Practically the first thing out of George Stephanopoulos's mouth on ABC was his assertion that the State of the Union address framed the upcoming election as a choice "between optimism and pessimism."

Hunh? I defy you to find anything in the speech itself that makes that assertion. It's just not there. It's not in the speech -- it's in the spin. I heard the same "optimism" line on NPR this morning, and no doubt you've heard or read it too, somewhere or other.

Does our press even know the difference anymore between objective reality and spin?

(UPDATE: Now Peter Jennings -- who's sometimes kind of snarky about this administration -- is asking John Kerry about Bush's "optimistic" speech. Kerry, defensively: "Well, I'm optimistic." Enough already!)

Well, they removed the Ten Commandments monument. No, not that one -- another one:

A Ten Commandments monument has been removed from the grounds of city hall in Winston-Salem, North Carolina....

A city council member had the granite marker placed in front of city hall yesterday, when it was closed for the Martin Luther King Junior holiday. Vernon Robinson says he was inspired by Alabama's former chief justice, who had installed a Ten Commandments monument at the state courthouse -- and lost his job over it.

A Winston-Salem city spokeswoman says officials feared the four-foot-tall monument would topple over....

--AP

The right-wing World Net Daily had this when the monument went up:

...Vernon Robinson, a candidate for a vacant U.S. House seat, said he paid $2,000 out of his personal funds to install the monument on a walkway yesterday in front of the city hall, which was deserted because of the Martin Luther King holiday, the Winston-Salem Journal reported.

...The city council member said he wanted the monument to be a surprise to the city's citizens and insisted he had no thought of what effect it would have on his campaign for the Republican nomination for the 5th Congressional District, the Winston-Salem paper said.

No thought about how it would affect his campaign for Congress -- oh yeah, that's plausible.

So, who is Vernon Robinson anyway? Well, he's not really himself. Click on the "candidate for a vacant U.S. House seat" link in that quote and you get, in addition to the home page, a pop-up ad that says, proudly,

"Jesse Helms is back! And this time, he's black." --The Winston-Salem Journal

The ad features a picture of a smiling Mr. Robinson -- who is, yes, black -- along with Ol' Jesse, who's also smiling.

Not much more you need to know about Vernon Robinson, is there?

But you should go to the Robinson for Congress issues page. Among the matters that exercise Mr. R. are "the feminization of the military"; his discussion of abortion fixates on

a prostitute who is pregnant for the eighth time. In the ninth month of her pregnancy she finds out that her child is a girl and not a boy, so she decides to have a late term, sex-selection, partial birth abortion. Because she is too poor to afford the procedure, she wants you to pay for it with your tax dollars.

Because that happens all the time in this country -- right?

Oh, and the godly Mr. Robinson believes in guns. Dusty Rhoades, a columnist for The Pilot in Southern Pines, North Carolina, wrote this a year ago:

Robinson, a Republican city councilman from Winston-Salem, suggested during the recent Orange Alert that folks preparing for terrorist attacks make sure they augment their survival kits with their trusty shotgun, rifle, or other firearm of choice. Robinson made his remarks at a joint meeting with Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines, held at the Green Street United Methodist Church....

Does Robinson think that we’re going to need weapons to fight off human wave attacks of wild-eyed, shoe-bombing Muslim extremists? Nope. The threat Robinson envisions comes from your fellow Americans, or to be more specific, those folks who failed to heed the words of Homeland Security and who didn’t stock up. "Robinson said people who stocked up on food and water would need guns to fend off people who had no supplies," according to a story in the News and Observer....

Yeah, that sounds just like the approach Jesus would take, doesn't it?

Ah, if only...

If Iraqis ever see Saddam Hussein on trial, they want his former American allies shackled beside him.

"Saddam should not be the only one who is put on trial. The Americans backed him when he was killing Iraqis so they should be prosecuted," said Ali Mahdi, a builder.

"If the Americans escape justice they will face God's justice. They must be stoned in hell." ...

In street interviews, Iraqis said Saddam must be tried by an Iraqi court prepared to hand down the death penalty and examine his ties to past U.S. governments....

"Saddam was a top graduate of the American school of politics," said Assad al-Saadi, standing with friends in the slum of Sadr city, formerly called Saddam City, a Shi'ite Muslim area oppressed by Saddam's security agents.

"My brother was an army officer who was executed. Saddam is a criminal and the Americans were his friends. We need justice so that we can forget the past." ...

"The Americans and Saddam should face justice. Do you really think the Americans are going to put themselves on trial?" said Ali, a U.S.-trained policeman.

"Of course we hope the Americans and Saddam will face trial. But will it ever happen? I doubt it."

--Reuters

The Vatican makes it official -- Peggy Noonan is a liar:

Pope never commented on Gibson's 'Passion' film, says papal secretary

Pope John Paul II never said "It is as it was" after watching Mel Gibson's film on the passion of Jesus, said the pope's longtime personal secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz.

"The Holy Father told no one his opinion of this film," the archbishop told Catholic News Service Jan. 18....

--Catholic News Service

Here's the lie, in a December Wall Street Journal column from lying liar Noonan:

'It Is as It Was': Mel Gibson's "The Passion" gets a thumbs-up from the pope.

Here's some happy news this Christmas season, an unexpected gift for those who have seen and admired Mel Gibson's controversial movie, "The Passion," and wish to support it. The film has a new admirer, and he is a person of some influence. He is in fact the head of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.

Pope John Paul II saw the movie the weekend before last, in the Vatican, apparently in his private rooms, on a television, with a DVD, and accompanied by his closest friend, Msgr. Stanislaw Dziwisz. Afterwards and with an eloquent economy John Paul shared with Msgr. Dziwisz his verdict. Dziwisz, the following Monday, shared John Paul's five-word response with the co-producer of The Passion, Steve McEveety.

This is what the pope said: "It is as it was."...

In yesterday's New York Times, Frank Rich could confirm only that the film's assistant director said that Archbishop Dziwisz said that the Pope had said the film "is as it was" -- third-hand hearsay.

Today's Times follow-up summarizes what's in the Caholic News Service story, though it ends with a blind quote that's clearly intended either to spare Noonan embarrassment (assuming she's capable of it) or to express solidarity with her and with Robert Novak, Matt Drudge, and all the film's other right-wing defenders:

One prominent Roman Catholic official close to the Vatican, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he had reason to believe that the pope probably did make the remark about the film.

"But I think there's some bad feeling at the Vatican that the comment was used the way it was," the official added. "It's all a little soap-operatic."

Rich's column, by the way, quotes a few viewers who've seen the film and have been less than enthusiastic:

Mark Hallinan, a priest at St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church, found the movie's portrayal of Jews "very bad," adding, "I don't think the intent was anti-Semitic, but Jews are unfairly portrayed." Robert Levine, the senior rabbi at Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan, called the film "appalling" and its portrayal of Jews "painful." On Christmas Day, Richard N. Ostling, the religion writer of The Associated Press, also analyzed "The Passion," writing that "while the script doesn't imply collective guilt for Jews as a people, there are villainous details that go beyond the Bible."

A discussion of Rich's column at the right-wing chat site Free Republic doesn't mince words -- it's called

The Pope's Thumbs Up for Gibson's 'Passion' (Liberal Jewish writer accuses Mel of using the Pope)

Lovely.

Too soon for direct Iraqi elections? As Juan Cole notes in his blog, the British are saying no, according to this story from the Financial Times:

British officials in Basra no longer oppose early elections in Iraq, saying security and procedural obstacles to polls could be surmounted before the transfer to civilian control on June 30.

"We have a working hypothesis that you could manage an electoral process within the timeframe and the security available," said Dominic D'Angelo, British spokesman for the UK-led southern zone of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Basra.

...British officials said their discussions involved a plan whereby voters in municipal and provincial polls would elect two-thirds of the Electoral College that will nominate delegates for a national assembly. The remaining third would be selected by the Governing Council.

The officials said that, while Ayatollah Sistani's proposal to base an electoral roll on ration cards was "flawed", an electoral roll drawn up from a mixture of ration, health and identity cards could prove acceptable....

Cole does note that

The British may in part been driven to this announcement by pure fear. They appear to have upped their estimate of the number of protesters last Thursday from 30,000 to 3 to 10 times that.

Iraqi women recently got shafted -- something your newspaper didn't tell you. Here's the lead of a story from last night's All Things considered:

Despite Saddam Hussein's tyranny, women in Iraq enjoyed some of the broadest legal protections in the Muslim world. But the U.S.-backed Governing Council has voted to eliminate those protections. The decision came in an unpublicized meeting last month, when the council ordered that the "personal status" law, as it's known, be canceled. Family issues would be placed under the Islamic legal doctrine known as sharia.

