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Sunday, February 27, 2005 there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle. --Marianne Moore I want to thank everyone who's read this blog over the two-plus years I've been doing it. I can't tell you how grateful I am that you came by. And I want to thank everyone who's linked to me -- especially the serial linkers (you know who you are). But, well, I'm wrapping it up. It's begun to dawn on me that there's nothing I can do here that isn't being done with more style, wit, and/or reportorial doggedness by dozens of others. It's gotten harder and harder lately to say something fresh, to make a connection no one else seems to be making. And it often seems futile -- the political world doesn't pay much attention to the first-raters on the Internet left, and often snickers when it does (see: Gannon, Jeff, revelations about). I'm not in the same league as those first-raters, so I can't imagine ever having any more impact with this blog than I'd would if I were just muttering about Bush in a bar. I've enjoyed this, but I don't read as many books as I used to, and I think and talk about this way too much. I need to move on. Maybe I'll do something similar someday, but right now it's time to let go. ****** UPDATE: Since I posted this, I've had a change of heart. I'm blogging again, thoughat a slightly diminished pace. posted by Steve M. | 9:23 PM | In the wake of Hunter Thompson's suicide, I noted that a number of right-wingers were saying kind things about him. But that wasn't true across the board: Stephen Schwartz reviewed Thompson's career in a Weekly Standard article that was nasty -- and, in a couple of passages, idiotic. Today The New York Times excerpts that piece, carefully selecting its most idiotic passage for preservation: Thompson had much in common with [William] Burroughs and [Allan] Ginsberg. First, their products were mainly noise. Their books were reissued but now sit inertly on bookstore shelves, incapable of inspiring younger readers, or even nostalgic baby boomers, to purchase them.... Say what? Granted, Schwartz may have a point about purchases of Burroughs and Ginsberg. That's because -- and this won't surprise anyone who (unlike Schwartz, apparently) was ever young -- their books are regularly stolen. Martin Gilbert of the Times learned in 2002 that book theft in New York varies by neighborhood; "In downtown Manhattan, for instance, it's the Beat poets and writers: Kerouac (the John Grisham of the Beats, when it comes to theft popularity), Bukowski, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Hunke." In 1999, the community relations coordinator of a Barnes & Noble in Hoboken told Dennis Loy Johnson of the book blog Moby Lives, "Did you know authors like Bukowski, Kerouac, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, and Paul Auster are all kept behind the register because they get stolen a lot?" -- and three years later Johnson found Burroughs books removed from shelves at several B&Ns in Manhattan. The New York Observer's Ron Rosenbaum was told by a B&N clerk in 2001 that Burroughs was among the store's "most shoplifted" authors. As for Thompson himself, his books are so "incapable of inspiring younger readers, or even nostalgic baby boomers, to purchase them" that, as I write this, three now sit in Amazon's Top 100 -- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at #29, Hell's Angels at #82, and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 at #99, with the forthcoming Hey Rube just behind at #115. Regarding Ginsberg, if you're of a mind to, do an Amazon search for "poetry" (Subject); in the "Sort results by" field, choose "Bestselling." Howl is the 50th-ranked book. But that's deceptive. Notice what beats it out: children's books, advice for poets, miscategorized essay collections, canonical authors (Homer, Dante, Poe, Emily Dickinson), and the likes of Tim Burton and Tupac. Apart from a couple of new collections and a Maya Angelou anthology, Howl is the bestselling poetry book at Amazon by any modern poet who could be called "serious." None of this needs to be spelled out or quantified for anyone who's lived among young people trying to pry their minds open. It should be obvious to the editors who chose to excerpt Schwartz's essay in the Times. I've thought for a while that the Times ought to consider giving up on "balance" of opinion -- the conservative press doesn't really bother reciprocating, and right-wing banshees will still howl "liberal bias" no matter how many Republicans grace the Times's pages. But at the very least the Times should resist the self-hate that leads to publication of right-wing opinion pieces premised on "facts" that are clearly pulled from the author's ass. posted by Steve M. | 11:23 AM | Saturday, February 26, 2005 It looks as if Bank of America misplaced something last December: Bank of America Corp. has lost tapes containing personal financial information for 1.2 million accounts of federal employees, including US senators and members of the Defense Department. The tapes contained personal information, including Social Security numbers, addresses, and account numbers for employees in several government agencies.... Bank of America first discovered in December that the tapes had been lost and alerted the Secret Service, but it did not make the loss public until yesterday.... According to a spokesman for the Defense Department, 900,000 of the customers were defense employees.... Oh well -- at least the chairman of Bank of America was severely punished at the end of December: An eight-figure severance package and a special deal on Boston Red Sox tickets are among the benefits Bank of America (BAC) Chairman Charles "Chad" Gifford will get when he retires on Jan. 31. Gifford will receive severance pay of about $16.4 million, plus cash incentives of up to $8.67 million, when he retires, the No. 3 U.S. bank said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. ...According to the filing, Gifford will for the next five years be paid $50,000 a year for consulting services, and given use of a company jet for up to 120 hours a year. He will also have the opportunity to buy up to four tickets for as many as 15 Red Sox baseball games of his choosing each year "for as long as he requests," the filing said.... Gifford had been CEO of Fleet Financial before Bank of America bought it and made him BofA's chairman. The CEO (and now chairman) of BofA is Kenneth Lewis. He certainly seems to run a tight ship: Enrico Bondi, the man overseeing the restructuring of bankrupt milk giant Parmalat, says he will likely add BofA to a roster of financial firms (Citigroup, Credit Suisse, UBS, Deutsche Bank et al.) he is suing over Parmalat's collapse. BofA's alleged sin was to cover up Parmalat's crumbling finances while peddling the Italian company's bonds to unsuspecting investors. The Bondi threat follows recent testimony by a onetime BofA worker in Milan that he accepted $27 million in kickbacks for helping to fob off some of those Parmalat bonds when the company was teetering on insolvency. "The reputation that [BofA] management built over the last few years is shot," says Richard Bove, an analyst at Hoefer & Arnett.... The bad news for the bank started in October 2002. That's when BofA and 17 other banks were hit with a suit alleging they sold WorldCom bonds, now close to worthless, without the diligence that was due. BofA, rejecting an offer to settle for $447 million, is fighting the suit. In September last year New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer sued BofA for helping hedge fund Canary Capital illegally trade mutual fund shares. BofA's Lewis fired several staffers and paid $375 million to settle the charges, a quick response that won cheers from Wall Street. Then, in February, a group of institutional investors, including HSBC, sued the bank, alleging that it allowed a hedge fund client to print out phony returns bearing the bank's name before it lost $571 million and was shut down. The bank denies any wrongdoing. In March BofA paid $10 million to the Securities & Exchange Commission for not handing over e-mails promptly during an insider trading investigation and, most damning, not disclosing that some of the requested documents had been destroyed. In July BofA paid $69 million to settle a suit brought by Enron shareholders accusing it of off-balance-sheet maneuvers designed to hide debt. BofA says it paid to avoid the "distraction" of litigation and that it "broke no law." ... Sounds like just the sort of outfit you want handling sensitive personal data about senators and Defense Department employees, no? posted by Steve M. | 2:14 PM | Another day, another pipeline blown up in Iraq. posted by Steve M. | 11:23 AM | I just ran across this -- a "Best and Worst of 2004" list from an organization called New Mexicans for Science and Reason -- in the current issue of Skeptical Inquirer. Here's something that caught my eye -- just let it wash over you if you don't really get it (it's not my area of expertise either): The "Don't Stop Now - It's Getting Good" Award goes to the Theory of Evolution, which still struggles for popular acceptance while finding stupendous experimental support and utility in science. In 2004, the evolution of irreducibly complex features was documented for flagellum motors and colorful coral proteins; more transitions were found between fish and amphibians (nostrils and fins-to-legs), the handedness of primordial amino acids was better understood, a single gene was found to be capable of giving mice long, bat-like fingers (explaining rapid evolution of bats), the natural history of the Uterus was developed, a gene common in Tibetans was found to improve oxygen intake, and a possible common ancestor of all the great apes, including humans, was found. Not a bad year, except for that "popular" thing.... In plain English, this is pointing out that scientists continue to find new evidence confirming the validity of evolution every few months. Americans don't understand this. Scientists discuss this with scientists, and a few popular-science writers address it in books written for readers who lack specialized knowledge but have fairly hoity-toity educations nonetheless. Nobody tries to reach a broad general public with this. But isn't it more or less the same wriggling-flagellates-under-the-microscope stuff millions of Americans watch on CSI? If Peter Jennings can host a two-hour prime-time network-TV special on UFOs, for pity's sake, why not this -- real science, on a subject that has a lot of Americans genuinely worked up? **** The NMSR "Best and Worst" list also recalls a statement Jimmy Carter made in early 2004 when Superintendent Kathy Cox of the Georgia Department of Education proposed removing the word "evolution" (though not the concept) from the state science curriculum. "There can be no incompatibility between Christian faith and proven facts concerning geology, biology, and astronomy. "There is no need to teach that stars can fall out of the sky and land on a flat Earth in order to defend our religious faith." I can't help suspecting that many Americans who doubt evolution think no one who believes in God also believes in evolution. I wish Carter would lead an effort to set them straight. And, as Jim Holt noted in The New York Times last Sunday, Pope John Paul II was comfortable declaring that evolution has been "proven true" and that "truth cannot contradict truth." posted by Steve M. | 11:20 AM | Friday, February 25, 2005 So, in addition to the insurgent violence, we have this in Iraq: Revenge killings of members of Saddam's former regime rise Shiite Muslim assassins are killing former members of Saddam Hussein's mostly Sunni Muslim regime at will and with impunity in a parallel conflict that some observers fear could snowball into civil war.... The killings have intensified since January's Shiite electoral victory, and U.S. and Iraqi officials worry that they could imperil progress toward a unified, democratic Iraq. "It's the beginning, and we could go down the slippery slope very quickly," said Sabah Kadhim, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry. "We've been so concerned with removing terrorists and Islamists that this other situation has reared its ugly head. Both sides are sharpening their knives." ... While Shiite politicians turn a blind eye, assassins are working their way through a hit list of Saddam's former security and intelligence personnel, according to Iraqi authorities, Sunni politicians and interviews with the families of those who've been targeted. Former Baathists have responded in kind, this month killing several Shiites allied with major political factions.... Look, I'm not shedding tears for high-level Saddam-era Baathist officials. But I'm not going to act like a right-wing blooger -- I'm not going to raise a whoo-whoo cheer for "frontier justice" if it's leading to civil war. posted by Steve M. | 7:11 PM | So ... back in '86, when she would get dressed for work, do you think Condi used to put on "Control" or "Nasty" or "What Have You Done for Me Lately?" and lip-sync in front of the mirror?   (Story here.) posted by Steve M. | 1:58 PM | You may already have learned (via TBogg, or indirectly via Sisyphus Shrugged or Pandagon) that David Duke was one of the guests on Bill O'Reilly's TV show last night. You'll probably be tempted to jump to conclusions about the Right -- "Like attracts like" and all that. OK -- but please note that Duke himself feels hard done by: After appearing on an eight minute segment of the O'Reilly Factor, which amounted not to a discussion of pertinent issues but a series of scurrilous and untrue attacks on me, I have some reflections on the so-called conservatives in media. Before I offer those reflections, I want to respond here to the core of O'Reilly's attacks on me. He accused me of being anti-black, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. ... I have never in my life uttered an anti-Catholic word in my life. In my millions of written words and thousands of hours of recorded interviews and speeches you will not find even a single anti-Catholic utterance.... I didn't begin the show by suggesting that he was a sex offender, yet there is a lot more evidence of that charge than the completely untrue and nonexistent evidence that I was ever anti-Catholic. Secondly, his promos for my appearance identified me as a White supremacist. I am not a White supremacist and in fact I strongly condemn any effort of any race to be supreme over or control other races or nations. I simply want to preserve my European American heritage in our own homelands and defend the basic civil rights and human rights of our people. That does not make me a supremacist. As my book Jewish Supremacism points out, the ultimate racial supremacists are the Jewish supremacists who seek supremacy over the press and the foreign policy of every nation.... There's more. Good Lord, is there more. I've visited Duke's Web site many times over the years, and the man sure can pile on the verbiage. (Yes, I gave you a link to his site. Don't click if you have a moral objection, but really, you might want to visit sometime -- the site is both frightening and a hoot. Something you may not realize: Duke hates Jews way more than he hates any other group.) On the other side, here's O'Reilly's take: ...The Factor told Duke that he and Ward Churchill are in effect opposite sides of the same coin: "Free speech has consequences--both you and Churchill, on opposite ends of the spectrum, have brought personal pain to Americans." What lovely measured tones. I didn't see the show, but I kinda-sorta suspect it wasn't all like that. (There's not much at Fox about this.) Look -- the Bushist Right simply doesn't embrace old-school racism anymore. We on the left have to recognize that. We should have known that O'Reilly wouldn't be nice to Duke. The new right-wing attitude toward race is this: Nonwhites have exactly the same potential to be good people as whites. We know this because some nonwhites actually do become first-rate Americans. You can recognize those nonwhites by the fact that they embrace right-wing principles. They have names such as Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, Condoleezza Rice, and Alberto Gonzales. We love these people, and we never tire of reminding liberals that we love these people. Regrettably, however, some nonwhites are lazy, shiftless, violent, sexually irresponsible, and overly dependent on government handouts. But that's not their fault. That's the fault of liberals, who make these nonwhites lazy, shiftless, violent, sexually irresponsible, and overly dependent by keeping them on their liberal plantation. Liberals, in fact, are the real racists. You can tell because they oppose nonwhites who embrace right-wing principles. Liberals claim they oppose nonwhites who embrace right-wing principles because they embrace right-wing principles, but we know they oppose them because they're racists. And that makes us feel very, very superior to liberals and Democrats, and to nonwhites who are liberal and vote Democrat. Thus, we get this, from a low-level right-wing pundit: You may be part of the right wing conspiracy if ... You think there's a Lib conspiracy bordering on racism against conservative Blacks. So if O'Reilly gave Duke a hard time, it's no surprise. He's arming himself for the next time a liberal calls him a racist. Then he'll pull the trigger. **** An odd fact about that David Duke appearance -- Duke was in Moscow (per Fox); the oreilly.com page says he's "now living and teaching in the Ukraine." What's up with that? The ADL explains: White supremacist David Duke has set his sights on Russia. Saying that the nation holds the "key to white survival," Duke has recently embarked on a campaign to spread his racial theories of white superiority and anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union. The notorious American hatemonger has recently launched an appeal to Russian nationalists. In Duke’s eyes, Russia presents an unmatched opportunity to help protect the longevity of the white race, since he predicts that "racially aware" parties could achieve political influence there. He believes that Russia’s "sense of racial understanding" will unleash a trend internationally. Duke has taken at least three recent trips to Russia to speak with nationalists and to promote his new book, The Ultimate Supremacism: My Awakening on the Jewish Question (the Russian title translates as The Jewish Question Through the Eyes of an American). Duke has indicated he may move there to more actively "struggle against people of other colors and with Jews," according to the Interfax news agency.... And, in fact, here's a Duke essay, "Is Russia the Key to White Survival?" ...Russia is a White nation! Of the many capital cities of Europe, it is accurate to say that Moscow is the Whitest of them all. Although there is the presence of some ethnic minorities in the Russian Federation, Russia has a greater sense of racial understanding among its population than does any other predominantly White nation. There is a common awareness among the people of the Bolshevik-Jewish invasion of 1917, commonly referred to in the United States as the “Russian Revolution” ... Yeesh. Sorry -- I'll understand if you think you need to take a shower now. posted by Steve M. | 1:18 PM | Nice to see that some right-wingers are showing their admiration for the Iraqis who voted on January 30 in the time-honored manner -- by exploiting them to make a quick buck. posted by Steve M. | 10:19 AM | Nothing to investigate here, move along... Probe leaves out ex-commander at Guantanamo The high-profile investigation into FBI agents' allegations of detainee abuses at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is not examining the conduct of the man who oversaw the interrogation operation at the time that prisoners were allegedly shackled in painful positions and exposed to extreme temperatures to break their silence. Army Major General Geoffrey Miller commanded Camp Delta, the intelligence-gathering prison, from fall 2002 until spring 2004, when the Pentagon sent him to Iraq to take over detention operations amid the Abu Ghraib scandal. According to several internal FBI memos made public in a lawsuit, agents assigned to help in the interrogations say they alerted Miller about the abusive techniques they witnessed at Guantanamo, but Miller rebuffed them. Despite Miller's key role at Guantanamo, the US Southern Command assigned a one-star officer, Brigadier General John Furlow, to conduct its investigation into the alleged abuses. Under Army regulations, an investigating officer must outrank anyone he or she investigates, and Miller's two stars place him beyond Furlow's reach. The assignment of a junior officer to investigate the allegations raises questions about whether the probe, which the Bush administration announced in January and has repeatedly touted in response to questions about the FBI memos, can reveal the full scope of responsibility.... --Boston Globe posted by Steve M. | 9:34 AM | Thursday, February 24, 2005 YEAH, REALLY -- WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? You might recall that John Ashcroft's Justice Department sought to obtain a number of abortion records last year, then abandoned the effort. Well, now (as you may already know via Atrios) it's happening in Kansas. AP reports: Attorney General Phill Kline is seeking the complete medical records of nearly 90 women who received late-term abortions to search for evidence of crimes, according to court documents.... Kline, an abortion opponent, scheduled a news conference for Thursday afternoon, and his office said he would discuss "questions raised relating to child rape and abortion in Kansas." The clinics' brief said Kline had demanded their complete, unedited medical records for women who sought abortions at least 22 weeks into their pregnancies. Court papers did not identify the clinics. The records would include the patient's name, medical history, details of her sex life, birth control practices and psychological profile. ... Yikes. Given the reference to "child rape," it's quite likely that this involves one of Kline's crusades: He's ordered all health-care providers in Kansas -- abortion clinics in particular -- to inform authorities of evidence of any underage sexual activity. See, it's a felony to have sex with a minor in Kansas even if you're also a minor. Never mind that such a requirement might deter a teenager -- say, a fifteen-year-old girl impregnated by her fifteen-year-old boyfriend, whom she loves very much -- from seeking not only abortion, but prenatal services, STD treatment, or other medical care. (A restraining order has been issued and Kline's directive isn't being enforced.) One possible target of all this is Dr. George Tiller, who's been attacked by right-to-lifers for years: ...