Last week I caught Paul Bremer moving the goalposts regarding restoration of power in Iraq. Today yankeedoodle at Daily War News points out that Bremer now says Iraqi oil production will return to prewar levels by October 2004 (revised from September 2003 after that date was substituted for July 2003).

Well, now we have this prediction from Bremer's pals at the Iraqi Governing Council:

The head of a technical committee charged with working out procedures for drafting a new Iraqi constitution said his team would complete its work within one and a half months.

"The committee ... will shortly start consultations with broad segments of Iraqi society and meetings with influential figures, experts in constitutional law, political parties and religious dignitaries" to formulate a mechanism for the proposed constitutional assembly, Fuad Massum told reporters.

The committee's "mission will take a month, or a month and a half, but not more," following which it will present a report to the interim Governing Council, which formed the committee on August 11, he said....

The story's dated yesterday -- August 25. Forty-five days from that is October 9. Think these guys will finish up on schedule?

Don't bet the house.

(Thanks to Atrios for the Daily War News link.)

Billmon notes the remarkable concentration of left, liberal, and otherwise anti-conservative books on Amazon's nonfiction bestseller list.

As I write this, Al Franken is #1, Joe Conason is #2, the forthcoming Bushwhacked by Molly Ivins and Lou DuBose is #4, Jim Hightower is #6, Fast Food Nation is #7, Robert Baer's Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude is #8, Barbara Ehrenreich is #9, Michael Moore is #10, Greg Palast is #11, one of Noam Chomsky's 672,396 books (so far) is #12, Barry Glassner's The Culture of Fear (an inspiration for Bowling for Columbine) is #20, Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States is #21, Rampton and Stauber's Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq is #22, and Eric Alterman is #23.

The righties have, er, Coulter, at #5.

"What more do I need to say? Conservative books sell. I can’t help it if liberal books don’t sell."

--Newt Gingrich, 1995

GOD HELPS SINGER WRITE SONG ABOUT ACCUSED RIGHT-WING TERRORIST

Gospel singer Gene Collett says he took a message from God and turned it into a song about accused serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph.

He has released "The Ballade of Eric Robert Rudolph" to 1,270 gospel and country radio stations.

"Right or wrong in what he's done, his race is over, now only in his mind are the sweet fields of clover," Collett sings in the chorus. "Rudolph has run, and where has he trod, now he faces Caesar but his final judge is God."

At least one radio station in Western North Carolina is interested in the song.

"We need to jump on that big time," said Vann Campbell, of WRKR 1320 AM in Murphy, the Cherokee County town where Rudolph was arrested May 31. "His song is really neutral. It's not overly judgmental and it doesn't make (Rudolph) out to be a hero." ...

--Citizen-Times (Asheville, N.C.)

Yeah, I guess you could say it's "neutral" -- if you assume that the line "now he faces Caesar but his final judge is God" is a general reference to the fallibility of human beings and not, you know, a prediction that if Rudolph is convicted God will say it was cool because his bombs targeted abortionists and gay people.

Secrecy and less than full cooperation on the part of the Blair government, as reported in yesterday's Guardian:

The government withheld from the Hutton inquiry pages from one draft of its dossier setting out the dangers Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed, it was revealed yesterday....

Yesterday the Hutton inquiry said that the government had not sent it three pages from the executive summary issued in Tony Blair's name of the September 16 version, drawn up eight days before the dossier was made public....

...The Cabinet Office did not respond when asked to comment about the missing dossier pages, nor did Downing Street when asked if it would release the witness statements of Mr Blair, Mr Campbell and other officials.

Apparently it's true that poodles resemble their masters.

Less than full cooperation in the U.K. on the part of the Blair government, as reported in yesterday's Guardian:

The government withheld from the Hutton inquiry pages from one draft of its [dodgy] dossier setting out the dangers Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) posed, it was revealed yesterday....

Yesterday the Hutton inquiry said that the government had not sent it three pages from the executive summary issued in Tony Blair's name of the September 16 version, drawn up eight days before the dossier was made public....


The Hutton inquiry said it was a matter for the Cabinet Office why the pages of the summary were missing.

A spokesman for Lord Hutton's inquiry said: "His lordship is considering the relevance of these pages. Should the inquiry team believe that these pages are relevant, the option remains open to them to make a request for them.

"The inquiry team is concerned at all stages that they receive all documents which are relevant to the inquiry they are conducting."

The spokesman also said that witness statements to the inquiry from Tony Blair, Geoff Hoon and Alastair Campbell, among others, could be kept secret for years.

"The witness statements are not a requirement of the process. The inquiry has received them under a duty of confidentiality. There are no plans to publish them. Individuals are free to permit the publication of their witness statements if they choose."

A large number are still being held back. Only three are for reasons of national security, the rest being witness statements, personal diaries and chronologies of events prepared by individuals, which are being kept back on "personal privacy grounds".

...The Cabinet Office did not respond when asked to comment about the missing dossier pages, nor did Downing Street when asked if it would release the witness statements of Mr Blair, Mr Campbell and other officials.

Apparently it's true that poodles resemble their masters.

In the Slate column I mentioned yesterday, Dahlia Litwick did cite the key Supreme Court decisions that undermine Judge Roy Moore's defense of his Ten Commandments doodad -- Everson v. Board of Education and Lemon v. Kurtzman. So maybe I shouldn't have criticized her for failing to address the argument advanced by Moore defenders such as Alan Keyes that there's no constitutional basis for rulings against Moore and the monument.

But Lithwick didn't mention the bridge used in Everson to get from the federal ban on established religion to a ban at the state level -- the Fourteenth Amendment, explicitly cited by Justice Hugo Black in Everson. Maybe Lithwick thought this was too obvious to mention. Maybe you think it's too obvious to mention. It isn't. America isn't exactly a nation of A+ civics students. Most of us don't know what's in our Constitution -- most of us haven't even read the damn thing. Do you think most of the demonstrators praying in Montgomery know what the Fourteenth Amendment says?

No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

And one of the laws covered by that "equal protection" clause is the First Amendment's disestablishment of religion.

So when Keyes asks,

Would somebody point out to me the law that this judge is basing his decision on? Because if I'm breaking the law, or if Judge Moore's breaking the law, I'd like to know which law it is. I'd like to know who passed it, I'd like to know where it's written! [cheering, applause]

...Where?! Where, I ask them, is the law that is being broken? Where is the Constitutional provision that is being defied?

there's the answer: the First Amendment, filtered through the Fourteenth.

Here's Justice Black, in Everson:

The "establishment of religion" clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or to remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect "a wall of separation between church and State."

(UPDATE: Atrios beat me to the punch on this, as he so often does, and he added a nice quote from Alabama's own constitution regarding church-state separation.)

Front-page, above-the-fold lead story in today's print USA Today:

Postwar deaths match war toll

WASHINGTON — With the confirmation Monday of the 276th U.S. military death in Iraq, the Pentagon passed an unpleasant milestone.

The fatality brought the number of dead since President Bush declared major combat over on May 1 to 138, equal to the number who died during the war....

AP notes that the "post"-war death toll is actually 139 -- more than the death toll "during" the war.

Fox has dropped its lawsuit against Al Franken, in its usual mature fashion:

"It's time to return Al Franken to the obscurity that he's normally accustomed to," Fox News spokeswoman Irena Steffen said.

OK, I'm not "fair and balanced" anymore.

And please, Fox News: Grow up.

I wish Dahlia Lithwick and Alan Keyes weren't speaking past each other. Lithwick, in Slate, tries to summarize established legal precedents on the issue of church-state separation. But she refers to what "the state" can do regarding establishment of religion. Keyes, in a speech in defense of Judge Roy Moore, says the federal government can't establish a religion but any state or community bloody well can if it feels like it.

