No More Mister Nice Blog

Monday, October 27, 2003   I've added three blogs to the links list -- blogs I probably should have added a long time ago: * Max Sawicky's MaxSpeak * Pandagon * World O'Crap posted by Steve M. | 11:23 PM |   Upset by the attacks in Iraq? Just keep telling yourself it's the product of ... desperation. Say it over and over and over again. As Billmon explains, that's what the Bush administration does. posted by Steve M. | 11:21 PM |   SO-CALLED LIBERAL BOOK REVIEWS OK, I haven't read Wesley Clark's Winning Modern Wars. Maybe it's not what the title suggests it is -- maybe it's much more about Wesley Clark the presidential wannabe than about war. But the thrust of Max Frankel's review in this past Sunday's New York Times seems to be that the book is meretricious, duplicitous, and utterly without merit merely because it was written with an election in mind: ...the general cannot camouflage the partisan thrust of his polemic. His deft review of the battlefield tactics that won Baghdad in less than a month is merely the preface to a bitter, global indictment of George W. Bush. The president and his administration are condemned for recklessly squandering a brilliant military performance on the wrong war at the worst possible time, diverting resources and talent from the pursuit of Al Qaeda, neglecting urgent domestic needs and dissipating the post-9/11 sympathy and support of most of the world. ...the war in Iraq, though generally well fought, was a costly diversion. ''Taking down Saddam became a hobbyhorse'' for the group around Rumsfeld even before they achieved authority over the Pentagon. And they exploited 9/11 as ''a gift-wrapped opportunity'' to try to ''clean up the Middle East.'' So instead of concentrating on a ''knockout blow'' against Al Qaeda, they turned the focus to Iraq and let the terrorists scatter from Afghanistan. As portrayed by Clark, the attack on Saddam Hussein -- without evidence to link him to Al Qaeda -- was not only wrong but deeply cynical. It bespoke a cold war mind-set of assigning terrorists a state sponsor, a ''face'' that could be more easily attacked. ''It was almost certain to be successful. It emphasized U.S. military strengths and built on a decade of preparation for a refight of the gulf war.'' The benefit of toppling Hussein is only faintly acknowledged: ''All else being equal the region and the Iraqi people were all better off with Saddam gone. But the U.S. actions against old adversaries like Saddam have costs and consequences that may still leave us far short of our objectives of winning the war on terror -- or, in themselves, may actually detract from our larger efforts.'' (Don't be fooled by those conditional ''mays''; the general knows how to protect a rhetorical flank.) Obviously, I have a problem with Frankel's contempt because I agree with every point he ascribes to Clark. But what bugs me is that Frankel seems to be suggesting that it's simply inappropriate to write a campaign book full of criticisms of the president you'd like to unseat. The danger, I guess, is that voters might actually vote for president based on candidates' positions on real issues if candidates are permitted to write pointed books in which they discuss those issues. We can't have that. Presidential elections aren't supposed to be about issues -- they're supposed to be about which candidate gets along better with the journalists covering him; they're supposed to be about which candidate embarrasses himself by switching to "earth tones" after getting clothing tips from a female adviser; they're supposed to be about which candidate is more outraged that a former president was fellated in the White House by a woman not his wife. posted by Steve M. | 11:04 PM |   Here's a fine, thoughtful, angry post on the Terry Schiavo case. It's from a Salon blog with a flippant name (World O'Crap), but don't let that fool you. Cited at WO'C is this article, which originally appeared in the Chicago Tribune. An excerpt: There is also no good way to determine if a patient in a persistent vegetative state feels pain or suffers. "In terms of what exactly a patient is aware of you can't quite know what he is thinking," said Dr. Jeffrey Frank, director of neurointensive care at the University of Chicago. "What you can do is know the extent of the brain injury and understand that if they have any kind of awareness it might be very primitive." That raises the question of whether a patient suffers more by having some type of minimal awareness of being bedridden, kept alive artificially and unable to connect to his environment, or by being allowed to die. "Their discomforts may be very primitive and poorly understood by the patient depending on the extent of their brain injury," Frank said. "But patients do suffer. I would say they suffer more by the life-sustaining kind of treatments than they would from just being allowed to die peacefully."   But sustain-life-at-all-costs absolutists don't seem to care much about suffering, do they? I should really stop posting on this subject, though -- at least until I've absorbed some more information. The Terry Schiavo Information Page at Abstract Appeal looks like a good place to start. posted by Steve M. | 1:43 PM |   Newsweek's new poll says that, if you include leaners, Howard Dean and Wesley Clark trail Bush by a mere 6 percentage points (and Lieberman and Kerry are down by 7 and 8, respectively). The numbers are at Polling Report. posted by Steve M. | 1:37 PM |   SO-CALLED LIBERAL OP-ED PAGE And while I'm ragging on The New York Times, let me describe the complete contents of yesterday's Times op-ed page: * A sanctimonious article by Slate's William Saletan chiding pro-choicers for not adequately acknowledging "the value of a fetus." * A piece by a former Reaganite who urges George W. Bush to "stay the course" on bellicosity and tax cuts, like his heroic ideological forebear, the Gipper. * A genuinely loopy Thomas Friedman column in which Tom urges the expansion of NATO to include Israel, Iraq, and (mostly for the swarthy and therefore expendable troops) Egypt -- a idea that sounds as if it arose when Rush Limbaugh slipped some OxyContin into one of Richard Perle's souffles. (Oh, yes -- there was also an utterly unfunny and pointless drawing by Steven J. Newman.) No word on whether the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, and the New York Post will respond with an analogous "all-liberal Sunday." posted by Steve M. | 1:13 PM |   ...the (much improved) New York Times.... --Andrew Sullivan, 10/24/03 I can see why Andy feels that way -- yesterday Joel Brinkley of the Times rewrote Bush administration talking points for this article telling us that the glass is far more than half full in Baghdad: ...When school reopened on Oct. 1, hundreds of parents, afraid for their children, waited out front at the end of the day to walk their children home. Now very few do. On Friday evening, the American authorities lifted the curfew on Baghdad starting early Sunday morning, saying life here was returning to normal. Across the city on Saturday, numerous Iraqis agreed and provided ample evidence. Streets swarmed with people shopping and socializing. Coffee houses were packed. Families strolled; vendors clogged the sidewalks. ...At the Ratidain state bank, Hussein Salman, an accountant, sat on a bag holding eight million dinars, or $4,000, in small bills. He was waiting to deposit it — something he would have thought twice about before the war. "It's safer to use banks now because there's more stability," he said. One reason for the stability was the American M1 Abrams tank outside the front door with its gun pointed at the street. Inside, around Mr. Salman, the lobby teemed with three dozen people waiting for a teller. Before the war, "it was never crowded," he said. "Almost nobody came here." To be sure, significant security problems remain.... Yeah, they sure do. Here's the latest Times update: Over 200 Are Wounded at Red Cross and 4 Police Posts BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 27 - A series of blasts shook Baghdad early today, including a suicide attack on the offices of the International Committee of the Red Cross and bombings at five Iraqi police stations that punctuated two days of bloody violence in this capital city. Iraq's police chief and deputy interior minister, Ahmad Ibrahim, said at a news conference that 34 people were killed and 224 were wounded in the attacks. He said 26 of the dead were civilians and eight were police. Sixty-five policemen and 159 civilians were wounded in the blasts, he said.... ******** Today the White House spin points that show up in the Times are economic. They're on view in the paper's lead story (or at least in the headline and lead paragraphs: Gains in Wages Expected to Give Economy a Lift On balance this story says the glass is half full, and quite possibly on its way to overflowing. The headline did what it was supposed to do: Bob Edwards, introducing Cokie Roberts on NPR this morning, cited the story as a suggestion that prosperity really might be just around the corner. But read the fine print: The wage gains have not been enough to overcome the economy's problems, however. Many families still have less income than they did a year ago because companies have reduced their workers' hours, and health care costs have risen rapidly. But economists say that the wage raises have provided a buffer.... So workers don't really have more money -- they just have more money than they would have had if they had less money. Following me so far? And, as a sidebar chart points out, overall income would still be down if not for the effects of mini-windfalls that won't be repeated, such as mortgage refinancings and the recent tax cut (many parents got checks over the summer). And not everyone's doing well: "What seems to be happening is that companies that are staying in business want to hold onto the people they have," Stephen R. Sleigh, director of strategic resources at the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which has negotiated annual pay increases of more than 3 percent on most recent contracts. "It's a very unusual labor market right now."... SAS, a software maker based in Cary, N.C., has reduced the amount of money it pays to employees from its profit-sharing plan as business has weakened in the last two years. But SAS has increased salaries 4 to 5 percent a year on average, with most of the raises going to the employees whom executives fear losing the most, said Jeff Chambers, vice president of human resources at the company, which employs 5,000 people in this country. "We've made money available to people who have the magic — the critical performers in the critical roles," Mr. Chambers said. So some people get fired, and life sucks for those people, but hey -- wage increases are (barely) over inflation if you "have the magic"! And, of course: Over all, workers at the very bottom of the income distribution are among the only ones whose hourly wages have trailed inflation recently. Naturally. posted by Steve M. | 9:16 AM | Sunday, October 26, 2003   I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't have all the facts last week when I criticized a spokeswoman for the parents of Terri Schiavo for saying that Michael Schiavo isn't really a husband to Terri anymore because he doesn't live with her. I've learned that "Mr. Schiavo is now living with another woman; they have a child and are expecting another" (New York Times). I don't know how much that really matters. Terri Schiavo fell into a persistent vegetative state on, to put it crudely, Michael Schiavo's watch. He became her legal guardian and, in a decade of fighting to have him removed as guardian, Terri's parents have been rebuffed by court after court. I've been poking around at the parents' Web site -- terrisfight.org. The "Recent News" section of the site is awfully short on writing by people with medical knowledge and long on missives from the vast right-wing conspiracy (NewsMax, WorldNetDaily, the Concerned Women for America, CNS News, the San Francisco Chronicle's Debra Saunders). Here you get the parents' petition to remove Michael Schiavo as guardian, and it's utterly pathetic in some of its particulars -- it accuses Michael Schiavo of violating Terri's right to privacy by appearing on TV (I guess the parents don't consider this still, or the repeated nationwide broadcasts of the videotape that's the source of the still, exploitative). It accuses him of mismanaging her assets by using a large amount of money on legal fees -- legal fees made necessary by the parents' lawsuits. And it tries to have it both ways -- while accusing him of pissing away all of Terri's money on defending himself against their legal actions, it includes a pathetically desperate attempt to charge him with trying to bring about her death for financial gain: The conflict of interest arising from the fact that Schiavo will inherit Terri’s estate has not decreased as the guardianship fund has dwindled. There are other valuable assets of the estate, including Terri’ s engagement and wedding rings that Schiavo has already appropriated to his own use by making jewelry for himself [Deposition of Michael Schiavo in the pending case, Nov. 19, 1993, at p. 80.] He's doing this for her rings? Are they serious? A reality check, from The New York Times: A vegetative state "is the ironic combination of wakefulness without awareness," said Dr. James L. Bernat, a Dartmouth Medical School neurologist and past chairman of the academy's ethics committee.... "Thirteen years is plenty long enough to tell," said Dr. Bernat, who said he had not examined Mrs. Schiavo or seen any videotapes. "Assuming she is in a vegetative state, I can say with medical certainty that there is no realistic hope that she'll recover." ...Mrs. Schiavo's parents and a Web site, terrisfight.org, have cited "miracle recoveries" by people who supposedly woke up, speaking and moving, after years in comas. Dr. Bernat said his 1994 panel looked into more than 70 "alleged late recoverers" and found that "there wasn't a single one that was verified, so I'm very skeptical." Dr. Ron Cranford, a Minneapolis neurologist who was Dr. Bernat's predecessor on the academy ethics committee, examined Mrs. Schiavo as part of the original trial and testified in favor of her husband's request to discontinue feeding. He was adamant that she would never get better, and he says he is furious about the popular videotape. "She's vegetative, she's flat-out vegetative, there's never been a shred of doubt that she's vegetative, and nothing's going to change that," Dr. Cranford said in a telephone interview. "This has been a massive propaganda campaign, which has been very successful because it deludes the public into thinking she's really there." Her eyes do not steadily track objects, he said, and when she appears to look at her mother or a camera for a moment, it is merely rapid eye movement. More important, he said, "the CAT scans indicate a massive shrinkage of her brain, with its higher centers completely destroyed, which indicates irreversibility." Thank you. posted by Steve M. | 11:54 PM |   In his article in the October 27 New Yorker (not available online), Jeffrey Toobin writes about the judge overseeing the trial of Enron's Andrew Fastow, Kenneth Hoyt -- a Reagan appointee: In a 1997 case involving alleged environmental contamination in a largely minority neighborhood, the Judge asserted that physical differences among races were the product of their environments. "Why do you think Chinese people are short?" Hoyt told the lawyers in the case. "Because there is so much damn wind over there they need to be short. Why are they so tall in Africa? Because they need to be tall. It's environmental. I mean, you don't jump up and get a banana off a tree if you're only four feet. If you're seven feet tall and you're standing in China, then you're going to get blown away when that Siberian wind comes through." Hoyt, for what it's worth, is African-American -- which just goes to prove that idiots come in all races, colors, and creeds. These far-right presidents sure know how to pick judges, don't they? posted by Steve M. | 10:48 PM | Friday, October 24, 2003   Is this really necessary -- WholesomeWear? Yes, it's swimwear for people who find the Lands' End skirted sport tankini a bit too risque. Amazing. Have social conservatives run out of real problems? (Thanks -- I think -- to TBOGG for this one.) posted by Steve M. | 6:29 PM |   Right-wing morality: Criticizing Mel Gibson's The Passion after reading a rough draft of the screenplay, even though you haven't actually seen it: bad. Sending harassing e-mails to sponsors of CBS's The Reagans, even though you haven't seen it or read a screenplay, but have only read short articles describing it: good. (Me, I'm an old-school free-speecher. I say bring 'em both on.) posted by Steve M. | 5:04 PM |   Do you remember Sharon Kowalski? Years ago, her name was a rallying cry for people fighting for gay rights. Kowalski, suffering severe brain damage and other injuries after a car crash, was cared for by her partner, Karen Thompson, until Kowalski's parents interceded, first obtaining guardianship and then denying visitation rights to Thompson. (Thompson ultimately won guardianship of Kowalski.) The solution to this problem was supposed to be legally recognized domestic partnership -- or gay marriage. But what's the point if theocrats believe they have blanket authority, granted by God, to usurp even lawfully wedded heterosexuals' right to speak for mentally impaired spouses? posted by Steve M. | 1:54 PM |   VAST RIGHT-WING CONSPIRACY GANGS UP ON GAY BISHOP The Rev. V. Gene Robinson, who is awaiting consecration as the Episcopal Church's first gay bishop, charged yesterday that the campaign against him is funded by a few major conservative donors with a broader political agenda. Robinson did not name the donors. But his supporters have provided reporters with tax filings and other documents showing that the two main organizations battling the Episcopal Church USA over Robinson's election are heavily financed by the Scaife and Ahmanson families, heirs to banking fortunes who have given to a range of conservative causes.... The two organizations leading the charge against Robinson are the American Anglican Council (AAC), an umbrella group for "biblically orthodox" Episcopalians, and the Institute for Religion and Democracy (IRD), a think tank that tries to counter what it sees as left-wing activism in mainline Protestant churches. ...According to public tax filings, the IRD received $3.8 million in grants from conservative foundations from 1985 to 2002, including $1.7 million from the Carthage, Scaife Family and Sarah Scaife foundations. All three are run by Richard Mellon Scaife of Pittsburgh, who is also a major funder of the Heritage Foundation and who bankrolled American Spectator magazine's $2.4 million "Arkansas Project" to investigate President Bill Clinton. The AAC's tax filings do not disclose the names of its donors. But a spokesman, Bruce Mason, said that it receives at least $200,000 annually from Howard F. Ahmanson Jr., much of it in matching grants to encourage other contributors. Ahmanson, who lives in Newport Beach, Calif., has been among the largest donors to California Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom McClintock and to the Chalcedon Foundation, a California-based religious movement that calls for a theocratic state enforcing biblical law.... --Washington Post So what's next? Is Scaife going to hook up with Randall Terry? And if so, am I too old for Canadian citizenship? posted by Steve M. | 11:26 AM |   Randall Terry thanks Florida's mullahs For giving him veto power over the entire judicial system, and warns us that, oh, by the way, any one of us might be next: Religious conservatives say that with an arsenal of prayer vigils, Christian radio broadcasts and thousands of e-mail messages to Florida lawmakers, they played a pivotal role in the legislative battle this week over whether to feed a brain-damaged woman who has been kept alive artificially for 13 years. Now some conservatives are hoping to use similar tactics to help them challenge court rulings they opposed in other states. Randall Terry, founder of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, said he and other conservatives intended to use what they consider a stunning victory here to pressure lawmakers elsewhere to chip away at court rulings allowing abortion and banning organized prayer in schools and the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools, among other issues. "Finally, a governor and legislature had the courage to stand up to judicial despots because of an overwhelming call by the public," Mr. Terry said.... Mr. Terry said he was strategizing on Thursday with other conservatives about how to use the Schiavo victory to make progress on other issues, at both the state and national levels. Among the other conservatives, he said, was Phil Sheldon, who runs a Web site called Conservative Petitions.com that collected tens of thousands of electronic signatures in support of the Schiavo bill and sent them to Florida legislators.... --New York Times Twice in the article, Terry has the unmitigated gall to say that this usurpation of Michael Schiavo's rights as a husband and legal guardian markes a "return to self-government." Yeah, sure -- if what Randall Terry means by "self-government" is government by himself. posted by Steve M. | 9:33 AM |   This is in the business section of today's New York Times -- the Times apparently doesn't consider it to be "real" (general-interest) news: House Leaders Are Pushing to Cut Corporate Taxes House Republican leaders are nearing agreement on a bill to give nearly $60 billion in additional tax breaks to corporations, brushing aside Democratic complaints that the measure would deepen the federal budget deficit. According to a draft circulated among Republican lawyers, the bill, which is expected to come up for a vote next week at the House Ways and Means Committee, would gradually reduce the corporate tax rate for most companies from 35 to 32 percent. It would also relax or abolish a number of longstanding tax regulations on foreign profits of American multinationals, a move that Congressional tax analysts say could save companies more than $40 billion in taxes over the next decade.... The proposals are in the latest draft of a bill to replace a tax break for American exporters that the World Trade Organization has declared an illegal trade subsidy.... Repealing the old tax break would bring the Treasury about $50 billion over 10 years, and the bill would raise nearly $30 billion more by blocking a variety of tax shelters and loopholes. But the new tax breaks would be worth about $142 billion over 10 years, leaving the net cost to the government at about $60 billion over the next decade. Drafted by Representative Bill Thomas of California, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the new proposal is less generous to companies than one he floated earlier this year that would have cost $128 billion. The new proposal does not include a provision, for example, that would allow American companies to bring back to this country hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign profits at a small fraction of the normal United States tax rate. Mr. Thomas also dropped a provision that would have extended through 2007 a tax credit for research and development, which was supposed to expire. But corporate lobbyists and Congressional officials said they hoped to reinstate many of those provisions in separate legislation or during a House-Senate conference committee on this bill.... Lovely. posted by Steve M. | 9:29 AM | Thursday, October 23, 2003   Here's what infuriated me this morning. It's from Phillip Davis's report on NPR's Morning Edition (transcribed from the Morning Edition Web page, story title "Comatose Florida Woman"): DAVIS: ...Meanwhile, Schiavo's family fired a volley in court, filing to have Michael Schiavo removed as Terry's guardian. Family spokeswoman Pam Hennessy: HENNESSY: Well, they would like to get him removed as the guardian. Calling Mr. Schiavo her spouse at this point is truly obsolete. DAVIS: The family says Michael Schiavo is not living with Terry as a husband.... Meaning what? He's unable to enjoy normal marital relations with her BECAUSE SHE'S IN A FREAKING COMA? (UPDATE: I posted this without knowing the facts about Michael Schiavo's current living arrangements. See this post. I still agree with his desire to have the feeding tube removed, however.) posted by Steve M. | 10:31 PM |   Bush opposes health plan for National Guard The Bush administration is formally opposing a proposal to give National Guard and Reserve members access to the Pentagon’s health-insurance system, jeopardizing the plan’s future and angering supporters. The proposal would give more than 1.2 million Guard and Reserve members the right to buy health coverage through the Pentagon even when they are not on active duty. The Senate has attached the plan to a nearly $87 billion bill to pay for fighting and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. A recent General Accounting Office report estimated that one of every five Guard members has no health insurance. The administration, in stating its objections, said the health-care proposal is too expensive. It would cost $400 million per year.... --Gannett News Service/Statesman Journal (Salem, Orgon) So we can afford the $87 billion to carry out the neocons' geostrategic opium dream, but we can't afford $400 million for the poor bastards who are actually carrying it out. But, of course, this is what you get when CEOs run the country: they stint on full-time workers and then dump as much work as possible on people who don't get benefits. Why should Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld's USA, Inc., be different from any other American company? posted by Steve M. | 6:14 PM |   Maybe not quite "destroying the village in order to save it" -- but close: U.S. Raid Nets Whole Iraqi Village HABBARIYAH, Iraq - American troops in helicopters swooped down on this remote sheepherding village in the desert and detained nearly all the men, one as old as 81, one as young as 13. A month after the raid, apparently aimed at preventing terrorists from slipping across the border from Saudi Arabia, only two of the 79 captives have been freed. The sweep — similar to those conducted in Afghanistan by U.S. special operations troops — came at a time when American officials are concerned that foreign fighters, including those loyal to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, are crossing into Iraq to join the resistance against the U.S.