No More Mister Nice Blog

Tuesday, November 11, 2003   Skepticism About U.S. Deep, Iraq Poll Shows Motive for Invasion Is Focus of Doubts More than half of Baghdad's residents said they did not believe the United States would allow the Iraqi people to fashion their political future without the direct influence of Washington, according to a Gallup poll. ....Three-quarters of those polled said they believed the policies and decisions of the Iraqi Governing Council -- whose members were appointed in July by Coalition Provisional Authority Administrator L. Paul Bremer -- were "mostly determined by the coalition's own authorities," and only 16 percent thought the council members were "fairly independent." ...Forty-three percent of the respondents said they believed that U.S. and British forces invaded in March primarily "to rob Iraq's oil." While 37 percent believed the United States acted to get rid of the Hussein regime, only 5 percent thought it did so "to assist the Iraq people," the poll found. ...Almost everyone interviewed -- 94 percent -- said Baghdad "now is a more dangerous place than before the invasion," and 86 percent said that for the previous four weeks "they or a member of their household had been afraid to go outside their home at night for safety reasons," Burkholder said in his analysis. He noted that in the two months before the U.S. invasion, only 8 percent said they had experienced a similar fear.... --Washington Post posted by Steve M. | 11:39 PM |   Last week I wrote about a contractors' boycott of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Austin, Texas. Apparently Planned Parenthood is fighting back: Planned Parenthood will take over as general contractor in the construction of its South Austin clinic, which will offer a range of health services, including abortions, the organization's board chairwoman announced Monday. The construction, which began in August, halted last week when San Antonio-based Browning Construction withdrew. Browning said it could not proceed after it was unable to hire subcontractors and others walked away. Anti-abortion activists had distributed the names of those participating in the construction, and several were persuaded to drop their tools and turn down the business. Planned Parenthood officials said that since the announcement last week, they have been contacted by several construction-related companies willing to help build the $4.2 million clinic, which will provide services primarily for poor or uninsured women. Some will serve as anonymous consultants for Planned Parenthood, they said.... A number of elected officials, including three mayors of Austin (two current, one former), came to a recent Planned Parenthood fundraiser, which raised nearly $200,000. Sidney Blumenthal was a keynote speaker. A boycott leader made clear what really rankles him about abortion rights: Chris Danze, president of Austin-based Maldonado and Danze Inc., a concrete supplier who organized the boycott of the project, said Monday in a statement: "This is good news for men who use women as sex objects. Bad news for women and children. The boycott continues." Yup -- apparently the lead boycott organizer believes that all unwanted pregnancies result from sex acts in which women are "sex objects," and no unwanted pregnancy has ever resulted from an act of consensual sex. Well, I hope the Planned Parenthood plan works. In the meantime, Gunther at The Gunther Concept is fed up -- he's found a lot of articles and Web sites that mention participants in this boycott (see his blog posts here, here, and here) -- and, kicking it up a notch, he's providing the boycotters' names, addresses, and e-mail addresses. Yeah, that might seem harsh to you. It does to me, too. Of course, they are contractors -- they're in the phone book. Certainly, if they're in your area, you should never, ever hire these people. Gunther says, Please use this information responsibly. Be polite but firm. Let them know that you don’t appreciate their infringement on individual rights. Call often. For businesses, let them know that you will boycott them and encourage others who do business with them to do the same. In other words, no harassment. Of course, I don't know at what point you'd actually be guilty of harassment if you contacted these people -- this article from the July Texas Monthly, about an embattled Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, Texas, suggests that it's rather hard to cross the line into illegality in the state: DYANN SANTOS FIRST SAW THE "Wanted" posters as she drove to work one morning in the summer of 1999. They were hard to miss. Every time she stopped at a red light or took a right turn on her route from College Station to Bryan, a poster bearing a photo of the clinic's doctor fluttered at eye level from a street sign or a telephone pole. "Someone knew my way to work," she said. "Someone had planned this out for me to see." Soon her neighbors began receiving postcards. "Under current Texas law, abortion providers, like convicted sex offenders, are required by state law to register with the State," they read, listing her home address. Farther down, the tone became more informal: "Please feel free to call Dyann at [her home number] or possibly catch her in the Wal-Mart parking lot. She drives a small 1999 silver Honda with Texas Tag [her license plate number]." Dozens more postcards arrived without return addresses. One listed the "body count" Santos was responsible for and the warning "God has his own way of keeping score!" And so she took precautions. She transferred her teenage son to a private school. She took different routes home. She changed her phone number, twice. She stopped taking walks at night.... Debbie McCall, the clinic's community service director, ... commutes from the town of Crockett, 72 miles away, along a two-lane road that threads through farmland. "I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck," she recalled. Still, she had little recourse. As with the anonymous mail and the "Wanted" posters, no one had broken the law. No threats of "imminent bodily injury," as the law requires, had been made. "They go right up to the edge of the law," observed Melissa Reyna, a nurse who worked at the clinic for three years. "They keep pushing that line a little further. The concern when I worked there was that someday, someone—that one loose cannon out there—would step over the line." Yes, folks -- apparently, in the Great State of Texas, nothing described in the paragraphs above is "over the line." The good news is that the Bryan clinic survived contractor skittishness and anti-abortion pressure: "Local businesses were pressured not to work with us," Santos said. "Electricians turned us down. The security company backed out. The plumber would not park his company van outside. The gates, the fences, the roof—everything came from out of town. The contractor drove in from Houston. Even people who had done business with us for twenty years were afraid." Let's hope the Austin boycott fails as well. Meanwhile, as this Focus on the Family Web page cited by Gunther makes clear, the boycotters think they're going to win, and win big: Danze, meanwhile, isn't stopping with one abortion clinic. He has plans to round up like-minded suppliers to deny pest control and even bottled water to the entire abortion industry in Austin. So this is war. posted by Steve M. | 1:38 PM |   The New York Times reports that the prescription-drug cartel has declared war: Brand-name drug makers have stepped up their drive to curtail exports of cheap medicines from Canada to the United States, raising prices in Canada for the first time in several years and imposing new restrictions on sales to Canadian pharmacies. Using loopholes in Canadian government price controls, several companies have raised drug prices 4 to 8 percent since the summer. Pfizer Canada recently notified customers of price increases on "the majority" of its drugs, the first such increases in a decade. GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly and Bayer have also lifted prices on many of their prescription drugs, including Zantac, Prozac and Cipro. On another front, AstraZeneca has imposed stricter sales conditions on Canadian drugstores, requiring written assurance that its products would not be made available for export.... And if that doesn't work, the drug kingpins might try this: One drug industry executive in the United States said that the gap in American and Canadian medicine prices might discourage manufacturers from releasing some new drugs in Canada. "From now on, if the Canadians don't give us a price close to our United States price, I'm not selling it there," he said. Buying prescription drugs is really starting to seem a bit like buying those other drugs we used to buy: ...Billy Shawn, owner of The Canadian Drug Store, one of the biggest online operators, said ... that doing business had become more difficult. "The guys who really need to get supply, get it," Mr. Shawn said. The difference, he said, was that the clampdown by the pharmaceutical groups "has changed the amount of effort it takes to purchase supplies every day." "What used to take 15 minutes now takes two or three hours," he said. But seriously: It was inevitable that a few well-meaning American politicians were going to be no match for Big Pharma. I fear the drug kingpins are going to win this fight -- unless we fight back harder. Remember, a lot of these guys make nonessential over-the-counter drugs and other items. These products can be boycotted. posted by Steve M. | 9:38 AM |   A group of more than two dozen House of Representatives Democrats on Monday said they had introduced a resolution urging President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "This resolution would make official what so many members of Congress already believe -- that the soldiers in Iraq and America's foreign policy would be helped greatly if Donald Rumsfeld would leave," Rep. Charles Rangel of New York said in a statement. Rangel said he so far had 25 co-sponsors to the resolution who were "willing to stand up and say what so many policy makers know, that the first step to bringing our troops home is to send Donald Rumsfeld home." ... --Reuters It's a start. posted by Steve M. | 7:03 AM | Monday, November 10, 2003   Shorter Newsweek cover story: Swallowing bullshit whole, Dick Cheney helped get us into an endless war on false pretenses -- but he isn't nearly as nuts as, say, Laurie Mylroie. There has been much speculation in the press and in the intelligence community about the impact of the conspiracy theories of Laurie Mylroie on the Bush administration. A somewhat eccentric Harvard-trained political scientist, Mylroie argued (from guesswork and sketchy evidence) that the 1993 World Trade Center attack was an Iraqi intelligence operation. When AEI published an updated version of her book “Study of Revenge” two years ago, her acknowledgments cited the help of, among others, Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of State John Bolton and Libby. But Cheney aides say that the vice president has never even discussed Mylroie’s book. (“I take satisfaction in the fact that we went to war with Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein,” said Mylroie. “The rest is details.”) Oh, but here's my favorite quote from the story, about Ahmed Chalabi: Chalabi was hailed in some circles, especially among the neocons at AEI, as the “George Washington of Iraq.” But the professionals at the State Department and at the CIA took a more skeptical view. In 1999, after Congress had passed and President Bill Clinton had signed the Iraqi Liberation Act, providing funds to support Iraqi exile groups, the U.S. government convened a conference with the INC and other opposition groups in London to discuss “regime change.” The American officials proposed bringing INC activists to America for training. Chalabi’s aides objected. Most of the likely candidates were Iraqi refugees living in various European countries. By coming to the United States, they could lose their refugee status. Some Pentagon officials shook their heads in disbelief. “You had to wonder,” said one who attended the conference, “how serious were these people. They kept telling us they wanted to risk their lives for their country. But they were afraid to risk their refugee status in Sweden?” posted by Steve M. | 11:35 PM |   We get just about every catalog in creation at the Nice Blog household, but we were a bit surprised to get this one today: Crossings -- or, rather, Crossings by Smith & Wesson. No, there aren't any guns in the catalog. There are one or two knives. Mostly it's knickknacks and "collectibles" (love that genuine cowboy boot lamp) and yuppified Western wear of a kind that wouldn't be out of place in, say, the Sundance catalog. Now, you may recall that a few years ago Smith & Wesson cut a deal with the Clinton White House under which the company would be dropped from gun suits and would abide by a set of restrictions on its sales (e.g., it wouldn't sell guns at any gun show where dealers didn't do background checks). When that agreement was announced, gun fetishists went, er, ballistic. A highly effective boycott began. You don't mess with gun fetishists. And now, of course, the occupant of the White House is the NRA's best friend. There's a strong likelihood of a pro-gun Democratic nominee for president in Howard Dean, and every other Dem in the race desperately trying to tap into that