No More Mister Nice Blog

Tuesday, February 10, 2004    U.S. Nixes Subpoenas Against Protesters DES MOINES, Iowa - Federal prosecutors withdrew a subpoena Tuesday ordering Drake University to turn over a list of people involved in an antiwar forum in November, as well as subpoenas ordering four activists to testify before a grand jury. Brian Terrell, leader of the Catholic Peace Ministry and one of the four, told a crowd of about 100 cheering people outside the federal courthouse: "We made them want to stop, and we have to make sure they never want to do this again." The U.S. attorney's office had no immediate comment on why the subpoenas were withdrawn just one day after federal prosecutor Stephen O'Meara issued a statement acknowledging an investigation was under way.... --AP posted by Steve M. | 7:29 PM |   I've added a few links in the right column: Seeing the Forest and Sisyphus Shrugged, which probably should have been there a long time ago; the homepage/blog of Michael Berube, professor, critic, and foe of David Horowitz; and, finally, the unique link stylings of INTL News. (Also, in a Monk-like moment, I alphabetized the links.) posted by Steve M. | 5:50 PM |   This is weird: A visit to Free Republic leads me to Christianity Today, where I learn that the evangelizin' pilot -- now identified as Roger Findiesen -- has broken his silence and given his first interview to -- I'm not making this up -- The Advocate. ("At no time did Findiesen mention homosexuality or say anything antigay," The Advocate's interviewer notes -- understandable when you realize that the guy seems to have no earthly idea what The Advocate is.) An excerpt from the interview: "I just got back from a mission in Costa Rica," said Findiesen, a tall white man with neatly trimmed thick white hair and a mustache, both lightly peppered with black. "I felt that God was telling me to say something." He went on to explain that he felt God wanted him to witness to the passengers on his first flight upon returning to work for American Airlines after his mission. Despite this feeling, he said, he had decided not to say anything--but then he got another sign from God. A minor problem with the plane's braking system had developed during final checks before takeoff, he said, a problem that might have grounded the aircraft, on which every seat was taken, in part because another American flight from Los Angeles to New York had been canceled that morning. But after a simple maneuver involving a power source, the braking problem inexplicably "disappeared," Findiesen said, and the plane was cleared for departure, and that's when he knew he had to use the P.A. system to talk about his Christian faith. Yeah -- well, when I was eight years old I stepped on a crack, and two days later ... well, nothing broke exactly, but my mother did have a mild lower back twinge, and I never, ever, ever stepped on a crack again, because I knew that lower back twinge was all my fault. posted by Steve M. | 4:46 PM |   I have absolutely no idea what to make of this: MOSCOW police said they were carrying out chemical tests at the Moscow office of the oil company BP on Tuesday, after employees reportedly felt ill following the reception of suspicious mail. Police said a person calling from the BP office said that employees suffered headaches, rashes and felt a stinging in their eye after handling mail that arrived from Houston, Texas, the Interfax news agency reported. Police experts were testing the air and the mail for chemicals, but found no powder or liquid inside the envelopes, Moscow police spokesman Pavel Klimovsky said. Officials at BP in Moscow could not immediately reached for comment. --News.com.au (Australia) posted by Steve M. | 2:58 PM |   Michael Berube has word of an endorsement in the presidential race that might surprise Limbaugh and Lileks. posted by Steve M. | 1:51 PM |   I see the Coalition Provisional Authority has had to explain to the Japanese that freedom of the press is pro-evildoer:  SAMAWA, Iraq -- The Coalition Provision Authority (CPA) has ordered police in Samawa to withhold security information from Japanese media covering Ground Self-Defense Force (GSDF) activities there, the Mainichi has learned. Karim Helbet Monahar al-Zayday, police commissioner in the southern Iraqi province of Musanna where Samawa is located, said the gag rule was imposed to improve the image of the town. "Some members of the Japanese media have reported that Samawa has security problems," al-Zayday told the Mainichi. "We just want to make Japanese understand that Musanna is a safe place." ... Yeah, and refusing to provide any information to back up a claim of safety is really the best way to make sure it's believed, isn't it? This is ham-handed, but it's also idiotic: If the CPA won't talk (in its usually Pollyannaish way) to the Japanese press, the stories are going to get more negative, not less -- which is what the CPA deserves. posted by Steve M. | 11:24 AM |   The story in today's New York Times doesn't even have this quote, but The Seattle Times caught it and (appropriately) made it the lead: Bush report: Sending jobs overseas helps U.S. WASHINGTON — The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said yesterday. The embrace of foreign "outsourcing," an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and has become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the U.S. economy. "Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, which prepared the report. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that's a good thing." ... Let them eat cake. posted by Steve M. | 10:03 AM |   Shorter David Brooks: Bush's problem on Meet the Press was that he didn't talk enough like Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter. posted by Steve M. | 9:50 AM |   ABORTION WARS First, here's Ashcroft, out of control: A move by U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to subpoena the medical records of 40 patients who received so-called partial-birth abortions at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago was halted -- at least temporarily -- when a Chicago federal judge quashed the information request. The ruling is the first in a series of subpoenas by the U.S. Justice Department seeking the medical records of patients from seven physicians and at least five hospitals... In a 16-page decision, U.S. Chief District Judge Charles Kocoras denied the government's request to obtain patient medical records from Northwestern, citing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and Illinois' medical privacy law. Northwestern received the subpoena in December, a month after obstetrician/gynecologist Cassing Hammond, a member of Northwestern's staff and medical school faculty, was served with subpoenas seeking his patient records. Hammond is one of seven doctors and three groups who has challenged the constitutionality of the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003.... While the Justice Department has said it is not seeking information that would identify the patients, that did not persuade Judge Kocoras.... --Chicago Business Then there's this: A bill is gathering support in the Virginia legislature that would require unborn children be administered a painkiller before abortions are performed. A measure introduced by Republican Dick Black will be considered by the justice committee of Virginia's lower chamber, the House of Delegates, Monday, reported WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. The Senate will address a similar measure Thursday. "We must do everything possible to relieve the terror and suffering of children as they are aborted," said Black in a statement.... That story's from WorldNetDaily, and, fortunately, it says nothing about how likely the bill is to pass -- from which I infer that it probably won't. (If the bill had substantial support, the far-right WND would be delighted to tell us.) But still -- let's all go to the Bible Belt and find liberal kids who are over 20 years and 3 months old, but under 21. Let's buy beers and sell them to the kids on the steps of police stations -- and when we get arrested, let's say that the kids are really 21 because, hey, life begins at conception, doesn't it? As every God-fearing Christian knows? (Both links via BuzzFlash.) posted by Steve M. | 7:51 AM | Monday, February 09, 2004   This AP story about the Zarqawi letter basically gets it right: A letter seized from an al-Qaida courier shows Osama bin Laden has made little headway in recruiting Iraqis for a holy war against America, raising questions about the Bush administration's contention that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. The 17-page letter, cited as a key piece of intelligence that offered a rare window into foreign terrorist operations in Iraq, appealed to al-Qaida leaders to help spark a civil war between Iraq's two main Muslim sects in an effort to "tear the country apart," U.S. officials said Monday.... "Many Iraqis would honor you as a guest and give you refuge, for you are a Muslim brother," it said. "However, they will not allow you to make their home a base for operations or a safe house." That suggests that Iraqis may be willing to support their homegrown insurgency but have little interest in backing foreign infiltrators. The letter's appeals for outside help raises questions whether al-Qaida had a support network here before Saddam's downfall.... But the cynical bastards in the White House know this is all hard for most Americans to follow. Alas, they know that they can robotically repeat the Big Lie ("White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that the letter, first reported Monday by The New York Times, shows that 'Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism'") and most of us will swallow it. And there's a chance they're actually going to revive the "increased violence means we're succeeding" line they tried out a few months ago: One senior U.S. officer, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, warned the plea could mean more "spectacular" attacks because the rebels were despairing that their devastating car bombs and the steady killing of U.S. troops were failing to shove the Americans from Iraq or spark massive discord. And now the administration can blame any truly nasty violent act in Iraq on al-Qaeda, with or without evidence -- just in time for the campaign. posted by Steve M. | 10:58 PM |   By now you know all about God's self-appointed copilot. But do you know about jellybeans for Jesus? Parents Sue To Allow Daughter To Distribute Religious Jellybeans DAYTON, Ohio -- Parents have sued a school district because a kindergarten teacher stopped their daughter from distributing bags of jellybeans with an attached prayer to her classmates. Allen and Sheila Wuebben, of suburban Kettering, say the school's policy of prohibiting students from distributing religious literature in the classroom violates their daughter Madison's rights to freedom of speech and religion.... According to the lawsuit, Madison sought permission from her teacher, Angela Helwig, to distribute "The Jelly Bean Prayer" to her Orchard Park Elementary School classmates before last Easter. The prayer's first two lines are: "Red is for the blood He gave, Green is for the grass He made." ... The teacher said no Jesus jellybeans in the classroom. The family cried "Persecution!" The superintendent said Jesus jellybeans were OK on the bus, in the playground, or after school. That wasn't good enough for the family. Oh, by the way: The family's lawyer is from the Rutherford Institute, legal backers of Paula Jones. Now, let me get this straight: According to religious conservatives, gay marriage is an intolerable infringement on the lives of married heterosexuals, even when those married gay people don't go anywhere near non-consenting heterosexuals -- yet if someone gets in my face and starts trying to convert me to Christ in a setting I can't readily leave (an airplane, my kindergarten class), that just fine. A kindergartner doesn't have a right to proselytize in the classroom, any more than a tenth grader has a right to get up in the middle of a math test, whip out an electric guitar and a portable amp and start working his way through the Good Charlotte songbook. No one says that guitarist's First Amendment rights are being denied if he's told to take it back to the garage. It's about common courtesy and mutual respect. It's about not being a rude, inconsiderate boor. Proselytizing Christians? You say Jesus loves us? We get it. Now, if we ask you to back off, back off. (Jellybean link via INTL News.) posted by Steve M. | 5:30 PM |   If you're enjoying Hans Blix's comments on the Iraq debacle, you'll be pleased to know that the book tour should be starting very soon. posted by Steve M. | 4:59 PM |   Last week I mentioned a Fox News story hyping the discovery of a block of cyanide salt found at a Baghdad compound reportedly used by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has been identified as a jihad-friendly terrorist. (Cyanide salt is commonly found in chemistry labs and jewelers' workshops.) Now, in today's New York Times, Dexter Filkins says that Zarqawi recently wrote a letter to al-Qaeda begging for help with the Iraq insurgency. Filkins summarizes the Bush administration's prewar rap on Zarqawi, and its relationship to the truth: In the period before the war, Bush administration officials argued that Mr. Zarqawi constituted the main link between Al Qaeda and Mr. Hussein's government. Last February at the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said, "Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants." ...Since the war ended, little evidence has emerged to support the allegation of a prewar Qaeda connection in Iraq. Last month, Mr. Powell conceded that the American government had found "no smoking gun" linking Mr. Hussein's government with Al Qaeda. If the document Filkins writes about is genuine, we now have Zarqawi begging al-Qaeda for help with the insurgency -- which implies that al-Qaeda isn't providing a whole lot of help with the insurgency now. If you're trying to make the case that Saddam = Osama and the Afghan and Iraq wars were part of one big war on terrorism, this isn't a very convincing Exhibit A. Nor is this: "Many Iraqis would honor you as a guest and give you refuge, for you are a Muslim brother," according to the document. "However, they will not allow you to make their home a base for operations or a safe house." In fact, all this even undermines the "flypaper theory" (you remember: the notion that war in Iraq was a neat idea because even if all the evildoers weren't in Iraq when we invaded, fighting the war there encouraged them all to show up later). Alas, Iraq = al-Qaeda could well be the message an awful lot of people take from this story, even though it's utterly wrong. posted by Steve M. | 11:41 AM |   I hope you've read about the federal judge who's ordered Drake University to turn over information about meetings of antiwar protesters; if not, the story's here. I'm amused that this story broke exactly one day after Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic wagged his finger on the op-ed page of The New York Times and told liberals opposed to Ashcroftism to mind their manners and be reasonable. Rosen said that reason and compromise could remove all the nasty excesses from the Patriot Act -- after all, he said, it had removed them from our system of scrutinizing airline passengers, hadn't it? Well, according to this story, it hasn't: The airport counter: This is as far as Rebecca Gordon and Janet Adams say they are allowed to go at San Francisco International Airport. The last time they checked in for a flight to Boston to visit Gordon's 80-year-old father, an airline employee called the police. "She came back and said you turned up on the FBI no-fly list. We have called the San Francisco police. We were shocked, really shocked,” recalled Adams. "We were detained. We were definitely detained. I couldn't even get a drink of water," Gordon remembered. So why would two women in their 50's, U.S. citizens, San Francisco homeowners and long-time peace activists with no criminal records be on a federal watch list with suspected terrorists? ... The list is now alleged to include not only suspected terrorists and those believed to be a threat to aviation security but civil rights activists say it also targets people based on their political views. A list that is thought to include members of the Green Party, a Jesuit priest who is a peace activist and two civil rights attorneys. In Gordon and Adams’ case, the ACLU believes the couple may have been targeted for their work on War Times, a free bilingual newspaper that has been critical of the war and the Bush administration's policies on terrorism. It’s very scary that two people who pose no danger, who are publishing something, which last time I looked we were allowed to do, are being detained at the airport and having the police called and they won't tell us why," Adams said. And as of today, Gordon and Adams still don't have any answers from the government but have a court hearing set for April 9th. This controversy isn't likely to go away anytime soon, since the government is planning on implementing a color code system this summer to track passengers and that list