To listen to the story, scroll down to "Iraqi Women Protest Loss of Rights" here; you can read Juan Cole's article on this here.

Dean is the only major Democratic candidate to evade the sissifying barbs of the GOP's shock-jock surrogates. First, comely John Edwards was labeled "the Breck girl." (He trimmed his hair, to no avail.) When Edwards flagged and John Kerry emerged, he was dubbed "Mr. Ketchup," implying that his wife's fortune, and by extension Teresa Heinz Kerry herself, wears the pants in their manse.

--Richard Goldstein in last week's Nation

I bring this quote up because a lot of people have been worried that Howard Dean would have been too vulnerable to attacks in the general election, and many of those people, I guess, are relieved, if not delighted, to see the Iowa result.

I understand that. But remember: Kerry's not going to be the candidate -- he may be the party's nominee, but if he is, Ketchup Boy is going to be the candidate. And if Edwards is nominated, Breck Girl is going to be the candidate.

You know what I mean: The process of turning the Democratic nominee into an awkward, pathetic loser and oddball is going to happen, no matter what -- the process just happened to kick into high gear a lot earlier for Dean. The mainstream press isn't parroting GOP attacks on most of the Democratic candidates yet, but it'll happen soon.

And you have to ask yourself who has the backbone to stand up to that kind of crap. Does Kerry? Does Edwards? I worry, especially about Edwards -- it's not that a sunny-dispositioned guy can't fight a bare-knuckle brawl and win (see Clinton, Bill), but right now Edwards is getting so many brownie points from the press for being nice that I'm afraid he'll be putty in Karl Rove's hands.

Well, we'll see. I suppose you could say these guys fought back in Iowa. But their primary antagonist was Howard Dean, and when they responded, the press piled on with them. The press damn sure isn't going to pile on with the Democratic nominee in the fall.

I want someone who can take hits and keep swinging. It doesn't have to be someone like Dean who seems like a battler -- maybe someone whose personality is a little less "hot" (as ol' Marshall McLuhan used to say) would play better in Peoria. But it's got to be someone who can take a low blow without crumpling, and who can battle back. I have trouble seeing Edwards as that candidate, or Kerry for that matter. But maybe they'll surprise me.

Over in the A section of yesterday's New York Times, did Jodi Wilgoren, in what was supposedly a straight news story on Howard Dean, really go on about milkshakes for three paragraphs?

Yup:

And Dr. Dean, the man who would be president, stood at [Senator Tom] Harkin's feet, slurping a strawberry milkshake.

Never mind the 12 pounds, mostly from chocolate-chip cookies, he has put on in the past few months of the campaign. Forget the cameras following his every move. In 109 days of campaigning here in Iowa since February 2002, Dr. Dean has rarely missed a milkshake opportunity. He even had one poured into a glass perched on his head last month at Stella's Diner in Urbandale.

Unsure whether to believe the lengthening list of polls showing his lead here and elsewhere slipping, or the ever-expanding cadre of consultants assuring him that his ground troops are unmatched, Dr. Dean stared into his glass. Strawberry is his favorite.

And a few paragraphs later, utterly pleased with herself, she returns to the beverages again, calling Dean "shake drunk" as she describes him pressing the flesh.

Oh well -- at least she's not doing what they did to Al Gore in 2000 with all that talk about "earth tones." At least she's not wasting time talking about Dean's clothes....

He even borrowed a sweater from his deputy campaign manager to fit in better with his new roadie, Mr. Harkin, but instead of looking more comfortable, he seemed to miss having sleeves to roll above the elbow.

Whoops -- sorry. I guess she is.

In a fine New York Times Magazine article about a woman's futile strruggle to leave the ranks of America's working poor, David K. Shipler makes an important observation about what's sacrosanct in this country. The woman, Caroline Payne, gets a manufacturing job but is required to work rotating shifts -- sometimes days, sometimes evenings, sometimes nights. She can't construct a regular routine, for herself or any caregiver, so she sometimes has to leave her profoundly retarded 14-year-old daughter (who also has epilepsy) home alone -- which leaves her open to charges of neglect. Shipler writes:

Perhaps the most curious and troubling facet of this confounding puzzle was everybody's failure to pursue the most obvious solution: if the factory had just let Caroline work day shifts, her problem would have disappeared. She asked a supervisor and got brushed off, but nobody else -- not the school principal, not the doctor, not the myriad agencies she contacted -- nobody in the profession of helping thought to pick up the phone and appeal to the factory manager or the foreman or anybody else in authority at her workplace.

Indeed, this solemn regard for the employer as untouchable and beyond the realm of persuasion unless in violation of the law permeates the culture of American antipoverty efforts, with only a few exceptions. The most socially minded physicians and psychologists who treat malnourished children, for example, will advocate vigorously with government agencies to provide food stamps, health insurance, housing and the like. But when they are asked if they ever urge the parents' employers to raise wages enough to pay for nutritious food, the doctors express surprise at the notion. First, it has never occurred to them, and second, it seems hopeless. Wages and hours are set by the marketplace, and you cannot expect magnanimity from the marketplace. It is the final arbiter from which there is no appeal.

Business in this country is like an abusive father -- it causes pain, but we need it, or assume we do, assume we'd be left out in the cold without it, so we protect it -- we close ranks with it and don't let anything harm it.

There's one little flaw in Maureen Dowd's argument today:

Presidential campaigns trace the patterns of mythological adventure, as contenders strive to show they are superior in the knightly virtues of temperance, loyalty and courage.

Once candidates showed that they had completed the "hero-task" by highlighting their war exploits — J.F.K. and PT 109, George Bush senior getting shot down as a young Navy pilot over Chichi Jima.

Candidates in the Vietnam War generation who chose not to go to Vietnam had to find more personal dragons and giants to slay. Bill Clinton told the story of confronting an abusive and alcoholic stepfather; George W. Bush recounted overcoming alcoholism and career drift by embracing Christ....

...a race rooted mainly in attacking the president may not take Dr. Dean far enough. Voters want someone who's been through the fire. They care about character. They want to know the evolution of the man, even if it's a myth.

The flaw is that in 2000 George W. Bush got fewer votes from the Great Unwashed, for whom Dowd claims to speak, that Al Gore did. Gore didn't talk much about his own "character"-- maybe a bit in the convention speech. And what the public thought it knew about his life story was nonsense concocted by the GOP and spread by willing accomplices in the press, as Bob Somerby's Daily Howler points out regularly (e.g., here).

Yet Gore got half a million votes more than the guy who told us his liquor cabinet was personally emptied by God.

Triangle Shirtwaist Company, 1911:

Workers recounted their helpless efforts to open the ninth floor doors to the Washington Place stairs. They and many others afterwards believed they were deliberately locked-- owners had frequently locked the exit doors in the past, claiming that workers stole materials. For all practical purposes, the ninth floor fire escape in the Asch Building led nowhere, certainly not to safety, and it bent under the weight of the factory workers trying to escape the inferno. Others waited at the windows for the rescue workers only to discover that the firefighters' ladders were several stories too short and the water from the hoses could not reach the top floors. Many chose to jump to their deaths rather than to burn alive.

Wal-Mart now:

Looking back to that night, Michael Rodriguez still has trouble believing the situation he faced when he was stocking shelves on the overnight shift at the Sam's Club in Corpus Christi, Tex.

It was 3 a.m., Mr. Rodriguez recalled, some heavy machinery had just crushed his ankle, and he had no idea how he would get to the hospital.

The Sam's Club, a Wal-Mart subsidiary, had locked its overnight workers in, as it always did, to keep robbers out and, as some managers say, to prevent employee theft. As usual, there was no manager with a key to let Mr. Rodriguez out. The fire exit, he said, was hardly an option — management had drummed into the overnight workers that if they ever used that exit for anything but a fire, they would lose their jobs.

"My ankle was crushed," Mr. Rodriguez said, explaining he had been struck by an electronic cart driven by an employee moving merchandise. "I was yelling and running around like a hurt dog that had been hit by a car. Another worker made some phone calls to reach a manager, and it took an hour for someone to get there and unlock the door."

The reason for Mr. Rodriguez's delayed trip to the hospital was a little-known Wal-Mart policy: the lock-in. For more than 15 years, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, has locked in overnight employees at some of its Wal-Mart and Sam's Club stores. It is a policy that many employees say has created disconcerting situations, such as when a worker in Indiana suffered a heart attack, when hurricanes hit in Florida and when workers' wives have gone into labor.