NASCAR/Toby Keith/gunrack vote. Yet S&W is still apparently trying to appeal to us soft-underbellied, Clinton-voting gun-grabber scum. I wish 'em luck with this, but I think, alas, they're misreading the zeitgeist. posted by Steve M. | 11:25 PM |   Rashomon time: An AP story I found at AOL says the Taliban have seized control of four Afghan provinces: Taliban rebels have gained control over four districts in Zabul Province in southeastern Afghanistan, Afghan Islamic Press reported Monday, quoting a senior provincial official. The Pakistan-based news agency quoted Maulvi Muhammad Omar, deputy governor of Zabul, as saying the four districts that have fallen under control of Taliban are Atghar, Nowbahar, Shenkay and Shamalzi in the southern part of the province. "No government official is there to run the affairs of the districts and these areas are occupied by Taliban or their supporters," he said. Omar also said Taliban are suspected of being involved in several bomb explosions, including a failed bomb attack on the governor, and the kidnapping of a Turkish engineer in the province recently. The engineer is still missing.... But Agence France-Presse says tribal chiefs, not the Taliban, are in charge: Afghan authorities have lost control of at least seven districts in troubled southeast Zabul province, the deputy governor said Monday. But tribal chiefs and elders, rather than resurgent Taliban forces, were in control of the areas, Mawlawy Mohammad Omar said. "There is no government control over Atghar, Naw Bahar, Shinkay and Shamazai in the south of the province," deputy Zabul governor Omar told AFP by satellite phone from the provincial capital Qalat. "There are some other districts such as Shahjoy, Daychopan and Khak-e-Afghan where the government has no control but the Taliban do not control these areas either." He said Taliban were fighters were moving around the districts on motorbikes. "But they aren't powerful enough to threaten the administration," Omar said.... Well, one thing's clear: We're not in charge, nor are our allies. ***** "Who's in charge here?" "Ain't you?" --from the screenplay of Apocalypse Now posted by Steve M. | 2:56 PM |   Busy day. Apologies for the limited blogging. posted by Steve M. | 2:47 PM |   This is from a new free daily paper called amNewYork that apparently doesn't have a Web site yet: Feds Snub Lady Liberty DC won't pay for extra security to reopen symbol of America The world's symbol of freedom -- the Statue of Liberty -- remains closed more than two years after the Sept. 11 attacks. Tourists can still visit the grounds and buy souvenirs, but they can forget about climbing the 354 steps to the torch. That's because the National Park Service, Lady Liberty's caretaker, said $5 million worth of additional security is needed to protect the terrorist's dream target. Until then, visitors can only mill about the base. "We've always thought about how to reopen the Statue of Liberty," said National Parks Service spokesman Brian Feeney. "We stil have security issues." But, the feds aren't paying.... The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, the nonprofit that oversaw its 1986 restoration, launched a "Reopen Lady Liberty Campaign" in late September. The campaign wants to raise the $5 million through private donations. Already the Folger Coffee Company pledged up to $1 million -- including $1 for every special Folger's seal returned by customers.... The 58-acre island in New York Harbor was closed to the public after Sept. 11. It partially reopened in Dec. 2001, after metal detectors were installed to screen passengers before boarding the ferry -- an hourlong process. "At the present time, there is no access to the interior of the Statue of Liberty Monument. The monument and the museum at its base remain closed temporarily as a security measure," the Parks Department has said on its Web site for almost two years.... Five million bucks. That's less than two cents per American citizen. Do you think if we asked the American people and put it to them that way, they'd be willing to pony up for one of our most important national symbols? Think they might just wonder why it hasn't been done yet? But it wouldn't surprise me if the Bushies are hoping to open the doors to coincide with the Republican convention next year. Maybe Jogger George will be the first guy to get to the top, doing wind sprints up the 354 steps to show how fit he is for a second term. (Cheney will presumably have business to attend to elsewhere.) Hey, and maybe, prior to that stunt, the GOP will seize on the issue by introducing a bill in Congress to reopen the statue -- but with union job protections removed for workers there (for "security reasons"). Then, if Democrats balk, suddenly the inaccessibility of the statue will be their fault. It's a cheap trick, but it worked before. posted by Steve M. | 9:26 AM | Sunday, November 09, 2003   BUSH’S LEAD against the five leading Democratic contenders - Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Richard Gephardt - has shrunk to a low of 4 points, vs. 6 points a month ago. Dean continues to poll best against Bush, with 45 percent of respondents saying they would vote for him, compared to 49 percent for Bush. Last month, 43 percent would have voted for Dean and 49 percent Bush. In a race against Clark, Bush would win 48 percent of the vote vs. 45 percent for Clark. Last month, those numbers were 49 percent and 43 percent. ...The narrowing of Bush’s lead may be due to an increasing pessimism about U.S. efforts in Iraq. In the NEWSWEEK poll, 53 percent said they don’t believe the administration has a well thought out plan for post-war Iraq; that represents a 5 percent increase since October. Sixty percent feel the United States is investing too much money in operations in Iraq, a statistic that has remained constant since September. The number of respondents who feel going to war with Iraq was the right decision has also slipped considerably in the past few months, from more than two-thirds in July to just 55 percent this week. --Newsweek This despite the fact that approval of Bush's economic policies went up in response to the positive economic news last week (though more people still disapprove of Bush on the economy than approve). posted by Steve M. | 11:20 PM |   WHAT'S ACCOMPLISHED? Obviously not the mission. Billmon has a great photo of an L.A. provocateur's take on the slogan from the aircraft carrier photo op -- and if you like that, here's more. posted by Steve M. | 10:59 PM |   Milt Bearden, a retired CIA counterintelligence officer, thinks the enemy we're facing in Iraq has a plan that's very well thought out: The insurgents' strategy could have been crafted by Sun Tzu, the Chinese military tactician, who more than 2,500 years ago wrote, in "The Art of War," that the highest realization of warfare is to attack the enemy's strategy. So it was probably no accident that as American forces approached Baghdad, expecting tough street fighting, the bulk of the Iraqi forces melted away. The American troops, forced to shift strategy on the run, have been bedeviled by the consequences of those early chaotic days ever since. Next, according to Sun Tzu, you attack his alliances. This, again, is what the Iraqi insurgents did. Presumably acting on the assumption that the Jordanians were being too helpful to the United States, insurgents detonated a car bomb outside the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad on Aug. 7, killing 11 and wounding scores. Less than three weeks later, as an increased role for the United Nations was debated, suicide bombers attacked the organization's headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people, including the United Nations special representative to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. Then, in mid-October, as proposals for an expanded peacekeeping role for Turkey were argued, a suicide bomb detonated outside the Turkish chancery in Baghdad, killing one bystander and wounding a dozen others. When Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, began in late October, Baghdad was rocked by a series of suicide bombings that killed dozens and wounded hundreds, including an attack on the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In addition, there have been countless attacks against individual Iraqis viewed as allied with the United States, whether police recruits, members of the Iraqi Governing Council or figures in the judiciary. A pattern of attack against American allies seems clear.... Next, Sun Tzu prescribed, attack their army. This is occurring with increasing lethality.... Interesting. posted by Steve M. | 10:56 PM |   So whatever happened to the heavily armed paranoids who thought (hoped?) that the Y2K bug was going to bring about the total collapse of American society? Well, as the Arizona Star reports, some of them now travel hundreds of miles to go immigrant huntin': Border militias claim success ...In the brush, half a dozen heavily armed men wait quietly in the gathering darkness as the voices approach. Suddenly, the voices and the footsteps stop. After a long moment of silence, a man whispers in Spanish, "Let's go, someone's coming." There is more movement in the brush as some of the armed men are suddenly visible, hurrying toward the sounds, searching for the source of the voices, but they've disappeared into a maze of piled dirt and brush. In the darkness, the nearest visible landmark is the water tower at the Border Patrol's Douglas Station, but these aren't Border Patrol agents. They're members of Texas-based Ranch Rescue and a contingent of Missouri Militia patrolling private property they say is being invaded by criminal trespassers - some of the hundreds of illegal entrants who cross through the Douglas area each night. Although the patrol came up empty-handed Friday night, Ranch Rescue founder Jack Foote considers it a success. Two groups of intruders were forced off the property as the patrol moved through and at least two people were picked up by Border Patrol agents responding to a report from a Ranch Rescue observer in a tower back at the ranch house. "Two down, 1.5 million to go," Foote said. Best of all, he said, his volunteers got a taste of what's in store for the next two weeks as "Operation Thunderbird" gets under way.... I wasn't making that Y2K part up, by the way: Tom Kinderknecht, 50, a retired firefighter and one of five Missouri Militia members who drove in together Thursday night, said he grew up in a farming community and learned as a boy what it meant to "be ready and to be self-reliant." He said he's not given to conspiracy theories, but the Y2K scare reawakened those early lessons and led him to join the Missouri Militia, whose members see themselves as a service and support group for law enforcement and the community, as well as a reserve of manpower for the military when needed. But hey, these guys are just being good citizens, right? Well... Jennifer Allen, director of the Border Action Network, said the failure of federal, state and Cochise County officials to arrest and prosecute self-proclaimed border enforcers allows groups like Ranch Rescue to flourish. Allen said that in Texas, Ranch Rescue members were arrested after an El Salvadoran couple claimed they were beaten and terrorized by Ranch Rescue members and property owner Joe Sutton. Four others, all Mexicans, have since come forward to claim they were subjected to similar treatment by the group on Sutton's ranch. Ranch Rescue has been named along with Sutton in a civil suit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Another criminal case, against Ranch Rescue member Casey Nethercott, continues in Hogg County, Texas. "I think it's incredibly dangerous. Those are the cases that are public, that we know about," Allen said. "We're concerned about the cases we haven't heard about."... Look, let me state the obvious: First you have to rejigger the entire economy so that businesses looking for cheap employees (hello, Wal-Mart) and well-off individuals looking for household help no longer count on a steady supply of illegals. Then talk to me about the scourge of swarthy illegal border-crossers. posted by Steve M. | 11:40 AM |   SO-CALLED LIBERAL SOFT NEWS Try to imagine Fox News or The Washington Times or the New York Post or Rush Limbaugh doing a feature story on someone who was a big part of the Dr. Laura boycott -- and not just a story, but a completely positive story, with no scorn for the boycott and warm-fuzzy details about the profiled boycotter. Unimaginable. But here's the "liberal media" equivalent from yesterday's New York Times, a profile of the guy whose Web site BoycottCBS.com was a big part of the movement to get the TV movie about the Reagans removed from broadcast TV. Listen up, Ann Coulter and Andrew Sullivan: here's a sample of the Times's ideologically pure left-wing invective: Mr. Paranzino, 37, is too modest to take all the credit, but he can scarcely believe the mountain he has moved from the cluttered downstairs den of his suburban Washington home, where he and his son, Cameron, 2, click away on side-by-side desktop computers. Each computer is now choked with the hundreds of thousands of e-mail messages that became a critical part of the campaign against CBS, and hundreds more pour in by the hour. "I'm happy. I'm excited. But there's still a problem that it's on Showtime," Mr. Paranzino said on Thursday as Cameron connected numbered dots on a Sesame Street software program. "I'm grateful that it's not going into 110 million homes as it would have on CBS. But it's still a smear of a great American leader on a network that'll reach 15 million homes, and I'm still getting hundreds of e-mails telling me, `Don't stop, keep the movement alive.' " Coulter, Sullivan, and others who describe the Times as ideologically rigid, as analogous to the conservative press or right-wing talk radio, are lying to you. posted by Steve M. | 9:52 AM | Friday, November 07, 2003   So are the right-wingers going to declare Jessica Lynch a Bush-hating traitor now? Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch has accused the military of using her capture and dramatic nighttime rescue to sway public support for the war in Iraq. Lynch said she's bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal in Iraq. She said the U.S. military manipulated the story of her dramatic rescue -- and shouldn't have filmed it in the first place. ...The 20-year-old private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. In an excerpt reported Friday in the New York Daily News, Lynch said, "They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. It's wrong." Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers Rambo-style and suffering knife and bullet wounds. In the interview, Lynch puts to rest the stories that she fought until her ammunition was gone, and that she was shot and stabbed. She said, "I did not shoot, not a round, nothing." ... posted by Steve M. | 9:11 AM |   After reading about President Bush's speech calling for democracy in the Middle East -- a speech that's likely to do more harm than good, making regional supporters of democracy look like stooges of the Great Crusader -- it's interesting to turn to Ronald Steel's review of several books about Woodrow Wilson in the latest New York Review of Books (the article, unfortunately, isn't available free online). Steel focuses on Wilson the unilateralist -- the president who sent troops to Latin America to, as he put it, "teach the South American Republics to elect good men." Steel writes: In seeking justification for the use of force, the word "democracy" is the mantra. When Wilson insisted that "the world must be made safe for democracy," he was expressing not a hope but a mandate. For Wilsonians the democratic imperative is not negotiable. Like most other faiths, it is intolerant of every system other than itself. The paradox of democracy is that it can be intolerant in its absolutist demand for tolerance. It does not hesitate, whether under liberals or conservatives, to use military power to enforce surrender to its imperative In this it is like other crusading monotheistic faiths. To be indifferent to the spread of American-style democracy is to be unpatriotic. To ask why the world must be made safe for democracy is a subversive question. Steel goes on to argue that Wilson wanted to spread democracy because he believed democratic countries don't fight one another, and thus the spread of democracy would be in America's self-interest. He adds, ...Wilson's political genius, from which his successors have learned much, was to formulate a policy that corresponded perfectly with America's strategic and political interests, and to phrase it in vocabulary that made it seem idealistic and self denying. Sounds a bit familiar. posted by Steve M. | 9:03 AM | Thursday, November 06, 2003   We are in a full-fledged culture war, and America's mullahs are winning. It's not just partial birth and Terry Schiavo (or Saint Ronald Reagan): AUSTIN, Texas - One of the state's largest construction companies backed out of a project to build a clinic where abortions would be provided, after concrete suppliers boycotted the job. Browning Construction Co. of San Antonio pulled out Tuesday, about six weeks after the start of the boycott. The company wanted out of the contract because it could not retain subcontractors and suppliers "due to events beyond our control," Browning owner James Browning said. The Austin Area Pro-Life Concrete Contractors and Suppliers Association announced the boycott shortly before the project began. Chairman Chris Danze, owner of Maldonado and Danze Inc., said every concrete supplier within 60 miles of Austin had agreed not to supply materials. Danze called Planned Parenthood "a social movement that promotes sexual chaos, especially of our youth."... A Planned Parenthood spokeswoman said one subcontractor, which she would not identify, had received more than 1,200 calls from around the country warning it not to participate. She said contractors were threatened with the loss of business if they did. When do we start fighting back? posted by Steve M. | 7:17 PM |   I don't know if what he's saying about "momentum" is in any way based in reality, but I don't care much -- I'm just glad he's saying it. Go Charlie! Rangel Says Dump Rumsfeld Movement Gains Momentum on Capitol Hill New York Democrat Charles Rangel, who received medals for valor and for being wounded on the battlefield in Korea, says he was "pushed to do this," referring to his call for President Bush to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Rangel says the Iraq occupation reflects a "military operation gone wrong." The Harlem representative says there is now a resolution circulating in the House asking for Rumsfeld's removal, and "several members of Congress want to sign on." He categorizes the Rumsfeld-dumpers as "frustrated Republicans, progressive Democrats and members of the Congressional Black Caucus." "I was pushed to do this," Rangel says. "There is a lot of frustration [on Capitol Hill] with the way things are going" with the war. He cites Rumsfeld's "gross mismanagement" of the war and his "insensitivity toward the troops and their families."... --BET.com posted by Steve M. | 6:45 PM |   Half of troops say re-up is out WASHINGTON - The stress of fighting the war on terror is taking a toll on U.S. troops, and nearly half want out when their enlistments are up, the Pentagon's personnel chief said yesterday. David Chu, the defense undersecretary for personnel, said 46% of the 90,000 regular soldiers in Iraq surveyed in July said constant deployments overseas and year-long tours in hot zones were souring their outlook on military life. About 66% of the 40,000 reservists and National Guard troops in Iraq said they would reenlist, Chu told the House Armed Services Committee.... --New York Daily News posted by Steve M. | 6:30 PM |   If the charges against Raymond and Vanessa Jackson of Collingswood, New Jersey, are true, then, yes, they're monsters -- but why does the House Ways and Means Committee need to get involved? A congressional committee will join the investigation into the case of a Collingswood couple accused of starving their four adopted boys over a period of years. The House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Human Resources will hold its first hearing on Thursday in the case, the subcommittee chairman said in a statement. "It is hard to imagine how adults could intentionally starve children," Rep. Wally Herger, R-Calif., said in the statement on Friday. "It is also hard to accept the grim reality that we, as taxpayers, subsidized their terrible neglect to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars." ...The four adopted boys, ages 9, 10, 14 and 19, were removed from the Jacksons' home Oct. 10. I don't seem to recall anything like this happening in Washington when Florida's scandal-plagued Department of Children and Families literally lost 5-year-old Rilya Wilson and mismanaged several other cases. Do you think maybe the difference is that Florida's governor at the time the Rilya Wilson story broke was a Republican (up for reelection) by the name of Bush, while New Jersey's governor is Jim McGreevey, a Democrat (up for reelection next year) who's struggling at the polls? Nawwww! That would be playing politics with childrens' lives, and Republicans would never do that, would they? (UPDATE: Whoops -- Jim McGreevey's up for reelection in 2005, not 2004. But I still think what I said above holds.) posted by Steve M. | 9:21 AM | Wednesday, November 05, 2003   Our rosy future if we do nothing to develop alternate sources of energy: The world's increasing demand for energy will require total investments of $16 trillion by 2030, most of it needed to maintain and expand the electricity infrastructure, according to a study released on Tuesday. The report - a yearlong study by the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based group set up by leading energy-consuming nations in response to the oil embargo of the early 1970's - finds that oil from the Persian Gulf region will play an increasingly important role in the world economy despite economic, political and geological questions in the region. ... By 2030, it predicted, 43 percent of the world's oil will come from the Middle East - a 50 percent increase from today.... It calculated further that if Middle East oil countries proved more hostile to foreign investment, that would increase the need for worldwide investment a further 8 percent, driving up energy prices. The report estimated that worldwide demand for oil would reach 120 million barrels a day by 2030, up from 77 million barrels now. But the $2.2 trillion that will be needed to explore and develop oil production will be mostly spent - 75 percent - on maintaining existing fields, with the remaining 25 percent spent on finding new oil to meet the greater demand.... --New York Times Remember this when you're told that a program to make alternate energy sources viable would be just too expensive. posted by Steve M. | 7:08 PM |   There was a story on yesterday's All Things Considered about the Pakistan government's attempts to deal with Pakistanis in the Northwest Frontier Province who make and sell Kalashnikov-style rifles, openly smoke drugs, and consort across the border with the Taliban in Afghanistan (scroll down to "Pakistan Sends Troops to Afghan Border" to hear the story). As I was listening to the story, I couldn't help noting some of the similarities between these guys and libertarians such as the folks at the Free State Project, who want to take over New Hampshire and make it a laissez-faire paradise. After all, as this article about the Free Staters notes, they don't like being deprived of guns, just as the Northwest Frontier Province Pakistanis don't like being told not to make and sell guns; the Pakistanis smoke hashish while the Free Staters seek drug legalization; and, most strikingly, the Free Staters say, once we have control of the county sheriffs' offices, we can order federal law enforcement agents out, or exercise strict supervision of their activities -- in other words, they seek pretty much the arrangement the Northwest Frontier Province Pakistanis have long had with the Pakistani federal government (an arrangement the central government is now trying to alter). Just thought I'd point this out. posted by Steve M. | 7:01 PM |   Vast right-wing conspiracy? What vast right-wing conspiracy? Michael Reagan, one of the president's sons and now a conservative radio talk show host, appeared on the Fox News Channel program "Hannity & Colmes" and said [of CBS's TV movie on the Reagans], "This is all about the agenda of dismantling my father, dismantling the conservative movement and tearing down Ronald Reagan as we go into an election year." Matt Drudge, whose Drudge Report is one of the more popular Web sites, soon obtained a copy of the script and regularly parsed out excerpts, which set the conservative talk radio, cable and other Internet sites back into motion. On Oct. 28, the Media Research Center, a conservative group led by L. Brent Bozell that monitors the news and entertainment industries for what it sees as liberal bias, wrote a letter to a list of 100 top television sponsors urging them to "refuse to associate your products with this movie." At around the same time Michael Paranzino, a former Republican Congressional staff member from Betheseda Md., decided to start a Web site called BoycottCBS.com. He said he spent a mere $8.95 to establish the site, which called for a viewer boycott of CBS and all the sponsors of the mini-series. Mr. Paranzino became a sort of grassroots spokesman against the television movie, appearing on conservative cable news programs including Bill O'Reilly's on Fox News and Joe Scarborough's on MSNBC. "We used technology that was not available 10 years ago to do in nine days what used to take months," Mr. Paranzino said. "We created a genuine, national, grass-roots movement that forced a broadcasting titan to cancel one of its key sweeps weeks series." Last Friday, the Republican National Committee entered the fray. Ed Gillespie, the chairman, held a teleconference with journalists calling for CBS to appoint a team of historians and associates of Mr. Reagan to review the film for accuracy. In the absence of such a committee, he said, the network should run a scroll on the bottom of the screen during the mini-series reminding viewers that "The Reagans" is a fictional account. The Republican National Committee then started a petition drive on its Web site supporting Mr. Gillespie's request. --New York Times posted by Steve M. | 6:49 PM |   Tucked in on top of the spare of the rental car we're driving this week were two month-old USA Todays. This article was in one of them: Job worries weigh down consumers Consumer confidence dropped to the lowest level in six months in September, while Midwest