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Monday, October 31, 2005 Well, this sounds encouraging: Research Finds Gel May Help Prevent AIDS ...A paper due for publication this week in the journal Nature found that a combination of three drugs applied topically in monkeys prevented infection with a virus similar to the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. The results are among the most promising to date in tests of this approach and point toward a prevention strategy that could save many lives. The International Partnership for Microbicides, a Silver Spring group working to bring a preventive gel to women at risk of AIDS in poor countries, said Monday it had struck deals with Merck & Co. and with Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. ...Scientists at the partnership hope to create a safe but powerful combination product that a woman could apply as long as several hours before sex, with or without the knowledge of her partner.... I hope this works out. I hope it's safe and effective. (In monkey tests, a three-drug gel seems to be highly effective in blocking the simian equivalent of HIV.) And then I hope distribution of the gel isn't limited because certain God-botherers in America think it will encourage promiscuity. Recently, U.S.-funded programs in Uganda, for instance, have been removing information about condoms from AIDS-prevention curricula, while access to condoms has been reduced. If a gel is developed, it won't be available for a while -- it will be after Bush leaves office -- but there's no guarantee that his successor will be less in the pocket of the religious right. So could access to an anti-AIDS gel be similarly curtailed? Remember, a former Focus on the Family medical analyst has been put on the government panel that will decide how widespread the distribution of an upcoming cervical cancer vaccine will be in this country. That's modern America. posted by Steve M. | 11:01 PM | WE ARE BORG On the right side of the Internet, there's a strikingly broad range of opinions on the Alito nomination: I think that at this moment, many, many conservatives, confident that the American people want judges to be judges, and not legislators, are stretching, flexing their muscles, and pounding the chest, whispering menacingly, "Bring. It. On." --Jim Geraghty at National Review Online If, as expected, the Kennedy-led, mindless-Reid cabal is intent on all out war pitting the Left against the Right, then bring it on. --BAH at A Certain Slant of Light If there is going to be a battle between liberals and conservatives, it'll happen now. Bring it on. --Bob Mendenall at Bob Blog! But if it’s a fight for what’s right, I say, bring it on. --Blogboing The Demos are making noises about a filibuster. Bring it on. --Daisy Cutter Bring it on Schummer, Kennedy and Biden. --Dick McDonald at The Right Scale Bring it on. --Bill Nienhuis at PunditGuy BRING IT ON Mike B. at useless! worthless! insipid! BRING. IT. ON. --marc at Hubs and Spokes It's War Bring it on, libs. --thoughtomator at thoughtomation Bring it on liberals!!! --Jim Wickre It's Time For The Left To Bring It On --Richard at Hyscience And to the Left -- Bring it on! --Mark Jakubik at Legal Right And Democrats ... Bring. It. On. --Mike's Noise In John Kerry's own words, "Bring It On!" --Blanton at RedState.org In the words of President Bush….Bring It On! --Don from Lake Ronkonkoma at Mark Levin Fan To quote our Commander-in-Chief: "Bring it on." --Alex, commenting at Political Aurora Now I'm pumped up. Bring. It. On! --jkelly at Irish Pennants Time To Begin Taking It Back, So Bring It On... --Fits at Shooting the Messenger I say, "Bring it on, lefties!" --Jay Anderson at Pro Ecclesia * Pro Familia * Pro Civitate Bring it on! I'm making popcorn. --Dan Burrell at Whirled Views I say bring it on, this fights overdo.....long overdo -- Traderrob at OpiniPundit I mean, ever since the wussy Miers nomination we've all been itching for a fight with those baby-killin', sodomizin' lefties. Bring it on. --usmcgunny68 at The List of Sicilian Messinger El nuevo lema de la derecha es: BRING IT ON! --Issidro Beccar at Argepundit ("Este es un blog de dos argentinos expatriados ... desde una perspectiva conservadora y católica") posted by Steve M. | 3:50 PM | Oh, meanwhile, six American troops were killed in Iraq today. October is the 4th-worst month for U.S. casualties since the start of the war. posted by Steve M. | 1:45 PM | I know you hate the gloom and doom, but here's something else that disturbs me -- the Rasmussen poll: Monday October 31, 2005--Forty-five percent (45%) of American adults now approve of the way George W. Bush is performing his role as President. That's up five points since Harriet Miers withdrew from consideration as a Supreme Court nominee. It's also the President's highest level of Approval in two weeks. Overall, 54% of Americans Disapprove of the President's performance including 39% strongly disapprove. The President's Approval rating is at 78% among Republicans, 18% among Democrats, and 35% among those not affiliated with either major party.... Let's look at that another way: it's up five since Fitzmas. (Bush was at 40% on Friday.) And if Bush is only at 78% among Republicans in this morning's results, before the Alito announcement, I think he's going to be around 90% with members of his party in post-announcement polling. (Right-wingers are just beside themselves right now, are they're slavering in anticipation of a huge fight.) And if I'm right about that and other polls show similar results, that becomes the story: Bush polling at about 50% again -- Bush, in other words, bouncing back. The problem is, nothing from the Democratic Party, or from outside the party among liberals, seized the public's imagination in the weeks of Katrina/the 2000th fatality/Miers. If I seem gloomy, it's because I'm frustrated: It's not enough to wait for Patrick Fitzgerald to save us, or for Bush and the GOP far right to destroy themselves -- someone on our side actually has to do something. In this bad period for Bush, what did we get besides Democrats furrowing their brows over a new slogan: Should it be "Together, We Can Do Better" or "Together, America Can Do Better"? If there was any substance, any new agenda, I missed it. American politics is not going to change until there's something for it to change to. If we think it's going to just happen, if we think the American public will just spontaneously discover its inner leftist out of sheer disgust, then we're living in a dream world, rather than the real world, in which liberal ideas and the word "liberal" have been demonized for decades. Nothing's going to change until that demonization gets some pushback. posted by Steve M. | 12:13 PM | Do you think America will rise up in outrage to oppose a Supreme Court nominee who said it was constitutionally OK to strip-search a ten-year-old who wasn't the subject of the search warrant in question? Oh, I don't know -- the last guy who got confirmed said it was legally OK to arrest and handcuff a 12-year-old who was eating french fries on the subway, and nobody gave a crap. posted by Steve M. | 9:56 AM | You know what this tells me? That Karl Rove isn't going to be indicted. He's back in charge. Miers was swiftly withdrawn and this nomination was put forward with Prussian efficiency. The troubles of last week are now encased in amber as Bush's "bad week." The GOP base is reunited and reenergized. I don't think a Roveless Bush could have pulled this off. So put down the Fitzmas champagne and gird your loins. These guys are back. posted by Steve M. | 8:27 AM | Forget it -- the Democrats won't mount a successful fight over Samuel Alito. Three reasons: (1) He's regarded as highly qualified. (2) He was confirmed unanimously in 1990 when Bush the Elder appointed him to the federal appeals court. (3) He's being touted as a "nice guy" (or so a liberal attorney on NPR just said a few minutes ago). That's all it going to take -- this guy is going to make it. If Bush had picked, say, Edith Jones, who denounced Roe from the bench in no uncertain terms, there might be a fight. But the gist of Alito's dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey was about spousal notification. It would be silly to think that he's any less anti-abortion than Jones -- but what will be said about Alito and abortion is that he has supported one particular restriction on abortion. This isn't enough to rally big numbers of ordinary voters. Liberals aren't like the NRA -- we don't all immediately conclude that all abortion rights are in jeopardy whenever one aspect of abortion rights is threatened; we can't successfully rally the faithful under those circumstances. So forget it -- it's over. posted by Steve M. | 8:13 AM | Sunday, October 30, 2005 It's interesting that David Brooks's diatribe on alleged Democratic paranoia with regard to Plamegate appears in the same edition of The New York Times as a review of The Assassins' Gate, George Packer's book about the Iraq disaster. A bit of the review: ...Part of the problem was the brutal and debilitating struggle between the State Department and the Defense Department, producing an utterly dysfunctional policy process. The secretary of the Army, Thomas White, who was fired after the invasion, explained to Packer that with the Defense Department "the first issue was, we've got to control this thing - so everyone else was suspect." The State Department was regarded as the enemy.... ... State Department officials were barred from high posts in Baghdad, even when they were uniquely qualified.... Packer describes in microcosm something that has infected conservatism in recent years. Conservatives live in fear of being betrayed ideologically. They particularly distrust nonpartisan technocrats - experts - who they suspect will be seduced by the "liberal establishment." The result, in government, journalism and think tanks alike, is a profusion of second-raters whose chief virtue is that they are undeniably "sound." ... You want to talk about "the paranoid style in American politics," David? Start there. posted by Steve M. | 2:04 PM | Matt Drudge quotes David Brooks's latest New York Times column, which concerns the alleged paranoia of Bush's opponents: ..."Leading Democratic politicians filled the air with grand conspiracy theories that would be at home in the John Birch Society." "Why are these people so compulsively overheated?.. Why do they have to slather on wild, unsupported charges that do little more than make them look unhinged? Brooks quotes from an essay written 40 years ago by Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." ... "The paranoid spokesman," Hofstadter wrote, "sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms -- he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization." Because his opponents are so evil, the conspiracy monger is never content with anything but their total destruction." Maybe I'm stating the obvious, but wasn't this precisely the Cheney/Rumsfeld/Chalabi/Mylroie/Niller/PNAC/Bush administration stance toward Saddam's Iraq? That he wasn't merely a brutal megalomaniac who wanted to be the big gun in the region (never mind the fact that, in the wake of Iraq War I and the sanctions, inspections, and no-fly zones, he found even that goal impossible) -- that, in fact, he was so evil that failure to destroy him would mean destruction of the world as we know it? In the column itself, Brooks quotes Hofstadter at greater length: Thus, "even partial success leaves him [the paranoid] with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes." Isn't this exactly how the people who got us into this war felt after the first Gulf war? posted by Steve M. | 10:56 AM | Saturday, October 29, 2005 Wow -- I guess even the troops are now sandal-wearing peacenik America-haters.... More than half the North Carolina military members surveyed in the latest Elon University poll don't like the way President Bush is handling his job and the war in Iraq.... Of the 539 adults surveyed, nearly 53 percent of military members said they strongly disapproved or disapproved of Bush's handling of his job. And 56 percent of that same group said they strongly disapproved or disapproved of his handling of the Iraq war.... --WCNC (Charlotte, N.C.)/AP The pollsters also point this out: Among citizens who are the parent, sibling or relative of a current member of the military, 53 percent said the U.S. should not be in Iraq, compared with 50 percent among those without a military relative. Yup -- their opposition to the war is greater than the general public's. Bush's overall approval in North Carolina is down to 41% -- and 11-point drop since March. In 2004, Bush beat Kerry 56%-44%. (First link via DU.) posted by Steve M. | 7:00 PM | Friday, October 28, 2005 Weird story: Strong, Sweet Smell Reported in Manhattan New York City has many odors, but when the city began to smell a little too good, New Yorkers became alarmed. Residents from the southern tip of Manhattan to the Upper West Side nearly 10 miles north called a city hot line to report a strong odor Thursday night that most compared to maple syrup, The New York Times reported Friday.... Air tests haven't turned up anything harmful, but the source was still a mystery.... "It's like maple syrup. With Eggos (waffles). Or pancakes," Arturo Padilla told The Times as he walked in Lower Manhattan. "It's pleasant." --AP This is true. I smelled it last night (as did this guy). I didn't even think it was an odor -- I thought it some weird sinus thing. Before Michelle Malkin picks up the story and concocts some bizarre theory about border-jumping Islamofascist terrorist waffle-makers, let me assure you that I feel fine. (Link via Memeorandum.) posted by Steve M. | 6:23 PM | I know only Plamegate stories are allowed in the blogosphere right now, but this caught my eye: Births to Unmarried U.S. Women Set Record Nearly 1.5 million babies, a record, were born to unmarried women in the United States last year, the government reported Friday.... There were 1,470,152 babies born to single women in 2004, 35.7 percent of all births in the country, NCHS said. That was up from 1,415,995 a year earlier.... The oral-sex-free aura of moral goodness emanating from God's Own President in the White House doesn't seem to be reaching the populace. Baffling. (The study is from the National Center for Health Statistics. You might want to take a look at this chart from NCHS. Notice that the percentage of U.S. births that were out of wedlock stayed pretty close to a plateau during the Clinton years, rising only slightly. The rate of increase has picked up since Bush took office. But a real increase seemed to take place from 1980 through the early '90s -- the Ronald Reagan/Poppy Bush years.) posted by Steve M. | 4:49 PM | Favorite reaction so far, from National Review's Tim Graham: The idea that a Libby indictment would require all three networks to go live in the middle of soaps is bizarre. Yeah, it's just a five-count indictment of a top aide to the vice president of the United States in what will probably be an ongoing investigation of other White House aides and officeholders that directly concerns a broadly unpopular war based on lies. What's the big deal? posted by Steve M. | 1:11 PM | I don't buy the argument that right-wing attacks on Harriet Miers were sexist, or lookist. Would the organized guardians of the right-wing faith have given a pass to a less-than-conservatively-correct man (think Alberto Gonzales), or a babe lacking conservative bona fides? I don't think so. Consider the chilling key passage of the Wall Street Journal op-ed that appeared under Rush Limbaugh's byline on Monday: This is no "crackup." It's a crackdown. We conservatives are unified in our objectives. And we are organized to advance them. The purpose of the Miers debate is to ensure that we are doing the very best we can to move the nation in the right direction. "Crackdown"? This is "political correctness" way beyond what's ascribed to liberals. The attack on Miers wasn't sexism or lookism, it was right-wing Maoism. It was a reminder to the president that, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, even the possibility of Incorrect Thinking will not be tolerated. posted by Steve M. | 12:21 PM | Man, overt right-wing racism is all the rage all of a sudden. AllSports.com reports: Air Force football coach Fisher DeBerry apologized Wednesday for racial remarks he made a day earlier. DeBerry, 67, who has been the coach of Air Force for 22 years, was reprimanded but not fired by the service academy.... During his weekly media briefing Tuesday, which followed Air Force's 48-10 Mountain West Conference loss to TCU over the weekend, DeBerry mentioned that the Horned Frogs "had a lot more Afro-American players than we did and they ran a lot faster than we did." "It just seems to me to be that way," he continued. "Afro-American kids can run very well. That doesn't mean that Caucasian kids and other descents can't run, but it's very obvious to me that they run extremely well." ... As USA Today notes: DeBerry was forced last November to remove a banner in the team's locker room that read in part, "I am a member of Team Jesus Christ." Meanwhile, as I mentioned briefly last night, Chris Craddock, a GOP candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates, made a few rather startling comments to a high school government class, according to students in the class: ... Craddock told the class he had a friend who'd studied in Africa and told him the reason there's an AIDS epidemic there is because "Africans will have sex with anything that has a pulse." Craddock went on to assert that he was misquoted: Regarding his comments about African sex, Craddock said, "Sex runs wild in Africa. One of my best friends went to Africa and got her doctorate from Johns Hopkins [University] studying the AIDS culture in Zimbabwe. And she said one of the main reasons [there's so much AIDS there] is that sex is just rampant in Zimbabwe." "Read any study that deals with the problems of AIDS in Africa and you'll see that," he said. In teacher Cynthia Szwajkowski['s] class, said Craddock, "I said sex runs rampant over there and that insane amounts of unprotected sex produces HIV." Furthermore, he stressed, "I was not talking about anybody here or black people [in general]. I was talking about a specific circumstance. If you have sex with anything with a pulse, AIDS is going to spread." Oh -- that clears that up. And from beyond the grave: Former president Richard Nixon considered Ugandan dictator Idi Amin an "ape" and mistrusted his own State Department as "always on the side of the blacks," according to documents made public this week.... The pair [Nixon and Henry Kissinger] were also left fulminating and frustrated by the 1972 slaughter of an estimated 150,000-200,000 Hutus in an outbreak of tribal violence in Burundi. "I'm getting tired of this business of letting these Africans eat a hundred thousand people and do nothing about it," Nixon fumed in the September 24 phone call.... (Links via Democratic Underground and AMERICAblog.) **** UPDATE: I should also have noted another element of Chris Craddock's worldview: "When we asked him about gay marriage, he said he believes nobody's born gay — they turn gay," said senior Natalie McLarty, 17. "He said, in his experience, from the gay males he's known, there are three ways to become gay: You don't have a father figure in your life, you have an abusive father figure or you have no loving support in your family." "I was extremely offended because one of my relatives is gay, so that's an assumption he's making about my family," she said. "I don't know where he's getting his statistics, but I know a ton of people who are gay, and they have father figures and love and support in their family. He's young, and I don't know where he's getting these old-fashioned concepts." SoCalPundit highlights this quote in a post headlined "The New Thought Police Get Younger All The Time" SoCalPundit adds this brilliant gloss: I fail to see how having a gay relative is something to get offended over. Everyone is allowed to have their opinion and the students did ask for his. We need to undo the speech codes that have been woven into the scene lest it one day become illegal to have an opinion that varies from that of the liberal line. You may not agree with Craddock and you may even hate what he said, but in a free country you do not have the right to stop him from saying it. The students that brought this matter to the media clearly want Craddock punished for his opinion. It is a horrible civics lesson to teach these young minds to lash out at people who do not share their opinion on a given matter. Problem is, there's no evidence whatsoever in the linked article or the follow-up that the students "want Craddock punished for his opinion." (The follow-up does note, however, that Craddock supporters "called and tried to prevent" the first article "from being published.") Craddock is running for office; if people choose not to vote for him after reading these comments, is that SoCalPundit's idea of "thought police"-style "punishment"? SoCalPundit, you're the thought police wannabe -- you don't think those kids have a right to disagree openly with Craddock. posted by Steve M. | 8:25 AM | Thursday, October 27, 2005 News from upstate New York: KINGSTON - Police are investigating the distribution of laminated cards bearing swastikas that were left on cars and driveways at several Kingston school district building in an apparent effort to promote a white supremacist and anti-Semitic Web site. Superintendent of Schools Gerard Gretzinger said the cards - measuring a little over 3 by 4 inches - have been left in front of both Kingston High School and district elementary schools.... The cards include a Web site address for Vanguard News Network.... I bring this up only because I couldn't resist wandering over to the site, and, bizarrely, there are movie reviews -- dozens of them. Want to read a racialist take on Death to Smoochy? Here you go: "Death to Smoochy" gives us a "what if" scenario, based loosely on the scandal that caused Jew pervert Paul Reubenfeld [aka Pee-Wee Herman] to fall from grace.... The film is full of brain-spinning visuals, punchy one-liners and the kind of morbid humor we've come to expect from DeVito, who, although married to Jewess Rhea Perlman, is not a Jew. Yikes. (David Duke used to post movie reviews just like this at Davidduke.com -- they're gone now, alas. Years ago you might have seen excerpts of his McHale's Navy review in the Readings section of Harper's.) **** I was going to say that as much as I complain about modern Republicans, the true racists are in a different league altogether -- but then I read this: "Africans will have sex with anything that has a pulse," says GOP candidate for Virginia House of Delegates Charming. What is wrong with these people? (And it says here that this candidate is also a youth pastor.) posted by Steve M. | 6:33 PM | Here's a key part of the Bush plan to deflect attention from any indictments, according to