-led occupation. ...Villagers say they heard the whir of helicopters at dawn over Habbariyah, a Bedouin enclave of 500 people clustered in an area about the size of two football fields. ...Over the next 10 hours, villagers say, U.S. troops rounded up men including police, the elderly and teenagers. One woman also was seized. All were restrained with plastic handcuffs and taken to one house. From there, U.S. troops loaded the captives onto the helicopters and flew them to an air base north of the village. The woman, the wife of a tribal leader, was released the next day. The men were transported to the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad, once used by Saddam to house political prisoners. All but two remain there.... --AP Well, they did let the 81-year-old guy go. And he does say the prisoners were treated well, though he also says he was held for a month and never questioned. posted by Steve M. | 4:40 PM |   THE DOG ATE MY HOMEWORK I wouldn't really care about this story -- it's just the yammerings of another demonizing yahoo -- but you have to realize that this yahoo's book was a New York Times bestseller: Author Miniter Faults Gore and Jeffords for Botching 9/11 WASHINGTON – Al Gore and Sen. Jim Jeffords are largely to blame for the slow start of the Bush administration’s security team before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Moreover, the president has good cause to be wary of the Clinton holdover who runs the CIA. Richard Miniter, author of the book “Losing bin Laden,” does not make this case in those exact words, but that is the essence of his message on where the fault lies in lack of preparedness for the aircraft-turned-bombs that brought down the World Trade Center towers, rammed into the Pentagon and went down in Pennsylvania. Gore’s refusal to concede his loss in Florida in 2000 “severely truncated the presidential transition,” the author and investigative journalist said at a meeting Tuesday at the Heritage Foundation. “So that the Bush people didn’t even know who they were going to name in certain spots in their national security apparatus. They were mostly empty boxes on an organizational chart,” he said. It did not help, of course that lame duck Bill Clinton refused to allow the Bush transition team access to federal facilities normally available to an incoming president until Gore’s five-week foot-dragging attempt to steal the election had been stopped. ...“And then we had some guy named Jim Jeffords who decided he wanted to be independent of the Republicans and handed the Senate to the Democrats,” Miniter noted. What that meant in practical terms, he explained, was that “all the national security jobs that we could expect to be confirmed within a month to six weeks by a Republican Senate, would take six or eight months in a Democratic Senate, and maybe not be confirmed at all.” ...Miniter believes that is one reason George Tenet was kept on at the CIA, because “the Bush people could not get their man confirmed as CIA director on a timely basis. Remember that the [new] FBI director [Robert Mueller] was put into his job only a week before 9/11.” ... --NewsMax The GOP -- the party of personal responsibility. So does that mean the attack-dog Right is suddenly going to stop blaming Janet Reno and the entire Clinton administration for the Waco incident? After all, Reno was Clinton's third choice for attorney general, after the GOP decided to score points by attacking Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood. Reno had just been sworn in when Waco came to a boil. posted by Steve M. | 3:25 PM |   WHY CAN'T THOSE HATE-FILLED DEMOCRATS BE LIKE US NICE REPUBLICANS? Bob Barr's crusade against Bill Clinton is still very much alive, even if the former U.S. Congressman is finished as a public servant. Barr told a gathering of Hall County Republicans on Monday that "Clinton's ghost is still with us. The damage he did to us will be with us for a long time." ...Much of Barr's speech at the Civic Center focused on Clinton, the former president impeached by the House of Representatives as a result of alleged sexual misconduct and allegations of perjury. Barr said Clinton lives in a world where there are no consequences for a person's actions. He blamed declining social values on the example Clinton set during his years in the White House. "Wile E. Coyote was a great philosopher," Barr said of the hard-luck Looney Tunes character. "He symbolizes the cartoon world of Bill Clinton. Not matter what he did, he always bounced back. In the cartoon world, Clinton has no worries." ...Barr wasn't content with just attacking the former president. He also said Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations have him concerned, whether or not she runs in 2004 or 2008.... --The Times (Gainesville, Georgia) posted by Steve M. | 3:02 PM |   What the hell kind of cheap stunt was that at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for Janice Rogers Brown yesterday? As Byron York reports at National Review Online, Orrin Hatch made an opening statement defending the ultraconservative state judge, then dived headfirst into the gutter:   Hatch then did something that put Democrats on the defensive for much of the day. Brown is opposed by a number of old-line civil-rights groups, and her nomination has been greeted with sometimes-vicious criticism in the black community. To illustrate that, Hatch unveiled a blow-up of a cartoon that had appeared on a website called BlackCommentator.com. The cartoon portrayed Brown as a fat black woman with huge lips, an unruly Afro, and an enormous backside. In the cartoon, President Bush is introducing her to other blacks in government. "Welcome to the federal bench, Ms. Clarence...I mean, Ms. Rogers Brown," the president says. "You'll fit right in." To the side, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice stand applauding. ..."Now I want to make clear that I am not referring to any of my colleagues here on the committee," Hatch said as he revealed the cartoon. "But let me show you what I am talking about — an example of how low Justice Brown's attackers will sink to smear a qualified African-American jurist who doesn't parrot their views. I hope that everyone here considers this cartoon offensive and despicable." OK -- do you want to see the cartoon? Here it is. Reasonable people can differ, but I think York's description of the caricature of Janice Rogers Brown says a lot more about York than it does about the cartoon. She's no Hottentot Venus in this cartoon. She's built like a typical cartoonist's version of a paunchy middle-aged man in drag -- and she's built like the depiction of Thomas himself in the same cartoon. (Thomas is not a slender man.) And as for the lips -- well, the source is Black Commentator. I'm going to leap into the void and assume the cartoonist is black. Do I have the right to tell a black cartoonist how to draw the lips of another black person? Does Byron York? (If York wants to see grotesquely caricatured lips, he should check out the way cartoonists draw this guy.) But I'm getting away from the main pont. Even if this cartoon is offensive, what on earth was it doing on display in the hearing room? Did anyone in the room draw the cartoon? Is there any reason to believe that any of the Democrats on the committee had even seen it, or heard of Black Commentator, before the cartoon was unveiled? And so if no one in the room knew about it, why try to hang it around Democrats' necks? (That "I am not referring to any of my colleagues" was utterly disingenuous.) The Democrats did recognize that they were being required to have the politically correct response to the cartoon, and they complied -- but that wasn't enough for Hatch. Here's York again: For the rest of the hearing, Democrats repeatedly condemned the cartoon and asked Hatch to remove it from display. He declined, and it remained on an easel beside the dais. So let's sum up: A cartoon drawn (presumably) by a black cartoonist for a publication aimed at a black audience is being used to implicitly depict white Democratic senators who presumably had never seen the cartoon as bigoted against blacks -- to depict them, in essence, as guilty of racism until proven innocent (and, apparently, not even then). Lovely. (Thanks to BuzzFlash for the link to the cartoon.) ************ By the way, I realize that months ago I wrote something about Janice Rogers Brown. She was rumored at the time to be a possible future Bush judicial nominee, and I noticed that she'd been the only dissenter in a California ruling affirming that a man can be found guilty of rape if he persists in intercourse after a woman says she doesn't want to continue. Reasonable people such as TalkLeft's Jeralyn Merritt can disagree with the principle that consent can be withdrawn in the middle of the act, but the case in question involved a man who persisted in intercourse for more than four minutes after the woman said she wanted to go home (as noted here). I really need to read more about Janice Rogers Brown -- though I'll note that Jeralyn Merritt opposes her confirmation. posted by Steve M. | 12:42 PM |   Did some self-righteous, self-satisfied meddler really just say on NPR that Michael Schiavo isn't truly his wife's spouse anymore because he doesn't live with her? SHE'S IN THE HOSPITAL! SHE'S IN A PERSISTENT VEGETATIVE STATE! OF COURSE HE DOESN'T LIVE WITH HER! Well, now a special guardian is being appointed for Terry Schiavo, even though her spouse is right there. The silence from all those right-wingers who endlessly rail against the excessive, totalitarian powers of "big government" is deafening. By the way, as you'll notice from the story, that repellent law that was passed to deny Michael Schiavo his rights has now taken on capital letters -- it's being called Terry's Law. That scares me. Oh, and by the way, this woman should burn in hell. (UPDATE: I posted this without knowing the facts about Michael Schiavo's current living arrangements. See this post. I still agree with his desire to have the feeding tube removed, however, and I still think the woman whose words appear in the last link should burn in hell.) posted by Steve M. | 7:37 AM | Wednesday, October 22, 2003   The new New York Times bestseller list is out. Michael Moore's still #1. Al Franken is back up to #2, while Bill O'Reilly slips to #3. Over on the fiction side, at #9, is Richard North Patterson's new book, Balance of Power. Here's the Times's capsule description: The president of the United States sets out to eliminate gun violence and to destroy lobbyists known as the Sons of the Second Amendment. Hmmm... here's more, from Publishers Weekly's capsule review at Amazon's page for the book: ... When ... Bowden goes on a killing spree in an airport while the Kilcannons are away on their honeymoon, [President] Kerry [Kilkannon] sees red and goes after the manufacturer of the gun Bowden used. The gun lobby circles wagons around the SSA and pushes a tort-reform bill called the Civil Justice Reform Act, which protects the manufacturers of any "products" from litigation by victims of criminals. Congress kowtows to America's captains of industry, with guns as the focal point: "gun immunity hung in the balance of power between the President and the senator who intended to displace him." This is a Democratic nightmare scenario, and the novel paints a grim picture of the challenges facing gun-control advocates.... I wonder how soon the gun-loving right is going to go after Patterson for this book. posted by Steve M. | 5:35 PM |   I'm not sure if Florida is a full-fledged banana republic yet, but Mark Silva at the Orlando Sentinel is certainly dishing out the flattery as if Jeb Bush is wearing epaulets: TALLAHASSEE -- Personal conviction rather than political gain is the driving force behind Gov. Jeb Bush's rapid intervention in the case of a brain-damaged woman whose feeding tube was removed. The Republican governor, a convert to Catholicism, arrived in Tallahassee with deeply held "core values" about the sanctity of life in cases such as these. Bush has never shied from trying to mold public policy based on his personal convictions. But the conservative governor has been strait-jacketed by state Supreme Court rulings limiting his ability to act on the right-to-life issues that fire up the Republican Party's most active base. The court has ruled repeatedly that the state Constitution specifically protects the privacy rights of all Floridians. That has meant abortion rights for women and the right to die for terminally ill patients. So the governor must wait until opportunities present themselves. When they do, he pounces, making clear his conservative credentials in the process.... Sorry -- my gag reflex prevents me from quoting the rest. This isn't journalism -- it's the first fundraising mailer for the President Jeb in '08 Committee. posted by Steve M. | 4:31 PM |   Foreign policy a la Kafka: GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — The detention facility here for prisoners captured mostly in the Afghanistan war is increasingly taking on a permanent air as the authorities are building a hard-walled traditional prison alongside the corrugated metal units that have housed detainees for nearly two years. Although the International Committee of the Red Cross has taken the unusual step of publicly criticizing the United States for the open-ended nature of the detention, officials here say they are planning changes that will allow for the long term. Col. Jerry Cannon, who is in charge of the prison facility, said in a recent interview here that he was revising some of the security procedures at the camp with the expectation that it would continue to hold prisoners for some years. The hard-walled prison will be ready next spring, said Lt. Col. Pamela Hart, the public affairs officer for the Joint Task Force that administers the detention camp and supervises prisoner interrogations. "This will be a permanent structure and will be able to house approximately 100 prisoners," Colonel Hart said.... --New York Times Think about how young most of the Guantanamo prisoners must be. Now think about the fact that the terror war might just go on as long as the Cold War. If we're going to keep these guys incarcerated "for the duration," without ever bringing charges against them, or even allowing them to be identified, your grandchildren may have to go to protest marches to get the prison camp under the scrutiny of the civilized world. posted by Steve M. | 1:29 PM |   Last night, Jim Lehrer's NewsHour brought on Robert Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, to discuss the case of Jesus' general, William Boykin. Maginnis has pretty solid right-wing credentials -- since his retirement from the military he's worked at the Family Research Council and at Fox News -- and his first answer invoked "political correctness," but not long afterward he said this about Boykin: Well, the sensitivity he should have with regard to what's going on around him, he's an intelligence officer as well as a special ops having worked a long time in that part of the world so he knows how incendiary words can be in that particular culture. He reads it every day. I hold him at fault for not demonstrating that. There is a problem though, Margaret, when he goes out in uniform. You know, I served a long time in the military. I can recall back right before i retired, i did some national television. And I was told very clearly you don't show up in uniform. You say up front these are my thoughts. And they do not represent those of the United States government. So i hold him at fault for showing up in his uniform with his polished boots as they said in the LA Times and then stating his beliefs. ...Politics does matter. The general should have known. He was going up the ranks fairly rapidly. If you live in a glass house, people throw rocks. And especially if you live in a glass house where there's a war going on, you better be very sensitive to that. That pretty much blows the "Boykin's a God-fearing innocent who couldn't possibly have foreseen this firestorm" argument out of the water. posted by Steve M. | 12:27 PM |   Remember being told by pundits that the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger was a sign of a new, socially tolerant Republican Party? Well, now we have the "partial birth" abortion ban, the Jesus Jihadists' move to force-feed Terry Schiavo against the wishes of her husband and every court that's heard her case, and General William Boykin calling the God of Islam an "idol" and being vigorously defended by congressional conservatives and right-wing talking heads. The California election was two weeks ago. That new, tolerant era was fun while it lasted, wasn't it? posted by Steve M. | 9:33 AM |   The head of an Iraqi oil agency said yesterday that his group had been trucking in gasoline and other fuel to Iraq for considerably less money than Halliburton, which has so far received more than $700 million from the Army Corps of Engineers to stave off shortages there. ... Iraq's State Oil Marketing Organization is now importing fuel, too, and from the same countries nearby as Halliburton. An Oct. 16 fax from the agency to the House Committee on Government Reform, where Mr. [Henry] Waxman is the ranking Democrat, indicates that the Iraqis are bringing in gasoline at a much lower price than is Halliburton. Halliburton said in response to the Congressional letter last week that it charges $1.59 a gallon for its gasoline imports, which includes the 2 percent profit margin. In the fax, the Iraqi marketing organization's general manager, Mohammed al-Jibouri, said that gasoline from Turkey costs $347 a metric ton delivered to Baghdad, which he said translates to about 98 cents a gallon. ...in an e-mail message to staff members of the House committee, the Washington office of the Coalition Provisional Authority suggested that Halliburton and the Iraqi marketing agency do not seem to have different security and distribution costs. ... Mr. Jibouri, the Iraqi marketing group's chief, said by telephone from Baghdad that the 98 cents a gallon it pays for the priciest gasoline it imports "includes everything." "The contractor we sign with is obliged to buy the gasoline and deliver it into our depots," he said. "There are no extra costs."... --New York Times posted by Steve M. | 9:15 AM | Tuesday, October 21, 2003   Zogby poll released yesterday. The Bush job performance rating is now 49% favorable, 51% favorable. On the question of whether we should reelect Bush or elect "someone new," Bush fails miserably -- 50%-42% in favor of someone new. But he beats Clark, Dean, Gephardt, and Lieberman handily, though his lead over Kerry is only 45%-41%. Regarding voters' perceptions of the state of the country, "wrong track" beats "right direction" handily. But 57% are still "proud of" Bush, while 26% are "ashamed of" him. posted by Steve M. | 4:05 PM |   The Tampa Tribune tells us about grandstanding Florida Republicans in Jesus-fish jackboots who are trampling on the right of a lawfully wedded spouse to determine the fate of his comatose wife -- a right affirmed by one court after another: A state Senate panel Tuesday morning approved legislation that would give Gov. Jeb Bush the power to order the feeding tube removed from Terri Schiavo reinserted. The full Senate is expected to approve the bill Tuesday evening. ...The Florida House of Representatives passed a bill 68-23 Monday night that would give Bush the authority to order the comatose Schiavo's feeding tube replaced, reversing a judicial order that other judges have upheld. Twenty-eight lawmakers did not vote. The state Senate is expected to pass the same measure today and send it to Bush, who likely will sign the bill immediately. As ABC notes, Schiavo has been at the center of a court battle between her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, and her husband, Michael Schiavo. The parents want Terri Schiavo to live, and her husband says she would rather die. The Florida Supreme Court has twice refused to hear the case, and it also has been rejected for review by the U.S. Supreme Court. Last week, a Florida appeals court again refused to block removal of the tube. But why should due process or legal precedent matter when the far Right wants something? After all, we're dealing with Florida -- it's much easier to rejigger the process and create a one-time exception to the rules, as the Tribune notes: The bill gives Bush the power to issue a ``one-time'' stay under certain conditions. All are designed to fit Schiavo's case. Among them, for example, is a requirement that the feeding tube must have been removed as of Oct. 15 - the day Schiavo's tube was removed. Others stipulate that the patient have no written advance directive or living will, and that a family member is actively challenging the judicial orders. Many other elements familiar to stories of far-Right hardball are present here. * Character assassination: The move came just hours after an advocacy group for disabled people pleaded with a federal judge in Tampa to keep Schiavo, 39, alive long enough to investigate a claim that she is being abused by her husband. (Tribune) * People so far beyond the pale you can't believe they're still allowed in the presence of decent human beings: Antiabortion activist Randall Terry watched from the House gallery as the legislation passed, 68-23. (Miami Herald) * People who think advocating theocracy is an excellent career move: Senate Republicans openly questioned whether House Speaker Johnnie Byrd, who is seeking the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, was leading the charge in hopes of burnishing his standing with the conservative wing of the party. (Ibid.) * The use of the right-wing media to try to intimidate dissenters: A reluctant Senate President Jim King made the first move Monday afternoon, suggesting his chamber would sponsor the legislation, even though King authored right-to-die legislation in the 1980s. Minutes earlier, Byrd's Senate campaign had sent out a press release touting his upcoming appearance on Fox television's Hannity & Colmes talk show to ``discuss his plans to save Terri Schiavo.'' (Ibid.) Get cracking on a living will if you don't have one -- that's what I'm going to do. You don't want yahoos like these deciding your fate if anything awful happens to you. (UPDATE: I fixed the name of the Tampa paper -- my apologies) posted by Steve M. | 12:21 PM |   David Frum expresses contempt here for three blogger-journalists who "have suddenly deputized themselves to serve as censors of offensive anti-Jewish speech" in the matter of Gregg Easterbrook. He fails to point out, however, that each of the writers he cites -- Eric Alterman, Mickey Kaus, and Joshua Micah Marshall -- has tied himself in knots trying to give Easterbrook the benefit of the doubt. Alterman, Kaus, and Marshall all conclude that Easterbrook is no bigot. Why didn't David Frum bother to notice that? posted by Steve M. | 11:20 AM |   Forgive me for piling on, but I'd like to note for the record that the New Republic blog post that got Gregg Easterbrook in so much trouble would have been narrow-minded and ignorant even if he'd never veered off into language about "Jewish executives" who "worship money above all else." In the post, Easterbrook seems to be channeling the ghost of an upright citizen of the 1950s who assumes payola and greed are the only possible explanation for the fact that all those juvenile delinquent teenagers want rock and roll at their sock hops -- after all, it's self-evident that the stuff is just noise, isn't it? Easterbrook doesn't like Quentin Tarantino's movies. That's fine -- I don't like them either. The near-dada chatter, the half-human characterizations -- I just can't get with the program. But I'd never say, as Easterbrook does, that "Tarantino does nothing but churn out shabby depictions of slaughter as a form of pleasure" in his movies, that "preposterous violence" is "all Tarantino has ever put onto film." That's ridiculous. You don't have to like Tarantino's movies to know that he's trying to concoct clever stews of B-movie action, comic-book storytelling, and slacker-style nods to pop-culture trivia, and that his audiences come for the stew, not just the violence. For me it gets tiresome, but for fans, Pulp Fiction was about Samuel Jackson's Jheri curls and Travolta and Uma doing the Batusi and the shaggy-dog story about the watch -- and the dialogue (fans found "Royale with cheese" endlessly amusing, and, hell, even I'll admit that at this point the phrase "get medieval on his ass" belongs in Bartlett's). There are intelligent things to be said about the juxtaposition of smirking humor and violence in modern pop culture -- but Easterbrook is too blinkered to say any of them. Lots of people bleed in Tarantino's movies, so, to Easterbrook, they are pure evil, they may lead to terrorist violence (yes, Easterbrook actually says something to that effect), and those who finance them are bad, greedy Jews (or ... er... perhaps non-Jews). posted by Steve M. | 9:23 AM | Monday, October 20, 2003   The gun fetishists just won't stop talking foolishness, will they? They've gleefully seized on this story: Gun crime in England and Wales rose to record levels in the past year, with nearly 200 incidents every week. There were 10,250 incidents, including 80 murders, involving firearms in the year to April, 276 (about 3 per cent) more than the previous year and double the number recorded five years ago. The lesson Instapundit draws from this is: "More Gun Control, More Crime." Lee at Right-Thinking from the Left Coast just goes totally unhinged: "Yet more evidence that gun control is an utter, abject failure, no matter where it is tried," he writes. Ahem. Here are U.S. gun-crime statistics from the Justice Department. * Gun crimes in the U.S. per 100,000 population: 124.6 * Gun murders per 100,000 population: 3.9 Now here's the British government's count of the population of England and Wales in 2001: 52,041,916 people. * 10,250 gun crimes per 52,041,916 people in England and Wales is 19.7 gun crimes per 100,000 population. The U.S. total is 124.6. * 80 gun murders per 52,041,916 people in England and Wales is 0.2 gun murders per 100,000 population (actually 0.1537222, but I'm rounding up because the number's over 1.5). The U.S. total is 3.9. Yes, the census figures in England and Wales are for 2001 and the crime stas are for 