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Thursday, July 31, 2003 US forces in Iraq have suffered cases of probable suicide, a senior military official said today, amid slumping morale among troops faced with daily and deadly attacks. The senior officer, who asked not to be named, said that among 53 US military non-combat deaths since May 1, when the war was declared effectively over, were "probable" suicides as well as a large number of road accidents. He did not say how many soldiers were suspected of committing suicide. There have been a number of "non-hostile gunshot incidents" among US troops in that time, with suspected suicides and accidental discharges of weapons, for example during cleaning, included under the category.... --Sunday Times (Australia) posted by Steve M. | 7:23 PM | Making critics look naive by distorting what they think: It works for Bush, so why shouldn't it work for Blair? This is from a Guardian report on a Tony Blair press conference (asterisks mine): He added: "The biggest problem ... is that a lot of people really don't believe that there is a threat arising from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.* I think they think it is a convenient construct politically." Asked if he should quit if no weapons were found, he said: "There has always been something bizarre about the notion that Saddam never** had any weapons of mass destruction." *Schmuck -- nobody disputes that "there is a threat arising from terrorism and weapons of mass destruction." What we dispute is that there was a threat to the U.S., Britain, and the rest of the West and its allies arising from Iraqi terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in the past decade. We think that threat very well may have ceased to exist, or effectively ceased to exist, quite possibly because Saddam curtailed his weapons programs in response to sanctions and bombings. **Schmuck -- no one says he never had any weapons of mass destruction. He had them. He used them. But that was a long time ago. Did he have them just before the recent war? Did he have them in the years leading up to it? Well, did he? How exasperating.... posted by Steve M. | 6:20 PM | If you're not sick of reading about the terrorism death pool yet, Sadly, No! has more -- some additional skepticism about the ability of betting pools to predict the future (Saddam's overthrow was predicted by TradeSports.com bettors -- betting in April!), plus some questions about whether the program would have been set up well, and whether we would have known what to do with good information if we'd gotten it. Well worth reading. posted by Steve M. | 5:21 PM | CalPundit collects some interesting -- and fairly encouraging -- poll numbers. posted by Steve M. | 4:31 PM | Who's ticked off at Bush now? Engineers. This is from an alert sent out by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers: PRESIDENT BLAMES UNEMPLOYMENT ON LACK OF SKILLS! Engineers Must Correct this Mistake During a Wednesday morning (July 30th) press conference, President Bush was asked a question about jobs going overseas as a result of technological innovation. His response was: "I fully understand what you're saying. In other words, as technology races through the economy, a lot of times worker skills don't keep up with technological change." Many people have taken his response to mean that unemployment in the high-tech sector is the result of American workers who allowed their skills to become obsolete. This is an unacceptable explanation.... When you write the President, tell him that unemployment in the high-tech sector has very little to do with the competency of American workers, and a great deal to do with the low cost of using foreign workers.... Look, I know there aren't very many pols at the national level who want to interfere with the global market's "race to the bottom" in wages and salaries. But for Pete's sake, Shrub, at least try not to actually insult the peons. posted by Steve M. | 3:28 PM | Maybe I'm beating this to death, but I want to clarify something I said last night about the ability of the Iowa Electronic Markets to see the future. In today's New York Times business section, UCal Berkeley business professor Hal Varian specifically cites IEM's presidential vote-share betting pool and says that pools of this kind have provided somewhat better forecasts than polls right before the election — and they provide much better (and less volatile) forecasts several months before the elections. Thus, markets do best exactly where the public opinion polls and expert opinion polls are weakest. But this, I think, is based on a misreading of the data. Go here (IEM's page for the 2000 White House vote-share pool), click "Price History," then check the numbers in August, September, and early October. Now compare polls for the same period at Polling Report. Months before the vote, IEM did have Bush closer to Gore than (most) polls did. But, by election eve, five of the seven polls listed by Polling Report had Bush up by a hair, or Gore up by a hair -- while IEM's betting pool had Bush up by 4.5%. What that says to me is that IEM had a consistent, if slight, pro-Bush skew. At IEM Bush was even with Gore before he was even in most professional polls; then Bush was up by five at IEM when, in most polls (and, ultimately, the actual popular vote), he wasn't up at all. I don't think this is right-wing bias. I think the consistently negative mainstream-media coverage of Gore skewed the results. The IEM betting pool, as I noted last night, utterly blew the 2002 congressional race, predicting a GOP House and a Dem/Independent Senate -- because, I think, the same mainstream press that loathed Gore in 2000 consistently told us in 2002 that that's how the congressional races would turn out. So why do we believe IEM sees the future? And why should we believe that the Pentagon's death pool would have seen the future? posted by Steve M. | 11:35 AM | Theocrats put pressure on the courts, in Iraq and the U.S.: NAJAF, Iraq, July 30 — The United States Marine colonel supervising the reconstruction of this Shiite holy city's government indefinitely postponed the swearing in of its first-ever female judge today after her appointment provoked a wave of resentment, including fatwas from senior Islamic clerics and heated protests by the city's lawyers.... "There is a woman on the Governing Council and nobody batted an eye," said Lt. Col. Christopher C. Conlin, the senior commanding officer here. "Sometimes you just don't know until you hit a point of sensitivity."... --New York Times It's odd that the colonel was surprised. American theocrats issue religious fatwas, too: In what critics are describing as an unprecedented challenge to judicial power, the House of Representatives last week overwhelmingly approved two legislative amendments aimed at short-circuiting a pair of high-profile court rulings regarding church-state issues. In a 260-161 vote, the House approved an amendment to an appropriations bill July 23 that would prohibit the use of federal funds to enforce a recent 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision calling for the removal of a Ten Commandments monument from Alabama's judicial building. A day earlier, in an even more lopsided 307-119 vote, the House adopted a similar amendment regarding the enforcement of a federal court ruling in California forbidding the recitation in public schools of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.... "Courts have to be able to enforce their decisions. What they're saying here is that if the states disregarded Brown v. Board of Education, Congress could have prohibited the enforcement of Brown, and I think that raises serious separation of powers questions," said University of Southern California law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, referring to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision prohibiting school segregation. "On the other hand, I think that this is purely a symbolic show by the House, because marshals aren't going to be called out to enforce these decisions."... --The Forward (New York) By the way, I wouldn't be too sure those marshals won't be needed in the Ten Commandments case. The Christian Defense Coalition and National Clergy Council will lead an effort in recruiting activists to "kneel in prayer" around preventing the removal of the 10 Commandments from the Alabama Supreme Court. The Coalition will discuss these plans at a news conference on Monday, July 28, at 10 a.m. on the steps of the Alabama State Judiciary Building in Montgomery, Ala. The Washington, D.C.-based groups applaud the courage of Chief Justice Roy Moore in his fight to keep the Commandments in the Court. Rev. Patrick Mahoney, director of the Christian Defense Coalition, said, "It is now time for the Church to stand and peacefully resist this kind of judicial tyranny, which crushes free speech and religious expression in the public square." --press release posted at usnewswire.com That's what's going on even before Judge Moore has exhausted all avenues of appeal. I don't want to think about what will happen if the U.S. Supreme Court rules against him. posted by Steve M. | 9:40 AM | Wednesday, July 30, 2003 Apparently the U.S. isn't going to cut air marshals after all, says Reuters. There's a catch, though: ...Roehrkasse said operations were continuing as before and marshals would still be deployed on "critical" flights. He said some planned spending -- like for advanced training and increased administrative staff -- for fiscal 2003 would be postponed as part of efforts to cut costs. Gotta pay for those tax cuts.... UPDATE: I should add that members of Congress (from both parties) are peeved. AP reports: Lawmakers from both parties said they would block any effort to reduce funding for air marshals.... The Transportation Security Administration asked Congress last Friday for permission to cut $104 million, or about 20 percent, of the funding for the air marshal program to help offset the agency's $900 million budget deficit.... It's unclear how many of the estimated several thousand air marshal jobs could be affected by the proposed cuts. Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said Wednesday that the proposed budget cut actually is $74 million because the air marshals had $30 million left over from last year. That would mean the cuts would apply only to an increase in support staff and some advanced training, he said. There are no plans right now to cut air marshal jobs, he said. Note the weasel-word "now." Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and other lawmakers also were upset by reports that air marshals had received a directive saying they would no longer be allowed to fly missions requiring overnight stays to save money on hotel bills. Such a move would reduce the number of cross-country and international flights with marshals on board. A Homeland Security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said no directive was sent by the agency. It was not clear whether the idea has been abandoned. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge would only say that every available air marshal is being deployed.... About 5 percent of the marshals quit or were fired in the past year, according to TSA spokesman Brian Turmail. He would not say whether those positions had been filled.... What a mess. And did you miss this when it happened? I did: Wisconsin Rep. David Obey, ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, tried unsuccessfully last week to add $50 million to a spending bill to keep the air marshals at full strength this year. His proposal was defeated 32-21 along party lines. Infuriating. posted by Steve M. | 11:03 PM | The Pentagon’s terrorism death pool is gone, but there are still people all over the Internet -- most but not all of them conservatives -- who believe that it was a fine idea and that its opponents are hypersensitive and closed-minded. At site after site-- here, here, here, here, here -- we’re told that betting pools predict outcomes with amazing accuracy. But is it possible that the astonishing predictive ability of widely scattered non-experts who place online bets in their Jockey shorts is one of those facts that’s just too good to check? One of the great engines of market-based prediction, say the defenders of the Pentagon plan, is the Iowa Electronic Markets. IEM’s bettors bet on election outcomes, among other things, and often predict those outcomes better than experts, we’re told. Well, not quite. IEM keeps data online for some bygone betting pools. Here’s the main page for the 2000 presidential popular-vote pool. We all know how that vote turned out: a Gore-Bush dead heat. IEM allowed bets on Democrats, Republicans, and the Reform Party (Perot’s old party, with Buchanan as the nominee), and liquidated contracts after the election at 49.9 cents for the Democrats, 49.7 cents for the Republicans, and .4 cents for Reform (ignoring Nader and all other candidates, this was the three parties’ share of their joint total; it adds up to $1.00, i.e., 100%). Now, most polls leading up to the election were predicting a Bush victory. If the IEM bettors had predicted a dead heat, or a slight Gore victory, that would have shown real predictive power. But here’s what contracts were going for on election eve, November 6, 2000: Republican (Bush): 52 cents Democrat (Gore): 47.5 cents Reform (Buchanan): 1.7 cents Did IEM's bettors do a better job than professional pollsters? Hardly -- see Polling Report's summary of election eve polls. IEM also ran a presidential winner-take-all pool -- you pick the winner, you get a buck per successful bet. On election eve, that one looked like this: Bush: 71.1 cents Gore: 29.1 cents Buchanan: 0 cents This was the right answer, but by an eyelash. A few tweaks here and there -- no butterfly ballots, for instance -- and Gore could have declared victory. The 2002 congressional control pool was just dreadfully inaccurate. Election day was November 5, 2002; at the close of the day on November 4, here were the numbers: Republican House, Republican Senate: 28.3 cents Republican House, non-Republican (Democrat + Independent) Senate: 57 cents Non-Republican House, non-Republican Senate: 10.3 cents Non-Republican House, Republican Senate: 1.7 cents So why do these betting pools have such a sterling reputation for accuracy? posted by Steve M. | 10:52 PM | In the post directly below, I link the MSNBC story about air marshals being pulled from coast-to-coast and international flights. Some of the right-wingers in this Free Republic thread are as angry as I am -- but others (see the first few messages) think this is a fake-out. They think it's disinformation. Is it conceivable that even the Bush administration would do something as unspeakable as that? Think about it: The government leaks a story that air marshals are being pulled from certain flights. Why? To make terrorists think those flights might be easy to hijack? If the administration did that, it would be inviting terrorists to hijack certain planes. It would be saying to terrorist hijackers, in effect, "Bring it on." Presumably those flights would actually have air marshals, and maybe extra layers of security as well. But even so, the government would be using passengers on those flights as bait. I don't even think the Bushies would stoop that low. I certainly hope not. posted by Steve M. | 1:10 PM | I'm just speechless -- the administration runs up massive deficits and then nickels-and-dimes security on the highest-risk flights: Despite renewed warnings about possible airline hijackings, the Transportation Security Administration has alerted federal air marshals that as of Friday they will no longer be covering cross-country or international flights, MSNBC.com has learned. The decision to drop coverage on flights that many experts consider to be at the highest risk of attack apparently stems from a policy decision to rework schedules so that air marshals don’t have to incur the expense of staying overnight in hotels.... Several marshals told MSNBC.com that the program is suffering budget troubles and that the agency is looking to make cuts wherever it can.... The move to pull air marshals from any flight requiring them to stay overnight is particularly disturbing to some because it coincides with a new high-level hijacking threat issued by the Department of Homeland Security. That warning memo says that “at