manufacturing slowed, according to two reports Tuesday that helped push stock prices lower. The New York-based Conference Board's monthly consumer confidence index fell nearly five points to 76.8, its lowest since the start of the Iraq war, as Americans expressed growing concern about the sluggish job market and future growth prospects... The report's expectations index, designed to gauge consumers' view of the economy six months out, fell to 88.4 from 94.9. The percentage expecting fewer jobs to be available in the next six months rose to 21% from 18.6%. Further, the percentage calling jobs currently "hard to get" rose to 35.3% from 34.1% in August, while those calling jobs "plentiful" fell to 10% from 11.3% ... Declining confidence is a concern because it could affect consumer spending, which makes up about 70% of the economy.... The article was in the October 1 paper; it went online September 30. Now remember: This survey happened just after that quarter of 7.2% GDP growth that had Republicans dancing in the aisles. Still want to bet on a "Bush boom"? posted by Steve M. | 6:36 PM | Tuesday, November 04, 2003   This New York Times article says we're totally screwed unless we develop new sources of energy that don't emit carbon dioxide. It suggests possible alternate ways of obtaining fuel, one of which is a space satellite that collects solar energy and beams it down as microwaves. But The futuristic techology might be impractically expensive. Developing a solar power satellite, for example, has been estimated at more than $200 billion. Er, here's the cost of the war in Iraq. $83 billion so far. The next installment is $87 billion. That's $170 billion right there. I guess it all depends on what the definition of "impractically expensive" is. posted by Steve M. | 11:09 PM |   Ten or twelve years ago, it was widely agreed that the lowest form of human life was a crack addict, and the lowest of the low was a pregnant addict, because she was guilty of a vicious assault and battery just for being pregnant while consumed by addiction. All right-thinking people hated her. Moral guardians of the William Bennett ilk denounced liberalism for creating her. It was said that we should lock her up to prevent her from letting the worst of all possible poisons, crack, flow through her bloodstream to her unborn child. Today's New York Times offered this clarification: ... in recent decades, scientists have discovered that alcohol can be remarkably toxic — more than any other abused drug — to developing fetuses... "Alcohol is a dirty drug," Dr. West added. "It affects a number of different neurotransmitters, and all cells can take it up." Compare this with cocaine, Dr. West said, which is taken up by only one neurotransmitter.... Because alcohol affects so many sites in the brain, researchers have come to believe that alcohol is far worse for the developing fetus than any other abused drug. Dr. Jacobson's study included cocaine users who also used varying quantities of alcohol. "We found more serious cognitive impairment in relation to alcohol than cocaine or other drugs, including marijuana and smoking," Dr. Jacobson said. The damage done to fetuses often has been wrongly connected to cocaine, many experts say. "The consensus, I think, at this point is that most of the adverse effects that had been reported due to cocaine and crack use were from alcohol use," said Dr. Kenneth R. Warren, the director of the office of scientific affairs at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. "It is the leading cause of birth defects due to an ingested environmental substance in this country." Whoops! Sorry about that misunderstanding. posted by Steve M. | 11:01 PM |   What will happen to the national mood when the news programs start broadcasting images of the brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably, there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the cause. --David Brooks today So Brooks joins the New York Post and Daily News and Trent ("just mow the place down") Lott in calling for some My Lais in Iraq. Well, we're getting there: At the same time, the Army's efforts to counterattack against the guerrillas have resulted in a rising number of civilian deaths. The problem is most severe around Falluja and Ramadi, cities west of Baghdad, where a rebellious local population has repeatedly clashed with units from the 82nd Airborne Division, which prides itself on its tough combat skills. When Americans do respond, Iraqis say, they have sometimes struck in the wrong place and at the wrong people... In an operation one night last month, soldiers from the 82nd called in an airstrike at 2 a.m. to bomb a farm outside Falluja, killing three people and wounding three others. The unit's public affairs officer said that the dead men were guerrillas and were the targets of precision fire. But to local Iraqis, such attacks can look less than precise. At the farm a few hours after the attack, bomb craters were scattered around the yard, and bullets had punched holes all over the site. Two of the three people wounded were children. --Alex Berenson in the Week in Review, New York Times, 11/2/03 That was in Sunday's paper -- before the Chinook shootdown, which was in Falluja. It's really working, isn't it? posted by Steve M. | 10:04 AM |   The right-wingers' God will not be mocked: Under pressure from Republican and conservative groups, CBS is expected to announce as early as today that it is canceling its plans to run a two-part mini-series in November deconstructing the Ronald Reagan presidency, two people close to the decision said last night. They said the film would most likely instead be handed over to CBS's pay-cable sibling, Showtime. The announcement would perhaps the first time a major broadcast network has ever removed a completed project from its schedule because of political pressure and under the threat of an advertising boycott. ...CBS executives have been reworking the film over the last week, trying to fix what many critics - none of whom had seen the film and were relying mostly on a report in The New York Times about its contents - called inaccurate and unfair portrayals of the former president.... The CBS chairman, Les Moonves, became concerned amid those complaints and ordered a revision of the film, several people close to the process said.... posted by Steve M. | 9:21 AM |   Shorter David Brooks: In Iraq we American innocents face Pure Evil, and, much as it pains us to do so, we must mercilessy fight that evil, an obligation that will end, conveniently, just as Bush's reelection campaign heats up. ******** Oh, and in the Brooks column, what is all this nonsense about America being a nation of dewy-eyed innocents unable to bear the sight of a drop of blood? ("...we Americans do not like staring into the face of evil. It is in our progressive and optimistic nature to believe that human beings are basically good, or at least rational.") Does Brooks get HBO? Is the multiplex near him not showing the quite successful remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? More to the point, has he never once in his life looked at crime statistics, particularly statistics on murder, for the U.S. as compared to other industrialized nations? Does he think this country is awash in guns and fundamentalist religion because we think most people are intrinsically nice? Brooks says that if it weren't for swarthy foreign savages, Americans would barely know evil exists. Last month Gregg Easterbrook placed the blame closer to home, saying we'd all happily content ourselves with cartoon bunnies and joan of Arcadia if greedy Jews didn't force us at gunpoint to watch violent films like Kill Bill. What planet do these guys live on? posted by Steve M. | 9:15 AM | Monday, November 03, 2003   In the current New York Review of books, Elizabeth Drew has an article about Wesley Clark. It's quite favorable (fine by me; I'm an Anybody But Bush guy, and that even includes Lieberman -- I don't have a candidate yet) -- but what's most striking is the number of times Clinton appears in the article as, well, spineless: * Clark's view on Kosovo, shared by Tony Blair and other European leaders, was that Clinton, by stating that ground troops would not be used there —a position Clinton took for domestic political reasons—gave the Serbs a military advantage. *According to three former Clinton aides, when Clinton approved the list of appointments submitted to him by Cohen, including the selection of General Joseph W. Ralston as the new commander of the NATO forces, it wasn't made clear to the President that this would cut Clark's term as the supreme commander by nearly three months.... Clinton was reportedly furious when he realized the mistake that had been made, but he didn't want to go back on it lest he look indecisive, or further alienate military officials, with whom he had been on bad terms since the beginning of his presidency. * Clark [tried] to prevent the Russians, who rushed a small troop unit to the Pristina airport after hostilities had supposedly ended, from establishing their own sector in Kosovo, completely independent of NATO.... Clark devoted an entire chapter to the airport incident in his first book, and his account has been confirmed by others. He explains that at first he had the support of the Clinton White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the secretary-general of NATO, Javier Solana. But when the British refused to support him, ... Washington backed down. (Emphasis mine in each case.) Look, I miss the Clinton years, and I think his most fervid haters suffer from something clinically pathological. But his fear of giving offense was one of his worst traits -- and it's a trait far too many Democrats seem to emulate. posted by Steve M. | 10:44 PM |   an occupant’s rights under international law do not include the right to develop a new oil field, to use the oil resources of occupied territory for the general benefit of the home economy or to grant oil concessions. That’s from a State Department legal memorandum prepared in the Ford administration, at a time when Israel intended to develop new oilfields in occupied Palestinian territories. William Greider quotes it in the current Nation (in an article that’s not available online) and says the memo is correct: “The obstacle is the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.” What this means, Greider says, is that Despite what many people, including many Washington officials, seem to believe, the US government is prohibited from simply seizing Iraqi oil revenues and spending the money however it chooses. Indeed, the US occupying force cannot remove the country’s judges and suspend Iraq’s domestic laws. Nor may it create massive unemployment by firing police, civil servants or military troops. On the contrary, an occupying force is required to maintain civil order and humanitarian necessities, to protect private property and public assets as well as individual rights. In fact, international law is designed to prevent an occupying nation from transforming a defeated society into its own likeness. Greider says that once Iraqis have re-established a sovereign government they will be free to sue the US government for damages and reparations. They may also sue Halliburton, the oil companies and any other businesses acting as contract agents for the Coalition Provisional Authority..... This venture could morph into multibillion-dollar lawsuits that go on for many years. And If the future government of Iraq does not wish to sue, then groups of citizens might still become plaintiffs. They could be joined by the foreign creditors who lent billions to Iraq in Saddam’s time -- including French and Russian interests. Interesting. posted by Steve M. | 10:27 PM |   The posting here will probably be light this week -- I'm actually on a low-key semi-vacation. Keep checking in -- I'll definitely be here off and on. posted by Steve M. | 10:08 AM | Sunday, November 02, 2003   "Bush boom"? In today's New York Times, Louis Uchitelle provided a reality check: The 7.2 percent growth rate is not sustainable. Nearly every forecaster concedes that. A month into the fourth quarter, the growth rate has probably fallen back to 4 percent or so. ... ...The corporate sector remains plagued with overcapacity and may require many months of 4 percent growth just to make full use of those currently working. Job creation has to move above 200,000 a month, most economists say, before we can begin to shrink the pool of nearly nine million unemployed. We haven't gotten to six-digit job creation yet, much less sustained it. No wonder the unemployed spend 19.7 months, on average, seeking work, the longest stretch in nearly 20 years. ...Of the nine million unemployed, five million were laid off or fired, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The remainder are new entrants or people returning to the labor force after a voluntary absence.) Most of those five million will work again, but for less pay. The bureau's wage data, from its "job displacement'' surveys done every two years, are clear on this point. Three people are laid off, and three years later only one has regained the lost wage or risen above it. Happy days aren't here again yet. posted by Steve M. | 11:10 PM |   This is infuriating: Homan McFarling has been farming here all his life, growing mostly soybeans along with a little corn. After each harvest, he puts some seed aside. "Every farmer that ever farmed has saved some