too is expected to be secret. (Frist link courtesy of BuzzFlash; last link courtesy of INTL News.) posted by Steve M. | 9:53 AM |   More on that proselytizing pilot, from AP: Passenger Amanda Nelligan told WCBS-TV of New York that the pilot called non-Christians "crazy" and that his comments "felt like a threat." She said she and several others aboard were so worried they tried to call relatives on their cell phones before flight attendants assured them they were safe and that people on the ground had been notified about the pilot's comments. You'd be torn, wouldn't you? You'd think: Am I merely being insulted by a self-righteous jerk who should just shut up and do his job, or am I about to be the victim of a mini-9/11 in Jesus' name? posted by Steve M. | 8:06 AM | Sunday, February 08, 2004   "Iraqization" -- er, no, it's not working: Iraqi Police Major, Gunmen Attack GIs TIKRIT, Iraq - Gunmen, including a major in the new Iraqi police force, attacked a group of American soldiers, sparking a gunbattle in which the officer was killed and two other attackers wounded, the U.S. military said Sunday. The soldiers were observing a house belonging to a person suspected in rocket-propelled grenade attacks on American forces in the village of Qadisiyah, 30 miles south of Tikrit, when the gunmen opened fire Saturday evening, the military said in a statement. The Americans fired back and threw a hand grenade at the attackers, killing one and wounding two. Two more gunmen were captured. The slain attacker was identified as an active Iraqi police major.... --AP posted by Steve M. | 11:23 PM | Saturday, February 07, 2004   Fareed Zakaria may be a centrist (and, by his own admission, a friend of one of the authors), but he gets in a few good digs in his New York Times review of David Frum and Richard Perle's An End to Evil: While terror mounted, Frum and Perle say, the Clinton administration did nothing. They remind us that in one case (an anti-Semitic attack in Argentina) ''it opened negotiations with the murderers.'' Now one can make the case that America's halfhearted responses have egged on Middle Eastern terrorists. But one should surely begin this story where the terrorists do themselves, with their huge attack on the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983 and America's disastrous decision to pull out immediately. Nor do the authors mention the most important instance of the United States ''negotiating with murderers,'' which was, of course, the decision to trade arms for hostages in the mid-1980's. Both events took place during the Reagan administration, when Perle was in high office. Moreover, the impression the authors give is that they and their confederates were outraged by Clinton's (weak-kneed) efforts against Al Qaeda. In fact neoconservatives were silent about Al Qaeda during the 1990's. One searches vainly through the archives of the Project for the New American Century, the main neoconservative advocacy group, for a single report on Al Qaeda or a letter urging action against it before 9/11. (There are dozens on the China threat, national missile defenses and Saddam Hussein's weapons.) Clinton may merely have lobbed missiles at terrorists, but the neoconservatives did not even launch a blast fax. Ouch. posted by Steve M. | 11:13 PM |   Is there something about pressurized jet-cabin air that turns some people into self-important, self-righteous jerks who can’t tolerate difference of opinion? The second American in a month was arrested while entering Brazil for making an obscene gesture while being photographed by an immigration official, police said on Saturday. Federal police in Foz do Iguacu on Brazil's border with Argentina and Paraguay said retired U.S. banker Douglas Allan Skolnick, 56, was jailed overnight for flipping his middle finger in a photo now required to be taken of all U.S. tourists entering Brazil. Brazil began fingerprinting and photographing Americans entering the country in January after the U.S. government imposed a similar process on foreigners, except for those from 27 mostly European countries.... --Reuters An American Airlines pilot flying passengers to New York asked Christians on board to identify themselves and suggested the non-Christians discuss the faith with them, a spokesman for the Fort Worth-based airline said today. Flight 34 was headed from Los Angeles to John F. Kennedy Airport on Friday afternoon, said spokesman Tim Wagner. The pilot, whose identity was not released, had been making flight announcements and then asked that the Christians on board raise their hands, Wagner said. The pilot told the airline that he then suggested the other passengers use the flight time to talk to the identified Christians about their faith, Wagner said. The pilot later told passengers he would be available at the end of the flight to talk about his first announcement. Wagner said the airline was investigating the incident, and that the company had guidelines about appropriate behavior. He said the pilot had just returned to work from a weeklong mission trip to Costa Rica. "It falls along the lines of a personal level of sharing that may not be appropriate for one of our employees to do while on the job," Wagner said. --AP posted by Steve M. | 11:09 PM |   On ABC's news broadcast last night, there was deep skepticism about Bush's new commission: PETER JENNINGS: ...President Bush signed an executive order today which many people believed as of yesterday was going to have as its prime mission an investigation of prewar U.S. intelligence in Iraq. The president used that intelligence to justify attacking Iraq, and much of it turns out to be flawed. Tonight, the official mission of this new commission is much less about Iraq than anticipated, and it is clearly the president's commission. Terry Moran is at the White House, and Terry, this afternoon -- late this afternoon, on a Friday -- you've had a chance to look at the finer print. TERRY MORAN: Indeed, Peter, and under this executive order, which the president just signed, the main job of this commission is not to look at that flawed intelligence on Iraq, and there's nothing in this order directing the commission to investigate how the Bush administration used that intelligence to justify war. Instead, the president wants this commission to look at the much broader question of gathering intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, and only secondarily to look at what went wrong in Iraq.... Moran concluded by noting this interesting factoid about the commission's report, which is due next March: ...there’s nothing in this order that would require that report to be made public. (Not available as text only; video available here.) posted by Steve M. | 10:00 AM |   Abdul al-Latif al-Mayah was never safe. Not before the war started, and not after. A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Mayah, a 53-year-old political scientist and human rights advocate known in his neighborhood here as "the professor," was driving to work when eight masked gunmen jumped in front of his car. They yanked him into the street, the police said, and shot him nine times in front of his bodyguard and another university lecturer. In an instant, he became one of hundreds of intellectuals and midlevel administrators who Iraqi officials say have been assassinated since May in a widening campaign against Iraq's professional class. "They are going after our brains," said Lt. Col. Jabbar Abu Natiha, head of the organized crime unit of the Baghdad police. "It is a big operation. Maybe even a movement."... --New York Times Read the story. Abdul al-Latif al-Mayah wasn't just a human rights advocate after Saddam was overthrown -- he was a human rights advocate when Saddam was in power. Back then he survived. posted by Steve M. | 9:12 AM |   Fred Phelps presses on, and idiots who just can't seem to grasp how church-state separation has to work on public land are making it possible: ...The Rev. Fred Phelps, from Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kan., has chosen Boise and roughly 10 cities around the country to be locations for an anti-gay monument because those cities all have Ten Commandments monuments on city property. He believes that, based on a federal court ruling, those cities have to allow his religious monument on city property because there is already another religious monument, his lawyer said. Boise City Councilman Alan Shealy proposed returning the Ten Commandments monument to the group that gave it to the city in 1965, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, rather than get into a court fight with Phelps over what Shealy called a "repugnant" message.... ...but a local Christian group led by the Rev. Bryan Fischer of the Community Church of the Valley is fighting the move, taking the issue to federal court.... Reverend Fischer thinks the you can permit "good" religious speech on public land and keep out "bad" religious speech. That's not how it works. For those of you who don't know who Fred Phelps is, well, he's a real sweetheart: Phelps has sent letters to several cities around the country seeking to put up a monument on city property with a picture of a gay Wyoming college student who was killed in a gay-bias attack, with the words, "Matthew Shepard. Entered Hell October 12, 1998. In Defiance of God's Warning: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.' Leviticus 18:22." Because of the Biblical quotation the monument is considered religious, and should be allowed to stand in public parks where there are already religious monuments, said Phelps' daughter and lawyer, Shirley Phelps-Roper. "That's basically the linchpin to it all, that they put up some religious monument in their public spaces, so they can't refuse ours," Phelps-Roper said.... Is this coming to your town? She said she could not recall all the cities the group has sent letters to, but among them are Nampa, Idaho; Cheyenne and Casper, Wyo.; Greeneville, Tenn.; St. Paul, Minn.; and Lebanon, Pa. ... --ABC posted by Steve M. | 8:54 AM | Friday, February 06, 2004   SILBERMAN President Bush named seven people Friday to sit on an independent study commission to look into intelligence failures on Iraqi weapons, choosing former Democratic Sen. Charles S. Robb and retired judge Laurence Silberman, a Republican, to head the panel.... --Associated Press BUZZFLASH: ... You also seemed quite involved with the Silbermans. It was still astonishing to see the extent that a sitting federal judge was interacting with the efforts to attack Clinton -- Judge Lawrence Silberman and his wife that is. Silberman gave you advice on proceeding with articles that attacked Anita Hill and the President. DAVID BROCK: Judge Lawrence Silberman, who sits on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, was an appointee of President Reagan to that court. His wife Ricky was the vice-chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the period that Clarence Thomas was the chairman on the Commission. I met them originally as sources for my first book on the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. They went beyond the role of source. BUZZFLASH: And he was a sitting judge at the time? DAVID BROCK: Yes he was a sitting judge. For example, they reviewed in draft the galleys of that book. And so it certainly went beyond a reporter-source relationship. And coming out of that, Judge Silberman became a mentor to me and was someone who I relied on, as well as Ricky, for political advice while I was at the American Spectator pursuing a lot of the anti-Clinton stories. When Ricky Silberman left the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she founded, or was one of the co-founders, of the Independent Women's Forum -- it was actually her idea. And it was actually Ricky Silberman's idea to approach Ken Starr to file that friend-of-the-court brief in the Paula Jones case. And Ricky knew the Jones case was simply payback for the Anita Hill affair. She thought, wouldn't it be delicious that Clinton would now be accused of sexual improprieties in the same way that Clarence Thomas had been? Judge Silberman played an absolutely key role at a critical juncture.... --BuzzFlash interview posted 5/29/02 posted by Steve M. | 3:45 PM |   George W. Bush -- still confusing the armed services and prop services: ..."Knowing what I knew then, and knowing what I know today, America did the right thing in Iraq," Bush told a handpicked crowd of applauding supporters on a Charleston Harbor dock.... The morning was raw, with wind whipping his hair, script and overcoat. Moments before the speech, the White House staff had to get the Coast Guard to reposition a cutter anchored behind him because it had drifted out of position and was no longer providing a perfect backdrop.... --Washington Post (Thanks to salto mortale for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 2:28 PM |   Paul Krugman writes today: Do you remember when the C.I.A. was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no longer operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised: see, it's the C.I.A.'s fault that the threat was overstated. Given its warnings, the administration had no choice but to invade. A tip from Joshua Marshall, of www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led me to a stark reminder of how different the story line used to be. Last year Laurie Mylroie published a book titled "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the C.I.A. and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror." Ms. Mylroie's book came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known to be close to Paul Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of staff. According to the jacket copy, "Mylroie describes how the C.I.A. and the State Department have systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime, including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass destruction." He's right -- and there's a bit more in An End to Evil, the book Perle recently wrote with David Frum. An excerpt: The CIA's analysts could not emancipate themselves from the ideologically liberal assumptions they brought with them from their elite colleges [during the cold war].... The CIA's reports on the Middle East today are colored by similar ideological biases -- exacerbated by poor understanding of the region's culture and a politically correct disinclination to acknowledge unflattering facts about non-Western peoples. No, I'm not making that up. posted by Steve M. | 1:09 PM |   I'm deeply, deeply flattered, World O'Crap (but obviously you've never seen my apartment). posted by Steve M. | 12:22 PM |   I'm picking up the distinct odor of rat: I just came across an apparently pro-Democrat but anti-Kerry Web page, called "Anybody but This Guy." It seems to be brand new -- its only entry is dated 2-5-04 -- yet it has somehow sidestepped the difficulties most of us have had getting attention for our political Web pages and instantly earned links from both Lucianne Goldberg (see "Some Blogtruth About Kerry") and Mickey Kaus (see "ABK404"). I smell a rat because, despite the site's "Who are we? People who want to see that Bush serves only one term" and its links to the sites of Dean, Clark, and Edwards, it's a one-stop link source for most of the GOP's anti-Kerry bullet points -- and it has this: How many hit pieces on Kerry are we going to see featuring Ted Kennedy and Michael Dukakis? You'll be seeing this picture soon. Er, yeah -- we've seen that picture, or pictures like it. It's a picture of Kerry with Kennedy. So? Only Republicans think Ted Kennedy is a liability for the Democrats. Real Democrats know that only hardcore, yellow-dog Republicans hate him -- nobody else does. I think this fake-lo-fi site is a pathetic attempt at political dirty trickery. posted by Steve M. | 10:25 AM |   Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has an anti-gay-marriage editorial in today's Wall Street Journal. The title of the editorial is "One Man, One Woman." Romney writes, ...marriage is not "an evolving paradigm." It is deeply rooted in the history, culture and tradition of civil society. It predates our Constitution and our nation by millennia. The institution of marriage was not created by government and it should not be redefined by government. I've said this before, but let me remind you again that Romney's own great-grandfather would beg to differ. Romney's father was former Michigan governor Gene Romney, whose grandfather, as The Washington Post has noted, "emigrated to Mexico in 1886 with his three wives and children after Congress outlawed polygamy." posted by Steve M. | 9:59 AM |   NO MILLIONAIRE LEFT BEHIND Floyd Norris's column in today's New York Times points out a little-noticed provision in the new Bush budget: ... a proposal to reduce the maximum capital gains tax on gold coins from 28 percent to 25 percent. These guys never run out of ways to make the wealthy wealthier, do they? posted by Steve M. | 9:23 AM | Thursday, February 05, 2004   ...which candidate do you think Al-Qaeda might root for in this election, John Kerry (should he be the Democratic nominee), or George W. Bush? ... do you think Al-Qaeda kind of enjoys John Kerry saying let's take our defense and give it to the UN and the French and the Germans? --Rush Limbaugh, from his 4/4/04 radio show ...who do