|
|
| No More Mister Nice Blog |
|
|
Tuesday, January 31, 2006 "ADDICTED TO OIL" Who knew Bush would use the State of the Union address to quote that pinko peacenik Kurt Vonnegut? Or maybe he was quoting the guy who wrote the book that was the basis for that commie George Clooney movie Syriana? posted by Steve M. | 11:23 PM | TIM KAINE DEMOCRATIC REBUTTAL Ah, "competence" -- that's the word that's really going to get voters' hearts racing. Just ask Mike Dukakis. TBogg was right -- the Democrats should have gotten Bill Clinton to do the rebuttal. posted by Steve M. | 10:20 PM | SHORTER STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS: WE MUST ARGUE IN A CIVIL MANNER, BUT REMEMBER THAT THE DEMOCRATS WANT EVERYONE TO DIE IN A TERRORIST ATTACK I can't believe people thought this speech was going to be all about medical savings accounts. **** ...Well, the second half is domestic -- and it sounds like a discarded partial draft (the laundry-list part) of an old Clinton State of the Union address (complete with a call for a line-item veto), with a few Bushie ideas (clean, safe nucular power!) thrown in. posted by Steve M. | 9:36 PM | Because much of the State of the Union address will almost certainly be devoted to September 11, domestic spying, and the Iraq War, you may want to prepare for the speech by boning up on the rules for acceptable discourse about these and related issues. Barbara O'Brien of the Mahablog will be your guide. Here are the rules: Republicans own the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and all issues touched by the attacks. Therefore, when a Republican waves the bloody WTC tower, so to speak, to stir up emotional support for a GOP policy, that is not politicizing 9/11. Because they own 9/11, see. However, whenever a Democrat mentions 9/11 in any context, that is politicizing 9/11. Further, wherever the GOP has used 9/11 as part of an emotional appeal for a GOP policy (which is not politicizing), Democrats may not criticize that policy. Because to do so "politicizes" the policy and is an insult to the memory of those who died on 9/11.... Read the whole thing here. posted by Steve M. | 5:09 PM | Dana Milbank in today's Washington Post: Tasting Victory, Liberals Instead Have a Food Fight The new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds congressional Democrats in the best position they've held in 14 years, besting President Bush and Republican lawmakers on Iraq, the economy, health care, immigration, ethics and more. All of which can mean only one thing: It is time for the Democrats to eat their own.... Milbank goes on to find this cannibal meal taking place at a D.C. bookshop where Ramsey Clark and Cindy Sheehan are appearing. Clark and Sheehan call for Bush's impeachment and an end to U.S. involvement in Iraq. We're led to believe that this is not merely the zealots prodding the cautious insiders, but a sign that the Democrats' wheels are coming off, the result of massive damage being done by a bunch of unwashed radicals. Hmmm. I seem to recall a food fight on the other side a few months back -- a fight in which one of the tossed cafeteria trays actually did permanent harm to a certain Harriet Miers, who was quietly eating a salad at the president's table. So I searched this Milbank column about the Miers melee, and this one, and this one, and while Milbank occasionally pokes gentle fun, there's no suggestion that the Republican Party was headed off a cliff, or that the opponents of Miers had anything but the finest of breeding. I think this is why I didn't bother to post about the "to filibuster or not to filibuster?" question. Here's the problem: Conventional wisdom always portrays Democrats as hapless, awkward, ungainly comic figures, while Republicans, even when they're screwing up or (as in the Miers affair) fighting one another, are always said to be smooth and, at worst, suffering a temporary setback. Some of this is Republicans' greater mastery of the appearance of dignity -- the phony sanctimoniousness I talked about in a post last night -- but some of it is just the fact that Democrats and Republicans are perceived through the lens of opposite stereotypes. If this were Shakespeare, Democrats would be the lower-class bumpkins speaking in prose, while Republicans would be the nobles uttering iambic pentameter. If the Democrats had mounted a filibuster and made it stick, they would have been portrayed as boorish radicals. If they'd done nothing, they'd have been portrayed as miserable wimps. Mounting a doomed filibuster, Kerry and Kennedy were portrayed as ineffectual radical-wannabes. Dems just can't win. Americans are probably inclined to believe that all politicians are bumptious, venal clowns. Right now, though, one party escapes that sort of skepticism. That will continue to be the case as long as the mainstream press continues to portray the GOP exactly the way the GOP portrays itself, and the Democrats exactly the way the GOP does. posted by Steve M. | 1:51 PM | Is that a bubble I hear popping? Housing slowdown squeezes borrowers Foreclosure cases hit 12-year high The number of foreclosure notices filed against Massachusetts homeowners last year reached their highest level since the housing bust of the early 1990s, as homeowners fell behind on their mortgages and lenders began the process of taking back the properties. It's happening, in part, because our national housing pyramid scheme, whereby we all agree that prices will go up forever and thus we can all buy whatever house we want, even if we can't afford it, knowing it will inevitably be worth more in the future, is starting to break down: ... Homeowners who stretched their finances to the limit to buy a home found it more difficult to make their payments on variable-rate mortgages as interest rates rose, but they were less able to refinance their loans at more attractive rates -- or sell and pay off their debts -- because the value of their homes fell or remained flat. ''When prices are skyrocketing, you have the option" of selling the house for a gain or refinancing, said Nicolas Retsinas, director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. ''In an economy where price appreciation is more modest or doesn't exist, what option do you have left?" he said. ''Sadly, one of those options is foreclosure." ... This isn't some trivial increase -- there were 32% more foreclosure filings in 2005 than in 2004. And it's mostly happening right along the coast, i.e., in and around Boston, where the boom, presumably, was at its boomiest. Is this coming to your neck of the woods next? posted by Steve M. | 10:52 AM | Monday, January 30, 2006 The New York Times just posted an article about the Alito battle called "Two Nominee Strategies. One Worked." It says what you'd expect -- the Democrats' failed to connect while jabbing at Alito about his membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton and his decision not to recuse himself in a case involving Vanguard. But there's also this: ...Democratic aides said their party had initially expected Judge Alito to live up to his reputation as "Scalito," suggesting a conservative firebrand in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia. Failing to adjust to his meekness, Democratic aides admit they searched too hard for scandal in Judge Alito's past.... Instead of a fearsome "Scalito" whom Democrats had initially expected, Judge Alito appeared timid and bland in the face of the Democratic questions, the aides said. "Instead of some brash, confrontational figure in the mold of Robert Bork, we got a quiet, studious guy you almost felt sorry for," [Jim] Manley [a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid] said. What is Manley saying -- that Alito's personal style was unknowable? That it was impossible to find video of him, to meet with people who know him, to draw inferences from senators' own meetings with him? The Democrats thought he'd be snappish, but they were just guessing? Even after meeting him? And why did they assume he'd be a Bork? Very few people are as unpleasant and arrogant as Bork, and it was a safe bet that even a nominee who's naturally unpleasant and arrogant would have the rough edges sanded off by Bush administration handlers before the hearings. I find that, outside talk radio and the blogosphere, very few Republicans lash out. Some of them just aren't the type; the rest skillfully and cynically deploy soft-spokenness, phony somberness, a cornpone gee-whiz quality, or some combination of the three to convey the sense that they're Boy Scouts and their opponents are sewer rats. Think of Dick Cheney: He never raises his voice, and he deploys sanctimoniousness brilliantly -- he always seems to be deeply pained at the nature of the Democrats. He cares about you. He cares about how horribly you'd die if Democrats had power. Cheney's a thug who cynically plays a tough but folksy grandpa on TV. Like Spiro Agnew, he's the VP as attack dog, but most of America doesn't even seem to know he's an attack dog. Republicans are good at this. We can't get them rattled, so we have to assume that the public will never see them, personally, as monsters. That's why we need to attack them on substance. And maybe we have to learn how to seem pained and self-righteous at all times, and how not to get rattled. In other words: We need to (a) seem nicer and (b) hit harder. posted by Steve M. | 11:35 PM | Well, they're still not requiring us to salaam and shield our eyes whenever Bush's motorcade passes by (I guess that will come after the midterm elections), but it looks as if the presidency might turn a bit more imperial soon, according to (yes, really) Fox News: A new provision tucked into the Patriot Act bill now before Congress would allow authorities to haul demonstrators at any "special event of national significance" away to jail on felony charges if they are caught breaching a security perimeter. Yup -- felony charges. And here's the kicker: The alleged felon doesn't even have to be anywhere near the alleged target: Sen. Arlen Specter , R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sponsored the measure, which would extend the authority of the Secret Service to allow agents to arrest people who willingly or knowingly enter a restricted area at an event, even if the president or other official normally protected by the Secret Service isn't in attendance at the time. ...the new provision would allow ... arrests even after those VIPs have left the premises of any designated "special event of national significance." The provision would increase the maximum penalty for such an infraction from six months to one year in jail. ..."You are talking about giving the executive branch broader authority to create these exclusion zones which could cover broad areas and last for days [during an event ]," David Kopel, a constitutional expert with the Cato Institute, told FOXNews.com.... The story goes on to cite "White House sources" who "say the measure was not instigated by the administration," but this stinks of Karl Rove (whose goal is to protect the securtity perimeter of every presidential photo op for the length of the news cycle during which it takes place). It also stinks of Dick Cheney, whose purchase of a house in Maryland has led to a permanent ban on overflights ("The no-flight zone, imposed last month, is in effect even when Cheney is not there") and a requirement that neighbors remain "barricaded in their homes while [his] motorcade passes by." Can't wait to see what's next.... posted by Steve M. | 3:38 PM | Our pals, the Pakistanis: Prevarication by the Pakistani government cost America the chance to kill Osama bin Laden in an airstrike near the Afghan border two years ago, the Sunday Telegraph has been told. A CIA lead that the al-Qaeda leader was hiding in a remote province was squandered because the Pakistani government delayed giving permission for the attack on its soil, according to a senior Western diplomat. By the time US officials got the go-ahead, bin Laden had left the suspected hideout in Zhob, in the Baluchistan province of south-west Pakistan.... The reason for the delay is not clear. While Pakistan's President, Pervez Musharraf, has vowed to eliminate terrorists operating within his country, elements within Pakistan's ISI intelligence service may have sought to protect bin Laden.... Really? You think? You're either with us or with the terrorists -- or, I suppose, both. You know, whatever. posted by Steve M. | 1:35 PM | Condoleezza Rice tells us once again that she was caught completely flatfooted: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged Sunday that the United States had failed to understand the depth of hostility among Palestinians toward their longtime leaders. The hostility led to an election victory by the militant group Hamas that has reduced to tatters crucial assumptions underlying American policies and hopes in the Middle East. "I've asked why nobody saw it coming," Ms. Rice said, speaking of her own staff. "It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse."... Ms. Rice pointed out that the election results surprised just about everyone. "I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by Hamas's strong showing," she said .... Yeah, it was totally unexpected: European Union to curb aid if Hamas wins big in Palestinian elections Monday, December 19, 2005 The European Union joined the U.S. House of Representatives on Sunday in threatening to curb aid to the Palestinian Authority if Hamas wins next month's parliamentary election.... Nobody saw it coming: Israel: Hamas win would be disastrous Saturday 17 December 2005, 14:31 Makka Time, 11:31 GMT Israel has said that a victory for Hamas in Palestinian parliamentary elections would set the region back 50 years.... Foreign Ministry officials said on Friday that if Hamas were to become a dominant force in the Palestinian leadership, it would mean an end to the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians.... Yes, a complete shock to everyone: May 10, 2005 Israeli defense minister says pullout will occur, even if Hamas wins vote Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip will not be called off under any circumstances, the defense minister said Tuesday, rebuffing suggestions by the foreign minister that the pullout should be canceled if the Hamas militant group wins Palestinian parliamentary elections... Oh, yes, we should definitely elect this woman president. Don't we all want a third Bush term -- four more years of "The dog ate my al-Qaeda briefing, so I had no idea they wanted to fly planes into towers"? posted by Steve M. | 10:27 AM | Sunday, January 29, 2006 I wish I'd said what Julia says here about Barack Obama and Joe Biden. posted by Steve M. | 11:15 PM | Oh, please, please -- make my day, George: President George W. Bush is expected on Tuesday to try and retake the initiative in the Washington political debate, in a speech that is expected to be long on optimism.... Mr Bush is expected to deliver an upbeat message on the war in Iraq in his annual yState of the Union address, pointing to progress being made in the country.... He is also expected to make optimistic comments on the US economy.... He's going to make "optimistic comments on the US economy"? Oh, I want him to do that every day -- I want him to tell people who are facing stagnating wages, rising health care costs, and high energy prices that we should all crack open the champagne because GDP growth is just great. If he thinks that will fly with average Americans, he's nuts. And -- apologies for my cynicism -- he's going to try to sell an upbeat message on the war at a time when a real live TV star has been seriously injured by a bomb in Iraq. Celebrity matters in America; insisting that there's a significant number of Iraqi troops who are kinda-sorta-almost ready to stand up so we can stand down is not going to trump this incident. (Via DU.) **** But I should add that I think what we'll probably remember from this speech is the "support Republicans rather than Democrats or you're all going to die" part -- which I think will be the extended climax of the speech, and a much more important part than you've been led to believe by all the "Bush to Emphasize Medical Savings Accounts" stories you've been reading. Expect to be manipulated yet again into thinking about bodies falling from the Towers. Expect to be told that some Democrats don't want there to be any surveillance of al-Qaeda. Remember, the Patriot Act is up for renewal again this week -- I find it hard to believe that there's going to be more about medical savings accounts than about that and the NSA. **** UPDATE: The happy talk on Iraq is going to be even harder to sell when there are new videos of Zawahiri taunting Bush* and Jill Carroll weeping. *(Damn, now I'm doing it -- conflating al-Qaeda and Iraq. Well, Bush will conflate them, so I still think the point is valid.) posted by Steve M. | 10:35 PM | MASTER IS GREAT, EVEN WHEN HE BEATS US! Shorter Matt Bai in The New York Times Magazine: The inadequacy of Bush's health-care policies shows that he's a true visionary -- just not enough of one. Yeah, Bai's article is a real critique. He tells us Bush's policies aren't good enough, but, heck, Bush still has gumption, dammit: Unlike most of his Democratic detractors, Bush has shown the vision to rethink time-honored orthodoxy, even at his own political peril; no matter what his critics may say, it took no small amount of courage to ask if Social Security could be stronger than it is or if the tax code could be simpler and less punitive. He recognizes that government should be more flexible and more consumer-oriented. Oh, is that what led to Bush's Social Security scheme and talk about overhauling the tax code? "Courage"? And here I thought it was hubris born of a misreading of the rather close '04 election as a "mandate," combined with a cynical belief that he could take advantage of most Americans' inability to understand complex financial matters in order to use Social Security and the tax code to line the pockets of the rich. Guess I was wrong, hunh? And I love the last part. Yes, a Medicare prescription drug benefit with a bewildering array of plans, all of which include different formularies of covered and non-covered drugs, with some patients assigned to plans at random whether or not those plans cover expensive drugs they're already taking, while all patients are left at the mercy of inadequately staffed insurance-company and government phone lines when they don't know what the hell's going on regarding their benefits -- oh, that's really "consumer-oriented," isn't it? And, of course, no Democrat who's ever proposed universal coverage for Americans is "rethink[ing] time-honored orthodoxy" -- only the Mighty Bush gets credit for that. Matt, I think there's still some shoe polish on your tongue. posted by Steve M. | 1:37 PM | Saturday, January 28, 2006 Busy day. See you tomorrow. posted by Steve M. | 10:17 PM | Friday, January 27, 2006 What a jerk Scott McClellan is: Q Can I also ask you, on Senator Kerry's comments, what is your reaction to the filibuster call by Senator Kerry, on Judge Alito? MR. McCLELLAN: On his call yesterday? It was a pretty historic day. This was the first time ever that a Senator has called for a filibuster from the slopes of Davos, Switzerland. I think even for a Senator, it takes some pretty serious yodeling to call for a filibuster from a five-star ski resort in the Swiss Alps. (Laughter.) Q But you know he's not there skiing. MR. McCLELLAN: Les, I didn't ask you to yodel. I can hear you. (Laughter.) Gee, what was Karl Rove saying to Hugh Hewitt on the radio this week? Oh, yeah: I mean, this president treats the opposition with dignity and respect. Of course he does. He leaves the nasty stuff to the help. **** And by the way, I notice that Davos wasn't such a big joke to these smart-asses when Dick Cheney made a speech there two years ago. posted by Steve M. | 7:23 PM | ROVE: "POST-7/4" Larry Stevens has a suggestion: Rove has framed the current political debate in terms of "pre-9/11 mentality" and "post-9/11 mentality".... To respond to Rove's "pre-9/11" and "post-9/11" language, we should speak of "pre-7/4" and "post-7/4" mentalities.... Interesting idea. Here's what he means: "7/4" refers to July 4, of course. Specifically, July 4, 1776. Bush and Rove have a pre-7/4 mentality, which means they believe in the divine right of kings.... The administration's critics, including their foes among the ranks of the Democratic Party, have a post-7/4 mentality, a paradigm that includes such notions as the consent of the governed, inalienable rights and all the other revolutionary ideas advanced by America's founding fathers and enshrined in our founding documents.... Read Larry's full post here. posted by Steve M. | 4:46 PM | Worse and worse: The new Medicare drug program is denying supplies that seriously ill patients need to administer intravenous antibiotics and other medications at home. As a result, some patients are being referred to nursing homes, and others have had to go into hospitals. Although no national estimates are available, the number of patients affected -- including some with life-threatening diseases such as cancer and multiple sclerosis -- could run into the thousands. One Anaheim pharmacy says 200 of its patients are having trouble.... Essentially, the prescription program allows coverage of the drugs but does not pay for the medical supplies and nursing help needed for the home infusion treatments to be safe and effective -- a policy that effectively shuts down such treatment for some patients, even though it is substantially cheaper than the alternatives.... Earliy in this story we're told, "Medicare officials say they are aggressively addressing the problem" -- but later on we have some of those same officials getting testy and defensive as they say it's out of their hands: ... Mark McClellan, administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the agency lacked specific legal authority to broaden the coverage policy, in effect, handing the problem back to Congress. "If we could pay for it, we would," said Dr. Jeff Kelman, chief medical officer for the division of Medicare that handles the drug benefit. "Read the act yourself .... It's a drug benefit, not a medical benefit." You know what? Maybe you should have read the damn act before you made it the centerpiece ofg the administration's domestic agenda. posted by Steve M. | 2:54 PM | THANK YOU FOR THE TASTY CRUMBS! Until Americans stop falling for this crap, Republicans are just going to keep doing it -- especially Republicans named Bush: Gov. Jeb Bush is expected next week to propose the biggest tax-cut package in state history, including a property-tax reduction that would save most homeowners less than $100 a year but mean millions of dollars to large landowners.... The cuts are meant to cap Bush's final year as the state's chief executive and boost his Republican Party's standing in a pivotal election year. Central to Bush's plan is about $500 million in a property-tax reduction that could save the owner of a home assessed at $300,000 about $80 a year. The cut, however, could save Orange County's biggest landowner, Walt Disney World, about $1.6 million annually; Universal Orlando more than $400,000; and the Marriott hotel chain