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Friday, March 31, 2006 FUN FACT FROM THE WINGNUTS' PARALLEL UNIVERSE "Did you know that in many ways the terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay have more rights than corporate CEOs and their employees?" --blurb from Mark Levin, talk-show host, National Review Online contributing editor, and president of the right-wing Landmark Legal Federation, for John Hasnas's book Trapped: When Acting Ethically Is Against the Law, published by the Cato Institute, which "examines over-criminalization in an age of corporate scandals" Quoted in Floyd Norris's column in today's New York Times (TimesSelect only). posted by Steve M. | 3:38 PM | Should we surprised to learn that prayers offered by total strangers don't help the healing process and may actually make things worse, as a newly published study reveals? Read to the end of the linked story and you'll see that an earlier University of New Mexico study of alcoholics in recovery also found that those who knew they were the subjects of remote prayers fared worse. Previous studies that have shown positive results for remote prayer have been tainted. As The New York Times noted in 2004, the source of data for a 2001 study claiming that remote prayer could increase the likelihood of a successful pregnancy was Daniel Wirth, a lawyer who later pleaded guilty to conspiracy in a business-fraud case; the case was unrelated to the study, but the journal that published the findings pulled the paper from its Web site. And according to a 2002 Wired magazine story, a 1998 study of the effects on remote prayer on AIDS patients used dubious methods of massaging data, incuding the unblinding and reblinding of data to help the scientists find correlations suggested to them after the information was collected. That study also showed that patients who were prayed for did worse on many measures of healing. I don't know why so much of this research focuses on remote prayer. I suppose it reflects what a lot of American Christians feel: that they'd really like other people to believe exactly what they believe. They believe in proselytizing, in converting the reluctant, and they believe God steps in to lend a hand when they do this. In other words, they believe in a God who's not so much all-powerful as pushy, like themselves. And I guess a fair number of researchers are willing to take funding from these people to test these beliefs. posted by Steve M. | 2:34 PM | One of these countries is The Greatest Country In The World. Guess which one: Country A: Gasoline prices will be unusually high and shortages might occur this summer, because the U.S. ethanol industry can't keep up with the demand for fuel-grade alcohol to mix with gasoline, the head of the U.S. Energy Information Administration told a Senate committee Wednesday. ... EIA, in a report last month warning of shortages, said that "new (ethanol) facilities will not start soon enough to meet 2006 demand." That, EIA head Guy Caruso told the committee, "could cause temporary supply dislocations and may cause price volatility." ... Country B: ... in Brazil, the fifth largest country in the world, there's a plan to become free from imported oil, not in the next 30 years, not in the next 10, but by the end of this year.... That's primarily because while the rest of the world was mapping the human genome, scientists in Brazil were mapping the DNA of sugar in an effort to create a cleaner, cheaper alternative to gasoline: sugarcane ethanol. They succeeded. Brazil's ethanol is about 30 percent less expensive than gasoline; according to the World Bank, it's about 50 cents cheaper per gallon to produce sugarcane ethanol. And although ethanol gets slightly less mileage, it's still cheaper on a per-mile-driven basis.... As chief economic advisor to Brazil's finance minister in the 1970s, Eduardo Carvalho pushed for government subsidies to help the fledgling sugarcane industry take shape.... Beginning in the 1970s, every gas station in the country was required to have at least one ethanol pump and the government mandated that all gasoline be mixed with ethanol. ... as the ethanol began to replace gasoline, that led to another development: a brand new kind of car called a "flex vehicle." The car gives you the option of using a gasoline ethanol blend or 100 percent ethanol depending on whatever is cheaper. In San Paolo, Brazil, ethanol is the cheaper fuel to use. Today, 70 percent of new cars sold in Brazil are flex vehicles, which cost no more than a regular car. ...The U.S. has made inroads on ethanol, but the focus here has been on corn-based ethanol, which is more expensive to process. By any measure, the U.S. is still probably decades behind Brazil on this alternative energy front. Ahhh, who cares? Encouraging innovation and energy independence through government subsidies is for wussies. U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A! posted by Steve M. | 11:49 AM | The unemployment rate among veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is very high. Want to know why? Well, you could seek out the truth, or you could let Ollie North lie to you: Part of the answer is found in the fact that so few corporate executives and personnel managers are veterans themselves. Couple that with a drumbeat of adverse publicity about the war, a mainstream media fixation on military "atrocities" and the constant harping about post-traumatic stress disorder -- PTSD -- and one has to wonder how any war veteran gets hired. On a recent flight to Texas, my seatmate, a corporate CEO, asked if "all the troops coming back from 'over there' were 'screwed up.'" He cited a study alleging that, "more than a third of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan needed psychological treatment." Now, want the truth? VA statistics show that in the first quarter of 2005, the monthly average of unemployed veterans ages 20 to 24 was 43,000, up significantly from the 2004 monthly average of 33,000. Officials said that’s partly because most service members seriously injured in Iraq and Afghanistan are in the early stages of their military careers and possess limited transferable job skills or very little civilian work experience. They said unless something is done to better prepare these separating service members for careers outside the military, the rate of unemployment for them will continue to rise. I'd add that a lot of these kids joined the service in large part because there wasn't much economic opportunity for them otherwise, and now they're back where they started. But Ollie North would rather blame the evil civilian world, where we all hate veterans and spit on them every chance we get while trying not to get any spit on our Birkenstocks. posted by Steve M. | 10:46 AM | Thursday, March 30, 2006 Phyllis Schlafly, quoted in today's New York Times: "I debated [Betty] Friedan several times. She was always very ugly to deal with and debate, and made it clear that she hated me. I rejected all press calls to comment on her death; I'm not inclined to say critical things when somebody dies." Yeah, we can tell. posted by Steve M. | 9:21 PM | Howard Kaloogian posted phony evidence of the success of a war that's cost America billions of dollars and thousands of lives. Newsweek carelessly referred to Kaloogian as a congressman rather than a congressional candidate in a Web headline (bottom left in linked image -- see the third bullet under "Newsweek online edition"). To Kaloogian, apparently, these two things are morally equivalent. posted by Steve M. | 4:59 PM | IMPEACH CHENEY FIRST This is from NewsMax: Dick Cheney: Iraq Documents Show Saddam-Osama Tie Vice President Dick Cheney predicted Wednesday that thousands of boxes of documents captured from Saddam's Hussein's former regime will show that the Iraqi dictator had a much closer relationship with Osama bin Laden than was previously known. "I think what we'll find as we get a chance to go through and analyze these documents -- there's some 50,000 boxes of them that are now being made available here over the next few months -- that we'll see a pretty complete picture that Saddam Hussein did, in fact, deal with some pretty nefarious characters out there," Cheney told Fox News Radio's Tony Snow. Asked if he was referring to Osama bin Laden, Cheney replied: "Yes, we don't know the full scale of it there yet, and I don't want to make a hard and fast prediction here. But there is reporting, obviously, that we've seen over the years that there was some kind of a relationship there between the Iraqis and Osama bin Laden." ... There you go. Still believe the mainstream-press story that the administration didn't want this stuff out and had to have its arm twisted by Congressman Peter Hoekstra? I'm still not sure whether these guys are lying or are simply unable to let go of a delicious pipe dream, but this seems like the work of a seasoned liar. Note that Cheney is very, very careful in his wording here. "[S]ome kind of a relationship there between the Iraqis and Osama bin Laden"? Well, yes -- as Peter Bergen put it in a New York Times op-ed a couple of days ago, "Iraqi officials were playing footsie with Al Qaeda in the mid-1990's, but these desultory contacts never yielded any cooperation." That qualifies, barely, as "some kind of a relationship." And Cheney adds that "Saddam Hussein did, in fact, deal with some pretty nefarious characters out there" -- weaseling out by naming no names. (It's true, of course -- he did deal with some pretty nefarious characters.) Filing a false police report is a crime. Despite the weasel words, in a just world this would be regarded as an impeachable high crime. posted by Steve M. | 12:57 PM | MORE ON SCALIA The photographer who took the picture of Antonin Scalia's disputed gesture over the weekend says the original story was right. The Boston Herald has the story and the photo: ..."It's inaccurate and deceptive of him to say there was no vulgarity in the moment," said Peter Smith, the Boston University assistant photojournalism professor who made the shot. Despite Scalia's insistence that the Sicilian gesture was not offensive and had been incorrectly characterized by the Herald as obscene, the photographer said the newspaper "got the story right." Smith said the jurist "immediately knew he'd made a mistake, and said, 'You're not going to print that, are you?'" ... There's a tipoff -- if the gesture meant "I don't care," why would he not want the photo shown? Smith was working as a freelance photographer for the Boston archdiocese’s weekly newspaper at a special Mass for lawyers Sunday when a Herald reporter asked the justice how he responds to critics who might question his impartiality as a judge given his public worship. "The judge paused for a second, then looked directly into my lens and said, 'To my critics, I say, 'Vaffanculo,'" punctuating the comment by flicking his right hand out from under his chin, Smith said. The Italian phrase means "(expletive) you." ... Yes, that's essentially what it means. (Not work safe.) (The story does note that the reporter didn't hear the curse.) Let's go to the image:  That doesn't look like "fanning the fingers of my right hand under my chin." That looks a lot more like the gesture I remember from my childhood -- a quick, sharp, abrupt, angry flick of the fingers past the chin, which was always angry, never indifferent. By the way, Sopranos stars have mixed opinions about the gesture -- a couple agree that it's not obscene, but Joseph Gannascoli (who plays Vito Spadafore) disagrees: "It's not like grabbing your crotch, not that bad an obscenity," Gannascoli said. "But it's an obscenity. It's something you would do after paying a bookie, to your bookie, but not something you would do in church." And John Fiore (Gigi Cestone) says: "It's not that bad, but I wouldn't do it to my mother. No way. Would I do it in church? These days, maybe. It depends if the priest was giving me the hairy eyeball." Fair enough. (Hat tip: JudiPhilly.) **** UPDATE: Damn, Atrios beat me to this. And he's not even Italian. By the way, I can assure you that the Peter Smith's e-mail in-box at BU will be completely filled with hate mail by this afternoon, if it isn't already. **** UPDATE: Roger Ailes* speculates on a possible Constitutional crisis. *The good one. posted by Steve M. | 10:20 AM | Jill Carroll, the Christian Science Monitor reporter who was kidnapped in Iraq in January, has been freed. The folks at Free Republic are just thrilled: Before too long,watch for her to speak about how well she was treated and how much she admires them and their cause. ***** No doubt whatsoever about that - I smell "usefull idiot"... Bigtime. ***** I wonder if she got a nice tan. ***** I saw her twin sister on TV (prior to this news). I smell a rat. Time will tell. ***** First they find 3 ungrateful 'peace activists' sitting in an empty, unguarded house. Now jill caroll gets released unscathed after no one decides she is worth the ransom or demands. Anyone else feel like they are getting punked? I'm starting to wonder if these kidnappings are part of an hoax/extortion scheme. ***** I wonder how much money her buddies captors got for her... ***** She's back from Burkaback Mountain and coming to Mohamad. ***** Ever since the lady from the Italian commie paper got that security guy killed in that "hostage" scam I've been suspicious of these things as actually being leftist extortion scams. ***** She will be spouting the same crap the peace activists that were released did. She will say they treated her well and they were kidnappers just in it for the money. They weren't the nice insurgents who are too busy fighting against the evil army of Bush to kidnap innocent people. ***** You cannot help but have your heart turn to stone.... ***** Her father was just interviewed on FNC. He seems like a really nice guy. Sounds like a rebellious daughter. We can only hope that her eyes have been opened to the truth after this.......however, I am not holding my breath. ***** ONE BIG FRAUD!! This is the heart and soul of the party that runs the entire federal government. Great. posted by Steve M. | 7:12 AM | Wednesday, March 29, 2006 JUSTICE BLOWHARD RESPONDS I see that Antonin Scalia has written to the Boston Herald to insist that his reportedly obscene gesture a couple of days ago at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross was not obscene. The Herald has a follow-up story here; Scalia's letter is here and here. Scalia wrote: Your reporter, an up-and-coming "gotcha" star named Laurel J. Sweet, asked me (o-so-sweetly) what I said to those people who objected to my taking part in such public religious ceremonies as the Red Mass I had just attended. I responded, jocularly, with a gesture that consisted of fanning the fingers of my right hand under my chin. Seeing that she did not understand, I said "That's Sicilian," and explained its meaning -- which was that I could not care less.... He goes on to cite (accurately) a passage from Luigi Barzini's book The Italians that suggests he's right -- if the gesture described in the book is the gesture he actually made. Personally, I never saw anyone gently fan fingers under the chin back in my old Italian neighborhood; then again, I'm only half-Sicilian. I did, however, see plenty of people flick the back of a hand abruptly at an object of their anger, often accompanied by a Sicilian curse (see my previous post on this). Scalia's letter concludes: How could your reporter leap to the conclusion (contrary to my explanation) that the gesture was obscene? Alas, the explanation is evident in the following line from her article: "'That’s Sicilian,' the Italian jurist said, interpreting for the 'Sopranos' challenged." From watching too many episodes of the Sopranos, your staff seems to have acquired the belief that any Sicilian gesture is obscene -- especially when made by an "Italian jurist." (I am, by the way, an American jurist.) OK, maybe the gesture wasn't obscene; maybe the reporter confused two (very similar) gestures. Apart from that, though, what we have here is Scalia responding to a reporter's question with a specifically ethnic gesture, which he then explained was a specifically ethnic gesture, yet now he's pissed off that someone mentioned his ethnicity while writing about it. What a jerk. And by the way, I wouldn't say Scalia's an American jurist or an Italian jurist; he's an Italian-American jurist. That's certainly what we should call him if he's going to play the ethnicity card every time it suits him and then whine every time it's played back at him. posted by Steve M. | 10:25 PM | Boy, this is how you know things are starting to get a bit embarrassing for the Bush administration in Afghanistan: the military is putting out press releases about rebuilding schools there. This one just opened Saturday in Nangarhar Province. "Coalition forces funded the $25,000 project," we're told. Hey, do you see any girls in the ribbon-cutton picture at the link? Or in this picture ("Hundreds of students gather at Agam High School for its official reopening ceremony")? Me either. posted by Steve M. | 6:51 PM | Maybe you've been following the story of Howard Kaloogian, a right-winger who's trying to replace Randy "Duke" Cunningham in the Senate. He posted a photo of a calm, orderly, bustling city street on his campaign Web site, accompanied by a caption claiming that the photo was taken on a recent trip to Baghdad. It's now been determined that the photo shows a street in a suburb of Istanbul. I'm bringing this up because I want to remind you that Kaloogian is not just another right-winger who occasionally shades the truth. He's a pro at stretching the truth, and he's a big-league political operator, so he knows exactly what he's doing. As Wikipedia notes: In 2003, Kaloogian became the chairman of the Recall Gray Davis Committee, dedicated to the ousting of California's governor, Gray Davis.... Kaloogian is a founder and co-chairman of Move America Forward, a controversial conservative political action group.... Kaloogian serves on the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project and was the Chairman of the Defend Reagan Project, which campaigned in 2003 for CBS to drop a docudrama about Ronald Reagan, The Reagans. The campaign was successful, as CBS did not show the mini-series, but handed it off to Showtime. Kaloogian and MAF tried to browbeat theaters into not screening Fahrenheit 9/11, asserting that the movie was endorsed by Hezbollah. MAF is running a petition drive to censure Jimmy Carter. MAF has run an "I (HEART) GITMO" campaign. Last year MAF sent a "truth tour" of right-wing talk-radio hosts to Iraq. The tour was partially sponsored