[In 1991] Operation Rescue went to Wichita and staged a 46-day picket in front of the Women's Health Care Services clinic operated by Dr. George Tiller. During that time, 2,700 protesters were arrested. Dr. Tiller was chosen for this 'mission' because he is one of the few abortion providers in the country that performs late-term therapeutic abortions to save the lives and health of women. His clinic has been bombed and he was shot several years ago by Shelly Shannon, who remains in jail for this crime.... More recently, right-to-lifers have staged a boycott of La Quinta Inns, claiming that a La Quinta hotel in Wichita offered discounts to Dr. Tiller's patients and arranged with him to allow nurses to check on the patients there after abortions. La Quinta has now distanced itself from Dr. Tiller. Also recently, Kline held a press conference at which he announced, erroneously, that a subpoena Dr. Tiller had received from the Texas attorney general's office was in connection with the death of a 19-year-old who'd had an abortion at Dr. Tiller's clinic. Kline backpedaled after the Texas AG's office said the woman's death wasn't under investigation: Kline, who opposes abortion, said he may have misspoken. "It probably could have been worded more delicately," he said. The AP story notes that two clinics have filed legal arguments opposing Kline's attempt to get the records of the 90 abortions. One lawyer interviewed by AP said he couldn't even confirm or deny whether the clinic he represented was Dr. Tiller's, citing a gag order. One tangential detail: As I told you at the time, Merrie Turner, an anti-abortion activist who was arrested in Wichita in 1991, organized a "First Ladies' Inaugural Tea" last month in connection with the inauguration ceremonies for President Bush. A featured speaker was Judge Roy Moore. **** UPDATE: In The New York Times, Jodi Wilgoren covers the story (and basically makes this post superfluous). She confirms that the Tiller clinic is the target, and adds this: Although Mr. Kline emphasized statutory rape in his news conference, many here on both sides of the abortion debate said they suspected that his real target was doctors who provide late-term abortions. Kansas law restricts abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy, where the fetus would be viable outside the womb, except when "continuation of the pregnancy will cause a substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman." Though I'm a bit puzzled -- how are they going to find an abortion outside the 22-week limit from patient records? Assuming any clinic in Kansas did perform a late abortion outside that limit, I can't imagine the fact would be put on paper. It seems far more likely that Kline is trying to intimidate women and girls seeking abortions, as well as looking for very young girls to feed to the media as tabloid fodder. "When a 10-, 11- or 12-year-old child is pregnant, under Kansas law that child has been raped, and as the state's chief law enforcement official it is my obligation to investigate child rape in order to protect Kansas children." --Kline, quoted in the Times story Protesters outside his clinic have seen girls that look as young as 10 or 11 going in for abortions.... --a pro-lifer in the comments to Atrios's post on this story posted by Steve M. | 9:20 PM | Jennifer Harper writes in the Moonie Washington Times: Try a bake sale Is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) using former White House reporter Jeff Gannon as a fund-raising inspiration? Depends on how one interprets a dramatic plea from Rep. Louise M. Slaughter yesterday, asking loyal Dems to sign a petition against him.... "Sign the petition and stop the propaganda," she advised in her missive, also accusing Mr. Gannon of recycling Republican press releases verbatim and characterizing Sen. John Kerry "as 'the first gay president.' " ... But wait, don't forget the cause, now. "I ask you to stand with me — and the DCCC — in demanding an end to the propaganda," Mrs. Slaughter wrote in closing. Hmmm, good point. After all, Republicans would never use a controversial figure who reports on the news with a left-leaning slant as a way of raising money for the GOP. Er, right? Democratic congressional candidate Ginny Schrader marched out of a debate Monday in protest of a Republican mailing that calls her the "Hate America" candidate and invokes the name of an Islamic terrorist group.... The mailing, paid for by the National Republican Congressional Committee, includes a picture of Schrader and states: "The Hate America crowd has found their candidate." It goes on to criticize her for a July fund-raiser at which she hosted a screening of the controversial Michael Moore documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11," saying that the film is "filled with propaganda that Hezbollah-related organizations offered to distribute."... Bo Harmon, a spokesman for the NRCC, defended the mailing. "I think that it is very disingenuous for Ginny Schrader to feign outrage when we're simply pointing out how out-of-the-mainstream the groups are that she is associating with and is using to fund her campaigns," he said. He added, though, that the NRCC was only highlighting Schrader's use of "Fahrenheit 9/11," not trying to connect her to a terrorist group.... Nope! Guess not! (WashTimes story via Sisyphus Shrugged and The Stakeholder.) **** Oh, and here's the petition. posted by Steve M. | 3:15 PM | SHUT UP AND TALK ABOUT OLD KNEE INJURIES The GOP, which absolutely hates it when people get involved in politics who have no political experience and are well known only because they entertain people, is about to have a gubernatorial candidate in a large state who has no political experience and is well known only because he used to entertain people: Former Pittsburgh Steelers star Lynn Swann has filed papers forming a campaign committee for governor, his first official step toward a possible campaign for the 2006 election. Swann's filing allows him to begin raising money for a campaign. He filed the papers Wednesday, on the eve of his first public speech as a potential candidate - at a Westmoreland County Republican dinner. He promised to begin "a conversation with the people of Pennsylvania."... (There's a lot of this going around in the GOP -- you'll recall that Republicans tried to draft Mike Ditka, the former coach of the Chicago Bears, to run against Barack Obama in the Illinois Senate race.) Now, quite a few athletes have served with distinction in politics, and there are others who might do so in the future. But is Lynn Swann one of them? Well, the national party thinks so much of his political skills that at the 2004 convention it sent him out to speak accompanied by Dorothy Hamill, the figure skater; the party didn't bother to post a transcript of their remarks on its convention Web site. News stories suggest that Swann has begun boning up on Republicanism 101, but hasn't gotten very far into the textbook. Here's GOP-friendly NewsMax, with a dispatch from the convention: A Pittsburgh Steelers football legend tells NewsMax why he supports President Bush: "It's an election year, and I'm involved in this particular campaign as co-chair for the African-American committee for the re-election of George Bush. "I'm here at the convention. I'm learning quite a bit and enjoying the experience." Lynn Swann said he had not been active in politics before, though he added, "I have supported Republican candidates in the past, but this is the first time that I just really come out and kinda finally have an influence." Swann said this year had a "sense of urgency." "I certainly believe that George W. Bush is the most qualified and most credible candidate to fulfill the role as president of the United States."... (Well, that's probably better than Ditka would have done.) Swann has to get through a primary, but if he does, look for the party to tout him as a "businessman," even though his business experience seems to be limited to selling his own memorabilia. (The Republicans pulled that stunt with Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose business experience was similarly limited.) And, yeah, the fact that Swann is black may mean his candidacy will be part of Karl Rove's never-ending quest to get the GOP's African-American vote permanently up to the low double digits. posted by Steve M. | 1:58 PM | Hey, folks -- tomorrow night Ralph Nader is holding an anti-war rally! Whoops, sorry -- tomorrow night Ralph Nader is holding a fund-raiser to pay off debts from his 2004 campaign disguised as an anti-war rally: RALPH NADER IS COMING TO MANHATTAN, FRIDAY, FEB. 25 WHO: RALPH NADER with a Performance by PATTI SMITH WHAT: Rally to Stop the Iraq War and Bring the Troops Home WHEN: Friday, February 25, 8:00 PM WHERE: New York Society for Ethical Culture Concert Hall 2 West 64th Street at Central Park West, New York, NY 10023 Admission $10-15 sliding scale at the door Local and national activists will speak words of insight and encouragement. For More Info on this rally contact: Austin Pferd at (917) 952-1842, or go to VoteNader.org Proceeds to help defray campaign expenses of Nader for President 2004 Contributions are not tax-deductible (And I see that Nader's Lee Greenwood, Patti Smith, will plow through "People Have the Power" for the 8000th time. Oh, Patti -- I actually had more respect for you when you were writing songs about Pope John Paul I and singing "You Light Up My Life" in concert. When are you going to dump this creep?) posted by Steve M. | 10:20 AM | From the Executive Summary of "The White House Initiative to Combat AIDS: Learning from Uganda" by Joseph Loconte, Heritage Foundation Backgrounder #1692, September 29, 2003: Beginning in the mid-1980s, the Ugandan government, working closely with community and faith-based organizations, delivered a consistent AIDS prevention message: Abstain from sex until marriage, Be faithful to your partner, or use Condoms if abstinence and fidelity are not practiced. The link between Uganda's "ABC" approach and the dramatic reduction in the country's HIV/AIDS rate is now widely acknowledged. Based on research data collected over the past decade, several lessons can be drawn from the success of Uganda's strategy: * High-risk sexual behaviors can be discouraged and replaced by healthier lifestyles. * Abstinence and marital fidelity appear to be the most important factors in preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS. * Condoms do not play the primary role in reducing HIV/AIDS transmission.... Got that? Right-wingers don't really like ABC -- they like AB. (C is just an icky add-on.) Too bad there's now evidence that A and B aren't all that effective in stopping HIV. From today's Washington Post: Abstinence and sexual fidelity have played virtually no role in the much-heralded decline of AIDS rates in the most closely studied region of Uganda, two researchers told a gathering of AIDS scientists here.... And from the San Francisco Chronicle story about the same study: Research from the heavily studied Rakai district in southern Uganda suggests that increased condom use, coupled with premature death among those infected more than a decade ago with the AIDS virus, are primarily responsible for the steady decline in HIV infections in that area. This is a good study, the Chronicle tells us: The Rakai findings are based on an extensive and continuing process of interviewing 10,000 adults each year -- a so-called population-based survey that is considered the gold standard for this kind of epidemiological research." And here are the numbers, as reported in the Post: In the Rakai district, the percentage of women infected with HIV fell from 20 percent in 1994 to 13 percent in 2003. For men, the rate of infection declined from 15 percent to 9 percent, a decline of roughly one-third. Over that same period, however, the fraction of men reporting two or more sexual partners in the previous year rose from 28 percent to 35 percent. The fraction of young men ages 15 to 19 who were not sexually active fell from about 60 percent to just under 50 percent. For women that age, the proportion not having sex remained at about 30 percent through the decade. The median age of first intercourse for men fell from 17.1 to 16.2 years, and for women from 15.9 to 15.5 years. Condom use, however, changed markedly over the survey period. In 1994, only about 10 percent of the men said they consistently used condoms with non-marital partners, compared with 50 percent in 2003. For women of the same age, the rate of condom use in non-marital sex increased from 2 percent to 28 percent. Professor Maria Wawer of Columbia University, who presented the study, said that the benefit from increased condom use (C) was canceled out by the decreases in abstinence and those who chose to be faithful (A and B). The decrease in infection in Rakai was actually caused by deaths of infected people. But since Uganda is now facing a condom shortage, infection rates may go up again. More at this NPR audio link. posted by Steve M. | 9:55 AM | Wednesday, February 23, 2005 WE PAY SO RUSH CAN LIE As you may know, Rush Limbaugh is in Afghanistan, apparently on our dime. He called in to his show yesterday and did what he does best -- he grotesquely distorted the truth: As you know we've had soldiers come back from both Afghanistan in Iraq and express frustration when they go home and watch the news and they see things that they don't see when they're actually deployed in these places, and these people have the same experience. Whenever they do see news out of Afghanistan -- when the UN came out today or yesterday saying that Afghanistan is losing ground; it's the fifth worst developed country in the world and unless there's a massive infusion then Afghanistan will descend back to the ravages of the Taliban. The Taliban is done. The Taliban is defeated. It has maybe 3,000 members. It's a phony report designed because the UN is trying to get their hands in the back pockets of the American taxpayer again by talking about Afghanistan not having enough development aid. I'm assuming he's talking about the report that was discussed in yesterday's New York Times: Three years after the United States drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan and vowed to rebuild, the war-shattered country ranked 173rd of 178 countries in the United Nations 2004 Human Development Index, according to a new report from the United Nations.... Despite the problems, Afghanistan has shown remarkable progress in the three years since the United States-led war in 2001, the report said. More than 54 percent of school-age children are enrolled, including four million high school students. The economy is making great strides, with growth of 16 percent in nondrug gross domestic product in 2003 and predicted growth of 10 to 12 percent annually for the next decade. While there has been rapid progress, said Zphirin Diabr, associate administrator of the United Nations Development Program, the country has a long way to go just to get back to where it was 20 years ago. The figures, as President Hamid Karzai says in the report's introduction, paint a gloomy picture.... Got that? It's such a "phony report" that Hamid Karzai agreed to write the introduction to it. And it doesn't say the country's getting worse -- it says the country's getting better. Lying bastard. Rush, for his part says, in the very same trancript, Roger, I have to tell you this place is a hell hole. This country is as backwards as any one else I have ever been or ever seen... And to the dittoheads, it's all true. (Boldface emphasis mine throughout.) **** Incidentally, in the transcript the guest host calls Rush "the Doctor of Democracy." Twice. posted by Steve M. | 4:15 PM | ARGH The percentage of Americans who believe utter bollocks about Iraq is actually going up, according to the Harris Poll: ... * 64 percent believe that Saddam Hussein had strong links to Al Qaeda (up slightly from 62% in November).... * 47 percent believe that Saddam Hussein helped plan and support the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11, 2001 (up six percentage points from November). * 44 percent actually believe that several of the hijackers who attacked the U.S. on September 11 were Iraqis (up significantly from 37% in November). * 36 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded (down slightly from 38% in November). Another interesting finding is that only 46 percent believe that Saddam Hussein was prevented from developing weapons of mass destruction by the U.N. weapons inspectors, a fact which most reports now support. When it comes to presidents and foreign policy, sometimes it seems as if Americans are like Ingrid Bergman sighing to Humphrey Bogart: You'll have to do the thinking for both of us, for all of us. (Via Cursor.) posted by Steve M. | 3:07 PM | CHALABI, IRAQ, AND IRAN Officials within the alliance [United Iraqi Alliance] said Chalabi was now expected to take over a senior ministry - possibly defense or finance. --AP today Well, there it is. Swell, huh? **** Oh, and according to Eli Lake in The New York Sun, Chalabi's still saying he had the votes to win: "Ahmad Chalabi had to withdraw his nomination for the prime minister to save the alliance's unity, in spite of the fact that he had the majority of votes," Mr. Qanbar [Entifadh Qanbar, Chalabi's spokesman] said. **** Juan Cole, citing this New York Times article, writes today: Current Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi told the NYT on Tuesday that he had heard that Iran had lobbied its Iraqi allies against allowing him to continue as prime minister. Allawi professes puzzlement at this stance. Uh, Iyad, it might be because you let your defense minister, Hazem Shaalan, say that Iran is Iraq's number one enemy! You could see how a thing like that might annoy Tehran a little bit. Not that Iran really has a veto-- pretending that it does may be an attempt to smear the United Iraqi Alliance as themselves puppets of Iran. In fact, that seems to be precisely what Eli Lake says in his Sun article -- that Iran has a veto: Mr. Chalabi's announcement of his withdrawal followed a meeting on Monday with the Iranian ambassador. Mr. Chalabi's spokesman, Entifadh Qanbar, described the meeting as "friendly." Other sources close to Mr. Chalabi's campaign said that during the meeting, the Iranians made it clear they preferred Mr. Jafari for the top post. Lake continues: Mr. Chalabi has recently distanced himself from Iran. In December he gave a press conference in which he said the Iraqi government would not emulate the Iranian style of political system that grants clerics unaccountable political authority. Mr. Jafari has also said that Iraq will not emulate Iran's system, though his aides have recently hinted that new laws should be vetted for their adherence to the Koran. Is Chalabi, accused last year of doing spy work for Iran, now telling us (using Eli Lake as his mouthpiece) that he's the guy who can save Iraq from the Iranian menace ... if not now, then eventually? posted by Steve M. | 12:33 AM | Tuesday, February 22, 2005 This L.A. Times story notes that a number of states have given workers the option of switching their pension plans to Bush-style accounts -- and the private accounts have been a bust: Montana: 30,000 public employees were given the two options; after a one-year enrollment period and hundreds of seminars, 3% chose individual accounts.... Michigan: Of 57,000 workers eligible to pick between traditional pension plans and individual accounts, about 3,000 chose accounts. Ohio: About 5% of eligible state workers have opted for retirement plans based partly or entirely on individual accounts. Florida: Given the choice of keeping a traditional pension or moving to an investment account or a hybrid plan (an account with a pared-down pension), 7% of workers picked the account-only option. Interesting. But I think the performance of private accounts in one state is more interesting: ...when Nebraska's state and county workers were given do-it-yourself accounts, they made so many investment errors that they ended up making less than colleagues with fixed-benefit pensions -- and less than what analysts have said is needed for old age. Their poor performance led the Nebraska Legislature two years ago to junk the accounts for new employees.... The state pioneered accounts for public employees in 1964 but restricted them to state and county workers. Teachers, judges and others were left in traditional pensions, where, in contrast to the accounts, their assets were professionally managed. Three and a half decades later, in 2000, a consultant working for the state discovered that individual account holders were making 6% to 7% a year on their money while the investment professionals who handled the state's pension assets earned 10.5% to 11%. The Nebraska Legislature reacted by dropping the accounts for all employees hired after January 2003, in favor of a centrally run "cash balance" plan that guarantees a minimum of 5% a year and can deliver higher returns depending on how its managers do. During the first year, the accounts earned 8%. "People weren't eating, sleeping, drinking investment all the time, so they didn't get the results the professionals did," said Sullivan, the state retirement director. Well, duh. (Story also available at Yahoo News). posted by Steve M. | 11:44 PM | CONSERVATIVES: WE HATE OLD PEOPLE So Rick Santorum held a town hall forum on Social Security yesterday, and, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, some older workers had the audacity to express doubts about the Republican plan. Cue the Free Republic crowd: Seniors are one of the greediest and ignorant groups of people in this country right now. ***** I'd say many minds were closed.... Older folks simply can't process this info... ***** ...they are stubborn obstinate old bastards that are concerned only for their own welfare. ***** I have talked with many and most are just ignorant of the facts and don't want to hear anything but AARP indoctrination. ***** These greedy geezers have nothing better to do than attend these town hall meeting. I wouldn't be surprised if the AARP is busing them to Santorum's town hall, followed by a stop at the casino. ***** I say let the greedy geezers kill this reform. When SS collapses, we won't have the Dems beating Republicans over the head with this cudgel any more. THEY will have killed it by not going along with these fixes until it was too late. As for the geezers, Alpo has more vitamins in it than tuna. ***** Lovely. posted by Steve M. | 11:30 PM | The campaign against Social Security is going so badly that longtime critics of President Bush, accustomed to seeing their efforts to point out flaws in administration initiatives brushed aside, are pinching themselves. But they shouldn't relax: if the past is any guide, the Bush administration will soon change the subject back to national security. ...I don't know which foreign threat the administration will start playing up this time, but Bush critics should be prepared for the shift. ... a president can always change the subject to national security if he wants to - and Mr. Bush has repeatedly shown himself willing to play the terrorism card when he is losing the debate on other issues.... --Paul Krugman in today's New York Times Federal prosecutors today unveiled sweeping terrorism charges against a Virginia man, accusing him of plotting to assassinate President Bush and trying to establish an al Qaeda cell in the United States. ...A U.S. citizen who grew up in Falls Church, Abu Ali had been detained in a Saudi prison for 20 months before being flown back to the United States yesterday.... --Washington Post today Just a coincidence, I'm sure. posted by Steve M. | 9:59 PM | First Time magazine tells us that members of the U.S. military are negotiating with a rebel leader in Iraq. Then England's Telegraph notes that a former Taliban commander is urging militants in Afghanistan to accept Hamid Karzai's amnesty, lay down their arms, and abandon jihad against Americans. Why are we hearing all this now? It seems to me that somebody wants it reported at this time. I'm thinking about a time-honored precinct-house practice: separating people who are suspected of the same crime and telling them, in their separate interrogation rooms, "Look, your buddy already confessed." I think these stories are being floated because the administration wants to send a message to its enemies: "Look, some of your buddies have given up." Of course, the Iraqi leader mentioned in the Time story represents only a small faction of the Iraqi insurgency (the ex-Baathists, not the Islamicists -- who are, among other things, bombing hair salons where Western-style barbering is taking place). And the ex-Taliban commander was in Guantanamo, so it's not clear that he's really representative of the fighters who've been at large since Kabul fell. (He actually began his pro-Karzai campaign in October, when he returned to Afghanistan, as The Economist reported a few months ago.) But who the hell knows? Maybe it'll work. posted by Steve M. | 5:47 PM | The New York Times reports that "skyrocketing costs" of "junk lawsuits" aren't the real reason malpractice insurance rates regularly spike, and have spiked recently: ...for all the worry over higher medical expenses, legal costs do not seem to be at the root of the recent increase in malpractice insurance premiums. Government and industry data show only a modest rise in malpractice claims over the last decade. And last year, the trend in payments for malpractice claims against doctors and other medical professionals turned sharply downward, falling 8.9 percent, to a nationwide total of $4.6 billion, according to data compiled by the Health and Human Services Department. "There is an underlying cost push," said J. Robert Hunter, the director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America, who is a former insurance regulator in Texas. "But there has not been an explosion of big jury verdicts or settlements. It's a constant drip, drip every year." ... The recent jump in premiums shows little correlation to the rise in claims. According to the National Practitioner Data Bank of the Health and Human Services Department, the total paid out by insurance companies for claims against doctors and other medical professionals rose 3.1 percent annually, on average, between 1993 and 2003 and then declined last year. ...