi soldiers?

Here's an interesting quote from The Virginian-Pilot's story about the christening of the USS Ronald Reagan:

``It's pretty ironic I'm here,'' Chief Warrant Officer 2 Earl McGallagher said ``He starved my family and my little girl.''

McGallagher, the Reagan's personnel director, said he was a laborer in Mobile, Ala., in 1982 when Reagan led the charge against some union rules. The result, he said, was an influx of non-union iron workers and a subsequent decrease in his hourly pay.

``My daughter was four months old. I joined the Navy out of sheer desperation,'' McGallagher said.

McGallagher does add that joining the service was one of the best decisions he ever made. It still sounds as if he's a tad bitter, though. Do you blame him?

The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan was commissioned today in Norfolk, Virginia. NewsMax says the ship cost $5 billion to build; The Virginian-Pilot reports that "$37 million in research and development led to some 1,300 significant design changes, according to Navy officials."

Five billion big ones -- that's a lot of money. Now, check out this story. -- It's about a "Ronald Reagan bear" -- a Beanie Baby that looks like a teddy bear and wears a sailor's hat. The story informs us that

Profits from the sale of the bear - which will hit shops nationwide Monday - will go entirely to the Santa Barbara Council of the Navy League to support ship improvements aboard the carrier Ronald Reagan. The Navy League of the United States is a civilian organization dedicated to supporting members of the Navy and their families.

What kinds of improvements does the bear pay for? The Santa Barbara Council's Web site explains:

While the Navy provides for sailors’ basic personal and educational needs, the Santa Barbara Navy League will provide “enhancements” designed to improve sailors’ comfort and quality of life. Such enhancements include recreation equipment; additional books and computers for crew members who are continuing their education while deployed; video equipment and email systems so sailors can feel a little closer to their loved ones at home; upgrades to lounge and mess areas; and china and silver for use when dignitaries are on board.

Now, I've never served in the military, but it surprises me that sailors' families and friends actually have to pony up for some of this stuff. Why wouldn't a $5 billion ship have enough computers to allow everyone who needs to to send e-mail? Why isn't there adequate recreation equipment? And why on earth do civilians have to supply china for use on the ship when dignitaries on board? (Isn't it a tad ironic that a ship named after Nancy Reagan's husband has to go begging for fancy china?) Has it always been this way in the military, even after it went all-volunteer -- huge expenditures, but not enough money spent on the troops?

You've probably seen that bumper sticker that reads (I'm quoting from memory), "It'll be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy bombers." I guess there actually is some of that bake-sale neediness in the military -- for the troops themselves, even while lots of cash is spent on the flashy hardware.

Bush's approval rating drops nine points in eighteen days, to 59%, in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, a poll in which he's consistently done quite well (better than in other polls). And

An overwhelming majority of Americans -- 80 percent -- said they fear the United States will become bogged down in a long and costly peacekeeping mission in Iraq, up eight points in less than three weeks.

There's still a general sense that the war was a good idea and that casualties aren't outrageously high yet. Read the results here.

A bill that would sharply limit the power of state securities regulators to police and penalize wrongdoing by brokerage firms and their employees was approved by a subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee yesterday.

It now moves on to debate by the full committee.

The bill ... was introduced in May by Richard H. Baker, Republican of Louisiana. It bars state securities regulators from creating rules for brokerage firms that differ from those established by the Securities and Exchange Commission or self-regulatory organizations like the New York Stock Exchange. If the bill had been law in 2002, for example, it would have prevented Eliot Spitzer, the New York attorney general, from pursuing the changes on Wall Street that resulted from his investigation into analyst conflicts.

If passed, the bill would prevent states from imposing rules on the disclosures that brokerage firms make about the investments they sell. The measure would also prohibit state regulators from instituting conflict of interest requirements on brokerage firms, like those relating to stock analysts that 10 large securities firms agreed to last December when they settled with regulators and paid $1.4 billion in penalties and fines....

--from yesterday's New York Times

Now, here's what the bill is called: the Securities Fraud Deterrence and Investor Restitution Act of 2003. Look, I know the word "Orwellian" is overused, but if you can't call that "Orwellian," then the word has no meaning.

A Harvard economist looked at several aspects of the economy to determine which ones help create jobs, especially good, high-paying jobs. It turns out that consumer spending isn't a very good job creator at all -- which is significant right now because the whole point of tax cuts (Bush's cure-all for everything that ails the economy, and the solution of certain me-too Democrats) is to increase consumer spending. Tax cuts haven't turned unemployment around, and it's doubtful they will.

By contrast, good old-fashioned government social spending actually does create jobs.

Jeff Madrick wrote about this in yesterday's New York Times:

James Medoff, a Harvard University economist, has explored the job-creating benefits of different categories of spending. His main research...was done in the early 1990's. But he has completed a partial updating and says the conclusions still apply today.

Mr. Medoff created a measure that included the number of jobs produced by a dollar of spending and the level of pay and benefits those jobs provided. Combining the two resulted in a labor market "score." He then examined how highly capital investment, consumption and various government spending programs scored — that is, added good jobs to the economy.

Private investment in durable goods did especially well, Mr. Medoff found, creating a reasonable number of jobs on average but ones that pay especially well. Thus, more capital investment is an excellent way to create good jobs.

But the nation's spending on education programs did even better. It created many more jobs per dollar spent, and they paid fairly well, if not as well as jobs derived from capital spending. Government health care spending also produced many well-paying jobs. Other government spending programs conducive to good job growth were for highways, water and air facilities, and police and firefighters. Military spending also added good jobs, but not at an equivalent rate.

The weakest job-creating spending on average was consumption itself, which is exactly what is driving the economy today. Tax cuts of both Democrats and Republicans are intended to stimulate just that. But such spending may well not create an adequate number of jobs, partly because so much leaks to imports.

So don't hold your breath waiting for that big turnaround in employment.

Polling Report tells us that Bush still gets high (if slipping) marks for his handling of Iraq in a CBS News poll dated July 8-9 (approval is 58%, disapproval 32%). People still think that removing Saddam from power was worth it and that Saddam was a threat to the U.S. But there are a few interesting results beyond that:

"Do you think the end result of the war with Iraq was worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?"

Worth It: 45%

Not Worth It: 45%

Don't Know: 10%

"Which comes closer to your opinion: Iraq was a threat to the United States that required immediate military action, or Iraq was a threat that could have been contained, or Iraq was not a threat to the United States at all?"

Required Immediate Action: 43%

Could Have Been Contained: 43%

Was Not a Threat: 9%

Don't Know: 5%

"From what you have seen or heard, is the United States in control of events taking place in Iraq, or are the events in Iraq out of U.S. control?"

In Control: 45%

Out of Control: 41%

Don't Know: 14%

"If the United States and its allies never find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, then do you think the war against Iraq will have been worth the loss of American life and other costs of attacking Iraq, or not?"

Worth It: 46%

Not Worth It: 46%

Don't Know: 8%

Thinking back now to the weeks before the war with Iraq, do you think the Bush Administration overestimated the number of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, underestimated the number of weapons of mass destruction, or accurately estimated the number of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?"

Overestimated: 56%

Underestimated: 11%

Accurately estimated: 19%

Don't Know: 14%

"When presenting what they knew about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before the war, do you think the members of the Bush Administration were telling everything they knew, most of what they knew, hiding important elements of what they knew, or mostly lying?"

Telling Everything: 4%

Telling Most: 32%

Hiding Important Elements: 45%

Mostly Lying: 11%

Don't Know: 8%

Interesting.

I found another letter from a soldier in Iraq. This one's posted at the blog Little Green Footballs, a favorite of right-wingers. It's from an Army major, and he thinks conditions are pretty swell:

The stuff you don't hear about on CNN? Let's start with Electrical Power production in Iraq. The day after the war was declared over, there was nearly 0 power being generated in Iraq; 45 days later, in a partnership between the Army, the Iraqi people and some private companies, there are now 3200 mega watts (Mw) of power produced daily, or 1/3 of the total national potential.