"You could be bleeding to death, and they'll have you locked in," Mr. Rodriguez said. "Being locked in in an emergency like that, that's not right."...

Yeah, these situations aren't exactly comparable -- if you're locked in at Wal-Mart or Sam's, you can save your life (at the cost of your job, perhaps). Well, fine -- call it Sweatshop Lite. It's still an appalling policy.

Gee, when did word of this new Halliburton contract for Iraq come out? Late on Friday?

Sneaky bastards.

This week in The Wall Street Journal, John Fund said that Paul O'Neill should have known he didn't belong in a Bush administration. But as Julian Borger in The Guardian notes, O'Neill did know that, and said so -- something Fund would have known if he'd actually read Ron Suskind's book:

Fund:

...it wouldn't have taken much for Mr. O'Neill to figure out that on issues his new boss would more resemble Ronald Reagan than Nixon, Ford or the first George Bush. All he had to do was pay attention to Mr. Bush's record in Texas and his 2000 campaign.

Borger:

By his own account, Mr O'Neill actually warned the president-elect and his deputy not to hire him. When he was flown in for a secret meeting in a Washington hotel, he took a list of his past pronouncements that could prove embarrassing to a conservative administration.

He had called for a petrol tax, and worse still, he believed global warming to be a real threat.

So, why didn't the message get through? Apparently President-Elect Bush had more important things on his mind:

But in the Washington hotel room, the book suggests, Mr Bush was not listening. Mr O'Neill was telling a long anecdote about an encounter with an environmental pressure group when Mr Bush held up his hand and asked: "Where's lunch?". The president then upbraided his chief of staff for failing to produce a cheeseburger on time.

(Thanks to Skimble for the Guardian link.)

Pretty good responses from the Democratic presidential candidates (even Lieberman) to the Pickering installation. But they have to keep talking about it after this weekend. They have to talk about it when people are paying attention.

Let's give the evil geniuses some credit: They sat down and calculated all the angles on this Pickering recess appointment and realized that all the political talk for the next several days will be about Iowa and (as of Monday) its aftermath. Monday will also be pre-Super Bowl hype day #1. So we can talk about this until we're blue in the face and it's not going to be a big news story.

...Unless, perhaps, the Democrats defy conventional wisdom and talk about it, passionately, now in Iowa and especially next week in, yes, the very, very white state of New Hampshire.

And why not? Bush's team is given credit for playing the angles with their immigration proposal -- white soccer moms will think it's compassionate! Why can't Democrats appeal to the same instincts on the part of whites? Cross burning? New Hampshire Democrats are against it. That's a sweeping generalization, perhaps, but I'll stand by it.

Democrats need to make Daniel Swan George Bush's running mate.

(By the way, John Edwards, I think this is your area of expertise.)

As a federal judge, Charles Pickering:

* criticized the “one-person, one-vote” principle recognized by the Supreme Court.

* suggested that large deviations from equality in drawing legislative district lines, which the Supreme Court has held presumptively unconstitutional, were “relatively minor” and “de minimis.”

* criticized or sought to limit important remedies provided by the Voting Rights Act.

* repeatedly inserted into his rulings, in cases involving claims of employment discrimination, severe criticisms of civil rights plaintiffs and the use of civil rights laws to address alleged discrimination.

* demonstrated a propensity to make it harder for some people to obtain access to justice, especially less powerful litigants, such as people raising civil rights or liberties claims.

* has been reversed 15 times by the 5th Circuit for ignoring or violating “well-settled principles of law” – 11 of those 15 in cases involving constitutional, civil rights, criminal procedure, or labor issues; in contrast, another Bush nominee who was confirmed to the 5th Circuit, Edith Brown Clement, was reversed only once during a slightly shorter tenure as a district court judge.

* engaged in unethical conduct in an effort to reduce the sentence for a defendant convicted for burning a cross on the lawn of an interracial family and by soliciting letters of support for his confirmation from attorneys who practiced before him.

As a state senator, Charles Pickering:

* co-sponsored a Mississippi Senate resolution calling on Congress to repeal Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act (providing federal oversight over jurisdictions with a history of discrimination in voting) or to apply it to all states regardless of their discrimination history, widely seen as an effort to gut the Act.

* supported “open primary” legislation that was blocked by the Justice Department over concerns about discrimination against black voters....

Hundreds of organizations, individuals and elected officials have announced their opposition to Pickering’s nomination:

* African-American organizations and leaders in Mississippi, including every local chapter and the state chapter of the NAACP, the Legislative Black Caucus, the Magnolia Bar Association, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Mississippi Worker’s Center for Human Rights, and more.

* National legal and civil rights organizations, including the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Alliance for Justice, the Human Rights Campaign, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, the National Bar Association and more....

(Source: People for the American Way.)

And Bush just gave this guy a recess appointment to the federal bench.

As TBOGG says,

And just the day after his MLK photo-op in Atlanta.

So many filibustered judges -- he picks this one, in order to give maximum offense.

Bush loves this. He loves saying, "Screw you -- I'm president and you're not. Don't like it? Start your own damn country."

But he doesn't have the guts to do this when people are paying attention. The yellow-bellied little pissant sneaks this in late on a Friday afternoon.

I hope somebody asks Coretta Scott King for a comment. And I hope it plays on the news not tonight, but Monday night -- on Martin Luther King Day.

John LeBoutillier was, briefly, a loud, boorish hard-right GOP congressman in the Reagan era. Since then you might have spotted him promoting a "Counter Clinton Library" or peddling sleazy sex rumors about Gary Condit. But LeBoutillier ("the Boot" to his pals) is a busy man. The Village Voice reports on a LeBoutillier scheme that only sounds like the plot of a direct-to-video Vin Diesel movie:

...Frank "Frankie Blue Eyes" Sparaco, former captain in the Colombo crime family, is serving out a 288-month sentence for murder and racketeering....

LeBoutillier told the Voice [that] Sparaco [has] enlisted in a new struggle: using his unique talents and connections to reach out to imprisoned Russian, East European, and Vietnamese gangsters who might have knowledge of where missing P.O.W.'s are allegedly being held.

"In our prisons are hundreds of Russians, many of nefarious background; some were even in the KGB," said LeBoutillier last week. "You and I could not go and find these guys and talk to them. If anyone in there could talk to them, that's what I want. It doesn't matter what his background is, if he can help get information about American prisoners of war I'll talk to him."

LeBoutillier did more than talk to Sparaco. In addition to visiting the inmate at least four times in prison, he has also written repeatedly to federal officials asking them to place Sparaco in better accommodations....

Sparaco, the multiple murderer, has been transferred to Allenwood since he bagan assisting the Boot -- "albeit in a medium-security prison, not the camp-style facility LeBoutillier had sought," the Voice says. But

Frankie Blue Eyes, according to a friend of the inmate, credited his well-connected friend with his relocation.

So, is this working? The Boot wrote this last May:

We are making serious progress because of his influence and never ending efforts. We may have located several U.S. airmen shot down over North Vietnam and then taken to Moscow. Later this summer we may successfully be able to bring these men home after more than 30 years as prisoners of war.

(Emphasis mine.)

John McCain and John Kerry have accused the Boot's organization of making sleazy fundraising pitches. LeBoutillier's response: He

called both senators "liars" and "evil." Of the former pilot who spent six years in a Hanoi cell, he wrote: "To know McCain is to detest him."

(The Boot, too young for Nam, has never served in the military.)

Fine cartoon on the Bush appearance in Atlanta yesterday, from Mike Luckovich of The Atlanta Journal Constitution.

(Thanks to TBOGG for the link.)

The West: It's declining again.

Recently the right-wing Claremont Institute's Claremont Review of Books published Terrence O. Moore's "Wimps and Barbarians," which argues, at great length, that America's young men are going to hell in a handbasket:

Too often among today's young males, the extremes seem to predominate. One extreme suffers from an excess of manliness, or from misdirected and unrefined manly energies. The other suffers from a lack of manliness, a total want of manly spirit. Call them barbarians and wimps....

Then yesterday and today WorldNetDaily.com published an even longer lament for the state of our youth by David Kupelian; Kupelian begins with an anecdote about his 12-year-old son wanting to (gasp!) wear a choker around his neck and somehow manages to link that to every extreme of sexual excess and body modification that ever surfaced in a horrified article in the Style section of The New York Times or Washington Post. (How this relates to chokers is unclear.) For good measure, Kupelian manages to blame "the explosion of middle-school sexual adventures across America" on Bill Clinton (because, as everyone knows, thirteen-year-old kids always take their behavioral cues from paunchy, gray-haired, middle-aged men in suits).