[Martin D.] Weiss of Weiss Ratings [an independent financial rating agency] and researchers at Dartmouth College, who separately studied data on premiums and payouts for medical mistakes in the 1990's and early 2000's, said they were unable to find a meaningful link between claims payments by insurers and the prices they charged doctors. "We didn't see it," said Amitabh Chandra, an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth. "Surprisingly, there appears to be a fairly weak relationship." The insurance industry touts caps on pain-and-suffering awards as a magic bullet to solve this problem, as do the White House and Republicans in Congress. But are insurance rates for doctors really lower in states with such caps? There doesn't seem to be any correlation: The most expensive place in the country [for medical liability insurance] is South Florida, where some obstetricians and general surgeons paid nearly $280,000 for coverage last year, according to The Monitor. Obstetricians in Illinois paid as much as $230,428, The Monitor said, while in Nebraska, the least expensive place in the country for malpractice insurance, obstetricians paid $16,194. Florida adopted a cap on awards of $500,000 to $1 million in 2003. Illinois has no cap and Nebraska has a cap of $500,000. So what causes the spikes? Frequently it's just a lousy stock and bond market. Insurance companies, obviously, don't take premiums and put them under the mattress -- they invest those premiums on Wall Street. And when Wall Street suffers, insurance companies suffer. Also, the insurance industry tends to go through price wars, after which insurance companies raise prices sharply to make up for lost revenue. Yes, as this chart shows, insurance rates seem to go up steadily, even after an adjustment for inflation, no matter what. But I'd say that's just because the cost of medical care regularly rises faster than the inflation rate. posted by Steve M. | 10:38 AM | Good news from Iraq: Chalabi Withdraws Bid to Be Next Iraqi PM Interim Iraqi Vice President Ibrahim al-Jaafari was chosen Tuesday to be his Shiite ticket's candidate for prime minister after Ahmad Chalabi dropped his bid, senior alliance officials said. Pressure from within the ranks of the winning United Iraqi Alliance forced the withdrawal of Chalabi, a one-time Pentagon favorite, said Hussein al-Moussai from the Shiite Political Council, an umbrella group for 38 Shiite parties. "They wanted him to withdraw. They didn't want to push the vote to a secret ballot," al-Moussawi said.... --AP Gee, a couple of days ago Chalabi was claiming he had the votes to win. But I wonder if there's any truth in this, from the Christian Science Monitor: Over the weekend, SCIRI leader Abdel-Aziz Hakim met with Chalabi and offered to make him the top financial overseer in Iraq, responsible for the oil, trade, and finance ministries in exchange for him withdrawing, according to the SCIRI official. Oh, great -- let's make the fox Minister for Henhouses. (CSM link via The Stakeholder.) posted by Steve M. | 8:27 AM | Monday, February 21, 2005 MOVING THE GOALPOSTS ... COMPLETELY OFF THE FIELD Apparently, according to a letter signed by Ann Coulter, it's now considered liberal media bias if the press fails to cover -- now, in 2005 -- an inflammatory statement made by an environmentalist in 1972 -- or perhaps never made at all. Sadly, No! explains. posted by Steve M. | 9:13 PM | Damn, I do wonder what drove Hunter Thompson to this. It's quite possible that we were naive to think of all that substance abuse as bacchanalian -- he may have been just another depressive who was self-medicating. Was his health failing him? Was money slipping through his fingers? A bullet to the head seems like a Thompsonian grand gesture, but I have to admit I thought he'd want to live as long as possible, because that'd show the bastards. Alas, the scoundrels who run the country now are far worse than the ones Thompson railed against in his prime. But I wonder if he failed to vanquish his foes or if his foes merely took his weapon and turned it on him. Recall that the current Scoundrel-in-Chief is a guy who, as Bill Minutaglio noted in First Son, once leapt on stage in the mid-seventies and sang, uninvited and surely unwelcome, behind Willie Nelson. Is that just a big night out for a small-minded Texas shitkicker narcissist, the kind of thing that would have repulsed Thompson? Or is it, well, gonzo? Sometimes it seems that all the gonzo is now on the right, and it's a much nastier strain. Trey Parker and Matt Stone are gonzo; the bourgeois rioters of Florida 2000 had a little gonzo in them. It occurs to me that you can go from Hunter Thompson to Ann Coulter in two moves (via P.J. O'Rourke). Maybe that's not surprising. In the end, a lot of what Thompson wrote about was just pure individualism -- thwarting enemies you regard as vermin, getting away with as much as possible, not giving a shit about hurt feelings. That's a fairly good capsule description of what the Right stands for now, albeit with a different enemies list. So it's sad that Thompson's gone, but I'm afraid it's not altogether surprising that a commenter at one blog could write, "He was definitely a moonbat politically, and as for his psychological problems, well, I’m not all that surprised by this development, but reading 'Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail' in Rolling Stone is seared, seared into my memory," or that Thompson is praised by this self-described purveyor of "hardcore conservative commentary," or by Blogs for Bush. posted by Steve M. | 8:32 PM | Sunday, February 20, 2005 Funny, I was planning to post something Mark Danner wrote in the current New York Review of Books about the fraudulence of political reporting in America when along comes a front-page story in today's New York Times about a curious "unauthorized" release of "secretly taped" conversations with George W. Bush. The recordings come from Doug Wead, an evangelical and author of a book on Bush; Wead says he made them before Bush reached the White House. We are told that Wead released the tapes of his own volition, and that the White House appears mildly nonplussed ("Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said, 'The governor was having casual conversations with someone he believed was his friend'"). Many excepts from the tapes are quoted -- but there doesn't seem to be a single unguarded moment. Every word appears to be focus-grouped, far enough to the right to win over the conservatives but not so far as to alienate the center. Either these tapes weren't made secretly or the excepts played for David Kirkpatrick of the Times were selected with extreme care, and almost certainly vetted by the White House, which almost certainly determined (or assented to) the timing of their release. (All the Times will tell us about the editing process is that "Mr. Wead said he withheld many tapes of conversations that were repetitive or of a purely personal nature. The dozen conversations he agreed to play ranged in length from five minutes to nearly half an hour.") Here are some exceprts. Does any of this strike you as candid? Preparing to meet Christian leaders in September 1998, Mr. Bush told Mr. Wead, "As you said, there are some code words. There are some proper ways to say things, and some improper ways." He added, "I am going to say that I've accepted Christ into my life. And that's a true statement." **** He mocked Vice President Al Gore for acknowledging marijuana use. "Baby boomers have got to grow up and say, yeah, I may have done drugs, but instead of admitting it, say to kids, don't do them," he said. **** When Mr. Wead warned him that "power corrupts," for example, Mr. Bush told him not to worry: "I have got a great wife. And I read the Bible daily. The Bible is pretty good about keeping your ego in check." **** Preparing to meet with influential Christian conservatives, Mr. Bush tested his lines with Mr. Wead. "I'm going to tell them the five turning points in my life," he said. "Accepting Christ. Marrying my wife. Having children. Running for governor. And listening to my mother." **** [Bush] said he told Mr. Robison: "Look, James, I got to tell you two things right off the bat. One, I'm not going to kick gays, because I'm a sinner. How can I differentiate sin?" Later, he read aloud an aide's report from a convention of the Christian Coalition, a conservative political group: "This crowd uses gays as the enemy. It's hard to distinguish between fear of the homosexual political agenda and fear of homosexuality, however." "This is an issue I have been trying to downplay," Mr. Bush said. "I think it is bad for Republicans to be kicking gays."... As early as 1998, however, Mr. Bush had already identified one gay-rights issue where he found common ground with conservative Christians: same-sex marriage. "Gay marriage, I am against that. Special rights, I am against that," Mr. Bush told Mr. Wead, five years before a Massachusetts court brought the issue to national attention. That last one makes me wonder if these tapes were even made when they were said to have been made. Now I want to talk about Mark Danner. The current New York Review prints two letters in response to a Danner article about the 2004, plus Danner's comment on the letters. What Danner says about campaign reporting seems true about much reporting that takes place when campaigns are over -- including the front-page "exclusive" about the Bush tapes: In the major newspapers and, above all, on the television networks, campaign coverage is typically led by "inside stories" ... More often than not, this is a charade: the supposed "inside story" is just another version of the "message" that the campaign wants to get out to the public, another way of manipulating the news by creating a narrative that in fact helps reinforce the plotline designed and chosen by the campaign in the first place. Far from telling readers and viewers what is "really" happening in the campaign, the "inside story" stratagem is simply another way to get across the carefully crafted plotline developed by the campaign itself. Danner gives an example: On March 5, for example, The New York Times published a piece headlined "Bush Campaigns Amid a Furor over Ads," about a supposed controversy over the campaign's first television ads, which offered a glimpse of a dead fireman being carried out of the World Trade Center site. In the article the Times reporters revealed that the campaign was "scrambling to counter criticism that his first television commercials crassly politicized the tragedy of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks." Indeed, the controversy was so serious, according to the Times, that it had "complicated efforts by Republicans to seize the initiative after months in which Mr. Bush has often been on the defensive." Newsweek, for its part, in an article headlined "A 'Shocking' Stumble," reported that the ad controversy "threw campaign officials on the defensive -- and raised questions about the Bush team's ability to effectively spend its massive $150 million war chest, some GOP insiders say." Seven months later, and two weeks after the election, Newsweek published another and very different "inside account," this one based on exclusive access to the campaigns which was granted on the understanding that nothing from this reporting would be published until after the election. Here is what Newsweek's writers now told us about what "two Bush strategists" really thought of their campaign's "shocking stumble": McKinnon and Dowd were ecstatic. At a strategy meeting the next day -- the same morning the Times headline appeared -- they joked about how they could fan the flames. Controversy sells, they said. It meant lots of "free media"; the ads were shown over and over again on news shows, particularly on cable TV. The "visual" of the rubble at the World Trade Center was a powerful reminder of the nation's darkest hour -- and Bush's finest, when he climbed on the rock pile with a bullhorn. What's more, the story eclipsed some grim economic news.... At that Saturday's Breakfast Club, they were still laughing about the ad flap.... Dowd told the group they had received $6 million to $7 million worth of free ad coverage. "Unfortunately, we've been talking about 9/11 and our ads for five days," Dowd deadpanned at a senior staff meeting. "We're going to try to pivot back to the economy as soon as we can." There were chuckles all around. So much for the "inside story." That was a big fraud. This is a small one. It's not an "inside story." It's really just more spin. posted by Steve M. | 10:08 AM | Saturday, February 19, 2005 Nothing profound -- I just want to say that even though I liked The Gates, I find this quite amusing. (New York Times story here.) posted by Steve M. | 9:44 AM | Friday, February 18, 2005 I'm going to try to do some posting over the three-day weekend, but Blogger's been as slow as rush-hour traffic, and I'll be slowed further because I'll be limited to dial-up, so I can't make any guarantees. In any case, have a good weekend. (And if I've inadvertently posted this more than once, my apologies. Blogger really is a mess right now.) posted by Steve M. | 5:48 PM | An excerpt from the AP story on the horrific violence in Iraq today, as posted at Yahoo News: ...The bloodshed began when a bomber entered the vestibule of al-Khadimain mosque in the Iraqi capital's Doura neighborhood and detonated his explosives as worshippers prayed, witness Hussein Rahim Qassim said.... The imam at the al-Khadimain mosque used the minaret's loudspeakers to appeal for blood donations, said 1st Lt. Ahmad Ali, who added that a suicide bomber was behind the blast.... An excerpt from the same AP story, as posted at Fox News: ...The bloodshed began when a bomber entered the vestibule of al-Khadimain mosque in the Iraqi capital's Doura neighborhood and detonated his explosives as worshippers prayed, witness Hussein Rahim Qassim said.... The imam at the al-Khadimain mosque used the minaret's loudspeakers to appeal for blood donations, said 1st Lt. Ahmad Ali, who added that a homicide bomber was behind the blast.... (Emphasis mine.) I've pointed this out before, but the stupidity of it never ceases to amaze me: Fox News has a ban on the use of "suicide bomber" and "suicide bombing" -- based on, I guess, the asinine premise that the word "suicide" will induce sympathy. The problem with this is that you already know the thing is a goddamn "homicide bombing" -- fifteen people died -- but you don't know that the bomber blew himself up without the word "suicide." By the way, does the word "suicide" make you want to shed a tear for a guy who blows himself up in a crowd of innocent civilians? Me either. Stupid Fox schmucks. posted by Steve M. | 3:14 PM | I know we on the left are supposed to be getting all faith-based and stuff, wiping the secular-humanist smirks off our faces and confronting the notion that some people are evil, just evil, but, er ... what century is this? Priests Sign Up for Exorcism 101 Faced with a shortage of skilled clerics, Vatican is offering a course on demonic possession. ...on Thursday about 100 priests stood, prayed for protection, then sat down to begin an eight-week study of how to distinguish and fight demonic possession. The course at Rome's prestigious Regina Apostolorum Pontifical Athenaeum, represents the first time a Vatican-sanctioned course in exorcism is being offered at this level. In Italy, the number of official exorcists has soared during the last 20 years to between 300 and 400, church officials say. But they aren't enough to handle the avalanche of requests for help from hundreds of tormented people who believe they are possessed. In the United States, the shortage is even more acute.... --L.A. Times So what profound evils will these newly trained exorcists confront? Genocide? Terrorism? Murder? Rape? Drug addiction? ...Father Christopher Barak traveled from his headquarters in Lincoln, Neb., to Rome to attend the course. Priests in Nebraska have recently heard troubling accounts from parishioners, including unexplained noises in homes and sightings of ghostlike figures, he said.... "There are a lot more behaviors and lifestyles that are not of God," he said. "There's a lot of relativism. Whatever goes, goes. There's a big surge in New Age, pantheism, young people playing with Satanism, a lot of drug use, black magic, psychics are so big, pornography, MTV…. People are not searching for holiness." Barak is planning to stay for the entire course, which ends in mid-April, and said he hoped to take a new understanding and a new battle plan back to Nebraska. Great -- this priest thinks Evil Incarnate inheres in creaky houses and kids watching Road Rules reruns on MTV. ***** And in other religion news, if you've ever suspected that God is a Republican, now your suspicions are confirmed -- by God Himself! TV preacher Pat Robertson last month revealed his annual in-depth conversation with God and brought back good news for George W. Bush: 2005 looks like it's going to be the president's year.... After spending "a wonderful time of prayer," the Christian Coalition founder said, "The Lord had some very encouraging news for George Bush. What I heard [from God] was that Bush is now positioned to have victory after victory and that his second term is going to be one of triumph, which is pretty strong stuff." According to Robertson, God even went into specifics. God reportedly said Bush will "also have Social Security reform passed, that he'll have tax reform passed, that he'll have conservative judges on the courts and that basically he is positioned for a series of dramatic victories... "The vendetta against religion in America is about to end," Robertson said God told him. In what Robertson portrayed as a direct quote, God reportedly said, "I will remove judges from the Supreme Court quickly and their successors will refuse to sanction the attacks on religious faith."... Then again, it's possible that Robertson is just being punked by God. It's happened before: ... On Jan. 1, 1980, Robertson reported that God had told him that the Soviet Union would in that year invade several Middle Eastern nations, seize the world's oil reserves and throw the United States and Western Europe into economic chaos, sparking worldwide conflict.... During his 2004 talk with God, the Almighty assured him that Bush would win reelection easily. Robertson reported that the race would be a "blowout." In fact, Bush won narrowly by less than 3 percent. posted by Steve M. | 2:33 PM | SUPPORT THE TROOPS Your government doesn't: Hundreds of Army Reserve and National Guard troops returning home after being wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone months without pay or medical benefits they were entitled to receive, military officials and government auditors said Thursday. ...Several wounded troops testified before the House panel Thursday. A Special Forces soldier who lost a leg to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan said he did not receive $5,000 in paychecks. Another veteran with knee and back injuries said he was forced to move in with his in-laws after missing paychecks totaling $3,886. Allen, a 14-year Army veteran who serves with the National Guard's 20th Special Forces Group, has a brain injury and other injuries to his legs, back, neck and eyes resulting from a helicopter accident and a grenade blast. But Allen said it wasn't until he returned home for extended treatment that his "real troubles began." He had to reapply for coverage every 90 days and was at times denied pay, medical coverage and access to his military base. After visiting his family in New Jersey for a week after his yearlong combat tour, his leave was cut short and he was ordered back to Ft. Bragg, N.C., because a commander could not find his paperwork. When his wife went into premature labor in August 2003, she was turned away from a military hospital because his active-duty extension had not yet been approved, Allen said.... Army officials told the House hearing that they had resolved many of the problems cited in the GAO report related to benefit eligibility for part-time troops. Daniel B. Denning, acting assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs, said the influx of wounded was "loading our system like it hasn't been loaded since World War II." ... However, the GAO found that recent changes had not resolved underlying management control problems. In September and October, for example, the Army did not know how many soldiers were on medical extensions or how many had returned to active duty, the study said. The Bushies started talking about the Iraq war at the beginning of 2001. The insurgency has been rampant for nearly two years. And the system still hasn't been rejiggered to deal with reality? And yet conservatives still write, and buy, books like this and this. I got your "dereliction of duty" -- right here. (Story also here.) posted by Steve M. | 12:27 PM | Another creepy sentence about John Negroponte, in this case from The New York Times: If his four decades in public service are any guide, colleagues in Washington and Baghdad predicted, he will try to be a stabilizing force who works quietly but understands the flow of power. Indeed: ...Time and again during his tour of duty in Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was confronted with evidence that a Honduran army intelligence unit, trained by the CIA, was stalking, kidnapping, torturing and killing suspected subversives. A 14-month investigation by The Sun, which included interviews with U.S. and Honduran officials who could not have spoken freely at the time, shows that Negroponte learned from numerous sources about the crimes of the unit called Battalion 316. The Honduran press was full of reports about military abuses, including hundreds of newspaper stories in 1982 alone. There were also direct pleas from Honduran officials to U.S. officials, including Negroponte. A disgruntled former Honduran intelligence chief publicly denounced Battalion 316. Relatives of the battalion's victims demonstrated in the streets and appealed to U.S. officials for intervention, including once in an open letter to President Reagan's presidential envoy to Central America. Rick Chidester, then a junior political officer in the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, told The Sun that he compiled substantial evidence of abuses by the Honduran military in 1982, but was ordered to delete most of it from the annual human rights report prepared for the State Department to deliver to Congress. Those reports consistently misled Congress and the public. "There are no political prisoners in Honduras," the State Department asserted falsely in its 1983 human rights report. The reports to Congress were carefully crafted to convey the impression that the Honduran government and military were committed to democratic ideals. It was important not to confront Congress with evidence that the military was trampling on civil liberties and murdering dissidents. The truth could have triggered congressional action under