There might be states in which they require a religious test or oath of office. There might be states in which they have established churches, where subventions are given to schools and so forth to teach the Bible. There might be places where you and I might disagree with the religion some folks wanted to put in place over their communities. But guess what the Founders believed? They believed that people in their states and localities had the right to live under institutions they would put together to govern themselves according to their faith....

We have the right to live in communities--and that means the people in Alabama can live in this state. And you know how come I know that this is so, that the First Amendment didn't intend to destroy this right, that in fact such communities could exist, such states could exist? Because at the time the First Amendment was passed, at the time they put it on the books in the first place, there were a majority of states in the United States--at the time, the former colonies--where there were religious tests and oaths of office, where there were, in fact, established churches.

This is a scary argument. It also might be a persuasive argument, especially to the many people in this country who are very pro-religion and not particularly focused on religious pluralism. Quite a number of these people aren't conservative or otherwise intolerant -- they may well have just grown up in religiously homogeneous communities, or they feel religion is like vitamins, something everyone could use a lot of, something you'd be foolish to deny yourself under any circumstances. These people don't get this fight, and I'm afraid our side doesn't work hard enough at trying to explain why the law is on our side and why establishment of religion is bad for society.

So, Dahlia, how about a follow-up column on what Keyes is saying -- why can't a state or a community have a state religion? No contempt for people who agree with him, please -- just give us the legal precedents straight. Call it "Church-State Separation for Dummies." A lot of people need this stuff spelled out, starting with the most basic information.

President George W. Bush’s approval ratings continue to decline. His current approval rating of 53 percent is down 18 percent from April. And for the first time since the question was initially asked last fall, more registered voters say they would not like to see him re-elected to another term as president (49 percent) than re-elected. Forty-four percent would favor giving Bush a second term; in April, 52 percent backed Bush for a second term and 38 percent did not.

That's from a Newsweek story. The story focuses on Americans' opinions on Iraq -- which aren't optimistic:

SIXTY-NINE PERCENT of Americans polled say they are very concerned (40 percent) or somewhat concerned (29 percent) that the United States will be bogged down for many years in Iraq without making much progress in achieving its goals. Just 18 percent say they’re confident that a stable, democratic form of government can take shape in Iraq over the long term; 37 percent are somewhat confident. Just 13 percent say U.S. efforts to establish security and rebuild Iraq have gone very well since May 1, when combat officially ended; 39 percent say somewhat well.

Nearly half of respondents, 47 percent, say they are very concerned that the cost of maintaining troops in Iraq will lead to a large budget deficit and seriously hurt the U.S. economy. And 60 percent of those polled say the estimated $1 billion per week that the United States is spending is too much and the country should scale back its efforts. One-third supports the current spending levels for now, but just 15 percent of those polled say they would support maintaining the current spending levels for three years or more.

(Thanks to Rational Enquirer for the link.)

Gary Hart for Senate in Colorado? Why the hell not? Why can't Hart come back when a philanderer like Gingrich can get a government job that gives him a platform to tell Colin Powell how to run the State Department? Hart can't come back merely because of adultery, but it was OK to bring back constitutional criminals Elliott Abrams and (until recently) Robert Poindexter? Yeah, why not Gary Hart?

James Risen can't bring himself to say so, but if you read his review in The New York Times of the new book by neocon and former Judith Miller collaborator Laurie Mylroie, it becomes clear that Mylroie is crazy as a loon.

It’s not merely that she believes Saddam Hussein was behind the September 11 attacks, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and virtually every other terrorist acts in recent memory -- it’s this:

She suggests that key Qaeda leaders who have been captured by the United States may only be posing as Qaeda leaders: they could actually be Iraqi intelligence agents who are way, way undercover. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Al Qaeda's chief of operations and the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and who is now in American custody, may not really be Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He could be an Iraqi intelligence agent secretly sent to run Al Qaeda by Saddam Hussein. Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the first World Trade Center bombing and a 1995 plot to blow up American airliners over the Pacific, who now sits in a federal prison, also may be an Iraqi agent. have been stolen for use by Iraqi intelligence agents during Baghdad's occupation of Kuwait in 1990.

I run into a lot of people here in New York City who think prominent figures in the news have been replaced by doubles. Most of these people sleep on the street in refrigerator boxes and think aliens are reading their thoughts.

Joseph Biddle, deputy national finance director for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, affirmed his partnership with David Allan Warner in a civil union ceremony Vermont on Friday night. Here's their New York Times announcement. Mazel tov.

If you read Paul Krugman’s Friday column about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s economic non-plan back to back with stories about the administration's desperate attempt to avoid increasing troop strength in the U.S. military (see, e.g., the lead story in today'sNew York Times, or this AP story), you realize that what P. J. O’Rourke said in the early ‘90s is exactly wrong.

O’Rourke said that God is a Republican and Santa Claus is a Democrat. Isn't it abundantly clear now that the Republicans are now the Santa Claus party -- the party that believes that you can regularly get something for nothing, without sacrifice?

Schwarzenegger thinks California can be extracted from its economic tailspin without new taxes or painful spending cuts; Rumsfeld and his generals say that the U.S. can be the world’s policeman without any extra money being spent on troops. This is infantile thinking -- Santa Claus thinking.

I mentioned this when the report was leaked, but now AP reports on the release of the EPA inspector general's report on Ground Zero air quality after 9/11:

EPA told to lie about WTC air

The Environmental Protection Agency's internal watchdog says White House officials pressured the agency to prematurely assure the public that the air was safe to breathe a week after the World Trade Center collapse.

The agency's initial statements in the days following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were not supported by proper air quality monitoring data and analysis, EPA's inspector general, Nikki L. Tinsley, says in a 155-page report released late Thursday.

An e-mail sent just one day after the attacks, from then-EPA Deputy Administrator Linda Fisher's chief of staff to senior EPA officials, said "all statements to the media should be cleared" first by the National Security Council, the report says.

Approval from the NSC, which is chaired by President Bush and serves as his main forum for discussing national security and foreign policy matters with his senior aides and Cabinet, was arranged through an official with the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the report said.

That council, which coordinates federal environmental efforts, in turn "convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones," the inspector general found....

A story in the Times Herald-Record (Middletown, N.Y.) has more:

Hudson Valley air quality specialists, doctors and Ground Zero workers knew from the beginning that the Environmental Protection Agency was not entirely truthful about air quality in Manhattan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Consider the evidence:

-A study conducted two days after the attack showed that the air quality at Ground Zero had the same pH as Drano....

-... local environmental engineer who attended those classified meetings said there were at least 180,000 pounds of freon stored in the Twin Tower basements for the air conditioning system. When freon is vaporized, it becomes phosgene.

Phosgene is a chemical weapon used during World War I....

As I said, I could smell a chemical stench near Ground Zero as late as December. None of this surprises me.

So I guess Al Franken won, just like that, unless Fox stupidly pursues the case:

"There are hard cases and there are easy cases," U.S. District Judge Denny Chin told Fox's lawyers Friday. "This is an easy case in my view and wholly without merit, both factually and legally."...

At a hearing Friday, Dory Hanswirth argued that consumers would see a photo of Fox TV pundit Bill O'Reilly on Franken's book cover and be confused. "It's a deadly serious cover, and it's using Fox News to sell itself," she said.

Chin appeared skeptical of her argument, interrupting her to say, "The president and vice president are also on the cover, are they not? Is someone going to think they're also affiliated with Fox?"...

After the ruling, Franken thanked Fox, saying the lawsuit's publicity had boosted sales. "I'd like to thank Fox's lawyers for filing one of the stupidest briefs I've ever seen in my life," he told The Associated Press.

I never did understand the legal point of the anti-Franken trash-talk in Fox's brief. The only explanation that made any sense was that O’Reilly is Fox News’s cash cow, so it actually seems worth it to Murdoch to have his lawyers waste their time preparing briefs that are utterly useless in court, just to keep the blowhard happy.