the L.A. Times (story also available via Yahoo News): Whenever possible, Bush and other administration officials would try to change the subject. Among the issues the president plans to put atop his new agenda are spending restraint, tax changes and immigration. Do the Bushies really think this would work? "Spending restraint": This means budget cuts, inevitably to popular programs, since it's clear that Congress doesn't want to cut pork and it's unthinkable that Bush will rescind the tax cuts. Now, it's one thing for Congress and the president to agree on painful cuts when the public's attention is elsewhere; it's another thing for a president to campaign openly for such cuts. How does that help reverse Bush's slide in the polls? "Tax changes": In other words, eliminating or curtailing deductions, such as the home mortgage deduction. Same potential to alienate ordinary voters. "Immigration": The problem here is that Bush wants a guest-worker program and lots of Americans -- in particular, voters in the GOP base -- really just want him to seal the borders. Unless he reverses course and starts talking like a Minuteman, a Bush push for immigration reform might alienate his loyalists in much the way the Miers nomination did. I think it's quite possible that Bush could get back into the game -- but if he does so, he'll do it by getting his base angry at his opponents. This isn't going to get the job done. posted by Steve M. | 3:57 PM | John at AMERICAblog says: The GOP just lost all of their Supreme Court talking points. Who in the GOP is going to be able to stand up with a straight face and say "every nominee deserves an up or down vote"? Who? Everybody, John. They're all going to say that Miers wasn't blocked at all, because there was never a vote or a hearing in the Senate. They're going to say that a Democratic filibuster is very, very different, and utterly beyond the pale. Now, they may not get away with it. The Democrats should still plan to filibuster the upcoming Federalist Society extremist, and argue that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. It might work. But, John, don't count on it. Centrist opinion-mongers (Nicholas Kristof? David Broder? Richard Cohen?) will quite possibly join right-wingers in arguing, essentially, that the borking of Miers wasn't obstructionism but a filibuster of a wingnut is. John goes on to say: Yes, Bush will pick a wack-job for the next nominee, even though he knows the wack-job won't be confirmed. Bush will fight for his nominee, blah blah blah, and the nomination will fail. Then Bush will say, see, I tried - then he'll nominate Alberto Gonzales, who the religious right hates, and get him confirmed. Bush will be able to argue that he gave the religious right want they wanted and it just didn't work. Oh well, time for Alberto. ...all of this makes me very very very happy... Alberto "I Heart Torture" Gonzales on the Supreme Court? That makes you happy? Say it ain't so, John. Fortunately, if Bush ignores his masters a second time and nominates Gonzales, there is a 0% chance of his confirmation -- it will be a shot-for-shot remake of the Miers fiasco, because the religious right will not accept him. posted by Steve M. | 1:09 PM | Two comments from National Review's Corner: RALLYING THE BASE [Mark R. Levin] It's time for our liberals friends to worry. If the president picks a solid nominee, the base -- meaning Republican Party loyalists and conservative activists -- will be united, reinvigorated, and ready for battle. At least that's the indication from my radio audience. And frankly, as an aside, there's another event that is uniting them, and that's their growing resentment toward Patrick Fitzgerald. Positive press profiles aside, they increasingly view him as a threat to the presidency, and are not much impressed with all the talk in the media about possible indictments for perjury or false statements over emails or memory lapses.... THE DEMOCRATIC BLUNDER [John J. Miller] Democrats may crow today about whatever they think they've gained from the Miers pullout--maybe a very short-term sense of triumph, but I'm not sure what else. Do they really hope they're going to see another nominee from this president who is more amenable to their views? Or less able to participate in conservative jurisprudence at the very highest level? Granted, it would have been difficult for them to embrace Miers. But it's conservatives who belong in the winners circle here, not Democrats. Obviously, that second one is off base -- the Democrats didn't make the Miers withdrawal happen. But ignore that. Miers was splitting the Republicans just when they needed to pull it together to react to whatever Fitzgerald's about to do. I really thought Bush might dig in his heels and let the hearings take place; it would have been a rough November for Republicans if they were still fighting over Miers just after a Fitzgerald indictment or two. Now I'm afraid they'll rally around whatever Federal Society member Bush nominates, and they might be able to stir up anger in the general public (or at least among the base) in response to Fitzgerald -- whom they'll describe the way we described Ken Starr. Don't count these SOBs out. At the very least, though, I hope the Democrats dig in their heels and resist the new nominee, and respond to any criticism of their resistance by saying, "What -- it's OK for Republicans to bork Harriet Miers but it's not OK for us to bork Edith Jones/Priscilla Owen/Michael Luttig/whoever?" posted by Steve M. | 11:28 AM | BUSH WHITE HOUSE WITHDRAWS MIERS NOMINATION Right-wing pressure groups tell Bush what to do. He does it. As LBJ might have said, right-wing pressure groups have Bush's pecker in their pocket. Bush isn't the president. Bush is a clerk who thought he was the president. Bush is allowed to act like the president only so long as he does what he's expected to do by the real presidents -- pressure groups. plutocrats, Cheney and his ideological soul mates. Usually Bush is eager to play along. This time he got out of line. He failed the pressure groups' litmus test. People like Phyllis Schlafly and David Frum didn't have to take that, so they gave him a good spanking. He'll know better next time. **** So is there any significance in the timing of this? Is he planning to announce a replacemenmt tomorrow, to blunt the impact of whatever Patrick Fitzgerald might do? **** UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg reminds Bush that he could be spanked again: NO GONZALES That is my only advice to Bush right now. No Gonzales, a thousand times no Gonzales. From Goldberg, maybe, this is advice. The rest of the pressure-group community has already made it clear that it's a direct order, and Bush up to now has dutifully obeyed it. posted by Steve M. | 9:40 AM | LIKE LIVING IN A COUNTRY WITH BROWNIE AS PRESIDENT NPR just did a story about what ordinary Iraqis do during Ramadan. In the evening, the family profiled in the story watches a TV show in which popular Iraqi entertainers go to people's homes and ask them quiz questions. A top prize for answering correctly? A generator. People seem to enjoy this show. At least they do if the power doesn't go out. (Audio here.) posted by Steve M. | 7:54 AM | Wednesday, October 26, 2005 Tell me again how the era of GOP dominance is almost over: House Republicans voted to cut student loan subsidies, child support enforcement and aid to firms hurt by unfair trade practices as various committees scrambled to piece together $50 billion in budget cuts.... President Bush met with House and Senate GOP leaders and said he was pleased with the progress.... "I encourage Congress to push the envelope when it comes to cutting spending," Bush said.... The House Education and the Workforce panel, for example, ... impose[d] new fees on students who default on loans or consolidate them and higher fees on parents who borrow on behalf of their college-age children.... The Ways and Means Committee approved on a party-line vote a plan [that] ... includes $3.8 billion in cuts to child support enforcement.... The bill also would tighten eligibility standards for foster care assistance in nine states and delay some lump-sum payments to very poor and elderly beneficiaries of Social Security's Supplemental Security Income program. Minority Democrats opposed virtually everything that was done, saying Wednesday's actions are part of a broader GOP budget blueprint that also calls for $106 billion in new tax cuts over the next five years.... --AP This is how brazen they are when they're getting slammed in the polls and are facing multiple investigations and indictments. They have no fear of the Democrats, they have no fear of the dewy-eyed idealists in their own party who thought they might cut some actual pork if asked nicely, and they certainly have no fear of the wrath of ordinary citizens. Why worry? Nothing's ever hurt them yet. The Democrats, by contrast, are timid when they're actually in charge. (Or so I seem to recall -- it's a fading memory.) posted by Steve M. | 9:13 PM | "Negligible." "Only 2,000." "A bogus number." How right-wingers honor our war dead. posted by Steve M. | 3:10 PM | Some dogs just can't resist rotting animal carcasses or vomit; the human equivalent is apparently Pat Robertson's CBN News, which joins a quest by other right-wing rabble-rousers to persuade a conservative public that an Oklahoma University student who committed suicide was actually an Islamist terrorist: Has terrorism returned to the Oklahoma City area? That is what folks in Norman have been asking, ever since a 21-year-old student at the University of Oklahoma killed himself in what some are calling an attempted homicide bombing. On Saturday, October 1, engineering major Joel Hinrichs detonated a homemade bomb near Memorial Stadium, where 84,000 fans were watching the hometown Sooners take on Kansas State.... Mark Tapscott of the Heritage Foundation ... and other online bloggers have questioned Hinrichs' true intentions. They point to his Pakistani Muslim roommate and the location of his apartment--just one block from the Norman Mosque. It is the same mosque that convicted 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui attended when he lived in Norman. As for Hinrichs, a spokesman for the mosque told us he had never seen him there.... But in a CBN exclusive, a former neighbor of the mosque, who wishes to remain anonymous, told us she did see Hinrichs there--not once, but several times. “I did see Joel on several occasions outside of the mosque, actually, in the parking lot of the mosque,” the neighbor said. “It wasn't in the yard, it wasn't behind the fence, it was always in the parking lot when I would see him. And there was one time when I passed him, actually, on the sidewalk. As soon as I saw the picture of Joel Hinrichs on TV, not the clean-shaven one, but the one with the beard, I knew immediately that that was the gentleman I had seen on several occasions.” ... Wow! Yeah, that's the smoking gun -- someone who claims he or she used to live near the mosque who won't give a name and tells the story to a "reporter" whose paychecks are signed by Pat Robertson. Color me persuaded! The Wall Street Journal largely demolished this story a couple of weeks ago; the Journal isn't making its report available free anymore, but a Google cache is here. ...blogs and local Oklahoma TV stations added several apparent inaccuracies, including: that Mr. Hinrichs was a Muslim and visited the mosque frequently; that he tried to enter the stadium twice but was rebuffed; that he had a one-way airplane ticket to Algeria; that there were nails in the bomb and that Islamic extremist literature was found in his apartment. None of these claims are true: Mr. Hinrichs's family, university officials and the Federal Bureau of Investigation say Mr. Hinrichs suffered from depression, and the explosion was an isolated event. The FBI's investigation is nearly complete. On Oct. 4, the FBI issued a statement saying, "At this time, there is no known link between Hinrichs and any terrorist or extremist organization(s) or activities." ... ...David L. Boren, president of the University of Oklahoma and the former senator who was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that while most news reports have been responsible, there has been a "feeding frenzy of false rumors" on blogs and in some local TV stations. On Friday, he said in a letter to students and staff that investigators had found "no evidence of a conspiracy involving others which creates an ongoing threat to our OU community."... On Wednesday, Oct. 5, KWTV correspondent Tamara Pratt reported that Mr. Hinrichs had spent "much of his time at the Norman mosque," and that investigators had seized an airline ticket to Algeria in Hinrichs's apartment. Mr. Boren said that Mr. Hinrichs isn't known ever to have visited the Norman mosque. And while investigators did find an airplane ticket to Algeria, it wasn't in Mr. Hinrichs's apartment, but rather in one belonging to an international student, Mr. Boren said.... Of course, Boren's a Democrat, which, for the wingnuts, presumably means he's a traitor to the United States as well. Tapscott apparently finds it incomprehensible that someone would use explosive material to commit suicide without having the intent to do so for Allah. I guess I would agree -- if I lived in a cave and didn't know, for instance, that apolitical American teenagers occasionally try to burn themselves to death, or if I'd never heard of suicide by cop. Does Tapscott serious believe that suicide by explosive is in another dimension altogether? And I have absolutely no idea whether there was ever any thought in Hinrichs's mind of harming others -- but it won't surprise me at all if someday a kid kills himself in America and takes part of a football stadium out with him. When and if that happens, though, it's almost certainly going to be a depressed, bullied kid's attempt to lash out at a culture he sees as dominated by jocks and assholes, Columbine kicked up a notch -- either that or, like so many workplace shootings, an attempt to get back at a beloved who spurns him. posted by Steve M. | 1:50 PM | COMPARE AND CONTRAST Bush now: Facing the darkest days of his presidency, President Bush is frustrated, sometimes angry and even bitter, his associates say.... Bush usually reserves his celebrated temper for senior aides because he knows they can take it. Lately, however, some junior staffers have also faced the boss' wrath. "This is not some manager at McDonald's chewing out the help," said a source with close ties to the White House when told about these outbursts. "This is the President of the United States, and it's not a pleasant sight." ... these sources say Bush, who has a long history of keeping staffers in their place, has lashed out at aides as his political woes have mounted. "The President is just unhappy in general and casting blame all about," said one Bush insider. "Andy [Card, the chief of staff] gets his share. Karl gets his share. Even Cheney gets his share. And the press gets a big share."... --New York Daily News, October 24, 2005 Bush then: As war with Iraq draws inexorably closer, President Bush is described by friends as not just determined, but surprisingly serene about the most profound decision he will likely ever make.... "He's totally at peace with it," one close adviser told the Daily News.... --New York Daily News, March 9, 2003 ...historians say that almost all [presidents] display certitude in public and more uncertainty in private. Friends and advisers of Mr. Bush insist that this president, in contrast, is much the same in private as he is in public.... ..."He's very determined, I would say," said Cardinal Pio Laghi, a Vatican peace emissary and longtime Bush family friend who last week hand-delivered a letter to Mr. Bush from Pope John Paul II asking the president to avoid an invasion of Iraq. "He was very friendly, he was very nice, he was very appreciative, but he didn't give me the idea that he was shaky." ... People who have met with Mr. Bush have been struck by his tranquillity. "You would never have known that he was sitting on a powder keg," said Don Hewitt, the executive producer of "60 Minutes," who recently spent 15 minutes with Mr. Bush in the Oval Office. "He was amazingly calm and wanted to talk about Harry Truman and not Saddam Hussein." --New York Times, March 9, 2003 Dropping a few points in the polls and possibly facing the need to let some of his political hand-holders go? He freaks. About to send thousands of people to face death in a war based on specious evidence? Sleeping like a baby. posted by Steve M. | 9:31 AM | Tuesday, October 25, 2005 Jesus, the GOP spinners love this analogy -- first Kay Bailey Hutchison uses it, and now this, from NewsMax: Before he was appointed special counsel in the Leakgate case, Patrick Fitzgerald defended the prosecution of Martha Stewart against criticism that the Justice Department indicted her only after it couldn't prove the underlying crime she was accused of - insider trading.... A June 2003 "Today Show" transcript unearthed on Monday by ABC Radio host Sean Hannity shows Fitzgerald defending [prosecutor James] Comey for throwing the book at the domestic diva.... Fitzgerald's defense of Comey's prosecution could turn out to be significant, since it's widely expected that any indictments he brings in the Leakgate case will mirror tactics used against Stewart - where the prosecution pursues "process" crimes after determining that the original allegations were unprovable. Uh, folks? Some people do think Martha got a raw deal, but she's not exactly Nelson Mandela. If you want to arouse sympathy for Bushies who might be indicted soon, you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better than that. ***** (By the way, Hannity, surprisingly, isn't being a hypocrite -- he defended Stewart last March. Scroll down here.) posted by Steve M. | 11:03 PM | Susan at Local Tint had a post yesterday about Condi Rice and Jack Straw's recent photo ops, including the most appalling: ...yesterday's Birmingham News ran a photo of Rice, Straw and four school-aged black girls, holding hands crossing the street. The girls wore dresses, coats, and white socks with mary janes--their idyllic and anachronistic dress clearly meant to evoke the 1963 bombing victims. Even considering she's a Bush Administration member, I was disappointed: a manipulative, tasteless photo op (that the community was apparently game for).  That really is ghoulish. posted by Steve M. | 5:05 PM | A new George Washington University Battleground poll has news that's good, but not good enough: ...On the overall political environment, the generic Congressional ballot stands at 46% for the Democratic Party and 41% for the Republican Party.... On a series of name identification questions, the President (46%-53%), Republicans in Congress (44%-47%), the Republican Party (45%-49%), and Tom Delay (21%-46%) all have favorable/unfavorable scores that are net negative. In addition, the job approval score for the President stands at 44% approve and 54% disapprove. However, the personal approval score for the President stands at 61% approve and 31% disapprove, indicating that President Bush does have some goodwill remaining with voters to rebuild his image and performance ratings. In contrast, the Democrats in Congress (47%-42%) and the Democratic Party (48%-45%) both enjoy favorable/unfavorable scores that are net positive.... (Emphasis mine.) People still like this guy -- this testy, spiteful, narrow-minded, ill-informed narcissist with a history of making colossally poor judgments. The numbers suggest that even people who voted against him twice like him. We've all heard what the Democrats need to do to get back on top: Have a positive agenda. Do better framing. Move to the left. Move to the center. Well, let me add a recommendation: The Democrats need to tarnish this guy's image as a person. You'd think that would be ridiculously easy, but even now it hasn't happened. posted by Steve M. | 2:17 PM | Please, people: keep your pants on. Far too many bloggers and blog readers seem almost certain that Patrick Fitzgerald is going to bring deliverance soon with one swoop of his mighty indictment sword. Yeah, yeah, I know -- it looks as if Cheney lied about what he knew of Valerie Wilson and when he knew it. But, folks, at least consider the possibility that Cheney might not be brought down by all this, and that Rove might not. Please consider the possibility that this might not make the Bush administration come crashing down. Please stop talking about "Fitzmas," or the chances of 22 indictments. However tenacious Fitzgerald is, I have to believe he'd think long and hard before indicting a sitting vice president. I think he'll let Cheney walk. And if he doesn't indict Rove either, I think this administration has its starting lineup back. And remember that the Democrats still aren't impressing the American people. (Greens and others who are now muttering, "Screw the Democrats -- what's going to save this country is a progressive third party": Yeah, and so? What have you been doing to fill the huge void in our politics? Feel free to step up anytime and show us why the American public will soon turn to you to get us out of this mess.) Even if Fitzmas does come, I recall that we went from Watergate to Reagan in an eyeblink. The march of Republicanism was halted only temporarily. I'm still looking for a sign that the Americans who have warmed to Reagan-Limbaugh-Gingrich-Bushism are ready to flee in droves. I still think the typical heterosexual white male megachurch attendee in the South would as soon have gay sex in the town square as register with the Democratic Party. I still think most blue-collar workers think Democrats are snooty Chablis-drinkers who don't care how a working person gets by. When does that change? Not on Fitzmas, assuming Fitzmas ever comes. posted by Steve M. | 10:36 AM | The people whose life's work is to make us go broke apparently didn't have the foggiest notion how successful they've been: ...Bankruptcy filings were supposed to snowball in the months before the tough new law went into effect on Oct. 17. But the avalanche of petitions, and the lines of debtors streaming out the courthouse doors caught even the credit card issuers who supported the new law by surprise. In recent days, the five biggest bank issuers of credit cards have said that the unexpectedly large flood of filings shaved hundreds of million of dollars off their earnings in the third quarter. But with tens of thousands of petitions still being processed and Hurricane Katrina's impact on cardholders still being sorted out, the bankruptcy rush is likely to result in well over a billion dollars worth of losses by the end of the year. "We thought it would cause a bubble," James Dimon, the president of J. P. Morgan Chase, said last week. "The bubble is just bigger than we thought."