about $200,000 in the Orlando area alone.... I love the assertion that this is supposed to help the party in an election year. Obviously, the gratitude of wealthy beneficiaries will help fill the party's coffers. But will this also be a popular move with ordinary voters? Yeah, probably. We're Americans, and Jeb is uttering the phrase that reliably zombifies us every time -- "TAX CUT!!!" Oh, by the way: The state's outstanding debt is $22.5 billion, more than double what it was 10 years ago. Class-size requirements and meeting the goals of growth-management legislation approved last spring also demand billions of dollars in state revenue, critics said. But pay no attention to that. The tax cut is affordable because Florida's property-tax roll has mushroomed to $1.6 trillion this year, a stunning 19 percent increase from 2005. Which, we're told, means that Florida can afford to enact a tax cut that will stay on the books forever (unless a future governor and legislature decide to commit political suicide by altering it). But that shouldn't be a problem, right? After all, housing booms last forever, don't they? (Via DU.) posted by Steve M. | 1:06 PM | I guess our health-care system wasn't inefficient enough. I guess the money being siphoned off as drug- and insurance-company profits wasn't making the system sufficiently expensive. I guess we just had to take even more of that money and use it to help another rich industry get even richer: ... Banks, credit unions and money management firms are now quietly positioning themselves to become central players in the business of health care, offering 401(k)-type accounts to cover future medical expenses. Bank of America, J. P. Morgan Chase, Fidelity Investments and hundreds of others are hoping to capitalize on the latest wrinkle in medical care paid by consumers: health savings accounts, which have been around since 2003 but are moving to the fore of the national agenda in anticipation of the State of the Union address on Tuesday. These supercharged checking accounts, which must be linked to a high-deductible health insurance plan, allow consumers to invest their own money for current and future medical expenses and have it grow tax-free. ... Banks and others are drawn by the promise of lucrative fees they can generate by offering consumers mutual funds and other investment vehicles as their account balances grow. Most also charge $50 to $75 to set up a health savings account, and they collect perhaps $40 or more each year in maintenance charges and service fees. Not since the creation of the individual retirement account in the mid-1970's has such a potentially huge mountain of money landed in the lap of the financial services industry. "Billions of dollars that used to be written in the form of checks with insurance companies' names on them would instead go to credit unions, banks, and long-term investment houses," said Dan Perrin, the publisher of H.S.A. Insider and executive director of the H.S.A. Coalition, a lobbying group backed by 70 small-business and medical industry groups as well as the American Bankers Association. "You know America: you see a financial opportunity and it sets off a gold rush." ... Lovely. And the point of these accounts, of course, is to discourage workers from obtaining medical care we don't need (allegedly all that "unnecessary" health care we're said to seek out with regularity, but in reality, I suppose, preventive care like dental checkups and mammograms) by making us pay for our care out of pocket up to a very high dollar amount every year: ...In essence, health savings plans are high-deductible insurance policies that people can obtain through their employers or buy independently from insurance companies. In exchange for paying at least the first $1,050 of their medical expenses each year (or for families, a deductible of the first $2,100, consumers are supposed to benefit in two ways: lower monthly premiums and the ability to put pretax dollars into a savings account that grows tax-free.... But in many cases, people have evidently signed up not because they are eager to direct their own medical spending but because the plan looked cheap or they had no other insurance option. And at least half of those enrolled have not put money in their health savings accounts. So there will be no money building up for next year's out-of-pocket expenses.... If you had an account like this, there are a lot of reasons you might not be able to build up reserves. Obviously, the less money you make, the less you can afford to contribute. Just as obviously, if you have excessive out-of-pocket medical expenses one year -- say, if you have a child with a serious chronic condition -- you won't be able to contribute much (or anything) for future medical expenses. So, in that way at least, these accounts would seem to do less for you the more you need them. Which is kind of the opposite of what you and I think the word "insurance" means. Is there going to be a massive transition to these accounts over the next few years? Are a lot of us going to go through what they're going through at Banta Corporation in Pennsylvania? Stacy Ryan, the benefits manager at Banta, said the company saw the plan as "the new wave of health care." Banta added health savings accounts and eliminated company-subsidized health benefits for its 4,000 nonunion workers this year. I imagine the answer is yes. It's certainly what Bush wants. And he thinks you'll like it. **** UPDATE: Ezra Klein points out that health savings accounts are even worse than you think -- i.e., even more of a scheme to transfer money from struggling people to banks: Here's how it works: About half of HSA holders don't put any money in their accounts. Many of the others sock away only paltry funds.... So when health emergencies hit, HSA users, faced with massive deductibles and no stored wealth to combat it, charge them. Hospitals, ERs, and doctors now take credit cards, allowing health care costs to become interest-gathering debt. Indeed, in an effort to take maximum advantage of the trend, banks and health care companies are offering health credit cards with interest rates of up to 23 percent. So, for many, health costs won't merely be the original expense, but the years of accumulated interest payments afterwards.... For the lower middle class, to say nothing of the genuinely poor, that's what HSAs will look like: periods of financial calm interrupted by medical catastrophe that rapidly transforms itself into crushing, long-term debt. Awful. posted by Steve M. | 10:29 AM | Thursday, January 26, 2006 Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media has a really, really clever idea. He thinks he's so clever for coming up with this idea that he's written about it twice, once in December and again today: Brian R. Hill, the founder/ Executive Director of the Oral Cancer Foundation, Inc., ... says a celebrity is needed to discuss the link between oral sex and cancer. Will Bill Clinton step forward? He should do so. He did more than anyone else to make oral sex into a household topic for young people and adults alike. And he told the nation under oath that it really wasn't sex, making it seem attractive or harmless. The disgraced former president can be contacted through his Clinton Foundation at scheduling@owjc.org If he won't step forward to take on this campaign, perhaps he can ask Monica Lewinsky to fill in for him. I agree that it is a risk for Clinton.... But that's why the media, if they had any integrity, would challenge him. They can ask him about giving up junk food. Why not ask him about immoral, unhealthy and compulsive sexual behavior? It's a matter of life and death. Isn't that just incredibly clever? And isn't it comforting to know that our entire federal government is run by people who would think that was the funniest thing they'd ever read? I think my favorite part of it is Kincaid's assertion that Bill statements about oral sex had the effect of "making it seem attractive or harmless." Oh, right -- oral sex didn't seem attractive or harmless to anyone before 1998, did it? Incidentally, Kincaid specifically cites the HPV-16 virus as the culprit in all this tragedy. Well, we seem to be on the verge of a breakthrough in developing a vaccine that will prevent cervical cancers caused by HPV-16 and HPV-18. It's quite possible that such a vaccine will be effective against oral cancer as well. I eagerly await Kincaid's denunciation of his allies in the Religious Right when they try to limit distribution of this vaccine. posted by Steve M. | 11:28 PM | So I was listening to an NPR story this morning that ticked off the administration's now-familiar arguments in defense of the warrantless domestic spying program, and I realized that many of these arguments -- as is often the case with the Right -- are lies of a very specific kind, one that doesn't have a name and desperately needs one. I'll give you an example: You and I know that administration critics would not be angry if these wiretaps took place under warrants from the FISA court -- yet a key administration talking point is that we simply don't want the government to eavesdrop on al-Qaeda terrorists. This is, obviously, a lie -- but it sounds like the truth. In fact, it is the truth -- but with a few key details (the key details) distorted, muddied, and/or excised. We are angry about these wiretaps. But we're not angry about wiretaps aimed at preventing terrorism per se, and we'd trust the FISA court's judgments. This distortion of the truth is close enough to the truth, unfortunately, to pass muster with much of the public and a lot of the press. The process of concocting lies of this kind -- lies in which the truth is tweaked, so the difference is almost invisible to casual listeners -- needs a name. I'm not much of a namer, but I'll give you a placeholder until there's something better. I call the process "truth creep." Truth creep is critical to right-wing argumentation. Example: John Kerry tells an interviewer that we'll never completely eliminate terrorism, but we can hope to reduce it to a "nuisance." Right-wingers immediately pounce, asserting that Kerry's position is that "terrorism is a nuisance." That's close enough to the truth to sound like the truth, but it's an out-and-out lie. That's truth creep. It's easier to condemn an vile or sleazy political practice when it has a name. That applies to everything from "Astroturf" and "push-polling" to "pork" and even "McCarthyism." We need a name for a lie that can slither by as the truth, and that name needs to enter the political lexicon. If you don't like my name, all suggestions are welcome. **** Yeah, "truthiness" is a clever word, though I'm not sure it quite captures the specific technique I'm describing. posted by Steve M. | 2:58 PM | I should have noted yesterday that the federal government has looked at the Medicare law and discovered that, golly, it can legally reimburse states for costs that should have been covered by the Medicare prescription drug plan: For weeks, federal officials said they did not have authority to reimburse states. On Tuesday, they said they had discovered that they could reimburse the states by conducting a demonstration project under Section 402 of the Social Security Amendments of 1967. But this is only temporary: Through Feb. 15, states will be reimbursed for prescription drugs provided to low-income Medicare beneficiaries. The reimbursement program would end Feb. 15 because problems with the new drug program will be corrected by then, federal officials said. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. And apparently the plan still requires the states to do the heavy bureaucratic lifting before they get their money back: Officials at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services yesterday outlined a plan that calls for states to first seek reimbursement from the private insurance plans contracted by Medicare to provide drug coverage. Medicare then will help pay for any difference, said Mark McClellan, the CMS director. And the feds seem to be suggesting that states allow seniors to go without drugs if the kinks aren't worked out by the deadline: Mark McClellan, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, ... called on the states "to work with us" and stop paying for the drugs by Feb. 15, although certain states may be able to get an extension. Just certain states? All heart, the Bushies. posted by Steve M. | 7:50 AM | Wednesday, January 25, 2006 WILL THE POWER TO AUTHORIZE WARRANTLESS SEARCHES BE SPREAD AROUND? I saw this exchange on CBS News tonight, at the end of a report by White House correspondent John Roberts about NSA wiretapping. The transcript's mine. Bob Schieffer seemed genuinely nonplussed: JOHN ROBERTS: ...In fact, one Republican senator told CBS News tonight she might consider loosening the standards for approving the wiretap and allowing more officials at the Justice Department, not just the attorney general, to authorize eavesdropping, so that it could begin just as soon as the NSA needed it. Bob? BOB SCHIEFFER: Now, just a second, John. Are you telling me there's a feeling amongst Republicans up in the Congress that they're going to give more people in the government the authority to eavesdop without warrants? Is that what you're saying here? ROBERTS: That's what one Republican senator is suggesting, that instead of making all eavesdropping or wiretapping requests go through the attorney general, that some lower-level officials might be available and able to be able [sic] to authorize these wiretaps. It would spread it out among dozens of people instead of just a single one at the top. SCHIEFFER: Well, what do you think the mood is up there? Do you think anything like that could pass? ROBERTS: It's certainly being considered by Republicans. They've got the majority in the Senate and in the House. If they want it, they'll probably get it. Who the hell are we talking about? Some little-known zealot a few levels down on the DoJ organizational chart? Some future John Yoo? What unelected, unaccountable person do they want to have this power? posted by Steve M. | 10:54 PM | ...Earlier [today], the chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, rejected various critical descriptions of the program. He said the effort was well-grounded legally and constitutionally and that it should be referred to as "surveillance" rather than spying.... --New York Times Oh, good Lord. Is that the next stunt the White House and its gang are going to pull -- they're going to accuse reporters and Democratic legislators of liberal bias if they refer to this as "spying" instead of "surveillance"? Last year, of course, they said you were a naked lefty partisan if you talked about "private" accounts rather than "personal" accounts in Social Security, or about the "nuclear option" rather than the "constitutional option" for ending filibusters in the Senate. I guess we're seeing this year's model. posted by Steve M. | 6:26 PM | From the Boston Herald Web site: Terror threat sparks Newton librarian/FBI standoff ...Police rushed to the Newton Free Library after tracing a terrorist threat e-mailed to Brandeis University to a computer at the library. But requests to examine computers Jan. 18 were rebuffed by Newton library Director Kathy Glick-Weil and Mayor David Cohen on the grounds that they did not have a warrant. Cohen, defending the library's actions, called the legal standoff one of Newton's "finest hours."... It took U.S. attorneys several hours to finally secure a warrant, Glick-Weil said, and they took the computer from the library at about 11:30 that night, after the library had closed. ...[But] a law enforcement official close to the investigation said in an e-mail the confrontation was a "nightmare." ... Hmmm, let's see: Glick-Weil has denounced provisions of the Patriot Act pertaining to libraries and has shredded documents in protest of those provisions. The Newton Board of Aldermen has also unanimously adopted a resolution questions aspects of the law. And now -- just at the moment when the Bush administration is passionately defending its warrantless spying program and awaiting renewal of the Patriot Act -- someone picks Newton's library to e-mail a terrorist threat? If this becomes a right-wing outrage du jour, I smell a rat -- a rat with the initials K.R. posted by Steve M. | 5:01 PM | New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni recently moonlighted as a waiter for a week and found out that real work is hard -- especially if you never really absorb the information you need to know to do your job: ... I need to redeem myself with the two diners at [table] X-9, who quizzed me about what the restaurant had on tap and received a blank stare in response. I'm supposed to remember the beers? Along with everything about the monkfish, these oddly coded table references, more than 10 wines by the glass and the provenance of the house oysters? I had no idea.... **** ...Pinging from table to table, I repeatedly forget to ask diners whether they want their tuna rare or medium and whether they want their margaritas up or on the rocks. I occasionally forget to put all the relevant information -- prices, special requests, time of submission -- on my ordering tickets.... **** ...By 7:30, all of these tables are occupied, and all have different needs at the same time. One man wants to know his tequila choices. I just learned the beers that afternoon.... I bet he was missing the nice, cushy job he has six years ago, the one where he served only one customer, a guy who treated him royally and didn't require him to know anything: ...Bruni, the most influential Bush correspondent [during the 2000 campaign] by virtue of his employer [The New York Times], was so assiduously courted by the Republican nominee that his book should have been called The Seduction of Frank Bruni. It is a case study of Bush's vaunted charm offensive. Bush constantly flirted with Bruni. He would playfully grab the reporter by the neck or pinch his cheeks or put his fingers in Bruni's ears. During press conferences he would wink and nod Bruni's way. And when Bruni mentions that he's taking a break from the campaign trail to celebrate his dad's birthday, Bush whips out a card and signs it for him. So perhaps it shouldn't surprise that Bruni becomes smitten, dishing to readers that Bush was far more charming in off-the-record gab sessions than his guarded public persona would suggest. When Bruni suspected the campaign was angry with him, Bush defused tensions by turning to him during a political event and announcing, "I love you, man." He may not have been kidding. Bruni was no better at absorbing important information back then than he was in his recent stint as a waiter: ... If [Bruni] recognized significant differences between Bush and Gore---how they would spend the surplus or respond to the terrorist attacks---he doesn't share them....What remains [in Bruni's campaign memoir] is only the most rudimentary explanation of what Bush actually stood for: a tax cut plan for economic conservatives, a faith-based initiative for religious conservatives, and an education plan for moderates. Policies, Bruni implies, tell us nothing about Bush as a person, which is his real interest here. Fortunately, his job back then was informing the readers of America's most influential newspaper about the candidates for the most important job in the world, at what would turn out to be a critical point in national and global history -- so if he didn't know what the hell he was doing, it was no big deal, right? After all, it didn't really matter how the election turned out, did it? posted by Steve M. | 1:38 PM | The Bush administration, citing the confidentiality of executive branch communications, said Tuesday that it did not plan to turn over certain documents about Hurricane Katrina or make senior White House officials available for sworn testimony before two Congressional committees investigating the storm response.... --New York Times today WASHINGTON, JUNE 14, 2006 -- The Bush administration completed work late last night on the conversion of the entire federal government to a password-protected, subscription-only entity. Under the plan, photo ops and speeches on terrorism will continue to be released to the general public. Access to all other information will be made available only to members of WhiteHouseSelect, a newly created portal restricted to subscribers. The cost of a subscription to WhiteHouseSelect will be $250,000 in bundled contributions to the Republican Party and/or one or more of its candidates. Discount subscriptions will be made available to right-wing bloggers. WhiteHouseSelect subscribers will have access to a number of site exclusives. These include face time with President Bush at his Crawford ranch and the opportunity to rewrite legislation. Asked to comment on the completion of the transition, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said he is, henceforth, not available for comment. posted by Steve M. | 9:55 AM | Tuesday, January 24, 2006  Right-wingers may harrumph ("It's so cheap and so lame," tut-tuts Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online), but at least Kanye West's handlers would admit that the Jesus effect is a carefully crafted bit of image-mongering, which is more than I can say for  a certain other person with a messiah complex and a huge publicity machine that works hard to control how the public sees him. posted by Steve M. | 9:28 PM | When Republican presidents phone in remarks to the annual anti-abortion march in Washington, they address those remarks to Nellie Gray, the president of the March for Life Fund. President Bush did so yesterday: ...By changing laws we can change our culture. And your persistence and prayers, Nellie, and the folks there with you, are making a real difference. We, of course, seek common ground where possible; we're working to persuade more of our fellow Americans of the rightness of our cause. And this is a cause that appeals to the conscience of our citizens, and is rooted in America's deepest principles -- and history tells us that with such a cause, we will prevail. Again, Nellie, thank you for letting me come to speak to you.... Similarly, Ronald Reagan chatted with her in 1988. I want to point out that this is not just someone who thinks abortion should be illegal. This is someone who thinks we should someday respond to abortion with Nuremberg trials: Nellie Gray, the president of March for Life, the group that organized the rally, said reversing Roe was this year's theme. Speaking to the crowd in fiery tones, Ms. Gray predicted that the United States would hold the equivalent of Nuremburg trials for "feminist abortionists," calling support for a woman's right to choose "crimes against humanity." "Roe v. Wade has brutalized our country," she said. "The feminist abortionists, look at the evil they are doing. From that will come an accountability." That's from The New York Times -- but lest you think the Times is misinterpreting what Ms. Gray believes, here's a quote from her own press release on the 2004 march: Roe vs. Wade did unleash on our beloved country the feminists/abortionists' evil agenda of 'choice' to kill preborn humans, and did begin the slippery slope to decriminalize infanticide, euthanasia, assisted suicide, fetal