Or does it just not matter anymore to these movement conservatives if they win their legal cases? If you listen to the Tavis Smiley Show audio link I posted last night, you can hear Ayesha Ali of Americans United for Separation of Church and State wondering about the strategy of the lawyers defending Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments monument. She says they made no effort to use legal arguments that might have won his case -- presumably because Moore would rather lose defending theocracy than win by arguing that the monument doesn’t represent theocracy.

These guys aren’t even trying to win. They’re grandstanding -- playing to a sympathetic segment of the public the way lefty radicals did back when they used to say things like “Not guilty under the terms of your fascist, imperialistic laws, Your Honor,” and sometimes made a circus of their own trials. Judge Moore is doing it because he is, in fact, a right-wing radical; Fox is playing to a peanut gallery of right-wing radicals who want the status quo destroyed, or pissed on, while they watch on TV.

Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who's now suspended, keeps saying (for instance, on Fox News last night) that his fight to preserve the 5300-pound granite Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of the Alabama judicial building is required of him by the state constitution:

The point is it's not about violation of order, it's about violation of my oath of office. And my oath of office to the Constitution requires an acknowledgment of God. It's that simple.

These Moore supporters explain (emphasis theirs):

The preamble to Alabama’s Constitution reads, “We, the people of the State of Alabama, in order to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God, do ordain and establish the following Constitution and form of government for the State of Alabama.”

Upon being sworn in as the Chief Justice of Alabama, Roy Moore pledged to support and defend the Constitution of the state of Alabama.

Here's my question: Would Moore and his supporters say that every previous Alabama chief justice who didn't have a 5300-pound granite Ten Commandments monument placed in the rotunda of the Alabama judicial building was failing to uphold the state constitution? Is having a 5300-pound granite Ten Commandments monument placed in the rotunda of the Alabama judicial building specifically required by the constution of the state? Would Judge Moore say that a granite monument weighing a mere 5000 pounds, or 4000 pounds, would pass constitutional muster, or is 5300 pounds the minimum acceptable weight?

**********

Incidentally, the extremist former presidential candidate Alan Keyes is a Moore supporter. Give a listen to his rather hysterical defense of Moore on The Tavis Smiley Show. If I understand Keyes's argument, he believes that it would be permissible for each and every one of the fifty states to establish a state religion if it so desires -- the Constitution, he argues, prohibits only the establishment of a national religion. Apparently U.S. citizenship is not, according to Keyes, truly a shield against theocracy.

I guess Schwarzie doesn't have coattails:

Bush's approval rating in California is no higher than 53%. Support for Bush's Iraq policy is no higher than 52%. And only 42% of Californians would vote to reelect Bush. AP summarizes two new polls.

There are charges of sexed-up Iraq intelligence in Australia, too:

The Australian government lied about the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to justify its involvement in the U.S.-led war, an official inquiry into intelligence on Iraq was told on Friday.

A former senior intelligence analyst, Andrew Wilkie, who resigned in March in protest over Australia's case for war, said Prime Minister John Howard, a close U.S. ally, created a mythical Iraq by dropping ambiguous references in intelligence reports.

"The government lied every time it skewed, misrepresented, used selectively and fabricated the Iraq story...The exaggeration was so great it was pure dishonesty," Wilkie, formerly of the Office of National Assessment (ONA), told the inquiry.

The ONA is equivalent to the U.S. National Security Agency....

--Reuters

Wilkie asserted, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, that,

In particular, the public was misled when the Government linked the war in Iraq to the "war on terrorism" and al-Qaeda, talked about Iraq's efforts to restart its nuclear program and spoke of "massive" weapons programs.

There seems to have been a lot of that going around.

Not that you couldn't have guessed, but the folks who may well have caused the recent blackout are in bed with Bush, as Joe Conason points out in The New York Observer:

While Kenneth (Kenny Boy) Lay may no longer be in a position to raise money and conceive policy for George W. Bush and Tom DeLay, other influential executives remain eager to fulfill his role. Among them was Anthony J. Alexander of Ohio’s First Energy Corp., the firm whose failing transmission lines near Lake Erie seems to have kicked off the blackout. As a deregulation enthusiast and loyal Republican, Mr. Alexander raised more than $100,000 for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000, thus earning distinction as a "Bush Pioneer."

All of the hundred or so checks delivered from First Energy’s donors to the G.O.P.’s accounts were marked with an "industry code"—and in due course, the grateful recipients of the company’s largesse appointed Mr. Alexander to the Bush administration’s Energy Transition Team. (That favor must have been particularly gratifying to him, since the departing Clinton administration had sued First Energy for violating the Clean Air Act.) Whether he also showed up as an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force remains a mystery, since the administration still refuses to disclose any of the task force’s documents. But public records show that First Energy’s executives and political-action committee have given about $2 million to (mainly Republican) politicians since 1999.

Today's New York Times has more:

In the 2002 federal elections, FirstEnergy's political action committee more than doubled spending from 1998, to $246,200. The company and its employees made more than $1 million in federal contributions in that cycle, with 70 percent going to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The company's top two officers, Anthony Alexander, the president, and H. Peter Burg, the chief executive and chairman, have been major fund-raisers for President Bush.

In 2001, FirstEnergy was one of several big utilities that hired Haley Barbour, the former Republican National Committee chairman, to lobby the Bush administration to encourage the president to back down from a campaign pledge to set limits on power plant emissions of carbon dioxide. Mr. Barbour sent a letter in March 2001 to Vice President Dick Cheney on behalf of the utilities, questioning whether environmental policy "still prevails over energy policy with Bush-Cheney, as it did with Clinton-Gore."

Two weeks later, Mr. Bush announced he would not support legislation capping carbon dioxide emissions. His staff denied industry lobbying had played a role.

Read that whole Times article, by the way. Choice quotes:

Boric acid [at FrirstEnergy's Davis-Besse nuclear plant] had seeped through cracks in plant control rods that pass through to the highly radioactive zone, where superpressurized water is used to cool the plant while it is creating energy. In fact, investigators found that the acid had eaten through the carbon steel part of the reactor vessel head, leaving only a thin stainless steel lining intact. Yet a backup system intended to cool the nuclear fuel in the event of a breach in the reactor vessel was handicapped because an undersize drainage screen could easily become blocked.

Taken together, what had been created is now widely considered the most serious nuclear plant incident in the nation since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.

And, on a lighter note:

[FirstEnergy's] New Jersey subsidiary has come under fire for frequent blackouts, for inadequate maintenance and for allowing stray electricity to run through the ground, leaving residents of Brick, N.J., tingling when they step into pools and Jacuzzis.

OK -- mini-emergency essentially dealt with.

I was managing to do this through work stress, a blackout, and the visits of a couple of houseguests, but a mini-emergency has been thrown into the mix, so blogging will be light to nonexistent for a day or two. Hope to see you soon.

Rudolph Giuliani is going to campaign for Bill Simon in California. Or so says National Review Online's The Corner, citing CNN.

Two years ago, even a year ago, I think this would have mattered. Giuliani singlehandedly saved a city, they said, then Giuliani was a 9/11 hero. But Arnold kills aliens. In Hollywood movies. So it's no contest.

His fellow state Supreme Court justices, the governor, and Attorney General Bill Pryor all tell Judge Roy Moore that it's time to, you know, obey the law.

All they want to do is move the damn thing to a part of the building that's not public. That's not acceptable for Moore.

Last night a "plywood-like" partition was put around the monument. Moore rode to the rescue:

Moore's spokesman, Tom Parker, said Moore was out of town for a family funeral but decided to return to Montgomery when he learned the monument had been walled from public view.

Hey, relatives die every day -- but if plywood is put around the monument, there'll be no conceivable way anyone in the state of Alabama will be able to read the Ten Commandments. Or something like that.