I love the fact that he uses as his baseline the day after we declared the war essentially over; it's sort of like saying you've really kept crime down in L.A. because it's way lower than it was during the Rodney King riots.

The major boasts of improvements in water purification and, yes, oil production, and I'm sure he has a point -- I'm sure a lot of hard work has been done and some things have really been accomplished. But even he must realize that what we're seeing on TV isn't an illusion, because he says, somewhat defensively (and sounding a bit like General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove),

all of you please realize that 90% of the damage you see on TV was caused by Iraqi's, NOT by us and not by the war. Sure we took out a few bridges from military necessity, we took out a few power and phone lines to disrupt communications, sure we drilled a few palaces and government headquarters buildings with 2000 lb. laser guided bombs (I work 100 yards from where two hit the Tikrit Palace), he had plenty to spare. But, ANY damage you see to schools, hospitals, power generation facilities, refineries, pipelines, was ALL caused either by .. the Iraqi Army in its death throes .. or from much of the Iraqi civilians looting the places.

Could we have prevented it? Nope.

Really? We couldn't have prevented this? How about if we hadn't fought the war?

The major's own life, we learn, isn't so bad:

I'm living in a "guest palace" on a 500 acre palace compound with 20 palaces with like facilities built in half a dozen towns all over Iraq that were built for one man.

Interesting. Remember the first soldier's letter I posted a couple of days ago, from hackworth.com?

I do know there are people living in areas with running water and A.C. That, of course, is not us... although my COL lives like that. I do believe he was shielded from the reality by his staff for a while. As we crammed 50 soldiers in to two medium frame tents near a pond of dead fish which was also infested with mosquitos and there was absolutely no field sanitation support for miles, he was living in his own room inside an air conditioned building, had his own king size bed, his own bathroom, his own refrigerator, and his cappuccino machine.

And remember the letter from SFTT.org I posted yesterday?

We are steadily providing bottled water to the citizens of Iraq though, and you can bet your next paycheck that anyone who is of any rank that allows them to work on a brigade or higher level staff position hasn't had to drink warm sanitized water lately. As a matter of fact, I have witnessed several "higher ups" in my particular unit with private shower facilities, private porta-johns, and ice chests full of bottled water and potable ice in their immediate work areas while their subordinates (meaning the soldiers) are struggling every day to get a cold bottle of water.

So, yeah, I guess life is good if you're living like Saddam before the war.

I noted earlier today that, according to The Washington Post, Pat Robertson has denounced President Bush for urging the abdication of Charles Taylor of Liberia: "...how dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down.' " Green Boy over at Needlenose points out that not long ago Robertson thought it was just hunky-dory for the U.S. to seek the overthrow of the leader of another country -- a country where, it just so happens, Robertson has no business dealings....

SFFT.org (Soldiers for the Truth) posts this letter, which it says was sent by a noncommissioned officer in Iraq to Colonel David Hackworth. The letter is dated June 19, and what it reports about the treatment of troops, if it's accurate, is a disgrace. Here's an excerpt:

We crossed the line of departure [from Kuwait] and finished the missions in a pretty much "as is" state of readiness with our vehicles. We did not receive a single piece of parts support for our vehicles during the entire battle....Now the [supply] system is turned on, but with the amount of soldiers in theatre and the subsequent amount of equipment that require repairs, not a single repair part has made to our vehicles to date. (This system applies to the units that have received follow on missions to places like Fallujah.)

...my unit had abandoned around 12 vehicles and transferred the soldiers to others in very cramped riding conditions.

This did two things detrimental to combat effectiveness. It overcrowded the vehicles that we fought from, thus reducing our ability to effectively defend or attack as warranted. It also provided a possibility of greater soldier casualties if the vehicle took and RPG round or other significant attack. To our amazement, our people made it to our objective, but others did not....

And the letter says supply logistics didn't really get better after that.

Please read the whole thing.

(Thanks to Phil for finding this.)

Charles Taylor, the Liberian president who has been indicted by an international court for crimes against humanity, has few remaining supporters in the United States. But one prominent American who has stuck with the West African leader is religious broadcaster and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

In recent broadcasts of his cable TV show "The 700 Club," watched by an estimated 1 million households, Robertson has defended Taylor as a fellow Baptist and Liberia's "freely elected" leader. The "horrible bloodbath" taking place in Liberia, he has repeatedly said, is the fault of the State Department.

"So we're undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels to take over the country. And how dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down,' " Robertson said to his viewers on Monday.

What Robertson, 73, has not discussed in these broadcasts is his financial interest in Liberia. In an interview yesterday, he said he has "written off in my own mind" an $8 million investment in a gold mining venture that he made four years ago under an agreement with Taylor's government.

Yet, he added: "Hope springs eternal. Once the dust has cleared on this thing, chances are there will be some investors from someplace who want to invest. If I could find some people to sell it to, I'd be more than delighted."...

--Washington Post

In 1999, Americans United for Separation of Church & State, reporting on Robertson's Liberian venture, noted that this wasn't the first time he'd tried to make money in Africa:

Taylor’s critics say he is corrupt and is amassing personal wealth while his people suffer. They compare him to Mobutu Sese Seko, who ruled for three decades in Congo (then known as Zaire), a country down the African coast from Liberia.

A few years ago Robertson struck a deal with Mobutu to do diamond-mining there. The venture eventually collapsed, but not before the religious broadcaster was accused of using airplanes from one of his charitable organizations in the for-profit jewel enterprise.

Two pilots told The Virginian-Pilot that planes sent to Zaire by Operation Blessing, a Robertson-founded relief agency, were used almost exclusively for the African Development Corporation (ADC), the Robertson company doing diamond-mining.

Robertson was investigated by the state of Virginia, which cleared him. He had given campaign contributions totaling $135,000 to Virginia's governor and attorney general.

In what they acknowledged was an effort to bring public pressure on the White House to meet the panel's demands for classified information, the [9/11] commission's Republican chairman and Democratic vice chairman released a statement, declaring that they had received only a small part of the millions of sensitive government documents they have requested from the executive branch.

..."While thousands of documents are flowing in — some in boxes and some digitized — most of the documents we need are still to come," the statement said.

--lead article in today's New York Times

For example, let me focus on the now famous declaration that Iraq submitted to this Council on December 7th. Iraq never had any intention of complying with this Council's mandate. Instead, Iraq planned to use the declaration to overwhelm us and to overwhelm the inspectors with useless information about Iraq's permitted weapons so that we would not have time to pursue Iraq's prohibited weapons. Iraq's goal was to give us in this room, to give those of us on this Council, the false impression that the inspection process was working.

You saw the result. Dr. Blix pronounced the 12,200-page declaration "rich in volume" but "poor in information and practically devoid of new evidence." Could any member of this Council honestly rise in defense of this false declaration?

--UN presentation by Secretary of State Colin Powell, February 5, 2003

Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton suggested that the Justice Department was behind a directive barring intelligence officials from being interviewed by the panel without the presence of agency colleagues.

At a news conference, Mr. Kean described the presence of "minders" at the interviews as a form of intimidation. "I think the commission feels unanimously that it's some intimidation to have somebody sitting behind you all the time who you either work for or works for your agency," he said.

--Times

Iraq has not complied with its obligation to allow immediate, unimpeded, unrestricted and private access to all officials and other persons, as required by Resolution 1441. The regime only allows interviews with inspectors in the presence of an Iraqi official, a minder. The official Iraqi organization charged with facilitating inspections announced publicly and announced ominously, that, "Nobody is ready" to leave Iraq to be interviewed.