2002. But you get the idea. And the very story Insty and Lee were citing included an England/U.S. comparison (with slightly different numbers) -- but I guess they hoped you wouldn't read it. posted by Steve M. | 11:10 PM |   You'd never know it, but technically we're not in a recession -- we're in a recovery, as measured by growth in gross domestic product, and we have been for nearly two years. As Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach points out it's a screw-the-workers recovery -- although he doesn't put it quite that way -- and this could have ongoing consequences: Wage and salary disbursements -- by far the dominant component of personal income -- are basically unchanged in real terms fully 21 months into this recovery; by contrast, at this juncture in the past six upturns, real wage income has been up, on average, by about 9%. The gap between the current cycle and the norm of earlier cycles works out to a shortfall of about $320 billion in real terms, or 4.4% of the current level of real disposable personal income.... Absent other sources of support -- tax cuts, home mortgage refinancing, or a renewal of vigorous hiring -- this shortfall of internally driven income generation could end up spelling serious trouble for the overly indebted, saving-short American consumer.... The flip side of this saga is, of course, quite beneficial to Corporate America. Sourcing demand through low-cost, offshore labor input has become an increasingly important tactic to enhance the operating efficiency of US businesses.... While this has resulted in a significant improvement in corporate earnings, the American workforce is not sharing the benefits. I'll say. (Thanks to Nathan Newman for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 5:41 PM |   The Boston Globe reports today that Bush is a uniter, not a divider, in the maufacturing city of Rockford, Illinois (soon, apparently, to be the former manufacturing city) -- he's united management and labor in disgust and outrage: At Rockford's Dial Machine Inc., general manager Eric Anderberg is intense: Since the recession ended in November 2001, he has laid off 35 of his 75 machinists, cut their work week to 32 hours, and contemplates shutting down all production. He blames foreign competition, particularly from China, for drying up demand for Dial's precision tools. "There's been no recovery for us," said Anderberg, whose plant 85 miles northwest of Chicago is in an industrial park dotted with "For Sale" signs. A conservative Republican, Anderberg does not think the White House is doing enough to help small business owners, who he says cannot compete with Chinese factories that use cheap labor and an undervalued yuan to undercut US prices for manufactured products. ...Acme Grinding, Inc., has been in Rockford for 57 years, but this might be its last, said owner Judy Pike. She already has laid off 33 of her 40 employees and did about 35 percent of her business with Textron's fastening plants. "We've had other recessions, and you could see the light at the end of the tunnel. It wasn't like the jobs weren't coming back," said Pike, who has joined with 85 women in Rockford manufacturing to boycott Christmas gifts with a "Made in China" label. "This time, the lights are going off." ...Edward Smith, 37, didn't vote for president in 2000. He says he will cast a ballot next year, but not for Bush. In 2002, he was laid off after nine years when his employer, a manufacturer of hydraulic cylinders, moved operations to Ohio and Mexico. He prays that he will find a job, but has dropped home remodeling projects, canceled cable service, and thinks about leaving Rockford and moving to Wisconsin. "President Bush is requesting billions of dollars to rebuild Iraq, but I don't hear so much about rebuilding our economy and creating jobs here," Smith said. "I'm wondering what his focus is." By no means do I wish to let Democrats off the hook for this -- far too many Dems in recent years have taken the job losses associated with globalization far too lightly (yes, that includes you, Bill Clinton). I know this will seem like heresy to most of the readers of this blog, but there are times when I think the strongest Democratic presidential candidate for '04 would be Richard Gephardt -- not the Gephardt who so often wimps out when confronted with an angry GOP, but the Gephardt we see only once in a while, the one who quite passionately preaches the old-school pro-labor Democratic gospel. Maybe Democrats wouldn't have to run around desperately trying to figure out how to appeal to Middle American guys (do a quail-hunting photo op? sponsor a NASCAR car?) if they just recognized the obvious fact that Middle American guys are workers, and would like their status as workers to be a lot less insecure. posted by Steve M. | 1:54 PM |   Yesterday The Boston Globe did what the government wants it to do -- it ran a Good News From Iraq front-page story, about American GIs who are training an Iraqi police force. But I don't think this is quite what the administration had in mind: ...occasionally [Sergeant Mike] Routh's pupils slip into the authoritarian law-enforcement methods ingrained in 34 years of dictatorship. One officer, Ahmed al Kareem, a 250-pound bruiser nicknamed ''Tiny,'' apprehended a fellow trainee and slammed him to the floor, demanding: ''Give me your money!'' The officers laughed as Routh rolled his eyes in exasperation. ''We're also trying to teach them that even though he's a suspect, he still has rights,'' said Routh, of Hannibal, Mo. ''Some things have been hard to translate.'' ... ...achieving a deeper understanding of the principles of a police force in a democracy could be a problem. [Captain Ahmad] Shihab indicated a steel door in his station marked ''D ROOM,'' where he said several members of a kidnapping gang were being held. ''These suspects here have all confessed that they are guilty,'' Shihab said. ''But we still have to take them to court. Can you believe that?'' But not all their problems are cultural: Mistreatment of suspects was not the only deficiency of Iraq's police under Hussein. Training, said Captain Ahmad Shihab, one of several fluent English speakers in the Major Crimes Unit, was ''worthless.'' ''As a captain with 11 years on the force, I may have practiced shooting for all of six days,'' Shihab said, pointing to a bottle on a desk a few feet from his. ''I couldn't hit that bottle if I shot at it.'' Then again, that may be a moot point: Like Iraqi police units everywhere, they lack police radios, squad cars, protective gear, computers, and precision weapons. ''We've put in a wish list of equipment,'' Routh said. ''Now we're waiting.'' Meet the new boss -- about as committed to professionalization as the old boss.... posted by Steve M. | 1:13 PM |   THAT SPECIAL BUSH FAMILY EMPATHY From a New York Times review of Barbara Bush's new book, Reflections: ... she recounts having two toes removed (because of foot pain); while her husband and son, the 41st and 43rd presidents, are known around the house as "41" and "43," Mrs. Bush wryly notes she now qualifies as "8." Ouch. posted by Steve M. | 9:17 AM | Sunday, October 19, 2003   You're probably aware of this story by now: A yearlong State Department study predicted many of the problems that have plagued the American-led occupation of Iraq, according to internal State Department documents and interviews with administration and Congressional officials. ....Their findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq's dilapidated electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis might react coolly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding civil society. ...The working group studying transitional justice was eerily prescient in forecasting the widespread looting in the aftermath of the fall of Mr. Hussein's government, caused in part by thousands of criminals set free from prison, and it recommended force to prevent the chaos. The article goes on to note that The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official, so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general heading the military's reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to join their team. ...But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick's appointment, and much of the project's work was shelved, State Department officials said. But this isn’t really news. Let's fill in the missing pieces with this story, from the October 6 issue of Newsweek: Rumsfeld ordered General Garner to drop a State Department official named Thomas Warrick from his reconstruction team. Garner protested, his aides recall; he needed Warrick, who had been the author of a $5 million, yearlong study called “The Future of Iraq.” Rumsfeld’s reply, as relayed by Garner to his aides, was: “I’m sorry, but I just got off a phone call from a level that is sufficiently high that I can’t argue with him.” Sources tell NEWSWEEK that Rumsfeld was taking his orders from Vice President Cheney. We have not just the worst president ever but the worst vice president ever. posted by Steve M. | 11:37 PM |   Haley Barbour, the GOP candidate hoping to unseat Missisippi's Democratic governor, Ronnie Musgrove, doesn't just play the race card when he's hanging out at shindigs organized by the Council of Conservative Citizens. As Nicholas Dawidoff notes in The New York Times Magazine: Back in 1967, when William Winter, a Democrat, was running for governor, his campaign was smeared by handbills equating a Winter election with ''Negro domination.'' Recently, according to the Musgrove campaign, handbills have been mailed out that say ''Some of Ronnie Musgrove's important appointments'' and show photographs of his black appointees. Nobody has claimed responsibility, and the Barbour campaign says it knows nothing about the handbills and denies involvement in any divisive tactics.... Then there is the matter of the lieutenant governor's election. In Mississippi, candidates for governor and lieutenant governor are obligated by the state Constitution to run separate campaigns and often have little politically in common except party affiliation. The incumbent, Amy Tuck, was elected as a Democrat but switched parties once in office. And when a black lawyer and legislator named Barbara Blackmon won the Democratic lieutenant governor's primary, Barbour introduced the novel notion of a ''Musgrove-Blackmon ticket'' into his speeches. He has since kept it up, warning his mostly all-white crowds that ''Blackmon did a great job getting out her supporters.'' By supporters, he means blacks. Blackmon, if elected, will become the first African-American to hold statewide office in Mississippi history. A laborer's daughter who grew up in inner-city Jackson, Blackmon graduated from college at 19 and subsequently earned three graduate degrees. Her presence on the ballot is expected to energize Mississippi's heavily Democratic black electorate. When she encountered Barbour after a labor meeting at which he made references to her, she told him that he wasn't running against her and requested that he desist. ''He told me I was right, and he wouldn't do it in the future,'' she says. That has turned out to be Barbour's first broken campaign promise. posted by Steve M. | 11:28 PM |   UPI has an appalling story about the treatment of ill and wounded National Gurad and Army Reserve soldiers at Fort Stewart, Georgia: Sgt. 1st Class Willie Buckels, a truck master with the 296th Transportation Company.... served in the Army Reserves for 27 years, including Operation Iraqi Freedom and the first Gulf War. "Now my whole idea about the U.S. Army has changed. I am treated like a third-class citizen." Since getting back from Iraq in May, Buckels, 52, has been trying to get doctors to find out why he has intense pain in the side of his abdomen since doubling over in pain there. After waiting since May for a diagnosis, Buckels has accepted 20 percent of his benefits for bad knees and is going home to his family in Mississippi. "They have not found out what my side is doing yet, but they are still trying," Buckels said. One month after President Bush greeted soldiers at Fort Stewart -- home of the famed Third Infantry Division -- as heroes on their return from Iraq, approximately 600 sick or injured members of the Army Reserves and National Guard are warehoused in rows of spare, steamy and dark cement barracks in a sandy field, waiting for doctors to treat their wounds or illnesses. The Reserve and National Guard soldiers are on what the Army calls "medical hold," while the Army decides how sick or disabled they are and what benefits -- if any -- they should get as a result. Some of the soldiers said they have waited six hours a day for an appointment without seeing a doctor. Others described waiting weeks or months without getting a diagnosis or proper treatment.... Soldiers make their way by walking or using crutches through the sandy dirt to a communal bathroom, where they have propped office partitions between otherwise open toilets for privacy. A row of leaky sinks sits on an opposite wall. The latrine smells of urine and is full of bugs, because many windows have no screens. Showering is in a communal, cinder block room. Soldiers say they have to buy their own toilet paper. CNN, which is also pursuing this story, reports a lot of denioals and "yes, but"s from the government but also confirms the basic facts of the story. posted by Steve M. | 11:05 PM |   "Waaaah! They hate us!" Yes, Andrew Sullivan, the Catholic Church does hate you and your fellow homosexuals -- just like we've been telling you for years. But after reading Sullivan's op-ed piece, I'm reminded that the Episcopals have welcomed a gay bishop and angry conservatives responded by threatening a schism, but the Catholics are rejecting gay people and gay and pro-gay Catholics aren't threatening a schism. Once again the bad guys play hardball and the good guys wimp out. posted by Steve M. | 10:40 PM | Friday, October 17, 2003   THE GOP -- THE PARTY OF CIVILITY I am wondering. At this point in the Democratic lunge for the presidential nomination, does Dr. Howard Dean have a monopoly on that sector of the Democratic vote that we may classify as the moron vote? Or is the idiotic Sen. John Pierre Kerry chipping away at these serried ranks of oafs? --first paragraph of a column published yesterday by Emmett Tyrell But ... but ... but I thought Republicans were the nice guys, and only Democrats were nasty now! (Thanks to Sadly, No! for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 6:26 PM |   Belated thanks to the reader who pointed out that inspectors found a vial of botulinum bacteria rather than botulinum toxin, as I stated in a post last week. And today the Los Angeles Times points out that * there's no record that anyone's ever managed to weaponize this particular botulinum strain of botulinum, and * we probably sold it to Iraq: ... Dr. David Franz, a former chief U.N. biological weapons inspector who is considered among America's foremost experts on biowarfare agents, said there was no evidence that Iraq or anyone else has ever succeeded in using botulinum B for biowarfare. "The Soviets dropped it [as a goal] and so did we, because we couldn't get it working as a weapon," said Franz, who is the former commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick, Md., the Pentagon's lead laboratory for bioweapons defense research. "From the weapons side, it's not something to be concerned about," agreed Dr. Raymond Zilinskas, another former U.N. inspector who is now director of the chemical and biological weapons nonproliferation program at the Monterey Institute in California. Botulinum B is a source of botulism, a common form of deadly food poisoning that usually results from improper canning. It disperses quickly in the air, however, and thus is not effective as an airborne agent for weapons, Zilinskas said.... ...Zilinskas said the sample almost certainly came from American Type Culture Collection. "We know they bought their botulinum strains from the United States, including B," he said. In 1994, an investigation by the House Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee determined that American Type Culture Collection had been a primary supplier of botulinum, anthrax and other pathogens to Iraq. The organization, based in Manassas, Va., shipped at least seven batches of botulinum strains to Baghdad in May 1986 and September 1988, according to records released by the committee. Nancy Wysocki, a spokeswoman for the bioresource center, said there was no way for her to know if her organization had exported the vial of botulinum B found in Iraq. But she said all botulinum and other exports to Iraq at the time had been approved by the Commerce Department. "Iraq was not an embargoed country in the 1980s," she said.... posted by Steve M. | 4:46 PM |   Maybe you've heard that box cutters were found on two planes in the South last night. That's distrurbing. Even more disturbing is the fact that testers slipped weapons past security last week at Logan Airport in Boston -- y'know, the airport from which the planes that leveled the Twin Towers took off? The federal security director at Logan said the security there is "no better or worse" than at other airports. Isn't that reassuring? posted by Steve M. | 3:40 PM |   The commerce secretary is overseas. His trip yields my favorite headline of the day: Heavily Guarded Evans Says Iraq Dangers Overblown ********** Meanwhile, this, from Charles Hanley at AP, is just embarrassing: The U.S. government has launched a "good news" offensive in Iraq, and a couple of Baghdad street kids, peddlers of soda pop, have been recruited for the first wave of attack. On a two-day visit, U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans said thousands of new businesses have sprung up here since the war, and gave an example of new entrepreneurship: two boys he spotted by the road selling soft drinks to Baghdad's parched drivers.... Don't worry -- Hanley's not cowed. He spends the next twenty paragraphs debunking the administration's Pollyanna spin. posted by Steve M. | 12:47 PM |   ABC News has a story about the surviving victims of the 2001 anthrax attacks and the problems (poor health, governmental indifference) they're still experiencing. Here's a surprising detail: Judicial Watch, a public interest group, has filed a $100 million class action lawsuit on behalf of the 1,600 employees who used to work at Brentwood, claiming the Postal Service knew the facility was contaminated days before it was closed. Judicial Watch? the guys who hounded Clinton? Well, now, of course, they're suing Cheney and Halliburton and succeeding in forcing the release of embarrassing documents. Yikes -- do we have start thinking of Larry Klayman as one of the good guys? posted by Steve M. | 12:39 PM |   It's nice to see that Haley Barbour, GOP candidate for governor of Mississippi, is feeling a bit of heat now that his picture is prominently displayed on the Web site of the racist Council of Conservative Citizens -- "Barbour Won't Ask CCC to Take Photo Off Web Site" is the headline of this story in The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi. But the story's somewhat deceiving. It says: A photo on the CCC national Web site shows Barbour and several other casually dressed people — including state Sen. Robert "Bunky" Huggins, R-Greenwood — at the Black Hawk political rally this past summer in rural Carroll County, about an hour's drive north of Jackson. Bill Lord of Greenwood, field director for the CCC, said critics are "trying to make something out of nothing." Lord said the CCC does not endorse candidates and the Barbour picture was included on the group's Internet site because the "Web master was just seeking some publicity for our organization." Lord said the CCC held a separate barbecue the same day as the Black Hawk rally, which traditionally attracts a broad spectrum of candidates, Democratic and Republican. That makes it sound as if the rally and the barbecue are unconnected, and the Council has connections only to the barbecue, while Barbour was photographed at the rally. But let's go straight to Council's Web site and read the caption under the offending picture: The election year Mississippi Black Hawk Barbecue and Political Rally held on July 19 drew dozens of political candidates and was attended by a crowd of over 500. The Black Hawk Barbecue is sponsored by the Council of Conservative Citizens to raise money for private academy school buses. (Pictured L-R: Chip Reynolds, State Senator Bucky Huggins, Ray Martin, GOP gubernatorial nominee Haley Barbour, John Thompson, and Black Hawk Rally emcee and C of CC Field Director Bill Lord.) Note the word "was" -- the barbecue and rally was attended by a crowd of over 500. I don't think that's an error, or bad syntax (these people are racially ignorant, but their English is just fine). I think they regard it as one event -- until the mainstream press comes nosing around. ********** By the way, in the Clarion-Ledger article, Barbour says, "Once you start down the slippery slope of saying 'That person can't be for me,' then where do you stop?" For all his faults, Ross Perot answered that back in the '92 presidential campaign -- he said, in the first presidential debate (and, as I recall, on several other occasions), If you hate people, I don't want your vote. That's all you have to say, Haley. posted by Steve M. | 11:26 AM |   Your "free," "liberal" press in action: Condoleezza Rice is a sticky subject at the Washington Post this week. The paper has suspended "The Boondocks," a comic strip populated by cynical, politically aware African-American children, because of a series of jokes about the national security adviser's personal life.... On Tuesday, cartoonist Aaron McGruder had one of his young characters speculate: "Maybe if there was a man in the world who Condoleezza truly loved, she wouldn't be so hell-bent to destroy it." A rep for the Post, which won't be resuming the strip until Sunday, said: "We had no way of knowing whether Mr. McGruder's assertion that Condoleezza Rice had no personal relationship was true or not." Rice's office didn't return a call yesterday. The artist's rep told us yesterday, "Not a single other paper in the nation chose to abort this week's strip." --New York Daily News (scroll down) Read through the week's strips for yourself here. Pretty mild for the most part, I'd say. For the record, the Post's squeamishness about the subject of interpersonal relationships in the Executive Branch does not prevent it from preserving a copy of the complete Starr Report on its Web site to this day. (Thanks to BuzzFlash for the Daily news link.) posted by Steve M. | 9:23 AM |   An interesting point about the Bush tax cuts, from Newsweek's Robert Samuelson: From 2003 to 2013, the tax cut totals an estimated $350 billion. Fully 60 percent ($210 billion) is crammed into the 15 months before the election. This was no accident. Samuelson's point is that presidents regularly try to get economics good times to coincide with elections, but Bush is trying awfully hard -- Samuelson also cites renewal of generous farm subsidies and an apparent effort to weaken the dollar so U.S. goods will sell better overseas -- and he really might get the timing just right, as Nixon did going into the '72 campaign. But, as Samuelson notes, Nixon's fix for the economy (wage and price controls) was a long-term disaster. Deja vu all over again? posted by Steve M. | 9:13 AM | Thursday, October 16, 2003   The Taliban have launched an unprecedented campaign to win money and support from Muslim militants outside Afghanistan amid a resurgence by the group marked by roadside killings, ambushes and public statements boasting of their successes. After remaining relatively quiet for months, a bevy of Taliban spokesmen have been turning up on Arab TV and the Pakistani media, and a handful have started making direct phone calls to the international press, including The Associated Press. The calls have increased in step with a bolder, bloodier insurgency that has shaken faith in the Washington-backed Afghan government's ability to assert its control, and the U.S. military's resolve at crushing the rebels. Omar Samad, the Afghan Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the Taliban are using the media blitz to try to get their message out to hard-liners in neighboring Pakistan who share their strict brand of Islam. "I think it is all part of a more organized effort," he told The Associated Press. "They have lost much of their ability to be a real threat to the whole process of change here, but they unfortunately still have substantial support among influential groups in Pakistan with money and access to arms and manpower." --AP The rest of this story is kind of murky (are these guys really responsible for a wave of killings of aid workers? have they threatened to cut off the noses and ears of clean-shaven men?), but the upshot is: we haven't even finished the job most Americans think we did manage to finish. ****** And on the subject of Afghanistan, ABC reported this a few days ago: ...The main highway from Kabul to Kandahar is known as the "American Road" because President Bush promised to rebuild it by the end of the year. But it is still mostly dirt, and at least five collapsed bridges are in disrepair, which poses major economic problems, since it is a crucial artery for the Afghan economy. The road is a perfect metaphor for what has happened all over Afghanistan. The international community has pledged less than the government says it needs, and it has received less than was promised. The result is that very little has been rebuilt. According to some Afghan bus drivers, the "American Road" is also becoming too dangerous to use because armed thieves target the slow-moving traffic. Similarly, relief aid workers say the condition of the road is hindering their work. "There have been a lot more incidents of people being attacked, bus being attacked, and aid workers being attacked. And that is obviously of concern to aid workers and is having a detrimental effect on aid work," said Sally Austin, assistant country director of CARE International in Afghanistan. Such incidents are why President Bush wants the road to be paved by the end of the year — all 245 miles of it. But army engineers who have studied the project say that timetable does not provide enough time to rebuild it properly. So in order to meet the tight deadline, the "American Road" will get just one layer of asphalt this year instead of the standard three... If that. posted by Steve M. | 11:23 PM |   What bugs me about people like General William Boykin --the deputy undersecretary of defense and Special Forces terrorist hunter who's attracted attention for making speeches in which he says that Bush's elevation to the White House is a miracle from God, that our real enemy is not Osama or Saddam but Satan, and that we're a Judeo-Christian nation, while the god of Muslims is an "idol" -- is that, like so many right-wing Christians, he literally doesn't think America would be America if its population weren't predominantly Christian and Jewish. That's as obnoxious an idea as the notion that my Catholic forbears and other non-Protestant immigrants were "polluting" this country a century ago. A century from now, Christians and Jews could in theory be a minority in America -- and if the non-Judeo-Christian majority embraces the American experiment, and works to preserve and strengthen it, it just doesn't matter what their religion is, or whether have any religion at all. America will still be America, whether the general likes it or not. Oh well -- the prime minister of Malaysia thinks Jews run the world and one of our generals thinks that Judaism and Christianity should be privileged over all other religions in this country. Can we just get these two guys in an elevator together and cut the power for a while? posted by Steve M. | 5:07 PM |   A couple of days ago I criticized the nasty tone of a Fox News two-minute hate that had Bush critic John MacArthur as its target. Sadly, No! picks up where I left off and nails Fox's Sean Hannity and guest Ann Coulter (and the president) on the facts. posted by Steve M. | 4:04 PM |   Joel "Yes, Reverend Robertson, I Think We Should Nuke the State Department" Mowbray's bright idea for the terror war, as articulated in a column he wrote last year: Time to Engage Malaysia Is Now ...Although Malaysia is not a perfect nation, it is an ideal partner for combating terrorism.... Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, leader of the moderate ruling party, is already working to establish a positive relationship with the Bush administration. ... By moving public opinion against hard-line politics, Mahathir has also managed to soften the main opposition party, which mostly consists of fundamentalist Muslims... Though there has been cooperation between authorities in both countries, our national security can only be enhanced if we forge stronger ties with Malaysia..... A few months later, ignoring Malaysia's dismal human-rights record, a smiling President Bush shook hands with Mohamad. Oops. AP reports today: Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad on Thursday told a summit of Islamic leaders that "Jews rule the world by proxy" and the world's 1.3 billion Muslims should unite, using nonviolent means for a "final victory." ...Mahathir, who is known for his outspoken, anti-Western rhetoric, criticized what he described as Jewish domination of the world and Muslim nations' inability to adequately respond to it as he opened the meeting of Islamic leaders from 57 nations. "The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy," Mahathir said. "They get others to fight and die for them." ...The prime minister, who has turned his country into the world's 17th-ranked trading nation during his 22 years in power, said Jews "invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy" to avoid persecution and gain control of the most powerful countries. Mahathir added that "1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews," but he suggested using political and economic tactics instead of violence.... No surprise, really -- a few months ago, members of his party were handing out copies of The International Jew, Henry Ford's notorious anti-Semitic book. Ain't realpolitik fun? Oh well -- Mohamad is stepping down sometime this month. posted by Steve M. | 11:06 AM |   Go, Henry Waxman, go! A Democratic lawmaker yesterday accused Halliburton, the Texas oil services company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, of overcharging the US government for gasoline the firm imports into Iraq. ..."Millions of Americans want to help Iraqis but they don't want to be fleeced [by Halliburton]," Representative Henry Waxman of California said at a news conference. Waxman said Army documents showed that as of Sept. 18, the United States had paid Halliburton $300 million to import about 190 million gallons of gasoline into Iraq. Halliburton charged an average price of $1.59 per gallon, excluding the company's fee of 2 percent to 7 percent, said Waxman. He said the average wholesale cost of gasoline during that period in the Middle East was about 71 cents a gallon, a figure an oil industry source told Reuters was accurate. That meant Halliburton was charging more than 90 cents a gallon to transport fuel into Iraq from Kuwait. "When we checked with independent experts to see if this fee was reasonable, they were stunned," said Waxman, saying a reasonable transport cost would be 10 to 25 cents per gallon.... --Boston Globe posted by Steve M. | 7:35 AM | Wednesday, October 15, 2003   Hey -- it's Marriage Protection Week, officially proclaimed by the White House and co-sponsored by such fine organizations as the Christian Coalition, William Bennett's Empower America, and Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. As a married guy, I suppose I should be happy about this -- except I'm struggling to figure out what exactly my marriage needs to be protected from. Oh yeah -- I guess it has to be protected from a five-year-old boy named Nicolaj: Eva Kadrey and Camille Caracappa had been a couple for five years before they decided to have a family together. With the help of an anonymous sperm donor, Ms. Kadrey became pregnant. In March 1998, with Ms. Caracappa and her mother in the delivery room, Ms. Kadrey gave birth to a boy. The couple named him Nicolaj, after Ms. Kadrey's father. For two years, the two women and their son were part of Ms. Caracappa's large and boisterous extended family in the Jersey Shore area, spending birthdays and holidays together. Then, in October 2000, Ms. Caracappa, an oncology nurse, died of a brain aneurysm at age 38. The following month, with the support and urging of Ms. Caracappa's mother, Ms. Kadrey — who had been a stay-at-home mother to her son — applied for Social Security survivor benefits for Nicolaj. But the Social Security Administration denied the request, saying that the child did not meet the agency's test as Ms. Caracappa's legal survivor. The two women were not legally married, as New Jersey law does not allow same-sex marriages, and Ms. Caracappa was not Nicolaj's biological mother.... Yeah -- it's a good thing we're not giving this kid the Social Security benefits I got when my father died. That would just destroy my marriage, and the marriages of all straight people. posted by Steve M. | 11:29 PM |   Just got a copy of the new New York Times list. Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? is #1 in its first week on the list. O'Reilly's #2. Al Franken slips to #3. Molly Ivins is still #6 and Paul Krugman's still #8. Laura Ingraham drops from #7 to #11. On the extended list, David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush is #29.) posted by Steve M. | 5:05 PM |   Those women who went public about Arnold Schwarzenegger's groping? They're like Stalin and Osama bin Laden -- just not quite as bad. Follow the logic of Celia Farber, writing in New York Press: They threw every imaginable weapon at Arnold, and it was as though they were suddenly shooting blanks. The L.A. Times. Gloria Allred. The whole rotten phony lot of them. Arnold sucked on my nipple! Blam. I’ve never been so traumatized in my life! Blam. He’s a sex criminal! Blam. He’s ambivalent about Hitler! Blam. Blam. Blam. ...It didn’t work this time. The voters rose up and said UP YOURS. They sent a message to the identity thugs and the agents of political correctness. It’s like the bird flying over to Noah with the leafed twig in his beak.... Few things in life are as enjoyable as watching despotism crumble. If Gorbachev could condemn the Soviet’s crushing of the Prague Spring two decades after it happened, I hold out hope that the identity thugs in America 2003 can come to their senses and start to make amends for what they have done. But it seems that they have no awareness whatsoever that they have "done" anything. Then again, neither did the Stasi, the VOPO (People’s Police), the KGB or any of the myriad enforcers of communism in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. As the cliche goes, they were just doing what the State had ordered them to do, even in homicide. Like terrorism, Political Correctness is stateless, and it lurks everywhere. Let’s not pretend it’s comparable with the despotic regimes I have cited. Of course it’s not, because it didn’t actually physically murder people.... Go read the whole thing. There are moments of lucidity, but on balance it's just loony. (Farber, by the way, is best known as a writer on AIDS who boinked her boss at Spin magazine, then railed against the fact that he was later charged with sexual harassment. The long rant she published on the subject in Salon in '97 is more of the same. In her writing on AIDS, she questioned the belief that HIV causes the disease, which explains a few otherwise baffling sentences in the current piece. Nothing, however, explains her utter ignorance of the attitude toward speech of the ACLU, which unswervingly opposes campus speech codes and defends the right to socially objectionable speech.) (UPDATE: Describing Farber's Salon piece on the Spin sexual-harassment trial as "more of the same" probably isn't fair. The process Farber describes sound very, very ugly and intrusive -- but she seems to regard the trial and everything that led up to it as singularly degrading and totalitarian, primarily for herself, whereas I'm sure it that at every given moment a hundred well-lawyered civil and criminal cases are similarly turning people's lives upside down. If she can think of a better way to litigate such matters, I'd like to hear what it is -- should we breed a race of mutant judges who can read minds and and resolve lawsuits and trials without evidence?) posted by Steve M. | 1:41 PM |   Have you seen the photo of Haley Barbour -- the Republican who'll he'll probably be Mississippi's next governor -- at an event sponsored by the racist Council of Conservative Citizens? Here it is, on the CofCC's Web site (just to the right of the Confederate flag and a bit above the link to a multi-part essay called "In Defense of Racism"). Barbour used to be the chairman of the Republican National Committee. In 1999, one of Barbour's successors at the RNC said of the CofCC, "It appears this group does hold racist views." (I'll say. Here's a good rundown of the group's history.) Barbour also, as the bio on his campaign Web site points out, "chaired the Bush for President Campaign Advisory Committee in Washington, D.C. He was one of ten members of Governor Bush’s National Presidential Exploratory Committee in 1999." posted by Steve M. | 9:51 AM |   Have you seen the Jesus pictures of George W. Bush? BuzzFlash and its readers have been tracking them. Here's one, from the Associated Press. Here's another, also from AP. Here's yet another (source unknown). Administrations regularly arrange sites of presidential appearances so the photographs and TV footage will be flattering -- you place the lectern here, you compel the photographers to stand there, and, if you've done your job right, your guy looks heroic or compassionate or whatever. But the Bushies want their guy to look as if he's got a halo around his head. That's creepy. And if a some voters actually like this, or respond to it even on a subconscious level, that's even creepier. posted by Steve M. | 9:28 AM | Tuesday, October 14, 2003   In a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, Bush's approval rating is at 53% -- his lowest ever in the poll. As for the matchup with a generic Democrat, If the 2004 presidential election were today, 46 percent of Americans say they would vote to re-elect Bush, while 47 percent would favor the Democratic candidate — the president's weakest showing to date in this so-called generic horse race. (It's 44 percent to 49 percent among registered voters). Bush's lead [sic] in this test is down from +13 in April, +8 in August and +5 last month. Women favor a Democrat over Bush, 50%-42%; men favor Bush, 50%-44%. Bush wins whites, 53%-39%, but loses nonwhites, 23%-74%. Higher-income people favor Bush, lower-income people the Democrat. All pretty much what you'd expect. posted by Steve M. | 11:17 PM |   The fact that the car was stopped so far from the hotel may have prevented much more extensive damage, said Maj. Will Delgado of the First Armored Division, who was at the scene. Military officials said there was no structural damage to the hotel and only minor damage to several nearby buildings. The concrete barriers absorbed much of the force of the blast, they said. --story by Alex Berenson in yesterday's New York Times story about Saturday's Baghdad Hotel bombing A U.S. military spokesman says they received a tip three days ago that the Turkish embassy could be a target. Had they not installed concrete blast barriers, he said, the loss of life could have been greater. --story by Bill Redeker on ABC's World News Tonight this evening about the bombing of the Turkish embassy in Baghdad today (not available online) I guess this is the new glass-is-half full U.S. line: Lots of civilians were injured, people are terrified, but hey, without those concrete barricades, everything could have been so much worse -- so hey, things are improving! posted by Steve M. | 11:02 PM |   I could give you a big explanation of what follows, but I think I'll let it speak for itself. It's a partial transcript of last night's Hannity & Colmes show on Fox News. In the excerpt, right-winger Sean Hannity interviews John MacArthur of Harper's Magazine. If you avoid political talk on cable TV and don't know why decent people express revulsion at the mention of Fox News or its conservative hosts, just read this. And please pass it along to any conservative friends who think liberals are the nasty ones now, the ones who need to learn civility: SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: While inspectors in Iraq continue searching for weapons of mass destruction, some Americans are outraged at the president that so far no weapons of mass destruction have been found. Our next guest thinks that's grounds for impeachment. We're joined by the publisher of Harper's magazine, John MacArthur, who's with us. And the author of the best selling book, Treason, Ann Coulter is with us. It's not even really intellectually worth discussing. After reading your article, my first reaction is to bubble and fizz and get mad. My second reaction is this is beyond silly, you know, but you really believe this? JOHN MACARTHUR, HARPER'S MAGAZINE: Why do you invite me to go on the show if you think it's beyond discussion? HANNITY: Because Alan wanted you on. That's why. MACARTHUR: OK. But clearly... HANNITY: It wasn't my first choice. MACARTHUR: Clearly, if the president of the United States has lied on a grand scale to Congress... HANNITY: Name me one lie. Name me one lie. MACARTHUR: Let me finish. HANNITY: If you're going to call him a liar, back it up. MACARTHUR: I will, yes. I'll talk about what he said to Bush…Blair at the press conference on September 7 at Camp David. He said…he cited a non-existent report from the International Atomic Energy Agency, saying that Saddam was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon and infamously said, "What more evidence do we need?" And from there... HANNITY: We don't have time for a speech. MACARTHUR: ... we moved on to aluminum tubes. We moved on to connections with Al Qaeda. HANNITY: Did you call... MACARTHUR: We talked about an atomic bomb threat that did not exist. Sean, this didn't exist. This didn't exist. HANNITY: This isn't a speech time. MACARTHUR: You need me to give you the facts. HANNITY: I've got to ask you, did you call for the impeachment of Bill Clinton? MACARTHUR: I wasn't interested in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. HANNITY: You weren't interested? So you're only interested in the impeachment of Republicans? MACARTHUR: No, no, no, no. I mean, it's…Listen, I can't stand Bill Clinton. HANNITY: Did Bill Clinton lie to the American people? MACARTHUR: Yes. HANNITY: Why do you have one standard for him and another standard for a Republican? MACARTHUR: I have the same standard for both of them. HANNITY: No, you don't. Because you didn't write an article asking for his impeachment. MACARTHUR: Actually, what I'm trying to tell you is that if you, as Senator Graham  put it a few months ago very intelligently, if you apply the same standard to Bush that was applied to Clinton, then it's impeachable. He should be impeached. Absolutely. HANNITY: Ann... MACARTHUR: Because as Alexander Hamilton said in The Federalist Papers, this has to do with the immediate consequences and harm done to society. What could be greater harm than the deaths of American soldiers... HANNITY: Excuse me. The immediate consequences…Sir, you have yet to... MACARTHUR: ... in Iraq, who have been sent to Iraq on a fraudulent pretext, utterly... HANNITY: My patience is really running thin. MACARTHUR: ... and they're dying. HANNITY: Could you please be quiet, because there are other people on the panel? MACARTHUR: OK. Sure. HANNITY: The idea here, he cannot give a specific example. MACARTHUR: I did give a specific example. HANNITY: He's full of crap. MACARTHUR: I did give an example. HANNITY: And this is just, hatred of George W. Bush now has become a sport for these guys.... posted by Steve M. | 5:15 PM |   Over at Jewish World Review (which is only incidentally Jewish and really should be called Right-Wing World Review) they found a black person who'll defend Rush Limbaugh's comments about black quarterbacks. Jimmie Walker. Yup, J.J. from Good Times. Mister Dyn-o-Mite! This guy must really need the money. Sample quote: The Left has a double standard. When someone on the Left says something about race, they're standing up for the people. But if someone on the Right dares to opine about race, he's a racist.... I've got one thing to say: Long Live El Rush-Bo! Yeah, I really believe he says stuff like this in his day-to-day life. I really believe that, when he's hanging around on Sunday with his friends watching football, he talks just like a National Review intern. And yes, I want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. posted by Steve M. | 2:21 PM |   The Asia Times says the U.S. is desperately looking for an exit strategy in Afghanistan -- and a big part of the strategy is working with members of the Taliban: With Afghanistan daily slipping into more anarchy and chaos, United States authorities, aware that they are unlikely to ever bring stability to the country by military means, continue to explore political avenues that ultimately could pave the way for them to withdraw from the country. First there were the talks at the Pakistan Air Force base in Quetta with "moderate" elements of the Taliban (which immediately failed due to the US insistence on the sidelining of Taliban leader Mullah Omar). Then came the formation of Jaishul Muslim, a formal grouping of lesser Taliban lights (which failed even to enter into Afghanistan), and moves to pry some of the more powerful mujahideen commanders from the anti-US resistance movement. And last week, former Taliban foreign minister Mullah Abdul Wakeel Mutawakil was released from US custody in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, where he had been in detention since handing himself over to the US in February last year..... ...Mutawakil ... is now expected, with help from the Pakistanis, to be given a senior position in the local government in Kandahar, the former spiritual headquarters of the Taliban. At the same time, options are being explored to recruit other powerful former Taliban ministers into the central cabinet in key positions, including that of defense.... The story goes on to say that the U.S. is trying to "flip" Maulana Jalaluddin Haqqani, a prominent mujahideen who "gave up his high position in the Taliban regime to take up arms as a guerrilla against the US-led invading army." (Hey, wouldn't that make him an "enemy combatant" if we had him in custody? Sorry, never mind.) If this is really what the Bush administration intends to do, it's awfully convenient that many Americans are now angrier at Saddam Hussein for the Taliban-supported al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11 than they are at al-Qaeda and the Taliban. posted by Steve M. | 1:13 PM |   Want to send a pre-written letter to your local newspaper that says the Bush administration is doing a really swell job? Just go here and click on one or more of the green check marks, then fill in a few of the other fields and you're good to go. I'll say it again -- why aren't the reporters who are writing stories about identical soldiers' letters bothering to mention that this is a favorite technique of the GOP? (UPDATE: I see from Hesiod at Counterspin Central that Joshua Micah Marshall was discussing the nature of "Astroturf" letter-writing campaigns on CNN Newsnight last night -- scroll down to "ADDENDUM" for a partial transcript. But it's discussed in an "everybody does it" way. Also, Bush's "regional media" strategy and the letter-writing campaign are mentioned in the same paragraph in this Washington Post story, but that's just an arched eyebrow, if that. I think the fact that the political wing of the GOP was caught doing this, recently, is highly relevant to the GI Astroturf story. Somebody needs to say so outright.) posted by Steve M. | 11:01 AM |   Lucianne.com is still pushing the notion that a 5% increase in approval plus a 5% decrease in disapproval (as reported by Gallup) means George W. is up 10% in the polls (scroll down to the photo caption). I haven't found evidence that this outright distortion of reality is being repeated elsewhere, but I'll keep looking. I'm still trying to figure out why Bush is up. The Gallup site says, "The improvement in Bush's ratings comes mainly from Democrats, who remain highly critical of the president, but show a 12-point improvement in ratings from mid-September (16%) to now (28%)"; Gallup simultaneously conducted a poll for CNN and USA Today that had similar results, and a CNN story on the poll cited "big gains among men and among high-income Americans." It's hard to believe both of these explanations are correct. I'd say this was a margin-of-error swing, or maybe some of the sticker shock from the $87 billion Iraq/Afghanistan request had worn off -- or maybe some white guys felt the urge to rally to Bush because they see him as an embodiment of Regular-Guydom (remember that the poll was conducted just at the moment when Regular Guy heroes Arnold and Rush were being attacked by those stinky old liberals and blacks and the the law and women who won't just shut up and play nice). That's just a wild guess, of course, but I haven't seen a better explanation. posted by Steve M. | 9:58 AM | Monday, October 13, 2003   Kurt Cobain was, ladies and gentlemen, a worthless shred of human debris. --Rush Limbaugh on his short-lived TV show, April 11, 1994, six days after the suicide by shotgun of the chronically depressed, drug-dependent leader of the rock group Nirvana Want to explain to me again why I'm supposed to go easy on Rush Limbaugh, Howie? (Quote from The Way Things Aren't by Steve Rendall, Jim Naureckas, and Jeff Cohen of FAIR.) posted by Steve M. | 10:59 PM |   IT'LL BE A GREAT DAY WHEN THE SCHOOLS HAVE ALL THE FUNDS THEY NEED AND THE PENTAGON HAS TO SELL NUDE PICTURES OF DONALD RUMSFELD TO BUY OMBERS How much do we care about our kids in this country? So much that local school districts have to do stuff like this: JUNCTION CITY, Oregon (AP) -- Cleve Dumdi -- a 70-year-old respected sheep rancher, husband of a former county commissioner -- was walking in this small Oregon town one day when a longtime acquaintance hailed him from across the street. "Hey Dumdi!," the man hollered. "Didn't recognize you with your clothes on!" It's the kind of ribbing Dumdi has had to bear ever since he disrobed and perched on his tractor for a 2004 nudie calendar featuring the men of Junction City's Long Tom Grange. All proceeds from calendar sales go to the Junction City school district, which has had to give up at least three classroom teachers, art, music, gym class and field trips after recent severe state cutbacks in education budgets. The calendar, which is being sold online for $17, is the latest gambit to raise money for local schools in a state where teachers already have lined up to sell their blood plasma and ranchers have auctioned off the rights to hunt for buffalo and antelope on their property.... Look, I don't want to be totally humorless about this -- the calendar is done in good fun, in the manner of England's Ladies of Rylstone calendar, which raised money for leukemia research. But come on, people. These are our schools. These are our kids. Pay some damn taxes. The sight of slightly embarrassed middle-aged naked people is entertaining for a year or two, but for school funding it's not a long-term plan. posted by Steve M. | 5:42 PM |   Why does the Bush administration hate the troops? Nearly one-quarter of the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq still have not been issued a new type of ceramic body armor strong enough to stop bullets fired from assault rifles. Delays in funding, production and shipping mean it will be December before all troops in Iraq will have the vests, which were introduced four years ago, military officials say. Congress approved $310 million in April to buy 300,000 more of the bulletproof vests, with 30,000 destined to complete outfitting of the troops in Iraq. Of that money, however, only about $75 million has reached the Army office responsible for overseeing the vests' manufacture and distribution, said David Nelson, an official in that office.... --AP posted by Steve M. | 5:33 PM |   I'm delighted that a number of newspapers, including USA Today, are running the story about the phony letter that's appeared over various soldiers' signatures in many different newspapers -- but why haven't any of the stories pointed out that this "Astroturf" (phony grassroots) propaganda technique was being used last winter by an online division of the Republican National Committee? posted by Steve M. | 2:17 PM |   This scares me a bit: BERLIN (Reuters) - Call it the "Arnold Effect." The straight-talking Hollywood action star's election win in California has had an electrifying impact on Germany, leading to calls Friday for top politicians to voice clear ideas in simple language or be swept away at the polls. "The more confused we are by what they say, the greater our longing for a man or woman with simple words," wrote Bild newspaper columnist Franz Josef Wagner. "The only problem is that it's the wrong ones who usually master simple language." Schwarzenegger's victory in the California race for governor has led to editorials calling for German politicians to abandon their barely comprehensible speaking style in favor of "Klartext" (straight talk). ..."My first thought was 'Oh my God, not another Austrian emigrant -- the first one caused enough damage"' wrote Peter Boenisch, a former government spokesman and newspaper editor, in an analysis on Schwarzenegger for the tabloid Bild. "But Germany urgently needs something Schwarzenegger-like: a can-do spirit, unconventional thinking, courage, strength and vision. We're facing the worst crisis since the war," he wrote.... "People want to be entertained and not bothered with problems," wrote the liberal Sueddeutsche Zeitung. "People want a strong leader."