the Foreign Assistance Act, which generally prohibits military aid to any government that "engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights." ... posted by Steve M. | 10:07 AM | President Bush doesn't oppose sensible Social Security reform: President Bush is not ruling out raising taxes on people who earn more than $90,000 as a way to help fix Social Security's finances.... Asked directly, Bush said he would not bar raising the $90,000 cap, although he does not want to see the payroll tax rate go up. "The one thing I'm not open-minded about is raising the payroll tax rate. And all the other issues go on the table," Bush said in the interview, according to an account in Wednesday's New Haven (Conn.) Register. No -- he doesn't oppose that. He has flunkies to oppose it for him: Flunky #1: ... Cheney seemed to suggest that was not an option. "We cannot tax our way out of this problem," Cheney said to cheers from some of the administration's core supporters at the CPAC meeting. "We must not increase payroll taxes on American workers. Higher taxes would only buy time and then future Congresses would need to come back and raise taxes again and again on our children and grandchildren." Flunkies #2 and #3: The two senior Republicans in the House, Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, the majority leader, and Rep. J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, the speaker, indicated that raising the income limit subject to payroll taxes would be considered a tax increase on workers and their employers.... Asked if Bush's opening the door to consideration of lifting the wage cap would make it easier to get legislation moving in the House, DeLay replied: "No. Because we're not going to do that." Asked why, DeLay replied, "That's a tax increase." Asked if it would be acceptable to his caucus, DeLay replied, "Nope, not at all." Bush gets to seem high-minded and bipartisan, for the few suckers in America who still believe he's a nice guy. And then these guys go out and tell us what the White House really thinks. posted by Steve M. | 7:48 AM | Thursday, February 17, 2005 With all due respect to Jonah Goldberg, I believe this little item by Jay Nordlinger may be the stupidest thing ever published by National Review: I was reading an op-ed piece by Fareed Zakaria in the Washington Post, and he began by quoting Jon Stewart, the comedian, who said, "We did it! We had the election. And now we can say to Iraq, 'Goodbye!'" The words "We did it!" brought me up short. I thought, "What do you mean, we?" It will be just like the Cold War, I think. George W. Bush and his allies will make progress in the Middle East, and then, with selective amnesia, those who fought Bush & Co. tooth and nail will say, "We, we, we." We liberalized Afghanistan, we liberalized Iraq, blah, blah, blah. If it had been up to Jon Stewart and his ilk, that election in Iraq would never have taken place. "We did it!" indeed. Excuse me?! It was a flippant remark, fer crissake! Watch the video! It was a flippant remark by a guy who, by the way, makes a lot of money and pays a lot of taxes! To the U.S. government! Which the government used in Iraq! Gah! Next up in National Review: Norman Mailer's novel Why Are We in Vietnam? -- if he called it that but actually wrote it in Brooklyn, is that fraud ... or treason? posted by Steve M. | 11:05 PM | I should write a post about Bush's choice of John Negroponte to be director of national intelligence, but I think this says it all. (The uncomprehending should click here.) posted by Steve M. | 3:40 PM | Ridge, Pollsters Met During Bush Campaign Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge met privately with Republican pollsters twice in a 10-day span last spring as he embarked on more than a dozen trips to presidential battleground states. Ridge's get-togethers with Republican strategists Frank Luntz and Bill McInturff during a period the secretary was saying his agency was playing no role in Bush's re-election campaign were revealed in daily appointment calendars obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act. "We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security," Ridge told reporters during the election season. His aides resisted releasing the calendars for over a year, finally providing them to the AP three days after Ridge left office this month.... Ridge's meetings with the pollsters occurred just before the first of 16 trips, from late May to late October, to 10 states important to the president's re-election campaign. During the same period, Ridge made 20 appearances in nine uncontested states.... --AP/Yahoo News According to the story, Ridge met with Luntz on May 17, 2004, and with McInturff on May 26. On May 27 there was this at MSNBC: Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said on NBC's "Today" show that there was some dissent over whether to raise the threat level from yellow, midpoint on the five-color scale, to orange. "There's not a consensus within the administration that we need to raise the threat level," he said Wednesday. But later in the day, he echoed Ashcroft in saying all key officials are in agreement about the terrorist threat. That was in connection with this: Having warned the public of a gathering threat of another major terrorist attack, law enforcement agencies on Thursday were focusing on providing protection for a number of high-profile events in the coming months, beginning with Saturday's dedication of a new World War II Memorial in Washington. A day after Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller warned that "credible intelligence from multiple sources indicates that al-Qaida plans to attempt an attack on the United States in the next few months," security officials were facing an immediate test in the dedication of the new war memorial.... In another pre-emption effort, federal and local authorities will conduct interviews nationwide of people who could provide information about terrorist plans or seven suspected al-Qaida members identified Wednesday by Ashcroft as presenting a "clear and present danger." ... In Wednesday's warning of the potential for a major terrorist attack this summer, Ashcroft said that "disturbing" intelligence, collected for months, augments al-Qaida's own declaration that its plans for a devastating follow-up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are 90 percent complete. Ashcroft said that could mean terrorists already are in the United States to execute the plan, though he acknowledged there is no new information indicating when, where or how an attack might happen. Ashcroft and Mueller also announced creation of a new FBI task force to focus on the threat and appealed to all Americans to be extra vigilant about their surroundings, their neighbors and any suspicious activity.... One of the seven al-Qaeda suspects named at that time was Adam Gadahn, whom you may recall as a hippieish-looking ex-metalhead from Orange County. Five months later -- a week before the election -- Gadahn was ID'd as the speaker making threats on a purported al-Qaeda terror tape. If one were paranoid, one might wonder whether there was something fishy about the appearance, at key points in the campaign, of an alleged terrorist who roughly matches the typical Limbaughnista's stereotype of a left-leaning youth. One might wonder if those responsible for crafting Bush's campaign "message" might want Gadahn to be part of that message. One might suspect that Gadahn didn't become a really big part of the message because Howard Dean, the candidate whose followers Gadahn most resembled in the Limbaughnista mind, failed to receive the Democratic nomination -- but one might also suspect that the Gadahn card was played anyway because, what the hell, when you're running against a Democrat, it never hurts to plant the thought that harmless-looking counterculturals could easily be insane terrorists. That's what one might think if one were paranoid. (Ridge story via Taegan Goddard.) posted by Steve M. | 1:24 PM | WHAT'S ON RIGHT-WING TELESCREENS NOW In case you're wondering who the next Goldstein is, I just saw the latest New York Times bestseller list. (It'll be posted on the Times site on Sunday.) All the way up at #4, in its first week on the list, is this book: MEN IN BLACK, by Mark R. Levin (Regnery, $27.95) A lawyer and conservative commentator enumerates ways in which "the Supreme Court is destroying America." Amazon page here. (It's #3 at Amazon.) From the Inside Flap The Supreme Court Endorses Terrorists' Rights, Flag Burning, and Importing Foreign Law. Is that in the Constitution? You're right: It's not. But these days the Constitution is no restraint on our out-of-control Supreme Court. The Court imperiously strikes down laws and imposes new ones purely on its own arbitrary whims. Even though liberals like John Kerry are repeatedly defeated at the polls, the majority on the allegedly "conservative" Supreme Court reflects their views and wields absolute power. There's a word for this: tyranny.... I love it that these people actually think the right to political speech (e.g., flag-burning) isn't in the Constitution. Levin is the president of the Landmark Legal Foundation, of Paula Jones fame. posted by Steve M. | 10:50 AM | ... (3) War with Iraq will bring more terrorism. This is a hardy perennial. It was claimed before the Gulf war and the Afghanistan campaign--and when bombs fell on al Qaeda and the Taliban during Ramadan. Rather than more terrorism, removing Saddam will bring more respect for the United States. Terrorists will be increasingly fearful. (4) The Arab street will erupt. Another perennial. This is often predicted but rarely happens. A swift, decisive victory over Saddam will quiet the Arab street.... --Fred Barnes, "The Peacenik Top 10: A Look at the Ten Most Popular Objections to War and Some Common-Sense Responses to Them," Weekly Standard, 3/6/03 War Helps Recruit Terrorists, Hill Told ... the U.S. occupation has become a potent recruiting tool for al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, top U.S. national security officials told Congress yesterday. "Islamic extremists are exploiting the Iraqi conflict to recruit new anti-U.S. jihadists," CIA Director Porter J. Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.... "Our policies in the Middle East fuel Islamic resentment," Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate panel. "Overwhelming majorities in Morocco, Jordan and Saudi Arabia believe the U.S. has a negative policy toward the Arab world." ... --Washington Post, 2/17/05 posted by Steve M. | 9:23 AM | Wednesday, February 16, 2005 Tonight, ABC's evening news led with the story of the theft of nearly 150,000 people's personal information from a ChoicePoint Inc. database. Stories also appeared in the L.A. Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Was there any mention, in any of those stories, of ChoicePoint's flawed felon-purge lists, which were used in the 2000 election in Florida? Nope. posted by Steve M. | 10:40 PM | A number of bloggers are puzzling over this story, which appeared in a small newspaper in Washington State yesterday: Five federal government officials, including three from the CIA, have removed several documents from the archival papers of the late Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson housed at the University of Washington. Last week the federal document security team spent three days in the special collections division of the UW Suzzallo-Allen library. The officials, which also included people from the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, combed through 1,200 boxes of material using a five-binder index to find the targeted papers. Carla Rickerson, head of special collections, said the team removed up to 10 documents.... Daria G at the Daily Kos and Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Daily News have various theories, mostly having to do with Jackson's proteges (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams) or with the possibility that this concerns the case of Larry Franklin, a policy analyst who worked under Feith and Wolfowitz and is under investigation as a possible Israeli spy. Laura Rozen of War and Piece, by contrast, reproduces an e-mail suggesting that this was a routine bit of mop-up -- "It happens every few years, either with donated papers or depository government documents, that they send something they didn't mean to send and need to take it back." Well, if it's not just tidying up, I'd guess the officials' visit has something to do with matters discussed by the historian Roger Morris in this 2003 Seattle Post-Intelligencer article: It was then, 40 years ago, that Jackson began to be linked directly, if furtively, to some of the uglier and little-known origins of the war on Iraq in 2003. Overseeing the CIA's "black budget" for covert operations and interventions from a subcommittee of Armed Services, he was one of a handful of senators who gave a nod to two U.S.-backed coups in Iraq, one in 1963 and again in 1968. Those plots brought Saddam Hussein to power amid bloodbaths in which the CIA, exacting the price for its support, handed Saddam and his Baath Party cohorts lists of supposed anti-U.S. Iraqis to be killed. The result was the systematic murder of several hundred and as many as several thousand people, in which Saddam himself participated. Whatever the toll, accounts agree that CIA killing lists comprised much of Iraq's young educated elite -- doctors, teachers, technicians, lawyers and other professionals as well as military officers and political figures -- Iraqis who would not be there to oppose Saddam's growing tyranny over ensuing years or to help rebuild or govern Iraq, as the United States now hopes to do, after the current war. Hmmm -- when is Saddam's trial supposed to start? posted by Steve M. | 7:17 PM | Another scalp: Embattled PBS Chief Will Step Down in 2006 Pat Mitchell, the Public Broadcasting Service chief under fire for spending public money on a cartoon show that also featured a real-life lesbian couple, will step down when her contract expires in June 2006.... She drew recent criticism from both liberals and conservatives for "Postcards From Buster," in which the title character, an animated bunny named Buster, traveled to Vermont -- a state known for recognizing same-sex civil unions. Though the focus was on farm life and maple sugaring, the episode, entitled "Sugartime," featured an actual lesbian couple. Newly appointed Education Secretary Margaret Spellings contended that the episode did not fulfill the intent Congress had in mind for programming and said many parents would not want children exposed to such lifestyles.... Judging from this and the Eason Jordan case, I guess it's one strike and you're out -- if you displease the right-wing Politburo you can climb down from a remark, you can rescind a decision, but it doesn't matter. You're already an unperson. You must be eliminated. posted by Steve M. | 3:54 PM | I don't recall being dragged out of my bed by jackbooted centurions from the Ministry of Art and forced to experience the tyranny that is The Gates, but Myron Magnet of the right/libertarian City Journal ("the best magazine in America" --Peggy Noonan) suggests that I was (in an essay called "'The Gates' on the Road to Serfdom"): For all the cant about the artist as a liberator of the human spirit, there is much in contemporary art and especially architecture that seeks to impose upon individuals the artist's vast ego and confine them within it, so that they cannot escape his will. It is this whiff of totalitarianism that makes Polish intellectuals label such architecture "neo-oppressionism." Fortunately, in two weeks, when the sensation of "The Gates" has worn off, Christo's work will disappear. If only the same could be said of other neo-oppressionist schemes... In The New York Sun, Magnet elaborates: "The fact is, this is not progressive. It is not life-enhancing. It does not speak of the liberty of the individual. Like so much of modern architecture, it speaks of some totalitarian system, be it corporate or state bureaucracy, in the face of which the individual is just a small cog in a great machine. It says, 'By God, you will go where Mr. and Mrs. Christo lead you.'" What would be better, I suppose, would be Atlas Smashed the Gates, a work that allowed every (in a Randian sense) radically free individual to destroy or build as many gates, or other monuments (or impediments) to the individual will, as he or she (probably he) could build. Or destroy. Or something like that. In an ongoing creative-destruction sort of way. Death to all artists with "visions" they brutally and tyrannically seek to impose on the willing and pleased! Alas, here's the front page of today's New York Times. It's worse than Magnet thought -- even Laura Bush can't escape arrest and forcible Gates reeducation at the hands of the Art Ministry's thugs! (Link will work today only. There's another photo here. Good Lord -- they got NotJenna, too!) Look, this is an artwork. It's up for two weeks. Citizens didn't pay for it; no one is forced to see it; no one who sees it is forced to like it. It's there for the taking, or avoiding. I think it's endearingly brash and somewhat barmy, in a way that really suits a huge, half-crazy built on ridiculously large ambitions. But maybe I feel this way only because I've come to believe 2+ 2 = 5, and I love Big Brother. posted by Steve M. | 1:30 PM | Until I read this, from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, I hadn't really paid attention to the fact that Janice Rogers Brown isn't quite sure the Bill of Rights should apply to the states. (Remember, Brown's judicial nomination will reportedly be the first test of Senate Republicans' "nuclear option.") As I've pointed out in the past, this is a line of thinking followed by a number of religious conservatives in defense of the notion that any state can establish a religion if it wants to. As Alan Keyes once said in a speech: There might be states in which they require a religious test or oath of office. There might be states in which they have established churches, where subventions are given to schools and so forth to teach the Bible. There might be places where you and I might disagree with the religion some folks wanted to put in place over their communities. But guess what the Founders believed? They believed that people in their states and localities had the right to live under institutions they would put together to govern themselves according to their faith.... Is that what Brown believes? This is from a an AP story published when she first appeared before the Judiciary Committee: In a 1999 speech at Pepperdine University titled "Beyond the Abyss: Restoring Religion on the Public Square," Brown disputed the doctrine of separation of church and state and questioned whether the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment, applied to the states.... After the Civil War, the Reconstruction Congress wrote the 14th Amendment, which sponsors said was intended to extend the Bill of Rights to the states.... The amendment set off a century of debate in the Supreme Court on whether states were truly barred from infringing the basic guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Courts in the late 19th century gave deference to states. By the mid-20th century, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the amendment in fact prevented states from violating basic individual rights, such as freedom from unreasonable searches and the rights to free speech and a fair trial. "The historical evidence supporting what the Supreme Court did here is pretty sketchy," Justice Brown said in her Pepperdine speech. "The argument on the other side is pretty overwhelming" that the 14th Amendment failed to apply the Bill of Rights to the states. This won't become an issue when her renomination comes up in the Senate -- Brown knows what to say when questioned about it: Asked by senators Wednesday about that comment, Brown said there was historical evidence pointing in both directions. But she also said she accepted the Supreme Court's view that the Bill of Rights protects all Americans today. "What the Supreme Court said is what counts. Speeches are an opportunity to think out loud," she said. But when Governor Roy Moore declares Christianity the state religion of Alabama, at least one federal judge will nod in approval. posted by Steve M. | 10:33 AM | Tuesday, February 15, 2005 I understand why people would get choked up at that Budweiser commercial with the troops receiving a round of applause at the airport -- hey, it's the troops, who are going through hell; at least it's not Rummy and Condi and Commander Flightsuit -- but this comment at Lucianne.com is creepy: Ad should run in continuous loop all day What, on the telescreens? Between Two Minutes Hates and reports on the war in Eastasia? posted by Steve M. | 4:49 PM | More thoughtful art criticism from the right -- this time it's Andrea Peyser, in yesterday's New York Post: WAKE me when these hideous things are gone! It's time to let the truth be known: "The Gates" -- that manically promoted, ludicrously expensive sculpture project now infesting Central Park -- is the artistic equivalent of a yard that's been strewn with stained toilet paper by juvenile delinquents on Halloween. It is the defacement of beauty, not its creation -- a fraud perpetrated on the people by no-talent hypemasters and their chief cheerleader in City Hall. Please, make them go away! Walking into the park yesterday, I was assaulted by thousands of what looked like shower curtains twisting in the wind. I had found "The Gates." Like a sucker in a game of three-card monte, I'd noticed I was about to be taken for a fool -- and I'd ignored them. The advance buzz had been all-consuming. "The Gates" was presented as the ticket for our stubborn, precious, maddening city to be elevated into something of a quasi-Eurotrash capital (except where the natives bathe regularly).... I led you yesterday to Roger Kimball's critique of The Gates; it was equally trenchant and perceptive, but -- perhaps because of limitations of space -- Kimball failed to make this point, which gives Christo and Jeanne-Claude's game away: French people never take showers! Really! And therefore all art by Europeans is a fraud! (Neither Kimball nor Peyser points out that, like Jeanne-Claude, John Kerry speaks French. But maybe Bill O'Reilly will get to that.) Kimball called The Gates a "scam." Peyser says it's "ludicrously expensive" and compares it to three-card monte. Isn't this odd, given that the Christos take no government or private funding and charge no admission, and given that the Christos run a highly efficient capitalist enterprise that balances its books a hell of a lot better than the Bush administration? You'd think right-wingers would cheer for those reasons alone. Or be pleased that, decades ago, Christo fled the Soviet bloc, and his work is, in part, a reaction to his early years. No. Their gut reaction is to recoil in disgust because art is so damn arty. Sometimes it's weird, and kooky, and often not classically beautiful! And artists, Lord help us! Duncan Maxwell Anderson took their measure in a column published last summer in the Post: Some men claim the status of artists simply because they don't know how to change a tire. Men from the arty class can become parasites, making their try for greatness simply by throwing muck at men who are truly great. The Gates column isn't Peyser's first venture into art criticism. Back in 2002, she joined in an attack on Tumbling Woman, a sculpture by Eric Fischl that was based on images of 9/11 victims plunging to their deaths from the Twin Towers. Where The Gates is charmingly meaningless (and that's meant as a compliment), Tumbling Woman is chilling and powerful. But Peyser was having none of it: SHAMEFUL ART ATTACK IS THIS art? Or assault? ...A violently disturbing sculpture popped up last week in the middle of Rock Center's busy underground concourse - right in front of the ice-skating rink. It depicts a naked woman, limbs flailing, face contorted, at the exact moment