--Powell

Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said today in response to the statement from the panel, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: "The president is committed to ensuring that the commission has all the information it needs. The president has directed federal agencies to cooperate and to do so quickly."

--Times

It was General Sa'di who last fall publicly pledged that Iraq was prepared to cooperate unconditionally with inspectors. Quite the contrary, Sa'di's job is not to cooperate; it is to deceive, not to disarm, but to undermine the inspectors; not to support them, but to frustrate them and to make sure they learn nothing.

--Powell

Under the law creating the bipartisan, 10-member panel last year, the commission, which met for the first time in January, is required to complete its investigation by next May. "While thousands of documents are flowing in — some in boxes and some digitized — most of the documents we need are still to come," the statement said. "Time is slipping by."

--Times

This issue before us is not how much time we are willing to give the inspectors to be frustrated by Iraqi obstruction. But how much longer are we willing to put up with Iraq's non-compliance before we, as a Council, we as the United Nations say, "Enough. Enough."

--Powell

The new New York Times bestseller list is in. Hillary Clinton is still #1; Ann Coulter is still #2. Walter Isaacson's much-hyped Benjamin Franklin leaps onto the list at #3; I think that book, not Coulter's, could be the one that knocks Hillary's book off the top of the list when that finally happens.

By the way, let me thank Dorothy Rabinowitz for her blistering review of Coulter's book. The column ran on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, but Rabinowitz doesn't shrink from criticizing a movement conservative on the movement conservatives' home turf -- she knows Coulter's book is a fraud, and she says so.

A dozen or so years ago, Rabinowitz denounced prosecutions of so-called ritual abuse at day-care centers; Debbie Nathan had written similar articles in The Village Voice, but Rabinowitz made it acceptable to question the veracity of outlandish and often physically impossible stories of abuse. Not enough people had the guts to buck a juggernaut then; Coulterism is less noxious than ruining day-care workers' lives and inducing false memories of abuse in children, but far too many people in the mainstream are afraid -- and I mean that literally -- to call Coulterism bullshit. Yes, Joe Conason debunked Coulter's book in Salon, and Spinsanity has had its say, but an awful lot of voices in the media have been muted or silent on this and previous irresponsible Coulter attacks and group slanders. Too many people in the "liberal" media have so internalized Coulter's (and other hard-rightists') hatred of them that they chose to keep Coulter in their Rolodexes even after she expressed delight at the thought of a McVeigh-style mass murder of New York Times employees -- their journalistic colleagues. Will Rabinowitz's willingness to say, in a large-circulation periodical, that Coulter's garbage is garbage give other reviewers the guts to do the same? I wonder.

Is criticizing Bush treason? Tell it to the Marines. A reader points out that "Nothing but Lip Service," an Army Times editorial that denounces attempts by the Bush administration and the GOP-controlled Congress to nickel-and-dime members of the U.S. armed services, also appeared in Marine Corps Times.

The same reader also refers me to military.com, where William S. Lind has been publishing quite a few columns that are highly critical of Bush administration policy -- among them "Lies, Damned Lies and Military Intelligence" ("It may be -- though I doubt it -- that our intelligence agencies really believed Saddam had all that stuff. But even if that is what they reported to the decision-makers, the decision-makers should have known better to swallow it. If they did not know that, they are not fit to be making military decisions. They lack the most basic understanding of the nature of military intelligence") and "Of Time and the Rivers" ("The promised American 'rebuilding' of Afghanistan has become a stale joke, because without security, nothing can be rebuilt. And America hasn't a clue on how to provide security in Afghanistan"). Back in 1989, Lind was the lead author of a Marine Corps Gazette article, "The Changing Face of War," which speculated on the nature of a future ("fourth") generation of warfare (it's dense reading, but if you're interested you can read it here). Lind thinks Saddam may have made a deliberate choice to lose what we think of as the Iraq War, as he explained (nearly two months ago) in "Is Saddam Really Out of the Game?": "Rather than fight for Baghdad, he decided to preserve himself and his most loyal military forces as a 'force in being' and, rather than attempting to hold on to the country, let the Americans take it, then re-take it from them through guerilla warfare." (This is similar to the speculations of Gary Anderson, a retired Marine colonel, in an op-ed piece first published in The Washington Post in April.)

In case you think Lind is a closet pinko, let me point out that he directs the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the very right-wing Free Congress Foundation. (I will note for the record that the head of the Free Congress Foundation, Paul Weyrich, opposed the Iraq War.)

Michael Savage was fired by MSNBC after he said on the air that a caller was a "sodomite" who should "get AIDS and die," but he says the firing was unfair, because ...

... he meant to say that to the caller off the air!

Which, to Savage, would be perfectly OK.

No, I'm not making this up.

As US President George W Bush proclaims his commitment to Africa during this week's five-day trip, his Republicans in Congress are planning on cutting back the money allocated to his much-vaunted plans to tackle HIV/Aids and encourage development....

Mr Bush has pledged $15bn to fight HIV/Aids, primarily in Africa, over the next five years, and an additional $10bn in additional foreign aid over the next three years in a new Millennium Challenge Account.

But the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee - which determines how much money will actually be spent in next year's budget - looks set to cut back that request when it meets on Thursday.

Representative Jim Kolbe, chairman of the subcommittee on foreign operations, said that in his view Congress would be unlikely to allocate the full amount because neither initiative will be fully operational by the time the fiscal year begins.

The amounts "assume you have full-blown programmes up and running on October 1, and that's not the case," he said....

--BBC

Vermont's Brattleboro Reformer has more:

Bush surprised AIDS activists earlier this year when he authorized $15 billion over five years to fight AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean. But the president has failed to commit himself to a full appropriation in the program's first year.

The budget he sent to Congress gives short shrift to the AIDS fight, coming in more than $1 billion under the $3 billion the president promised, and even that will have to come at the expense of other critical health programs....

The administration's 2004 foreign aid budget is $1.18 billion, more than 17 percent less than last year's $1.4 billion. It proposes $745 million for key global health programs other than AIDS, a 14 percent reduction from last year's $869 million; it slashes disaster relief and emergency food aid by 18 percent; programs to protect child and maternal health and combat infectious diseases other than AIDS by 14 percent; and programs to build free-markets and democratic institutions by 3 percent.

The House version of the budget goes even deeper, reducing the president's spending plan by another $1.7 billion....

"The large print giveth and the small print taketh away...."

This is posted at hackworth.com, the Web page of gadfly ex-soldier David Hackworth, under the heading "Feedback from Iraq":

I do know there are people living in areas with running water and A.C. That, of course, is not us... although my COL lives like that. I do believe he was shielded from the reality by his staff for a while. As we crammed 50 soldiers in to two medium frame tents near a pond of dead fish which was also infested with mosquitos and there was absolutely no field sanitation support for miles, he was living in his own room inside an air conditioned building, had his own king size bed, his own bathroom, his own refrigerator, and his cappuccino machine. It was two weeks before he came down to see where the soldiers were living and that was only after the S4 and CSM kept blowing me off... so, I had to get the Corps Surgeon involved for sanitation reasons.

I do believe the COL is entitled to a higher standard of living, however, the inequality was astounding and even more was the fact that he tried to hide it, by posting guards at the entrance to the hallway and didn't say more than two words to any of the soldiers until two weeks after our arrival in Baghdad. We just needed to hear that he understood our situation and was doing everything he could to improve it."

And Hackworth himself has some choice words for Bush and (especially) Rumsfeld in his latest column (entitled "Bring What On?").

As the president travels through Africa, TBOGG compares and contrasts. A palpable hit.

By failing to draw a clear line between satirical exaggeration and historical analysis, by refusing to credit the laudable role played by patriotic, anti-Communist liberals like Truman, Kennedy and Humphrey, Coulter has compromised her case....Coulter mars her case with claims that cannot be sustained.

