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Thursday, September 30, 2004 "Senator Kerry has momentum coming out of here." --George Stephanopoulos on ABC just now. Hell yeah. A poll on ABC showed Kerry as the clear winner, and Stephanopoulos said a CBS poll showed him a "significant" winner. Nice. UPDATE: MyDD has the numbers: ABC -- Kerry 45, Bush 36, unsure 17; CBS -- Kerry 44, Bush 26, unsure 30. posted by Steve M. | 10:54 PM | That was as good as I could have hoped. Kerry looked and sounded clear, direct and presidential. Bush seemed both snappish and fuzzy-headed (those senior-moment pauses!); by the end, he seemed reduced. Jeff Greenfield on CNN just said, clearly in agony, that Kerry looked almost as presidential as Bush. What Greenfield means is that Kerry looked as presidential as the myth of Bush. We saw the real Bush tonight -- a sullen brat in an adult's job who's clearly out of his depth. He was awful. posted by Steve M. | 10:12 PM | Kerry is doing a great job. Bush ... well, I've said over and over that he frequently adopts a "you'd know this if you weren't such an idiot" tone. For some reason, he's decided to do this entire debate using that tone. I don't know how swing voters are reacting to that, but to me it sounds awful. Certainly unpresidential. posted by Steve M. | 9:02 PM | When I look at the horror in Iraq today, I can't fight off a political thought: "Security moms," if you're planning to vote for Bush because his tough talk has persuaded you that he can prevent another Beslan, well, Beslan just happened in Baghdad, on Bush's watch. posted by Steve M. | 5:46 PM | For the last month, we've heard that bloggers are the future of media, that the "old media" are dead, that Dan Rather signed the death warrant because he was too arrogant to check his facts. So The Guardian gives a weekly column to right-wing blog god Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds, and right off the bat he gives us two whoppers. ...many have concluded that it's impossible for a Democrat to win the south unless - like Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter - he has southern roots.... But why would that be? It can't be because southerners won't vote for people from outside the south. After all, they happily voted in droves for Ronald Reagan, a Californian transplanted from the midwest. Nor is it likely to be because of "traditional values", since southerners also voted for Bill Clinton, a Democrat whose commitment to monogamy was famously shaky. Here's the 1992 electoral map. Here's the 1996 electoral map. Southerners voted for Clinton? Er, no, they didn't. Clinton won some Southern states (probably because he's, y'know, Southern), but the GOP dominated the South twice. In his two three-way races, Clinton won a majority (rather than a plurality) of the vote in the South only in his home state of Arkansas (twice) and in Louisiana in '96. (Source.) ...the south's commitment to traditional values is, like Bill Clinton's, less strong than many might believe. Dayton, Tennessee - home of the Scopes "monkey trial", depicted entertainingly in Inherit the Wind, and more accurately in Ed Larson's book, A Summer for the Gods, - recently sponsored a "Gay Day" after overturning local anti-gay legislation. Did Reynolds even read his own link? Let's start at the end: Yes, county commissioners overturned anti-gay legislation -- but what they overturned was legislation to ban homosexuals and have them arrested for "crimes against nature." ... Although commissioner J.C. Fugate clearly explained his motion to ban gays in March, members of the panel have since said they thought their first vote was only to show support for state lawmakers banning same-sex marriages. Very pro-gay of them. And did the local government actually sponsor Gay Day? Hell, no -- as this story notes, it was put together by a local lesbian and a team of volunteers. (The story also makes clear that the county commissioners almost certainly overturned their own vote only because they were embarrassed by the bad publicity.) If the gate-storming Rather-haters can't do better than this, I think we're going to need the old media a little longer. posted by Steve M. | 5:00 PM | President Bush's top political adviser, Karl Rove, said Wednesday that the Bush-Cheney campaign is planning some October "surprises" for challengers John Kerry and John Edwards. "We've got a couple of surprises that we intend to spring," Rove told ABC radio host Sean Hannity... --NewsMax story, 9/29/04 A man called Sean Hannity after 4 PM ET today. Said he lived in Naples, FL, but originally lived in MA. He said that Kerry lost his first congressional race when networks aired a film of Kerry (in uniform) burning & urinating on an American flag. Sean was skeptical. The guy suggested checking with possibly John O'Neill or Howie Carr in MA. Anyone ever hear about anything like this? --Free Republic discussion thread, 9/29/04 Coincidence? An isolated event -- or the start of the next phase of Bush's sewer campaign? Even Hannity expresses skepticism about this rumor, but that may be beside the point. In 1988 there were completely unsubstantiated rumors that Kitty Dukakis had once burned an American flag, rumors to which Bush the Elder made an oblique but pointed allusion while talking about running mate Dan Quayle. Meanwhile, another FR thread notes that Bob Dornan tried to link Kerry to flag-burning in the '70s on Hannity's TV show in August: Bob Dornan went on a savage attack, showing burned US flag and VC/Communist flags that were burned by Kerry's anti-war group in 1971. The Freeper who describes this Dornan appearance goes on to say, Dornan also wanted Fox to have anti-Kerry widows from the Vietnam war. Which brings us back to the latest ad by the Swift boat Kerry-haters, which -- yes -- features wives of Vietnam POWs. Oh, and, of course, Congress is about to take up a flag-burning amendment. Is Rove delicately orchestrating this? Hard to say. Color me suspicious. posted by Steve M. | 1:26 PM | Today, in most of Iraq, children are about to go back to school... --George W. Bush, radio address, 9/25/04 In this second school year since the United States deposed Saddam Hussein, Iraqi education officials have twice put off the start of classes, citing instability in the provinces.... Education officials said the start of school had been postponed from Sept. 11 to Sept. 18, then to Oct. 2. The timing is still not entirely clear, with some children saying they were told Oct. 15. Other ministry officials said that because of a delay in financing, new textbooks would not be printed and fully distributed for another month or more.... --New York Times posted by Steve M. | 11:03 AM | Is there an echo in here? Despite all their sparring over the war in Iraq, President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry have one thing in common when it comes to foreign policy: Neither wants to draw attention to how much they actually agree. --Los Angeles Times How and why the United States went to war with Iraq will be debated for years. How the United States can get out, however, is a far more urgent question. On that topic, the candidates have remarkably similar answers. --ABC ...for all the talk about stark differences - on many foreign policy subjects... the two differ only slightly, if at all. Even on Iraq, the candidates' sharpest stated differences are retrospective, rather than prospective. Mr. Bush defends the war as central to the struggle against terrorism; Mr. Kerry criticizes it as a diversion. As they look ahead, though, neither man is calling for the immediate departure of American troops; both advocate accelerating the training of Iraqi forces. --New York Times Gee, when have I heard this before? Could it have been just after Kerry's NYU speech? "Forty-three days before the election, my opponent has now settled on a proposal for what to do next," Mr. Bush said there, "and it's exactly what we're currently doing." Why is this the lead? Shortly after the NYU speech we had, in The New York Times, "2 Iraq Views, 2 Campaigns": To hear President Bush and John Kerry argue bitterly in the past two days about the American mission in Iraq is to wonder if they are talking about the same war, or even the same country. Is this new emphasis on the candidates' similarities -- which comes at a time when Kerry's statements and ads on the war are becoming much tougher and more pointed -- just a Truth that's slowly dawned on all these reporters at the same time? Are the reporters parroting GOP spin? Or is it that, after so many years in which the GOP has set the terms of one debate after another, Beltway reporters don't even know the difference anymore between what they hear from Republican spinners and what they actually think? Remember: These are the same people who told you four years ago that you'd barely be able to tell a Bush and Gore presidency apart. posted by Steve M. | 10:10 AM | Wednesday, September 29, 2004 Is this thing tightening again? Bush is up by just 2 in Ohio, per CNN/USA Today/Gallup. (Early in the month, Bush led by 8 in the same poll.) If Gallup's oversampling Republicans, who's really winning? The Electoral-Vote.com composite has Bush's EV lead narrowing to 273-241. (Bush has recently been over 300.) Meanwhile ... yeah, the International Communications Research (who?) poll has Bush up by 10 (likely voters)/8 (registered voters), but the L.A. Times has a Bush lead of 5 (likely)/4 (registered) -- both per Polling Report. UPDATE: From the L.A. Times story on its poll: Nineteen percent of likely voters said the debate could affect their vote, whereas 79% said it was not likely to. One good sign for Kerry: 63% of those who said the debate could change their mind now support Bush, and 27% back the Democrat. Am I doing the math right? Does that mean nearly 12% of surveyed voters are Bush supporters who might switch? That's a real opportunity. posted by Steve M. | 11:16 PM | In the wake of CBS News' "60 Minutes" controversy, an influential Republican on Tuesday said he wants to convene a Capitol Hill hearing on TV news operations after the Nov. 2 election. Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), chair of the House Commerce Committee, told a meeting of the TV engineering trade group MSTV in Washington that broadcast network news divisions "need to have safeguards to prevent reporters from infusing their opinions into news reports." The lawmaker said he wanted to hear from execs of all the nets -- not just CBS -- and threatened to introduce legislation requiring TV news operations to impose safeguards against partisan bias seeping into reports.... --Variety/Yahoo News I don't care that, as the story goes on to report, Barton "backed off the threat of legislation when pressed for specifics." I want to know why the hell he wants to waste my tax dollars and yours with this crap in the first place. It apparently has escaped Barton's notice that for more than a decade "partisan bias" has literally been the only item on offer at most AM talk radio stations in America. Or perhaps Barton's definition of "nonpartisan" is the same as the Fox News definition of "fair and balanced": biased to the right in a way we think everyone else is biased to the left. The U.S. once had a "fairness doctrine" that required broadcasters to provide a balance of viewpoints, on the principle that you can't truly have free speech on TV and radio because the broadcast spectrum is limited -- which it unquestionably was for decades. Barton apparently forgot that it was Saint Ronald Reagan who got rid of the fairness doctrine, on the principle (pre-Internet) that cable TV expanded the opportunity for opposing views. I'd say we don't need a fairness doctrine these days -- broadcasting is still in the control of a few Goliaths, but broadcasters and print publishers are now too tied to the Internet to be unreachable by the hoi polloi. But I'll support government reregulation of CBS's bias if Joe Barton will support reregulation of AM radio's. posted by Steve M. | 3:55 PM | BlogBites directs me to this post at Obsidian Wings, which expresses entirely justified horror at an open letter calling for genocide against Arabs and Muslims. The author of this letter has identified himself as Martin Kozloff, an education professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington (and author of, among other books, Reaching the Autistic Child and Improving Educational Outcomes for Children with Disabilities). ...Like most Americans, I knew little about arab-muslim culture and believed that the developed nations were partly responsible for the poverty and authoritarian regimes that infest the middle east. Things changed on 9/11/01 when you ruined the lives of at least 10,000 Americans [sic]. These people instantly became my countrymen and you became my mortal enemy. Ordinary Americans are arming themselves for war with you. I and many of my friends have closets full of handguns, rifles, shotguns and thousands of cartridges. If we had enough ammunition and time, we would kill every last one of you. ...One day soon, our planes and missiles will begin turning your mosques, your madrasses, your hotels, your government offices, your hideouts, and your neighborhoods into rubble. And then our soldiers will enter your cities and begin the work of killing you, roaches, as you crawl from the debris.... And if you come to this country and harm a child, shoot a mother, hijack a bus, or bomb a mall, we will do what we did in 1775. Millions of us will form militias. We will burn your mosques. We will invade the offices of pro-arab-muslim organizations, destroy them, and drag their officers outside.... We will transport arab-muslims to our deserts, where they can pray to scorpions under the blazing sun. You have fucked with the wrong people. We will rid the world of your foul breath. Your caliphate will be your grave. George W. Bush on October 12, 2001: "Ours is a war against terrorism and evil, not against Islam. Americans respect and admire that religion of peace. And I'm proud our country is home to many followers of the Islamic faith. Those who hijacked four airliners on September the 11th are also trying to hijack Islam." Professor Kozloff, although he backs Bush ("We completely support our President and our armed forces. We only wish they would destroy you faster, but we are certain that they will") and, naturally, loathes Democrats ("We no longer listen to the insane words of Kerry, Harkin, Kennedy, Clark, and others whom we now see as ideologues who would sacrifice our country and our lives on the alter of their vanity and desire for power"), apparently didn't get the memo. If a man believes in Muslim blood guilt, is it appropriate for him to be teaching young people, some of whom may well be Muslims? ***** UPDATE: Atrios follows up: ...various people are saying the guy wrote them and his response included this sentence, which is his basic claim: The letter was sociological in intent. It was a literary device to get readers to examine their own assumptions. And denies actually believing most of what was posted, and claims he didn't sign his name to it. Man, Ann Coulter needs to give this guy a few pointers. When you publish a rant that calls for the extermination of Arabs and Muslims, you can't be solemn and self-righteous -- you need to be sarcastic so when people call you on it you can say, "It was a joke. Can't you take a joke? Boy, you liberals are really humor-impaired." But judging from this page on Kozloff's own site, Kozloff's pretty solemn about the vicarious war he's conducting from his desk chair. "[Kozloff] claims he didn't sign his name to it." Well, no, not exactly -- but, as noted above, Kozloff identified himself, or at the very least allowed himself to be identified, by a blogger with whom he clearly has a fairly comfortable relationship, a blogger who posted this under Kozloff's byline. Most days I wake up, stagger out of bed (which is hard to do, since the bed's six inches off the ground), pick up the loaded Smith and Wesson .357 magnum from the nightstand, fumble in the pewter bowl for the empty can of jock itch spray (where I cleverly hide the key to the arsenal—or closet), and put away the revolver—alongside the M1 30.06 Garand, the Ruger .44 magnum, the 12 gauge six-round pump, and the 1500 or so rounds of full metal jacket and semi-jacket hollow point ammunition. Since 9/11, I have gotten the family prepared. For what, and when, I’m not sure. But just as I fear and prepare for the hurricanes that rip through here, so I fear and prepare for Islamo-Nazi violence. I may not live to see it, but I want my wife and kid to be armed. I love this guy -- the 9/11 terrorists flew planes into buildings eighty stories above the ground and he thinks he's going to beat them with a frigging handgun. posted by Steve M. | 11:54 AM | The good news for John Kerry in tomorrow's debate is that he's the underdog. That wasn't supposed to happen. The Bushies have been trying to lower expectations -- Scott McLellan has described Kerry as "the most skilled debater" Bush has ever faced -- but they can't pull that off because they've spent months telling us that we can't trust anything Kerry says. Some in the press are returning to old truisms about Bush's struggles with public speaking, but that's not enough to offset months of media snark about Kerry's syntax (some of it fictional). Throw in the many recent stories about Bush gains in the polls and swing-voter wariness about Kerry -- and add in Bush's rampaging ego, on display throughout his term (he certainly acts as if only an idiot would prefer Kerry) -- and the president is the clear favorite, the guy who really might get hurt by a couple of noticeable gaffes. And that's good for Kerry. On the other hand, the conventional wisdom -- that the first debate is the most important one, the debate that will sway the most votes -- isn't always accurate. Remember 1984? Ronald Reagan stumbled badly in that year's first debate. Here, from Paul Slansky's The Clothes Have No Emperor, is a description of the most shocking moment from that debate; this doesn't show up in the transcripts, but it jibes with the way I remember it: [Reagan] blanks out completely in the middle of an answer, stalling for a mini-eternity -- "The system is still where it was with regard to the ... uh ... the ... uh ... the ... uh ... the ... uh ..." -- until he comes up, who knows how, with the missing word, "progressivity." Reagan made errors of fact in that debate, referred to military uniforms as "wardrobe," and said, just before his closing statement, "I'm all confused now." Spin ensued. Slansky notes that Reagan challenged Mondale to arm-wrestle, and that the president claimed Mondale seemed younger in the debate because he was wearing makeup (Reagan denied wearing any). Reagan's doctor called him "mentally alert." Republican senator Paul Laxalt blamed the briefing process. That was October 7. Slansky writes about October 21: At the second Reagan/Mondale debate in Kansas City, the President successfully delivers an obviously rehearsed one-liner -- "I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience" -- and thereby puts an end to fears about his recently displayed senility. So determined are voters to ignore his flaws that not even his observation that Armageddon could come "the day after tomorrow" (a commnt that prompts Nancy to gasp, "Oh, no!") or his almost incoherent closing statement (something about a time capsule and a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway) can dissuade them. The moral of the story: Even if Bush screws up tomorrow night, Kerry may not benefit. George W. Bush may not know much about "winning the postwar" in real life, but Republicans are experts at "winning the postwar" after a debate. There's nothing dishonest in this -- every four years I ask myself when the hell the Democrats are going to learn what Republicans know about campaigning -- but just keep in mind that the GOP will do whatever it takes to "win" the first debate ... even if takes weeks. posted by Steve M. | 10:27 AM | Tuesday, September 28, 2004 Bush up by 8 in the new Pew poll -- but Kerry up by 1 in the new Investor's Business Daily/Christian Science Monitor/TIPP poll. These polls seem to be going in opposite directions: Roughly two weeks ago, the Pew poll had Bush and Kerry tied; a little more than a week ago, the IBD/CSM/TIPP poll had Bush up by 3. Weird year. posted by Steve M. | 10:17 PM | 30 PIECES OF SILVER GOP takes care of Zell for taking care of Kerry The Republicans are making sure that Sen. Zell Miller, who launched a withering attack on presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry last month, gets his pet projects paid for in appropriations legislation. Miller, the Georgia Democrat who was the keynote speaker at the GOP convention in New York and who alienated his party by excoriating Kerry, has been told not to worry about losing his earmarks in the new fiscal year, which begins Friday. The week that Congress returned after the GOP convention, Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) grabbed Miller’s arm outside the Senate chamber and assured him, "Don’t worry about appropriations, I've already put that stuff of yours in there." The New Mexico Republican is chairman of the Appropriations Energy and Water Subcommittee, a panel that small-government advocacy groups say doles out far more pet projects than most other spending subcommittees. Domenici later explained, "He left me a note telling me he had a project, and I wanted to tell him it was in." ... --The Hill posted by Steve M. | 9:56 PM | Federal Review has some thoughts about those varying poll numbers: Could it be that pollsters who push "leaners" to answer get better numbers for Bush [while] pollsters who are content to find undecided voters show a closer race? ... I reviewed all polls for the last three weeks and compared the number of undecided voters to the level of support for each of Bush and Kerry.... as undecideds decrease in a poll, both Bush and Kerry's support increases - as you might expect. But Bush's support increases more rapidly.... What does this tell us about undecideds and how they may break? Well, the Republican spin is clear - the undecideds are showing a tendency to break heavily for the President. But the spin you might expect from Democrats is probably more accurate and more relevant to campaigns trying to figure out where the race stands today. "Leaners" are both less solidly behind their candidate and, probably, less likely to vote. Thus, a greater proportion of Bush's voters in the latest polls may be soft. While that should give some hope to Democrats, they should still be concerned that Bush still holds a lead even when poll victims aren't pressed for whom they lean toward. At the same time, Democrats can hope that this soft support can be turned. There's an opening for Kerry in this. posted by Steve M. | 4:45 PM | Oh, well, that's it -- it's over. I just read this in The Washington Times: Psychic dogs smell Bush victory Psychic dogs belonging to actor Sylvester Stallone's mother have projected President George Bush the winner in November, the Los Angeles Times said Monday. The paper said the dogs foresee the president will beat Democratic challenger John Kerry by 15 percent.... The Times said Mama Stallone's dogs correctly predicted in July 2000 Bush would capture the White House that year.... Which is true -- although the dogs also miss a few: In October 2002, Jackie told MSNBC's Jeannette Walls that the Maryland sniper would strike again before being caught. The shooter, she added, was "a light-haired person, in his 20s or 30s, from a good family, though he's not that close to them." Er, not exactly. My marvelous, extraordinary, irrepressible, unpredictable Mother. Gifted with a facile mind, she has a vast array of talents, but without question her greatest talent is to foresee the future... [T]he truth is the only thing that matters to her, and to tell the truth is the only thing she knows how to do. --Sylvester Stallone, from the back cover of Mom's book Starpower I guess that settles that. posted by Steve M. | 2:15 PM | Remember the long-ago era when even the soldiers hated the war America sent them to fight? Well, welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President: Fewer than two-thirds of the former soldiers being reactivated for duty in Iraq and elsewhere have reported on time, prompting the Army to threaten some with punishment for desertion. The former soldiers, part of what is known as the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), are being recalled to fill shortages in skills needed for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 1,662 ready reservists ordered to report to Fort Jackson, S.C., by Sept. 22, only 1,038 had done so, the Army said Monday. About 500 of those who failed to report have requested exemptions on health or personal grounds. "The numbers did not look good," said Lt. Col. Burton Masters, a spokesman for the Army's Human Resources Command.... --USA Today And remember how, a few years back, certain right-wing commentators would blame this or that ordinary citizen's (or corporate CEO's) ethical lapses on a "moral climate" allegedly set by Bill Clinton? Well... Several of those who received recall notices have