... All right -- let me say that Arnold Schwarzenegger is not, at the end of the day, actually a believer in Nazism. And let me also say that Germans have tried really, really hard to learn from their mistakes in the middle of the last century. OK, I said those things. I still don't feel any better. posted by Steve M. | 12:32 PM |   GREAT MOMENTS IN TRANSPARENTLY DISHONEST SPIN The most recent Gallup Poll shows a mixed set of results on ratings of George W. Bush. The president's job approval rating is up slightly from his previous rating, which was the low point of his presidency.... The poll was conducted Oct. 6-8 and shows Bush's job approval rating at 55%, with 42% disapproving. This represents a modest improvement from the previous Gallup Poll of Sept. 19-21, when 50% approved and 47% disapproved -- the most negative approval ratings in Bush's presidency to date. --Gallup poll analysis at Gallup.com * Mixed Results in Latest Bush Ratings Not so 'mixed' - up 10% --citation of the Gallup poll at Lucianne Goldberg's Lucianne.com So now, if Bush is up 5% in a poll, he isn't just up 5% -- he's really up 10%, because the spread between "favorable" and "unfavorable" has now changed 10% in his direction. This is a highly creative use of numbers. Somehow I don't think Lucianne and her allies ever read the numbers quite this way during the last presidency. ******** Here's what Gallup actually means by "mixed results": Forty-two percent of Americans approve of Bush's handling of the economy, compared with steady ratings in the mid-40s from July through September. Currently, 55% of Americans disapprove of Bush's handling of the economy. Bush's current economic ratings are the worst of his presidency. ...Ratings of Bush's handling of Iraq have also hit a new low. Just 47% approve while 50% disapprove, the first time this approval rating has dipped below 50% in the year in which Gallup has tracked his handling of Iraq. ...Consistent with what has been the case throughout his presidency, the public still has a generally positive impression of Bush. Sixty percent view him favorably, while 39% hold an unfavorable view. While still firmly in positive territory, this is the lowest rating Bush has received since he took office, tied with a 60% favorable rating in August 2001. posted by Steve M. | 9:59 AM | Sunday, October 12, 2003   WWJN? (WHAT WOULD JESUS NUKE?) The U.S. State Department has condemned an on-air suggestion by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson that the agency ought to be blown up with a nuclear device. Robertson, who heads the Virginia Beach-based Christian Broadcasting Network, made the remark while interviewing author Joel Mowbray on "The 700 Club" television program last week. Mowbray wrote a book called "Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Endangers America's Security." "I read your book. When you get through, you say, 'If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom, I think that's the answer.' I mean, you get through this, and you say, 'We've got to blow that thing up,'" Robertson said during the interview. ...Robertson also advocated bombing the State Department during a June interview with Mowbray. "Well, it looks like Congress had better do something, and maybe we need a very small nuke thrown off on Foggy Bottom to shake things up," Robertson said. --AP Yes, yhe State Department denounced the remark, but nothing has been said, as far as I know, by the folks who got so worked up a few months ago about John Kerry's far milder call for "regime change in the United States." (Thanks to BuzzFlash for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 11:51 PM |   Some fun facts about CEO pay: CEOs at companies with the largest layoffs, most underfunded pensions and biggest tax breaks were rewarded with bigger paychecks, according to a new report, “Executive Excess 2003: CEOs Win, Workers and Taxpayers Lose.” Median CEO pay skyrocketed 44 percent from 2001 to 2002 at the 50 companies with the most announced layoffs in 2001, while overall CEO pay rose only 6 percent. These layoff leaders had median compensation of $5.1 million in 2002, compared with $3.7 million at the 365 large corporations surveyed by Business Week. At the 30 companies with the greatest shortfall in their employees’ pension funds, CEOs made 59 percent more than the median CEO in Business Week's survey.... ...At the 24 Fortune 500 companies with the most subsidiaries in offshore tax havens, median CEO pay over the 2000 to 2002 period was $26.5 million -- 87 percent more than the $14.2 million median three-year pay at firms surveyed by Business Week. The top layoff leader in terms of layoff numbers is Carly S. Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard. She fired 25,700 workers in 2001, and saw her pay jump 231 percent, from $1.2 million in 2001 to $4.1 million in 2002. The top layoff leader by percentage pay increase is AOL Time Warner's Gerald M. Levin, who presided over 4,380 layoffs in 2001. Levin's pay increased a staggering 1,612 percent, from $1.2 million in 2001 to $21.2 million in 2002. The highest paid layoff leader was Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski, who took home over $71 million in 2002, a $34.7 million raise, even though he was forced out in disgrace mid-year. In 2001, Tyco laid off 11,300 workers. The top 50 layoff leaders cut a total of 465,252 jobs in 2001. This report, by Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Chris Hartman, and Scott Klinger, “ was done for the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy. posted by Steve M. | 10:54 PM | Thursday, October 09, 2003   Family matters are going to keep me from Blog Land for the next couple of days. Poke your head in on Sunday, probably, for fresh kvetching. posted by Steve M. | 7:50 PM |   Well, we are trying, I guess. The St. Petersburg Times reports: Earlier this year, American officials in Iraq contracted with two United Nations agencies to provide 72-million new textbooks for Iraqi schoolchildren to replace the old books crammed with photos and praise of Saddam Hussein. But when Iraq's schools reopened last week, there were few, if any, revised textbooks in the classrooms. U.S. officials said that most of the new books, which are being printed primarily on local presses, may not get to Iraqi children until sometime in November. And some books may even be delayed until next April. In the breach, references to Hussein were crossed out by hand and decals pasted over his pictures.... About 1,000 of the country's 13,500 school buildings have been refurbished so far, according to U.S. officials. U.S. officials say the schoolbook revision project was carried out by a committee of Iraqi teachers. The committee went through more than 500 different books, deleting such statements as "learn the instruction of the Leader and all science shall be yours." The new Iraqi education ministry also has pledged to increase salaries for teachers. In the past, teachers were paid the equivalent of $5.33 to $13.33 a month; the new scale calls for monthly wages of $66.66 to $333.33. At the link there's information about other aspects of the reconstruction, some of it good, more of it bad. The report is summed up in this sidebar, which begins: Status of goals Two months ago, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq listed hundreds of projects it wanted to accomplish by Oct. 3. When that day passed on Friday, some of the tasks were done and some were not. Here is a sampling: SECURITY Locate, secure and eliminate WMD. Actual: Not yet. Defeat internal armed threats. Actual: Not yet.... Click the link for the rest. posted by Steve M. | 4:09 PM |   This is truly appalling: Catholic Churches Say Condoms Don't Stop AIDS - BBC The lives of Roman Catholics in some of the countries worst hit by HIV/AIDS are being put at even greater risk by advice from their churches that the use of condoms does not prevent transmission of the disease, according to a British television program. ..."The moral argument against the use of condoms is being superseded by a clinical argument which is flawed," said Steve Bradshaw, reporter on the BBC Panorama program "Sex and the Holy City" that will be aired in Britain on Sunday night. "The Aids virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon," Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family, told the program. "The spermatozoon can easily pass through the 'net' that is formed by the condom." ...The Archbishop of Nairobi, Raphael Ndingi Nzeki told the program: "AIDS...has grown so fast because of the availability of condoms." While in Luak near Lake Victoria, Gordon Wambi, director of an AIDS testing center, said he had been prevented from distributing condoms because of church opposition. ...The World Health Organization, guardian watchdog of global wellbeing, rejected the Vatican view. "These incorrect statements about condoms and HIV are dangerous when we are facing a global pandemic which has already killed more than 20 million people, and currently affects at least 42 million," the WHO told the program.... Don't you dare accuse me of "anti-Catholic bigotry" for objecting to this. In this case, the church of my youth is working strictly in the secular realm, peddling junk science and playing games with human lives. And if you must accuse me of anti-Catholic bigotry, accuse the Centers for Disease Control as well -- although information on the effectiveness of condoms in preventing HIV infection was once taken down from the CDC's Web site, it's back up now: Latex condoms, when used consistently and correctly, are highly effective in preventing the sexual transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. AIDS is, by far, the most deadly sexually transmitted disease, and considerably more scientific evidence exists regarding condom effectiveness for prevention of HIV infection than for other STDs. The body of research on the effectiveness of latex condoms in preventing sexual transmission of HIV is both comprehensive and conclusive. In fact, the ability of latex condoms to prevent transmission of HIV has been scientifically established in “real-life” studies of sexually active couples as well as in laboratory studies. Laboratory studies have demonstrated that latex condoms provide an essentially impermeable barrier to particles the size of STD pathogens. posted by Steve M. | 1:26 PM |   Well, we made everyone in America think you're a filthy traitor, but -- whoops! -- we just noticed we really have no case against you. Awfully sorry about that.... No spy rap vs. cleric? Expect just minor Gitmo charges WASHINGTON - Army investigators are leaning toward filing slap-on-the-wrist charges versus a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay who was investigated for espionage, a military source told the Daily News yesterday. The "handful" of minor charges against Capt. Yousef Yee could be leveled by next week and are not expected to include the more serious allegations of spying, sedition or aiding the enemy, according to the source familiar with the probe. "It's very weak," the military source said, saying the charges are likely to be related to dereliction of duty and disobeying a general order. "It's nothing compared to espionage or anything like that." ... --New York Daily News Oh, and by the way, Several military sources said that although many questions remain in the larger espionage investigation, there is no indication a spy ring operated inside the camp. (Thanks to BuzzFlash for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 11:02 AM |   Ever read an actual Republican Party platform? Ever read the Texas Republican Party platform? Kevin Drum at Calpundit has, and it's more extreme than you could possibly imagine. I can give you some of the highlights (it is the official position of the Texas Republican Party that Social Security and the minimum wage should be abolished), and I can point out Neanderthal social attitudes (not only do Texas Republicans oppose adoptions by homosexuals, they believe no gay person should be allowed to be in the same room with a minor unsupervised) -- but read read Kevin's post (and the excerpts) for yourself. Kevin says, "Texas-style conservatism has already put George Bush, Tom DeLay, and Karl Rove in charge of the country, and it is very much the future of the Republican party." I agree. Forget Schwarzenegger and Giuliani. Look at the Republicans who actually run the country, in the White House and Congress and on the Supreme Court. Kevin's absolutely right -- this is why we loathe the GOP, and it's why we're right to do so. posted by Steve M. | 10:16 AM |   I said yesterday, in response to a post at Calpundit, that I think it would be a really bad idea to do what some people are proposing -- start a drive right now to recall Arnold Schwarzenegger. But I think this would be a perfect time for Democrats to turn the recall table on Republicans in a different way. I think -- right now -- someone needs to draft an amendment to the U.S. Constitution allowing for recall of elected and appointed officials in the federal government. Ideally, this amendment would be introduced as a bill by a member of Congress, but a petition drive calling for a constitutional convention (see Article V of the Constitution) could be rather frightening to the GOP, too. We don't actually have to succeed -- if this gets a big enough favorable response and enough press, it will reinforce the impression of a weakened, wounded, vulnerable administration. Just what we want going into 2004. Recall Bush? Recall Cheney? Recall Rummy? Let's write a law that could make it happen. (UPDATE: Yeah, I know -- a constitutional convention can go off half-cocked and produce any amendments it wants, and any con-con that took place in contemporary America would probably approve amendments outlawing abortion, mandating school prayer, banning gay marriage, and so on -- but that's no reason not to threaten to go that route. This is meant to rally refuseniks and put the regime on notice. Remember how Bob Barr called for Clinton's impeachment well before Monica? It's meant to be like that.) posted by Steve M. | 7:50 AM | Wednesday, October 08, 2003   Just got the new New York Times bestseller list, and after one week at the top, Bill O'Reilly's book slips to #2, to be replaced by Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which was #1 for five weeks before being replaced by O'Reilly. Har-de-har-har. posted by Steve M. | 5:39 PM |   Judging from this AP report, it appears that the Bush administration's new Iraq strategy consists largely of having Dick Cheney's Big Lies delivered in a high, girlish voice: Rice Says Iraq Never Disarmed ...Condoleezza Rice told a foreign policy forum in Chicago that the team led by chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay "is finding proof that Iraq never disarmed and never complied with U.N. inspectors." In fact, she suggested, if the U.N. Security Council knew last winter what Kay's group has uncovered now, it never would have rejected the U.S. call for war. "Right up until the end, Saddam lied to the Security Council. And let there be no mistake, right up to the end, Saddam Hussein continued to harbor ambitions to threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction and to hide his illegal weapons activity," she told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. ..."We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks," Rice said. Still, she added, the possibility that the Iraqi leader could be behind another attack "beyond the scale of 9-11 ... could not be put aside." ... Oh, for the love of Mike.... Iraq clearly had WMDs a long time ago. They're not there now, dammit. A hundred thousand Americans were in Saddam's own country overthrowing his government and he couldn't get his chem-bio-nuke act together to attack a single one of those soldiers unconventionally. The UN couldn't find the WMDs and the best we've come up with is one stinking vial of botulinum toxin squirreled away far from any battalion of soldiers or military outpost. Do these Bushies ever get sick of lying? (UPDATE: And don't forget that that vial of botulinum toxin had been sitting in a refrigerator since 1993, as Billmon notes, and is a precursor agent, not a bioweapon on its own.) (UPDATE: Actually, it's awfully hard to beat the debunking of the Kay report by Fred Kaplan in Slate, which points out weasel-word after weasel-word and shows that no one's yet found evidence of an imminent threat.) (UPDATE: I said "botulinum toxin" above, but of course it wasn't toxin at all, as a reader has pointed out. And see this later post for more, from the L.A. Times.) posted by Steve M. | 4:03 PM |   The New York Times has posted the front-page Financial Times story "Rumsfeld Says Not Told of Postwar Shake-up" -- it's here. Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, said on Tuesday he had not been told by President George W. Bush or the National Security Council that the White House was to restructure the handling of postwar Iraq before the media were briefed on the plan by NSC officials. Mr Bush has ordered the creation of an "Iraq Stabilization Group," which will be run by Condoleezza Rice who is head of the NSC, which co-ordinates foreign policy in the White House.... In an interview with the Financial Times and three European news organisations, Mr Rumsfeld insisted that the new NSC role appeared to be no different from the policy-co-ordinating structure that had existed for more than a year. He said he did not know why Ms Rice, Mr Bush's national security adviser, had felt it necessary to send a memorandum about the new organisation to cabinet officials or brief the New York Times about the move. "That's what the NSC's charter is," Mr Rumsfeld said. "The only thing unusual about it is the attention. I kind of wish they'd just release the memorandum."... And here's the Washington Post story in which he blows up when asked about it ("I said I don't know. Isn't that clear? You don't understand English?"). posted by Steve M. | 2:51 PM |   Meanwhile, back at the quagmire.... U.S. Can't Locate Missiles Once Held in Iraq Arsenal The United States military has been unable to locate a large number of shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles that were part of the arsenal of Saddam Hussein, officials say, compounding the security risks for airports and airlines in Iraq and around the world. The lack of accounting for the missiles — officials say there could be hundreds — is the primary reason the occupation authorities have not yet reopened the Baghdad International Airport to commercial traffic, officials said. The terminal has been rebuilt and the runways repaired, and Australian soldiers are running the air traffic control system. But portable missiles were fired at incoming planes several times in recent weeks, one senior official said. Most of those incidents have not been reported to the public.... --New York Times We are paying $500 to Iraqis who turn these missiles in -- but, of course, they go for $5,000 on the black market. And TBOGG takes note of a few details in this story about changes made in the House to Bush's request for Iraq/Afghanistan money: From Bush's request for rebuilding Iraq, the House version drops $50 million for traffic police; $300 million out of $509 million Bush wants for prisons; and $153 million that included money to buy garbage trucks for $50,000 apiece. Also dropped from Bush's request is $100 million for restoring Iraq's marshlands, systematically emptied and destroyed by deposed President Saddam Hussein's government to punish Shiite Muslims who live there; $13 million for ZIP and area codes; $100 million to build seven public housing communities; and $150 million to begin building a new children's hospital in Basra. Way to win hearts and minds, guys! posted by Steve M. | 1:40 PM |   There's a lot to chew on in CNN's California exit poll. Most interesting fact, in my opinion: This was a revolt of the haves. The recall was rejected by voters with household incomes between $30,000 and $49,999, and by voters with household incomes between $15,000 and $29,999. For household incomes under $15,000, the vote was 50-50. The pro-recall majorities were in the upper brackets ($50,000-$74,999 and up), and the biggest majority (62%-38% in favor of recall) was in the $75,000-$99,999 bracket. (For a gloss on this, I wish I had my copy of Barbara Ehrenreich's Fear of Falling handy.) Schwarzenegger got 24% of the vote of people who call themselves liberal, including 16% of those who call themselves "very liberal." He got 22% of the vote among people who disapprove of Bush. Oh, and he got 42% of gays and bisexuals. Of those who voted, 39% said they were Democrats, 38% Republicans. Soi what happened to that big registration advantage Democrats have? It doesn't help much if the extra Democrats don't actually vote. 64% of voters didn't think Schwarzenegger addressed issues in enough detail -- but 38% of that group voted for him anyway. Here's my favorite: 15% of voters who "strongly approve" of Gray Davis's job performance say they voted to recall him anyway. Um, should we repeat the question? posted by Steve M. | 1:23 PM |   I'm with Kevin Drum of Calpundit -- please, no quickie campaign to recall Schwarzenegger. I haven't read all the comments that follow his post, but the ones I've read present this as a choice between playing nice and taking a stand. But do you know that old political saying -- "When your enemy's drowning, throw him an anvil"? People who want to recall Schwarzenegger want to throw him an anvil when he's not even damp. Let him screw up first. Then consider -- consider -- a recall campaign. Don't get so far ahead of the general population's opinion that you look ridiculous, just because you want payback for Florida '00 and the Texas legislature '03. Sustain the anger. Develop counterarguments. But don't try to take Schwarzenegger down between election cycles unless there is genuine widespread outrage. There'll be a real election soon enough -- I'm not sure I fully believe that revenge is a dish that's best served cold, but that can be a really satisfying way to serve it. Meanwhile, if Schwarzenegger makes an absolute bollocks of the job, he'll be a big fat millstone around Bush's neck a year from now in the state with more electoral votes than any other. posted by Steve M. | 11:36 AM | Tuesday, October 07, 2003   Davis is out, Schwarzenegger wins -- Tom Brokaw cut into the local news just after 11:00 Eastern time to make the call. If it's this obvious this early, presumably neither vote is even close. Not that I'm the least bit surprised. Wasn't there anyone in the national Democratic Party with a pulse and a brain who could have prevented this train wreck? This wasn't just a California race. This became the biggest news in the country. Why was Gray Davis allowed to embody the Democratic Party in this moment of intense national focus on politics? Why did Clinton and so many presidential candidates dutifully flock to Davis's side, sending a message that being a Democrat means supporting a status quo hated by the citizenry? Yes, I know that hatred was largely misplaced. But, as I've said before, a campaign isn't a damn poli sci seminar, and certainly not a campaign this short -- the time to educate the voters was long past. Why didn't anyone tell Davis to stop signing bills that looked like interest-group pandering? Why didn't anyone see that the party's only hope was to deemphasize the "no on recall" mantra and unite behind a replacement candidate, Bustamante or someone else, with a message that it was OK if you wanted change? And why, if Gray Davis or his allies really did have a hand in it, was the eleventh-hour mudslinging -- however much fun it was for a couple of days -- allowed to happen? Didn't we learn anything about modern attitudes about politicians' sexual behavior from the Clinton years? Did supporters of Davis really think that this wouldn't be, rightly or wrongly, ascribed to Davis and, rightly or wrongly, seen as last-minute desperation? I don't really care if I'm pissing off people who usually agree with me. This was a debacle, and it was preventable. I'm sure a lot of people deserve blame, but I blame Terry McAuliffe. If Karl Rove can micromanage races across the country for the GOP, then McAuliffe could have developed a clue somewhere along the line and done something, anything, to prevent this embarassment. Lord, it's worse than I thought -- maybe this isn't accurate, but Fox is projecting that Schwarzenegger got a majority of the vote on the recall ballot. A majority, in what was, or should have been, a three-man race. For Republicans everywhere, that would have to feel even better than that damn Supreme Court decision in 2000 How the hell did we allow this to happen? posted by Steve M. | 11:27 PM |   Not even bothering to wait until the polls close to declare their guy a winner, the folks at Fox News are saying Schwarzenegger is comfortably ahead in exit polls, according to Kathryn Jean Lopez, blogging at National Review Online. By the way, does anyone think that some of Schwarzie's most fervent supporters might get a tad rowdy tonight? posted by Steve M. | 6:44 PM |   That one-joke homophobia machine, Reverend Fred Phelps, is at it again. The proprietor of godhatesfags.com, whose last big stunt was a protest at the opening of New York City's Harvey Milk High School, wants to do something special for the folks of Matthew Shepard's hometown, Casper, Wyoming. The Denver Post reports: To commemorate the fifth anniversary of gay college student Matthew Shepard's gruesome death, the Rev. Fred Phelps wants to erect what he calls an "absolutely beautiful" monument in Shepard's hometown of Casper, Wyo. About 6 feet tall and 3 1/2 feet wide, Phelps' monument would bear a brass plaque reading: "Matthew Shepard entered Hell October 12, 1998, at age 21 in defiance of God's solemn warning: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.' Leviticus 18:22." ...."He's a bad cold that won't go away," Casper City Manager Tom Forslund said of Phelps, who has announced he'll protest gay rights in Fort Collins, Casper and Laramie later this month. "He just is a very strange person. He sends faxes to us. I got three of them this morning."