--David Horowitz in Front Page Magazine

You know how neutered the mainstream press is when a rabid right-winger like Horowitz is less afraid to make pointed criticisms of Ann Coulter than, say, The New Yorker (which, as I noted in a previous post, has nothing worse to say about the book than that it is "strangely lopsided"). Horowitz's review/essay/screed vigorously defends red-baiting, as well as the past and present demonization of leftists and liberals, so don't go to to it looking for a changed Dave. Nevertheless, Horowitz does declare the book fatally flawed -- which is more, I suspect, than most reviewers in the mainstream press will have the cojones to do.

ABC News reminds us of this:

President Bush has embarked on a widely heralded visit to Africa, but early in his presidency he seemed to have little interest in the region.

An appearance in Goteborg, Sweden, on June 14, 2001, did little to change that impression. "Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease," he said — referring to Africa as a country, instead of a continent.

Howard Dean is being raked over the coals for (barely) underestimating U.S. troop strength in Iraq. He's not the president, and if he's elected he won't be for eighteen months. Bush had been president for nearly half a year (and had been alive for more than half a century) when he asserted that Africa is one country.

Over the weekend I was in a drugstore that's part of a big national chain and I saw a book on sale -- God's Pathway to Healing: Prostate. It's hard to judge these things, but it appears that the book may be a financial success -- it's being sold by a national chain and it's part of a series, other volumes of which were also on sale at the store; the series includes God's Pathway to Healing: Digestion and the forthcoming God's Pathway to Healing: Vitamins and Supplements.

If you're struggling to recall where exactly subjects such as prostate health and nutritional supplements are mentioned in the Bible, well, me too.

Feeding people nonsense while thumping the Bible -- hey, it works for the president.

In this week's New Yorker, Walter Isaacson gives us a sneering, contemptuous review of the recent books by Sidney Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton, in which, among other things, he compares Blumenthal to Buddy the dog and says of Hillary that there is a "perception of phoniness that dogs her." In one paragraph of Isaacson's review, we learn what a paranoid nutjob Blumenthal is:

Suddenly the tone turns conspiratorial. A legion of enemies small and large, from Arkansas lowlifes to the independent counsel Kenneth Starr, are woven into a tangled web of buffoons who share the same sinister motives and tactics. And many in the press are portrayed either as willing dupes or as craven co-conspirators.

Odd, then, that a paragraph later Isaacson tells us,

On the day that the Monica Lewinsky story broke, Blumenthal called [David] Brock, who had already been expiating his guilt by leaking to Blumenthal the maneuvers of the most ardent Clinton-haters. Brock proceeded to detail the collusion among Kenneth Starr’s office, journalists at Newsweek, Lewinsky’s turncoat confessor Linda Tripp, the merry mischief-maker Lucianne Goldberg, the Internet gossip Matt Drudge, and a motley if not vast right-wing conspiracy that included a collection of freelance investigators and legal “elves” funded by the conservative millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.

So wait -- Isaacson acknowledges that there was "a legion of enemies small and large" arrayed against Clinton, a legion that included Kenneth Starr, and there were those in the press who were "co-conspirators"? So why, when Blumenthal says precisely this, does Isaacson sneer that "the tone turns conspiratorial"?

Isaacson says of Hillary Clinton's book, "most of her anger ... is directed at the enemies she claims sought to destroy [Bill Clinton's] Presidency." Excuse me: "she claims"? Is Isaacson actually prepared to argue that there may not have been enemies of Bill Clinton who sought to destroy his presidency? Is he saying that this an assertion that can be disputed?

Elsewhere in The New Yorker, there's a short review of Ann Coulter's Treason. The worst the anonymous reviewer can say about this book that charges every liberal and Democrat of the past half century with disloyalty to country is that the book is "strangely lopsided" and that Coulter lacks "any real acumen as a political commentator." Far better, I guess, to save the real venom for Sidney Blumenthal and Hillary Clinton, who worked with a president who was attacked by capable enemies for eight years, and who have the unmitigated gall to find this disturbing.

President Bush has urged Iraqis to try to kill American troops. Now General Tommy Franks has done the same thing:

‘Bring ’Em On’: Retiring Gen. Franks Stands Behind Bush’s Words

T A M P A , Fla., July 7— Gen. Tommy Franks leaves his top spot at U.S. Central Command repeating President Bush's taunt to Iraqi militants: "Bring 'em on."

On the last day of his command, Franks told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America that he agreed with the president's comment, and he doesn't think more U.S. troops are needed to deal with the recent spate of attacks against American forces.

"The fact is, wherever we find criminals, death squads and so forth who are anxious to do damage to this country and to peace-loving countries around the world, I absolutely agree with the president of the United States: 'bring 'em on," Franks said....

--ABC News

I'm sure the troops thank him for that.

Andrew Sullivan, playing the "responsible conservative," is dismissive of Ann Coulter's book Treason in this column from Sunday's Times of London -- although he praises her motives and expresses agreement with a number of her points (and also, bafflingly, declares her "sexy"). But I'm less interested in what he has to say than I am in this, which appears near the end of his column:

One of the most reputable scholars who has studied the McCarthy era in great detail, Ron Radosh, is appalled at the damage Coulter has done to the work he and many others have painstakingly done over the years. "I am furious and upset about her book," he told me last week. "I am reading it - she uses my stuff, Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, Allen Weinstein etc. to distort what we actually say and to make ludicrous and historically incorrect arguments. You might recall my lengthy and negative review in The New Republic a few years ago of Herman's book on McCarthy; well, she is ten times worse than Herman. At least he tried to use bona fide historical methods of research and argument." Now Radosh has endured ostracism and abuse for insisting that many of McCarthy's victims were indeed Communist spies or agents. But he draws the line at Coulter's crude and inflammatory defense of McCarthy. "I think it is important that those who are considered critics of left/liberalism don't stop using our critical faculties when self-proclaimed conservatives start producing crap."

Terrific, Professor Radosh. Now, do you plan to say this under your own byline? Maybe in The New Republic? Or in that column you write for David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine? (I see Treason is the lead item in Front Page's online store. Surely that won't prevent you from explaining in detail to your fellow neocons how sloppy and irresponsible Coulter is -- will it?)

Two devastating articles for President "Mission Accomplished" from today's Christian Science Monitor:

Troop morale in Iraq hits 'rock bottom':

US troops facing extended deployments amid the danger, heat, and uncertainty of an Iraq occupation are suffering from low morale that has in some cases hit "rock bottom."

...Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity....

"Make no mistake, the level of morale for most soldiers that I've seen has hit rock bottom," said another soldier, an officer from the Army's 3rd Infantry Division in Iraq....

The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress....

Fatigued, US troops yearn for home

Facing repeatedly delayed go-home dates and attacks by elements of a population they were sent to protect, American troops in Iraq are under increasing stress. The killing of a US soldier Sunday at Baghdad University epitomizes the non-combat violence that leaves US forces on tenterhooks - and waiting for a ticket home.

"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"...

"The frustration is so great, you just wonder if it's going to cause someone to snap," says Maj. Patrick Ratigan, chaplain for the 2nd Brigade Combat Team in Fallujah. This unit was told that the way home was through Baghdad, and subsequent exit dates have come and gone, as the deployment stretches to 10 months....

"I never saw any bodies back then [in the first Gulf War], but this time we would pull into somebody's backyard and start shooting," says Juan Carlos Cardona, a field artillery sergeant and platoon leader, who leads day and night patrols west of Baghdad. "Intelligence was telling us that anybody you saw could be a terrorist - that was a new experience."

Though Sergeant Cardona says Iraqis have yet to unanimously praise their efforts at winning hearts and minds - by distributing fresh water in a local village and protecting propane supplies - he dreams every day of going home. After his alert level has been so high for so long, though, he says he will ease into it.