So it may not be the best moment for Regnery -- the publisher that is to hysterical, underresearched right-wing books what Sun Records was to countrified rock and roll -- is planning to publish this (as reported by Publishers Lunch):

City Journal editor Brian C. Anderson's THE END OF THE LIBERAL MONOPOLY: How the Media Revolution is Turning American Politics and Culture to the Right, examining how the emergence of a hip new anti-liberal attitude in popular culture from South Park to Dennis Miller -- along with huge changes in communications, from Fox News to the Blogosphere, are eroding the liberal monoculture and transforming American culture and politics...

Anderson's book will be an expansion of this Wall Street Journal article, in which he prattles on endlessly about several purported signs of the emerging Republican utopia, most notably the once-hip (though apparently still hip on the right) South Park:

One episode, "Cripple Fight," concludes with a slugfest between the boys' wheelchair-bound, cerebral-palsy-stricken friend, Timmy, and the obnoxious Jimmy, who wants to be South Park's No. 1 "handi-capable" citizen (in his cringe-making PC locution). In another, "Rainforest Shmainforest," the boys' school sends them on a field trip to Costa Rica, led by an activist choir group, "Getting Gay with Kids," which wants to raise youth awareness about "our vanishing rain forests." Shown San José, Costa Rica's capital, the boys are unimpressed:

Cartman: [holding his nose] Oh my God, it smells like ass out here!

Choir teacher: All right, that does it! Eric Cartman, you respect other cultures this instant.

Cartman: I wasn't saying anything about their culture, I was just saying their city smells like ass....

Anderson also approvingly cites the patriotic conservatism of readers of the "hipster bible Vice magazine," as attested by Vice's publisher, Gavin MacInnes. Vice?

Last year's "Vice Guide to Getting Reamed Up the Cake" outlined a five-month campaign to coax your reluctant girlfriend into getting "down with the brown." McInnes advises, "She won't like anal sex until her seventeenth time. It's an acquired taste. But you have to get her to want to go through that good pain, seventeen times. To get that response, you must employ the 'Pavlov's Dog' technique." The piece's underlying message is more Camille Paglia than Dr. Ruth: "Love hurts and sex is hostile." (Village Voice)

Oh, that Vice.

I go back and forth on this cultural-decline stuff -- sometimes I think pop culture goes over the top, then I see smart, sane kids and think it all does far less harm than culturally conservative handwringers assume.

What bugs me, though, is that the right wing seems to derive strength from both sides of the argument: Satanic barbarians want to get on TV and say "smells like ass" to your kids, and then evil PC liberals want to clean up TV so Cartman can't say "smells like ass."

I want right-wingers fighting about this with each other. I want to strand Terrence Moore, David Kupelian, and Brian Anderson in a smowbound cabin for a couple of weeks with nothing for intellectual diversion but a TV and Anderson's DVD collection. And I want to videotape the results.

(Thanks to Sadly, No!, for pointing me to the Kupelian links -- here and here.)

This is no surprise, I guess:

Study: TV network newscasts harder on Dean

Howard Dean received significantly more negative criticism on network newscasts than the other Democratic presidential contenders, according to a study released Thursday.

More than three-quarters of the coverage of Dean's foes by the nightly news programs was favorable, while a majority of attention to Dean was negative, the Center for Media and Public Affairs found....

The study found that 49 percent of the coverage of former Vermont Gov. Dean was positive, compared to 78 percent of the rest of the Democratic field, collectively....

--AP

A few little gaps in our meat safety program:

...testing records, obtained by UPI under the Freedom of Information Act, which the USDA delayed releasing for six months, ... show a number of ... gaps in the agency's national surveillance strategy for mad cow disease, including:

-- Tests were conducted at fewer than 100 of the 700 plants known to slaughter cattle.

-- Some of the biggest slaughterhouses were not tested at all.

-- Cows from the top four beef producing states, which account for nearly 70 percent of all cattle slaughtered each year in the United States, only accounted for 11 percent of all the animals screened.

-- Though dairy cattle are considered the most likely to develop mad cow, some of the top dairy slaughtering plants were sampled only a few times or not at all.

-- The test tally for 2003 includes more than 1,000 animals ages 24 months or less, which would not test positive for the disease on the test used by the USDA even if they were infected....

Many of the top dairy slaughtering plants around the country either do not appear in the testing records at all or are listed only a couple of times....

[Felicia] Nestor [of the Government Accountability Project] questioned the rationale behind USDA's apparent strategy of ignoring the large beef companies and targeting efforts at smaller plants.

"It's really significant that they're focusing all of their attention on the very smallest plants," she said. "It's almost like the USDA wants to protect the big plants from a finding because the implications would be too scary. If they find a case at a small plant, the USDA can then say it's an isolated problem" and infected meat wasn't distributed all over the country or internationally as might happen with a larger plant, she said....

Scant testing was done at the top five slaughter companies -- Tyson, Excel, Swift, Farmland National Beef and Smithfield -- which combined slaughter more than 100,000 cows per day, accounting for 78 percent of the U.S. beef industry and $97.3 billion in annual sales....

--UPI

Oh boy -- there goes another wonky coast-dwelling liberal throwing his education in our faces, just to prove how superior he is to the rest of us. "Pliny the Elder"! "Kafkaesque"! "Mensch discrepancy"! What wusses these liberals are. They just don't have the common touch, like George W. or Reagan.

...Wait -- that's no liberal! It's Dennis Miller! He's a Republican!

WOOOOOO - HOO! DEN-NIS! DEN-NIS! DEN-NIS! DEN-NIS! RAWKNROLLLLLLLLL!

The most evil man on the planet engages in more evil:

Clinton Gets Five Companies to Reduce the Cost of AIDS Tests

Former President Bill Clinton announced yesterday that his foundation had negotiated deals with five major medical companies to steeply discount the price of two crucial diagnostic tests for H.I.V./AIDS in Africa and the Caribbean.

Those price reductions come just three months after Mr. Clinton's foundation brokered an agreement with generic drug manufacturers to cut prices of AIDS drugs.

The two sets of agreements will cut about 70 percent of the annual cost of treating an AIDS patient in the 13 developing countries where his foundation is working — down to $250 a year from $800, Mr. Clinton said.

...The Clinton Foundation "has made a major contribution to the fight against H.I.V./AIDS," said Dr. Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria....

--New York Times

How wickedly diabolical! Can't anyone stop him?

GAY RELATIONSHIPS MORALLY EQUIVALENT TO SLAVERY, SAYS CONSERVATIVE

In a television interview last month, Mr. Bush said he believed a marriage was "between a man and a woman" and that he would support a constitutional amendment "if necessary." But he also said that "whatever legal arrangements people want to make, they're allowed to make, so long as it's embraced by the state, or does start at the state level," and he emphasized the need for tolerance.

Ms. [Sandy] Rios of Concerned Women of America said Mr. Bush had implicitly endorsed gay unions. "It is the same as saying the federal government doesn't want to weigh in on slavery, but if the states want to call it chattel that is O.K.," Ms. Rios said.

--New York Times

Californians seem to be acting like grown-ups -- apparently they'd rather pay down their deficit themselves than force their kids and grandkids to do it:

...Six out of 10 likely voters say they favor tax increases as part of the solution to the deficit, according to the public opinion survey released today by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

... only 35 percent of likely voters say they would vote for [Schwarzenegger's] $15 billion March 2 bond measure if the election were held today.

...Nearly two-thirds -- 64 percent of likely voters and 67 percent of all adults -- say they would be willing to pay higher taxes to maintain current funding for public education, and smaller majorities would pay higher taxes to maintain current local government services.

The greatest support was for taxes on cigarettes and alcoholic beverages, and for raising income taxes on highest-income residents. Little support was found for a higher statewide sales tax or car tax....

--L.A. Daily News

Arnold Schwarzenegger does, however, have a 64% approval rating. But if the bond measure fails and, as expected, he and legislative Republicans resist tax increases, I assume that number will head south in a hurry.

Chuck Colson -- felon, friend to Jeb and Shrub, and all-around faith-based guy -- has some thoughts to share with us about UFOs:

Some twenty-five years ago, a Stanford astronomy professor surveyed members of the American Astronomical Society. The subject: UFOs. About 1,300 astronomers responded -- and what they said sheds light on the kind of people who believe they encounter UFOs.

Although nearly all so-called UFOs can be explained by natural causes, a small percentage can't be. Hugh Ross, himself a Christian, an astronomer, and the author of a book titled Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men, says researchers call these unexplainable phenomena "residual UFOs." In the Stanford study, sixty-two astronomers, or 5 percent, said they'd seen residual UFOs. But here's the interesting part: Astronomers with just a few observation hours per year witnessed UFOs, while those logging more than a thousand hours per year saw nothing.