by the Defense Department. MAF has produced TV ads insisting Iraq had WMDs "shortly before the U.S. led invasion," as well as "extensive ties" to Al Qaeda. There's also the anti-Cindy Sheehan campaign, the pro-John Bolton campaign, the campaign to expel the UN from the United States, etc., etc. Some of that is just straightforward political advocacy. Some of it is outright fraud. And Kaloogian could (still, even after this embarrassment) be the next Congressman from California? posted by Steve M. | 1:49 PM | Via Juan Cole, I see that those freedom-loving Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq have sentenced a journalist to 18 months in prison "for allegedly defaming Kurdish political leaders." Nice -- a year and a half in the joint for insults. I fully expect Christopher Hitchens to issue a blistering denunciation of his Kurdish pals. (Kidding.) posted by Steve M. | 12:40 PM | In yesterday's Washington Post, E. J. Dionne wrote about John McCain's recent attempts to mend fences with the Republican right. What Dionne said sounds sensible -- but he's flat wrong about this: ...If McCain spends the next two years obviously positioning himself to win Republican primary votes, he will start to look like just another politician. Once lost, a maverick's image is hard to earn back. Moreover, McCain is winning a hearing from previously reluctant Republicans as the one person who might save the party if Bush's popularity continues to sink. But if McCain gets too close to Bush in the next two years, he will no longer have his independence as a selling point. And if Bush should make a comeback, a lot of Republicans flirting with McCain now out of necessity will happily abandon him for someone more to their liking.... Er, no. The press long ago got hold of (in the Daily Howler's phrase) "a story it likes" about McCain, the maverick story, the story that he's a pure, sainted, shoot-from-the-hip guy who's not afraid to go after even members of his own party. The public likes that story, too. So that's going to be the story no matter what McCain does, unless something extraordinary dislodges it. That's how it works in American politics. Bill Clinton was a big liberal even after NAFTA and welfare reform and the Defense of Marriage Act. George W. Bush was seen as a moderate all through the 2000 campaign, even as he talked about Reaganite tax cuts and Social Security privatization, and even as he declared that his ideal judges were Scalia and Thomas and his favorite philosopher was Jesus. Bush's reputation as a moderate -- the term of art was "compassionate conservative" -- survived the Ashcroft nomination and the first tax cut and the curtailment of stem-cell research; for the press and most Americans, Bush's conservatism became obvious only after 9/11, and only gradually even then. (You can change your reputation without a world-historical cataclysm, but it's not easy. Jimmy Carter's did it, but only by devoting his entire post-presidential life to becoming a living saint. Then again, that's not even a huge leap from his image in the 70s.) Does Dionne think McCain's going to stop seeming like a maverick because he's speaking at the graduation ceremony at Jerry Falwell's college? Nah. All McCain has to do that evening is go on Hardball and seem like his old self, and Chris Matthews's guy-crush will remain intact. McCain could harm his reputation as a maverick, but he'd have to work really, really hard. The biggest obstacle to this is the fact that GOP rightists still hate McCain no matter how hard he tries to pander to them. He won't look like a sellout until he can find a buyer. He'll never get to that point unless, perhaps, he masters some of the really obscure wingnut shibboleths. He'd have to go on Imus and declare that Jamie Gorelick caused 9/11 and should be shot for treason, or cancel an appearance on The Today Show because he refuses to be interviewed by "Katie Commie," or hold forth about the evils of Jimmy Carter. He'd have to do that -- the wingnuts want respect. Only then would they truly embrace him (maybe), and only then (maybe) would the press begin describing him as anything other than a maverick. posted by Steve M. | 8:05 AM | Tuesday, March 28, 2006 Interesting point made by Bulworth late last week, before Abdul Rahman was released: Should Afghanistan "give in" to international pressure and substitute international notions of basic human rights in place of its own constitution and religious mores? This may sound like a callous question to raise regarding the case of the Afghan Christian convert facing a death penalty under Sharia law in Afghanistan. But isn't this basically the complaint of far-right conservatives in this country when U.S. Supreme Court justices appear to base their decisions at least in part on international laws and concepts of human rights? Complaints that have, as the link points out, reached the level of death threats? Right: What we've wanted Afghan's justice system to do in this case -- infuriating Afghan conservatives -- is the same thing that infuriates American conservatives when it happens in our own justice system. Our absolutists don't take it very well either when our system takes into account the views of the rest of the world. posted by Steve M. | 3:41 PM | In today's New York Times, Scott Shane writes about the Bush administration's decision to dump Saddam-era documents on the Internet, many of them untranslated. I've written off and on about the document dump, most recently in this post. Unlike some of the commenters here, I don't think the Bushies have planted any freshly forged smoking-gun documents in the dump, just as they didn't plant WMDs in Iraq. (What? Plant evidence? I think, to them, that would be like admitting they were wrong about the war, which they won't do, even to themselves. I think they still think they'll find real smoking guns.) On the other hand, I do think old Chalabi-generated forgeries are in there (as I note in the post linked above); Shane acknowledges as much ("the intelligence official said ... the database included 'a fair amount of forgeries,' sold by Iraqi hustlers or concocted by Iraqis opposed to Mr. Hussein"). Unlike Shane, I don't believe for a minute that the Bushies didn't want the documents released and Congressman Peter Hoekstra hectored them until they gave in -- to me that's as plausible as the notion that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were operating completely independently of the Bush campaign. I think the document dump is specifically intended to rally the base in an election year. The Bushies want right-wingers and right-leaners to get a fuzzy notion in their heads that the no-WMD and no-Saddam/Osama-connection stories are the real lies, spread by Democrats and peaceniks and the liberal media. If documents are dumped on the Internet and some Freeper declares that this document or that one is the smoking gun regarding WMDs or an al-Qaeda connection, talk radio and righty blogs and conservative rant sites (CNS News, World Net Daily, Men's News Daily, MichNews, etc., etc.) will pick it up -- and now the untruth is just out there. No Bushie or GOP elected official actually has to say something untrue -- the work of spreading misinformation has been done for the party by volunteers. And then, at the proverbial backyard barbecue, your right-wing cousin will say, "You don't know what you're talking about. Saddam had all the weapons shipped to Syria. And he and bin Laden were like this." And maybe he won't convert anyone else at the barbecue, but maybe he will make some of them rethink their increasing anger at the administration. And he, at least, will show up to vote Republican in November, because, well, you can't trust Democrats and the liberal media, and the only countervailing force against all those liars is the Republican Party. posted by Steve M. | 11:58 AM | TBogg visitors: the Battlecry post is here. (And did I forget to mention that Battlecry founder Ron Luce was appointed by Bush to the White House Advisory Commission on Drug-Free Communities?) posted by Steve M. | 8:07 AM | So I'm listening to NPR and I just heard this in an interview with Karen Hughes, our esteemed Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy: "One of the things that I heard as I traveled throughout the Middle East is concern about the Israeli-Palestinian policy. I came back from my first trip and relayed to both the secretary (of State) and the president that, to the extent that we could be seen as visibly working to improve life for the Palestinian people," [it] would improve the U.S. image across the world. Excuse me? She didn't know this until she went on her freakin' trip?? She didn't know this was a huge concern for Muslims everywhere? And she had to explain this to Bush and Condi? Well, this team is doing a bang-up job, and I can certainly see why. posted by Steve M. | 7:49 AM | Monday, March 27, 2006 Zacarias Moussaoui testified today that he was supposed to fly a fifth plane into the White House on 9/11. I don't understand why so many people are taking this at face value. I'm skeptical, for the reasons talked about by Andrew Cohen of CBS: ... Moussaoui's jaw-dropping performance ... leaves open two fundamental questions which jurors ultimately must resolve. First, they will have to determine whether Moussaoui is now, finally, telling the truth (after such a long history of lies) or whether this is just another attempt to aggrandize his own stature in the antisocial registry of terrorists. Remember, there are plenty of intelligence officials, and now-captured al Qaeda leaders, who see Moussaoui as a terrorist-wannabe, a buffoon, a failure, a cheerleader who now wants desperately to be executed by America as a so-called martyr for jihad even though he wasn't clever or competent enough in 2001 to carry out his role as a terrorist. The defense now will have to pivot to emphasize this side of Moussaoui. Fortunately for them, at least, there is some material with which to work. Jurors now are learning (in the form of written summaries of statements) what Moussaoui's al Qaeda bosses thought of him -- and I can virtually guarantee you that it will not necessarily synch up with what Moussaoui's own perceptions of his role in the terror network.... Indeed, before the day was out, jurors had heard the words of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the nuts-and-bolts planner of the horror of 9-11, whose summarized testimony indicated that Moussaoui was on al Qaeda's "back burner" and designated for another wave of attacks after 9-11. And jurors will have to decide, too, whether Moussaoui isn't just a bit too eager to seal his own doom. You can bet that if the case goes much further defense counsel will tell jurors that recommending a death sentence for Moussaoui will be a gift to him rather than a punishment. Normally, that type of pap never flies with a jury. But there is little about this case that is normal. Don't give this creepy, kooky, slimly terrorist what he wants, the defense is likely to tell jurors, as it turns on its own witness the way he has turned on them for years in this case. And there was an element of farce to Moussaoui's testimony; as if he were delighted to subvert his own defense and confound his own tormentors. Here's Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's take on Moussaoui, according to CNN: After Moussaoui's testimony, the defense introduced the statements from Mohammed. Moussaoui was a "problem from the start," Mohammed said. He eventually ordered plot coordinator Ramzi Binalshibh to wire Moussaoui money for flight school and cut off ties. Moussaoui had a hard time following instructions and was "lax with operational security," sending too many e-mails and making too many phone calls, according to Mohammed's testimony. The potential targets for the second wave of attacks -- the White House, the Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois, the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles, California -- were not even finalized, he said. If Mohammed is lying, what does he gain from it? Nothing. His words certainly don't please the people holding him. But if Moussaoui is lying, by doing so he may have singlehandedly won himself a jihadist's martyrdom when it seemed as if his life might be spared. He wanted to do horrible things. He might have been part of a second wave of attacks. But I don't believe this story. posted by Steve M. | 11:40 PM | First two sentences of an open letter to Michael Schiavo published Saturday by Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life: A year ago this week, I stood by the bedside of the woman you married and promised to love in good times and bad, in sickness and health. She was enduring a very bad time, because she hadn't been given food or drink in nearly two weeks. Yeah, right. Other than that, she was fine. Pavone -- who, as I've pointed out a number of times, gave invocations at both a rally for religious conservatives organized by the GOP before the 2004 convention and a subsequent "Christian Inaugural Eve Gala" that was also addressed by Karl Rove -- goes on to call Michael Schiavo a murderer, over and over again: ... after Terri died, I called her death a killing, and I called you a murderer because you knew -- as we all did -- that ceasing to feed Terri would kill her.... Some have demanded that I apologize to you for calling you a murderer. Not only will I not apologize, I will repeat it again. Your decision to have Terri dehydrated to death was a decision to kill her. It doesn't matter if Judge Greer said it was legal. No judge, no court, no power on earth can legitimize what you did. It makes no difference if what you did was legal in the eyes of men; it was murder in the eyes of God and of millions of your fellow Americans and countless more around the world. You are the one who owes all of us an apology. Your actions offend us. Not only have you killed Terri and deeply wounded her family, but you have disgraced our nation, betrayed the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and undermined the principles that hold us together as a civilized society. He's saying that to most of us here in America -- he's saying most of us are potential murderers -- because, as an ABC News poll points out, we overwhelmingly agree that the right thing was done in this case, across the spectrum: Sixty-four percent in this ABC News poll support last year's decision to remove Schiavo's feeding tube. It was an almost identical 63 percent at the time. ... Democrats, Republicans and independents are equally likely to say removing Schiavo's feeding tube was the right thing to do. Conservatives are less likely than liberals and moderates to support removal of the tube, while 53 percent of conservatives think it was right -- that compares with seven in 10 liberals and moderates. Sizable majorities of evangelical white Protestants and white Catholics -- 61 percent and 73 percent, respectively -- call the removal of Schiavo's tube the right thing to do, despite criticisms of the step by evangelical and Catholic leaders.... Pavone, of course, is the guy who told Fox News this about Schiavo's condition just before she died: She was very responsive--closing her eyes when I said, “Let’s pray together, Terri,” opening them up after the prayer. Smiling, returning the kiss of her father. Turning her eyes to me when I spoke to her. In many other ways, as well, responsive. Even today, although, of course, with the effects of the dehydration, her response was much less. Nevertheless, her eyes were open, her eyes were moving, and as I prayed with her, her eyes were shifting over toward my direction--even until the last moments that I was with her. It's a sin to tell a lie, Father. posted by Steve M. | 5:32 PM | I think I see a common thread running through a few stories today that seem unrelated. First, a New York Times story a lot of people are talking about: ...During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, [President Bush] made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair's top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.... Without much elaboration, the memo also says the president raised ... possible ways of provoking a confrontation.... "The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach." ... Next we move to the West Coast: More than 25,000 evangelical Christian youth landed Friday in San Francisco for a two-day rally at AT&T Park against "the virtue terrorism" of popular culture.... "Battle Cry for a Generation" is led by a 44-year-old Concord native, Ron Luce, who wants "God's instruction book" to guide young people away from the corrupting influence of popular culture. Luce, whose Teen Mania organization is based in Texas, kicked off a three-city "reverse rebellion" tour Friday night intended to counter a popular culture that he says glamorizes violence and sex.... Military metaphors abound in Luce's descriptions of the struggle. He tells young people of how "an enemy has launched a brutal attack on them." At a pre-Battle Cry rally Friday afternoon on the steps of City Hall, Luce told his mostly teenage audience that "terrorists of a different kind" -- advertisers -- were targeting them and that they were "caught in the middle of the battle." ... And back here in New York, we have this in the New York Post: HILLARY'S 'TROOP' BUILDUP March 27, 2006 -- PREZ-ENT ARMS! WASHINGTON - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won't say if she's running for the White House -- but she's already drafted a presidential-size army of campaign staffers that dwarfs John McCain's outfit and those of everyone else in the field.... You see where I'm going. In every case, right-wingers are jonesing for war. (Not the kind where they could actually get die or get hurt, of course. But war anyway! War is cool!) Right-wingers love war. Right-wingers love to think they're at war (as long as they're not physically in the line of fire). If they can't have a real war (enjoyed from a safe distance), they want a metaphorical war. But they prefer a particular kind of war: a war in which they can say the other guy declared war first. So Hillary isn't staffing up for multiple campaigns -- she's engaged in a "troop buildup." MTV's programming is literally comparable to 9/11, according to Ron Luce. (Also see the press release for his rally and the rad war-hungry graphics at the Web site for his campaign.) And Saddam -- well, it must have been a huge disappointment to Bush when he could never get the Brutal Dictator to shoot down a plane with U.N. markings. Last month, when the story of Bush's desire to provoke Saddam first broke in the U.K. press, Juan Cole speculated