"I've already told my wife that I'm not going to drive for a week or two, and I'm probably going to be afraid to drive at night," Cardona says. "That stuff messes up your mind - you're driving at night, then think you see an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] aimed at you."...

The second article suggests that these troops think they'll be criticized by civilians when they come back. I don't see that at all, except possibly by a few idiots. But we won't understand what they've been through -- and they themselves won't, either. And I don't know how much help they'll get from the sons of bitches who sent them there and then used them as pawns.

In my last post, I imagined Bush administration Strangeloves testing nuclear weapons in the Grand Canyon. No, they don't really want to do that. But they do want to start testing nukes again where they used to, in Nevada, as early as 2005. This would end a testing moratorium imposed by Poppy Bush in 1992, as USA Today's lead story reminds us.

The current Bushies love the idea that "bunker-buster" nukes can magically, cleanly neutralize deeply buried chemical and biological weapons. Alas, it's not that easy:

The limitations of physics mean even the best-designed bunker-busters can burrow only 30 to 50 feet before exploding. The explosion triggers shock waves that travel down toward buried targets and destroy them.

Critics say that means nuclear bunker-busters wouldn't be able to burrow deep enough before exploding to contain the fallout they would create. Sidney Drell, a Stanford University physicist, determined that destroying a target dug 1,000 feet into rock would require a nuclear weapon with a yield of 100 kilotons — more than six times that of the Hiroshima bomb. The explosion of a nuclear bomb that big would launch enormous amounts of radioactive debris into the air and contaminate a huge area.

To contain fallout for a one-kiloton bomb, the warhead would have to penetrate an estimated 220 feet underground, many times the depth achievable by any current earth-penetrator warhead. The challenge scientists face is to find some way to get the bomb deep enough so that the explosion harms only what's underground — not people on the surface.

Critics say the evidence against battlefield use of nuclear weapons is spread all over the Nevada Test Site. Most notable is Sedan Crater, 1,280 feet across and 320 feet deep. It is the largest crater at the test site, the result of a 104-kiloton device that was exploded 635 feet underground in 1962.

The idea was to see whether nuclear weapons could be used for such peaceful purposes as creating new harbors. The blast threw 12 million tons of radioactive earth 290 feet into the air, where it became airborne fallout. That was the end of the idea of digging harbors with nuclear bombs.

Until now, apparently.

We're wargaming in the Galapagos Islands?

Yes, we are, in conjunction with Columbia, Chile, Mexico, and Ecuador, as the BBC points out.

Um, what's next? Nuclear missile tests in the Grand Canyon?

...What was then called Saddam International Airport fell to soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division on April 3. For the next two weeks, airport workers say, soldiers sleeping in the airport's main terminal helped themselves to items in the duty-free shop, including alcohol, cassettes, perfume, cigarettes and expensive watches....

Coalition soldiers also vandalized the airport, American sources say...."There was no chance this was done by Iraqis" before the airport fell, says a senior Pentagon official. "The airport was secure when this was done."...

The airplanes suffered the greatest damage. Of the 10 Iraqi Airways jets on the tarmac when the airport fell, a U.S. inspection in early May found that five were serviceable: three 727s, a 747 and a 737. Over the next few weeks, U.S. soldiers looking for comfortable seats and souvenirs ripped out many of the planes' fittings, slashed seats, damaged cockpit equipment and popped out every windshield....

--Time

SO-CALLED LIBERAL BOOK REVIEWS

...peculiar...

...The mostly first-person questions and the footnoted answers have a note of parody, forcing the terms of consumerism to witness the materials of Goya....

The method of his book, its form..., is too eccentric, too self-parodic, to be fully adequate to its purpose. The summary morsels of fact, the sometimes falsely naive questions, vaguely despise themselves....

OK, I'm quoted just some of the negative passages in Robert Pinsky's review of What Every Person Should Know About War by Chris Hedges, which appeared in today's New York Times Book Review. The review was mixed (Pinsky, in fact, called it "arresting, peculiar, significant"). But notice that it's not a rave.

I'm telling you this to make a point about "our" media and "their" media. When you remind conservatives of the overwhelmingly right-wing bias of talk radio, or cable-news commentary, or the entire broadcast schedule of Fox News, they invariably say, "Yes we have those things, but you have ABC, CBS, NBC, The Washington Post, and The New York Times."

But think of Chris Hedges's career, as a reporter, author of an acclaimed book on war, and, most recently, the subject of controversy because of an anti-war commencement speech he delivered.

Now, imagine that a respected right-wing journalist and author had recently upset a commencement audience with a speech in which he lashed out at the anti-war movement. And imagine if he published a book right after doing so (and, perhaps, incurring the wrath of progressives from coast to coast). Is it conceivable that the book would get a mixed review in the New York Post or The Washington Times? Is it conceivable that Fox News would be lukewarm toward a writer who had lashed out against the anti-war movement?

But that's just how "our" side works, virtually all the time. And it's good, really -- except for the fact that the right is at war with us, and extends that war to the Times and other institutions it considers ideological, and many of those institutions do nothing in response. I'm not arguing for biased, ideological book reviews. What I would like is for someone on the right to have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the Times doesn't use its book reviews to fight a culture war, much as Ann Coulter might like her readers to believe it does.

I told you on Wednesday that Ann Coulter's Treason came in at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week in release (Hillary Clinton is still #1; the list is now up on the Web). On the Publishers Weekly list (which is here, though you may need to register to read it), Coulter didn't even get to the bridesmaid spot -- Treason finished not only Hillary's book but also The South Beach Diet by Arthur Agatston. (The Times has the diet book on a "Advice, How-To, and Miscellaneous" list that's separate from its general nonfiction list.) On USA Today's list, which lumps together hardcovers and paperbacks, fiction and all kinds of nonfiction, adult books and kids' books, Hillary's #3 (behind Harry Potter and the Oprah pick East of Eden); Coulter's at #9.

Sorry to dwell on this horse race, but it's very, very important to conservatives of a certain stripe -- or at least it was until it became clear that it wasn't going to turn out quite the way they dreamed it would.

The people running Iraq insist that everything's really, really not bad at all -- but please please please, they beg us, don't repatriate any refugees. I mentioned a few days ago that the occupiers are desperate to keep Iraqis now living in Iran from returning to Iraq; now, according to The Observer, it's refugees from England:

British and American officials in the provisional government in Iraq have scuppered plans by the Home Office to repatriate thousands of Iraqi asylum-seekers.

Home Secretary David Blunkett announced in May that asylum-seekers who fled Saddam Hussein's regime would be returning to Iraq within weeks. However, The Observer has discovered that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Baghdad has told the Home Office that neither the country, nor the current administration, is ready for any returning refugees.

The Home Office last night confirmed that it intended to begin voluntary repatriations this month and wished to start forced deportations by the end of the year.

A spokeswoman said: 'There are some people who actively want to go home and we are putting measures in place to help them. We will start forced returns when it is realistic to do so. It still stands that we would still be looking towards the end of the year if at all possible.'...

Humanitarian officials say the CPA is 'livid' at being 'pushed into accepting refugees', even when they were returning voluntarily. 'They believe they have got enough problems to deal with already without Western governments adding more for their own domestic reasons,' the official said....

LIE DOWN WITH DOGS...

As an American, I don't even blanch at the notion of "confess-or-die" -- it's just routine law enforcement here. But apparently it's a bit too much even for the government of that great hero of the American right wing, Tony Blair:

The two British terrorist suspects facing a secret US military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay will be given a choice: plead guilty and accept a 20-year prison sentence, or be executed if found guilty.

American legal sources close to the process said that the prisoners' dilemma was intended to encourage maximum 'co-operation'.