...Those who are deeply involved in cultic, occultic, or certain New Age pursuits often see UFOs, whereas astronomers who avoid those things do not....

Ross is convinced that the so-called UFOs are actually evidence of demonic activity. He points to Scriptures that warn that demons can attack only those who, through their pursuits and friendships, invite them. This, of course, is exactly what the victims of UFO phenomena do....

You might want to read Ross's fascinating book Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men. It gives a rational look at UFOs. And then, the next time your kids watch a film about "friendly" aliens, or read about the latest UFO sighting, share Ross’s concerns with them. If Ross is right, there's nothing friendly about these so-called aliens.

Somebody, please call Bellevue.

In terms of the cost, Bush gave an estimate only for the initial downpayment on his space plan. He said it would cost $12 billion over the next five years, but only $1 billion in new funds. The remainder would come from money reallocated under NASA's five-year budget. Thus, it would be for Bush's successors to figure out how to finance the costliest part of the plan.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who flew on a space shuttle in 1986, questioned whether $1 billion in extra funding would be enough. "You can't go to the moon by 2014 with that," Nelson said.

--AP

Lowballing the cost of a cockamamie testosterone-fueled fantasy -- sound familiar?

NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, March 25, 2003:

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: Today I'm sending the Congress a wartime supplemental appropriations request of $74.7 billion to fund needs directly arising from the Iraqi conflict and our global war against terror....

KWAME HOLMAN: For weeks, congressional Democrats had criticized the administration for withholding the true costs of the war. After being briefed by the president yesterday, West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd said the American people should know $75 billion is only the beginning.

SENATOR ROBERT BYRD: This is the down payment. There's more to come, and we've got to level with the American people. We need to let the American people know up front as much as we can what the costs are expected to be.

"One Cow, Hundreds of Uses"

This story, from Newhouse News, ran in some Sunday papers this week. Go read it (though, like most recent stories about cows, it's not pleasant reading). Then ask yourself why the conventional wisdom about mad cow is "Hey, just don't eat T-bone steaks and you'll be 100% safe":

Consider:

...The cow's nasal septum is processed into chondroitin sulfate, an alternative medical treatment for arthritis....

The root gland of the tongue yields pregastric lipase, which is used in cheese production as a curdling agent....

Heparin, an anticoagulant used to thin blood, comes from a cow's lungs and intestines.

Epinephrine from the adrenal gland can treat hay fever, asthma or other allergies, or stimulate the heart in the event of cardiac arrest.

Catalase, a liver enzyme, goes into contact lens care products....

Is this all risk-free if there's some BSE out there? I don't know. Do you?

Study Disputes View of Costly Surge in Class-Action Suits

A new study has concluded that both the average price of settling class-action lawsuits and the average fee paid to lawyers who bring them have held steady for a decade, even though companies have said the suits are driving up the cost of doing business, hurting the economy and lining lawyers' pockets.

The issue is a fiercely divisive one that has fueled a heated debate over whether to place limits on class-action lawsuits. Legislation to curb class actions is a priority of President Bush and many Republicans in Congress....

According to the study, the average settlement over the 10-year period was $100 million in inflation-adjusted 2002 dollars...."The mean client recovery has not noticeably increased over the last decade," the professors wrote.

The study also found that "neither the mean nor the median level of fee awards has increased over time." ...

--New York Times

CUT OUT THE MIDDLEMAN

I found this at Free Republic. It's a column from The Yazoo Herald in Mississippi. It almost leaves me speechless:

Possibility: Barbour for president in '08

...Haley Barbour was sworn in Tuesday as Mississippi’s 63rd governor, but it’s the possibility of a much grander inauguration that motivated the Yazoo City resident’s re-entry into electoral politics after two decades as a successful lobbyist and Republican power broker.

Haley for President.

In 2008.

No joke.

Three prominent Mississippi Republicans, none of whom claimed first-hand knowledge of Barbour’s presidential plans, told this columnist that all signs point to a Barbour run to succeed a term-limited President Bush, who is heavily favored to win re-election this year....

There was the nagging question two years ago, when Barbour’s name first surfaced as a possible gubernatorial contender, of why he would leave the prestige and wealth of a multimillion-dollar Washington lobbying firm that he built from scratch, divest himself of its substantial profits, and take a job in Mississippi that pays less than $200,000 a year....

If Barbour indeed has presidential ambitions, he needed an elected platform from which to make the jump....

Just imagine: a president and a lobbyist all rolled up in one!

In 1997, Barbour completed his term as party chairman and returned to the lobbying trade. Immediately, many of the R.N.C.'s biggest corporate donors signed on with his firm. Added to [its] client list ... were the five major tobacco companies (which gave the Republican Party a reported $22 million between 1996 and 2001), airlines, drug companies and defense contractors. Most lobbying firms in Washington have a bipartisan roster of employees, but B.G.&R. insists on a Republican staff, right down to the receptionists. The advice the firm often gives its corporate clients includes this: Open a Washington office and supply those in-house lobbyists with plump checks for the politicians you want something from.

Those checks can be handed off in person at B.G.&R [Barbour Griffith & Rogers Inc.]....

--Nicholas Dawidoff, "Mr. Washington Goes to Mississippi," New York Times Magazine, 10/19/03

The Yazoo City Herald column says, admiringly,

Imagine how much he could raise on the national level.

Indeed.

Saddam didn't want Iraqis to work with non-Iraqi fighters after the fall of Baghdad. And those mortar shells found last week apparently contain no chemical agent.

What else have you got, W?

Skimble notes this Houston Chronicle story about tax shelters of dubious legality -- a story that cites one beneficiary who really should have known better:

KPMG [devised a tax shelter that] involved several complex offshore transactions that created a loss — on paper — of $30 million, for a fee of $2.4 million.

The Senate subcommittee on investigations recently found that KPMG ignored warnings from its own staff that the shelters were bogus and concocted legal opinions to the contrary.

"I think everybody here knew what they were doing was wrong," said Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., the subcommittee's chairman.

The committee reported that KPMG, one of the Big Four accounting firms, collected fees of $124 million from 1997 through 2001 on shelter plans — saving clients $1.4 billion in taxes.

The clients included Maurice Marciano, co-chairman of Guess; Dale Earnhardt, the late race car driver; and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., according to documents filed an IRS lawsuit against KPMG. (emphasis mine)

Frist's investments are in a blind trust. But why is a prominent senator (who's now a member of the Senate Finance Committee) working with a trustee who puts his money in obviously questionable investments?

Sadly, No! cites a Wall Street Journal editorial that continues to insist that, even though we're scared out of our wits to let anyone fly a plane over our airspace, Howard Dean was wrong to say that the capture of Saddam didn't make us safer: "In the wake of Saddam Hussein's capture, Mr. Dean declared we were no safer because of it. This was bad enough as a gaffe, but he has stuck by the point, like Mike Dukakis on furloughs for felons, suggesting an obstinate disregard for the judgment of most Americans."

Infuriating -- but hey, this is the rabid Wall Street Journal editorial page, so it's hardly surprising. How about this, from an article on Iowa Democrats in last Friday's edition of (Even) The Liberal New York Times?

Yet the concerns voiced in interviews come during a rough month for Dr. Dean: what his own aides have described as political missteps — such as saying that the capture of Saddam Hussein had not made the United States safer — have coincided with a stretch of time when many voters in Iowa are making decisions.

(The article is coauthored by Adam Nagourney, for whom anything a Democrat does is, much as it clearly pains him to say so, a gaffe and a blueprint for disaster.)

Yesterday I mentioned Michiko Kakutani's nasty New York Times review of An End to Evil by David Frum and Richard Perle, but I didn't quote any of the gems Kakutani found in the book. Such as:

The U.N. regularly broadcasts a spectacle as dishonest and morally deadening as a Stalinist show trial....

I'm holding my breath waiting for the howls of outrage from the "How dare those liberals compare Bush to Hitler!" crowd.

White House seeks control on health, safety

Under a new proposal, the White House would decide what and when the public would be told about an outbreak of mad cow disease, an anthrax release, a nuclear plant accident or any other crisis.

The White House Office of Management and Budget is trying to gain final control over release of emergency declarations from the federal agencies responsible for public health, safety and the environment....

On Friday, a nonpartisan group of 20 former top agency officials sent a letter to the OMB asking the White House watchdog agency to withdraw its proposal, saying it "could damage the federal system for protecting public health and the environment." ...

Michael Taylor, former deputy commissioner at the FDA under the first Bush administration, warned that the OMB's involvement in the dissemination of information on "imminent health hazards" is dangerous.