that it might be a sign Bush is still drinking or on drugs. Naaah -- not necessarily. It's just a sign that he's a purebred Americanus bellicosus -- a right-winger who's sure he's peace-loving and slow to anger, but who's just itching for a war he can blame on someone else and watch other people fight. **** See also: Mahablog (Bush), Shakespeare's Sister (San Francisco rally). **** UPDATE: Garbled parenthetical fixed. posted by Steve M. | 1:14 PM | SCALIA: BASPHEMER If Ted Kennedy had done something like this thirty years ago, they'd still be attacking him for it: Minutes after receiving the Eucharist at a special Mass for lawyers and politicians at Cathedral of the Holy Cross, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had a special blessing of his own for those who question his impartiality when it comes to matters of church and state. "You know what I say to those people?" Scalia, 70, replied, making an obscene gesture under his chin when asked by a Herald reporter if he fends off a lot of flak for publicly celebrating his conservative Roman Catholic beliefs. "That's Sicilian," the Italian jurist said, interpreting for the "Sopranos" challenged.... The conduct unbecoming a 20-year veteran of the country's highest court -- and just feet from the Mother Church’s altar -- was captured by a photographer for the Archdiocese of Boston newspaper The Pilot, whose publisher is newly minted Cardinal Sean O’Malley.... Alas, there's no photo of this accompanying the article (which is from the Boston Herald) or at The Pilot's Web site. But if you're having trouble picturing this gesture, instructions are here: partially close your hand, not quite curling the fingers, then bring your fingertips upward against your neck (knuckles face recipient), kind of popping off the end of the chin, then holding the slightly bent hand up at the recipient. maybe a little forward emphasis of the hand for a little extra oomph. if i'm remembering this correctly, an accompanying profanity is "fongul!" (spelling?) Yeah, that's the way I remember it from the old neighborhood. Never at a church, though. But I guess it's OK if you're a Republican. No word on whether Scalia was questioned about the fact that he's apparently already prejudged a case that's soon to come before the Court: ...During an unpublicized March 8 talk at the University of Freiburg in Switzerland, Scalia dismissed the idea that the detainees have rights under the U.S. Constitution or international conventions, adding he was "astounded" at the "hypocritical" reaction in Europe to Gitmo. "War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts," he says on a tape of the talk reviewed by NEWSWEEK. "Give me a break." ... Scalia didn't refer directly to this week's case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, though issues at stake hinge in part on whether the detainees deserve legal protections that make the military tribunals unfair. "As these things mount, a legitimate question could be asked about whether he is compromising the credibility of the court," said Stephen Gillers, a legal-ethics expert.... **** UPDATE: UPI says Scalia gave the photographer the finger. I don't believe that -- if that were the case, why would he bother to add the little footnote ("That's Sicilian")? (UPI also quotes him as saying that.) Not that it matters -- the gesture he used means pretty much the same thing. **** UPDATE: The Italian expression that usually accompanies the gesture is this. (Not work safe, unless you have lifetime tenure.) posted by Steve M. | 7:35 AM | Sunday, March 26, 2006 Well, I enjoyed "Atrios" on The West Wing...  ...but I think I preferred his work in the late '70s and early '80s with the No Wave band DNA: 
posted by Steve M. |
9:42 PM
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Good Lord, I half-agree with Michelle Malkin: Condi Rice thinks Afghanistan has "come a long way" because when the Taliban ruled, they "wantonly" executed people for playing music (as opposed to now, you know, where executions of people for abandoning Islam are contemplated in a much more civilized, non-wanton manner.) I hate to admit it, but she actually has the best roundup of news I've seen on the Abdel Rahman case -- yes, an Afghan court has dismissed the case against him, but this is disturbing: Some Islamic clerics had called for him to be put to death, saying Rahman would face danger from his countrymen if he were released. Earlier Sunday he was moved to a notorious maximum-security prison outside Kabul that is also home to hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaida militants. The move to Policharki Prison came after detainees threatened his life at an overcrowded police holding facility in central Kabul, a court official said.... Policharki was the site of an uprising last month in which four inmates died. It's also -- small world! -- the prison where freelance torturer Jonathan Keith "Jack" Idema is being held. Hey, if he's such a tough guy, maybe he'll protect Rahman. This, from the Chicago Tribune, is also disturbing: In all likelihood, the court will declare Rahman mentally unfit to stand trial and release him, Afghan sources and Western diplomats said. But this is only a temporary fix, and it does not solve what will happen to Rahman next. Many Afghans want to kill him. "He should be hanged in a square," said Aqa Gul, 40, a baker. "He should be stoned to death," said Sayed Saber, 32, a construction worker. Rahman was the major topic of conversation across Kabul on Friday. In a restaurant, influential leaders met with a group of young people from Panjshir province, where Rahman is from. The young men talked about what would happen if Rahman is released. "Anything could happen--whether a big demonstration, even the possibility of killing him," said Shojah Mostaqel, who organized the meeting. "Everyone knows what Islam says. Bush and his friends are trying to interfere in an Islamic country." At Pol-e-Kheshti mosque, Kabul's largest, more than 10,000 people listened to cleric Maulavi Enayatullah Baligh talk about Rahman. They yelled, "God is great!" after Baligh said Rahman deserved death. "If this Abdul Rahman does not come to Islam and does not repent, even if the government does not sentence him to death, then the people of Afghanistan will kill him," said Baligh, 50, also a lecturer in Islamic law at Kabul University. This story may not be coming to an end -- or at least not to a good end. posted by Steve M. | 9:40 PM | Saturday, March 25, 2006 So I guess Koufax voting ends tomorrow at 11:59 P.M. I'm up for Most Deserving of Wider Recognition, and I'm getting my butt kicked so far, so vote for me if you like, but it's kind of like voting for a Democrat in Utah. If you can't post a vote in the comments here or here, you can vote via email at wampum @ nic-naa.net. (remove spaces arount the @). Put "Koufax" in the subject line. Meanwhile, I'll be working on my concession speech. posted by Steve M. | 12:21 PM | Where does the New York Republican Party find these people? A Republican challenger to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is bizarrely claiming that the former first lady has been spying in her bedroom window and flying helicopters over her house in the Hamptons, witnesses told The Post yesterday. Former Reagan-era Pentagon official Kathleen "KT" McFarland stunned a crowd of Suffolk County Republicans on Thursday by saying: "Hillary Clinton is really worried about me, and is so worried, in fact, that she had helicopters flying over my house in Southampton today taking pictures," according to a prominent GOP activist who was at the event.... McFarland spokesman William O'Reilly responded that the GOP hopeful was just kidding around with her far-fetched claims. "It was a joke, and people laughed," O'Reilly insisted. But three witnesses who were present said nobody in the audience cracked a smile. "The whole room sort of went silent when she said it," one person said.... This is from the New York Post, by the way, so take it with a grain of salt. (As I've mentioned before, Murdoch is being very, very nice to Hillary these days. For more on that, go here or here.) posted by Steve M. | 11:14 AM | South Dakota abortion ban? Maybe not on the rez: ...The President of the Oglala Sioux Tribe on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Cecilia Fire Thunder, was incensed. A former nurse and healthcare giver she was very angry that a state body made up mostly of white males, would make such a stupid law against women. "To me, it is now a question of sovereignty," she said to me last week. "I will personally establish a Planned Parenthood clinic on my own land which is within the boundaries of the Pine Ridge Reservation where the State of South Dakota has absolutely no jurisdiction." ... Interesting. posted by Steve M. | 11:10 AM | Friday, March 24, 2006 You know what popped into my head as I was reading about the resignation of Ben Domenech at The Washington Post? Paul Bremer saying, "We got him." Remember that? The capture of Saddam? He was out of power and in hiding; he was an irrelevant relic -- but the message that went out from the Bush administration about his capture was: This is a real blow to the insurgency. Which it wasn't, of course, because the strength of the insurgency had nothing to do with whether Saddam was in custody or at large. I'm afraid right now we're like the Bushies then, giddy because, well, we got him. We got Ben Domenech. Yes, he deserved what he got (so did Saddam) -- but how much does it matter? What effect is it really going to have? Domenech is almost certainly going to be replaced at the Post by someone who's an ideological clone but who's been vetted more carefully. And life will go on as it has. The same people will control what they've controlled for years. The initial anger at the hiring of Ben Domenech was for an understandable reason: the Post was responding to right-wing criticism of a mildly liberal Post blogger by "balancing" him with an out-and-out right-wing apparatchik. But eventually the concern was not about the decision to hire an apparatchik but, rather, about the (admittedly juicy) failures of judgment on the individual hired. It's now been conclusively demonstrated that Ben Domenech should not have been hired. What's been lost is the principle that an apparachik should not have been hired. And is it really so important? Bloggers at the Post have limited influence on the discourse; I'm sure most of America doesn't even know that the Post has a stable of bloggers. I think there's been a loss of perspective -- Ben Domenech became just about the only topic on many left-wing blogs this week because he was one of us, a blogger. Are we developing a bit of tunnel vision? Is it good that we sometimes seem to be sniping at other bloggers more than at Cabinet members or senators? Why are we doing this? Is the point to keep up a running conversation about the state of the country? Or is it all about which side's bloggers are better? posted by Steve M. | 11:44 PM | Over at the New York Sun, our old pal Eli "Chalabi on Speed-Dial" Lake beats the dead horse of the Osama-Saddam connection (emphasis mine): ...Last night ABC News reported on five recently declassified documents captured in Iraq. One of these was a handwritten account of a February 19, 1995, meeting between an official representative of Iraq and Mr. bin Laden himself, where Mr. bin Laden broached the idea of "carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. The document, which has no official stamps or markers, reports that when Saddam was informed of the meeting on March 4, 1995 he agreed to broadcast sermons of a radical imam, Suleiman al Ouda, requested by Mr. bin Laden. ... the fact that Saddam broadcast the sermons of al-Ouda at bin Laden's request was previously unknown, as was a conversation about possible collaboration on attacks against Saudi Arabia.... "Previously unknown"? Not exactly. From The Telegraph, June 26, 2004: Saddam Hussein's intelligence services reached out to Osama bin Laden in an effort to assist militants working to overthrow the Saudi ruling family, a document obtained by the US military in Iraq appears to show. Iraqi intelligence officials were given permission by Saddam to meet bin Laden in the Sudan in February 1995, according to the internal Iraqi intelligence file. Baghdad also agreed to re-broadcast sermons by an anti-Saudi cleric, reports the document which was leaked to yesterday's New York Times.... And is this even believable? Here's what the Times story said about the document cited by The Telegraph: ...The Americans confirmed that they had obtained the document from the Iraqi National Congress, as part of a trove that the group gathered after the fall of Saddam Hussein's government last year.... A translation of the new Iraqi document was reviewed by a Pentagon working group in the spring, officials said. It included senior analysts from the military's Joint Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency and a joint intelligence task force that specialized in counterterrorism issues, they said. The task force concluded that the document "appeared authentic" ... It is not known whether some on the task force held dissenting opinions about the document's veracity.... That document was from Chalabi. The one cited in the Eli Lake story is either the same document or a related document. Where do you suppose it came from? Recall what Jane Mayer wrote a couple of years ago in The New Yorker: In 1994, [former CIA officer Robert] Baer said, he went with Chalabi to visit "a forgery shop" that the I.N.C. had set up inside an abandoned schoolhouse in Salahuddin, a town in Kurdistan. "It was something like a spy novel," Baer said. "It was a room where people were scanning Iraqi intelligence documents into computers, and doing disinformation. There was a whole wing of it that he did forgeries in." Baer had no evidence that Chalabi forged any of the disputed intelligence documents that were used to foment alarm in the run-up to the war. But, he said, "he was forging back then, in order to bring down Saddam." posted by Steve M. | 4:13 PM | Make of this what you will: U.S. District Judge John D. Bates has been named to replace a judge who resigned from the secretive court set up by Congress to oversee domestic spying. Bates, a former Whitewater prosecutor, was appointed by Chief Justice John Roberts in February to replace U.S. District Judge James Robertson, who quit shortly after news reports about the Bush administration going around the court to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens suspected of communicating with terrorists. This is weird: The appointment was not announced by the court. Secrecy News reported the appointment Friday after it appeared in Bates' official online biography. "In February 2006, he was appointed by Chief Justice Roberts to serve as a judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," according to Bates' bio on the Web site maintained by the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia.... Three years ago in The Washington Post, E. J. Dionne summed up all you need to know about Bates: ...consider the ruling of Judge John D. Bates in December declaring that Congress's General Accounting Office -- and thus the public -- had no right to learn the specifics about meetings between Vice President Cheney's famous energy task force and various energy executives and lobbyists. The same John Bates, an appointee of the current president, was an attorney for Ken Starr's Whitewater investigation and pushed hard (and successfully) for the release of various White House documents related to Hillary Rodham Clinton's activities. "When that guy was working for Ken Starr, he wanted to go open the dresser drawers of the White House," said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. "I guess it's a lot different when it's a Republican vice president." Such suspicions of partisanship in the judiciary are corrosive because, unfortunately, they are now plausible. Indeed they are. posted by Steve M. | 2:48 PM | This could be fun. posted by Steve M. | 2:19 PM | LIBERALISM KILLS KIDS A few members of Congress think you and I are mass murderers -- or at least don't consider that assertion objectionable. At least that's how I interpret this press release: Vision America President Dr. Rick Scarborough will unveil his new book, "Liberalism Kills Kids," at The War on Christians Conference (March 27 and 28, at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.) As well as the president of Vision America, Scarborough is the conference organizer. He's also one of the keynote speakers at the Monday evening banquet, along with U.S. Senator John Cornyn. "Liberalism Kills Kids" is a groundbreaking work which documents the devastating failure of America's 40-year experiment with liberal statism. From the deaths of 44 million unborn children, to skyrocketing rates of out-of-wedlock births, to the divorce epidemic, to the destructive demands of the movement to normalize homosexuality -- the book exposes a cultural coup d'etat that has left our families gasping for air.... In addition to Senator Cornyn, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and our old pal Tom DeLay will also be at the conference. Also Alan Keyes and Phyllis Schlafly. If I ever run into any of these people, here's what I'm going to say: You attended a conference where Rick Scarborough was promoting this book. I'm a liberal. I want you to look me in the eye and say that you think I'm a mass murderer of children. More on Scarborough here. **** By the way, the "war on Christians" that's going to be the subject of this conference is apparently taking place exclusively in America, to judge from the the conference agenda. Isn't talking about a war on Christianity in America a disgusting insult to people like the Afghani Christian who may be executed for converting? posted by Steve M. | 12:36 PM | Sorry, I haven't posted a word about Ben Domenech. Am I still allowed to call myself a left-wing blogger? posted by Steve M. | 11:24 AM | I wish I had something clever to say about these stories from the past few days: Barbara Bush insisting that a portion of her Katrina gift be spent on Neil Bush's education software. (Via Atrios.) A music teacher in Colorado who was placed on leave after showing clips from a video of the opera Faust to her class, after "[s]everal parents complained that the video ... contained references to abortion and Satan worship." (Via Sisyphus Shrugged, where Julia adds, "Look upon your works, William F Buckley, and despair.") The Washington Post's list of Christian conservative organizations that have received generous outlays