already been declared AWOL (absent without official leave) and technically are considered deserters. "We are not in a rush to put someone in the AWOL category," Masters said. "We contact them and convince them it is in their best interests to show up. If you are a deserter, it can affect you the rest of your life." Or, as we now know, maybe not. posted by Steve M. | 10:33 AM | The Washington Post/ABC poll isn't particularly good news for Kerry (7-point Bush lead among registered voters), but there are bits of silver around the clouds -- several voters express serious doubts about Bush and are begging Kerry to close the sale ("His biggest card right now is the 'anybody but Bush' card, and I'm not there yet....We'll see how it sorts itself out"). There's more in this Post story, "Anti-Bush Voters Seek Reasons to Back Kerry." Come on, John -- bring it on. Beyond that, though, I think the flip-flop thing is killing Kerry: "Voters routinely describe Kerry as wishy-washy, as a flip-flopper and as a candidate they are not sure they can trust, almost as if they are reading from Bush campaign ad scripts." Bush has branded Kerry with that. It's a hook for Bush's ads, and for ads by right-wing 527s. Meanwhile, when did Kos post this list of flip-flops by Bush? Back in March. I still say the Kerry campaign, or the Kerry-friendly 527s, could have neutralized this line of attack, or at least weakened it, by creating a duel of flip-flop ads. It's probably too late, but, hell, it can't hurt -- do it, please. Now. posted by Steve M. | 9:54 AM | Monday, September 27, 2004 Fox tries to suppress the vote in a swing state; news media yawns (except for Katha Pollitt in The Nation): Juliana Zuccaro and Kelly Kraus thought they were exercising their civic rights and responsibilities on August 31 when, as officers of the Network of Feminist Student Activists at the University of Arizona in Tucson, they helped set up a voter-registration drive on the UA mall. Imagine their astonishment when the local Fox affiliate news team showed up and lit into the young women. "The reporter asked if we knew that we were potentially signing students up to commit felonies," Juliana told me--by registering out-of-state students to vote in Arizona. When Kelly then asserted that Arizona law requires only that those registering be resident in the state twenty-nine days before the election, Natalie Tejeda, the Fox reporter, insisted it was illegal to register students. On the news that night, student voter registration was the crime du jour.... When an urgent e-mail from UA professor Laura Briggs about the Fox broadcast flashed across my screen a few days later, I assumed that such an egregious example of voter intimidation by proxy--with GOP TV standing in for, well, the GOP--would be all over the media by the time my next column deadline rolled around, so I passed on it. Silly me. As I write three weeks later, almost nothing has appeared outside the local press.... Pollitt points out that the students absolutely have the law on their side -- "a 1979 Supreme Court ruling affirming their right to vote where they attend school." The Fox report quotes a local election official: Tejeda: What many don't realize is that legally, students from out of state aren't eligible to vote in Arizona because they're considered temporary residents. Chris Roads [Pima County Registrar's office]: If they are only here to attend school and their intention is to immediately return to where they came from when school is over then they are not residents of the state of Arizona for voting purposes and they cannot register to vote here. Turns out Roads was brazenly quoted out of context: When I spoke to Chris Roads, the official quoted in Tejeda's story--yes, he's a Republican--he claimed that Fox had quoted him out of context. His mention of "felony" was originally addressed to a "hypothetical" posed by Tejeda: What would he say to someone who planned to flat-out lie--who said, "I don't live here, can I fill out the form?" Roads says he was "shocked when it blossomed into a story about prosecuting people" for registering.... It's deceptive, partisan, and shameless. It's Fox. But I repeat myself. ****** (To be sure, this isn't as bad as the Republican registrar in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, throwing out new registrations because they're on the wrong paper stock, a blatant violation of the law.) ****** UPDATE: A New York Times editorial cites the Fox report in Arizona as part of a pattern of impediments to student voting. posted by Steve M. | 9:54 PM | CHRISTIANS PERSECUTED... ...but you'll never hear a word about from this guy, or from the folks who usually complain about the persecution of Christians, because, well, it's happening in the epicenter of goodness and freedom -- Iraq: Thousands of fearful Christians fleeing Iraq ...Fearing lawlessness and rising Islamic fundamentalism in their own country, large numbers of Iraqi Christians are fleeing to neighboring Jordan and Syria. No one knows for certain how many of Iraq's 750,000 Christians have left the country since the removal of Saddam Hussein, but estimates are in the tens of thousands. ...One Christian ..., Samir, requested that his full name not be used because of fear of reprisals against his family. A businessman from Baghdad, he recounted how militants linked to renegade Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al Sadr recently kidnapped and tortured him until his family paid ransom money. ..."They repeatedly hit me and poured boiling water all over my body. I was held hostage until my family paid them $50,000 to finally get me released." ...The synchronized bombings of five churches in recent weeks and another car bombing at a Baghdad church on Sept. 10 have sent further shock waves into the Christian community. The blasts killed 11 people and wounded more than 50 in Baghdad and in the northern city of Mosul.... The priest of the Latin Catholic church in Amman's Hashimi district, the Rev. Raymond Musili, has put the figure of recent arrivals from Iraq at about 7,000 at his church alone. In Syria, the U.N. refugee agency operating in Damascus reports that some 4,000 Iraqi Christians have sought refuge in the country.... President Gore never would have responded to 9/11 by trying to overthrow a guy who had nothing to do with it, but imagine if he had -- and if this were happening now. For a significant percentage of Americans, it would be incontrovertible proof that Beelzebub is a Democrat. posted by Steve M. | 3:54 PM | Why do American corporations hate America? The New York Times reports: America's biggest corporations are increasingly funneling profits earned in the United States to tax havens around the globe, depriving the United States Treasury of anywhere from $10 billion to $20 billion in lost tax revenue each year, according to a new study. The study's author, Martin A. Sullivan, ... said yesterday that at least some of the transfer probably occurred through questionable tax shelters. In a related study, published by Tax Notes earlier this month, Mr. Sullivan concluded that that profits reported by American multinational companies from their foreign subsidiaries, and not from their operations based in the United States, soared 68 percent since 1999, to $149 billion last year. The earlier study said that the rise in foreign earnings was not accompanied by any gain in real economic activity in the tax havens, suggesting that multinationals were increasingly using offshore tax shelters to shield earnings. Here's my favorite detail: Mr. Sullivan's new study did not mention any companies by name. He has previously cited the pharmaceutical industry as a leading shifter of domestic profits to overseas havens.... So you and I can't save money by legally buying prescription drugs from overseas, but big pharmaceutical companies can save money by shifting profits overseas. Nice. An earlier Times story notes that this is a new development: According to Commerce Department data not cited in the study, American companies took 17 cents of each dollar of worldwide profits in tax havens in 2002, up from 10 cents in 1999. Mr. Sullivan noted in an interview that in 1991, when he first seriously examined the issue, only a small part of profit was taken from tax havens.... But isn't this just an inevitable result of globalization? Maybe not: The figures also show how Congress, by eroding the capacity of the Internal Revenue Service to enforce tax laws and through laws and treaties that favor the use of tax havens, is shifting the burden of taxes from multinational companies to individuals and purely domestic companies. Some members of Congress, Mr. Sullivan said, will take comfort in his findings because "they believe in tax sabotage, the idea that we don't care if the I.R.S. can't enforce the laws because it means less taxes."... posted by Steve M. | 10:15 AM | Pathetic. Desperate. What you're reduced to when you never had an adequate plan: Army Sends Weaponless Reserve Unit To Iraq About 800 members of the 98th Army Reserve Division from Rochester, New York will begin a year-long mission in Iraq next month. The unit, which normally trains reserve and active-duty soldiers in the U.S., will find itself training Iraq's new army. The 98th is a non-combat unit that doesn't even have its own weapons or vehicles. "This is a hard war and we, frankly, inside the Army Reserve have been not properly prepared for it," said Lt. Gen. James Helmly, chief of the U.S. Army Reserve. More from The Washington Post here. (First link via the Raw Story.) posted by Steve M. | 7:58 AM | Sunday, September 26, 2004 A million bloggers have already commented on the big blogging article in The New York Times Magazine, and I don't have much to add except this: With all of its newsgathering resources, couldn't someone at the Times have ascertained that "Jesse and Ezra, whose blog is called Pandagon," "Jeralyn of Talkleft," and "Zoe of Gadflyer" have last names -- last names that can easily be determined by going to the blogs and looking them up? ***** (The funniest gloss on the Times article is here.) posted by Steve M. | 11:01 PM | Bushies say: It's not our fault! Administration officials remind audiences constantly that the federal deficits are largely a result of economic shocks: the collapse of the stock market bubble, which wiped out trillions in stock market value; the recession of 2001; and the plunge in business investment that lasted until this year. Objective reality responds: Er, yes it is (at least now)... The Congressional Budget Office estimated this month that cyclical economic problems contributed only $47 billion of this year's anticipated deficit of $422 billion. Next year, cyclical economic problems are expected to have almost no impact on the budget, but the deficit is expected to be $348 billion. Going forward, virtually the entire federal deficit will be a result of structural causes - tax and spending policies set down by the president and Congress. Oh, and by the way, we're not overtaxed: Tax revenues in 2004 are expected to make up only 16.2 percent of gross domestic product, the lowest share in more than four decades. Although the share is expected to climb to 17.6 percent over the next decade, it would still be lower than it was in the 1960's. (Source.) posted by Steve M. | 10:48 PM | Two weeks ago, Bush had a 12-point lead in the Time poll. That lead has shrunk to 4 points. And in swing states, new voters are being registered in heavily Democratic counties at a much faster pace than in Republican-leaning counties. So how close is this race, really? And if Bush isn't winning, why did I spend the morning reading article after article after article in my New York Times suggesting that awkward, tentative lousy manager Kerry needs to make major changes to save his struggling campaign? posted by Steve M. | 1:38 PM | Saturday, September 25, 2004 The right-wing Internet community can't get enough of stories that make Dan Rather look bad, but, curiously, I'm not seeing many gleeful links to this New York Observer story. The reason is obvious: the story doesn't fit the Right's narrative. It says that there may have been links between Rather and a guy who's hardly a candidate for lefty heroism: Jonathan (Jack) Idema, the American bounty hunter and war-hero wannabe who was recently convicted of running a torture prison in Afghanistan. (Video footage of Idema in Afghanistan bore a CBS "watermark," and a 60 Minutes spokesman confirms that the footage was transmitted by a CBS technician; Idema's lawyer says Rather's voice can be distinguished clearly in a taped phone conversation with Idema. Oh, and Idema's been a source for a couple of previous 60 Minutes stories.) A producer for a rival network says in the Observer story that he found Idema untrustworthy and didn't want to work with him, even in order to get a scoop. Similarly, USA Today got the Burkett National Guard documents and didn't think they were trustworthy. Is that the common thread -- that Rather and CBS News, perhaps because they're foolhardy and irresponsible, perhaps because they're just journalistically aggressive, are more willing to trust suspect sources in pursuit of a story? Seems reasonable to me -- but I'm not a right-winger. The right-wingers have an idee fixe -- that Rather is an agent of the Left -- and evidence to the contrary just doesn't concern them. ****** (Oh, and for what it's worth, the Observer article reminds us that Idema claims to be working in cooperation with the Pentagon -- and says one of his contacts is General William G. Boykin, of "I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol" fame.) ****** (Link updated.) posted by Steve M. | 11:58 AM | Friday, September 24, 2004 BUSH: THE REMIX A sliced-'n'-diced Bush State of the Union address gets a dance remix (really) in the first post here. More cheap MP3 laffs here and here. posted by Steve M. | 5:34 PM | Stanley Fish has written a New York Times op-ed piece that's gladdening right-wing hearts: In an unofficial but very formal poll taken in my freshman writing class the other day, George Bush beat John Kerry by a vote of 13 to 2 (14 to 2, if you count me). My students were not voting on the candidates' ideas. They were voting on the skill (or lack of skill) displayed in the presentation of those ideas. The basis for their judgments was a side-by-side display in this newspaper on Sept. 8 of excerpts from speeches each man gave the previous day. Put aside whatever preferences you might have for either candidate's positions, I instructed; just tell me who does a better job of articulating his positions, and why. Fish and his students at the University of Illinois have a point about John Kerry's indirectness and George W. Bush's directness. But it's interesting to read this back to back with a Web posting found by Ezra Klein at Pandagon; it's from the parent of a middle-schooler who just attended a meeting with the kid's teacher: The teacher told of an exercise wherein he read from both the Bush and Kerry websites. He read where each of the candidates stood on the main issues of the campaign. He didn't say who was who...just "this is what candidate one says, this is what candidate two says". The kids made tally marks about each thing they agreed with from each candidate. Then the kids voted on the issues. Four kids voted for Bush. 26 kids voted for Kerry. You have to realize the significance of this. We live in Eden Prairie, MN.... ...Eden Prairie has grown a crop of Bush/Cheney yard signs that rivals the corn crops of neighboring rural towns. This is Bush country, make no mistake about it.... ...as illustrated by the fact that most of the kids who voted for John Kerry were greatly upset by it. They booed the results of their vote. They were upset that they had voted for the "wrong guy".... It's discouraging, because it's obvious that Democratic ideas are winners, even if Democratic rhetoric falls flat. But do you know what else is discouraging? Fish's article is in The New York Times -- and in all likelihood nothing about the Eden Prairie results will ever get similar wide exposure. If the "liberal media" really were liberal in the way that Fox and The Washington Times and the Murdoch press and talk radio are conservative, the Times and papers of a similar bent would commission articles and op-eds about Eden Prairie -- while Fish, well respected as he may be in liberal/left circles, would be told to take his op-ed to The Wall Street Journal or the New York Post. I respect the attempt to be evenhanded -- but I resent it as long as it's not reciprocated. posted by Steve M. | 1:45 PM | A couple of days ago I wrote about Scott Taylor, a Canadian journalist who was captured, beaten, threatened with death, and then released by insurgents in northern Iraq. Zeynup Tugrul, a Turkish journalist who was captured with Taylor, tells a harrowing story of the ordeal in today's New York Times. As she tells the story, she makes a point about the nature of the insurgency, at least in and around Mosul, that doesn't exactly jibe with the Bush administration's happy talk: Everywhere they were taken, she said, people appeared eager to help anyone they thought was part of the resistance. "I saw that around Mosul, everybody is the resistance - not terrorists, but not civilians really either," she said. "They used the small kids to bring them water, and nobody treated them like children. They'd be with the men who were talking about cutting heads, and the kids would be standing guard, like little men, so you become afraid of the children too." Taylor said something very similar in an interview he gave after his release: When we were imprisoned, we were housed by local people, in their own homes. Their mothers and wives were doing the cooking and exhorting their sons to go out and die as martyrs. It's hopeless for the U.S. We're not winning. posted by Steve M. | 10:02 AM | You know what I'm sick of hearing? "Where's John Edwards?" John Edwards in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Thursday. John Edwards in Davenport, Iowa, on Thursday. John Edwards in Miami on Wednesday. John Edwards in Columbia, South Carolina, on Wednesday. John Edwards in Tampa on Tuesday. John Edwards in Cleveland on Tuesday. John Edwards in Cincinnati on Monday. John Edwards in Raleigh on Monday. Shall I go on? Don't blame the Kerry campaign. Edwards is out there, doing just what Cheney and Bush and Kerry are doing -- making speeches, working up crowds. You know where the blame lies -- with the press. If it seems that Edwards is invisible, it's because the press -- particularly the elite national press -- has made him invisible. posted by Steve M. | 8:40 AM | In The New York Observer, Tom Scocca claims to have gotten to the bottom of the story of Phil Parlock, the Republican who says he was attacked by Democrats at rallies in three separate presidential election years: Mr. Parlock's overall public record is less that of a G.O.P. operative than of a run-of-the-mill publicity hound, a quote machine who's gotten his name in print for stories about cell phones, a new Boy Scout climbing tower and his candidacy for school-board elections. The conspiracy theories about a Republican agent provocateur tearing up the sign don't hold up very well. Bloggers have been speculating that an unidentified man in some of Mr. Snyder's photos -- wearing a T-shirt from the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades and holding scraps of little Sophie's sign -- could have been one of Mr. Parlock’s older sons in disguise. But IUPAT spokesman Gavin McDonald said that the union has recognized the mystery figure as one of its members from West Virginia. "We're taking the appropriate steps within our union rules and regulations to deal with the matter," he added. Well, OK. Maybe he really was subject to rough treatment this year and four years ago and eight years ago. Right-wingers who saw this story thought that was the case, and said it just showed what awful people Democrats are. But Sue Niederer recently tried to interrupt a Laura Bush speech to talk about her son, who was killed in Iraq, and was drowned out by counter-hecklers shouting "Four more years!" -- and who knows what else the crowd would have done to her if she hadn't been carried away in handcuffs. And another woman who interrupted a Bush speech had her hair pulled by an audience member. Maybe this is just what happens when you make your way into the thick of a political rally with the wrong message. In which case, Phil, why go looking for trouble -- with your little girl on your shoulders? By the way, I never thought Parlock was an "operative" -- I thought he was a freelance zealot. Every four years, at least, I still think that's what he is. A lot of zealots have a martyr complex. posted by Steve M. | 8:00 AM | Thursday, September 23, 2004 Fox News poll: Bush 45%, Kerry 43%. Time and Gallup look sillier and sillier. posted by Steve M. | 5:10 PM | Repeat after me, John Kerry -- and all Democrats: This is a Republican tax increase. Bid to Save Tax Refunds for the Poor Is Blocked Congressional negotiators beat back efforts yesterday to expand and preserve tax refunds for poor families, even as they added $13 billion in corporate tax breaks to a package of middle-class tax cuts that could come to a vote in the Senate today. Bear with this -- it's a bit complicated: ...The dust-up centers on an obscure provision in the 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut that Congress passed in 2001. That tax cut expanded the $500-per-child tax credit to $1,000, but it also made another child credit available as a tax refund to some poor families who pay little or no federal income taxes. Such families were allowed to claim a child credit worth as much as 10 percent of their earnings over $10,000. But the 2001 law stipulated that the $10,000 threshold would rise with inflation, effectively slicing into or eliminating refunds for families whose income does not keep up with inflation.... But the result isn't complicated at all: Because incomes at the bottom end of the workforce have largely stagnated, the rising threshold has had a significant impact, said Leonard E. Burman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. Of the 11 million families claiming the child tax refund, more than 4 million -- with 9.2 million children -- will see their credit shrink or disappear in 2005, Burman estimated. Here's what Republican negotiators thought was more important than helping poor families get by: Instead, they focused on a package of 20 expiring business taxes worth $13 billion, including a research and experimentation tax credit worth $7.6 billion through 2014, a $700 million tax credit for hiring welfare recipients, and smaller breaks to help Caribbean distillers, clean-fuel vehicle manufacturers, environmental remediation and wind energy, among others. Message: Caribbean distillers get a tax break. Poor American families get a TAX INCREASE. (If the parties were reversed, isn't that what the Republicans would say?) posted by Steve M. | 2:26 PM | Is it really a terrible idea to respond to the Bush campaign's windsurfing ad by reminding voters that Kerry is a grown-up who doesn't live in Fantasyland? I think it might be an adequate response -- but I'd enjoy a nastier one: The key is the background music -- Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." What song better encapsulates the Bush reelection message? Over that, layer clips of Bush in his most unbearable pleased-with-myself mode. Throw in the "Mission Accomplished" clip and one or two other premature declarations of victory. Intercut car bombs, bin Laden clips, and other evidence of the chaos. Oh, and you could easily do an economic version of this as well, or combine the two. I don't know if there'd be resistance to politicizing that song -- but it was written by Eric Idle, whose opinion of the current U.S. regime can probably be surmised from his recent "FCC Song." Hell, I just want to see an ad like that. posted by Steve M. | 10:15 AM | From the L.A. Times today: U.S. Hand Seen in Afghan Election Mohammed Mohaqiq says he was getting ready to make his run for the Afghan presidency when U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad dropped by his campaign office and proposed a deal. "He told me to drop out of the elections, but not in a way to put pressure," Mohaqiq said. "It was like a request." After the hourlong meeting last month, the ethnic Hazara warlord said in an interview Tuesday, he wasn't satisfied with the rewards offered for quitting, which he did not detail. Mohaqiq was still determined to run for president — though, he said, the U.S. ambassador wouldn't give up trying to elbow him out of the race. "He left, and then called my most loyal men, and the most educated people in my party or campaign, to the presidential palace and told them to make me — or request me — to resign the nomination. And he told my men to ask me what I need in return." Mohaqiq, who is running in the Oct. 9 election, is one of several candidates who maintain that the U.S. ambassador and his aides are pushing behind the scenes to ensure a convincing victory by the pro-American incumbent, President Hamid Karzai.... Sound familiar? This is from The Hill back in January '03: White House seeks to steer Senate races White House officials have put pressure on at least two House Republicans to put their Senate ambitions on hold and leave the way clear for the administration's favored candidates, Republican sources say. To engineer victories in South Dakota and Washington, Reps. William Janklow (R-S.D.) and George Nethercutt (R-Wash.) have been asked to let former Rep. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Rep. Jennifer Dunn (R-Wash.) weigh their options first. The White House operatives have also played up preferred candidates in the Carolinas, North Dakota and Nevada. Some Republicans are holding back for fear of taking on the White House. The White House apparently seeks a repeat performance of the 2002 midterm elections, when President Bush's political guru, Karl Rove, persuaded several Senate hopefuls not to run.... Yeah, it sounds a bit familiar. Now, in Iraq the election rules are somewhat complicated, as today's New York Times reports: Under the electoral system, drawn up by the United Nations, voters will select not individual candidates but lists, whose members will take a number of seats in the National Assembly roughly proportional to the shares of the votes their parties receive. Nevertheless, there are signs of election scheming, at least according to the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani -- and, curiously, the scheming involves U.S.-affiliated parties: Ayatollah Sistani is concerned that the nascent democratic process here is falling under the control of a handful of the largest political parties, which cooperated with the American occupation and are comprised largely of exiles. In particular, these sources say, Ayatollah Sistani is worried about discussions now under way among those parties to form a single ticket for the elections, thus limiting the choices of voters and smothering smaller political parties. The Bushies couldn't successfully run a two-car parade, but they know how to game an election. posted by Steve M. | 8:26 AM | Wednesday, September 22, 2004 NBC/Wall Street Journal: Bush 48%, Kerry 45%. "The difference between those couple of points and being in a dead-even race is modest," said GOP pollster Bill McInturff. "This is not a difficult race [for Kerry] to get quickly back to being functionally tied." In fact, the results among registered voters are virtually identical to the results from past NBC/Wall Street Journal polls — even though many experts claim that Bush had a resoundingly successful convention, and noted that Kerry (dogged by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who attacked his Vietnam record, and Democrats who questioned whether his campaign had a concrete message) had a dreadful August.... We're still in it. posted by Steve M. | 11:16 PM | Just got the new New York Times bestseller list, and yes, it's true -- the Swift boat book has been knocked out of the #1 spot by Kitty Kelley's The Family. 'Bout time. Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command is #5. posted by Steve M. | 6:03 PM | COMPARE & CONTRAST While Mr. Kerry has certainly lost support among women, some polls show he is still slightly ahead of Mr. Bush. --Katharine Q. Seelye in today's New York Times Among women nationwide, 42% say they would vote for Bush and 50% say they would vote for Kerry. --poll results released today by the American Research Group posted by Steve M. | 2:42 PM | I have two reactions when I hear about Yusuf Islam, aka Cat Stevens. One is a bit embarrassing: I still like some of his songs, which I think hold up a lot better than those of other '70s soft-rockers. The other has to do with the Salman Rushdie fatwa: He supported it, and I can't forgive him for that. So when I read that a London-to-D.C. flight on which he was a passenger was diverted to Maine because he was onboard and that he's now going to be deported, I have trouble working up outrage. You may have heard that he didn't really call for Rushdie's death. But here's the 1989 press release in which he attempted to correct what he saw as misleading press accounts: Yusuf Islam Issues A Formal Statement On The Rushdie Affair Under Islamic Law, the ruling regarding blasphemy is quite clear; the person found guilty of it must be put to death. Only under certain circumstances can repentance be accepted. ...However, that is not to say I am encouraging people to break the law or take it into their own hands: far from it. Under the Islamic Law, Muslims are bound to keep within the limits of the law of the country in which they live, providing that it does not restrict the freedom to worship and serve God and fulfil their basic religious duties (fard'ayn). One must not forget the ruling in Islam is also very clear about adultery, stealing and murder, but that doesn't mean that British Muslims will go about lynching and stoning adulterers, theives and murderers. If we can't get satisfaction within the present limits of the law, like a ban on this blasphemous book, 'Satanic Verses' which insults God and His prophets - including those prophets honoured by Christians, Jews as well as Muslims - this does not mean that we should step outside of the law to find redress. No. If Mrs. Thatcher and her Government are unwilling to listen to our pleas, if our demonstrations and peaceful lobbying don't work, then perhaps the only alternative is for Muslims to get more involved in the political process of this country. It seems to be the only way left for us. So in his clarification he said death was the proper punishment for Rushdie, if only the law permitted it, and at the very least he wanted the book banned under Britain's blasphemy laws. Hey, but it's all academic, right? Rushdie's alive and well, and Khomeini's dead. Yes, but: In 1989, two bookstores in Berkeley, California were firebombed [for selling the book]. That same year, two moderate Muslim leaders, after publicly expressing opposition to the censorship of the book, were murdered in Brussels, Belgium. In July 1991, Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator of The Satanic Verses, was stabbed by an assailant who demanded Rushdie's address. That same month, Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was found stabbed to death at Tsukuba University. In October 1993, publisher William Nygaard, whose firm published a Norse translation of The Satanic Verses, was seriously wounded by gunshot outside his home in Oslo. These are people very much like the people I work with, and like the people I worked with at the time. So I'm a bit sensitive about this subject. I loathe Bush and Ashcroft, but many years ago Stevens/Islam poured a few drops of gasoline on a fire that really did burn some people. He may not deserve to be treated as a current threat to American society, but what he said in '89 was not harmless. posted by Steve M. | 2:26 PM | In two posts (here and here), Fubar at Needlenose discusses the story of Scott Taylor, a Canadian journalist who was recently kidnapped in northwest Iran by resistance fighters, then released. Fubar draws on Taylor's account of his ordeal and a subsequent interview at Antiwar.com. If what Taylor says in the interview is correct, we shouldn't expect too much help in defeating the resistance from Iraqi cops: Everywhere we went, it was obvious that the militants had the full cooperation of the U.S.-trained Iraqi police. Whenever we transited outside the city, to the corners of Mosul or the checkpoints, the cops would see us bound in the back seats -- and offer cigarettes to our captors! ... I learned that the Iraqi police on the checkpoints were contributing part of their salary to the resistance's local leader, the emir. After all, they're whacking the crap out of these police recruits all over the place throughout Iraq, so it's partially protection money. One guy was laughing at me and saying how ironic it is that the Americans are being attacked with RPGs purchased with their own money. Sad to say, the U.S. taxpayer is actually funding the Iraqi resistance. By paying these cops' salaries, U.S. taxpayers are actually helping to buy the weapons that are killing American soldiers every day. Wait -- it gets worse: ...my mujahedin captors told me in advance the exact time the U.S. air strikes would hit them. I said, "How the hell you know?" To which the guy laughed and said, "Don't be stupid, of course we know." They have infiltrated U.S. command even. And then there's this gloss on U.S. forces, from Taylor's account: Around 2 p.m. we had stopped near a remote desert house. The nearly 30 fighters had assembled around our car and began to conduct a mass prayer. Zeynep and I were instructed to remain in the car. It was as they were engrossed in their prayer that I spotted the two American helicopters coming out of the south – low and fast and headed straight towards our parked convoy. I cried out in alarm. At first the mujahedeen were angry at the interruption until they too spotted the approaching threat. Caught out in the open, they were sitting ducks. Nobody could move; they simply watched the helicopters steadily bear down on us. At about 800 metres distance, the gunships inexplicably banked away to the east without so much as a reconnaissance overpass of our mysterious group of vehicles in the middle of the desert. We had to have been in plain view, but the Americans turned away. "They always fly the same patrol routes" explained one of the fighters, "They see nothing." Victory is not in sight. posted by Steve M. | 1:36 PM | Dr. Rihab Taha, aka "Dr. Germ," is being released after a second beheading this week of an American hostage. ("The United States sent Taha her first bugs in April 1986," the New York Daily News noted drily in 2002.) When the Bush invasion of Iraq was imminent, she gave an interview to ABC: Although U.S. Seceteray of State Colin Powell says Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons, Dr. Rihab Taha says the weapons, including 2,200 gallons of anthrax, were all destroyed over a decade ago. "In summer of 1991, the whole quantity was completely destructed by [the] Iraqi side and the bombs and the warheads, and UNSCOM [United Nations Special Commission] themselves verified this matter," Taha told ABCNEWS' Diane Sawyer. In Iraq's declaration to the United Nations in December, the country rebutted claims it has nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The U.S. and Britain dismissed the 12,000-page declaration and United Nations weapons inspectors reported a discrepancy between the amount of anthrax Iraq produced and what it had accounted for. However, Taha said the biological section of the report, which she said she helped compile, was honest and transparent. "We spent a lot, hundreds of hours with them, clarifying these things to them. If they are fair, they should close this matter," she said. At the time, that was seen as outrageous. It doesn't seem quite so outrageous now. posted by Steve M. | 8:18 AM | Tuesday, September 21, 2004 Saint Clinton? I love it. (Thanks to Hard Attack News for the link.) posted by Steve M. | 11:18 PM | Kerry has at least one right-winger (at National Review Online's Corner) worried: REVEILLE [Rick Brookhiser] Yut-dut-dut-dut-da-da! Yut-duh-duh-dut-dut-daaa! Wake up! Put down your Dan Rather teddy bears! The election is not going to be a smooth coast home, flipping through memos from Burkett to Barnes to Lockhart to Dan. As Rich says, Kerry has engaged the main issue. The Nader vote, which was showing signs of life, will disappear again. Kerry has a position, finally, and the flip flop meme is about as valuable as mulch. Who cares what he said yesterday, if what he says today seems to make sense? A foolish consistency, etc. ...Bush will have to explain why Iraq was right, why it is better to have Saddam gone, and how we are going to prevail there; and how we intend to prevail over all. He will have to say it in big speeches, and he will have to say it in sound bites. It won't be Lincoln Douglas or the Federalist Papers, but it will be as close as we come. I like it when they worry. posted by Steve M. | 10:43 PM | So who has the "September 10" mentality now? Who cares more about America's security? The people who were cheering Kerry's speech yesterday -- or the people who talk as if we've already won the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and now seem to be spending all their time trying to turn Dan Rather into this year's Gary Condit? posted by Steve M. | 8:16 PM | Everything is wonderful. Freedom is everywhere. Freedom is good. Bush is good. Pay no attention to this: Afghanistan's vice president is ambushed A convoy carrying Vice President Nematullah Shahrani was attacked by remote-control explosives Monday in northern Afghanistan, just four days after President Hamid Karzai's helicopter was rocketed as it attempted to land at a school in southern Afghanistan.... The incident coincided with the deaths of two U.S. soldiers in a gun battle with Islamic militants in Paktika province, with reports that three Afghan soldiers were beheaded in Zabul province, and with warnings from a renegade Afghan militia leader in Pakistan that Afghan refugees there will be at risk of attack if they attempt to vote [on October 9].... posted by Steve M. | 10:55 AM | An American was beheaded in Iraq yesterday, and the news is barely causing a ripple. It's the subject of a below-the-fold story on the front page of The New York Times. It's not currently the subject of any of the "Top Stories" at Google News. Over on the right, the New York Post keeps it off the front page (where the top story is "MOMSTERS -- Lesbian duo beat son to death: cops"). And as I write this, none of the 25 most-blogged-about stories, as surveyed by Memeorandum, concern the beheading (12 of the 25 concern Dan Rather and the National Guard documents). Back in May, right-wingers -- William Bennett and Jonah Goldberg, for instance, in National Review -- argued that the press was paying too little attention to Nick Berg's beheading. Funny -- I'm not hearing anything like that now. Could it be because the story that dominated the headlines back then was Abu Ghraib, which was embarrassing to Bush, and the story that tops the charts now is CBS's documents blunder -- an inadvertent gift to the Bush campaign? posted by Steve M. | 8:21 AM | I'm genuinely sick of this story, but I see that USA Today is reporting that CBS agreed to put Bill Burkett, source of those National Guard memos, in touch with Kerry aide Joe Lockhart as a condition of Burkett's cooperation with CBS. Now, what does this tell us? It tells us that the Democrats weren't giving Burkett the time of day, and he needed help to get in touch with them. If the story is accurate, isn't it a strong indication that the the Kerry campaign wasn't involved in the dissemination of the documents, no matter what the Republicans might insinuate? ****** Meanwhile, there's this, from another USA Today story: Burkett now maintains that the source of the papers was Lucy Ramirez, who he says phoned him from Houston in March to offer the documents. USA TODAY has been unable to locate Ramirez.... Burkett said he arranged to get the documents during a trip to Houston for a livestock show in March. But instead of being met at the show by Ramirez, he was approached by a man who asked for Burkett, handed him an envelope and quickly left, Burkett recounted.... An acquaintance of Burkett, who he said could corroborate his story, said he was at the livestock show on March 3. The woman, who asked that her name not be used, said Burkett asked if he could put papers inside a box she had at the livestock show. Often, she said, friends ask to store papers in her box that verify their purchases at the livestock auction. She said she did not know the nature of the papers Burkett gave her, and he did not say anything about them. Farfetched, right? Burkett's just making up an absurd story to conceal the fact that he forged the documents, right? Oh, don't do this to me. Don't pique my interest. I'm really, really ready to turn the page. Don't make me think he might be telling the truth about this. Don't make me think there are mysterious, shadowy figures setting him up. Well, that's what I said way back. And Atrios, citing Bush's Brain coauthor James C. Moore, is speculating about Rove's involvement right now. I suspect Burkett foolishly generated the documents himself, and is now afraid he'll face a forgery prosecuting for it -- but it would certainly be interesting if Moore, or someone else, demonstrates otherwise. posted by Steve M. | 7:26 AM | Monday, September 20, 2004 I posted a link last week to Rising Hegemon's story about Phil Parlock, who's charged Democrats with roughing him up and/or destroying his pro-GOP signs at campaign rallies in 1996, 2000, and this year. Hard News Now has also looked at this and finds that the "union thug" who allegedly destroyed Poppa Parlock's Bush sign looks suspiciously like a member of a barbershop group at nearby Marshall University -- a barbershop group that includes a member named Phil Parlock (Junior?). And the backwards green hat worn by the "union thug" has a logo that just might be the logo of Marshall University. Parlock continues to deny any wrongdoing, per AP (yeah, the story's inching up the media food chain). posted by Steve M. | 11:30 PM | John Kerry gave a hell of a speech today. ...the President rushed to war without letting the weapons inspectors finish their work. He went without a broad and deep coalition of allies. He acted without making sure our troops had enough body armor. And he plunged ahead without understanding or preparing for the consequences of the post-war. None of which I would have done. Yet today, President Bush tells us that he would do everything all over again, the same way. How can he possibly be serious? Is he really saying that if we knew there were no imminent threat, no weapons of mass destruction, no ties to Al Qaeda, the United States should have invaded Iraq? My answer is no – because a Commander-in-Chief's first responsibility is to make a wise and responsible decision to keep America safe. Now the president, in looking for a new reason, tries to hang his hat on the "capability" to acquire weapons. But that was not the reason given to the nation; it was not the reason Congress voted on; it's not a reason, it's an excuse. Thirty-five to forty countries have greater capability to build a nuclear bomb than Iraq did in 2003. Is President Bush saying we should invade them? I would have concentrated our power and resources on defeating global terrorism and capturing or killing Osama bin Laden. I would have tightened the noose and continued to pressure and isolate Saddam Hussein – who was weak and getting weaker -- so that he would pose no threat to the region or America. The President's insistence that he would do the same thing all over again in Iraq is a clear warning for the future. And it makes the choice in this election clear: more of the same with President Bush or a new direction that makes our troops and America safer. It is time, at long last, to ask the questions and insist on the answers from the Commander-in-Chief about his serious misjudgments and what they tell us about his administration and the President himself. If George W. Bush is re-elected, he will cling to the same failed policies in Iraq -- and he will repeat, somewhere else, the same reckless mistakes that have made America less secure than we can or should be. Maybe it's the Hail Mary pass some people have been hoping for. On the other hand, maybe it'll just be described as a flip-flop. In any case, read it. If you've been lukewarm in your support for Kerry, it really might inspire you. posted by Steve M. | 6:06 PM | Oh, all right -- so the National Guard documents came from Bill Burkett. CBS said Burkett acknowledged he provided the documents and said he deliberately misled a CBS producer, giving her a false account of their origin to protect a promise of confidentiality to a source. Damn, I really liked my Karl Rove theory. And I was probably the first lefty blogger to bail on the documents, so I could've been Mr. Credibility. So ... has anybody come up with proof that Bush fulfilled his duties in Alabama? Anyone collect the reward yet? posted by Steve M. | 5:14 PM | Gee, just yesterday I was reading on the front page of The New York Times that however dire things may seem in Iraq now, as soon as the election is over we're going to give those nasty insurgents in Fallujah a good, satisfying ass-kicking. Today, though, I'm getting a different message from Robert Novak: however dire things may seem in Iraq now, as soon as the election is over we're going to get the hell out of Iraq. Surely both of these things can't be true. Let's see: Voters tell pollsters they don't feel they know what Kerry plans to do about Iraq. Voters don't know what Bush plans to do, either -- but they haven't called him on it yet, nor has the press. Still, what does Bush do if that changes -- wht does he do in the unlikely event that he's actually held accountable for once in his life? Well, he could float one of these two scenarios as a trial balloon -- but one makes him look bellicose to soccer moms, while the other makes him look weak to NASCAR dads. So why not float both? And, just to make both seem plausible, why not have "senior officials" whisper the macho one to the "liberal" East Coast paper of record, while the peacenik one goes to a GOP apparatchik? Then all voters hear what they want to hear, and it seems that Bush has a plan. (Whichever one it is.) (Novak column also available here.) posted by Steve M. | 1:54 PM | One month ago, Kerry enjoyed a wide margin among women, leading the president by 14 points in a Time magazine poll. As Bush pulled ahead in several state and national polls after his convention, Kerry fell below the president among women voters by 1 point in the Time survey and clung to a narrow advantage in other polls.... --Chicago Tribune Even odder, perhaps, was the gender gap on a question in the Times poll asking whether Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Twenty-nine percent of men said he was, versus 47 percent of women, putting them 18 points ahead - or maybe behind. --John Tierney in The New York Times discussing his paper's recent poll Coincidence? Bush & Co. suggest a connection between Saddam and 9/11 every chance they get, segueing from one to the other in speech after speech. The fact that this is a Big Lie is not getting through to female voters, and that's really hurting the Kerry campaign. I don't know whose fault this is, but something needs to be done. posted by Steve M. | 12:24 AM | Sunday, September 19, 2004 NOT FIT TO PRINT Did anybody read today's front-page New York Times story about Tom Coburn, the GOP's wingnut candidate for Senate in Oklahoma, and wonder about this unexplained passage? While criticizing state legislators in Oklahoma City, he used what he called "an inappropriate word" that even he conceded had gotten him in trouble. Golly -- this is a guy who loves Jesus and calls for the death penalty for abortion providers. What on earth could he have said about those legislators that was so awful the Times wouldn't print it? Here's your answer: State Democratic Party Chairman Jay Parmley on Thursday called for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tom Coburn to apologize for comments made during an Altus Town Hall meeting. Parmley said Coburn told supporters Aug. 21 that "you have a bunch of crapheads in Oklahoma City that have killed the vision of anybody wanting to invest in Oklahoma."