Strom Thurmond's family has acknowledged that Essie Mae Washington-Williams was his daughter. Thurmond fathered her when he was 22; the mother was a 16-year-old black servant. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Thurmond didn't see his daughter until she was 16.

Amazing, isn't it? There was no rock or rap music back then, the Supreme Court hadn't yet said that mandatory public-school prayer was unconstitutional, Bill Clinton hadn't had sex in the White House and Thurmond still managed to father a child out of wedlock with a teenager and then neglect the child for years. I simply don't know how he managed it. I thought immoral personal conduct was invented in the 1960s by hippies.

Er, what happened to that big we-got-him rally that was supposed to happen on Wall Street?

The front page of today's New York Daily News screams,

WE BAG THE BUM!

I'm shocked that I can find no online confirmation of this, but I'm certain that I've seen this tabloid headline before -- I've been chuckling over it and quoting it to people for years. As I recall, it first appeared after the capture of Manuel Noriega.*

Which is interesting because back then, under a president named Bush, we worried about the scourge of drugs almost the way we now, under a president named Bush, worry about the scourge of terrorism. And it may not have been said in so many words, but we were led to believe that the capture of Noriega was a huge victory in the war on drugs.

Remember how, after Noriega was captured, no one in this country used illegal drugs ever again?

No, I don't remember it either.

---------

*Actually, it wasn't Noriega -- see this update.

Y'know, the Iraqi people just love seeing stuff like this.

Rick Perlstein on Joe Lieberman in The Village Voice this past October:

Then, as his star fades, he'll have only one viable strategy left, a manic, all-or-nothing strategy: trying to convince Democrats that the front-runner must be dumped altogether....

Lieberman still loses the nomination. But the successful nominee ends up, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, becoming just what the spoiler-candidate said he was: unelectable....

Senator Joe Lieberman on Meet the Press yesterday:

If Howard Dean had his way, Saddam Hussein would be in power today, not in prison.

I was skeptical when I read Perlstein's article a couple of months ago -- I didn't think the limp Lieberman campaign could pose much of a threat to a front-runner. And I found it hard to imagine that history would repeat itself so exactly, as Perlstein imagined it would -- that Holy Joe would dig up an obscure but damaging fact from the front-runner's past, hurting the leader the way then-DLCer Al Gore wounded Michael Dukakis in '88 by bringing up Willie Horton.*

Now, though, I can imagine that Lieberman really might want to destroy Dean (who, to be sure, may not remain the front-runner). If it happens, I don't think Lieberman will be acting out of centrist "principle" as much as out of anger at Gore. But it's a worry nonetheless.

-------

*Sorry -- that's not quite accurate. Gore brought up the furlough program, but not Horton.

Our fight against terrorism is a long-term war, and today we have won an important battle.

--Senator Charles Schumer on the capture of Saddam

Et tu, Chuckie?

Yeah, I know, you voted to authorize the war -- maybe even out of conviction, rather than merely a desire to cover your butt. But that moment has passed. This war was not about terrorism. You are reciting Karl Rove's bullet points when you say or imply that it was. Stop it.

Very interesting results from an instant Washington Post/ABC poll:

At least initially, the capture did not do much to change the overall shape of opinion on the war in Iraq.

Roughly 2 in 3 respondents said Hussein's capture would be at least somewhat helpful in ending attacks on U.S. troops and contributing to Americans' long-term security, although only 15 to 23 percent thought the arrest would "help a great deal." Larger percentages were hopeful the news would help restore stability to Iraq.

Nine in 10 Americans said big challenges still face the United States in Iraq, with fewer than 1 in 10 saying Hussein's capture would resolve the hurdles facing U.S. troops. Eight in 10 rejected the notion that with the former Iraqi president in custody, the United States should withdraw its forces from the country....

The public remains deeply divided as to whether "the war with Iraq was worth fighting," with 53 percent agreeing it was, and 42 percent saying it was not -- unchanged from last month.

...Meanwhile, more Americans say the war in Iraq is going worse than expected (27 percent) than say it is going better than expected (14 percent)....

And Bush's overall approval rating went up to just 57%, from 53%.

All the numbers are here.

I do think that polls taken within the next couple of days might show better numbers for Bush -- quite possibly because the Bushies will be trying to spread the "big victory for Bush" meme, and Beltway reporters will dutifully repeat the phrase. Then ordinary citizens will know what the "right answer" is and repeat it to pollsters when called.

Meanwhile, it seems to be business as usual among the real terrorists:

Pakistani authorities were last night investigating whether the country's military ruler, President Pervez Musharraf, was the target of an assassination attempt after a bomb detonated on a road minutes after his motorcade passed.

The explosion happened about a mile from the Islamabad International Airport as the president was returning home after a visit to the southern city of Karachi. Witnesses said the blast occurred at a bridge close to a military compound. Sheharyar Khan, whose car was stopped at a roadblock shortly afterwards, said: "As the president's motorcade passed, a huge explosion blew up the bridge."

...Talat Masood, a former senior defence official, said it was too early to say who was behind yesterday's attack, but the most likely suspects were extremist religious forces opposed to Mr Musharraf's policy on Afghanistan and his efforts to reform Islamic schools that have become hotbeds of radicalism.

Mr Masood said: "I think these are the forces who want to eliminate him."...

--The Independent

I can't find a link, but CBS News showed a clip tonight of Wesley Clark bringing up Osama bin Laden when asked about the capture of Saddam. He said he's regularly asked about the hunt for bin Laden -- and he's never asked about the hunt for Saddam. Good for him.

And CBS ran this Osama story tonight. It's awfully "balanced" (do people really think the capture of Saddam will make it easier to catch Osama?), but it does have this nice line:

If the U.S. does decide to mount an all-out effort to find Osama, more troops will likely be needed: 130,000 were available to find Saddam, but just 15,000 are based in Afghanistan where Osama may be hiding.

Thank you.

OK, the Big News:

Saddam was -- sure, I'll use the word -- evil. The capture is a good thing. I'm not going to be a knee-jerk contrarian and say, "It won't make a bit of difference" -- I think it really could help wind down the insurgency. I don't know that, but it seems quite possible.

But the news coverage has no perspective. We got here via 9/11, yet this has nothing to do with 9/11. It may be the right solution (or, rather, partial solution), but it's a solution to the wrong problem.

I don't know of any reporter or analyst who's touched on that. It's the most important fact, it should be pointed out over and over, yet it gets lost.

I haven't heard what all the Democratic candidates have said about the capture -- I've only heard Gephardt, who was on CNN this afternoon and handed Bush a big fat Christmas present by linking Saddam to 9/11 just the way Bush would have wanted him to. And Bush did it himself, subtly and deftly, in his football pregame show speech -- he dropped in the word "terrorists" about two-thirds of the way through ("We still face terrorists who would rather go on killing the innocent than accept the rise of liberty in the heart of the Middle East"), then moved on to "the war on terror."

This has nothing to do with the war on terror.

I don't even hear Dean say that often enough. Everyone who's opposed Bush with regard to this war has to say it -- this is good, but it has nothing to do with the people responsible for 9/11. Bush doesn't just link Iraq and 9/11 -- he does it every chance he gets. He never neglects to do it -- every statement on Iraq makes the link.

So every statement on Iraq by his would-be opponents has to stress the lack of a link. This is more important than ever.

Something I was planning to post before the Big News hit:

Time columnist Joel Stein has substituted a couple of times for right-wing talk-radio host Mike Gallagher. Stein has conservative beliefs, but apparently he's not pure enough for the talk-radio audience. Here he is, in his most recent column, to tell us what he learned as a host:

I had invited a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) on to talk about cockfighting, of which I'm an advocate. Yet just having the PETA woman on the show made listeners think I was a liberal. A caller said the PETA rep was a terrorist, which I agreed with, since the organization totally disrupted last year's Victoria's Secret fashion show. Then he said she was the same as Osama bin Laden. I questioned that, mostly because PETA hasn't killed anyone. He said that all terrorists were equal and that parsing out evil made me a sympathizer. I questioned his epistemology, at which point he called me a "stupid liberal kike," which caused the switchboard guy to hang up on him. That switchboard guy ruined all the fun.

..."A conservative can spot a liberal a mile away. You are, or you ain't," Gallagher told me. "It's not just an ideology or a philosophy. We have an ability to cut to the chase. Black and white isn't a bad thing. Liberals gravitate toward the gray to muddy the waters, to muddle people's thinking..."

...When I sat down to host the show, playing with all the dials until I realized the producer had wisely taken away all my powers, I was startled by the intro. It was a quote from Al Pacino in The Recruit.... Pacino yells, "We believe in good and evil. And we choose good. We believe in right and wrong. And we choose right. Our cause is just. Our enemies everywhere. They're all around us."