research, and more evil. History records the Nazi experience of slippery slope from the so-called 1935 Nuremberg laws, through years of 'final solution' horrors, to reality of judgments at the Nuremberg Trials. Every time we on the left attend an anti-war rally in which participants include International A.N.S.W.E.R. and United for Peace and Justice, we're told that we're endorsing the extremism of those groups on issues such as support for the Taliban and North Korea's Kim Jong-il. OK, so what about Nellie Gray? When he calls her up, is President Bush endorsing her extremism? Is he endorsing Nuremberg trials for abortion? posted by Steve M. | 2:45 PM | Although the bill is stalled in the Senate, last year the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed legislation raising the top fine for a single incident of broadcast indecency. Top fine under the House bill? $500,000 for a broadcast company and $500,000 for an entertainer involved in the indecency. Right now, the Bush administration is proposing to raising the top fine for an "egregious" mine safety violation. How high? $220,000. Less than half what you'd pay if you offered a peek of nipple at a Super Bowl halftime show. Nice to know we've gor our priorities straight. posted by Steve M. | 9:56 AM | Monday, January 23, 2006 Of course Hillary Clinton's recent claim that Republicans run the House of Representatives like a "plantation" was old-fashioned political and racial pandering. After all, she uttered this remark at what certainly would have been a prime venue for her husband: a largely black audience on Martin Luther King Day. So, clearly, she was looking to connect with this most loyal Democratic constituency. But Mrs. Clinton is possessed of a tin ear precisely where her husband is all deftness and charm. Black audiences are beyond her. The room of black faces that brings her husband alive, freezes her in overbearing rectitude. --Shelby Steele on the Wall Street Journal editorial page today "When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about," Clinton (D-N.Y.) told an audience at the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ during an event sponsored by the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network. "It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard," she added to thunderous applause. --Newsday, January 17, 2006 (Emphasis mine.) posted by Steve M. | 4:11 PM | Speaking of Rove, am I the only person who thinks the recent stories about photos of Bush and Jack Abramoff are actually the work of the White House, engaging in some Rovian political jiujitsu? First we were told a couple of weeks ago (in Time) that Bush aides are ... trying to identify all the photos that may exist of the two men together Now reporters at The Washingtonian and (again) Time are saying that an anonymous source has shown them a small number of photos of the two men together. (The source, we're told, wouldn't allow them to be published, although Time says the tabloids are probably going to pay for the photos and publish them eventually.) If this is the work of the White House, orchestrating a phony embarrassing leak, it's brilliant. With regard to Abramoff, we've been wondering what the Bushies might be trying to hide, and now we supposedly know the answer: What they're trying to hide is this series of photos. So now, instead of trying to get to the bottom of the story of the relationship between the two men, we'll all fixate on the photos -- they must be really bad if the White House doesn't want them to leak. In fact, it sounds as if they're just suggestive enough to (the White House hopes) get Democrats and us lefty noisemakers howling, yet innocuous enough to make us sound as if we're wildly overreacting: In one shot that TIME saw, Bush appears with Abramoff, several unidentified people and Raul Garza Sr., a Texan Abramoff represented who was then chairman of the Kickapoo Indians, which owned a casino in southern Texas.... Another photo shows Bush shaking hands with Abramoff in front of a window and a blue drape. The shot bears Bush's signature, perhaps made by a machine. Three other photos are of Bush, Abramoff and, in each view, one of the lobbyist's sons (three of his five children are boys). A sixth picture shows several Abramoff children with Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert... Most of the pictures have the formal look of photos taken at presidential receptions. The images of Bush, Abramoff and one of his sons appear to be the rapid-fire shots -- known in White House parlance as clicks -- that the President snaps with top supporters before taking the podium at fund-raising receptions. Over five years, Bush has posed for tens of thousands of such shots -- many with people he does not know. Last month 9,500 people attended holiday receptions at the White House, and most went two by two through a line for a photo with the President and the First Lady. The White House is generous about providing copies -- in some cases, signed by the President -- that become centerpieces for "walls of fame" throughout status-conscious Washington. If I'm right about this, the White House has now deftly framed the Bush-Abramoff question: instead of "How cozy was W. with Jack?," the question has become "What exactly was going on in and around those pictures?" It's a question I'm sure the White House is more than ready to answer -- and once those answers emerge, all speculation about the relationship between the two men will cease in the mainstream press. posted by Steve M. | 1:02 PM | After months of staying out of the limelight amid scrutiny in the CIA leak investigation, Rove is back and circulating... --Holly Bailey in this week's Newsweek Cokie Roberts said pretty much the same thing this morning on NPR (audio here). So I guess this well-publicized speech in November didn't count as a comeback? (Headline at MSNBC.com at the time: "Rove re-emerges at conservative lawyers' group.") In other words, the Beltway press is so lazy that when Rove's handlers decide to say he's coming out of hiding after months in seclusion, that just goes right into the story, regardless of the facts? He gets to declare that a page has been turned as many times as he wants to, and the press just meekly goes along? posted by Steve M. | 9:26 AM | I know -- this blog has seemed a bit off recently. I don't seem to be able to say anything interesting about anything significant, and the posts I do put up don't seem to have much of point. Not to make excuses, but I've been fighting some sort of cold or flu literally all month, and keeping up with my blogly duties has seemed like a struggle. I hope things will be back to normal when I feel better. **** Meanwhile, go read Frank Rich for free. posted by Steve M. | 7:22 AM | Sunday, January 22, 2006 I haven't paid much attention to Norah Vincent in a while. Years ago she used to write a column for a New York weekly in which she regularly bitched about noise on her block on weekend nights -- a reasonable complaint, except for the fact that she lived on St. Mark's Place between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, a strip of bars, restaurants, and T-shirt and CD stores that was (and is) the East Village's 42nd Street. Living there and complaining about noise is like living on the tarmac at JFK and complaining about the smell of jet fuel; I got tired of yelling at the paper every week, "Go look for another apartment, you dumbass!," so I stopped reading her. She was evolving into a Camille Paglia wannabe -- a lesbian right-winger whose gender consciousness somehow led her to the conclusion that the highest form of human existence is the macho man. (Vincent on 9/11: "Western masculinity is in remarkably good shape at present. Part of the reason is, of course, that physical bravery, one of the cardinal masculine virtues of old, is popular again after Sept. 11 -- more popular, one could argue, than it has been since the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Suddenly everybody understands why it's not such a bad idea to have a few stolid, burly guys in uniform around when the enemy attacks.") Well, now she's written a book about her experience posing as a man, and it just got a rave on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. And here's the problem: In at least one part of it, I don't believe she's telling the truth. Or let's say I'm suspicious. Let's say I'd like The Smoking Gun to do a sort of James Frey investigation of this: Norah-as-Ned commits to [a bowling league] for eight months, becoming the weak link on a four-man team of working-class white men. (Vincent has changed the names of the characters and obscured the locations to protect the identities of her subjects.) The resultant chapter is as tender and unpatronizing a portrait of America's "white trash" underclass as I've ever read. "They took people at face value," writes Vincent of Ned's teammates, a plumber, an appliance repairman and a construction worker. "If you did your job or held up your end, and treated them with the passing respect they accorded you, you were all right." Neither dumb lugs nor proletarian saints, Ned's bowling buddies are wont to make homophobic cracks and pay an occasional visit to a strip club, but they surprise Vincent with their lack of rage and racism, their unflagging efforts to improve Ned's atrocious bowling technique and "the absolute reverence with which they spoke about their wives," one of whom is wasting away from cancer. OK -- on the right here is a picture of Vincent as a man. Note the nerd-chic square glasses. Note the salon-fresh hairdo. Think that guy could join a bowling league with a plumber, an appliance repairman and a construction worker and just be accepted as a boon companion with no questions asked, even though he can't really bowl? Think no one would find him hoity-toity (at least)? Think they'd just shrug off his ineptitude and good-naturedly engage in "unflagging attempts to improve [his] atrocious bowling technique"? Oh, and this is the kicker -- think they'd speak about their wives with "absolute reverence"? Maybe the guy whose wife has cancer -- maybe. But the rest of them? Remember, these are straight guys. These are guy guys. Guy guys don't talk about feelings. Well, maybe the plumber talked about the construction worker's wife with "absolute reverence." Or certain parts of her, at least. Yeah, that I'd believe. posted by Steve M. | 10:39 PM | Never mind the airstrike -- according to two stories out today, al-Qaeda and the Taliban are winning on the Afghan-Pakistan border. First, from Carlotta Gall and Mohammad Khan of The New York Times: Two years after the Pakistani Army began operations in border tribal areas to root out members of Al Qaeda and other foreign militants, Pakistani officials who know the area say the military campaign is bogged down, the local political administration is powerless and the militants are stronger than ever. ... the Pakistani officials, and former residents who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution, said the militants -- who call themselves Taliban -- now dispensed their own justice, ran their own jails, robbed banks, shelled military and civilian government compounds and attacked convoys at will. They are recruiting men from the local tribes and have gained a hold over the population through a mix of fear and religion, the officials and former residents said.... Gall and Khan say bin Laden and Zawahiri are in this region along with "possibly hundreds of foreign militants from Arab countries, Central Asia and the Caucasus." Then there's this AP story, which suggests what's really meant by the assertion in the Times story that "the military campaign is bogged down": ...Pakistan authorities have said they are looking for militants who might have survived [the January 13 airstrike], but security forces have not visibly stepped up maneuvers in border regions where anger runs high among the 3.2 million residents. The military still mans ubiquitous checkpoints in the area, but analysts say Pakistan is taking a low-profile approach so as not to enrage local people with large-scale offensives that may cause more civilian casualties. The military has about 70,000 soldiers in the area, although an Associated Press reporter who has visited Damadola three times since the attack has not seen a single uniformed soldier in town.... So Pakistanis walk on eggshells in this region, while American troops can't legally go there. I'm so happy that Bush decided to shoot the moon in Iraq while impotently shaking his fist at the real 9/11 killers. posted by Steve M. | 12:01 PM | Saturday, January 21, 2006 So I wasn't aware until now that Brian Rohrbough, the father of one of the dead kids at Columbine, is blaming the massacre on legalized abortion. What's more, he's made a radio commercial to that effect And the right mocks Cindy Sheehan. At least she's actually denouncing the very thing that killed her son. An MP3 of Rohrbough's ad is here. This is the text: Do you remember the picture of my son? It won a Pulitzer Prize -- the picture of him lying dead on the sidewalk at Columbine High School. His name is Daniel. My name is Brian Rohrbough. Did you know that the roots of the Columbine murders started back in 1967, when our Colorado lawmakers passed a law that allowed a baby to be put to death because her father was a criminal? In one evil law, they changed our country from a culture of life to a culture of death. Since that day, fifty million babies in this country have been killed through abortion. Will you stand with me? Will you stand in the place of just one of these victims? Join me as Colorado Right to Life presents the annual March for Life at the state capitol, Saturday, January 21st, at 1:30 P.M. I will share with you a story that few know. Join me, because abortion is always wrong. Yeah, we really had a culture of life in this country before 1967, didn't we? Back in '67, Time ran a brief story on the first two beneficiaries of that original abortion law. Both were raped. The second one was twelve years old. (If you have some desire to read and hear more on this and related subjects, go to the Web site of right-wing radio station KGOV.) posted by Steve M. | 12:43 PM | At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security," Rove said. "Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic -- not at all. But it does make them wrong -- deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong." --Washington Post story on Rove's speech to the Republican National Committee Look, it's simple: When is a Democrat going to have the guys to say this in a speech? "Karl Rove says his party has a 9/11 mentality and some in our party have a pre-9/11 mentality. Well, when it comes to terrorism, Mr. Rove has a first-Tuesday-in-November mentality. He looks at terrorist attacks and thinks, 'How can I exploit this for votes?'" posted by Steve M. | 10:07 AM | Friday, January 20, 2006 THE PATTERN BECOMES FAMILIAR First the scary words from overseas, then the scary words from the Bush administration: The nation's top law enforcement officials warned today that al Qaeda may have plotters already inside the United States. "We have to assume that there are persons out there that want to attack us," said FBI director Robert Mueller. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said police chiefs have been told to review all the intelligence the federal government has given them in the last two years about al Qaeda tactics. Chertoff told ABC News: "We've seen them attack in London, for example. We've seen them attack in Spain. We've seen them attack elsewhere, so I think we have to operate on the assumption that they do have some capability and they certainly have the intent." ... But they're not raising the alert level -- yet. Let's see: the Patriot Act is set to expire on February 3. The State of the Union address will be January 31. I'm betting we go to orange on January 30. posted by Steve M. | 11:35 PM | A small victory for human decency: The secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections says he has directed his staff to end the use of restraints on pregnant inmates during labor, delivery and recovery. "I believe that we can have a policy that protects safety and security but still allows for a woman offender to have a baby without having restraints on," Matt Frank told The Post-Crescent newspaper Wednesday after it reported on the practice earlier this week.... Well, good for him -- but he can just forget about getting a job with the Bush administration. Here's that Post-Crescent story, by the way. In it, we were assured the old way was very humane: Inmates ... have the option of wearing plastic ties in lieu of the heavy shackles... Oh, that makes me feel much better. The story also tells us that, as of 2001, twenty-one U.S. states followed this practice. posted by Steve M. | 5:28 PM | RIGHT-WING WEIRDNESS Shortly after Samuel Alito's wife had her tear-stained moment, an obscure right-wing blog posted a link to a story that appeared on the Washington Post Web site, but added a detail that wasn't in the Post story at all: While out of the room, Alito’s wife received a call of encouragement from Gwen Kopechne. Mrs. Kopechne told Bomgardner (Mrs. Alito) that while she understood the emotions that caused her to leave the room, she should be thankful her family member being abused by Sen. Edward Kennedy was still in the room, and not in the back of a Buick at the bottom of a pond. The altered story was later picked up here. And now today we have this at Free Republic: I have an interesting tidbit of information to share. My old college roommate's mother is friends with Judge Alito's mother. They go to the same church in Roseland, New Jersey. Well, the judge's mother shared something with her that hasn't been in the papers and may bring a different perspective to those tears Alito's wife shed in the hearing. It seems Judge Alito's wife (the former Martha-Ann Bomgardner) has had personal reasons to dislike Senator Kennedy since long before Splash's shameful treatment of her husband. Long ago, the Senator was also less than kind to girl whose family was friends with the Bombgardner family. A girl that Martha-Ann knew fairly well before her untimely demise. A girl named Mary Jo Kopechne. It's a failed meme so far -- even the Freepers are skeptical about it. (One read the fake Post story and replied, "Color me skeptical. In the blog it says 'in the back end of a Buick.' Anybody remotely familiar with the story knows it was an Oldsmobile.") Still, ten years from now, when an aging Ted Kennedy is denouncing Justice Alito's majority opinion upholding President Lynne Cheney's suspension of habeas corpus nationwide, I guarantee you'll hear someone tell you this was the absolute truth. posted by Steve M. | 3:36 PM | For what it's worth, at least one voice-authentication expert interviewed this morning on NPR seemed to think the CIA was awfully quick to declare the bin Laden tape genuine -- the declaration came much faster than the one for the last tape. (Although he did say that maybe it was just because the CIA has some fancy-schmancy technology and/or techniques he might not be aware of.) **** MORE: Bruce Lawrence, a Duke professor who's the editor of this recent collection of bin Laden statements, has told a reporter that he's not sure the tape is genuine: ...He thinks bin Laden is dead and has doubts about the tape. Lawrence recently analyzed more than 20 complete speeches and interviews of the al Qaida leader for his book. He says the new message is missing several key elements. "There's nothing in this from the Koran. He's, by his own standards, a faithful Muslim," Lawrence said. "He quotes scripture in defense of his actions. There's no quotation from the Koran in the excerpts we got, no reference to specific events, no reference to past atrocities." ...Lawrence believes faulty Pakistani intelligence led to the strike and the civilian deaths, and the tape was leaked by Pakistani authorities to divert attention from their mistake.... Believers in a Bush-based conspiracy theory regarding the tape will take heart from the words of CNN's Jack Cafferty: "The last time we got a tape from Osama bin Laden was right before the 2004 presidential election. Now here we are, four days away from hearings starting in Washington into the wiretapping of America's telephones without bothering to get a court order or a warrant, and up pops another tape from Osama bin Laden. Coincidence? Who knows." (Cafferty's wrong, though, that the last bin Laden tape was the one right befor the '04 election -- there was another one in December '04). posted by Steve M. | 10:09 AM | THE ENEMY OF OUR ENEMY IS ... I suspect a lot of right-wingers will pick up on this BBC story, which notes that many Arab broadcasters have ignored the new bin Laden tape, as well as recent tapes by Zawahiri and Zarqawi, and that other Arab media outlets have recently been quite critical of al-Qaeda. Those right-wingers, however, will probably skip this part: One columnist, Nahid Hattar, in the Jordanian paper, al-Arab al-Yawm, portrayed the al-Qaeda number two as a parasite. "American imperialism in Iraq is certainly on the verge of defeat," the columnist said. "But the credit for that goes to the sacrifice of the Iraqi people... It will never go to al-Qaeda under the leadership of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who appeared in his televised message to be thirsty, like a leech, for the blood of Iraqis, as well as haughty, stupid and lacking any connection to reality, just like George Bush junior." ... In Egypt, a commentary in al-Akhbar said that the "continued threats" by "al-Zawahiri and the other leaders of terrorism is in the end providing an acceptable justification" for the Americans to "occupy Iraq, Afghanistan and other places". Little if any of this criticism is directed at what's widely seen in the Arab and Muslim world as a legitimate resistance movement in Iraq, but is instead aimed at al-Qaeda for trying to take credit for it.... The enemy of our enemy is our enemy. posted by Steve M. | 7:52 AM | Thursday, January 19, 2006 BUSH IS RIGHT Even though inflation-adjusted earnings for the average American worker fell 0.5% in 2005 (after falling 0.7% in 2004), I think President Bush is absolutely right when he says the economy is in great shape -- this proves it! MBAs are hot, again. Salaries and signing bonuses of fresh graduates took a double-digit jump in 2005 to a record average $106,000.... The $106,000 salary and signing bonus was up 13.5% from 2004, according to a GMAC survey of 5,829 2005 grads. Salary alone increased to $88,600, surpassing the previous high of $85,400 set in 2001.... The average bonus paid to a 2005 MBA graduate by investment banks was $40,000.... A small group of elitists is making money while ordinary schmucks are falling behind! I BELIEVE!!! posted by Steve M. | 6:21 PM | Are you a pundit or average Joe who's simply appalled at Hillary Clinton's "plantation" remark? Congratulations -- you're on the same side as Free Republic's Mia T. Keep scrolling through all the links and illustrations. posted by Steve M. | 5:22 PM | OUR M.B.A. PRESIDENT From Bush's gung-ho speech on the economy today: American families have benefited from the tax cuts on dividends and