The news comes as Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, prepares to urge US Secretary of State Colin Powell to repatriate the two Britons. He will say that they should face a fair trial here under English law. Backed by Home Secretary David Blunkett, Straw will make it clear that the Government opposes the death penalty and wants to see both men tried 'under normal judicial process'....

--Observer

Apparently it's not just the death penalty that's making the government of Hero Blair go wobbly -- it's little details like this:

According to US legal and constitutional experts, the Final Rule, the regulations that will govern the military commissions, has rendered a fair trial almost impossible.

Among those representing the two British men in the United States is Michael Ratner, of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, who believes the tribunals are weighted in favour of securing guilt verdicts.

'The trial system in Guantanamo Bay allows a whole series of serious breaches of defendant rights that would mean that they could never come to trial in the US.

'First, it allows the wiretapping of attorney-client meetings, although those wiretaps cannot actually be used in evidence. Then there is the fact that the Pentagon "Appointing Authority" - probably US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld - has the ability to remove a judge at any time without giving any reason.'

Among other concerns about the 50-page Final Rule, which was published by the Department of Defence last week for governing the trials, are:

· that rules of evidence are so broad that it is left at the discretion of the trial's presiding officer whether to allow any evidence he believes would be convincing to a 'reasonable person' and that that would appear to allow the admission of hearsay evidence; · that evidence can be admitted by telephone and by pseudonym; · that it is insisted that only security-screened civil attorneys be allowed to appear before the court and they can also be removed at any time....

Hey Tony -- due process, schmue process. Sorry, this is how we do things in America now. As a bumper sticker I saw recently put it: KILL 'EM ALL -- LET ALLAH SORT 'EM OUT.

In The New Yorker's letters column (which isn't online), Roger Brandwein of Scarsdale, New York, responds to a Talk of the Town piece by Philip Gourevitch about the tales told to us by Bush and Blair:

It's worth remembering, in reading Gourevitch's Comment, that past Presidents have not only lied about threats posed to America but also been held to account for their dishonesty. In 1846, President James Polk deceived the public into believing that Mexican troops who had crossed the Rio Grande had, in an unprovoked attack, "shed American blood on American soil." In response to this "invasion," General Zachary Taylor was ordered into action, and Congress declared war on Mexico. But when it became clear to legislators that the President had duped them Congress acted again: the House of Representatives censured Polk, finding that the war had been "unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun."

First it was French wines. Then French fries. Now it's French exchange students who are getting the cold shoulder from American families still smarting over France's opposition to the war in Iraq....

"This has been a horrible year," said Deborah Bertrand, the New York area manager for Loisirs Culturels à L'Étranger, a not-for-profit exchange program based in Paris. "Usually I have no problem finding host families. The only thing I can attribute it to is the anti-French feeling going on because of the Iraq war. My coordinators all up and down the East Coast are having the same problem."

Each year, L.E.C., as the program is known in France, signs up several hundred French teenagers whose parents have paid dearly for them to come to the United States for a summer tradition that has endured for more than three decades. But this year, even though the number of prospective visitors is one-quarter what it once was, the program has yet to find host families for nearly half the 250 teenagers who signed up.

The first wave began arriving on Monday, and unless homes can be found quickly, four Boston-bound teenagers in that group will get refunds instead of trips. At least 100 participants in the program who expected to come in August are also in limbo.

" `Not this year' is what I hear a lot," said Mary Lou Church, an L.E.C. recruiter in Portsmouth, R.I., who is taking extra students into her own home this year rather than turn them away. "This year, with everything that happened with the war, people locally have just taken it personally. When I ask them, `Would you open your home to a French teenager?' they look at me like, `Are you out of your mind? Why would we, when they've been so ungiving to us?' "...

--New York Times

"Why would we?" Because, you ignorant schmucks, these are French people who like America. Why else would they want to come here? You could show them that there's more to this country than painstakingly cultivated simpleminded jingoism. But instead you want them to hate us.

Choke on a freedom fry, morons.

The United States began building the coalition on September 12, 2001, and there are currently 70 nations supporting the global war on terrorism. To date, 21 nations have deployed more than 16,000 troops to the U.S. Central Command’s region of responsibility. This coalition of the willing is working hard every day to defeat terrorism, wherever it may exist.

--from the International Contributions to the War on Terror page at www.centcom.mil

The administration has been struggling to enlist other countries to contribute troops to the Iraqi occupation force and reduce the strain on the U.S. military. Despite vigorous appeals from the president and his senior advisers, however, foreign governments have been reluctant to provide large numbers of troops. While the administration has queried 70 countries about the possibility of contributing forces, 10 have thus far agreed to contribute about 20,000 troops by the end of the summer. Only Britain, Ukraine and Poland have provided substantial assistance so far.

--Washington Post, July 3, 2203

Of course, those countries agreed to join in the war on terror. They didn't agree to join whatever-the-hell war we said was part of the war on terror....

Hey, Happy 4th.

In time for the holiday, Walter Isaacson is going around promoting his new Benjamin Franklin biography. In one way this is a good thing -- Isaacson gets to talk about Franklin's illegitimate son, and the illegitimate son's illegitimate son, and Franklin's illegal common-law marriage to a woman who wasn't the son's mother. Isaacson also gets to point out that there was a lot of illegitimacy among the Founding Fathers. He said all this on Terry Gross's radio show last night, and I hope he does so again and again across this great land. Americans need to be reminded that the country wasn't founded by God-bothering prigs like Bush and Ashcroft.

From Publishers Lunch:

It’s a whole new world when Nielsen Bookscan updates become a weekly headline feature on the Drudge Report! Today’s posting:

1. HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX 2,007,990 (YTD: 5,916,994)

2. EAST OF EDEN 119,222 (YTD: 261,478)

3. LIVING HISTORY 106,658 (YTD: 715,061)

4. TREASON (Ann Coulter) 68,854 (YTD: 69,576)

A few thoughts about this:

* If Drudge posted this, he didn't post it for very long -- I never saw it. Was the news that a brand-new Ann Coulter book was outsold by a weeks-old, poorly reviewed Hillary Clinton book too embarrassing for the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?

* Coulter did sell a good number of books, however -- real bar-code-scanned books to real buyers. So we can't smugly assume that if a right-wing book is on the bestseller list, it's because a cash-rich foundation bought all the copies up.

* But Hillary's book is still a far bigger hit.

* And if, as I noted last week, Nielsen's system tracks only 65% of total book sales in the U.S., scanned sales of 715,061 suggest total sales of 1,100,094. Isn't it time for Tucker Carlson to fire up the barbecue and start grilling those items of clothing he promised to eat if Hill cracked a mill?

(By the way, East of Eden is the first selection of the newly revived Oprah's Book Club.)

A couple of days ago, Richard Cohen said this in a Washington Post column about Ann Coulter's book Treason:

In some ways, the nutso American brand of archconservatism mirrors traditional anti-Semitism. Jew-haters proclaim that Jews control the media, international finance and almost everything else of importance -- but, somehow, Jews have accumulated a 2,000-year history of expulsions, pogroms and, finally, the mass murder of the Holocaust. It is the same with American liberals. They control everything, and yet, somehow, the White House, both houses of Congress and, with the exception of several delis in New York, the entire business community are in the hands of conservatives. It's hard to figure.

Hmmm -- has Richard Cohen been reading my old posts?

I guess it's possible that Bush's "bring 'em on" remark played badly with the general public. If so, I'm surprised. It's clear that online lefties thought it was outrageous, but the public at large never seems to react negatively to Bush. Nobody except us usual grumblers seemed to mind the Top Gun nonsense. I'll stand by what I wrote yesterday -- the public likes this lack-of-self-doubt stuff, unless I'm mistaken.

An acquaintance has been thumbing through the newly published eleventh edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary and notes the following:

"Nigger" is usu offensive, though "faggot" is merely usu disparaging. Go figure.

Odd.