of his seed to plant again," he said. In 1998, Mr. McFarling bought 1,000 bags of genetically altered soybean seeds, and he did what he had always done. But the seeds, called Roundup Ready, are patented. When Monsanto, which holds the patent, learned what Mr. McFarling had sown, it sued him in federal court in St. Louis for patent infringement and was awarded $780,000. The company calls the planting of saved seed piracy, and it says it has won millions of dollars from farmers in lawsuits and settlements in such cases. Mr. McFarling's is the first to reach a federal appeals court, which will consider how the law should reconcile patented food with a practice as old as farming itself. If the appeals court rules against him, said Mr. McFarling, 61, he will be forced into bankruptcy and early retirement. ...The idea that planting saved seed amounts to patent infringement ... follows inexorably from two United States Supreme Court decisions allowing patents for life forms.... --New York Times How did we allow this to happen? Oh, yeah, I forget: We kept electing Republican presidents, and they put a lot of idiots on the Supreme Court. posted by Steve M. | 7:59 PM |   With regard to Iraq, this is what really matters to the Bush White House: * Focusing on the preferred propaganda line rather than the reality (even if the people in-country don't always deliver the message correcetly): Mr. Bremer and Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq, contended that the threats and attacks against occupying forces were being carried out by "elements of Saddam Hussein's forces," as Mr. Bremer put it, and by foreign fighters who have slipped into the country. "There is a flow of foreign fighters, but I don't want to overstate it," he said. The White House has argued that foreign terrorists are active in Iraq, and is trying to demonstrate that, officials said, to support the notion that the American forces are engaged in the global campaign against terrorism. But Mr. Bremer said, "It's not a large number." He said fighters from Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Sudan had been captured or killed. * Using the country as a Petri dish for experiments inspired by too much reading of Ayn Rand: The flat tax, long a dream of economic conservatives, is finally getting its day -- not in the United States, but in Iraq. ..."The highest individual and corporate income tax rates for 2004 and subsequent years shall not exceed 15 percent," Bremer wrote in Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 37, "Tax Strategy for 2003," issued last month. ...Iraq's new finance minister, Kamil Mubdir Gailani, is considered a follower of Ahmed Chalabi, the Western-oriented banker who has closely adhered to the Bush administration's economic policies, according to one expert on the Iraqi economy. Gailani presented the new Iraq finance program, including the flat tax, at a recent international meeting. "A piece of social engineering is being done on Iraq, but it has almost no support from other members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council," said a Middle East expert who heard Gailani's presentation.... Lovely. posted by Steve M. | 7:08 PM |   The tabloid headline I want to see tomorrow is GEORGE, DO SOMETHING. The words should be wrapped around a photo of a president with a trapped, defensive look on his face. GEORGE, SO SOMETHING or maybe RUMMY, DO SOMETHING. New Yorkers will recognize the allusion. DAVE, DO SOMETHING was a tabloid headline after a particularly nasty run of violent crime during the mayoralty of David Dinkins. The headline wasn’t really a plea -- it was really a verdict: Dinkins, we’re getting killed and you’re not doing a damn thing. Well, people are getting killed in Iraq -- fifteen soldiers today in the shootdown of the Chinook and three soldiers elsewhere -- and, in the short term at least, it looks as if Bush and Rummy aren’t doing a damn thing. Manana, they tell us, there’ll be a drawdown of U.S. forces, to be replaced by eager young Iraqis ... but what about now? Where’s the sense of urgency? Someone needs to ask these guys point blank: Is there nothing you can do right now to lessen the bloodshed, to win this war we were told was won six months ago? Of course, the image of the Bushies as manly men of action is still so deeply ingrained that an alternate impression of them can’t seem to take hold -- that they’re people who don’t grasp the seriousness of the situation and thus won’t rouse themselves to make significant changes to a strategy that’s a dismal failure. That has to change. Oh, and by the way, why haven't numerous Democratic members of Congress, and all the Democratic presidential candiates, called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld? If yesterday this might not have seemed to some like a reasonable reaction to the failures of the past six months, today it seems utterly sensible. Our soldiers are dying because we haven't had enough troops to secure the weapons caches and secure the peace in general, and Rumsfeld muleheadedly refuses to alter the strategy a whit. He should be called to account for that. Please, folks, for once in your lives set the terms of the debate. Say it: Rumsfeld must go. posted by Steve M. | 6:50 PM | Saturday, November 01, 2003   Screw the facts -- we just hate the Clintons: You've got to admire the Bush administration's restraint in refusing to be goaded by Hillary Rodham Clinton's latest sputterings about Iraq. Because New York's junior senator has gone way over the line of what constitutes legitimate political debate.... The senator this week accused the White House of trying to cover up the visual impact of U.S. casualties in Iraq by refusing to let Americans see "the sight of caskets coming home" to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.... ... In fact, preventing the media from filming the arrival of dead servicemen at Dover has been government policy for the past decade. Including when Bill Clinton was president - and Americans came home in coffins from places like Somalia and Haiti and Bosnia/Herzegovina and from the port of Yemen, where USS Cole was attacked by Osama bin Laden. We don't recall either Hillary or her husband inviting press photographers to Dover to film the arrival of those coffins.... --New York Post editorial today Though Dover Air Force Base, which has the military's largest mortuary, has had restrictions for 12 years, ... photos of coffins arriving at Andrews and elsewhere continued to appear through the Clinton administration. In 1996, Dover made an exception to allow filming of Clinton's visit to welcome the 33 caskets with remains from Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown's plane crash. In 1998, Clinton went to Andrews to see the coffins of Americans killed in the terrorist bombing in Nairobi. Dover also allowed public distribution of photos of the homecoming caskets after the terrorist attack on the USS Cole in 2000. --Washington Post, October 21, 2003 (Scroll down here for some photos of remains of Cole victims at Dover. And here are more. These are Navy and Defense Department photos -- but they are publicly available, and nothing's available from Dover now. Current Bush policy, according to the Washington Post article, bans not only photos but the ceremonies themselves.) posted by Steve M. | 10:07 AM | Friday, October 31, 2003   James Taranto at The Wall Street Journal's OpinionJournal writes: If He Were a Republican, This Would Be Hate Speech... It turns out the Associated Press account of an Iowa brawl between staffers for Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean, which we noted yesterday, was rather sanitized. Deanie Hunter Allen alleged that the two unnamed Gephardtians "used a derogatory slur," as the AP's Dept. of Redundancy Dept. put it. The Sioux City Journal adds some crucial detail: "The Dean staff member, 24-year-old Hunter Allen, who is openly gay, said he was called a 'faggot' by a Gephardt staff member after being shoved and escorted out of the event." OK, I'll bite: It's hate speech. Absolutely. Assuming he actually said it (he denies doing so), it's an utterly unacceptable slur. Any more questions? posted by Steve M. | 5:05 PM |   (UPDATE: I just deleted the raw, barely edited version of this post, which little gremlins decided to put up without my consent. Read this instead:) USA Today reports that because of the preposterous way homeland security money is distributed, New York and L.A. still don't have enough equipment -- while Zanesville, Ohio, has a $13,500 thermal imager to help find victims in heavy smoke. An $800 thermal heat gun to test the temperature of gases that might ignite. A $1,250 test kit for deadly nerve agents such as VX and mustard gas. A $1,300 monitor to gauge oxygen and carbon monoxide levels in the air. Four air packs at $3,800 each, with masks and extra bottles. Four chemical suits at $875 apiece. And much more. ... "We were poor as church mice," says Gene Hanning, hazardous materials coordinator for southeastern Ohio's Muskingum County (pop. 85,000), where Zanesville is located. "This has been better than any Christmas." And how target-rich an environment is Zanesville? There's no nuclear power plant, no big chemical plants, no major airport — none of what homeland security people call "critical infrastructure." There's a small steel processing plant, a couple of medical centers and a power-supply station in a nearby county. But that's about it. Zanesville once was known as the "Pottery Capital of the World." Today, its biggest claim to fame is its unusual Y-shaped bridge, with a stoplight in the middle, that spans the Muskingum and Licking rivers.... In the past decade or so, their worst incidents included a farmer pinned in a grain silo, a city worker trapped in a trench and a vacant building that collapsed. "We don't have any 100-story buildings," Chief Dave Lacy says. "But a four-story building falling on people is going to have the same effect." Blame the aid formula: ...each state receives 0.75% of the $2 billion pot regardless of population, accounting for nearly 40% of the money. The rest is divided among the states on a per-person basis. Other factors, such as population density, potential targets and threat levels, are not taken into consideration. Here's the preposterous result: Because 40% of the money is divided equally among all states, the least populous state, Wyoming, gets the most money per capita: $35.31 per person in 2003. California gets the least: $4.68 per person. New York, the third-largest state, gets $5.05 per person; Ohio gets $5.59 per person. Some terrorist might go after Wyoming or after Zanesville, Ohio. But even William Bennett would play it safe and bet on New York or L.A. posted by Steve M. | 3:28 PM |   If you must eat while the R[epublican]s control the White House, both houses of Congress, and the judiciary, you might want to consider becoming a vegetarian about now. --Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose, Bushwhacked They always announce the outrages on Friday afternoon, because few people read the Saturday papers or watch the Saturday TV news. --Paul Krugman in the current New York Review of Books In Initial Finding, F.D.A. Calls Cloned Animals Safe as Food Milk and meat from cloned animals are safe to consume, the Food and Drug Administration has tentatively concluded, a finding that could eventually clear the way for such products to reach supermarket shelves and for cloning to be widely used to breed livestock. The agency's conclusions, which could face some opposition, are being released today in advance of a public meeting on the issue on Tuesday in Rockville, Md. Agency officials said that after receiving public comments, they hope by late next spring to outline their views on how, if at all, cloning would be regulated, including whether food from cloned animals should be labeled. But if the preliminary conclusion stands, labeling would not be needed and there would be little regulation, Dr. Stephen Sundlof, director of the agency's Center for Veterinary Medicine, said in an interview.... The major safety concern is that cloning results in many failed pregnancies and abnormal babies, raising the risk that milk or meat from such animals could be tainted.... --New York Times Well, the Times did get this story into today's paper (though it was tucked in the back of the A section, on page A20). But I watched network news last night and didn't see anything about it, and that's where it'll probably be discussed ... tonight, the night of the official announcement. And well, gosh, it'll be Friday night tonight, won't it? posted by Steve M. | 1:44 PM |   This is something to look forward to... UNTITLED ON THE BUSH WHITE HOUSE By Ron Suskind Simon & Schuster, January 2004, ( 384 pages, $26.00 ) ... ISBN: 0-743-25545-3 Suskind's the guy who wrote this for Esquire. Surely you remember: ..."There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," says DiIulio. "What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."