Taylor cited the severe November hepatitis outbreak from contaminated green onions at a Mexican fast food restaurant near Pittsburgh.

"OMB's proposal says it gets to weigh in on any agency statement that would have a significant impact on an industry. Any FDA warning or recall would have that nationwide impact. So should the FDA commissioner have to go to John Graham [administrator of the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs] for permission to warn people about the possible danger from tainted green onions?" Taylor asked....

--St. Louis Post-Dispatch

(Link via BuzzFlash.)

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times reviews David Frum and Richard Perle's An End to Evil:

The title of this new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror," says it all. It captures the authors' absolutist, Manichaean language and worldview; their cocky know-it-all tone; their swaggering insinuation that they know "how to win the war on terror" and that readers, the Bush administration and the rest of the world had better listen to them....

Making its points with all the subtlety of a pit bull on steroids, "An End to Evil" is smug, shrill and deliberately provocative...

The authors make some persuasive points about the disturbing role the Saudis have played in fomenting radical Islamist doctrine, the persecution of women in some Muslim countries and the intelligence failures leading up to 9/11. But these points tend to be drowned out by their triumphalist boasts ("the United States has become the greatest of all great powers in world history"), their macho posturing and their willful, flame-throwing language....

...Throughout "An End to Evil" they purvey a worldview of us-versus-them, all-or-nothing, either-or, and this outlook results in a refusal to countenance the possibility that people who do not share the authors' views about the war in Iraq or their faith in a pre-emptive, unilateralist foreign policy might have legitimate reasons for doing so....

No, the parts I didn't quote aren't any nicer.

In The New York Times, David Brooks gathers together some poll results to prove that "Bush has crashed through the 45/45 partisan divide" and that "there are many more people who support him than oppose him." Here are some numbers he somehow managed to overlook:

CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll. Jan. 9-11, 2004:

"Which comes closest to your view about the election for president in November? You plan to vote for Bush regardless of whom the Democrats nominate for president. You are waiting to see who the Democrats nominate for president before you make up your mind about who to vote for. OR, You plan to vote against Bush regardless of whom the Democrats nominate for president." Options rotated

Vote For Bush: 39%

Waiting: 28%

Vote Against Bush: 33%

**************

Newsweek Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. Jan. 8-9, 2004:

"In general, would you like to see George W. Bush reelected to another term as president, or not?"

Yes: 48%

No: 46%

Don't Know: 6%

**************

Associated Press poll conducted by Ipsos-Public Affairs. Jan. 5-7, 2004:

"If the election were held today, would you definitely vote to reelect George W. Bush as president, consider voting for someone else, or definitely vote for someone else as president?"

Definitely Bush: 41%

Consider Someone Else: 24%

Vote for Someone Else: 33%

Not Sure: 2%

**************

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. Dec. 19, 2003-Jan. 4, 2004:

"Looking ahead to the general election in November, would you like to see George W. Bush reelected president in 2004 or would you prefer that a Democratic candidate win the election?" If "Other" or "Someone else": "If you had to choose, would you like to see George W. Bush reelected or would you prefer that a Democratic candidate win the election?"

Bush: 44%

Democrat: 42%

Other/Unsure: 14%

**************

CNN/Time Poll conducted by Harris Interactive. Dec. 30, 2003-Jan. 1, 2004:

"If George W. Bush runs for reelection, how likely are you to vote for him: very likely, somewhat likely, somewhat unlikely, or very unlikely?"
.
Very Likely: 33%

Somewhat Likely: 18%

Somewhat Unlikely: 8%

Very Unlikely: 38%

Not Sure: 3%

"Suppose the 2004 election for president were being held today and you had to choose between [see below], the Democrat, and George W. Bush, the Republican. For whom would you vote: [see below]?"

George W. Bush: 51%

Howard Dean: 46%

Not Sure: 3%

"Crashed through" my ass.

(All poll results from Polling Report.)

Newsweek reports that the Bush administration is willing to extend the 9/11 commission's deadline -- if the commission will agree to make its report in December, after the election.

Gee, guys -- what are you afraid will come out in the report?

(Thanks to Cursor for the link.)

I'm largely in agreement with what Richard Goldstein says in the current Nation about Howard Dean's swagger:

... ever since Ronald Reagan rode roughshod over that wimp in the Mr. Rogers cardigan, the Republicans have played the gender card very effectively against the Democrats. From Bill Clinton's "rhymes with witch" wife to Gore's obsession with earth colors, the party of give-'em-hell Harry has taken blow after blow to the primal parts. It's been a long time since the Democrats had a presidential candidate who could jut out his chest and shoot from the hip with Dean's credibility. Maybe it's natural, maybe it's an act, but as even some Republicans are willing to admit, it seems to be working....

After decades of associating Democrats with failed masculinity, the Republicans are faced with an opponent who knows how to put on a butch display.

I know a lot of people sneer at this kind of analysis, but consider some numbers from yesterday's edition of the decidedly non-postmodern USA Today:

...Highly educated men and women increasingly view the political world in dramatically different ways: Men are mostly Republicans, women are predominantly Democrats. A modest gender gap among Americans who don't have college educations balloons for those with a college degree or more....

...An analysis of more than 40,000 interviews for the USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll from January through November this year shows the trend. Among those with a high school diploma or less, men were inclined by a single percentage point, 45% to 44%, to vote Democratic. Women leaned toward the Democrats by 11 percentage points, 50% to 39%. That's a partisan gap between the sexes of 10 percentage points.

For those who had taken some college courses but not graduated, that gender gap grew to 15 percentage points. Among those with a college degree, it rose to 20. And for voters who had taken postgraduate courses, it reached 28 percentage points — almost triple the gender difference among the least-educated voters.

Goldstein argues that white men have gone conservative because racial minorities, feminists, and gays pose "threats to the masculine mystique"; the people quoted in USA Today think it's about money:

...John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, co-authored a study that concluded the votes of men and women were driven by the state of the economy. But they assessed the economy by different standards: "We found men tended to vote in terms of their personal economic situation, and women were more likely to vote on the nation's economic situation."

Whether that's because of biology or socialization or something else is the subject of academic study and ideological debate. Whatever the reason, women are more likely to agree with Democrats about the need for a safety net of government social programs. Even upscale women are more likely to imagine that they might one day need it.

"It's left-brain/right-brain," says Nancy Hurlbert, 56, a civil engineer in Deerfield Beach, Fla., who usually votes Democratic. "Women are just more inclined to be socially aware, and perhaps even from their own personal experience or their mother's experience understand the need for social programs. They know that the government can't be run like a business."...

Either way, it does look as if men feel they're being deprived of something.

What the Republicans have done so successfully over the past quarter century is make it all seem one amorphous entity: feel-your-pain-tax-and-spend-welfare-freeloader-homosexual-agenda-castrating-bitch. Meanwhile, of course, when your job gets sent overseas, it's by a rich white guy in a suit. If men feel deprived and are angry, maybe Howard Dean can -- for a change -- get them (us) angry at the right people.

MESSAGE FROM ONE OF THE GROWN-UPS

If you watched Paul O'Neill, George W. Bush's first treasury secretary, in his self-serving interview on 60 Minutes Sunday night, during which he spewed venom at his former White House colleagues, you know that all that was missing was his clown outfit.

--lead paragraph of a National Review Online column on Paul O'Neill by Stephen Moore

(Stephen Moore, of course, is the president of the Club for Growth, the organization that denounced Howard Dean's "tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading ... Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show" in a recent attack ad.)

US military 'brutalised' journalists

The international news agency Reuters has made a formal complaint to the Pentagon following the "wrongful" arrest and apparent "brutalisation" of three of its staff this month by US troops in Iraq....

Although Reuters has not commented publicly, it is understood that the journalists were "brutalised and intimidated" by US soldiers, who put bags over their heads, told them they would be sent to Guantanamo Bay, and whispered: "Let's have sex." ...

The US troops, from the 82nd Airborne Division, based in Falluja, also made the blindfolded journalists stand for hours with their arms raised and their palms pressed against the cell wall....

On January 2 Reuters' Baghdad-based cameraman Salem Ureibi, Falluja stringer Ahmed Mohammed Hussein al-Badrani and driver Sattar Jabar al-Badrani turned up at the crash site where a US Kiowa Warrior helicopter had just been shot down, killing one soldier.

The journalists were all wearing bulletproof jackets clearly marked "press". They drove off after US soldiers who were securing the scene opened fire on their Mercedes, but were arrested shortly afterwards....

Last night the nephew of veteran Reuters driver and latterly cameraman Mr Ureibi said that US troops had forced his uncle to strip naked and had ordered him to put his shoe in his mouth.