capital gains. Let me repeat that. American families all across this country have benefitted from the tax cuts on dividends and capital gains. (Applause.) Half of American households -- that's more than 50 million households -- now have some investment in the stock market, either by owning shares in individual companies, or through owning mutual funds.... I'll never forget going to an automobile manufacturing plant in Mississippi. It was a very diverse group of workers. I said, how many of you own your own 401K? In other words, how many of you have a stock portfolio. Nearly 90 percent held their hands up. When you cut taxes on capital gains, and you cut taxes on dividends, you're helping the line workers in the automobile plant. Does the M.B.A. president of the United States actually not understand that earnings on 401(k)s are tax-deferred, which means that those of us whose only stocks are in 401(k)s get absolutely no benefit from these tax cuts? posted by Steve M. | 1:38 PM | This is pathetic: Divided Democrats Aren't Capitalizing on Republican Scandals Congressional Democrats, divided over changes to lobbying and ethics rules, have been slow to take advantage of the corruption scandals that have engulfed Republicans. Representative David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat, said many members of his party oppose tightening lobbying rules at a time when Democrats have a chance to regain a majority in Congress in the November elections. "I've had a number of people who said, 'Geez, you really want to do this, after the way Republicans have treated us?''' Obey said. "Why would we guarantee them this stuff if we take control?'' ... Representative Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 House Democrat, said he saw little need to change the rules because Republicans, not lax regulations, were to blame for the ethics scandals. "It is not the rules that are the issue, it's the character of the players that is the issue here,'' Hoyer said in an interview. "That is what I want to focus on, the culture of corruption.'' ... THE ABRAMOFF GUILTY PLEA WAS TWO WEEKS AGO AND YOU PEOPLE ARE STILL ARGUING ABOUT THIS? Schmucks. And thanks a lot, David Obey, for telling a reporter flat out, "Hey, a lot of us want to be sleazy when we take power." Nice job of undercutting the message contained in the Democrats' one (failed) attempt to get a catchphrase into the political lexicon, "Republican culture of corruption." Of course, if you continue to have no clear message, on this or anything else, you'll never actually take power, so it's all kind of moot, isn't it? posted by Steve M. | 12:04 PM | Wednesday, January 18, 2006 So now Neal Boortz is calling Hillary Clinton's "plantation" remark racist? Neal "Arnie will commute Tookie's death sentence because otherwise blacks will riot" Boortz? I guess now we've heard from pretty much everyone except David Duke. I'm still waiting for a Republican to explain to me why the word "plantation" was OK when it was in the 1992 GOP platform. posted by Steve M. | 11:02 PM | Bush to states: Thanks for helping us out of a jam, suckers.... The federal government won't repay states that are making emergency purchases for hundreds of thousands of poor, sick people whose new Medicare drug coverage isn't yet working, Medicare officials say. Instead, those states must recoup the money from the private plans that began providing drug coverage Jan. 1 on behalf of Medicare. Medicare administrator Mark McClellan said the new Medicare legislation was clear: "Under this program, we don't have the authority to pay states directly. People are in Medicare drug plans and it's the Medicare plans that are supposed to pay for the medications." ... Oh, so in this case the Bush administration says its hands are tied by the exact text of a law. Funny how that doesn't seem to matter to these guys at other times. Now, let's review: This plan is a disaster so far, but the people who are supposed to make sure that the mess is cleaned up aren't the people at the federal government (which created the plan) or at the private companies (which sell and profit from the actual drug coverage), but in the states, which had all this foisted on them. Ah, but the feds aren't being completely selfish: Medicare will, however, help states deal with the drug plans. "If they're not paying for the claim they should have, we can make sure they do," [Medicare spokesman Gary] Karr said. States can send Medicare batch files of all the people they've bought drugs for and then match those names with the drug plans the patients belong to. "We can tell (plan A) 'Hey, here's 10 claims you should have paid. You have these people. Double-check that you've got these people and then pay these claims because they're clearly legit,'" Karr said. Yeah, the feds are doing such a great job already -- I'm sure they'll effortly process, say, a 34,000-claim batch file from California. (First link via Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 8:30 PM | The right-wing Boston Herald reaches into the gutter: Mag: Ted K's secret love child a secret no more The National Enquirer splashes this week with a shocking story about Sen. Ted Kennedy's secret love child with a Cape Cod woman whom the mag says he dated during his days as a swinging single. According to the tabloid's source, the boy, named Christopher, just celebrated his 21st birthday and is "mature enough to make his own choices about his background and biological father." A Kennedy family confidante told the Enquirer, "This is one of the biggest secrets in the Kennedy family and known to only a few people including Ted's ex-wife, Joan." As for the senator, his spokesgal Melissa Wagoner last night called the tabloid tale "irresponsible fiction."... Curious that the story should surface at this exact moment, don't you think? posted by Steve M. | 3:39 PM | James Webb graduated from Annapolis and went to Vietnam as a Marine. He went on to attend Georgetown Law School at the height of the antiwar movement in the early 1970s; Robert Timberg's book The Nightingale's Song recounts some of his experiences there as the only Vietnam veteran in his class: [Webb] had a number of storied clashes with the school's sizable antiwar clique, which included professors as well as students. ...The professor [of a criminal law class Webb took during his first year] was Heathcote Wales.... Wales, part of the antiwar set, often dreamed up vignettes to explain points of law, at times giving characters the names of his students. The initial question on the first-term final was about search and seizure. It involved a Marine seregeant named Webb who attempts to ship home pieces of jade in the dead bodies of two Marines from his platoon. Webb would later say that he felt like he had been shot as he read the question. "All those broken bodies and nights in the rain, for what? To be laughed at?" he said. Immobilized for a full fifteen minutes, he thought about walking out of the exam, but stayed and finished it. That night, he went through some of the bleakest hours of his life, repeatedly bursting into tears as he tried to study for other finals. Two days later, he confronted Wales in his office. "I just want you to know it wasn't funny," he told the professor. "I went over to Vietnam with sixty-seven lieutenants, twenty-two died, and it wasn't funny." However painful, something valuable came of that experience. "I decided then and there never to take any shit on that again," he said, meaning his Vietnam service. Webb later became Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan. Not exactly a guy you'd expect to be sympathizing with opponents of a Republican administration in the midst of a war. And yet here he is on the op-ed page of The New York Times, lambasting the Bush administration and its surrogates for trashing the reputations of fellow veterans: IT should come as no surprise that an arch-conservative Web site is questioning whether Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has been critical of the war in Iraq, deserved the combat awards he received in Vietnam. After all, in recent years extremist Republican operatives have inverted a longstanding principle: that our combat veterans be accorded a place of honor in political circles. This trend began with the ugly insinuations leveled at Senator John McCain during the 2000 Republican primaries and continued with the slurs against Senators Max Cleland and John Kerry, and now Mr. Murtha. Military people past and present have good reason to wonder if the current administration truly values their service beyond its immediate effect on its battlefield of choice. The casting of suspicion and doubt about the actions of veterans who have run against President Bush or opposed his policies has been a constant theme of his career. This pattern of denigrating the service of those with whom they disagree risks cheapening the public's appreciation of what it means to serve, and in the long term may hurt the Republicans themselves.... As admirers of the administration scrounge for scraps of evidence that opponents of the Iraq War are doing harm to the troops in the field, it appears that James Webb has arrived at a very different conclusion: that denigration of military service is coming from the right this time. It's Bush operatives who are reminding him of Heathcote Wales. posted by Steve M. | 11:12 AM | Tuesday, January 17, 2006 LES WINGNUTS These people are sick: FAR-right groups in France are distributing ham sandwiches and pork soup to homeless people in an attempt to discriminate against Muslims and Jews, forbidden to eat pork products. Food hand-outs, which have already taken place in Paris, Nice and Nantes, and in Brussels and Charleroi in Belgium, have now spread to the eastern French city of Strasboug. At the weekend, Strasbourg's prefect banned the extreme right association Solidarite Alsacienne from distributing its soupe au cochon (pig soup) to poor and homeless people in the city centre. On Saturday, police intervened to close the soup kitchen after Solidarite Alsacienne defied the ban and began distributing food in one of Strasbourg's main squares.... The president of Solidarite Alsacienne is married to a former MP for Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front Party; the group is close to Le Bloc Identitaire, an extreme-right umbrella group led by Fabrice Robert, a former leader of Unite Radicale, a neo-Nazi cell which broke up in 2002 after one its members attempted to assassinate the president, Jacques Chirac. It's not exactly the same, but when I read about this practice of, in effect, waving food in front of hungry people that they can't eat, I'm reminded of the way Alabama prison guards reportedly taunt prisoners they've tied to hitching posts in the hot sun: The plaintiff in this case, Larry Hope, charged that he had been handcuffed to a hitching post twice, one time for seven hours, during which he was shirtless "while the sun burned his skin... At one point, a guard taunted Hope about his thirst. According to Hope's affidavit: '[The guard] first gave water to some dogs, then brought the water cooler closer to me, removed its lid, and kicked the cooler over, spilling the water onto the ground.'" That practice was defended as not cruel and unusual by William Pryor, then Alabama's attorney general and now a federal judge. Do I even need to tell you that the French food distribution is being defended by American right-wingers? posted by Steve M. | 4:58 PM | DUH. Roll Call reports that Sen. Reid (D-Nev.) and Rep. Pelosi (D-Cal.) plan to unveil a [congressional ethics] package on Wednesday.... --Paul Kiel at TPM Cafe last Thursday Yeah, that's just brilliant: give the Republicans nearly a week's notice, so they can beat you to the punch by a day: House Republicans moved to seize the initiative for ethics reform Tuesday with a comprehensive package of changes, including the banning of privately sponsored travel like that arranged by convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The package also includes a virtual ban on gifts, except for inconsequential items like baseball caps, and a provision that will affect few people: elimination of congressional pensions for anyone convicted of a felony related to official duties.... Democrats, who have adopted a "culture of corruption" theme in a drive to oust Republicans from control of Congress, intend to unveil this week a proposed ban on lobbyists' gifts to lawmakers.... Caught flatfooted. Again. Are the Democrats actually trying to ensure that they get as little political advantage from this scandal as possible? posted by Steve M. | 3:47 PM | Yet another story about immigrant laborers getting shafted while working on the Katrina cleanup -- this one's from The Dallas Morning News (if the link doesn't work, try this): Melvin Diaz ... and scores of other workers said they toil in an effective suspension of labor rights and employment rules. Some don't get paid. Others aren't given safety equipment. Housing is so short that many sleep in trucks or live in tents in the city's largest park.... "I've worked at companies that don't pay, or those that give checks that can't be cashed. Some have given me bad food, and I had to go to the hospital," said Mr. Diaz, who's on his fourth job after arriving here three months ago as part of a crew to clear debris at a hotel.... Other workers say some employers fail to take safety precautions or provide protective masks, suits and gloves. Salvador Calderon, a 42-year-old from southern Mexico who last lived in Houston, has a nasty rash over his torso. He can't find a doctor or free clinic and has no transportation. Mr. Calderon isn't certain if his rash comes from the mold and debris he's handled cleaning houses, where there have been snakes, rats and spoiled food that's made other workers vomit.... His workmate, who goes only by Jose, defends his friend: "They promised us vaccines, and we never got them. We are not so stupid; many of us have made it to the ninth grade." ... You know what I'm wondering? How come the Minuteman Project isn't here, or some similar group? I'm not saying that the preferred solution of the Minutemen would be the same as mine; I'm just surprised at their absence. You'd think this would be a perfect high-profile location where they could get their message across. Yet I don't see them there. I do see groups protesting undocumented workers in places like Rockland County, New York, and Danbury, Connecticut -- but New Orleans? No sign of them. Could it be these groups aren't really concerned with keeping illegal immigrants out of America? Could it be that they just want to keep those immigrants out of white suburbs? posted by Steve M. | 1:38 PM | Monday, January 16, 2006 The Martin Luther King Day celebration at Reverend Al Sharpton's National Action Network is a rite of passage in an election year. And with so many big races this year, candidates and controversy were the order of the day.... "I need you to tell us what distinguishes Democrats from Republicans right now," [Senator Hillary Clinton] was asked. Clinton's answer was provocative. Said Clinton, "When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation and you know what I'm talking about..." Some House Republicans took immediate offense at Senator Clinton's choice of words. Said Republican Congressman Peter King, of Long Island, "It's always wrong to play the race card for political gain by using a loaded word like plantation. But it is particularly wrong to do so on Martin Luther King Day." --WCBS-TV, New York **** 1992 Republican Party platform: For low-income families, the Republican Party stands for a revolution in housing by converting public housing into homes owned by low-income Americans. President Bush is eager to work closely with the States to fight and win a new conservative war on poverty. The truest measure of our success will not be how many families we add to housing assistance rolls but, rather, how many families move into the ranks of homeownership. But every part of that opportunity agenda has been thwarted by landlord Democrats in Congress. We ask the electorate: End the strangulation of divided government. Give Republicans the chance to move housing policy off the Democrat Party plantation into the main-stream of American life. National Republican Senatorial Committee press release, December 2005: Charles Krauthammer Called [Senator Harry] Reid's Objection To [Judge Clarence] Thomas A Symbol Of The "Liberal Plantation Mentality," Where It Is Unacceptable To Be A Conservative African-American Man. Charles Krauthammer: "He said some nice things about Scalia and lousy stuff about Thomas. If you look at their records on the Court, Scalia and Thomas are two closest in terms of concurrences and agreements. . . . In the end, you've got to ask yourself, why Scalia, good, Thomas, bad in the eyes of a man like Reid. I say it's the liberal plantation mentality, in which if you're a man on the right and white, it's OK. If you are the man on the right and you're African-American, it's not." (Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume," December 6, 2004) (emphasis in original) (See also: Joseph Farah, "Racism on Dem Plantation," World Net Daily, 11/19/03; Michael Gonzalez, "Hispanics for Jorge: Another Immigrant Group Wanders Off the Democratic Plantation," Wall Street Journal, 11/8/04; Edward Whelan, "The Liberal Plantation," National Review Online, 6/7/05; etc., etc.) posted by Steve M. | 10:03 PM | I listened to an hour of All Things Considered on NPR this afternoon and was told three times that Bush went to look at the Emancipation Proclamation. IT'S A FREAKIN' PHOTO OP, PEOPLE! IT'S NOT NEWS! The beginning of wisdom would be not even sending a reporter to cover nonsense like this. posted by Steve M. | 7:04 PM | WWGOPD? Everybody knows that the Democrats failed to make their case against Alito in the Judiciary Committee hearings, right? It's somewhat similar to November 1998, when everybody knew that Republican losses in the midterm elections meant that the GOP hadn't made its case for impeachment. We know the GOP didn't give a damn and impeached Clinton anyway, but I just want to remind you what the immediate reaction was: November 6, 1998 Judiciary Chairman Asks Clinton to Admit or Deny 81 Findings Forging ahead with an impeachment inquiry that most Americans say Congress should drop, Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., asked President Clinton Thursday to say flatly whether he lied under oath, tampered with witnesses or obstructed justice. In an 11-page letter, Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asked Clinton to admit or deny 81 selected findings gleaned from the independent counsel's 445-page report on the president's affair with Monica Lewinsky.... Hyde said the president could speed the process by not disputing the findings. But many questions are pointed and ask Clinton to admit to accusations that he and his advisers have strenuously denied since the independent counsel Kenneth Starr sent his scathing report to Congress. For example, question No. 20: "Do you admit or deny that you gave false and misleading testimony under oath when you stated during your deposition in the case of Jones v. Clinton on Jan. 17, 1998, that you did not know if Monica Lewinsky had been subpoenaed to testify in that case?" ... Hyde denied the questions constituted a witch hunt. "It would be a witch hunt if we served him with a subpoena to come in, get under oath and testify to a cross-examination from all members," Hyde said. "That would be pushing the envelope. We're doing it in the most genteel way."... Yup -- electorally they'd screwed up, as the entire political establishment noted, and yet they came right back that week with a new, obnoxious, full-bore attack on Clinton. Just to prove they still could. Please note that the attack was surprising, and therefore headline-grabbing; it was in an unexpected form, which helped make it newsworthy. The linked article is from The New York Times. Note what the conventional wisdom was in the days after the election: But the shock waves from Democratic gains in the midterm election on Tuesday have injected new doubts and uncertainty into the impeachment process, lawmakers said Thursday.... With the possibility of impeachment growing dimmer, attention is shifting to a group of 10 committee moderates who have been exploring alternative punishment, including censure.... It was actually believed at that moment that the election results meant the SOBs probably couldn't impeach. But Republicans just pressed on. And they got their victory -- not against Clinton, but against Democrats ever since, by branding Dems as the party of immorality. A lesson for Senate Democrats now? posted by Steve M. | 9:49 AM | Sunday, January 15, 2006 When I read in this New York Times Magazine story that so far there have been 134 victories in municipal and statewide campaigns to raise the minimum wage to a "living wage," that "a hypothetical state ballot measure [on the issue] typically generates support of around 70 percent," that a living wage measure got 71% of the vote in Jeb Bush's Florida in 2004 (even as Jeb's brother got 52%), and that "over the years there has been anywhere from a 2 to 5 percent increase in voter turnout specifically correlated with wage measures," particularly among "the kind of voters who are difficult to engage in other ways: younger voters, infrequent voters, low-income urban voters," I have to ask: Why the hell don't more Democrats run on economic populism? Did you read the Slate article this past week in which John Dickerson argues that Bush actually wants hearings on warrantless spying because he thinks the public will come down on the GOP's side? Well, running against Bush's GOP with a message of economic populism would be a way to do the same thing back to the Republicans, because Bush, in particular, looks at the GDP numbers and the Dow Jones industrial average and thinks the economy is just hunky-dory -- and just doesn't get that the average American, faced with stagnant wages, rising medical costs, rising energy costs, and permanent job insecurity, strenuously disagrees. I think John Edwards gets all this, but does any other Democrat of national stature? And why not? posted by Steve M. | 7:09 PM | THE DOG ATE OUR HOMEWORK This is just pathetic: Democratic aides said there had been even less strategy than usual in trying to coordinate the questioning [of Samuel Alito] by the eight Democratic senators [on the Judiciary Committee]. The situation was complicated because senators and staff were out of Washington before the hearing. But what about that newfangled gadget everyone's using these days -- what's it called? The "telephone"? And that "e-mail" whoozywhatsis all the kids seem to like? Couldn't the senators have tried that? posted by Steve M. | 10:22 AM | Saturday, January 14, 2006 Think they'll literally "Swift Boat" him? How much do you want to bet someone's out there right now trying to prove that John Murtha didn't deserve his medals? --me, 11/17/05 Guess I really should have taken some bets -- here's the smear. Sources claiming Murtha is a liar: Three guys who've run against him and lost. Yeah, that's really persuasive, isn't it? Every time I think I've seen the worst the Right can do, the level