you think Al Qaeda wants to win the election? ... Who would Iran want to deal with when it comes to its nuclear program – Cowboy Bush or “Send in the bribed French inspectors” Kerry? --right-wing columnist/"humorist" James Lileks, from his 4/5/04 blog entry I'm sure this is an astonishing coincidence and not, y'know, part of an elaborate process of test-marketing GOP talking points or anything like that. posted by Steve M. | 5:59 PM |   Now we're being told that no one tried to shoot Sistani. Strange. posted by Steve M. | 4:28 PM |   No boycotts or protests outside movies are planned for the Feb. 25 release of Mel Gibson's hotly anticipated "The Passion of the Christ." However, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee will sponsor lectures, interfaith talks and other programs.... --The Washington Times No ... please ... not the interfaith talks! Oh, those jackbooted non-Christian liberal thugs! posted by Steve M. | 3:06 PM |   Er, who almost shot Grand Ayatollah Sistani? posted by Steve M. | 2:37 PM |   Those Iraqi evildoers talk tough... A coalition of insurgent groups has vowed to take over cities vacated by U.S. troops, and warned of "harsh consequences" for Iraqis who resist.... "America is getting ready to withdraw its forces from our country with its tail between its legs ... pressured by rockets and explosive devices," the statement said.... Despite the threats, U.S. officials have expressed confidence Iraqi police will be able to handle the security situation.... The U.S. Army has said it will gradually reduce its presence in Iraqi cities and hand over control to Iraqi security forces. The Army has so far given a detailed withdrawal plan only for the capital, Baghdad, which it envisages to be virtually free of U.S. troops by May.... But our well-trained Iraqi replacements will kick their butts! Right? Er ... right? The men of Bravo Company hold an important distinction: They are the first members of the Iraqi civil defense forces to be sent out on their own in Baghdad. But the first three weeks of that experiment have left them exasperated. At the start of this week, despite what they said were repeated requests to the U.S. battalion that is supposed to support them, they were working without radios, bulletproof vests, gasoline, furniture or a functioning vehicle. "We go on our patrols every day," Capt. Haider Salah, the unit's commander, said Tuesday. "But we go without radios or vests. . . . Even the pens and paper are from home." U.S. officials frequently hail the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a paramilitary force akin to a national guard, as the cornerstone of U.S. plans to transfer security tasks to Iraqis. Sending Bravo Company, part of the 36th Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, to live and work without any U.S. soldiers by their side was to be a major test of the plan to train and deploy 40,000 such troops across the country by May. And Bravo's experience is a testament to the challenges ahead.... OK, OK -- never mind. posted by Steve M. | 11:22 AM |   Could gay marriage in Massachusetts hurt a John Kerry candidacy? Yeah, I suppose -- but I don't think harm is inevitable. Gay people will legally be allowed to marry in Massachusetts starting May 17. For a few days, the press will prowl the Bay State, desperate for the perfect, unrepresentative photo of sodomite matrimonial makeup excess. And then it'll be over, and we'll all move on to the next celebrity felony or orange alert. Don't believe me? Notice the complete evaporation of the "Saddam bounce" in Bush's approval ratings in the latest Gallup poll. We have no memory for news in this country. (Turkey? Did Bush serve turkey somewhere on Thanksgiving?) Oh, sure -- the Bushies will try to make the campaign all gay marriage, all the time, especially in the South and Midwest. But all Kerry has to do is hone a response -- and he's had months to prepare. The Bushies will be refighting the family's last war against a "Massachusetts liberal," and they'll expect Kerry to be as passive as Dukakis. And it's almost biochemically impossible for any other human being to be as passive as Dukakis was. posted by Steve M. | 9:55 AM |   "Was the situation in Iraq worth going to war over, or not?" In the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, the percentage saying yes has dropped a new low -- 49% (Yes-no is now a 49%-49% tie.) And 53% of poll respondents disapprove of Bush's handling of the war -- a new high. (But ... but ... what about the "Saddam bounce"?) Full report here (including some lovely graphs showing the decline in support). posted by Steve M. | 9:40 AM | Wednesday, February 04, 2004   The New York Times article about today's opening of the fancy-schmancy new Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle mentions Cindy Crawford swanning past a tray of risotto and mushroom tarts, but not the leafletters outside protesting CNN union-busting. For more information, read these letters from the unions involved, NABET and CWA (1, 2; warning: PDFs). Also see this December article from Broadcast Engineering: CNN, a business unit of Time Warner, has terminated its agreement with a unionized contractor that provides more than 220 technicians and camera crews for its Washington and New York bureaus. CNN said it wants to bring the jobs in-house with nonunion workers. The technicians, who are represented by the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET), have been invited to apply for nonunion jobs at CNN. Some already have been hired.... Your liberal media in action. (Thanks to Blah3 for the last link.) posted by Steve M. | 11:37 PM |   I wondered why, a few months ago, we were suddenly seeing a barrage of well-produced public-service announcements promoting 1-800-MEDICARE as an information source. Now I know: Just two days after the White House proposed serious budget cuts and the President said he's "calling upon Congress to be wise with the taxpayer's money," ... the White House will use $9.5 million from the Department of Health and Human Services – money that is supposed to be used to implement the law and could go to restore some of the cuts to social services for the poor – on political commercials that "rebut criticism of the new Medicare law." ... The new Medicare ads urge citizens to call 1-800-MEDICARE to hear more about the new law.... So the Bushies were setting us up to regard this phone number as a benign source of friendly information, and now they've turned it (at least in part) into a tax-funded political propaganda unit. (Though it's hard to imagine that it'll be a particularly successful one, if, as the link reports, you have to shout "Medicare improvement" into the phone in order to hear the propaganda. Hey, schmucks, if you want to use Orwellian doublespeak, use it yourselves -- but don't think you're going to make it sink in by forcing us proles to use it.) posted by Steve M. | 3:17 PM |   Google News hits for "jackson apologizes": 68. Google News hits for "timberlake apologizes": 0. You really don't have to be Katha Pollitt to suspect that we have a rather sexist double standard about Areolagate. posted by Steve M. | 2:21 PM |   I think a lot of us assume that we're going to have a Kerry-Edwards ticket in the fall -- but it was pointed out last night, by some pundit or other, that John Edwards has said he doesn't want to be vice president. Here's the quote, from the Today show a week ago: "No, no. Final. I don't want to be vice president. I'm running for president." And, for all we know, Kerry might not want to pick Edwards. If Kerry and Edwards don't pair up, I think Kerry's might try to gobsmack the two noncombatants on the other ticket by pairing himself with a fellow veteran -- Max Cleland. We know Cleland has campaigned for Kerry. And we know that a campaign that's willing to revisit the Bush AWOL issue is willing to bring up other issues the press considers old news -- such as the disgraceful Republican campaign ads that compared Cleland to Saddam and bin Laden. With Cleland on the ticket, those ads would go nationwide -- the ads would run on the nightly news, juxtaposed with footage of Cleland in his wheelchair, and the whole country would get a glimpse of the GOP in all its sleazy glory. Two Nam vets? I know the rules say that running mates are supposed to "balance" each other -- but Clinton threw the rulebook out in '92, picking a fellow young Southerner as his #2, and it worked. That said the Democrats were ready to battle for the South. This would say the Democrats are really ready to take on the flight suit. posted by Steve M. | 12:59 PM |   Parodying Massachusetts is a way to keep old resentments alive without getting into any of the inconvenient details. It also allows a pro-business, Yale-educated president with an MBA from Harvard to cast himself as anti-elitist by implying (as his Yale-educated father did in 1988 with that line about the "Harvard boutique") that Massachusetts people are a bunch of snobs. The people selling this stuff should know that in my hometown, folks get punched out for being snobs.... Massachusetts voted for McGovern over Richard Nixon -- not so much because of the Harvard boutique but because the old factory towns such as the one where I grew up remained loyal to the party of Al Smith, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. In any case, why, in light of history, is voting against Nixon so dishonorable? ... That's from "The Truth About Massachusetts," a good column by The Washington Post's E. J. Dionne (a native of Fall River, Mass.). I grew up in Boston and I'm very pleased to see that this GOP crap is getting more and more Bay Staters' backs up. posted by Steve M. | 11:19 AM |   Here's a thought: Howard Dean's campaign is struggling now -- but he's a hell of a speaker. Assuming he doesn't make an amazing comeback in this race, why not offer him a show on Progress Media, the in-development liberal talk-radio network? I think Dean's got just the right touch for radio -- he's pointed, funny, and (yeah, at times) pugnacious, but the sound of his voice goes down easy. And he could probably do the show out of Burlington -- Judy wouldn't have to give up her patients. Hey, why not? posted by Steve M. | 7:36 AM | Tuesday, February 03, 2004   OK -- is this story going to be part of the administration's Saddam = al-Qaeda = ricin terrorism case? (Or, at least, part of an attempt to blur the distinctions in people's minds?) A 7-pound block of cyanide salt was discovered by U.S. troops in Baghdad at the end of January, officials confirmed to Fox News. The potentially lethal compound was located in what was believed to be the safe house of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a poisons specialist described by some U.S. intelligence officials as having been a key link between deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda terror network. ...Zarqawi, believed to have been operating in Iraq before March's invasion, was still being sought by coalition forces. It was not clear if anyone had been apprehended in connection with last month's find.... U.S. officials, who said they were getting new intelligence in the hunt for Zarqawi, also believe he had been attempting to produce large quantities of the toxin ricin in northern Iraq. --Fox News (emphasis mine) First, cyanide salts: I don't know much about 'em, but I guess they're used in electroplating, so you might want to tell the FBI if you have any neighbors who are jewelers. Now, as for Zarqawi: You might have heard of him because he's an alleged al-Qaeda operative who once got medical treatment in Baghdad; as a result, right-wingers see him as a human smoking gun, a Saddam-Osama link. But a lot of other people think (a) he may not have had strong al-Qaeda ties and (b) his presence in Iraq, even in Baghdad, may not be a sign of a Saddam endorsement -- possibly it's a sign of Iraq's instability just before the war. (Zarqawi was captured near Baghdad last April, yet the capture somehow hasn't managed to generate proof of any of the Bushies' more melodramatic theories.) And meanwhile, the Senate ricin mailer might just be an American trucking company owner, so go figure. posted by Steve M. | 11:31 PM |   I guess they really just can't stop, can they? HILLARY'S VEEPSTAKES by DICK MORRIS The demise of Howard Dean's candidacy opens the door to a Kerry/Clinton ticket in 2004.... Here's Step 1 for you, Dick: "I admit I am powerless over my Hillary obsession -- that my life has become unmanageable...." posted by Steve M. | 6:39 PM |   Saddam did try to kill an ex-president of the United States ... right? In The Nation (subscribers only), Scott Sherman says, er, maybe not: A few weeks ago, Slate asked a number of "liberal hawks"--among them George Packer, Kenneth Pollack, Thomas Friedman, Paul Berman and Fareed Zakaria --to reflect on their support for the Iraq war. For several days, Slate readers witnessed a steady stream of linguistic acrobatics, graceful, guilt-ridden prose and, in some cases, genuine contrition. But if contributors like Pollack and Slate editor Jacob Weisberg expressed deep misgivings about their initial support for military intervention, they accepted Administration claims that, in Weisberg's words, "Saddam tried to assassinate former President Bush." Weisberg and Pollack echoed what Bush himself said of Saddam in 2002: "This is a guy that tried to kill my dad." Is Saddam guilty as charged? Backtrack to spring 1993, when the Clinton Administration announced that Iraqi intelligence had attempted to assassinate George Bush Sr. with a car bomb during a ceremonial visit to Kuwait. In retaliation Clinton ordered a missile attack on Baghdad, which killed eight civilians. Our knowledge of the plot against Bush might have ended there if not for the efforts of Seymour Hersh, who revisited the episode in a lengthy piece for The New Yorker in November 1993. After numerous interviews with high-ranking US and Kuwaiti officials, along with electrical engineers and bomb experts, Hersh concluded that the key suspects in the plot were beaten (and possibly tortured) by Kuwaiti authorities, and that "there is no evidence that any of the alleged assassins took any overt steps to deploy any bombs." In February 2003, in a little-noticed article, the Baltimore Sun disclosed that "the former FBI chemist who tested the explosive recovered in Kuwait says he told superiors it did not match known Iraqi explosives"--a fact that does much to bolster Hersh's reporting. Do Weisberg and Pollack know something Hersh doesn't? One can only speculate, since they didn't return phone calls. posted by Steve M. | 5:29 PM |   Hey, folks, it's the BUSH BOOM! Job Cuts Top 100,000 in January - Report Planned job cuts in January were 26 percent higher than in December as U.S. jobs moved to countries like India, China and the Philippines, and as mergers made some jobs redundant, according to a report on Tuesday. The outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., said post-holiday job cuts reached 117,556 in January surpassing the 100,000 threshold for the first time since last October. ...According to Challenger, consumer product companies led the January cutbacks with 22,775 job cuts, the largest number of reported job cuts in that sector in a single month since 1993, according to Challenger. Challenger said one of the main factors for the job cuts in January was an increase of employers eliminating jobs in the United States and shifting to service providers in India, China and the Philippines among other countries. Another factor was an increase in mergers so far this year. The survey's head, John Challenger, noted in a statement that one of those mergers will result in "as many as 10,000 job cuts to take place as redundant positions are eliminated." --Reuters posted by Steve M. | 4:00 PM |   Well, we can't really say what we're thinking, can we? You know what I mean -- that the sudden appearance of (what seems to be) ricin is a Bushie plot that coincides with plummeting poll numbers and the rise of John Kerry as a serious threat. We can't say it, we can't even speculate about it, we can't even consider it and dismiss it, because that would make us conspiracy wackos. Even though we were practically required to believe, or at least to consider the possibility, that the bombs Bill Clinton dropped on Iraq in 1998 were a craven attempt to use deadly force to distract voters from his failings. David Kay, of course, said that ricin was one of the few irregular weapons Iraq was still actively working to produce just before the war. The Right desperately grasped at this straw (see paragraph #2 of Charles Krauthammer's last column), and righties assume you were paying attention, too. You don't have to believe that the administration did this to believe that the Bushies will try to exploit it. Of course, if the administration does try to exploit the ricin attack (assuming it is a ricin attack), spinning it as a justification for administration policies, and particularly the Iraq war, that just makes no sense -- if it's ricin and it came from the Saddam's labs, then that the proves that the war didn't protect us from him ... and if it's ricin and it came from another foreign source, that says that maybe there were some resources we shouldn't have redirected to Iraq. (And if it's ricin and the mailer is