... posted by Steve M. | 12:29 PM |   Violence may be surging in Iraq, but there's another thing Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz says Iraqis fear: President Bush getting booted from office. Wolfowitz, speaking at Georgetown University, said a worried resident of the southern city of Najaf asked him in July at a town hall meeting, "What's going to happen to us if George Bush loses the election?" Wolfowitz didn't mention the Democrats, but he suggested the question sums up Iraqi fears that a new team in the White House would abandon them.... --New York Daily News So what's the point? That it would be a moral betrayal of the Iraqis to have an '04 election at all? posted by Steve M. | 10:18 AM |   "Bush boom"? Paul Krugman says don't be so sure. We've appeared to be out of the woods before when we really weren't. A great column. posted by Steve M. | 9:49 AM | Thursday, October 30, 2003   Your liberal media in action.... Dennis Miller, the sardonic comedian who delivered a fake newscast on "Saturday Night Live" and told jokes in the "Monday Night Football" booth, will host a prime-time political talk show on CNBC. The network said Thursday it had inked Miller to a multiyear deal for the political chat show, set to begin in January. ...Miller, a registered Republican, has become increasingly known for his political views. He bashed anti-war activists on a "Tonight" show appearance last spring, calling filmmaker Michael Moore a "stupid moron" for criticizing President Bush at the Academy Awards. A few months later, Miller was the opening act at a Bush fund-raiser in California, earning him a ride on Air Force One and the president's limousine. He said of Bush's Democratic opponents: "I haven't seen a starting nine like that since the '62 Mets." There was talk among some Republican political strategists of running Miller as an opponent to California Sen. Barbara Boxer. --AP posted by Steve M. | 11:35 PM |   I posted a brief excerpt from this Newsweek column by Robert Samuelson a couple of weeks ago, but today seems like a better day for it, given the fact that Republicans are declaring that today's GDP report completely and vindicates Bushonomics and perfectly positions Bush for '04: ...To win in 1972, Nixon revved the economy. All presidents would like to do this, because all know they’ll be judged—rightly or wrongly—on the economy’s performance. Few succeed, because the economy is so big and unruly. Nixon beat the odds. Facing stubborn inflation, he embraced wage-price controls in August 1971. With inflation suppressed, easy money and a big deficit stimulated demand. Unemployment fell from 6.1 percent in August to 5.5 percent by the next fall. In November, Nixon trounced George McGovern, who won a meager 37.5 percent of the vote. Could Bush—in different times and using different tools—repeat Nixon’s feat? ... ...Fully 60 percent ($210 billion) [of the 2003 Bush tax cut] is crammed into the 15 months before the election. This was no accident. Some tax cuts (the higher child credit, the bigger 10 percent bracket, marriage-penalty relief) expire after the election. In 2003 and 2004, the child credit is $1,000; from 2005 to 2008, it’s $700.... ...History’s final verdict of Bush will depend less on election returns than on whether his policies ultimately succeed. We can’t know that yet. But Nixon does offer a cautionary lesson, because wage-price controls proved calamitous. Once they ended, inflation exploded (8.7 percent in 1973 and 12.3 percent in 1974) and a harsh recession followed. “The tragedy was that they didn’t have to do anything,” says Matusow. “The economy was on schedule to deliver by 1972. They panicked.” Such a judgment is surely one Nixon parallel that Bush doesn’t covet. posted by Steve M. | 11:13 PM |   There's a movement to recall yet another Democratic governor in the West -- Arizona's Janet Napolitano -- but I don't think it'll get very far. First off, it's being spearheaded by Charles Goodson, chairman of the neo-Confederate Southern Parties of the Southwest. In addition, one of the reasons he and his fellow recallers want Napolitano out of office is that she bent the rules slightly to have Arizona's Squaw Peak renamed for Lori Piestewa, a Hopi Indian woman who was a member of the 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company and who was killed in the Iraq War (she was a close friend of Jessica Lynch and died after the same ambush). Arizona's Board on Geographic and Historic Names did vote to waive a requirement in this case that a person be dead for five years before the state can name anything in that person's honor. And people disagree on the need to rename landmarks with "squaw" in their names -- some say the word is offensive, while others say that's not etymologically true. But really, now: Do we not want to honor Lori Piestewa? Charles Goodson is a fool. Darrel Issa he ain't. posted by Steve M. | 6:22 PM |   So I guess a "gunman" breached security at the Cannon House Office Building in D.C. today, creating a real scare until it was discovered that his gun was a toy. Over at National Review Online, the bloggers at The Corner are horrified -- horrified that one member of Congress who was interviewed about the incident was Carolyn McCarthy: ...Why select her from the 435 members of Congress? Why, because her husband was the victim of gun violence, of course! Fortunately, the story turned out to be a false alarm. Otherwise CNN's viewers would have been subjected to who knows how much fear-inspired, uninformed anti-gun speculation. This example of liberal media bias is so great, one suspects even Eric Alterman might notice. Yeah -- what horrible bias! To interview a woman whose husband was brutally gunned down on the subject of an apparent rampant gunman! It's almost as bad as when those liberals at CBS talked to victims of the Oklahaoma City bombing about the World Trade Center! How dare they! That was anti-terrorist bias! posted by Steve M. | 3:32 PM |   The Bush boom. The Bush boom. The Bush boom. Oh -- did the Republicans neglect to mention that they think there's a Bush boom? It's really just one quarter of (admittedly impressive) growth, generated by the only aspect of the recent tax cut that actually put money in the pockets of ordinary citizens -- the distribution of tax-credit checks to parents. That was a one-time-only event -- and the money seems to have largely been spent. All his life George W. Bush has been one of the luckiest SOBs who ever lived; the timing of the business cycle might continue his run of luck. But the Repubs aren't going to see whether that happens. They're going to try to pound this phrase into everyone's head until it's stuck like a bad jingle. posted by Steve M. | 2:18 PM |   You really need to see the chart Kevin (Calpundit) Drum found in an Economist article. It shows CEO pay per dollar of company profit over the years. Kevin says: As the chart shows, during the 80s CEO pay nearly doubled for a given level of corporate profitability, and during the 90s it increased again almost 4x. Overall, a CEO who generates $10 million in net profits today is paid about 7x what a CEO who generated exactly the same amount was paid in 1980. As he says of CEO pay, "it's not based on performance in any defensible way." Damn straight. posted by Steve M. | 1:17 PM |   I guess the coverage of the '04 presidential election is going to be about as high-minded and serious as the coverage in '00. This is from Denver's Rocky Mountain News: Hair cuts into Kerry's support Democratic senator needs to trim his long locks, some younger voters say Is it John Kerry's Beatles-era haircut that doesn't appeal to students sporting today's shorter styles? A waffle breakfast for the Massachusetts senator and Democratic president hopeful drew only about 10 people at the University of Colorado on Tuesday, even as several thousand rallied for political rival Howard Dean outside. ..."I'm not sure why people don't see the light," said Jason Meininger, who heads Kerry's CU effort. ...Photographs on the wall showed Kerry with hair combed neatly over his ears. One showed him with John Lennon. "I think that's just him. He's had long hair for a long time. That's who he is, and that's what's so great about John Kerry - he's not afraid to be himself," said Meininger, who has short hair.... So, what's the reporter's sample set for the hypothesis that hair is what's holding Kerry back? One kid who actually did respond to Kerry's breakfast invitation and who doesn't really seem to care much about his hair, plus a Dean campaign worker: "He does need a haircut," said Eric Morgan, a graduate student in history who was eating a waffle. "I think if he trimmed it back, it would be nice." Michele Buckley, a leader of the campus Democrats and an organizer of the Dean rally, said the former Vermont governor's short haircut helps on campus. Good Lord -- people actually get paid to write stuff like this. posted by Steve M. | 12:14 PM |   I think all you need to know to get the measure of National Review Online's Donald Luskin is that a few months ago, in his own blog (with the paranoid-friendly title "The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid"), he published this rant. The issue was a meeting between high government intelligence operatives and Michael Drosnin, author of best-selling but utterly dotty books that claim to find God's will in the letters of the Hebrew Bible arranged in the form of a word-search puzzle. Luskin wasn't the least bit upset that people paid by our tax dollars were wasting their time meeting with Drosnin; he was more exercised at the fact that "the leftist press" (i.e., The New York Times) and "trained-doggy bloggers" had the audacity to imply that meetings between this modern-day Madame Blavatsky and important government officials weren't a good idea. To find such meetings unwise was "snobbish," "condescending," and "snotty." (The pages provided here show the sort of thing Drosnin purports to find in the Bible; as Brendan MacKay, his best-known debunker, points out, clues of the kind Drosnin finds so meaningful in the Bible can be found just by chance in other texts -- want to find JFK's assassination in Moby-Dick?) Luskin went on to split hairs maniacally, complaining that as liberal writers retold the Drosnin story a "meeting" became a "briefing" (in Luskin's word, this is a distinction fraught with sinister meaning) and then "a briefing of 'the Pentagon' -- the whole damn building, it seems" (Luskin's dictionary apparently does not include the word synecdoche). There's a word for this: nuts. And now Luskin has sent his flying monkeys (a white-shoe law firm) after Atrios, the best blogger out there, in part because Atrios responded to Luskin's obsession with the alleged high crimes of Paul Krugman by calling Luskin a stalker (months after Luskin called himself a stalker). Atrios was motivated by this Luskin blog post, in which he described the Travis Bickle-like moment in which he queued up to get a book signed by Krugman, his arch-nemesis (Luskin on Krugman: "I have looked evil in the face. I've been in the same room with it. I don't know how else to describe my feelings now except to say that I feel unclean, and I'm having to fight being afraid.") If Luskin has any case at all, it's with regard to reader-comment pages appended to Atrios's blog -- his lawyer cites this one and this one -- but is that our new standard for libel? That saying "That dude is just completely fucking insane" now constitutes "straying beyond mere expressions of opinion and making false and defamatory statements of alleged fact"? Aren't right-wingers the guys who complain all the time about "frivolous lawsuits"? Sorry to take up so much space with what might seem like "inside baseball." But in the online world there has to be some sort of reasonable accommodation of what any half-intelligent reader can recognize as flippant, discontented grumbles rather than willful misstatements of legal or psychological fact. This suit is wildly inappropriate. Atrios doesn't deserve it. I can't think of anyone, including the nastiest right-wing bloggers, who deserves it. posted by Steve M. | 9:52 AM |   First it was Fort Stewart. Now Fort Knox is apparently providing substandard medical care to military personnal, including some returning Iraq War veterans, according to UPI: ...I joined to serve my country," said Cpl. Waymond Boyd, 34. He served in Iraq with the National Guard's 1175 Transportation Company. He has been in medical hold since the end of July. "It doesn't make any sense to go over there and risk your life and come back to this," Boyd said. "It ain't fair and it ain't right. I used to be patriotic." He has served the military for 15 years. Boyd's knee and wrist injuries were severe enough that he was evacuated to Germany at the end of July and then sent to Fort Knox. His medical records show doctor appointments around four weeks apart. He said it took him almost two months to get a cast for his wrist, which is so weak he can't lift 5 pounds or play with his two children. He is taking painkilling drugs and walks with a cane with some difficulty. ...Command Sgt. Major Glen Talley, 57, is in the hospital at Fort Knox for heart problems, clotting blood and Graves' disease, a thyroid disorder. All of the problems became apparent after he went to war in April, he says. He is a reservist. Talley said he was moved to Fort Knox on Oct. 16 and had not seen a doctor yet, only a physician's assistant. His next appointment with an endocrinologist was scheduled for Dec. 30. "I don't mind serving my country," Talley said. "I just hate what they are doing to me now." Talley has served for 30 years. He was awarded two Purple Hearts in Vietnam. ...After returning from Iraq, some soldiers spent about eight weeks in Spartan, dilapidated World War II-era barracks with leaking roofs, animal infestations and no air conditioning in the Kentucky heat. "I arrived here and was