"He protested that he was a journalist but they stuck a shoe in his mouth anyway. They also hurt his leg. One of the soldiers told him: 'If you don't shut up we'll fuck you.'"

He added: "His treatment was very shameful. He's very sad. He has also had hospital treatment because of his leg." ...

--The Guardian

Just another day at the office:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 12 — American soldiers on Monday night killed an Iraqi man and a boy and wounded four others in a car that was driving behind their convoy after a roadside bomb went off nearby, said witnesses, a police official and relatives of the family in the car.....

By the end of the day, in violence around the country involving the American military, an American soldier and at least 9 Iraqis had been killed, and 10 Iraqis and 2 American soldiers wounded....

Earlier in the day a roadside bomb in Baghdad killed a soldier in the First Armored Division and wounded two others, military officials said.

Another roadside bomb exploded near an Army convoy in Ramadi, a town west of Baghdad, but the military said no American casualties had been reported, The Associated Press reported. The report quoted residents as saying Americans had opened fire after the attack, killing two Iraqis.

The military also said soldiers killed 7 of about 40 members of a gang of smugglers that was siphoning oil from a pipeline south of Samarra, a guerrilla stronghold 60 miles north of Baghdad.

About 9 p.m. on Monday, suspected guerrillas fired rockets in Sadr City, a sprawling Shiite Muslim slum of 2.2 million people in northeastern Baghdad, Captain Beck said. Later, suspected insurgents fired two mortar rounds at the Baghdad Hotel on the east bank of the Tigris but failed to hit anything, a hotel guard said....

Also on Monday, riots continued in southern Iraq, as about 400 protesters marched on a government building in the city of Kut to demand jobs, The Associated Press reported. Someone in the crowd threw a grenade at Ukrainian soldiers and Iraqi policemen guarding the building, wounding five people, an official said. Ukrainian soldiers then fired into the air to disperse the crowd, he said, and wounded one protester.

--New York Times

Oh yeah -- we're definitely winning.

How we enforce our gun laws:

...It took the Washington-based lobbyist group Americans for Gun Safety six years and three lawsuits to get the names of the gun stores that sell a disproportionate number of the guns traced to crimes.

The group's study found that just 120 dealers in 22 states sold nearly 55,000 guns linked to crime in five years....

Of the 120 so-called high-crime gun stores, only 24 have been inspected in the last 3 ½ years, according to the Americans for Gun Safety report. Nationwide, only 27 gun dealers were prosecuted last year....

--ABC News

America's future, under the Bush immigration plan:

Under the plan, businesses would have to show that no Americans want the jobs available before they bring in temporary workers from abroad....

One fear, for example, is that a business that now pays American construction laborers $11 an hour will say that it henceforth needs laborers at $6 an hour, knowing that hardly any Americans would take arduous jobs paying so little.

As a result, some labor unions say they want a wage floor incorporated into the immigration reforms.

"If you don't have these protections, you're going to have a race to the bottom," said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a liberal group that seeks to ease immigration rules. "You'll have $12-an-hour hotel workers undermined by the $7-an-hour temporary workers from overseas."...

--New York Times

Hey, it's all the fun of outsourcing -- and you don't even have to send the jobs out of the country!

MS. MYLROIE ISSUES A CLARIFICATION

Via Free Republic, we have this apparently accurate assertion from the usually loopy "terrorism expert" Laurie Mylroie:

In his appearance this evening on "60 Minutes," Ron Suskind, author of The Price of Loyalty, based to a large extent on information from former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill, made an astonishing, very serious misstatement.

Suskind claimed he has documents showing that preparations for the Iraq war were well underway before 9-11. He cited--and even showed--what he said was a Pentagon document, entitled, "Foreign Suitors for Iraq Oilfield contracts." He claimed the document was about planning for post-war Iraqi oil (CBS's promotional story also contains that claim): http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/ printable592330.shtml

But that is not a Pentagon document. It's from the Vice-President's Office. It was part of the Energy Project that was the focus of Dick Cheney's attention before the 9/11 strikes.

...It was part of a study of global oil supplies. Judicial Watch obtained it in a law suit and posted it, along with related documents, on its website at: http://www.judicialwatch.org/071703.c_.shtml

And this is supposed to strike us as less sleazy -- as less of a sign that the administration was planning an Iraq war long before 9/11 -- for what reason exactly?

I think the ex-Treasury Secretary is about to encounter the politics of personal destruction -- up close and personal.

--Billmon

I'll say:

US Treasury seeks probe into papers taken by O'Neill

The U.S. Treasury has asked the U.S. inspector general's office to investigate how a possibly classified document appeared on Sunday in a televised interview of ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, a department spokesman said on Monday....

--Reuters

Paul? The keyword is omerta.

John Edwards wins the Miss Congeniality award from two editorial boards:

Like all the Democratic candidates, Edwards is strongly critical of Bush, but with him it tends to be a little less personal.... He tends to conduct positive, optimistic campaigns.

--Des Moines Register

SOME PRESIDENTIAL candidates seem to grow shriller or more haggard as the grueling campaign grinds on. North Carolina Sen. John Edwards is the opposite -- a candidate who remains as appealing as ever and who seems to have grown more thoughtful and confident....

...Mr. Edwards has a natural ability to connect with voters and a trial lawyer's facility for translating complicated concepts into plain English without sounding condescending. He's run a relentlessly positive campaign; while his rivals have gone after front-runner Howard Dean, Mr. Edwards's strategy has been to stay above the fray....

--The Washington Post

Well, that's the way our press likes Democrats -- nice, decent, genial, inoffensive, harmless, nonthreatening. A Democrat should help the press with its homework -- right before the press goes on a date with the (GOP) captain of the football team:

As last week proved again, this president has embraced not only "the vision thing" but the idea of a very big presidency: big ideas, big costs, big gambles. More than many presidents, historians say, Mr. Bush seems to understand how to use the powers of the office and to see the political benefits in risk. He may leave the details to others, but when backed into a corner, he doubles his bets....

"The vision thing" is the point, whether it is big tax cuts, big wars, big plans for democracy in the Middle East. Presidents, historians say, need national unifying principles....

--New York Times

Too bad that snarling meanie Howard Dean has to threaten the natural order of things. Why does he have to be angry all the time? Why can't he be nice? Doesn't he realize he's a Democrat?

The Bushies abuse the English language again:

Saddam Hussein has been designated an EPW, not a POW, the Pentagon clarified yesterday.

The enemy prisoner of war designation, cited by Pentagon spokeswoman Megan Grafton, may be used by the feds to get around the prisoner of war protections the U.S. agreed to when it signed the 1948 Geneva Convention, a legal expert said.

"I've never heard the term EPW used," said Michael Noone, a retired Air Force JAG officer who teaches law at Catholic University. "It's certainly not in the Geneva Conventions." ...

--New York Daily News

(Link via BuzzFlash.)

If you can't rebut the testimony, just say the witness is a hapless old loser. Thus John Fund on Paul O'Neill in The Wall Street Journal:

I once had dinner with Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary who is now making headlines with a scathing portrayal of his days in the Bush administration prior to his firing in December 2002. Bush critics will hail Mr. O'Neill as a truth-teller, White House aides are already calling him a back-stabber. In fact, Mr. O'Neill is a relic. The man I broke bread with was clearly a product of the Nixon and Ford administrations, in which he had served, and simply hadn't adapted to the post-Reagan Republican Party.

Poor pathetic Paul -- nobody told him that right-centrism is just so thirty years ago.

Bush, the conservative, hired the moderate O'Neill, then clashed with him. Bafflingly, Fund thinks this is O'Neill's fault:

Mr. O'Neill was a fish out of water in the Bush administration. Time magazine reports that he considered himself, Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman and Secretary of State Colin Powell to be "three beleaguered souls . . . who shared a more nonideological approach [but] were used for window dressing." Mr. O'Neill tells Mr. Suskind, the author of a new book that tells Mr. O'Neill's side of his tour at Treasury, that the three moderates "may have been there, in large part, as cover" for the administration's conservative agenda.

But it wouldn't have taken much for Mr. O'Neill to figure out that on issues his new boss would more resemble Ronald Reagan than Nixon, Ford or the first George Bush. All he had to do was pay attention to Mr. Bush's record in Texas and his 2000 campaign.

Er, excuse me: Why was it O'Neill's job to figure out that Bush was incompatible with him? After all, didn't we all -- Paul O'Neill presumably included -- spend 2000 learning that George W. Bush was a "compassionate conservative," a pragmatist, a guy who works well with those of different ideological stripes? The press said it, over and over and over again, so surely O'Neill wasn't crazy if he believed it.