... More than 500,000 Americans filed for bankruptcy protection in the 10 days before the law took effect on Oct. 17 ... some bankruptcy courts were so inundated with filers that thousands more could be counted this week.... Far too many Americans are financially overstretched. Every so often there's a news story about this problem, but then the overstretched people disappear from public perception again. But you'd think the credit-card issuers would know the truth behind the happy talk about our economic robustness. Apparently not. posted by Steve M. | 7:53 AM | Monday, October 24, 2005 Did everyone in the Bush administration sign some sort of bad-government pledge? The Pentagon paid $20 apiece for plastic ice cube trays that once cost it 85 cents. It paid a supplier more than $81 apiece for coffeemakers that it bought for years for just $29 from the manufacturer. That's because instead of getting competitive bids or buying directly from manufacturers like it used to, the Pentagon is using middlemen who set their own prices.... And it's costing taxpayers 20 percent more than the old system, a Knight Ridder investigation found. The higher prices are the result of a Defense Department purchasing program called prime vendor, which favors a handful of firms.... Knight Ridder Newspapers conducted a computer database analysis of prices charged by a small segment of prime vendors and how much the DLA paid for the same items from companies outside the prime vendor program.... The average prime vendor price - when adjusted for inflation - was higher for 102 of the 122 items.... In the 1980s, the high cost of Pentagon supplies was a scandal, and the butt of a lot of jokes (e.g., this 1986 humor book) -- though as I did some searches I learned that there were defenders of that era's Pentagon procurement who weren't necessarily Reagan apologists (see the Washington Monthly article here, and this National Journal article). So maybe there's a good explanation for this. Somehow, though, I doubt it. (Link via DU.) posted by Steve M. | 4:01 PM | Freedom on the march in Afghanistan: For the first time since the fall of the Taliban's Islamic government four years ago, a journalist has been convicted by a Kabul court under the country's blasphemy laws. Ali Mohaqiq Nasab, the editor of a monthly magazine for women called Women's Rights, was sentenced Saturday to two years in prison by the primary court in Kabul. ...the court had bypassed a commission that was supposed to make recommendations in cases involving the news media and that the commission had found no blasphemy after examining the articles.... Could have been worse, I guess -- the prosecutor asked for the death penalty. Perhaps the courts are following the election returns: More than a month after the elections, nearly all provisional results have finally been released for Afghanistan's Parliament and provincial assemblies, cementing a victory for Islamic conservatives and the jihad fighters involved in the wars of the past two decades. At least half of the 249-seat Wolesi Jirga, or lower house of Parliament, will be made up of religious figures or former fighters, including four former Taliban commanders.... And you may also have seen this last week: A former regional governor who oversaw the destruction of two giant 1,500-year-old Buddha statues during the Taliban's reign has been elected to parliament, election organisers said yesterday as results from two provinces were finalised. Mawlawi Mohammed Islam Mohammadi was the Taliban's governor of Bamiyan province where the Taliban destroyed the statues in 2001... On September 18, he stood as an election candidate in Samangan province and won. (Last link via Sisyphus Shrugged.) posted by Steve M. | 10:57 AM | We're Americans -- we don't need to know anything about anything: Foreign Secretary Jack Straw joined Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for a weekend tour of her home state to promote understanding of the Anglo-American alliance, but Alabamans struggled to name him.... At a ceremony to unveil statues in Birmingham, speakers variously called the visitor Mr Shaw and Mr Snow. They also mangled his title, appointing him secretary of state to the commonwealth of the United Kingdom.... Incidentally, while I think Condi's clumsily constructed back-to-my-roots tour/photo op with a global mover and shaker was an attempt to test the waters for an '08 presidential bid, I also think it was part of an administration effort to try to improve its image with dames, who are, y'know, real bleeding hearts, so it's easy to play on their sympathies and get them to tell pollsters they don't want to see any Bushies frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs (see my previous post). And although it wasn't the source for the Rice-Straw story, this seems like as good a time as any to add Americans Are Dumb to the blogroll. posted by Steve M. | 9:55 AM | So I missed Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison defending the administration on Meet the Press by suggesting that perjury isn't really a crime and that Martha Stewart was also unfairly accused and convicted. A female senator talking about Martha Stewart? It's interesting that the opening salvo of the GOP's media strategy is aimed at women. (I don't have to tell you that Martha polls a hell of a lot better among women than among men.) If there are big indictments, are we going to get not a White House of cornered feral animals lashing out at Fitzgerald and the Democrats, but feel-your-painers struggling to do Clinton imitations? Are there going to be endless TV appearances by Laura and Condi? Do they think that's going to be their secret weapon -- estrogen? posted by Steve M. | 7:59 AM | Sunday, October 23, 2005 ALLERGIC TO COMPETENCE Cover story of today's Newsday: The government's roll-out of its $40-billion-a-year Medicare prescription drug plan has hit another snag. People trained to help seniors figure out which plan to choose under the new program said they don't have the pricing information they need and seniors are scratching their heads in confusion. Earlier this week, Dr. Mark McClellan, head of the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, launched a prescription drug plan finder designed to help those on Medicare plug in specific financial information and prescription needs so they can determine which plans are best for them. The tool is available on www.medicare.gov and is also used by those trained to counsel seniors. But a crucial piece of data -- pricing information on the drugs -- is still not available... "People are asking questions and we don't know the answers," said Jim, who is one of 9,000 customer service representatives hired to answer questions at 1-800-Medicare. Jim, who asked that his last name not be used, said he and his colleagues joke that "it's kind of the same way FEMA is run; I guess we're using the same playbook."... Seniors have also received a booklet in the mail, but it's making them crazy: "You have to sit down and have a whole day to read it," Susan Tasker, of Greenport, said of the booklet. At this point, the 78-year-old who is on four medications said she plans to stay with her current drug plan. "That's just too much book," she said. Betty Jean Thomas of Freeport, who is trying to parse the plans for her mother, who is on both Medicaid and Medicare, agreed. "It's really bad. You have to think on it. You have to go through it and spend a whole day on it," she said.... Murray Chernow, who lives in Rego Park and Deerfield Beach, Fla., who called the booklet "a tome," said he is meeting with a private health insurance representative to discuss his options.... And the booklet misleads recipients about the prices of some plans, as I told you a couple of weeks ago. Can these people do anything right? posted by Steve M. | 9:52 PM | LIKE GLENN CLOSE IN THE BATHTUB Joe Klein writes in Time about the unkillable career of Ahmed Chalabi: ... He currently serves as Deputy Prime Minister in Ibrahim al-Jaafari's government. And now -- trumpet clarion here -- he is coming back to Washington in November at the invitation of Treasury Secretary John Snow. But Chalabi will have potentially more significant meetings with National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and perhaps Condoleezza Rice, both of whom -- according to high-ranking Administration officials -- believe that he is a plausible and acceptable candidate to be the next Prime Minister of Iraq when that nation votes, yet again, for a new government on Dec. 15. ... the Bush Administration harbors a gossamer strand of hope that the Dec. 15 election will finally produce a strong Iraqi government, a real coalition of Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds. The Administration also realizes it may take a supremely oleaginous political thug, perhaps someone as rare and fetid as Ahmad Chalabi, to bring it off.... Good grief. I know this is pure fantasy, but if we can seize Manuel Noriega and put him in a U.S. jail, why can't we do the same to this son of a bitch for disseminating the lies that led to this godforsaken war? (But hey, maybe Chalabi will take Judy Miller off Bill Keller's hands. I bet she'd make a swell information minister....) posted by Steve M. | 12:41 PM | Pat Robertson's greatest hits. There are a couple I'd never run across before, including this one: "[Homosexuality] is a pathology. It is a sickness, and it needs to be treated.... Many of those people involved with Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many of them were homosexuals. The two things seem to go together." –"700 Club," March 7, 1990 Whatever you say, Pat. posted by Steve M. | 10:45 AM | If we really had a liberal media that functioned like the conservative media , this would be a huge story: Bush motorcade leaves other folks fuming One hundred Brentwood kindergartners, many dressed in costumes, were all set to go see "The Wizard of Oz" on Friday when their first-ever field trip was blocked by the nation's 43rd president. They never got to see the wizard. President George W. Bush, his Marine One helicopter grounded by fog, brought morning rush hour to a standstill while his motorcade proceeded from West Los Angeles through the San Fernando Valley to Simi Valley for the dedication of the Air Force One Pavilion. "We had buses all loaded up - but by the time they got to school it was too late," said Julie Fahn, a volunteer mom at Kenter Canyon Elementary in Brentwood, where girls had dressed as Dorothy to see the play performed in Malibu.... Hmm, let's see: Google hits for "clinton haircut," more than twelve years after the fact? 266,000. That story will never die. Never mind the fact that no flights were actually delayed by the runway haircut, according to a Newsday report at the time. (Story via Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 10:37 AM | Saturday, October 22, 2005 Interesting stuff about Her Nibs from Maureen Dowd in today's New York Times (read the complete column free here): I've always liked Judy Miller. I have often wondered what Waugh or Thackeray would have made of the Fourth Estate's Becky Sharp. The traits she has that drive many reporters at The Times crazy - her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur - have never bothered me. I enjoy operatic types. Once when I was covering the first Bush White House, I was in The Times's seat in the crowded White House press room, listening to an administration official's background briefing. Judy had moved on from her tempestuous tenure as a Washington editor to be a reporter based in New York, but she showed up at this national security affairs briefing. At first she leaned against the wall near where I was sitting, but I noticed that she seemed agitated about something. Midway through the briefing, she came over and whispered to me, "I think I should be sitting in the Times seat." It was such an outrageous move, I could only laugh. I got up and stood in the back of the room, while Judy claimed what she felt was her rightful power perch.... Wow. A "tropism toward powerful men"? Acting like a Mean Girl toward a female colleague? Yeah, I find that believable. I regret to say I've known a few women like that -- women who were successful professionals, and who thus seemed to embody what feminism is all about, who nevertheless seemed resentful of feminism, and catty toward other women, and who wanted to be cosseted in a pre-feminist way. Feminism seemed never to have posed a serious challenge to the fairy-princess images in the books they'd read as kids. So it strikes me as believable that Miller, a woman who fought her way to the top in a "man's job," might not really like or respect most women and might really, really admire puffed-up, manly, dominance-challenge-issuing men. If she held a different job, this would be a problem only for her and her shrink. In Miller's case, it means that she embraced would-be dragon slayers who were full of shit. And I suppose that's what she put in the paper -- her wish fulfillment instead of the news. posted by Steve M. | 1:12 PM | PRUSSIAN BLUE Yes, it's rather disturbing that there's a new musical act made up of pubescent blond neo-Nazi twins who vaguely resemble the Olsen Twins, as ABC reported a couple of nights ago, but trust me: they suck. Their songs are staggeringly boring and they can't sing on key (or even in harmony, which is what sibling acts are usually best at). The one who plays guitar can't play, and the other one doesn't play an instrument at all. Imagine the Shaggs without the rhythmic intricacy. Singing about Rudolph Hess. In matching Hitler smiley-face tees. Trust me, your kids will not glom onto this. Ever. Except maybe as a sick joke. If you saw the ABC report, you already know this (alas, the link above doesn't provide a video stream). If you need proof, go here and give a listen (the girls come in just before 9:00). Agonizing. Yes, their parents and their parents' friends are the scum of the earth. But this stuff is way out on the margins, and it's going to stay there. (I actually think the militancy of the anti-liberal, anti-abortion, anti-gay "mainstream" right -- i.e., the modern GOP and its allies -- has sucked the life out of the white pride movement, which has never seemed more toothless. Hating "Hitlery" is just as satisfying as hating the people Hitler hated, but it's respectable.) posted by Steve M. | 1:04 PM | Friday, October 21, 2005 "PRO-LIFE," PRO-DEATH From AP: Catholic diocese pulls support from Race for the Cure CHARLESTON, S.C. - The Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston and Bishop England High School have broken ties to Saturday's Race for the Cure because the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Research Foundation gives money to Planned Parenthood in other cities.... Race organizers said some Bishop England students will participate but will not receive community service credit from the school. According to diocese spokesman Steve Gajdosik, Bishop England students previously had earned approximately 15 percent of their required 30 community service hours from participating in the race.... This is just an extension of what Pope Ratzo wants: Roman Catholic bishops in several dioceses have been taking steps to reinforce church teaching by restricting who can participate in public events on diocesan property and refusing to attend graduation ceremonies at Catholic universities if a commencement speaker supports abortion rights.... Now, just a reminder of where the ill-gotten gains from the race actually go: Proceeds from the race are required to go toward breast cancer screenings for low-income women. "We only fund those things that will help us find a cure for breast cancer," said Colleen Adams, chairwoman of this year's local race.... According to Emily Callahan, spokeswoman for the national Komen foundation, affiliate offices around the country have their own boards that review grant applications and award funds. Allocations are "restricted to breast health services," Callahan said, and are "done on merit alone, and do they meet a need in the community that is not otherwise being met." Callahan said that, in 2004, affiliates allocated just over $40 million in community grants, 1.2 percent of which went to Planned Parenthood offices throughout the country.... The Race for the Cure is the biggest fundraiser for the Komen foundation's local affiliate, said Taffy Tamblyn, the local group's executive director. ...Any group requesting money would have to show the money is only used for breast cancer programs. "It's not just thrown out there at their discretion," Tamblyn said. "It's highly restrictive."... WWJD? **** Another story from the anti-abortion front: A national organization of pregnancy centers that helps women will team up with Interstate Batteries and NASCAR driver Bobby LaBonte to raise money to help women with pregnancy needs and to find abortion alternatives. Care Net and the battery maker have partnered in a "Charged for Life" fundraising campaign that will begin on Sunday at the race in Martinsville. "Thousands of women will be helped as a result of the 'Charged for Life' campaign" says Care Net president Kurt Entsminger. "At Care Net pregnancy centers, we believe that people make positive life decisions when they are empowered with information and know that they are not alone." The #18 car of LaBonte, will sport both the lime green Interstate Batteries logo and pint job as well as a logo for CareNet. During the fall campaign, more than fifty percent of the proceeds raise from the sale of various kinds of batteries will help Care Net and more than 900 pregnancy centers across the United States and Canada.... If you don't support this kind of thing, you might want to think twice about shopping at Interstate Batteries. ***** (And, as many other bloggers have pointed out, you might also want to ask Target whether its policy is to allow pharmacists to refuse to fill contraception prescriptions. Target's response so far appears to be denial that any such incident ever took place.) posted by Steve M. | 1:44 PM | The cover story of a recent New Republic was a scathing review by David Rieff of Robert Kaplan's jingoistic new book, Imperial Grunts. (You can read the review here, via Ocnus.Net.) Rieff begins by saying this about another jingoistic writer of the past: The French writer Jean Larteguy is largely forgotten now, but in the late 1950s and early 1960s his novels chronicling and celebrating the French paratroopers' fight against Vietnamese and Algerian revolutionaries, first for empire and then for a metropole stretching from Normandy to the Sahara, were immensely popular. These books, which were very skillfully written, had titles such as The Mercenaries, The Centurions, and The Praetorians, all evocative of the comparison that was central to Larteguy's vision: the French troops as latter-day Roman centurions holding the line against the barbarians... It was hardly surprising that rootless Paris cosmopolitans, homosexuals, self-serving politicians, and traitorous leftists tended to be the villains in Larteguy's books, and far more so than the revolutionaries whom his commandos were fighting. (Emphasis mine.) That doesn't surprise me at all. As I've said in the past, the #1 enemy of modern American right-wingers is American liberalism, not any foreign foe. The American right rails against the Clintons and Ted Kennedy and leftist college professors and supporters of gay marriage far more than it does toward the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocities. It's interesting to note that there's a precedent for this. posted by Steve M. | 9:59 AM | Thursday, October 20, 2005 The FCC smites a Massachusetts high school radio station, in the name of Jesus: Today's lesson: Don't cross Christian broadcasting. Maynard High School's radio frequency, 91.7 FM, is being seized by a network of Christian broadcasting stations that the Federal Communications Commission has ruled is a better use of the public airwaves. "People are furious,'' said faculty adviser Joe Magno. Maynard High's WAVM, which has been broadcasting from the school for 35 years, found itself in this David vs. Goliath battle when it applied to increase its transmitter signal from 10 to 250 watts. According to Magno, that "opens the floodgates for any other station to challenge the station's license and take its frequency.'' ... --Boston Herald Is it common for the FCC to just yank a license from a 35-year-old station that's done nothing wrong? And Maynard, I would imagine, would already be able to pick up WEZE ("New England's Christian Radio") from Boston and/or one or more of these Christian stations. Why the need for a switch? This strikes me as obnoxious. (Via Fiat Lux.) posted by Steve M. | 7:12 PM | The wheels come off, and National Review's Byron York is forced to watch: Strategists working with the White House in support of the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers are becoming increasingly demoralized and pessimistic about the nomination's prospects on Capitol Hill in the wake of Miers's meetings with several Republican and Democratic senators.... "It's been a gradual descent into almost silence," says a ... source.... "The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end....Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have a do-over as soon as possible. But the White House is so irrational that who knows? As of this morning, there is a sort of pig-headed resolve to press forward, cancel the meetings with senators if necessary, and bone up for the hearings."... I keep thinking that this is like the moment in Spinal Tap when, after a succession of screw-ups, Ian Faith is replaced as manager by David St. Hubbins's girlfriend, Jeanine Pettitbone, and things go from bad to worse. In this case, the Jeanine -- the person who takes on big responsibilities despite having no idea how to go about the job -- is Bush himself. I think he's now running the show, either because Rove and Cheney are preoccupied or because his head has swollen to the size of a house. "The White House is so irrational"? "Pig-headed resolve"? Sure sounds like Bush to me. posted by Steve M. | 5:57 PM | Peggy Noonan today: Once again there's a family in crisis, and it's conservatism. He can let it break up, or let it wither under his watch. Or he can change. Just as he learned at 40 that to keep his family he had to become part of something larger than himself, he should realize as he approaches 60 that he has to become part of something larger if he is to save his administration. And that "something larger" is a movement that has been building for half a century, since before Barry Goldwater. The president would be well advised to look at the stakes, see what's in the balance, judge the strengths and weaknesses of his own leadership, and get back to the basics of conservatism. Oh, so that's it. The trouble isn't a dysfunctional FEMA, or the deficit, or tens of millions without health insurance, or the endless disaster in Iraq. The trouble is Bush is making conservatives bicker. Hey, Peggy, you're right for once -- Bush should try to become part of something larger than himself. How about something bigger than the brotherhood of right-wing dogmatists? Or even than Bush's native tribe, the plutocrats? How about America? posted by Steve M. | 2:00 PM | THE MARCH OF SCIENCE A press release: New risk analysis study shows school soft drink consumption has no impact on adolescent obesity WASHINGTON, D.C.