of your tax dollars during the Bush leaders -- including Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing, a couple of "pregnancy crisis centers," and at least one "pregnancy crisis center" that, thanks to federal government largesse, has now metasasized into a multi-state organization that provides abstinence "education" materials. (That last outfit is Heritage Comunity Services of South Carolina. I see that the state of Rhode Island has just decided that abstinence curriculum materials from an affiliated group, Heritage of Rhode Island, are inappropriate for the state's public schools, so they've been banned: "Lawyers at the Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union first complained last year that a now-abandoned textbook used by Heritage of Rhode Island taught students that girls should wear clothing that doesn't invite 'lustful thoughts' from boys. The book described men as 'strong' and 'courageous' while women were called 'caring.'" Good for Rhode Island for standing up for blue-state values.) posted by Steve M. | 7:48 AM | Thursday, March 23, 2006 Where to start regarding the latest Christopher Hitchens pronouncements, in this radio interview with Hugh Hewitt? Do you start with Hitchens's McCarthyite suggestion that most war correspondents are working in cahoots to help bring about U.S. failure in Iraq? And when I've been in the company of people covering Iraq, I notice this...another herd mentality, and it's been there since before the war, and it's placed a bet on quagmire at best ... And defeat at worst.... I won't say any more than that. Do you talk about his distortion of the history of Zarqawi? (Hitchens suggests that Zarqawi was tight with bin Laden right up until the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. In fact, as Nir Rosen reminded us last month in The New York Times Magazine, Zarqawi had begun bickering with Al Qaeda, had turned his focus to the "near enemy" of regional "infidels" whom he considered insufficiently Islamist, and had already moved to a separate part of Afghanistan; it was the U.S. invasion of Iraq that brought him back together with Al Qaeda, because the "Crusaders" of the U.S. and the "near enemy" in Iraq were now working side by side.) Do you talk about the free pass Hitchens gives all war supporters -- the argument that, because Saddam and the insurgents are very, very bad guys, it's wrong to hold the Bush administration and its allies to any standard of accountability whatsoever? ... you could look at any of your today's newspapers and notice it, and say well, there's a civil war atmosphere, as if that was a criticism of the Bush administration, instead of the people like Zarqawi.... People look at you when they read about atrocities is if it's your fault for wanting to get rid of Saddam Hussein. This is simply illogical. It's a non sequitur. Or do you talk about the weirdly sexual and bitchy way he dismisses one war critic? Hugh Hewitt: ... Last night on CNN, I was debating this with Michael Ware from Time Magazine.... I want to play you a little bit. Michael Ware's a very respected war correspondent. He's covered Timor, he's covered all sorts of civil wars. He's an Australian, he's a rugby player. He's tough as nails. But here's an exchange last night I'd like your take on. I'm asking him a question. ...Michael Ware: ... Who's winning from this war? Who is benefitting right now? Well, the main winners so far are al Qaeda, which is stronger than it was before the invasion. Abu Musab al Zarqawi was a nobody. Now he's the superstar of international jihad. And Iran...Iran essentially has a proxy government in place, a very, very friendly government. Its sphere of influence has expanded, and any U.S. diplomat or senior military intelligence commander here will tell you that. So that's the big picture. Where is that being reported? HH: Christopher Hitchens, does that reflect the mindset that you're talking about? Christopher Hitchens: In part it does, because it's very passive. ... It's a non sequitur. And you'll note the slight tone of hysteria and the nervousness, I think, in the over-assertive way that your man was just talking now. HH: Yes, I did notice that. (Emphasis mine.) Hewitt notes that Ware is a tough Aussie rugby player -- and Hitchens immediately dismisses him as an overemotional hysteric. There are several things to be said about that. First, please note that there's an MP3 of the interview at the link. If you listen to it, you won't hear hysteria on Ware's part. He's straightforward and bluff -- no sneering barbs of irony for him. (I've heard him before on TV and he always sounds like this.) The question does, momentarily, seem to tap into some pent-up frustration. But also, he's talking loudly because he wants to be heard. He's answering questions via satellite from half a world away. (And what are the car horns and crowd noises? Whether they're in the background as he's speaking or part of a news clip CNN played under his words, he needed a little extra volume to be audible.) But most important, Ware was speaking from Baghdad. He's in a war zone. Where was Hitchens speaking from? Nevertheless, I'm sure Hitchens walked away from the Hewitt interview that thinking he could kick Michael Ware's ass. posted by Steve M. | 1:51 PM | Not much to blog about, so I want to throw out a question: After Bush leaves office, what do you think he's going to do with the rest of his life? Discuss. posted by Steve M. | 10:10 AM | Bush boom! ...The Standard & Poor's 500 Index -- the benchmark for American equities -- is down 2.8 percent since Bush took office five years and two months ago. That's the worst performance during the same stage of any two-term administration in the past half century except that of Richard M. Nixon.... By comparison with other two-term administrations of the past half-century, the index grew 153.6 percent at this point during the presidency of Bill Clinton, 79.7 percent for Ronald Reagan, 61.9 percent under Dwight D. Eisenhower and 45.4 percent during the Kennedy-Johnson administration. At the same stage in Nixon's presidency the S&P dropped 4.1 percent.... And this is now -- imagine what happens in the event of another large terrorist attack on the U.S., or a full-scale civil war in Iraq that turns regional, or a bird flu pandemic that involves human-to-human transmission, or a serious oil-price shock caused by tensions between America and, say, Iran or Venezuela, or even the bursting of the housing bubble. Anyone sorry we didn't go for those Social Security private investment accounts? (Via DU.) posted by Steve M. | 7:40 AM | Wednesday, March 22, 2006 Added to the blogroll, in most cases belatedly, are Annie's Annals, Busy, Busy, Busy, Doghouse Riley (Bats Left Throws Right), Lawyers, Guns and Money, Left I on the News, the MoJoBlog from Mother Jones, The Republic of T., and Shakespeare's Sister. Welcome aboard. What took me so long? posted by Steve M. | 11:28 PM | Yikes: Harris invokes biblical parables on TV's 'Nightline' Florida's most theatrical political figure, U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris, invoked biblical parables on national TV Tuesday night in support of her promise to spend $10-million of her own money to unseat Sen. Bill Nelson. ..."I am willing to take this widow's mite, this pearl of great price, and put everything on the line," she said. "No matter how much you have, are you willing to take what you have and sell it all for a great price." The "widow's mite" is a reference to a parable in which Jesus praises a poor widow for donating all she has - two Roman coins - while those with more wealth offered proportionally less.... Let's see: The widow was poor. Harris is rich. The widow was giving her money to the temple. Harris is giving her money to win herself and her party a position of great power and influence. Yeah, pretty much the same thing, right? Harris been portraying herself as God's Chosen Candidate a lot lately: ... Katherine Harris told hundreds of conservative Christians Saturday that she is "a work in progress." Harris, who told a national television audience Wednesday that she would be spending $10 million to win Florida's U.S. Senate race, said she never would have entered politics if she did not believe that God wanted her to make public service part of her life.... More than 800 conservative Christians were attending a two-day annual conference called Reclaiming America for Christ at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale. Harris received a standing ovation when she arrived at the pulpit. She told the crowd that she studied under Francis Schaeffer in Geneva, Switzerland. Schaeffer is considered a founder of the modern evangelical movement, which encourages advocating Christian beliefs in public life. Schaeffer, in his book A Christian Manifesto, called for Christian activists to demand "biblical morality" in government affairs. Harris, a Presbyterian, said she "redirected my life to the Lord when I was only in the third grade." She said she was "blessed to be raised in a godly family." ... Determined to stay in the race, Harris said she is getting inspiration from Bill Bright's book, The Joy of Supernatural Thinking -- Believing in God for the Impossible. "Everything is possible with God," said Harris, who never directly mentioned her Senate campaign.... She also told the group that she was inspired by the Lord of the Rings movies and, as a young woman, by the movie version of The Last of the Mohicans -- "because 'people were willing to die for something bigger than themselves.'" (Is that even an appropriate lesson to draw from The Last of the Mohicans?) posted by Steve M. | 3:31 PM | NON-SMOKING GUN "Secret Saddam tapes" say Saddam had no WMDs, according to AP: Exasperated, besieged by global pressure, Saddam Hussein and top aides searched for ways in the 1990s to prove to the world they'd given up banned weapons. "We don't have anything hidden!" the frustrated Iraqi president interjected at one meeting, transcripts show.... Saddam's inner circle entertained notions of reviving the programs someday, the newly released documents show. "The factories will remain in our brains," one unidentified participant told Saddam at a meeting, apparently in the early 1990s. At the same meeting, however, Saddam ... led a discussion about converting chemical weapons factories to beneficial uses. ...Scores of Iraqi documents, seized after the 2003 invasion, are being released at the request of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee chairman, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, who has suggested that evidence might turn up that the Iraqis hid their weapons or sent them to neighboring Syria. No such evidence has emerged. Repeatedly in the transcripts, Saddam and his lieutenants remind each other that Iraq destroyed its chemical and biological weapons in the early 1990s, and shut down those programs and the nuclear-bomb program, which had never produced a weapon. "We played by the rules of the game," Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said at a session in the mid-1990s. "In 1991, our weapons were destroyed." ... Not that any right-winger will ever believe this, of course.... posted by Steve M. | 1:58 PM | If you're wondering what Bush meant yesterday about a U.S. troop presence in Iraq until at least the next presidency, Barbara at the Mahablog reminds us that he's talking about permanent bases. As is noted in the news reports she cites, there's a lot of concrete being poured out there, and it ain't for schools or hospitals. **** ... what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. --Robert A. Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, p. 4 posted by Steve M. | 10:14 AM | And speaking of Michelle Malkin, she's made a cause out of the case of Abdul Rahman, the Afghan man who faces the death penalty for converting to Christianity -- but I'm afraid National Public Radio is monkeying with her worldview by doing a feature story this morning on Rahman's case. How dare the "liberal media," the "MSM," fail to live up to right-wingers' stereotypes of it! The NPR story says a way may have been found to save Rahman's life -- he may be found mentally unfit to stand trial. That's confirmed by this AP story. No word on whether that means he'll walk free. In any case, it still sounds like Taliban Lite. **** (NPR also ran an interview this morning with a UN official in Iraq who says the country isn't experiencing a civil war. Damn liberal media! Damn liberal UN!) posted by Steve M. | 8:00 AM | Tuesday, March 21, 2006 I see that the latest thing Michelle Malkin is hyperventilating about is this poster from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees:  Looks innocuous, you say? Ah, no -- that red thing is a Lego, and Legos are made in Denmark; Malkin thinks we should all buy Danish products to prove we don't stand with the cartoon rioters (OK, fine so far). Beyond that, however, she says that the use of a Lego in this ad makes this a "vile poster portraying Denmark's most famous company as racist." Michelle, you're nuts. Just so you know, Michelle -- Legos have been part of UNHCR anti-racism ads since at least 1994. ***** UPDATE: If you want to see the 1990s posters full size, go here and click on the thumbnails. ***** UPDATE: Well, OK -- it appears that Lego got hypersensitive, too, and MM is gloating about the UN's decision to pull the ad from its Web site. Er, doesn't that mean it's bowing to censorship? Shouldn't we all put the UN poster on our sites, as a show of solidarity? posted by Steve M. | 6:05 PM | Bafflingly, I made the finals: No More Mister Nice Blog is one of a dozen blogs up for the "Most Deserving of Wider Recognition" Koufax. Thanks to everyone who voted for me in Round One (and to everyone who's already voted for me in Round Two). Voting in Round Two ends, er, I don't know. Relatively soon, I'm guessing. posted by Steve M. | 4:34 PM | Righties are snickering because of the light turnout at this weekend's anti-war demonstrations. But seriously: do you know anyone who actually thinks a bunch of big demonstrations might have led to changes in this administration's policies? When you're dealing with someone who's addicted to harmful behavior, at a certain point you may realize that you've said everything you possibly can to try to persuade the person to change course, and nothing you say or do will help. If the person refuses to see the need for change, you may have to just give up and recognize that you've done everything you can to stop the death spiral, and nothing you said or did got through. Some people just can't or won't change. Bush is one of them. posted by Steve M. | 2:13 PM | As a lot of you already know, The American Prospect's Garance Franke-Ruta has noticed something about the New York Times op-ed page: ... during [the past two years], not one op-ed discussing abortion on the op-ed page of the most powerful liberal paper in the nation was written by a reproductive-rights advocate, a pro-choice service-provider, or a representative of a women's group. Instead, the officially pro-choice New York Times has hosted a conversation about abortion on its op-ed page that consisted almost entirely of the views of pro-life or abortion-ambivalent men, male scholars of the right, and men with strong, usually Catholic, religious affiliations. In fact, a stunning 83 percent of the pieces appearing on the page that discussed abortion were written by men. Please note that the Times op-ed page editor during this period -- he was appointed in January 2003 -- has been David Shipley, whose marriage to the Godmother of Postfeminism, Naomi Wolf, is only now ending in divorce after about a decade. Wolf's position on abortion is quintessentially "abortion-ambivalent": she calls for an abortion-rights movement willing publicly to mourn the evil -- necessary evil though it may be -- that is abortion and laments that many must pretend that abortion is not a transgression of any kind if we wish to champion abortion rights. We have no ground on which to say that abortion is a necessary evil that should be faced and opposed in the realm of conscience and action and even soul; yet remain legal. If you're a man and the person closest to you who has a uterus thinks like this, it's no surprise if you hate abortion (while perhaps also supporting abortion rights). And it's no surprise if you advance this way of thinking in your role as a cultural gatekeeper. posted by Steve M. | 11:32 AM | This can't be good: ...More than one-quarter of Boston's mortgage-holders appear to be stretched thin financially, spending at least half their income on housing, according to an analysis of census figures.... Typically, homeowners should spend no more than 30 percent of their income on housing, financial planners say.... These people are in over their heads. And it's taking a toll: Rising interest rates are pushing up the costs for those who have adjustable mortgages. At the same time, these homeowners are finding it harder to sell. The number of homes sold in Massachusetts dropped a whopping 21 percent in January compared with a year ago, the largest year-to-year decrease in monthly home sales in a decade. As a result, home values have begun to soften. Statewide, they actually fell slightly in January compared with a year ago. Such pressures are forcing a rising number of homeowners to erase their debts by forfeiting their homes. Foreclosure filings in the county that includes Boston nearly doubled in January from a year ago, ForeclosuresMass. says.... Another big jump in energy prices -- a military strike against Iran, perhaps? maybe just in time for the November elections, which is precisely when New Englanders start needing home heating oil? -- could put even more pressure on these people. This may not be a nationwide problem, but in places like Boston it's going to get very ugly. posted by Steve M. | 10:55 AM | Your tax-return data? Well, we could retain privacy protections, or we could let your tax preparer make a nice profit on your personal financial information. Guess which choice the Bushies prefer? IRS plans to allow preparers to sell data The IRS is quietly moving to loosen the once-inviolable privacy of federal income-tax returns. If it succeeds, accountants and other tax-return preparers will be able to sell information from individual returns - or even entire returns - to marketers and data brokers. The change ... was included in a set of proposed rules that the Treasury Department and the IRS published in the Dec. 8 Federal Register, where the official notice labeled them "not a significant regulatory action." ...The proposed rules ... would require a tax preparer to