... From godhatesfags.com itself, here's a rendition of the proposed monument. According to both the Post (Phelps's site concurs), a federal court ruling may require Casper to allow the monument: In July 2002, the 10th Circuit ruled that governments that allow statements like the Ten Commandments to be posted on public property must permit all other messages, too. The folks who put up the Commandments monument have offered to take it back. I don't know what Phelps's point is. He's so over the top that he alienates and embarrasses people who might agree with him. But I guess he must be having the time of his life doing this. Most guys his age would just want to buy a Porsche. posted by Steve M. | 5:53 PM |   Is this guy Rush Limbaugh, who became so upset about the fact that three Democratic presidential candidates said he should be fired from his second job, the same Rush Limbaugh who urged his listeners to make it as difficult as possible for the Dixie Chicks to do their first job? (Thanks to TBOGG for the first link.) posted by Steve M. | 3:42 PM |   I don't normally get my news from the right-wing frothers at Free Republic, but if what this person is saying is true, it's appalling on multiple levels, and it strongly suggests that the next recall we should have is for our entire news media, possibly worldwide: There are literally 100's of journalists, local, national, and international waiting at the Brentwood Polling center at this very moment waiting for Arnold to vote. They are all disappointed that he hasn't shown up yet, but they are breathlessly awaiting his arrival. Too bad no one called them to report that Arnold voted over 2 hours ago at his polling center in Pacific Pallisades. This is what hundreds of them are doing: waiting for him to walk out of a polling place so he can smile and wave at them. And they don't even know where he votes, or that he voted already. What else don't these people have a clue about? posted by Steve M. | 1:17 PM |   Far too few people seem to want to think about the fact that Governor Schwarzenegger won't just be able to go around making rousing speeches with the word "terminate" in every sentence -- he'll actually have to, you know, govern, i.e., engage in a tedious, unsexy bureaucratic process involving long, dull documents that bring changes, many of them unpleasant, to ordinary people's lives. Mark Paul of The Sacramento Bee is a grown-up and hasn't forgotten this non-entertaining fact. On Sunday he tried to imagine Governor S's first year in office: ...The camera crews sent to the Capitol to record the doings of California's new celebrity governor had largely occupied themselves broadcasting pictures of angry crowds of police, firefighters and librarians protesting the impending loss of their jobs from Schwarzenegger's elimination of the car tax, a local revenue source. ...[Schwarzenegger] soon grew grumpier as his audit committee delivered the bad news. The structural deficit for the coming year was $8 billion. Backfilling the loss of the car tax, as Schwarzenegger had quickly promised in order to get the police protests out of the news, would cost another $6 billion over a year and a half. The recent court decision throwing out pension obligation bonds added $2 billion more. And the governor's promise to shift property taxes from schools back to cities and counties, if implemented, would widen the budget gap by another $2 billion. The state's fiscal situation was "serious indeed," the audit group reported. With a gap of $18 billion there was no way to balance the budget without breaking Schwarzenegger's campaign vows to protect education and to not raise taxes, they told him. Faced with the inexorable arithmetic, the governor at first stalled. With no time left to write his own budget, in January he offered the version left by the departed administration, filling the deficit with dubious assumptions borrowed from Sacramento's handy inventory of wishful thinking: $6 billion from a tax amnesty; $2 billion from Indian gaming tribes; $5 billion from the federal government, $3 billion in spending cuts. Fiscal experts and pundits howled. From Washington, where the Bush deficits were mounting to astronomical heights, there came only gales of laughter. Perhaps California could get assistance, Washington wags said, from a new federal entitlement program: ASDC, or Aid to States with Defective Constitutions.... I'm not sure I buy the part where he realizes he has to "bypass the unyieldingly anti-tax conservatives in his own party" -- but read it to the end, because I do think something's going to happen to make it end the way Paul thinks it's going to end. (Thanks to BuzzFlash for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 11:00 AM |   Came out of nowhere to became a national cultural phenomenon and a household name? Yes. Regarded as an entertainer, but really more of a successful businessman? Yes. Took a form of entertainment that was considered marginal and tawdry and helped bring it into the mainstream? Yes. Producer of an entertainment product that is looked on with disgust by the liberal intelligentsia but eagerly embraced by the American heartland? Yes. Denounced as a hater of women despite a long-term marriage? Yes. Accused of racism? Yes. Willing to acknowledge past drug abuse? Yes. Icon of 1970s hedonism who now wants to be taken seriously as a political force? Yes. So why isn’t Larry Flynt going to be the next governor of California? posted by Steve M. | 9:30 AM |   And one more for California, from Bertolt Brecht: Andrea: "Unhappy is the land that has no heroes!" Galileo: "No. Unhappy the land that needs heroes." posted by Steve M. | 9:07 AM | Monday, October 06, 2003   For Cali's Election Eve I want to post a few excerpts from Cintra Wilson's essay collection A Massive Swelling, because her rants are about the recall-slash-Schwarzenegger-coronation even if they were written years before it happened. I wish Salon were still free with Cintra Wilson posting diatribes every week or two, but I'll content myself with this -- read up, Arnold: Most celebrities suffer from an advanced strain of Hubris, which leads them to believe that everything they do is cute and interesting. These stars believe that they are well-rounded, Renaissance-style “artists” and are capable of doing more than the thing that they originally gained success for -- i.e.: Actors start thinking they can sing, write, or direct. Models start thinking they can act, or sing. Authors and songwriters start thinking they can paint. Once in a great while, we will be surprised by the versatility of a talent, but most of the time we are hushed into a helpless viewing of an enormous ego performing far outside of its element, flailing grotesquely, wrongly and shamelessly. We shall call the unfortunate disease that compels a star to disgrace itself with an unbecoming art medium “Brunitis,” lovingly named after Bruce Willis’s blues album debut, The Return of Bruno, which left us all paralyzed with feelings of hopelessness and despair. ***************** ...if a person actually becomes famous, they are somehow ethically exempt from acceptable human conduct, and nobody, due to some grave universal error, is allowed to say anything when they step outrageously out of line. An acrobat friend of mine we’ll call Sparky was hanging out with a famous heavyweight actor, doing what Hollywood people do: drinking heavily and hanging around at three A.M. Being Themselves....The actor politely asked to see [Sparky’s] watch, and Sparky obliged.... The actor put the watch on the coffee table, pulled a .45 that had been concealed in his pants, and shot it, the incredible blast terrifying everyone in the living room into a sickly green silence. The actor started smirking, in his trademark multiplex fashion. To dispel the vapor of unsafe and terrible feeling that pervaded the room, another guest drawled, “Hey, Sparky, now why don’t you give him your necklace.” Everybody chuckled with blood-sweating relief, and the evening went on. The actor never apologized, Sparky bought himself a new watch, and the incident just became another laughable, aura-enhancing, iconic legend of how that star is such a bitchin’ psycho. ***************** Nearly all the men, young and old, that I met in L.A. openly kept Club Internationals and Penthouses around the house in stacks as high as their neck, dating back to the seventies, with dog-eared “favorite” shaved-crotch shots that they treated with the tenderness of old friends. Male Lip Service to Belief in Feminism vs. Male Desire of the Basest Forms of Feminine Exploitation is a big conundrum in L.A. One is left with the overall impression that most men in L.A. are so disgusted and confused by their own tacky sexual peccadilloes that they simply bury themselves in mounds of vice, and instead of eschewing the depravity of porn, try to embrace the normalness of it by having it be as much an obvious part of their lives as cigars or Wellbutrin. ***************** We treat our celebrities, regardless of artistic merit, like an untouchable royal family, which causes most of us to act like dribbling serfs despite the value of our individual lives. We regard ourselves as slow-minded, vermin-infested bedwetters when presented with the gold-plated auras of media success in others. The implication of Fame, in this value-warped society, is: You’ve made it. You and your grand talents are so bright, you are somehow, both physically and spiritually, light-years beyond all us bone-sucking hacks. I yowl in disgust at this bias. posted by Steve M. | 11:37 PM |   If you read a lot of blogs, which I assume most of you do, it's likely that you've already seen this column from National Review Online -- because an awful lot of bloggers have (quite properly) gasped at its unabashed stupidity. If you don't read a lot of blogs -- I know some of my readers don't -- prepare to gasp yourself as Jennifer Graham prefaces a defense of Rush Limbaugh's comments on black quarterbacks: A couple of years ago, the husband and I were eating out — something you don't do often with four kids under 10 — when he lowered his voice and gestured for me to look at the next table. I did so, expecting to find something peculiar, such as Karl Rove conspiring with Elvis. What I saw: A young family of five — father, mother, three young children, well-dressed, well-behaved, enjoying their night out, too. Except for the well-behaved children — mythical creatures with which we have no personal experience with — the family was unremarkable. But they were black. And my husband whispered that in a nation where 70 percent of black children are born into homes without fathers, it was great to see a picture-perfect black family dining together. "I almost want to go give the guy a high five," he said, somewhat sheepishly. He didn't, of course. When we left, we nodded, smiled at the children and promptly forgot the exchange...in which both of us unconsciously revealed that — horrors! — we are very desirous that black Americans do well. It's true. We desire Condoleezza Rice to do well! We desire Colin Powell to do well! We desire Clarence Thomas to do well! We desire practically every black American — with the possible exception of O.J. — to do well! Words fail me. Fortuntely, words don't fail TBOGG and Atrios and Steve Gilliard (scroll down) and Jesse at Pandagon and Tom Tomorrow. There's not much I can add to what they say, except perhaps in response to this statement by Graham: The people on Rosa Park's bus did not want her to succeed. Today, with few exceptions, they would. I don't believe that for a minute. When it comes to race, Americans -- liberal, moderate, and conservative -- are, generally speaking, starting to get it. But Americans don't like disorder. We don't like people who "make trouble" -- who disrupt routine and stop traffic and demand that a status quo that works for most people be changed because it's harmful to others. The Montgomery bus boycott was devastating to downtown businesses. In particular, if you believe the capitalism-worshipers at National Review Online, even the ones who denounced Trent Lott late last year, would have a good word to say about a modern Rosa Parks, you're deluding yourself. posted by Steve M. | 6:45 PM |   The LA Weekly says that, yes, a Gray Davis ally is behind at least one of the Gropinator stories. The Times maintains that none of the women came forward at the behest of Schwarzenegger’s opponents. That claim, however, is looking increasingly dubious. One of the three women in the story says she came forward at the urging of Jodie Evans, described by the Times as a peace activist and "co-founder of the women’s peace group Code Pink." At best, this is an incomplete, misleading description. Here’s what the newspaper should have said about Evans. She is actually a former close colleague of Gov. Gray Davis, a longtime Democratic operative and a friend of noted Democratic hit man Bob Mulholland. Evans is also the ex-wife of Westside financier Max Palevsky, the man who gave Gray Davis his first job in politics as the fund-raiser in Tom Bradley’s 1973 mayoral campaign. A few thoughts: * Why are Democrats so much worse at lowball politics -- more ham-fisted and more likely to leave fingerprints -- than Republicans? (Surely you don't think anyone will ever suffer any consequences for outing Valerie Plame, do you?) * There are reasons not to like Gray Davis. Wouldn't it have been nice if some part of the Democratic Party had established itself as a beachhead of anti-Davis but also anti-GOP sentiment? (The Democratic Party agrees on a message for practically the first time in its history, and the message it agrees on -- save Gray Davis's job -- is about as popular as toxic waste.) * If people with ties to an embattled Republican governor floated a story like this to Fox News, can you even conceive of any publication or group on the Right that would expose the connection rather than helping to circle the wagons? * Schwarzenegger is still a sleazebag. posted by Steve M. | 4:46 PM |   A mini-crisis has come up -- apologies for the light blogging. Work is the curse of the blogging classes. posted by Steve M. | 3:10 PM |   Maybe you'll get a different link, but when I go to this Amazon page, the page includes a "sponsored link" to something called Dixie Outfitters -- which sells Confederate-flag T-shirts (for example, this one, which scares me, and this one and this one, from the "girl's" page, which I just find creepy). Um, why is Amazon accepting sponsorship by proud supporters of this flag of racism and treason? posted by Steve M. | 1:17 PM | Sunday, October 05, 2003   If Schwarzenegger wins on Tuesday, we probably shouldn't be surprised. But we also shouldn't be disheartened. Think about what happened to the last two political figures who went through huge scandals involving sex -- Bill Clinton and Clarence Thomas. Bill Clinton's job approval ratings were strikingly high through the Monica period (early '98 to early '99) -- they were mostly in the mid-60s. But after Clinton avoided conviction in the Senate, his ratings went down somewhat. What's more, the taint of the scandal lingered. It hurt Al Gore in 2000 and it hurts Clinton's reputation (and the Democrats') to this day. Clarence Thomas had a similar experience. As Jane Mayer and Jill Abraham note in their book on the Thomas confirmation battle, Strange Justice, 47% of Americans believed Thomas and only 24% believed Anita Hill in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken in October 1991, the month of the Thomas hearings. But a year later there was a significant reversal of opinion: 44% believed Hill and only 34% believed Thomas. And by that time Thomas had become a national punchline, a fact that even David Brock's hit job The Real Anita Hill couldn't change. Americans don't seem to want to be told that sexual behavior disqualifies someone in the political sphere -- at least while the attacks threaten that person's career. But when the scandal fades, the accusations linger -- maybe because now it looks as if the guy got away with something sleazy. It makes no sense, but we don't want these people bounced, yet afterward we don't like the fact that they weren't bounced. So I think a year from now there's going to be a perception that a sleazebag got away with something in California and made it to the governor's mansion. This is going to taint the Republicans -- nationally, because Schwarzenegger is newsworthy coast to coast. Whenever Governor Schwarzenegger screws up, we'll be reminded, yet again, that he's also a groper who likes to goosestep. And it's going to make campaigning in California difficult for Bush. The Republicans really want this win. They should be careful what they wish for. posted by Steve M. | 11:39 PM |   The big news in England today is that Robin Cook, Tony Blair's former foreign secretary, says in a forthcoming book that Blair knew Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction that could hit targets outside Iraq's borders within 45 minutes. An excerpt from the book is in The Times of London; I don't have an online subscription to The Times, but this is from The Scotsman/Scotland on Sunday: In an explosive allegation which challenges the Prime Minister’s honesty and dramatically undermines the case for military action, Cook says Blair told him on March 5 he no longer believed Saddam had WMD ready to fire within 45 minutes. Cook claims John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, also "assented" that the Iraqi dictator possessed no such weapons.... ...Cook claims that during a private meeting with Blair he told the Prime Minister it was clear from a briefing he had from John Scarlett that Saddam had no WMD that could strike at strategic cities. Cook also said Saddam probably did have several thousands of battlefield chemical munitions and asked the Prime Minister if he feared the Iraqi leader could use these against British troops. Cook writes that Blair replied: "Yes, but all the effort he has had to put into concealment makes it difficult for him to assemble them quickly for use." Cook adds: "There were two distinct elements to this exchange that sent me away deeply troubled. The first was that the timetable to war was plainly not driven by the progress of the UN inspections. Tony made no attempt to pretend that what Hans Blix might report would make any difference to the countdown to invasion. The second troubling element to our conversation was that Tony did not try to argue me out of this view that Saddam did not have real weapons of mass destruction that were designed for strategic use against city populations and capable of being delivered with reliability over long distances. I had now expressed that view to both the chairman of the JIC and to the Prime Minister and both had assented to it." In a New York Review of Books article (which unfortunately isn't available online except to subscribers and purchasers), James Fenton points out that John Scarlett has, in effect, verified Cook's claim. On August 26, Scarlett was testifying at the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr. David Kelley, the weapons scientist who was the source of a BBC report undermining the Blair government's claims about Iraq. Scarlett said this about Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter, and Gilligan's source, Dr. Kelley: SCARLETT: ...certainly Andrew Gilligan, when quoting his source, said that the source believed that the report was relating to warheads for missiles. LORD HUTTON: Yes. SCARLETT: Which, in fact, it was not; it related to munitions, which we had interpreted to mean battlefield mortar shells or small calibre weaponry, quite different from missiles. Fenton, in his NYRB article, makes clear what this means: This, from Scarlett, was entirely new. After three months of daily public wrangling on this point, and nearly a year after the original dossier's publication, the Cabinet's head of intelligence finally vouchsafed the fact that the weapons of mass destruction Blair had thought merited a war were such as might be fired from mortars or small-caliber weapons -- devilishly tiny weapons of mass destruction. They were not installed in missiles that could reach Tel Aviv, Kuwait City, Cyprus, and other parts of the region. No wonder they have proved so elusive. And yet Tony Blair had written this in his foreword to the September 2002 dossier: Intelligence reports make clear that he [Saddam] sees the building up of his WMD capability, and the belief overseas that he would use these weapons, as vital to his strategic interests, and in particular his goal of regional domination. And the document discloses that his military planning allows for some of the WMD to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them. That was untrue, and it's obvious that in early 2003 it was widely known in the Blair government that it was untrue. posted by Steve M. | 6:33 PM | Saturday, October 04, 2003   Yesterday I told you about the backing and filling of George Butler, author of the book proposal in which Arnold Schwarzenegger either (a) said he admired Hitler or (b) said he kinda-sorta admired Hitler's line readings but really, really had no earthly idea what figures from history he admired. Apparently the discrepancy can be cleared up if we can get hold of outtakes Schwarzenegger took possession of in 1991, but ... well, Schwarzie's dog ate them -- or something like that: The campaign appeared to refine its position on release of the footage from Mr. Schwarzenegger's initial statements on Thursday, when he said he was prepared to release the film outtakes to the public but was not sure where they were. "I don't know if I have them now," he said in an interview Thursday afternoon. "If I find them, I would." Meanwhile, the campaign and Butler did an elegant little evasion two-step: ...Mr. Butler said yesterday that he had located a relevant transcript of about 20 pages. He read portions over the phone to a reporter, but he declined to provide the transcript in full without the authorization of the campaign. By the time that a spokesman for the campaign authorized the release at the end of the day, Mr. Butler could not be reached.... Mr. Butler said the book proposal had erroneously dropped a few words from a quotation attributed to Mr. Schwarzenegger. According to Mr. Butler's reading of the transcript, Mr. Schwarzenegger followed his comments about Hitler's public speaking by adding, "But I didn't admire him for what he did with it." He did not say, "I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it," as he was quoted in the book proposal and in early editions of The Times. Mr. Butler said he could not explain the inaccuracy. "I am amazed that something like that escaped me." Yes, isn't that amazing. Another fun detail: Yesterday, Douglas Kent Hall, a writer and photographer who co-authored Mr. Schwarzenegger's autobiography, "Arnold: The Education of a Body Builder," said that on two occasions around 1980 he, too, had watched Mr. Schwarzenegger imitate Hitler gestures and appearance for laughs. Mr. Hall provided a photograph of Mr. Schwarzenegger clowning around in a barbershop, pulling his hair down over his forehead, employing the end of a comb as a short mustache, and raising his fist. I haven't found the photo yet. I'd love to see it. posted by Steve M. | 11:58 AM |   "It really is an emerging situation," Limbaugh said on his syndicated radio talk show. "When I get all the facts, rest assured I will discuss it with you."... "I'm not even going to characterize this on how you should look at this in the press," said Limbaugh, who said he got more than 35,000 supportive E-mails. "I'm going to come clean when I get all the facts and details." --New York Daily News Hey, Rush, do you need an indictment in your hand before you can tell us for sure whether you yourself bought pills in a parking lot? posted by Steve M. | 9:07 AM |   Floyd Norris of The New York Times thinks the U.S. economy just had a terrific quarter -- but there's no reason to expect an encore: The third quarter was a phenomenal one for the American economy, which probably grew at an annual rate of above 5 percent. Corporate profits soared.... Overlooked in some of the analysis at the time was the most obvious fact of all: checks totaling $13.7 billion were being mailed out by Uncle Sam to millions of families.... Now comes the aftermath. The checks were in the hands of Americans in July and August, and clearly lifted spending in the back-to-school season. We don't have September numbers yet, but there was probably some stimulative effect then. But it's over now.... "The fading of the tax-cut impact means consumption growth will slow significantly in coming months," said Greg Jensen of Bridgewater Associates, an institutional money management firm. "There is some chance this decline will be muted if corporations start hiring, but there are no signs they are doing that yet. Without a significant increase in labor compensation, spending growth will decline significantly and we could be in the early stages of a renewed dip in the economy." posted by Steve M. | 9:02 AM | Friday, October 03, 2003   In Newsday, Ellis Henican hoists Rush Limbaugh on several of his own petards. Quite delightful. Here's one from 1995, about racial sentencing disparities in drug cases: "What this says to me," he told his listeners that day, "is that too many whites are getting away with drug use. Too many whites are getting away with drug sales. Too many whites are getting away with trafficking in this stuff. The answer to this disparity is not to start letting people out of jail because we're not putting others in jail who are breaking the law. The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too." Thanks to the good Roger Ailes for this one. (Roger thinks it may not be fair to chastise Rush for words he uttered about drugs at a time when he hadn't succumbed to them. I disagree. If you suddenly discover that a certain class of people doesn't consist exclusively of moral degenerates when you yourself find yourself in that class, maybe you were wrong all along to be such a mean-spirited son of a bitch.) posted by Steve M. | 5:13 PM |   The fun never stops: John Rocker, the former Atlanta Brave who's hardly the voice of discretion, has come out in defense of Rush Limbaugh. "All I will say, is people need [to] stop being so sensitive," Rocker said while appearing on Sporting News Radio's Peter Brown Show this week. "(Rush) wasn't trying to physically hurt or mentally hurt Donovan McNabb. I mean, he just wasn't doing it. I know Donovan is probably a little upset by it, but that certainly wasn't [Rush's] his intent. He has been a journalist and newsman long enough to know better than to intentionally, blatantly make a comment like that to intentionally offend somebody."