of scum rises higher. posted by Steve M. | 6:47 PM | I've been reading recently about efforts to increase the number of non-American troops in Afghanistan. Australia has agreed to augment its force there; so has NATO -- among NATO members, the Dutch, in particular, are under great pressure to send more fighters, and have just now agreed to do so. This is meant, it seems, to "free up US troops to mount a more aggressive offensive against the Taliban in the border regions." Or, perhaps, to mount a more aggressive offensive against al-Qaeda in the border regions -- which might explain the bombing that was meant to kill Zawahiri. In my last post I noted that the U.S. had fallen for bad intel again and had failed to kill a top terrorist leader -- but I don't want to be completely cynical about this. Maybe, just maybe, we're redoubling our efforts to capture or kill the masterminds of 9/11. That would be a good thing. And if that's the case, maybe it took relentless criticism, approval ratings in the 30s, and the threat of losing GOP control over one or both houses of Congress to get President Bush to grope for ways he could regain the upper hand and to decide that one way might be to focus -- finally -- on al-Qaeda. If that's what's going on, then Bush's biggest supporters owe those of us who criticize him a word of thanks, for getting him to take seriously a bit of business that's been unfinished for more than four years. After all, a year ago Bush thought he had the country in his pocket, and he'd gotten to that point without harming a hair on the heads of bin Laden and Zawahiri. But we critics didn't kowtow to Bush and his supposed mandate; we criticized him on any number of issues, and some of it stuck. He's been hurting recently, and so has his party. And maybe that put the fear of God into him. I really don't think George W. Bush will ever get us out of Iraq, will ever reverse runaway deficits, will ever preside over a country in which the poor no longer get poorer as the rich get richer. But maybe, just maybe, he now wants the U.S. military to get bin Laden and Zawahiri, and maybe, despite his blundering mismanagement of the job of commander in chief, the military will get the job done. If that happens, perhaps it will turn out to have been a genuine response to pressure applied by free people in a democracy -- which would be a good thing. Then again, why the hell do we have to put pressure on the president of the United States in order to get him to focus on this? **** On the other hand, The U.S. is reducing the number of troops it has in Afghanistan, even as violence there increases. So maybe you should forget everything I just said. posted by Steve M. | 6:31 PM | AL-QAEDA'S LEADERSHIP = ROADRUNNER. BUSH = COYOTE. So they sent us to bed all excited, hinting that they might have killed Zarqawi, but once again they were acting on bad intel: al-Qaida Leader Not at Site of Airstrike Al-Qaida's second-in-command was the target of a U.S. airstrike near the Afghan border but he was not at the site of the attack, two senior Pakistani officials said Saturday. At least 17 people were killed. ...The two Pakistani officials told The Associated Press on Saturday that the CIA had acted on incorrect information, and Ayman al-Zawahri was not in the village of Damadola when it came under attack.... "Their information was wrong, and our investigations conclude that they acted on a false information," said a senior intelligence official. His account was confirmed by a senior government official, who said al-Zawahri "was not there." ... An AP reporter who visited the scene in Damadola village about 12 hours later saw three destroyed houses hundreds of yards apart. Villagers recounted hearing aircraft overhead moments before the attack. By their count at least 30 people died, including women and children.... Aw, hell, the Bushies have lowered my expectations so much that I'm impressed they're even still trying to get the people who were actually responsible for 9/11. Too bad they can devote only a fraction of the resources they've committed to the Iraq quagmire, an effort that's done nothing to al-Qaeda except allow it to metastasize. What did Bush say days after 9/11? Oh, yeah, that's right: "When I take action," he said, "I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive." Still waiting. posted by Steve M. | 8:36 AM | Friday, January 13, 2006 If you've already read Kate O'Beirne's Women Who Make the World Worse: And How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports and you're hungry for more writing by women who use feminism as a pinata, be patient: I see from Publishers Lunch (in its subscription-only edition for today) that Random House has just signed a book by syndicated columnist and "maverick conservative" Kathleen Parker that will be titled Save the Males. For those who've never heard of Parker, go here for a thumbnail bio, and for a sample column that could well be in the book; it bears the charming title "Feminism's Devolution from Hoaxers to Whores." I probably won't surprise you when I tell you that the column bashes feminists for making straight men want to be "metrosexuals" -- a word right-wing pundits grab at greedily every time they're writing about the sexes, even though no one else in America has talked about metrosexuals for at least a year, much less met one. posted by Steve M. | 6:00 PM | People with problems, as reported by The New York Times: ...Many megayachts have grown so big -- sometimes as long as a football field -- that their very size rules out docking at most marinas, which don't have large enough slips to accommodate them.... It is a problem that has vexed Ira and Audrey Kaufman ever since they built their dream boat, Gray Mist III, a 150-foot yacht fashioned after their home in Highland Park, Ill. -- complete with antique furniture, a working fireplace and a dining table that seats 12 -- about five years ago. "Many places that we go to, you can't get in the marina because our draft is too deep," said Mr. Kaufman, 77, a senior managing director at Mesirow Financial.... "There's so few marinas now that you can get a boat in," Mr. Kaufman said. "There's not room." ... People with problems, as reported by USA Today: The problems began showing up earlier this month at small pharmacies such as the one Ed Derderian runs in Dinuba, Calif.: poor, elderly and disabled residents unable to get their prescriptions refilled. ... trouble persists for people such as Geoffery Foughnor of Galveston, Texas, and his mother, Helen Walker. Foughnor has been without his prostate-cancer medicine for a week. Walker used her last blood pressure pill -- a loan from the neighborhood CVS drugstore -- on Thursday.... Since Medicare began covering prescription drugs this month for the first time, some low-income Americans have lost ground. They are among 6.2 million Medicare beneficiaries also on Medicaid.... Until Dec. 31, they were getting prescription drugs from Medicaid, usually with co-payments of just a few dollars. On Jan. 1, they were automatically enrolled in one of Medicare's private insurance plans. But many beneficiaries have disappeared from the government's database, been overcharged or found that important prescriptions are no longer covered, pharmacists and government officials say.... Do I even need to tell you which group is getting a break from the taxman? THE BUDGET blueprint for fiscal 2006 could come to the House and Senate floors this week.... The resolution would take from the poor and give to the rich. It would provide for easy passage -- no Senate filibuster allowed -- of what's likely to be $70 billion in tax cuts over the next five years, the benefits of which would tilt heavily toward wealthier Americans.... The new cuts would, among other things, extend the lower tax rates for dividend and capital gains income. According to an analysis by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center, almost three-fourths of the benefits from those cuts would go to the richest 3 percent of Americans, households making more than $200,000 a year.... Good thing, too, because marinas for those huge yachts are finally being built in large numbers, according to the Times, and the fees will undoubtedly make a lot of megayacht owners really feel the pinch. As for those seniors who are running out of drugs: Your call is important to us. Please continue to hold.... (Third link via Sisyphus Shrugged.) posted by Steve M. | 3:38 PM | WANKER OF THE DAY I'll say it before Atrios does: It's Jake Tapper of ABC News, for telling us on his blog that Samuel Alito was unfairly smeared as a racist because Dinesh D'Souza says so: ...D'Souza worked for CAP [Concerned Alumni of Princeton] from 1983 to 1985, editing CAP's controversial Prospect magazine. He said a number of the Democratic attacks on Samuel Alito were based on falsehoods. First off, D'Souza says, one of the two stories from Prospect that Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, read this week at the confirmation hearings was intended as a satire. The 1983 essay "In Defense of Elitism" by Harry Crocker III included this line, read dramatically by Kennedy: "People nowadays just don't seem to know their place. Everywhere one turns blacks and hispanics are demanding jobs simply because they're black and hispanic..." The essay may not have been funny, D'Souza acknowledges, but Kennedy read from it as if it had been serious instead of an attempt at humor. "I think left-wing groups have been feeding Senator Kennedy snippets and he has been mindlessly reciting them," D'Souza said. "It was a satire."... Yeah, because satire can't possibly be racist, can it, Dinesh? Under D'Souza's editorship, the [right-wing campus newspaper] Dartmouth Review ... published a parody titled "Dis Sho Ain't No Jive Bro," which mocked the way African-American students supposedly speak. ("Dese boys be sayin' that we be comin' here to Dartmut an' not takin' the classics. You know, Homa, Shakesphere; but I hea' dey all be co'd in da ground, six feet unda, and whatchu be askin' us to learn from dem?") Also during his tenure as editor, according to a September 22, 1995, article in The Washington Post, the Review "published an interview with a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, using a mock photograph of a black man hanging from a campus tree." (Via Memeorandum.) posted by Steve M. | 2:18 PM | Atrios, citing this enumeration of some of Samuel Alito's more troubling opinions, asks: Why is it that white guys who comb their hair, dress well, and mostly speak in full sentences are presumed to be "decent" no matter what the evidence to the contrary? Good question -- but it isn't "white guys," it's Republican guys, and gals. John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, and Condoleezza Rice operate under a blanket presumption of decency that's challenged only out here on the wild fringes of lefty advocacy; the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, by contrast -- all but one of them white and male -- operate under no such presumption. Some of this is a matter of style: Most Republicans have mastered the technique of using politesse to disguise relentlessness and sometimes viciousness. Then again, Charles Schumer is generally polite and soft-spoken even at his most dogged, whereas President Bush often can barely conceal his mile-wide mean streak -- yet it's Schumer whose character is frequently questioned and Bush who is seen as possessing an unmistakable decency at his core. Why is this? Because Republicans have mastered the art of persuading the public that Democrats, individually and collectively, are evil freaks, neurotics with malign intent. The New York Times may catalog failures in the Iraq War on its front page, but Rush Limbaugh and Fox News and the Drudge Report and the New York Post make it personal, snickering and recoiling in mock-revulsion at the unhinged perfidy of twisted yet powerful Democrats (and presumed Democrats) -- compulsive liar Al Gore, power-mad Hillary Clinton, sexual predator Bill Clinton, drunk Ted Kennedy, prissy traitor John Kerry, raving old coot ex-Klansman Robert Byrd, wacko GOP-basher Dan Rather. This is a cancer on our politics, and it would be best if it disappeared from the scene, but it won't. So Democrats won't have a fighting chance until there's a comparable effort on our side. Sure, we on the left do a good job of spreading negative impressions of Republicans amongst ourselves. But Republicans reach the middle -- mostly, I think, because they use tools other than snark and ridicule. The right-wing specialty is a fake tone of concern -- Bill O'Reilly is the master of this, Sean Hannity is quite adept at it, and even Rush, between infantile song parodies, regularly goes solemn while sounding the alarum bells about the crimes of Democratic and liberals. This is mixed in with relentless attacks on soft targets (e.g., Ward Churchill) and campaigns based on half-truths (e.g., stories about "the war on Christmas") to paint a picture of a vast, interlinked liberal/left/Democratic conspiracy of dangerous weirdos preventing the triumph of decency and of common sense. It all plays in Peoria. We might have won this thing if we had built a multi-tiered, self-referential advocacy/attack media that could persuade Middle America that Samuel Alito is an evil freak and so, for that matter, is the oleaginous Lindsay Graham; until we build it, we're going to get beaten over and over again. I'm not saying I necessarily want to live in a country in which we send as much poison into the political atmosphere as the Right. I'm just saying that may be the only way to prevent Republican rule without end. posted by Steve M. | 11:37 AM | So, when is the media going to start cordoning this off as "the Senate Democrats' bad week" and arguing that they're "poised for a comeback"? posted by Steve M. | 8:27 AM | Thursday, January 12, 2006 The New York Times tells us today that Iraq-born Sunni insurgents are beginning to get tired of the tactics of foreign-born Islamists. Exultant voices from the right say this is a very, very good thing. Well, maybe. I'm skeptical: ...American and Iraqi officials believe that the conflicts present them with one of the biggest opportunities since the insurgency burst upon Iraq nearly three years ago. They have begun talking with local insurgents, hoping to enlist them to cooperate against Al Qaeda, said Western diplomats, Iraqi officials and an insurgent leader. One problem is that there's no evidence whatsoever that this means Iraqi insurgents will actually work with Americans: ...the Americans face significant challenges in trying to exploit the split. "It is against my beliefs to put my hand with the Americans," said an Iraqi member of the Islamic Army who uses the nom de guerre Abu Omar. Still, he said in an interview in a house in Baghdad, he allowed himself a small celebration whenever a member of Al Qaeda fell to an American bullet. "I feel happy when the Americans kill them," he said. And if that attitude changes, do we really want these insurgents as our allies? Whatever the answer, what we seem to have right now is something like a gang war: Samarra, north of Baghdad, had been infiltrated by Al Qaeda's fighters. In desperation, a local sheik, Hekmat Mumtaz al-Baz, traveled to Baghdad in September to meet with Iraq's defense minister and ask for help, said one of the sheik's aides, Waleed al-Samarrai. A few weeks after the visit, the sheik was shot dead by Qaeda gunmen in his yard.... The tribe was furious, and its members tracked down the three men who carried out the killing. Elders from the tribe held a trial in a local farmhouse and interrogated the men for days.... Members of the tribe swept the town and arrested 17 people they suspected were associated with the sheik's killing. In one house raid, the tribe found men from Sudan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, a member of the tribe said. Al Qaeda's fighters struck back during the tribe's offensive. A foreign Arab believed to be a Saudi wearing in a suicide belt blew himself up at the sheik's funeral, killing one guest and wounding two.... As a lesson to all those associated with the sheik's death, the tribe staged a public killing. While the sheik's father watched, men with machine guns shot the three men who carried out the assassination.... **** Two and a half years into the American occupation, the towns and villages south of Baghdad are divided among the insurgent groups like gang territory in big American cities. The arrangement is largely invisible to American troops who patrol the towns, the insurgents said in interviews. But guerrillas themselves say they must seek permission to travel through towns their groups do not control.... This is progress? If this were, say, Los Angeles circa 1990, would we consider it a hopeful sign that tensions between the Crips and Bloods had escalated to all-out combat? Would we say a gang war should make the residents of South Central or Compton feel safer? Would we argue that our best hope for peace would be the possibility that one gang might brutally eliminate the other in a series of drive-by shootings? Would we look forward hopefully to the day when the Crips or the Bloods will show up at police headquarers and offer to work with the cops? Maybe these tensions really will lead to the insurgency's demise. Or maybe we're getting this story now because otherwise we're fresh out of potential sources of light at the end of the tunnel. posted by Steve M. | 4:23 PM | THE BLOWHARD WITH A THOUSAND FACES It's Rush Limbaugh's birthday today. In honor of the solemn occasion, this thread at Free Republic links to a two-year-old essay of sorts entitled "Rush Limbaugh Is 'The Passion.'" Here are some excerpts: Make no mistake. Rush Limbaugh is "The Passion." He is the passion of conservatism, the very pulse, bounding through the veins of the nation. He produces life with every heartbeat of his show as he scoffs at liberals and gives us his interpretation of conservative truth. His brand of ideology shakes the very foundations of liberalism. He follows in the footsteps of giants, such as George Washington, Thomas Paine, and Ronald Reagan, promoting the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He broadcasts affectionately trying to steer growing government towards the ideals of the Constitution.... Mildly he sits and passes on his message, his passion, his views, his legacy. A legacy of truth, justice, and the conservative American way.... There are few men in history that has received the same award as President Ronald Reagan. There are fewer men that could go on day after day under the scrutiny he faces. And there are only a handful of men that could keep themselves reserved while suffering the onslaught of the visceral hatred of "compassionate liberals." Quite frankly, I don't know how he does it. How does he stand so strong against so much? How does he execute his duties so faithfully with the onslaught of these lies? How does he continue to go on the air? Especially when the people that presume to blackmail him walk free! "The Passion." That’s how.... Liberalism was planted deep within me, as if it were a parasite feeding on me. Rush cut it out like a surgeon excising a cancerous tumor, giving me the opportunity to experience life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He gave me the chance of a lifetime.... The author of this essay, Chris Davis, also posts it here, along with two follow-ups. The first is a mock-eulogy for Limbaugh that presents a sort of origin myth: In an excerpt of a speech given many times, Rush's father, Rush Limbaugh, Jr. talked about the Founding Fathers. "Of those 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence, nine died of wounds or hardships during the war," he said. "Five were captured and imprisoned, in each case with brutal treatment. Several lost wives, sons or entire families. One lost his 13 children. Two wives were brutally treated. All were at one time or another, the victims of manhunts and driven from their homes. Twelve signers had their homes completely burned. Seventeen lost everything they owned. Yet not one defected or went back on his pledged word. Their honor, and the nation they sacrificed so much to create, is still intact." The speech, The Americans who Risked Everything, was included as an article supplement to the September 1997 issue of The Limbaugh Letter.... Those fundamentals were passed from the patriarch, Rush H. Limbaugh, Sr. to Rush H. Limbaugh, Jr. -- in turn -- passing them to Rush Limbaugh III. The second is a note on the passing of the author's father: ... there are only two men that could've changed my life for the better. One was my father, the other Rush Limbaugh. This is nuts. Isn't it? Well, yes and no. On one level, obviously, it's nutty in a love-letters-to-Hitler way. But it also reminds us that right-wingers believe in themselves as figures in a great saga of good and evil. I think this really helps them gird their loins and fight in a way we can never seem to manage. So many of the elements of legend are here: the noble descent (from sage ancestors and the Founding Fathers), the vicious enemy (us) whose "onslaught" only a rare hero can withstand, the serene demeanor of the hero ("Mildly he sits..."). "The Passion" might as well be "the Force," although it seems, in this legend, to have no Dark Side. Liberalism, here, is an enemy worthy of legend -- a "parasite," a "cancerous tumor," spread by shape-shifting tricksters who appear "compassionate." Its foul nature even helps explain away Limbaugh's painkiller addiction, according to Davis (perhaps this is the Dark Side of the Force): I can’t help but applaud a man with this many medical conditions going on day after day after day after day, executing liberal lies with impunity. I have too much respect and admiration for the man that put his own show ahead of pain, pushing himself into addiction and blackmail. Too much admiration for the man that removed the disease, the man that removed liberalism. Right-wingers tell stories like this -- about Rush and about other conservatives, most notably Bush, Chosen of God. Ultimately, these are stories about themselves. They don't grumble about their side very much because they believe in their side; they believe in their side because they think God believes in their side, and the Founders would believe in it. They believe God and the Founders would want them to smite the enemy -- us -- without mercy. So when the battle is joined, they don't hold back, and they throw everything at us they think they can get away with. After all, they're fighting for something bigger than themselves, something bigger than the day-to-day -- something mythical. I'd like to laugh at Chris Davis -- and I would, if I didn't fear what he represents. posted by Steve M. | 1:24 PM | Wednesday, January 11, 2006 After telling us for months and months that al-Qaeda captives regularly claim torture when it hasn't taken place, right-wingers have apparently decided to try this technique themselves: ALITO WIFE LEAVES HEARING IN TEARS AFTER DEM ATTACK Judge Samuel A. Alito’s wife Martha left the confirmation hearing room in tears this evening, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) apologized to the Judge's family for the behavior of his fellow committee