least one of these attacks could be executed by the end of the summer,” according to a source familiar with the document.... --MSNBC Understandably, it's not public knowledge which flights have air marshals. But if terrorists do go on to hijack a cross-country or international flight and there's no marshal on board, and if it's a route where there were marshals before this change of policy took place, I hope someone in the bureaucracy does the patriotic thing and blows the whistle. (Thanks to BuzzFlash for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 7:30 AM | Tuesday, July 29, 2003 Mission not exactly accomplished in Afghanistan, as Human Rights Watch reports: "Human rights abuses in Afghanistan are being committed by gunmen and warlords who were propelled into power by the United States and its coalition partners after the Taliban fell in 2001," said Brad Adams, executive director of the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch. "These men and others have essentially hijacked the country outside of Kabul. With less than a year to go before national elections, Afghanistan's human rights situation appears to be worsening." [HRW's] 101-page report, "Killing You Is a Very Easy Thing for Us": Human Rights Abuses in Southeast Afghanistan, documents army and police troops kidnapping Afghans and holding them for ransom in unofficial prisons; breaking into households and robbing families; raping women, girls and boys; and extorting shopkeepers and bus, truck and taxi drivers. The report also describes political organizers, journalists and media editors being threatened with death, arrested and harassed by army, police and intelligence agents. The subject area of the report, the southeast of Afghanistan and Kabul city, is one of the most densely populated areas of Afghanistan. Because soldiers are targeting women and girls, many are staying indoors, especially in rural areas, making it impossible for them to attend school, go to work, or actively participate in the country's reconstruction.... To its credit, the Bush administration wants to give Afghanistan $1 billion in new aid, so maybe the situation will improve. (But please notice that, as Sadly, No! notes, citing a Washington Post story from Sunday, the $1 billion for Afghanistan will be "shifted from existing foreign and military aid accounts so as not to increase the deficit." This is because, I guess, the Bush administration wouldn't want Americans to think that a massive program of regime change and nation-building will actually, you know, cost money or anything.) posted by Steve M. | 11:32 PM | The administration has nominated Brett Kavanaugh and Janice Brown to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, often considered the nation's most important court after the Supreme Court. Mr. Kavanaugh, 38, would be one of the youngest federal judges and has no judicial experience. The main items on an otherwise thin résumé are Mr. Kavanaugh's loyal service to Mr. Starr during the divisive investigation of President Bill Clinton and, later, his loyal service as an assistant to President Bush, in which capacity he has helped engineer the confirmation of the administration's judicial nominees.... ...In analyzing Mr. Kavanaugh's record, senators should look for positive evidence that he is fit, by experience and temperament, for high judicial office. Given the vast number of federal and state judges, seasoned lawyers and academics who could be named to the circuit, it is hard to believe that Mr. Kavanaugh is the most qualified candidate available. --editorial in today's New York Times Just in case you forgot about Kavanaugh's work on the Starr team, here's an excerpt from Jeffrey Toobin's book A Vast Conspiracy: The Grounds [the “Grounds for an Impeachment” section of the Starr Report] was principally the work of Brett Kavanaugh, a lawyer from Kirkland & Ellis [Starr’s law firm] and a former Supreme Court law clerk, who was perhaps the most favored of Starr’s young male proteges. In one amazing stretch of the Grounds, Kavanaugh cited Lewinsky’s sex deposition in thirty-four consecutive footnotes, and he included some material that even the [Starr Report] Narrative’s authors judged too viciously unnecessary to mention. For example, after the description of the December 31, 1995, tryst, Kavanaugh’s team dropped the following deadpan footnote: “After the sexual encounter, she saw the President masturbate in the bathroom near the sink.” Such details had no conceivable relevance to Congress’s duty, but were rather designed to humiliate Clinton. Ah, those traditional conservative values. posted by Steve M. | 11:16 PM | Senator John Warner has announced that the Pentagon's idiotic mass-murder death pool -- really, what else should we call it? -- is being terminated. As we pay it our last respects, let's savor the enthusiasm with which law professor Glenn Reynolds, and others whom he quoted approvingly, responded to news that the death pool was being set up: I think it's an excellent example of creative thinking, and the Pentagon deserves to be congratulated for it.... The notion that the dim-bulbs in Congress and the media should attack such a useful and proven idea as the Pentagon's is utterly absurd.... I was pleasantly surprised to see a bit of "out of the box" thinking on the government's part about how to evaluate the likelyhood of terror threats. Doesn't it just figure that a couple of maroons from the senate would complain so that they can be seen "taking the high ground?" I'd pay them the compliment of believing that they wrote the complaint for cynical reasons, but just watching them on TV is enough to lead one to conclude that they really are stupid enough to be making an issue of this on principle. Lovely. Now, I do understand the thinking behind the death pool. The Pentagon's statement (quoted in this morning's New York Times) was, in its way, rational: "Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information," the Defense Department said in a statement. "Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often better than expert opinions." But it's one thing to bet on midterm elections at the Iowa Electronic Markets based on an unmistakable sense you've gathered at weekend barbecues that suburban white males are leaning strongly GOP. That's "dispersed and even hidden information" the concealment (or revelation) of which can't kill people. Information about terrorism is very, very different -- if you know a second 9/11 is coming, or have good reason to suspect this, you bloody well ought to tell the authorities and stop it, not try to finance a vacation from what you know or suspect. It boggles the mind that the Pentagon didn't grasp this, nor do the market-worshiping Reynolds and his pals. Remind me again: Which political wing is it that's supposed to be rife with brainiacs so besotted with their own theories that they're unable to recognize when those theories threaten the real lives of real people? posted by Steve M. | 1:53 PM | "Centrist Democrats Warn Party Not to Present Itself as 'Far Left'" is the headline of a story in today's New York Times about this year's confab of the Democratic Leadership Council. On Sunday, Billmon posted this. Consider it a preemptive reply to the DLC: A whole bunch of people ... have weighed in recently on the Howard Dean phenomenon, with a heavy focus (naturally) on the question of whether he is "electable" – which, the context of the modern Democratic Party, means "is he another George McGovern?" Most, though not all, of the above have answered in the affirmative, casting Dean into the pit of left-wing losers – the kind of candidates the Democratic establishment may secretly admire, but has no wish to actually nominate. Now personally, I think the better question is this: If Howard Dean is nominated, will he: A. Stand up at the Democratic National Convention and swear to raise everybody’s taxes? B. Take a ride in an Abrams tank, wearing a silly helmet that makes him look like Snoopy? C. Break down and cry on camera because some right-wing nut case of a newspaper publisher wrote nasty things about his wife? D. Slap a ton of orange pancake makeup on his face and sigh loudly into his mike every time his opponent tries to get a word in edgewise in the next presidential debate? All of these, of course, are stupid things that were actually done by the party establishment's favored candidates.... My point is that if the establishment is going to throw George McGovern in our faces, then progressives should have the right to throw some of the establishment's turkey candidates back in its collective face. Did Wally Mondale win more states in 1984 than George McGovern did in 1972? Not that I noticed. To give the DLCers their due, they lump Mondale in with McGovern as a sandal-wearing hippie peacenik loser. I'm of two minds here. I don't want to see the Democrats nominate someone who's wildly unpopular outside the party's core. On the other hand, some things are starting to change in this country right now, though the DLC doesn't seem to have noticed -- voters are worrying about the effect of tax cuts on deficits, they're noticing that the star-spangled Bush has painted a big fat "AMBUSH ME" target on the troops in Iraq, they're grasping the fact that a presidential lie that isn't about oral sex can also be regarded as a sign of character deficiencies. So I'm not sure we know right now what makes someone "electable." One thing that will make the Democrats' 2004 nominee a lot less electable is being accused by fellow Democrats of being an out-of-step pinko. One interviewee in the Times article seems to get that. The rest of the DLCers need to figure it out. posted by Steve M. | 9:55 AM | This may cheer you up: Check out the big photo on this page. Way to go! (Thanks to BuzzFlash for the link.) ******* And here's some more compare-and-contrast: I don't read AndrewSullivan.com as much as I used to -- life's too short. And I rarely go to the blog's letters page. This means I missed a good one that's no longer posted. But SullyWatch still has it: Imagine JFK lied about missiles in Cuba to get public opinion behind an invasion (untrue of course, but let’s run with this though experiment). Let’s say he also lied about the many extra-marital affairs he had. Which is worse? I think the answer is pretty obvious, and I think it’s also clear what analogy I am drawing. If Bush wanted to invade Iraq, he should have made his case without resorting to lies and deception. Without resorting to reckless interference in intelligence gathering. Whatever happened to bringing integrity to the White House? Nice. posted by Steve M. | 8:19 AM | Monday, July 28, 2003 Here's an instructive but infuriating story. The story describes how Richard Dyke, the owner of Bushmaster Firearms Inc., hopes to protect himself from lawsuits: He invests in Republican members of Congress -- and if I'm reading this correctly, he invests in all of them: Dyke is a GOP loyalist and writes $1,000 checks - the maximum amount - to all Republican congressional candidates for every primary and general election, whether they are opposed or not. This story is in a Maine newspaper, and Bushmaster is a Maine company, so maybe Dyke's largesse is limited to every single GOP candidate from that state. Or maybe not. Dyke is smart, needless to say. He knows that it helps him if even moderate Republicans are elected, Republicans who might not toe the gun lobby's line, because building the GOP majority, and thus the power of the current leadership, is sufficient to give the gun folks victory after victory. Dyke is currently lobbying for a federal law that would prohibit lawsuits against manufacturers, distributors, dealers or importers of firearms for damages that result from the use of their products by others. This sounds reasonable until you realize that some gun dealers repeatedly violate firearms laws, with the result that their guns regularly get into the hands of criminals, and these dealers, as a rule, get no more than a slap on the wrist. And manufacturers know this and continue to sell to these dealers. As I've pointed out many times, Bull's Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, Washington, is a repeat violator of gun laws and has received nothing but wrist-slaps for it, as The Seattle Times reported last December. The gun used in the D.C. sniper killings came from Bull's Eye. That gun was made by Richard Dyke's company, Bushmaster. Is Bushmaster partly liable for the fact that it sold guns to a shop with a documented history of gun-law violations? Richard Dyke doesn't want a jury to be able to decide. And Maine's two "moderate Republican" senators, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, agree with Dyke. It's no surprise that Collins agrees: After Collins lost the 1994 gubernatorial race to Angus King, Dyke played a big role in finding her next job. Dyke donated $265,000 to his alma mater, Husson College, to establish a center for small business, which hired Collins. "I told Susan, 'They are looking for an executive director, and that might be a good fit for you until you decide to run again,' " Dyke said. The arrangement was no secret, says Collins press secretary Megan Sowards. "It is called the 'Richard E. Dyke Center for Family Business,' and she was the inaugural director," Sowards said. A year after Collins took the Husson job, U.S. Sen. William Cohen announced his retirement. Collins won the seat in 1996. Snowe, for her part, says it's "a matter of fairness." The people named here would beg to differ. posted by Steve M. | 11:30 PM | I'm one of the bloggers who quoted the UPI story about the 9/11 report that included the sentence "The report shows there is no link between Iraq and al-Qaida," said a government official who has seen the report. along with a confirmation of that assertion by Max Cleland. So, a couple of days late, I have to note that UPI subsequently updated the story: Prior to the report's publication, a person who had read it told UPI that it showed U.S. intelligence agencies had no evidence linking Iraq to the 9-11 attacks or to al-Qaida. In fact, the issue is not addressed in the declassified sections of the report. One other person who has seen the classified version of the document told UPI subsequently that the Iraq issue is not addressed in the still-classified section, either. "They didn't ask that question," the person said. But the fact that a 900-page report could be written about 9/11 and al-Qaeda with no reference whatsoever to Iraq tells us something, doesn't it? posted by Steve M. | 10:53 PM | I love this. posted by Steve M. | 2:48 PM | Remember when William Bennett said he gambled frequently, wagering huge amounts of money, but essentially broke even over the years? Well, apparently he lied. That's right: America's national treasure, our living embodiment of morality, is a big liar. Roger Ailes (the good one) explains here. posted by Steve M. | 2:47 PM | For at least thirty years, the right-wingers' rap on liberals is that we're out-of-touch elitists who think we know what's good for people with less money, status, and influence, even if those people disagree with us. Well, over on their side, there's this guy: ORANGE, N.J. -- The Rev. John A. Perricone, an erudite Roman Catholic priest who uses Latin phrases and refers to T. S. Eliot in conversation, is known nationally as [a] leading proponent of the centuries-old Latin Mass, which was banished in favor of a more accessible service by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960's. This month, Father Perricone was called from his academic post as a professor of philosophy at St. Francis College in Brooklyn and assigned here as administrator of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a working-class parish not far from Newark. So far, the match has not gone well. A group of parishioners is enraged that in their view, the priest is imposing on them aspects of the traditional Latin Mass, called the Tridentine Mass after the Council of Trent in the 16th century. Today, nearly three-dozen parishioners — some carrying signs denouncing the priest ("Get Rid of John Perricone Now," read one) — picketed Our Lady of Mount Carmel before and after the 10:30 a.m. service, which drew nearly 200 people.... One protester, Carmine Guerriero yelled, "Our people built this church!" He said his grandfather, a mason, had helped build the church, whose golden spire rises gleaming above Route 280. "He put his sweat and blood in this church, and his money," Mr. Guerriero said.... If any conservatives are reading this now, they're probably approaching a breakdown like HAL's in 2001, the kind that comes from being told something that utterly contradicts what they consider an inviolate rule: It's impossible that a conservative could arouse the ire of the working class! Conservatives' ideas are utterly in sync with the thoughts of the working class! Liberals always think they always know better, not conservatives! Peggy Noonan says so, so it must be true! Er, no: "He came in with the attitude of, `I'm here; I'm going to rule; this is a dictatorship; if you don't like it, leave,' " said a protest organizer, John J. Sammaro, 38, whose great-grandparents belonged to the church. "He's not serving God and the people. He's serving himself."