I know conservatives believe in "personal responsibility" for everyone but their own heroes, but sorry: It was Bush's job (or the job of consigliere Cheney) to figure out that O'Neill wasn't conservative enough for Bush. Fund notes that

At the first meeting of the president's cabinet, Mr. O'Neill passed out copies of a speech he gave in 1998 in which he said that there were two issues that transcend all others: "One is nuclear holocaust. . . . The second is environmental: specifically, the issue of global climate change and the potential of global warming."

A speech on global warming and nukes? With regard to whether O'Neill would ever go wobbly on hard-right principles, shouldn't this have been a bit of a tipoff?

Well, I guess page A12 of The Washington Post is better than nothing for this:

Study Published by Army Criticizes War on Terror's Scope

A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.

The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point."

It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network.

"[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly ... its parameters should be readjusted," Record writes. Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign "is strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security."

...Record's core criticism is that the administration is biting off more than it can chew. He likens the scale of U.S. ambitions in the war on terrorism to Adolf Hitler's overreach in World War II. "A cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable number," he writes. "The Germans were defeated in two world wars . . . because their strategic ends outran their available means."

He also scoffs at the administration's policy, laid out by Bush in a November speech, of seeking to transform and democratize the Middle East. "The potential policy payoff of a democratic and prosperous Middle East, if there is one, almost certainly lies in the very distant future," he writes. "The basis on which this democratic domino theory rests has never been explicated." ...

Gee -- everyone who actually examines the situation in depth turns into a Bush-hating, America-hating, freedom-hating peacenik. Funny how that works. Even this guy, who used to be an aide to the hawkish Senator Sam Nunn and who "in 1999, while on the staff of the Air War College, ... published work critical of the Clinton administration," according to the Post article.

I haven't read the whole report, but you can get to it here.

So I guess even our counterinsurgency forces are Bush-hating, America-hating, sandal-wearing peaceniks. This is from Peter Maass's fine New York Times Magazine cover story on Major John Nagl, a counterinsurgency theorist who's putting his knowledge into practice in Iraq -- and finding it a struggle:

A few hours after the car bomb detonated, the American military announced that Saddam Hussein had been captured. The news did not elicit shouts of joy at Nagl's base. The reaction among Nagl's men was summed up by a soldier who didn't hesitate when I asked whether he thought Hussein's capture would make his job easier. ''Nah, there are too many bad people here,'' he replied. ''They don't need Saddam Hussein to tell them to do bad things.''

What?! That soldier didn't think he was safer with Saddam captured? Why does he hate freedom?

So shouldn't Iraq be a little less of a mess after the fall of Baghdad, given the fact that, as Paul O'Neill and Ron Suskind showed us on 60 Minutes tonight, the Bushies have been planning what to do after regime change since early 2001?

There were three articles in the Sunday New York Times that looked at the road ahead for prominent candidates. The article about Tom Daschle says he "is facing what could be the toughest campaign of his career" and raises "the question of how Mr. Daschle will juggle the conflicting jobs of Senate candidate and Senate leader." The lead article about the Democratic presidential candidates suggests that things aren't going according to plan for the party -- "The Iowa caucus contest is ending in an electoral environment quite different from what Democrats expected when planning for this moment a year ago....By some measures, the economy is showing signs of life, and it is certainly less of an issue than Democrats had hoped it might be now.... And with Saddam Hussein captured, the subject of the war ... appears to command less attention." (The article is written by Adam Nagourney, who always manages to point out that that the Democrats' glass is half empty, at best.)

But in the article about George W. Bush's 2004 campaign, everything's coming up roses. There's no struggle to reconcile governing and campaigning. There's no change in the country or the world that could throw a spanner in the campaign's works. Bush is tanned, rested, and ready (an adviser, unnamed, "for fear of angering the White House" -- oh, please -- gushes, "Karl [Rove] is brilliant, but in terms of political strategy, there's no question that the president is intimately engaged. When he comes into a state, he will know exactly what his numbers are, whether people think the country is moving in the right direction, what his approval rating is"), and the Bush team is a well-oiled machine:

At campaign headquarters, just as at the White House, days begin early. Aides are in at 6 a.m. or earlier to begin assembling packets of the day's relevant stories from the newspapers and television into White House-like news summaries for the campaign's senior staff.

By 7:30 a.m., there is what the staff calls a "rapid response" conference call between the campaign staff and Ed Gillespie, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, to review the important political events coming that day, like major speeches by the Democrats, polls and presidential events. The goal is to be ready with consistent talking points.

Between 8 and 8:30 a.m., the campaign has a senior staff meeting to go over the battle plan for the day. Those attending include Mr. Mehlman, Mr. Dowd and Mr. Holt, as well as Jack Oliver, the deputy finance chairman; Mark McKinnon, who is in charge of political advertising; and Nicolle Devenish, the communications director.

...There are also 33 staff members in 14 newly opened offices in major states, plus 5,500 county and precinct leaders who have been trained in 52 sessions around the country. They have learned, Mr. Mehlman said, basic grass-roots political skills: how to register voters, hold Bush-Cheney barbecues, call in to talk radio shows and send letters to the editor extolling the virtues of their candidate....

This, alas, is pretty much how the news coverage goes every day in the A section of the Times: The Democrats are hapless also-rans, and Bush is the political equivalent of the '27 Yankees.

The Bush boom, according to Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley, as quoted by Gretchen Mortenson in The New York Times:

But the unpleasant reality remains that private-sector payrolls are now 7.5 million workers below the level that would be typical 25 months into an economic recovery, [Roach] said....

"In the last five months, 280,000 jobs have been created, a number that we get easily in a month during a normal recovery,'' he said. Most of the new jobs are in temporary staffing, health and government, he added.

"The days of an old-fashioned hiring-led recovery are over," Mr. Roach said. "And we have to face that, in terms of understanding the potential for our economy to keep growing as many in our financial markets are now blindly assuming will be the case."

Mr. Roach said the second half of 2004 might bring an economic relapse. Hmm.

And Roach isn't the only economic skeptic:

Also casting doubt on the recovery is Robert H. Parks, economist and professor of finance at Pace University. He said he thought that interest rates would rise significantly by the end of the year, pushed up not by Alan Greenspan, who never saw an asset bubble he didn't like, but by the bond market vigilantes. "Deficits financed by way of freshly printed money to fund tax cuts, pork-barrel spending and huge outlays for military spending are going to generate headline news on sharply rising interest rates, long before 2004 is over," Mr. Parks said.

We'll see.

I'd love to think that this is going to make a big difference, but, alas, I'm pessimistic. I'll explain why below....

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill charges in a new book that President Bush entered office in January 2001 intent on invading Iraq and was in search of a way to go about it....

The former treasury secretary and other White House insiders gave Suskind documents that in the first three months of 2001 revealed the Bush administration was examining military options for removing Saddam Hussein, CBS said.

"There are memos," Suskind told CBS. "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq."'

Another Pentagon document entitled "Foreign suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts" talks about contractors from 40 countries and which ones have interest in Iraq, Suskind said....

--Reuters

The problem is that credulous Americans will effortlessly fit even this into their Saddam = Osama worldview. How? Thus: Freedom-hating Muslims -- whom we can't possibly differentiate -- hated us and wanted to do us harm, and our brave flight-suit-wearing hero, George W. Bush, knew this, even as far back as the first months of 2001. So when another freedom-hating Muslim, Osama, attacked us on 9/11, Bush's wise policy of regime change for Osama's ally Saddam was vindicated.

Sorry for the gloom. I really hope I'm wrong about this.

It's amazing: This is, literally, a conspiracy theory -- the belief that Saddam and Osama were co-conspirators -- yet those who doubt it are the heretics, the iconoclasts, in American politics. I hope O'Neill's interview and Suskind's book change this, but I'm not holding my breath.

It turns out there were plenty of new jobs created in December ...

... in Canada:

The Canadian economy finished 2003 on a strong note, generating new jobs at more than twice the expected pace in December, Statistics Canada said Friday.

...In the final month of the year, the Canadian job market — which had stalled for much of the early part of 2003 — added a surprising 53,100 jobs. That marked the fourth consecutive month of employment growth in this country and far exceeded even the most optimistic forecasts.

...Most of December's new jobs were full-time. In total, 45,500 full-time positions were created, while an additional 7,600 part-time jobs were added to the payrolls....

--Toronto Globe and Mail

The population of the U.S. is about nine times that of Canada, but we didn't add 477,900 jobs in our economy in December -- as you probably know, we added 1,000.