Y'know, I'm still waiting for that Nicholas Kristof op-ed about non-Democratic haters.

Once again, for the willfully obtuse:

Iraqi Agent Denies He Met 9/11 Hijacker in Prague Before Attacks on the U.S.

A former Iraqi intelligence officer who was said to have met with the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 attacks has told American interrogators the meeting never happened, according to United States officials familiar with classified intelligence reports on the matter.

Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the former intelligence officer, was taken into custody by the United States in July. Under questioning he has said that he did not meet with Mohamed Atta in Prague, according to the officials, who have reviewed classified debriefing reports based on the interrogations....

--New York Times

This tall tale can't be debunked often enough, even though I'm sure it will never go away, not until the last neocon dog dies -- William Safire will never stop believing it, nor will Laurie Mylroie, nor will Dick Cheney.

And don't assume for a minute that Bush knows it's nonsense. You remember that Cheney told the tall tale on Meet the Press last September, and you remember that Bush immediately contradicted him. But he contradicted him only on 9/11, and he didn't say there wasn't a connection -- he said only that there was "no evidence" of one. The SOB absolutely thinks there was a connection. Here's what he said:

Mr. Bush, asked by a reporter today about Mr. Cheney's statement, said, "No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th," a far more definitive statement than his vice president made.

"Now, what the vice president said was is that he has been involved with Al Qaeda," Mr. Bush said. "And al-Zarqawi, an Al Qaeda operative, was in Baghdad. He's the guy that order the killing of a U.S. diplomat," he said, a reference to the killing in October of Lawrence Foley, on the doorstep of his home in Amman, Jordan.

Mr. Bush said that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is "still running loose, involved with the poisons network," and concluded, "there's no question that Saddam Hussein had Al Qaeda ties."

Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here. See you soon, we hope. Signed, Your pals, the (real) evildoers. P.S. How are you enjoying Iraq?

KAMALZAI, PAKISTAN - With a bitter winter chill and the largest US ground offensive in nearly two years afoot in Afghanistan, Taliban commander Maulvi Pardes Akhund and his fighters are cheered by the warm reception and accommodations in a refugee camp for Afghans here.

Mr. Akhund's band, and others like them, have come to Pakistan's sprawling Balochistan Province for a bit of R&R and to recruit new blood for the Islamic militia's fight in Afghanistan. Recruitment is going well, Akhund says, with 10 new fighters joining the ranks this week, and donations from local people pouring in....

...Sources in religious circles here say the Taliban fighters are still getting financial support from the banned Al-Rasheed and Al-Akhtar Trust, which worked in Afghanistan during the Taliban regime, and other welfare organizations, besides collecting huge amount of donations from rich and influential traders in Karachi. Many of these traders donate to the Taliban on a monthly basis.

..."From our village only, people donated 1.7 million rupees [around $30,000], and two truckloads of blankets, warm clothes, and medicines were dispatched for the Taliban," says Abdus Salam, a local villager in Killi Karbala. "People support the Taliban not only because they are Muslims, but when they were in power people here could travel across the border easily, as there was peace and security."...

...A former Taliban leader, who is now hiding in Balochistan, says, "Things are changing. Karzai is losing his control in Afghanistan. Initially we used to hide from our own shadows in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but now we can easily mingle with the locals who extend us all sorts of support."...

"Winter restricts our movement so we might have to scale down our military attacks, so we try to intensify political efforts against the infidels and defeat the loya jirga," says on former Taliban leader in Quetta. "But we are also working hard to reorganize and regroup through winter because we want our cause to blossom in spring."

--Christian Science Monitor

Yesterday I posted part of the transcript of Tim Russert's Hillary Clinton interview, in which she denied that she wants the '04 nomination and he wouldn't take no for an answer. An e-mailer writes:

I could not help comparing Russert's pressing Ms. Clinton about her willingness to accept the Democratic nomination with a Saturday Night Live appearance by John McCain ~1 year ago in which he was pressed on whether he would run for President in 2004.

McCAIN:  "I repeat I will not run."

INTERVIEWER:  "What if President Bush forgets to run?  Would you run then?"

McCAIN:  "If the president forgot to run, I would remind him."

INTERVIEWER:  "So you're saying you MIGHT be a candidate."

Eerie parallels.

Indeed.

(And yes, as McCain himself notes here, the "interviewer" was Tim Russert, played by Darrell Hammond.)

Are we getting the truth about troop deaths in Iraq? Lunaville notes that there are conflicting accounts of an incident in Ad Duluiyah on December 9 in which three soldiers died -- Centcom called it an accident, but a news story now cites an Iraqi attack. And last week Needlenose cited this Knight-Ridder story:

An influential Mississippi congressman has raised the possibility that the Pentagon has undercounted combat casualties in Iraq after he learned that five members of the Mississippi National Guard who were injured Sept. 12 by a booby trap in Iraq were denied Purple Heart medals.

The guardsmen were wounded by an artillery shell that detonated as their convoy passed the tree in which it was hidden, but their injuries were classified as "noncombat," according to Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss. Taylor, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, learned of the classification when he visited the most seriously injured of the guardsmen, Spc. Carl Sampson, 35, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

"How could no one have caught this?" Taylor said....

Is this just a fog-of-war thing, or is the Pentagon concealing the truth?

Please, please, please tell me they're not this stupid:

Saddam's Palace May Be New U.S. Embassy

U.S. bombs never hit Saddam Hussein's grandiose presidential palace in Baghdad, making its ample meeting rooms and vast conference tables an ideal headquarters for U.S.-led occupation authorities after the war.

Now the building — the physical seat and biggest symbol of Saddam's 23-year dictatorship — is the likely site for the next U.S. Embassy in Iraq, U.S. officials in Washington and Iraq said this week....

If the building does become the U.S. Embassy, analysts say its negative symbolism as the previous seat of Iraq's dictatorship will be reinforced when U.S. representatives move in....

No! Really? You think so?

Slouching towards The Handmaid's Tale in Italy....

Italy's Senate has overwhelmingly approved a law which bans the use of donor sperm, eggs or surrogate mothers.

It also limits the right to artificial fertilisation to "heterosexual couples in stable relationships", excluding gay couples and single women.

...The legislation, passed in the Senate by 169 votes to 90 on Thursday, will now be sent back to the lower house of the parliament for minor adjustments.

Officials say it will remain essentially unchanged.

Under the law, only infertile couples can apply for artificial insemination, and only to government-approved centres.

They have to prove that they are married or in a stable relationship.

Doctors can create up to three embryos for each attempt, and these cannot be frozen or used for research.

Indeed, the freezing of any embryo or sperm is outlawed, as is screening for abnormalities, even in couples who suffer from genetic disorders.

Women are also not allowed to use the sperm of a deceased partner....

--BBC

But the story notes that abortion isn't being banned -- yet.

Here's a report that points out just who might benefit from the drug discount cards in the Medicare bill -- David Halbert, a friend of George W. Bush's since 1986. Halbert happens to be the CEO of AdvancePCS, one of the biggest guns in the pharmaceutical benefit management field. Bush was an early investor in the company (he reported a $1 million capital gain when cashed out in 1996); Halbert, in turn was an early investor in -- er, contributor to -- candidate Bush.

The report, in turn, cites this story, by Newsday's Knut Royce (writing for The Public i). It's complicated, but if you make your way through it, you'll see that Bush sold Harken Energy stock in 1990 at a nice profit just before Harken collapsed -- which you probably knew -- and Halbert's energy business, Advance Petroleum Marketing, after agreeing to buy a failing division of Harken from a partnership of Harken insiders, got much more favorable terms when Harken was forced to renegotiate the deal. (Halbert's gain was Harken's loss -- the very loss that helped send Harken's stock price plummeting to $2.37 a share weeks after Bush sold his Harken stock for $4 a share.)

(Thanks to Nick Confessore at Tapped for spotting this.)

The BUSH BOOM!'s GDP spike gets front-page treatment. This, by contrast, gets buried on the back page of the business section:

According to the minutes [of an October 28 meeting] released on Thursday, members of the Fed's policy-making committee were convinced in late October that inflation would remain quite low "for the next year or two" and that the "slack" in both the job market and in factory use would not disappear until "the latter part of 2005 of even later."...

According to the October minutes, members of the policy-making committee argued that the rapid rise in productivity over the last year would curb job creation....

The projected 4 percent economic growth for 2004 might not be enough to ignite inflationary pressures, because productivity has been climbing at more than 5 percent a year. If productivity continues to climb at that pace, the economy could expand by 4 percent and still not have a meaningful drop in unemployment.

--New York Times

So there's no boom yet for unemployed, and it looks as if there won't be one for a good long time. And it's not Paul Krugman who's saying this -- it's Alan Greenspan's Fed. Shouldn't this be bigger news?