... You'd think the good father might be somewhat abashed, or at the very least ask himself whether he'd done the right thing but gone about it the wrong way. You'd be wrong. "I guess if the people want to be captious, they will alight on anything," he said, adding that the complaints would have no effect on him. "I'm perfectly in conformity with the teachings of the church and the archbishop," he said, adding that the traditional Latin Mass is particularly popular among younger people engaged in a "cultural repudiation" of the excesses of the 1960's. "There's a sense of a right order in it," he said. "Captious," for those of you who are intellectually inferior to the good padre, means "marked by an often ill-natured inclination to stress faults and raise objections." Nice way to talk about your parishioners. Father Perricone, 53, also denounced the criticism of his celebration of the Mass as either "lies" or the carping of some parishioners who simply do not like the fact that they have a new priest. "I can't imagine an instance where I showed insensitivity to anyone," he said. How about just now, when you called them "captious"? Think this is doctrinal rather than political? Actually, it's both: Check out this speech by Father Perricone, to a Catholic organization, in which he says his message especially needs to be understood by the very young present whose religion classes consisted in self-affirmation exercises and committing to memory all the sacred articles of Democratic platform.... He ends the speech as follows: On September 11, 1964, William F. Buckley Jr. addressed the national convention of the Young Americans for Freedom. Barry Goldwater is going to lose the coming election, he tells them. But, he continues, the Goldwater campaign and the conservative efforts that will follow are the parts of the decades-long assault on the walls of fortress liberalism. On the day after the election. he says, "We must emerge smiling, confident in the knowledge that we weakened those walls, that they will never again stand so firmly against us." Today I bid you Church Militant - soldiers - continue your assault on the walls of fortress modernism. Use your intelligence in a thousand different ways. Most of all use your sanctity and your virtue to persevere in a battle we shall soon win. For we must always stay smiling, because all of you must be confident in the knowledge that we have weakened those walls, and that they will never again stand so firmly against us. This is expressly political. There's a conservative movement in the Catholic Church that has much closer ties to the GOP and the VRWC than, say, Al Qaeda ever had to Saddam's Iraq. Consider the crowd who attended Robert Bork's baptism (by an Opus Dei priest); consider the people who ran the scurrilous ad accusing Democratic opponents of William Pryor's confirmation of anti-Catholic bias (despite the fact that four of the nine Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who voted against Pryor are themselves Catholic). I left the Catholic Church when I was 14, so maybe I'm no expert, but I don't think this movement reflects the thinking of the rank and file. I think it's an arrogant imposition on the rank and file. And, in addition, it's bubbling up in our political life. posted by Steve M. | 10:40 AM | Sunday, July 27, 2003 Did I suggest in the post below that Afghanistan is "defanged"? Well, maybe not.... The government of a volatile southern Afghan province urged U.S. forces on Sunday to deal with resurgent Taliban guerrillas and said hundreds of them were roaming around freely. A Taliban official said its elusive leader Mullah Omar had approved a new deputy for the south on Saturday to assist a notorious commander suffering from wounds, and ordered him to intensify attacks on U.S. and government forces. In a further sign of stepped up Taliban activity, residents of a southern town close to the Pakistani border woke on Sunday to posters threatening death to 25 "informers" accused of collaborating with U.S. and Afghan government forces. The deputy governor of Zabul province told Reuters Taliban officials, meeting in the Pakistani city of Quetta, had named Mullah Abdul Jabar as a rival governor for the province. Mullah Mohammed Omar, a namesake of the Taliban leader, said hundreds of Taliban now roamed freely in several districts of Zabul and provincial forces were powerless to act as they had insufficient support from the U.S.-backed central government. "There are about 500 Taliban in Deh Chopan district," he said. "The district is under our control, but they are walking freely in the bazaar." "If coalition forces do not launch a big operation here, it will be a big problem."... --Reuters posted by Steve M. | 11:19 PM | OK, let's say the noose really is tightening around Saddam. And let's assume for the sake of argument that the Bush administration is right -- that capturing or (more likely) killing Saddam will drastically reduce attacks against U.S. troops. That's great news for the troops -- but what happens to Iraqis if the guerrilla war ends? Isn't it likely that a pacified, defanged Iraq will be treated to the same halfhearted effort at nation-building that we're seeing in Afghanistan? Will the administration even try to appear as if it's trying to do right by the Iraqis if there's no Iraqi outrage? I'm not saying I want more U.S. soldiers to die -- I'm saying I'd prefer it the administration would act in good faith, but I don't think it will ever do so except under duress. Which means I don't see a good way out of this. posted by Steve M. | 11:16 PM | Paul Wolfowitz on Fox News Sunday this morning, as quoted by Reuters: "The battle to secure the peace in Iraq is now the central battle in the war on terror." Yes, he actually said that. Iraqis reacting violently to our occupation of their country = Al Qaeda flying planes into our buildings, per Wolfowitz. How does someone who says things like this live with himself? posted by Steve M. | 10:45 PM | Above the fold on page 1 of the print New York Times, and prominent on the Times home page, is this story about a Marine who was killed in Iraq on July 1. The 21-year-old Marine, Corporal Travis J. Bradach-Nall, was killed while clearing land mines. Please remember this when you read (for example, here) that 49 American troops have died in combat since Bush's May 1 "mission accomplished" photo op. Corporal Bradach-Nall presumably isn't counted among those who died in combat, but he sure as hell didn't die in a way that could have happened to him back home. (The Times story does note that since May 1 "more than 100 service members have died since then, either in continued fighting, accidents, ambushes or on reconstruction tasks," but it's an exception among recent Iraq stories in the U.S. media.) Also, please note in the Times story that Corporal Bradach-Hall's mother was and is a liberal Democrat and an opponent of the war. She loved her son, though, and the feeling was mutual -- incomprehensible as that may seem to the members of the Defense Policy Board or the staff of The Weekly Standard. posted by Steve M. | 1:50 PM | Saturday, July 26, 2003 Max Rodenbeck writes in the current New York Review of Books that he recently interviewed a self-appointed regional governor in Iraq, who had taken up residence in a palace formerly owned by "Chemical Ali." After the interview, Rodenbeck learned from his driver that the governor had secretly received an interesting visitor: Late the previous night, a car had come to the villa. A stooped, thin, balding man was released from the trunk of the car, spent several hours with the governor, and departed at dawn in the same manner. The midnight guest ... was none other than Ezzat Ibrahim, the king of clubs in the Pentagon's Most Wanted deck, a former ice merchant who had served as Saddam Hussein's most loyal deputy since the 1968 coup that brought his party to power. It was odd that this man would harbor a wanted member of Saddam's regime -- and yet he did so: The governor who was helping to harbor this man had spent many years in exile, hounded by Saddam's agents. His joy at the toppling of the Baath Party was apparent. He gushed about the debt of gratitude which he said all Iraqis should feel toward America. He professed deep respect for the local American commanding officer, a man he met with regularly. But did he trust the Americans? No. Rodenbeck had asked the new occupant of Chemical Ali's palace if he knew Ali's whereabouts: "Chemical Ali, no," he said. "But I do know where others are hiding. Why don't I tell the Americans? Because I am a son of Iraq and my children will be raised here. Perhaps in future I would be judged a traitor." He paused, pushing away an empty coffee cup. "Look, fugitives from the old regime are being sheltered by tribes that owe them favors. It is not simply a matter of honor, or fear of retribution. The real problem is that the Americans won't say what they plan to do with their 'pack of cards.' Will they send them to Guantanamo? Will they just let them go? If we knew that these bloody criminals would be tried here by an Iraqi court, it would be a different story." Rodenbeck filed his report on July 16. About a week later, the U.S. caught up with two of the aces in the deck -- and the result sure wasn't a trial in an Iraqi court. I wonder how the governor felt about that. posted by Steve M. | 5:41 PM | Yesterday's New York Times ran a story about Charles Napoleon, a descendant of Napoleon Bonaparte, who's a deputy mayor in his famous ancestor's birthplace of Ajaccio, Corsica. "The name is known all over the world. I once went to a tiny village in China, and when I told them my name, they knew who Napoleon was." His great-grandfather, Napoleon Joseph Charles Bonaparte, a one-time politician in Corsica, changed the family's last name from Bonaparte to Napoleon. That makes booking hotels or restaurants a challenge. "When I've called and said I'm `Mr. Napoleon,' I've been told, `Sure, and I'm the pope,' " he said. "That's my heritage. What can I do?" And in America? It is easier, he said, in the United States: "Americans don't know much about history. I have to spell my name in the U.S." Gosh, I'm so proud. posted by Steve M. | 5:36 PM | KEYSTONE KOALITION President Bush is contemplating major changes in the U.S. reconstruction of Iraq for the second time in three months.... As part of the effort, the White House is considering asking several major figures, including former secretary of state James A. Baker III, to take charge of specific tasks such as seeking funds from other countries or restructuring Iraq's debt.... In another augmentation of the postwar structure, the administration plans to name Reuben Jeffery III, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who is now coordinating the federal aid aimed to help reconstruct Lower Manhattan, as Washington-based coordinator for the Iraq reconstruction effort.... Jeffery, the Goldman Sachs veteran, will become the administration's Washington face for the operation in Baghdad. His jobs will include lobbying lawmakers and dealing with other parts of the government. Officials said the White House concluded that, given the distance between Baghdad and Washington, Bremer needed a senior aide in Washington who could navigate the bureaucracy and work with Capitol Hill. --Washington Post So we're not all on the same page here? We have a GOP White House, a GOP House, and a GOP Senate, and Bremer still can't get what he needs? And no one now in the White House, the Defense Department, or the State Department can rectify this situation? Why is that? Isn't Bush a titanic, magisterial leader before whom all the world trembles? Oh, and here's my favorite paragraph in the Post article: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told reporters this week after a visit to Iraq that some important administration assumptions "turned out to underestimate the problem," and that some conditions "were worse than we anticipated." ... No! Really? You think so? ...Some officials involved in the occupation planning have complained that the administration underestimated the armed resistance and overestimated the eagerness of Iraqi soldiers and police to embrace the invaders. A keen grasp of the obvious. (Three more U.S. troops died today in Iraq, by the way.) (UPDATE: A fourth U.S. soldier has been killed today.) posted by Steve M. | 9:46 AM | Friday, July 25, 2003 YOU EITHER THINK THE PRESIDENT IS A STUD OR YOU'RE WITH THE TERRORISTS Publishers Lunch also spotted this one: A Borders Books & Music store has banned a Baltimore singer-songwriter from performing there after she made an unflattering comment about President Bush's physique during a concert at the store last week. Julia Rose, who is also a fitness advocate, told the audience, "George Bush has chicken legs. He needs to pump some iron." ...Rose said she's mystified by the reaction. "I never said anything about Bush being a bad president or anything," she said. "I was just poking fun at his scrawny frame." --AP Unbelievable. posted by Steve M. | 11:21 AM | From Bookselling This Week, a publication of the American Booksellers Association: As Bookselling This Week went to press, it was expected that Senator Russell D. Feingold (D-WI) would introduce the Library, Bookstore, and Personal Records Privacy Act into the Senate early next week. Feingold's bill would narrow the universe of people whose bookstore or library records could be searched under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).... The Library, Bookstore, and Personal Records Privacy Act looks to "protect privacy by limiting the access of the government to library, bookseller, and other personal records for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes." For one, it would amend Section 501 of FISA so that, prior to seeking a suspect's records, the FBI must "specify that there are specific and articulable facts giving reason to believe that the person to whom the records pertain is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power." Currently, the Library, Bookstore, and Personal Records Privacy Act has eight co-sponsors: Senators Daniel Akaka (D-HI), Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), Maria Cantwell (D-WA), Jon S. Corzine (D-NJ), Richard Durbin (D-IL), James M. Jeffords (I-VT), Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA), and Ron Wyden (D-OR). No Republican sponsors? Gosh, I'm shocked. (Thanks to Publishers Lunch for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 11:17 AM | Obviously this is far from the biggest story of the day, but I just learned from Andrew Sullivan's blog (scroll down) that David Brooks is being added to the op-ed page of The New York Times. Now, this would be a reasonable move if it were likely to be matched by the addition of liberals to the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and Washington Times, as well as to solo hosting duties on the prime-time lineup of Fox News -- but obviously none of that is going to happen. Brooks is coming to The New York Times, apparently, to tell its East Coast liberal scum readers that they're far less worthwhile as human beings than just about everyone else in America. Brooks has advanced this argument in just about everything he's written for the Times recently, even when he's had to contradict himself to do so. And now Naomi Wolf's husband, David Shipley, is giving him a regular platform to show us more of his contempt. Thanks for nothing, David. (UPDATE: Here's the Times's announcement of the Brooks appointment. The bloggers at The American Prospect may