... Stumping in Stillwater on Thursday, Coburn told The Oklahoman that he wouldn't respond to Parmley's calls for an apology. "Did I use an inappropriate word? Maybe ... " "Craphead." He said "craphead." That's too racy for the Times. Also today, a review appeared in the Times book section of a memoir by Nick Flynn that focuses on Flynn's work at a homeless shelter and the time Flynn's father spent living at the same shelter; the book is entitled, as the Times puts it, Another Bull____ Night .... So what's that really supposed to be? Cover your eyes if you've got a delicate sensibility: The real title of the book is Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. OK -- I can see not wanting to print "Bullshit" in a "family newspaper," but "Suck City"? Is "suck" any more than a mild, TV-friendly vulgarism these days? Incidentally, the fastidious nannies of the Times still offer the complete text of the Starr Report on the paper's Web site. ****** Speaking of books, I'm glad to see the Daily Howler saying this about Unfit to Command, the Swift boat book by John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi: This summer, the overwrought pair published a book which may have transformed this White House campaign. But very few newspapers have dared to review it, and one thing readers are not being told is how kooky this important book is. The New York Times is one of the papers that haven't reviewed the book -- in fact, since 1996, the Times has reviewed only 17 Regnery books, and that total includes A Prima Donna's Progress: The Autobiography of Joan Sutherland and Ross Leckie's historical novel Hannibal. When lefty Nicholson Baker wrote Checkpoint, a novella about a yammerer who wants to kill Bush, the Times leapt on as soon as it was published -- and gave it a vicious pan. But Regnery's right-wing attack books go unreviewed in the Times year in and year out -- High Crimes and Misdemeanors, by Ann Coulter, Hell to Pay by Barbara Olson, Unlimited Access by Gary Aldrich, Betrayal by Bill Gertz, Dereliction of Duty by Robert "Buzz" Patterson, and Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson by Kenneth R. Timmerman, to name a few. Most of those were big Times bestsellers. They help set the terms of America's political debate -- yet no one at the Times bothers to engage them. Unfit to Command is just the latest in a long series of Regnery stink bombs that were able to do their damage in part by getting under the elite media's radar. posted by Steve M. | 10:38 PM | Here's my favorite passage from the lengthy Washington Post story on CBS's decision to include the Killian memos in the Bush National Guard story. It's from a document expert CBS consulted, one who raised objections early on: Emily Will said she called the network that Tuesday and repeated her objections as strongly as possible. "If you air the program on Wednesday," she recalled saying, "on Thursday you're going to have hundreds of document examiners raising the same questions." Oh, really? Gee, I thought Truth was suppressed in this case until The Power Of A Thousand Mighty Right-Wing Bloggers brought it to light. Is Will making the heretical suggestion that even without the existence of the right-wing Net commentariat these documents might have been discredited anyway, by experts, some of whom might even be liberals? Perish the thought! Meanwhile, there are now AP and New York Times stories about a phone conversation between Bill Burkett, suspected source of the Killian documents, and Max Cleland. It sounds as if no one in the Kerry campaign really wanted to deal with this guy -- he complains in an e-mail of having to go through "seven layers of bureaucratic kids" before he could talk to Cleland and about not hearing back after talking to Cleland -- yet the Bushies are cranking up a dry-ice machine next to a gun and insisting that the gun itself is smoking ("The trail of connections is becoming increasingly clear"). Now, I've enjoyed advancing the theory that Burkett was hawking this story but Karl Rove actually produced the fake memos and faxed them from a Kinko's near Burkett's house -- but I'm not going to stick with this theory if all the evidence continues to point to Burkett. Look, CBS got fished in -- there's the problem. It's not the Democrats or Kerry or "the liberal media." (What liberal media?) An interesting tidbit in the Post story is that the White House saw the memos before CBS aired the story and no one there questioned their authenticity. Not enough time? That's White House spokesman Dan Bartlett's excuse: "How am I supposed to verify something that came from a dead man in three hours?" Well, Dan, you aren't -- you're supposed to say you don't know for sure and you have your doubts. Unless you know the documents are fake and you want CBS to embarrass itself. OK, that's another conspiracy theory. The more likely explanation, of course, as others have noted, is that the White House didn't question the authenticity of the memos because what the documents said was accurate. **** Meanwhile, a couple of days ago the L.A. Times ID'd "Buckhead," the Free Republic poster who first questioned the Killian National Guard documents, as Harry MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer who's a member of two right-wing lawyers' groups, the Federalist Society and the Southeastern Legal Federation. One last time, just for fun, a little utterly irresponsible idle speculation: Do you think Harry MacDougald is any relation to Jim MacDougald of St. Petersburg, Florida, the former president of Ceridian Benefits Services who retired in 2000 and attended this Florida confab with Karl Rove in 2003? (Nah -- probably not, right? And, as noted above, questions would have been raised about these documents in any case -- though it was awfully helpful to the White House to have them raised within hours, no?) By the way, chrishardcore.com has collected some of Buckhead's non-pseudonymous writings. Typical right-wing blather, if mustily florid ("...one of the grand pooh-bahs of the chattering class in Washington is utterly bereft of any moral discernment...") posted by Steve M. | 1:01 PM | The blogroll has been updated to include James Wolcott, The Dark Window, The American Street, Rising Hegemon, and The Poor Man. posted by Steve M. | 11:26 AM | Friday, September 17, 2004 Entertainment Weekly (print edition only) finds this gem in Kitty Kelley's Bush book, The Family: The New Yorker's Brendan Gill, who once visited the family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine ... tried to find something to read late at night. After investigating the entire mansion, he found one book: The Fart Book. I believe that. posted by Steve M. | 10:27 PM | In the post-Reagan world, everything's supposed to be run like a business. The New York Times explains the possible consequences when that includes schools: ... one of the nation's largest charter school operators collapsed, leaving 6,000 students with no school to attend this fall. The businessman who used $100 million in state financing to build an empire of 60 mostly storefront schools had simply abandoned his headquarters as bankruptcy loomed, refusing to take phone calls. That left [Ken] Larson, a school superintendent whose district licensed dozens of the schools, to clean up the mess.... Thousands of parents were forced into a last-minute search for alternate schools, and some are still looking; many teachers remain jobless; and students' academic records are at risk in abandoned school sites across California.... "Until the Charter Academy went into its tailspin, few people predicted that these crashes could be so bloody, but this has been a catastrophe for many people," said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at the University of California, Berkeley. "The critics of market-oriented reforms warned of risks with the philosophy of let-the-buyer-beware, but in this case, buyers were just totally hung out to dry."... Then there's this AP story from a couple of days ago: ...Because of a budget crunch, California has suspended a tax credit that reimbursed teachers up to $1,500 for classroom supplies. Meanwhile, a $250 federal tax deduction for teachers that helped defray out-of-pocket spending expired this year.... The California credit was first offered in 2000 as a way to keep teachers from quitting. Teachers with four to 11 years in the profession received $250 to $500. Those more experienced could receive up to $1,500. The credit was suspended in 2002 as state legislators battled a budget gap. It was resurrected for the 2003-04 tax year, at a cost of $180 million to the state. Last month, legislators suspended the relief until 2007.... Well, that's America. We won't even pay for all our kids' school supplies out of our taxes. In a pinch we won't even reimburse teachers who pick up the tab themselves. We think it's a plot to screw us when someone proposes the level of taxation that would actually fund the schools adequately, or come reasonably close; instead, we want some CEO (the post-Reagan equivalent of a knight on a white horse) to come along and just solve all the problems by waving the free-market magic sword -- we don't even mind throwing tax money at you if you're a CEO -- and we ignore the rather inconvenient fact that CEOs are quite capable of making mistakes, busting budgets, or failing altogether. But hey, what the hell -- it's just our kids, right? (AP link via Pandagon.) posted by Steve M. | 5:41 PM | Was TV news coverage of Bush and Kerry during and after the Republican convention biased against Kerry? According to the research company Media Tenor International, er, yeah, kinda: 
Story here. Note that Fox's negative coverage of Kerry is staggeringly excessive -- but that Fox's positive Bush coverage is exceeded by the pro-Bush coverage of that Liberal Media mainstay, NBC. (Link via Media Watch and Cursor's Derelection 2004.) (Hey, my first illustrated post. About time I figured out how to do that...) posted by Steve M. | 4:18 PM | If you haven't seen the story about the Republican who's charged Democrats with assault in three consecutive presidential elections, and whose alleged assailant in at least one incident looks suspiciously like a member of his own family, here it is, from Rising Hegemon. (The fraud's latest charges are outlined in this Washington Times story.) You're seeing the exposure of this fraud in blogs, and it originated at the left-lib bulletin board Democratic Underground. But that's as far up the media food chain as it's going to rise. You won't see it on CNN or MSNBC or the major networks. It won't be in your "liberal media" newspaper. Remember "Axis of Weasels"? It originated at a right-wing humor blog called ScrappleFace, spread to James Taranto's online Wall Street Journal column the next day and made the front page of the New York Post a day later. And then it was off to the races. (And let's not even talk about how fast the critiques of those National Guard memos spread.) Members of the conservative establishment think online conservative partisans are a resource. Members of the liberal establishment, with a few exceptions, think online liberal partisans are nuts. So e-mail the Rising Hegemon story to friends who don't read blogs. It's the only way they'll ever see it. (Thanks to Atrios for spotting this.) **** Meanwhile the Kerry headquarters in Lafayette, Louisiana, has been vandalized again: Burned campaign signs and apparent pro-President Bush messages scrawled in a tarry black substance greeted volunteers Thursday morning at Lafayette's presidential campaign headquarters for U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.... Lexi Thompson, state director for the national Democratic Party, said it's the second time the office has been vandalized. The first time, about two weeks ago, vandals apparently left broken glass on the pavement in front of the office, egged it and stole campaign signs, she said.... She said this second round of vandalism is more worrisome, because the fire could have seriously damaged the building or spread into the neighborhood.... Nice people. posted by Steve M. | 10:23 AM | Thursday, September 16, 2004 The people at the Traditional Values Coalition have an important new crusade: policing personal choices that are none of their goddamn business: Entertainer Wynonna Judd To Sing On Homosexual Cruise September 16, 2004 – County music legend Wynonna Judd is scheduled to be an entertainer on a female homosexual cruise from January 29-February 2, 2005. The singer will also be accompanied by lesbian comedians Elvira Kurt, Lisa Koch; and entertainers Zoe Lewis and a duo called Halcyon. Judging from the comedian’s web sites, it is likely that their comedy routines will be filled with obscenities and vulgar sex talk. Judd should be encouraged to cancel her tour with Olivia, the "lesbian" tourism agency. She has attended Grace Chapel in Leiper's Fork, Tennessee and helped raise funds for the church with a free concert several years ago. However, her involvement in providing entertainment for female homosexuals should conflict with her professed Christian faith. It is likely that Wynonna Judd has been misled by the mainstream media on the origins of same-sex attractions and the self-destructive results of such attractions. TAKE ACTION: Contact Wynonna Judd and ask that she cancel her upcoming concert cruise for homosexuals. Urge her to study what the Bible says in both the Old and New Testaments about homosexuality and encourage her to contact Exodus International to learn how faith in Christ has set men and women free from bondage to this life-controlling condition. Be polite! "Be polite"? I'll tell you people how to "be polite" in this situation -- mind your own damn business. (Exodus International, if you care, is an organization that promises "freedom from homosexuality" through Godliness. It, er, doesn't always work.) posted by Steve M. | 11:17 PM | Kerry's up by 1 in the Harris poll, Kerry and Bush are neck-and-neck in the Pew poll, Bush is up by 1 (likely voters) or 2 (registered voters) in the American Research Group poll ... and (scroll down) Bush is up by 14 in the Gallup poll? Screwy. But no screwier than 2000, when Gallup had Gore up by 10 on September 20 and Fox had the race dead even a day later. This pattern persisted: On October 26, Reuters/MSNBC had Gore up by 2 and Gallup had Bush up by 13. So take 'em all with a grain of salt. posted by Steve M. | 9:44 PM | Sharon Bush, former wife of Neil, has denied confirming for Kitty Kelley a story about her ex-brother-in-law George W. doing coke at Camp David during Poppy Bush's presidency. Sharon repeated her denial to Matt Lauer on the Today show a couple of days ago. In The New York Sun (subscription only), Tina Brown says there's at least one thing Sharon's lying about to protect her former in-laws: I happen to know that Sharon fibbed frantically when she told Mr. Lauer that, yes, she had once been planning to write a book herself but it was a "self-help" book. Two years ago, I was invited to the apartment of a social grande dame to meet Sharon and offer her publishing advice about a tell-all she wanted to write about her life in the bosom of the Bush family. Sharon was accompanied by her then-PR rep, Lou Colasuonno, who has since flipped sides and confirmed Ms. Kelley's claim that Sharon endorsed the coke story. The former Mrs. Neil Bush was a sad, lost soul that afternoon, dissolving into hanky-soaking tears as she talked for two hours about the lousy deal the presidential family had offered her in her acrimonious divorce from W's womanizing kid brother. It wasn't a pretty story and it had the authentic whiff of how power can bully the circle's outcast. She told how her appeals for help to Bar and Poppy had fallen on deaf ears. In despair, she even pled her case to the Reverend Billy Graham, whom she asked to make a call to Bush 41 on her behalf. But, according, to Sharon, Rev. Graham was too sick to do it. Ultimately, it seems, she lost her nerve about the memoir but was dumb enough to have a four-hour lunch with Killy Kelley. Now Sharon has the worst of all worlds: no big fat book advance of her own and all the wrath of the Bush family and its many retainers. I don't know if I believe that Shrub did coke at Camp David. However, I absolutely believe Kitty Kelley's telling the truth about her conversation with Sharon Bush. posted by Steve M. | 9:14 PM | JESUS LOVES YOU AND WANTS YOU TO HAVE YOUR RAPIST'S CHILD Chipping away at Roe ... ...A little-noticed provision cleared the House of Representatives last week that would prohibit local, state or federal authorities from requiring any institution or health care professional to provide abortions, pay for them, or make abortion-related referrals, even in cases of rape or medical emergency. In Mississippi, a bill became law in July that admirers and critics consider the nation's most sweeping "conscience clause." It allows all types of health care workers and facilities to refuse performing virtually any service they object to on moral or religious grounds. And in states across the country, anti-abortion organizations and a group called Pharmacists for Life are encouraging pharmacists to refuse to distribute emergency contraceptives, which they consider a potential form of abortion.... Karen Brauer, president of Pharmacists for Life, was fired by Kmart in 1996 for refusing to dispense a birth-control drug.... Brauer, who lives in Lawrence, Ind., and works at a drugstore in Ohio, hopes more states will emulate Mississippi, South Dakota and Arkansas by specifying that pharmacists, as well as doctors, have the right to withhold services on moral grounds. She does not believe there should be any obligation to refer rebuffed customers to another pharmacist who would fill their prescription. "Forced referral is stupid," she said. "If we're not going to kill a human being, we're not going to help the customer go do it somewhere else." ... --AP By the way, here's a story from the Web site of Pharmacists for Life about a pharmacist who won't fill prescriptions for birth-control pills. Where does this end? What if your "conscience" tells you you shouldn't use a defibrillator on a gay person who's having a heart attack ... or on a Muslim, or a Democrat? What's the limit? posted by Steve M. | 1:25 PM | MISSION ACCOMPLISHED From AP: President Hamid Karzai escaped a rocket attack on the U.S. helicopter carrying him to a provincial capital in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, officials said, in the second apparent attempt to assassinate the U.S.-backed interim leader since he took office in 2001.... The American military said the rocket missed the chopper as it approached a landing zone near Gardez, where Karzai planned to open a school. The helicopter did not touch down and returned the president to Kabul. No, here's my favorite part, where the spin doctor defines deviancy down: "The rocket was fired at the helicopter as it was landing, and missed," U.S. military spokesman Maj. Mark McCann said. "The president was not in any imminent danger." Got that? Having a rocket fired at your helicopter does not constitute "imminent danger." In fact, the danger was so non-"imminent" that he got the hell out of there, just to be sure he wasn't caught in the cross-non-imminence. New slogan for the Bush campaign: "Karzai, Allawi, Musharraf -- Not Assassinated Yet!" posted by Steve M. | 11:53 AM | Interesting results from the Rasmussen poll: Know what Dan Rather's favorable and unfavorable ratings are? 42%-33% -- a 9-point difference in his favor. Know what Bush's favorable and unfavorable ratings are? 53%-46% -- a 7-point difference in his favor. So people who have an opinion like Dan more than they like Shrub. Word to the right-wingers: Don't congratulate yourself on a successful revolution until you've taken at least one city. ****** Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd writes today about the theory that Karl Rove had something to do with those forged Killian documents. Dowd calls the theory "preposterous" and "paranoid" -- but she gives it two thirds of her column, and she never suggests any concrete reason why you shouldn't believe it. So, do you really believe it's preposterous, MoDo? But I guess now the conventional wisdom is official: Following up on a Newsweek story, The Washington Post and The New York Times have settled on the notion that the documents came from Bill Burkett, a retired Texas National Guard officer and Bush foe who has said (see the Post story) that in 1997 he heard about the destruction of Bush Guard records, and later saw some of the records in the trash. The "smoking gun," according to the Post, is that marks on the document indicate that they were faxed from the only Kinko's near Burkett's home. But here's what's odd: Newsweek says Mary Mapes, a CBS producer, flew to Texas to interview Burkett. So why didn't he just give her the documents at that time? You know, anyone can go to Abilene, Texas, walk into the Kinko's, and fax a few forged documents -- it's a free country. Or did Burkett generate -- or mysteriously receive -- some documents after talking to Mapes? And if he mysteriously received them, who mysteriously gave them to him? James Moore, coauthor of The Karl Rove book Bush's Brain, doubts that Burkett's the culprit, according to the Post: Author James Moore, who relied on Burkett as a primary source for a book attacking Bush as having wriggled out of his Guard service, said in an interview yesterday that he did not think Burkett provided the memos to CBS. "His life is complicated enough already, and I don't know why he would make further complications for himself," Moore said. On the other hand, Burkett's response is limited to this: Burkett ... did not return telephone calls to his home. His lawyer, David Van Os, issued a statement on Burkett's behalf saying he "no longer trusts any possible outcome of speaking to the press on any issue regarding George W. Bush and does not choose to dignify recent spurious attacks upon his character with any comment." That doesn't sound like how you'd react if you were being framed. posted by Steve M. | 10:24 AM | Kerry up by 1%? That's what the Harris Poll says. And this poll showed Bush with a 10-point lead in June, so it's not one that habitually leans left. posted by Steve M. | 7:14 AM | Wednesday, September 15, 2004 Did you know that the National Catholic Register runs a regular comic strip about a talking fetus? "Umbert the Unborn" has been a regular feature in NCR since last year. Here's a sample cartoon; here's another one. Here's the Web site (or, rather, "womb-site" -- it's "still under construction" -- like Umbert, I guess! -- but you can use it to buy the book, A Womb with a View). Yikes.... posted by Steve M. | 3:19 PM | 100,000 Iraqi insurgents? Jeffrey White, a former senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst ... who's now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said his conservative estimate is that there are some 100,000 Iraqis involved in the Sunni insurgency, including fighters, messengers and people who provide logistical, housing and other assistance. That's from a Knight Ridder story. Gosh, was it only a month ago that The New York Times said the number of Iraqi insurgents was 20,000? (KR link via Laura Rozen.) posted by Steve M. | 1:47 PM | The New York Times says there's an unusually high interest in this election among young people. What the Times doesn't mention is that Kerry's winning that youth vote. In Newsweek's most recent poll, Bush led Kerry overall 49%-43% in a three-way race -- but Kerry led 46%-43% among 18-29-year-olds. And Nader gets 7%, so the anti-Bush vote is a clear majority. Major-party presidential campaigns rarely fight for the youth vote, but this would be a good year for Kerry to buck the conventional wisdom. posted by Steve M. | 9:47 AM | So yesterday I was flipping through a copy of a newly published novel -- Slick by Daniel Price. It's about an ethically challenged publicist who devises a scheme to help a rapper named Jeremy (aka Hunta) who's about to be publicly accused of sexual assault. The ruse is: the publicist will produce another accuser who will go public first with charges that she was sexually assaulted by Hunta -- and then that accuser will be discredited. Do you understand why I'm bringing this up here? Early on, I said I didn't think the Killian memos about George Bush's National Guard service were genuine -- and I also said that if they were fakes, I suspected Karl Rove might have had them created and planted in order to poison the evidence trail. Now here's a novel with a plot that hinges on a scheme to clear a man who's under suspicion by faking an accusation in the expectation that the fake will be discredited. I haven't actually read Slick, but here's some of the dialogue in which the publicist explains the scheme to the rapper and some of his associates: "You want to save Jeremy from one slanderous charge by hitting him with another." ..."No," I assured him. "I want to save him from one slanderous charge by missing him with another. That's the key difference.... "There were a lot of other women at that Christmas party," I continued. "If we get just one of them to beat Lisa to the press with the exact same charge and the exact same story, down to the minute, then Lisa will be jammed forever. She'll be nullified. What's she going to say? 'No, Hunta didn't sexually abuse that woman that night. He was too busy sexually abusing me'? Nobody would take her seriously. She'd be a copycat. A shameless opportunist. She’d barely get a mention.... "... as far as the press is concerned, it's not who’s right, it's who's first. If we get there first, our woman will be the tent pole. She'll be the one the reporters rally around. And once she goes down, everyone goes down with her. It's like fruit from a poisonous tree. That's why it's really important that we work fast and get our decoy out there first."