CNN, December 14, 1999:

Former GOP presidential candidate Lamar Alexander endorsed Republican front-runner George W. Bush Tuesday, becoming the latest in a long line of Republican figures to back the Texas governor.

...Appearing at a news conference with Bush, Alexander said Bush is assured of winning the nomination -- even though the first caucuses and primaries are more than a month away and Bush is facing a strong challenge from Arizona Sen. John McCain.

"The process is almost over," Alexander said....

USA Today, January 4, 2000:

Elizabeth Dole endorsed George W. Bush Tuesday for the Republican presidential nomination, invoking Ronald Reagan and asserting that the Texas governor would restore trust to the White House.

...After picking up Dole's endorsement four weeks before the New Hampshire primary, Bush headed to Iowa to stump for votes in advance of the Jan. 24 presidential caucuses there....

Associated Press, January 4, 2000:

Bush is the endorsement champion this time. He has the support of 29 of the 55 Republican senators, including the newest, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island....

Twenty-five of the 31 Republican governors have endorsed Bush. He has the backing of 166 of the 222 GOP House members so far....

As I recall, the press response to this was awestruck admiration -- what a mighty machine the Bush campaign was! No one found any of the endorsements "puzzling." No one argued that they disenfranchised voters. No one argued that decent human beings would have waited two months.

Joe Lieberman, stop whining -- and everyone else, stop feeling sorry for him. That's what Michael Tomasky says in this American Prospect article. Tomasky says Gore graciously stepped aside for Lieberman, but Lieberman squandered the opportunity, so why shed tears over his snub by Gore?

Tomasky also reminds us that there's been friction between the two for a while. In case you've forgotten:

Leaders of a centrist Democratic group, the Democratic Leadership Council, meeting last week at a policy conference in New York, complained about Gore's economic populism theme from the 2000 campaign. They said they did not believe a theme of "the people versus the powerful" was a winning formula for Democratic candidates.

--USA Today, 8/4/02

I believe Governor Bill Clinton and I were right to maintain, during our 1992 campaign, that fighting for "the forgotten middle class" against the "forces of greed." Standing up for the people, not the powerful was the right choice in 2000. In fact, it is the ground of the Democratic party's being, our meaning and our mission.

The suggestion from some in our party that we should no longer speak that truth, especially at a time like this, strikes me as bad politics and wrong in principle. This struggle between the people and the powerful was at the heart of every major domestic issue of the 2000 campaign and is still the central dynamic of politics in 2002.

--New York Times op-ed by Al Gore, 8/4/02

Al Gore's 2000 running mate said Sunday that Gore's populist themes did not accurately reflect the Democrats' pro-growth campaign for the White House.

"The people versus the powerful theme was too subject to misunderstanding and not representative" of the economic growth that occurred during the 1990s under President Clinton and Vice President Gore, said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.

The populist approach, Lieberman said, was "also not expressive of the fiscally responsible, pro-growth, grow-the-middle-class campaign we were running" that included targeted tax cuts and other centrist proposals championed by the Democratic Leadership Council.

--USA Today, 8/4/02

Gore has moved to the left, and Lieberman and the DLC have responded by taking potshots at him. So who was rude first?

LIAR

A half-hour after Dean alarmed party regulars over television Sunday, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on NBC titillated worried Democrats by hesitating at closing the door for 2004.

--Robert Novak today

MR. RUSSERT: So no matter what happens, absolutely, categorically, no?

SEN. CLINTON: You know, I am going to do everything I can to support this nominee, whoever that person might be.

MR. RUSSERT: But just say no. You would...

SEN. CLINTON: I have said no and no and I’m trying to think of different ways of saying no and no. And I hope that in ’08, I’ll be supporting a Democratic president for re-election.

MR. RUSSERT: But you would never accept the nomination in 2004?
 
SEN. CLINTON: You know, I have said over and over again—and, you know, my view on all of this is that...

MR. RUSSERT: You’ve said over and over what?

SEN. CLINTON: That I’m not running, I’m not in this race.

MR. RUSSERT: But you wouldn’t accept the nomination?

SEN. CLINTON: The nomination—it’s not going to be offered to me, that’s one thing.

MR. RUSSERT: But if it is...

SEN. CLINTON: Oh, Tim, you know, I—it’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen.

MR. RUSSERT: Well, but if it did happen?

SEN. CLINTON: You know, I have—I am...

MR. RUSSERT: I think the door is opening a bit, Senator.

SEN. CLINTON: Oh, no, it’s not. Now, don’t you try to make something out of nothing.

MR. RUSSERT: Oh, no, no, no.

SEN. CLINTON: No, no. I’ve said, no. I’ve said no, no, no, no. And I...

MR. RUSSERT: OK, so the door is sealed.

SEN. CLINTON: The door is shut. The door is shut.

MR. RUSSERT: “I will never accept the nomination in 2004”?

SEN. CLINTON: I am not accepting the nomination. I am going to work for whoever the nominee is.

--Transcript of Meet the Press for December 7, 2003

What the hell more do these people want?

George W. Bush doesn't hate the earth -- hey, he favors the development of clean-burning hydrogen cars!

And how does he want to generate the hydrogen for those hydrogen cars?

Nuclear power!

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Daniel Hirsch and George M. Woodwell explain:

Buried in the president's energy budget proposal is a "nuclear hydrogen initiative." Building upon it, the energy bill hashed out behind closed doors by congressional Republicans includes $1.1 billion to construct an atomic reactor in Idaho to produce hydrogen.

That's right. Nuclear hydrogen. Who says these guys don't have a sense of humor? A public that yearns for, and has now been promised, "pollution-free" energy will be given instead something that produces plutonium, strontium, cesium and dozens of other highly toxic radioactive waste products.

There are more goodies for the nuclear industry in the energy bill (which is two Senate votes away from becoming law), including $6 billion to stimulate construction of reactors, and a reauthorization of the Price-Anderson Act,

the most extraordinary piece of corporate socialist legislation in U.S. history. Price-Anderson immunizes the nuclear industry from as much as 99 percent of the liability it might face in case of a serious release of radioactivity in a major accident.

Oh, and

the conference committee's rewrite of the energy bill inexplicably relaxes protections against nuclear terrorism.

Terrific!

(Thanks to Green Boy at Needlenose for this.)

A black eye for Ashcroft?

The Bush administration's first major post-Sept. 11 prosecution, which broke up a terrorist cell in Detroit, is in danger of unraveling after the Justice Department divulged it had failed to turn over evidence that might have helped the defense. The evidence includes a letter from an imprisoned drug gang leader who alleges the government's key witness confided he made up some of his story.

The December 2001 letter, which could have been used by defense lawyers to challenge the prosecution witness during the trial this spring, wasn't turned over until a couple of weeks ago.

The defendants are now asking that their convictions be overturned, and the judge has scheduled an emergency hearing for tomorrow to demand an explanation from the government.

...Senior law enforcement officials told the Associated Press yesterday the Justice Department is concerned how the judge will rule and will acknowledge that its prosecutors erred....

--Boston Globe/AP

For years we've heard Republicans denounce "Washington, D.C." and say they believe in "returning power to the states." But have you noticed you don't hear much about returning power to the states anymore? That's because many states and municipalities want to do things the Gop's principal constituents -- lobbyists -- don't like: fighting corporate malfeasance, for instance, or buying prescription drugs from Canada. A couple of days ago, USA Today had a good story about this federal-state conflict.

And here's another example, as reported by Newsday:

New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who's already clashed with the Securities and Exchange Commision over the investigation of mutual funds, yesterday threatened to sue federal banking regulators if they attempt to curtail his enforcement power.

Flanked by politicians and consumer advocates during a news conference at his Manhattan office, Spitzer railed against the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's recent proposal to allow federal banking law to supercede state consumer protection law. "The OCC is trying to pre-empt state and local laws ... This is bad law; it is simply wrong," said Spitzer, adding, "We know how to draft lawsuits," if the OCC continues to push its proposal....

Spitzer said he and other state attorney generals became concerned when the OCC sent a letter to national banks last year telling them they are not subject to state enforcement and to "consult with the OCC if state officials contact them concerning the potential application of state law."...

Spitzer, New York State Banking Department Superintendent Diana Taylor and consumer groups say that such a proposal would allow national banks to sidestep New York's strong anti-predatory lending laws.

Predatory lenders offer loans with exorbitant interest rates to disadvantaged consumers, which include immigrants, African Americans, Latinos and seniors. Spitzer and the New York State Banking Department have gone after several large financial institutions, such as Delta Funding and Household, for abusive lending. Spitzer said predatory lending costs American consumers more than $9.1 billion a year.