domestic, well, did we nickel-and-dime domestic anti-terror efforts to pay for tax cuts?) But the administration knows that, for most Americans, it's all just a muddle -- according to a Newsweek poll, most Americans interviewed just after David Kay's recent interviews and testimony said they believe Iraq had banned chem or bio weapos in the days before the war. I don't know if this is "wag the ricin." I don't like succumbing to conspiracy theories. I think it's more likely that we're dealing with a Kaczynski, someone both schizophrenic and craftsmanlike, who might not even have a political agenda (or at least not a coherent one). But I do think we'll hear a lot from the administration about how "the world is a dangerous place" and Bush is the guy to keep us safe -- even though he obviously isn't keeping us safe. And I worry that it might work. posted by Steve M. | 1:27 PM |   Notice that what got up the nose of the FCC's Michael Powell wasn't some pirate post-post-post-post-punk radio station run by two NYU students, or some struggling independently owned AM station in Oklahoma, but, rather, one of the very behemoths he wants to reward handsomely through his push for media deregulation? And notice that one of the behemoths (actually the same one, Viacom) was the employer of the shock jocks who upset Powell last year by broadcasting (alleged) sex at St. Patrick's Cathedral? And notice that Viacom is also the employer of the much-fined Howard Stern, while Clear Channel (as that second link notes) was recently being disciplined for a radio show in which teenage girls were encouraged to discuss sex at their high school? Hey, Michael, how many more times are you going to go out of your way to try to reward these huge companies, only to find yourself shocked, shocked, at what they broadcast? posted by Steve M. | 12:47 PM | Monday, February 02, 2004   So I stumbled on this a few days ago. It's a reasonably amusing little poke at the Democrats ... but look at the bottom of the page. The person who put the page up is a Democrat who really wants Bush out of office. The same goes for the person who maintains DeanGoesNuts.com -- this person is not only anti-Bush but passionately pro-Dean, even though the Dean scream remixes on the page attract a lot of Democrat-haters. This is a big difference between our side and the other side: We sometimes make fun of our own. They don't. Oh sure, I guess P. J. O'Rourke has occasionally made a joke about conservatives. But he's old-school, a Reagan-era relic, not representative of modern conservatism. And yes, occasionally Peggy Noonan or David Brooks will write a column in which a bit of right-wing self-deprecation appears in a subordinate clause somewhere -- but the point of the rest of the column will be that Democrats and liberals are dangerous freaks. Is there any aspect of the right-wing worldview that strikes right-wingers as a wee bit ridiculous? The Hillary-hate? The schoolgirl crush on capitalism? Bush's padded crotch in that flight suit? Who on the right has a sense of humor about the right? I can't think of anyone. posted by Steve M. | 5:15 PM |   Has John Kerry ever tried to get his way from a service worker by saying, "Do you know who I am?," as some of his detractors claim? I have no idea -- though Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online sure wants me to think it's true. But, er, Jonah? A word of advice? If you want me to believe that "such tales are not rrare [sic] in the blogosphere," it'd be a tad more convincing if a few more of the hits in the Google search you offer as evidence actually referred to your subject. Let's see -- we have: * an anecdote about Australian billionaire Kerry Packer * some ER fan fiction involving the character Dr. Kerry Weaver; * some spam quoted in a blog that contains the phrase "do you know who i am"; * an anecdote about Gwyneth Paltrow; * an anecdote about Prince... ... you get the point. posted by Steve M. | 3:44 PM |   Robert Novak's latest column is here. It's actually heartening -- Novak says Republicans worry about their guy running against Kerry, and I think Novak is being sincere (in other words, this isn't like that "Republicans say I'm the opponent they fear most" nonsense Joe Lieberman is spouting). But this passage pisses me off: Republican National Chairman Ed Gillespie, given the assignment of rolling out Kerry's liberal record, has come under private criticism by his GOP colleagues. They knock Gillespie, not for trying, but for failing to clearly expose Kerry as a compulsive liberal. "Compulsive liberal"? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Republicans love suggesting that being a Democrat or a liberal is a variety of mental illness -- maybe not an out-and-out psychosis, but certainly a neurosis or an obsessive tic. Back in the '80s, the subtext of all that talk about "tax-and-spend liberals" was that Democrats raised taxes because they just couldn't stop themselves. (Which is a bit ironic now, as we watch Bush bankrupting our grandchildren and moving on to the great-grandkids.) The right has never stopped doing this -- and our side, even with a snappish, pettish, compulsive-spending ex-alcoholic narcissist as president, hasn't figured out how to react in kind. posted by Steve M. | 12:11 PM |   Direct elections in Iraq? Impossible! Surely not this summer! We can't even compile voter rolls by then! But somehow the CPA was able to cobble together hardware, software, and experts to make this happen: ...Jay Hallen ... was hired by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to oversee the establishment of the new Iraq Stock Exchange, where trading is expected to start within a few weeks. "When this opens, it will be a big sign that normalcy has returned to Iraqi life," Hallen says in a phone interview from Baghdad. "There's great excitement about an economy that's been suppressed and is ready to boom."... William Bautz, former chief technology officer at the New York Stock Exchange ... is an adviser to the newly named Iraq Stock Exchange through the Financial Services Volunteer Corps (FSVC), a nonprofit group in New York that assists developing economies. Last November, he took part in a planning conference in Amman, Jordan, where the volunteers helped Iraqi brokers and officials set up securities laws in line with international standards.... Technology is another issue. Previously, each company kept its own records, so the exchange needs an electronic depository to track prices, trades, and shareholder identity numbers. Temporarily, the depository will be based in Egypt or Jordan, neighbors that have more sophisticated capital markets and are eager to help.... For staff at the 52 licensed brokerages in Iraq, the opening bell of the new exchange will be a welcome sound. (A consultant from the Philadelphia Stock Exchange has offered to bring a small replica of the Liberty Bell.) ... Priorities straight, as usual.... posted by Steve M. | 10:55 AM |   Lead story in today's amNewYork: Although $5 million is needed to re-open the Statue of Liberty, amNewYork has learned that the foundation asking the world for donations is already sitting on at least eight times that much money -- $40 million. ...the non-profit Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation refuses to say how much cash it has collected or when it will use that money to reopen the monument.... The foundation said it will make an announcement in March on the status of the "Re-Open Lady Liberty" campaign, but [foundation president Stephen] Briganti said it won't be anytime soon and certainly not before July 4. Let me take a wild stab in the dark here: You think maybe they're planning to reopen the statue sometime between August 30 and September 2? posted by Steve M. | 9:35 AM |   John Tierney wagged a finger in yesterday's New York Times: When they walk on stage to address their cheering supporters this Tuesday night, the Democratic presidential candidates might want to consider a new mantra: It's the living room, stupid.... ...in New Hampshire last Tuesday, the candidates were still spending their precious moments on national television thanking aides and volunteers. Just when they could finally stop pandering to voters, they went on rhapsodizing about the locals' hospitality for so long that the networks cut them off in midspeech.... It may seem cruel to subject a roomful of supporters to a stump speech they already know word for word. John Kerry's volunteers presumably do not want to be rewarded at a victory party with a speech about his tax policies; John Edwards's workers do not need to hear for the millionth time that he is the son of a millworker. But only 20 percent of Americans know that Mr. Edwards's father worked in a mill, and two-thirds do not recognize the most rudimentary distinction in the candidates' tax policies, according to the latest National Annenberg Election Survey from the University of Pennsylvania. It's hard for the crowd at an election-night party to imagine so many Americans know so little about the candidates, but those channel-surfers in the living rooms are the ones who will be picking the next president. Oh, I get it, John: It's the candidates' fault if voters don't know their stories and their platforms. The fact that you and most of your media colleagues can't bear to cover anything besides the horse race or gaffes (Dean's scream) has nothing to do with it. posted by Steve M. | 9:20 AM | Saturday, January 31, 2004   Some not-exactly-satisfied Bush customers: When she could find an extra quarter during the Depression, Marie Scott saved it in a coffee can. When she could afford Stride Rite shoes for her daughters, she bought them a half size bigger so they could be grown into. She didn't think a car was broken in until the odometer said 50,000 miles. For all of her 77 years, Marie Scott did everything the straight and narrow American way – including paying her Social Security taxes – so she could enjoy a secure retirement. Now she feels like her country punched her in her gut. It passed a Medicare prescription drug bill that, she says, will hurt her – and millions of other senior citizens. Scott has a coronary heart condition. The new bill could cost her $3,600 per year in drug costs.... She was one of a crowd of 50 who turned out for the first meeting of the revived Senior Legislative Action Committee, which featured Rep. Maurice D. Hinchey, D-Saugerties, blasting the bill he called "obnoxious." "We are no longer the silent majority,'' said Priscilla Bassett. "I'm 70 plus and I'm angry."... --Times Herald-Record (Monticello, N.Y.) So ordinary citizens are holding meetings to get this legislation repealed (and they're coming out in weather that's pretty damn cold) -- and a congressional Democrat (i.e., by definition a member of a highly risk-averse group) shows up to egg them on. Remember when this bill was being described as a political home run? posted by Steve M. | 7:02 PM | Friday, January 30, 2004   Burke would refuse communion to Kerry If Sen. John Kerry were to stand in Archbishop Raymond L. Burke's communion line Sunday, Burke would bless him without giving him communion. Kerry, a Catholic, has voted to support abortion rights, contrary to Catholic Church long-held teaching opposing abortion. "I would have to admonish him not to present himself for communion," said Burke. "I might give him a blessing or something," he said.... --St. Louis Post-Dispatch This would be a cheap stunt, perhaps, but, assuming Kerry's the nominee, I think it would boost him in the polls if, next October, he walked into a Mass that was being said by Archbishop Burke and Burke yanked the host away. Bring it on, Father.... posted by Steve M. | 5:48 PM |   Don't know much about the American Research Group, but its poll has George W. Bush with a 47% approval rating and trailing Kerry, 47%-46%. Bush loses to Kerry among independents, 55%-39%, in this poll. Nice. posted by Steve M. | 3:17 PM |   Bloody hell ... the GOP-majority Georgia Senate has voted to erect a statue of Zell Miller. You know Miller -- the alleged Democrat who's endorsed George W. Bush and written a book attacking his own party? Hey, it's working for him: Once relatively obscure, he's now a New York Times bestselling author and a golden god on the Right. Maybe, when they unveil this objet d'art, they can invite all the Democrat-hating Democrats -- Joe Lieberman, Mickey Kaus of Slate, freelance pundit/blowhard/racist Tammy Bruce. Folks, here's a prediction: I don't think Bush is going to drop Cheney from the ticket, but if he does, his running mate is going to be Zell Miller. I'm dead serious about this. And idiots in the commentariat will tell you with a straight face that it's a sincere act of "bipartisanship." (Thanks to Pandagon for the statue story.) posted by Steve M. | 1:13 PM |   AP, January 13, 2004: Guerrilla attacks on the 150,000 U.S.-led coalition soldiers in Iraq have dropped sharply since the Dec. 13 capture of Saddam Hussein, and the number of troops killed and wounded has plummeted as well. The figures appear to show the capture of Saddam has taken some of the sting out of the Iraqi insurgency.... The slump in combat casualties comes alongside a 22 percent drop in attacks on American-led forces in those four weeks.... According to U.S. military figures, insurgent attacks against coalition forces declined to an average of 18 a day in the past four weeks, compared to 23 a day in the four weeks before Saddam's capture. ... Financial Times today: US combat deaths in Iraq have risen sharply during January despite a drop in the number of attacks and the capture of former dictator Saddam Hussein over a month ago. As of Thursday, 33 American soldiers and one civilian had been killed by hostile fire during the month. That compares with 24 US combat deaths in December, and a total of 32 coalition combat deaths.... Overall, January has been one of the bloodiest post-war months for the coalition. Combat deaths in the first 28 days of January alone exceeded those in every post-war month except October (35) and November (94), according toIraq Coalition Casualty Count - a website devoted to tracking coalition deaths.... Oh, and I love this: The US military on Thursday declined to confirm or deny the figures for combat deaths in Iraq this month, which were calculated from press releases from US Central Command in Florida. A US military spokesman in Baghdad said figures were only kept for two-month periods, and a computer malfunction made it impossible to calculate an official casualty count for separate months. Oh, please. (Thanks to Cursor for the FT link.) posted by Steve M. | 11:58 AM |   The much awaited Hutton report is an absolute vindication for Tony Blair and a catastrophe for the BBC. --Andrew Sullivan on Wednesday Some 56% of [British] voters believe the Hutton report was a whitewash, according to a YouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph. Despite the report, the poll found 67% of people still trust BBC news journalists to tell the truth and 31% trust the Government. In an NOP poll, half of those questioned said Lord Hutton was wrong to clear Mr Blair and his aides of any "underhand and duplicitous" naming strategy. A clear majority, 56%, said the peer was wrong to lay all the blame at the door of the BBC. His inquiry was branded a whitewash by 49%, with 40% disagreeing, in the survey for London's Evening Standard. And a full independent inquiry into the reason Britain went to war with Iraq was supported by an overwhelming 70%. Three times as many people trust the BBC to tell the truth than the Government, another poll showed today. However, almost half, 49%, trusted neither side, the ICM survey for The Guardian found. Just one in 10 had faith in ministers compared with 31% who believed the Corporation. --icWales ****** Update: Well, even Sullivan seems to be figuring it out now. Today he quotes an e-mail he's received about the Hutton inquiry, which the e-mailer calls "a joke": Everyone I have spoken to here who is not directly involved in politics (but who keeps a "watching brief" on events as they affect our daily lives) is horrified. We seem effectively to live in an elected dictatorship: over-reaching powers of Tony Blair without any check whatsoever; supine parliament (whose powers of scrutiny have been wrecked by said Prime Minister); pliant judiciary; and a commercial media hamstrung by regulation preventing any form of political partiality. The inquiry seems to have suddenly clarified the unease that a number of us here have felt deep down for some time.... posted by Steve M. | 10:13 AM |   Attention Wal-Mart shoppers: The US economy braked fiercely in the last quarter of 2003, slowing to an unexpectedly low 4.0 percent annualized growth pace... Growth shrank to less than half the blistering, 19-year record 8.2 percent pace of the third quarter, defying economists' predictions of a 5.0 percent expansion to wrap up the year. Over the whole of 2003, output in the world's biggest economy was up 3.1 percent, the Commerce Department said Friday. --AFP today China's economy grew a surprising 9.9 percent in the final quarter of last year, the government said Tuesday, signaling a quick recovery from the economic fallout of the SARS epidemic and hinting at a favorable outlook for 2004. Investment and foreign trade helped drive the country's