obtain written consent before selling tax information. Critics ... say the requirement for signed consent would prove meaningless for many taxpayers, especially those hurriedly reviewing stacks of documents before a filing deadline. "The normal interaction is that the taxpayer just signs what the tax preparer puts in front of them," said Jean Ann Fox of the Consumer Federation of America, one of several groups fighting the changes. "They think, 'This person is a tax professional, and I'm going to rely on them.'" But wait -- where's the Orwellian language the Bushies like to use when doing things like this? The IRS first announced the proposal in a news release the day before the official notice was published, headlined: "IRS Issues Proposed Regulations to Safeguard Taxpayer Information." Ah, there it is! **** (UPDATE: Garbled syntax corrected.) posted by Steve M. | 7:28 AM | Monday, March 20, 2006 The utter brilliance of just the title of this post from right-wing blogger Dr. Sanity has me in a state of absolute awe: LET'S FINISH IT AND WIN Wow. That's it! That's the solution to all of our problems in Iraq! Right there! That's the answer! Why didn't we think of it before? Somebody tell Rummy about this! Condi and Cheney, too! It's genius! posted by Steve M. | 11:30 PM | I SEE YOU'RE TRYING TO PUT OUT A FIRE. HERE, HAVE SOME OF THIS GASOLINE. Dear Catholic Church: Thanks for nothing. THE Vatican has begun moves to rehabilitate the Crusaders by sponsoring a conference at the weekend that portrays the Crusades as wars fought with the "noble aim" of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity. ...The late Pope John Paul II sought to achieve Muslim-Christian reconciliation by asking "pardon" for the Crusades during the 2000 Millennium celebrations. But John Paul's apologies for the past "errors of the Church" -- including the Inquisition and anti-Semitism -- irritated some Vatican conservatives. According to Vatican insiders, the dissenters included Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.... Great -- Pope Ratzo is to the right of John Paul on this. And here's an appalling detail: One of the speakers at this conference was Robert Spencer, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). Spencer is the founder of Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch, where he publishes (and defends) items like this Hugh Fitzgerald blog post, written in response to Congressman Tom Tancredo's infamous "bomb Mecca" remarks (emphasis mine below): ...Deterrent measures that could be undertaken in the event of a chemical or nuclear attack, but without waiting in some cases for any further attacks (although further attacks will help to justify the more far-reaching among them) might include, but not be limited to: 1) Seizure of Saudi-owned assets in the West, and sale of such assets to pay for the economic damage, including the cost of surveillance and other security measures, that are attributable to Saudi-funded mosques, madrasas, and propaganda all over the world. 2) Seizure of other Arab-owned or Muslim-owned assets in the West, for the same reasons. There need not be any distinction made between property owned by governments and those who are deemed to be enemy nationals -- no such distinction was made during World War II. 3) A complete ban on Muslim migration to the Western world (which needs to be undertaken in any case), and limits put on any contact between Muslims living in the West, who may already have obtained ciizenship and -- unless they are native-born converts -- their countries of origin. 4) Careful review of how citizenship is obtained, and what oaths of loyalty are administered, and if those oaths can possibly have been meant by those whose sole loyalty, by the very tenets of their belief-system, can only be to Islam and the Community of Believers, the umma al-islamiyya.... 7) An end to all outward and visible signs of rhetorical "respect" for Islam.... 8) End all access to Western education, not only for those Arabs and Muslims studying any kind of science, but in every area.... These are things that can be done, should be done, long before suggestions about "bombing Mecca" need to be bruited about. Peace on earth, good will to men -- except you, raghead! posted by Steve M. | 4:18 PM | Sometimes it seems as if Republican presidents and the people they choose as allies created every threat we're now facing. First, from AFP: US-made Stinger missiles will pose a threat to military and commercial aircraft across the region if they fall into the hands of Taliban rebels in Afghanistan, the US-led coalition said Monday. Washington supplied a large number of shoulder-fired Stingers to Afghans fighting the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and dozens are still thought to be missing. There was no evidence to support media reports that the Taliban had obtained some of the heat-seeking missiles but coalition forces were continuously monitoring the situation, spokesman Colonel Jim Yonts said.... I found a bit more about this in a story from the Irish Independent -- which, if true, says that these missiles are a threat because of our pals: Pakistan officials 'gave missile parts' to Taliban US AND Nato forces are following up reports that the Taliban has received vital component parts for shoulder-fired Stinger missiles from Pakistani officials enabling them to be used against helicopters in Afghanistan. It is claimed that the missiles - originally supplied to the Afghan Mujaheddin by the US during the war against the Russians - have been fitted with new battery packs allegedly provided by the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, in the last four months. Western sources say they are not sure whether the supplies, needed to make the American-made missiles operational, were provided by rogue elements within the Pakistani secret service or approved at a high level.... "In the last four months." Lovely. Then we've got this from England's Independent on Sunday (IoS): Apparently bomb technology used in IEDs that have killed soldiers in Iraq was used by the Irish Republican Army more than a decade ago -- and the technology was provided to the IRA by the FBI and England's MI5: ...Our story showed that the technology, far from being new, had in fact first been used in Newry, Co Down, in 1992 to murder a policewoman and maim her male colleague. Kevin Fulton, a former soldier who infiltrated the IRA on behalf of the security services, made an astonishing claim: that he had flown to New York, met FBI and MI5 agents and was given money to buy an infra-red device to be used to set off IRA bombs. The security services - already successful in preventing radio-signal bombs - believed that by supplying the equipment they could then introduce counter-measures. "They knew the IRA was looking at the technology. By supplying the equipment, they thought they could stay one step ahead of the IRA," Mr Fulton told the IoS yesterday.... The IoS has also spoken to a republican who was a senior IRA member in the early 1990s. He confirmed that Mr Fulton had introduced the IRA to the new technology and that the IRA shared this with "like-minded organisations abroad".... The story notes that after eight British soldiers were killed by bombs of this kind, John Reid, England's Secretary of State for Defence, said the technology had come from Iran. He later issued a retraction when the technology's provenance was revealed. Oops! So that was 1992 -- gee, what was the name of the U.S. president back then? Same as it was in 2004, when the U.S. government also thought it would be a swell idea to slip weapons know-how to bad guys -- this time the mullahs in Iran. You remember that story, which appears in James Risen's book State of War. In that case, we didn't hand out working technology we assumed could be controlled because we knew how to defeat it; we gave out bomb plans with a hidden flaw -- but our courier, a Russian defector, told the Iranians about the flaw. Oops again! (IRA story via Norwegianity.) posted by Steve M. | 11:47 AM | Sunday, March 19, 2006 Remember James G. Poulos? As I told you last year, he's the right-wing commentator (The Washington Times, The American Spectator, etc.) who thinks our children's moral well-being is threatened by wacky typography and deliberate misspellings. Well, he's been watching TV, and he's freaking again: A television commercial. A young male soaps himself up in the shower. He's using man body wash. The brand is Old Spice. At the sink, a woman -- wife? girlfriend? lover? -- attends to herself. She asks: "If you were going to be with one of my friends, who would it be?" Cut to face of male. Cue face of soapy confusion. "Don't worry," she soothes. "I won't get mad or anything." Soapy male clutches his chest. Voice over explains: not everything has to be this difficult. Buy Old Spice man body wash. ... Our psychocapitalists -- in both meanings of that word -- toy with the deaths and dangers that must be repressed and sell the erotic charge any way they can, in both directions, at every turn.... Boycott Old Spice and damn them, for breaking that which is not to be broken and making a comedy of the shattered smithereens. Damn the way in which a laugh is meant to distract, to create the diverting illusion of escape from the inescapable. Seeping from every pore of the hollow joke is a nausea that may have to be experienced first to be believed.... Oh. My. God. But wait -- Poulos wasn't finished! ...It's open to interpretation that the Old Spice girl (be she wife, girlfriend, or neither) is really not interested in the twisted kick she's trying to coax out of her man. She may really be trying to trap him into confessing his own private fantasies, the better to know her foe with. But the tone of the commercial, and the poise of her whole performance, is one of deliberate, toying ambiguity, the sort that plows a trail of tears through our sexier generations who seek the sexual cognate of self-justification so desperately that they are willing to try anything, physically and psychologically. They peep over the abyss of fleshly possibility and tumble in paralyzed. Egging them on is a whole culture. ... there is a world of difference between the gay marriage and the hip/bi threesome style. The screaming index of our cultural soul-sickness is the relentless making public of that which is private.... STOP! STOP! PLEASE STOP! That Old Spice ad? I got a mild squirm out of it. Poulos? He gives me the creeps. posted by Steve M. | 10:58 PM | OUR PALS Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post doesn't much like Christian Frei's new documentary film about the Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the Taliban in early 2001, but he does note this detail Frei uncovered: ...it was the Taliban that destroyed them. With the help, we're told by a local, of engineers from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, although the filmmaker doesn't bother to follow up on that tantalizing but possibly dubious nugget of complexity.... Interesting, if true. (What, not Iranian engineers, or Saddamist Iraqis? Aren't they the region's worst freedom-haters and evildoers?) For what it's worth, when the prime minister and foreign minister of Sri Lanka tried to prevent the destruction of the Buddhas, they appealed not to anyone in the Taliban, but to Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf; Pakistan was one of only three countries that recognized the Taliban government, the other two being Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. posted by Steve M. | 12:21 PM | Saturday, March 18, 2006 Gee, how wonderful: Afghan Man Faces Execution After Converting to Christianity An Afghan man who recently admitted he converted to Christianity faces the death penalty under the country's strict Islamic legal system. The trial is a critical test of Afghanistan's new constitution and democratic government.... ...officially, Muslim-born [Abdul] Rahman is charged with rejecting Islam and not for practicing Christianity. ...Officials say his family, who remain observant Muslims, turned him over to the authorities. ...If convicted, ... President Hamid Karzai ... would have to sign the papers authorizing Rahman's execution, a move that could jeopardize Mr. Karzai's standing with human rights groups and Western governments. ...political analysts here in Kabul say he will be under significant pressure from the country's hard-line religious groups to make an example of Rahman. --VOA News ...I want you to understand that you're on the frontier of freedom. --President Bush to troops at Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, March 1, 2006 ***** (Via Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 11:40 PM | (What follows was written before I had a chance to read the Time story "How Operation Swarmer Fizzled." Wow, it's even worse than I thought.) Here's what I don't get: If the Bush administration launched Operation Swarmer to focus America's attention on the skill of the Iraqi military, how was that supposed to help the administration in the polls? It seems obvious to me that if you're telling the public, "These Iraqis are really doing a really fine job," the American is going to think, "If they're so great, why the hell aren't we starting to get our troops out?" Plus, it's a mixed message. The message is "The Iraqis are standing up," but it's also "Three years into the war, we feel we need to launch a huge air assault -- and yes, it has to be with our aircraft." That says, "We're taking it to the enemy" -- but it also says we're still struggling to defeat the enemy. It says the Iraqis can fight -- but it also says they still need us to give them a ride. Only the Bush cultists were ever going to see this operation in a positive light. For everyone else, this was inevitably going to be seen as confirmation that we're still in this up to our necks. posted by Steve M. | 9:36 AM | Friday, March 17, 2006 Nice to see John Ashcroft has found something to keep himself busy in his golden years: ...in the era of the Jack Abramoff scandal, Mr. Ashcroft has become a Washington lobbyist, setting himself up as something of an anti-Abramoff and marketing his insider's knowledge of how Washington works. To do so, he has amassed a staff of Republican insiders and rented fancy offices. For corporations seeking contracts from the growing homeland security budget, Mr. Ashcroft promises to draw on his central role in the war on terror and in helping set up the Department of Homeland Security. For companies in trouble with regulators, he says his experience in cracking down on corporate corruption can provide valuable insights. "Clients would call in an individual who has a reputation for the highest level of integrity," he said in an interview in his office. "Those who have been in government should not be forbidden from helping people deal with government, which is what I see myself doing." In the hourlong interview, Mr. Ashcroft used the word "integrity" scores of times.... Yeah, this has "integrity" stamped all over it: One of Mr. Ashcroft's newest clients is ChoicePoint, a broker of consumer data that is increasingly being used by the government to keep tabs on people within the United States. The company received millions of dollars in contracts from the Justice Department under Mr. Ashcroft as part of the war on terror and has now hired him to find more. "The Ashcroft Group contacted us and we initiated a relationship," said Chuck Jones, a ChoicePoint spokesman. "He's got a lot of knowledge that could benefit ChoicePoint." ... A further opportunity for Mr. Ashcroft arises from an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into insider trading by the company's chief executive and chief operating officer. Chris Jay Hoofnagle, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington digital rights group, said Mr. Ashcroft had the inside edge. "As attorney general, Ashcroft created the conditions that allow companies like ChoicePoint to flourish," Mr. Hoofnagle said. "Ashcroft can open doors that others can't." ... This, too: After helping prosecute executives at Enron and WorldCom, Mr. Ashcroft also says he can counsel troubled companies on how to deal with government regulators and avoid the fate of Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that collapsed after it was indicted in the Enron scandal. "They need someone who can take threatening circumstances and neutralize them," Mr. Ashcroft said. "I'll be a lightning rod for people facing serious challenges." ... As does his staff: His staff includes David T. Ayres, his former chief of staff; Juleanna Glover Weiss, a Republican lobbyist and a former press secretary to Vice President Dick Cheney; and a Republican fund-raiser, William C. T. Gaynor II, who helped raise more than $300 million in the 2004 election. He opened his office 10 months after leaving the Justice Department. Whom would Jesus schmooze? posted by Steve M. | 2:24 PM | More disgusting than green beer: The head of the St. Patrick's Day Parade [in Manhattan] ignited march madness yesterday when he likened letting gays participate to allowing neo-Nazis and the KKK to join other ethnic events. "If an Israeli group wants to march in New York, do you allow neo-Nazis into their parade? If African-Americans are marching in Harlem, do they have to let the Ku Klux Klan into their parade?" the parade's chairman, John Dunleavy, was quoted as saying in an interview with The Irish Times. "People have rights," Dunleavy added. "If we let the [Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization] in, is it the Irish Prostitute Association next?" When the Daily News caught up with Dunleavy at a dinner at The Waldorf-Astoria yesterday, he refused to discuss his remarks. "I'm not talking to you. This is a private party," he said. "I'll have you removed." ... The Irish Times interview is here. From another Irish Times article, we learn that a few people have been rejecting Manhattan for Queens, where they're a bit more welcoming: In Woodside, Queens, where gay groups set up their own parade, the local anarchist marching band refused to march in the Manhattan parade because it excludes gays. The first openly gay speaker of New York city council, Christine Quinn, is also boycotting the Manhattan parade, as is author Frank McCourt, who noted that if you threw a bomb among the leaders of the Manhattan parade, you would kill "the cream of Irish mediocrity". His brother Malachy, dressed in an outlandish Tricolour hat for last Sunday's pro-gay Woodside parade, is even running for governor on the Green Party ticket to raise awareness of the anti-gay discrimination. Nice. (You know all about Frank. Malachy's not a