--A first-of-its-kind peer-reviewed study applying risk analysis methodology to nutrition policy shows that consumption of carbonated soft drinks from school vending machines has virtually no impact on adolescent obesity. The study appears in the October issue of the journal Risk Analysis. It was authored by Dr. Richard Forshee and Dr. Maureen Storey of the Center for Food, Nutrition, and Agriculture Policy at The University of Maryland--College Park, and Dr. Michael Ginevan of Exponent in Washington, DC. ... Hmmm ... maybe this will be a story on your local news soon. But please note some of the fine print in the press release: The research paper was supported by an unrestricted gift from the American Beverage Association. More of the fine print: In accordance with the policy of the Center for Food, Nutrition, and Agriculture Policy, the sponsor had no control or input into the design, methodologies, data, analysis, results, conclusions, or the decision to publish. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. posted by Steve M. | 1:28 PM | It's the NRA's country -- we just live in it: President Bush will likely get a chance to sign into law a bill to shield the gun industry from lawsuits brought by victims of gun crimes, a controversial measure that has survived the Senate for the first time and is headed for passage in the House.... Opponents say the strength of the bill's support is testament to the influence of the gun lobby. They say that if the bill had been law when six victims of convicted Washington-area snipers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo sued the gun dealer from which they obtained their rifle, the dealer would not have agreed to pay the families and victims $2.5 million.... Supporters, of course, see it differently: ..."Lawsuits seeking to hold the firearms industry responsible for the criminal and unlawful use of its products are brazen attempts to accomplish through litigation what has not been achieved by legislation and the democratic process," House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., said in remarks prepared for Thursday's floor debate.... The House will pass the bill today. The gun lobby's fondness for achieving things through legislation and the democratic process does not, I should point out, extend to legislation it doesn't like: Starting Wednesday, handgun owners won't need permits to carry concealed weapons in the seven Alaska cities where they're still required. There also will be no more restrictions on keeping a firearm in a vehicle. A new state anti-gun control law that goes into effect will essentially bar municipalities from passing gun laws that are more restrictive than state law. ... the NRA ... calls it state pre-emption, and Alaska will be the 44th state to have such a law on its books. "We are looking to make it uniform to all 50 states," said NRA spokeswoman Kelly Hobbs.... The opponents of this, are, of course, a bunch of granola-eating liberals ... in cop shoes: ... Alaska police chiefs worry about no longer being able to enforce laws banning guns from public buildings, such as city halls. The new law would allow cities to keep guns out of places beyond a restricted access point, such as a metal detector, but the chiefs say their cities can't afford the staff or equipment. "There are lots of people, myself included, we really value our constitutional rights," said Anchorage Police Chief Walter Monegan. "But if we had the same enthusiasm to also support our constitutional responsibilities, then I would be less concerned over this issue."... I'm not a "gun-grabber." I think there should be background checks at gun shows, and I think it's unconscionable that Congress has made the ATF toothless, unable to rein in really bad gun dealers like Bull's Eye Shooter Supply, the source of the D.C. snipers' rifle. (The pressure on the ATF not to charge bad dealers with crimes dovetails neatly with the anti-lawsuit bill, which permits suits when a crime has been committed. If the ATF doesn't charge even the worst dealers with crimes, what good is that?) People who actually believe that a limited tightening of the gun laws would put us a short step from house-to-house confiscation of law-abiding owners' guns are exactly as ignorant as people who think Jews put Christian babies' blood in Passover matzohs. posted by Steve M. | 10:15 AM | Wednesday, October 19, 2005 Well, I don't buy this, from Newsweek's Christopher Dickey: ...Given the way Judy [Miller] takes notes, I'm not surprised that she can't remember who first gave her the name of [Valerie] "Flame." I've even seen speculation that it came from one of her other not-so-reliable sources, Iraqi exile leader (and now vice president) Ahmad Chalabi, who peddled so many of the WMD rumors that wound up as facts in the Times. Ahmad keeps close tabs on his enemies, and I know first-hand that he counted many people at the CIA on that list.... I don't buy it because the information about Plame was more or less accurate. When has that been true about any of Chalabi's other leaks? (Link via the Mahablog.) posted by Steve M. | 10:33 PM | DEFINITION OF A WINGNUT Someone who actually thinks this is funny. posted by Steve M. | 6:09 PM | I suppose this shouldn't be much of a surprise: Oil companies awash in profits after storms ...Although hurricanes Katrina and Rita created compounding headaches for energy companies since late August, the storms ultimately benefited them because as supplies tightened, prices for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel soared. Exactly how much money was made will become clearer next week when the industry begins to detail its third-quarter performance. Analysts are expecting huge profits. "They are just printing money right now," said oil analyst Fadel Gheit at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York. "They are making so many trips to the bank because they can't take all the money there at one time." Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp., BP PLC, ConocoPhillips Co., and Royal Dutch Shell PLC are expected to report a $9 billion, or 46 percent, increase in their combined third-quarter profits, according to analysts' estimates compiled by Thomson Financial.... ...And ... the fourth quarter is already shaping up to be another good one for the industry -- in part because production of oil and natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico remains hindered. ... Gheit said that because most energy producers "are covered by insurance for physical damage as well as business interruption, the negative impact on earnings is expected to be minimal."... Pro-gouging bootlickers like John Stossel never want to talk about the big increases in gougers' profits in times of shortage. If price increases were just a way for honorable tradesmen to tough out unexpected setbacks, as Stossel would have you believe, the firms' profits would stay roughly the same in bad times. But as everyone with a lick of sense knows, that's not how it works in the real world, which is not to be confused with Stossel's dreamland. posted by Steve M. | 4:45 PM | WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS AGAIN US soldiers in Afghanistan burnt the bodies of dead Taliban and taunted their opponents about the corpses, in an act deeply offensive to Muslims and in breach of the Geneva conventions. An investigation by SBS's Dateline program, to be aired tonight, filmed the burning of the bodies. It also filmed a US Army psychological operations unit broadcasting a message boasting of the burnt corpses into a village believed to be harbouring Taliban. According to an SBS translation of the message, delivered in the local language, the soldiers accused Taliban fighters near Kandahar of being "cowardly dogs". "You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burnt. You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be," the message reportedly said.... The burning of a body is a deep insult to Muslims. Islam requires burial within 24 hours.... --Sydney Morning Herald Oh, that's brilliant. Yeah, in order to show a few enemy fighters that we're bad-ass, let's offend all Muslims worldwide, including the ones who haven't yet concluded that they hate the United States. And let's do it while TV cameras are rolling, so the whole world can eventually see the footage. You know, if our goal were to rule the region by brute force -- and we were actually capable of doing so -- this might make sense. But our selling point is that we're the good guys. And then we do this. posted by Steve M. | 1:46 PM | It's not clear whether President Bush will actually fight to implement the recommendations of his tax advisory commission, but if he does, there goes the housing boom that's been propping up the economy. As if high energy prices aren't already going to rein in the sale of expensive-to-heat McMansions in long-commute exurbs, now Bush's advisors are recommending this: At present, all interest payments on mortgage loans smaller than $1 million are deductible. For the new mortgage interest credit, however, both plans would lower the mortgage limit to the maximum that the Federal Housing Administration will insure. That level changes each year and varies depending on housing costs in each county, with a current maximum loan limit of $312,895, in communities where housing is most expensive, and a national average of about $244,000. I'm sure that will be a comfort, say, in California, where the median home price in August was $568,890. Yes, the commission also wants to repeal the alternate minimum tax, which will surely help many owners of high-priced homes (and also many owners of second homes -- the commission wants to eliminate the deductibility of second-home mortgage interest). But then there's this: Deductions of the interest payments on home-equity loans ... would be disallowed. As of mid-2003, "homeowners had $315 billion in outstanding debt from home equity lines of credit...The average line of credit available as of June 2003 was about $69,500." I can't believe that all those debtors are AMT payers. This is supposed to soften the shock: These provisions would be phased in over five years to allow taxpayers to adjust to the changes. Yes, that might ease the pain somewhat until Bush is safely out of office, but it would also make a lot of people think twice about home-buying decisions right away -- if you're buying a home, you have to think about tax consequences a few years into the future. Unless, of course, you're buying the home to flip it rather than to, you know, live in it for a while. And that gives away the bias of this commission: It rewards wheeling and dealing; it punishes working for a steady paycheck and saving up your pay to buy a house to come home to at the end of the workday. Consider this: The commission would also raise to $600,000 from $500,000 the amount of profits from home sales that could be excluded from capital gains. And consider other, non-housing-related proposals: One would eliminate taxes on dividends paid by American companies and lower the top capital gains rate to 8.25 percent on the sale of stock in such companies, while continuing to tax interest income at the same rate as wages. ... the maximum corporate tax rate [would be lowered] to 32 percent from 35 percent. That's a central tenet of Bushism: Everyone should be an entrepreneur, a capitalist, a buyer and seller. No one should be a worker -- certainly no one should want to be one. Workers are chumps. The Bushists are half-right about that -- workers who voted for Bush are chumps. posted by Steve M. | 10:05 AM | Tuesday, October 18, 2005 So, do the rumors of a possible Cheney indictment and resignation explain his little house-hunting trip to Maryland last month? You know -- a guy from the West thinks he might need to stay in the East to clear up some legal problems, but he also thinks he might be on the verge of having to give up his employer-paid housing? posted by Steve M. | 8:14 PM | MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME? The Toronto Globe & Mail reports what appears to be grim news about Winnipeg: According to a report by Statistics Canada, the city is now the country's murder capital -- it has the highest per capita murder rate of Canada's nine largest urban areas. Shootings and other violent crimes have become so commonplace in Winnipeg, especially in the impoverished northern and central parts of the city, that some streets are empty at dusk. Many people from middle-class suburbs avoid entire neighbourhoods, even during the daytime. Know how many murders there have been in Winnipeg so far this year? 22. Know what Winnipeg's population is? Approximately 600,000 people. Here are the murder stats for Canada's nine largest metropolitan areas, according to the Globe & Mail: Homicides by census metropolitan area per 100,000 population. Winnipeg 4.89 Edmonton 3.39 Vancouver 2.58 Calgary 1.91 Toronto 1.80 Montreal 1.73 Ottawa-Gatineau 1.14 Hamilton 1.30 Quebec 0.84 The worst metro area in Canada -- the murder capital, the place decent people fear to go -- has a lower murder rate than the U.S. as a whole. Our murder rate is 5.5. per 100,000 population. 4.89? That's nothing. Several metropolitan areas in America (at least as of 2002) had murder rates over 10 per 100,000: Los Angeles-Long Beach; Detroit; Baltimore; Little Rock-North Little Rock; Baton Rouge; Gary, Indiana; Mobile, Alabama; Richmond-Petersburg, Virginia; and Stockton-Lodi, California. The rate in Memphis? Over 15. In, er, New Orleans? 24.4. Also over 10 per 100,000: Jackson, Mississippi; Savannah, Georgia; Shreveport-Bossier City, Louisiana; and Fayetteville, North Carolina. Oh, and: Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Alexandria, Louisiana; and (over 15) Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Victoria, Texas. Smirkers on the right will note that quite a few of the listed cities are in Louisiana. Smirkers on the left will note that quite a few are in other, unambiguously red states in the South. Smirkers in Canada will note that, by comparison, even Winnipeg looks awfully safe. posted by Steve M. | 4:41 PM | Cheney might resign and be replaced by Condi? Interesting, and Condi would be the obvious choice -- but my favorite response to the rumor so far is from this wag at Free Republic: Harriet Miers for VP ! The way Bush is operating these days, I wouldn't put that past him. posted by Steve M. | 4:19 PM | I don't know which is more unintentionally amusing -- Truth for Youth's Hairy Polarity and the Sinister Sorcery Satire, a Chick Publications-style comic intended to remind young people and their parents that the Harry Potter books are a primrose path to hell (which you may have already learned about via World O'Crap), or the Halloween page at Pat Robertson's CBN.com, a jam-packed collection of writings from which we learn that interest in the supernatural can mutate into an addiction and is inextricably linked to suicide and drug abuse, even though, as it turns out, poltergeists are real. Don't worry, though, it's not all gloom and doom -- if you're looking for an alternative to trick-or-treating, CBN recommends this "Fun Family Prayer Adventure": Pass around a bag or bowl of M & M's the next time your family is gathered for prayer. Let each person take a handful, but don't let anyone eat the candies yet. Explain that the color of the candies will indicate the direction of the families' prayers. Lead your family in prayer using this guide and stopping for prayer after explaining each color. Say: * For every green M & M you chose, pray for your spouse (present or future) or some other significant person in your life. This is a great way to get kids thinking about what qualities they want to find in a future mate. Encourage them to pray for this person’s safety, spiritual and physical growth, and so on). * For every red M & M you chose, pray for a member of your family by name (a parent, son, daughter, brother, sister, grandchild, niece, nephew, cousin, aunt, uncle, and so on). * For every orange M & M you chose, pray for a teacher in your life (a co-worker, a professor, a pastor, a Bible study leader, a child’s school teacher, a mentor, or another teacher).... Woo-hoo! That sounds like way more fun than TP-ing a neighbor's trees! Special bonus column by Chuck Colson -- with a scary goth-looking photo of Chuck!  (Hey, isn't that an outtake from the Nine Inch Nails "Closer" video?) posted by Steve M. | 1:55 PM | ANOTHER BRAVE CONSERVATIVE YOUTH SPEAKS TRUTH TO POWER Last spring, a Larkin student wrote an essay lamenting the celebration of Mexican holidays in American schools, the Herald reported. --WorldNetDaily, reporting on ethnic tensions at a high school in suburban Chicago ...last spring ... a Larkin student wrote an essay lamenting the celebration of Mexican holidays in American schools. -- article cited by WorldNetDaily, from the Daily Herald, Arlington Heights, Illinois "If it was up to me, they would be expelled, beaten, wrapped in their flag, set on fire and tossed over the border," one portion of the student essay reads. --from another story on the same incident Wow, that's some lament. **** UPDATE, 10/19: The last link doesn't seem to be working. Here's a cached version from Google. posted by Steve M. | 10:18 AM | A Gallup approval rating of 39%? I thought Bush would never get below 40% in a Gallup poll; I was wrong. That's crow I'll happily eat. posted by Steve M. | 9:54 AM | Monday, October 17, 2005 Haley Barbour wants you to think that, after Katrina, affected areas of Mississippi were pretty much crime-free. I imagine he doesn't count this: ... Mr. Velazquez, 45, is one of 32 immigrants housed in three mobile homes who are being paid $8 an hour to tear Sheetrock for 10 hours a day. The men are among hundreds of illegal immigrants who entered the United States hoping to find work in the aftermath of the hurricane. They are promised good pay, three meals a day and a place to stay, and some contractors make good on this. But the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, an advocacy group, says many do not. "These workers are superexploited by contractors in horrible living conditions," said Bill Chandler, the president of the alliance. "People are working without any kind of inoculation - tetanus or anti-hepatitis - they don't have goggles, they don't have gloves, they don't have any safety protection at all."... Arnoldo Antonio Lopez, 36, another worker in the group, said he paid $70 a month to live in trailer No. 10. He said he would have put up with the poor conditions, but the contractor who hired him did not pay him. "He promised me $7 an hour wages and good food," Mr. Lopez said.... "They hadn't eaten for three days when we got to them," said Vicki Cintra, the Gulf Coast outreach organizer for the alliance. "They had no blankets, nothing. They were sleeping on the floor. They had no money to buy food."... It could be happening in Louisiana, too. In any case, illegal immigrants are also getting a lot of the jobs there: Two weeks ago, Geremias Lopez was picking grapes near Bakersfield, but when he saw an advertisement on Univision, the nation's largest Spanish-language television network, for work on the Gulf Coast, he and a friend called the 1-800 number flashing on the screen and were soon aboard a Greyhound bus headed east. Lopez and the 80-some other Mexican and Honduran immigrants in his crew are now earning $100 a day covering torn and mangled roofs with blue tarps until the roofs can be re-shingled and restored to some semblance of what they looked like before Hurricane Katrina struck six weeks ago.... The Louisiana Department of Labor says it has received requests from contractors to certify 500 illegal migrants. Agency officials estimate that the actual number of illegal migrants already working for contractors is far higher, because many employers are not bothering with the paperwork. This is adding to the unhappiness of local contractors trying to re-establish their own businesses and hire local workers, after being evacuated or otherwise losing their ability to operate for weeks. "The local people can't participate in their own recovery," said Jack Donahue, whose Mandeville, La.