her head smacks pavement following her leap from the flaming World Trade Center. The worst part about the piece is that you can't miss it. Even if you try. Titled "Tumbling Woman," the sculpture is by '80s darling Eric Fischl.... "It's disgusting!" said Ken Fidje, 34.... The sculpture was removed from Rockefeller Center just as Peyser's column hit the newsstands. That was too much even for the conservative New York Sun: We're no fans of a lot of what passes for public art around town, but "Tumbling Woman" is no abstract lump of bronze. It is an extraordinary rendering of a woman in one of the most gripping poses we can imagine in art. It captured a moment that will live in the imagination of New York forever, and it deserves a place in the city. Not, as we say, that we lack regard for the Great Peyser. She deserves her own statue, perhaps in that plaza in front of the News Corp. building on Sixth Avenue. Call it "Woman on a High Horse." A good man for the job would be Eric Fischl. You'd think Peyser would have approved of a work of art that reminded us of the horror wrought by terrorists on 9/11. But terrorists aren't the Right's real enemy -- liberals are. And a time-honored way to attack American liberals is to mock our presumed allies: foreign artists with funny accents. ***** Roger Kimball got his dander up at some artists back in February 2003 -- Sam Hamill and other poets who had been invited to the White House by Laura Bush and decided to protest the imminent war with Iraq. Skimble posted Kimball's column about the poets on his blog. Kimball actually went light on the philistinism in that column -- but, with the benefit of hindsight, I do enjoy this passage: [Hamill] is also given to ... exaggeration. He had, he said, just read "a lengthy report" about the president's Iraq war plans. According to Mr. Hamill, they called for "saturation bombing that would be like the firebombing of Dresden or Tokyo, killing countless innocent civilians." Really? Every report I have seen has dilated on the extraordinary efforts of U.S. military planners to minimize civilian casualties by the use of precision weapons, tactics to isolate Saddam from control of his weapons of mass destruction, and so on. But somehow the headline "U.S. Strives to Remove Brutal Dictator, Liberate the Iraqi Populace, While Keeping Civilian Casualties and Damage to Infrastructure to a Minimum" doesn't play well to the gallery. Er, no comment. **** Today in the New York Post it's John Podhoretz going after The Gates; next, I guess, it will be Cindy Adams and the sports cartoonist. Again, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are "snake-oil salesmen"; again, the easily traversed gates are deemed an exercise in obstruction ("like an endless row of construction cones shutting down two lanes on Interstate 95.") And, of course, cultural fascism is the order of the day: You weren't going to catch anybody in Central Park making a negative peep about the whole project, lest he or she be considered uncool, uncouth, narrow-minded, philistine, incapable of recognizing innovative art when he saw it. I guess I just imagined that conversation my wife and I had on Sunday with a New York-dwelling Ivy Leaguer who didn't much like The Gates. But the second half of Podhoretz's column is where the real nonsense appears: But there is a wonderfully salutary aspect to "The Gates," and that is how the mobs of people thronging the park seem blissfully unaware that they are walking through reclaimed territory. From the late 1960s until the late 1980s, Central Park was an object lesson in the decline of New York City. This urban paradise, this wondrous invented playground, had become a sodden, dirty, dangerous place. The famous moments in Central Park during these decades were all nightmarish descents into menace, lawlessness and death. It was in Central Park that Robert Chambers killed Jennifer Dawn Levin. It was where dozens of people were harassed and injured after a Diana Ross concert by a gang of monstrous youths who said they were out "wilding." It was where Tricia Meili went jogging one evening and was raped so brutally that she lost half the blood in her body. In 1970, a movie called "Where's Poppa" captured the feeling in the city perfectly, as a man living on Fifth Avenue would run across the park at night to try to reach his ailing mother on Central Park West, only to be mugged again and again and again. In the 11 years since Rudy Giuliani was inaugurated as mayor, the most dramatic indication of the change in New York's fortunes is the declining crime and murder rate. But nobody talks about a less quantifiable but equally dramatic decline here -- the decline of menace. No, that's true. You know why? Because people who live here felt safe in Central Park long before Giuliani. I can't talk about the early 1970s, when I was growing up in Boston. But the park was certainly a joy, in the daytime at least, as far back as the 1980s. Robert Chambers killing Jennifer Levin? That happened sometime between 4:30 A.M. and dawn -- and they went off assuming that nobody would mug them. What's more, it was acquaintance sexual violence, so it's not even relevant to Podhoretz's argument. Tricia Meili, the Central Park jogger? That attack took place around 10:00 P.M. -- an act of brutality, but remember that dozens of people were jogging, strolling, and bicycling through the park at that hour, persuaded that doing so was reasonably safe. And then recall that Central Park was, in its earliest days, closed at night. Meili regularly jogged there after dark without incident prior to her horrific assault, and she wasn't alone. Podhoretz mentions the riot after the 1983 Diana Ross concert. He conveniently overlooks a somewhat similar moment in the park: On June 11, [2000,] roving bands of boys and young men allegedly doused, stripped, and molested more than 50 women in New York's Central Park. The assaults took place during and after the National Puerto Rican Day Parade. On June 11, 2000, the mayor of New York was Rudolph Giuliani. posted by Steve M. | 12:14 PM | Why did we reelect Bush? Oh, yeah -- because he was going to keep us safer: Budget cuts FDA safety checks The Food and Drug Administration's proposed budget for next year includes cuts to nearly all its inspection programs, from checks on imported food to reviews of overseas plants that make prescription drugs bound for the USA. If Congress approves, the number of domestic food safety inspections made next year would fall by 5%, foreign drug plant inspections would drop 5.8% and checks on the nation's blood banks would be cut 4.7%, compared with estimated 2005 inspections.... The proposed cuts come amid criticism the FDA failed to inspect often enough a long-troubled British vaccine plant that the United States had counted on for half of its flu vaccine supply.... --USA Today Er, isn't this odd, considering that the Bushies are always fretting over the possibility that we could die if we continue importing drugs from that lawless rogue nation Canada, where life is cheap? posted by Steve M. | 10:03 AM | This assassination in Lebanon is actually working out very nicely for the Bush administration, The New York Times notes. The Bushies blame the killing on Syria -- but: In the view of American analysts, Syria has in turn done the bidding of Iran, using Syrian territory to support Hezbollah, a major presence in Lebanon, and other Islamic groups that have attacked Israel. The United States has focused mounting attention on Iran in recent weeks, both because of its suspected nuclear arms program and because of its support of groups trying to disrupt a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A Western diplomat said the United States, in condemning Syria's possible role in the Beirut attack, may also be trying to rebuke Iran, signaling that American tolerance of such behavior was diminishing. Yes, it's idee fixe time at the White House. All roads lead to Public Enemy #1. posted by Steve M. | 8:29 AM | Monday, February 14, 2005 AFP reports: For the second time in as many months, a test of the Pentagon's missile defense system has ended in fiasco.... The Missile Defense Agency said the failure became apparent when an interceptor that was supposed to shoot down an incoming target missile carrying a mock warhead did not take off from the Ronald Reagan Test Site located on the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific.... Yeah, that would be a tipoff. posted by Steve M. | 10:57 PM | So the Kurds, who won 59% of the vote in oil-rich Kirkuk (even though they represent about a third of the population there, and even though many of the Kurds who voted in Kirkuk don't actually live there), were celebrating last night, according to Reuters: U.S. soldiers and Iraqi policemen initially tried to dampen the party by confiscating flags and posters and banning celebratory gunfire, but were overwhelmed and had to give up. "There was so much going on we just couldn't stop them," Smith said. "We just changed plan and decided to keep an eye on them instead to make sure they weren't causing trouble." AFP notes that others in the region had a reaction that vaguely resembled "celebratory gunfire": Insurgents blew up an oil pipeline in the northern oil fields of Iraq.... The oil field attack occurred at the North Oil Company's Al-Dibbis oil field near Kirkuk, said Maj Gen Anwar Mohammad Amin.... Hmm, let's see: The Kurds will probably control Kirkuk's oil. The Shiites and Kurds will control Iraq. The insurgents are mostly Sunnis. Could be a problem. Oh, and the Turkmen in Kirkuk have ties to Turkey, which really doesn't like it when Kurds are feeling their oats. Gosh, do you think this U.S. officer, quoted by Reuters, might be on to something? "I think there'll be some ethnic violence here, I really do," said U.S. Captain Mitch Smith, a company commander in the heart of Kirkuk, the most ethnically diverse city in Iraq. "Before the elections there were concerted attacks on coalition forces and Iraqi security forces but I think the focus may have shifted now," he told Reuters on Monday. "Rather than targeting us, I expect we might see the various groups in the city fighting among themselves." posted by Steve M. | 3:55 PM | Yeah, yeah, yeah -- I said a couple of days ago that we on the left all had fun watching Jeff Gannon fall, and then we moved on. But that wasn't true for the folks at AMERICAblog. They kept digging and found graphic and all-but-incontrovertible proof that Gannon has been a prostitute. Sorry -- this is the administration that's still firing Arab linguists merely for being gay, and that wants to enshrine a national ban on gay marriage in the Constitution. So yes, this is worth pointing out. posted by Steve M. | 2:59 PM | Apart from his repulsive habit of publishing Charles (Bell Curve) Murray, can someone please explain to me why David Shipley regularly wastes so many column inches in the New York Times op-ed page on fluff like this? Nice enough photos, but, er, this is an op-ed page. In the print edition, the photos takes up nearly a third of the page. Does no one on the planet have anything more substantive to offer that could fill those 38 column inches? posted by Steve M. | 1:25 PM | Romance is in the air today across the land. But in Washington, the buzz continues about "The Kiss." No, not Gustav Klimt's famous painting. It's the big fat one an exuberant President Bush planted on Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's right cheek as he waded through the Capitol crowd after the State of the Union a couple of weeks ago. ... There's been K Street chatter, our colleague Jeffrey H. Birnbaum tells us, that Lieberman could be on an administration list to replace Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in the next year or so. That would be convenient for Lieberman, whose term is up in 2006, and could give Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell (R) an opportunity to appoint a Republican to the seat for at least a few months before the election, inching the GOP closer to a filibuster-proof Senate. Or maybe it's just love? --Washington Post In Luke 22, Judas kisses Jesus and Jesus is arrested. I wonder if Bush, who prides himself on being a loyal follower of the Guy Upstairs, had this in mind when he kissed Lieberman. The two stories aren't quite analogous, of course -- Judas betrayed the man he kissed, while the man Bush kissed is teaming up with Bush to betray his own party -- but I suspect Bush isn't enough of an actual scholar of the Bible (or logical thinker) to grasp that. posted by Steve M. | 11:13 AM | Sunday, February 13, 2005 I was in Central Park today to see The Gates. It's charming; it created a near-giddiness in the crowd. I really want to see it again tomorrow when it's raining. But over on the right, a cane is being shook in a white-knuckled fist and a voice is croaking, "Get off my lawn!!" Andy Warhol once remarked that 'art is what you can get away with'. And how. Just ask Christo, the Bulgarian-born entrepreneur who wraps things in cloth, calls it Art and sits back while the money pours into his bank account.... His latest wheeze is 'The Gates' in Central Park, New York.... This visual litter will inconvenience visitors to the park from 12 February to 27 February, when the whole shebang will be rolled up and put into storage somewhere....In the meantime, Christo is drawing furiously, churning out the drawings, the largest of which are fetching $600,000.... This isn't a Rotarian boor, Dennis Prager one of the Limbaughs. This is one of the Right's intellectuals: Roger (Tenured Radicals) Kimball. And that's his critique of the art: It inconveniences Joe Average Man! (It doesn't, actually -- the gates of The Gates are wide and inviting, the saffron curtains billowing overhead; on a sunny Sunday in New York, if you truly want inconvenience, just walk, well, anywhere, and fall in behind a slow-creeping pedestrian gabbing on a cellphone, or try to get past a wall of tourists walking four abreast.) And ... and ... really rich people pay a lot of money to the artists! (Poor dears. Won't somebody save them from themselves, before they spend themselves down to their last hundred or two hundred million?) This is my favorite Kimball line: Why should the city let an individual capitalise on public property, possibly compromising the local bird life and foliage, in order to enhance his own notoriety and balance sheet? Um ... local bird life? Does Kimball mean pigeons? Is he concerned that The Gates is going to harm pigeons? Would that it were so. posted by Steve M. | 11:22 PM | HOW HIGH IS DOWN? CNN is reporting a 72% turnout. [Later: Some readers think that will turn out to be high, with the final number more like 60%. Still a lot, in the face of widespread death threats....] --Instapundit, 1/30/05 And read this post on turnout by Roger Simon: "Before the spin doctors get a hold of the 'how big was the turnout' question in Iraq (60%? 70%?) and use that to denigrate this great step forward that has just taken place, let's remind ourselves that turnout in recent US Presidential elections is barely over 50% of eligible voters and that in the nascent days of our democracy, 1824, it was 26.9%." --Instapundit, a later post on 1/30/05 The election commission said overall turnout was 8.55 million votes, which was about 58 percent of the 14.66 million registered voters. That was a little less than the 60 percent that election officials had predicted soon after the election took place. --Washington Post today Turnout was also somewhat higher than previously estimated. --Instapundit today posted by Steve M. | 6:06 PM | In The New York Times, David Cay Johnston notes that we've already taken the first step down the slippery slope that leads to the end of progressive taxation: The richest Americans no longer pay the highest federal tax rates. When both income and payroll levies like those for Social Security are counted, Americans making as little as $100,000 paid a larger share of their income in taxes in 2002 than those making more than $10 million. Those with incomes of $100,000 to $200,000 paid 20.6 percent of their income in these taxes, compared with 20.1 percent for those in the $10-million-and-up group, the Tax Policy Center computer model calculated. You'll hear something different from conservatives -- but they're counting only federal income taxes. Payroll taxes (for Social Security and Medicare) are federal taxes, too, and if you're a middle-class wage earner, you pay them on every dime you earn, while every dime over $90,000 is exempt from the SS tax, which means high earners get a big break. And meanwhile, as Edward Andrews notes in the Times, there's a push to combine "tax reform" -- which, for conservatives, means a regressive consumption tax, or an approximation of one -- with Social Security "reform." ..."We can deal with Social Security and taxes simultaneously," said Representative Bill Thomas, Republican of California and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, in a speech last month. "Sometimes, the more you include in a piece of legislation, the easier it is to pass."... In recent weeks, numerous Republican lawmakers and Mr. Breaux [John Breaux, co-chair of Bush's tax advisory panel] have echoed Mr. Thomas's call to broaden the Social Security debate and link it with tax reform. "Why don't we look at the whole picture of how we fund entitlement programs?" Mr. Breaux said of Mr. Thomas's idea. "I think he's raised very worthwhile questions." As Andrews notes, Both a flat tax and a consumption tax would probably shift more of the tax burden from high-income households to middle- and lower-income taxpayers. If Thomas and Breaux get their way, kiss progressivity goodbye. Of course, I'm not sure what's really going on -- maybe this call for even more radical change all at once is a trick to make Bush's SS reform seem like the sensible middle ground. (Something like that happened in 2001, when a few members of Congress demanded bigger tax cuts than Bush was asking for.) Or maybe these guys are serious. Maybe when Thomas says, "Sometimes, the more you include in a piece of legislation, the easier it is to pass," what he means is "If we make this really, really confusing we might be able to pull the wool over the eyes of the public and get it all passed." posted by Steve M. | 5:54 PM | Saturday, February 12, 2005 Conservatives like to say that the left has its priorities treasonously skewed -- that we hate George W. Bush (or, say, John Ashcroft) more than we hate terrorists. Well, Eason Jordan has quit his job at CNN, and after observing the near-monomania of the conservative commentariat on the subject of this man -- day after day after day after day -- I think it's clearer than ever that the people at whom such a charge should be leveled are on the right. Right-wingers simply hate liberals, and people they believe are liberals (the entire mainstream media, for example), more than they hate bin Laden and Zawahiri and Zarqawi. We are the real enemy. Conservatives don't care that the masterminds of 9/11 are still at large, as is the anthrax killer -- they've begun taking down the real menaces to society, John Kerry and Tom Daschle and Dan Rather and Eason Jordan. They're working on Ward Churchill. Oh, sure, conservatives cheered when Saddam was found in that spider hole, but that wasn't about Saddam -- that was about Bush. The point of the Iraq war was to give one of their own a big flag for America to rally around, as a means of vanquishing the Democratic Party in 2004. (Just debating the authorization of the war had done the trick in '02.) Why do you think conservatives didn't care that the pursuit of bin Laden was all but abandoned in favor of war against Saddam? Because the real result they wanted wasn't justice for the victims of the Towers, but exaltation for the guy who stood on their mass grave with a bullhorn on 9/14. And if the leaders of al-Qaeda are captured now, for conservatives the point will be that it happened on a right-winger's watch. Back in 1999, the New York Post asked readers to choose the most evil person of the millennium. Bill Clinton came in second, ahead of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Josef Megele; Hillary Clinton came in sixth. That wasn't done as a joke. There may have been some glee among the Free Republic members who stuffed the ballot box, but the opinions expressed were sincere. (One Freeper wrote: "There is space at the bottom for 3 write-ins. Bill & Hillary each got a vote...the 3rd was Charles Schumer. Although, I should have put Senator Boxer or Feinstein.") This is the Right's real war. If that poll were being conducted today, I wonder where Eason Jordan and Dan Rather would rank. **** (Note: Yes, we on the left had some fun for a couple of days with the pseudonymous superpatriotic rent boy Jeff Gannon. But one or two lefty blogs went all Gannon, all the time. The rest of us cheered, but quickly moved on.) **** (Oh, and what's the Latin sentence at the top of the page of Hugh Hewitt's blog? It's "Potestas Democraticorum delenda est!" -- "The power of Democrats must be destroyed." I rest my case.) posted by Steve M. | 10:33 AM | Friday, February 11, 2005 Added to the blogroll, in some cases very belatedly, are AMERICAblog, Bill's Big Diamond Blog, Crooked Timber, Scoobie Davis, Hard Attack News, Malvolio, The Raw Story, Remain Calm, The Sideshow, Think Progress, and Wampum. Also, I've updated the links for Alas, a Blog and INTL News, as well as for Ann Coulter's original New York Observer interview and John Scalzi's "I Hate Your Politics" column. posted by Steve M. | 10:55 PM | OH, WE'RE SORRY. WE FORGOT THAT WE'RE SUPPOSED TO FOLLOW THE MARQUIS OF QUEENSBURY RULES WHILE YOU GET TO KICK US IN THE NUTS Congressman: Democrat Leadership Threatening 'Retribution' for Dems Who Cooperate with White House Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) was asked at a CATO conference in Washington yesterday whether he had persuaded any Democrats to back his plan to rescue Social Security from its financial troubles. Under his legislation (HR 4851), no new taxes would be needed to pay for "transition costs," participation in the new system would be voluntary and individuals would be allowed to divert a portion of their payroll tax into a mutual fund.... "We were in planning stages [with friendly Democrats]," said Ryan. But each essentially told him: "I like what you're doing. I like this bill. I think it's the right way to go. But my party leadership will break my back. The retribution that they are promising us is as great as I have ever seen. We can't do it."