bad storyteller, either.) That second Irish Times link notes that an earlier chairman of the Manhattan parade said "that homosexuality is a disease that can be cured in a hospital and that, if gays were allowed to march, they might attack children lining the parade route." It also notes that a bishop is trying to keep the National Organization for Women out of the parade in Morristown, New Jersey. (And there's more -- about dwarves in Belmar, New Jersey, who either were or weren't too drunk at last year's parade there, and are banned and/or boycotting this year's parade. I bet they'd be welcome in Woodside.) posted by Steve M. | 11:20 AM | Besides noting that the what the Bushies are doing is obviously an election year stunt, I can't add a thing to what Barbara at the Mahablog says about the newly released Saddam documents. Read what she says here and here. **** UPDATE: No, wait -- go read this, too, from Gavin at Sadly, No! It examines the absurd scenario the Bushies have concocted to explain why the allegedly really, really incriminating documents are trickling out so slowly. Their explanation: the president of the United States cowers in fear of his own director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, who's said to be the roadblock. It has nothing to do with election-year politics at all! But let Gavin explain in more detail. posted by Steve M. | 9:24 AM | Thursday, March 16, 2006 Brilliant. **** (Via A Lie a Day.) posted by Steve M. | 7:30 PM | The lyrics to the 1978 song "Bullet" by the punk band by the Misfits aren't very nice. They're about the assassination of JFK and the (imagined) degradation of Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath. But that's no excuse for this: A Mars Hill College freshman says he's no fan of President Bush. But Tim Willis claims he didn't mean to harm anybody when he changed song lyrics so they described the violent death of the president. The Secret Service wasn't impressed, and seized the computer Willis used. Willis says he made the posting to myspace.com in late February in response to a posting by a friend, whose computer also was seized. The lyrics were from "Bullet," a 1978 song by the punk band The Misfits. Willis replaced references to President Kennedy with Bush's name. A Secret Service agent who seized Willis's computer on March 7th declined to discuss the case. What the hell is the Secret Service looking for on these kids' computers for nine days and counting? What do they expect to find? Bin Laden's ATM password? They're kids, for crissakes. They did a punk-rock thing to a punk-rock song and posted it as a joke to a very public site that has a gazillion users a day. How long does it take to figure out that they're not terrorists? (Story via DU.) posted by Steve M. | 3:43 PM | THE LARGE PRINT GIVETH AND THE SMALL PRINT TAKETH AWAY USA Today notes that seniors and their families will soon have yet another reason to hate Bush and the Republicans: Medicare drug plan gaps may hit soon ... A special 90-day transition period, set by Medicare to prevent beneficiaries from losing any drug coverage, ends April 1. Private insurance plans can then stop covering drugs they don't usually pay for. Most of the 36 states that stepped in on an emergency basis to help low-income beneficiaries also will stop paying. State insurance counselors and health care advocates say the result could be a repeat of problems first encountered in January, when the program began. Thousands of beneficiaries were turned away from pharmacies when their records weren't found or their drugs weren't covered. "Some of these people are going to be in really difficult spots," said Jude Walsh, special assistant to Maine Gov. John Baldacci. "I think they're going to be going without medication again."... Ah, but don't worry -- the magic of privatization can make this all go smoothly! Meanwhile, Medicare officials said insurance plans need to educate seniors about what happens when the transition period ends. Some seniors could have to change drugs, file appeals or pay out of pocket. "We have a short time to be working with the plans to make sure the beneficiaries get the information," said Peter Ashkenaz of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "Some plans are already doing it." Or maybe not.... But dozens of state health insurance counselors in a nationwide conference call Wednesday said they were unaware of any insurance plans helping to educate seniors.... The private insurers aren't doing good customer service? I'm shocked. Shocked! posted by Steve M. | 12:14 PM | Well, other bloggers have told you this, but you really will enjoy "The Final Word Is Hooray!," FAIR's compilation of premature celebratory quotes about the Iraq War from our journalistic betters back in the spring of '03. It's hard to pick a favorite -- this is just a mild example of the fun to be found within: NPR's Mara Liasson: Where there was a debate about whether or not Iraq had these weapons of mass destruction and whether we can find it... Brit Hume: No, there wasn't. Nobody seriously argued that he didn't have them beforehand. Nobody. (Fox News Channel, April 6, 2003) But, you know, some people will read that and not quite get what's so funny. Here's House Intelligence Committee chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) responding to the Bush administration's release of Saddam documents, which began this week and will continue, apparently, right through this election year: "Whether Saddam Hussein destroyed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or hid or transferred them, the most important thing is we discover the truth of what was happening in the country prior to the war," he said. Yeah, right, Pete. They were all spirited out in the dead of night just before the war, invisible to satellite photos and leaving behind no radiation traces or chemical traces or tire treads or any other kind of forensic evidence. Elves and fairies are really good at this kind of thing. There are a couple of straws right-wingers will grasp at in this first batch of documents. Here's one straw: The Pentagon Web site described [one] document this way: "2002 Iraqi Intelligence Correspondence concerning the presence of al-Qaida Members in Iraq. Correspondence between [regime] members on a suspicion, later confirmed, of the presence of an Al-Qaeda terrorist group. Moreover, it includes photos and names." So I guess this is what the Bushites meant when they said Saddam was "harboring" terrorists -- they meant "they were in the country and at first he didn't know where the hell they were, or even if they were there at all." By that definition, the kids in the house in the Friday the 13th movies are "harboring" Jason. Here's another straw for the right: ... one Iraqi intelligence document indicat[ed] Saddam's feared Fedayeen paramilitary forces were investigating rumors in the fall of 2001 that as many as 3,000 Iraqis and Saudis were going to fight in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion. ... "After presenting the matter to the Supervisor of Fedayeen Saddam, he ordered that the matter should be looked into for verification of the truth of the rumor," the translation said. So he couldn't prevent ordinary citizens from crossing his border to volunteer for a war. Good thing we cleared that problem up! Ah, but it's Groundhog Day, folks. Did you catch this? The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, on Wednesday compared the threat from Iran's nuclear programs to the September 11 terror attacks on the United States. "Just like September 11, only with nuclear weapons this time, that's the threat. I think that is the threat," Bolton told ABC News' Nightline program.... Arrrrgh! It's happening again! Please make it stop! posted by Steve M. | 7:55 AM | Wednesday, March 15, 2006 The government proposed a fine of $3.6 million against CBS and dozens of its stations and affiliates Wednesday in a crackdown on what regulators called indecent television programming. The Federal Communications Commission said a network program, "Without a Trace," that aired in December 2004 was indecent. It cited the graphic depiction of "teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy." ... Rejecting an appeal by CBS, the FCC upheld its previous $550,000 fine against 20 of the network's stations for the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl two years ago.... --AP today Just to put that in perspective, here's an AP story from last week: The federal government said Wednesday it had fined the company that owns the West Virginia mine where a dozen miners were killed in January more than $100,000 in new penalties. The fines were for 43 citations that had previously been issued but which had not yet received a price tag. They are part of 208 citations that the federal agency issued against Ashland, Ky.-based International Coal Group for problems at Sago in the calendar year prior to the Jan. 2 explosion. The new fines, totaling $105,840, are in addition to a little more than $24,000 previously assessed. Many of the new fines are meant to address serious health and safety violations. The largest fine was for $9,600 and involved roof support problems. Another fine for $9,200 dealt with ventilation problems. None of the penalties the government previously issued at Sago exceeded $1,000, a fact that has drawn criticism from lawmakers and worker representatives. ... The agency's minimum penalty is $60, while $60,000 is its maximum.... Nice to see our government has its priorities straight. (Emphasis mine throughout.) **** UPDATE: You can read a description of the offending Without a Trace episode here; there's also a clip (which I can't tell you anything about because it's not loading on this computer). Yes, it all sounds quite racy. However, I'd like to ask Brent Bozell, whose Parents Television Council provided the synopsis and clip and also conducted a form-letter campaign regarding the episode, whether he'd be willing to go to West Virginia and tell the families of the dead miners that near-naked teen flesh on TV is 30 times worse than their relatives' deaths. posted by Steve M. | 4:57 PM | Well, this is amusing -- it appears that Hillary Clinton's likely GOP opponent this year is a felon: ...Just-announced Republican Senate hopeful Kathleen McFarland ... a Reagan administration official in the early 1980s, has maintained two voting addresses since 1996: at her posh Park Avenue home and at her family's stunning second home on a small island near Southampton, according to the records. She pingponged her vote from Manhattan to Southampton in various years, casting her ballot from the Ram Island address in 1998 and 1999, but voting from Park Avenue in 2000 and 2001. She skipped the 2002 and 2003 elections, and then it was back to voting in Southampton in 2004, according to the records. State law makes it a felony to be registered at two addresses during the same election cycle, according to state Board of Elections spokesman Lee Daghlian. "When you change the place you've been voting, a new registration has to be filed, showing that you've changed your address," Daghlian said.... Right-wingers will scoff, but when they think Democrats are merely registering at a new address without voiding the old registration, they're the first to scream "Voter fraud!" Maybe the New York GOP should reconsider the out-of-favor candidacy of former Yonkers mayor John Spencer. Er, no, wait -- he would apparently bring to the race marital troubles, "dicey friends, ... impulse-control issues and a spot on an FBI surveillance tape," among other items on his C.V. Never mind -- stick with the felon. (The story is from the New York Post -- which I believe is being nice to Mrs. Clinton because Rupert Murdoch thinks she'll be elected president in '08 and he wants to be sure he still has friends in high places.) posted by Steve M. | 1:52 PM | The poor bastards. They were going to enjoy Able Danger so much. Everyone on the Bushista (and Clinton-hating) Right was feeling a surge of anticipatory ecstasy as the moment approached when all liberals and Democrats (and defenders of top Clinton Justice Department official Jamie Gorelick) would have to eat crow and reluctantly acknowledge the awesome power of Able Danger. Consider Fox News: Fox, August 12, 2005: 'Able Danger' Could Rewrite History The federal commission that probed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks was told twice about "Able Danger," a military intelligence unit that had identified Mohamed Atta and other hijackers a year before the attacks, a congressman close to the investigation said Wednesday.... John Gibson, Fox, August 12, 2005: I'm like a lot of my e-mailers: I think this business about the "Able Danger" unit at the Pentagon -- the people who had their eye on Mohammad Atta way before 9/11 -- is now going to come home to roost with the 9/11 commission itself. The reason is simple. One of the 9/11 commissioners should have been in the witness chair during the entire hearings. She was Jamie Gorelick, who was in the Justice Department making up the rules before 9/11. She was the one who ruled that the spies and military analysts couldn't tell the FBI things about people like Atta they had found information on. This is the so-called wall -- civil liberties, you know -- that protected you from the evil old feds investigating you here at home in the land of the free and home of the brave. And under this thinking, a guy like Atta could be in the crosshairs of the spooks but wander around free as a bird because the spooks had been told they couldn't tell the feds charged with tracking terrorists that they had one on the radar. This is not to say 9/11 is Jamie Gorelick's fault.... Fox, August 23, 2005: A second military officer has publicly backed claims by a military intelligence officer that a Pentagon unit named "Able Danger" identified lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in early 2000 as a security risk.... Fox, August 28, 2005: A third person has now come forward to verify claims made by a military intelligence unit that a year before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it had information showing that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta and other terrorists were identified as being in the United States.... Whoops! Sorry -- never mind: Late one night in June, Rep. Curt Weldon (R., Pa.) stood up in a largely empty House chamber and made an incendiary charge. With dramatic rhetorical flourish, he said that a secret military intelligence program called Able Danger fingered Mohamed Atta and two other al-Qaeda hijackers before the 9/11 attacks -- and that the government had failed to act.... But Weldon's story, which unleashed a wave of national media attention as well as probes and congressional hearings, is unraveling. He now says that he's not sure the chart had a picture of Atta, as he has sometimes maintained, and that he has been relying on the memory of an intelligence analyst who helped produce it. Meanwhile, other key players in the story ... contradict Weldon, saying they never saw Atta's picture. Moreover, several government investigations have failed to find any documentation so far that the program had identified hijackers before the attacks, and Weldon has begun to allow that there are parts of his story that may not be proven.... Here's my favorite part of this: ...Weldon has said Rep. Dan Burton (R., Ind.) went with him to Hadley's office to discuss the Able Danger program and to deliver the chart produced by the Able Danger team. But a spokesman for Burton said that while he was at the meeting, he does not recall seeing Atta's name or picture on the chart.... Man, if Dan Burton won't back your right-wing conspiracy theory, you've got problems. posted by Steve M. | 11:26 AM | Tuesday, March 14, 2006 Saw this at BuzzFlash yesterday: Child sex suspect once was in 'ex-gay' ministry The former Summit Christian School teacher arrested last weekend after admitting having sex with a teen boy was enrolled in a controversial "ex-gay" ministry whose adherents believe people can change their sexual preference through the power of Christ. Love in Action International in Memphis, Tenn., is the oldest and best known of the ministries that try to counsel people away from homosexuality through spirituality.... [Chad] Stoffel, 29, a popular teacher and coach at Summit Christian School for more than five years, resigned in December, according to school officials. It's not clear when Stoffel went to Love in Action, but on Feb. 1 a counselor there called a Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office detective and told him Stoffel had confessed to molesting "numerous" boys in South Florida, according to Stoffel's arrest report.... Oops. When I was poking around looking for other comments on this, I saw a post at The Republic of T that cited a report on the "ex-gay" movement from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. I haven't read the report, but there's a summary here and it has some creepy details: ... A key finding of the report shows that, in this third wave of ex-gay activism, ex-gay programs and their evangelical Christian right allies are focusing less on "curing" adults of homosexuality and more on preventing its development by targeting parents, children and adolescents. Whether through ex-gay teen programs or traveling ex-gay conferences like Focus on the Family's Love Won Out ex-gay programs are recommending that parents commit their children to treatment of "prehomosexuality" even if it is against their children's wishes. Heterosexual youth are also being recruited in schools and churches to spread the message that homosexuality is a treatable mental illness. "One of the most disturbing accounts in this report is a case involving a 5-year-old boy who was subjected to conversion therapy to address 'prehomosexuality.' The case involves a psychologist who claims that his theories and treatments are scientific," said study co-author Jason Cianciotto, the Policy Institute's research director.... "Prehomosexuality"? "Curing" five-year-olds? Recruiting fellow teens to propagandize for this quackery? These people are disgusting. **** ALSO SEE this Alicublog post about the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, which "Dr. Helen" (Mrs. Instapundit) believes is being brutally mistreated by the fascist jackboot-wearers of the American Psychological Association. posted by Steve M. | 11:08 PM | There are some good posts up right now about Democrats and religion -- from Scott Lemieux, Avedon Carol, Atrios, among others. But I want to go to back to the Steve Waldman post that helped get Scott, Avedon, and Atrios riled up: ...I had been making a narrower point -- that many liberals carry an elitist attitude toward evangelical Christians.... I think a distinction should be made between the elites and the rank and file on this. The fact is that most Democrats are religious. But secular liberals, who made up about 16% of the Kerry vote (more stats here) seem to have a disproportionate impact on the party's image and approach. The key words here, I think, are "elites" and "elitist." Let's never forget that the discussion of Democrats and religion is very much a discussion of class and sociocultural status. The people who now respond to the message of the GOP are the spiritual (and sometimes literal) descendants of people who responded to the economic populism and elite-bashing of politicians like Huey Long decades ago -- but we've replaced the Wall Street tycoons as their big-city villains. They think all Democrats are effete cultural elitists who sneer at ordinary citizens. They think we think they're trash. And, of course, a lot of elite Republicans (and their Democratic apologists, such as Waldman) wrap themselves in the mantle of regular-Americanness, regardless of how many movers and shakers they consort with. They help keep this sociocultural resentment alive. Red-staters are thus primed to anticipate contempt from us -- and so yokel-bashing by individuals is said to represent every liberal or Democrat's point of view; a politician's unfamiliarity with NASCAR or newly purchased hunting camo is said to be a slap in the face at regular folks. The religion-bashing they claim to detect is just part of this. I don't know what will help us persuade religious conservatives that we don't resent their faith but do resent attempts to compel us to live our lives according to religious beliefs we don't share. But I try to leave style differences out of the discussion -- I have no desire to mock NASCAR or megachurches or country music or Southern accents, though I will criticize what's said in a megachurch or in a Southern accent if it threatens people's liberties. I know, though, that that's not going to spare me -- I'm still going to be branded a religion-hating East Coast snob, because non-coastal people have a long history of feeling disrespected, and because Democrat-haters know very well how to use that feeling of disrespect. posted by Steve M. | 12:38 PM | FOX NEWS CHANNEL: CABLE NEWS-TALK OUTLET -- OR CULT? You decide: Blogs for FOX Blogs in support and defense of the defiant FOX NEWS CHANNEL. Also featured - articles about the Main Stream Media (MSM) and journalism. Scroll down the sidebar to find out how you can add your blog to the Blogs for FOX blogroll. Maybe these people will all quit their jobs and start handing out Fox pamphlets door to door. posted by Steve M. | 10:39 AM | Monday, March 13, 2006 Sometimes I feel really, really dumb. I heard Bush's radio address on Saturday and couldn't figure out why the hell he was explaining to us that insurgents in Iraq have resorted to brutal attacks against innocent Iraqis and American forces using improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. IEDs are homemade bombs that can be hidden in cars or by the side of a road and detonated remotely, using everyday devices like garage door openers and cordless phones. I assumed that the Graydon Carter quip was all the explanation I'd get: "He speaks to the audience as if they're idiots. I think the reason he does that is because that's the way these issues were explained to him." But that's not it. At least not this time. I figured out what's going on while watching a Jim Axelrod story on CBS tonight. The story was about a speech Bush gave today (video link here): AXELROD: For a speech designed to build support for the war in Iraq, the biggest headline was accusing Iran of being behind some of the worst violence. Describing IEDs -- those roadside bombs detonated by remote control -- Mr. Bush said Iran is to blame for ever more lethal versions. BUSH: Coalition forces have seized IEDs and components that were clearly produced in Iran. That's why Bush is giving more speeches about Iraq -- to segue into Iran. He's talking about IEDs so he can call Iran evil. It really doesn't matter to him that he screwed up regime change in the ever-more-violent narco-state of Afghanistan and he screwed up far more appallingly in Iraq -- he wants to do it again. Yesterday's Washington Post told us that: ...Iran has vaulted to the front of the U.S. national security agenda amid Bush administration plans for a sustained campaign against the ayatollahs of Tehran. ...Members of the Hoover Institution's board of overseers who met with Bush, Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley two weeks ago emerged with the impression that the administration has shifted to a more robust policy aimed at the Iranian government. "The message that we received is that they are in favor of separating the Iranian people from the regime," said Esmail Amid-Hozour, an Iranian American businessman who serves on the Hoover board. "The upper hand is with those who are pushing regime change rather than those who are advocating more diplomacy," said Richard N. Haass, who as State Department policy planning director in Bush's first term was among those pushing for engagement.... They were going to make so many dominoes fall in the Middle East -- and they can't believe they can't still do it. Regime change has given them victories in two election cycles, plus it's given the spoiled scion president a reason to get up in the morning, so they're just going to keep trying to do it. (The Post story does suggest that they'd like regime change in Iran by nonviolent means. That's nice. But if that's the case, that means the Bushies think the people of Iran are going to openly side with America and simply overthrow the mullahs essentially all by themselves. If they really believe all that, they're too stupid to breathe.) posted by Steve M. | 11:10 PM | John McCain hugged George W. Bush at the '04 convention, says he would have signed the South Dakota abortion bill, and tried to rally conferees around the president at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference meeting this past weekend -- and guess what? The GOP Right still hates him. If you can't tell, let New York Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove present the evidence: Is John McCain a lesbian? Maybe we'll learn the answer from Edward Klein, who insinuated as much about Hillary Clinton in his 2005 biography -- largely a clip-job of hit pieces, reviewers said -- and is apparently hard at work on a poison-pen book about the Arizona senator. According to Crain's New York Business, Klein claims he'll chronicle the Republican presidential front-runner's "sexual infidelity, chronic gambling and anger management." I can hardly wait. Klein may not have always been a soldier in the right-wing attack army, but he's one now. Go here and read about the extensive publicity campaign mounted by the Scaife-funded NewsMax operation for Klein's book on Hillary Clinton. He'll get a lot of help from the NewsMax crowd for this book as well. Oh, and see this item at the Drudge Report -- Drudge insists that McCain's attempt to get voters in the SRLC straw poll to write in Bush as their '08 presidential choice was meant to cover over the fact that he expected to lose the poll; Drudge calls it an "embarrassment" and notes with a sneer that McCain finished fifth. **** UPDATE: Atrios has a point -- Klein's Hillary book was so nasty it was disowned even by much of the right. But the timing of the McCain book will be very, very different -- it'll be coming out just as McCain is about to face a pool of voters that will include a lot of people who'll actually believe whatever nonsense Klein dredges up. Remember what happened with the Hillary book -- decent people across the political spectrum denounced it, but it hit #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Somebody must have believed it. With McCain, again, Klein doesn't need the approval of the high-minded -- he just needs to sell books, and his pals need him to queer the pitch for McCain in South Carolina once again. posted by Steve M. | 5:34 PM | It's not a conservative crack-up yet, but this is a small shot across the bow: A Reckoning In Crawford Texas! Protest Bush for not stopping the illegal alien invasion Saturday May 6, 2006 The good citizens of the United States of America with the help of the patriotic media will be in Crawford Texas to lawfully and peacefully demonstrate against George W. Bush's lack of enforcement of immigration law. For calling the Minutemen and other border watchers "vigilantes", for not directing ICE to round up illegal aliens in our cities, for willfully failing to put our miltary on the border, For being a Mexican president and the best friend an illegal alien can have, for putting American citizens last. We, the American people will be in Crawford Texas May 6 2006, for a reckoning. Join us! God Bless America. When: 1 PM Saturday May 6, 2006 Where: Crawford Texas next to the Crawford Community Service Center 999 East 4TH Street on the parking lot of the football field.... Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist will be among our speakers at this event! I wonder if they'll do more of this when Bush and the press corps are actually hanging around. Demo or no, if Bush ever insists that GOP members of Congress stand with him on a guest-worker program, he's going to suffer some defections. It might not be another Harriet Miers or Dubai, but it could be rather unpleasant. posted by Steve M. | 2:16 PM | Over the weekend, the good Roger Ailes linked to this Washington Post story about Fred Malek, who's apparently been a creep even longer than he's been a top Republican mover and shaker. The Post story notes that in 1959, when Malek was 22, he and some friends got rip-roaring drunk and decided to skin and eat a dog -- a stunt for which they were arrested. No big deal, you might say -- except that, as the Post story notes, not long afterward Malek was the White House chief of personnel and agreed, at Richard Nixon's request, to examine the Bureau of Labor Statistics in order to determine how many Jews worked there. (Nixon felt there was a "Jewish cabal" at the BLS.) And more recently Malek (who's looking to become an owner of the Washington Nationals baseball team) has run afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Two words that don't show up in the Post story, however, are "George" and "Bush." As Timothy Noah noted in Slate in 2001, Malek was the elder Bush's "hand-picked deputy chairman for the Republican National Committee," but was forced to resign in 1988 when his role as Nixon's Jew-counter surfaced. This didn't prevent Poppy from making Malek an adviser to his 1992 campaign. Nor did it prevent the younger George Bush from turning to Malek for help in forming a group to buy the Texas Rangers baseball team. By the way, here's part of the Post's account of Malek's SEC troubles: The SEC charged that in 1998 the Connecticut treasurer, Paul J. Silvester, used state pension investments in Malek's company to reward a friend and political supporter, William DiBella, former majority leader of the Connecticut Senate. The SEC charged that Malek, who was seeking state money for investment in one of [his company] Thayer's funds, hired DiBella and paid him a percentage of the state pension fund's total investment with Malek's company, "even though DiBella had no prior involvement with the transaction and ultimately performed no meaningful work related to the investment." DiBella understood from Silvester that he didn't have to do any work for Malek or his company and that Silvester even increased the amount of the pension fund's investment with Malek "by at least $25 million (to a total of $75 million) solely to secure a larger fee for DiBella," according to the SEC News Digest. Hmmm -- a politically connected guy participating in a deal with Malek and making a lot of money while not doing very much? Where have I heard this before? [George W.] Bush ... received $15 million for his share of the Texas Rangers franchise.... Bush's stake in the team, just under 2 percent, [had been] among the smallest. He purchased his shares with a $500,000 loan from a Midland bank of which he had been a director and eventually scraped together another $106,000 to buy out two other limited partners.... ... While ... the other partners remained in the background, George W. behaved as if he were "the owner" of the Rangers. He attended every home game and even printed "baseball cards" bearing his own picture to hand out from his box. (The big money in Texas, of course, came as the result of an extremely cushy deal to finance a new stadium with tax revenues. As Timothy Noah continues to point out in Slate, Malek is quite likely to benefit from a similar taxpayer-subsidized deal if his group succeeds in acquiring the D.C. baseball team.) posted by Steve M. | 11:02 AM | Sunday, March 12, 2006 No, I still haven't read Robert Ferrigno's Prayers for the Assassin, but this (from an interview with Ferrigno in The Oregonian) is just idiotic: How hard was it to find the voice for your Muslim characters? Not hard in the slightest. They're Americans. I find it rather amusing that most people have to reassure themselves that the premise of the book -- a mass conversion of millions of Americans to Islam because in a time of vast social upheaval, the certainty of Islam is more attractive than tepid pieties from church and state -- is impossible. We have had mass conversions before, during the 1920s and Great Depression, when values were challenged and poverty was epidemic. Aimee Semple McPherson led tent revivals that were broadcast over radio and converted millions of desperate Americans to her form of Christianity. But the vast majority of those people were already Christians, schmuck. They were Christians in a Christian country called by a charismatic and showbizzy Christian evangelist to, well, Christianity. There's more: Islam is currently the fastest-growing religion in Germany and Great Britain among young adults, with most of the converts college-educated women. Yeah, I'm finding stories about that. You know how many converts we're talking about in Great Britain? 14,000. In a country of 60 million. That is, .02% of the population. And as for Germany, 1,152 Germans converted to Islam between May 2004 and May 2005 -- in a country with a population of more than 80 million. You do the math. TBogg and Tom Tomorrow have actually read the book and insist that it's not "warblogger porn," but every word I've read from Ferrigno suggests that he's just another bedwetter who's sure the Islamofascists will eventually find him hiding under the bed. posted by Steve M. | 11:17 PM | From David Kirkpatrick's New York Times review of Rod Dreher's Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or at Least the Republican Party): Are [Dreher's] crunchy cons really so conservative? ... He speaks approvingly of government action to protect the environment, restrain big businesses and help out hard-pressed home-schooling parents -- all of which sounds suspiciously like liberalism, rewound to before the sexual revolution. Er, no, it doesn't. It sounds suspiciously like just what we expect of conservatives: that they'll abandon the right-wing party line the minute it conflicts with their own wants, needs, and desires. Think Richard Brookhiser advocating the legalization of medical marijuana (because he smoked pot when he had cancer), or Andrew Sullivan's high-risk gay sex life (which doesn't quite jibe with his moralizing about others and indifference to those who can't afford the treatment that keeps him alive). Nothing liberal here -- just the same old "I want mine, I don't care about anyone else's" attitude we've come to expect from the Right. posted by Steve M. | 2:38 PM | Sorry -- busy weekend (plus some computer trouble, though that's solved now). I'll check bac in sometime this afternoon or this evening. posted by Steve M. | 10:35 AM | Friday, March 10, 2006 I find this somewhat bizarre: There's going to be a meeting in Memphis of the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, and National Journal is planning to conduct a 2008 presidential straw poll there -- and the conferees are being urged to write in George W. Bush as the party's preferred '08 candidate. Patrick Hynes talks about this scheme at Ankle Biting Pundits, and Hotline is confirming the story. Here's the point, according to Hynes: ...more that a couple friends of mine on hand in Memphis are considering using the straw poll as a device to show consistent and strong support for President George W. Bush. If just enough people write in the name of George W. Bush on their straw poll ballots, their thinking goes, maybe they can show the snarky media that Republicans are unfazed by its relentless and dishonest negative assaults on the President and his administration. The Hotline story says John McCain is solidly behind the plan, and Hynes, in a follow-up, adds that " McCain will not be alone in urging conferees to 'Write in Bush' -- we haven't heard the last of this developing story, I suspect." This is what Republicans think is going to turn everything around for the Bush administration -- not putting noses to the grindstone and actually doing a good job, not responding to the legitimate anger of the public, but a forced display of solidarity that makes it seem as if the Bush presidency is wildly successful and overwhelmingly popular among the Republican hard core. They think they're the norm and two-thirds of America is outliers. They think their only problem is bad PR. (Via Memeorandum.) **** Incidentally, does anyone else with some knowledge of the civil rights era find it offensive that an organization even exists with the name Southern Republican Leadership Conference? (And yes, just to rub it in, they're calling this year's confab "Red, White, Rhythm & Blues," and holding it in the city where Martin Luther King was killed.) posted by Steve M. | 7:08 PM | Kathy at Birmingham Blues notes that Richard Scrushy, the former CEO of HealthSouth who was acquitted a few months ago of fraud and conspiracy charges (after spending a great deal of time on religious broadcasts that probably helped sway his jury), is now a full-fledged minister, and just received permission from a federal judge to attend a pastors' conference with his family later this month -- in the Bahamas. ("Yeah, they’re really living the simple life now," Kathy says.) Scrushy is still facing bribery charges. In addition, a preacher who regularly sat in Scrushy's "Amen Corner" during the trial has claimed