think Brooks is "sympathetic to the upper-middle-class, Boomer culture," but that was the Brooks who wrote Bobos in Paradise when Bill Clinton was president and Al Gore looked like a good bet to succeed him; Brooks may not be Ann Coulter, but he knows which party has been on the ascent for the past few years, and he knows that contempt for the "Eastern liberal establishment" does a lot better in today's marketplace than acknowledging that even some Republicans buy organic vegetables. I don't think his column is going to be particularly nice or gentle.) posted by Steve M. | 10:06 AM | Thursday, July 24, 2003 Michael Savage, the hatemongering talk-radio host ("You open the door to ['turd world' immigrants], and the next thing you know, they are defecating on your country and breeding out of control") and best-selling author, was recently fired by MSNBC for telling a caller to "get AIDS and die," but apparently he's not letting any grass grow under his feet: The folks at Free Republic report that he's thinking of running for governor of California. And his Web site confirms that he's giving the race some thought. Well, fine. Maybe it'll happen -- and thus maybe for once the general public will get to see the slimy underside of the hard right. Guys like Rush Limbaugh tend to use euphemisms when stepping over the line from mere right-wing ranting to actual hate -- but Savage serves it up straight, no chaser. I don't believe all the listeners in the talk-radio audience are haters, by any means, but I think a good number are, and Savage says what they think. And now people who have day jobs may finally learn, to their horror, what a surprisingly large percentage of their fellow citizens believe. In a way, I think this could be a really good thing. (UPDATE: Apparently I was wrong about one fact in the paragraph above -- I guess in much of the country you can listen to Savage if you have a day job. He's heard live in California from 4:00 P.M. to 7:00 P.M., so you can compound the annoyance of your traffic jam home by listening to him whine about gays, feminists, and immigrants. So instead of saying that "now people who have day jobs" can get exposed to Savage, I suppose I should have said, "now people who have lives....") posted by Steve M. | 11:32 PM | The current scandal [in the Catholic Church] has been billed as many things: a celibacy story, an "emotional immaturity" story, a homosexuality story. What it really is is a 1970s story. Virtually all the sexual wrongs were committed during the 1970s and early 1980s, when liberal Catholicism was at its zenith of cultural power in the U.S. church, sticking its gooey fingers into every corner of American Catholic life, from pulpit "dissent" to music, liturgy styles, and radical church redesign to the private lives of priests — all supposedly prompted by the window-opening Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. ...the Vatican II changes in the church, combined with the prevailing Sixties ethos of self-fulfillment, gave many priests the idea that anything went. --Charlotte Allen in National Review Online, June 17, 2002 Over six decades, likely more than 1,000 people were molested by Roman Catholic priests and church workers while leaders in the Boston archdiocese engaged in a ''massive, inexcusable failure'' to do anything about it, the Massachusetts attorney general said in a report Wednesday that outlines the results of a lengthy criminal investigation.... The archdiocese itself documented 789 allegations of sexual abuse made against 237 priests and 13 other church workers from 1940 to 2000. --Boston Globe/AP, July 23, 2003 posted by Steve M. | 6:29 PM | And on the al-Qaida link, it seems to me [the press] are just not doing their job at all. There are innumerable links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida that have been demonstrated very many times. And now every broadcast and every utterance by the Ba'ath Party is as if it was written by Osama bin Laden, and half the fighters in Iraq, half the bandits there, are imported from outside jihad forces. This relationship did not begin yesterday. They are, in effect, now a fusion of those who believe in the one party and those who believe in the one-God state. --Christopher Hitchens on MSNBC, quoted admiringly in Andrew Sullivan's blog in the wee hours last night The report of the joint congressional inquiry into the suicide hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001, to be published Thursday, reveals U.S. intelligence had no evidence that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks, or that it had supported al-Qaida, United Press International has learned. "The report shows there is no link between Iraq and al-Qaida," said a government official who has seen the report. Former Democratic Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who was a member of the joint congressional committee that produced the report, confirmed the official's statement. Asked whether he believed the report will reveal that there was no connection between al-Qaida and Iraq, Cleland replied: "I do ... There's no connection, and that's been confirmed by some of (al-Qaida leader Osama) bin Laden's terrorist followers." --UPI I want to see this one argued head-to-head: on one side a bloated opportunist who a few years ago found favor with the forces of reaction in his adopted country and now carefully manicures the hand that feeds him, and on the other side a genuine war hero who lost three limbs in Nam and then served his country with distinction in the Cabinet and Senate. Come on, Hitchypoo -- look Max Cleland in the eye and tell him he's wrong. I dare you. (UPDATE: I see TBOGG was thinking along the same lines last night.) posted by Steve M. | 1:23 PM | AIDS bait-and-switch, as described by The New York Times: Two weeks after President Bush toured Africa with promises of vast increases in spending on global AIDS, the House of Representatives was poised today to approve a measure that would bring total spending on the epidemic next year to roughly $2 billion — $1 billion short of the amount set out in a bill Mr. Bush signed in May. Democrats sought to introduce an emergency spending measure that would have added the $1 billion, but were prevented from doing so under House procedures. OK, so let me get this straight: President Compassionate Conservative really, really wanted $3 billion spent, but those mean old House Republicans cut his request, and, well, his hands were tied? Er, not quite: Instead, [Democrats] offered amendments that would increase AIDS spending by $375 million, taking $75 million from foreign aid to Colombia's military and $300 million from a new foreign aid initiative, the Millennium Challenge account, which is also a high priority of the president. But the White House has threatened to veto the entire $17.1 billion spending package for foreign assistance if the amount in the Millennium Challenge account is reduced.... So the president wanted the $3 billion, but the Republican meanies in the House cut it, and then the Dems tried to restore it in an unacceptable way, and that's why he's objecting? Well, no, it's not that, either: The bill Mr. Bush signed, creating the new program, authorized annual spending of $3 billion on AIDS and two other diseases, tuberculosis and malaria. But in his proposed budget, Mr. Bush asked for only $2 billion.... Ah -- so the bait-and-switch is Bush's idea. But, see, we're doing dying Africans a favor. Giving them $2 billion this year to fight disease is better than giving them $3 billion: The White House has insisted that African nations have no capacity to absorb $3 billion in spending on AIDS next year -- no, I'm not making that up -- ...but with 29.4 million people in Africa already infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, advocates for people with AIDS insist that the money can be well spent. No! Really? You think so? In the Senate last week, Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat, tried to add $1.1 billion for global AIDS to a defense spending measure. But the effort failed. Yeah, but he's just a senile old coot, right? posted by Steve M. | 9:50 AM | Wednesday, July 23, 2003 IT'S THE PREEMPTIVE WAR DOCTRINE, STUPID In this whole saga of Iraq, congressional and other critics are focusing on the trees -- the individual questions about weapons of mass destruction, about hyped intelligence, about an unproven link between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein, even about whether the war is over. In doing so, they are neglecting to address the forest. That's the much bigger and more significant question of Congress' responsibility to explore the wisdom, not to mention the constitutionality, of engaging in a pre-emptive war as part of a new and overarching American approach for dealing with the world. ....In any event, Congress needs to wake up and recognize that Mr. Bush's war in Iraq may be only the opening chapter in a foreign policy adventure that can have deep and destructive ramifications for America's role in the world and for domestic well-being and progress at home. Who will step back and examine what is being wrought? --Jules Witcover in the Baltimore Sun (Thanks to TalkLeft for spotting this.) posted by Steve M. | 11:34 PM | Earlier today I wrote about this article in The Weekly Standard, which argues that President Bush's choices for the Medal of Freedom are excellent while Bill Clinton's were unspeakably icky. The folks at Sadly, No! noticed something about the article that I overlooked: It's essentially plagiarized -- taken from this White House press release, with a bit of anti-Democrat nastiness tacked on. When I wrote about the Standard article, it included no acknowledgment of the plagiarism; now the cribbing is acknowledged. Hey -- I thought all right-wing journalists were scrupulously honest, unlike those fact-inventing, affirmative-action-addled liberal amoralist decadents at The New York Times. What gives? I'd also like to note, by the way, that the Standard article, after praising Bush's Medal of Freedom choices, reproduces the entire 2003 list -- except for the first two names. Why would those honorees be omitted? The first is an esteemed American professor and author. Could the Standard have left him out because his name is Jacques Barzun and he was born in (ick!) France? (Note: Professor Barzun, a nonagenarian, has lived in the U.S. for the last 84 years.) And was the second honoree omitted by the Standard because it's Julia Child -- the French Chef? posted by Steve M. | 11:25 PM | The new New York Times bestseller list has been e-mailed to subscribers, and these folks will be happy to learn that Hillery Clinton's Living History is no longer the #1 nonfiction hardcover. However, they will probably be unhappy to learn that Hillary has been replaced at the top not by one of their heroes, Ann Coulter, but by a well-educated atheist homewrecker whose mother hung out with Margaret Sanger: Katharine Hepburn, the subject of Scott Berg's Kate Remembered. (Coulter drops to #6.) Meanwhile, this Hillary-hater grasps at straws, noting that her book is being sold at 40% off list price at Amazon. As some of the people who respond to this person point out, Amazon discounts a lot of big bestsellers that much, precisely because they're bestsellers (and, as such, are deeply discounted at the bricks-and-mortar stores that are Amazon's competitors). This is what I don't get: These people are conservatives, which means that, by definition, they have the utmost admiration for capitalism -- and yet they don't seem to have a clue how businesses actually operate. They don't understand deep discounting of new, hot-selling products, even though it's common in the book and CD businesses. And they were shocked, shocked, that the publisher of the Clinton book may have manufactured a pre-publication leak -- even though this practice is also commonplace in media businesses. Do these people actually know anything about capitalism that doesn't come from the heavy-breathing pages of Ayn Rand? Have any of these people ever even had jobs? (Oh -- this is unrelated, but please note that at least one of the Hillary-haters in the first link above doesn't know how to use, or refrain from using, an apostrophe. Thanks to Dack at Rational Enquirer for spotting this. The spelling in the second link isn't so hot, either.) posted by Steve M. | 5:55 PM | Over at Eschaton, Lambert (pinch-hitting for Atrios) is outraged (here, here, and here) that American soldiers killed Saddam's sons when it was possible to take them alive. (Lambert cites this MSNBC article, which notes that psyops teams were standing by but weren't used, and this DefenseLINK article, which says we had them surrounded and they couldn't have escaped.) Lambert's right in theory, but it really doesn't matter: Never in a million years would the Bushies have agreed to ship the brothers Hussein to the Hague. They were never going to try them publicly in America, and they were never going to allow them to be tried publicly in Iraq. The same goes for their daddy: If U.S. troops take Saddam alive and can't kill him for some reason, he'll be bundled off to an Undisclosed Location so fast it'll make your head spin -- far from Iraq, where the people he brutalized can't get their own justice, far from the public courts of the U.S., and far from the International Criminal Court. The Bushies love secrecy. They love control. They hate what they see as a sissified, pantywaist deference to due process. And they think the American people agree with them. And while I know Bush's poll numbers are dropping right now, I think there's something to this -- when Bush seemed to be kicking ass on his own terms, with utter disregard for the opinions of others, during each of the two wars, he was riding pretty high in the polls, virtually exempt from criticism. Forget humbling or humiliating the Husseins before the people they brutalized. Forget placing them in the dock to answer charges while the world watches. The Bushies wanted these kills, and they got 'em. They want one more, and they'll probably get that one, too. posted by Steve M. | 4:31 PM | In an earlier post I said that, according to Glenn "InstaPundit" Reynolds, Bill O'Reilly's Fox News show was going to feature as a guest Gilbert Merritt, an American judge who's been working for the Justice Department in Iraq and believes he's been given a "smoking gun" Iraqi newspaper story linking Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda. My mistake was to misread the date of Reynolds's post -- he wrote it Monday, not yesterday. Reynolds's mistake was to believe the person who told him the judge would appear on the show -- apparently the Merritt who was scheduled to appear on O'Reilly's show Monday was Jeralyn Merritt, who presides over the fine blog Talk Left. By the way, Judge Merritt writes about the gag order he was subjected to in this column for the Nashville Tennesseean. So either the administration doesn't want this story floated or it doesn't want it floated the way the judge was floating it. Maybe it won't go any further than the New York Post and Weekly Standard. Or maybe it will go further, but not just yet. posted by Steve M. | 12:24 PM | I don't know how old Katherine Mangu-Ward is, but judging from the sketch that accompanies this article in The Weekly Standard, which she wrote, she's rather young. Which makes me suspect that the article demonstrates how you try to separate yourself from the pack if you're a young right-wing apparatchik/journalist: you take the most innocuous news item you can find and show that you can manipulate its facts to persuade people -- or at least people who are really, really simpleminded -- that Democrats are the embodiment of pure evil. Here's Mangu-Ward's lead: THIS AFTERNOON, a ceremony will be held for the 2003 Medal of Freedom recipients in the East Room of the White House. President Bush's list is uniformly excellent, and incredibly revealing when compared with some of Bill Clinton's picks for the nation's highest civilian honor. Clinton's choices, of course, included several remarkable and deserving man and women. But he placed them on equal footing with other, lesser lights, including Jesse Jackson (2000), Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter (1999), George McGovern (2000), and Marian Wright Edelman (2000), who is currently suing the Bush administration over the No Child Left Behind program. Clinton's most controversial pick was J. William Fulbright (1993); his most entertaining was Albert Shanker (1998). Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, may be most famous for his cameo in Woody Allen's comedy "Sleeper": Allen's character, frozen in 1973, wakes up after 100 years and learns that civilization was destroyed when "a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead." A glance over a full list of Clinton's choices hints at the political machinations at work beneath the surface. Mangu-Ward knows a lot of readers won't bother to click on the link. Click on it -- and ask yourself which Clinton-era honorees Mangu-Ward finds objectionable. Thurgood Marshall? Colin Powell? Rosa Parks? Admiral Elmo Zumwalt? Admiral William Crowe? Simon Wiesenthal? Aung San Suu Kyi? And which choices strike her as made through "political machinations"? Bob Dole? Gerald Ford? Elliot Richardson? Yes, there are a labor leaders and environmentalists and civil-rights leaders on Clinton's list -- advocates of evil liberal principles. But look who's on Bush's list this year, as Mangu-Ward reports: Charlton Heston. Albert Shanker is controversial, but Heston isn't? And Nancy Reagan and Irving Kristol made the list last year. Utterly apolitical choices? Right-wing readers will swallow Mangu-Ward's article whole, because they so desperately want it to be true. They'll accept as accurate its preposterously hyperbolic title -- "Night and Day." This is how the conservative two-minute-hate machine works. posted by Steve M. | 10:01 AM | Tuesday, July 22, 2003 There's an odd story making the right-wing rounds. According to the story, a certain Iraqi, Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod (or Abd-al-Karim Muhammad Aswad), was identified as Iraq's liaison to Osama bin Laden in a public document -- an article that appeared in November 2002 in Babil, a newspaper whose publisher was Uday Hussein, son of Saddam. The article was given to an American judge, Gilbert Merritt, who had been sent to Iraq by the Justice Department after the war. Merritt wrote about the document in this article for Nashville's Tennesseean newspaper. He explains: On the back page [of the newspaper] was a story headlined ''List of Honor.'' In a box below the headline was ''A list of men we publish for the public.'' The lead sentence refers to a list of ''regime persons'' with their names and positions. The list has 600 names and titles in three columns. It contains, for example, the names of the important officials who are members of Saddam's family, such as Uday, and then other high officials, including the 55 American ''deck of cards'' Iraqi officials, some of whom have been apprehended. Halfway down the middle column is written: ''Abid Al-Karim Muhamed Aswod, intelligence officer responsible for the coordination of activities with the Osama bin Laden group at the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan.'' This may seem odd to you -- the U.S. was clearly hankering for a war with Iraq, and looking for a casus belli, and here, allegedly, was an Iraqi newspaper proclaiming an Iraqi link to al-Qaeda. But it gets weirder. As a sidebar to the judge's story explains, the list was prefaced by this puzzling passage: ''This is a list of the henchmen of the regime. Our hands will reach them sooner or later. Woe unto them.'' Since the list was published in a newspaper run by Saddam Hussein's son, it was not clear why this passage would have been allowed to appear. The judge was told a rather farfetched tale, which he believes: The lawyer who brought the newspaper to me, Samir, and another lawyer with whom I have been working, Zuhair, translated the Arabic words and described what had happened in Baghdad the day it was published. Samir bought his paper at a newsstand at around 8 a.m. Within two hours, the Iraqi intelligence officers were going by every newsstand in Baghdad and confiscating the papers. They also went to the home of every person who they were told received a paper that day and confiscated it. The other lawyer, Zuhair, who was the counsel for the Arab League in Baghdad, did not receive delivery of his paper that day. He called his vendor, who told him that there would be no paper that day, a singular occurrence he could not explain. For the next 10 days, the paper was not published at all. Samir's newspaper was not confiscated and he retained it because it contained this interesting ''Honor Roll of 600'' of the people closest to the regime. The only explanation for this strange set of events, according to the Iraqi lawyers, is that Uday, an impulsive and somewhat unbalanced individual, decided to publish this honor roll at a time when the regime was under worldwide verbal attack in the press, especially by us. It would, he thought, make them more loyal and supportive of the regime. None of which explains why the threatening remarks about the honor-roll members also saw print. Is this bizarre item a smoking gun? Is it even a real newspaper article? The Weekly Standard (which is owned by Rupert Murdoch) thinks so -- the Standard published an article about the document a couple of months before Judge Merritt did. The New York Post (which is owned by Rupert Murdoch) thinks so -- its story cheekily adds the detail that the judge is "a Democrat and longtime family friend of Al Gore." And, according to Glenn "InstaPundit" Reynolds, Bill O'Reilly (who is employed by Rupert Murdoch) will have the judge on his show tonight.* Look, I don't know about this thing. Has anyone seen it who might be able to judge whether it's genuine or a crude Yellowcakegate-level forgery? Has the story of the seizure of the papers been verified? Is the translation accurate? I worry that this story will make its way up the media food chain until it's taken seriously. On the other hand, InstaPundit says the judge has "complained about being 'gagged' by the U.S. government." So maybe something else is going on -- maybe the point is just to float a story that will keep the true believers believing, but to keep it under the radar so it's never subjected to real scrutiny by people who could really debunk it. Maybe this is being put out in the hope that it will be half-heard and half-read by people who will go on to tell their friends and neighbors, "You know, there are documents proving a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda." This would be a nonstandard propaganda technique, an odd use of word of mouth, but I wouldn't put it past the Bushies. * That last sentence isn't exactly accurate. See this post for a couple of corrections. posted by Steve M. | 8:28 PM | Saddam's sons are nasty pieces of work, by all accounts. I made a snide comment last night about the hunt for Husseins, but if a couple have been captured or killed, the world certainly won't miss them. But let's see what happens in Iraq now if they really are in custody or dead. Is the guerrilla war just a show of loyalty to a dynasty that's perceived as capable of making a comeback, or has it taken on a life of its own? The death or capture of Saddam would be the true test, but this will tell us something. I don't know the answer -- time will tell. posted by Steve M. | 2:52 PM | From Newsweek's online front page right now: Did President Bush know the uranium claim in the State of the Union was false? 11991 responses No. The President was a victim of bad intelligence: 18% Yes. He bent the truth to build his case for war: 76% I don't know: 6% Yeah, I know: Online polls are completely unscientific. Nevertheless... posted by Steve M. | 12:38 PM | How was David Kelly exposed? Tony Blair today fuelled the row over David Kelly's death to insist that he had played no role in the "outing" of the government scientist as the source of the BBC's Iraq dossier story. Speaking to reporters on the plane en route to Hong Kong from Shanghai, the prime minister stated categorically: " I did not authorise the leaking of the name of David Kelly." Mr Blair said he "emphatically" did not authorise the leak, but he said the confirmation of Dr Kelly's name was a different matter, adding that the judicial inquiry he had set up would look at all the facts. Questioned on why the government confirmed Dr Kelly's identity, he replied: "That's a completely different matter once the name is out there. The inquiry can look at these things." The provenance of Dr Kelly's name in the media has become the new focus of the ongoing blame game over Dr Kelly's apparent suicide, 48 hours after giving evidence to the foreign affairs select committee. Today's Financial Times claims the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, personally authorised his press office's strategy of confirming Dr Kelly's name to journalists who came up with it. Meanwhile the Guardian claims that Sir Kevin Tebbit, the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, came up with the idea of confirming the name if a journalist deduced it. But although there were enough clues in both Mr Gilligan's Mail on Sunday account of his source, and Downing Street's background details, to allow well-connected journalists to arrive at Dr Kelly's identity, there is still some suspicion that Downing Street gave the name to select lobby journalists for it then to be confirmed by the MoD.... --Guardian Meanwhile, a lot of Britons are thinking about regime change: A new poll for the Daily Telegraph newspaper released Monday suggested the size of the political damage Blair, who was on a diplomatic mission to Beijing on Tuesday, has suffered in recent days. It reported that 39 percent of voters surveyed said Blair should resign, almost as many as the 41 percent who said he should stay in office. Twenty percent were undecided. The poll also reported 59 percent said their opinion of Blair had dropped as a result of Kelly's death, while 64 percent now believed the government had not given accurate information about the Iraqi weapons threat in the days before the war began. --Washington Post story, from tThe Salt Lake Tribune posted by Steve M. | 9:49 AM | Here in America, many of us can't quite understand why friendship has flourished between George W. Bush and Tony Blair. Blair, for all his faults, seems sincere, overeager, earnest, and genuinely concerned (if delusionally) with issues of right and wrong, unlike the cynical, nasty, mean-spirited Bush, whose talk of morality always seems phony. But I guess in Britain they don't see Blair quite the way we do. This is from The Scotsman: ...the kind of brutality which led Dr Kelly to take his own life is a very close relative of the kind of brutality which has characterised Tony Blair’s years in power. Throughout his time in office, political opponents within Labour have been discredited. Dirty tricks have been deployed. Those not prepared to toe the party line have been bullied. Those who might compromise the government have been hung out to dry. Lies have been repeatedly told. The victims have been left badly bruised - though never before dead. The hardest ministers, such as John Reid, have thrived in this administration. The most humane, such as Estelle Morris, have languished. Politics has always been a dirty business, but it has rarely been this filthy. John Major’s regime may have been mired in sleaze and hypocrisy, but even those wallowing in that particular quagmire would have quailed at the techniques used by Blair’s henchmen. Charlie Whelan, the former government spin doctor, told me that he used to make intimidating phone calls to journalists in the middle of the night. He admitted to "doing-in Cabinet ministers" and talked cheerfully of "putting the boot into the bastards". In ten days’ time, Blair will become the longest-serving Labour prime minister in British history, and it could be argued that these bully-boy techniques have allowed him to stay at the top for so long. They may yet, however, be the cause of his demise. Now it starts to make sense. posted by Steve M. | 7:24 AM | Monday, July 21, 2003 I'm puzzling over the fact that the late Dr. David Kelly, a source for the BBC's report on British intelligence, was a pal of New York Times reporter Judith Miller -- the Times reported today that one ominous e-mail he sent shortly before his death (the one with the phrase "many dark actors playing games") was sent to Miller. The Times today also published an appreciation of Kelly written by Miller, an article that echoes some of what she wrote in a piece published yesterday, "A Chronicle of Confusion in the Hunt for Hussein's Weapons." In today's article, Miller says that before his death Kelly was critical of the way in which American armed forces had gone about hunting for [WMDs], and expressed the fear that material might have been looted, hidden or carried away. "It may be virtually impossible to construct through traditional forensics what Iraq had done," he once said. He also expressed frustration that the weapons hunters in Iraq included so few people who were knowledgeable about the country and its scientific and weapons experts. Yesterday she wrote: Some said that promising sites were looted — or cleared of evidence — before Americans could search or secure them. "Because we arrived at sites so late, so often," said Capt. J. Ryan Cutchin, the leader of the team known as MET Bravo, "we may never know what was there, and either walked or was taken away by looters and Baathist elements under the guise of looting." ...some said that Special Operations forces alienated potential Iraqi sources through midnight raids and other harsh tactics.... Several analysts said that although the task force's weapons-hunting teams were highly motivated and innovative, the Pentagon initially erred in putting a field artillery brigade in charge of the hunt.... ...the task force had virtually no inspectors and few analysts who knew Iraq or its weapons programs well.... It seems likely to me that Kelly was a source for yesterday's article by Miller although his opinions were seconded by other interviewees. posted by Steve M. | 11:38 PM | Does this seem as pathetic to you as it does to me? SHAKY, Iraq - U.S. soldiers raided the home of a wealthy auto dealer Monday after a man claiming to be Saddam Hussein's mechanic said the ousted dictator was hiding there. Four Bradley fighting vehicles smashed through the front walls of the compound in Ishaky, on the banks of the Tigris about 35 miles north of Baghdad, said Capt. Karl Pfuetze, whose 4th Infantry 3rd Brigade unit led the raid. Dozens of soldiers stormed the compound, which consisted of three interconnected houses with an estimated 50 rooms, he said. Saddam was not in the house, and soldiers found no escape tunnels on the property.... --AP No Saddam, but I hear they missed Elvis by that much.... posted by Steve M. | 7:09 PM | President George W. Bush's job performance rating has slipped to 53% positive, his lowest since the terrorist attacks in 2001, according to a poll of 1,004 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. His negative rating reached 46%, just under his pre-9/11 unfavorable of 49%.... For the first time, more likely voters (47%) say it's time for someone new in the White House, compared to 46% who said the President deserves to be re-elected.... --from the Zogby Web site posted by Steve M. | 12:55 PM | The FBI blew repeated chances to uncover the 9-11 plot because it failed to aggressively investigate evidence of Al Qaeda’s presence in the United States, especially in the San Diego area, where two of the hijackers were living with one of the bureau’s own informants, according to the congressional report set for release this week. --Newsweek D'oh! The long-delayed 900-page report also contains potentially explosive new evidence suggesting that Omar al-Bayoumi, a key associate of two of the hijackers, may have been a Saudi-government agent, sources tell NEWSWEEK. The report documents extensive ties between al-Bayoumi and the hijackers. But the bureau never kept tabs on al-Bayoumi—despite receiving prior information he was a secret Saudi agent, the report says. In January 2000, al-Bayoumi had a meeting at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles—and then went directly to a restaurant where he met future hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, whom he took back with him to San Diego. (Al-Bayoumi later arranged for the men to get an apartment next to his and fronted them their first two months rent.) The report is sure to reignite questions about whether some Saudi officials were secretly monitoring the hijackers—or even facilitating their conduct.... Obviously, I understand why the United States of SUVs tolerates Saudi nonsense -- and I know a lot of people, across the political spectrum, wish we didn't. What I don't understand is why the FBI's coating of Teflon never seems to get scratched. (Oh, and here's an old story about alleged ties between al-Bayoumi and the Saudi royal family.) posted by Steve M. | 11:43 AM | Why does the same story keep coming up again and again? And if the Bushies are so sure it's incorrect, why doesn't any empirical evidence ever disprove it? As Dack at the Rational Enquirer pointed out a couple of days ago, citing this Washington Post story and this AP story, Mahdi Shukur Obeidi, the Iraqi scientist who had the blueprint and centrifuge parts buried in his backyard, says the Iraqi nuclear program was suspended back in (all together now, class) 1991. Now, certainly this could be a lie everyone was supposed to tell, but if so, where's the evidence that points in another direction? Jacques Baute, a nuclear scientist for the International Atomic Energy Agency, is quoted in the Washington Post story. According to Baute, what was buried in that backyard was woefully inadequate if Saddam wanted to restart his nuke program -- and would have been even in the unlikely event that Saddam managed to get Iraq's pariah-nation status changed: Baute, in the interview Friday, pointed out that once U.N. economic sanctions were ended, after inspectors certified Baghdad's weapons work had ceased, the Security Council was to have imposed an Ongoing Monitoring and Verification regime on Iraq - controls short-circuited by the U.S.