Atrios cites this story, in which an official in Britain's Foreign Office recounts a conversation he had in February with Dr. David Kelly, the now-deceased weapons expert:

Mr Broucher added: "As David Kelly was leaving, I said to him 'what do you think will happen if Iraq is invaded?'. "His reply was, which at the time I took to be a throwaway remark, he said 'I will probably be found dead in the woods'."

The Guardian has a story that's longer and more detailed but doesn't dispel the notion that Dr. Kelly really might have been foreseeing exactly what happened to him.

Reading The New York Times last Sunday, I was struck by the fact that The Times's Alan Cowell described Dr. Kelly's death as "apparently" a suicide. I guess that qualification may be entirely justified.

As I watch the Ten Commandments spectacle in Alabama and the recall spectacle in California, I find myself wishing our side had some poker-faced pranksters who could have used recent events to tweak a few right-wing noses.

Here's the prank I have in mind: During the candidate registration process in California, I wish someone had tried to register, as a candidate for governor, Jesus Christ -- carefully submitting the requisite paperwork, signatures, and cash. The state of California, presumably, would have refused to put Jesus Christ on the ballot -- after all, He isn't a California resident.

That's where the fun could have started. Our team of pranksters could then sue to get Christ on the ballot. The premise of the suit would be that Christ, as the Son of God, is everywhere, resident in all true believers' hearts, and therefore a resident of the Golden State. There would be much talk of the perils of rejecting God's law in favor of man's law. A Web site would be set up, and a legal defense fund. Press releases would go to talk radio, Christian radio, Fox News, and Free Republic. Prayer vigils would take place in Sacramento. There would be civil disobedience.

Before our pranksters acknowledged that they'd pulled a prank, how many Americans would actually have fallen for this? How many Americans would have considered it a terrific idea? Would there have been copycats? Possibly even a movement to see to it that Christ's name is on every ballot in America? Would Sean Hannity and Dr. Laura have endorsed it? Rick Santorum? Joe Lieberman? Bush?

Damn -- I'm sorry we'll never find out.

Twenty-one protestors arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, in a demonstration in support of Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments doohickey.

Please, folks -- pray as much as you want. Construct all the religious stuff you want to construct. Shout "Praise Jesus!" from the housetops. Just make sure you're doing it from your housetops. If my tax money goes to pay for a building, let's keep it neutral, by mutual agreement. Is that so bloody difficult to understand?

Well, it probably is for people who can't even get past the first letter when trying to spell "Iraq."

At a time when a lot of people on the right want the Constitution to be amended to include a biblical definition of marriage, Alex Frantz of the blog Public Nuisance gives us a marriage amendment that's actually based on the Bible:

1 Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives.

2 A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden.

3 Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce.

4 If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law.

Go here for Alex's full post, which includes chapter-and-verse citations from the Good Book and extensive commentary.

(Thanks to Calpundit for the link.)

UK Officials Wanted to Gag Expert on Iraq Dossier

Government documents released on Wednesday show top British officials tried to stop a scientist airing doubts on a Iraqi weapons dossier on which Prime Minister Tony Blair based the case for war.

The documents emerged in an inquiry into the suicide of weapons expert David Kelly, sucked into the heart of a furious row between Blair's government and the BBC over whether intelligence was "sexed up" for political ends....

An official note, written on July 14, the day before Kelly was due to testify to a parliamentary committee, made clear that Kelly would be told to keep his views to himself....

"DCDI is to brief Dr Kelly this afternoon for his appearance tomorrow before the FAC and ISC and will strongly recommend that Kelly is not drawn on his assessment of the dossier," read the note, which was shown to the inquiry.

Separate documents revealed that the top civil servant at Britain's Ministry of Defense had said at a meeting in Blair's office one week earlier that some of Kelly's views would be awkward for the government.

"If he was summoned to give evidence, some of it might be uncomfortable on specifics such as the likelihood of there being weapons systems ready for use within 45 minutes," the defense civil servant said at the meeting.

The inquiry heard how Blair's official spokesmen proposed ways to tighten the draft dossier's evidence on Saddam Hussein's intent to use banned weapons.

"The weakness obviously is our inability to say that he (Saddam) could pull the nuclear trigger any time soon," Tom Kelly [no relation to David] said in one of many e-mails written by Downing Street staff and shown to the inquiry....

--Reuters

So was it known in the British government that the 45-minute claim was a crock? Yes. Did the government promulgate this lie anyway? Yes. Did David Kelly believe it was a crock? Clearly he did.

So why was the War Party telling us a couple of weeks ago that this was all a fabrication on the part of out-of-control, libelous Saddam-lovers at the BBC?

ANN COULTER: GEORGE H. W. BUSH WAS NEVER PRESIDENT

[Coulter] said the real danger, if any, is 2008.

"I don’t know who we’re going to run, and the Republican Party has a history of running people who they think are electable, like Gerald Ford, George Bush Sr. and Bob Dole. That is how you can have another Hillary Presidency."

--George Gurley and Lauren A. E. Schuker, "My Dinner with Ann," in the current New York Observer

Four wives of men killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11 taught themselves how the government works. Within less than two years, they were asking tougher questions than most Beltway journalists (or Democratic politicians):

"I don’t understand, with all the warnings about the possibilities of Al Qaeda using planes as weapons, and the Phoenix Memo from one of your own agents warning that Osama bin Laden was sending operatives to this country for flight-school training, why didn’t you check out flight schools before Sept. 11?"

"Do you know how many flight schools there are in the U.S.? Thousands," a senior agent protested. "We couldn’t have investigated them all and found these few guys."

"Wait, you just told me there were too many flight schools and that prohibited you from investigating them before 9/11," Kristen persisted. "How is it that a few hours after the attacks, the nation is brought to its knees, and miraculously F.B.I. agents showed up at Embry-Riddle flight school in Florida where some of the terrorists trained?"

"We got lucky," was the reply....

They keep getting stonewalled, of course, but they're fighting the good fight. Read about them here.

The FBI said on Wednesday the bomb that ripped through U.N. headquarters here was made from 1,000 pounds of old munitions including one single 500 pound bomb, all of the materials from Saddam Hussein's prewar arsenal that required no "great degree of sophistication" to build....

"We believe it (the bomb) was made from existing military ordnance. ... I cannot say that it required any great degree of sophistication or expertise to create," Fuentes told The Associated Press....

--AP story today

What a great war plan we had: Race to Baghdad for a quick win, and don't worry about having adequate personnel to secure (or even find) weapons caches as cities were taken, or immediately after the capital fell.

There are plenty of stories from April about unsecured weapons caches, though most of the stories focus on Iraqis either arming themselves with looted guns or possibly exposing themselves to radioactive material. But here's a story (datelined Mosul) about Marines who didn't have the tools to prevent looting:

"When we arrived in Mosul April 11th, [the Iraqi] Fifth Corps' ammunition supply point was wide open for anyone who wanted weapons and ammunition," said the Force Recon platoon commander, Capt. Andrew Christian, 33, of Neenah, Wisc. "With no one to guard those large weapons caches and most of their locks having been cut, broken or smashed, crates of rocket-propelled grenades (RPG), mortar rounds, shoulder-fired missiles, explosives, assorted ammunition and small arms were rapidly disappearing," he said.

With security in post-war Iraq a key requirement for large-scale reconstruction efforts, preventing these kinds of weapons and ammunition from ending up in the hands of terrorist groups or supporters of the former regime is of prime concern. For this reason, the Marines and U.S. Special Forces here have strived to stop the looting of hundreds of stockpiles of ammunition and weapons and to retake these items from looters as they come across them during their numerous patrols throughout the city....

"I wish that we could have done a little bit more here," said Sgt. Travis Haley, 27, a Force Recon operator from Dunnellon, FL. "We brought a smaller slice of the MEU than we usually do, so we were without our Cobras [AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopters] and many of our ground vehicles. We had a lot of potential to do great things, such as securing the armories and bunkers, but simply not the personnel and close air support to meet our capabilities."