If national banks are allowed to sidestep these laws, it will encourage state-chartered banks to do the same by becoming national banks, he said....

Go, Eliot!

Bush Seeks Help of Allies Barred From Iraq Deals

President Bush found himself in the awkward position on Wednesday of calling the leaders of France, Germany and Russia to ask them to forgive Iraq's debts, just a day after the Pentagon excluded those countries and others from $18 billion in American-financed Iraqi reconstruction projects....

The Russian defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, when asked about the Pentagon decision, responded by ruling out any debt write-off for Iraq.

The Canadian deputy prime minister, John Manley, suggested crisply that "it would be difficult" to add to the $190 million already given for reconstruction in Iraq.

White House officials said Mr. Bush and his aides had been surprised by both the timing and the blunt wording of the Pentagon's declaration....

Those officials apparently did not realize that the memorandum, signed by Paul D. Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, would appear on a Defense Department Web site hours before Mr. Bush was scheduled to ask world leaders to receive James A. Baker III, the former treasury secretary and secretary of state, who is heading up the effort to wipe out Iraq's debt....

--New York Times

D'oh!

Here's the story I posted yesterday, then deleted:

...In the past week, two retail chains stopped buying goods from American furniture makers who are supporting a so-called "anti-dumping petition" that could impose steep tariffs on Chinese products, thus dramatically raising import costs.

...American Furniture Warehouse Co. Inc., based in Englewood, Colo., which has nine stores across Colorado, and Columbus, Ohio,-based Value City Furniture, which has 80 stores across the East Coast and Midwest, are no longer buying bedroom sets from companies whose executives signed a petition charging China with illegally dumping cheap furniture in the United States....

...For the American furniture making executives who signed the petition, the argument is simple.

China has fixed its currency at about 40 percent of the value of the U.S. dollar, thereby insuring what they deem as persistently unfair pricing advantages over U.S. products. In addition, the petition supporters argue that the Chinese government subsidizes the building of furniture plants in that country and is not abiding by World Trade Organization standards to protect worker safety and the environment to further keep costs down.

...Wickes Furniture, a 40-store chain in the Midwest, has also stopped buying from Vaughan-Bassett. Wickes was spending as much as $1 million a year with the company, but has gradually cut back and shifted to buying from China manufacturers after Seffner, Fla.,-based retail giant Rooms To Go Inc. bought half of the company.

....Jeff Seaman, chief executive of Rooms To Go, said he isn't boycotting any American manufacturer company that signed the anti-dumping petition. But Seaman said he prefers to buy from furniture makers that are not backing the petition.

..."I'm against the petition because it's going to raise prices for consumers," Seaman said. "Anything that's anti-consumer is bad for larger retailers."

...Just in the wood bedroom furniture segment, the United States has lost 106,000 jobs in the past four years -- including more than 16,000 factory jobs in North Carolina -- according to the U.S. Department of Labor....

--MSNBC, from The Business Journal of the Greater Triad Area (North Carolina)

What's odd about this -- and about Bush's warning to Taiwan -- is that Bush and the furniture dealers (and other retailers, from Wal-Mart on down) clearly no longer fear that there'll be a public outcry. Some rightists still mistrust China, and some on the left worry about human-rights violations and lost American jobs, but the average American wants that $29 DVD player and doesn't seem angry at China the way, not so long ago, many Americans were angry at Japan.

Part of the problem, I think, is that average Americans can't figure out what would save American jobs -- protectionism? free trade? unionism? huge tax cuts for the rich? So Americans just shrug and, as long as they're employed, spend.

I can't figure it out either. I'd love to tick off a progressive laundry list of solutions, but the relentless ratcheting down of costs by corporations is a trend that isn't going to be reversed by one or two successful union organizing campaigns, or "living wage" laws. I fear that it's going to have to get a lot worse before people are really motivated to take steps to turn it back, and at that point it may require a (literal) class war.

This is a shock: I completely agree with Jonah Goldberg about something. This is another shock: I think you will too.

Over at The Corner at National Review Online he cites a short article from PoliticsNH.com:

Ralph Nader, a guest of presidential candidate U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, stood outside the press room of Tuesday’s debate telling reporters he’ll make a decision whether to enter his own name in the race for the White House early next year.

Nader explained that he is waiting for the Democratic and Republican National Committees to formally respond to a 25-page agenda that he proposed to them in recent weeks.

He will make the agenda public when he gets a response, he said.

Nader said he is expecting a reply from both organizations sometime in mid-December.

“I’m going to get a response,” he said. “The question is: what’s the quality.” ...

Goldberg's response:

I've got a high quality formal response for him, but I'm not sure it's anatomically possible.

He took the words right out of my mouth.

This is shameful:

Prosecutors Say It's Unclear Papers Chaplain Carried Were Classified

The criminal proceedings against Capt. James J. Yee, the former Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, fell into confusion on Tuesday and stalled as the military prosecutors asked for extra time to determine whether documents that were found in Captain Yee's luggage when he was leaving the base were, in fact, classified.

The hearing was postponed until Jan. 19 to give the prosecutors time to review the documents that set off a major investigation into whether Captain Yee was a spy, a contention from which the government has since emphatically distanced itself....

Officials placed Captain Yee in solitary confinement for nearly three months in a naval brig while they completed their investigation into possible espionage. Maj. Scott Sikes, one of Captain Yee's defense lawyers, said on Tuesday that military prosecutors once told him that they might seek the death penalty in the case.

But when the investigation was completed last month and Captain Yee was released, the military did not bring any serious espionage case....

--New York Times

Well, this didn't take long....

California's already battered credit rating suffered another downgrade from a Wall Street rating agency that criticized Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's decision to cut car taxes without any plan to pay for the move.

Moody's Investors Service said Tuesday that little has changed since Schwarzenegger won the Oct. 7 recall election, and the state has a "continuing inability to reach political consensus on solutions to its budget and financial problems." ...

Moody's analysts said the state's deficit will balloon by $7.5 billion this year because of the car tax reduction if no other steps are taken. Tuesday's downgrade mirrors one imposed last summer by Standard & Poor's and a more recent poor rating from Wall Street's other big credit agency, Fitch Ratings.

California has had the lowest credit rating among all 50 states for most of the last year. The low rating could cost taxpayers millions of dollars in higher interest payments on the billions of dollars the state will likely need to borrow in the coming months.

--AP

A new Quinnipiac poll has some good news for the president -- his lead over various Democrats has (probably as the result of economic and turkey hype) expanded somewhat.

But here's what I want to know: If Howard Dean is, among the top contenders, uniquely unelectable, why is he trailing Bush by roughly the same margins as the guys who are seen as more mainstream?

Here are Bush's leads, according to Quinnipiac:

* 51 -- 40 percent over Dean

* 51 -- 40 percent over Lieberman

* 51 -- 39 percent over Kerry

* 53 -- 38 percent over Gephardt

* 50 -- 41 percent over Clark

Raise your hand if you see a statistically significant difference.

Even Nancy Reagan doesn't want her husband to replace FDR on the dime -- but proponents of the Reagan dime aren't going to rest. Now they want to put Reagan on some of the dimes, while leaving FDR on others. Read all about it here. Isn't it great that we now have world peace and prosperity and our legislators can spend their days worrying about things like this?

It's a big headline on the title screen of the New York Times Web site, and it's a front-page story in the print edition: Restaurant Hiring May Lead the Way to Wider Job Gains. The story begins:

The restaurant industry has gone on a hiring spree over the last four months, suggesting that broader gains in the job market could be on the way.

But go to the story and look at the graph. It's tucked away on the side of the page; in the print edition it's on the jump, on page C2. The increases in employment this year are less than they were in January 2002 -- when increases absolutely weren't an early sign of a general job boom -- and are much less than those in 1991 and 1992 (a period that technically wasn't recessionary but sure felt like a recession for a lot of workers).

This hiring does suggest that we've touched bottom -- but it sure doesn't look like the sign of a boom.

Earlier today I posted, then deleted, a grumble about what seems to be the premature end of the Democratic nomination process. I deleted it when I read this asinine column by Slate's William Saletan and realized that what I'd written implied that I share his view -- which is that Al Gore somehow did harm to democracy by endorsing Howard Dean.

I do think that people who aren't actively involved in the political process, or who aren't willing or able to spend a lot of time poring over political news, are likely to feel alienated if the nominee in what seemed to be a wide-open contest is all but decided before a single vote is cast. But that's not Al Gore's fault, as Saletan stupidly argues -- it's the media's fault for overemphasizing the horse race (and doling out coverage based on who's up in the polls) while showing little or no interest in informing the public about policy differences among candidates.

(As Atrios reveals in painful detail, in tonight's debate it took nineteen questions before a candidate was asked anything about policy.)