-British invasion. Inspectors, with unhindered access under U.N. resolutions, would have kept close watch on Iraq's military-industrial complex, aided by air and water sampling technology, satellite and aerial surveillance, and monitoring of Iraq's imports. An enrichment plant, a vast array of thousands of centrifuges, would have been easily detected, said Baute, who once helped build French nuclear bombs. "To have turned it into a full-blown enrichment program while OMV was in place would have been virtually impossible," he said of the Obeidi equipment. Although U.S. officials have not shared their Obeidi data with the IAEA, Baute's experts closely examined available photos of the components and found they included one critical part, the bottom bearing assembly. But other vital elements apparently are lacking, Baute said, including the advanced carbon-fiber rotor, the spinning tube in which uranium gas is separated. "It is far, far from being a complete set," he said. He also noted the Iraqis would have had to expose themselves by searching for foreign manufacturers to duplicate complex components. As for Obeidi's documents, they appear to be copies of centrifuge drawings and papers seized by IAEA inspectors in 1995, Baute said. "These Iraqi drawings seem to contain mistakes," he said. German engineers who secretly assisted the centrifuge program apparently didn't leave their hosts finished designs, and the Iraqis erred at times in filling in gaps. Oh, and as the AP story notes, Obeidi says the now-notorious aluminum tubes Iraq purchased weren't for nuclear bomb production. Go to the Rational Enquirer story for a nice list of who dismisses the tubes as possible "smoking guns" (e.g., the State Department) and who (a much shorter list) doesn't. Recall The New Republic's widely read article "The First Casualty": The tubes' thick walls and particular diameter made them a poor fit for uranium enrichment, even after modification. That determination ... came from weeks of interviews with "the nation's experts on the subject, ... they're the ones that have the labs, like Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where people really know the science and technology of enriching uranium." posted by Steve M. | 10:23 AM | Sunday, July 20, 2003 Thanks to the readers who sent me Friday's Wall Street Journal story on ricin. I'm not sure if I can now make it available to the rest of you -- try this, it might work. The point of the story is that the CIA said just before the war that Iraq might be making ricin, while the Pentagon stated flatly that Iraq had provided "help in making explosives and poisons, such as ricin," to terrorist groups. However, Now, some Iraqi scientists who researched ricin are challenging the prewar claims about ricin. Turning it into a battlefield weapon took know-how Iraq never had, according to Shakir al-Akidy, who says he took the lead in trying to develop a ricin weapon. In an interview in Baghdad, he contends that the less-toxic ricin Iraq managed to produce was all either consumed in tests or destroyed. "Ricin is very difficult to isolate," he says. "What we made was very crude, not useful for military applications. We threw everything away and that was the end." The program, Dr. al-Akidy says, was abandoned in early 1991. He has some backup: Though it's impossible to be certain of Dr. al-Akidy's credibility, his claims were verified in most respects by another ricin-project scientist, Loay Abdul Rathman, now dean of a Baghdad pharmacy college. Some details of the Iraqi ricin program, including Dr. al-Akidy's involvement, were also corroborated by current and former United Nations weapons inspectors and by an unreleased 1998 U.N. report, which summarized Iraqi documents and interviews with others who worked in the ricin project. And, of course, nobody can find any ricin in Iraq right now. Dr. al-Akidy doesn't deny that Iraq made nasty stuff before the first Gulf War, and tried to make yet more. But ricin was a struggle for Iraq: The program had problems from the start. The team tried crushing the beans using hammers, but that was time-consuming and messy. They bought two electric food processors. For each grinding, they put a handful of beans into the small machines, collecting the resulting mash. Sometimes the hard beans would cause the grinders to jam, forcing the scientists to return to crushing by hand. Hammers and blenders...I guess we have to extend our definition of the term "dual-use technology." ******************* Trying to follow the stories in this weekend's news made my head spin. Here's AP saying that the evidence for an ongoing Iraqi nuke program was thin: Before the war, U.N. nuclear inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency interviewed Iraq's nuclear scientists and found no indication that they were working on a weapons program. "The whole thing was antiquated," said IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming. "These guys were aging, they weren't working collectively and the facilities and infrastructure was dilapidated." And there's that same claim again -- that WMD work was curtailed more than a decade ago: Senior Iraqi nuclear scientists interviewed by The Associated Press in Baghdad said their efforts to build a weapon remained dismantled after the 1991 Gulf War. Shakher Hameed, a physicist who was one of Iraq's top nuclear officials in recent years, said there was no program. "This whole American story of an Iraqi nuclear program is a lie," said Hameed, a frequent interviewee of both U.N. inspectors and U.S. intelligence officers. "The IAEA knew exactly what was going on here and they made it clear there was no program." The New York Times had this story, from which we learned that the Bushies were lying when they claimed to have better intelligence than UN inspectors could obtain: Richard Kerr, who headed a four-member team of retired C.I.A. officials that reviewed prewar intelligence about Iraq, said analysts at the C.I.A. and other agencies were forced to rely heavily on evidence that was five years old at least. ..."There were pieces of new information, but not a lot of hard information, and so the products that dealt with W.M.D. were based heavily on analysis drawn out of that earlier period," Mr. Kerr said, using the shorthand for weapons of mass destruction. Even so, just days before President Bush's State of the Union address in January, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, described the intelligence as not only convincing but up-to-date. "It is a case grounded in current intelligence," he told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, "current intelligence that comes not only from sophisticated overhead satellites and our ability to intercept communications, but from brave people who told us the truth at the risk of their lives. We have that; it is very convincing." Yeah, really convincing -- so convincing that Colim Powell knew a lot of it was bunk: Mr. Powell was more cautious than Mr. Bush was in describing Mr. Hussein's meetings with what the president, in his Cincinnati speech, had called Iraq's "nuclear mujahedeen." Mr. Powell was urged by some in the administration to cite those meetings, and to illustrate it with a picture of one of the sessions. "Now tell me who these guys are," he asked a few nights before his presentation, when the C.I.A. showed him the picture, a participant in the conversation recalled. "Oh, we're quite sure this is his nuclear crowd," came the response. "How do you know?" Mr. Powell pressed. "Prove it. Who are they?" No one could answer the question. "There were a lot of cigars lit," Mr. Powell recalled, referring to the evidence. "I didn't want any going off in my face or the president's face." And then we have Judith Miller's Times article, in which she claims no one can find WMDs in Iraq because, among other things, the U.S. intel is lousy. She also says that WMD sites may be revealing nothing now because they've been looted or because "stockpiles of banned weapons had been destroyed from 1995 to a few days before the war," an assertion she ascribes to a mysterious unnamed Iraqi intelligence officer. But as the AP story notes, Some kinds of uranium-enrichment programs require vast amounts of electricity; many need large, secure industrial sites, U.S. government scientists say. The soil around sites that are home to uranium weapons work also has greater traces of the substance than regular soil. Andrew Wilkie, a senior Australian intelligence analyst who resigned in protest of his government's handling of prewar intelligence, said intelligence services did not pick up on telltale emissions and other signs that would point to a large-scale nuclear program. "Every stage of the weapons cycle was missing," he said. So why aren't Miller's weapons-hunters finding any evidence of this kind? Bizarrely, Miller's article also takes a turn into Julia Child territory: MET Alpha's final mission underscores the continuing problems that plague the hunt. Sent to Basra to investigate what senior Iraq Survey Group intelligence and weapons experts called highly suspicious equipment that could be components for a nuclear weapons program, the team collected what turned out to be oil production equipment and a handful of large, industrial-scale vegetable steamers. Cuisine of mass destruction.... posted by Steve M. | 11:24 PM | I want to write about serious stuff, and I will later on, but for now I just want to point out that today's New York Times gives Ann Coulter a small taste of her own medicine: But though she often extols the virtues of places like Kansas City and claims to love the hoi polloi, she seems to like them best at the other end of the television set. Take her taste in ski hills. "Vail was going more family-oriented," she complained, recalling a time when she avoided Aspen because it was full of celebrities from Los Angeles. "I'm sitting enjoying my margarita in the hot tub, and these kids rolled this enormous snowball, like bigger than my entire body, heaved it in the hot tub. And I stormed up to our room and I told my skiing partner: `O.K., that's it. No more Vail. We're going to Aspen.' Who am I kidding? I love superficial L.A. people." Meow! Yes, it's in the Sunday Styles section. No, it doesn't delve very deep into the steaming pile of lies and group slanders Coulter has constructed over the years. And yes, the Times developed the courage to do this only after several conservatives criticized Coulter harshly. Still, it's a start. posted by Steve M. | 11:15 AM | Friday, July 18, 2003 I'll be in transit again much of today, and I probably won't be posting much this weekend. I was hoping that someone somewhere would post excerpts from a story in today's Wall Street Journal (the news section, not the hard-right editorial page) that seems to debunk some claims made to justify the Iraq war. Here's the summary from the WSJ's home page: Iraqi scientists who say they were involved in a 1990 ricin project that was abandoned nearly as soon as it began are coming forward to challenge Washington's claims, and significant parts of their story are backed by other evidence. I haven't ponied up for an online WSJ subscription, so I haven't read the story and I can't excerpt it, but its author was on Morning Edition this morning, and if you're of a mind to, you can listen to what he says here (scroll down to "Report: Iraq Ricin Program Abandoned in Late '90s" -- an inaccurate headline because, as NPR's own summary notes, Iraq, according to the WSJ story, abandoned the project in late 1990). By the way, as CNN reported at the time, Europeans were skeptical back in February when Colin Powell claimed that ricin found by police in a London apartment had come from Iraq. Morning Edition also had a good report on the government's own highly critical assessment of Iraq reconstruction efforts (scroll to "Pentagon Control of Post-War Iraq Criticized"). A couple of print stories on this are here and here. posted by Steve M. | 12:12 PM | You may have already learned that David Kelly, the arms adviser who's been accused of being the source for a BBC story about Britain's "dodgy dossier," is missing and quite possibly dead. Here's more from AP: Television journalist Tom Mangold said he had spoken to Kelly's wife, Janice, on Friday morning, and she had said her husband felt stressed after appearing before a parliamentary committee to face questions about the BBC report. "She told me he had been under considerable stress, that he was very, very angry about what had happened at the committee, that he wasn't well, that he had been to a safe house, he hadn't liked that, he wanted to come home," Mangold told ITV news. "She didn't use the word depressed, but she said he was very, very stressed and unhappy about what had happened and this was really not the kind of world he wanted to live in." The Ministry of Defense said it had offered accommodation for Kelly so that he could avoid media attention. Safe house? Does that just sound sinister to me because I don't understand how these things are done, or is it, in fact, sinister? posted by Steve M. | 9:54 AM | LEAVE SEVERAL HUNDRED THOUSAND CHILDREN BEHIND The first report to document the impact of the government's new formula for financial aid has found that it will reduce the nation's largest grant program by $270 million and bar 84,000 college students from receiving any award at all.... The Department of Education has cited its obligation under federal law to revise the formula and played down the impact. Sally L. Stroup, its assistant secretary for postsecondary education, told The Washington Post last month that "the changes will have a minimal impact on a handful of students." The figures cited in the report made clear, however, that the new formula would trim the government's primary award program, the Pell grant, by $270 million once it takes effect in the 2004-5 academic year. That amount, financial aid experts said, probably means that hundreds of thousands of students will end up getting smaller Pell grants, not counting the 84,000 who it is estimated will no longer qualify. "It's pretty hard to call several hundred thousand students a handful," said Brian K. Fitzgerald, director of the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, which was created by Congress to advise it on higher education. He estimated that more than one million students could receive smaller Pell grants because of the new formula.... --New York Times posted by Steve M. | 9:42 AM | They loved Tony Blair in Congress. We love him in America -- alas. An anecdote, from Newsweek: It was Thursday, March 20. The United States had begun bombing Baghdad in the predawn hours, catching Tony Blair by surprise. According to a new inside account of the prime minister at war, “Thirty Days,” by British journalist Peter Stothard, the assault started before Blair expected. As his inner circle knew, this historical footnote would feed criticism among Britons that he was little more than President George W. Bush’s “poodle” in Iraq. Now, as the P.M. huddled with his aides to prepare for an address to the nation, he didn’t need to be reminded of that. “How should I start?” he asked. Blair’s smart-aleck communications czar, Alastair Campbell, had a suggestion: How about, “My fellow Americans ...” posted by Steve M. | 7:22 AM | Thursday, July 17, 2003 You may have already read this at Tom Tomorrow's blog or Eschaton, but if you haven't, you need to know: Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said today that documents turned over by the Commerce Department, under court order as a result of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” The documents, which are dated March 2001, are available on the Internet at: www.JudicialWatch.org. Yes, you read that righrt: March 2001. Here's the press release. Here are the documents. As Tom T. says, "Judicial Watch was one of the conservative groups that went after Clinton, on Richard Mellon Scaife's dime, back in the day. At the time, founder Larry Klayman stated, 'I take it to heart when I see the government not telling the truth, not doing the right thing and covering up.' And what do you know? It looks like he meant it." Well, maybe. But whatever the reason for the suit, I'm amazed at what it has apparently turned up. posted by Steve M. | 11:52 PM | ...In the past, to tell President Bush — or at least those assigned to read his mail — what was on your mind it was necessary only to sit down at a personal computer connected to the Internet and dash off a note to president@whitehouse.gov. But this week, Tom Matzzie, an online organizer with the A.F.L.