With the arrival of the 101st Airborne Division from Baghdad and their mechanized vehicles and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, I would expect that the ammunition supply point would be secured within the next 24 hours said Christian. "The 101st have been doing numerous 'gun runs' with the Apaches and their vehicles are now all over the area, so those illegal activities that we saw early on should cease," he said.

--Marine Corps News, April 24, 2003

I never tire of going back to Fred Barnes's March 6 column in The Weekly Standard, "The Peacenik Top 10: A Look at the Ten Most Popular Objections to War and Some Common-Sense Responses to Them." Barnes's #3 was

War with Iraq will bring more terrorism.

Here was his response:

This is a hardy perennial. It was claimed before the Gulf war and the Afghanistan campaign--and when bombs fell on al Qaeda and the Taliban during Ramadan. Rather than more terrorism, removing Saddam will bring more respect for the United States. Terrorists will be increasingly fearful.

Hope you didn't have money on that prediction, Fred.

Well, that's it -- I'm dropping all of my objections to the big lug's campaign: It says here that Arnold Schwarzenegger has been endorsed for governor by Oakland's own M.C. Hammer. Hey, that's all I need to know -- Schwarzie's my man now.

(Just kidding, folks.)

(The link I gave you apparently links to an item in the August 13 "Peachbuzz" column at the Atlanta-Journal Contitution's Access Atlanta site, but that link seems to have expired.)

There are terrible things happening in the world, but to a lot of Americans the most important event of the week is Judge Roy Moore's refusal to remove his Ten Commandments monument by today (the court-ordered deadline). I learn from Free Republic that talk-radio pottymouth Michael Savage is lining up behind the judge, and Savage's Web site confirms this (scroll down), although the decision to hook up with the judge looks an awful lot like an attempt to scarf up more cash for Savage's "Paul Revere Society." Incidentally, here's the Paul Revere Society's "8-point program," as it appears on Savage's home page:

1. End Affirmative Action.
2. Close the Borders now.
3. Deport all illegal immigrants now.
4. Eliminate bilingual education in all states.
5. Require health tests for all recent foreign born immigrants.
6. Make tax cuts permanent.
7. Reduce the number of Federal Employees.
8. Tort Reform - Stop Class Action Lawyers.

Yeah, that sounds a lot like the Ten Commandments, doesn't it?

A reader points out that I may have been naive to believe a claim made by that Ten Commandments-lovin’ judge, Roy Moore of Alabama -- and Fox News may also have been naive.

The judge told Fox that the state of Alabama has spent $125 million to defend the massive Commandments monument he’s had installed in the state judicial building; I quoted his claim in this post.

As my reader points out, $125 million is a hell of a lot of money -- by comparison, Kenneth Starr’s investigation cost maybe $70 million. Americans United for Separation of Church & State has noted that the state’s attorney general, William Pryor, now a Bush judicial nominee, arranged legal help for Judge Moore, but private citizens paid for that help. Even if they hadn’t, though, as my reader points out, $125 million “would represent the full-time services of a team of 25 lawyers working exclusively on this case for a period of five years.”

Why would the judge exaggerate like this? After all, he lives in a deficit-ridden, tax-hating state, and he's claiming to have been responsible for huge government expenditures. Is this innumeracy? Is it some sort of delusion of grandeur? Or does the judge think Alabamans really don't hate taxes under all circumstances -- that they'd be happy to support Big Government if Big Government were in the service of the Big Guy Upstairs? And, if so, is he right about that?

Or could it be that he really has managed to cause the state to spend more than Ken Starr spent to investigate everything Bill Clinton ever did in his adult life? And if so, how did he do it?

If you follow right-wing thinking, you know that recently righties have been propounding what's called the "flypaper theory" to explain Bush administration policy in Iraq, and Bush's "bring 'em on" taunt in particular. Joshua Micah Marshall explains the theory (citing this essay by David Warren):

The thinking goes something like this. These guerilla engagements we're seeing in Iraq may not be such a bad thing. What we're doing is attracting all the terrorists to Iraq (i.e., like "flypaper") so that a) they won't be attacking us in America and b) we can fight them there on our own terms.

For a while, the righties almost seemed to have a case -- one could be cold-blooded and say that our casualty level in Iraq was "acceptable," and it was better to have U.S. soldiers in the line of fire than stateside civilians.

But that line of thinking seems like utter bullshit today, doesn't it?

An explosion rocked a bus in Jerusalem on Tuesday night, leaving a number of casualties, police and rescue services said.

Police said it was not yet known if a bomb was planted or it was a suicide bombing.

--AP

In Slate (scroll down to the Sunday entry), Mickey Kaus wonders aloud whether Schwarzenegger is a bully:

Schwarzenegger's reputation, meanwhile--which I've heard from one reliable source, one eyewitness ultra-reliable source, and one unreliable Premiere article-- is this: He bullies people "below the line." That is, he bullies the technicians, costumers, etc. who aren't billboardable talents. Is it to get his way? No--he's the star and he's going to get his way anyway. It's from an ugly sense of pleasure in others' discomfort. ...

Kevin Drum at CalPundit also wonders about this (here and here) and Robert Garcia Tagorda at Boomshock adds his own speculations (here) -- but I find it interesting that when talking about bullying, Kaus, Drum, and Tagorda never bring up allegations that Schwarzenegger gropes women who don't want to be groped.

I've previously linked Salon's summary of a 1991 Premiere story that says Arnold groped a female crew member on a movie set, as well as a British tabloid story that discusses several Schwarzenegger groping incidents (at least one of which occurred on British television). In yesterday's edition of London's Evening Standard Wendy Leigh repeated some of the same charges:

Most notably, Arnold has developed an apparent penchant for groping nubile young women. This has even extended to fondling the breasts of his Terminator co-star Linda Hamilton — in front of Hamilton’s then-boyfriend, Terminator producer James Cameron.

And when Arnold came to London in 2000, his behaviour led insiders to label him ‘the octopus’.

When TV presenter Anna Richardson interviewed Arnold for Big Screen at the Dorchester Hotel, he asked her pointblank if her breasts were real. He then pulled her onto his knee, circled her nipple with his finger, squeezed it and announced: ‘Yeah, they are real.’

And when Denise Van Outen interviewed him for The Big Breakfast, he slapped her bottom then brushed his arm against her breast. Afterwards, he smirked: ‘It was a handful. I never know if my wife’s watching. I’ll tell her it was a stuntman.’

If these stories are true, Schwarzenegger's using power -- star power and the power that comes from fear of physical force -- to get away with mini-sexual assaults. Doesn't this qualify as bullying?

(Thanks to BuzzFlash for the Evening Standard link.)

A car bomb caused the explosion at the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on Tuesday which wrecked the complex and caused scores of casualties, the U.S. military said.

"We can confirm that there was a car bombing at the Canal Hotel at 4:30 p.m.," a U.S. military spokeswoman told Reuters. The U.N. uses the hotel as its headquarters.

--Reuters

Paul Bremer moves the goalposts just a wee bit:

The total – the total amount of power available [in Iraq] once we get to pre-war levels is about 4,000 megawatts ... we’ve been working our way up and we’re going to continue to work our way up and the next 60 days we’ll get to 4,000.

--Bremer's conference call with editorial writers, July 23, 2003

On restoring power, we expect to restore power to the pre-war level, and that's the maximum there is here, in the next six weeks, by the end of September ... we will be back at pre-war levels here in the next six to eight weeks.

--Bremer on CNN's Live from the Headlines today

I'll do the math for you: Sixty days from the time of the first statement is September 21. Six weeks from today is September 29. Eight weeks from today is October 13.

It must be driving the right-wingers nuts that Detroit went through an extended blackout last week without looting, and its mayor is an earring-wearing, hip-hop-admiring Democrat named Kwame.

(Although it should be noted that Hizzoner is a DLCer.)