... --Allan Ryskind in Human Events Online No matter how many times they lose, they still want to define "bipartisanship" as "doing what the Democrats want." --right-wing blogger C. D. Harris Apparently, bipartisanship is not a two-way street. --right-wing blogger Betsy Newmark ***** ...Bob Dole, after having told me earlier that we would work out a compromise on the issue, announced that he would block any health-care legislation and make my program a major issue in the November congressional elections. A few days later, Newt Gingrich was quoted as saying the Republican strategy was to make health-care reform unpassable by voting against improving amendments. He was as good as his word. On June 30, [1994,] the House Ways and Means Committee voted out a universal coverage bill without a single Republican vote. The Republican leaders had received a memorandum from William Kristol, former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, urging them to kill health-care reform. Kristol said the Republicans couldn't afford to allow anything to pass; a success on health care would present a "serious political threat to the Republican Party," while its demise would be a "monumental setback for the President." At the end of May, at a Memorial Day retreat, the Republican congressional leaders decided to adopt Kristol's position. --Bill Clinton, My Life, p. 601 posted by Steve M. | 4:32 PM | DEMOCRACY = FREEDOM = PLURALISM ...Er, maybe not always: Candidates backed by Islamic clerics won races in the Saudi Arabian capital in the kingdom's first regular balloting, an election observer said Friday. Suleiman al-Oqaili told a press conference at which the preliminary results were announced that he saw the seven Riyadh winners' names on a list circulated via cell phones and the Internet. "It was promoted as a list that had a religious blessing," al-Oqaili said.... At least five of the winning candidates for the seven electable seats on the Riyadh City Council are believed to be Islamists.... --AP I'm not sure what the ramifications of these results are, but this comes to mind: In Indonesia, which just achieved its third democratic transfer of power since Suharto's rule ended in 1998, the jihadist movement is growing stronger, as it is in other Asian democracies. In Algeria, free elections in 1990 and 1991 resulted in victories for those who advocated a jihadist theocracy. Throughout Western Europe, the jihadists are becoming deeply rooted among disaffected Muslim youth. Free elections, in short, have not dimmed the desire of jihadists to create a caliphate. --Richard Clarke in The New York Times Magazine, 2/6/05 posted by Steve M. | 3:46 PM | I know you're not supposed to pick apart sentimental fluff like this Peggy Noonan column about the Pope, but I don't get it. The main thrust of the column is that God is keeping Pope John Paul on earth, miserable in infirmity, in order to teach lessons: Love the elderly and weak; love one another as the Pope, who shows his love by regularly dragging himself painfully before the public, loves you. OK. But if being a public figure who's floridly ill makes the Pope a walking reminder from God of our duty to love, why not say the same thing about, say, Yasser Arafat in his last days? Why not Christopher Reeve testifying in Congress in favor of the embryonic stem cell research Noonan hates? Why not, in a lesser way, Janet Reno? And what exactly is it that the Pope inspires? Noonan saw him speak in 2003; prior to his appearance in the hall, she saw evidence of, I guess, his transformative power in the behavior of the audience waiting with her: The room rocked. Cheering here, drums there, an American spiritual crooned somewhere in the back. The choruses would pick up each other's sound, so that a group from Santo Domingo would sing, and as they finished a young male choir from Poland, in white tie and tails, would take up the song, and then as they finished a group of American Indians--in native dress and full headdresses they looked like beautiful peacocks--would break into native drums. I thought the disparate but unified members of the audience, as they echoed and supported each other, were like a living symbol of the church every day in the world. Er, it sounds to me like an international version of the parking lot at any Grateful Dead concert during the last 25 years of Jerry's life. To Noonan, the Pope is a monumental figure in history -- but she never really tells you why she believes this. Maybe this is because her weekly Wall Street Journal column is a sermon preached to the conservative choir, which already regards the Pope as one of the two great men of the twentieth century, a sort of anti-Martin Luther King to Reagan's anti-FDR. Conservatives give the Pope more credit for the end of communism than they do, say, the actual shipworkers at Gdansk. But Noonan doesn't discuss any of this. Nor does she talk about what, exactly, the Pope says or does to nourish his followers' souls. This reminds me of The Passion of the Christ, a movie Noonan loved. The Passion gives you next to nothing of Jesus' teachings or the things he did as a spiritual leader. Its message -- like Noonan's about the Pope -- seems tautological: Jesus was great because Jesus was great. Why worship him? Well, he's just ... monumental. And (like Noonan's Pope) he suffered -- a lot. This brings us to Noonan's George W. Bush. He too, in her eyes, has suffered -- he's an ex-drunk (though he never seems to have truly touched bottom) and he's the man history has burdened with the task of leading the war on terror (calm down, I'm just trying to see the world as she sees it). And he too is great because he's, well, great. It's almost like a 50s hipster's take on hard bop or action painting: He suffers. His suffering led to this. And it sends me. If you need me to explain it to you, you just wouldn't understand. ***** UPDATE: William F. Buckley has also decided to write about John Paul this week, but he has a slightly different take: DEATH FOR THE POPE At church on Sunday the congregation was asked to pray for the recovery of the pope. I have abstained from doing so. I hope that he will not recover.... Wow. Let's start with headline: Does anybody remember the howls of outrage in 1991 when a film studio dared to release a movie called The Pope Must Die? I guess, on that score, there really is blanket immunity for Republicans. But that's a side issue. Buckley's point, of course, is that the Pontiff is very, very sick -- too sick to be effective and too sick not to be in extreme discomfort: ...the progressive deterioration in the pope's health over the last several years confirms that there are yet things medical science can't do, and these include giving the pope the physical strength to coordinate and to use his voice intelligibly. So, what is wrong with praying for his death? For relief from his manifest sufferings? And for the opportunity to pay honor to his legacy by turning to the responsibility of electing a successor to get on with John Paul's work? Noonan, by contrast, seems to think God is doing the right thing by leaving the Pope on earth to suffer. Rather like Kathy Bates in Misery, she acknowledges her beloved's distress, but seems to think it's OK as long as it means she (and others) can dote on him. posted by Steve M. | 1:02 PM | OK -- you know about the newly released Richard Clarke memo from January 25, 2001, warning Condi Rice about al-Qaeda in no uncertain terms (available here). And you know that the FAA got 52 specific warnings about bin Laden and al-Qaeda between April 1 and September 10, 2001 -- more than two a week. But hey, that's all in the past. The folks who run things are keeping us safe now, right? Well, let's see. Here's a story from The Boston Globe: It seems that a certain American company recently imported some radioactive material. The plan was to ship it to Houston. It wound up, instead, slightly off course -- that is to say, it wound up in Chelsea, Massachusetts, an inner-ring suburb of Boston that's fallen on tough times in the past few decades (and happens to be where I was born). The Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires immediate notification when such a shipment goes missing. This one went missing in October. The company told the NRC it went missing on Tuesday. I haven't told you the name of the company. It's possible you can already guess the punch line: The container held devices that use the radioactive element americium to probe oil wells. It had been imported from Russia by Halliburton Energy Services.... I found this story via a post at Sisyphus Shrugged. You should read the post, because Julia has discovered that the shipper was participating in something called the Customs Trade Partnership Against Terrorism program. A little taste of what the Customs Department says about C-TPAT: Q: As a company, we are very interested in C-TPAT but we are not interested in spending a lot of money, nor putting ourselves in a liability position if something goes wrong. Is it still possible to do this partnership? A: Yes. Customs intent is to not impose security requirements that will be cost prohibitive.... That should make you sleep better tonight. posted by Steve M. | 9:54 AM | Thursday, February 10, 2005 Our future? Some elderly Saudis are being disposed of by their families who dump them off in front of area hospitals and speed away, leaving doctors furious and flabbergasted by this bizarre, cruel behavior. Recently, three separate families abandoned their parents — and their responsibilities — at King Fahd Hospital. In an incident at the hospital on Tuesday, a woman in her late 80s who was abandoned by her son there 10 days earlier was reunited with him. During her hospital stay, officials tried several times to get in touch with her family, who denied her existence. Security guards were able to trace her taxi-driver son who ditched her at the hospital. He was recognized as a regular visitor to the premises, frequently dropping off passengers at the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) entrance.... Not all of the elderly are so lucky. "Uncle Hamed," as he’s called at the hospital, was abandoned during Ramadan and still lies on a King Fahd Hospital bed. He is blind, emaciated and 87 years old. Officials have tried to find a person to contact, but the man has no identification — and no one knows who left him at the hospital.... --Arab News, 2/3/05 (Link via Skimble.) posted by Steve M. | 10:48 PM | UPDATE Virginia lawmakers dropped their droopy-pants bill Thursday after the whole thing became just too embarrassing. The bill, which would have slapped a $50 fine on people who wear their pants so low that their underwear is visible in "a lewd or indecent manner," passed the state House on Tuesday but was killed by a Senate committee two days later in a unanimous vote.... --AP I can't tell you how relieved I am. posted by Steve M. | 6:25 PM | The bodies of more than 20 Iraqi drivers and security forces from a convoy of government trucks carrying sugar were found on Thursday south of Baghdad, police said. The drivers had all been burned in their vehicles. Police said they believed the convoy was attacked at least two days ago but the bodies were left to rot. --AFP At least 10 Iraqi policemen were killed in a gun battle with insurgents south of Baghdad on Thursday, police sources said. --Reuters A car bomb detonated by remote control exploded Thursday in Baghdad, killing two Iraqis but missing a U.S. military convoy.... Gunmen fired on an Iraqi police patrol Thursday in Baqouba, north of Baghdad, triggering a gunbattle that killed a civilian and wounded two police officers, officials said. Assailants also killed a police lieutenant in Baqouba. Five bodies in Iraqi National Guard uniforms were found Thursday in the insurgent stronghold of Ramadi, 70 miles west of Baghdad.... A strong explosion shook the Rahmaniyah neighborhood of western Baghdad late Thursday, and residents said the blast occurred near a small Shiite mosque. Witnesses said there were casualties but police had no report. A videotape obtained Thursday by Associated Press Television News showed gunmen killing four blindfolded men who identified themselves as Iraqi policemen.... Elsewhere, a body was found riddled with bullets in Mosul, and in the northern oil center of Kirkuk, a roadside bomb exploded several minutes after a U.S. military patrol passed, killing one Iraqi, police said. In Baghdad, gunmen shot to death a hospital receptionist. ... --AP 
"WOO WOO WOO! G-O-P! G-O-P! BUSH! BUSH! BUSH! BUSH! JANUARY 30! JANUARY 30! MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!" ****** I post these items because they happened, they would seem to be perfectly comprehensible, and yet it seems as if we can't take them in because they run contrary to consensus reality, which is that Iraqis issued a stinging rebuke to terror on election day and now it's all over but the shouting for evildoers in Iraq. posted by Steve M. | 5:18 PM | More evidence that Roy Moore could be Alabama's next governor, from the Mobile Register: Despite speculation that Constitution Party ties might hurt his chances with the GOP, former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore would likely be accepted onto the Republican ballot if he runs for office, according to several GOP leaders. Moore, who has been linked to the Constitution Party, has said he is considering a bid for governor in 2006 and that he would probably run as a Republican.... If Moore were to seek the GOP's 2006 gubernatorial nod, he'd most likely face Gov. Bob Riley. The incumbent has not officially announced plans to seek a second term but most observers believe he will run for re-election.... Apparently, that party-loyalty thing is ordinarily a big hurdle, but Moore has cleared it with ease where others have failed: Leaders of the Constitution Party had wanted Moore to be their presidential candidate. He turned them down, but appeared several times last year with the third-party's nominee, Michael A. Peroutka. Peroutka advocated outlawing abortion, abolishing the Internal Revenue Service and making America a Bible-based republic. The Republican Party booted Mobile radio host and Moore supporter Kelly McGinley from its primary ballot last April. She wanted to run for the state school board. Party officials said McGinley had endorsed the Constitution Party and had resigned from a local Republican committee. So, let's sum up: For the Alabama GOP, planning an intraparty challenge against the sitting governor isn't a problem. Violating the Constitution of the United States with a big granite Ten Commandments monument isn't a problem. Campaigning for someone who advocates turning America into a theocracy isn't a problem -- at least not anymore. Scary state, Alabama. Oh, and Moore has a book coming out soon: Moore has not indicated publicly if he will seek office in the 2006 election cycle. He has said any announcement would come sometime after his book, "So Help Me God," is released on March 1.... Here's the Amazon page for the book. Think this guy might show up on a radio show or two? Think he might perhaps wangle an appearance on, say, Fox News? Oh, this could be a big book tour. When So Help Me God makes the New York Times bestseller list, don't say I didn't warn you. (The publisher, Broadman & Holman, is not one of the big guns, admittedly, and is mostly, you won't be surprised to learn, a religious publisher, but it's had a couple of Times bestsellers -- an Ollie North novel and a biography of the golfer Payne Stewart.) (Story via Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 3:52 PM | TRACTION The Jeff Gannon story is in the New York Daily News, under this headline: "Bush Press Pal Quits Over Gay Prostie Link." That's very nice. (Those of you who don't know who Jeff Gannon is should go to the link immediately, or get the basic story at World O'Crap or AMERICAblog.) But mark my words, this story is cresting; it'll disappear from sight soon. An anti-gay White House credentials a "journalist" (with no journalism experience) who seems linked to gay prostitution; the "journalist" receives a classified CIA memo on Valerie Plame; his "news outlet" is a propaganda operation linked to the Texas GOP ... sounds like a juicy story, right? Unh-unh. Wolf Blitzer and Howard Kurtz say it's just de trop, and they and their friends decide these things. And now this morning I see that Atrios is citing the shocking racism of the wife of the managing editor of The Washington Times ("Muslims are 'human hyenas' who 'smell blood' and are 'closing in' on their 'weakened prey,' meaning 'the white race'"); she's been published 35 times in his paper. And I have an e-mail correspondent who, in response to posts I've done on Grover Norquist, urges me to point out whenever possible that the highly influential GOP strategist has been linked to Hezbollah. I'm mentioning all these things together because sometimes I wonder why we lefty bloggers bother to bring any of this stuff up. None of it gets traction. The scandals of the Clinton years -- not just Monica but the haircut and the Travel Office -- have lingered in America's collective memory for years; the embarrassments we dig up (or the ones that are just hiding in plain sight) just fizzle out. You can say what you want about the "liberal media," but here's something you can't dispute seriously: The press outlets described as "mainstream" and "liberal" reflexively recoil from scandal and outrage involving the Right. If you got all your news from CNN or The New York Times (Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd perhaps excepted), you might never know that anyone in the GOP has ties to monsters, or says things that are utterly beyond the pale, or engages in behavior that's lurid and titillating. Republicans' Social Security numbers may not add up, their WMDs may not be buried where they were supposed to be buried, but they, personally, are not freaks. And the comparable voices on the right never stop describing Democrats and liberals as freaks. So what you get from, say, the Fox News one-two punch in prime time -- Hannity & Colmes and The O'Reilly Factor -- is an endless succession of stories meant to appall mainstream America and affirm the premise that Democrats, liberals, and leftists are dangerous, delusional, hate-filled, irresponsible, indecent, profligate, and profane; people who pick pockets and undermine morals; people who favor jackbooted totalitarianism and anarchic lawlessness. People who are, in a word, freaks. I don't know if America believes everything the Right says. But if the only controversial things America learns about the GOP from the press involve policy, while scandal is a big part of what's discussed regarding Democrats, is it any wonder that America votes Republican? What we're being told is that one party is made up of people who are within the pale while the other party is full of sickos; if you were an apolitical undecided voter unable to make up your mind in a close election, which would you ultimately choose? Our side needs to start talk about GOP freaks and sickos; we need to remove the mantle of normality from the Republican Party. We can't just pitch our media (Air America, etc.) to our own -- we have to push stories that will make apolitical Aunt Edna and Uncle Ned think, "That guy is really messed up in the head." This needs to happen on TV. If I were, say, Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, I'd go to an all-GOP-freak format, as direct counterprogramming to Fox. It might just save the country -- and I'm not exaggerating. posted by Steve M. | 11:38 AM | Wednesday, February 09, 2005 Wal-Mart Stores Inc. said Wednesday it will close a Canadian store whose workers are on the verge of becoming the first ever to win a union contract from the world's biggest retailer.... The store in Jonquiere, about 100 miles north of Quebec City, became the first unionized Wal-Mart store in North America last September, after the bargaining unit was certified by provincial labor officials. Since then, workers at a second Quebec store have also been granted union status. Neither had reached a contract.... The closest a U.S. union has ever come to winning a battle with Wal-Mart was in 2000, at a store in Jacksonville, Texas. In that store, 11 workers -- all members of the store's meatpacking department -- voted to join and be represented by the UFCW. That effort failed when Wal-Mart eliminated the job of meatcutter companywide, and moved away from in-store meatcutting to stocking only pre-wrapped meat.... --AP 
posted by Steve M. | 6:09 PM | The New York Times reports that Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons is apparently not selling worth a damn: ...According to Nielsen BookScan, the media-tracking company, "I Am Charlotte Simmons" has sold fewer than 250,000 copies from its release in November through the end of January. Even after accounting for BookScan's acknowledgment that it typically measures about 70 percent of total hardcover sales, that would indicate that the book was selling at a slower pace than Mr. Wolfe's two previous novels.... It would also indicate that the book might not be meeting the publisher's expectations. When Farrar, Straus & Giroux published the novel, it announced a first printing of 1.5 million copies, a figure which, in the wink-wink world of publishing, usually means a commitment to actually print about half that many copies. (I'll do the math for you, if you're confused: The Times is assuming that 750,000 copies were printed -- and only about 357,000 have been sold. That's less than half the print run, which is dreadful.) ... "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is being discounted by 50 percent or more at bookstores and online, a move publishers often make to try to recoup some of their investment in a book that has not met expectations.... Executives at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Mr. Wolfe's longtime publisher, said the discounting is a common marketing technique intended to keep a book on the best-seller list in the post-holiday period, when fewer people are visiting bookstores. It does not indicate that the performance of "I Am Charlotte Simmons" is disappointing, the executives said.... Stop right there. That last statement is a crock. As a rule, publishers don't blithely print far more copies of a book than they can sell at normal retail prices -- you're not going to find the rest of the pre-Christmas bestseller list already on sale at B&N or Borders at 50% off. This "shared markdown" is simply a sign that demand was overestimated. Publishers always work with retailers to make sure first printings aren't wildly optimistic; in this case, what seemed like a reasonable first printing (Wolfe's previous novel sold more than a million in hardcover, the Times notes) was way off the mark. I can't help wondering if the recent report that Charlotte is a presidential favorite was some sort of attempt on the part of the White House to provide support to an ideological comrade. You may think of the book as merely a novel, but on the right it's a text much applauded for correct thinking. posted by Steve M. | 4:58 PM | Ahmad Chalabi, the man whose lie-propagation machine sent Americans to die in Iraq, just might become its next prime minister, says Eli Lake in The New York Sun. Note, however, that since Judith Miller was taken off the Iraq beat at The New York Times, Lake has become Chalabi's #1 mouthpiece in the U.S. press. So maybe you should take this with a grain of salt. posted by Steve M. | 2:42 PM | WHAT TRULY MATTERS Virginians who wear their pants so low their underwear shows may want to think about investing in a stronger belt. The state's House of Delegates passed a bill Tuesday authorizing a $50 fine for anyone who displays his or her underpants in a "lewd or indecent manner." ... --AP today Gun buyers, including criminals, can continue to avoid background checks by doing business with unlicensed dealers at Virginia gun shows. The Virginia Senate voted 20-17 Wednesday to kill Sen. Henry Marsh's bill requiring criminal background checks on all purchasers at gun shows. State law requires federally licensed dealers to conduct the checks at gun shows but it exempts unlicensed vendors, such as gun collectors and private sellers. Marsh, D-Richmond, said Virginia is the only state along the coast from North Carolina to the Canadian border that has not closed "the gun show loophole." ... --AP, 1/26/05 posted by Steve M. | 1:11 PM | COULTER: IT WOULD BE A GOOD THING IF U.S. TROOPS KILLED JOURNALISTS On CNBC's Kudlow & Kramer show: LARRY KUDLOW: You got a couple seconds before the break, when you guys are all gonna come back, but Ann, I just want to give you first whack at this: Eason Jordan, top news executive at CNN -- I mean, to me, this is absolutely incredible. This guy says, at a big conference in Davos, that the U.S. military is deliberately targeting and assassinating American journalists? Hunh? He still has a job? Hunh? You got a take on that? ANN COULTER: Would that it were so. (Laughs) KUDLOW: (Laughs) Would what were so? COULTER: (Laughs) That the American military were targeting journalists. KUDLOW: (Laughs) Oh, no! Don't go there!... Video here. (Yeah, it's the Glenn Reynolds blog at MSNBC. Sorry.) I don't want to talk about what Eason Jordan said or didn't say (the facts are in dispute). I want to talk about Ann Coulter giggling, again, while advocating the killing of people she considers her ideological enemies. She said Timothy McVeigh should have blown up every reporter and editor at The New York Times. Now she says U.S. troops should kill reporters in Iraq. Explain to me again: Why is Ward Churchill a pariah and Ann Coulter isn't? posted by Steve M. | 7:25 AM | Tuesday, February 08, 2005 BUSH, MAN OF FAITH From the New York Daily News: ...Dubya didn't let the Sabbath inhibit him Sunday when he and Laura Bush attended services at St. John's Episcopal Church near the White House. The frisky moment came shortly after the Rev. Luis Leon encouraged his flock to greet one another. Most congregants settled for a handshake and the salutation "Peace be with you." But the Chicago Tribune's White House correspondent wrote in his pool report: "[President Bush] leans toward [the First Lady], gives her a quick kiss on the lips and then pats her behind - I am not making this up - before turning to shake hands with other worshipers around him." ... Didn't Poppy Bush once give Bar a little love-tap on the butt in the middle of anationally televised interview a few years ago? Dignity -- always dignity. posted by Steve M. | 6:14 PM | THOSE WACKY GERMANS Parade float in Dusseldorf: 