If you run a good campaign in the months leading up to the early primaries and caucuses, you should do well in the early primaries and caucuses -- you shouldn't already be declared the winner before those votes are cast. That's how it should work, but the press likes to anoint a winner prematurely. Gore is taking advantage of that, which he has every right to do. He's not preventing anyone from voting for another candidate, as Saletan (I'm not making this up) implies.

Of course, surprises are still possible. But I do suspect this thing is over. However, it might not be if the press took its responsibilities seriously.

Housing boom about to go bust?

Shares of home builders tanked on Tuesday after Washington Mutual Inc., the No. 3 U.S. mortgage lender, cut its earnings outlook and said it would slash 2,900 jobs early next year, analysts said.

Although analysts said it was unclear whether the savings and loan company's business slowdown was due to a drop in mortgage lending or refinancing, the disappointing news was enough to help throw investors in home builders off balance.

"It seems to be a combination of that and (trading) ahead of the Fed's move," Natexis Bleichroeder analyst Barbara Allen said earlier in the day.

However, even after the Federal Reserve said it would hold interest rates at 45-year lows, housing stocks continued to trade lower....

--Reuters

I guess those 2,900 people who worked for Washington Mutual through the huge wave of refinancings were just temps. Too bad they probably didn't know that.

I deleted a couple of posts from earlier today -- one that went up inadvertently and one that I posted intentionally but thought better of. No doubt I'm violating an unwritten law of blogs by doing this.

From AP (emphasis mine):

Iraq's interim government voted Tuesday to establish a war crimes tribunal to prosecute top members of Saddam Hussein's regime, two people who attended the meeting said....

One Governing Council member, Younadem Kana, told The Associated Press that the court's proceedings would be open to the Iraqi public - and possibly broadcast on television....

The law calls for Iraqi judges to hear cases presented by Iraqi lawyers, with international experts serving only as advisers....

It remained unclear whether the law included the death penalty, although Kana said most council members agreed it should - "like in Texas."...

Yikes!

(Link via Sadly, No!)

Washington Post, May 2, 2003:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said today that 8,000 U.S. forces in Afghanistan have ended major combat operations and will shift their focus to stabilizing and rebuilding the country.

CNN today:

The U.S. military has launched a major ground operation in Afghanistan in an effort to eliminate the remnants of al Qaeda and the Taliban regime overthrown in 2001.

Military spokesman Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty described "Operation Avalanche", which began over the weekend, as the largest ground operation yet in Afghanistan.

(Thanks to Cursor for this; also see Rational Enquirer.)

A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll shows somewhat higher approval ratings for the Medicare bill than the ABC/Washington Post poll I cite directly below -- but it's still not good news for the Bush administration. USA Today reports:

A 52% majority of those surveyed said they favored the bill; 30% opposed it. Among those age 65 and older, support was lower: 46% in favor, 39% opposed.

But

* Eight in 10 said they were worried that the benefit doesn't provide enough help. A 56% majority of those 65 and older were very concerned about that.

* Nearly two-thirds expressed a conflicting fear ? that it will cost the government too much. But concerns about coverage trumped deficit fears. When asked whether excessive cost or inadequate coverage was their greater concern, 75% said coverage.

* Three-fourths were worried that the provisions are too complicated for seniors to understand. Among seniors, 84% were concerned about that.

A look at the poll numbers shows that only 15% of senior citizens think the bill will help them financially -- 21% think it will actually hurt them, and 58% think it will not have much effect.

Also, 73% of seniors (and 66% of all poll respondents) are concerned that the bill could force some Medicare recipients into HMOs.

And 59% of seniors think the bill will do more to help drug companies than to help recipients; 28% think the opposite.

I'm starting to suspect that you won't hear a word about this bill at the Republican convention next year -- it'll be a skeleton in the closet, right next to the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED photo op. Alas, unlike that photo op, it's the law, and it really seems like a big nothing with a huge price tag.

The chattering classes told us that Bush stole the Medicare issue from the Democrats. Apparently somebody forgot to explain this to the voters:

Americans are casting a skeptical eye on the Medicare changes signed into law by President Bush, according to an ABCNEWS/Washington Post poll. More disapprove than approve of the legislation, with doubts peaking among senior citizens and among those who've been following the issue most closely.

Among all Americans, 38 percent disapprove of the Medicare changes, slightly more than the 32 percent who approve (many, 30 percent, are withholding judgment). But it's a broader spread — 47 percent to 26 percent disapproval — among senior citizens, and a similar 46 percent to 32 percent disapproval in the next age group, 55- to 64-year-olds.

Moreover, disapproval is highest among the one-sixth of the public — many seniors among them — who have been following the issue most closely. Most people in this highest-attention group, 56 percent, disapprove of the plan; indeed, many of them disapprove "strongly." People who know more about it, this result suggests, like it less....

It follows, then, that the legislation has not delivered any immediate political boost to the president. His overall job approval rating in this poll is 53 percent, not up and if anything slightly down from its recent level (57 percent last month and 56 percent in October)....

--ABC News

In The New Yorker, John Cassidy catches The New York Times falling for the hype:

Things are looking up --according to George W. Bush and the Times, anyway. Last Tuesday, the paper led its front page with this sunny triple-decker: MANUFACTURING AT HIGHEST LEVEL IN TWO DECADES; HIRING OUTLOOK IS UPBEAT; STOCKS AT 18-MONTH PEAK ON RUN OF POSITIVE DATA --BUSH OPTIMISTIC. The headline's main claim, however, was inaccurate. It misinterpreted an economic indicator that is designed to gauge whether factories are churning out more or less stuff than they did last month, not absolute levels of production. The most reliable measure of how manufacturing is doing is the Federal Reserve's index of industrial production, which in October was 112.7, compared with a high of 118.4 in June of 2000. The November figure comes out next week. A six-point jump isn't impossible, but it would be virtually unprecedented.

What we can be sure of is that most manufacturing companies are still operating well below capacity, and that millions of manufacturing jobs have been lost. In October, 73.5 per cent of plants and equipment were in active use. Three years ago, more than eighty per cent were. When President Bush took office, about 17.1 million Americans worked in factories; today, 14.5 million do. Last month, another seventeen thousand manufacturing jobs disappeared. Manufacturing employment has now fallen for forty straight months.

Oops.

The schools! We weren't talking about the schools! Every night on the news -- casualties, casualties, casualties! Nothing about the schools!

Georgia Democrat Jim Marshall ... and a bipartisan group of six other representatives just returned from Iraq. They charged that reporters have developed an overall negative tone and a "police blotter" mind-set, stressing attacks and little else. Ranking member Ike Skelton, D.-Mo., said he was impressed with the flexibility and innovation of the American military, including 3,100 projects in northern Iraq, from soccer fields to schools ...

--syndicated columnist John Leo, 9/30/03

Six months ago, nearly all of Iraq's schools were closed, and many primary schools lacked electrical wiring and plumbing and windows. Today, all 22 universities and 43 technical institutes and colleges are open, as are nearly all primary and secondary schools in the country. Earlier this year we said we would rehabilitate 1,000 schools by the time school started. This month, just days before the first day of class, our coalition and our Iraqi partners had refurbished over 1,500 schools.

--President's radio address, 10/18/03

Oops:

On its corporate Web site, under a page titled "A Fresh Start for Iraqi School Children," Bechtel Group showcases sparkling new classrooms filled with happy, young Iraqi students.

But the reality is far different, according to Army investigators.

"In almost every case, the paint jobs were done in a hurry, causing more damage to the appearance of the school than in terms of providing a finish that will protect the structure," a recent Army investigation into Bechtel's work found. "In one case, the paint job actually damaged critical lab equipment, making it unusable."...

During repairs, "reports started coming in about poor quality," said 422nd Civil Affairs Battalion Maj. Linda Scharf, who was responsible for the schools in question, and who started fielding calls from concerned teachers and headmasters.

"So I asked one of my teams to go verify the rumors," Scharf said. "They took their digital camera, and the reality turned out to be worse than the rumors."

What they found: The subcontractors Bechtel hired left paint everywhere - on the floors, on desks, all over windows. The classrooms were filthy, the school's desks and chairs were thrown out into the playground and left, broken. Windows were left damaged, and bathrooms that were reportedly fixed were left in broken, unsanitary condition.

"Would you allow your child to use that bathroom? I wouldn't," Scharf said, pointing to a photograph of a stained, broken hole in a dirty, tiled stall.

..."Because it is an American company, they didn't allow anyone to control them," [Iraqi Education Ministry city planner Israa Mohammed] said....

--Scripps Howard News Service

(Scripps Howard story via Atrios.)