members during the course of the last three days. Sen. Graham said: "Judge Alito, I am sorry that you've had to go through this. I am sorry that your family has had to sit here and listen to this." ...One senior Republican in the hearing room said of the situation: "After three full days of attacks against her husband's character, Mrs. Alito had enough. Democrat behavior during this hearing has not only been wrong, it's been embarrassing. Ted Kennedy is nothing but a bully." (Actually, as I explained last June, the manual for al-Qaeda operatives tells them to expect real torture if they're captured -- it doesn't tell them to fake it. Apparently this is not true of the manual for Republican Party operatives.) **** UPDATE, THURSDAY MORNING: John Cole at Balloon Juice, no fan of the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, says Drudge is completely distorting the incident. Yes, John -- Drudge and the operatives who spoon-fed the "meanie Democrats" narrative to him. **** UPDATE: Karl Rove must have wet himself with glee when he saw the front page of this morning's USA Today. Ditto Newsday. posted by Steve M. | 6:39 PM | A lot of people (at least here in New York) have been talking this week about the Smoking Gun's story on James Frey, author of the mega-selling Oprah-endorsed substance-abuse-recovery memoir A Million Little Pieces. The Smoking Gun conducted interviews, consulted documents, and now presents large amounts of evidence leading to the conclusion that Frey wholly fabricated or wildly embellished details of his purported criminal career, jail terms, and status as an outlaw "wanted in three states." Now, you'd think this might hurt his literary career. You'd think that this, combined with earlier skepticism about some of Frey's tales (such as his claim that he had a root canal without painkillers after he got clean), might lead readers to shun his work. But I just received the weekly e-mail containing the new New York Times bestseller lists (the new lists will appear here next Sunday) -- and I see that * Frey's newest hardcover, My Friend Leonard, has shot from #9 on the list to #1 * the hardcover edition of A Million Little Pieces has returned to the list * the softcover edition of A Million Little Pieces has remained at #1 on the paperback nonfiction list The moral of this story? In this country, we apparently like self-dramatizing macho braggart ex-drunks, even when -- perhaps especially when -- we think they're lying. Draw your own conclusions as to how this relates to the usual subject area of this blog. posted by Steve M. | 5:58 PM | HAKIM TO BUSH: WHO CARES WHAT YOU THINK? When the new Iraqi government assumes office, ... Iraqi leaders will also have to review and possibly amend the constitution to ensure that this historic document earns the broad support of all Iraqi communities.... --Bush speech, 1/10/06 The leader of Iraq's most powerful party indicated today that his group would block substantive changes to the country's new constitution, despite a promise to Sunnis to consider amendments. ... Abdul Azziz al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, the most influential group in the ruling Shiite coalition, today said that "the first principle is not to change the essence of the constitution," according to The Associated Press. ...Mr. Hakim appeared to rule out in particular any change in the constitution's provisions allowing the creation of strong regional provinces, a point that had angered many Sunnis.... --New York Times today The Interior Ministry's Special Police are the most capable of the Iraqi police forces.... Many of these Special Police forces are professional, they represent all aspects of society. But recently some have been accused of committing abuses against Iraqi civilians. That's unacceptable. That's unacceptable to the United States government; it's unacceptable to the Iraqi government, as well. And Iraqi leaders are committed to stopping these abuses. --same Bush speech Mr. Hakim's speech today followed tough statements he made last week in the wake of suicide bombs that killed more than 200 people over two days. Mr. Hakim criticized the United States and Sunni parties that encouraged the insurgency.... Mr. Hakim's criticism of the United States referred to recent pressure from the American forces to rein in the Iraqi security forces, which are under Shiite control. --same New York Times article posted by Steve M. | 1:38 PM | TIPS And as Iraqis see their own countrymen defending them against the terrorists and Saddamists, they're beginning to step forward with needed intelligence. General Casey reports that the number of tips from Iraqis has grown from 400 in the month of March of 2005 to over 4,700 last month.... --Bush speech, 1/10/06 In the week since national elections, police officers and Iraqi National Guardsmen said they have received more tips from the public, resulting in more arrests and greater effectiveness in their efforts to weaken the violent insurgency rocking the country. --Washington Post, 2/7/05 U.S. and Iraqi officials insist they are getting more tips from Iraqis about insurgent activity since the Americans transferred sovereignty to an interim government last June. --AP, 1/21/05 The U.S. military is reaping more high-quality intelligence tips from Iraqi prisoners than ever since it stopped using several coercive interrogation techniques after the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal in May, the American general in charge of Iraqi prisons said Monday. --USA Today, 9/6/04 Saddam arrest leads to more tips, U.S. says BAGHDAD -- The capture of Saddam Hussein has prompted many more Iraqis to come forward with intelligence about the armed insurgency... --The Olympian, Olympia, Washington, 1/5/04 Our greatest advantage has been the one the media ignore: Few Iraqis wanted the Ba'athists back. As they began to feel more confident of American resolve, they offered ever more tips about hide-outs and arms caches.... --Ralph Peters in the New York Post, 12/15/03 Intelligence has begun flowing in at a faster rate, according to Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq. More and more tips are coming in every day, said General Odierno in a videoconference with Washington-based reporters. "It is probably 10- or 20-fold more than when we first started here ... the number of people we have coming in to provide us human information," he said. --Christian Science Monitor, 10/29/03 **** (Yes, this is an update of an earlier post.) posted by Steve M. | 8:51 AM | Tuesday, January 10, 2006 John Tierney, raving about the privatized Chilean social security system in The New York Times, April 26, 2005: ... if you contribute for at least 20 years, Chile guarantees you a minimum pension that, relative to the median salary, is actually more generous than the median Social Security check. ..."I'm very happy with my account," [my Chilean friend Pablo] said to me after comparing our pensions. He was kind enough not to gloat.... John Tierney, still raving about the privatized Chilean social security system in The New York Times, May 7, 2005: I can't protect my pension against political risk, but Pablo can help protect his against the risks of the stock market. As he approaches retirement, he can gradually shift his money out of stocks and into bonds, like the ones that financed the private road between Santiago and the port city of Valparaiso, which will be paid off by tolls. ... My pension depends on 535 politicians who will be asked to vote for steep tax increases or budget cuts that they fear could cost them their jobs. Pablo's pension depends on people driving between Chile's two largest cities. John Tierney, still raving about the privatized Chilean social security system in The New York Times, June 14, 2005: [Chile's] pension system has a stronger safety net for the older poor than America's (relative to each country's wages) and more incentives for people to work, because Chileans' contributions go directly into their own private accounts instead of a common pool like Social Security.... **** The New York Times today: ... "Many of those who started work when the system was first adopted are realizing that they have not been able to contribute enough to get a significant pension," [Chilean political science professor Patricio] Navia said, adding that they resent "overhead costs that are so high" and that have led to record profits for the pension funds that manage contributions automatically deducted from workers' paychecks. ...According to a recent study here, Chile's pension funds, whose number has shrunk to 6 from more than 20 as competition has diminished, recorded an average annual profitability of more than 50 percent during a recent five-year period. Other studies, including one conducted by the World Bank, indicate that pension funds retain between a quarter and a third of workers' contributions in the form of commissions, insurance and other administrative fees. ... many young people, who should be enrolling in the system early to accrue maximum benefit, are staying out or paying in very little. Some cannot afford to contribute beyond the obligatory minimum payment, which is 10 percent of wages, while others are either self-employed or have been hired by companies as low-paid independent contract workers and therefore do not have to contribute at all.... As a result of such doubts, attacking the pension system and especially the perceived excesses of the funds has become a surefire source of votes. One of the big winners in the first round of the election last month, for example, was Guido Girardi, a senator-elect ... who has taken upon himself the role of scourge of the private management funds. "I am going to do away with these thieves in jackets and ties," Mr. Girardi vowed. "We are going to defend the citizenry from these funds that rob people of their pensions."... posted by Steve M. | 11:07 PM | Show trial fizzles out: Yesterday's hearing on academic freedom at Pennsylvania's public universities was hyped by conservative activists as a "historic moment," in which school administrators would finally be "called to account" in front of state legislators for allowing student "indoctrination and abuse" by leftist professors. But the hearing at Temple University did not live up to that billing. A professor scheduled to testify about alleged rampant liberal bias at Temple canceled. The sole student to appear before the legislative committee acknowledged he had never filed a formal grievance. And Temple president David Adamany testified that in fact no student had made an official classroom bias complaint in at least five years, despite well-developed policies and procedures for doing so.... Rep. Dan Surra (D., Elk) called the hearings a "colossal waste of time and taxpayer money."... So much for the big victory Davey Horowitz declared last summer when the Pennsylvania House passed the resolution calling for the hearings. Incidentally, maybe I'm missing something here, but it appears that the Horowitz/Front Page Magazine crowd's entire case with regard to Temple is based on one course. If the Liberal International is really hell-bent on brainwashing the next generation of America's youth, shouldn't we be working harder than that? (First link via DU.) **** UPDATE: More on this from Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged, The All Spin Zone, Michael Berube, and Inside Higher Ed. posted by Steve M. | 5:51 PM | I know I should be posting about Abramoff, or going all Alito all the time, but I'm trying to suppress laughter as I read about a competition some people from my old home state are planning to stage next month:  Feb 4th, 2006 Location to be determined. Mr Heterosexual Contest 2006 A Celebration of God's Creation A real competition that will bring fun and laughter as we celebrate God's design. I learn from this article that the contest will be actually held on February 18, not February 4 -- a facility in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, backed out of hosting the competition on the earlier date, and now it's being held two weeks later in Worcester. Gay activists hope Worcester's Mechanics Hall will also back out, but I don't think it's a big deal -- this thing is too ridiculous to take seriously: Mr Heterosexual is the creation of Tom Crouse. On his radio show- "Engaging Your World", Tom mentioned the Mr Gay international contest that was held in San Diego and stated that "you never hear of anything for heterosexuals- someone should have a Mr Heterosexual Contest." One thing led to another and Tom decides to put the event together. The local and national media picked up on the event as well as the homosexual activists, who were outraged that someone could have such an event. Tom has been called by the homosexual activists everything from Osama Bin Laden- to Hitler. Why? Because he has the nerve to have an event celebrating Gods design of Heterosexuality, and also has the nerve to have at the event someone who will give testimony to the fact that Jesus Christ freed them from all their sins.... Yes, that last point is important -- according to this article, the contest's highlight ... [will be] the appearance of a young man who has decried his homosexuality and has, through the teachings of Jesus Christ, discovered the pleasure and benefits of living a heterosexual life. So this may be less about straightness than about ex-gayness -- the insistence, through gritted teeth, that whomever one might stare at or fantasize about or flirt with or, in moments of weakness, even have sex with, one has really, really beaten the gay thing. No, seriously. This isn't going to be a mere beauty contest -- there will be tests of manliness: Strength - how many oprah magazines can you tear? Talent - your choice Intellectual - answering random questions such as your favorite heterosexual role model Competition - name that food ..........more events to be announced. Er, I dunno -- doesn't sound all that Y-chromosome to me. If this were a true celebration of the manly, it seems to me the competition would involve, say, chainsaws. (Competitive chainsawing on ESPN: My idea of great TV.) I also think the images on the main page of the Mr. Hetero Web site would be a bit less J. Crew catalog and a bit more like, well, maybe The Onion's Area Man. On the other hand, the stuff on the Mr. Hetero merchandise page does seem to lack a certain design flair.  On his blog, Crouse promises that the event will stick it to the politically correct Man: We might say the Pledge of Allegiance and even use the term, "One nation under God", who knows, we might do that a few times. There could also be random outbreaks of "Merry Christmas" during the evening. In mid-February? Knock yourself out. posted by Steve M. | 1:48 PM | I share Sam Rosenfeld's Alito fatalism -- especially after seeing the results of yesterday's Washington Post poll, which said that a majority of Americans favor the nomination and an even bigger majority believe Alito won't vote to overturn Roe. This is when I ask: What would Republicans have done in this situation if they were Democrats? Here's what I think they would have done: Particularly after the release of Alito's 1985 letter denying that the Constitution protects abortion, they'd have deployed several members of the party to go out and say, point blank, "Alito, if he's confirmed, will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade" -- "will vote to overturn," with no ambiguity. It would have simple, it would have been easily digested by the TV-viewing public -- and it would have been denounced as over the line by Alito's defenders. Thus, it would have been news, and it could have framed the debate, because the public doesn't want Roe overturned. This would have worked only if the party refused to back down. Alito's supporters would have tried to make the bluntness of the statement into the issue. This is where discipline would have come in: The statement shouldn't have been made by top leaders of the party, but those leaders should have refused to distance themselves from it; they should have defended the honor and integrity of whoever had made the remarks. And, after the first wave of criticism, yet more Democrats should have said the same thing. Alito's own words, plus a list of the groups and individuals praising him, would be enough to make the statement highly plausible. Do something bold so what you're doing leaps to the top of the nightly newscast; strike first; keep it simple; stand your ground after taking your shot; declare that the opposition is not just wrong, but the enemy of reasonable Americans -- that's what Republicans do. And it works. posted by Steve M. | 10:58 AM | Monday, January 09, 2006 Freedom on the march! ...Last week a journalist in the Kurdish city of Arbil was sentenced to 30 years in prison for articles he wrote critical of Kurdish regional president Masoud Barzani. In the southern city of Kut, two other journalists have been charged with defaming police and the judiciary after criticizing provincial officials in a local paper. If convicted, they face 10 years in prison and heavy fines.... Funny, I haven't seen a whole lot of press about this. I know American right-wingers aren't very fond of journalists who criticize governments, so I wonder if the U.S. right would consider this some of the "good news from Iraq" that the U.S. media won't report.... **** (More information on those two cases here and here.) posted by Steve M. | 11:55 PM | BUSH BOOM If, as Bush has been boasting lately, we're doing so well in the area of money, how come the average American doesn't actually seem to be accruing any? When the Commerce Department recently tallied up consumer finances for November, it found that Americans shelled out more money than they took in. It was the seventh such month of red ink during 2005.... Given how much red ink households racked up in the first 11 months of last year, [Kevin] Lansing [a Federal Reserve Bank economist] said the nation's personal savings rate could well be negative for all of 2005. That, he added, would be "the first such occurrence since the Great Depression." ... "You're seeing a situation where the consumers are spending every penny they possibly can and borrowing on top of that,'' said Joel Naroff, a Pennsylvania economic consultant.... A member of the Federal Reserve Board -- not a mere economist -- says in the same article that we shouldn't worry: people are just tapping into all that lovely home equity from the housing boom. But if we've all got such a big windfall, shouldn't we be a bit ahead? Shouldn't we be able to pay the bills and put something away for a rainy day? And what happens when the boom goes bust, or even just flattens out? What do we do then? Cut rich people's taxes even more? posted by Steve M. | 6:19 PM | New York Times reporter David Rosenbaum was killed in a mugging in D.C. on Friday evening. He was 63. The folks at Lucianne.com are deeply moved: Sometimes justice reveals itself in harsh ways. Biting lip. ***** It's sad to see anyone die, especially in such a manner. But the man was hateful and mean spirited. ***** Look, I agree that someone being murdered should not be cause for joy. But I really can't work up too much grief for him. We reap what we sow. I'm sure he was a big advocate of denying New Yorkers (or all Americans, for that matter) the means to protect themselves. So to some extent he was instrumental in his own demise. And he probably supported policies that could very well relegate you or you loved ones to a similar fate. So don't blame the chickens for coming home to roost; that's what they do -- it's just the natural order of things. ***** This is protected "speech". Its just another way that a culture expresses itself - sort of like ebonics or having a brood of multi-hued babies sired and abandoned by anonymous sperm doners. We must view this conduct as just another manifestation of cultural diversity. After all, who are we to be judgemental about other cultures? /sarcasm off/ ***** ... I condemn Rosenbaum's murder, but I do not grive his death. Rosenbaum was enemy of freedom, working for the anti baby, anti freedom, pro terror, vanity blog the New York Times. Rosenbaum's death is a case of enemy fraticide. Oh the allies Pinch Shultzberger chooses. ***** I am not sure that felling sorry for a person who actively contributed to an organization that has propagandized for those who would kill us on the streets, in building or just because we exist deserves much in the way of respect. One would have to ask the question as to whether anyone who works for the NYTimes or any MSM outlet has shown any respect for those who disagree with them at all. How many stories have we read about the desire for the assassination of anyone who disagrees with them? There is not a dime's worth of difference between the terrorists propaganda outlets and what this person and the organization that he worked for do every day. Sad to think like this, but that is what the MSM and democratic party have wrought. ***** Good news is that his social security contributions will be available for redistribution. There's more of the same at Free Republic: Must resist urge to yawn... ***** "Tell me the frequency Kenneth!" ***** Did they beat him with the Sunday edition? ***** A lot of the suicide bombers in Iraq are hasbands and fathers too. But the thing is, any one of them probably does less damage to America than the typical New York Times editor does.... ***** I am ... sure this guy was a lefty..and he believed it was "our" fault that these people are the way they are...so I don't feel so much pain...just like when a nuke will go off in San Francisco or NYC....the libs don't want us to look for them or to protect them...so I won't be sending money to help the survivors....they wanted it....the old saying..." don't bring a knife to a gunfight"...the liberals don't even bring a knife...... ***** ... If you are a liberal, you are doing Satan's work. ...There may be some liberals who act like "good people" when they are around other liberals, but the way they act when in the presence of conservatism leads me to think them -- not pure evil, but contaminated by evil to a greater or lesser extent. ...Conservatives as a general rule have a policy of trying to correct whatever evil they find in themselves. Liberals, on the other hand, celebrate evil and seek to increase it, because they have gotten turned around and think good is in the other direction. Liberalism, the demonrat party, socialism, progressivism, whatever name it hides behind, is where Satan does some of his most effective work. Their ideas are of and from Satan, and no one who embraces more than a certain small number of those ideas can by any stretch be thought a good person. ***** The Slimes are the enemy and anyone who associates with them becomes the enemy. They started this war against good American Elected Officials and if they want to stop it they have the ability to do so. If Bin Laden got robbed and killed will there be any tears for him? The Slimes want to promote the enemy agenda they can go down like the enemy. I hope someone that works for them reads this and passes it on. ***** ...It makes me so mad when people say against the president. How is that not treason? Dump-o-craps are all going to burn in hell for this. They are as bad as murderers and molesters and pedofiles. ***** Just a misunderstood victim of society in an outreach program, acting out his anger against the white man. Either that or else a gay hooker got violent. Oh, and a few other people think his death had something to do with Bill Clinton. No, I'm serious. posted by Steve M. | 11:42 AM | So, have we "turned a corner" yet in Iraq? Is there a "light at the end of the tunnel"? Here's your answer: Two suicide bombers dressed as senior police officers blew themselves up inside the Interior Ministry compound in Baghdad on Monday, killing 14 people and wounding 22 as Iraq marked National Police Day.... A ceremony ... was taking place at the police academy next door to the ministry at the time of the blasts about 500 meters (yards) away.... An attack on a celebration of National Police Day? Wow, there's something no one could have possibly seen coming! Oh, sure, maybe you could have guessed if you had any firsthand knowledge whatsoever of the situation in Iraq, or if you'd opened a newspaper anywhere in the world at any time in the past year, but other than that... Ah, but it's nice to know some things never change -- there's always an American around to remind us that the glass is half full: Among dignitaries attending [the ceremony] were the U.S. ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, and the Iraqi defense and interior ministers. U.S. military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Barry Johnson, who was at the ceremony, said the attack on the ministry did not interrupt the parade. I'm sure that's a great comfort to the victims and their families. **** UPDATE: Death toll now being reported as 29. posted by Steve M. | 10:12 AM | Sunday, January 08, 2006 So I see that after daring to express skepticism about the Iraq War and Bill O'Reilly's claims of a "war on Christmas," David Letterman is being lectured -- by Pat Boone: ...But host Dave's mistreatment of guest Bill still provokes me, especially in view of his audience's warmth to Dave's echoing question "Why are we in Iraq anyway?" It's become an acceptable social choice by now to forget the answer to that question. It's sad there's any need, but it seems there can't be too much reminding. Okay: 9-11. Airliners taken over by terrorists who destroy them and hundreds of innocent passengers. World Trade Center destroyed. Over 3,000 Americans killed. Evidence being reported of many plots to do more of the same.... I see a picture of a neighborhood, on a nice cul de sac, happy and contented. One day a nest of rattlesnakes is discovered in one neighbor's backyard. Several neighbors insist on going in together and wiping out the nest, before the snakes inevitably slither into the other yards. In this instance, which is most important? Is it privacy or wiping out the snakes, before every home is afflicted and people unnecessarily die? Why are we in Iraq, Dave? BECAUSE WE'RE AMERICANS – AND AMERICANS KILL SNAKES BEFORE THEY KILL US! You're a daddy now, Dave, with a backyard. Think about it. Mr. Pat Boone, ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Pat Boone of Beverly Hills, California. You know, we don't have rattlesnakes here in the East, Mr. Boone. We did, however, have a nasty terrorist attack back here. I know where David Letterman was in September 2001 -- right back at work in Manhattan, less than a week after the attack. Where were you, Mr. Beverly Hills? posted by Steve M. | 11:07 PM | A law unto themselves: The Bush administration has illegally stopped making public detailed tax enforcement data, which has been used to show which kinds of taxpayers get the most and toughest audits, a noted tax researcher says. Syracuse University Professor Susan B. Long said in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Seattle late last week that since Nov. 1, 2004, the Internal Revenue Service has violated a 1976 court order requiring the release of the data.... Long, who has researched and written about federal tax administration for more than 30 years, used the Freedom of Information Act to win the court order in 1976.... The 1976 court order listed 38 types of IRS reports ... that Long was entitled to receive "promptly" and regularly under the Freedom of Information Act. The court said IRS must continue to make the same statistical data contained in the listed reports available without charge in future years "regardless of the format ... hereafter compiled." Despite filing regular FOIA requests for the material, the last data Long received arrived Nov. 1, 2004 and covered only the first six months of fiscal year 2004, through March, 2004, she said in an interview. "They really shut down access," she said.... Yeah -- days before the '04 election. I guess the Bushies assumed that after that they'd either be out of a job or utterly above the law. Long uses this information to determine, for instance, whether low-income taxpayers get audited more than the rich -- something she said was taking place in 2000, when Bill Clinton was president (a sign she no Democratic partisan). I guess the public isn't entitled to know that kind of thing anymore if our leaders just don't feel like telling us. posted by Steve M. | 11:06 PM | Saturday, January 07, 2006 In the stores for barely two months and already marked down 50%. (It's 50% here, too.) That means the publisher and booksellers can't give it away at the usual retail price -- which means, I guess, that America's taste in food and political families is better than we thought. By the way, I've taken this book off store shelves twice, and each time it fell open to the recipe for "Cheese Puff Delights." Perfect. posted by Steve M. | 4:59 PM | Friday, January 06, 2006 From National Journal's Hotline: BREAKING NEWS: HOUSE GOPERS CALL FOR ELECTIONS The Hotline has learned from three House sources that at least two-dozen House GOPers spanning the ideological spectrum have agreed to sign a letter to House Conference Chair Deborah Pryce (R-OH) requesting new leadership elections in an effort to block Rep. Tom DeLay from reclaiming his post as Maj Leader.... The Republicans and the conservative movement have gotten out in front of this scandal so fast it's making my head spin. They know they have to save the Party by any means necessary -- and they're getting the job done. The general public is just starting to pay attention to this, and the first impressions the public is getting are of Gingrich calling for reform and right-leaning columnists expressing disgust and the Republican rank-and-file purging its leadership. There it is -- game, set, and match. By November, outside their home states, Tom DeLay and Bob Ney will no more than answers to a trivia question. Sad to say, Abramoff will be about as big an issue in the '06 elections as Enron was in '02 and '04. **** I should add that I do think the Republicans are vulnerable in '06 on Iraq (see: yesterday's news) and on the economy (they just don't understand the persistent, wentirely justified economic insecurity of ordinary Americans). But Abramoff? Not gonna matter a whit. posted by Steve M. | 4:58 PM | DICK CHENEY: IN ANY HEMISPHERE, A BIG PAIN IN THE ASS ...According to well-to-do residents near their waterfront estates, Don and Joy Rumsfeld blend in, don't inconvenience their neighbors and get around town with minimum fuss since they bought their weekend house a year ago. But Dick and Lynne Cheney, who settled into St. Michaels last fall, are being blamed by the locals for stopping traffic, keeping neighbors barricaded in their homes while the motorcade passes by, and disrupting sleepers' REM cycles with low-flying Chinook helicopters. "I hear that Mrs. Cheney is delightful," a disgruntled neighbor, who lives within sight of Ballintober, the Cheneys' $2.7 million estate, told me yesterday. "But I've had great big helicopters fly over my house at 3 o'clock in the morning and at 1 in the morning. I can tell you I'm not happy. They're very noisy. The dogs start barking, and we can't get back to sleep." The neighbor continued: "When they travel, the Secret Service clears Church Neck Road and prevents people from leaving their property. When they drive into town, people are actually told to stay inside their houses until the Cheneys go by. And I hear that two weeks ago, they told the DNR Police to keep their boats away from Cheney's house because it was ruining his view."... --New York Daily News today KABUL, Afghanistan - ...After spending 10 days discussing rules of procedure for Parliament, ... lawmakers on Sunday formally turned for the first time to pressing problems facing Afghans. For an hour, representatives spoke with passion of the suffering of the homeless from cold weather, disease and poverty, and of government corruption and the fate of people in American military detention. But the issue that threatens to cause an international incident is frustration about traffic problems in Kabul and the closing of whole districts when foreign or government dignitaries visit -- like when Vice President Dick Cheney attended the recent opening of Parliament. "We have to open the roads that have been closed by foreign princes and war princes," said Ramazan Bashardost, a populist member of Parliament.... --New York Times, 1/2/06 posted by Steve M. | 1:59 PM | RUPERT MURDOCH PROFITS FROM AMERICAN GIRL BOYCOTT? The Southern Baptist Conference's BP News reports: A conservative-led boycott of the popular American Girl book and doll series during the Christmas season apparently led many parents to seek alternatives -- so much so that one Christian company saw its sales nearly triple in the final weeks of 2005. The Life of Faith book and doll series -- sometimes called the Christian alternative to American Girl -- experienced a 172 percent increase in sales from the time the boycott began, says Sandi Shelton, president of Mission City Press, which owns the Life of Faith series.... Mission City Press is part of Zonderkidz, a division of religious publisher Zondervan -- which, in turn, is a division of HarperCollins, a part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. A flyspeck on Murdoch's balance sheet, to be sure, but every little bit helps. posted by Steve M. | 11:08 AM | So I've been following the speculation about possible NSA bugging of CNN's Christiane Amanpour. (For those who don't know, this speculation arose after AMERICAblog's John Aravosis found an online transcript of Andrea's Mitchell's NBC interview with State of War author James Risen, in which, out of nowhere, Mitchell blurted out, "You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?" -- a question that was later deleted from the transcript.) I can't help linking this to the announcement by James Moore, coauthor of the Karl Rove expose Bush's Brain, that he's on a terrorist watch list and now has to go through extra scrutiny every time he flies. ..."Mam, I'd like to know how I got on the No Fly Watch List." "I'm not really authorized to tell you that, sir," she explained after taking down my social security and Texas driver's license numbers. "What can you tell me?" "All I can tell you is that there is something in your background that in some way is similar to someone they are looking for."... "Oh, wait," I said. "One last thing: this guy they are looking for? Did he write books critical of the Bush administration, too?" I have been on the No Fly Watch List for a year. I will never be told the official reason. No one ever is. You cannot sue to get the information. Nothing I have done has moved me any closer to getting off the list.... This is all just speculation so far, but if, among on-the-ground reporters who may have direct contact with al-Qaeda, Amanpour has been singled out for a wiretap, that could be sheer vindictiveness. Putting Moore on an airport watch list is, unquestionably, sheer vindictiveness -- it's pure, unadulterated Nixon. Amanpour is an on-the-ground reporter who may at times have had contact with terrorists. If you want to argue that that justifies a wiretap, you also have to argue that every other reporter who does what she does is in the same category. Should they all be wiretapped? Amanpour, as Aravosis and others have noted, is married to James Rubin, who worked in the Clinton State Department and then in the presidential campaigns of Wesley Clark and John Kerry. That's one reason some have speculated Amanpour might be targeted, if in fact she has been. I'd point out that she's a rare reporter who's complained about press intimidation on the part of the Bush administration. She criticized the administration -- just as Moore has. She may have been punished for it; he certainly has been. There really may be nothing more to this than that. posted by Steve M. | 8:44 AM | Thursday, January 05, 2006 Mad scientists: THE US Department of Defense has revealed plans to develop a lie detector that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed. The Remote Personnel Assessment (RPA) device will also be used to pinpoint fighters hiding in a combat zone, or even to spot signs of stress that might mark someone out as a terrorist or suicide bomber. In a call for proposals on a DoD website, contractors are being given until 13 January to suggest ways to develop the RPA, which will use microwave or laser beams reflected off a subject's skin to assess various physiological parameters without the need for wires or skin contacts.... Because these parameters are the same as those assessed by a polygraph lie detector, the DoD claims the RPA will also indicate the subject's psychological state: if they are agitated or stressed because they are lying, for example. So it will be used as a "remote or concealed lie detector during prisoner interrogation".... Never mind the fact that, as a polygraph examiner points out in the article, you can't do an effective lie-detector examination without the knowledge of the subject -- the technology just doesn't work. Not to worry -- we'll wave the DoD lie-detector machine in the general direction of someone with olive-colored skin and a beard and if the right readouts come up, presto! It's rendition time. Or not, as we see fit. Whether it works properly or not. **** (Somewhat related: this story posted by Steve Gilliard, in which an Office of Naval Research scientist says, "I'd like to be able to pick the terrorist out. I'd like a detector 'tricorder' for intent or evil.") posted by Steve M. | 7:08 PM | By the way, I watched CBS News last night and the story on Abramoff featured exactly zero Democrats. Brought out to comment were two retired GOP congressmen, Vin Weber and Newt Gingrich. Both tut-tutted on cue: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told CBS News that the Abramoff scandal is the latest signal of how unhealthy and dysfunctional the lobbying process in Washington, D.C. has become.... "Things were being done that are indefensible and where members and staff were engaged in things that I think you are going to find were clear and absolute violations of House rules," Gingrich said.... Lobbyist Vin Weber, once part of the House Repubican leadership, said it's up to the Republican majority to fix things -- fast. "Are they going to seize this issue and become the reformers of the lobbying system, or are they going to simply sit back and let it happen to them?" Weber asked. "In which case it could cost them the control of the House." In an astonishing coincidence, the same two guys show up in David Brooks's column today, the one that impressed Atrios so much: First, [Republicans] need to hold new leadership elections. As Newt Gingrich and Vin Weber told me yesterday, Tom DeLay needs to take care of his own legal problems and give up the dream of returning as majority leader. Clearly the Republicans have been rehearsing this dog-and-pony show for months. They had a plan for what to say and do when this scandal exploded. The Democrats didn't. Is the GOP finally going to get its comeuppance? Don't hold your breath. posted by Steve M. | 12:21 PM | Stories like this have been showing up for a while in the Massachusetts media: When Karen Aveyard signed a petition last fall, she had no idea it involved the status of gay marriage in Massachusetts. Aveyard said the person who asked her to sign said nothing about the proposed amendment. "I think it was in front of a grocery store," the Leominster resident said. "I was asked to sign something else, I didn't know it had anything to do with marriage." ... The signature collector asked her to sign a petition regarding an amendment to allow grocery stores to sell wine, Aveyard said. She was surprised to learn her name turned up on the Vote on Marriage list.... Forty thousand of the 170,000 signatures were collected by out-of-state employees from Arno, a political consulting group based in California, Mineau said. Confusion over the content of the petition could have risen because the Arno employees sometimes worked on more than one petition at a time.... Yeah -- "confusion" is one possible explanation, if you're being charitable. But read on. The Boston Globe ran several stories on this subject late last year: ...In each case, the voters said they were asked to sign a ballot question about the sale of wine in grocery stores and were then told to sign a second sheet of paper without being told it was the initiative to ban same-sex marriage. In some cases they said they were told the second sheet was a backup sheet for the wine question. ''She said 'could you sign the backup copy?' She completely made it clear that it was for beer and wine," said Somerville resident Victoria Ellis. ''I was really disgusted by the tactic." Angela McElroy, a Florida college student who worked as a paid signature gatherer, said her boss taught her how to deceive voters by arranging both petitions on her clipboard so she could ask voters to sign twice, but they would see only the language for the wine question. ''Mark trained me personally in bait and switch tactics . . . The fraud was looked upon as a game," she said. ''I felt horrible for lying to so many people." Mark Jacoby is a subcontractor working for California-based Arno Political Consultants.... Ah, yes -- Arno's Mark Jacoby. This isn't the only time his name shows up in connection with funny business: GAINESVILLE, Fla. - Alachua County's elections supervisor gave more than 500 voter registration forms to local prosecutors because some people said their party affiliation was fraudulently changed to Republican by a student working for the GOP. Beverly Hill, Alachua's Democratic elections supervisor, last week began reviewing the forms collected at the University of Florida and other schools by Mark Jacoby, who worked for a contractor that signed up voters for the Republican Party of Florida. "I decided it was fraud," Hill said Tuesday, a day after she gave the forms to the State Attorney's Office in Gainesville. She said her staff checked 30 of them, "And they were across the board (saying), 'No, I never intended to do that.'"... The St. Petersburg Times reported that Jacoby's company, Young Political Majors LLC, worked for a company called JSM Inc., which in turn worked for Arno Political Consultants.... JSM has also drawn the attention of Ohio officials: As Summit County sheriff's deputies search for a suspected forger in a petition drive for an amendment to ban same-sex marriage in Ohio, the activities of a second circulator have come into question. In addition, three of the circulators who participated in what a federal judge called substantial and widespread fraud to get presidential hopeful Ralph Nader on the ballot in Ohio also turned in several anti-gay-marriage petitions to the Summit County Board of Elections.... The three circulators who also turned in petitions for Nader's candidacy were paid by the signature by the same Florida company -- JSM Inc. -- that was hired to collect signatures for the same-sex-marriage question.... This story quotes a petition signer who thought she was signing a petition to increase financial aid for education, when in fact she was signing an anti-gay-marriage petition -- and she was told (incorrectly) that she had to re-register to vote, which she did. Sorry if this is old news to some of you -- I'll admit I haven't paid nearly enough attention to this kind of sleaze. posted by Steve M. | 10:12 AM | Wednesday, January 04, 2006 BUSH HATES MINERS (Alito, Too) Good round-ups of information on mine safety from Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged, Bulworth, and Scott Shields at MyDD. posted by Steve M. | 4:41 PM | Matthew Yglesias thinks this is hilarious: Republican leaders in the Senate have had a plan in place for the last two months to "get ahead of" the Jack Abramoff scandal by coming up with a new proposal for lobbying reform. The leadership "decided in November that lobby reform for the Senate was a priority for this session," and Majority Leader Bill Frist placed Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum in charge of it, Senate sources tell National Review Online. And of course it is hilarious -- if you're a well-informed liberal who knows about the questionable ethics of Frist, Santorum, and so many of their GOP colleagues. Problem is, we're not a nation of liberal wonks: About half of U.S. adults believe most members of Congress are corrupt, a poll released Tuesday suggests. According to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, 49 percent of respondents said most members of Congress are corrupt.... But when asked ... how many congressional Republicans are corrupt, 19 percent of respondents said "almost all" and 28 percent said "many." The response was similar when people were asked about corruption among Democrats: 17 percent said "almost all" and 27 percent said "many." In other words, the public sees no difference whatsoever between the parties on this. The Republicans have been cooking up a response to Jack Abramoff's indictment for months? Bully for them. I'd love to think the Democrats have done the same thing, but I see no evidence of that. As Yglesias's Tapped colleague Sam Rosenfeld notes, back in the early '90s Newt Gingrich didn't let the involvement of a few Republicans in the House banking scandal stop him from going after the Democrats hammer and tongs -- but press reports suggest that the Democratic response is, as usual, mixed: some Democrats plan to use the scandal as a campaign issue, others are cowering in fear. Sorry, that won't wash. Republicans don't control everything because they win battles of ideas -- they control everything because every chance they get they portray their opponents as sick, dangerous, and evil. Sorry if this offends delicate sensibilities, but Democrats won't win until they fight fire with fire. I doubt it'll happen. We thought Enron would critically wound the GOP; it didn't. We thought Abu Ghraib would bring down the White House; it didn't. We're still waiting for more Fitzmas presents in the Plamegate scandal; they haven't arrived. In every case, Republicans sent a message that yes, some mistakes were made, but by a small, finite number of wrongdoers who aren't D.C.'s marquee names; in every case, the public has failed to take it out on the GOP at the polls. I'd love to think this will be different, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. The right-leaners in the media will foreground any and all Democrats caught in this net, and the Democrat or Democrats will be deemed equal to however many Republicans are also caught. And so it will be a D.C. corruption story, not a GOP corruption story. And life will go on as usual. That's unless the Democrats step up now and howl in partisan outrage with one voice, for as long as necessary. Anybody really think that will happen? posted by Steve M. | 2:06 PM | Freedom on the march: Officials on Wednesday blamed Taliban militants for beheading a teacher in a central Afghan town, the latest in a string of attacks against educators at schools where girls study. Armed men decapitated Malim Abdul Habib in his home in the town of Qalat late Tuesday and forced his wife and children to watch, said Ali Khail, a provincial government spokesman.... Reuters recounts a few of the other recent attacks: Last month, guerrillas dragged a teacher from a classroom of teenagers in Helmand province and executed him at the school gate after he ignored their orders to stop teaching girls. Two days later insurgents attacked another school in the same southern province, killing a teenage student and a guard. Oh, sorry, I forgot: Afghanistan's already in the record books as a win. Never mind. posted by Steve M. | 1:54 PM | They really are the biggest screw-ups of all time, aren't they? In a clumsy effort to sabotage Iran's nuclear program, the CIA in 2004 intentionally handed Tehran some top-secret bomb designs laced with a hidden flaw that U.S. officials hoped would doom any weapon made from them, according to a new book about the U.S. intelligence agency. But the Iranians were tipped to the scheme by the Russian defector hired by the CIA to deliver the plans and may have gleaned scientific information useful for designing a bomb, writes New York Times reporter James Risen in "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration."... David Albright, a former weapons inspector for the IAEA, [said] that the plans could have shaved many years off Iran's nuclear effort.... Letting 9/11 happen. Failing to capture bin Laden and Zawahiri. Failing to bring down Zarqawi and alowing his organization to grow and flourish. Miring the U.S. in Iraq. Straining alliances. Wreaking havoc on the U.S. military. And this. When will the Right realize that no president in recent memory has endangered U.S. national security like Bush? (If you can't read the story, try this Google search.) posted by Steve M. | 10:43 AM | Tuesday, January 03, 2006 Well, it's going to be an election year, and here in New York it appears that the GOP Goon Squad is already hard at work. Now the squad is targeting Eliot Spitzer, the crusading state attorney general who's the front-runner in this year's race for governor. And the story is a bit complicated. The first sucker punch came a few days before Christmas. John Whitehead, a sometime GOP fund-raiser who used to be the chairman of Goldman Sachs and now chairs the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation and Lower Manhattan Development Fund, wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal alleging that Spitzer had threatened him because he'd written an earlier op-ed criticizing Spitzer's investigation of Hank Greenberg, head of the insurance firm AIG. Whitehead claimed Spitzer phoned him when the piece appeared; his account of what was said deserves the sort of portentous music that accompanies death threats on daytime soap operas: ...After asking me one or two questions about where I got my facts, he came right to the point. I was so shocked that I wrote it all down right away so I would be sure to remember it exactly as he said it. This is what he said: "Mr. Whitehead, it's now a war between us and you've fired the first shot. I will be coming after you. You will pay the price. This is only the beginning and you will pay dearly for what you have done. You will wish you had never written that letter." ... He went on in the same vein for several more sentences and then abruptly hung up. I was astounded. No one had ever talked to me like that before. It was a little scary.... As New York Observer blogger Matthew Schuerman and others have pointed out, there's something odd about the timing of this. Whitehead's article appeared in April. Whitehead waited eight months to tell this tale, then claimed he had to tell it now because "there have been rumors in the media as to what happened next" -- even though there really haven't been any such rumors. What's going on? Now for Part Two. You know that terrorist trick -- I think the IRA invented it -- of setting off a bomb and waiting for the police to arrive and a crowd to gather, then setting off another bomb? Well, that appears to be what the Goon Squad is doing with stories about Spitzer. Now, according to an "exclusive" in today's New York Post, we have what seems to be a miraculous case of recovered memory on the part of a top figure on Sean Hannity's radio show. This guy says that he recalls a Spitzer threat, too! And all because of Whitehead: ...Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is being accused again of threatening to use his office to punish an opponent -- this time, nationally syndicated radio talk-show host Sean Hannity.... [Eric] Stanger [of Hannity's staff] told The Post that the alleged threat reminded him of the charges now being leveled by ... John Whitehead.... "That's really brought back memories," Stanger said.... It's like an episode of Perry Mason -- the second Whitehead op-ed was so shocking it cured Stanger's amnesia! And if you think Whitehead's prose reeks of cheap melodrama, check out the dialogue Stanger's cooked up: ...Stanger ... said Spitzer was a telephone guest on the Hannity show in 2000 and at first hung up in anger in response to comments made by the conservative-oriented host. "A minute later, I looked down and the hot line was ringing. It was Spitzer, very angry, very agitated, very upset, and he said, 'Let me tell you something: I fully intend to use the capacity of my office to act on this,' " Stanger told The Post. "I was really floored, and I said, 'Is that a threat, sir?' " Stanger continued. With that, Stanger said, Spitzer "quickly changed his tone," insisting, "No, no, no. It's not a threat." But Stanger said Spitzer then threatened to organize a boycott of the Hannity show, saying, " 'I have a lot of friends in government, and I'm going to organize a boycott of the show.' And then he hung up." Yeah, right. Let's review: Eliot Spitzer is the attorney general of the state of New York. He wants to be the state's next governor. And Stanger and the Post want us to believe he would endanger his political career by announcing to a top aide to a highly influential radio and TV host that he's going to misuse the power of his office ("I fully intend to use the capacity of my office to act on this"). Moreover, Stanger and the Post want us believe Spitzer would announce this threat by saying, "I have a lot of friends in government." That's beyond stupid. Think about it: If Russell Crowe were threatening a hotel clerk, what would he say? Would he say something as pathetic as "I have a lot of friends in Hollywood"? Oh, but it gets better: Stanger ... add[ed] that Hannity has ordered that a search be made for the audiotape of the incident and, if found, may play it on his show this week. Oh yeah -- I'm sure that tape will really turn up. Somebody decided to launch this campaign at the beginning of the year because now is when the governor's race starts to get serious. That's why Whitehead didn't write his op-ed until eight months after he allegedly had his "scary" conversation with Spitzer. And the real point of all this was to make the war on Spitzer a crusade of the Fox/talk radio right. Maybe Spitzer can be made a national pariah among these yahoos. Maybe the smear campaign will open their wallets. I bet it's working like a charm. I won't even get into the accompanying Post op-ed, which chides Spitzer for being a wealthy man's son and accuses him of being an enemy of the common man because he goes after Wall Street guys. I'm not making this up; it actually makes sense if you're a wingnut. ("His zealous prosecution/persecution of Wall Street companies, supposedly to protect investors and shareholders, has consequences that might be lost on a born-to-riches man whose political career was bankrolled by a real-estate mogul father.") It's basically GOP Attack Politics 101 -- the Democrat is always the devious, effete elitist (remember that Poppy Bush said the policies of son-of-immigrants Michael Dukakis were "born in Harvard Yard's boutique"). And we've got ten more months of this to go before Election Day. **** Oops, almost left this out: According to the January 1 Post, a "top Democratic operative" chided Spitzer for what he allegedly said to Whitehead -- and what do you know, the "top Democratic operative" is anonymous! Oh, but I'm sure this person exists! And "other Democratic insiders" -- also anonymous -- say Spitzer's temper makes him a "walking time bomb." These people in the GOP and right-wing attack media really are sewer rats. posted by Steve M. | 11:36 PM | Hmmm ... I thought only America-hating liberals were saying that the Army is worn out: U.S. airmen are increasingly on the ground in Iraq, driving in convoys and even working with detainees -- a shift in the Air Force's historic mission that military officials call necessary to bolster the strapped Army. The main aerial hub for the war in Iraq has 1,500 airmen doing convoy operations in Iraq and 1,000 working with detainees, training Iraqis and performing other activities not usually associated with the Air Force, said Col. Tim Hale, commander of the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing. "Every one of us has learned that we are in a nontraditional state in our armed forces," he said, standing outside an auditorium at an air base in Kuwait.... "More and more Air Force are doing Army jobs," said Senior Master Sgt. Matt Rossoni, 46, of San Francisco. "It's nothing bad about the Army. They're just tapped out."... The Navy is seeing the same trend, using its fighter aircraft to escort convoys and protect oil infrastructure and sending sailors in boats to contact fishermen from Saudi Arabia and even Iran for tips on terror suspects. "In the last three or four years we've done a lot more of that," Rear Adm. James A. Winnefeld, commander of Carrier Strike Group 2, said aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.... And, in addition, The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps flew thousands of missions in support of U.S. ground troops in Iraq this fall, including attacks by unmanned Predator aircraft armed with Hellfire missiles, military records show. The number of air strikes, of course, has been increasing dramatically -- just as Seymour Hersh predicted; you probably already know that a U.S. air strike just killed six members of an Iraqi family. Onward.... posted by Steve M. | 2:58 PM | I was elected to protect the American people from harm. --President Bush, 1/1/06 Facing cuts in antiterrorism financing, the Department of Homeland Security plans to announce today that it will evaluate new requests for money from an $800 million aid program for cities based less on politics and more on assessments of where terrorists are likely to strike and potentially cause the greatest damage, department officials say. The changes to the program, the Urban Area Security Initiative, are being driven in part by a reduction in the overall pool of money for antiterrorism efforts. For 2006, Congress has appropriated $120 million less in these urban grants than for 2005.... [Homeland Security Secretary Michael] Chertoff, in a speech last month, said the changes he was considering would require an acknowledgment that the nation could not protect itself against all risks. "That means tough choices," he said. "And choices mean focusing on the risks which are the greatest. And that means some risks get less focus.".... --New York Times, 1/3/06 Yeah, I know: The government really can't protect everyone from every threat (and obviously it's good that the priorities have shifted to higher-risk areas). But it still infuriates me that top officials of President Macho's administration and party are subject to, as far as I can tell, absolutely no criticism for saying flat out that we have to watch our pennies when it comes to homeland security. I seem to recall that a big reason Bush et al. are still in office is the fact that they and their coat-holders in the media howled in outrage when a certain Democrat talked about reducing terrorism to the level of a "nuisance." It was utterly unacceptable then to suggest anything less than a maximalist, zero-tolerance assault on The Enemy. Now? Whoops -- sorry: We have more will than wallet. Which, of course, was an absolutely unavoidable set of circumstances -- right? They call them the PEP and Pease provisions of tax law and they are on their way out. If you are wealthy, this should make you smile. You could be a little richer. PEP and Pease refer to two tax increases adopted in 1990 when President George H.W. Bush broke his "read my lips" promise against boosting taxes in order to cut the deficit, angering many in the Republican Party. But on Sunday, thanks to a law quietly passed in 2001 when his son, George W. Bush, was in the White House, the PEP and Pease provisions --- essentially limitations on tax exemptions --- began a five-year phaseout at a cost of $27 billion. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank here, some 53.5 percent of this money will go to households earning more than $1 million. Another 43.2 percent will go to those with incomes between $200,000 and $1 million. The rest will go to those earning between $100,000 and $200,000.... Millionaires will receive an average tax cut of $19,000 a year when the two provisions are wiped out, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities said. The center added that this comes on top of an average tax cut of $103,000 millionaires received in 2005 because of other tax cuts adopted since 2001.... Yeah yeah yeah -- the rich get tax cuts, government programs get squeezed. I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Do you know who should regularly be shouting from the rooftops about this sort of thing? Joe Lieberman. What is the point of constantly reminding the world that (a) you are still a Democrat but (b) no one can gainsay your patriotism and hawkishness if you never take advantage of the political capital you accrue by means of your support of the war to mount a serious challenge to any Bush/GOP policies -- especially on matters of security? This really would be a perfect fit for Lieberman if he were what he claims to be, a sincere Democrat who's also a sincere hawk. But he's not -- Washington is like a classroom in which the White House, the GOP, and right-leaners in the media like to whack Democrats' hands with a steel ruler when they act like Democrats, and all Joe cares about is being the teacher's pet, the class snitch. posted by Steve M. | 11:59 AM | Monday, January 02, 2006 How long is it likely to take before Iraqi troops are really able to stand up and allow U.S. troops to stand down? Let's ask the U.S. troops themselves: How soon do you think the Iraqi military will be ready to replace large numbers of American troops? Less than a year 2% 1-2 years 27% 3-5 years 40% 5-10 years 17% More than 10 years 7% No opinion/no answer 6% How long do you think the U.S. will need to stay in Iraq to reach its goals? Less than a year 2% 1-2 years 11% 3-5 years 35% 5-10 years 30% More than 10 years 15% No opinion/no answer 6% Yup -- nearly two thirds think it will take at least three years for the Iraqis to replace a lot of American troops, and 80% think the U.S. will have to be in Iraq for at least three more years. These results come from a poll of readers of the Military Times newspapers -- Army Times, Navy Times, Air Force Times, and Marine Corps Times -- a majority of whom have deployed to Iraq and/or Afghanistan. (Main story and links to results and related stories here.) In this poll, right-wingers will seize on the fact that the troops say their morale is high and think the press doesn't report enough good news from Iraq; Bush critics will seize on this: Support for President Bush and for the war in Iraq has slipped significantly... Approval of the president's Iraq policy fell 9 percentage points from 2004; a bare majority, 54 percent, now say they view his performance on Iraq as favorable. Support for his overall performance fell 11 points, to 60 percent, among active-duty readers of the Military Times newspapers.... The poll also found diminished optimism that U.S. goals in Iraq can be accomplished, and a somewhat smaller drop in support for the decision to go to war in 2003.... And this is interesting: As in the previous two years, Military Times Poll respondents were reluctant to express opinions, even anonymously, about the commander in chief or his policies. About one in five refused to say whether they approved of the president's performance on Iraq or overall. "That's my boss," Army Lt. Col. Earnestine Beatty said in a follow-up interview. "I can't comment." So the troops are still upbeat, but less so -- and when you hear that big numbers of troops can probably come home this year, remember that the troops don't believe that. posted by Steve M. | 10:14 PM | I saw this on Friday and thought it was a bit disturbing: ...In a Bush administration revision of plans for Pentagon succession in a doomsday scenario, three of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's most loyal advisers moved ahead of the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force. A little-noticed holiday week executive order from President Bush moved the Pentagon's intelligence chief to the No. 3 spot in the succession hierarchy behind Rumsfeld.... The Army secretary, which long held the No. 3 spot, was dropped to sixth. ... in its current incarnation, the doomsday plan moves to near the top three undersecretaries who are Rumsfeld loyalists and who previously worked for Vice President Dick Cheney when he was defense secretary. ...Under the new plan, Rumsfeld ally Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary for intelligence, moved up to the third spot. Former Ambassador Eric Edelman, the policy undersecretary, and Kenneth Krieg, the undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics, hold the fourth and fifth positions.... At least one big-cheese lefty blogger, Matthew Yglesias, thinks this is actually a positive development. Really, Matt? Why? Let's see. Cambone, as you may well know, is a dreadful human being: he was an advocate of missile defense and space-based weapons, he worked with the PNAC, then he was a top aide to Rumsfeld working on military "transformation" -- and then, most notoriously, he sent General Geoffrey Miller to Abu Ghraib to "Gitmoize" the prison. Yeah, there's a guy you want to reward. Eric Edelman used to work for Scooter Libby and became an undersecretary of defense after receiving a recess appointment; Edelman, in a written statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, had denied that he had any involvement in any government investigation despite the fact that Libby had discussed Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger with Edelman before Wilson's name became public, and thus is named by title in Libby's indictment. I don't know much about Krieg. He used to be a VP at International Paper. (The guy who'll be #2, ahead of Cambone, is Gordon England, and he's also a suit: he used to be an executive at Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, two major defense contractors, but he's never served in the military. He's expected to receive a recess appointment as deputy secretary of defense.) Apart from the dubiousness of the lineup itself, and the scary Cheney connections, what I find upsetting is that Rumsfeld is so obsessed with his own turf battle with the career military that even if a nuclear bomb wipes out much of our government, he wants to prevail. Not prevail against the people who bombed us -- he wants to prevail against the Pentagon careerists. That's sick. But that really is Rumsfeld. posted by Steve M. | 12:10 PM | Newsflash! Democracy doesn't instantly turn every nation it touches into Shangri-La! Democracies -- especially brand-new ones -- don't abandon bellicosity, and even established democracies only refrain from fighting other established democracies. All of this is revealed in two remarkable caches of documents, apparently heretofore untapped by anyone in the Bush administration or sympathetic to it; the document caches are known as "world history" and "the last couple of decades' worth of newspapers." ...In a series of studies culminating in their new book, "Electing to Fight," the political scientists Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder argue that new democracies are often unstable and thus particularly warlike. Mansfield and Snyder note that democratizing countries often lack the rule of law, organized political parties and professional news media. Without those restraining institutions firmly in place, empowering the public can mean empowering bellicose nationalists. As communism crumbled in Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Franjo Tudjman in Croatia used populist nationalism to fuel their rise to power -- and to start a blood bath. Mansfield and Snyder try to prove that young democracies without fully formed domestic institutions are especially aggressive; their examples range from France's disastrous 1870 attack on Prussia to Turkey's 1974 invasion of Cyprus to Vladimir Putin's continuing brutal clampdown in Chechnya. At best, scholars agree, the democratic peace exists only when established liberal democracies face one another. Confronting nondemocracies, established democracies are about as warlike as normal dictatorships. Think of Britain, France and Israel's attacking Egypt in 1956, or Bush's invasion of Iraq. When a democratic government squabbles with a dictator, it often doesn't trust the dictator enough for serious negotiations, and war is a likely result. Elihu Root, who'd been Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of state, said in 1917: "To be safe, democracy must kill its enemy when it can and where it can. The world ... must be all democratic or all Prussian." ...Mansfield and Snyder cite writers like Samuel P. Huntington, who gingerly emphasizes that democratization works best in proper sequence: first establishing functioning institutions -- political parties, courts -- and then allowing widespread elections. Poland and Chile democratized successfully, Mansfield and Snyder say, but Iraq, it seems, has not. They warn that "unleashing Islamic mass opinion through a sudden democratization could only raise the likelihood of war." .... But -- but -- but freedom is good! And people want good things! And when they have good things, they'll shun bad things! Purple fingers! Purple fingers! Purple fingers! Pay no attention to that commando unit throwing dead Iraqis into a ditch! posted by Steve M. | 10:18 AM | Sunday, January 01, 2006 Hey, happy new year ... Long travel day. I thought I'd be posting today, but I promise I will tomorrow. posted by Steve M. | 10:49 PM | |
|
|