placed in the World War II barracks," one soldier wrote in an internal Fort Knox survey of the conditions. "On the 28th of August we moved out. On 30 Aug. the roof collapsed. Had we not moved, someone would be dead," that soldier wrote.... There are claims of two-tiered care: Also like Fort Stewart, soldiers at Fort Knox claimed they are getting substandard treatment because they are in the National Guard or Army Reserve as opposed to regular Army. The Army has denied any discrepancies in treatment or housing. Right-wingers like to say that Clinton had no respect for the military, and the feeling was mutual. So what do these troops say? "I have never been so disrespected in my military career," said Lt. Jullian Goodrum, who has been in the Army Reserve for 16 years. His health problems do not appear to be severe -- injured wrists -- but he said the medical situation at Fort Knox is bad. He said he waited a month for therapy. "I have never been so treated like dirt." (Thanks to BuzzFlash for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 7:28 AM | Wednesday, October 29, 2003   They're still lying about the "Mission Accomplished" banner! The White House said on Wednesday it had helped with the production of a "Mission Accomplished" banner as the backdrop for President Bush to declare major combat operations over in Iraq on May 1.... "They asked if we could help take care of the production of the banner and we were more than happy to do so because this is a very nice way to pay tribute to our sailors and aviators and men and women in the military who were on board that ship for a job well done," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.... McClellan told reporters the banner had been sought by the U.S. Navy to honor the end of the Lincoln's lengthy deployment at sea. "It was the Navy, the people on board the ship who had the idea of this banner and made the suggestion because they wanted to have a way to commemorate the fact that these sailors and the crew on board the ship had completed their mission after a very lengthy deployment," he said.... --Reuters From the May 4 Washington Post: Still, it's also impossible to agree with the banner that was draped near Mr. Bush on the carrier deck, proclaiming "Mission Accomplished." Aides say the slogan was chosen in part to mark a presidential turn toward domestic affairs as his campaign for reelection approaches. From USA Today: The White House communications office, well-known for the care it takes with the backdrops at Bush's speeches, created the "Mission Accomplished" banner in the same style as banners the president uses in other appearances, including one in Canton, Ohio, just a week before the carrier speech. That banner, with the same typeface and soft, brush-stroked American flag in the background, read: "Jobs and Growth." And, to repeat, from the May 16 New York Times: Media strategists noted afterward that Mr. Sforza and his aides had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder and the "Mission Accomplished" banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. The speech was specifically timed for what image makers call "magic hour light," which cast a golden glow on Mr. Bush. (Last three links via Atrios and Kicking Ass.) posted by Steve M. | 6:14 PM |   SENATOR ZELL MILLER OF GEORGIA, the nation's most prominent conservative Democrat, said today he will endorse President Bush for re-election in 2004 and campaign for him if Bush wishes him to. Miller said Bush is "the right man at the right time" to govern the country. The next five years "will determine the kind of world my children and grandchildren will live in," Miller said in an interview. And he wouldn't "trust" any of the nine Democratic presidential candidates with governing during "that crucial period," he said. "This Democrat will vote for President Bush in 2004." Miller, who is retiring from the Senate next year, has often expressed his admiration for Bush. He was a co-sponsor of the president's tax cuts in 2001 and 2003.... --Weekly Standard Thanks for that big fat show of party loyalty, schmuck. posted by Steve M. | 6:10 PM |   Sadly, No! has found the text of Paul Bremer's televised Ramadan address to the Iraqi people. Here's an excerpt. Warning: this is not a joke. ...you must not lose hope.  Especially during Ramadan you must not lose hope.   You must not lose hope because you have seen the evil one go.   You, the Iraqi people, whom the evil one was bound to protect, he instead tortured, he instead murdered.    You, the Iraqi people, whom the evil one was bound to feed, he instead starved.    You, the Iraqi people whom the evil one was bound to lead in peace, he instead led into foolish wars, wars which poured your blood into the sand.    When the people of the world asked the evil one to stop he sneered.    When the people of the world demanded that the evil one stop, he threatened them and fought them.   And when the evil one fought them, he fought them in your name, with your money and your blood and the blood of your fathers, your mothers and your children.    But when the enemies the tyrant drew close, he took your money and he fled your justice like a common thief and coward.... Er, this reads like something concocted by a man locked in a windowless room for three days with a large supply of hallucinogens and either a King James Bible or an extensive collection of Star Wars fan fiction. (Or perhaps a Bremer underling drafted it after a White House staffer angrily phoned to veto an earlier draft: "NO! You have to say 'evil'! POTUS wants the word 'evil' in there! You have to put in more 'evil's!") And no, this is not a hoax -- I gave you the direct link, but you can get to the transcript by clicking on the central link the official site of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Oh, and by the way, it was first broadcast last Friday. Can we all agree that it ain't working? posted by Steve M. | 4:08 PM |   I guess the next thing we’re going to hear is that the sailors told him to wear the flight suit and prance around on the aircraft carrier. --General Wesley Clark, commenting on George W. Bush's claim that sailors put up the "Mission Accomplished" banner at his May 1 photo op, as quoted in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Thanks to Kos for finding the quote.) posted by Steve M. | 2:30 PM |   This is odd -- does the Bush administration want to send astronauts back to the moon? A site called SpaceDaily says yes -- and not just the moon, but eventually Mars: Bush May Announce Return To Moon At Kitty Hawk A report by Space Lift Washington and published by NASA Watch suggests a major new space policy initiative is under consideration and may be announced by US President George Bush at celebrations planned for the centenary of flight at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina December 17th.... Space Lift's Frank Sietzen quoting Washington sources writes that a central recommendation maybe the "resumption of manned lunar flights to develop advanced technologies that can support U.S. astronauts working beyond Earth orbit to not only the Moon, but eventually to near-Earth asteroids and Mars." The Space Lift report further added that: "in an early phase of the meetings, manned Mars expeditions were considered too expensive and risky to adopt as a central goal for the civil space program" However, Bush was said to being "urged to factor in future interplanetary manned flight capabilities as part of the justification for a return to the moon."... The SpaceDaily article links to this story, which comes from a site that looks fairly responsible. So maybe this is true. I guess GWB is looking to take on that JFK glow. Or maybe there are contracts in all this for Halliburton. What? You want to know how we're going to pay for manned missions to the moon and Mars when we already have a gazillion-dollar deficit? Well, not to worry -- it isn't supposed to cost any money at all! According to Space Lift Washington, President Bush may announce at Kitty Hawk a return to manned lunar exploration but without any specific massive new funding, forcing NASA to get serious about what it wants to do with it considerable human spaceflight assets and decades of experience. So I guess all NASA has to do is cut waste, fraud, and abuse and we can have a huge new manned space program practically free! And probably more tax cuts! posted by Steve M. | 1:45 PM |   Opposed to affirmative action in college admissions? Then you shouldn't object to this: Senate Democrats Tuesday proposed requiring colleges to report data on two popular admissions policies -- preferences for alumni relatives, known as legacies, and for students who apply early -- that tend to favor affluent white students over low-income minorities. Under a bill filed by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who was himself a legacy admission to Harvard University, colleges would have to report on the race and economic status of first year students who are relatives of alumni or were admitted under early-decision programs that require students to enroll in the school if they are accepted early.... --Wall Street Journal article reproduced at Free Republic Good for class-traitor Kennedy. Also supporting the bill, according to the article, is John Edwards, whose father was a millworker. The article also notes, perhaps surprisingly, that Trent Lott (whose father was a pipefitter) has criticized legacies. But New Hampshire Sen. Judd Gregg, a Republican and chairman of the Senate education committee, isn't seen as likely to back the measure. Gregg attended Columbia while his father attended Yale, so he's not, strictly speaking, a legacy -- unless you go down to the prep-school level (father and son both attended Phillips Exeter). (If you're wondering, I'm a truck driver's son and I went to Columbia. I'm not a legacy.) posted by Steve M. | 1:23 PM |   A new Quinnipiac poll has a lot of Democrats breathing down Bush's neck: Looking at possible 2004 presidential matchups, Bush leads Clark 47 -- 43 percent. Bush leads other Democratic contenders, but his margins have slipped since September 17: * 48 - 43 percent over Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, compared to 52 -- 41; * 49 -- 43 percent over Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, compared to 53 -- 38 percent; * 49 -- 43 percent over Missouri Congressman Richard Gephardt, compared to 51 -- 39; * 48 -- 42 percent over former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, compared to 53 -- 38; * 50 -- 42 percent over New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, compared to 52 -- 42. Nice. posted by Steve M. | 1:15 PM |   We take young men, throw them into a dangerous situation without adequately preparing them, give them weapons, then sit back and do next to nothing as they're routinely attacked. Big surprise: some of them react to the attacks by retaliating indiscriminately, killing civilians.... An American convoy of about eight vehicles was traveling east toward Falluja, on a road where United States patrols are often attacked. Two bombs planted in the center median exploded, damaging one of the vehicles but not stopping the convoy's progress, witnesses said. Still heading east, the convoy began to fire, shooting at several vehicles heading southwest, away from the patrol, on a nearby road, said Amir Ahmed Saleh, a passenger in a vehicle on that road. The convoy's targets included a minivan carrying employees of Iraq's state oil company, Mr. Saleh said. He was a passenger in a second minivan being used by the oil company. The minivan in which Mr Saleh was riding was ahead of the minivan that was shot, and Mr. Saleh was unhurt. The American fire devastated the minivan, which crashed into a lamppost by the side of the road, Mr Saleh said. Four people in the minivan died, and two were severely wounded, Mr. Saleh said.... Hassan Hussein, who lives across the road from the spot where the minivan crashed into the lamppost, corroborated Mr. Saleh's account, as did Abbas Hussein, one of Mr. Hussein's neighbors. At least two other cars were also hit, killing two more people, the men said. "There was an explosion," said Mr. Badewi, the mayor. Referring to the American troops, he added, "They accused some people in their cars of shooting at them, and they opened fire on them." Colonel Khamis, the police chief, said of the American forces: "When they're subjected to attack, they start shooting indiscriminately. The minibus was heading to Ramadi — they didn't have any link with the issue."... --New York Times If this account is accurate, I'm not condoning what the U.S. soldiers did. But I do blame their commander in chief and his immediate subordinates. The fish stinks from the head. posted by Steve M. | 11:19 AM |   More U.S. soldiers have died in combat in Iraq since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat operations, than died during main phase of the war, the U.S. military said on Tuesday. ...The 115th combat death occurred on Monday - 114 died prior to May 1 - during the wave of bombings in the Iraqi capital. A typically terse statement was issued on Tuesday by the Department of Defense: "Sgt. Aubrey D. Bell, 33, of Tuskegee, Ala., was killed in action on Oct. 27 in Baghdad, Iraq. Bell was at the Al Bayra Police Station when his unit came under small arms fire and an improvised explosive device detonated at his location. Bell was assigned to the 214th Military Police Company, Alabama National Guard." Similar brief statements are posted almost daily at the U.S.