The Independent reports that there's a bit of skepticism about the Iraqi who's identified himself as the source of the WMDs-in-45-minutes claim in Britain's dossier about Saddam:

Officials within the Iraqi occupation authorities are puzzling over a British newspaper's interview with a man purporting to be an Iraqi colonel who said he believed he was the source of the Government's claim that Saddam Hussein could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

...The interviewee was identified only as Lt-Col al-Dabbagh, 40, who was the "head of an Iraqi air defence unit in the western desert". He was also interviewed by the American network channel, NBC....

...sections of the transcript of the NBC interview that the network did not broadcast were aired on the ITV News Channel, which has a partnership with NBC. In one, the colonel was asked by NBC's Baghdad correspondent why he was so sure that these were chemical or biological weapons. His reply suggests that he was not, in fact, sure at all.

"We cannot determine exactly, but the procedures taken show that these were indeed WMD," he said. "It might have been chemical or biological but it was definitely unconventional weapons."

In another section, broadcast by ITV, the colonel says: "The instructions from Saddam were clear. When you get to a critical point where the survival of the country is at stake then you can use these weapons. All weapons starting from the common knife all the way up to nuclear weapons can be used.That was the instruction."

As it has long been known that Iraq's armed forces did not possess nuclear weapons, this raises further doubts about the unnamed "colonel's" credibility....

Please recall that before this story broke there was intelligence, attributable to one unnamed Iraqi source (but otherwise unverified), that Saddam's forces could launch battlefield (not long-distance) chemical or biological weapons on 45 minutes' notice -- and now there's intelligence, attributable to one named Iraqi source (but otherwise unverified), that Saddam's forces could launch battlefield (not long-distance) chemical or biological weapons on 45 minutes' notice. So there's not much new here. Yet the New York Post gave the story a front-page banner headline and other conservatives are treating it as big news.

Incidentally, as Sadly, No! notes, The Independent reported yesterday that Colonel al-Dabbagh has been identified as "an advisor to the Iraqi Governing Council." Think this guy does anything useful for the Iraqi people when he's not pumping self-aggrandizing stories to the British and American press?

A new talking point among right-wingers is that President Bush isn't really a right-winger because a right-winger would never go for all that spending. In a good analysis in The New Republic, Jonathan Chait clears up some of the confusion:

Bush's extremism does not lie in the purity of his devotion to the teachings of Milton Friedman but rather in the slavishness of his fealty to K Street. The distinction is a fine one, but it's highly revealing. In most instances, being pro-free market and pro-business amount to the same thing. Businesses usually want the government out of their way, which is why the business lobby threw its weight behind Bush's efforts to cut taxes, scuttle workplace safety standards, and so on. The way you tell the difference between a free-marketer and a servant of business is how he behaves when the interests of the two diverge. And all the evidence, including the Medicare and energy bills, points to the conclusion that Bush is happy to throw free-market conservatism out the window when business interests so desire. 

Take the Medicare bill, for example:

...most of the major liberal and conservative think tanks opposed the bill. But the pharmaceutical companies were ecstatic with it: Not only does it subsidize drug purchases, it specifically prohibits the federal government from using its negotiating power to hold down the cost of the drugs it purchases. (Got that? Those who spend your tax dollars are forbidden from striking a good bargain with the drug companies.) The American Medical Association was brought on board with a promise to boost Medicare reimbursements. And employers received federal subsidies--more than twice what they requested--to help cover the cost of their retirees' health care. As Thomas Scully, the Bush appointee who heads the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, put it, businesses received "way beyond their wildest requests" and "should be having a giant ticker-tape parade."

Nick Confessore at TAPPED, citing the story, calls this "free-lunch conservatism." Nice phrase. Every Democrat who gets within a foot of a live microphone should use it.

E-mail I just sent to Nicholas Kristof:

Dear Mr. Kristof:

I know that you’ve expressed concern in some of your columns about liberal anger at President Bush. You’ve said that you find this anger disturbing in the way you find conservative anger at President Clinton disturbing.

Yet you don’t seem to write very much about that conservative anger.

Yesterday Senator Hillary Clinton made some television appearances; conservatives who discuss politics at Lucianne Goldberg’s Lucianne.com Web site were not amused. Here are some of the names they’ve used today at Lucianne.com to describe Senator Clinton:

* The gelid-eyed witch.

* This lying harpy.

* This jezebel.

* Her Thighness.

* Pure evil.

* Her royal pigness, snorting away.

* Hanoi Hillary.

* Miss Piggy.

* Haggy McNasty with a voice like an ice-cube enema.

* The shrew.

* Hildabroom.

* This hag [who] would steal the stink off of Shiite.

* The pink Marxist.

* Her Wickenedness.

* This scumbag.

* The stench of the decaying flesh, raw sewage and anaerobic infection.

(Source: http://www.lucianne.com/threads2.asp?artnum=96486)

Hillary Clinton isn’t the president. Hillary Clinton isn’t running for president. Hillary Clinton is a first-term senator in the minority party, and is therefore rather powerless. Furthermore, she has frequently tacked to the center -- as she did in her television appearances yesterday, in which she defended President Bush’s interpretation of Iraq intelligence. Given all that, isn’t her detractors’ anger more disturbing than anger directed at a president who has a great deal of power and, after running as a right-centrist, has chosen to wield it in aggressive and highly partisan ways? Doesn’t the persistence of this extreme vitriol deserve more than a passing mention in one of your columns?

Sincerely,

Yeah, I was dismayed when I heard Howard Dean's statement about guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks -- but I also recall being a bit skeptical when a pundits and others self-righteously declared that Dean's image of the South was utterly at odds with reality. Over the weekend I read this Nation article by Paul Wachter, a reporter for a major South Carolina newspaper; the article concerns, among other things, a project to build a museum for the Hunley, a Confederate submarine. If Dean's view of the South is so off base, what's going on here?

Republican State Senator Glenn McConnell, ... the champion of the Hunley Museum and South Carolina's most powerful state senator, runs a Confederate memorabilia store just a few exits down Interstate 26 from the Hunley. On a recent day he wore a tie decorated with the state flag--in Confederate red, not blue--and a wristwatch with a Confederate flag insignia. His cell phone, in a Confederate flag-emblazoned plastic sheath, is programmed to play "Dixie." McConnell's store is stocked with hundreds of such items as well as portraits of Civil War generals and rolls of toilet paper bearing Sherman's image.

McConnell, 55, ... now heads the nine-member state commission that oversees the Hunley project. The all-white Hunley Commission also includes five other Republican state legislators and Chris Sullivan, editor of Southern Partisan, a Confederate apologist magazine based in Columbia.

In its current location, the Hunley shares space with a concession area offering such items as Confederate T-shirts and bolls of cotton. The conservation center was packed during my two visits, but I never saw an African-American. If McConnell, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, gets his way, the Hunley museum will offer no apologies for slavery. "Racism existed in all quadrants of the United States during the War Between the States, and it's only the practice of modern politics to heap the blame for racism on the South," he said....

McConnell is counting on public funding for his estimated $40 million museum, which should be completed in a few years; taxpayers have already spent $8 million to raise and preserve the submarine. (The state has also committed to spending another $3.5 million to purchase a Civil War painting and artifact collection to be displayed alongside it.)

Wachter also discusses a proposed museum of African-American history, to be built in the city of Charleston. It's being built primarily with private money, unlike the Hunley museum. And the chairman of the museum's steering committee is a U.S. congressman, James Clyburn; Wachter points out that Clyburn is "the first and only African-American to represent South Carolina in Congress since Reconstruction." Amazing.

Bushies are crowing about their AIDS initiative. It's a lot more money than the feds have provided in the past, but, as The Nation reminds us (article not available online to nonsubscribers), there are, er, a few strings attached:

A third of the bill's prevention dollars are tagged for abstinence-only messages, which forbid the mention of condoms, an indispensable tool wherever rates of infection have been reduced. The money channeled through USAID may not be spent on syringe exchange, a proven strategy for reducing the drug-injection infections that now drive the epidemic in Russia and elsewhere. Churches and missionary operations will receive special consideration in the awarding of grants, while family planning networks, the main source of community healthcare in much of the developing world and the best positioned to deliver HIV care, have been forced to shutter clinics under Bush's 2001 global gag rule, which ended aid to outfits that mention abortion as an option for women with unplanned pregnancies. Many of the bill's treatment dollars will be wasted because the Administration continues to support restrictions on the production and export of cheap, generic HIV medications. And the bill continues to starve the UN's Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria in favor of unilateral aid that can be used for political ends--much of it bound by restrictive "buy American" provisions.

Hey, but other than that it's a great bill!