Atrios links this post (from Michael at a blog called A Minority of One), which recounts a rally last week in support of that huge granite Ten Commandments monument Judge Roy Moore had installed in Alabama's judicial building. Thousands of people attended. Michael notes this CNN story, which points out that a former Moore supporter, Alabama attorney general William Pryor -- yes, the Bush judicial nominee -- is distancing himself from Moore, saying he won't help Moore violate the court order that requires him to remove the monument. (This is probably a wise choice for a would-be federal judge, though it's too little, too late, considering that, as an employee of the state, Pryor formerly arranged for teams of lawyers in private practice to help Moore in his legal fight).

It should be noted that many of the people at the Ten Commandments protest were there to proclaim their opposition to GOP Governor Bob Riley's attempt to do the right thing and raise much-needed tax revenue. AS The Washington Post reports, Riley

says the state should act to improve schools funded at the nation's lowest level per child and to lift the tax burden from poor people, who pay income taxes starting at $4,600 a year for a family of four while out-of-state timber companies pay $1.25 an acre in property taxes. The changes would move Alabama from 50th to 44th in total state and local taxes per capita, he says.

The paper notes that Alabama's tax system currently "imposes an effective rate of 3 percent on the wealthiest Alabamians and 12 percent on the poorest." But Jesus has personally spoken to the anti-Riley protestors and told them that his tax increase is the work of Satan.

I guess Saddam isn't the same person as Osama anymore. I guess Saddam is now more important than the guy who actually masterminded the deaths of three thousand civilians on 9/11:

As the hunt for Saddam Hussein grows more urgent and the guerrilla war in Iraq shows little sign of abating, the Bush administration is continuing to shift highly specialized intelligence officers from the hunt for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to the Iraq crisis, according to intelligence officials who have been involved in the redeployments.

The recent moves -- involving both analysts in Washington and specially trained field operatives -- follow the transfer of hundreds of elite commandos from Afghanistan duty to service in Iraq, Pentagon officials said....

--Boston Globe

The article quotes U.S. officials (and our pals, the Pakistanis) staunchly defending what we're doing, or not doing, in Afghanistan. But read to the end. Note that we're replacing Green Berets in Afghanistan with reserve troops who have no special-forces training. Oh, and note that someone from this not exactly touchy-feely think tank thinks we need to put more resources into Afghanistan.

Besides being unusually tolerant of pop-up ads, the people who use the Information Please Almanac's InfoPlease.com site are rather skeptical of the Bush administration, as you'll see if you vote in this poll, then view the results. Also see this poll -- it seems users of InfoPlease are even more cynical than I am (I think Saddam's weapons did exist and were destroyed, but how long ago I don't know).

Alabama chief justice Roy Moore still won't remove that huge granite Ten Commandments thing from the state judicial building, even under court order and threats of fines.

You should know that Alabama has a $675 million budget deficit, a shortfall that presumably threatens police protection and clean drinking water and state child protective services and so on. But, as Fox News pointed out last week, Alabama has spent $125 million defending Moore's Ten Commandments monument, and "is spending $25,000 a day of taxpayers' money on the case," according to Moore himself.

You think that's what Jesus would do?

I'm not quite sure how to describe this article or excerpt it without making some readers' eyes glaze over, but Gretchen Mortenson, a New York Times business writer, thinks we're in serious trouble because the mortgage-based securities market buys and sells an awful lot of Treasury bills and bonds, and thus has the potential to create huge spikes in interest rates. I'm not sure I've even described the process with pinpoint accuracy, but read the article -- it has the rather unambiguous headline "Mortgage Markets Are Out of Control."

The guy who runs the blog Capitalist Lion is patting himself on the back: He thinks he's debunked what he sees as blame-America-firstism in The New York Times -- specifically, a sentence in this Times article:

Intelligence agencies say Al Qaeda already has dozens of missiles, many of them American-made Stingers left over from the war in Afghanistan in the 1980's when the United States supplied them to Afghan guerrillas seeking to oust Soviet troops from their country.

Mr. Lion plays what he thinks is a trump card:

Aside from the moral right or wrong of suppling the mujahideen with Stingers so they could stand something resembling a fighting chance against Soviet Hind helicopters, there's a neat little fact that tends to escape most of the people who jump on the We gave them weapons! bandwagon.

Batteries.

Yes, and not the kind that one picks up at the local 7-11. See, the Hughes/Raytheon's Stinger has fairly sophisticated targeting electronics built into the launcher, which are required to lock on to a target and fire the missile. It's a spiffy kind of chemical battery which has a finite life of about ten years. The missile itself also has a small thermal battery inside it, with roughly the same lifetime.

Without either battery providing the needed power, the tracking electronics don't turn on, the gyros don't spin up, and you have what amounts to a very expensive jack handle.

And finally, Stingers use a three-stage solid fuel rocket motor. It also has a finite life expectancy, and the older they get, the easier it is for the fuel to crack and crumble when the missiles are moved. Know what happens if you pull the trigger on one of those babies when it's too old? Yep. Time to play "It's raining Men" and get out the hefty bags.

Sounds reassuring. Too bad the folks at a Web site run by a little outfit called Jane's -- you know, the folks who've been trusted experts on military matters for a gazillion years -- beg to differ. Here's what the Jane's people say in an article about MANPADs (manportable surface-to-air missiles), including the Stinger:

One popular misconception is that these missiles become unusable after several years due to battery or other systems failures and are therefore useless after a period of time. While it is true that all MANPAD batteries have a finite shelf life, these can be replaced with commercially purchased batteries available on the open market and technically proficient terrorist groups might also be able to construct hybrid batteries to replace used ones.

Other concerns include deterioration of missile propellants and seeker coolant, and general storage issues. While these concerns merit attention, the commonly held assumption that these weapons have short shelf lives is erroneous. Most missiles are hermetically sealed in launchers designed for rough handling by soldiers in the field. Temperature extremes are also factored into the design of these weapons, reducing the threat of environmental degradation.

Clearly, the shelf life of MANPADs is, in large part, dependent on the conditions in which the weapon is stored. However, under ideal (factory specified) conditions, some versions of these weapons can remain operational for 22 years or more.

Mr. Lion also says this:

And finally, we have to look at the Stinger's range. It's about 10,000 feet, maximum. This would limit it to small prop aircraft, helicopters, or jet aircraft as they are taking off or landing. One couldn't pull one out of uncle Bob's pickup truck in the middle of an Iowa corn field and pick off a jumbo at 35,000 feet. It's just not going to happen.

An Iowa cornfield? Maybe not. But people can get way too close to the planes in certain neighborhoods in this country, especially in the East. I know because I grew up in one of those neighborhoods, near a major metropolitan airport. Trust me -- the planes fly low near residential streets. We'd be fools if we shrugged off the risk.

UPDATE: I posted some of what I've written here in Mr. Lion's comments box. He's responded by updating the post -- and his contention is that he's right and Jane's is wrong. Now, this isn't my area of expertise, but the last time I looked, Jane's was the gold standard for this sort of information. So there it stands.

I find it interesting that, in the course of arguing that unauthorized use of old Stingers is highly unlikely, Mr. Lion repeatedly invokes images of splattered terrorists -- he seems to think that fear of sudden death should be enough of a deterrent to prevent terrorists from learning how to jury-rig an outdated MANPAD. I'd like to point out that fear of going splat wasn't much of a deterrent to nineteen terrorists a couple of Septembers ago.

Did you know that you're engaged in trademark violation every time you use the word "oh"?

(UPDATE: Link corrected.)

I hope all the right-wingers who think Al Franken deserves to be sued by Fox for using "fair and balanced" are equally disturbed by the large numbers of people who feel free to use "all the news that's fit to print," some of them conservative, many of them using it as they defame The New York Times. Surely conservative believers in the sanctity of trademark will find this an outrage ... no?