Nice. (Source.) (Link via Free Republic's "dead," who posts it under the heading "Germans interrupt Jew killing and consensual homosexual cannibalism to mock Bush & his religion." Gosh, and I thought it was liberals who had no sense of humor.) posted by Steve M. | 2:51 PM | The Bush administration on Monday proposed cutting the Environmental Protection Agency budget by nearly 6 percent to $7.57 billion in fiscal 2006.... Most of the EPA cut proposed for 2006 is from a reduction in funding for a revolving fund that states use to upgrade sewage and septic systems, and storm-water run-off projects. Funding for the fund fell $361 million, or 33 percent, in the Bush administration budget proposal. Environmental groups say cities need the loans and grants to replace and upgrade aging sewage systems, some of which are over a century old.... --Reuters As a symbol of what Bush is doing to America, that's almost too perfect, isn't it? posted by Steve M. | 10:49 AM | Alexander Cockburn (in a subscribers-only Nation column) notes that it's perfectly acceptable to describe the violent death of your ideological opponents as simple justice, a la Ward "Little Eichmanns" Churchill -- as long as your opponents are on the left: The New Republic's Tom Frank (not the Frank, please note, who just wrote a book about Kansas) describes in TNR how he recently sat in on an antiwar panel in Washington. Frank listened to Stan Goff, a former Delta Force soldier and current organizer for Military Families Speak Out, who duly moved Frank to write that "what I needed was a Republican like Arnold [Schwarzenegger] who would walk up to [Goff] and punch him in the face." Then upon Frank's outraged ears fell the views of International Socialist Review editorial board member Sherry Wolf, who asserted that Iraqis had a "right" to rebel against occupation, prompting TNR's man to confide to his readers that "these weren't harmless lefties. I didn't want Nancy Pelosi talking sense to them; I wanted John Ashcroft to come busting through the wall with a submachine gun to round everyone up for an immediate trip to Gitmo, with Charles Graner on hand for interrogation." After Wolf quoted Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy's defense of the right to resist, Frank mused, "Maybe sometimes you just want to be on the side of whoever is more likely to take a bunker buster to Arundhati Roy." Here's that New Republic article, courtesy of a Freeper, who finds it delightful. Now, I'm still not willing to defend Churchill's death sentence for World Trade Center workers (all of them in the original essay, all but the blue-collar workers and various others in his subsequent apologia -- a qualification just like the one made by his ideological opposite number, Ann Coulter). But can we have a single standard, please? posted by Steve M. | 8:11 AM | Monday, February 07, 2005 We just had the Iraqi elections and the State of the Union and all Bush can muster is a 57% approval rating from Gallup? Yeah, it's an uptick, but hell, Clinton beat that in every Gallup poll taken from the time of Drudge's first Monica story to the end of the Senate trial. posted by Steve M. | 9:38 PM | Good news from Iraq! Iraq expects to restart its northern oil export pipeline in five or six days, ending a stoppage of more than seven weeks because of sabotage attacks, an Iraqi oil official said on Monday.... Exports have been idle since Dec. 18, when saboteurs blew up a section of the pipeline, which runs from the Kirkuk oilfields to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan... --Daily Star (Lebanon) ... Er, maybe not: A pipeline carrying crude oil from Iraq's northern Kirkuk hub to the key refinery of Baiji was attacked Monday, an official from the North Oil Company said. "Preliminary reports indicate that a rocket was fired at a cluster of pipelines near Al-Fatha, just on the edge of the Tigris river," the official told AFP on condition of anonymity. "This 16-inch pipeline was already sabotaged three weeks ago and is crucial in providing the oil needed for the Baiji refinery," itself key to much of Baghdad's power supply, the source said.... --AFP/Turkish Press Here's the map. The pipeline to Turkey runs through Baiji. And, of course, people are still getting killed, just like before January 30. But hey -- according to CENTCOM, 49 Iraqis just graduated from highway patrol school! Tasked with providing law enforcement and security along Iraq’s highways and major roadways, the IHP [Iraqi Highway Patrol] will also respond to incidents involving anti-Iraqi forces, foreign terrorists, car bombs and attacks on convoys. Hey, and do you know how long they train you before CENTCOM declares you ready to take on those tasks? Three weeks. posted by Steve M. | 6:42 PM | No, it's not particularly tasteful, but if you want to save yourself the trouble of reading all those terrorism stories from Iraq, now you can use Rational Enquirer's Bomb-A-Tron™ and just write your own.... posted by Steve M. | 3:04 PM | Josh Marshall says it; Atrios quotes it approvingly: It is not just that Social Security phase-out is proving unpopular in some states where President Bush is popular. It's turning out to be most unpopular in some of the reddest parts of the country. Alabama is a good example. Montana is another. Or Rep. Virgil Goode (R) in Southside Virginia. And they're not the only ones. This isn't particularly surprising when you think about it. These are areas are often older, more rural and have more voters with lower incomes. These are states where President Bush has campaigned on a pseudo-populism which is belied by his own economic policies. Phase-out is bringing the contradiction to the surface. True. And yet ... Here's Bush, campaigning for his Social Security plan in Montana, as reported in yesterday's New York Times: More than 4,000 people went to hear Mr. Bush speak on Thursday, and many others wanted to but could not get in. Cheers rocked the convention hall as he described the war against terror and his commitment to national security. They also cheered his jokes, his declaration that he was thrilled to be in a place where there were more cowboy hats than ties. It was, politicians in both parties said, a powerful performance. ... Senator Conrad Burns, a Republican, gave Mr. Bush a warm and rousing introduction on Thursday as "a bold leader" and a "man who earned his spurs." ... Yes, the Times also notes that the front page of The Great Falls Tribune that greeted Mr. Bush on Thursday with the headline "Bush Arrives with Bold Plan" also included a statewide poll conducted for the paper, that declared, "Montanans oppose switching to personal Social Security investment accounts by a nearly 2-to-1 margin." But is there a possible tipping point -- a point at which the cult of personality takes over and public opinion shifts just because Bush loves freedom and hates gay marriage and talks in a twang, all of which convinces a lot of people that anything he's monomaniacal about (cf. Iraq in '02) must be exactly the way he describes it? posted by Steve M. | 2:51 PM | In the week since national elections, police officers and Iraqi National Guardsmen said they have received more tips from the public, resulting in more arrests and greater effectiveness in their efforts to weaken the violent insurgency rocking the country. --Washington Post today U.S. and Iraqi officials insist they are getting more tips from Iraqis about insurgent activity since the Americans transferred sovereignty to an interim government last June. --AP, 1/21/05 The U.S. military is reaping more high-quality intelligence tips from Iraqi prisoners than ever since it stopped using several coercive interrogation techniques after the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal in May, the American general in charge of Iraqi prisons said Monday. --USA Today, 9/6/04 Saddam arrest leads to more tips, U.S. says BAGHDAD -- The capture of Saddam Hussein has prompted many more Iraqis to come forward with intelligence about the armed insurgency... --The Olympian, Olympia, Washington, 1/5/04 Our greatest advantage has been the one the media ignore: Few Iraqis wanted the Ba'athists back. As they began to feel more confident of American resolve, they offered ever more tips about hide-outs and arms caches, sometimes for money, sometimes because they believed in freedom — or just because they didn't want combat in their neighborhoods. --Ralph Peters in the New York Post, 12/15/03 Intelligence has begun flowing in at a faster rate, according to Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq. More and more tips are coming in every day, said General Odierno in a videoconference with Washington-based reporters. "It is probably 10- or 20-fold more than when we first started here ... the number of people we have coming in to provide us human information," he said. --Christian Science Monitor, 10/29/03 posted by Steve M. | 8:30 AM | Sunday, February 06, 2005 Oh, bloody hell: In December, New Republic editor Peter Beinart responded to John Kerry's defeat with "A Fighting Faith," a 6,000-word manifesto on the future of the American left. Now Mr. Beinart will be stepping aside to spend the next eight months expanding his theory of New Liberalism into a book for HarperCollins -- for an advance in the mid–six figures. ... rival publishing sources said the deal was worth more than $600,000. Doubleday contemplated offering Mr. Beinart more than $650,000 for a two-book deal, according to a Random House source familiar with the bid. "If [Mr. Beinart’s deal] is less than that, it’s not a lot less," the source said.... In the publishing business, six hundred grand is a nice piece of change -- it means the book has to sell in New York Times bestseller numbers or it'll lose mnoey. So we're going to get the big push from HarperCollins when this book comes out -- in, not surprisingly, 2006. The only upside is that I can't imagine a mass audience buying a book based on "A Fighting Faith" -- Beinart says too many nice things about liberalism (in the abstract) to appeal to the mouth-breathers who bought, say, Zell Miller's book, and his simpleminded message (essentially, attack "Islamic fascism" however the Right defines it, in order to save liberalism) isn't going to appeal to the people who buy lefty books. But for the duration of his book tour next year we're going to be bashed over the head with this all over again. posted by Steve M. | 9:36 PM | So I'm reading a generally positive review of the new Christopher Hitchens book in The New York Times, and I see this in the first paragraph: Although more than a dozen of these articles appeared before 9/11, "Love, Poverty, and War" is nonetheless overshadowed by that day and by Hitchens's response to it. ... he suggests that "it is civilization and pluralism and secularism that need pitiless and unapologetic fighters." This book, in the main, shows him quite ready, indeed eager, to join the fray. And my first thought, naturally, is: Oh yeah, Hitch? The recruiting office is that way. Why don't you sign up? But that's unfair, right? After all, Hitchens is 55 years old. Then I turn to the Metro section. Folks, here's the commander of the rear detachment of the New York National Guard's 42nd Infantry Division: 
The story says that When the 42nd moves into position next month, it will become the first full Guard division in its entirety to deploy into combat since the Korean War. ... The division is expected to remain abroad for at least a year, commanders say, protecting four northern provinces that include Kurdish areas where residents have long been friendly to American forces, but also Saddam Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, and the oil city of Kirkuk, where a dozen Iraqi Army soldiers were killed on Wednesday. I think that commander, Colonel Russell Catalano, might be about your age, Hitchypoo. So? What are you waiting for? **** UPDATE: Whatever the relative ages of Hitch and Colonel Catalano, I think it's safe to say that the colonel has a few years on the 35-year-old Jonah Goldberg. posted by Steve M. | 2:00 PM | Saturday, February 05, 2005 Senate Republican leaders have decided to begin their use of the "nuclear option" -- forcing confirmation of President Bush's judicial nominations with a majority Senate vote -- on an African-American woman blocked by Democrats from a federal judgeship. Associate Justice Janice Rogers Brown of the California Supreme Court was one of 16 Bush nominees for U.S. appellate courts whose confirmation was prevented by Democratic filibusters in the last Congress.... Republican leaders ... decided ... to launch the offensive about a month from now by trying to confirm Brown. --Robert Novak OK -- game on. Want to learn something about Janice Rogers Brown? People for the American Way has a lot of information here. There's a more concise fact sheet from the AFL-CIO here. Short version: She's a property-rights extremist. But she is black, so we know how Republicans are going to try to get her confirmed -- by portraying her as a victim of Democratic massas with bullwhips. That could be quite effective. And we know how Democrats are going to fight back -- by, in effect, saying, "Argh! She's so conservative!" That won't be effective. Here's a suggestion. Why don't Democrats and liberal groups focus attacks on this (from the AFL-CIO page)? In one speech, Brown described the Supreme Court's decisions upholding New Deal legislation such as minimum wage laws as "the triumph of our own socialist revolution." ... She goes so far as to say that "[t]oday's senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much 'free' stuff as the political system will permit them to extract." I would plaster the latter quote across full-page newspaper (and maybe TV) ads in 64-point type. The point being: In Janice Rogers Brown's ideal world, Grandma and Grandpa wouldn't get any Social Security. This is a two-fer -- you attack Brown and you link the attack to Bush's attempt to destroy Social Security. You make it seem to be all part of one big plan. (Which, in fact, it is.) There's much, much more to go after Brown on. But this could stick. It could infuriate the elderly. And it would blindside the Bushies -- their SS scheme would be under attack in an unexpected forum. posted by Steve M. | 10:45 AM | Friday, February 04, 2005 For those who watched the State of the Union address and were amused to learn that Laura Bush will be in charge of an anti-gang initiative (yeah, I'm talking to you, TBogg), I have a theme song the White House might want to use: Nina Gordon's utterly bizarre acoustic-guitar version of N.W.A's "Straight Outta Compton." Get it at this page from her site; direct link to the MP3 here. Parental advisory: explicit content. posted by Steve M. | 5:43 PM | When the Bushies started talking about Iraq back in '02 and '03, I was puzzled. Why did they insist that Iraq had to be the Middle East's model society? Why didn't they just work harder to turn Afghanistan -- where it was generally understood that the U.S. had a right to intervene -- into a model? Today I read this about Afghanistan: ...Eighteen people have died since the extreme cold descended on the country two weeks ago, the minister of health, Sayeed Mohammad Amin Fatimie, said in an interview this week. Of the 18 people, 13 died in and around Kabul, including several babies.... An estimated 10,000 homeless people are in Kabul, about 4,000 of them in two squatter camps. In addition, groups of displaced people are living in public buildings and abandoned ruins in as many as 25 locations throughout the city. Most are refugees who have returned from camps in Pakistan in the three years since the fall of the Taliban. Some families have been living all that time in tents, with the men scraping up a little work as porters in nearby fruit markets. Meanwhile, scores of expensive private villas are going up around Kabul, some of them built by commanders and government officials on former government land, a sign of growing inequities. Hmmm -- maybe they didn't lose focus after all. Maybe they actually did turn Afghanistan into their idea of a model society. posted by Steve M. | 1:45 PM | WANKER Richard Brookhiser, in The New York Observer: There you have the lineup of the two sides, in Iraq and in the United States: liberals and terrorists versus Bush and voters. Note the asymmetry on the first side. Most liberals do not favor terrorism and tyranny. (Some do -- Michael Moore called the terrorists Minutemen.) They fear that the cost of liberation is too high, or that the goal is unreachable -- reasonable concerns, for ends must always be proportioned to means. But Mr. Zarqawi hoped the liberals would win. Their victory here in November would have made his task in Iraq so much easier. On the other side, Mr. Bush and Iraq's voters are closer in sympathy, and dependence. Follow that? Liberals are allies of the scum who are trying to kill our troops and suppress freedom. Granted, most of them really aren't. But when you get right down to it, they really are. Therefore, Michael Moore Michael Moore Michael Moore. Brookhiser has, I take it, spent much of the war up in Ulster County, New York, looking for evil liberals to heap scorn on and trying to decide whether to get a satellite dish. His Observer colleague, Tish Durkin, has spent months and months actually dodging bullets in Iraq, as an honest-to-God war correspondent. Brookhiser believes George W. Bush and the voters of Iraq are essentially on the same page. Durkin knows better: To the American public, the Iraqi people said, "We love you! We thank you! God bless you! Without you, we'd still be under the cruel thumb of the dictator! If there's anything we can do to strengthen your hand in our part of the world, just give us a holler!" No, no, no, scratch that -- I was just listening to some idiot crowing on talk radio. Given the remarkable ability of positive developments in Iraq -- the toppling and later the capture of Saddam, let’s say -- to be immediately followed by brutally negative periods of violence, you'd think that there would be a media-wide moratorium on crowing, as well as gloating, preening, high-fiving and self-congratulating generally. But no: It's not enough to see, and to celebrate, what actually is great about this moment. It is necessary to invent all kinds of other stuff. Don't get me wrong. Had Americans not led the way to the uprooting of Saddam, Sunday's election would never have happened. So, hooray for us. But there is no time like the present for Americans to take those rose-colored glasses and toss them into the deepest ocean they can find. The fact that so many Iraqis voted reflected nothing more or less than a calculation on the part of themselves and their leaders that Iraqis would be better off with an election than without an election. Happy TV pictures from Sunday or no happy TV pictures from Sunday, the only sound assumption upon which to go forward is the assumption that the reservoir of Iraqi good will toward Americans has long since run dry -- and predictably so, because it was pretty darn shallow to begin with. This was true before the election, it was true during the election, and it will be true long after the election: For every Iraqi who believes that the United States primarily came to save them from Saddam, there are thousands who believe that the Americans came primarily to steal their oil. For every Iraqi who associates Bush 43 with suffrage, there are millions who associate Bush 41 with Saddam's mass slaughter of Shiites after the Gulf War in 1991. The belief that the Americans are tools of a Jewish conspiracy, and that this whole war was nothing but a great big excuse to expand Israel through the whole of Mesopotamia, is as widely and strongly held as it is patently nuts. Click through to Durkin's article for a truly nutso conversation Durkin had with a Sadr-ite in Baghdad last summer. Durkin praises the Iraqi people to the skies for their courage on Sunday. But life is complicated -- and the Right's stick-figure Iraq morality play isn't. (Note: If you're reading this after February 8 or 9, 2005, the Observer links won't work. Try this for the Durkin and this for the Brookheiser.) posted by Steve M. | 10:13 AM | Thursday, February 03, 2005 I'm a bit behind the curve on this story, and I may be making an obvious point, but here goes: This is from "College Cancels Speech by Professor Who Disparaged 9/11 Attack Victims," New York Times, 2/2/05: In his original essay, Mr. [Ward] Churchill wrote that the thousands killed at the World Trade Center had played a role in American sanctions on Iraq that "translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants." "If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it," he wrote. And this is from the Ann Coulter entry at wikiquote.org: * "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building." - in a New York Observer interview, 26 August, 2002 On the previous quote: * "Of course I regret it. I should have added 'after everyone had left the building except the editors and the reporters.'" - in a rightwingnews.com interview, 26 June, 2003 Is there any difference here? Any difference? Both Ward Churchill and Ann Coulter have explicitly described terrorist mass murder of noncombatants as politically appropriate, because both, appointing themselves judge and jury, have concluded that those noncombatants are guilty of crimes worthy of death. Churchill is not being allowed to make a scheduled campus speech. Ann Coulter makes speeches in college settings on a regular basis. If you're affiliated with a university and Ann Coulter's coming to speak, don't say it's wrong because she's a hate-filled fascist with an overly prominent Adam's apple. Just quote her words and ask why the standard that's now being applied to Ward Churchill shouldn't be applied to her. (And in case it isn't obvious, I'm not defending Churchill. He and Coulter probably ought to be paired up for eternity in Sartre's Hell.) posted by Steve M. | 5:45 PM | As long as the Rude Pundit and Atrios are pointing out what hypocrites Republicans are for complaining about the momentary booing at the State of the Union last night, let me add this from a Mary McGrory column about the 1993 State of the Union: The high point of the evening was when a dialogue did occur. President Clinton was rattling off figures about future budgets, "using the independent numbers of the Congressional Budget Office." The Republicans began to snicker and jeer. The CBO, source of numbers they love to hate, is a favorite villain. Clinton paused and then, unexpectedly, miraculously, replied: "Well, you can laugh, my fellow Republicans, but I'll point out that the Congressional Budget Office was normally more conservative in what was going to happen and closer to right than previous presidents have been." (Emphasis mine. And yeah, Freudian slip or not, he said "my fellow Republicans.") posted by Steve M. | 3:10 PM | The insurgents apparently haven't gotten the message that the Mighty Bush's electoral triumph has compelled them to stop killing people. posted by Steve M. | 3:02 PM | WE LOVE "CHIEF TWO STONES" (and Dick Cheney’s