Awww, man -- this would have been good for a chuckle:

When some Republicans heard about Representative Tom DeLay's plan to house delegates on a chartered cruise ship during their convention in New York, the plan was abandoned for fear of reinforcing Republicans' image as staid suburbanites aloof from the city. But if they'd stuck with Mr. DeLay's plan to charter the Norwegian Dawn, they might have ended up with a different image in tabloid headlines: GRAND OLD PARTY ON GAY CRUISE SHIP.

Mr. DeLay, whose party's relation with gay voters has been awkward at best, happened to pick a ship with a great reputation among gays and lesbians. Rosie O'Donnell and her partner, Kelli Carpenter O'Donnell, have a travel company, R. Family Vacations, that has chartered the entire Norwegian Dawn next summer for what the company advertises as "the very first gay and lesbian family cruise" with "our very own special brand of gay and lesbian family-friendly fun."

The ship is also a favorite of Atlantis Events, a gay and lesbian tour company based in Hollywood that has advertised its trips with a different kind of marketing: "Three of the best gay D.J.'s spinning today will keep you dancing until the sun comes up." The company's president, Rich Campbell, said he was ready to help Mr. DeLay and his delegates dance the night away.

"I thought of calling Tom's office," he said, "and saying: `I'm with a gay cruise company. Let me tell you why this is such a wonderful ship. I'd be happy to provide entertainment and consulting service.' "

--New York Times

I was already sorry that the bad publicity persuaded the GOP to ditch the elitist ship plan -- it would have been much better if the plan had gone forward and all the bad publicity happened during the convention. But this! This would hve been a real hoot. I would have loved to have seen the look on Tom DeLay's face when somebody told him. Or Santorum's.

The large print giveth and the small print taketh away:

Medicare beneficiaries will not be allowed to buy insurance to cover their share of prescription drug costs under the new Medicare bill to be signed on Monday by President Bush, the legislation says.

Millions of Medicare beneficiaries have bought private insurance to fill gaps in Medicare. But a little-noticed provision of the legislation prohibits the sale of any Medigap policy that would help pay drug costs after Jan. 1, 2006, when the new Medicare drug benefit becomes available....

Congress began regulating the Medigap market in 1990, as a way to protect consumers, many of whom had bought duplicative policies. The federal government and state insurance commissioners developed 10 standard policies, to replace thousands then on the market.

Three of the 10 Medigap policies cover drugs. Under the legislation, an old policy with drug benefits could be renewed — but only by a person who chose to forgo the new Medicare drug benefit. A person who enrolls in the new program could not buy or renew a Medigap policy to help defray drug costs....

--New York Times

If this bill affects you in any way, do yourself a favor and read the whole article. It describes a few other nasty little surprises the bill's supporters (and the AARP and the media) didn't tell you about before the vote.

Working hard to win those hearts and minds:

ABU HISHMA, Iraq, Dec. 6 — As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire.

In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in.

...So far, the new approach appears to be succeeding in diminishing the threat to American soldiers. But it appears to be coming at the cost of alienating many of the people the Americans are trying to win over. Abu Hishma is quiet now, but it is angry, too.

In Abu Hishma, encased in a razor-wire fence after repeated attacks on American troops, Iraqi civilians line up to go in and out, filing through an American-guarded checkpoint, each carrying an identification card printed in English only.

"If you have one of these cards, you can come and go," coaxed Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman, the battalion commander whose men oversee the village, about 50 miles north of Baghdad. "If you don't have one of these cards, you can't."

The Iraqis nodded and edged their cars through the line. Over to one side, an Iraqi man named Tariq muttered in anger.

"I see no difference between us and the Palestinians," he said. "We didn't expect anything like this after Saddam fell." ...

--New York Times

There are two quotes in the article that are just appalling:

"You have to understand the Arab mind," Capt. Todd Brown, a company commander with the Fourth Infantry Division, said as he stood outside the gates of Abu Hishma. "The only thing they understand is force — force, pride and saving face."

******

"With a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them," Colonel [Nathan] Sassaman [the battalion commander whose men oversee the village] said.

Yikes.

Remember Afghanistan? That place where we fought a war a long time ago?

KABUL, Afghanistan - Nine children were found dead Saturday after an American air raid in eastern Afghanistan, and the military was investigating whether U.S. forces were responsible, a spokesman said.

An American A-10 aircraft struck a site south of Ghazni, 100 miles southwest of the capital, Kabul, where a "known terrorist" was believed to be hiding at about 10:30 a.m. Saturday, Army Maj. Christopher E. West told The Associated Press.

"At the time we initiated the attack, we did not know there were children nearby," he said....

Also Saturday, a bomb in Kandahar, the main southern stronghold of the Taliban, ripped through a bustling bazaar, wounding 20 Afghans. Taliban fighters claimed responsibility, saying the blast was aimed at American soldiers but went off late....

--AP

USERS

On Wednesday, relatives of Terri Schiavo, along with others who think the comatose woman should be kept alive by artificial means, held a gathering to mark her 40th birthday. Attending was a delegation from Free Republic, the Web site where far-rightists gather to castigate liberals and boast of their own patriotism; the Freepers' deep concern for Terri Schiavo can be felt in one Freeper attendee's report:

...the donation cup on Free Republic's table consisted of a flag, a small gavel taped onto it and hanging on by a twist tie, my Daniel Webster beanie baby. Daniel just happened to be carrying a cloth book entited "LAW". Daniel Webster made some cash for the Foundation.

...thanks to another freeper, I printed out a 17 page list of all the threads that were posted for Terri at Free Republic through November 18, 2003. I put Free Republic's Logo in a stand up picture frame and also wore my name tag from the Friva Conference held in Las Vegas in August of 2001....

Free Republic highlight for me: Almost as quickly as the Free Republic table was set up, a forum broke out on the right side of the table. I had to ask the A & E cameraman to move over so that I could take a picture of OUR TABLE. Then A & E asked me to flip through the book that showed all the threads. He also filmed the flowers and semi-participated in the forum on the right...

This report, from LifeNews.com, tells how others marked the day:

...several hundred people sent Terri birthday cards and while others gave balloons and cupcakes.

Cupcakes. Recall that Terri Schiavo is fed through a feeding tube.

...Though Terri's family was permitted to bring in a piece of cake to Terri's room (she was not fed with it) the officer on duty mocked them as they put lip gloss -- a birthday present -- on her lips.

"All of these little indignities add up to one great, giant indignity, namely treating Terri as though she were dead," said Pat Anderson, attorney for the Schindler family.

Lip gloss.

In January 2001, the Second District Court of Appeal described Terri Schiavo's condition:

Since 1990, Theresa has lived in nursing homes with constant care. She is fed and hydrated by tubes. The staff changes her diapers regularly....

Over the span of this last decade, Theresa's brain has deteriorated because of the lack of oxygen it suffered at the time of the heart attack. By mid 1996, the CAT scans of her brain showed a severely abnormal structure. At this point, much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid. Medicine cannot cure this condition. Unless an act of God, a true miracle, were to recreate her brain, Theresa will always remain in an unconscious, reflexive state, totally dependent upon others to feed her and care for her most private needs.

For her birthday, they gave her lip gloss.

Whose life is it, anyway?

Good news! Iraq's going to get more violent!

The top U.S. administrator in Iraq predicted Friday attacks against coalition forces will escalate over the next few months as the country prepares for a transfer from the occupation authority to a new Iraqi government.

"In the immediate phase ahead of us between now and the end of June we will actually see an increase in attacks, because the people who are against us now realize that there's huge momentum behind both the economic and political reconstruction of this country," L. Paul Bremer said in an interview with Associated Press Television News....

--CBS

Gosh, I hope casualties are massive! That'll really show we're succeeding!*

-------------

*Note to conservatives: I don't hope casualties are massive. This is called sarcasm.

Yeah, yeah, yeah -- we're "Bush haters." We're the ones who are tearing the country apart.

Never mind the fact that it's considered perfectly normal on the other side to spend hours hunched over a computer in order to produce infantile, semi-coherent "humor" like this about a guy three years after he leaves office.

It was going to happen -- people could just feel it:

U.S. factory activity rocketed to its fastest pace since 1983 in November and construction spending hit another record high the prior month, according to reports on Monday showing the economy's rapid growth is starting to turn the tide of three years of job losses....

"It's pretty eye-popping. If you look at the components, everything is very positive," said Stephen Stanley, senior markets economist at RBS Greenwich Capital.

That good news means government data to be released on Friday could show an even bigger rise in November payrolls than the 135,000 gain forecast by economists, after an increase of 126,000 in October.

"People have really underestimated the speed and improvement in the labor markets," Stanley said....

--Reuters story, 12/1/03

But instead:

American employers hired far fewer workers than expected in November, a government report showed on Friday...

The number of workers on U.S. payrolls outside the farm sector in November edged up by 57,000, the Labor Department said, from an upwardly revised climb of 137,000 the previous month.