In Friday's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof said it disturbed him to learn that 83% of Americans believe in the virgin birth of Jesus and only 28% believe in evolution. He finds belief in the virgin birth absurd, as did his grandfather, a Presbyterian elder.

I'm grateful that he wrote this, but I do want to point out that of I'd stayed in the Catholic Church I'd now believe in evolution and the virgin birth -- for all its faults, the Catholic Church made peace with evolution a long time ago, and it's one of many churches that have done so. I'm an atheist now, and I figure you can't believe in God without believing some things that defy reason. That's OK; the problem is not believing what massive amounts of evidence shows is true. I'm far more upset at people (including, reortedly, the president of the United States) who don't believe in evolution than I am at people who believe in the virgin birth.

I'm pleasantly shocked to learn that a Field Poll has Cruz Bustamante ahead of Arnold, according to The Washington Post. Hmmm -- I guess voting for Prop. 187, getting 187 champion Pete Wilson to chair your campaign, and getting Pete Wilson's advisers to run your campaign may not be a good idea in a state that's one-third Hispanic....

This story on Afghanistan was in a tiny box in yesterday's New York Times, with no byline. It didn't even get its own link online (scroll down):

The amount of land dedicated to growing the illicit opium poppy, which is the raw material for opium and heroin, jumped to 76,000 acres last year, according to State Department figures. Officials said the numbers continue to rise as growers take advantage of the limited reach of law enforcement under the fledgling government of President Karzai. Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium.

By contrast, in 2001, when the Taliban controlled the country and enforced an opium ban, only 4,200 acres were cultivated, according to the State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.

Donald Rumsfeld responded to this in his usual Wally-Cleaver-meets-General-Buck-Turgidson manner:

A surge in opium cultivation in Afghanistan is "a whale of a tough problem" that defies easy solutions, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today.

Gee whillikers, yes, it is, isn't it?

And a big shout-out to all the fair and balanced blogs ... just go here, and, starting around #14 or so, we're most of the first hundred-plus hits you get. By all means check them out.

Hold it, fellas -- that unfairness and imbalance don’t move me! Let’s get real, real fair and balanced for a change....

Fair and balanced? Gosh, yes, fair and balanced! How fair and balanced? Why, so fair and balanced you could just plotz! Heavens -- that’s certainly fair and balanced, isn’t it? Why, it certainly is -- profoundly fair and balanced! Incontrovertibly fair and balanced! Mind-roastingly fair and balanced! By all accounts unprecedentedly fair and balanced! Well, you know what they say: Fair and balanced is as fair and balanced does. When the going gets fair and balanced, the fair and balanced get going. And, me, well -- I believe the fair and balanced children are our future. So half a fair and balanced league, half a fair and balanced league, half a fair and balanced league onward! Into the fair and balanced valley of death rode the fair and balanced six hundred! How do I love thee? Let me count the fair and balanced ways. Ah, look at all the lonely fair and balanced people. Because 911 is a fair and balanced joke in your town.

So are you ready, Rupert? Start suing.

Sorry -- I seem to have overlooked the fact that it's Fair and Balanced Day, when bloggers are supposed to post fair and balanced messages using the phrase fair and balanced as much as possible, in fair and balanced solidarity with Al Franken. I'll try to be fair and balance some of what I've posted with more fair and balancedness.

Oh, this is pathetic:

Actor and Democratic activist Rob Lowe isn't exactly moving from "The West Wing" to the right wing, but he's going to play a real-life role in Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign, people close to the situation said Thursday.

The 39-year-old actor has been asked by Schwarzenegger and his wife, Democrat Maria Shriver, who are longtime social friends, to take a senior position in the campaign, the sources said. Although Lowe is expected to have a co-chair title, his exact role is still being defined....

--L.A. Times

Rob Lowe -- not someone with political knowledge, but someone who plays someone with political knowledge on TV. It's like a frigging Baudrillard essay.

*******

I was thinking it was possibly a good sign that Warren Buffett was joining Schwarzie's campaign, and then (the good) Roger Ailes pointed out a Wall Street Journal editorial that noted this:

Friends of Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman are urging him to appear in a commercial for Mr. Schwarzenegger, much as he did for Proposition 13 a quarter century ago. Mr. Schwarzenegger has been quoted as saying that for years his favorite Christmas present for friends was Mr. Friedman's book "Free to Choose." Other prominent economic figures who are talking with Mr. Schwarzenegger about a role in the campaign include Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Art Laffer and Steve Moore of the Club for Growth.

Buffett's a critic of right-wing economics. Friedman, Forbes, Kudlow, Laffer, and Moore guys who, when they read Dickens, root for Scrooge and against Bob Cratchit. What sense does this make?

Oh, and now it's being announced that George Shultz will chair Schwarzie's economic team.

This is all about the cult of the macho amateur -- the guy who knows next to nothing but gets smart people to do the thinking for him. Many people like Schwarzenegger just as they liked Bush (and loathed Gore) -- because he swaggers, smirks, and has no idea what he's talking about. They think it's good that Schwarzie -- and Bush -- don't know anything. This, they believe, makes it easier for these macho swaggerers to get in touch with their exquisitely accurate moral compasses and superior ability to process what they're told by smarter (but lesser) folks who are experts.

Because that's part of what makes these guys great: they don't know Jack, but they're so personable they can attract many people who do know Jack -- so many, in fact, that their decisions will be better than decisions made by actual smart people. David Brooks actually made this argument in all seriousness in Salon in 2000 while endorsing Bush for president.

Expect Schwarzie's "all-star team" to get more and more bloated as election day approaches. Expect right-wing pundits to actually start calling it an "all-star team" (or, even worse and more likely, a "dream team").

"I think the first thing that Americans ought to be pleased about is that we're better organized today than we were two-and-a-half years ago to deal with an emergency."

--George W. Bush

So, you see, 9/11 was really kind of a good thing.

Our power just went back on. That SOB Murdoch must really have been desperate to shut down Fair and Balanced Day.

By the way, I'm going to throttle any idiot from National Review Online who proclaims that the Iraqi people are whiners because we had a power outage in America and it wasn't that bad (for fourteen whole hours, and in temperatures that were hot but well under 100 degrees).

A couple of weeks ago I predicted that the Bush administration would try to release David Kay's report on Iraq weapons right around the time of the early Democratic primaries and the State of the Union address. Now it looks as if the administration is planning to give us what it's got in September. In his blog, Joshua Micah Marshall speculates on what we'll get. You should read the whole thing, but here's an excerpt:

What many suspect is that Kay is going to pull an intel version of a classic 1990s-era document dump. In other words, come forward with a mound of documents detailing the Iraqis' extensive programs, their histories, the means used to conceal them, whom they imported parts from, and so forth. And then conveniently leave as a footnote the fact that these program had gone pretty dormant by 2002. The idea will be to make up with paper poundage what the report lacks in relevance. Hit them with twenty reams of report about the Iraqi WMD programs and then figure that the follow-on reports about how little was actually happening in 2002 are buried in the back of the papers after no one is paying attention.

All of this is to say that we're probably set for an elaborate festival of goal post moving courtesy of Mr Kay -- the widely telegraphed switch from weapons to 'programs' being the key sign.

Sounds about right to me -- although I still think it's possible we'll get a multimedia spectacle like the now-discredited Powell dog-and-pony show at the U.N.

Remember when Jacques Chirac made a nasty remark about Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic and said they should try to make themselves seem a little more worthy of membership in the EU? Conservatives sneered. This was during the buildup to the Iraq War (all three countries in question were in the "coalition of the willing"), so of course conservatives were sneering a lot at Chirac and other representatives of "Old Europe." "New Europe" was forward-looking, eagerly shaking off the socialist yoke in anticipation of a free-market future, while "Old Europe" countries such as France and Germany were, as one Heritage Foundation pundit put it, "Socialist in outlook, resistant to change, and Luddite in their thinking ... stuck in the past, and one that is far from glorious."