... Simba remained firmly rooted in skepticism.... "I don't understand," she said. "You're going to have one of these dancing skanks come forward, frame Jeremy, and then what? Admit it was all a lie?" "Yes, but not hers. That's the best part. She'll tell the world she was offered a lot of money by some unnamed source, some shadow conspirator with an anti-rap objective. The press will eat it up. They'll do a total 180 and go after all the people who were going after Hunta. How's that for payback?" I turned to Hunta.... "Not only will this silence Lisa, not only will this turn you from monster to martyr, but this'll weatherproof you against all future accusations. For the rest of your life, you'll have the benefit of the doubt. You'll have precedent." The tent pole. That's what the discredited Killian documents have become in this National Guard story, right? Maybe it's rash to say that something like this did happen in the case of the Killian documents. But obviously I'm not the only person who can imagine a scheme of this kind. ***** UPDATE: You may want to don an extra layer of tinfoil before reading this, but Mike Burke of Democracy Now points out (at BuzzFlash) something curious about another story that failed to tarnish Bush: Remember the allegations that Bush was arrested in 1972 on drug possession charges, specifically cocaine? Today it is basically a non-story. But it is worth looking back at why. In 1999, St. Martin's Press published a critical biography of Bush titled "Fortunate Son". The book quoted an unnamed "high-ranking advisor to Bush," who revealed Bush's 1972 drug bust. The source told author J.H. Hatfield, Bush "was ordered by a Texas judge to perform community service in exchange for expunging his record showing illicit drug use." Hatfield later revealed that his source was none other than Karl Rove. That might seem ridiculous, considering Rove's lifelong loyalty to the Bushes and the fact that he now has an office adjacent to Bush's in the White House. But leaking the story to Hatfield essentially discredited the story and sent it into the annals of conspiracy theory. Soon after the book was published and just as St. Martin's was preparing a high profile launching of the book, the "Dallas Morning News" ran a story revealing that Hatfield was a felon who had served time in jail. In response, St. Martin's pulled the book. "When the media stumbled upon a story regarding George W. Bush's 1972 cocaine possession arrest, Rove had to find a way to kill the story. He did so by destroying the messenger," says Sander Hicks, the former publisher of Soft Skull, which re-published "Fortunate Son." "They knew the stories of Dubya's cocaine and drink busts would come out, so they made certain that it would come out of the mouth of a guy they could smear," said journalist Greg Palast, who wrote the forward to the final edition of the book. Interesting. Now, needless to say, there's a difference between poisoning a story by handing it off to a journalist with a dubious reputation and poisoning a story by handing a reputable journalistic outfit a dubious piece of evidence. But it's a variation on the same theme. I don't know if Hatfield was even telling the truth about Rove. But this certainly piques my interest. posted by Steve M. | 8:04 AM | Tuesday, September 14, 2004 I find this a bit troubling: On the third anniversary of the terrorist attacks that claimed over 3,000 innocent lives, 80% of Americans agree that the attacks changed America forever. However, they are divided as to whether those changes have been for better or worse. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that 37% say the nation has changed for the better while 43% say it has changed for the worse. Only 7% say the nation was not changed by the events of that horrible day. These numbers are similar to the assessment given a year ago when 38% say better and 47% worse. I suppose there are several rational explanations for the fact that more than a third of Americans think America is better since 9/11 -- people hear the question and think, "Yes, we're certainly better off than we were that day," or think 9/11 has made the country pull together in a good way, or think it's made us get serious about threats we were overlooking. But I worry that some of the positive results have to do with a feeling that 9/11 was an inherently good thing. Surely some people believe it was what a wicked nation deserved. And since we know that a fair number of people believe God intervened to make Bush president in 2000 ("During those 30 days that we had to wait to see who our next President was going to be, there was a battle royal going on in the heavenlies.... I believe in my heart that God allowed George W. Bush to become our 43rd President to not only be the political leader of the United States, but as a man that openly professed to being a follower of Jesus Christ, to be used by God to exercise spiritual leadership in key areas to turn our nation back to God"), you'd imagine these some of these people also believe 9/11 was God's way of getting St. George's holy light out from under the bushel. Then there are the people I really worry about, the ones who, even though they'd never admit it, like the fear and anxiety and sense of danger of the post-9/11 era. I alluded to this just after Rudy Giuliani's convention speech, then noticed that the headline in the next day's New York Post was IT'S 9/11, which even more than at the time seems almost like a triumphant declaration. A couple of days later, Paul Krugman quoted the Chris Hedges book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning in relation to the Bush campaign: War, Mr. Hedges says, plays to some fundamental urges. "Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours," he says, "is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver." When war psychology takes hold, the public believes, temporarily, in a "mythic reality" in which our nation is purely good, our enemies are purely evil, and anyone who isn't our ally is our enemy. This state of mind works greatly to the benefit of those in power. Maybe Kerry couldn't beat Bush even with the perfect campaign. Maybe too many voters are perversely pleased that we can't go back to September 10. posted by Steve M. | 2:05 PM | I'm with Paul Krugman 100%: U.S. news organizations are under constant pressure to report good news from Iraq. In fact, as a Newsweek headline puts it, "It's worse than you think." Attacks on coalition forces are intensifying and getting more effective; no-go zones, which the military prefers to call "insurgent enclaves," are spreading - even in Baghdad. We're losing ground. And the losses aren't only in Iraq. Al Qaeda has regrouped. The invasion of Iraq, intended to demonstrate American power, has done just the opposite: nasty regimes around the world feel empowered now that our forces are bogged down. When a Times reporter asked Mr. Bush about North Korea's ongoing nuclear program, "he opened his palms and shrugged." Yet many voters still believe that Mr. Bush is doing a good job protecting America. If Senator John Kerry really has advisers telling him not to attack Mr. Bush on national security, he should dump them. When Dick Cheney is saying vote Bush or die, responding with speeches about jobs and health care doesn't cut it. Mr. Kerry should counterattack by saying that Mr. Bush is endangering the nation by subordinating national security to politics. Hell yes. No more timidity. Here's the ad I want to see: Rapid-fire images of the quagmire -- car-bomb blasts, burning Humvees, the hooded prisoner on the box -- intercut with all the bullshit lines we've heard for two years -- "Bring 'em on," "We know where the weapons are" -- BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM, faster and faster and faster. Then stop and fade to: FOUR MORE YEARS? posted by Steve M. | 1:59 PM | You probably aren't aware of this if you don't lurk at right-wing Web sites, but the questioning of those National Guard documents doesn't just make conservatives think they've caught Dan Rather and CBS with egg on their faces -- it makes them think they are on the verge of destroying the entire established media universe. It doesn't matter to these people that Jayson Blair didn't destroy The New York Times, or that Stephen Glass didn't destroy The New Republic. Hell, it doesn't even matter to them that the Clinton mulatto-baby story didn't seem to put a dent in Matt Drudge, as they of all people should know. Like their god George Bush on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln declaring "Mission Accomplished," these people are premature self-congratulators, and they have a laughably overcaffeinated sense of their own importance. Here's Tony Blankley in The Washington Times: "The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur." That observation by the British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead came to mind this past week as I watched Dan Rather struggle violently like a proud old marlin caught on a hook by the young Internet fishermen.... This week it is Dan Rather and CBS News, through their failed effort to prove the legitimacy of their forged Bush National Guard documents, who are being revealed as hapless, helpless victims of an anarchic, swarming, overwhelming Internet blog technology. Soon, other great news institutions inevitably will be revealed for their inadequate capacity to fully report the news. As in all revolutions, first, the old order must be destroyed, then we will learn both the strengths and the shortcomings of the new order. We got a glimpse of the Internet blogger's strength this past week. Here's Limbaugh: This 50 or 75 years from now will be looked at by nonpartisan, noninvolved, people not even born yet historians, who will write about this is something seminal, as something monumental and momentous in the changing political makeup of this country. This is a time that's going to be looked back on, when a press revolution was completed, when the old media giants fell, when a monopoly was emphatically shattered, and when the new media solidified its right place as one of the great and good forces in American society which I firmly believe that we are, ladies and gentlemen. And here's Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online, comparing this incident to -- no, I'm not making this up -- the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand: Dan Rather didn't think he was going to blow himself up. He believed he was invulnerable. He was the equivalent of some powdered-wigged fool who believed that Austria would come out on the other side of a short battle with its reputation enhanced. Instead, it revealed that CBS News is really the Sick Man of Big Media. I have no desire to go trolling around inside Dan Rather's brain. We all know from Star Trek that a mind-meld with such an alien psyche could leave me permanently damaged. But it's clear that Dan Rather doesn't understand what's going on any more than those poor last dinosaurs understood why the tasty green fronds became so hard to find when it got cloudy. As an icon of the old world of big media, his self-inflicted extinction will surely be recognized as the end of not merely Dan Rather, but the age of Dan Rathers. Would it be unfair to point out that Blankley appears regularly on "old-media" political talk shows, that Limbaugh used to draw a paycheck for football commentary from ABC, and that Goldberg happily pinch-hit for Ann Coulter when USA Today wanted a conservative take on the Democratic convention? No, it would not. Nor would it be unfair to point out that every blogger these writers praise would take old-media money in a heartbeat. And would it be unfair to say that that Goldberg's paragraph, with its jarring Star Trek analogy, is the worst paragraph ever written about the media? Well, yes, it would be unfair -- because Goldberg's lead paragraph is, in fact, the worst paragraph ever written about the media: I love the CBS News forged-document story. To paraphrase the abominable snowman from the Bugs Bunny cartoons, I want to hug it and squeeze it and name it George. Okay, I don't want to name it George, but you get my drift. If this story were hot fudge, I would smear it all over my body and then roll around in nougat. Merciful mother of God. Yes, he actually wrote that, and yes, William F. Buckley, or his heirs and assigns, actually paid him to write it. And yes, the link on the words "abominable snowman" -- a Looney Tunes sound clip -- is in the original. These are your revolutionaries. posted by Steve M. | 9:56 AM | Bill Maher on Larry King Live last night: KING: ...You don't think Iraq is becoming Vietnam, do you? MAHER: No. In Vietnam, George Bush had an exit strategy. posted by Steve M. | 7:21 AM | Monday, September 13, 2004 I guess right-wing GOP congressman David Dreier has been outed. This isn't all that satisfying -- apparently his homosexuality has been such an open secret that it was even speculated on in his Wikipedia entry. He has a lousy voting record on gay issues, although he did oppose an anti-gay-marriage constitutional amendment. Dreier, of course, was prominent in Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign and went on to head Schwarzie's transition team; it's a shame this outing couldn't have happened a couple of weeks ago -- maybe, say, ten minutes before Arnold went off on that riff about "girlie man." ****** Also, you might have read in the L.A. Times or Yahoo News that a former employee of televangelist Paul Crouch is saying he had a gay sexual encounter with Crouch years ago. I have no idea if it's true, but if so, I wonder if it will affect Crouch's relationship with his close personal friend John Ashcroft. When I greeted ATTORNEY GENERAL JOHN ASHCROFT, it was not our first meeting, but a bit of a reunion! In fact, the first time we met, we were boys growing up in Springfield, Missouri, attending the same church! Pray for John, and pray for our PRESIDENT every day! And, when the Washington Times Foundation had an "Inaugural Prayer Lucheon for Unity and Renewal" in honor of George W. Bush, needless to say, Crouch was there. Crouch, by the way, is the founder of TBN, the Trinity Broadcast Network. Here's a partial transcript of a 2003 TBN fund-raiser. Crouch is in the audience; Pastor Rod Parsley is preaching: You foul spirit of homosexuality and lesbianism, right now, get ready, get ready, get ready, get ready, get ready, get ready. [Founder of the TBN Network Paul Crouch is now standing to his feet repeatedly raising both arms in the air with clenched fist "in agreement" with Parsley.] I - Paul - I'm about to do it, I'm about to do it. Listen - [Parsley walks over to Paul Crouch founder of TBN who is now standing in agreement with Parsley.] Dr. Crouch listen. Before Brother Sumrall went to heaven, he pulled me up to him [Parsley now grabbing the lapel of Crouch's white suit.] and he said, 'I'm releasing an anointing -' I've never told this publicly not even in my church. He said, 'I'm releasing an anointing into you right now that you will give one command [Parsley starts poking Crouch's chest with his index finger.] over television and 10,000 homosexual spirits will be broken.' I've never shared that. I feel that anointing right now. I feel that anointing right now. I feel that anointing right now. Somebody go to your phone. If God's telling yeh to go to your phone and your not going - that breaks the agreement. Do you understand that? That breaks the agreement. Go to your phone. DO SOME THING. I'm tellin yeh, there's an anointing right now on $1,000. 1,000 dollars - make my - make my check out for $1,000...your about to get a promotion, your about to get a raise...[etc.] ... Yikes. posted by Steve M. | 11:16 PM | You might want to turn on CNN. Bill Maher is kicking George Bush's butt on Larry King Live. Screw it -- the Democrats should run this guy in '08. Bill Maher-Jon Stewart. Or Stewart-Maher. People whose instict is to return fire when they're attacked, and to do it with poise and wit. Republicans campaigning ... abusive drunk hecklers at the Laff Spot in Waukegan, Illinois on a Tuesday night -- what's the difference in discourse level? ...Yeah, Maher is all over the ideological map. Yeah, he takes a lot of shots at Kerry and the Democrats. But the body blows on Bush were really bracing -- I want that from my candidate. posted by Steve M. | 9:11 PM | PRO-BUSH BOSS FIRES WOMAN FOR KERRY BUMPER STICKER Lynne Gobbell never imagined the cost of a John Kerry-John Edwards bumper sticker could run so high. Gobbell of Moulton didn't pay a cent for the sticker that she proudly displays on the rear windshield of her Chevrolet Lumina, but said it cost her job at a local factory after it angered her boss, Phil Gaddis. Gaddis, a Decatur bankruptcy attorney, owns Enviromate, a cellulose insulation company in Moulton. ..."I asked him if he said to remove the sticker and he said, 'Yes, I did.' I told him he couldn't tell me who to vote for. When I told him that, he told me, 'I own this place.' I told him he still couldn't tell me who to vote for." Gobbell said Gaddis told her to "get out of here." "I asked him if I was fired and he told me he was thinking about it," she said. "I said, 'Well, am I fired?' He hollered and said, 'Get out of here and shut the door.' " She said her manager was standing in another room and she asked him if that meant for her to go back to work or go home. The manager told her to go back to work, but he came back a few minutes later and said, "'I reckon you're fired. You could either work for him or John Kerry,'" Gobbell said.... --Decatur Daily, Decatur, Alabama Lovely. Gaddis is, as the story reports, the sort of boss who puts pro-Bush leaflets in employees' pay envelopes -- "because of the Bush tax (cut) ... I was able to give you a job." (Does he put these leaflets in every pay envelope? If so, what is he saying -- that it's categorically impossible to employee someone if Bush isn't President? Did this company exist before January 20, 2001? Will it just automatically close its doors on January 20, 2005 or January 20, 2009, or whenever Fate deprives Gaddis of Bush? How does Gaddis think capitalism managed to survive in this country before the Dawn of Bush? Did we have 100% unemployment before then?) (Link via INTL News.) posted by Steve M. | 4:23 PM | The Kerry campaign is using the old Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Fortunate Son" in attacks on Bush. That works -- the song rocks and it's about people exactly like Bush. But if the Kerry people are looking for more songs to use against the president, may I suggest another one? It's less rock, more electronic (it's by a band called Electronic), and the lyrics as a whole don't really apply, but the chorus is dead-on apropos. The song is "Getting Away with It." Here's the chorus: I've been getting away with it all ... my ... life .... That's Bush's biography in one sentence, isn't it? posted by Steve M. | 3:29 PM | PARLE, Afghanistan - The loudspeakers atop the Humvee crackled to life: "The Taliban are women! They're bitches! If they were real men, they'd stop hiding under their burkas and they'd come out and fight!" --first paragraph of a new Knight Ridder article about U.S. stroops struggling in Afghanistan Oh, great -- Schwarzenegger's speechwriters are now in charge of psy-ops against the Taliban. (Link via Rational Enquirer.) posted by Steve M. | 2:47 PM | OK, I'm not the only blogger on the left who's skeptical of the Killian documents. Max Sawicky, economist and, it seems, ex-typesetter, also finds them suspicious. Here's his take. posted by Steve M. | 1:13 PM | I told you a couple of months ago that the Vatican had found a cushy position for Cardinal Bernard Law, who was never really held accountable for sexual abuse by priests that took place on his watch when he was archbishop of Boston. Now a Dallas Morning News investigation is reporting that priests who themselves are accused of abuse are being sheltered as well. Here's the Dallas News story, via the Billings Gazette: ...today, one block from the Vatican, a fugitive priest lives in a church building with rooftop views of St. Peter's Basilica and the pope's apartment. The Rev. Joseph Henn's superiors have let him stay with them, even though they say he has refused their instructions to go back to Phoenix and face charges that he molested three boys. A short cab ride north, the Rev. Barry Bossa, an ex-con and fugitive, has found similar sanctuary in a leafy neighborhood of sidewalk cafes and low-rise apartments. His religious bosses hastily moved him out of the United States two years ago as his criminal record and new allegations began to emerge. Here in the heart of Catholicism, church leaders are giving refuge to priests who face allegations of sexual abuse in other countries.... Some are stationed in the comfort of their religious orders' world headquarters. One strolls by St. Peter's Square en route to his job. Another leads English-language tours at ancient church burial grounds. And until recently, one man was serving his house arrest across the street from the Vatican.... The News' investigation ... found more than 200 accused priests, brothers and other Catholic workers hiding across international borders and living in unsuspecting communities, often with the church's support. About 30 of the men were wanted by law enforcement in another country.... Remember, this is an institution that allowed some of its most prominent U.S. leaders to hector John Kerry and other Democratic politicians all year for pro-choice and pro-stem-cell-research positions, while giving Republicans such as Giuliani, Pataki, and Schwarzenegger a free ride (and giving George W. Bush no more a verbal love tap for the Iraq war, which the church opposed). Yes, the church is modifying its selective election-year fatwa in the face of criticism: In essence, a vote for a pro-choice politician is not necessarily sinful if a Catholic, who is also against abortion, believes the candidate's other positions outweigh the politician's support for abortion rights, Ratzinger said. He heads the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. But there's still this: Ratzinger said Catholic politicians show "formal cooperation with evil" if they consistently campaign and vote for abortion rights, and that Catholic pastors and bishops should counsel and warn such politicians that they could, in time, be refused communion. "Formal cooperation with evil" -- can you think of a better term to describe what the church itself is doing by harboring pedophile priests? posted by Steve M. | 10:02 AM | Is absolutely everything fair game for the press these days? From the contours of John Kerry's war wounds to George Bush's failure to take a National Guard physical to a book's disputed allegations of drug use at Camp David, the media seem consumed these days with excavating the down-and-dirty past. All too often the details are murky, the evidence secondhand, the documents doubted, the arguments driven by high-decibel partisanship. "I don't think the media feel badly anymore covering 30-year-old wars or personal scandals," says Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist and press critic. "I don't think they feel particularly badly about publishing gossip and unproven allegations." ... --Howard Kurtz, "Media Notes," in The Washington Post Er, Whitewater, Howie? Not to mention Bill Clinton's draft status? Or even the burning question of whether Clinton "inhaled"? Any of this ringing a bell for you, Howie? Do you have any memory of these discussions? posted by Steve M. | 8:20 AM | Sunday, September 12, 2004 Writing in The New York Times Book Review about some pro- and anti-Bush books, Timothy Noah notes that he learned this from David Aikman's A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush: If Bush is relaxing after hours in a sweater and needs to fetch something from the Oval Office, he will change into business attire, then change back out of it when he's done. Noah adds, invoking the color-coded 2000 election map, Red teamers will think this is admirable; Blue teamers will think it's insane. Yep -- he's right about that. (And you know what else? Any Red-staters who think that's admirable are also insane.) posted by Steve M. | 11:52 PM | Every campaign story in my Sunday New York Times suggests that John Kerry is hopelessly screwing up, but every poll taken since the convention ended, now including the Newsweek poll, shows Bush with a lead of 7 points or less, which the exception the Time poll. In Newsweek, the Bush lead dropped from 11% to 6% in a week. In Newsweek, by the way, the "right track/wrong track" question is now very much against Bush ("Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?" -- satisfied, 39%; dissatisfied, 53%) and Bush's job approval is at 48%, just about where it's been all year, and below the magic 50% number that the Bushies say means he's going to be reelected. So spare me the funeral music -- the Kerry campaign is very much alive. posted by Steve M. | 10:30 AM | Saturday, September 11, 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: the Bush campaign by other means. Several of the largest donors are longtime supporters of President Bush, according to a financial disclosure report filed on Friday with the Federal Election Commission. The largest contributor was T. Boone Pickens, a famous Texas oilman and longtime Republican supporter who was a major political backer of Mr. Bush's father, who gave $500,000 to the Swift boat group. Aubrey McClendon, chief executive of Chesapeake Energy in Oklahoma, gave $250,000; Bob Perry, another Bush supporter from Texas, gave $200,000 to seed the group; and Albert Huddleston, a Texas energy executive who has raised money for Mr. Bush, gave $100,000, records show. Sam Wyly, the wealthy Texas entrepreneur who financed commercials attacking Senator John McCain in the 2000 Republican primary against Mr. Bush, also made the list at $10,000 , as did his brother Charles, records show. At least two Swift boat donors are also listed as Bush Pioneers, meaning they raised at least $100,000 for Mr. Bush. --New York Times Bush says Kerry served honorably in Vietnam. Why do his supporters finance ads that say just the opposite? Bush says he opposes 527s in principle. Why don't his supporters respect that principle? posted by Steve M. | 8:59 AM | Friday, September 10, 2004 MORE DOCUMENTS EMERGE This is funny. This is very funny. **** UPDATE: This, on the other hand, is spectacularly unfunny. But what can you expect from someone who thinks this is funny, or who writes this? Do we all recall the W.C. Fields bromide "You can't cheat an honest man?" It is an assertion of dubious use when it comes to the ilk of the Mordant Media such as CBS. Yikes. ("Hello, here's my press pass. I'm Ilk of The Mordant Media.") posted by Steve M. | 4:10 PM | Go, Terry, go! Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe today said neither his organization nor John Kerry´s campaign leaked to CBS documents questioning President Bush's service record, which may have been forged. He suggested White House adviser Karl Rove could be behind the documents. "I can unequivocally say that no one involved here at the Democratic National Committee had anything at all to do with any of those documents. If I were an aspiring young journalist, I think I would ask Karl Rove that question," Mr. McAuliffe said. Asked later if he believed Mr. Rove or Republican operatives were involved, he said: "I am telling you that nobody -- Democratic National Committee or groups associate with us -- were involved in any way with these documents. I am just saying I would ask Karl Rove the same question." ... --The Washington Times Yes! ***** Of course, the WashTimes also notes the following: The Prowler, an Internet political column, is reporting that the documents attributed to Col. Killian were given to a DNC staffer "more than six weeks ago." It says the documents were handed over to the campaign of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. "The Prowler, an Internet political column," is, to be specific, The Prowler, an Internet political column in The American Spectator, which, alas, still exists and is trying to be as much of a pustule on the American body politic as it was in the '90s. Here's the article (if you can get it to load -- the Spec's server is about as reliable as its reporting was in the "real Anita Hill" days). The story quotes an (unnamed) DNCer who says the Kerry campaign didn't think the Killian documents were smoking guns ("Those documents were not something anyone was talking about or trying to generate buzz on") and people at the DNC doubted that they were genuine ("When there was discussion here, there were doubts raised about their authenticity") -- yet the story still suggests that Dems are responsible for the fact that CBS went public with them ("There is a school of thought here that the Kerry people dumped this in our laps," says a CBS producer in the story, unnamed of course). The Spec server overload and the many citations of the Spec story in the right-wing blog world suggest that "Dems did it" is now the meme of choice and will be the official GOP line on this story by this weekend, Terry McAuliffe's valiant efforts notwithstanding. All I want is for someone at CBS to get angry enough to make destroying Karl Rove his or her life's work. UPDATE: Power Line notes that, in an interview with Ted Koppel, Chris Lehane of the Kerry campaign blamed the Bush campaign. posted by Steve M. | 2:47 PM | It's going to have absolutely no effect, but I love this ad, which the Brady Campaign ran in The New York Times today. posted by Steve M. | 1:13 PM | Why am I not a skeptic about claims that the Killian documents are forgeries, like Atrios and Joshua Micah Marshall? Because the work I actually get paid to do -- and have done since 1980 -- has always involved squinting at type. In the early and mid-1980s, I worked for companies where "typesetting" was done (for sci-tech books and journals) on IBM typewriters. I did some spot typing myself back then -- switching from the standard IBM Selectric "golf ball" to the one with all the scientific notation, or, on a non-Selectric typewriter with the traditional long, spindly type elements that swung around to hit the paper, using what I think we called a "dead key" -- a key that typed whatever character was on a removable type element you snapped in and out. (These type elements were kept, if I remember correctly, in a wooden case by the typewriter. If you're much younger than I am, this would all look absolutely Victorian to you. But we used it twenty or so years ago.) I later saw proportional-font type stumble to its current state -- really good-looking type is now generated on desktop computers, but there was some truly ugly desktop typesetting done about fifteen years ago that was trumpeted as state-of-the-art. These are issues I've thought about for years. I've had to -- it's been part of my job. I don't know about every way type has been generated since the 1970s, but I really do know a lot about type, and what's being said by the people who believe these documents are fake makes a great deal of sense to me. ***** As for my Rove theory, I'll say it again -- go see Bush's Brain or read the book. Then decide for yourself whether you can imagine Rove ordering poison to be spread along a promising evidence trail, poison for which Democrats would be blamed. I can't say for sure that this is Rove's work, but look -- if Bush wins, it really has to be open season on Rove. The press loves to say that Rove can't be caught because he leaves "no fingerprints." I'm sick of hearing that. How hard have major national news organizations tried to find the fingerprints? Have they tried as hard as, say, The New York Times tried to find evidence of chicanery in Whitewater? Clinton was a Southerner perceived as too "slick" to get caught back home, and the national press, far from feeling they'd met their match, took him on as a challenge. The same thing has to happen to Rove. He needs to be destroyed. I just don't believe it's impossible to find concrete evidence of the immoral and illegal things he's done. He may well elect the next president of the United States if that doesn't happen. **** ON THE OTHER HAND: Alicublog reproduces this ad for IBM's proportional-font "Executive," which shows the type quality the machine could produce; the ad is taken from a long post at Rising Hegemon, which, among other things, explains that the ad appeared in 1954. Interesting. The machine wasn't really a typewriter, but the technology began appearing in some IBM Selectric typewriters in 1966. But note this about the justified-font Selectric: Since it has no memory, the user was required to type everything twice. While typing the text the first time, the machine would measure the length of the line and count the number of spaces. When the user finished typing a line of text, they would record special measurements into the right margin of the paper. Once the entire column of text was typed and measured, it would then be retyped, however before typing each line, the operator would set the special justification dial (on the right side) to the proper settings, then type the line. The machine would automatically insert the appropriate amount of space between words so that all of the text would be justified. Hard to believe the military would buy typewriters that required typists to type every document twice. posted by Steve M. | 10:21 AM | Thursday, September 09, 2004 Folks, let's be a little bit wary about at least one aspect of this National Guard story. The right-wingers are claiming that the "smoking gun" documents from Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian are forgeries; that's no surprise, but they may actually be right. The documents in question are dated 1972 and 1973; they're available partway down the left column at this CBS page; they're PDFs. The gist of the forgery argument is that the documents are in a proportional font -- which means that different letters have different widths and the characters don't stack up neatly from line to line as they do on a typical document typed on a typewriter. There were typewriters in the early 1970s that used proportional fonts, as Atrios notes ... but then there's another problem: in a few places there are typographic peculiarities that were virtually impossible to generate on even the fanciest 1970s typewriters but are produced routinely in Microsoft Word, most notably the "th" in "111th" that's a superscript and in smaller type. Power Line is the one-stop-shopping spot for forgery claims; from there you can go to INDC Journal for more info, and to the usually vile Little Green Footballs for a replication of one document that, yes, does look a lot like one of the documents in question. (The letterspacing in the two versions of "CYA" is almost identical.) If these documents are forgeries, my first inclination is to don the tinfoil hat and ask whether Karl Rove had something to do with this. Can I imagine Rove creating forged documents that make his boss look bad, planting them, seeing to it that interested parties know they exist, then staying mum at the White House after they're brought to light, while bloggers and other journalistic irregulars reveal the fakery and embarrass anyone who was fished in? Sure I can: There's Rove announcing in 1986 that his office had been bugged. By sheer chance, no doubt, he gave this news to the media the morning before a critical debate between Texas' Democratic Gov. Mark White and Republican Bill Clements, Rove's guy and the man expected to lose the debate. Democrats always suspected that Rove had the bug planted himself, but they could never prove it. Clements won. You know about that (and a lot more) if you've read the book Bush's Brain or seen the movie. If I'm right, it's brilliant -- it taints the whole subject; it rubs off on honest people raising questions about Bush's youth, whose claims the public will never be able to distinguish from the forgeries, if that's what they are. And large chunks of the public will associate the forgery with the Kerry campaign. Yikes. Maybe these documents are legit -- peculiarly modern-looking papers from decades ago -- or maybe they were faked by a well-intentioned fool on our side. I fear they're fakes, and I smell a familiar rat. UPDATE: It's Friday morning and everyone in creation is on this story -- The Washington Post, ABC, USA Today, take your pick. The Washington Post says, The doubts about the documents left the White House and the Bush campaign in a state of suspended animation, with Bush aides encouraging doubts about the documents but conceding that the possibility that they were forged seemed too good to be true. Yeah, I'll bet. Put that together with this: Presidential spokesperson Scott McClellan said, "I think you absolutely are seeing a co-ordinated attack by John Kerry and his surrogates on the president." Now you know that the forgery is going to be hung around Kerry's neck -- a forgery I still suspect was the work of Karl Rove. posted by Steve M. | 5:54 PM | A 7-point Bush lead in the latest CBS poll? That's surmountable. A 3-point Bush lead in the latest Economist/YouGov poll? That's really surmountable. A 2-point Bush lead in the latest Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll? That's highly surmountable. That convention was right-wing crack -- a big rush, but it wore off awfully fast. posted by Steve M. | 3:28 PM | ONE OF THE BEAUTIES He was not getting out of drills, he wasn't going to be physically there to do the drills because he was going to be in another state to perform his civilian occupation, which was very common in the Guard then, and it is very common in the Guard today -- that it's a civilian occupation which allows them to also fulfill their military obligation. And President Bush was working with the commanders at that point, at that time, to find out how he could fulfill his duties, as well as meet the duties in civilian life. That's one of the beauties of the National Guard system, that you can do both. --Dan Bartlett, the White House communication director, replying to a question from CBS's John Roberts about George W. Bush's National Guard service The Iraq war is taking a growing toll on soldiers of the National Guard and Reserve, which have suffered more deaths since April 1 than in the previous seven months combined. ...Throughout the conflict, deaths among National Guard and Reserve troops have represented 15% to 20% of the monthly U.S. total. In May that figure jumped to 28%, and it jumped even higher this month [June], when 18 of the first 35 Americans who died were members of the Guard or Reserve. ...Army Gen. George Casey, chosen to assume command of all U.S. and coalition troops in Iraq, told Congress on Thursday that that National Guard and Reserve troops could make up as much as 50% of the total U.S. force in Iraq in the months ahead.... --USA Today/AP, 6/27/04 posted by Steve M. | 1:30 PM | Family 'thanks' Bush for death of son ...Ken and Betty Landrus have put up a large sign outside their home near Thompson, Ohio that is sharply critical of the Bush administration. The sign reads "Thanks Mr. Bush for the death of our son." Their son, Staff Sgt. Sean Landrus was killed near Fallujah in January.... "Yes I do feel lied to because they kept saying there's mass destruction and nobody's found anything yet," father Ken Landrus said. Sean Landrus also left behind a wife and three young children. His youngest daughter, Kennedy, was born just before Sean left to serve inside Iraq. Story and photos here. posted by Steve M. | 11:16 AM | Well, this Air National Guard stuff is fun, but I'm afraid it won't have nearly enough impact on the election. What we're hearing now about Bush is the truth -- and, alas, the truth about Bush lacks the satisfying narrative richness of the charges against Kerry, which were invented by a conspiracy of liars. All this would be far more effective if there were 260-odd lifelong Bush haters willing to sign affidavits asserting that they hoovered up lines of coke with Bush before waving goodbye as he drove his prostitute girlfriend to an illegal abortionist just across the Mexican border, all of which explain his failure to show up for meetings and take required physicals. Or, even better, that he never flew the damn planes at all. Let's not get our hopes up -- this won't turn the election around. It sure can't hurt, though. posted by Steve M. | 8:00 AM | Wednesday, September 08, 2004 First lady Laura Bush defended her husband's policy on embryonic stem cell research Monday, calling Democratic rival John Kerry's criticism "ridiculous" and accusing proponents of overstating the potential for medical breakthroughs. "We don't even know that stem cell research will provide cures for anything -- much less that it's very close" to yielding major advances, Mrs. Bush said.... "I hope that stem cell research will yield cures," the first lady said. "But I know that embryonic stem cell research is very preliminary right now...." --AP, August 10, 2004 Scientists in Britain said they have produced the world's first colonies of embryonic stem cells containing the genetic defect behind cystic fibrosis, in an apparent breakthrough in the fight against the disease. Researchers from King's College London, speaking at the British Association Festival of Science at the University of Exeter, said it is the first definitive case of stem cells being created containing any kind of genetic disease defect.... CF clogs the lungs and other organs in the body with thick, sticky mucus, triggering repeated infections which ultimately lead to death.... [Stephen Minger, who headed the research,] said two US researchers had shown keen interest in the CF cells but had been prevented from using them because they were federally funded. The US government does not support experiments on human embryos. --AFP, September 8, 2004 posted by Steve M. | 11:29 PM | You've probably heard that Kitty Kelley's forthcoming book on the Bush family says that George W. snorted cocaine at Camp David more than once while his father was president. Fun stuff -- but I'm surprised we've heard so little about another drug allegation in the book, as reported by The Independent: Perhaps the book's most improbable claim is that Laura Bush, now the model of primness and propriety as First Lady, both sold and smoked marijuana during her days at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Improbable? Is it really? When I was a lad, pot use certainly wasn't limited to the extroverted. Nor was pot selling, at least to friends. Then there's The Incident That Shall Not Be Mentioned from Laura's high school years -- an incident that would have been the subject of a multi-year FBI investigation if it had happened to a high schooler named Hillary Rodham, but has disappeared down the memory hole in the present circumstances: The accident occurred Nov. 5, 1963, when Bush was talking to a friend while she was driving to a party in her hometown of Midland, Texas, the New York Post reported. At an intersection, she apparently failed to see her boyfriend, Mike Douglas, driving south. The vehicles collided and Douglas was thrown from his doorless Jeep, breaking his neck. He died instantly. So let's review, shall we? Laura killed a man -- by remarkable coincidence, her boyfriend -- while driving as a teenager. A few years later she agreed to spend the rest of her life on earth with a man who drank to excess. Why do we assume, then, that she's always been straitlaced and abstemious? This isn't just idle gossip. I think it matters. In recent months Laura has become an extremely important part of her husband's reelection bid. Highly visible, cool and self-possessed in all her interviews, she's presenting herself as ballast for a man who needs to persuade voters that he isn't overly inclined to go off on dangerous tangents. She's W's surrogate mother, his female superego. (Cheney, of course, is Dad.) Too many people are falling for this. Even Tony Kushner seems to have concluded that Laura's still waters run deep. A year ago, Kushner published part of a work-in-progress about Laura that ridiculed her as naively blind to the moral underpinnings of the literature she praises; now, by contrast, he's written a new scene in which a tart-tongued Laura twits a naive liberal character (named Tony Kushner) for spinelessness -- a contrast to the flight-suit manliness of her husband: LAURA BUSH: You're afraid of George because, because, well first off you hate him because he does things, I mean actually likely to act, to act on his convictions — it's not his convictions, it's that he does stuff about it. TONY KUSHNER: Well, no, it's that he does stuff about it and also his convictions are really, really hideous, his ideological— LAURA BUSH: Y'all can't stand his, well let's call it vividness. For people like you, a bookish pallor is a precious badge of distinction, "I have read enough to be muddleheaded enough to be 100 percent entirely immobilized!" Screw that. For no reason other than shrewd packaging, we made an American heroine out of one woman who had the bad judgment to marry a worthless SOB named George Bush. If images of Pothead Laura prevent us from making that mistake again, and make a few swing voters think twice about the nonsense they're fed every day about the Bush family's saintliness, then that's all to the good. posted by Steve M. | 2:55 PM | You know those horrible quislings David Brooks was complaining about yesterday, the ones who see the slaughter in Beslan and -- instead of being real men and proclaiming a counter-jihad against members of the Islamic "cult of death" -- talk about nonviolent political and logistical measures for dealing with the Chechens? Well, it appears that such quislings work in the Bush administration: The Bush administration differed Tuesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin and said that only a political settlement could end the crisis between Russia and the breakaway region of Chechnya. The administration also left open the possibility of U.S. meetings with Chechens who are not linked to terrorists. ...[Richard] Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said Tuesday that "our view on the overall situation has not changed." That is, he said, ultimately "there must be a political settlement" over Chechnya. He said U.S. officials had met with Chechens with a variety of views in the past, although "we do not meet with terrorists." There may be additional meetings in the future, though none are planned, he said…. --AP And, as CNN notes, A few weeks ago the United States granted asylum to Ilias Akhmadov, the "foreign minister" of the Chechen separatist movement. Here's what an AFP story said at the time about that: Russia, which accuses Akhmadov of terrorism and of links to an armed incursion in the Russian republic of Dagestan in 1999, has been seeking his extradition since he arrived in the United States in 2002. I'm really no expert on this. But apparently even this bellicose administration thinks that chanting EVIL EVIL EVIL is not the way to prevent future atrocities like Beslan. posted by Steve M. | 1:22 PM | You already know that Dick Cheney said "the danger is that we'll get hit again" by a terrorist attack if John Kerry wins. (AP story here.) I find myself less appalled by Cheney's remark (hey, he's just saying what all true Republicans believe -- that Democratic presidencies are the gateway to evil) than by reporting on the remark by ABC's Jake Tapper (yes, that guy who used to write snark for Salon). In Tapper's report, broadcast last night, we heard Cheney's attack, followed by John Edwards's response (that Cheney "crossed the line" and effectively blamed voters for terrorism if Kerry wins and it happens). Then Tapper said this: TAPPER: Is there any evidence that terrorists are more likely to attack if Democrats are in charge? What the hell kind of question is that? I'll tell you: It's a question that dignifies Cheney's sewer-level allegation by suggesting that such evidence could exist -- Tapper implies that it could be objectively demonstrated that Democrats will get you killed. Tapper, to be fair, says: TAPPER: There is no evidence. But then he implies that there may, in fact, be a legitimate reason for fear: TAPPER: But Republicans based their remarks on this statement from Kerry's convention speech, which they say means Kerry would wait to be attacked, then retaliate: KERRY: Let there be no mistake: I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and a certain response. TAPPER: Republicans say Democratic criticism of the President's doctrine of preemptive war indicates Democrats are more likely to play defense. Ah, so there is evidence! It's just circumstantial. Thanks for clearing that up, Jake! Tapper finishes by muttering this, for balance: TAPPER: Democrats say the President's campaign in Iraq has made more enemies for the U.S., making the U.S. less safe. This is the debate for every day between now and November. And so the outrageous attack by the snarly, craggy Cheney is made to seem reasonable and legitimate by the baby-faced, decent-seeming "objective" or "liberal media" (choose one) reporter for ABC. posted by Steve M. | 8:27 AM | Tuesday, September 07, 2004 For nearly a year, [a] small group of senior aides from the White House and campaign headquarters has assembled for what Mr. Rove calls "eggies" - cholesterol-laden concoctions of eggs, butter, cream and bacon fat. He serves them with slabs of bacon. --New York Times, 8/29/04 Normally inaccessible to the press, a succession of senior Bush advisers chatted freely while Karl Rove, the president's strategic mastermind, offered cream puffs to sweeten the mood among reporters. --Newsweek, 9/13/04 issue There, perhaps, is the most powerful man in America -- and he subsists on a diet of vindictiveness, secrecy, and saturated fat. I weep for my country. posted by Steve M. | 4:58 PM | Remember how scary things semed in Iraq back in the spring, whereas now the insurgency rarely seems to make the news? That's wool being pulled over your eyes. This is from a Knight Ridder story published today -- not six months ago: By day, Iraqis loyal to Saddam's Hussein's much-feared Baath Party recite their oath in clandestine meetings, solicit donations from former members and talk politics over sugary tea at a Baghdad cafe known as simply "The Party." By night, cells of these same men stage attacks on American and Iraqi forces, host soirees for Saddam's birthday and other former regime holidays, and debrief informants still dressed in suits and ties from their jobs in the new, U.S.