annual gross domestic product growth to 9.1 percent, according to the official figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics. --AP, 1/20/04 posted by Steve M. | 9:38 AM | Thursday, January 29, 2004   Via TBOGG, I learned about this post from Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online's blog. He quotes an e-mail: ...I was recently in my local Meijer store, which is a Wal-Mart like mega-store, and walked down the cheap art aisle and was stopped in my tracks by a painting of George W. Bush. It was at least 18x12 in size and portrayed our President on one knee, with an open Bible in his right hand, and a clear and distinct wedding ring on his left. He is wearing a shirt and tie, but has the sleeves rolled up. It surprised me, in that, even out here in red country, there is still plenty of cynicism about our leaders. I guess I just don't expect our generation to lionize heroes like our parents generation did.... Hmmm -- what does this remind me of? Oh yeah -- this: Live appearances by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on state-run media have been rare of late, but you're never far from his image. It's on the streets and in stores and offices, often in three dimensions. Unlike many past dictators, who usually depicted their leaders in heroic, militaristic poses, Hussein can be seen in murals handing out flowers, blessing a child, saying prayers and riding a horse. ...Salam Abid has been painting Saddam Hussein's portrait since 1976, and sells three or four a month at a price of $100 US, a whopping sum for most Iraqis. "I paint him in military uniform, or holding a sword, or in traditional Arab-Muslim dress, but I like him best in a suit," Abid says.... Bush with a Bible ... Saddam in a traditional headdress -- is there a difference? posted by Steve M. | 10:49 PM |   Georgia's Republican schools superintendent wants to clear something up: A change that would strike the word "evolution" from Georgia's science classes is only a suggestion and far from becoming official policy, a spokesman for state schools Superintendent Kathy Cox said Thursday. Cox's proposal for new middle and high school science standards would ban references to "evolution" and replace it with the term "biological changes over time." "The whole point for us is we really don't have a stance on the issue," said Cox spokesman Kirk Englehardt. "We're very open to hearing every side of the issue." The proposed change is part of more than 800 pages of revisions to Georgia's curriculum that were posted Jan. 12 on the Department of Education Web site for educators to consider. The new curriculum ... is expected to be voted on by the state Board of Education in May.... But hey, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, this isn't provincial know-nothingism -- it's about freedom of choice! Cox, a Republican elected to the state's top public school position in 2002, addressed the issue briefly in a public debate during the campaign. The candidates were asked about a school dispute in Cobb County over evolution and Bible-based teachings on creation. Cox responded: "It was a good thing for parents and the community to stand up and say we want our children exposed to this [creationism] idea as well. . . . I'd leave the state out of it and I would make sure teachers were well prepared to deal with competing theories." Well, sure -- except that a lot of the material on the one "theory" every respectable scientist on the planet believes has been snipped out, as has the name of that "theory." So what happened? The Georgia Department of Education based its biology curriculum on national standards put forth by a respected source, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But while the state copied most of the national standards, it deleted much of the section that covers the origin of living things. A committee of science teachers, college professors and curriculum experts was involved in reviewing the proposal. The state did not specify why the references to evolution were removed, and by whom, even to educators involved in the process. Terrie Kielborn, a middle school science teacher in Paulding County who was on the committee, recalled that Stephen Pruitt, the state's curriculum specialist for science, told the panel not to include the word evolution. "We were pretty much told not to put it in there," Kielborn said. The rationale was community reaction, she said. "When you say the word evolution, people automatically, whatever age they are, think of the man-monkey thing," Kielborn said. Oh. Ick! Monkeys! Well, that explains it. Can't have monkey discussed in the same breath as people, can we? Ignorance is infinitely preferable than exposing impressionable youngsters to talk about monkeys. posted by Steve M. | 5:06 PM |   Afghan Weapons Cache Blast Kills 7 GIs Yes, that's Afghanistan -- not Iraq. posted by Steve M. | 2:58 PM |   Oh jeez -- here it comes (from CNN/Money) ... Why Kerry worries the Street Securities firms may have donated big to his campaign, but that doesn't mean the market likes him. ...In his economic plan, Kerry has said he is against Bush's dividend tax cut, but that he would lower capital gains and dividend taxes for the middle class. Among other things, Kerry's plan calls for setting up tax incentives that would encourage businesses to create manufacturing jobs in the United States. He has also said he would use the scaling back of the Bush tax cuts to reduce the federal budget deficit. ... for those who believe the tax cuts are directly linked to the 2003 stock market rally and the surging economy, Kerry's talk is worrisome. "I think it would be difficult for Kerry to prove that the tax cuts were not effective," said Ned Riley, chief investment strategist at State Street Global Advisors.... And on and on and on. And all this despite the fact that the story includes a link to another CNN/Money story that says stocks are in fact less volatile and perform better under Democratic presidents. That story is here. It cites a study published in the Journal of Finance. Looking at the 72-year period between 1927 and 1999, the study shows that a broad stock index, similar to the S&P 500, returned approximately 11 percent more a year on average under a Democratic president versus safer, three-month Treasurys. By comparison, the index only returned 2 percent more a year versus the T-bills when Republicans were in office. ...On average, value-weighted portfolios returned 9 percent more under Democrats than Republicans during the 72 year period, while equal-weighted portfolios returned 16 percent more under Democrats. This is described in the article as a "strange little irony." A market analyst, told of the study's results, is quoted as saying, "I think plenty on Wall Street would be pretty shocked to hear that." Why? The authors of the study have their own theories, but here's mine: Consumer spending drives the economy. The rich simply don't spend as great a percentage of their income as the non-rich do. GOP policies mostly put money in the hands of non-spenders, while any tax cuts for the non-rich are offset by hikes in other taxes, job losses, increases in fees, and so on. I know businesspeople would rather have money just handed to them, in the form, say, of tax loopholes, but sometimes being forced to make money by actually selling the stuff you're ostensibly in business to sell can be good for the soul. And profitable. posted by Steve M. | 1:56 PM |   I keep hearing people on TV say that John Kerry is "aloof". Why? Because he doesn't walk around in a flightsuit and a cowboy hat? Up here we call that "not acting like a jackass". Why does the Northeast always have to apologize for who we are? We're Americans, too. New Englanders were the ones who stood up to King George. New Englanders risked their necks (literally) by tossing the tea into Boston Harbor. New Englanders lowered their muskets and fired at British soldiers when the whole world trembled at the sight of them. Sorry if we talk too fast; it gets really cold here, ok? We do everything quickly so we can go home. There's a pot of chowder on the stove, and the game is on.... That's from a blog called 201k.com, and as a native of Boston I say thank you. Read the rest here (under the heading "A New England Primer"). (Thanks to Cursor for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 1:15 PM |   A few days ago, I asked why John Kerry's hockey playing can't be construed as mythically manly, like, say, Bush's clearing of brush in Crawford. The Mahablog has an (unfortunately) good answer -- There are two aspects to the Andrew Jackson/John Wayne mystique. First is to be a rugged man of action, yes. But second is that you have to be a little uncivilized. The macho-mystique guy is instinctual rather than intellectual; more rough than polished; and a person for whom the rules do not apply.  This might describe most hockey players, but not, I think, to John Kerry. -- as well as the sage observation that brush clearing is a perfect activity for Bush because the brush can't fight back. Yup -- that's it. Meanwhile, George Will is telling us that Kerry's campaign seems to mark "a retreat from the feminization of politics," yet fellow right-wing Michelle Malkin insists that Kerry is an, er, "insufficiently attentive spouse" to his wife (who, Malkin implies, is nuts and wears the pants in the family). But then Ann Coulter tells us that Kerry takes advantage of rich women, his wife being the most recent. So confusing! And maybe this is reason enough for the Democrats to nominate Kerry: We know the Right is going to argue that the Dem nominee, whoever it is, is a spawn of Satan who isn't fit to be around decent people -- so maybe the best we can hope for is that they'll strongly disagree on exactly why the nominee is the Antichrist. Confusion to our enemies! posted by Steve M. | 9:45 AM | Wednesday, January 28, 2004   I have a good feeling about this guy. I've asked a few somewhat alarmist questions about mad-cow disease in this blog recently, but this scientist sounds like just the person you'd want examining suspect (human) brains, and if he says he's ruled out variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in hundreds of brains he's examined (variant CJD, as opposed to plain old CJD, is mad cow disease), I believe him. But he does say he'd like more brains of the deceased to examine, in case he's missing something. Twenty-six states require reporting of CJD. C'mon, what's wrong with the other 24? And are we really only now realizing that mad cow can spread via transfused blood? Is there a lot more we need to discover about vCJD? posted by Steve M. | 11:15 PM |   The Hutton report severely chastized the BBC and exonerated Tony Blair. In The Guardian, Ewen MacAskill and Richard Norton-Taylor aren't satisfied: ...Lord Hutton leaves himself open to accusations of having cherrypicked the evidence that supports the government case and sidelined that which supports the BBC. Awkward bits of evidence that do not fit his final conclusion are left lying around unanswered. He ignores the issue of the reliability of the intelligence in the government's dossier on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction published on September 24, 2002. Instead, he focuses on the specific issue of the claim by the BBC Today reporter Andrew Gilligan in May last year that the government had tampered with intelligence to strengthen the case for war. The evidence of the BBC science correspondent Susan Watts, whose taped conversation with Dr Kelly corroborates much of Gilligan's report, is ignored.... Evidence emerged during the inquiry from John Scarlett, the head of the joint intelligence committee (JIC), who drew up the dossier, that the 45 minutes related not to long-range weapons as had been widely assumed at the time but to battlefield weapons. This is significant, because it supports the BBC case that the threat from Saddam was not as grave as the government dossier suggested. But Lord Hutton said in his report that the distinction between battlefield weapons and long-range ones deployable within 45 minutes "does not fall within my terms of reference".... ...Nor does he address the extracts from the diary of Alastair Campbell, the then Downing Street director of communications, hinting at a personal vendetta against Gilligan taken to the final conclusion. At one point in his diary Mr Campbell said it would "fuck Gilligan" if Dr Kelly turned out to be the source of his story.... Also in his diary, Mr Campbell refers to a conversation with the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, in which he spoke about "a plea bargain", suggesting that the defence secretary would offer a deal to Dr Kelly. Lord Hutton again brushes this aside, saying: "One of those areas of uncertainty is whether in his discussion with Mr Campbell, Mr Hoon used the term 'plea bargain' in relation to Dr Kelly and, if he did, what did he mean by that term." It was revealed last night that the family of Dr Kelly expressly referred to Mr Campbell's diary entries in its final submission to the inquiry. The family argued that the government wanted Dr Kelly's name to come out as a way of assisting its battle with the BBC. The family said: "Alastair Campbell's diary reveals that it was his desire and the desire of others, including the secretary of state for defence, that the fact and identity of the source should be made public." ... posted by Steve M. | 10:58 PM |   Direct elections, reliable electricity -- oh, and one more thing.... (I gather this has been kicking around for a while. I don't know the source.) posted by Steve M. | 4:30 PM |   Dean, on "Meet the Press" in March 2003, said he believed that Iraq "is automatically an imminent threat to the countries that surround it because of the possession of these weapons." Yet, in his now familiar flip-flop style, candidate Dean later declared, "I never said Saddam was a danger to the United States." --right-wing columnist and talk-radio host Larry Elder, 1/22/04 column Maybe that's the difference between conservatives and the rest of us: They think the U.S. is in the Middle East. posted by Steve M. | 2:59 PM |   Ezra at Pandagon worries that this bit of gossip from MSNBC's Jeannette Walls might be true: A well-placed source says that the president will "most likely" drop Dick Cheney from his re-election ticket and his first choice for a replacement is former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. I don't like going out on limbs, but I think this is impossible. It isn't just that Giuliani is pro-gun control, or pro-choice, or pro-gay rights -- the dealbreaker, I think, is that he signed New York City's domestic partnership bill into law. What could be more infuriating to Bush's base, more likely to keep them home on Election Day? I can think of a lot of other reasons this won't happen -- Rudy's too much of an egomaniac to want to be a second banana for four years; criticism makes Bush dig in his heels, so (like his father) he won't drop a VP who's a potential liability; Jeb probably is the Bush family's choice for the '08 nomination, and a Cheney vice presidency doesn't harm Jeb's chances (though wouldn't it be a kick in the collective Bush pants if Cheney suddenly decides that he's not to sickly to head the ticket in '08?). Don't give this another thought -- New York insiders regularly declare that local pols are on the verge of going national. (Funny how that Bush-Pataki ticket The New York Observer promised us in '00 never quite happened.) Jeannette Walls is a gossip columnist; her expertise is the entertainment world. She doesn't know that whoever told her this was blowing smoke. posted by Steve M. | 1:16 PM |   So that's the message from talk radio and Drudge -- that Kerry is unfit to govern because he might have had a facelift? Two words, my Republican friends: Arnold Schwarzenegger. Two more words: Laura Bush. (Yeah, I know -- if it turns out he's had cosmetic work they'll say the point isn't so much that as the lying. And that's an important moral litmus test for Republicans because, of course, Honest Ronald Reagan never dyed his hair.) There's so much plastic surgery among the regularly televised that this idiocy may not migrate to the "respectable" media, but you never know. (If the Drudge link above doesn't show the Kerry story, try this.) posted by Steve M. | 12:43 PM |   Good Lord -- isn't there something in the stalker laws that Hillary Clinton can use against this sicko obsessive? (Scroll to the end.) posted by Steve M. | 9:42 AM |   John Kerry flipflopped on the war, but I think that's actually working to his advantage. I'm reminded of what a pollster named Jeff Levine told Matt Bai of The New York Times Magazine recently about responses to survey questions: ''The pauses people have can be very telling,'' Levine said as we eavesdropped. ''There's an emerging school of survey research that actually times the length of the pauses. The finding is that there's a very strong correlation between the time it takes to answer the question and the strength of a person's belief.'' (The longer the pause, the weaker the respondent's attachment to the answer.) ''You saw a lot of pauses on a question like, 'Was it worth going to war in Iraq or not worth going to war?''' Levine pointed out. ''People don't feel comfortable picking one or the other.'' I can live with this -- complete rejection of a war that unseated a guy like Saddam is further than some people can go, yet many of these people hate the unholy mess of the aftermath, hate the cost in money and lives, feel betrayed by the lies that got us in, and so on, and that's good. Even if voters are responding better to the "evolving" position on the war of Kerry than to the pure opposition of Dean or Kucinich, it's still a rebuke to Bush and a rejection of Bushism. posted by Steve M. | 9:10 AM | Tuesday, January 27, 2004   By the way, here's a curious thing: If you go to the State of the Union page at the White House Web site, you automatically get bounced to the page for this year's speech. OK, fine -- but what if you were trying to find last year's speech -- the one with all the claims about Iraqi weapons that turn out not to be true? Well, there's a "State of the Union - 2003" link on that '04 page. But try clicking on it. You won't get the '03 speech -- you'll get looped back to the main SOTU page, which bounces you to '04. Yeah, the '03 speech is still available. But the only way you can get it at whitehouse.gov, I think, is by clicking on the 2002 link and replacing "2002" with "2003." Interesting glitch. posted by Steve M. | 7:15 PM |   (UPDATE: I fixed the main link in this post.) Remember the $15 billion pledged in the 2003 State of the Union address to fight HIV/AIDS? Well, apparently the check's still in the mail. This is from Newsweek:  ... In his 2003 speech, the president pledged the monies would assure the treatment of "at least 2 million people with life-saving drugs.” But the Global AIDS Alliance estimates that just 1,000 people overseas have received treatment funded by the United States over the past year—all from programs that predate Bush’s big announcement. Last fall, Stephen Lewis, the United Nation’s top AIDS official, said he was enraged that "rich powers” like the United States were still neglectng the crisis in Africa. Yet, the administration’s office of the Global AIDS Coordinator still operates with a skeleton staff borrowed from other departments while dozens of its positions remain unfilled.  