... Yes, that John Rocker. In case you've forgotten the Sports Illustrated cover story on him, the good folks at Time Warner still archive it: * On ever playing for a New York team: "I would retire first. It's the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the [Number] 7 train to the ballpark, looking like you're [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It's depressing." * On New York City itself: "The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners. I'm not a very big fan of foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?" You're with your own kind now, Rush. posted by Steve M. | 3:39 PM |   Visitors from TBOGG: The Debra Saunders post is three posts down. posted by Steve M. | 2:03 PM |   One more: A well-known nationally syndicated radio host on Thursday publicly described being groped and propositioned by Arnold Schwarzenegger more than 20 years ago, when she was starting in the business and he was promoting his film "Pumping Iron." Joy Browne, a psychologist whose advice program is syndicated to nearly 200 stations nationwide, described on the radio an encounter with Schwarzenegger that took place during an interview about the documentary, which was released in 1977. Schwarzenegger fondled her legs under the table during the interview, she said. Then, she said, he left his Gold American Express card in the studio and insisted that Browne personally return it to his hotel room. According to Browne, who was in her late 20s at the time, she took her young daughter along to return the credit card. Schwarzenegger, she said, answered the door in tight pants, wearing no shirt. He had champagne. He asked her if her daughter could "take a walk for a while?" She declined.... --L.A. Times posted by Steve M. | 2:00 PM |   Just in case you don't know every last embarrassing detail of the Nazi allegations, this is what's in The New York Times today: In addition to the transcript, Mr. Butler wrote in his book proposal that in the 1970's, he considered Mr. Schwarzenegger a "flagrant, outspoken admirer of Hitler." In the proposal, Mr. Butler also said he had seen Mr. Schwarzenegger playing "Nazi marching songs from long-playing records in his collection at home" and said that the actor "frequently clicked his heels and pretended to be an S.S. officer."... The Times also reports that George Butler is backpedaling desperately: ...early this morning, Mr. Butler called back, saying he had driven back to his New Hampshire home and found another transcript of the interview, with different wording: "I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for his way of getting to the people and so on. But I didn't admire him for what he did with it. It's very hard to say who I admire, who are my heroes." Mr. Butler that his transcribers had had difficulty rendering Mr. Schwarzenegger's remarks because of his accent and said the only way to resolve the discrepancy was to listen to the tapes, which are in Mr. Schwarznegger's possession. And I guess Arnold really wasn't clicking his heels and imitating an SS officer -- he was really doing the Electric Slide, but Butler couldn't tell because Arnold's feet move with an Austrian accent. posted by Steve M. | 11:48 AM |   To look at something that's 20, 30 years old, that's just not fair and not relevant. If you have to go back to the '70s, '80s and '90s to make your point, maybe it's not a point. --conservative San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders, quoted in Howard Kurtz's Washington Post column today in response to charges that Arnold Schwarzenegger harassed women I didn't believe Gennifer Flowers when she said she had an affair with Bill Clinton. I felt the burden of proof was on the accuser. Then I didn't even listen to her whole story because her accusation -- that they had an adulterous affair to which she had consented -- seemed so, well, cheesy. Then I read Clinton's own testimony and learned that he lied to the American people when he denied the affair. Now I believe Gennifer Flowers. (I still don't believe Clinton when he testified under oath that he only had sex with Gennifer Flowers "once.'') ... I believe Juanita Broaddrick's charge that Clinton sexually assaulted her in 1978. I don't believe Clinton's attorney's denial. I believe that this White House -- or Clinton's outside operatives -- will do everything possible to smear the reputations of women who tell the truth about Clinton.... --Debra Saunders, writing on February 26, 1999, in the San Francisco Chronicle (quoted here) posted by Steve M. | 10:04 AM |   On ABC this morning, Jake Tapper said that a pro-Schwarzenegger demonstration is planned for today, organized by a group called “California Guys for the Arnold Lifestyle.” (Yeah, I realize “demonstration” is probably a strong word for this event, which I imagine will basically be a happy hour with picket signs, involving maybe eight guys whose real goal is to get on The Howard Stern Show.) This reminds me of an online-only Newsweek article I read earlier this week. The article suggests that over the past couple of years Vice, WYWS, and other “cool” magazines have been promoting what might be called the “Arnold lifestyle”: … in [WYWS], two birds are killed with one stone when a leading porn Web master says, “I love the NRA, less government, less taxes, supply-side economics and freedom of speech. I believe in family values....” Vice magazine’s conservatism is declared rather than inferred. Just before the American invasion of Iraq, its cover featured two concupiscent breasts, a sparkly crucifix and the motto, in Gothic script, THE WEST IS BEST. Last month, Vice’s cofounder Gavin McInnes wrote an article for Pat Buchanan’s magazine the American Conservative bearing the subtitle, “It’s getting cooler to be conservative,” in which he asserted it has “become fashionable to link liberalism with weakness and conservatism with honesty.” Joy Press, writing last November in The Village Voice, noted that the Vicers, like Schwarzenegger, seem equally amused by hedonism and fascism: "Hanging out with Ryan [hard-partying Vice photo editor Ryan McGinley] you feel like you're part of an infamous moment," brags McInnes. ". . . Even when you're puking or getting swastika's [sic] drawn on your passed out face you're thinking, 'I'm making history.' " And Vice’s most notorious article reflects an attitude toward sexual consent that seems rather Schwarzeneggeresque: Last year's "Vice Guide to Getting Reamed Up the Cake" outlined a five-month campaign to coax your reluctant girlfriend into getting "down with the brown." McInnes advises, "She won't like anal sex until her seventeenth time. It's an acquired taste. But you have to get her to want to go through that good pain, seventeen times. To get that response, you must employ the 'Pavlov's Dog' technique." The piece's underlying message is more Camille Paglia than Dr. Ruth: "Love hurts and sex is hostile." If Schwarzenegger wins, maybe one of these guys can be his press secretary. posted by Steve M. | 9:53 AM | Thursday, October 02, 2003   In the course of reviewing several books on George W. Bush for The New York Observer, Robert Sam Anson read The Faith of George W. Bush by Stephen Mansfield, so you wouldn't have to. So how did Bush find God? Mr. Mansfield reports that Mr. Bush’s journey from Jack Daniels to Jesus Christ commenced with his attendance of a 1984 revival meeting conducted by evangelist Arthur Blessit, holder of the Guinness "longest walk" crown, for having hauled a 12-foot cross 38,800 miles across 284 nations. Yikes. A quick Net search reveals that Blessitt (with two t's) is still around and, according to his home page, still schlepping that cross. (Here you can find a spec sheet for the cross, and the accompanying tire -- I think he wheels it, which seems like cheating.) Blessitt's site notes that he was a minister on Sunset Strip in the 1960s. (Cool shirt! Cool love beads!) On his site Blessitt also discusses the day he first joined hands and prayed with Dubya ('He had a firm strong but tender grip") -- though his story seems to suggest that Bush later gave Billy Graham most of the credit for actually converting him. (Blessitt's story about a subsequent attempt to make contact with Bush reminds me a bit of that awkward scene in Truth or Dare in which a schoolmate of Madonna's meets her backstage and it's obvious that Madonna can barely endure the old acquaintance's non-fabulousness.) Anson, in his book review, discusses a more recent prayer session between Bush and a marquee name of televangelism: [Bush's] crusade for "regime change" in Iraq was sealed by an Oval Office kneel-down with Reverend [James] Robison. (According to Mr. Mansfield, Mr. Bush’s decision-making in this case was divinely simple: "Saddam is evil …. Evil-doers have no legitimacy. Removing Saddam is a moral act. Case closed.") Again, yikes. posted by Steve M. | 11:39 PM |   With Schwarzenegger reeling from today's groping story, ABC News now declares that an old tale about Arnold (concerning Nazism, not sex) is true: ABCNEWS obtained a copy of an unpublished book proposal with quotes from a verbatim transcript of an interview Schwarzenegger gave in 1975 while making the film Pumping Iron. Asked who his heroes are, he answered, "I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it." He is quoted as saying he wished he could have an experience, "like Hitler in the Nuremberg stadium. And have all those people scream at you and just being total agreement whatever you say." The author of the book proposal was Charles Butler, the director of Pumping Iron. As the L.A. Times noted in 1996, this allegation appeared in Wendy Leigh's 1991 Schwarzenegger biography. Schwarzenegger later sued Leigh, but the suit concerned a 1988 newspaper article, not the book. Leigh went on to issue this apology: "Mr. Schwarzenegger has never espoused Nazi or anti-Semitic views, has never been an admirer of Hitler's evil regime, and he did not admire or approve of his father's alleged conduct." But the quote in the ABC story doesn't suggest that he admired Hitler's regime -- just Hitler himself, which isn't much better. The 1996 L.A. Times article, by the way, quotes an chargefrom a 1992 Spy article that in the 1970s Schwarzenegger "enjoyed playing and giving away records of Hitler's speeches." posted by Steve M. | 11:11 PM |   Meanwhile, in Iraq, as UPI reported a couple of days ago, we've utterly lost control of the guns: The U.S.-led coalition forces are losing a bidding war for sophisticated weapons still widely available in Iraq, nearly six months after the fall of Baghdad. Anti-occupation groups and supporters of the old regime are financially able and willing to spend more for weapons, a series of interviews with underground arms dealers by United Press International has determined. Adding to the concern, private contractors involved in security consulting to companies operating in Iraq say the street prices for some weapons appear to be increasing, indicating weapons are being bought at a higher rate than previously during the occupation. Some security experts, who asked they not be named, say the higher prices for common military staples such as the AK-47 assault rifle could indicate an impeding attack by anti-U.S. forces and supporters of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's Baath Party regime. In the case of sophisticated weapons such as the Russian-made SA-7 and SA-9 surface-to-air missiles, which are portable and operated by one man, the coalition forces are being largely outbid by arms dealers helping the resistance.... We're being outbid for arms, though one arms dealer, Mazen Mikhael, says that may not be the whole problem: "No, they have nothing to do with the prices," he said. "(The Americans) started (fighting the arms dealing) wrong. They let people sell weapons and buy heavy weapons. So no one pays any attention to them after that." Well, of course we did. WWCHD?* *(What Would Charlton Heston Do?) (Thanks to Rational Enquirer for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 6:09 PM |   So what happens if the Gropinator wins and really does roll back the car tax, as he's promised to do? UPI explains: Arnold Schwarzenegger may have charged into a dead-end canyon by vowing to repeal an increase in California's so-called car tax, which just so happens to be a major funding source for police and fire protection in the city. Almost immediately after Schwarzenegger promised this week to void a three-fold jump in the state's vehicle licensing fee [VLF], Democrats rounded up a bevy of police chiefs and firefighters for a news conference to warn that public safety faced a devastating hit should the $4.2 billion in additional fees fail to materialize. "Public safety can easily eat up three-quarters of a city's general-fund budget," noted Rick TerBorch, chief of police in Arroyo Grande and the president of the California Police Chiefs Association. "Given the extent that VLF funds local general funds -- 14 (percent to) 40 percent on average -- a cut in the VLF would be devastating."... Californians with reasonable information-processing skills already know this, but everyone else -- Cali idiots and non-Californians -- needs to know that Davis isn't even remotely responsible for the car-tax increase: In 1998, the state was flush with cash from the high-tech boom and the Legislature approved a Republican plan to reduce the VLF by two-thirds.... The plan, however, contained a provision that if economic times became tough, the VLF would automatically be restored to its original 2 percent. ..."One of the first things the public sector wants is police and fire protection," said state Sen. Richard Alarcon. "This VLF tax is exactly that kind of notion; it dedicates a specific source of revenue for police and fire services. It's a disingenuous message that somehow Gray Davis created this. He wasn't even in the Legislature at the time." So when Schwarzie refers to "the Davis administration's tripling of the car tax," he's lying, big time. posted by Steve M. | 5:40 PM |   Yes, the one-two punch dealt to Rush Limbaugh this week has been astonishing and gratifying. But even though all of this couldn't have happened to a more deserving person -- the resignation under pressure after he revealed himself to be not just a racist but an unapologetic racist, and now the front-page story in the New York Daily News that charges him with being a heavy user of illegal pills -- I still have to ask: Why is this the most coverage the man has ever received from the mainstream media? No one in American politics today has been as influential as Limbaugh for as long. Talk radio has veto power over virtually everything that passes through the political sphere in America, at every level of government, and that's the work of Limbaugh and Limbaugh imitators who ready (and properly) acknowledge his influence. Yet he and his fellow right-wing talkers have been virtually ignored by most newspapers, newsmagazines, and TV news operations -- the mainstream press doesn't challenge these blowhards' inaccuracies, discuss their vendettas, or pay any attention to their often overt prejudices. Limbaugh's a racist? That was an open secret -- but it wasn't The New York Times or CNN that documented it; it was the lefty group FAIR, years ago (the link is from 2000, when he was rumored to be in line for another job as a football commentator; the examples are from a 1995 FAIR book on Rush). For the most part, the Big Media paid no attention. I'm happy that the press has just noticed that Limbaugh exists. Glad you could finally make it. Sorry you weren't here earlier. posted by Steve M. | 12:41 PM |   Add today's story about a series of (newly interviewed) women who say Schwarzenegger groped them to this story, this story, and this story and make up your own mind whether we have, you know, a pattern. Conservatives will argue that there was a pattern with Bill Clinton, yet we didn't believe he was a sexual predator. Well, yeah, there was a pattern -- he was clearly a horndog, and only the truly naive found it implausible that he might be messing around with Monica. But stories about Clinton fall into two categories, often with regard to the same woman. Was Paula Jones a consensual lover, as David Brock originally wrote, or a victim, as per the later story? Was Clinton the considerate lover of Gennifer Flowers's book or the thug of her more recent accusations? Juanita Broaddrick wept on TV when she recalled Clinton; Monica Lewinsky squirmed with delight. What's the reality? What's his M.O.? Schwarzenegger stories, by contrast, seem awfully similar: Approach woman who is in no position to cause serious trouble. Make indecent proposal. Fondle breasts. Laugh. Repeat as necessary. That's not enough to convict the guy, but if I had a daughter, I'd hope she never got anywhere near him. posted by Steve M. | 9:46 AM | Wednesday, October 01, 2003   The Bush administration is seeking more than $600 million from Congress to continue the hunt for conclusive evidence that Saddam Hussein's government had an illegal weapons program, officials said Wednesday. The money, part of the White House's request for $87 billion in supplemental spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, comes on top of at least $300 million that has already been spent on the weapons search, the officials said.... --New York Times Was it Einstein who said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? posted by Steve M. | 11:24 PM |   In case you really, really missed the dumb, simple-minded political jokes of the Reagan era -- good news! They're back! The [Schwarzenegger] campaign plans a bus tour starting on Thursday in San Diego and ending on Sunday in Sacramento. Mr. Schwarzenegger will ride a coach christened "Running Man," after his 1987 movie. Supporters will ride on "Total Recall," like his sci-fi movie where he kills his wife. Reporters will ride on "Predator" and "True Lies." Oy. posted by Steve M. | 11:22 PM |   What a splendid idea -- a gay-hostile mutual fund: The Ave Maria Funds ... screen[...] out companies that offer non-marital partner benefits, regardless of whether they are same- or opposite-sex partners. "Our Catholic Advisory Board believes that marriage between a man and a woman is a sacrament instituted by God, therefore when a company offers to put a non-marital union on par with marriage, it's a slap in the face to the Catholic Church and such companies should be screened out," said Mr. Schwartz. ...The funds' other three screens include abortion, pornography, and contributors to Planned Parenthood. "The Catholic Advisory Board feels that Planned Parenthood is an evil organization that promotes and finances the murder of unborn children," said Mr. Schwartz. ...The top three holdings of the Catholic Values Fund are Automatic Data Processing (ADP), Genuine Parts (GPC), and Ross Stores (ROST). The top three holdings in the Ave Maria Growth Fund, Eli Lily (LLY), Patterson Dental (PDCO), and Factset Research Systems (FDS), will probably shift by the beginning of next year. Eli Lily, whose 11 main competitors offer non-marital partner benefits, recently announced it would do so as well as of January 1, 2004. "If they do in fact implement the policy, we're going to have to sell the stock on January 2," said Mr. Schwartz.... Ave Maria advisors include Phyllis Schlafly, former baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, and the former head of Domino's Pizza, Tom Monaghan. (Thanks again to Nathan Newman.) posted by Steve M. | 11:07 PM |   DISPOSABLE JOBS A new U.S. data series released on Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a "tremendous churn" of jobs every quarter... 7.2 percent of all jobs in December 2002 did not exist three months earlier, while 7.3 percent of jobs in September 2002 had disappeared by the end of the year -- a significant churn that cannot be seen by looking at the Labor Department's monthly payrolls report. --Reuters What does this mean? It seems to mean we're hiring a lot of freelancers and temps, as Nathan Newman explains. The new economy? posted by Steve M. | 10:52 PM |   A couple of weeks ago, an article in The New York Times reassured us that the Army and Army Reserve would meet their recruiting goals for the fiscal year that just ended yesterday. A couple of days ago, USA Today explained precisely why the Reserve is OK for now: Although the [Army National] Guard and Reserve say their retention rates have not suffered this year, the figures could be misleading. Under an order known as "stop loss," soldiers on active duty are prohibited from leaving the service until their tours end. Active-duty and Reserve commanders fear that when U.S. soldiers on yearlong rotations come home next year, many will choose to leave the service. Assuming they're actually allowed to come home next year. (Thanks to Skimble for the USA Today link.) posted by Steve M. | 10:37 PM |   COUNTERREVOLUTION IN ONE STATE? Lenin said, "Complete victory of the socialist revolution in one country is inconceivable," but apparently the government! yuck! folks of the Libertarian Party think they can have a counterrevolution in one state. AP reports: A group of libertarians announced a project Wednesday to get 20,000 Americans to move to New Hampshire and work to transform it into a "free state" with fewer laws, smaller government and greater liberty. ...The 5,000 members have already pledged to move to the selected state, Free State Project organizers said. They hope to increase their numbers to 20,000 within two years and start transforming the state into a national model of liberty. The Free State Project's Web site proclaims their desire for "the benefits of robust individual liberty" and denounces "the failings of the nanny state" (yeah, cops, an army, a minimum wage, a Pure Food and Drug Act, child labor laws -- who needs that crap?). You know, guys, when the public schools are abolished, the roads are untended and full of potholes, and the police are replaced with private militias, fewer and fewer people from Boston and its suburbs are going to venture north for leaf-peeping and outlet shopping, and lots of fairly well-heeled recent Granite State arrivals are going to start thinking about moving out. And meanwhile, you guys are going to be so busy trying to keep the Christian Identity libertarians from drumming the Legalize All Drugs libertarians out of your little club that you might forget to make arrangements to remove -- and remove again -- the (massive amounts of) snow. I really can't wait to see how this works out. posted by Steve M. | 5:29 PM |   Sad news: The new New York Times list is out and -- drat! -- Bill O'Reilly did manage to knock Al Franken out of the #1 slot. Oh, well -- Al had five straight weeks at #1; let's see how the blowhard does. It's a multiple-car culture-war (presidency-war?) pileup at the top of the list, by the way: The forces of darkness have O'Reilly at #1, Laura Ingraham's Shut Up and Sing! at #6, Reagan: A Life in Letters at #7, and, at #8, Persecution, David Limbaugh's account of the 23 years he spent in solitary confinement in a rat-infested prison in Marin County for owning a Bible (or something like that); lefties, libs, moderates, and Democrats have Al Franken at #2, Madeleine Albright at #3, Bushwhacked (the new Molly Ivins/Lou Dubose book) at #4, and Paul Krugman at #5. Hillary's at #10; the odd book out in the top ten is Walter Isaacson's Ben Franklin bio, at #9 (but he had a common-law wife and enjoyed life in France, so I'll put him on our side). This list will be up at the Times Web site sometime Sunday night. posted by Steve M. | 5:00 PM |   Have you noticed that we've moved from the age of the culture wars to the age of the presidency wars? --David Brooks in yesterday's New York Times Uh, no, David, I haven't noticed that -- because we haven't. Obviously you missed the recent unpleasantness in Alabama; now here's the latest guerrilla attack: GOLDEN, Colo. - A county treasurer is handing out booklets to potential jurors saying they are answerable "only to God almighty" and not to the law when it comes to deliberations. Jefferson County Treasurer Mark Paschall, a former state lawmaker known for his anti-abortion and pro-gun views, said the booklets are "my personal gift to the people." He said the booklets, many stamped with his name and elected title, were bought with $500 to $600 of his money and that of two political allies who work in the treasurer's office. The 61-page booklets promote "jury nullification," a concept promoted by conservative groups that say juries have the right to not only decide guilt or innocence, but also whether laws are just and adhere to God's law. "You are above the law!" the booklet says. "As a juror in a trial setting, when it comes to your individual vote of innocent or guilty, you truly are answerable only to God almighty."