Yesterday I read the New York Times story about Dr. Steven Hatfill, who's being investigated but has denied he had anything to do with the 2001 anthrax attacks. One of the Times reporters who wrote the story was Judith Miller.

Judith Miller's kind of an interesting person. She published a book on bioweapons that came out, and became a #1 bestseller, just about when the anthrax attacks took place. She received an anthrax letter herself -- except that letter contained a harmless powder. And in the book she acknowledges her debt to a "bioweapons mentor" who has, in the course of his reasearch, deliberately infected people with fever-inducing microbes. Oh, and she can be a bit short-tempered.

Hey, you don't think....

Nahhh!

Conservatives, prepare to weep. The new New York Times bestseller list just arrived in my e-mail in-box, and, well, sorry:

Hillary Clinton's Living History is still the nonfiction #1.

Ann Coulter's Treason, in its first week on the list, gets the consolation prize: the #2 slot.

Buck up, righties. You can take it.

Now, I actually think the bulk of Coulter's sales are legit, which puts me at odds with a lot of people on the left. However, I do note that out of fifteen titles on the Times hardcover nonfiction list, three are marked with a dagger, which means that "some bookstores report receiving bulk orders." Those three books are Ann Coulter's Treason, Dick Morris's Off with Their Heads, and Robert (Buzz) Patterson's Dereliction of Duty -- all just the sorts of books that a cash-rich right-wing foundation might want to purchase in bulk in order to get (or keep) it on the bestseller list. But some right-wing books do a whole lot better on the bestseller lists than others, and Coulter's new book, like her last one, is doing very, very well. So I think she really does have readers, and we should take her as seriously as we would take any other utterly irresponsible hatemonger with a large public following.

But in any case -- oh, did I mention this already? -- Hillary is still #1.

Saying U.S. troops were capable of responding to ambush attacks in Iraq, President Bush maintained Wednesday such violence would not undercut his resolve to keep Americans there until stability was restored. “My answer is: Bring them on,” he said of the hit-and-run attackers.

--MSNBC

If I ever have a chance to sit down and talk with Bill Clinron, here's the question I want to ask him: Why were you never able to do something like this? Why were you never able to put your critics on the defensive in the midst of a screw-up by making a defiant, bombastic, macho declaration like this?

This is a time-honored right-wing technique. It's essentially what Ollie North did when he went before Congress -- he told his questioners that he was the living embodiment of Right and Truth and Americanism and he didn't give a damn what they thought because who the hell were they to criticize him or Saint Reagan, and not only did the general public all but forget after that that he and his president had violated the law of the land and used the Constitution as toilet paper, but he became, briefly, a national hero.

Why can't Democrats ever do something like this? Is it because we don't really believe we have a monopoly on truth and morality, the way so many Republicans do? Is it because it's presumed in this country that all politicians lie about everything, except Republicans when they talk about foreign foes?

Guess what treasonous, America-hating rag published this editorial:

Nothing but lip service

In recent months, President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have missed no opportunity to heap richly deserved praise on the military. But talk is cheap — and getting cheaper by the day, judging from the nickel-and-dime treatment the troops are getting lately.

For example, the White House griped that various pay-and-benefits incentives added to the 2004 defense budget by Congress are wasteful and unnecessary — including a modest proposal to double the $6,000 gratuity paid to families of troops who die on active duty. This comes at a time when Americans continue to die in Iraq at a rate of about one a day.

Similarly, the administration announced that on Oct. 1 it wants to roll back recent modest increases in monthly imminent-danger pay (from $225 to $150) and family-separation allowance (from $250 to $100) for troops getting shot at in combat zones.

Then there’s military tax relief — or the lack thereof. As Bush and Republican leaders in Congress preach the mantra of tax cuts, they can’t seem to find time to make progress on minor tax provisions that would be a boon to military homeowners, reservists who travel long distances for training and parents deployed to combat zones, among others.

Incredibly, one of those tax provisions — easing residency rules for service members to qualify for capital-gains exemptions when selling a home — has been a homeless orphan in the corridors of power for more than five years now....

Translation: Money talks — and we all know what walks.

Give up?

Army Times.

(Thanks to Bob Harris at Tom Tomorrow's blog for spotting this.)

Now that we've solved all the problems in Iraq and now that everyone there loves us, surely we won't mind an influx of refugees from Iran....

...Whoops! Guess not:

Handling the return of millions of Iraqis who fled to other countries or were driven from their homes during Saddam Hussein's rule stands as one of the most daunting long-term challenges for the U.S. administrators running Iraq.
    
About 200,000 Iraqis are living in neighboring Iran, whose government is now eager to send them home. But U.S. officials are balking, worried that a flood of mainly Shi'ite Muslim Iraqis would further destabilize a situation that is precarious.
    
"We're facing problems created by the occupying powers that prevent us from returning these refugees," Ahmad Hosseini, Iran's director general for refugee issues, recently told reporters at the Geneva offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
    
"The occupying powers believe it's not the proper time for all Iraqis who reside abroad to go back," he said without elaborating....
    
U.S. officials say they support an orderly return of the refugees but decline to offer any specifics on a timetable, or what conditions would have to be met to create a stable environment.
    
"As a practical matter, we simply do not have at the moment the capacity to perform adequate security checks on people returning in large numbers," said L. Paul Bremer, the chief of the civilian Coalition Provisional Authority, the occupying power in Iraq....
    
--Washington Times

Hey, maybe we can get Bush one of those "PLAN AHEAD" signs for his office -- you know, the ones with "PLAN AHE" in really big letters and "AD" really, really small and crammed in the lower right corner....

Bush's Big-Lie-by-Implication, that Iraq was involved in 9/11, is now so deeply ingrained that even Chris Matthews, who for several decades (as a congressional aide to the Speaker of the House, a TV pundit, a columnist, and the author of several books) has earned a living based on the presumption that he knows what the hell is going on in the world. Here he is talking to Ann Coulter on his shown on Monday night:

COULTER: ...North Korea is different from Iraq. That isn’t -- the 9/11 terrorists didn’t come out of that region.
       
MATTHEWS: That region. But they came out of Iraq.
       
COULTER: No, they came out of the Middle East.

Even Coulter (who presumably hangs out with many of Big Lie's most prominent promulgators) seems to know better.

Atrios is surprised to learn (from a Richard Cohen column in The Washington Post) that Ann Coulter, in her new book, Treason, refers to the Japanese military in World War II as "savage Oriental beasts."

But is this really surprising? As I've pointed out, in three columns Coulter wrote last year about the Central Park jogger case she called the group of teenagers who were convicted (and whose convictions were ultimately thrown out for lack of evidence) "savages" five times, "animals" five times, and "beasts," "feral beasts," and "primitives" once each.

This is why it annoys me that The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and other first-rank publications ignore books by Coulter and her ilk. Quite a few Americans read this stuff, and it flies in under the cultural radar because the mainstream press thinks it's not worth the attention of the majority of Americans who won't read it and have no idea how repellent it is. (No, I don't think all the sales are Richard Mellon Scaife buybacks -- Scaife might game the system to get Regnery's anti-Jesse Jackson book onto the bestseller list for a week or two, but the sustained run on the charts of books such as Coulter's Slander and Bernard Goldberg's Bias can't be explained just by bulk orders.)

I'm glad Cohen mentioned Coulter's racist epithet -- more journalists and reviewers need to do the same. Moreover, in the case of this book, reviewers need to walk Americans through the real history of the Cold War and debunk Coulter's absurdly one-sided revisionist version. As I've said before, there will soon be quite a few Americans whose knowledge of the Cold War comes almost exclusively from Coulter's Treason. This is a bit like getting all one's knowledge of Judaism from Henry Ford, and we should worry about it.

KABUL, Afghanistan - With her grandfather, father, mother and a brother all addicted to opium, it's little surprise that this Afghan family's youngest member has also fallen under the drug's spell.