-based firm Donahue Favret Contractors Inc. specializes in such construction tasks as sheetrock and flooring removal and mold remediation. Part of the problem, Donahue said, is that local construction workers scattered during the evacuation and are just beginning to come back. Many are returning to destroyed or severely damaged homes and have discovered that the hotels in the region are full of out-of-state workers, including migrants. "There's no room for local people in the hotels," Donahue said.... Credit for this goes to that great conservative hero, George W. Bush: Recognizing the demand for migrant labor, and to help speed reconstruction in the areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security temporarily suspended rules mandating employers to prove that workers they hire are citizens or have a legal right to work in the United States. In addition, President Bush suspended application in the Katrina-affected region of the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, under which employers must pay prevailing wage rates on federally financed construction projects -- in order, Bush said, to "permit the employment of thousands of additional individuals." Most people aren't paying attention to this story -- and I wonder what Bush voters, in particular, would think if they knew any of this. posted by Steve M. | 9:20 PM | CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP CONTINUES Last week I told you that the Reverend Donald Wildmon's American Family Association is P.O.'d at NASCAR because driver Robby Gordon said "shit" on a NASCAR broadcast and wasn't subjected to a draconian punishment. Now I see that there's some red-state grumbling about remarks made by Brian France, the new CEO of NASCAR, on 60 Minutes last week: NASCAR CEO Brian France doesn't like fans flying Confederate flags at races as he tries to make stock-car racing more appealing to minorities and women. "It's not a flag that I look at with anything favorable. That's for sure," he said in an interview with CBS' 60 Minutes... ...he doesn’t believe the racial stereotypes associated with the Confederate flag will affect NASCAR. “I think it’s a fading image,” France said. A fan in Alabama is not pleased: ...Southerners who have always been the meat and potatoes for NASCAR have made this sport what it is today. Southerners who love the Confederate flag, their history, heritage and culture should boycott NASCAR and keep their money at home for one whole racing season. Then Brian France will know which group of race fans butters his bread. And a fan writing to NASCAR.com's "Last Lap" column is a bit disgruntled: I understand that he is trying to grow his corporation by appealing to everyone but he is forgetting how NASCAR made it to the level it currently enjoys: Rednecks. Plain and simple. I am one of them. I grew up on NASCAR, beer, cigarettes and confederate flags. Now we have to appeal to everyone on the planet. Don't say s*** or you're outta here. Don't want the kiddies to hear it. Well let me tell ya, the folks that watch NASCAR could care less about the odd four-letter word and appreciate a good scuffle in the infield. Soon it will be plain old vanilla television. And I like this comment at Free Republic: Don't really like that the Confederate Battle Flag on every truck and moron's hands at the track. Not really the meaning of that flag.... Yeah, that's the real problem -- flying the Stars and Bars at a NASCAR race is disrespectful to the flag. posted by Steve M. | 3:29 PM | CAMBODIA This story from Saturday's New York Times should get a bit more attention: A series of clashes in the last year between American and Syrian troops, including a prolonged firefight this summer that killed several Syrians, has raised the prospect that cross-border military operations may become a dangerous new front in the Iraq war, according to current and former military and government officials.... One of Mr. Bush's most senior aides, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said that so far American military forces in Iraq had moved right up to the border to cut off the entry of insurgents, but he insisted that they had refrained from going over it. But other officials, who say they got their information in the field or by talking to Special Operations commanders, say that as American efforts to cut off the flow of fighters have intensified, the operations have spilled over the border - sometimes by accident, sometimes by design.... The troops can't secure one country, so now they're being spread even thinner. Oh yeah, that'll work. And do I even need to tell you -- given that this is the Bush administration -- that many people who know what they're talking about think this is a huge mistake? ...Some current and former United States military and intelligence officials who said they believed that Americans were already secretly penetrating Syrian territory question what they see as the Bush administration's excessive focus on the threat posed by foreign Arab fighters going through Syria. They say the vast majority of insurgents battling American forces are Iraqis, not foreign jihadis. According to a new study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, intelligence analysis and the pattern of detentions in Iraq show that the number of foreign fighters represents "well below 10 percent, and may well be closer to 4 percent to 6 percent" of the total makeup of the insurgency. One former United States official with access to recent intelligence on the insurgency added that American intelligence reports had concluded that 95 percent of the insurgents were Iraqi. This former intelligence official said that in conversations with several midcareer American military officers who had recently served in Iraq, they had privately complained to him that senior commanders in Iraq seemed fixated on the issue of foreign fighters, despite the evidence that they represented a small portion of the insurgency. "They think that the senior commanders are obsessed with the foreign fighters because that's an easier issue to deal with," the former intelligence official said. "It's easier to blame foreign fighters instead of developing new counterinsurgency strategies.".... Worse and worse... posted by Steve M. | 9:42 AM | Sunday, October 16, 2005 Could the mistrust Bush has engendered around the world actually make a bird flu pandemic more likely? Sounds crazy, but read this, from Lebanon's Daily Star: The citizens of South Lebanon appear to be ignoring the threat of bird flu, which has reached Romania and Turkey, with the hunting season continuing despite severe government warnings.... The Daily Star visited bird sanctuaries in South Lebanon, where work continues as normal, regardless of the warnings of the environment and health ministries. An owner of one of the sanctuaries, 45-year-old Mohammad Masri, said he did not believe in the existence of bird flu, adding: "This is an American creation aimed at distracting the people from their economic and political problems."... Carrying a butchered chicken, Umm Walid, a resident of Sidon, said: "Chicken is the cheapest food; why do they want to prevent us from buying it?" She added: "I assure you this is not bird flu, this is an American flu, a flu of personal interests and ambitions." ... Yikes. Thanks for elevating our standing in the eyes of the world, George. posted by Steve M. | 11:17 PM | Well, I said on Friday that there would be a contested GOP primary in New York for the 2006 Senate race, but now Jeannie Pirro has the thing effectively locked up because rival Ed Cox dropped out. Seems like something Karl Rove would have engineered with a horse's head in Cox's bed, but apparently Governor Pataki and the state GOP pressured Cox to withdraw. posted by Steve M. | 10:39 PM | GO FOR WHAT YOU KNOW Human rights activists in Iraq claim there are no polling stations in parts of the predominantly Sunni province of Anbar, in western Iraq, for a referendum today on the country's new constitution.... Much of the population is expected to vote against the US-backed constitution. "There are no voting centres in cities like Haditha, Hit, Rawa, Qaim, Ana, Baghdadi and the villages around them," said Mahmoud Salman al-Ani, a human rights activist in Ramadi, listing locations across the western province. "There aren't actually any voting centres or even voting sheets in these cities ... Nobody knows how and where to vote if they decide to," he said of the predominantly Sunni Arab region.... --Reuters yesterday ... as the House Judiciary Democratic Committee investigation found in Ohio, "There was a wide discrepancy between the availability of voting machines in more minority, Democratic and urban areas as compared to more Republican, suburban and exurban areas." Right after the election the Washington Post reported that, "local political activists seeking a recount analyzed how Franklin County officials distributed voting machines. They found that 27 of the 30 wards with the most machines per registered voter showed majorities for Bush. At the other end of the spectrum, six of the seven wards with the fewest machines delivered large margins for Kerry." --Tova Andrea Wang, "Waiting for Democracy," Century Foundation comment on the 2004 election, 6/24/2005 (Reuters link via Juan Cole.) posted by Steve M. | 10:09 PM | Saturday, October 15, 2005 Complicated day. Tomorrow, too, possibly, or at least part of it. I'll get back to you as soon as I can. posted by Steve M. | 8:35 PM | Friday, October 14, 2005 I keep trying to figure out whether yesterday's Daily News story about the New York subway terror alert makes it more or less likely that the alert was a Bush deception (as I know all of you believe it was). The city's rich and well-connected were tipped off to last week's subway terror threat days before average New Yorkers, the Daily News has learned. At least two E-mails revealing the purported plot were sent to a select crowd of business and arts executives early last week by New Yorkers who claimed to have close connections to Homeland Security and other federal officials, authorities said. The NYPD confirmed that it learned of the E-mails on Oct. 3 - three days before Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and the FBI went public with the threat.... The early warning infuriated several police officials, who noted that Homeland Security officials had challenged the credibility of the threat after the city and FBI warned the public. "We're briefing the mayor, ratcheting up security, talking about when to go public - and Homeland Security is downplaying the whole thing while their people are telling friends to stay out of the subways," a police source said. "It's pretty bad." ... Here's what I think: If the Bushies wanted to spread fear, is this how they'd do it? Not through a big, brassy D.C. press conference, but through viral marketing to a select demographic? If this was a Bush ruse to spread fear via "new media," it didn't work -- word didn't spread very far; the public didn't find out until New York City made the announcement a couple of days later. One person who didn't spread the word was the unnamed blogger at GOP and the City. He posted a partial text of one of the e-mails, but only when the alert was being made public by the city (note the date at the very top of the post), adding this comment: Now, put on your tin hats...I got this email forwarded to me on Tuesday (10/4/05) from a coworker. I sent it on to Snopes and some other NYC Bloggers as a potential hoax. Look who's not laughing now. So a Republican blogger got one of the e-mails two days before the story went public -- and didn't post it. You know what else makes me doubt White House skulduggery? The fact that Bloomberg and his police commissioner were the focus of all the attention. In a White House operation, wouldn't the point have been to persuade the public that Flight Suit Bush and His Band of Mighty Warriors are all that stands between America and the unthinkable? Why yield the headlines to a not-very-Republican Republican, a guy who just recently made a point of telling NYC voters that he opposed John Roberts? Hell, I don't think Bush would have yielded the stage to a mayor who agreed with him on everything. Bush and obvious Bush surrogates would have made the message clear: "We will keep you safe. We are your daddies." Also, why New York? If Bush wanted to scare people, why convey the sense that the "real" America wasn't under threat? I'm sticking with my theory: This really was based on an intelligence report, one that turned out to be unreliable. And the feds couldn't make up their minds what the hell to think when they passed it on to the city. (Also note this New York Times story, which says that Homeland Security personnel didn't believe the intel because it was too specific. I mention that only because, like the NYPD officials quoted in the story, I don't get it at all. These Homeland Security people are not to be confused with the Homeland Security people who obviously did believe the intel and e-mailed their friends accordingly. Feel safe now?) A final thought: I wonder if the administration has changed strategies and doesn't want to scare the public anymore -- apart from the subway alert, there's been a lot less of this kind of thing in the second Bush term. Maybe Ashcroft and Ridge liked grandstanding more than Gonzales and Chertoff do. Or maybe the White House is trying to send the message that We're Winning the War on Terror, Dammit, and scaring people undermines the new party line. posted by Steve M. | 5:16 PM | AFGHANISTAN: THE NEW IRAQ? (II) Afghan rebels are now travelling to Iraq to learn from insurgents there and returning home equipped with deadlier weapons and new techniques to use against US troops, analysts and reports say.... "Whether it's some old Taliban or some new insurgency, some of the things we're seeing happen have the fingerprints of things that are going on in Iraq," [Milton Bearden, a former CIA agent who was based in Pakistan during the Afghan rebellion against Soviet occupation,] told AFP.... The US magazine Newsweek in late September said its reporter had met two Taliban regional leaders, Mohammed Daud and Hamza Sangari, who told of spending several weeks in Iraq being trained by insurgents there. "I'm explaining to my fighters every day the lessons I learned and my experience in Iraq," Daud told the weekly. "I want to copy in Afghanistan the tactics and spirit of the glorious Iraqi resistance".... --AFP "I want to copy in Afghanistan the tactics and spirit of the glorious Iraqi resistance." Tactics like this, perhaps? A blast destroyed eight fuel tankers Friday outside the U.S.-led coalition's main base in southern Afghanistan. Two drivers were injured in the explosion, which sent thick black clouds billowing over Kandahar Airfield. ... Afghan army commander Gen. Mohammed Sarwar said the explosion was believed to have been caused by a bomb hidden in one of the tankers.... There has been a string of attacks on tankers contracted by the coalition to haul fuel to its bases from neighboring Pakistan.... (Via Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 2:29 PM | You may know that some experts think the Zawahiri-Zarqawi letter is a fake. Well, add Professor Juan Cole to the list of doubters. He literally can't get past the salutation without skepticism. posted by Steve M. | 10:35 AM | Oops -- Karl Rove's designated Hillary-slayer has suffered a few stumbles: Two Republican leaders in upstate New York on Thursday disputed the claim by Jeanine F. Pirro's campaign that they had endorsed her candidacy for the United States Senate, dealing another embarrassing setback to a campaign struggling to build momentum as she seeks to unseat Hillary Rodham Clinton. On her campaign Web site, Ms. Pirro has been mentioning endorsements she said she had received from Republican leaders in the politically important upstate region, including Gordon Brown, the chairman of the Wyoming County Republican Party, and Tom Hayden, the chairman of the Allegany County Republican Party. But in separate interviews on Thursday, Mr. Brown and Mr. Hayden took issue with that claim, saying that neither they nor the county parties they lead had endorsed Ms. Pirro, who is in a primary battle for her party's nomination. Mr. Hayden said he had not even met Ms. Pirro.... "The statement is inaccurate," [Mr. Brown] said of the campaign's claim about his endorsement.... This is part of a larger problem: ...Mrs. Pirro entered the race saying that she had the support of 46 Republican Party county chairmen around the state. "So my support in the Republican Party runs deep and wide," she said, according an August article in The New York Observer. But only 17 of these chairmen have officially endorsed her candidacy, according to her campaign.... Also, since she announced her candidacy, her disapproval rating has skyrocketed: As more voters have gotten to know potential Senate candidate Jeanine Pirro, more have decided they don't like her, according to a new poll. ...Voters polled favored Clinton over Pirro, 59 percent to 31 percent.... Maybe more troubling for Pirro than being so far behind Clinton is that 25 percent of the respondents had an unfavorable opinion of her in this poll, compared to 12 percent who felt that way in July.... You know, Rove used to be able to clear the GOP field and run a winner, but now he's got contested Senate primaries in Florida (the candidate he dreads, Katherine Harris, won't go away) and New York (Pirro is screwing up and Nixon son-in-law Ed Cox wants the nomination, too). Clearly, he was losing his touch even before the Plamegate noose started tightening. posted by Steve M. | 9:51 AM | THREE DOWN... This is brilliant. posted by Steve M. | 8:32 AM | Thursday, October 13, 2005 I'm late to this, but I just love the fact that Jerome Corsi, of all people, now thinks there might have been something fishy about how George W. Bush got into the Texas Air National Guard. Yeah, that Jerome Corsi -- the guy who wrote the Swift Boat book and helped get Bush reelected. He and Joseph Farah have been publishing stories at WorldNetDaily about Harriet Miers's tenure as head of the Texas Lottery Commission. (To put it mildly, they're no fans of Miers.) They assert that former Texas lieutenant governor Ben Barnes engaged in shady business practices as a lobbyist for the company that ran the state's lottery, GTECH, and that Miers looked the other way -- which is interesting if true, because Barnes says he was the guy who pulled strings to get George W. Bush into the Texas Air National Guard during Vietnam, and perhaps the administration of a governor with higher political ambitions didn't want to give Barnes a reason to want to go public with such recollections. Farah writes: Corsi ... wonders out loud whether Barnes may have been telling the truth about his involvement in securing Bush a spot in the National Guard. "The Barnes melodrama got drowned out by the forged document saga, but to this day, nobody has disproved Barnes played the role he said he did," writes Corsi.... Barnes had been hired first by GTECH because of his relationship with former Gov. Ann Richards. When Richards was replaced by George W. Bush in 1995, he boasted to the company that he knew the Bush family well. He explained that Bush family friend Sidney Adger approached him in 1968 to ask Barnes to use his influence to make sure George W. Bush was admitted to the Texas Air National Guard.... "GTECH further dodged a bullet when the Texas Lottery Commission, including Harriet Miers, decided to end the competitive bidding and re-award the contract to GTECH, deciding not to pursue the lower-price competitive bids that were on the table," Corsi reports. "In the period of 1995-1997, the George Bush controversy over the National Guard had not yet surfaced to be vetted. Was there a cover-up going on? That's a reasonable question given what we've uncovered so far." ... posted by Steve M. | 10:44 PM | I hate these people: In the case of employer-paid health insurance, the main proposal [President Bush's tax advisory commission] discussed would limit tax-free premium payments.... The main proponent of the health insurance proposal, Timothy J. Muris, ... said limitless tax-free health insurance premiums encouraged workers to demand and companies to offer overly generous insurance and resulted in increased health costs. Here's the reality: Mitch Mayne, 38, is a marketing executive in San Francisco who considers himself basically healthy. Mr. Mayne went to his doctor three times between March and June for the same thing: recurring bronchitis. Yet the explanation of benefits statements he received from his insurer after each office visit differed drastically in the amount he owed, varying from $10.66 to $90, with no explanation of the services provided. "What did I do on June 27 that was different than what I did on April 6 that was different than what I did on March 4?" Mr. Mayne asked. When he calls for an explanation of the E.O.B.'s [explanations of benefits], he said, the most tangible result he sees is a new card in the mail with no indication of the amount he owes as a co-payment printed on the card. "I'm paying through the nose for this premium, and when I go to the doctor it's a roll of the dice as to whether or not they'll pay it," said Mr. Mayne. "It seems like it depends on the mood of whoever happens to be doing the claim that day, or on the phases of the moon." Mr. Mayne recently grew so fed up that he decided to try to beat the bronchitis on his own. "I can't deal with all this paperwork," he recalled saying. "It's just too much of a hassle." That turned out to be a mistake. Mr. Mayne became so sick that he finally relented and saw his doctor. What if something truly catastrophic should happen to the state of his health? "Oh wow, I hadn't even thought of that," Mr. Mayne said. "That's actually a pretty scary proposition. If I can't manage my health care as a healthy individual, the prospect of trying to manage it and be really sick at the same time - I don't know that I could do it." I'm grateful to The New York Times for running that second article today, but the Times has had a big hand in spreading the myth retailed by Timothy Muris in the first article -- that our health care woes are all the fault of cosseted middle-class employees who avail themselves of the medical system at the drop of a hat. As if we really enjoy the paperwork, the maddening insurance company phone trees; as if we're not facing ever increasing premiums and co-payments. Back in the '90s, the Times -- fat with ads from drug companies -- strongly suggested that managed care was a magic bullet for our health care woes, and scolded us just the way Muris is scolding us now. Yeah, managed care -- that was really an efficient solution to our problems, wasn't it? posted by Steve M. | 1:32 PM | THUG LIFE ...a Federalist Society member tells ABC News the following: "The Federalist Society staffers are ready to launch a coup. They have started whispering awful things about Miers. The staffers are just now reaching the point of wanting to talk on background." "The whispering started on Monday, but has revved up. . . ." "They are willing to talk."... --The Note, ABC News Several large GOP donors in Texas have met to discuss spending large sums to run ads calling on Ms. Miers to withdraw. "They include both male and female friends of hers who don't think the confirmation process will be good for her or the country," one told me. --John Fund, The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal Wow. What happened to the manly war hero in the flight suit? These days, Bush seems more like the owner of a mob-controlled pizzeria whose payments are late. I wonder what those Texas Republicans are up to. Maybe they sense that the Federalistas, or others, are willing to scorch a bit of earth to kill this nomination -- possibly including earth some of the Texans are standing on. If Miers withdraws, I want Democrats to frame the question for the general public (which, I think, still sees Bush as a macho man who does what he pleases): Who really runs this White House? Whose orders make Bush jump? (Regarding a Miers withdrawal, one more mistake Bush made is nominating someone who's childless and thus can't suddenly develop a nanny problem.) posted by Steve M. | 11:35 AM | Will Bunch says, Do you honestly believe that Harriet Miers -- with all her other qualifications exactly the same -- would have been nominated to the Supreme Court if she had been Jewish, or an atheist, or Muslim? Well, no -- but as I keep saying, that's because Bush stupidly misjudged the people who tell him what to do and chose someone who's religiously correct, not ideologically correct. Look -- Bush could have picked a gay junkie atheist and been subjected to less criticism from his base, if that gay junkie atheist were ideologically pure. The people in the base love Christopher Hitchens, even though he hates religion. They love the liberal-bashing Tammy Bruce, author of The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and other books, even though she is -- as WorldNetDaily puts it -- a "self-proclaimed homosexual." (And in the early days of the war, when he was unambiguously gung ho, they loved Andrew Sullivan.) To the extent that the Right has overcome some of its historical racism, it's because of admiration for ideological purists such as Clarence Thomas (Strom Thurmond voted for him even though he had a white wife) and Alan Keyes. I still don't understand why Bush didn't understand that. So I'll answer Will Bunch's question with a question: Do you honestly believe that there would have been a firestorm of right-wing criticism if Bush had nominated a certain never-married woman in her forties who "make[s] out in public" and "live[s] on nothing but Chardonnay and cigarettes"? Isn't it obvious that he's getting more criticism on the right for nominating Harriet Miers than he would have if he'd nominated Ann Coulter? posted by Steve M. | 8:30 AM | Wednesday, October 12, 2005 Right-wing Christian wingnuttery -- it isn't just for Americans anymore: Christian group may seek ban on Qur'an A Protestant evangelical pressure group has warned that it will try to use the government's racial and religious hatred law to prosecute bookshops selling the Qur'an for inciting religious hatred. Christian Voice, a fringe fundamentalist group which first came to public prominence this year when it campaigned against the BBC's broadcasting of Jerry Springer The Opera, was among the evangelical organisations taking part in a 1,000-strong demonstration against the bill outside parliament yesterday as the House of Lords held a second reading debate on the measure. Its director, Stephen Green, said the organisation would consider taking out prosecutions against shops selling the Islamic holy book. He told the Guardian: "If the Qur'an is not hate speech, I don't know what is. We will report staff who sell it. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that unbelievers must be killed."... Note that the folks at Christian Voice are not above stirring up a bit of hatred of their own: The Bishop of Worcester has criticised campaigners who issued death threats to BBC staff over the controversial screening of 'Jerry Springer - The Opera'. ...Security guards are continuing to monitor the North London home of Roly Keating, the Controller of BBC 2, who received threats from protesters. The homes of six other BBC executives were also targeted after Christian Voice, an extreme Christian group, posted their addresses and telephone numbers on its website.... More Christian charity from Christian Voice: CV went on to exert pressure on a Scottish charity to refuse a £3,000 donation that would help cancer sufferers, because cast members from the Jerry Springer show had been involved in raising it. National Director Stephen Green also caused widespread offence by declining to offer compensation to the cancer sufferers, and by saying that he wished to reverse the stereotype of Christianity as "a religion for women and wimps". And here are some of CV's thoughts on Hurricane Katrina: ...What an expression of trust in God and holy fear of God it would be if the people of New Orleans told the abortionists, the criminals, the pimps and whores, the drug pushers, the voodoo priests and the homosexual tourists, "Your presence has cursed us. We don't want you back; we don't want your money." And what blessing it would bring on the whole United States if the whole of that land followed such an example.... In England, gratifyingly, there is mainstream religious disgust at Christian Voice: [The Reverend Dr. David] Peel [of the United Reformed Church] added: “Christian Voice has the right to express its extreme views, but it is as representative of Christian opinion in Britain as the Monster Raving Loony Party would be of mainstream political parties – and far less entertaining.” In America, these guys might just be getting a heads-up from the White House every time a judge is about to be nominated. ***** (I should point out that the bill Christian Voice is protesting, which would outlaw "incitement to religious hatred," is opposed not only by Christian conservatives but by a number of secularist groups, lawyers, and well-known entertainers.) posted by Steve M. | 4:23 PM | OOPS. Intelligent design isn't "stealth creationism"... Intelligent design needs to be distinguished from creation science, or scientific creationism. The most obvious difference is that scientific creationism has prior religious commitments whereas intelligent design does not. --ID advocate William Dembski When Bertha Spahr opened the box containing Dover Area High School’s donated copies of "Of Pandas and People" last year, she also found inside a catalogue from the publishing company listing the pro-intelligent design textbook under the heading of creation science. --York (Pa.) Daily Record **** (No surprise, really. Jon Buell, publisher of Of Pandas and People, has acknowledged that passages in the 1993 edition essentially match drafts of the 1983 edition except for the fact that in 1993 "intelligent design" was used instead of "creation." And here's a 1983 article by Buell and one of the textbook's authors, Charles Thaxton, at creationism.org; the article is titled, "Why All the Fuss About Creation and Evolution?" and includes this sentence: "That's why Christians - in fact all theists - must insist that whenever origins are discussed, public schools allow the teaching of the evidence for creation alongside instruction in the naturalistic concept of evolution.") posted by Steve M. | 3:03 PM | PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF CIVIL LIBERTIES I love the way the Right tells tales about the ACLU without doing even the most rudimentary fact-checking. Here's the opening of Dennis Prager's latest column: Not a week goes by that some part of the Left does not hurt America. But in the past two weeks, three examples stood out for the degree of such harm. The first example involved the ACLU, which has threatened Southwest Airlines with a lawsuit. Southwest ordered a passenger off a flight after she refused to cover her T-shirt on which was printed an expletive -- "Fu--ers" -- referring to President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The ACLU position is not surprising.... So what is "the ACLU position"? Did the ACLU really threaten a lawsuit? Here's what AP's story on the incident says: ...Southwest rules allow the airline to deny boarding to any passenger whose clothing is "lewd, obscene or patently offensive." Allen Lichtenstein, lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union in Las Vegas, said Heasley's T-shirt is "protected" political speech under the Constitution. The real issue is that the airline allowed her to wear the shirt onboard and then objected only when passengers complained, he said. "That they changed rules in the middle of a flight simply because someone didn't like it ... might be problematic," Lichtenstein said.... Heasley says she has been in touch with ACLU lawyers in Seattle, and wants Southwest to reimburse her for the last leg of her trip. "Might be problematic" -- wow, that's some dogmatic, absolutist position. A person who didn't realize that ACLU lawyers are demons incarnate might think that Lichtenstein actually accepts the notion that Southwest, as a private corporation, has a right to set ground rules for its customers, and merely wonders whether Southwest engaged in an ad hoc tweak of its own stated policies, allowing her to wear her shirt on the flight and then saying she wasn't allowed to wear it on board after all. As for the threat of a lawsuit, the story says that Lorrie Heasley "has been in touch with ACLU lawyers." In addition, AP's reporter has been in touch with an ACLU lawyer in Vegas. That's all I can find. Here are the Web sites for the national ACLU, and the ACLU chapters in Nevada and Washington State. Not a word about this case. Of course, this is a column in which Prager goes on to write about a court decision requiring the release of Abu Ghraib torture photos (an issue the ACLU does actually care about). Prager's gloss: Indeed, for the ACLU, release of the photos is a victory precisely because it does weaken American ability to fight Islamic terrorists. I love that word "weaken." Sounds awfully familiar.... Political freedom is an idea but not a fact. This idea one must know how to apply whenever it appears necessary with this bait of an idea to attract the masses of the people to one's party for the purpose of crushing another who is in authority. This task is rendered easier if the opponent has himself been infected with the idea of freedom, SO-CALLED LIBERALISM, and, for the sake of an idea, is willing to yield some of his power. It is precisely here that the triumph of our theory appears; the slackened reins of government are immediately, by the law of life, caught up and gathered together by a new hand, because the blind might of the nation cannot for one single day exist without guidance, and the new authority merely fits into the place of the old already weakened by liberalism. --Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 1:6 **** UPDATE: Perhaps I'm going a bit overboard by comparing anti-ACLU rants to anti-Semitic propaganda of the past. But you can compare this illustration and this one and draw your own conclusions. (Source, source.) posted by Steve M. | 10:44 AM | Tuesday, October 11, 2005 SURVEY RESULTS Let's see: 95% of 18-to-29-year-olds approve of interracial dating. 76% of 18-to-24-year-olds, in a sample that was nearly all male and half Republican, are so unfazed by homosexuality that lifting the ban on gays in the military would have no effect on whether they'd enlist. (The skew in this sample mimics the demographic makeup of the military itself.) And surely there's a fair amount of overlap between these non-traditional young people and the 13-to-24-year-old males who say they went to 24% fewer movies in theaters this past summer than two summers earlier. (They watched a lot more home videos and DVDs, and spent more time playing video games and surfing the Net.) And yet if Hollywood's box office slump continues, you know that idiots like Michael Medved will still say it's because of Hollywood's liberal values. posted by Steve M. | 4:25 PM | Right-wingers vs. George W. Bush on the Miers nomination? Hey, that's not the only sign of a conservative crackup. We also have the Reverend Donald Wildmon's American Family Association fighting with NASCAR! NASCAR, TNT Allow 'S' Word During Race Broadcast Send and email to NASCAR, TNT Network, and corporate sponsor of driver Robby Gordon.... ...During a race on Sunday, September 18, NASCAR racer Robby Gordon shocked viewers by verbally exploding against fellow driver, Michael Waltrip, after an on-track racing incident. "Everyone thinks Michael is a good guy. He is not the good guy like he acts like he is. Caution was out, and he wrecked me," Gordon said. "He's a piece of sh--!" Just prior to the language assault, Gordon had physically lashed out on the track by throwing his helmet at Waltrip's car as it passed by.... AFA asked members to demand a big fine and a suspension -- for the four-letter word, not the throwing of the helmet. And NASCAR ticked the AFA off even more by blocking the e-mails. Gordon went on to auction off the helmet on eBay for $51,100, which he donated to a Katrina relief fund. But AFA's home page is still posting a link to the Action Alert. **** Meanwhile, here's some broadcast obscenity you'd think might upset right-wing Christians if they were, you know, Christian: After devoting a portion of the October 6 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show to discussing pending legislation that would prohibit "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" of detainees held by the U.S. government, Glenn Beck interviewed a caller who claimed to have worked as an "intelligence officer" and to have "extracted intelligence" from U.S.-held prisoners by torturing them. (Warning: This gets a bit hard to stomach.) The caller said his preferred methods of torture included burning the retinas of prisoners' eyes with high-powered halogen lamps and blowing out prisoners' eardrums with high-pressure water and air. He also claimed to have known "a contractor that did drilling on live teeth." After hearing the caller describe these torture techniques, Beck responded, "I've got to tell you, I appreciate your service." During the interview, Beck asked the caller if he ever had trouble sleeping at night. When the caller answered, "No," Beck responded, "Good for you." He later added, "[W]hen all is said and done, I'm glad people like you are on our side." Transcript and audio at the link. No sign of an alert at the AFA site. Glenn Beck has previously said he's thought about killing Michael Moore and has called Katrina survivors "scumbags" (comparing them to survivors of 9/11 victims, whom he also admits to "hating"). Beck obtained an interview with Dick Cheney a few weeks before the 2004 election. posted by Steve M. | 1:26 PM | Gee, thank God we have a pro-business Republican M.B.A. president.... More than $88 billion of U.S. corporate debt is teetering on the edge of investment grade and soon may join the record amount of bonds downgraded to junk this year. Hertz Corp., the world's largest car rental firm, and radio broadcaster Clear Channel Communications are among 46 companies that probably will be categorized as noninvestment grade, according to credit-rating company Standard & Poor's.... Not since the Depression of 1929 has corporate America received so many black eyes. General Motors, the world's largest automaker, Sears Holdings Corp., the biggest U.S. department store chain, and Eastman Kodak Co., the largest photography company, led 27 borrowers whose $499 billion of outstanding debt obligations suffered the ignominy of being downgraded to junk. And if history is any guide, there will be no rebound soon. "You don't see companies get downgraded and work their way up, by and large," said Greg Peters, head of U.S. credit strategy at New York-based Morgan Stanley.... --Houston Chronicle/Bloomberg News Kodak and GM and Sears are aging warhorses, but Clear Channel isn't -- what's it doing on the list? posted by Steve M. | 11:00 AM | Afghanistan: the new Iraq? Suspected Taliban rebels ambushed a police convoy traveling on a mountain road in southern Afghanistan, killing 19 officers in the deadliest attack ever on the fledgling police force, officials said Tuesday. The convoy of 150 police was attacked late Monday while driving on a dirt road in Helmand province, Interior Ministry spokesman Yusuf Stanikzai said. Dozens of insurgents opened fire on the convoy, sparking a gunbattle that lasted until early Tuesday, when the militants fled into the mountains, he said.... --AP posted by Steve M. | 7:55 AM | There goes your Bush tax cut. posted by Steve M. | 7:34 AM | Monday, October 10, 2005 Five years ago, the political press decided as a group that Al Gore was a stuck-up weenie and George W. Bush was just a really swell guy. The journalists then set out to get us to elect the guy they preferred as president; the election coverage in 2000 was biased accordingly. Three years from now, that could happen again -- and if you want to see what the coverage of the chosen one is going to be like, read this profile of Mississippi governor Haley Barbour from today's Washington Post. Barbour is seriously considering running for president. Yeah, the story lingers briefly over the question of whether it's seemly for the quality of a state's hurricane relief to be predicated on the impressiveness of the governor's circle of friends. It doesn't stay there long, though, because Barbour is just too perfect -- appealingly powerful (a tad ruthless, actually), yet folksy and courtly as all-get-out; devoted to The Little Woman (an old-fashioned gal who excuses herself to go to "the little girls' room"), yet equally devoted to amber-colored adult beverages and fine cigars; mildly prayerful, yet quite fond of an off-color joke. Reporters who still hate the fact that they never got to see LBJ in action must be slavering at the prospect of a Barbour presidency -- they think they'll get to write about a pol from the old school, and some of that intoxicating non-metrosexuality will rub off. It's enough to give an overeducated yuppie scribe goosebumps and a schoolgirl crush. Here's the lead: Gov. Haley Barbour's favorite political memento is a framed sequence of four photos of himself trading off-color jokes with his former boss, Ronald Reagan. In the first photo, the young White House aide is seen telling the president a joke, "the one about the three couples joining the church," Barbour says. He adds, rightly, that the joke is not suitable for the newspaper -- its punch line features one of the couples doing something enormously inappropriate in the frozen-food section at Kroger. In the third picture, Reagan is saying, "Haley, have I ever told you the one about the two Episcopal preachers?" This joke can't go in the newspaper, either.... Here's the middle: Barbour is not a starry-eyed idealist or a politician compelled to mention his religion at every chance. He generally eschews public self-reflection, the feel-your-pain deal. "I'm just not that kind of guy," he says, responding to a Barbara Walters-ish inquiry about whether Katrina has "changed" him. But Barbour was clearly shaken by the storm. He kept saying, "Pray for us," says Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers, Barbour's longtime friend and business partner. "We've never been 'pray for us' kind of guys." And here's the end: ..."You can't explain it to people unless you're in the arena," he says of what it's like to lead a state during a catastrophe. "All these people who are relying on you. And suddenly you've got to rise to that occasion." He closes his eyes, enunciating his words. He speaks of the importance of "hitching up your britches." That's what you do when you get knocked down: "Hitch up your britches." Like Mississippi did after the Civil War, after Reconstruction, after Camille in 1969. Barbour's voice quiets to the tone of a bedtime story. He finishes off his sixth glass of wine. Another visit to the devastation looms in a few hours. "We'll overcome Katrina," he vows, "just like she overwhelmed us. "And with that, good night." In other countries, heads of state have to maintain torture chambers to get journalists to write about them like this. Here in America it's done voluntarily, even on behalf of pols who haven't reached the White House yet. **** UPDATE: Julia did a much better job of taking the measure of the man in this post from 2004. posted by Steve M. | 4:41 PM | Well, it's nice to see that Gary McCullough still has some money coming in. A few months ago he was in the news as a spokesman for Terri Schiavo's parents; prior to that, as World O'Crap noted, he defended murderer Michael Griffin by claiming that killing an abortion provider is "justifiable homicide," was closely associated with double-murderer Paul Hill; funneled money to Clayton Waagner, the anti-abortion "terrorist" who sent those anthrax hoax letters to abortion clincs; and [was] arrested 30 times (he says) for his involvement in disruptive abortion protests. Now I see that he's helping to promote a rather dubious medical book to religious conservatives through his Christian Communication Network: In his research for Germ Theory, a new book on the latest surprises in medicine, veteran science writer William C. Shumay Jr. has uncovered a new understanding of human chronic disease that points away from the role of eating habits, exercise, and attitude. Hundreds of new medical studies suggest instead that sexual abstinence and monogamy may be the ultimate strategy to keep dangerous disease at bay throughout an individual's life.... The research for the Germ Theory report indicates that intimate human contact with a number of partners is an excellent way to pick up a tumor virus, a brain infection, or perhaps the germ for an inflammation that means a heart attack years down the road.... Yup -- non-monogamous sex might cause all kinds of cancer! In fact, as Shumay's amateurish home page for the book explains, even being touched might cause cancer: ... one of mankind’s most dangerous diseases, melanoma, starts out on the body surface, then rapidly spreads throughout the body.... What causes it? The original theory made sense: Most melanomas seem to start on visible skin surfaces expected to be exposed to the sun routinely. But consider too: These skin areas are also those that are exposed to contact with other people, as well as public surfaces that other people touch. A melanoma germ? Has anyone looked for one? Would Shumay extend that to other skin cancers? Would he argue that Ronald Reagan, say, got skin cancer not because he was an Irish guy who liked to ride horses in the strong California sun, but because people regularly touched the tip of his nose? (I won't ask how Shumay imagines Reagan got colon cancer.) By the way, Shumay's also a poet: From a Better World Than Yours Greetings, This is Juki 3.14159 (But you can call me Juki Pi), I want to make your world like Jukian Prime; And let me tell you why. The moment Juki 4.2 emerged full-grown From Clone-Tank 63, I loved him dearly as my own, As when properly programmed, he would be me. And when it came time for him to eat his mother, (A special time in anybody's life), I laughed loud when he asked me for another, I had no plans as yet for a future wife.... Er, I think eating your mother really might cause cancer. (It definitely can cause a disease similar to mad cow.) posted by Steve M. | 12:54 PM | I'm appalled to learn that Antonin Scalia will be the grand marshal of today's Columbus Day parade in New York. Scalia was picked by the same people who banned James Gandolfini and other members of the cast of The Sopranos from the parade a few years ago. Hell, those people only play thugs on TV. In any case, I'm amazed that the parade organizers could find a float strong enough to hold Scalia's ego. posted by Steve M. | 8:19 AM | Sunday, October 09, 2005 It's interesting to me that the Harriet Miers brouhaha coincided with stories about the return of two high-profile Republicans to the political fray: Rudy Giuliani just announced that he might run for president in 2008 and Roy Moore just declared his candidacy for governor of Alabama. Polls suggest that Rudy's candidacy is the better bet -- he is GOP voters' favorite candidate for '08 according to a late-September Fox poll, while a Mobile Register poll shows Moore well behind incumbent governor Bob Riley in the Alabama Republican primary. But the anger about Miers is coming from somewhere, and it's not going to be limited to one Supreme Court pick. The worst the right can say about Miers is that it's not clear whether she toes the conservative line -- and merely on that basis right-wingers are livid about her choice. Giuliani favors gun control and gay rights as well as legal abortion. Can he possibly maintain his lead among Republican voters once those facts move to the foreground? Maybe moderates really will outvote zealots in the '08 primaries and Giuliani or John McCain (#2 in the poll) will manage to win the nomination -- I can't see it, but that's what the numbers predict. If that happens, I think the rightists will bolt -- and they're certainly not going to bolt to Hillary. That's where Moore could conceivably come in. Yeah, it looks as if he may not get past the governor's race; he's getting drubbed in the Mobile Register poll. But it surveys only likely GOP voters. And note this: Riley held his largest lead over Moore among respondents from households where the annual income exceeded $60,000. With each step down the economic ladder, the race tightened. Likewise, Riley held a wider lead