hot, too) The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show ... New Kids on the Block ... the Backstreet Boys ... the 2005 State of the Union address.... What am I getting at? Well, just look at some selected posts from the State of the Union thread at Lucianne.com: And the Cabinet Arrives....Condi looks wonderful and Rummy looks yummy! ***** Laura Bush looks good in that color. IMHO, Laura Bush looks good in any color!!! ***** I love Cheney's half smile. It warms my heart. ***** I can't stop looking at Dick Cheney. I'm sorry, but I've had a crush on him since he was appointed defense secretary under '41. He truly is the thinking woman's sex symbol. Sigh.... ***** Dick Cheney would be one of my top choices of who I would like to have dinner with - clever, witty, smart - and I too love his half-smile. ***** If any of you make a move for Dick Cheney (and you know who you are) I may have to hurt you. He's mine. Want to drive a liberal right straight up the wall? Tell 'em you think Cheney is sexy. They go mad. ***** Just seeing VP Cheney sitting there is so-ooo reassuring. What a man! ***** It's that Cheney smile that tells you he knows all kinds of secrets. ***** Dick Cheney is sexy. He's a man's man! ***** President Bush just thanked our First Lady, Laura Bush. How we love our First Family! ***** We have an awesome President and First Lady. ***** Beautiful Laura in her Purple suit. I am so proud to be an American tonight. God Bless George W. Bush! ***** he said nuclear with all the stuff he has got about that word you would think he would shy away not chief two stones thwak!! ***** Fifty years from now, Mount Rushmore. This is the favorite president of my lifetime. I loved Ronnie, but I've felt connected to Dubya from the beginning, and he's never disappointed me yet. ***** My admiration for our President grows by leaps and bounds, and I am near tears with pride. ***** Trust in your President is absolutely everything. I trust President Bush implicitely!! I thank God every day that he is in office. ***** He wants to ban gay marriage! The pundits said that he just said that during the campaign. PRO-LIFE!!! Now FAITH BASED agenda! The dems must be ready to explode! I just LOVE President BUSH ***** Thank you, God for this president. ***** My Goodness Mr. President!! Such a large 2x4 you're swinging tonight! He's certainly in a target rich environment! ***** W is walkin the walk. Yowser! ***** I just can't get enough of that word. FREEDOM. I love George W! FREEDOM!! ***** He called out Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, and Iran. This dude clanks when he walks! ***** We are witnessing history, folks. We'll be able to tell our grandchildren how we voted for this great man WAY back in 2004! ***** The RIGHT man at the RIGHT place at the RIGHT time. Go Dubya!!!! ***** And a new young generation of Americans learns what it’s like to have a REAL President! ***** The accomplishments of this president are approaching legendary status. ***** The very best president of my lifetime (60+). ***** That's it! I'm in tears! WOW! Go W! ***** I don't want this speech to end! I could listen to more of this, for hours yet! ***** This is, simply, a magnificent man and a magnificent speech. President Bush is an absolutely extraordinary President. ***** I'm in tears too! I LOVE THIS MAN! ***** (By the way, as a point of comparison I went over to the Bright Eyes discussion board -- Bright Eyes is the band led by the current #1 pouty heartthrob in indie rock, Conor Oberst -- and the talk there is much less breathless.) (Oh and the “If any of you make a move for Dick Cheney” post is from Lucianne Goldberg herself.) posted by Steve M. | 1:18 PM | Bush last night: We'll make sure that your earnings are not eaten up by hidden Wall Street fees. Yeah, because we want to eat it up ourselves: Under the proposal, workers could invest as much as 4 percent of their wages subject to Social Security taxation in a limited assortment of stock, bond and mixed-investment funds. ... Upon retirement, workers would then be given any money that exceeded inflation-adjusted gains over 3 percent. That money would augment a guaranteed Social Security benefit that would be reduced by a still-undetermined amount from the currently promised benefit. In effect, the accounts would work more like a loan from the government, to be paid back upon retirement at an inflation-adjusted 3 percent interest rate ... The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.... posted by Steve M. | 10:11 AM | Shorter David Frum: Bush's speech was much better than it would have been if it had actually been eloquent. posted by Steve M. | 9:24 AM | Lull over. 19 Killed in Insurgent Attacks in Iraq BAGHDAD, Iraq - Insurgents struck back with a vengeance following a post-election lull, waylaying a minibus carrying new Iraqi army recruits, firing on Iraqis heading for work at a U.S. base and gunning down an Iraqi soldier in the capital, officials said Thursday. Two U.S. Marines were killed in action. At least 20 people, including the Marines, died in insurgent-related incidents starting Wednesday night, according to U.S. and Iraqi reports.... In the deadliest incident, insurgents stopped the minibus south of Kirkuk, ordered army recruits off the vehicle and gunned down 12 of them, said Maj. Gen. Anwar Mohammed Amin. The rebels allowed two of the soldiers to go free and ordered them to warn others against joining Iraq's U.S.-backed security forces, he said.... In the south, gunmen overran a police station in the city of Samawah, killing one Iraqi policeman and injuring two others Wednesday night, Japan's Kyodo news agency reported. Japanese troops are based outside Samawah. An Iraqi soldier was killed Thursday as assailants opened fire as he was leaving his home in Baghdad, officials said. The governor of Anbar province, a rebel stronghold west of the capital, escaped assassination Thursday when a roadside bomb exploded near his car in Ramadi.... posted by Steve M. | 7:52 AM | Wednesday, February 02, 2005 Well, he did finally do the inspirational-uplift thing at the end. But the speech is supposed to have enough poetry in it that the guests in the First Lady's box don't get that much more applause than the president -- even under these circumstances (the gold star parents were heartbreaking). This speech couldn't live up. It was prose, prose, prose. And did he actually kiss Joe Lieberman afterward? posted by Steve M. | 10:03 PM | What did Cheney just eat? posted by Steve M. | 9:46 PM | It sounds as if his speechwriters took an old Clinton State of the Union, threw out all the inspiring parts, retained all the uninspiring, wonky, laundry-list parts, and then tweaked them (in many cases only slightly) and said, "Here's your speech." Odd. posted by Steve M. | 9:29 PM | I think he just said he'll listen to all sorts of ideas about Social Security, but he's already decided that private accounts are the best solution to SS's problems. posted by Steve M. | 9:25 PM | This is weird: Not even ten minutes into the speech (five?), he was already talking about asbestos suits. And here I was expecting a speech not unlike the Saturday Night Live parody of his father ("Operation Desert Storm!" [STANDING OVATION] "Operation Desert Storm!" [STANDING OVATION]) -- he easily could have gotten away with basking, really basking, in the Iraqi election results at great length right off the bat, but he just touched on it and went straight into the laundry list. Jeez -- he just said "ethanol"! He's missing a chance to say, "I'm the alpha dog! Now kneel!" Not that I'm complaining. posted by Steve M. | 9:21 PM | Want to get ready for the State of the Union address? Go here. Also here. And here. posted by Steve M. | 7:34 PM | BuzzFlash notes this Reuters story about morality in the ultimate Bush state: Texas Teens Increased Sex After Abstinence Program Abstinence-only sex education programs, a major plank in President Bush's education plan, have had no impact on teenagers' behavior in his home state of Texas, according to a new study. Despite taking courses emphasizing abstinence-only themes, teenagers in 29 high schools became increasingly sexually active, mirroring the overall state trends, according to the study conducted by researchers at Texas A&M University.... "The jury is still out, but most of what we've discovered shows there's no evidence the large amount of money spent is having an effect," [Dr. Buzz Pruitt, who directed the study,] said. The study showed about 23 percent of ninth-grade girls, typically 13 to 14 years old, had sex before receiving abstinence education. After taking the course, 29 percent of the girls in the same group said they had had sex.... But wait! The good folks at the Abstinence Foundation beg to differ: Opponents of truth and common sense are working hard to make abstinence education look bad. Unfortunately, it isn't working. Most recently, a study by Texas A & M University is drawing headlines across the state questioning the results of abstinence education. The flawed study, however, fails to have a control group by which to compare its results. When compared with the general teen population (data found in the 2003 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance), teens who participate in abstinence education programs have significantly lower sexual activity rates.... But there's a tiny problem with their analysis: the key number isn't the overall rate of sexual activity, it's the increase. For instance, the survey the Abstinence Foundation is citing for comparison shows that the overall percentage of Texas males who've had sex goes up from 45.5% in the ninth grade to 56.6% in the tenth. For the kids surveyed by Texas A&M, the percentages go up from 24% in the ninth grade -- when they haven't yet had abstinence education -- to 39%. If you're keeping score at home, that means that in each case about 20% of the boys left in the inactive pool become active. So where's the improvement? Texas is just a mess on this score. As a Salon story from last year notes, the Union of Concerned Scientists found that During President Bush's tenure as governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000, for instance, with abstinence-only programs in place, the state ranked last in the nation in the decline of teen birth rates among 15- to 17-year-old females. Overall, the teen pregnancy rate in Texas was exceeded by only four other states. And you can't help wondering just what the hell is in the abstinence curriculum in the schools studied by Texas A&M. Back in December, of course, we learned about one abstinence textbook that tells the story of a knight who married a village maiden instead of the princess because the princess offered so many tips on slaying the local dragon. "Moral of the story," notes the popular text: "Occasional suggestions and assistance may be alright, but too much of it will lessen a man's confidence or even turn him away from his princess." A fuller quote from that passage is in the Readings section of the February Harper's; you can read it and other curriculum excerpts at this blog, Here's a favorite of mine: It is hard for many of us to understand terrorism and why someone would have such hatred in their heart that they would deliberately kill innocent people. Today I would like to introduce you to another form of terrorism that gets little, if any, attention - the terrorism that our youth face every day. At one time the definition of an adult was someone who had left childhood behind and taken on the responsibilities of life. In contrast, today "adult" means being able to view and participate in all types of perverse activities that depraved minds can imagine. We actively seek to eliminate terrorism from our land; please help us actively seek to eliminate this corruptive terrorism that is stealing our children's future. Hunh??? (Oh, by the way, the Salon article is available without the day-pass hassle at this perfectly harmless link with a rather embarrassing URL.) posted by Steve M. | 2:17 PM | Today's New York Times has an article about religious groups that are using sonogram machines at anti-abortion pregnancy centers, as a way of talking women out of having abortions. It's working: Sixteen months ago, Andrea Brown, 24 years old and unmarried, was desperate for an abortion, fearing the disappointment of her parents and the humiliation she might face. While frantically searching the telephone book one day, she came across the Bowie Crofton Pregnancy Center and Medical Clinic, a church-financed organization that provides counseling and education about sexual abstinence. The receptionist told Ms. Brown that the clinic did not perform abortions or make referrals but that she could come in for an ultrasound to make sure her six-and-a-half-week pregnancy was viable. When she did, everything changed. "When I had the sonogram and heard the heartbeat - and for me a heartbeat symbolizes life - after that there was no way I could do it," Ms. Brown said recently as she revisited the clinic and watched her daughter, Elora, now 9 months old, play at her feet.... This is a trend -- Focus on the Family, the story tells us, "has budgeted $4.2 million in the current fiscal year for the machines and on training on how to use them." But I wondered what happens after one of these clinics prevents a pregnancy. And the story provides an answer, of sorts, at least with regard to the Bowie Crofton Pregnancy Center: Besides pregnancy counseling and ultrasounds, the center also dispenses free prenatal vitamins, offers parenting classes and help with broader issues like health care, family budgets and résumé building. So I went to the Bowie Crofton Web site and I clicked on "Life $ense Classes." Here's what I got: The Bowie Crofton Pregnancy Clinic has developed Life $ense--a special series on topics important to women and men. We invite you to take part in our free classes. Most people participate during their pregnancy, but participants are welcome whether or not they are expecting a baby. These classes are approximately 1-2 hours in length and are one-time sessions. They cover a variety of topics: * Baby Basics * Budgeting * Considering Adoption * Deciding Whether to Breastfeed * Faithful Fathers * Healthy Relationships * Infant Health & Safety * Parenting I: Family Life * Parent II: Tools for Parents * Spiritual Growth Call 301-262-1330 to find out more. That's it. That's all the Christian charity Bowie Crofton offers to women -- a few one-shot classes. You get the baby for eighteen years. They give you, maybe, a little adult education, and then vaya con dios. Oh, and there's this: Life $ense also allows you to earn a layette of starter items if you are in need. Well, OK, that's a little better. ("Earn"? How exactly?) However, if you've had an abortion, Bowie Crofton offers PACE -- Post Abortion Counseling & Education. This counseling and support group is designed to help women and men who have been hurt by abortion. PACE provides a safe, confidential refuge staffed by counselors who are trained to help those suffering from Post Abortion Stress Syndrome. For more information on PACE, call 301-262-1330. All information and messages are kept strictly confidential. So if you need to learn to hate abortion providers, liberals, and yourself for having an abortion, services will be provided for you on an ongoing basis. (There seem to be a lot of PACE groups around the country -- at this one the counseling process "lasts approximately 10 – 12 weeks.") But if you need financial help or job training, well, show up for one class (if we have one suited to your needs) and then get the hell out. Or, maybe, "earn" a layette. posted by Steve M. | 10:30 AM | I didn't post anything yesterday about "Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes," from the science section of The New York Times, but please read it and get angry: In districts around the country, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue. Teaching guides and textbooks may meet the approval of biologists, but superintendents or principals discourage teachers from discussing it. Or teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests from fundamentalists in their communities.... So, David Brooks, is this is the kind of rejection of blue-state values you admire? And Newt Gingrich, you've always been a science-oriented guy -- if, as seems to be the case, you're running for president in '08, are you in favor of truthful science, even when it conflicts with some people's ideas about God? The Times article says this flat out: There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that all living things evolved from common ancestors, that evolution on earth has been going on for billions of years and that evolution can be and has been tested and confirmed by the methods of science. Thank you. So what can be done about this? The article notes that Advocates for the teaching of evolution provide teachers or school officials who are challenged on it with information to help them make the case that evolution is completely accepted as a bedrock idea of science. Organizations like the science teachers' association, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science provide position papers and other information on the subject. As I said a couple of weeks ago, where's the material aimed at the broader public? Is anyone working on anything that will reach out directly to ordinary Americans and make the pro-evolution case? posted by Steve M. | 10:01 AM | Tuesday, February 01, 2005 Well, we're all having a chuckle over the story of the Iraqi insurgents who claim to have taken a U.S. soldier hostage and who posted a photo on a Web site of the soldier that's actually a photo of a doll. Oh, those silly terrorists! Allow me to don the tinfoil hat for a second: Any chance this is U.S. disinformation? It's not exactly comparable, but according to Milt Bearden, a thirty-year CIA veteran, now retired, we've spread toy disinformation before: While I managed the C.I.A.'s covert war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the mid-1980's, I came upon the enduring myth of the Soviet army's use of booby-trapped toys designed to attract and then kill or mutilate Afghan children. While gratified by the grief this story was causing the Soviets, I shared my skepticism about it with C.I.A. headquarters. Langley's response was swift. The toy bomb story, I was told informally, though not an American creation, was a favorite of both the C.I.A. director, William J. Casey, and President Ronald Reagan. It fit their view of the evil empire and fell in the same category as the story of the K.G.B. plotting the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II - too good a yarn to check or dispute. So we ran with it for three more years. I even had copies of the Toys "R" Us catalog sent anonymously to the local K.G.B. chief. The current Web posting, according to AP's story, is at ansarnet.ws -- which is here. Judging from the English-language text, it's a discussion forum. Presumably anyone can sign up and post. Why not Americans posing as an Iraqi insurgent group? You know, if our guys want to make the insurgents look silly, it's probably not a bad psyop, tactically. Hell, why not? posted by Steve M. | 9:05 PM | In case you're not keeping up, the Iraqi body count on Election Day is now being reported as "at least 50," according to Edward Wong of The New York Times, reporting from Najaf. And four Shiites in Baqubah had their dyed fingers shot off after voting. Make of this what you will. posted by Steve M. | 6:44 PM | THE VICTIM CARD From Taegan Goddard's Political Wire: Quote of the Day "So, nobody expected you to win -- I know how you feel." -- President Bush, quoted by the Detroit News, "chuckling" with the Detroit Pistons in a White House celebration of their 2004 NBA championship. Hunh? In what parallel universe is this anything other than a non sequitur? Yeah, there were a few observers who thought Bush was likely to lose (Zogby's the only one I remember), but here on Earth the vast majority of sentient beings thought Kerry maybe had a reasonable chance to win. Good Christ -- now this puffed-up son of a bitch is congratulating himself for winning as an underdog? posted by Steve M. | 12:45 PM | Shorter Dennis Prager: Liberals are actually morally worse than suicide bombers who kill and mutilate children. Somehow, as much as I don't want to, I can understand why a Muslim raised in a world permeated with hate-filled lies about America and Israel, and taught from childhood that God loves death, will blow himself up and joyfully maim and murder children. As evil as the Muslim terrorist is, given the Islamic world in which he was raised, he has some excuse. But the non-Muslims who fail to acknowledge and confront the evil of Muslim terror and the evil of those monsters who cut innocent people's throats and murder those trying to make a democracy -- these people are truly worth nothing. Unlike the Muslims raised in a religious totalitarian society, they have no excuse. And in my lifetime, these people have overwhelmingly congregated on the political Left. Since the 1960s, with few exceptions, on the greatest questions of good and evil, the Left has either been neutral toward or actively supported evil. 
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Newt Gingrich, from his new book, as quoted in the New York Times review: "We must transform the health system so people can live longer and healthier lives while taking 20 percent out of the cost of the system. We can achieve this through the efficiencies of information technology, and by the kind of waste reduction and productivity increases that have been common in manufacturing for the last 30 years and in service industries for the last 15 years." OK, Newt -- how would we apply "the kind of waste reduction and productivity increases" that we see elsewhere in the economy to medicine? Pay all American health care workers $8.50 an hour? Outsource all operations to Bangalore? Put bar codes on all internal organs? posted by Steve M. | 9:43 AM | This is where it gets Orwellian -- not in the sense of systematically rewriting the news archives, but in the sense of subtly trying to rewire our memories ("Four legs good, two legs better"). Here's David Brooks today: These Iraqis are people who ... have spent their lives in hell and cannot have been unaffected by it. They have touched pitch and witnessed or participated in man's capacity for violence and treachery. They must be both damaged and toughened. They lived most of their lives under the dense evil of Saddam's regime - the mass graves, the rape rooms, the chemical attacks, the wars against Iran. Totalitarian cruelty on that scale was bound to get into their heads. As the U.S. toppled the Baath regime, the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya wrote about one of his countrymen who had lost his brother and been imprisoned by Saddam. "Try to imagine the worst and still you will not come close to the physical pain this man has suffered. ... This is the human raw material you want to build democracy for." And from the dense evil of Saddam, these people were thrust into the haphazard evil of the terrorists and the occupation. The Zarqawi terrorists commit murder in a mood of spiritual ecstasy, while the old Baathists feed their addiction to sadism and domination. These new monsters brought beheadings to the country, bombs in crowds of children and people with Down syndrome sent off to become unwitting suicide bombers. Notice what's missing in this catalog of suffering? That's right -- the war. In Brooks's view, the war was apparently not part of the ongoing traumatization of Iraqis. Brooks invokes the war merely to set up a quote. He uses the word "occupation," but he doesn't mention any of its effects -- Abu Ghraib, the destruction of Fallujah, and so on; he doesn't acknowledge the U.S. failure to prevent anarchy. This is how the Right wants you to remember the recent history of Iraq: a savage named Saddam gave way seamlessly to a savage named Zarqawi. Nothing else happened until, on January 30, the sun came out. posted by Steve M. | 8:37 AM | |
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