Except for one thing: Aria is just 15 months old.

"All the time she is crying, so I give her just a little bit of opium to go to sleep," said 30-year-old Suhaila, who goes by one name, cradling her daughter Aria in a squalid apartment block in eastern Kabul.

Opium use among all age groups is on the rise in Afghanistan, which produces more of the drug than any other nation, according to the United Nations. But in a poor country where anti-narcotics efforts are focused on combating supply, not demand, there are few places to treat addicts who need help.

"It's a big problem here, there aren't many places to go," says Mohammad Stanekzai, program manager at the Nejat rehabilitation center in Kabul, the only aid agency in the capital established specifically to help addicts. "We have 130 people on the waiting list (for in-house care), but we've only got 10 beds." ...

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Kabul is carrying out a study to determine the number of addicts in Kabul. The report has yet to be completed, but the UNODC deputy representative to Afghanistan, Adam C. Bouloukos, said one trend is clear.

"We're definitely seeing an increase in opium use — eating, smoking, injecting — particularly among refugees (in Pakistan and Iran) and returning refugees," Bouloukos says....

--AP

Two good op-ed pieces on Afghanistan in today's New York Times. Too bad no one in America gives a damn anymore:

Eager for Afghan forces to help fight the Taliban, the United States brought ... warlords back from exile after 9/11. What began as a relationship of convenience was cemented in a brotherhood of arms, as United States troops fraternized with the exotic fighters they had bivouacked with. Because they had reaped weapons and cash in the bargain, the warlords were able to impose themselves as provincial governors, despite being reviled by the Afghan people, as every conversation I've had and study I've done demonstrates.

...In late May, President Karzai summoned to Kabul the 12 governors who control Afghanistan's strategic borders. For the previous fortnight, Afghan and international officials say, he had been preparing to dismiss the most egregious offenders: four or five governors who are running their provinces like personal fiefs, who withhold vast customs revenue from the central government, who truck with meddlesome foreign governments, who oppress their people, who turn a blind eye to extremist activities while trumpeting their anti-Taliban bona fides. United States officials, saying they were taken aback by the scope of the Afghan government's plan, discouraged him. The plan was scrapped, and the Afghan government made do with an agreement in which the recalcitrant governors promised to hand over customs revenue owed the central government.

--"Afghanistan's Future, Lost in the Shuffle" by Sarah Chayes, field director of Afghans for Civil Society

One morning [in Kabul] I met a policeman named Nasser directing traffic near the Haji Yaghoub Mosque, and I asked him how his life had changed since the fall of the Taliban. "Well, I am allowed to shave now," he said, shrugging. He told me he was supposed to make $40 a month, but the government hadn't paid him in three months. And he needed to feed a family of 12: his wife and four children, and his dead brother's two wives and five children. As he spoke, a crowd of burqa-clad women and barefoot children with rotten teeth were begging for money in front of the mosque....

Security is the most urgent problem. It is tenuous at best outside Kabul. Taliban forces are regrouping. Disarmament is a distant dream. Afghanistan last year was once again the world's leading opium producer. One child in four still dies before the age of 5. Major roads remain unbuilt. Women are still harassed and threatened. The provincial warlords battle one another while scoffing at the central government....

--"Desperation in Kabul" by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghani who now lives in California

A police informant told investigators that missing Baylor University basketball player Patrick Dennehy was shot in the head by a former teammate as the two argued while firing guns together, according to court documents.

A search warrant affidavit released Monday says the informant told investigators in Delaware that Carlton Dotson shot Dennehy in the head with a 9 mm handgun. Dennehy has been missing nearly three weeks.

The informant said Dotson told a cousin that he and Dennehy argued while shooting guns in the Waco area and that Dennehy pointed a weapon at Dotson as if to shoot him.

But Dotson instead shot Dennehy, the informant said....

--AP

But ... but that's impossible! Two fine young men engaging in shooting sports would never get in an argument -- and if they did, one would never murder the other! It just couldn't happen! An armed society is a polite society!

Good news -- and I love the first sentence of this story:

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that a Ten Commandments monument the size of a washing machine must be removed from the Alabama Supreme Court building.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed a ruling by a federal judge who said that the 2 1/2-ton granite monument, placed there by Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, violates the constitutional separation of church and state.

"If we adopted his position, the chief justice would be free to adorn the walls of the Alabama Supreme Court's courtroom with sectarian religious murals and have decidedly religious quotations painted above the bench," the three-judge panel said.

"Every government building could be topped with a cross, or a menorah, or a statue of Buddha, depending upon the views of the officials with authority over the premises."...

--AP

Previously, the 11th Circuit said the Miami relatives couldn't make Elian their puppet in an asylum hearing and tried to keep the Florida recount going. No wonder Bush wants the appalling William Pryor on the 11th Circuit.

Does anyone see the irony in a group of people the country looks to for cutting-edge cultural innovation in design, style, fashion, theater and the arts in general, suddenly shrieking for something as heavy duty as marriage. Perhaps someone straight should quietly explain how much work marriage really is and the potential for it to be dull and unfunny - things the gays have always recoiled against. Perhaps then they'll stop all the nonsense, tell their partners they love them and go back to writing really great musicals.

--Lucianne Goldberg's Lucianne.com on the Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas ruling

And the colored people -- they're such terrific athletes and dancers! What are they all worked up about this civil rights stuff? Hey, don't get me wrong -- some of my best friends are colored....

A KEEN GRASP OF THE GLARINGLY OBVIOUS

Troops Still Needed in Iraq, Bush Says

Uncertainty on Hussein Unhelpful, Rumsfeld Says

Thanks for clearing those things up for us, guys.

The Iraqi people will figure out what the government of Iraq will do.

The Iraqi people will ultimately decide on a constitution, the Iraqi people will be the ones to decide what the form of that government might be. There will be an interim, meaning temporary, short-lived authority of some kind....

--Donald Rumsfeld, May 4, 2003

Find this embarrassing blast from the past plus more here. Nice work by Leah, one of Atrios's guest bloggers.

Seven in 10 people in a poll say the Bush administration implied that Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States.

And a majority, 52 percent, say they believe the United States has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam was working closely with the al-Qaida terrorist organization.

The number that believes this country has found weapons of mass destruction is 23 percent, down from 34 percent in May, according to a poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland....

Only four in 10 of those polled, 39 percent, said they thought the government was being fully truthful when it presented evidence of links between Saddam and al-Qaida. But among those who thought the government was not telling the truth, people were more likely to say the government was "stretching the truth, but not making false statements" rather than "presenting evidence they knew was false."...

--AP

Mission accomplished.

And I mean that literally -- establishing these lies as the truth is the primary mission, or certainly one of the primary missions, Bush and his people wanted to accomplish in Iraq. I don't know how the son of a bitch lives with himself.

Also from Pakistan's PakTribune:

700 Afghan soldiers revolt against discrimination

Hundreds of soldiers of Afghan Combine Army have revolt against the low salaries, maltreatment by the US forces and in view of ever increasing attacks by the Taliban fighters.

According to reports received from Afghan capital Kabul, about seven hundred soldiers of Afghan Combine Army have expressed their no confidence against the US polices vis-à-vis Afghanistan.

They have resigned from their jobs and also vacated the official residences. These soldiers were deployed at different official check posts in Kabul and its adjoining areas.

The rebellion by these Afghan soldiers has created security problems in the Afghan capital.

These soldiers were of the view that they were being given only $ 30 per month whereas the Afghan National Army officials were receiving much more salary in comparison to them.

They also informed that the Taliban fighters have also intensified their attacks against the US and its allied forces in Afghanistan during the recent weeks.

Meanwhile the reports of rebellion by Afghan soldiers from other areas of Afghanistan have also been received.