The November gain was far lower than forecasts for a bumper increase of 150,000....

--Reuters story today

What happened?

This is from a Wall Street Journal Online/Yahoo News story:

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires and CNBC had forecast unemployment to remain steady at 6% and expected a rise of 150,000 in payrolls. The average workweek grew to a 14-month high, indicating employers are running out of ways to meet demand with reduced work forces.

Er, apparently they aren't running out of ways to squeeze productivity out of existing workers (and temps, and overseas workers) as fast as the experts thought.

**********

And, of course, even with the upticks we're still lagging way behind (a) various administration predictions for job growth, (b) the rate of job growth needed to make up for job losses since Bush took office, and even (c) the rate of job growth needed just to employ new entrants into the workforce -- as the Economic Policy Institute notes:

On October 21, The New York Times reported that Treasury Secretary John Snow projected that the economy will generate two million additional jobs, about 200,000 per month, before next year’s election. This new number is a huge retreat from the administration’s previous projection made when it was selling its tax cuts. In February the Council of Economic Advisers projected 306,000 per month job growth starting in mid-2003 if the tax cuts were passed and roughly 228,000 jobs created per month without the tax cuts.

Monthly job creation of 200,000 and maintaining unemployment at its current level is far from a satisfactory economic performance. It takes monthly gains of about 150,000 payroll jobs and 155,000 in household employment just to keep the gap in jobs since March 2001 from widening further. Even with job gains of 306,000 a month, as promised by the Administration early this year, it would take more than four years to close the jobs gap that two and a half years of job losses have created.

Oh, dahling, isn't the Bush Boom ever so much fun? Pity we can't share it with the servants:

Retail sales in November, including the bellwether Thanksgiving weekend, failed to rise to analysts' expectations, suggesting that the Christmas season may not be as good as some retailers hoped a month or two ago.

But for luxury retailers, the season still looks upbeat. Shoppers tended to buy higher-priced, higher-profit items last month....

"By and large, the analysts' estimates had been fairly reasonable, but the retailers didn't perform," said Ken Perkins, a research analyst at Thomson First Call, which tracks analysts' predictions. "It doesn't mean that definitely December will be bad, too, but I bet you'll see a lot of December estimates pared down."

High-end department stores like Saks, Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom fared better in November....

Over all, luxury goods stores continued to rally. Analysts said that President Bush's tax cuts, a strengthening stock market and improving job security, as well as pent-up demand, drove affluent shoppers into stores like Saks Fifth Avenue, where $1,000 watches with diamond-studded bezels and green crocodile bands were big sellers.

Most stores, however, are no longer benefiting from the tax cuts or from the extra cash that many homeowners had after a wave of mortgage refinancings earlier in the year, Mr. Perkins of Thomson First Call said. "The benefits of the tax refunds are drying up," he said, "and the re-fi wave is ebbing."...

--New York Times

"I can tell you that by November, every soldier that's serving in Iraq will have one."

--General John Abizaid, talking about Interceptor body armor in congressional testimony this past September

Soldiers will not patrol without the armor -- if they can get it. But as of now, there is not enough to go around....

Last month, Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio) and 102 other House members wrote to Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, to demand hearings on why the Pentagon had been unable to provide all U.S. service members in Iraq with the latest body armor. In the letter, the lawmakers cited reports that soldiers' parents had been purchasing body armor with ceramic plates and sending it to their children in Iraq.

--The Washington Post today

By contrast, according to this soldier's letter to the European and Pacific edition of Stars & Stripes, troops well outside Iraq are equipped with Interceptor vests -- even when they don't need them:

I’m serving in Kosovo. Almost all the members of my task force and I have been issued Interceptor Body Armor with ballistic plates. We received these vests shortly after arriving in Kosovo back in July.

There’s little to no threat to any of us here compared to the troops in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. Certainly there always exists the possibility of something happening here. But in Iraq it’s not simply a possibility. Several times a day, day after day, the need for this body armor is demonstrated. With every incident that occurs in Iraq in which a soldier is lost due to substandard body armor, the other soldiers and I who have the armor but don’t need it have to live with the guilt of their loss.

I’m personally embarrassed to even have the Interceptor vest. The sad truth is that we rarely wear the vests. They’re seen as one more piece of useless equipment that soldiers are forced to tote along with them on patrols. A lot of us are often left to wonder how the U.S. military can be so incompetent and so seemingly brainless. How was something like this allowed to happen? What command personnel would submit a request at this time for this level of armor for the troops in Kosovo?

The soldier adds,

In addition to the body armor, I also take issue with the “up-armored” Humvees. We arrived to a full complement of these vehicles. Shortly afterward, we were told the vehicles would be shipped to Iraq. Finally, something right was going to happen. But we’re now well into our fourth month in country, and there are still “up-armored” Humvees here in Kosovo. To my knowledge it’s a slow process and few have been shipped. I’d venture to say that even fewer, if any at all, have found their way to the soldiers in Iraq. I’m certain the KFOR command and its soldiers would gladly hand deliver these vests and vehicles today if it were only that easy.

So when will every soldier who needs an Interceptor get one? I know it isn't as important as, y'know, shipping Bush and a press pool to the Baghdad airport so he can pose with a prop turkey, but really now....

(Stars & Stripes link via BuzzFlash.)

Susan Estrich, in a syndicated column, chides Hollywood's Laurie David for "forwarding invites" via e-mail to a "Hate Bush 12-2 Event." But wait -- days ago, Lloyd Grove declared in the New York Daily News, after doing some digging, that Laurie David wasn't the one who gave the e-mails that "Hate Bush" subject line. So why is Michael Dukakis's 1988 campaign chief helping the GOP sustain this story?

Wait, there's more. The point of Estrich's column is that

The way to defeat Bush is not to advertise how much you hate him. Hard-core ideologues who hate Bush are not going to decide this election. They'll vote for the Democrat, as they do every four years, but there aren't enough of them to elect a Democrat. You need swing voters to do that. Hatred may motivate the left to contribute money, but it is hardly an effective talking point for public consumption if you want to win elections.

Hold on a second. Regardless of who called the gathering a "Hate Bush" event, no one set out to advertise hatred of Bush. My dictionary says that "advertise" means "announce publicly." A chain e-mail sent to like-minded acquaintances isn't a public announcement. "Hate Bush" -- whoever put it on the subject line -- wasn't meant to be a "talking point for public consumption."

But that's Susan Estrich these days. She bashed the L.A. Times for reporting on Arnold Schwarzenegger's groping (and later joined his transition team). Prior to that, she wrote a nasty, catty column accusing Arianna Huffington of being a bad mother. Oh, and she's a political analyst at Fox News. I assume she'll be quite useful to the GOP for the foreseeable future.

Bishops to pressure Catholic politicians

...America's 275 active bishops are gearing up a new task force that could bring Catholic politicians in line in a way not seen before in American politics.

Announced at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops annual meeting last month, it is headed by Washington Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick. The task force will produce guidelines on how to deal with recalcitrant politicians....
    
...the bishops have felt pressured to come up with sanctions with a bite to them ever since January, when the Vatican came out with a 17-page "doctrinal note," a document on how Catholics in politics should behave.
    
"Those who are directly involved in lawmaking bodies have a grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that attacks human life," it said. "For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them."
    
Besides abortion, the document listed euthanasia, slavery, religious freedom and the sanctity of marriage as black-and-white issues for Catholic politicians....

--Washington Times

Abortion, euthanasia, slavery, religious freedom and "the sanctity of marriage" -- gee, isn't there something missing on that list?

Y'know, capital punishment?

OK, I've checked -- Catholic doctrine isn't 100% in opposition to the death penalty. But note what was said in modifications to the catechism that were issued by the Vatican in 1997:

Assuming that the guilty party's identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.

If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person.

Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm--without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself--the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity "are rare, if not practically non-existent." (NT: John Paul II, Evangelium vitae 56)

Here's more:

In a homily at a Jan. 27, 1999 Papal Mass in St. Louis, Mo., [the pope] termed the death penalty "both cruel and unnecessary," and went on to say:

"The new evangelization calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life: who will acclaim, celebrate and serve the Gospel of life in every situation. A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil. Modern society has the means of protecting itself, without definitively denying criminals the chance to reform."

In a declaration to the first World Congress on the Death Penalty held June 21-23, 2001 in Strasbourg, France, the Vatican termed the death penalty "a sign of desperation," and said it pursued the abolition of capital punishment as "an integral part of the defense of human life at every stage of its development.... The universal abolition of the death penalty would be a courageous reaffirmation of the belief that humankind can be successful in dealing with criminality and of our refusal to succumb to despair before such forces, and as such it would regenerate new hope in our very humanity."

But opposition to the death penalty just doesn't jibe with American political realities, so it's expendable.