among respondents who had gone to college than among those with a high school diploma or less. Likely voters tend to be wealthier and better educated. It seems to me that if unlikely (i.e., poorer) voters turn out, Moore could do much better. And they might turn out if they feel that (a) the country's going to hell in a handbasket and (b) even mainstream Republicans are betraying conservative principles. Right now, George W. Bush seems to be doing his level best to keep his base thinking both of those things are true. If that's still the case next summer, when the GOP primary takes place in Alabama, a vote for Moore may seem like an effective way to flip the bird (in a godly way, of course) to Bush and the established GOP. I don't trust the Moore poll. As the linked article notes, Riley has benefited recently from favorable publicity for his hurricane response. Before that, in a January poll, Moore actually led Riley by eight points. And here's something else, from an article about Moore in the current Atlantic: Moore has ... toured the country tirelessly, speaking about the Ten Commandments at churches and dinners, conferences and conventions, hitting thirty-one states last year alone to share the news that the federal government is threatening the American way of life.... One political consultant I spoke to, who is not affiliated with Moore, predicted that Moore would easily raise more money from out of state than any other gubernatorial candidate in U.S. history. So Moore could do quite well -- and even if he merely loses to Riley by a few percentage points, he'll be in a position to take his messianic act national, possibly as a third-party candidate for president. (He considered a run last year; read the Atlantic article if you want to know just how grandiose his vision of his theocratic life mission is.) So maybe we'll have a three-way race in '08, with the third-party candidate pulling votes from the Republican. And so maybe we'll have another Clinton winning the White House with much less than 50% of the popular vote and thus, according to conventional wisdom, no mandate. Wasn't that fun the first time? (Atlantic article via Red Hair & Black Leather.) posted by Steve M. | 11:30 PM | One more thought about the right-wing reaction to the Miers pick: The mistake Bush made here was thinking that he's the president of the United States. That's not what the base thinks. The base didn't vote for Bush -- the base voted for the conservative movement. To the base, Bush is president only insofar as he embodies the conservative movement. Mere months ago, some in the base were saying they loved Bush even more than they loved Reagan; now, however, he's violated the movement's principles, and he may never be forgiven for it. What's happening to Bush is not exactly analogous to falling out of favor with the Party during the Soviet era, but any resemblance you may detect is real. posted by Steve M. | 11:40 AM | Saturday, October 08, 2005 In the Sunday The New York Times, David Kirkpatrick tries to explain why Bush's base is so ticked off at the Harriet Miers pick -- and, unsurprisingly, he blows it: ...Some on the right said the reaction reflected a growing discontent among conservative[s] with Mr. Bush even before he announced his selection over issues like federal spending, especially after Hurricane Katrina.... Some reasons for the discontent over Ms. Miers may go back to the pessimistic view many evangelicals hold about society and culture, Professor Green said. "They kind of expect to be betrayed," he said. "They see themselves as an embattled minority...." And on and on. Kirkpatrick also lists Bush's initial failure to back the Federal Marriage Amendment after the '04 election; right-wing disappointment at Reagan's pick of Anthony Kennedy and Bush the Elder's pick of David Souter; and even " pent-up aggression" after the easy John Roberts confirmation. In other words, Kirkpatrick is clueless. What the hell does any of this have to do with Harriet Miers? If Christian conservatives are wary of Bush, why does that prevent them from backing him on this one pick? They backed John Roberts wholeheartedly, didn't they? Does Kirkpatrick think there's a vague, free-floating wariness or sense of discontent that would have surfaced even if a darling of the right, such as Priscilla Owen or Michael Luttig, had been picked? And if so, is he nuts? (Incidentally, I read Frank Rich in the dead-tree Times and he addresses the same question -- and also comes up with the wrong answer. He thinks the base doesn't accept Bush's "Trust me" on Miers because Bush has been saying "Trust me" on many things and then failing, and the base has noticed. Er, I don't think so. Most of the base still loves Bush and hates whoever criticizes him on the war, tax cuts, religiosity, and so on.) Miers appears to be religious in exactly the way that ought to appeal to the Bush base -- but it's not enough. Why? Because the Bush base doesn't really care about whether someone loves God -- the Bush base cares only about whether someone hates Hillary Clinton and Ted Kennedy and Chuck Schumer and evolution and abortion and stem-cell research and Michael Schiavo and the "homosexual agenda." At the very least, it's critical to express, or at least hint at, enough of these hatreds that the base can assume the rest. The people in the Bush base believe that John Roberts hates what they hate. They don't believe Harriet Miers does. They fear she's nice. They fear she'd be nice to liberals. They think she might think liberals are human. They hate that. That's why they hate the pick. It's that simple. posted by Steve M. | 11:45 PM | If the Bushies are trying to stir up fear with a fake terror alert -- as every liberal in America except me apparently believes -- they sure have a funny way of doing it: In Washington, White House spokesman Scott McClellan, echoing a bulletin issued by the Homeland Security Department, said the threat was "of doubtful credibility." --Reuters Department of Homeland Security spokesman Brian Doyle said yesterday: "The specified intelligence was checked out through the intelligence agencies. They looked at all the information and couldn't put a credible factor on it." --Washington Times One senior federal law enforcement official ... said the alleged plotters talked about going to New York to launch an attack, but authorities questioned whether they had the means or ability to do so. "It was crazy, fantastical. You're talking about guys who had no capability of doing what they say they were going to do," said the official. --Los Angeles Times But a high-level federal official said there was "zero danger." --New York Post How does this make the fearmongering more effective, if fearmongering is all it is? I'm going to believe what I'm reading in Newsday: Behind the scenes, a top city official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the FBI encouraged Bloomberg to make the threat public, despite questions all parties had about the quality of intelligence. The source described Homeland Security brass as "asleep at the wheel" and said city leaders were "confused over which federal agency to believe." An utter lack of coordination between agencies working on terrorism? Sounds like the Bush administration to me. posted by Steve M. | 12:50 PM | Roughly 1,000 marines, soldiers and sailors ended Operation Iron Fist late Thursday, a statement said.... --AFP "Operation Iron Fist"? OK, kids -- it's quiz time: Pacification operation by the U.S. military in Iraq ... or Chuck Norris movie? Can you tell which of the following is which? 1. Able Warrior 2. Bells of Innocence 3. Centaur Strike II 4. Desert Scorpion 5. Delta Force 2 6. Devil Thrust 7. Firewalker 8. Forced Vengeance 9. Forest Warrior 10. Hellbound 11. Hitman 12. Ivy Lightning 13. Lancer Fury 14. Silent Rage 15. Octagon 16. Rapier Thrust 17. Resolute Sword 18. Rocketman III 19. Top Dog 20. Vigilant Resolve 21. Warrior's Rage 22. Wrecking Crew Answers below. * * * * * * * * * * * * * Answers: 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 19, and 22 are Chuck Norris movies. All others are military operations. Sources: GlobalSecurity.org and the Internet Movie Database. posted by Steve M. | 10:40 AM | Friday, October 07, 2005 Just a reminder that the list of ten terror plots the Bush administration says it's foiled includes one that couldn't possibly have worked: Jose Padilla In May 2002, the US disrupted a plot that involved blowing up apartment buildings in the United States.... A 2004 New York Times article explained the alleged plan: ...[Padilla] and an accomplice were to enter the United States from Mexico or Puerto Rico, identify three high-rise apartment buildings that used natural gas, rent two apartments in each building, seal all the openings, turn on the gas and set timers to detonate the buildings simultaneously. "Selection of the target city in the United States was left up to Padilla," the document said. He indicated to interrogators that New York City was the primary target .... As I wrote at the time: Yeah, right -- as if you could just walk into a building in New York City, examine large numbers of vacant apartments, and say, "I'll take that one and that one." And then do it again. And again. Do you know how hard it is to find a vacant apartment in New York, much less be the one person lucky enough to get it? Rentals are scarce and there's a lot of vetting of potential tenants. And the vetting in co-op buildings is worse -- even Madonna, at the peak of her fame, got turned down by one co-op board. And as another Times story made clear, such a plan would have been scientifically absurd: ...several experts contacted yesterday said that from an engineering perspective, it would be almost impossible for a terrorist to bring a building down that way. ..."We would expect maybe a wall blown out, maybe a bad fire, but not a building collapse," said Jonathan Barnett, a professor at the Center for Fire Safety Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. "This is actually much ado about nothing." Even if every apartment in a high-rise building were filled with gas, and the gas ignited simultaneously, the resulting explosion would not achieve that goal. "I think it's a nutty idea, frankly, an act of desperation," said Matthys Levy, a consultant who is a co-author of "Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail" (W. W. Norton & Company, 1994).... Kudos if the plot was foiled, but Padilla and his pals apparently were the gang that couldn't terrorize straight.... posted by Steve M. | 11:25 PM | I don't know if the very devout folks who'll be bringing National PornSunday to churches across America a couple of days from now will be successful in reducing the demand for porn, but the guys behind it seem much more amused by porn than they ought to be if they think it's very, very harmful, as they claim. "PORN SUCKS," the trailer for their documentary proclaims. OK, guys, whatever you say -- I guess "Pete the Porno Puppet" and "Wally the 25 Foot Weiner" are expressions of your deep outrage. "One day I was praying and God spoke to me, and he said the word 'porn,'" one says in the movie trailer. Er, I don't think that was God. posted by Steve M. | 4:33 PM | A new poll shows Santorum tanking: Pennsylvania State Treasurer Robert Casey, Jr., has opened a 52 - 34 percent lead over incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum in the 2006 Senate race, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. This compares to a 50 - 39 percent Casey lead in a July 13 poll by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN uh-pe-ack) University.... Eighteen points behind. Nice. Oh, and also in that Pennsylvania poll: Voters disapprove 61 - 37 percent of the job President Bush is doing, his lowest score ever and down from a 53 - 44 percent disapproval July 13. Bush barely lost Pennsylvania in 2004 -- it was 51%-49% Kerry. posted by Steve M. | 1:22 PM | Authorities briefly closed part of Penn Station on Friday and commuters headed to work under the watchful eyes of police after a newly disclosed terror threat against the New York subway system. A discarded soda bottle filled with an unidentified green liquid was found at the station during morning rush hour, Amtrak officials said. The substance did not pose a threat to passengers and was removed for testing.... --AP Better safe than sorry, I suppose, but if they're going to shut down parts of the transit system every time they find something like this, there are going to be a lot of shutdowns. Although usually what's in such discarded bottles is an unidentified yellow liquid.... posted by Steve M. | 12:01 PM | Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Did Harriet Miers force a young man in the White House speechwriting shop to edit the True Meaning of Christmas out of a Bush Yuletide message? For whatever it's worth, that's what the young man, an ex-White House staffer named Ned Ryun, says here: ... In 2001, I was given the task of writing the President’s Christmas message to the nation. After researching Reagan, Bush, and Clinton’s previous Christmas messages, I wrote something that was well within the bounds of what had been previously written (and in case you are wondering, Clinton’s messages were far more evangelical than the elder Bush’s). The director of correspondence and the deputy of correspondence edited and approved the message and it was sent to the Staff Secretary’s office for the final vetting. Miers emailed me and told me that the message might offend people of other faiths, i.e., that the message was too Christian. She wanted me to change it. I refused to change the message (In my poor benighted reasoning, I actually think that Christmas is an overtly Christian holiday that celebrates the birth of Christ and the beginning of the redemption of man.). The director and deputy of correspondence supported me. I even emailed Ken Mehlman (then the Political Director at the White House, now the Republican National Committee Chairman), to see what he thought about the message. He was not offended by it in the least. Miers insisted that I change the tone of the message. I again refused, and after several weeks, the assignment was taken out of my hands. I was later encouraged to apologize to Miers. I did not apologize. That is my one personal anecdote about Harriet Miers. Some will probably write that incident off as an insignificant, almost meaningless, occurrence. And perhaps it is. But Miers purposefully sought to dilute the Christianity of the message, thus revealing to me at least a willingness to compromise unnecessarily without outside pressure. That is my opinion based off that experience and I would be more than happy to be proved wrong.... Now, please note that Ryun is writing for the Christian Worldview Network ("Your Antidote for Liberalism and Christian Happy-Talk"); also note that he "is currently the head of Generation Joshua (www.generationjoshua.org), a national youth organization that encourages Christian young people to become active in the civic and political process." (Generation Joshua was founded by homeschooling advocate and Patrick Henry College head Michael Farris.) So it's conceivable that the draft message was a tad over the top, and not "well within the bounds of what had been previously written." I found two 2001 Christmas messages that presumably cleared the Bush White House's editing process -- they're here and here. I find them hard to distinguish from both Bill Clinton's 1999 message and this one from Poppy in '91, but then again I'm a Godless heathen. In any case, it's more Miers discontent on the right. What fun. posted by Steve M. | 11:38 AM | I'd find it a lot easier to shrug off the reported threat to the New York subways if Homeland Security were worked up and the city were downplaying the threat. Unfortunately, it's the other way around. Of the two, I know which one I consider more credible. This strikes me as the key line in last night's ABC/AP story, linked above: After several days of work, sources said, the NYPD became increasingly concerned because it was unable to discredit the initial source and additional information from the source. That doesn't mean this is credible. It just means no hole has been found in the story yet. If the Bushies were trying to scare America for a bump in the polls, I think they'd be yelling "Boo!" a lot louder, and not letting Mike Bloomberg hog the spotlight. Bloomberg, of course, is running for reelection, but I think he's savvy enough to know that many New Yorkers are skeptical about these warnings; moreover, unlike Bush and Giuliani, he's never tried to declare himself the guy who's led the fight to keep us safe from terrorism -- we don't connect him with fear, so surely he knows that inspiring fear won't make his poll numbers go up. I realize I'm supposed to be dubious, but I think this is just what it appears to be -- a probably specious threat that, nevertheless, can't yet be written off through hard facts, and that Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly are therefore taking seriously. So the city is raising an alarm, assuming that can do more good than harm -- if there's anything there, the alert might help disrupt the threat. Normal cynicism will return to this space shortly. posted by Steve M. | 8:50 AM | Thursday, October 06, 2005 By now you've probably seen this: Federal prosecutors have accepted an offer from presidential adviser Karl Rove to give 11th hour testimony in the case of a CIA officer's leaked identity but have warned they cannot guarantee he won't be indicted, according to people directly familiar with the investigation.... I think that explains this curious Washington Times story, which preceded it: Senior Bush adviser Karl Rove was "very involved" in President Bush's Supreme Court nomination of Harriet Miers, who was selected in part because she has no judicial track record, according to a Republican with close ties to the administration. "We know that Rove was very involved in the process, and he's certainly well tuned in to the Hill and how it works," said GOP strategist Charlie Black.... I assume the Times story ran in order to assure the paper's GOP audience that, yes, dammit, Rove is still on the job -- he's not working full-time on keeping himself out of jail, thus leaving Bush utterly rudderless, as I'm sure many of the paper's readers suspect. Alas for those readers, I think the Times story is a smokescreen, and their suspicions are correct. Also see this AMERICAblog post: I just talked to a source who told me that Karl Rove has been missing from a number of recent White House presidential events - events that he has ALWAYS attended in the past. For example, Rove was absent from yesterday's presidential press conference to promote Harriet Miers. These are the kind of events Rove ALWAYS attends, I'm told, yet of late he's been MIA each and every time. My source tells me that the scuttlebutt around town is that the White House knows something bad is coming, in terms of Karl getting indicted, and they're already trying to distance him from the president. Are they trying to distance him from the president? Or are they just giving him leave to work on keeping his ass out of the penitentiary? Rove's absence from day-to-day combat would certainly explain the Harriet Miers screw-up. Listen to James Moore, co-author of Bush's Brain, speaking in 2003: ... all of the messages that the White House sends in the way the White House governs is to that base Republican core that Karl believes is the foundation of the Republican Party and its future, and its hope for election in 2004. By design, they have no enemies on the right. And they'll take them on the left, but there are none on the right. And that's precisely what Karl chooses to do. I just can't believe Rove would have allowed Miers to be chosen unless he was certain the choice would make no enemies on the right. So, yeah, I think he's effectively on leave. **** UPDATE: Obviously, when I wrote this I was overlooking Karl Rove's breiefing of James Dobson on the Miers nomination. But I still think he wasn't a full-time participant in the decision-making process. posted by Steve M. | 5:21 PM | BUSH TO LOW-INCOME SENIORS: YES, WE GAVE YOU BAD INFORMATION. GUESS WHAT? WE DON'T CARE. As NPR reported this morning and MedPage reports here, the Bushies did a mass mailing to senior citizens about the prescription-drug benefit that contains critical mistakes that could cost poor seniors money. The administration's response? "Get the correct information youself!" ...The Centers for Medicare/Medicaid Services (CMS), which runs Medicare, conceded yesterday that it goofed in a handbook just mailed to Medicare beneficiaries. Moreover, the error occurs in a section on low-income seniors -- those who could potentially get the greatest relief from a Medicare prescription-drug benefit. The information brochure wrongly states that the low-income seniors ... can sign up for any of the PDPs [prescription drug plans] that offer plans in their area at no extra charge. That information is wrong, said Medicare spokesperson Gary Karr. Low-income seniors can avoid extra charges only if they sign up with plans that charge premiums that are equal to or below the state average.... CMS acknowledged the error but said it is too late to send out a new mailing because the clock is running on Medicare Part D enrollment, which opens on November 15 and continues through May 15, 2006. Seniors who sign up by December 31, 2005 will get coverage beginning on January 1, 2006. The right information, CMS said, can be found on the Medicare Website, and Medicare said it has informed the PDPs that they must inform low-income seniors about the error. Hey, it's only ordinary citizens getting screwed -- it's not as if this is an important error to rectify. By the way, it's not even certain that low-income seniors who go to the Web site will get the correct information -- they haven't always: But the Medicare Website has also been plagued by errors. For example, on Sept. 23 -- the day CMS unveiled the list of Medicare-approved national and regional PDPs -- a Medicare announcement to Alabama residents carried this headline: “Medicare Approves Plans to Offer Drug Coverage in Alabama; Many Plans to Offer Premiums Lower Than $2.” That would be a bargain in any state, but in a poor state such as Alabama it would be a real boon -- if it were true. The headline was supposed to tout premiums lower than $20.... No competence, please -- we're Republicans.... posted by Steve M. | 2:20 PM | The images and experience of September the 11th are unique for Americans. --Bush speech this morning Funny -- it seemed to me that the six dead and more than 1,000 injured who were in the World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, experienced something rather similar to 9/11. But that incident didn't bump George W. Bush up 40 points in the polls, so I guess it wasn't similar at all. posted by Steve M. | 12:28 PM | Over at Sisyphus Shrugged, Julia has a list of senators who voted for torture: Allard, Colo.; Bond, Mo.; Coburn, Okla.; Cochran, Miss.; Cornyn, Texas; Inhofe, Okla.; Roberts, Kan.; Sessions, Ala.; Stevens, Alaska. Hmm, let's see: Allard -- 100% ratings from the Christian Coalition in 2004 and 2003. Bond -- 100% ratings from the Christian Coalition in 2004 and 2003. Coburn -- right-wing religious zealot elected to the Senate in 2004 with endorsements from James Dobson and Gary Bauer; has been a Family Research Council board member. Cochran -- 100% ratings from the Christian Coalition in 2004 and 2003. Cornyn -- 100% ratings from the Christian Coalition in 2004 and 2003. Inhofe -- 100% ratings from the Christian Coalition in 2004 and 2003. Roberts -- 100% ratings from the Christian Coalition in 2004 and 2003. Sessions -- 100% ratings from the Christian Coalition in 2004 and 2003. Stevens -- 83% ratings from the Christian Coalition in 2004 and 2003. Whom would Jesus waterboard? posted by Steve M. | 10:15 AM | CHEAP SHOT Photo and caption from The New York Times:  Iraqi voters got booklets like this one to help explain the constitution. Hmm ... must be a translation of the booklet Condi gave Bush. posted by Steve M. | 9:32 AM | Wednesday, October 05, 2005 John Podhoretz gets it half right: IS THIS BUSH'S HIDDEN AGENDA? A friend, one of the wisest analysts of politics I know, asks the following fascinating questions: Did the president pick Harriet Miers because she is an evangelical Christian? Is this the real meaning of the "trust me" message -- and are her religious beliefs the reason that James Dobson, Chuck Colson, Marvin Olasky and others have given her the big thumbs-up? They were clearly given an early preview of the Miers nomination and were told things about her or told things by her that made her right with them. So far, spot on. Has the president decided, in effect, that just as there has been a Jewish seat and an African-American seat and a female seat on the court, there will now be a born-again seat? And that, therefore, the Miers selection is indeed a reward for the people who turned out in such force for him last November -- but he can't quite say it aloud and hopes people will figure it out over time? If so, this wasn't cronyism, but rather a new form of conservative tokenism.... No, it isn't. Bush would like nine Christian conservatives on the Court. So would everyone on the religious right, the people whose approval is required before Bush will make any move. (What Bush stupidly failed to grasp this time was that Christian conservatism wasn't all these people were looking for in his Supreme Court nominees.) Bush doesn't make a distinction between a far-right Catholic such as John Roberts and an evangelical Protestant. As a rule, most of his base doesn't make that distinction either -- members of both groups can generally be relied upon to hate abortion, gay people, embryonic stem-cell research, non-abstinence-based sex education, separation of church and state, and government social spending. Bush's screw-up was to pick an evangelical who's been traveling in Republican circles for years and still hasn't bothered to assimilate that political agenda. posted by Steve M. | 10:45 PM | YO, JUDGE! MAKE ME A SANDWICH! Every blogger in America has linked this denunciation of the Harriet Miers pick by George Will; many of the liberals who are delighting in it are choosing to overlook its concluding paragraphs, which, reduced to plain words, would read, "One broad on the Supreme Court is plenty!" ...Under the rubric of "diversity" -- nowadays, the first refuge of intellectually disreputable impulses -- the president announced, surely without fathoming the implications, his belief in identity politics and its tawdry corollary, the idea of categorical representation. ... playing the victim card clarified, as much as anything has so far done, her credentials, which are her chromosomes and their supposedly painful consequences. For this we need a conservative president? In The Family, her book on the Bushes, Kitty Kelley notes that Will was a bit less polysyllabic in his patronizing sexism twenty years ago: When George F. Will reported that [Geraldine Ferraro's] husband, John Zaccaro, had not paid taxes, Ferraro proved Will wrong and suggested he publicly apologize. Instead, Will sent roses with a card, which read: "Has anyone told you you are cute when you're mad?" Pig. posted by Steve M. | 1:08 PM | You know, Jeb really is the smart one. All sorts of right-wing politicians, including Jeb's brother, practice cronyism and push theocracy -- but Jeb's managed to do both simultaneously.... Book chosen by Gov. Bush for contest tied to GOP donor's movie Gov. Jeb Bush is encouraging Florida schoolchildren to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a parable of the New Testament gospels, for a contest timed with the release of the movie version by a company owned by a prominent Republican donor. The $150 million film opens Dec. 9, and three sets of winners will get a private screening in Orlando, two nights at a Disney resort, a dinner at Medieval Times and a copy of the C.S. Lewis children's novel signed by Jeb and Columba Bush. The movie is being co-produced by Disney and Walden Media, which is owned by Philip Anschutz, a Colorado billionaire. Anschutz, his family, his foundation and his company have donated nearly $100,000 to Republican candidates and causes in the past three elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.... Mary Laura Openshaw, Bush's director of Just Read, Florida, said other books that were made into movies in recent years -- such as the Harry Potter movies and the film of the award-winning children's book, The Polar Express -- were not selected for contests because the companies that made them were not partners with Just Read, Florida, as Walden is.... As to the religious themes in the book, Openshaw said the story could be read without reference to Christianity. She said she wanted children "to read the book and decide for themselves."... In the book, four children escaping the Nazi blitz of London during World War II find a wardrobe that lets them enter a magical land called Narnia, where the evil White Witch has cast a perpetual winter. A lion named Aslan arrives, where he dies to redeem one of the children, but then is resurrected. In the end, Aslan and the children -- who in Narnia are known as Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve -- defeat the White Witch. The state's Just Read, Florida Web site links to Walden's, which then links to an "educator's discussion board" -- the most popular thread of which is about a "17-week Narnia Bible Study for children." ... --Palm Beach Post Jeb's previous choice for Just Read served Mammon, if not God -- it was Carl Hiaasen's kids' book Hoot, which is also being made into a Walden Media movie. **** UPDATE: Another person who's likely to be pleased with Jeb's current reading choice is Rupert Murdoch. The Boston Globe reports on the Murdoch marketing blitz that's accompanying the film: ...HarperCollins, the publishing arm of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, is pumping out 170 C.S. Lewis-related book titles in more than 60 countries -- 140 related to ''The Chronicles of Narnia." The number represents a vast variety of editions and companion volumes. Lewis's own books are only the beginning. Besides various editions of ''The Chronicles of Narnia," there's a six-volume box set of Lewis's mostly Christian books for adults, including ''Mere Christianity," ''The Screwtape Letters," ''Miracles," and ''The Problem of Pain." There's also a new adult biography titled ''The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis," by Lewis scholar Alan Jacobs. Then there are the extras. To mention a few: ''A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings From His Classic Works"; ''Mere Christianity Journal," a faux-leather-bound study guide with excerpts and blank pages for reader reflections; ''Beyond the Wardrobe: The Official Guide to Narnia"; and ''Companion to Narnia," an alphabetized reference book to the world of the ''Narnia" books. And there are not one but two glossy photo books about the making of the movie. ... ''The more they are able to get people to read the books," said Cary Granat, chief executive officer of Walden Media, ''the bigger the base to grow the film. As more people want to see the film and read the books, it will extend the franchise. It's a cultural phenomenon that needs to be managed at all levels."... Sounds very educational and very spiritual. HarperCollins finalized an agreement in early 2001 that made it the principal English-language publisher of C. S. Lewis worldwide. That announcement was also accompanied by words of nurturance and spirituality: "C.S. Lewis is one of the most beloved and respected literary figures of our time,'' said Jane Friedman, President and CEO of HarperCollins Publishers. "The new agreement allows HarperCollins to capitalize on our strengths as a global publisher to bring C.S. Lewis to audiences of all ages around the world through a vibrant, coordinated publishing program. We move forward with a focused worldwide branding effort, the goal of which is to encourage readers to appreciate the remarkable freshness of C.S. Lewis' works in the new century, while also celebrating the classic best-selling status of the Narnia books.'' And Jeb is happy to pitch in. Maybe he should change the name of that program to "Just Cross-Market, Florida." posted by Steve M. | 10:16 AM | Tuesday, October 04, 2005 Republicans like code words. But every so often there's a Republican who's just too dumb or lazy or arrogant to use those code words correctly. This can lead to serious trouble. Back in '92, Dan Quayle actually thought Republicans meant "single mothers" when they expressed alarm about the rising number of "single mothers on welfare." Quayle overlooked the obvious fact that "on welfare" was always tacked on to "single mothers" so white suburbanites, some of whom were single mothers, would think that the single mothers in question were all black teenagers on public assistance. Quayle forgot that. Stupidly, he denounced a rich white fictional character, Murphy Brown, who had a child and no husband. Real single mothers of Murphy Brown's approximate melanin level never forgave him, or the guy at the top of his ticket. (Quayle made the speech in an election year -- d'oh!) More recently, William Bennett made the opposite mistake: He remembered a code phrase and its meaning, but he uttered the real words, forgetting to use the code. An economist had posited that aborting unwanted babies might have led to a lower crime rate a generation later; "unwanted" translated to "black" in Bennett's head, as it does in many conservatives' heads -- but he was too dumb to remember not to say "black" out loud. Big trouble for him. And so we come to the current President Bush. He promised his supporters that he'd choose for the Supreme Court a person who'd faithfully interpret the Constitution. He thinks that's what he's actually done. Dumb bastard -- his base doesn't give a crap about that pleasant-sounding platitude; the base, as Atrios said, "wanted Bush to extend a giant middle finger to everyone to the left of John Ashcroft.... They wanted this to be their 'WE RUN THE COUNTRY AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT' moment." To the base, that's what "faithfully interpret the Constitution" means. It really seems as if Bush literally didn't know that. posted by Steve M. | 11:20 PM | I read this on the plane over the weekend in a two-week-old Time magazine: Why DNA exonerations may get rarer Justice, it seems, has an expiration date. Luis Diaz last month became one of a handful of Florida prisoners -- and one of 99 nationwide -- exonerated by DNA testing since 2000. But the 2001 statute that helped set him free after he spent 26 years in jail for rapes he did not commit is set to expire next week. After October 1, when prisoners can no longer petition Florida courts for post-conviction DNA testing, their only hope will be to ask prosecutors (the people who put them in jail in the first place) to reopen their case. Prisoners in Ohio face a similar deadline at the end of the month.... Worse still, the four-year window in Florida that required the preservation of evidence for older cases -- which may have predated reliable DNA testing -- is also closing. And unlike California, which last year passed a law ensuring the preservation of evidence throughout an inmate's incarceration, Florida Governor Jeb Bush last month mandated that law-enforcement agencies need give only a 90-day notice before destroying evidence, which isn't much time given the low literacy rates among inmates and how hard prison protocol makes it for them to reach a lawyer.... And new hurdles could arise at the congressional level, where a bill threatens to restrict many prisoners from filing one last-ditch petition in federal court.... Such compassionate conservatives in the all-GOP governments of Florida, Ohio, and D.C. posted by Steve M. | 10:02 PM | Why is a Bush insider and chairman of America's seventh-largest home-building company selling large amounts of his company's stock? ...Dwight C. Schar, the chairman of NVR, ... tops the list of insider sales so far this year. In eight days in May, Mr. Schar sold $88.4 million worth of stock in NVR, based in Reston, Va. ...Mr. Schar, 63, who would not comment for this article, also owns a stake in the Washington Redskins football team and runs with Washington's political elite as the Republican National Committee finance chairman. President Bush often singles him out in speeches to thank him for his fund-raising prowess..... That's from an article in the New York Times business section. Here's that article's lead: Home builders have never had it so good. Low interest rates and creative financing have caused a frenetic pace of new-home construction across the country. Builders are reporting blistering earnings and their shares are trading at or near record highs. Now they are cashing in. Executives and directors at many of the nation's largest development companies sold stock at a record pace this summer. Insiders at the 10 largest home builders by market value, including D. R. Horton, KB Home, Toll Brothers and M.D.C. Holdings, have sold nearly 11 million shares, worth $952 million, so far this year. That is a huge jump from the 6.8 million shares, worth $658 million, that insiders sold during all of last year, according to data compiled by Thomson Financial. Market specialists often view heavy stock sales by corporate insiders as a possible indicator that share prices are headed lower. Some analysts say that the share sales by home builders are reminiscent of the heavy dumping of stock by technology company executives just before the technology bubble burst in 2000.... And there's this, from another Times story today: A real estate slowdown that began in a handful of cities this summer has spread to almost every hot housing market in the country, including New York. More sellers are putting their homes on the market, houses are selling less quickly and prices are no longer increasing as rapidly as they were in the spring, according to local data and interviews with brokers. In Manhattan, the average sales price fell almost 13 percent in the third quarter from the second quarter, according to a widely followed report to be released today by Miller Samuel, an appraisal firm, and Prudential Douglas Elliman, a real estate firm. The amount of time it took to sell a home was also up 30.4 percent over the same period.... Outside Washington, in Fairfax County, Va., the number of homes on the market in August rose nearly 50 percent from August 2004. In the Boston suburb of Brookline, Mass., where many three-bedroom houses cost $1 million or more, the inventory of homes for sale has increased in just the last few weeks, said Chobee Hoy, a broker there. For-sale listings have also swelled throughout California, according to the California Association of Realtors. In the San Francisco Bay area, they have increased 16 percent in the last year, Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage said.... 
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Did anyone catch this over the weekend in Sam Tanenhaus's New York Times Magazine cover story on William F. Buckley's 1965 campaign for the mayor's office in New York? ...although [Buckley] did not sound like a bigot - and indeed he was not - he seemed to give comfort to those who were. A startling instance of this occurred in April, even before the campaign began. Buckley was the featured speaker at the Holy Name Society Communion Breakfast, an annual gathering of Catholic police officers, and he caused a sensation. Speaking after the famous Selma marches, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Buckley, addressing the uniformed crowd of 5,600 (about one-quarter of the entire force), accused the news media of emphasizing the brutality shown by the Alabama police and editing out their initial restraint and of playing up the story of Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife who had gone south to help civil rights workers and been murdered there. "Why, one wonders, was this a story that occupied the front pages from one end to another, if newspapers are concerned with the unusual, the unexpected?" Buckley asked. "Didn't the killing merely confirm precisely what everyone has been saying about the South?" Yes, gosh -- why would this story make the front pages? Ordinary people horrified by the attacks went to Selma to add their voices to the cry for justice. One who answered the call was a Detroit housewife, Viola Liuzzo, 40, wife of a Teamster official, and mother of five.... After the march ended, thousands had to get out of the city before nightfall. Viola Liuzzo got her car and headed back to Selma with a load of passengers. She had not been following the civil rights workers' rules of the road very carefully over the past several days. She drove fast along the highway, stopping for gas at white-owned stations in Lowndes County. Her Michigan plates made her green Oldsmobile conspicuous ... A carload of whites pulled up behind her, bumping the rear of her car several times before passing and racing off. She commented to Leroy Moton, a black teenager who had been helping her drive, that she thought these local white folks were crazy. As soon as their passengers were dropped off at Brown Chapel in Selma, they headed back toward Montgomery for a second load. On the way out of town they stopped at a traffic light, and another car pulled alongside. In it were four Ku Klux Klansmen from Bessemer, a steel town near Birmingham, including FBI informer Gary Rowe, who was sitting in the back seat. Collie Leroy Wilkins looked out the window and saw Mrs. Liuzzo and her black companion stopped beside them. "Look there, baby brother," Wilkins said to Rowe, "I'll be damned. Look there." Eugene Thomas, who was driving the Klan car, said, "Let's get them." When the light changed they began chasing the Oldsmobile, careening through the darkened swamps of Lowndes County at almost 100 mph. Rowe later said he tried repeatedly to persuade the others to give up the pursuit, but Thomas insisted, "We're not going to give up, we're going to take that car." As the Klansmen closed in on their prey Thomas pulled out a pistol and handed it to Wilkins and told the others to draw their own weapons. Rowe tried once more to get them to abandon the game; but Thomas said "I done told you, baby brother, you're in the big time now." A moment later they pulled alongside the Oldsmobile. Wilkins put his arm out the window, Mrs. Liuzzo turned and looked straight at him and he fired twice through the glass. The fourth Klansman, William Eaton, emptied his pistol at the car. Rowe said he only pretended to fire his weapon. Then their car sped on away. Yeah, it certainly would have been much more appropriate for the press to focus on the many demonstrators who weren't killed that night with malice aforethought. And as for the "initial restraint" of local police officers, perhaps there was an explanation other than their fine moral character: Gov. Wallace told the White House the state couldn't afford to pay the cost of mobilizing the National Guard for the march, giving President Johnson the opportunity he was looking for. He federalized 1,900 of Alabama's National Guard, authorized use of 2,000 regular army troops, as well as 200 FBI agents and U.S. marshals to protect the march. In any case, it's a good thing Buckley was, indeed, not a bigot. If he had been, it might be appropriate to be offended by his remarks. posted by Steve M. | 11:10 AM | Conservatives who are supporting Harriet Miers, or who believe they might support her, are pointing to her deep involvement in her Dallas church, Valley View Christian. Here's Marvin Olasky favorably quoting her former pastor there, Ron Key, and citing an account of her church work from Martin Hecht, a pro-life Texas Supreme Court justice who's dated Miers and remains a friend. The former pastor says, "Our church is strong for life.... We believe in the biblical approach to marriage." But here's a passage from the church's Web site: We try not to be dogmatic about matters on which believers hold divergent views. Our core beliefs are centered in Christ and His message as supported by Scripture. More obscure doctrine, as well as controversial issues about which the Bible is silent, are left to believers to sort out on their own. On these issues we take no official/dogmatic position. Jeez, no wonder a lot of the right-wing hard core is freaking. posted by Steve M. | 8:35 AM | Monday, October 03, 2005 SWEATING THE DETAILS, BUSH STYLE "A humanitarian army is going to follow our army into Iraq, right?" Mr. Bush asked [Condoleezza Rice] in January 2003. --the president of the United States and commander in chief of U.S. armed forces, as quoted in George Packer's new book, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (see this review; also this one) posted by Steve M. | 11:24 PM | William Kristol hears about the Harriet Miers pick and is "Disappointed, Depressed and Demoralized." Rod Dreher at National Review Online asks, "What was Bush thinking?" The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler says, "President Milquetoast just couldn’t wait to drop trou, bend over and invite the Dhimmicrats in again by nominating Miers to the Supreme Court." Zach Wendling of In the Agora says, "Where were you when you heard that Bush had just plain given up?" But: James Dobson of Focus on the Family says, "We welcome the president's nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court." Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, the anti-ACLU founded by Pat Robertson, praises her. Marvin "Compassionate Conservatism" Olasky quotes a source who says "conservatives have nothing to worry about." So don't be too happy about the pick. And yes, David Frum has written, In the White House that hero worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met. No, really. That's not a joke. posted by Steve M. | 11:20 PM | |
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