-C.I.O., discovered that communicating with the White House had become a bit more daunting. When Mr. Matzzie sent an e-mail protest against a Bush administration policy, the message was bounced back with an automated reply, saying he had to send it again in a new way. Under a system deployed on the White House Web site for the first time last week, those who want to send a message to President Bush must now navigate as many as nine Web pages and fill out a detailed form that starts by asking whether the message sender supports White House policy or differs with it.... "This is the most ridiculous Web form for contacting someone I have ever seen," said Mr. Matzzie, who is a professional Web site designer. Having sent his e-mail message on Tuesday, Mr. Matzzie said he was still waiting for a response. --from tomorrow's New York Times The Times page also provides this pop-up chart, which accurately depicts how tedious the process is. I tried it. (You can, too, at whitehouse.gov, if you can find the word "CONTACT.") In the article, Tom Matzzie complains about not being able to find "Unemployment" or "Jobs" after choosing "Economy" on screen #4. Well, I chose "Legal/Judicial" and I couldn't find "Judicial Nominees" or any subcategory like it -- my only choices were "245I Immigration Issue" (whatever the hell that is), "Amnesty (Mexico/Canada)," "Campaign Finance Reform," "Death Penalty," "Election Reform" (which, I guess, doesn't include Campaign Finance Reform), "Immigration" -- why "245I Immigration Issue" and "Amnesty (Mexico/Canada)" had to be broken out from "Immigration," I'm not sure -- "Pledge of Allegiance," "Pornography," "Racial Profiling," "Tort Reform," and "United States Refugee Program" (again, why this isn't under "Immigration," I'm not sure). And don't look for "Military Tribunal" under "Legal/Judicial," though it is under "General Defense/Homeland Security." You also have to use a form to e-mail the Web Development Team (go here). Your e-mail address is requested, but you're told in no uncertain terms thatyou won't get a reply. Odd. Curiously, you can still e-mail Dick Cheney directly, at vice.president@whitehouse.gov. And hey, maybe you should. posted by Steve M. | 11:30 PM | Did you all see the Newsweek poll from last week (the second poll listed here)? Here's the shocker: "In general, would you like to see George W. Bush reelected to another term as president, or not?" Yes: 47% No: 46% Don't Know: 7% In early May, "yes" beat "no" 51% - 38%. That's a hell of a drop. And the Dems are within shouting distance of the incumbent -- Bush beats Kerry 50% - 42%, Gephardt 51% - 42%, Edwards 51% - 39%, Lieberman 52% - 39%, Dean 53% - 38%. Those are very closable gaps. Dare we hope? posted by Steve M. | 5:37 PM | Somehow I don't think Bush will be too eager to count the overseas vote in 2004. -- Roger Ailes (the good one), citing this Ouch! posted by Steve M. | 5:22 PM | It's a cliche of journalism -- hell, it's a cliche of blogging; I've done it, and if you're a blogger you probably have, too: you tick off a few details that seem to describe a contemporary situation and then say, "Contemporary Situation X? No! Event from History Y!" And everyone ooohs and ahhhs at the heretofore unrecognized parallels. But before proceeding, you do want to make sure your parallels actually exist, and exist in a meaningful way. Unless you're Ralph Peters. If you're Ralph Peters, you just dump a half-baked column like this into the New York Post and trust that your right-wing readers will oooh and ahhh and gasp, "Why, yes! Dubya is a lot like Lincoln, isn't he?" Here's how he tries to show that the Civil War was really a whole lot like the Iraq war: The liberation of millions goes ignored. Stop right there. Was the toppling of the Saddam regime and the Saddam statues ignored? Did I hallucinate all that TV coverage back in April? Democrats attack the Republican president over a continuing conflict, insisting it cannot be won.... Who says it can't be won? I think the conventional non-Republican wisdom is precisely that it can be won if we act like grown-ups and acknowledge how much time, money and effort we need to put into Iraq. The president acts vigorously in response to a threat to our national survival.... Or, in the contemporary case, something that can be gussied up to look an awful lot like a threat to our national survival. A retired general is one of the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination,... There are nine candidates for the Democratic nomination. Wesley Clark is not one of them yet, and he may never be. McClellan actually won the Democratic nomination in 1864, while Clark almost certainly won't in 2004. ... although the Army realizes it's winning and continues to support the president. Yeah, there's nothing but unwavering support evident here and here and here and here and here. Continental European powers, especially France, tacitly back Washington's enemies, jockeying for financial advantage.... What financial advantage? France opposed the Iraq war knowing full well that the U.S. would topple the Saddam regime and seize the country's assets, and undoubtedly realizing that the vindictive U.S. administration would reserve the spoils of war for its own nationals and, perhaps, those of Britain. ...The media attack the president savagely, making fun of his lack of sophistication and even his appearance. Cartoonists lampoon the man even more fiercely than his policies. Leading newspapers and journals insist that his policies are disastrous and that he is unfit to lead the nation. I've seen a lot of "Bush = chimp" stuff on the Web, but where is it in the print or broadcast media? And what's Peters's point, anyway? That anyone who's mocked for his looks in the press is another Lincoln? If so, let's build a Nixon Memorial in D.C. right now. And if being denounced in the press as "unfit to lead the nation" makes you Lincolnesque, then the most Lincolnesque president of the past quarter-century is Bill Clinton. ...The president's secretary of state is accused of failure and ineptitude.... The reaction to Colin Powell is decidedly mixed. We grumbled about the UN presentation, but at least he had the decency to leave the Niger nonsense out if it. The verdict of the intelligentsia is unanimous: This president is leading the nation into disaster. So, none of those Bush supporters at National Review, The Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, The Washington Times, and Fox News, not to mention the Regnery and Crown Forum and talk-radio crowds, are members of "the intelligentsia"? Yet, the people continue to support the man.... Less and less. posted by Steve M. | 2:52 PM | Yeah, there were a few dumb signs back when we were protesting the war, and I've never been a fan of the Spartacus Youth League, but here's a right-wing blogger who thinks that demonstrators whose opinions he disagrees with deserve to be run down and killed by errant drivers. Remind me again: it's conservatives who are supposed to have "traditional Judeo-Christian values," right? posted by Steve M. | 12:01 PM | Three-fourths of Americans say the economy is "not so good" or "poor," according to a new poll, and the number who say it is poor is the highest in a decade. The poll by ABC-Money Magazine found that consumer confidence — a combination of attitudes about the national economy, the buying climate and personal finances — had slipped to its lowest level in almost two months. The survey has found consumers' mood on average this year to be as pessimistic about the economy as they have been in a decade. The most optimistic year in the history of this 17-year-old survey was in 2000.... --AP posted by Steve M. | 7:31 AM | Wednesday, July 16, 2003 ABC News has confirmed that, of those deaths [of U.S. troops] in Iraq, at least five are suspected suicides. These are figures we've been trying to get for several days now, something the Pentagon really does not want to talk about. --Martha Raddatz on this evening's broadcast of ABC's World News Tonight (text not available online) I should acknowledge, though, that I don't know how unusual this is in war, or among populations of (mostly) young men with ready access to guns. posted by Steve M. | 11:37 PM | The 9/11 commission can't get the documents and witnesses it wants, but last week it did get as a witness one Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie is a "terrorism expert" who believes, as James Ridgeway points out in this week's Village Voice, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was behind the 2001 World Trade Center attack and the 1993 World Trade Center attack, and may well have been behind the 2001 anthrax mailings and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. On the right, Mylroie isn't regarded as a nut -- to the contrary, as Ridgeway points out, "Mylroie's work on Iraq and its connections to the two World Trade Center attacks have been endorsed by Rumsfeldians Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and former CIA director James Woolsey." Jude at the blog Iddybud provides a few links to Mylroie's writings -- this one will get you up to speed on her 9/11 views -- but I'm sorry Jude doesn't link my favorite Mylroie page, this transcript of an October 29, 2001, CNN online chat in which Mylroie not only links Saddam to the anthrax attacks but warns that "children and all non-essential personnel" might have to be evacuated from America's major cities prior to a war with Iraq (which she desperately craved) because, in her view, Saddam was likely to escalate the bioweapons campaign against the U.S. he had begun with the anthrax mailings. The anthrax letters stopped, WMDs weren't used in the recent Iraq war, WMDs weren't used in the first Gulf war, no WMDs or evidence of an active WMD program have been found in Iraq in the months since Saddam left the country and we got the run of the place -- and yet Laurie Mylroie is still taken seriously, as an "expert" and as a useful witness for the 9/11 commission. Lovely. I'm also sorry that neither Ridgeway nor Jude mentions the fact that back in 1990 Laurie Mylroie wrote a quickie book called Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, a bestseller, with Judith Miller of The New York Times. I've been trying to dig around to determine whether the "expert" and the journalist/fabulist have maintained ties to this day -- unfortunately, I'm not sure. But they did share book royalties once upon a time. posted by Steve M. | 5:41 PM | I know a lot of you read Eschaton, so you know about this already, but for the rest of you there's this from CNN: Iraqis Cheer U.S. Death ...The convoy had just passed wreckage of an abandoned vehicle when an explosion was heard. One truck in that convoy was destroyed, and the soldier who was killed was in that truck. Those who were wounded were evacuated to a military hospital. When that explosion was heard, a group of Iraqi civilians, who were nearby, gathered at the site of the aftermath [and] were watching what was going on. And when they apparently realized that this was an attack on a U.S. military force, they erupted in cheers. And that cheering went on for several minutes.... I believe it's now officially a quagmire. posted by Steve M. | 2:53 PM | Also on the subject of Syria, please see Dexter Filkins's article in yesterday's New York Times: ...Soldiers on the Syrian side of the border said American soldiers shot dead two cousins, one Iraqi and one Syrian, as they crossed into Iraqi territory about three weeks ago. Since then, they said, two other Syrian civilians have been wounded in separate incidents this month. The Syrians said that American helicopters and planes routinely violate Syrian airspace while patrolling. The events described at this Syrian border post are the latest in a series of incidents along the frontier. They include the American attack, on June 18, on a convoy suspected of ferrying loyalists of Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi leader.... "The Americans are firing at random, firing at so many people," said Maj. Ali Shamad, the chief of the Syrian border post, who confirmed the deaths of the two villagers and the wounding of two more. "Their planes come over the border every day. The Americans have gone too far."