-backed Iraqi government. Even with Saddam under lock and key, the Baath Party is back in business.... In the Saddam stronghold north and west of the capital, a sprawling area known as the Sunni Triangle, Baathists freely distribute price lists to unemployed young men. Burning a U.S. Humvee or detonating a homemade bomb can earn them a few hundred dollars. Killing an American soldiers brings at least $1,000.... It's worth reading that story back to back with what Dexter Filkins wrote in yesterday's New York Times: The struggle over Sadr City is over just that - who would take control, the Iraqi police or the Mahdi Army. The Americans, who have watched repeatedly as the Iraqi police have retreated before Mr. Sadr's militia and as the Mahdi Army has broken its promises, clearly fear the worst. In places like Falluja, Samarra and Ramadi, ... the Americans and the Iraqi government appear to have forfeited their influence. Residents of all three places say insurgents are in charge. Falluja, for instance, has become a haven for insurgents and terrorists, including, the Americans believe, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian thought to be responsible for a number of car bombings that have killed hundreds of civilians. In Falluja, the insurgents are free to carry out their own brand of justice, like the public lashings of people suspected of theft and rape, and the videotaped beheading last month of Suleiman Mar'awi, one of the city's National Guard commanders. The Knight Ridder story makes clear that the Baathist Party has been "restructured as an umbrella organization for opposition groups that run the gamut from anti-occupation nationalists to Islamic extremists." The party may now be what it never was under Saddam: a secular organization that, among other things, gives aid and comfort to jihadists. Remember, in this election you can vote for someone who thinks this adds up to a major victory -- or you can vote for someone who knows it's a bloody mess. (Knight Ridder link via Rational Enquirer.) posted by Steve M. | 2:40 PM | Bill Clinton's memoir was rather dense, so this anecdote didn't get the attention it deserved. It certainly seems appropriate now. Clinton describes a call he received in July 1991 from Roger Porter, a domestic policy advisor to George Bush the Elder, with whom Clinton had worked on education issues. Porter asked Clinton if he was going to run for president -- Clinton says he hadn't made up his mind at the time -- and the two talked in a reasonable fashion for a while. Then the conversation shifted. After five or ten minutes of what I thought was a serious conversation, Roger cut it off and got to the point. I'll never forget the first words of the message he had been designated to deliver: "Cut the crap, Governor." He said "they" had reviewed all the potential candidates against the President. Governor Cuomo was the most powerful speaker, but they could paint him as too liberal. All the senators could be defeated by attacks on their voting records. But I was different. With a strong record in economic development, education, and crime, and a strong DLC message, I actually had a chance to win. So if I ran, they would have to destroy me personally. "Here's how Washington works," he said. "The press has to have somebody in every election, and we're going to give them you." He went on to say the press were elitists who would believe any tales they were told about backwater Arkansas. "We'll spend whatever we have to spend to get whoever we have to get to say whatever they have to say to take you out. And we'll do it early." I tried to stay calm, but I was mad. I told Roger that what he had just said showed what was wrong with the administration. They had been in power so long they thought they were entitled to it. I said, "You think those parking spaces off the West Wing are yours, but they belong to the American people, and you have to earn the right to use them." I told Roger that what he had said made me more likely to run. Roger said that was a nice sentiment, but he was calling me as a friend to give me fair warning. If I waited until 1996, I could win the presidency. If I ran in 1992, they would destroy me, and my political career would be over. Here's what I find fascinating: It was apparently OK if Clinton won in '96. The point of the gutter campaign Porter described wasn't to prevent Clinton from beating the Republicans -- the point was to prevent him from beating Bush. I don't know if this happened exactly the way Clinton describes it -- the dialogue, especially at Clinton's end, seems a bit stilted and Capraesque. But I bet the facts are essentially accurate. After all, history has shown us that character assassination is to Bush family campaigns what touch football is to weekends at the Kennedy compound. posted by Steve M. | 1:49 PM | I tear my hair out when I read something like this New York Times op-ed by David Brooks, about the school massacre in Russia: Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible targets for their rage.... This death cult [i.e., all Islamic terrorists who kill civilians, lumped into one undifferentiated mass] has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate. Brooks is saying that when brutal people commit brutal acts, it is moral relativism, if not moral bankruptcy, to respond to savagery with rational thought -- to think about our response, to ask ourselves what we can actually do. He believes we must instead turn our brains off and chant EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL until we are worked up into a lather and are prepared to ... ... to what? Brooks never answers -- although maybe he gave his answer in a piece he wrote last November, when it was becoming clear even to obtuse right-wingers that the Iraqi insurgency wasn't going away: History shows that Americans are willing to make sacrifices. The real doubts come when we see ourselves inflicting them. What will happen to the national mood when the news programs start broadcasting images of the brutal measures our own troops will have to adopt? Inevitably, there will be atrocities that will cause many good-hearted people to defect from the cause. They will be tempted to have us retreat into the paradise of our own innocence.... The president will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we have to take morally hazardous action if we are to defeat the killers who confront us. It is our responsibility to not walk away. It is our responsibility to recognize the dark realities of human nature, while still preserving our idealistic faith in a better Middle East. In other words, the apparent point of chanting EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL EVIL when we see Islamists committing atrocities is to steel ourselves for atrocities of our own. ***** Brooks singles out a Boston Globe editorial for special opprobrium. It's not clear which of two Globe editorials on the massacre strikes his as "glid[ing] over the perpetrators of this act" -- is it the one that begins like this? It would be hard to imagine a more heartless crime than to take children hostage and threaten them with death if demands are not met. Or is it the one that begins like this? Yesterday's horrific end of the hostage crisis in Russia's Republic of North Ossetia, with a death toll in three figures, illustrates above all the hostage-takers' pitiless cruelty. And here's some of the "rage" and "hate" directed at the "comprehensible" Russian government in that first Globe editorial: Responses to the hostage-taking must be of two kinds: for the short term, a painstaking effort to resolve the crisis without further harm to the hostages, and for the long term, a recognition that it is in the interest of Russians and Chechens to find a political solution of the horrific conflict in Chechnya. ... the first obligation of a government exercising popular sovereignty should be to protect the lives of its citizens. In 2002, when Russian security forces sought to rescue hostages by pumping lethal gas into a Moscow theater without having the proper antidotes at the site, they ended up killing 129 hostages and making the Kremlin look callous about Russian lives. Putin ought to be doing everything he can to avoid a repeat of the tragic denouement at the Moscow theater.... Putin should seek a political solution in Chechnya not in response to terrorism but for the sake of justice for Russians as well as Chechens. And here's the enraged, hate-filled follow-up: Even if the official Russian version of what happened yesterday at the school in Breslan, North Ossetia, is taken at face value, it appears the Russian forces managing the siege and the rescue operation were guilty of blunders that cost many lives. Inexplicably, they failed to establish a tight security cordon around the school where the hostages were being held. They also neglected to keep civilians at a safe distance from the site of the standoff. Since there was no proper security perimeter, many of the terrorists were able to hide among fleeing hostages and escape into the town of Breslan after an explosion collapsed part of the gymnasium and Russian forces exchanged fire with a cluster of hostage-takers inside the school. Russian authorities said the storming of the school was not planned and had been forced on them by the explosion. Whether or not this version of events is true, those authorities ought to have been prepared for an eventual assault on the hostage-takers. Talking of concrete measures that rational people might take to save innocent lives -- how appallingly hateful! posted by Steve M. | 10:09 AM | Monday, September 06, 2004 I saw those polls over the weekend that showed a double-digit Bush lead and thought, "Well, that means that when the bounce wears off, Bush will be up by 7 points or so." But it's not at all clear that those polls were an accurate reflection of even a temporary infatuation. Now comes CNN/USA Today/Gallup. If Gallup's right, how tiny will Bush's lead be -- will it exist at all -- when this wears off? The CNN/USA Today/Gallup post-Republican convention poll -- the first national poll conducted entirely after the completion of that convention -- shows George W. Bush getting a small increase in voter support.... Bush now leads Kerry by 52% to 45% among likely voters, compared with a 50% to 47% lead for Bush prior to the convention. And among registered voters rather than likely voters, the candidates are essentially tied, with 49% saying they would vote for Bush and 48% for Kerry in the two-candidate race; and 48% for Bush, 46% for Kerry, and 4% for Nader in the three-candidate race. Tell me more: Bush's two-point convention bounce is one of the smallest registered in Gallup polling history.... Bush's bounce is the smallest an incumbent president has received. So, no "mo." Matthew Yglesias apparently believes all these polls -- the double-digits and Gallup. He thinks that something a bit nutty is going on with polls taken on, say, Friday showing dramatically different results from polls taken over the weekend. Is this "faster public opinion" where people love Bush after seeing his speak and then forget all about it after 36 hours of hurricane coverage? No. I think I know what might be going on. Years ago -- I can't find the passage now -- Roy Blount Jr. wrote that while growing up in Georgia he would go to revival meetings and get saved ... but it never lasted. It wore off after a day or two. That's what just happened to Bush. The convention was a secular revival meeting, and Zell Miller, I suppose, almost made it into a literal one. While it was in progress, poll respondents got the spirit. But the tents are folded up and the spirit is gone. And it's not coming back. posted by Steve M. | 9:49 PM | I suppose attention must be paid when a Hall of Fame campaigner like Clinton says that Kerry should focus on domestic issues, rather than on foreign policy, Bush's "strong suit" (as reported in The New York Times). Me, I'm with the unidentified senior aide quoted in the Times article, who thinks a broad focus that very much includes Iraq is just fine, thank you: The notion that the campaign was settling on a new message for the fall came as news to some senior staff members. "That's really groundbreaking," one senior aide said sarcastically.... "I think our negative frame should be that George Bush is a liar. He misled the country on Iraq. And then everything else that he lies about, bring it back to that." Amen. Today, in case you didn't know, a car bomb in Fallujah killed seven Marines. "Strong suit" my ass. Incidentally, here's Kerry, as quoted by Reuters, attacking Bush on Iraq in response to a question at a town meeting: "I said this from the beginning of the debate to the walk up to the war. I said, Mr. President don't rush to war, take the time to build a legitimate coalition and have a plan to win the peace." Kerry said Bush had failed on all three counts. He called the president's talk about a coalition fighting alongside about 125,000 U.S. troops "the phoniest thing I've ever heard." "You've about 500 troops here, 500 troops there and it's American troops that are 90 percent of the combat casualties and it's American taxpayers that are paying 90 percent of the cost of the war," he said. "It's the wrong war, in the wrong place at the wrong time." I say do this more, John, and keep refining it. Why the hell should Republicans be more willing to talk about their own failures than Democrats are? posted by Steve M. | 11:21 AM | WWKRD? As I noted in the previous post, George W. Bush is out on the campaign trail boasting that he's supported by a Democrat -- Zell Miller. Now, what would Karl Rove do under these circumstances if he were running the Kerry campaign? I think he'd send a surrogate out to get interviewed on TV or in a major newspaper -- a retired senator perhaps, someone like Bob Dole. Here's what the surrogate would say: "Zell -- he's turning himself into kind of a sideshow freak, isn't he? 'See the Democrat who's really a Republican!' He's the Bearded Lady of American politics." If a prominent Republican said something like this about a Kerry supporter, the remark would instantly become an albatross around the Kerry backer's neck, endlessly repeated, possibly for the rest of his life. Would it work if Democrats got rough this way? I don't know -- they never try it, do they? posted by Steve M. | 8:59 AM | FLIP-FLOP BUSH CAMPAIGN Thursday: After gauging the harsh reaction from Democrats and Republicans alike to Sen. Zell Miller's keynote address at the Republican National Convention, the Bush campaign -- led by the first lady -- backed away Thursday from Miller's savage attack on Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, insisting that the estranged Democrat was speaking only for himself.... In an interview Thursday, Laura Bush told NBC News’ Tom Brokaw: "I don't know that we share that point of view. I mean, I think Zell Miller has a very interesting viewpoint, just like I had the personal viewpoint to talk about the president when I spoke on Tuesday night...." A senior White House official, speaking to reporters before Bush's address Thursday night, said, "Senator Miller was speaking on behalf of himself and obviously on behalf of himself." ... Today: Campaigning here on Sunday, Mr. Bush invoked Mr. Miller's support as a reason Democrats and independents could feel comfortable voting for the Republican ticket. Mr. Bush has used a version of the same line at every campaign stop he has made since the end of his convention on Thursday night, and here, as in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio in recent days, it brought rousing cheers from the audience.... "See, my message is for everybody," Mr. Bush said after noting that the crowd included Mayor Jimmy Colombo of Parkersburg, a Democrat. "A safer, stronger, better America is for every citizen of this country. I think old Zell Miller set a pretty good tempo for Democrats all across the country. He made it clear it's all right to come and support the Bush ticket."... Best friend to pariah to best friend again, all in the space of a week -- that's steadfast resolve! posted by Steve M. | 6:55 AM | Sunday, September 05, 2004 Regular readers of this blog know what I think of idiot Democrats who make the party's internal struggles public by blabbing to reporters such as Adam Nagourney of The New York Times. Why repeat myself on the subject of these fools just because Nagourney has written his ninety thousandth "Democratic Candidate Screws Up, Say Democrats" article? But I'd like something explained to me: These Democratic blabbermouths say it's a mistake for Kerry to talk about "national security" -- which is, we are told, "Mr. Bush's strongest turf." Why is it a mistake? All we've heard for the last month is how brilliant Karl Rove is for repeatedly attacking his opponents' strengths. If it's done right -- and if some of these Democrats will give Kerry a little backup -- why shouldn't this strategy work for Kerry, too? posted by Steve M. | 2:40 PM | Saturday, September 04, 2004 Let's put this into context: Yes, Time has Bush up by 11 among likely voters (or up by 10, according to Polling Report, though Newsweek has Bush up by 11). That's bad. But.... Let's look at 2000. Newsweek had Bush up by 11 in early August (just after the Republican convention). Then Newsweek had Gore up by 10 at the very end of August (a couple of weeks after the Democratic convention). We know how that one turned out, right? CNN/Time had Bush up by 14 on August 10. That wasn't exactly predictive either. Bad news, yes, but this is a very reversible lead. posted by Steve M. | 3:03 PM | From an article in yesterday's New York Times about a gathering on the last day of the Republican convention: In the morning, Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican Party; Matt Schlapp, a top White House political aide; Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas; and a number of Republican elected officials addressed a gathering of about 300 Catholics at the Westin Hotel near the convention. They said the party had recruited more than 50,000 Catholic "team leaders" nationwide as part of an effort to build a special Catholic outreach program alongside the state and local Republican Parties.... In an invocation, the Rev. Frank Pavone, the founder of Priests for Life, who is seeking to organize voter registration efforts in Catholic churches around the country for the first time, said, "Isn't it great to be with Catholics who aren't afraid to be political?" Can someone please explain to me why donations to Priests for Life are tax-deductible? posted by Steve M. | 8:56 AM | It might not be your idea of leisurely reading on a long weekend, but at some point you've really got to get to John Cassidy's New Yorker article on the scary erosion of progressive taxation -- and how much worse it's likely to get in the event of a second Bush term. A sample: Roughly two-thirds of taxable income is paid to workers in the form of wages and benefits. The other third goes to reward capital, or accumulated savings, in the form of corporate profits, dividends, and interest payments. If Bush's economic agenda was fully enacted, the vast bulk of these payments wouldn't be taxed at all, and labor would end up shouldering practically the entire burden of financing the federal government. In a new book, "Neoconomy: George Bush's Revolutionary Gamble with America’s Future," Daniel Altman, a former economics reporter for the Times and The Economist, describes what such a system might look like. "The fortunate and growing minority who managed to receive all their income from stocks, bonds and other securities would pay nothing -- not a dime -- for America's cancer research, its international diplomacy, its military deterrent, the maintenance of the interstate highway system, the space program or almost anything else the federal government did.... Broadly speaking, that fortunate minority would be free-riders." Cassidy's point is that this is already happening, gradually -- as Bush chips away at the estate tax and capital gains taxes and the like. This is what worries me about a second Bush term more than the Patriot Act or additional wars -- the likelihood that, when the dust settles, every single member of America's middle class will be paying taxes at a higher rate than every billionaire. I think this is a formula for unimaginable deficits if social programs aren't drastically cut, or for a return to the Victorian era -- massive inequality, children sleeping under bridges -- if they are drastically cut. Read the article. It really could happen. ******* Meanwhile, Floyd Norris noted in yesterday's New York Times just how bad the Bush years have been for private-sector wage earners -- worse than under any president since Kennedy: In the area people think of when they hear about personal income - wage and salary payments - the picture is not as pretty. The entire increase there comes from the government payroll. Adjusted for inflation, private industry is paying almost exactly the same as in 2000. To be precise, private spending on wages is up less than 0.1 percent. No administration back to John F. Kennedy has done as poorly. The two that came closest - a 1.4 percent rise under the first President Bush and a 3.3 percent gain in the term that ended with Gerald Ford in the White House - each ended with incumbents losing the election. (Though I guess if you complain about this, you're an economic girly-man.) The main point of Norris's column is that under Bush -- despite the fact that he's a member of The Party That Hates Government -- the only significant increase in total (inflation adjusted) wages and salaries has been in the government sector. Think all those delegates in elephant-trunk hats this week knew that? John Cassidy notes in The New Yorker that anti-tax types close to the president -- the Club for Growth, Grover Norquist -- are pushing for "halving the size of federal spending, from twenty per cent of G.D.P. to ten per cent." But Bush is doing no such thing -- he's just cutting taxes. How high can the deficits go? How much can debt can we foist on future generations? posted by Steve M. | 8:30 AM | Friday, September 03, 2004 This morning Atrios posted a link to a really, fine, angry visual rebuttal to the veteran-dishonoring RNC Republicans. If you liked that, you might also appreciate this story (spotted by Barbara O'Brien at the Mahablog): NEW YORK - Young Republicans gathered here for their party's national convention are united in applauding the war in Iraq, supporting the U.S. troops there and calling the U.S. mission a noble cause. But there's no such unanimity when they're asked a more personal question: Would you be willing to put on the uniform and go to fight in Iraq?... "Frankly, I want to be a politician. I'd like to survive to see that," said Vivian Lee, 17, a war supporter visiting the convention from Los Angeles, Lee said she supports the war but would volunteer only if the United States faced a dire troop shortage or "if there's another Sept. 11." "As long as there's a steady stream of volunteers, I don't see why I necessarily should volunteer," said Lee, who has a cousin deployed in the Middle East.... "If there was a need presented, I would go," said Chris Cusmano, a 21-year-old member of the College Republicans organization from Rocky Point, N.Y. But he said he hasn't really considered volunteering.... "I physically probably couldn't do a whole lot" in Iraq, said Tiffanee Hokel, 18, of Webster City, Iowa, who called the war a moral imperative. She knows people posted in Iraq, but she didn't flinch when asked why she wouldn't go. "I think I could do more here," Hokel said, adding that she's focusing on political action that supports the war and the troops. "We don't have to be there physically to fight it," she said.... Emulating the president, clearly. posted by Steve M. | 1:07 PM | My favorite line from John Zogby's comments on his new presidential poll, conducted throughout the week: Remember that two weeks after the Democratic Convention of 2000, Newsweek's cover story asked if Al Gore could be stopped. That's important, because some polls (probably Gallup, CNN/USA Today/Gallup, and Washington Post/ABC, which always skew toward the GOP) will surely show Bush with a lead larger than the margin of error. Zogby's results? A whopping two-point lead for Bush. posted by Steve M. | 11:13 AM | From the Bush speech: Three days after September the 11th, I stood where Americans died, in the ruins of the twin towers. Workers in hard hats were shouting to me, "Whatever it takes." A fellow grabbed me by the arm, and he said, "Do not let me down." Since that day, I wake up every morning thinking about how to better protect our country. Here's something I'd love to hear Kerry to say in response: The president says that since September 11 he wakes up every morning thinking about how to protect the country better. Well, let me remind you of something: On August 6, 2001, five weeks before September 11, the president received a CIA briefing paper titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." That was the title of the briefing: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." Can't get clearer than that. The briefing paper said, "Al Qaeda members -- including some who are U.S. citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks." It talked about "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings." The president received this briefing while on vacation at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. I'm pleased that the president now wakes up wondering how best to protect the country. But shouldn't we have had a president who woke up thinking about protecting America every morning between August 6 and September 11, 2001? Shouldn't we have had a president who woke up thinking about protecting America every morning from the day he was sworn in? posted by Steve M. | 9:44 AM | Thursday, September 02, 2004 Oh, and that riff in Bush's speech about naysayers in Germany just after World War II? As I told you a couple of months ago, those stories (which right-wingers have been circulating for a while now) came from 1945 and 1946. The Marshall Plan didn't start until 1948. UPDATE: OK, I'm looking at the text of Bush's speech and I see that newspaper editorial he quotes isn't one of the ones I linked. But my point stands: The editorial was from 1946. The inception of the Marshall Plan was April 3, 1948, the day Harry Truman signed the Economic Cooperation Act. posted by Steve M. | 11:36 PM | Odd Bush speech, in some ways. I'm baffled by the decision to put in so much about liberty. People want jobs; they want American troops to be able to get the hell out of Iraq. Americans will have liberty regardless of who's president; as regards the effort that's described as an effort to export liberty to the Middle East, undecided voters are, frankly, sick of it. But there it was. It was, in the language of a presidential speech, the foreign-policy stuff they talk about in think tanks -- just as much of the first half of the speech was a recitation of domestic-policy ideas from think tanks. Strange. posted by Steve M. | 11:05 PM | Striking absence of nastiness in Bush's speech so far. But that's no surprise, really.... It's easy for the Bushes to stay gallant. They delegate the gutter. --Maureen Dowd ...Whoops, never mind. Here comes some red meat. Kerry -- he's from Massachusetts! ("Hey, Zell, you think you're the big Kerry-bashing stud? Watch this.") posted by Steve M. | 10:25 PM | Bush. In the round! Whoa! The people who redesigned Jay Leno's set a few years ago deserve a royalty. posted by Steve M. | 10:08 PM | Now Pataki is turning into Zell Miller. And Pataki started out sounding as if he was reading a children's book aloud. In fact, he still sounds as if he's reading a children's book aloud -- and the book is turning into Zell Miller's speech. It's creepy. It's Stephen King creepy. posted by Steve M. | 9:47 PM | The August start of the back-to-school shopping season was a disappointment for major retailers, giving the industry a third straight month of tepid sales. Higher gasoline prices and consumers' ongoing worries about jobs contributed to the poor showing. As storeowners reported their monthly results Thursday, the discouraging news came from all sectors, though discounters and wholesale club operators like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp. were particularly hard-hit. Wal-Mart, usually the industry leader, suffered its weakest performance in more than 3 1/2 years. The big exceptions were high-end stores whose well-heeled customers have been the first to benefit from the economic recovery and have not been as vulnerable to rising gasoline prices.... --AP To Republicans, I think that qualifies as an economic boom. posted by Steve M. | 6:19 PM | SORRY -- THERE'S ONE SET OF LAWS FOR US GOOD PEOPLE AND ANOTHER SET FOR YOU SATAN-WORSHIPPING DEMOCRATS Fox News says that a pro-Bush DVD may be coming to a church near you in time for the election: President Bush prays, he consults scripture; he even plans services on Air Force One when he isn't able to attend church on the ground. So says a new documentary that points out that yes, Bush is a religious man, and many of his core supporters find that one of his most endearing traits. "I think what they like about this man -- and what seems to scare other people -- is his faith," said David W. Balsiger, producer of "George W. Bush: Faith in the White House."