-led coalition's press information desk in the Iraqi capital.... --Knight-Ridder story (Again via Billmon.) posted by Steve M. | 10:13 AM |   "If we have to, we just mow the whole place down, see what happens." --Trent Lott on Iraq, as quoted in The Hill Yikes. (Thanks to Billmon and TBOGG.) posted by Steve M. | 9:58 AM |   The president's lie about the "Mission Accomplished" banner has now been widely exposed (here's The New York Times; here's AP), but Lucianne Goldberg (or whoever ghostwrites the snippy copy at her Web site) thinks the exposure of the lie is the product of a vast conspiracy: Borking The Banner: MSNBC reporter Norah O’Donnell seemed to have some DNC help with her Rose Garden question yesterday when she tried to pin down Dubya on where the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the Abe Lincoln came from. He said the ship's crew made it as a comment on their own mission not his. The White House issued a semi-demi-mini-pullback later. Score one for the dems' efforts to neutralize the dreaded flight-suit footage in the upcoming campaign.... New slogan for the Republicans: THE TRUTH IS JUST A DEMOCRATIC PLOT. posted by Steve M. | 9:02 AM |   Oh, those Bush judicial nominees.... Federal appellate nominee Claude Allen told a Senate committee Tuesday he didn't mean it as a slur against homosexuals when he used the word "queer" while working as a press aide to a conservative Republican senator. Allen also said he was "conflicted" about a 1983 filibuster mounted by his then-boss, Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, against a proposed federal holiday for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "It was the most difficult day for me in my life," said Allen, who if confirmed could become the second black appeals judge on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. "I believed that Dr. King deserved a holiday." ...During Helms' campaign against former North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, Allen was quoted as saying Hunt was vulnerable because his campaign could be "linked with the queers." He also was quoted as saying the Hunt campaign could be connected with homosexuals, labor unions, radical feminists and socialists.... --AP He'll get a pass on "queer," because for a decade or so a lot of gay people have been trying to take the word back and use it defiantly. Now it's fairly mainstream (hence Queer Eye for the Straight Guy), but the word was a slur at the time and he knows it. posted by Steve M. | 7:31 AM | Tuesday, October 28, 2003   The "Mission Accomplished" sign, of course, was put up by the members of the USS Abraham Lincoln, saying that their mission was accomplished. I know it was attributed some how to some ingenious advance man from my staff ... --President Bush at his press conference today The most elaborate — and criticized — White House event so far was Mr. Bush's speech aboard the Abraham Lincoln announcing the end of major combat in Iraq. White House officials say that a variety of people, including the president, came up with the idea, and that Mr. [Scott] Sforza [of White House communications director Dan Bartlett's staff] embedded himself on the carrier to make preparations days before Mr. Bush's landing in a flight suit and his early evening speech. Media strategists noted afterward that Mr. Sforza and his aides had choreographed every aspect of the event, even down to the members of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bush's right shoulder and the "Mission Accomplished" banner placed to perfectly capture the president and the celebratory two words in a single shot. --Elisabeth Bumiller, "Keepers of Bush Image Lift Stagecraft to New Heights," New York Times, May 16, 2003 (available here via CNN) I don't recall anyone from the White House disputing this story when it appeared. So Bush was lying. (And Media Whores Online notes that, according to MSNBC's Bill Press, "Senior Navy officials now confirm the sign was in fact produced by the White House.") posted by Steve M. | 11:12 PM |   Former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman, often regarded as a lone moderate in the Bush administration, is writing a book calling for Democrats and Republicans to work together. "It's My Party, Too: The Education of a Moderate" has a tentative publication date of 2005. Financial terms were not disclosed. "The public is turned off by the increasingly hard-line stances both parties are taking," Whitman said in a statement issued Tuesday by her publisher, the Penguin Group. "The leaders must recognize the gap they are creating between themselves and the majority of the electorate." ... --AP Interesting. Of course, I don't think she's quite ready for the abuse that's going to be heaped on her from the right when this book comes out -- any more than Tom Kean, her fellow moderate Republican and a Jersey gubernatorial predecessor, is ready for what he's going to face soon if he doesn't march in Bushie lockstep (already, here's John Podhoretz at the New York Post saying Kean "seems to have confused his position with that of the Sun King" because he's dared to ask King George II for 9/11 documents). Every movement conservative in America will sneer at Whitman book. (And, alas, regardless of how nasty she is to Dems, every prominent Democrat who reads it will probably praise it.) posted by Steve M. | 5:49 PM |   I guess this means she can now join the Justice League of America, or the pro wrestling circuit, or maybe the Wu-Tang Clan: President Bush gave his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, a new job description Tuesday: the White House's "unsticker." The White House recently set up, under Rice, a new National Security Council oversight group over Iraq. ...Bush was asked what changed with the creation of Rice's new group. He did not directly answer the question, but suggested her Iraq oversight was a natural outgrowth of her job description. "The role of the national security adviser is to not only provide good advice to the president, which she does on a regular basis," the president said during a Rose Garden news conference, "... but her job is also to deal inter-agency and to help unstick things that may get stuck. That's the best way to put it. She's an unsticker." With Rice, arms crossed in front of her chest, watching from the sidelines, Bush added, to laughter: "Is she listening? OK, well, she's doing a fine job." --AP "The Unsticker." Not quite as catchy as, say, Ghostface Killah, but, well, maybe if she spells it "Tha Unstikka".... posted by Steve M. | 5:20 PM |   Turkey slams US "ineptitude" in request for troops to Iraq ANKARA (AFP) - Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul charged that the United States had been inept in handling a request for Turkish troops to be sent to neighbouring Iraq to help its forces there, Anatolia news agency reported. "Of course, there is ineptitude here. First they came, very enthusiastic, and said 'please do not be late' and then they saw that there are many different issues. They have many hesitations themselves," Gul was quoted as telling reporters.... The Turkish parliament authorized the government on October 7 to send soldiers to Iraq, but US officials have since failed to soften the Iraqi Governing Council's objections to the plan.... "We are not going to undertake anything as long as there are hesitations... Everything concerning us should be very clear, everybody should say 'yes,'" Gul said. He stressed that it was up to Washington to persuade the Iraqi leadership. "They are supposed to convince those who they themselves have appointed...." --AFP posted by Steve M. | 1:22 PM |   How can this possibly be happening during the reign of God's Own President, George W. Bush, The Most Moral Man (Besides Reagan) Who Ever Lived? Crime rising from 1990s' record low Crime across the USA continued to tick upward in 2002 for the second straight year after record lows in the 1990s, according to a new FBI report that cites increases in rapes, homicides and burglaries. The number of rapes reported by U.S. law enforcement agencies last year was up 4.7% to 95,136; homicides were up 1% (to 16,204) and burglaries increased 1.7% (to 2.2 million), the FBI national crime report says. Vehicle thefts were up 1.4%, but other property crimes — larceny-thefts and robberies — were down slightly, the report says.... Well, don't worry -- I'm sure conservatives will find a way to demonstrate that this is just a delayed reaction to the rampant lawlessness of Bill Clinton, who, along with his wife, is the cause of all evil things in the universe. And even though the FBI reports that The American Northeast had the lowest crime rate, with 2,889 serious crimes per 100,000 people. The South, the highest: 4,722 crimes per 100,000 people no doubt John Lott will find a way to use the new statistics to reinforce his message that increased gun ownership reduces crime. On that subject, I always enjoy looking at crime statistics broken down by state, like those the FBI generously supplies here. The Bureau has statistics on ten categories of crime. Let's compare the rates per 100,000 population of Bible-belt, gun-friendly, conservative, traditionalist Texas and commie-liberal, morally decadent, gun-grabbing New York State: Rate Per 100,000 Inhabitants: [Overall] Crime Index: New York: 2,803.7 Texas: 5,189.6 Violent Crime New York: 496.0 Texas: 578.6 Property Crime New York: 2,307.7 Texas: 4,611.0 Murder And Non-Negligent Manslaughter New York: 4.7 Texas: 6.0 Forcible Rape New York: 20.3 Texas: 39.1 Robbery New York:191.3 Texas: 172.5 Aggravated Assault New York: 279.7 Texas: 361.0 Burglary New York: 400.4 Texas: 976.1 Larceny-Theft New York: 1,660.1 Texas: 3,163.4 Motor Vehicle Theft New York: 247.2 Texas: 471.4 Ten categories, and New York beats Texas in nine of them, in most cases handily. And Hillary Clinton's one of our senators! There must be a computer glitch somewhere.... posted by Steve M. | 12:11 PM |   The New York Post and the Daily News, whose perpetual tabloid war has heated up recently, have separately arrived at the same solution for our woes in Iraq: Just kick ass! Here's what a Post editorial says today: In Iraq, Coalition forces face a determined and resourceful foe - one that operates outside the realm of civilized behavior. The recent attacks are believed to have been carried out by "foreign agents" - al Qaeda & friends - or by Saddam Hussein loyalists. Or some combination thereof. They are well-armed. They appear to be a sizable force. This leaves only one course for Washington. America and its allies cannot pull any punches. They must not shy away from action for fear of inciting Arabs and Muslims. And here's the Daily News: There is an alternative to merely staying the course - take the gloves off altogether. We've been playing a little too nice in Iraq. We've been pacifying more than we've been taking care of business. We've been more culturally sensitive than is entirely a good thing for the safety of our troops. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it himself: Our aggression is insufficient. We're not punching hard enough. Sunday's hotel assault, it is reported, was known by intel to be imminent. Yet local officials conceded that no particular precautions were taken. Not to put too fine a point on this, but: Why the hell not? It has now been nearly six months since the President declared major combat operations to have concluded. It's time to declare them resumed. What? And rework the Bush administration's narrative arc, according to which we won a great victory for freedom last spring and all these attacks are just signs of "desperation"? posted by Steve M. | 9:46 AM | 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 |

archives October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 links MAIN PAGE E-MAIL NO MORE MISTER NICE BLOG ATOM FEED * Spencer Ackerman (Attackerman) * (the other) Roger Ailes * Alas, a Blog * Alicublog (Roy Edroso) * Alterdestiny * Eric Alterman's Altercation * AlterNet PEEK * AMERICAblog * The American Street * Americans United for Separation of Church and State * Annie's Annals * Applesauce * Atrios (Eschaton) * Attytood (Will Bunch's Philadelphia Daily News blog) * Bad Attitudes * BAGnewsNotes * Balloon Juice * Bark Bark Woof Woof * bastard.logic * Steve Benen (Washington Monthly) * Michael Berube * Bill's Big Diamond Blog * Birmingham Blues * bjkeefe * Blue Gal * Blue Wren * Break the Terror * Bulworth * BuzzFlash * A Cautious Man * Ta-Nehisi Coates * Juan Cole (Informed Comment) * Comments from Left Field * Cormulley.com * Betty Cracker * Crooked Timber * Crooks and Liars * Cup O' Joe * Daai Tou Laam Diary * The Daily Howler * Daily Kos * Scoobie Davis * D-Day * Dear Leader Blog * Dependable Renegade * distributorcap NY * Doghouse Riley (Bats Left Throws Right) * Donkey Mountain * Kevin Drum (Mother Jones) * Eccentricity * David Ehrenstein's Fablog * Emptywheel * Fafblog * Feministe * Feministing * Firedoglake * First Draft * FiveThirtyEight * Freedom Camp * The Garlic * ginandtacos.com * Glenn Greenwald * The Heretik * The Huffington Post * Hullabaloo * If I Ran the Zoo * The Impolitic * Instaputz * Interesting Times * Isebrand * Jack & Jill Politics * Jesus' General * Lady Insignificant (D. 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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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