... Remind you of anything? Night after night through the summer, fall and winter of 1969 an into the early months of 1970 the eight-engined planes passed west over South Vietnam and on to Cambodia. Peasants were killed -- no one knows how many -- and Communist logistics were somewhat disrupted. To avoid the attacks, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong pushed their sanctuaries and supply bases deeper into the country, and the area that the B-52s bombarded expanded as the year passed. The war spread. --William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979), page 35 Perhaps the comparison is somewhat inexact. Nevertheless, we know how that one turned out. posted by Steve M. | 9:42 AM | So now the Bushies are distorting evidence of Syrian weapons of mass destruction... In a new dispute over interpreting intelligence data, the CIA and other agencies objected vigorously to a Bush administration assessment of the threat of Syria's weapons of mass destruction that was to be presented Tuesday on Capitol Hill. After the objections, the planned testimony by Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, a leading administration hawk, was delayed until September. U.S. officials told Knight Ridder that Bolton was prepared to tell members of a House of Representatives International Relations subcommittee that Syria's development of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons had progressed to such a point that they posed a threat to stability in the region. The CIA and other intelligence agencies said that assessment was exaggerated.... --Miami Herald (Thanks to Lambert at Eschaton for this one.) posted by Steve M. | 7:30 AM | Tuesday, July 15, 2003 Jeffrey Kofman of ABC News goes to Fallujah and finds that some U.S. soldiers -- told repeatedly that they could go home, then told otherwise -- don't exactly accept the notion that Top Gun Bush and Trash Talk Rumsfeld are their friends: The sergeant at the 2nd Battle Combat Team Headquarters pulled me aside in the corridor. "I've got my own 'Most Wanted' list," he told me. He was referring to the deck of cards the U.S. government published, featuring Saddam Hussein, his sons and other wanted members of the former Iraqi regime. "The aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz," he said.... "If Donald Rumsfeld were sitting here in front of us, what would you say to him?" I asked a group of soldiers who gathered around a table, eager to talk to a visiting reporter.... In the back of the group, Spc. Clinton Deitz put up his hand. "If Donald Rumsfeld was here," he said, "I'd ask him for his resignation." Those are strong words from troops used to following orders. They say they will continue to do their job, but they no longer seem to have their hearts in the mission. "I used to want to help these people," said Pfc. Eric Rattler, "but now I don't really care about them anymore. I've seen so much, you know, little kids throwing rocks at you. Once you pacify an area, it seems like the area you just came from turns bad again. I'd like this country to be all right, but I don't care anymore." ... posted by Steve M. | 11:11 PM | Robert Byrd, flawed though he is, has delivered himself of a number of magnificent speeches recently -- yet conservatives describe him as a babbling old coot. These same conservatives, by contrast, consider William F. Buckley the sagest of elders, a genius because he employs gnarled syntax and really, really long words. Buckley's latest column for National Review Online is here. It's lazy, half-baked, and utterly lacking in insight. He begins by talking about the prescription-drug bill: ...The emphasis is of course on help to older people, the principal beneficiaries of whatever the reduced cost would be in buying drugs. Older people have more to worry about in looking after their health, but less in looking after school bills and mortgage payments. It would be very difficult to prove, over the long run, that older people will, as a class, benefit from the pending bills. It would? Have we utterly lost the ability to use higher-level math, or even simple math, to assess the burden of prescription-drug costs on the elderly, and to assess the costs and benefits of a long, detailed piece of legislation? Is an epidemic of math anxiety sweeping the nation, and I haven't heard about it? There is no tax bill on the table that exempts older people from taxation, and it is probable that they will devote the same percentage of their income as before to medical expenses. It is? And how was this determined? Is it based on a long-forgotten formula that's been occupying a Buckley brain cell for half a century, right next to the brain cell with the phone number of his yacht dealer? Or did Buckley just pluck this statistical judgment from air? The House bill being manifestly superior to the Senate bill, ... For "manifestly superior," read: "stingier, and therefore more pleasing to a rich, selfish old semi-libertarian." What follows is an awkward segue to a denunciation of the Supreme Court: The Supreme Court has pronounced itself arbiter of all serious questions having to do with states' rights. The president was manifestly pleased that the Court took over the whole affirmative-action problem, and he confessed himself "pleased" that the Court acknowledged the utility and the pleasures of diversity. Ah, yes, states' rights. Recall this: Buckley's opposition to federal civil rights measures, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, has remained unchanged. In a recent debate this year on his television show, "Firing Line," he was questioned by ACLU president Ira Glasser: Glasser: In 1961, you said you were "not ready to abandon the ideal of local government in order to kill Jim Crow." Buckley: That's true. Glasser: You ought to be ashamed of that now. Are you? Buckley: No In order to advance them [blacks], certain cultural changes, including education, had to be done Whether it should have been turned over to the federal government, in my judgment, it ought not to have been. But let's go on: Diversity will, one supposes, be interpreted by some as license to incestuous love... "One supposes"? The utterly nonexistent pro-incest movement is a group hallucination on the right these days. ... It was simply inconceivable, up until a few years ago, that a judge could not display the Ten Commandments in his courtroom, unthinkable that marriage could take place except between a man and a woman. Buckley really needs to get out more. These things weren't inconceivable to everyone. There are more things in heaven and earth, Bill, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.... ...The attitude of Mr. Bush on the matter of the other two branches of government is remarkably compliant. He has not exercised the veto power once, matching the record of John Quincy Adams. He's working with a movement-conservative House and, now, a similar Senate. The Senate was temporarily in the hands of Democrats, but they were Democrats of a particularly supine variety. The exceptions have been the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, but what can Bush do about them? You can't veto a filibuster. The judiciary is apparently secure from his criticism. Hey, what do you expect? These guys got him the job. ...All presidents, nearing voting time, tend to be dominated by the animal need for reelection. And maybe that's why Bush isn't denouncing recent Supreme Court rulings. Tactically, he needs to start playing the Compassionate Conservative soon. He wants whatever gay votes and black votes he can muster, and he'll actually get a few; then, after November '04, with, if he's lucky, an even more conservative Senate, he can put a bunch of true Scalia clones on the federal bench -- including the Supreme Court. Mr. Bush has something to worry about here. His popularity rating in the polls seems to be going down about one half point per U.S. soldier killed. Eighteen soldiers, nine points down, from 61 percent approval to 52 on his handling of the Iraq question. "Eighteen soldiers killed"? Try 221. Plus 43 from the U.K. He will very much need the enthusiastic endorsement of conservatives.... Why? Where are conservatives going to go? He has their votes -- inevitably his approval rating among registered Republicans exceeds 90%. And he's been looking like a sure winner in '04, at least until this week. Righties are going to blow off a potential landslide to go huddle in a corner with Pat Buchanan? There are plenty of reasons for conservatives to vote hopefully for Bush, but he has to remind them what those reasons are. I don't think so. All he has to say is "I'm not Bill Clinton! I'm not married to Hillary! Bill! Hillary! Booga-booga-booga!" posted by Steve M. | 7:27 PM | My apologies for not posting more about Uraniumgate or Yellowcakegate or whatever it is we're calling the Nixonian doings in the Bush White House. In this blog I try to draw your attention to things I think might otherwise escape your attention; right now, though, the sneaky business is being looked at everywhere -- not just by the people in my links list, but also, refreshingly, by portions of the mainstream media. Read Krugman. Read Josh Marshall. Check the links at Cursor. Hell, read Time or watch ABC's evening newscast -- right now you'll get skepticism about Bush at a level that was unimaginable even a year ago, or even two months ago. posted by Steve M. | 5:22 PM | As anyone who's seen the movie Spellbound knows, there are kids well under the legal driving age who can spell xanthosis, succedaneum, or prospicience correctly in front of fellow competitors, judges, family, friends, and strangers, plus a cable-TV audience. Then there's this dumb cluck. Who's the object of her wrath? Guess. posted by Steve M. | 1:28 PM | I was going to point out that the Africa sentence in the State of the Union address is not technically accurate, as Bush defenders insist, because one key word makes it a lie, but Michael Kinsley beat me to the punch, in point #1 of this column. Points #2 and #3 and even better -- funny and damning. posted by Steve M. | 11:12 AM | Ignorant, desperate, or a pathological liar? You decide. As Busy, Busy, Busy and Rational Enquirer have noted, the Leader of the Free World said this yesterday (scroll to the end of this White House transcript): The larger point is, and the fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in. Hunh? He wouldn't? So who were all those UN people running around Iraq who kept being described by sneering American right-wingers as "Inspector Clouseaus" because they couldn't find the same weapons we can't find now, even though now we run the country? posted by Steve M. | 9:14 AM | Monday, July 14, 2003 "No Outcome but Victory"? Eventually, I guess, but certainly not now. (This link came from a banner ad at the top of my blog.) posted by Steve M. | 11:11 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 10:59 PM | Sunday, July 13, 2003 I probably won't be able to do much posting tomorrow. See you tomorrow night. posted by Steve M. | 11:08 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 11:05 PM | 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? posted by Steve M. | 10:55 PM | Saturday, July 12, 2003 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? posted by Steve M. | 6:07 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 6:05 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 8:31 AM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 8:22 AM | Friday, July 11, 2003 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. posted by Steve M. | 10:39 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 10:33 AM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 6:48 AM | Thursday, July 10, 2003 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.... posted by Steve M. | 6:49 PM | 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.) posted by Steve M. | 5:44 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | Wednesday, July 09, 2003 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 posted by Steve M. | 11:24 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 5:49 PM | 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.) posted by Steve M. | 1:41 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 10:50 AM | 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...." posted by Steve M. | 9:54 AM | Tuesday, July 08, 2003 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?"). posted by Steve M. | 11:56 PM | As the president travels through Africa, TBOGG compares and contrasts. A palpable hit. posted by Steve M. | 3:40 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 12:51 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 9:43 AM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 6:52 AM | Monday, July 07, 2003 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. posted by Steve M. | 11:17 PM | 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?) posted by Steve M. | 2:27 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 10:50 AM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 9:29 AM | 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? posted by Steve M. | 9:17 AM | ...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 posted by Steve M. | 12:05 AM | Sunday, July 06, 2003 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. posted by Steve M. | 11:58 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 11:29 PM | 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.... posted by Steve M. | 11:38 AM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 11:22 AM | Saturday, July 05, 2003 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." posted by Steve M. | 11:00 AM | Friday, July 04, 2003 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. posted by Steve M. | 5:21 PM | 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.... posted by Steve M. | 9:45 AM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 9:32 AM | Thursday, July 03, 2003 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.) posted by Steve M. | 2:20 PM | 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? posted by Steve M. | 1:10 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 12:20 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 11:58 AM | 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! posted by Steve M. | 10:16 AM | Wednesday, July 02, 2003 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. posted by Steve M. | 5:56 PM | 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? posted by Steve M. | 5:25 PM | 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.) posted by Steve M. | 2:34 PM | 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.... posted by Steve M. | 2:10 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 12:27 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 10:16 AM | 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 posted by Steve M. | 9:25 AM | Tuesday, July 01, 2003 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 posted by Steve M. | 11:29 PM | 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! posted by Steve M. | 11:17 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 5:50 PM | 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.... posted by Steve M. | 5:30 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 5:20 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 4:05 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 2:20 PM | 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. posted by Steve M. | 10:41 AM | Kabul back as terror hot spot Less than two years after the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghanistan is re-emerging as a terrorism hotspot on radar screens. A spate of attacks and an increase in intercepted electronic 'chatter' indicate that the Al-Qaeda network could be re-establishing its foothold there. Intelligence officials said this communication buzz and tapes reportedly released by Mullah Mohammed Omar, former leader of the Taleban, suggest that Osama bin Laden has renewed his partnership with it. The Taleban have been regrouping in the far-flung areas of the country. The Al-Qaeda has also formed new tie-ups with outfits such as the Hizbi Islami of renegade Afghan warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Some of its members, who had fled to Pakistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, are beginning to return. The most recent suicide attack in Afghanistan is believed to be jointly organised by the Al-Qaeda, the Taleban and those affiliated with Hekmatyar. Earlier this month, a bus packed with international peacekeepers was blown up in Kabul, leaving four German peacekeepers and one civilian dead, and 29 others injured.... 'Operation Enduring Freedom was a full frontal assault on the Taleban in Afghanistan...(but) no one was guarding the back door,' said terrorism commentator M.J. Gohel, a director with the Asia-Pacific Foundation on CNN's Your World Today, last week.... In another surprising move Pakistani authorities who have so far captured more than 500 of Al-Qaeda members, have found Indian made communication systems being used by some of these activists indicating the involvment of Indian agencies in Afghanistan.... --PakTribune (Pakistan) (Link courtesy of BuzzFlash.) posted by Steve M. | 10:37 AM | Bush tax cuts 'may sap confidence' The Bush tax cuts risk undermining confidence in the health of US public finances, according to the Bank for International Settlements, the forum for the world's central banks. The BIS said in its annual report that the Bush administration and the US Federal Reserve had been right to take action to boost the economy. But it said the $350bn tax cuts package agreed by Congress had "not been helpful" and there was a danger that debt would reach unsustainable levels. The BIS warned that the US risked exacerbating imbalances in the US economy which could result in a painful correction in the future.... Its report also echoes private-sector economists' concerns that the US government may be reluctant to rein in fiscal policy when the economy is out of danger. "The tax cuts should have been more short-term and reversible," said George Magnus, global economist at UBS.... --Financial Times posted by Steve M. | 9:39 AM | I predicted a while back that a few phrases from Andrew Sullivan's nasty review of Sidney Blumenthal's book would wind up in ads for the book, as praise; a couple of weeks ago, as I noted, an ad for Blumenthal's book appeared in The New York Times with a Sullivan quote. Well, a similar ad appears on page 2 of the current (July 7) New Yorker, and there's Sullivan again, praising the book as "Brutally revealing." Nice. posted by Steve M. | 7:15 AM | |
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