As you may have read elsewhere, the Bush administration bargained down the initial outlay (which then became part of an omnibus spending bill that was held up until recently): ...while Bush—to much fanfare—authorized Congress to spend up to $3 billion on AIDS this year, the administration lobbied lawmakers privately to hold that appropriation to $2 billion. They eventually compromised on $2.4 billion. The administration’s rationale: time is needed to build healthcare infrastructure in the targeted 15 AIDS-stricken countries so that the money can be utilized effectively.... But the Global Fund [to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria], a two-year-old program created with help from the U.S. and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that now works in 120 countries, says it has the capacity to effectively spend the full $3 billion—and then some—right now. The administration, however, prefers to distribute the money through U.S. aid agencies, even if that means getting to work more slowly.... Activists say the administration views the Global Fund with the same hostility it revealed toward the U.N. in the run-up to the Iraq War. This in spite of the fact that, around the time of last year's State of the Union, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson was named chairman of the Global Fund's board, replacing a former Ugandan health minister. Oh, and of course, there's this: Another reason the administration prefers to distribute the aid unilaterally is that it can then spend it on programs that fit its socially conservative agenda. A third of the money to be spent for prevention is for “abstinence-only until marriage” programs. Compassionate conservatism..... posted by Steve M. | 7:03 PM |   Bush in 2004 after losing the election? (Update: Link corrected.) posted by Steve M. | 5:00 PM |   In The New York Review of Books, Ahmed Rashid, writing about Afghanistan, reports on a character assessment: When US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited Herat on April 29, 2002, he described [Ismail] Khan as "an appealing person, thoughtful, measured, and self-confident." Rashid notes that this is perhaps too kind: In two reports at the end of 2002, HRW [Human Rights Watch] described the horrific situation in western Afghanistan where Ismail Khan had established a dictatorial fiefdom over three provinces, ignoring the Karzai government with tacit approval from the US. In an HRW report entitled "'We Want to Live as Humans': Repression of Women and Girls in Western Afghanistan," several women described the situation under Khan as virtually similar to living under the Taliban. Local police were stopping girls in the street and forcefully carrying out virginity tests. "Herat is the worst province for women in Afghanistan," said a UN official working with women's groups in Afghanistan. Women were allowed to study only in segregated schools, were discouraged from working, and were forbidden to ride in cars with foreigners. Those caught riding in cars with an Afghan male who was not their husband were taken off to hospitals where doctors would examine them to determine whether they had recently had sexual intercourse. Doctors said that up to ten girls a day were being tested and many girls were too ashamed even to talk about it. Ismail Khan has also revived the Taliban's much-feared Department of Vice and Virtue, which encourages young male goons to walk around streets and schools to make sure that segregation is being enforced. "You have the right to monitor whether people obey Islamic rules, whether it be inside school, outside school, or even in the national park," Ismail Khan told a group of schoolboys who were being trained as a vigilante squad in early October 2002. By the end of 2003 the Department of Vice and Virtue was still banning all independent press and censoring television to the point where women appearing in movies were being replaced by a flower on the screen. The department continues to harass local civic leaders and journalists and to ban professional organizations such as women's and lawyers' groups, even a literary society where people read poems to one another. The violence against women by Taliban members was memorable not just for their violation of genuine Islamic values but for their obsessive attention to sexual and gender detail. The same can be said about Ismail Khan today when he forbids women to wear makeup outside the house even though they must wear the burqa at all times. Men are forbidden to wear neckties or shake hands with local or foreign women. Acts of torture were, and are, according to HRW, commonplace in Herat -- "beatings...hanging upside-down, whipping, and shocking with electrical wires attached to the toes and thumbs." Nice to see Rummy's as good a judge of character as ever. posted by Steve M. | 12:20 PM |   David Horowitz appeared on Dennis Miller's show last night as part of a panel that also included David Frum and Naomi Wolf. (Miller, Frum, and Horo versus Wolf -- exquisitely balanced, no?) The first topic, discussed at length, was David Kay's acknowledgment that he never found WMDs in Iraq. Wolf was a lot better than I expected her to be -- but she was unfailingly polite. Now, it could be argued that the proper response to Miller would have been to grab him by the scruff of the neck and beat him senseless while shouting "Apologize! Apologize!" and force-feeding him multiple transcripts of his appearance on The Tonight Show last spring: You know Hans Blix to me is like Weapons Inspector Clouseau or something. They're in there foraging around, they're in the Scooby Doo van looking for weapons. (Crowd laughs) But that would be wrong. In fact, there was no mention of Miller's little quip on last night's show. posted by Steve M. | 9:28 AM |   Kay also said that he thinks the weapons -- there are weapons of mass destruction in Syria. --David Horowitz on Dennis Miller's CNBC show last night Er, not exactly. Here's James Risen in yesterday's New York Times: Dr. Kay said there was also no conclusive evidence that Iraq had moved any unconventional weapons to Syria, as some Bush administration officials have suggested. He said there had been persistent reports from Iraqis saying they or someone they knew had see cargo being moved across the border, but there is no proof that such movements involved weapons materials. Now, Kay did say something rather different to The Telegraph, but it still doesn't jibe with what Horowitz said (emphasis mine): In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Dr Kay, who last week resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said that he had uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before last year's war to overthrow Saddam. "We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," he said. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved." So it's not clear what Kay really believes, but he seems to believe that, at most, components of the program went to Syria -- though he's not sure even about that. posted by Steve M. | 7:42 AM | Monday, January 26, 2004   "...evil chemistry and evil biology..." Uh-oh -- did somebody replace John Ashcroft's sleep-learning tapes with audiobooks by Hunter Thompson? posted by Steve M. | 4:33 PM |   You may have heard that Charles Duelfer, who's replacing David Kay as America's lead WMD hunter in Iraq, is a "skeptic" on the subject of whether those weapons will be found; The New York Times used that word to describe him a few days ago. But in a story posted Friday, the far-right NewsMax site correctly points out something about Duelfer that was overlooked by the Times: The investigator picked by the CIA to replace David Kay as head of the U.S. team in Iraq hunting for weapons of mass destruction has told British reporters that he saw terrorists training near Baghdad in airplane hijack techniques resembling those used in the 9/11 attacks. In a November 2001 account to the London Observer, Charles Duelfer, the former No. 2 United Nations weapons inspector who was appointed Thursday to head the U.S.'s Iraq Survey Group, corroborated the testimony of Iraqi military defectors who said they helped train radical Muslim recruits to hijack U.S. airliners aboard a Boeing 707 fuselage parked at the terrorist training camp Salman Pak. At the time the London Observer reported: "Duelfer said he visited Salman Pak several times, landing by helicopter. He saw the 707, in exactly the place described by the defectors. The Iraqis, he said, told Unscom it was used by police for counter-terrorist training." "Of course we automatically took out the word 'counter,'" Duelfer told the Observer. "I'm surprised that people seem to be shocked that there should be terror camps in Iraq," he added.... (The Observer story is here; the quotes are accurate.) So is Duelfer in Iraq to beat the Saddam = Osama dead horse? Today, in another story, NewsMax alleges that, as a U.N. staffer during the Clinton years, Duelfer, working with Madeleine Albright, was engaging in back-channel communications with Iraq to avoid "regime change." But the story also adds this: NewsMax has also learned that during his final months at the U.N., Duelfer had numerous dealings with the Bush-Cheney campaign, specifically Condoleezza Rice. Sources at the U.N. claim that the acting U.N. arms chief was "unofficially" providing "thoughts" on Iraq to the Bush campaign. Curious, if true. And there's this: NewsMax has learned that Duelfer first entered Iraq shortly after U.S.-U.K. troops invaded in March 2003. Neither the U.S. government nor Duelfer would disclose what he was doing in the Persian Gulf war zone during the period in question. And even the Times story links Duelfer to spooky doings, however obliquely: Near the end of [Duelfer's] tenure [at the U.N.], the disclosure of a covert American effort to install listening devices and otherwise gather intelligence in Iraq under cover of the inspections effort strained relations between Washington and the United Nations. Paging John le Carre.... posted by Steve M. | 1:39 PM |   Golly, I hope the president doesn't fire Dick Cheney for this. We know that when Bush said he wanted U.N. backing for the war, he really, really, really meant it: Dick Cheney, US vice-president, "waged a guerrilla war" against attempts by Tony Blair, the British prime minister, to secure United Nations backing for the invasion of Iraq. Mr Cheney remained implacably opposed to the strategy even after George W. Bush, US president, addressed the UN on the importance of a multilateralist approach, according to a new biography of Mr Blair. ...One Blair aide remarked: "[Mr Cheney] waged a guerrilla war against the process . . . He's a visceral unilateralist". Another agreed: "Cheney fought it all the way - at every twist and turn, even after Bush's speech to the UN." ...Mr Stephens' book reveals a string of acid interventions by Mr Cheney during critical talks between the president and prime minister at Camp David in September 2002. Once, he directly rebuked Alastair Campbell, Mr Blair's communications director. In occasional contacts with British officials, Scooter Libby, the vice-president's chief of staff, made little secret of his boss's scorn for multilateralism. He once jibed: "Oh dear, we'd better not do that or we might upset the prime minister."... --Financial Times (Thanks to Rational Enquirer for the link; story also available here.) posted by Steve M. | 12:04 PM |   Joe Lieberman Deserves Your Vote Yup, Lieberman got an endorsement -- from NewsMax. You know NewsMax -- home to Rush's brother, Gary "The Clintons Hung Sex Toys on the White House Christmas Tree!" Aldrich, and other fine writers. Congratulations, Joe. People who loathe and despise Democrats almost as much as you do have endorsed you. This must be a great day for you. posted by Steve M. | 10:53 AM |   Oh yeah -- these people love us: Anti-U.S. tunes big hits in Iraq ...Americans have flooded [Iraq]'s airwaves with harmless Western and Arab pop tunes, but many are drawn more to the catchy rhythms of crooners such as Sabah al-Jenabi. "America has come and occupied Baghdad," he sings in one popular number. "The army and people have weapons and ammunition. Let's go fight and call out the name of God." U.S.-led coalition authorities have barred the media from promoting any kind of violence, but there is a hot market in the bazaars of central Iraq for cassettes by singers calling for insurrection. "The men of Fallujah are men of hard tasks," Mr. al-Jenabi sings in a dialect decipherable only to people in the Sunni Muslim heartland cities of Fallujah and Ramadi. "They paralyzed America with rocket-propelled grenades. May God protect them from [U.S.] airplanes." ...      At Sabah Recordings, a popular cassette shop in a Fallujah alleyway, owner Maher al-Ajrari initially denied that he sold Mr. al-Jenabi's music. But after an hour of conversation, he admitted that the resistance tapes are best sellers. Mr. Ajrari even carries multimedia "video" versions of the CDs, in which the anti-U.S. tunes are accompanied by footage of American troops killing and maiming Iraqis.... --Washington Times posted by Steve M. | 10:03 AM |   Just noticed this: David Horowitz will appear as a regular on the new Dennis Miller Show starting Monday night on CNBC at 9PM EST (6PM PST) Wow, that ought to be -- how can I put this? -- unusual. What is Horowitz going to do on TV? Give us exactly the same humorless rants week after week, over and over and over, the way he does in his books and articles? ("All college professors in America are left-wing totalitarian fascists! And all of America's cultural institutions are dominated by fascist leftists! I used to be a fascist leftist, so I should know! All college professors are...") That should work really well -- after all, America's TV viewers have always had a soft spot for whiny, humorless, paranoid, repetitive jeremiad-spewers: Forgive me this rant. I don't know what it is -- the increasingly hysterical, increasingly lunatic Bush-hating left all over the media and the press, my particular edition of the leftwing Sunday Times promoting yet another brain dead reactionary Marxist movement -- this time against copyright law -- before I could get to my crossword puzzle, the nasty Frank Rich repeating the "mistakes" he made thirty years ago in agitating to get America to leave the Vietnam war and expose two and half million Indochinese to the tender mercies of their Communist executioners, or the two minutes of the increasingly Marxoid Democrats I indulged myself in on C-Span before flipping it off? ... Our universities, our principal media and the Democratic Party are ... Oh yeah -- people are definitely going to click away from Everybody Loves Raymond to watch that. posted by Steve M. | 9:16 AM | Sunday, January 25, 2004   Inspired by these folks, I put Fatboy Slim's "Rockafeller Skank" and the Howard Dean Iowa speech in the audio Cuisinart (actually a copy of ProTools Free that likes to crash my PC); the result was "The Dean Skank." I think this link will work -- if not, try this. posted by Steve M. | 2:49 PM |   OK -- we know that Kerry plays hockey. Now, the gold standard for myth-building recreational activities in presidential politics is still JFK's touch football -- but since Kennedy, the two presidents who've gotten the most mileage out of what they do in their leisure time have been Reagan (horseback riding) and George W. (clearing brush and other ranch activities). There's been a slight undercurrent of fear in the discussion of these two presidents' leisure, as if the press is cowering before a dominance challenge: OK, you pasty East Coast liberals, you wanna try doing some of this? We're regularly told that no one from the Northeast can ever be president -- it's never said in so many words, but the implication is that the South and West breed real men, partly through rugged physical activity that's native to those regions, while the Northeast breeds pantywaists. But New Englanders play hockey, which is a pretty tough game. Oh, sure, it's played all over the place now, but it's a game with deep roots in New England. Why shouldn't New England get a little respect from the press for characteristic activities that involve toughness? Why is Bush with a chainsaw regarded as any more mythically macho than Kerry with a hockey stick? posted by Steve M. | 1:44 PM | Saturday, January 24, 2004   In 2002, the Bush administration and the GOP Congress gave certain laid-off workers what they claimed was a nifty way to obtain health insurance -- tax credits! Tax credits that would pay part of the cost of health insurance for people who have no jobs whatsoever (and thus, presumably, little or no income). Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) simply can't figure out why laid-off workers aren't taking advantage of this program. The New York Times quotes her: "We have to find out immediately what's limiting the success of this program. We are talking about health insurance for people who have lost their jobs. The delays are troubling and unacceptable." Roy J. Ramthun, a senior adviser on health initiatives at the Treasury Department, is equally baffled: "We are surprised that more people have not signed up for the advance payment option. We've tried to do everything we can to make the process of qualifying for the credit as simple as possible." E, you don't suppose these laid-off workers aren't giving the miss because, y'know, they can't afford the co-payment, do you? Mrs. Craven said she and her 61-year-old husband had lost their jobs in a Pillowtex mill where they worked for three decades. She has asthma. He is diabetic and has had a heart attack. Mrs. Craven said the premiums for the insurance offered to them ranged from $1,700 to $5,400 a month. Their share of the premiums would be $595 to $1,890 a month. The couple, drawing $416 a month in unemployment benefits, was in no position to pay such costs, Mrs. Craven said.... Nah! That can't be the explanation! It's obviously a complete mystery! posted by Steve M. | 11:57 PM |   Terrific news from Newsweek: Overall, 52 percent of those polled by NEWSWEEK say they would not like to see Bush serve a second term, compared to 44 percent who want to see him win again in November. As a result, Kerry is enjoying a marginal advantage over Bush, a first for the poll. Forty-nine percent of registered voters chose Kerry, compared to 46 percent who re-elected Bush. In fact, all Democrats are polling better against Bush, perhaps due to increased media attention to their primary horserace: Clark gets 47 percent of voters’ choice compared to 48 percent from Bush; Edwards has 46 percent compared to Bush’s 49; Leiberman wins 45 percent versus Bush’s 49 percent; and Dean fares the worst with 45 percent of their votes to Bush’s 50 percent. posted by Steve M. | 11:47 PM |   Good Lord -- did a New York Times reporter actually refer to Joe Lieberman's smile as voluptuous? Yup -- in the eleventh paragraph of this story. The mind reels. posted by Steve M. | 12:17 PM | Friday, January 23, 2004   David Kay stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for banned weapons in Iraq on Friday and said he did not believe the country had any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.... "I don't think they existed," Kay said. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s," he said.... --Reuters If he keeps saying this, I think Mr. Kay is about to get a little visit from the Politics of Personal Destruction Fairy.... posted by Steve M. | 7:11 PM |   Not even trying to conceal it, are they? Two senators have written Chief Justice William Rehnquist to raise concerns about Justice Antonin Scalia's impartiality in a case that involves the White House's energy task force. Scalia went on a hunting trip to Louisiana with Dick Cheney, a longtime friend, shortly after the court agreed to review a lower court's decision that required White House to identify members of the vice president's task force. Scalia has said there is no reason to question his ability to judge the case fairly. But in their letter, Democratic Sens. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, a presidential candidate, and Patrick Leahy of Vermont questioned whether the court can disqualify a justice who declines to withdraw from a case. The lawmakers asked if the court has issued any guidelines about accepting gifts or travel.... Scalia also had dinner with Cheney in November, two months after the administration asked the justices to overrule the lower court.... --AP And, annoying as we may find him, let's give Lieberman a little credit for this. You know, he wouldn't be such a bad guy if he'd just stop telling us how superior a human being he is to all other Democrats. posted by Steve M. | 6:28 PM |   This is weird: MOSES LAKE, Wash. -- In the days after the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that mad cow disease had been discovered in a Holstein in Washington, officials insisted that the cow was a "downer" -- unable to walk. The government's most significant subsequent step to prevent spread of the disease -- a Dec. 30 ban on processing "downer" cows for food -- stemmed from that finding. Now, three people have come forward to assert that the cow was not a downer. While their stories vary on what happened Dec. 9 at Vern's Moses Lake Meats, their accounts agree on a key point: The cow was able to walk on its own. The distinction on whether the cow could stand is significant. The department's search for mad cow disease has focussed on downed cattle or those with obvious signs of neurological damage.... ... three people who were at Vern's Moses Lake Meats on the day the cow was killed told The Oregonian the cow was a "walker." Those men include the plant manager, a former employee and a man who was present when the cow was delivered to the site. The third man asked not to be identified.... --The Oregonian We've really shrugged this incident off -- OK, we'll test a few more downer cows and everything will be hunky-dory again (not that it wasn't hunky-dory already!). But if this wasn't a downer, that's a reminder that we don't really know what warning signs to watch for, isn't it? posted by Steve M. | 5:12 PM |   Rod Dreher is the Dallas Morning News columnist who's collaborating with Peggy Noonan on the Case of the Mysterious Papal Quote. Dreher's a Catholic -- but he thinks the Vatican might be trying to screw with him by denying that the Pope praised his favorite movie, and it's really pissing him off. Here's the lead of his latest column: Whom do you trust, Hollywood or the Vatican? That used to be an easy call. Not anymore. This week, we see that either top officials of Mel Gibson's production company are manipulative deceivers or the top aide to Pope John Paul II and the papal spokesman is. "Manipulative deceivers"! But wait -- Dreher's not finished. Here he is talking to ABC News: Dreher is not convinced and says he thinks the Vatican is trying to reverse itself, adding, "I think it's a disgrace. I think the Vatican has to remember the commandment 'Do not bear false witness.'" Lecturing his church on morality? Sure. If the church is getting in the way of the right-wing culture war, then the church is The Enemy. posted by Steve M. | 3:28 PM |   Lucianne Goldberg, vileness personified, on the ABC interview of Howard and Judy Dean: Judy, the un-Hillary sweet., with just a tiny touch of Hedda Nussbaum In case you don't recognize the allusion: Ten years ago, Hedda Nussbaum became a household name. Her face, shattered and scarred after years of physical abuse by her live-in partner, Joel Steinberg, was splashed across newspaper and magazine covers when Steinberg beat the couple's 6 year old adopted daughter Lisa to death. (That's from SafeNet, which also reproduces a picture of the abused Nussbaum shortly after Steinberg's arrest -- an image that's burned into a lot of memories around here.) Goldberg worked this riff yesterday as well. And Peggy Noonan and National Review Online's Kathryn Jean Lopez have had a good chuckle over this little quip, in reference to Dean's Iowa speech: There's an old joke that Goerge Bush 41 reminds women of their first husband. Howard Dean last night reminds women of their first husband against whom they had to take out a restraining order. Yeah, I know -- your opponent's drowning, you toss in an anvil. But there are anvils and anvils. Absence evidence, a charge like this, or even jokes like this, should be beyond the pale. This is essentially calling the man a domestic Hitler. posted by Steve M. | 12:06 PM |   Lead story in today's Wall Street Journal: Wage inequality -- the gap between America's highest and lowest earners -- has started widening again.... New data from the Labor Department show that after adjustment for inflation, salaries of the country's lowest-paid workers -- those who fall just inside the bottom 10% of the pay range -- fell 0.3% last year from 2002. Meanwhile, the salaries of the highest paid workers -- those who are just inside the top 10% -- were unchanged. The divergence appeared to grow in the fourth quarter as higher-paid workers gained ground and lower-paid workers slipped further.... (Emphasis mine.) Gee, the fourth quarter of '03 -- that's the quarter the Bushies are always boasting about, isn't it? The numbers continue a movement to greater wage inequality that began around the time President Bush succeeded President Clinton.... posted by Steve M. | 11:14 AM |   As we belabor the subject of "temperament" and a certain candidate's marriage, let's not forget that four years from now many of the people who are criticizing or questioning Howard Dean (and Judy Dean) will be calling for a Giuliani presidency. You remember Rudy Giuliani -- a guy who was really angry much of the time (no, not in the aftermath of 9/11, but virtually every day prior to that in his eight years as mayor). Giuliani as mayor was snappish, punitive, and vindictive. Giuliani also once went ballistic before a crowd in the midst of a campaign, in 1992 -- but he didn't merely rally the faithful with an overabundance of enthusiasm. What he did was unleash a profanity-laden denunciation of then-mayor David Dinkins before a crowd of cops objecting to a proposed mayoral commission on police corruption. The cops subsequently rioted. (See Wayne Barrett's Rudy!, pp. 259ff.) Oh, and Giuliani's wife also famously absented herself from many events she was expected to attend with him -- she too said it was because she had a career separate from her husband's. Her absence was the subject of occasional snickers on the inside pages of the papers, but that was that ... until it became clear that, unlike the Deans, the Giulianis hated each other's guts and were headed for the sort of ugly divorce you'd try to avoid if you were a grown-up. But none of this will matter in '08. Rudy doesn't stand a chance to get the GOP nomination -- he's pro-choice and pro-gay rights, although I suppose his positions on these issues could "evolve" -- but he's loved in the media. And among the people who'll gush over Rudy most audibly will be Diane Sawyer and David Letterman, who took Dean to the woodshed last night on national TV. posted by Steve M. | 9:26 AM | Thursday, January 22, 2004   Yikes! Report: Rumsfeld considers striking Hizbullah to provoke Syria US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is considering provoking a military confrontation with Syria by attacking Hizbullah bases near the Syrian border in Lebanon, according to the authoritative London-based Jane's Intelligence Digest. In an article to be published on Friday, the journal said multi-faceted US attacks, which would be conducted within the framework of the global war on terrorism, are likely to focus on Hizbullah bases in the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon. It noted that the deployment of US special forces in the Bekaa Valley, where most of Syria's occupation forces in Lebanon are based, would be highly inflammatory and would "almost certainly involve a confrontation with Syrian troops." Such a conflict might well prove to be the objective of the US, said the journal... The journal noted that the US administration has long considered Damascus "a prime candidate for regime-change," along with Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and, possibly, Saudi Arabia. "Syria, once a powerhouse of Arab radicalism that could not be ignored, has been seriously weakened, both militarily and politically. Washington may feel that the time is coming to oust Assad and the ruling generals.... --Jerusalem Post UPDATE: Here's part of the Jane's story. (The rest is for subscribers only.) Yeah, I think this is coming. The lead story in today's edition of Conrad Black's New York Sun was "Syrians Airlifted Arms to Hezbollah." It's not available to nonsubscribers, but here's how it starts: A Syrian earthquake-relief flight to Iran returned to Damascus from Tehran earlier this month loaded with a lethal cargo of weapons bound for the Hezbollah terrorist organization, American intelligence shows. Administration officials told The New York Sun that American intelligence agencies have collected overhead photographs of a Syrian aircraft that delivered relief aid in December to the victims of the Bam earthquake. The plane was loaded with small arms in Tehran before its return flight to Damascus. This was also confirmed by American signal intercepts suggesting that the weapons were destined for Hezbollah camps in southern Lebanon.... And there's this, from Reuters: U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts says there is some concern Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have gone to Syria, as Washington vowed to carry on searching for such arms in Iraq. Roberts, a leading member of President George W. Bush's Republican Party, said in Washington on Wednesday: "I think that there is some concern that shipments of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) went to Syria." He did not elaborate.... Weapons shipments or no weapons shipments, I think an attack of the kind that's apparently being contemplated would make a lot of center-dwellers start asking whether we lefties have been right along when we've said that Bush is a war-happy lunatic. posted by Steve M. | 6:40 PM |   A couple of weeks ago, a Sean Hannity fan sent Sean a funny: Many thanks to the loyal 3-hours a day listener that sent in this unique photo of a soldier meeting New York Senator, Hillary Clinton while she was on her "troop tour." Pay attention to the "hand shaking." Enjoy! Here's the picture. Now imagine this photo with Laura Bush or Barbara Bush substituted for Hillary -- and with the little message at the top of the photo the same. Think our soldier would already have been dishonorably discharged, under pressure from right-wing Web vultures, GOP congressmen, and talk radio? posted by Steve M. | 4:04 PM |   The Economic Policy Institute confirms what we already know: Jobs shift from higher-paying to lower-paying industries In 48 of the 50 states, jobs in higher-paying industries have given way to jobs in lower-paying industries since the recession ended in November 2001. Nationwide, industries that are gaining jobs relative to industries that are losing jobs pay 21% less annually. For the 30 states that have lost jobs since the recession purportedly ended, this is the other shoe dropping -- not only have jobs been lost, but in 29 of them the losses have been concentrated in higher paying sectors. And for 19 of the 20 states that have seen some small gain in jobs since the end of the recession, the jobs gained have been disproportionately in lower-paying sectors.... A story in the L.A. Times summarizes the findings for California: Statewide, since the national recession officially ended in November 2001, the jobs that have been created are in industries that pay an average of 40% less than do those in which jobs have disappeared, the Economic Policy Institute said.... ...California lost 127,000 manufacturing jobs and 55,000 jobs in the information sector from November 2001 to November 2003. Meanwhile, the leisure and hospitality sector gained 48,000 jobs, retail trade grew by 32,000 and health and education, which includes day-care teachers and low-wage hospital crews, grew by 65,000. It's pretty much like that for every state in the union. Here's the EPI's data chart (warning: it's a PDF) and here's the California story in graph form from the Times. posted by Steve M. | 12:39 PM |   Weird: U.S. Official: No