... Balsiger said he expects more than one million DVDs of his film, which documents the role of faith in the president's life and in his leadership, to be in circulation in the next few months, and he hopes it will "go head to head" with the DVD release of Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" on Oct 5.... Aside from distributing the film through secular channels like Wal-Mart, Balsiger said it will be available at thousands of churches, religious organizations and bookstores.... From the IRS: Organizations described in section 501(c)(3) of the Code that are exempt from federal income tax are prohibited from participating or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office. Charities, educational institutions and religious organizations, including churches, are among those that are tax-exempt under this code section. These organizations cannot endorse any candidates, make donations to their campaigns, engage in fund raising, distribute statements, or become involved in any other activities that may be beneficial or detrimental to any candidate.... So, is anyone going to uphold the law in this case? This appears to be a clear violation of the law, yet the people who made the film seem not to care. Meanwhile, other film companies are trying so hard to be careful that they may be deciding not to do things that are perfectly legal. Will it shock you if I tell you these movies are not right-wing? Warner Brothers has decided not to distribute the director David O. Russell's new antiwar documentary when it re-releases his 1999 Gulf War movie, "Three Kings," this fall, judging it "totally inappropriate" to do so in a political season, a studio spokeswoman said.... The studio's decision reflects a heightened sensitivity by media companies over movies that may be construed as partisan. Sony recently backed out of a deal to distribute the DVD of "The Control Room," a documentary about the Arab news channel Al Jazeera.... Earlier this year the Walt Disney Company became part of a cultural firestorm when it declined to distribute Michael Moore's anti-Bush documentary, "Fahrenheit: 9/11," saying it was too political. ...unlike Mr. Moore's film, the Russell documentary does not endorse or even mention either presidential candidate.... Warner Brothers ... ask[ed] its lawyers if the documentary might run afoul of Federal Election Commission regulations, or constitute a so-called soft money political contribution. Though the legal opinion was unclear, the studio decided not to release a film that might be construed as partisan ahead of the election.... Warner planned to include the documentary as an extra on the DVD of Three Kings. Presumably Warner plans to advertise the Three Kings DVD on TV, and I'm guessing that Warner doesn't want to advertise the movie during the campaign if the DVD has "partisan" content -- even though the "partisan" content may not be explicitly partisan and even though the ads don't have to say anything about the documentary. Meanwhile, I assume the makers of the Bush doc will do whatever the hell they feel like doing. posted by Steve M. | 4:15 PM | On this Day After Zell, it might be instructive to look back at the way some media Deep Thinkers have portrayed angry right-wing political speech -- as primarily a '90s affliction, or as something that exists to this day but is primarily the province of cable-news pundits and the "vaudevillians" of talk radio: There are those who believe the Democrats cannot succeed without the politics of the sewer. These are the same people who believe it is the politics of the sewer to which the Republicans owe their success. This view significantly underestimates the depth and the nature of George W. Bush's support in American society, and significantly overestimates the influence of the media and its pundit vaudeville on American politics. Rush Limbaugh did not elect a president and neither will Michael Moore. --Leon Wieseltier in The New York Times Book Review, 8/8/04 The left should have learned from Newt Gingrich that rage impedes understanding -- and turns off voters. That's why President Bush was careful in 2000, unlike many in his party, to project amiability and optimism. --Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times, 11/12/03 It wasn't surprising when the right foamed at the mouth during the Clinton years, for conservatives have always been quick to detect evil empires. But liberals love subtlety and describe the world in a palette of grays -- yet many have now dropped all nuance about this president. --Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times, 6/30/04 If the reds have Bill O'Reilly, the blues now have Al Franken. If red people read "Treason," blue people read "Thieves in High Places." Log onto Amazon.com, and one click takes you to the literary red team, another to the blue team.... Now we are getting our own space in the cineplex. When "Fahrenheit 9/11" hit $23.9 million the first weekend, box office receipts were read like political tea leaves. Moore was also cast as the left's Mel Gibson. Whose "passion" was more powerful? --Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, 7/1/04 After last night, the truth should be obvious even to these media elitists: Conservative hatred of political opponents is not a historical artifact, and it is not primarily a phenomenon of the media. Conservative hatred of political opponents is a central element of the Republican Party. posted by Steve M. | 12:17 PM | The peripheral stuff (the Zell Miller MSNBC interview, the Purple Heart bandages) is ugly and seems likely to backfire, but I have to disagree with what seems to be the conventional lefty wisdom -- that last night's speeches were a disaster for the GOP. (Andrew Sullivan, to my surprise, feels that way as well.) Although I still think undecided voters want something other than red meat, the Miller and Cheney speeches were, alas, extremely well-prepared red meat. Voters buy the flip-flop line, and the GOP packaging of Kerry's Senate record is fairly skillful. (Kerry really, really needs to do an ad about Bush flip-flops; his best defense against the attacks on his record is to keep reminding people, as he did in his American Legion speech, which candidate in this race has truly endagered America by showing abysmal judgment at critical moments in history.) I think tonight is going to be a bad night for the Republicans. Juan Williams, the GOP's go-to transmitter of talking points on NPR, said this morning that we'll be getting the nice, domesticated George W. tonight. That means Bush will be manfully trying to suppress his cocksureness and smugness, an effort that often makes him seem dull and zombified. Or the cocksureness will come out -- he'll say things in his signature "If you weren't such a clueless idiot I wouldn't even have to be explaining this" tone. And the content -- medical savings accounts? "The ownership society"? "If you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country," Bush tells audiences -- if he says that tonight, how is that supposed to inspire people who can barely afford the rent? He'll say we're winning the war on terror. He'll say the economy is turning around. He'll say the No Child Left Behind law is working. He'll say the Medicare prescription-drug plan is working. How on earth is this going to help him with voters who are undecided largely because they don't believe any of this? **** Oh, and he'll be introduced by New York's not exactly dynamic governor, George Pataki -- the Droop-A-Long Coyote of American politics. And in a bizarre mismatch, the utterly prosaic governor is getting speechwriting help from Peggy Noonan, usually a purveyor of pseudo-poetic gunk. Noonan is also a social conservative, while Pataki supports abortion rights and gay rights. Hard to imagine that this is going to work. posted by Steve M. | 10:51 AM | And conservatives think Howard Dean has an anger problem? Zell Miller, as a lot of you already know, did an interview on MSNBC last night with Chris Matthews and apparently approached it like a guy itching to pick a bar fight. You can watch video of the dust-up here or here, or scroll down here to read a transcript. Here are the three things that set Miller off: 1. A perfectly reasonable question. 2. An analogy Miller couldn't follow -- possibly because of background noise at both ends of the interview, but shouldn't a grown-up have asked for a clarification before blowing his top? 3. An interruption by Matthews -- something that's rude by the standards of everyday conservation but is now such a commonplace of TV political interviewing that taking umbrage at it is like threatening to pick a fight with someone who brushes your shoulder in a crowded subway car at rush hour. 1: MATTHEWS [responding to a list of weapons systems Miller said Kerry opposed]: Which of those systems was effective in either Afghanistan or Iraq? The M.X. certainly wasn't, thank God, nor was the other (CROSSTALK) MILLER: Look, this is front and -- wait, this is front and back, and it's two pages. I have got more documentation here than they have got in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. MATTHEWS: OK. MILLER: I knew you was going to be coming with all of that stuff. And I knew that these people from the Kerry campaign would be coming with all this kind of stuff. That's just baloney. 2: MATTHEWS: Well, let me ask you, when Democrats come out, as they often do, liberal Democrats, and attack conservatives, and say they want to starve little kids, they want to get rid of education, they want to kill the old people... MILLER: I am not saying that. Wait a minute. MATTHEWS: That kind of rhetoric is not educational, is it? MILLER: Wait a minute. Now, this is your program. And I am a guest on your program. MATTHEWS: Yes, sir. MILLER: And so I want to try to be as nice as I possibly can to you. I wish I was over there, where I could get a little closer up into your face. (LAUGHTER) MILLER: But I don't have to stand here and listen to that kind of stuff. I didn't say anything about not feeding poor kids. What are you doing? 3: MATTHEWS: If a Republican Senator broke ranks and -- all right, I'm sorry. A Republican Senator broke ranks and came over and spoke for the Democrats, would you respect him? MILLER: Yes, of course I would. MATTHEWS: Why? MILLER: I have seen that happen from time to time. Look, I believe... (CROSSTALK) MATTHEWS: What does Jim Jeffords say to you? MILLER: Wait a minute. (CROSSTALK) MATTHEWS: Jim Jeffords switched parties after getting elected. MILLER: If you're going to ask a question... MATTHEWS: Well, it's a tough question. It takes a few words. MILLER: Get out of my face. This isn't a gaffe. This is a moral philosophy: There's us and there's human scum. posted by Steve M. | 9:03 AM | Wednesday, September 01, 2004 Senator Kerry denounces American action when other countries don't approve as if the whole object of our foreign policy were to please a few persistent critics.... George W. Bush will never seek a permission slip to defend the American people. --Dick Cheney, Republican convention speech Let there be no mistake: I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response. I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security. --John Kerry, Democratic convention speech posted by Steve M. | 11:19 PM | The local news guys seem kind of shocked that the speeches by Miller and Cheney were as negative as they were. So was ABC News Now's Lisa Todorovich. Jesus, what country have these people been living in? posted by Steve M. | 10:49 PM | Zell Miller -- wow, meat doesn't get redder than that, does it? I think that speech impressed millions of people -- four or five of whom hadn't already decided to vote for Bush. He could kick butt in the '08 GOP primaries; too bad Curtis LeMay isn't around to be his running mate. posted by Steve M. | 10:21 PM | BAD WORD CHOICE, KARL ...former Sens. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., and Max Cleland, D-Ga., ... accused Rove of coordinating with a GOP-leaning group of veterans that has been attacking Kerry's combat record and later anti-war activities. Cleland noted that two Bush campaign aides resigned when their ties to the group were revealed. He said Rove should, too. In the AP interview, Rove strongly denied that he is linked to the group. "Those guys ought to stop drinking from the swamp. The fevers are getting to them," he said. --AP Excuse me? First of all, Karl, you might want to think twice about saying this about men who actually spent some quality time in far-off swamps a few decades ago, while you ... er, remind me again: What did you do in the war, Karly? Rove received a student deferment when he graduated from high school in 1969. Second of all, Karl, isn't it a bit odd that you would accuse a couple of veterans of losing their grip on reality when you insist you had absolutely nothing to do with a whispering campaign in 2000 that suggested John McCain was crazy? The AP article notes that retired Air Force general Merrill McPeak is also calling on Rove to resign. In an AFP story, Cleland sums up the charges against Rove rather nicely: Cleland added that Rove was "the strategist behind George Bush going after four Vietnam veterans in the last four years." He said the veterans who were attacked were Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican presidential primary, Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire during his failed re-election bid in 2002, Kerry this year and himself two years ago during his failed re-election effort in Georgia. "Karl Rove was behind it all," Cleland said. "It's part of his smear campaign ... to tarnish the records of service of Vietnam veterans, and now he's doing it again." Amen. (AP link via Pandagon.) posted by Steve M. | 5:04 PM | Funniest political essay ever. posted by Steve M. | 4:52 PM | Via Atrios, I see that The Washington Post has found a few untruths among Rudy Giuliani's attacks on John Kerry Monday night. But, as Jack Newfield noted a couple of years ago, this isn't the first time Rudy has twisted the truth to attack someone: Giuliani's lowest moment as Mayor came in March 2000, when the unarmed Patrick Dorismond was shot and killed by undercover narcotics police in midtown Manhattan. Dorismond, 26 and black, an off-duty security guard, was standing outside a bar when a plainclothes cop, part of a narcotics detail patrolling the area, tried to buy crack from him. "What are you doing asking me for that shit?" Dorismond asked. A fight developed, and one of the cops killed him.... At first Giuliani called for calm, asking the city to withhold judgment until all the facts were established. But the next morning he ignored his own counsel and started demonizing the dead man. Instead of trying to be fair-minded and reassuring, Giuliani made a series of prejudicial and venomous remarks about Dorismond--even before his funeral. The Mayor seemed unable to express any human sympathy for the dead man's mother, or to grasp the fact that this was a citizen of his city who was killed--by police--for saying no to drugs. Giuliani authorized the release of Dorismond's sealed juvenile arrest record, which contained nothing more serious than a violation punishable by a summons, to discredit him. Juvenile arrest records are supposed to be kept confidential, and Giuliani violated legal ethics by breaking the seal without getting a court order. Dorismond was 13 at the time his arrest was entered into a police computer. At a press conference Giuliani argued that the dead man's conduct at age 13 was "highly relevant." Dorismond, he sneered, was "no altar boy." But Dorismond had actually been an altar boy. He had even attended the same elite Catholic high school as the Mayor--Bishop Loughlin in Brooklyn. A few nights later television journalist Dominick Carter asked Giuliani about his "no altar boy" comment. "This is not a fair question," the Mayor complained. He declared that Dorismond had "spent a good deal of his adult life punching people," and that he had a "propensity" for violence. The Mayor's defense for opening the records was that Dorismond had no privacy rights because he was dead. posted by Steve M. | 3:30 PM | OK, now we're starting to see the real Republican Party: In an interview with SIRUS satellite radio, the Internet's Drudge Report said Wednesday, [Alan] Keyes called Mary Cheney "a 'selfish hedonist' because she is a lesbian." Keyes said: "The essence of ... family life remains procreation. If we embrace homosexuality as a proper basis for marriage, we are saying that it's possible to have a marriage state that in principal excludes procreation and is based simply on the premise of selfish hedonism." Asked whether that meant Mary Cheney "is a selfish hedonist," Keyes said: "That goes by definition. Of course she is."... --UPI/Washington Times Of course, it's already "possible to have a marriage state that in princip[le] excludes procreation" -- it's called "letting old people marry." (Not to mention the infertile.) Taken to its logical conclusion, Keyes's statement means that you're being a "selfish hedonist" anytime you engage in a sexual act that can't lead to a baby -- and that would extend to straight people who use birth control, and, I suppose, to married couples who have sex during pregnancy. *** Meanwhile, The New York Times has this on a GOP confab that doesn't quite fit the moderate moderate moderate message of the party: At a closed, invitation-only Bush campaign rally for Christian conservatives yesterday, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas called for a broad social conservative agenda notably different from the televised presentations at the Republican convention, including adopting requirements that pregnant women considering abortions be offered anesthetics for their fetuses and loosening requirements on the separation of church and state. "We must win this culture war," Senator Brownback urged a crowd of several hundred in a packed ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel... So, is this new bill on fetus anesthesia a sincere response to what Senator Brownback considers a social problem, or is it an opportunistic way to open a new front in the culture war? Hard to say exactly: His call for women contemplating abortions to be offered anesthetics for the fetus referred to a bill, "The Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act," that he has discussed introducing in Congress. "We are going to keep moving this agenda forward," he vowed. Guess it's a little bit of both, isn't it? But even though "the event was organized by the Bush-Cheney campaign 'to celebrate America and President George W. Bush,' according to a copy of the invitation," it's apparently none of your damn business if you're a heathen: ... in an e-mail message to The New York Times, Nicolle Devenish, the campaign's communications director, criticized the newspaper for covering an event that "was closed to the press" as "not professional or appropriate." A New York Times reporter was invited to the event by participants who accompanied him. But if these folks have a monopoly on Right and Truth, why do they want to keep their light under a bushel? posted by Steve M. | 1:16 PM | New School president Bob Kerrey - a former Democratic senator from Nebraska and a Medal of Honor recipient in Vietnam - had choice words for the Swifties accusing Sen. John Kerry of volunteering for Vietnam combat duty to pad his political resume. "Oh, f-- them," he told the Daily News' James Gordon Meek. "Quote me on that. The idea that you'd volunteer for [Swift boat duty] because you're thinking about a political career. ... That's what you think about doing if you want a posthumous political career." --New York Daily News Nicely put. UPDATE: Bob Kerrey is pressing Bush to condemn the Swift boat ads. posted by Steve M. | 11:13 AM | On the subject of demonstrations, is there any chance we'll ever see protests of the Swift boat liars? I'd love to (peacefully) hector them. Here's the page where the liars list their upcoming TV and radio appearances. I don't know why these appearances aren't routinely met by dozens of protesters -- ideally including a lot of veterans. Protests of these guys would be pointed, and also surprising. The message could be clear and easily absorbed: These are Bush's liars, being given multiple megaphones by the media. The Swift boat guys look scummier every day. Here's the basic case against them; here's a great Daily Howler column on appallingly underreported information that further demolishes their case; here's yet another sign of their loathsomeness from Atrios. Read that -- then, if you still need motivation, subject yourself to the arrogance of this. posted by Steve M. | 10:21 AM | So I'm reading the New York Times story on yesterday's demonstrations in New York, and I'm listening to the local NPR story, and I'm noticing that both of the stories are about the demonstrations. They're about arrests and about things the demonstrators did more than about the reasons for the demonstrations. The stories are primarily about form and only incidentally about content. If you say that that's just the biased corporatist media, and that people in "the streets" know what's really happening, I have to tell you that I work a mile north of Madison Square Garden and I live a little further uptown, and all I know is what I read in the papers. It's a huge country -- if I didn't experience your demo live, they sure as hell didn't experience it in Kansas. All they know is what they can glean from news reports. And if the news reports are a murk, well, apart from reminding people in Kansas that some people don't like Bush very much (which they already knew), did your demo really get any kind of concrete political message across? Look, I know, it sucks -- getting heard as an ordinary citizen in this society is very, very difficult. But squeezing a thousand separate "actions" into a four-day period makes it worse. It's like playing a thousand songs at once and expecting people to sing along with each one. posted by Steve M. | 7:50 AM | |
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