... --AP posted by Steve M. | 4:27 PM |   REAGAN REDUX In Fresno, Arnold Schwarzenegger fielded a question at a campaign event from a farmer wondering why California needed a state environmental protection agency when the feds already had one. Schwarzenegger had this to say: "What you just talked about is the waste -- overlapping agencies. They cost a fortune." He continued, "We have to strip that down and get rid of some of those agencies." ...Does Schwarzenegger mean the whole California Environmental Protection Agency, which is charged with upholding a variety of state laws to clean up the air and water? And how about another agency that Republicans in the state Legislature have been longing to gut, the California Coastal Commission? Would Schwarzenegger shrink this commission's budget to the point that it could no longer prevent development of the coastline? These are among the questions that aren't getting answers these days. Candidate Schwarzenegger is refusing to directly engage the political press corps. It is left to his paid handlers, like Rob Stutzman, to later explain what the candidate actually said or meant. So which agencies on the chopping block was Schwarzenegger actually talking about? "Not at this time," Stutzman told the Los Angeles Times with a laugh.... --from an editorial in The Sacramento Bee posted by Steve M. | 2:52 PM |   I can't believe we paid attention to the conventional wisdom about the California recall -- that having two prominent candidates was a sign that Republicans in the state didn't have their act together. Now, Schwarzenegger is surging and McClintock has high favorables, according to the new L.A. Times poll. It's the Democrats who can't get their act together. I'm in New York and I may be completely misunderstanding the nuances, but even from the East Coast the situation seem clear: Large percentages of California voters hate Davis and don’t want to be deprived of a delicious opportunity to act on that anger (and to stick it “the politicians” in general). The Democrats' message is: Davis is really OK, or maybe he's not that great but it doesn't matter because this is a right-wing conspiracy, so vote no, but if you vote yes -- or no -- you should also vote Bustamante, who everyone knows is no friend of Davis, who angered Davis by getting in the race, but who won't say anything bad about Davis (nor will any other Democrat). The Republicans' message is: Davis sucks. Vote Republican. Gee, guess which one voters find more compelling. But Cali Democrats have Goodness and Truth on our side, don’t they? There’s a budget deficit because the national economy is in the toilet. Enron was more to blame for the California energy crisis than Davis was. Well, sure -- but campaigns aren’t poli-sci seminars. The Democratic Party had about as much chance of getting the populace to grasp these notions in the heat of a recall campaign as Michael Dukakis had of educating voters about the First Amendment problems of mandatory allegiance-pledging in 1988. I'm going to seem like a turncoat for saying this, but Democrats should have abandoned Davis weeks ago. He should have resigned, and done so while it was still possible to say, “OK, he’s gone -- let’s go to court and find out whether we still have to have this recall, or whether we can just start fresh with Bustamante.” (At this point, the voters would never accept that outcome; now they want a kill, and for that purpose -- boy, am I sick to death of this metaphor -- they’ve found their Terminator.) In D.C. a few years ago, Gingrich resigned, then Livingston resigned. More recently, Trent Lott stepped down from his leadership position. Perle and Poindexter have left the Bush administration. And guess what? Republican domination of Washington continues -- in fact, the Republicans became more powerful in the election cycle following Gingrich's abdication. These guys were pieces on the chessboard, strategically sacrificed. The game went on, and the Republicans are still winning. (Hell, Nixon and Agnew resigned and Carter barely beat Ford.) The recall was a horrible idea. California in the hands of the Republican Party, with a telegenic know-nothing as figurehead, is an even worse idea. And now it looks as if it’s going to become reality. posted by Steve M. | 2:16 PM |   A little more about Robert Novak as a peddler of confidential information in the service of GOP partisanship, from Joe Conason's New York Observer column for August 6, 2001: Robert Novak ... admitted on July 12 [2001] that [Robert] Hanssen had served as his main source for a 1997 column attacking Janet Reno, then the U.S. Attorney General, for supposedly covering up 1996 campaign-finance scandals. Although Mr. Novak still believes that the information offered by Mr. Hanssen was valid, even he cannot help wondering whether Mr. Hanssen was “merely using me to undermine Reno.” If you do't think of Robert Hanssen as part of the right-wing conspiracy, read on: Apparently Mr. Hanssen would have been eager to use Mr. Novak against the Clinton administration, if a June 16 cover story published by Insight magazine is to be believed. The author, Paul Rodriguez, obtained numerous e-mails allegedly written by the spy in recent years, some of which include venomous invective against President Clinton and his appointees. The messages are full of speculation about subjects ranging from Mr. Clinton’s personal behavior to the Elian Gonzalez and China fund-raising affairs. One of the Hanssen e-mails concludes sardonically, “I guess from this you can determine that I am not a big fan of Clinton.” (Kudos to the good Roger Ailes for spotting this.) posted by Steve M. | 11:12 AM |   So Arianna's out, and yet another poll (from the L.A. Times) shows Schwarzie surging. No story I've read or heard has made the connection, but doesn't it seem that he made that big leap in the polls after he got nasty with her in the debate? That "Terminator 4" bit was the soundbite of choice in the day or two after the debate. And now he's on his way to a landslide win. Feminism, schmeminism -- attacking a "bitchy" woman was an excellent political move. posted by Steve M. | 8:23 AM |   This is pathetic: Schwarzenegger's main campaign event of the day — an early evening news conference in San Francisco — was interrupted by the entrance of comedian Dana Carvey, who attended at the invitation of the actor's campaign. Carvey, who was dwarfed by the bodybuilder candidate, is known for a "Saturday Night Live" sketch from the 1980s in which he played Hans, part of a bodybuilding team of Hans and Franz, who worshipped Schwarzenegger. As Schwarzenegger lambasted Davis for recent criticisms that the actor was inexperienced, Carvey bounced into a Fairmont Hotel room jammed with press and declared in an Austrian accent to the audible groans of reporters: "He's 10% body fat, but 40% in the polls." Carvey's appearance effectively ended Schwarzenegger's first question-and-answer session in five days. Is his whole term as governor going to be a vaudeville act like this? posted by Steve M. | 8:18 AM | Tuesday, September 30, 2003   Why do all the commie liberals in America hate capitalism? Why can't they be like these fine, upstanding, free-market-admiring Americans? At age 3, Timberland is too young to be embarrassed about being named after a bestselling brand of footwear, but his mother cringes. "His daddy insisted on it because Timberlands were the pride of his wardrobe. The alternative was Reebok," said the 32-year-old nurse, who is now divorced. "I wanted Kevin." The boy is not alone: five other Americans were named Timberland in 2000, according to social security records. A trend for naming children after favourite possessions is accelerating in brand-driven America. The records show that in 2000, 49 children were named Canon, followed by 11 Bentleys, five Jaguars and a Xerox.... Somewhere in hell, Ayn Rand is smiling. ****** (Yes, I know there's a Timbaland who produces and performs hip-hop and R&B music, but he has a decidedly normal real name, Tim Mosley.) posted by Steve M. | 4:41 PM |   If you haven't yet read the New York Times story about the new firm set up by Bush cronies to broker Iraq reconstruction deals, read it (Yahoo News reproduces it here for those who aren't registered with the Times). If you're rushed, just skip to the end and learn about the principals' many ties to the Bush administration and other unsavory organizations ("Mr. Rogers, the vice chairman who was a deputy assistant to the first President Bush and an executive assistant to the White House chief of staff, is also vice chairman of Barbour Griffith & Rogers, one of the best-connected Republican lobbying firms in the capital. Mr. Rogers founded it in 1991 with Haley Barbour, who became chairman of the Republican National Committee and is now running for governor of Mississippi. Shortly after leaving the White House, Mr. Rogers ... signed a $600,000 contract to represent a Saudi, Sheik Kamal Adham, who was a main figure under scrutiny in a case that involved the Bank of Commerce and Credit International..."). And Paul Krugman has more on Bushie cronyism in Iraq. Mathematically, it's like this: Bushies : post-Saddam Iraq :: Mafia : pre-Castro Cuba posted by Steve M. | 1:58 PM |   We were about to conquer and occupy a country that had suffers through years and years of repression, sanctions, and war, including the war we had just started. It's gratifying to learn that Donald Rumsfeld knew what was truly important at that critical moment: slapping down the State Department and kowtowing to right-wing political correctness. Newsweek reports:  LAST FEBRUARY, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner was trying to put together a team of experts to rebuild Iraq after the war was over, and his list included 20 State Department officials. The day before he was supposed to leave for the region, Garner got a call from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who ordered him to cut 16 of the 20 State officials from his roster. It seems that the State Department people were deemed to be Arabist apologists, or squishy about the United Nations, or in some way politically incorrect to the right-wing ideologues at the White House or the neocons in the office of the Secretary of Defense. The vetting process “got so bad that even doctors sent to restore medical services had to be anti-abortion,” recalled one of Garner’s team. Finally, Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to stand up for his troops and stop Rumsfeld’s meddling. “I can take hostages, too,” Powell warned the secretary of Defense. “How hard do you want to play this thing?” Pretty hard. Powell lost, as he often does in the councils of the Bush war cabinet, and Rumsfeld had his way. Only one of the 16 State officials was restored to Garner’s reconstruction team. It was a petty triumph, but emblematic of Rumsfeld’s dominating, sometimes overbearing style. In Rumsfeld's eyes, who do you think Enemy No. 1 really is -- Osama, Saddam, or Powell? posted by Steve M. | 1:00 PM |   Doing its best to keep people angry and stupid, the New York Post gives us this cover today. (Yes, in New York Post Land, the French are still "weasels.") From the accompanying Post story: DAMSEL IN DISTRESS Grim-faced First Lady Laura Bush looks as if she'd rather be anywhere else in the world yesterday as French President Jacques Chirac takes a stab at chivalry by planting a kiss on her hand. ...Intent on playing the charming host, the French leader repeated the hand-smooching performance when the first lady departed. Later, when reporters teased her about the kisses, the first lady said diplomatically, "I think that was just French hospitality." AP's take is a bit different: As Chirac bent low over her hand the first time, Mrs. Bush seemed slightly amused, smiling toward television cameras gathered to the side. Later, when reporters teased her about the kisses, she laughed. "I think that was just French hospitality," she said. Damn liberal media! Those kisses were a fate worse than death! (UPDATE: Tom Burka at Opinions You Should Have sees something in Laura's eyes that isn't distress....) posted by Steve M. | 10:11 AM |   Remember this (from USA Today) the next time the lead story of the day from Iraq is "Whoopee, we found a weapons cache!": In strategic sections of Iraq, just about every school, hospital or Baath Party building that U.S. forces come across is stacked high with ammunition, according to Gen. John Abizaid, overall commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. The number of sites is a logistical nightmare for the coalition, which can't remove the arms fast enough and lacks manpower to guard all the caches. Abizaid's military command estimates it will take five years to destroy all the explosives already confiscated. Meanwhile, unguarded sites become ready-made supply houses for guerrilla fighters. "There is more ammunition in Iraq than any place I've ever been in my life, and it is all not securable," Abizaid told senators in a Sept. 24 hearing. "I wish I could tell you that we had it all under control, but we don't." (UPDATE: Here's the New York Times story on the same subject. Disturbing quote from General Abizaid about sites we have -- ostensibly -- secured: "There's probably places where we've put Iraqi guards that may be vulnerable to people that would come in and bribe the guards." Infuriating illustration of how we're being lied to: "General Abizaid's sobering assessment directly contradicted reassurances from a senior Pentagon official earlier in September that 'all known Iraqi munitions sites are being secured by coalition forces.' ... Previously, American military and law enforcement officials in Iraq privately acknowledged that about 50 munitions sites containing explosives similar to those used in the recent major bombings had little or no security. But General Abizaid's comments now suggest that the number could be much higher." Two-way tie for the best imitation of Sergeant "I Know Nothink!" Schultz from Hogan's Heroes: "Senior Defense Department officials in Washington say they have only recently been made aware of the scope and seriousness of the problem.... A spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the top American civilian administrator in Iraq, said Mr. Bremer had also received briefings on the larger issue but was not familiar with security at individual sites.") posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | Monday, September 29, 2003   Two days before the end of 1988, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak ran a column calling George W. "the increasingly likely Republican candidate for governor ... engaging and articulate, more conservative than the president-elect and the family member with the purest Texas accent." In Texas, suspicious Democrats chortled, suspecting that they saw Karl Rove's handiwork churning forward with the same columnists that George W.'s mentor Lee Atwater had allegedly enjoyed planting stories with. --Bill Minutaglio, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty, p. 235 (With a nod to Josh Marshall and Atrios, whose coverage of the Valerie Plame story has been relentless and outstanding.) posted by Steve M. | 11:22 PM |   The guys at TheRevolutionWillBeLive.com want a million Americans to post the Ten Commandments on their front lawns. No, let me correct that: They want a million Americans to buy their Ten Commandments signs (at $19.95 a pop) and post them on their front lawns. No, let me correct that again: They want a million people to post the Ten Commandments, then they want the ACLU and the rest of us socialist-atheist godless liberals to get hopping mad and sue them ("we can watch as the ACLU and its deceived followers go absolutely crazy over the thousands, if not millions of 10 Commandments displays cropping up all over the American landscape"). Dumbasses. They don't get it: The ACLU believes you have an inalienable right to display the Ten Commandments on your own property. You just don't have the right to slather your religion all over public property in a pluralistic society in which people of every belief and nonbelief system are equal citizens. You know who'll really try to compel homeowners with Ten Commandments lawn signs to remove them? Not atheists. Not liberals. Not the ACLU. Neighborhood associations. And when this happens, you know who'll defend the Ten Commandments sign owners -- or who'll at least offer to? The ACLU. And as an atheist, I agree with that. posted by Steve M. | 5:49 PM |   Have you seen the cover of Time this week? Very gratifying. posted by Steve M. | 4:55 PM |   South Carolina -- still soft on treason: COLUMBIA, S.C. - A proposal to have the bodies of eight Confederate sailors lie in state in the Capitol has drawn criticism from some who contend giving them the honor would be unfair and disrespectful. The sailors' remains were recovered when the submarine H.L. Hunley was brought up in 2000 from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, where it sank shortly after downing the Union blockade ship Housatonic in 1864. The Hunley was the first submarine to sink an enemy ship during a war. A Hunley Commission member said no formal request has been made, but a Web site listing details of funeral plans had initially included two days in the Capitol.... The governor, speaker of the House and president pro tem of the Senate, who are all Republicans, have the power to decide who can lie in state. The head of the Senate, Glenn McConnell, is a Confederate re-enactor and is leading the effort to raise $40 million for a Hunley museum. I love this part: Other critics question the fairness of honoring Confederate soldiers while not giving U.S. soldiers the same treatment. "We have had many in South Carolina who have given their lives," said state Rep. Joe Neal. "And we have not had this kind of recognition for them." So they honor Confederates more than they honor South Carolinians who've fought for the U.S.? Great. You know, next time they want to secede, we should just say "Be my guest" and tell them not to let the door hit their treasonous asses on the way out. posted by Steve M. | 11:21 AM |   It's really perfect timing: Last night The New York Times posted a new best-seller list that includes the first appearance of Shut Up and Sing, a right-wing book by Laura Ingraham that, among other things, denounces entertainers who talk about politics -- at just about the exact moment when Gallup was releasing poll results showing Republican "actor" Arnold Schwarzenegger blowing away the rest of the recall field (he now leads Cruz Bustamante among likely voters, 40%-25%). And, at the same time, we got a trial balloon for the possible candidacy of yet another GOP entertainer -- Dennis Miller: The comedian Dennis Miller is being talked about, apparently seriously, as a Republican candidate for a statewide post. Three Republican strategists interviewed in the past week have said they want to draft Miller into politics. One, a prominent Republican operative and Schwarzenegger aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that once the recall election is over, he plans to recruit Miller to challenge Barbara Boxer for her U.S. Senate seat next year. The Schwarzenegger campaign even provided Miller a political audition of sorts this week. The comedian, famous for his raunchy and irreverent rants and his stint on "Saturday Night Live" more than a decade ago, provided the campaign's official post-debate spin in Sacramento Wednesday night. Later the same evening, Miller spoke at a Schwarzenegger rally. Last week, of course, a Kelsey Grammer trial balloon was floated by the Republicans. This is rank hypocrisy -- as Barbra Streisand, Janeane Garofalo, the Dixie Chicks, and a lot of other entertainers know. But I don't blame the GOP -- at the national level, at least, the media have rolled over for Schwarzenegger like lovesick puppies, and it's clear that this could happen anytime a Republican star runs. (Celebrities who are Democrats are deemed decadent and out of touch with ordinary Americans' values, but GOP registration clearly confers Teflon.) posted by Steve M. | 9:20 AM | Sunday, September 28, 2003   Bush and the Mrs. gave an interview to Peggy Noonan for the October issue of Ladies' Home Journal. I read it in a checkout line over the weekend. It's pretty much what you'd expect -- but I find this little anecdote a bit jarring, because the evening they're describing is 9/11: President Bush: But the day ended on a relatively humorous note. The agents said, "You'll be sleeping downstairs. Washington's still a dangerous place." And I said no, I can't sleep down there, the bed didn't look comfortable. I was really tired, Laura was tired, we like our own bed. We like our own routine. You know, kind of a nester. Like the way things are. I knew I had to deal with the issue the next day and provide strength and comfort to the country, and so I needed rest in order to be mentally prepared. So I told the agent we're going upstairs, and he reluctantly said okay. Laura wears contacts, and she was sound asleep. Barney was there. And the agent comes running up and says, "We're under attack. We need you downstairs," and so there we go. I'm in my running shorts and my T-shirt, and I'm barefooted. Got the dog in one hand, Laura had a cat, I'm holding Laura -- Mrs. Bush: I don't have my contacts in, and I'm in my fuzzy house slippers -- President Bush: And this guy's out of breath, and we're heading straight down to the basement because there's an incoming unidentified airplane, which is coming toward the White House. Then the guy says it's a friendly airplane. And we hustle all the way back upstairs and go to bed. Mrs. Bush: [laughs] And we just lay there thinking about the way we must have looked. Noonan: So the day starts in tragedy and ends in Marx Brothers. President Bush: That's right -- we got a laugh out of it. "We got a laugh out of it." The president of the United States. On 9/11. I'm just shaking my head. posted by Steve M. | 11:46 PM |   Boy, this sure makes me feel secure: When two Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials found a security guard asleep at his post at the Indian Point 2 nuclear reactor last year, the agency decided not to issue a notice of violation because there was no terrorist attack on the plant during the half-hour or so that the guard was sleeping, a Congressional audit has found. Isn't that a great standard? As long as a nuclear power plant (one that, by the way, happens to be about 30 miles north of Ground Zero) isn't actually under terrorist attack, it's OK for the guards to be asleep on the job. Or allegedly asleep. I love this: The report described the guard as "inattentive to duty," a term that the agency often uses in its reports. Agency officials say they cannot prove that an individual is asleep, even one who is not moving and whose eyes are closed. And the safety drills at Indian Point? It turns out that its owners are allowed to bring in ringers -- they can add security guards just for the drills, then dismiss them as soon as the drills are over: The General Accounting Office also said that auditors who reviewed 80 commission reports of force-on-force exercises found that at 12 plants, the operators added security guards, and at 35, guards got extra training. Most plants also took special precautions before the drills. "It's virtually cheating when you do that," said Peter Stockton, a senior investigator with the Project on Government Oversight and a former security adviser to the federal energy secretary. Mr. Zimmerman said the commission expected plants that made such improvements to do so permanently. But the General Accounting Office report said that a regulatory commission official, whom it did not identify, said the agency could require the plants to have on duty only the number of guards specified in their security plans, and that if they added guards before a drill and removed them later, the agency "could not hold a licensee accountable for ramping down" after the exercise. Unbelievable. posted by Steve M. | 11:29 PM |   A reporter for The New York Observer recently watched as Marion Nestle, an NYU nutritionist and food-industry gadfly, sorted through some promotional items she's collected: There’s the Oreo Cookie Counting Book, with the story line of an adorable toddler devouring 10 cookies "until there are none." There’s also Oreo Barbie, festooned in Oreo-patterned clothes and standing in a swirling sea of creamy white filling, and her counterpart, McDonald’s Barbie, who wears the fast-food giant’s uniform and serves a Happy Meal to little sister Kelly. Then there’s a glass baby bottle with a rubber nipple and a Diet Pepsi logo. "This one really bothers me," Ms. Nestle said, burying it back in its box. "I’ve been trying to get them to get rid of this for years. They finally told me they did." Yikes. Well, maybe that helps to explain this: Perhaps nowhere is the issue of obesity in America more vividly illustrated than at Goliath Casket of Lynn, Ind., specialty manufacturers of oversize coffins. There one can see a triple-wide coffin — 44 inches across, compared with 24 inches for a standard model. With extra bracing, reinforced hinges and handles, the triple-wide is designed to handle 700 pounds without losing what the euphemism-happy funeral industry calls its "integrity." When Keith and Julane Davis started Goliath Casket in the late 1980's, they sold just one triple-wide each year. But times, along with waistlines, have changed; the Davises now ship four or five triple-wide models a month, and sales at the company have been increasing around 20 percent annually. The Davises say they base their design specifications not on demographic studies so much as on simple observations of the world around them. "It's just going to local restaurants or walking in a normal Wal-Mart," Mrs. Davis said. "People are getting wider and they're getting thicker."... And this is before the widespread distribution of cheeseburger fries.... posted by Steve M. | 9:59 AM |

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(also here) "Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President" (from Scotland's Sunday Herald) "Yankee Go Home: Who's leading the anti-war movement? Congressional Republicans" (1999 Slate compilation of GOP antiwar quotes) "The Press vs. Al Gore: How lazy reporting, pack journalism and GOP spin cost him the election" by Eric Boehlert (from Rolling Stone) America's Taliban (Coulter, Falwell, etc.) in their own words Language: A Key Mechanism of Control (Gingrich's guidelines, still in use today) John Scalzi's "I Hate Your Politics" Column IS IT ANN COULTER -- OR IS IT DAVID DUKE? IS IT CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -- OR IS IT DWIGHT SCHRUTE? SORELY MISSED: * Americans Are Dumb * Anti-Coulter * Billmon (Whiskey Bar) * The Blog Report at Salon * Busy, Busy, Busy * Cursor * Greg T. * Happy Furry Puppy Story Time with Norbizness * The Jed Report * Little Green Fascists * Main and Cenral * Martini Republic * MaxSpeak * mfinley * Mykeru * Nathan Newman * The News Blog (R.I.P. 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