Well, The New York Times had an article yesterday about three Eastern European countries facing shrinking GDP growth and skyrocketing deficits even as they plan to join the EU -- and the three countries were Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic. What's the trouble? Well, in Hungary, at least, according to the Times, the trouble is ... socialism. Or at least a Socialist Party that's struggling to ensure that citizens have a decent standard of living as jobs flee to lower-wage countries.

Right-wing pundits in America wanted you to think that our Iraq War allies from Eastern Europe are all happy capitalists while "Old Europe" does business following the tenets of Stalin and Mao. Or something like that. This is nonsense. Too bad so many people believe it.

Sensitive souls such as Sean Hannity got the vapors when a member of California's Democratic Party said, metaphorically, that as a declared candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger would now face "real bullets."

Think they'll have a similar reaction when people start showing up at Schwarzie's rallies wearing this shirt?

Is one of Schwarzenegger's top consultants a wife beater and a deadbeat dad? The consultant's ex-wives say so. Roger Ailes (the good one) has the details.

I'd give you a link to video of Ralph Nader being pied, but surely you won't actually click on it, will you?

Nah -- I didn't think so.

Fox sues Donald Rumsfeld!

Sorry, wishful thinking....

He's rich as Croesus. He's praised Hillary Clinton. He called Bush's dividend-tax cut "voodoo economics."

And now Warren Buffett will be a Schwarzenegger economic adviser.

These folks are beside themselves.

This is starting to get interesting....

I guess that conservative "big tent" just got closed for repairs -- I found this posted by Lee of the blog Right-Thinking from the Left Coast:

Cheetah

Take this however you like, but the black chick singing with Madonna in the new Gap commercials looks like a fucking monkey. I don't mean that in a racist, pejorative sense; I mean she actually looks like an ape. (I've had similar criticisms of the Williams Sisters. Ugh. Anyone remember when they only used to put attractive women in commercials?)

Good Lord.

You know, the "black chick" in question, Missy Elliott, happens to be one of the few smart, clever, inventive people making hit records right now, as a songwriter, record producer, singer, and rapper -- but even if that weren't the case, this would be a disgusting thing to say.

If there were a God, or any justice, Lee would be forced to walk through his native Bay Area -- all the neighborhoods -- with that damn post hung around his neck on a sandwich board printed in 128-point extra-bold type.

Sixty-one people were killed and dozens wounded in outbreaks of violence across Afghanistan in the troubled country's bloodiest 24 hours in more than a year, officials said Wednesday.

At least 25 people, mostly factional fighters, were killed after fighting erupted early Wednesday between forces of a sacked provincial official and his successor in a remote district of Uruzgan province, a cabinet minister said.

Also Wednesday, at least 15 died, including a woman and six children, and five were wounded when a suspected Taliban bomb blew apart a bus in the southern province of Helmand....

--Reuters

Mission accomplished.

So Schwarzenegger's Kennedy in-laws aren't supporting his candidacy, nor is much of Tinseltown.

I admire their devotion to principle -- but don't they get it? If they want Schwarzie to lose, they should endorse him -- the Kennedys and Barbra Streisand and Robbins & Sarandon and all the people on this list. The Dixie Chicks should offer to do a few numbers at his rallies. Michael Moore should switch to an AHHNULD hat.

It's called a ratfuck, folks.

All the Limbaughnistas would desert Schwarzie in droves. National Review Online and the Wall Street Journal editorial page would start calling him a Nazi. Before long, Gary Coleman would be passing the big guy in the polls.

Sean Penn? Martin Sheen? Would someone please start the sabotage?

You can't help being confused if, like me, you're a non-Briton and you're trying to keep up with the story of Dr. David Kelly. Dr. Kelly was the weapons expert who committed suicide after he was identified as the source of a BBC report by Andrew Gilligan on the Blair government's "dodgy dossier," a report that was (choose one) (a) mildly hyperbolic (b) or scurrilous and utterly unsubstantiated. (The Sun, for instance, is solidly in the latter camp, to the delight of the knuckle-draggers at Lucianne Goldberg's Web site.)

The issue here is whether Andrew Gilligan was telling the truth when he reported that his source (Dr. Kelly) had named Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's communications director, as the person responsible for inserting into the dossier the claim that Iraqi could deploy a weapon of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

Susan Watts, a BBC reporter who also spoke to Dr. Kelly, has now appeared before the British government's inquiry into the matter, and has played a tape recording of her conversation with Dr. Kelly -- and here's where the confusion comes in. Here are three headlines from today's online Guardian:

Watts: 'Kelly did not blame Campbell'

Second BBC reporter [Watts] says Kelly told her Campbell 'sexed up' dossier

Kelly blamed 'someone' at No 10

All of these stories describe what the inquiry learned from one witness.

This makes my head swim -- but look at the third story, which discusses the tape-recorded conversation between Watts and Dr. Kelly. Here's some of the conversation in detail:

Watts then asked: "But on the 45 minutes?"

Dr Kelly replied: "Oh, that I knew, because I knew the concern about the statement. It was a statement that was made and it just got out of all proportion. You know someone, they were desperate for information. They were pushing hard for information which could be released.

"That was one that popped up and it was seized on and it was unfortunate that it was, which is why there is the argument between the intelligence services and the Cabinet Office/No 10, because things were picked on, and once they've picked up on it you can't pull back, that's the problem."

Watts went on to ask Dr Kelly if the 45 minute claim was published against his advice, to which he replied: "I wouldn't go as strongly as to say, that particular bit, because I was not involved in the assessment of it. No. I can't say that it was against my advice.

"I was uneasy with it. I mean my problem was that I could give other explanations which I've indicated to you. That it was the time to erect something like a scud missile or it was the time to fill a 40 barrel, multi-barrel rocket launcher."…

Watts asked Dr Kelly to expand on the issue of the 45 minute claim: "So would it be accurate then, as you did in that earlier conversation, to say that it was Alastair Campbell himself who..?"

Dr Kelly replied: "No I can't. All I can says is the No 10 press office. I've never met Alastair Campbell so I can't," Watts interrupted: "They seized on that?"

The scientist continued: "But I think Alastair Campbell is synonymous with that press office because he's responsible for it."

The big issue for BBC-bashers on both sides of the Atlantic is whether Andrew Gilligan, presumably hearing similar things from Dr. Kelly, leapt to a conclusion Dr. Kelly would not have endorsed (that Alastair Campbell was personally responsible for sexing up the dossier). The stories suggest that Gilligan did go too far -- but Dr. Kelly does detect Campbell's hand in the sexing-up.

And, more important, it's clear from this tape-recorded conversation that the Blair government seized on intelligence that could be interpreted several ways -- and then spun it in a way that made Saddam look far more dangerous than he was. (Sound familiar?) And it's clear that this troubled Dr. Kelly. As well it should have.

The next governor of California, naked.

Don't thank me. Thank Daniel Radosh for sharing.

(Incidentally, if you want to know about the content of Arnold's character, Radosh provides three worthwhile links -- this one, this one, and especially this one, a rather exhaustive compilation of Schwarzie dirt, with links, all of which you should forward to Republican friends. Never forget: Arnold is being hailed as a hero by people who think Bill Clinton is the most morally compromised man who ever lived.)

Nader hit by pie, three years too late.

Fox sues George W. Bush!

Alas, just joking.

If you care, Right Wing News has posted lefty bloggers' choices for the twenty worst figures in U.S. history. A previous list from right-wing bloggers is here; RWN's gloss on the lists is here; they're stacked in an attractive chart here; and if that's not enough to slake your thirst for knowledge about this poll, well, I can't help you.

My opinion is: I think our list is better -- we were less focused on the present and we didn't pick anyone like Robert Byrd or Hillary Clinton, people who, whatever you think of them, have had relatively little effect on history. I'm basically pleased.

Now I plan never to think about this again.