Truth to Rumor Bin Laden Captured --Reuters OSAMA CAPTURE DENIED --Sky News "There is no way this could be true. Drudge never mentioned it." --comment at Free Republic Are we actually getting somewhere in this quest, or are the Bushies floating disinformation because, post-Iowa, they now think they're going to have a competitive election? posted by Steve M. | 11:41 AM |   Skimble has turned a Washington Post profile of the vice president into a poem that I find quietly chilling: It's called "The Silence of Cheney." An excerpt: He likes to ask questions, pointed and at times rapid-fire. This is a variation on silence in that he does not explicitly express his views or divulge information. He just acquires. posted by Steve M. | 10:51 AM |   A lot of people (myself included) have called Peggy Noonan a liar for declaring in December that the Pope had said of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, "It is as it was" -- which the Vatican denies. But Noonan insists she's not a liar. She's not a liar because the movie's producer told her that Monsignor Stanislaw Dziwisz told him that the Pope told him, "It is as it was." In a follow-up column today, Noonan acknowledges that, er, yeah, when she e-mailed the Pope's spokesman, Joaquin Navarro-Valls, hoping for confirmation of the quote, she didn't get it: So I e-mailed Dr Navarro Valls at the Vatican telling him I wanted to write a piece for OpinionJournal and asking him about the quote. I didn't hear back and sent another: "Dr. Navarro Valles [sic], my deadline is in two hours and I do hope you'll let me know if there is anything on the Pope's reaction beyond 'It is as it was'--wonderful words, and I know you have already been in touch with Steve about them, but I would greatly appreciate it if there's anything you could add regarding general Vatican feeling on the film, any further comment from the Holy Father, etc. Best, Peggy Noonan" I got a response. "Dear Peggy, I don't have for now any other comment on this. I [sic] anything is said in the future I will send it to you. Greetings, J. Navarro-Valls." So, no confirmation. But the guy who produced the movie -- and who presumably stands to make or lose a lot of money, depending on how it does at the box office -- said the quote was legit. And that was enough for Ol' Peggy. After Noonan's "It is..." column appeared, the producer sent her an e-mail that included a Navarro-Valls message confirming the quote. But Navarro-Valls has now e-mailed Noonan and said that that quote confirmation was fabricated. (Gosh -- a Hollywood guy faking a rave review? That would never happen, would it?) Of course, Noonan ran with the quote before getting any confirmation of it whatsoever, real or fake, and after failing to get a confirmation from the Vatican. But hey -- pass up a major propaganda coup? A good right-wing apparatchik would never do that. (UPDATE: Yeah, World O'Crap got to this story first, and is a lot funnier.) (UPDATE: And TBOGG is funny and nasty.) posted by Steve M. | 9:45 AM | Wednesday, January 21, 2004   Let's do the math: Bush proposes $250,000,000 for job training. We have 8,774,000 unemployed people. That's $28.49 for each unemployed person in America. That wouldn't buy much job training, would it? posted by Steve M. | 11:15 PM |   I should also have mentioned a couple of other highlights of the new New York Times bestseller list: Not only is Ron Suskind's book at #1 on the nonfiction list, as I noted below, but at #3, #4, and #5 (after Pete Rose at #2) are American Dynasty, the Kevin Phillips book on the Bushes; Dude, Where's My Country? by Michael Moore; and Lies ... by Al Franken. Oh, and John le Carre's Absolute Friends, which includes passages critical of the Iraq war, is at #3 in its first week on the fiction list. posted by Steve M. | 10:48 PM |   On the new bestseller list that was e-mailed today by The New York Times, the #1 nonfiction hardcover is Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty. That's good, but unfortunately this book is already "so five minutes ago" as far as the press is concerned. We proles are just going to have to be gauche and keep talking about it. posted by Steve M. | 5:42 PM |   Reuters reports that a Belgian cardinal has called the vast majority of gay men and lesbians "sexual perverts"; at National Review Online's blog, Mike Potemra declares that this is actually a compassionate statement. Don't ask me to explain Potemra's logic -- just read the links yourself. Where does the right find these people? (OK, maybe this will help: Potemra notes that the cardinal thinks only about 5-10% of gay people are really gay -- the rest are just, in Potemra's paraphrase, "libertine dabblers." Can we safely assume that this cardinal doesn't get out much? And didn't I see the Libertine Dabblers opening for Wall of Voodoo at Irving Plaza back in the '80s?) posted by Steve M. | 2:16 PM |   When last weekend's New York Times/CBS poll showed Bush's approval rating slipping to 50%, Andrew Sullivan declared that the books were cooked: He quoted "a seasoned Republican analyst" who said in an e-mail, ...in the CBS/NYT poll on Sunday, the party ID was 34 percent GOP and 47 percent Democratic. Is it any wonder the numbers were what they were? This is more evidence, in my judgment, why you shouldn't trust the NYT polls. It's not clear where the "seasoned Republican analyst" got these numbers -- they didn't appear anywhere in the stories on the poll published by The Times and CBS -- but if "a seasoned Republican analyst" said it was so, that was good enough for Andy. He called for an investigation by the Times ombudsman. Then Sullivan heard from Rich Meislin, the Times's editor for news surveys and election analysis. To his credit, Sully reprinted what Meislin had to say: I'm not sure where your seasoned Republican analyst is getting his numbers, but they seem to be incorrect.... The latest NYT/CBS News poll, taken Jan. 12-15, has this party ID breakdown: Republicans 28 Democrats 32 Independents 31 So Sully libeled the Times based on a GOP operative's lie. Incidentally, Gallup has an instant poll today on the State of the Union address. Here's the headline: Speech Watchers React Positively to Bush's Message Want to know what the breakdown of poll respondents was? The sample consists of 46% of respondents who identify themselves as Republicans, 26% who identify themselves as Democrats, and 28% who identify themselves as independents. Nearly twice as many Republicans as Democrats. No comment on this from Sullivan. posted by Steve M. | 11:40 AM |   I thought it was the most belligerent State of the Union that I have ever seen. It was the return of President Bring 'Em On featuring one narrowed eye, the smirk, and an occasional glare towards the Democrats, particularly when they applauded at this: Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year. (Applause.) ...throwing the boy off his rhythm. It was scattershot and bizarre (steroids? WTF?)... That's TBOGG on the speech. I agree, I agree. More here. posted by Steve M. | 10:45 AM |   OK -- it was an easy speech to criticize. But the Iraq section of the speech was premised on the notion that Democrats have no reply when Bush says, Hey, I got rid of Saddam, and what was your plan? Not getting rid of Saddam? -- and that's still a compelling message for a lot of voters. We talk about Bush's "ever-shifting" justifications for the Iraq war, but for him (and for roughly half of America, alas), that ever-expanding list of reasons for war is a strength: Hey, the Iraqi people now have FREEDOM!, and Saddam had weapons programs, and ... and ... and hey, Qaddafi just disarmed! That's another good thing! Everyone in America knows the reason-turned-multiple-reasons for the Iraq war. The counterargument just isn't as familiar to American voters. Oh, sure -- people say, "Well, what about doing something for this country?" But an awful lot of Americans still think we did a Good Thing in Iraq. We gave them Freedom. Did we? Despite the best efforts of the troops on the ground, it looks as if we gave them chaos and anarchy, thanks to the Bush administration's "Duh, what do we do now?" approach to the "postwar" period. Bush says, without fear of contradiction, "The world is a safer place." But Iraq is dangerously unstable. How does that make the world a safer place? And we have ten times as many troops in Iraq as we have hunting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. We captured Saddam, yet air travel got more dangerous -- and even in Iraq violence and unrest didn't abate. And where was the threat to the U.S. in Iraq? Where were the weapons? We had Saddam in a box. Republicans talk as if we did nothing unpleasant to Saddam between the end of the '91 war and March of 2003 -- as if the sanctions and the bombing runs in the no-fly zones were a slap on the wrist. These measures were rarely mentioned by the media, so Republicans can argue that Clinton wrung his hands while Bush did something. The fact is that we had an unpleasant but measured and effective response to Saddam, then, using 9/11 as a pretext, Bush launched a war that killed five hundred Americans (and counting) to contain a threat that was already contained -- and that had nothing to do with 9/11. I'm belaboring the obvious -- but it's not obvious to a hell of a lot of voters. This counterargument just isn't familiar out in the heartland. If that continues to be the case, the winner in November, appalling as we may find it, will be Bush, the war hero. posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | Tuesday, January 20, 2004   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!) posted by Steve M. | 10:23 PM |   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? posted by Steve M. | 5:00 PM |   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 posted by Steve M. | 2:17 PM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 12:35 PM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 9:16 AM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 7:32 AM | Monday, January 19, 2004   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. posted by Steve M. | 11:16 PM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 9:14 AM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 9:05 AM | Sunday, January 18, 2004   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. posted by Steve M. | 11:52 AM | Saturday, January 17, 2004   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. posted by Steve M. | 6:15 PM |   Gee, when did word of this new Halliburton contract for Iraq come out? Late on Friday? Sneaky bastards. posted by Steve M. | 9:30 AM |   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.) posted by Steve M. | 9:22 AM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 9:06 AM | Friday, January 16, 2004   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.) posted by Steve M. | 4:48 PM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 4:25 PM |   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.) posted by Steve M. | 1:03 PM |   Fine cartoon on the Bush appearance in Atlanta yesterday, from Mike Luckovich of The Atlanta Journal Constitution. (Thanks to TBOGG for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 12:29 PM |   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.) posted by Steve M. | 11:01 AM | Thursday, January 15, 2004   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 posted by Steve M. | 11:50 PM |   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 posted by Steve M. | 11:43 PM |   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! posted by Steve M. | 3:09 PM |   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? posted by Steve M. | 2:38 PM |   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 posted by Steve M. | 1:48 PM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 12:47 PM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 9:56 AM | Wednesday, January 14, 2004   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. posted by Steve M. | 11:38 PM |   "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? posted by Steve M. | 11:27 PM |   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 posted by Steve M. | 11:19 PM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 3:07 PM |   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? posted by Steve M. | 2:02 PM |   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? posted by Steve M. | 12:52 PM |   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.) posted by Steve M. | 11:24 AM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 9:37 AM |   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.) posted by Steve M. | 7:41 AM | Tuesday, January 13, 2004   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. posted by Steve M. | 6:38 PM |   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.) posted by Steve M. | 4:44 PM |   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.) posted by Steve M. | 2:23 PM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 11:33 AM |   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.) posted by Steve M. | 9:47 AM |   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 posted by Steve M. | 9:31 AM | Monday, January 12, 2004   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. posted by Steve M. | 11:38 PM |   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 posted by Steve M. | 11:14 PM |   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! posted by Steve M. | 11:11 PM |   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? posted by Steve M. | 4:47 PM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 4:07 PM |   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? posted by Steve M. | 3:09 PM |   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.) posted by Steve M. | 11:04 AM |   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? posted by Steve M. | 10:00 AM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 9:30 AM |   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? posted by Steve M. | 7:26 AM | Sunday, January 11, 2004   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? posted by Steve M. | 11:58 PM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 11:42 PM |   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. posted by Steve M. | 11:07 PM |

archives October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 December 2003 January 2004 February 2004 March 2004 April 2004 May 2004 June 2004 July 2004 August 2004 September 2004 October 2004 November 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 links MAIN PAGE E-MAIL NO MORE MISTER NICE BLOG ATOM FEED * Spencer Ackerman (Attackerman) * (the other) Roger Ailes * Alas, a Blog * Alicublog (Roy Edroso) * Alterdestiny * Eric Alterman's Altercation * AlterNet PEEK * AMERICAblog * The American Street * Americans United for Separation of Church and State * Annie's Annals * Applesauce * Atrios (Eschaton) * Attytood (Will Bunch's Philadelphia Daily News blog) * Bad Attitudes * BAGnewsNotes * Balloon Juice * Bark Bark Woof Woof * bastard.logic * Steve Benen (Washington Monthly) * Michael Berube * Bill's Big Diamond Blog * Birmingham Blues * bjkeefe * Blue Gal * Blue Wren * Break the Terror * Bulworth * BuzzFlash * A Cautious Man * Ta-Nehisi Coates * Juan Cole (Informed Comment) * Comments from Left Field * Cormulley.com * Betty Cracker * Crooked Timber * Crooks and Liars * Cup O' Joe * Daai Tou Laam Diary * The Daily Howler * Daily Kos * Scoobie Davis * D-Day * Dear Leader Blog * Dependable Renegade * distributorcap NY * Doghouse Riley (Bats Left Throws Right) * Donkey Mountain * Kevin Drum (Mother Jones) * Eccentricity * David Ehrenstein's Fablog * Emptywheel * Fafblog * Feministe * Feministing * Firedoglake * First Draft * FiveThirtyEight * Freedom Camp * The Garlic * ginandtacos.com * Glenn Greenwald * The Heretik * The Huffington Post * Hullabaloo * If I Ran the Zoo * The Impolitic * Instaputz * Interesting Times * Isebrand * Jack & Jill Politics * Jesus' General * Lady Insignificant (D. 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(also here) "Bush planned Iraq 'regime change' before becoming President" (from Scotland's Sunday Herald) "Yankee Go Home: Who's leading the anti-war movement? Congressional Republicans" (1999 Slate compilation of GOP antiwar quotes) "The Press vs. Al Gore: How lazy reporting, pack journalism and GOP spin cost him the election" by Eric Boehlert (from Rolling Stone) America's Taliban (Coulter, Falwell, etc.) in their own words Language: A Key Mechanism of Control (Gingrich's guidelines, still in use today) John Scalzi's "I Hate Your Politics" Column IS IT ANN COULTER -- OR IS IT DAVID DUKE? IS IT CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS -- OR IS IT DWIGHT SCHRUTE? SORELY MISSED: * Americans Are Dumb * Anti-Coulter * Billmon (Whiskey Bar) * The Blog Report at Salon * Busy, Busy, Busy * Cursor * Greg T. * Happy Furry Puppy Story Time with Norbizness * The Jed Report * Little Green Fascists * Main and Cenral * Martini Republic * MaxSpeak * mfinley * Mykeru * The News Blog (R.I.P. Steve Gilliard) * Nitpicker * The Rational Enquirer * Rittenhouse Review (R.I.P. Jim Capozzola) * Tristram Shandy (now at Instaputz?) * Slannder (anti-Ann Coulter) * SullyWatch * Jon Swift * Too Sense (but Adam "dnA" Serwer is now at TAPPED) * wastedirony.com * Cintra Wilson