he was paid to organize black pastors to give Scrushy support; Scrushy has also been charged with paying for favorable news stories. posted by Steve M. | 4:18 PM | Wow, a three-fer. Via Jesse Berney and Atrios, I see that the National Republican Senatorial Committee has set up FancyFord.com to attack Harold Ford, who's black and is running for Senate in Tennessee as a Democrat. Jesse and Atrios say that the "Fancy Ford" site is basically calling Ford a pimp. They're right -- and before any right-winger disingenuously tells you that such a slur was the furthest thing from any Republican's mind, why don't you grab a dictionary and look up fancy man. Here -- I'll do it for you. But "fancy" is a potent word. It implies "pimp" and effeminate. And free-spending. The GOP pinned the latter two on Kerry, but this time they got three smears in one phrase. They really are evil geniuses. Remember: Republicans don't want you to weight the candidates and decide the Republican would do a better job. They want you to look at the Democrat and decide he or she isn't fit to live in decent society. **** UPDATE: The Republic of T. says similar things about the site, but a lot more pungently. posted by Steve M. | 11:57 AM | George Bush clears brush and drops his g's. John Kerry windsurfs and speaks French. That's the kind of thing you're suppose to pay attention to when trying to determine which party represents the interests of "the elites" and which one cares about "regular Americans." You're not supposed to pay attention to this: ...Last month, ... the bedding industry persuaded the Consumer Product Safety Commission to adopt a rule over the objections of safety groups that would limit the ability of consumers to win damages under state laws for mattresses that catch fire. The move was the first instance in the agency's 33-year history of the commission's voting to limit the ability of consumers to bring cases in state courts. Or this: In January, the Food and Drug Administration approved a drug label rule that pre-empts state laws. The rule will make it easier for pharmaceutical makers to prevail in consumer lawsuits that could have been brought under state laws more favorable to victims. Or this: Pending before the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are proposals announced last year by the agency that would pre-empt state laws on the safety standards for car roofs and seat positions. A third rule proposed by the traffic safety agency would preclude states from adopting more stringent fuel emission standards for light trucks and sport utility vehicles. Or this: This week, the Office of Thrift Supervision, a unit of the Treasury Department, successfully challenged a law recently adopted in Montgomery County, Md., a suburb of Washington, that was intended to reduce discriminatory lending practices. Didn't know about any of this? Neither did I. This you might have heard about: On Wednesday the House of Representatives, at the urging of the White House and the food industry, adopted a food safety measure that would prevent the states from imposing higher standards than those set by the F.D.A. The bill, which faces an uncertain future in the Senate, was strongly opposed by the states. They say it would undermine scores of stringent state laws and regulations. Americans should resent all this (or at least the portion of it they hear about in between white-women-in-peril stories on the news). But even when these stories make the news, it doesn't matter: Republicans have diverted ordinary citizens' natural resentment of arrogant economic elitism by focusing everyone's attention on supposed cultural elitism. Pay no attention to that bankruptcy law that could send you to the poorhouse. Two guys are kissing onscreen at the multiplex! **** (In the interests of equal time, I should point out that a "scholar" from the American Enterprise Institute insists that the stricter state regulations "hamper research and innovation." I guess being burned alive in your bed is a real spur to creativity.) posted by Steve M. | 10:13 AM | Thursday, March 09, 2006 Hmmm -- Forbes reports that the Dubai deal may not be exactly what you may think it is: In what could be a last-ditch effort to salvage its deal to operate American East and Gulf Coast ports, DP World told Congress that it would agree to transfer control to a "U.S. entity," which could simply mean a subsidiary of the Dubai operation. In a statement, first read on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Virginia Republican John Warner, DP World said the decision was made to "preserve the strong relationship between the U.S. and the U.A.E." But in fact, it sounded suspiciously like a device carefully crafted by DP World's huge team of lobbyists and lawyers to salvage the deal in some fashion. The new entity is supposed to have an American board and American managers, but the ownership was still questionable, or as New York's Democratic Senator Charles Schumer observed, "the devil is in the details." ... Meanwhile, the wingnuts have a recommendation for the ports: "Bad Dog" at Lucianne.com: Now, bring on Halliburton! "Reader Marty M." at MichelleMalkin.com:: Please, please, please let Halliburton get the ports contract. Sure, they have no experience at running ports--I just want to see moonbat heads explode. Ace of Spades: The issue goes away, the ports will be run by an American operation (assuming, say, Halliburton is willing to take over), and, to the extent American security was compromised, it no longer is. Well, no surprise, really. After all, apparently somebody is buying these damn things:  **** UPDATE: Via TBogg, I see that yet another Bushist is is saying "Halliburton! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!" Damn, it's the right-wing "Aristocrats." posted by Steve M. | 4:08 PM | Shorter Peggy Noonan, prissily lecturing George Clooney: Your movie, about an actual person who tried to destroy innocent people in 1950s America, wasn't about real life. I prefer the movie about kids stepping into a piece of furniture and finding themselves in a magical kingdom where they help an anthropomorphic lion fight an evil witch, which was about real life. I'm not kidding: The Clooney generation in Hollywood is not writing and directing movies about life as if they've experienced it, with all its mysteries and complexity and variety. In an odd way they haven't experienced life; they've experienced media. Their films seem more an elaboration and meditation on media than an elaboration and meditation on life. This is how he could take such an unnuanced, unsophisticated, unknowing gloss on the 1950s and the McCarthy era. He just absorbed media about it. And that media itself came from certain assumptions and understandings, and myths. Most Americans aren't leading media, they're leading lives. It would be nice to see a new respect in Hollywood for the lives they live. It would be nice to see them start to understand that rediscovering the work of, say, C.S. Lewis, and making a Narnia film, is not "giving in" to the audience but serving it. That, by the way, leads to this: It isn't bad to look for and present good material that is known to have a following. It's a smart thing to do. It's why David O. Selznick bought "Gone With the Wind": People were reading it. It was his decision to make it into a movie from which he would profit that gave Hattie McDaniel her great role. Taboos are broken by markets, not poses. Uh, Peggy? Hollyweird is making a movie of the freaking Da Vinci Code, which has sold eight million copies in hardcover -- and which you will denounce as a slap in the face to your beloved church the moment it's released. Eight million copies is not enough of a "following" for you? **** Noonan lectures Clooney after giving us the usual right-wing twaddle about box-office woes: ...You don't have to be a genius to figure out that viewership of the Oscars is down because movie attendance itself is down, and that movie attendance is down because Hollywood isn't making the kind of movies that compel people to leave their homes and go to the multiplex. There are those who think Hollywood hates America, and they have reason to think it. Hollywood does, as host Jon Stewart suggested, seem detached from the country it seeks to entertain. It is politically and culturally to the left of America, and it often seems disdainful of or oblivious to its assumptions and traditions. ... What [studio executives and producers] care about a great deal is status, and in their community status is bestowed by the cultural left. This is an old story. But it seems only to get worse, not better. If a lot of the American audience, certainly the red-state audience, assumes Hollywood hates them, they won't go as often to the movies as they used to. If you thought Wal-Mart hated you, would you shop there? Which brings me to this story from the New York Times business section: ...Data released yesterday by Beverage Digest, the industry trade publication, shows that for the first time in 20 years, the number of cases of soda sold in the United States declined. Case volume in 2005 was down 0.7 percent, to 10.2 billion cases.... While soft drinks are still the country's most heavily consumed beverage, the category is losing ground to bottled water, sports drinks like Gatorade and Powerade and energy drinks like Red Bull and Full Throttle.... "Traditional carbonated soft drinks have got a tough road ahead," Mr. Sicher said. "The migration to water and sports drinks and other noncarbonated drinks seems to be permanent." ... Why are people going to the movies less? For the same reason they're drinking less Pepsi and more Red Bull -- they have new choices, and a lot of people prefer the new stuff to the old stuff. That's how it works in capitalism. Or are you going to argue that Coke and Pepsi are "liberal," while Red Bull exemplifies a rejection of left-wing cultural hegemonism and a return to traditional values? **** Oh, one last thought: If a movie that's "an elaboration and meditation on media" deserves to be consigned to the ash heap of cultural history, does that mean we have to stop screening Citizen Kane? posted by Steve M. | 12:46 PM | Wednesday, March 08, 2006 Why is this happening now? I'll tell you below: President Bush ordered the Department of Homeland Security yesterday to create a center for faith-based and community initiatives within 45 days to eliminate regulatory, contracting and programmatic barriers to providing federal funds to religious groups to deliver social services, the White House announced last night.... This is happening now because Karl Rove knows that America is angry about the administration's Katrina response, and he wants to change what we talk about when we talk about Katrina -- not adminstration incompetence, but liberal "hostility to religion." He wants us liberals to get riled up about this, then he wants the administration and right-wing opinion-mongers to attack us for getting riled up. It's easy to tell that this is a reaction to recent events (the release of pre-Katrina briefing videos, ever worsening Katrina poll numbers) -- if it weren't, why didn't it happen months ago? Being the party in Washington that didn't screw up Katrina is a plus for congressional Democrats, and Karl Rove is doing what he always does -- he's attacking his opponents by going after their strength. If he blunts the Democrats' advantage on Katrina, maybe Republicans win in November. So, yes, it angers me that the administration is looking to bang a few more holes in the wall of separation between church and state. But it angers me even more that Rove and the Bushies are looking at the ongoing Katrina debacle and focusing most intently on how they can make political hay out of it. posted by Steve M. | 10:03 PM | I gave undeserved attention last fall to the right-wing children's book Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed, and I probably shouldn't repeat that error, but I've been reading some of the promo material for the sequel and I just want to point out a few things: * Help! Mom! Hollywood's in My Hamper! is a dumb, stilted, un-childlike title. If you have a kid who uses the word "Hollywood" this way, you're raising a freak. * I'm deeply suspicious of the fact that the first Help! Mom! book shot to the top of two online bookstores' bestseller lists, but never, as far as I know, made any print bestseller list (e.g., the ones in USA Today and The New York Times). Is it true what they say -- that online bestseller lists are easy to game? * As parody names go, most of the following are not worthy of Cracked, much less Mad: Daisy Snears, Rayonna, Barbara Buttersand, Sean Penny, Oh! Prah, Ben Aflac, Larry Queen, Whoopie, "Toenailology" Tom, Katie Curtain, and Michael Maroon. Really -- "Toenailology"? (And Aflac should sue.) * Re "Daisy Snears": Britney Spears is a Bush supporter. (Don't take my word for it -- ask the Chicago Sun-Times, The Washington Times, or CNN. ("I think we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that," Spears told a CNN interviewer, in reference to the Iraq War.) * Being a self-hating homosexual who belongs to a litigious cult religion that would withhold needed medical care from people experiencing devastating mental illness is not left-wing. If you're not sure which celebrity I'm referring to, there are many liberals who would be happy to explain. (I'd tell you myself, but I don't feel like getting sued.) * What's next? Help! Mom! I Just Heard Rap Music and Liked It -- Should I Kill Myself Before I Turn into a Liberal? posted by Steve M. | 4:58 PM | A couple of weeks ago, a few of the A-list lefty bloggers were talking among themselves, and they began to devise a plan: they would urge liberals in six states to write letters to the editor and phone radio talk shows in order to pressure Republican senators to call for a full investigation of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program. It was a particularly opportune moment, they said, in part because other events had begun making the administration and its supporters particularly vulnerable. Jane Hamsher at firedoglake wrote: Cheney (and by extension) BushCo. are heavily damaged after Cheney got away with shooting an old man in the face... Anyway, the upshot -- several GOP are in critical positions with regard to these investigations, and they are also extremely susceptible to pressure in their own back yards right now. Glenn Greenwald wrote: NSA scandal and Portgate - a perfect match ... the serious split between the Administration and their formerly compliant Congressional allies is, for many reasons, the perfect framework in which to press for real Congressional investigations into the NSA scandal. The emergence of this sharp wedge between the Congress and White House, as well as the distrust of the White House which the port controversy is generating, create the ideal groundwork for agitating for Congressional investigations..... Oh well -- so much for that: Moving to tamp down Democratic calls for an investigation of the administration's domestic eavesdropping program, Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Tuesday that they had reached agreement with the White House on proposed bills to impose new oversight but allow wiretapping without warrants for up to 45 days. The agreement, hashed out in weeks of negotiations between Vice President Dick Cheney and Republicans critical of the program, dashes Democratic hopes of starting a full committee investigation because the proposal won the support of [moderate Republican] Senators Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia J. Snowe of Maine.... Democrats called the deal an abdication of the special bipartisan committee's role as a watchdog, saying the Republicans had in effect blessed the program before learning how it worked or what it entailed. "The committee is, to put it bluntly, basically under the control of the White House," said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is vice chairman of the panel.... **** Look, I'm not an A-list lefty blogger. I'm a C-lister who can read polls, and who knows that politicians can also read polls. Bush is unpopular, and it's prudent for even Republican members of Congress to defy him once in a great while. They're doing that on Dubai. But most Republicans are going to defy the president only when public opinion is overwhelming -- that is, when public anger threatens their job security -- and when bucking the president can be portrayed as consistent with being Republican. Dubai fits those criteria. Warrantless spying doesn't. Public opinion on that issue is split -- and, given the GOP's vast superiority at media management, a split is as good as a win. Opposing warrantless spying also looks like a pro-"weakness" position. On Iraq, of course, Bush seems vulnerable -- but the issue just isn't simple. Here's an ABC report by George Stephanopoulos on the recent Washington Post/ABC poll: About half the public [52 percent] wants a withdrawal of American troops. But they're split. Fewer than one in five say bring the troops home right now [17 percent]. About a third [35 percent] say bring them home gradually over time. Another third says have the troop levels stay exactly the same [34 percent]. And then you've got about ten percent, actually 11 percent, of the country says increase troops now. So you've got a chaotic situation in Iraq which has left the public confused. So there's no monolithic opposition to leaving troop levels high in the near term; very few people want an immediate withdrawal. With numbers like that, Republicans in Congress know they don't have to abandon the president to save their jobs. Even if the war is increasingly unpopular, sticking with Bush won't lose them too many votes, and they'll continue to look "tough." The problem with many people on the left is that we get to the first base camp and think we've already climbed the mountain. Bush is in the 30s or low 40s in the polls -- so we think the new liberal dawn is just about to arrive, requiring little more than a nudge from us. The fact is, a few letters to the editor aren't going to change the fact that a huge percentage of the public still endorses the essential GOP approach to Iraq and terrorism, despite significant skepticism about the specifics. The right-wing explanation of how the world works still holds sway with the American public. I think Bush is vulnerable -- on issues like Katrina and economic insecurity. But I think we need to do a lot more storytelling before we'll get the public to believe that Bushism is bad for our national security, and national security is what the '06 midterm elections are going to be about, as was the case in '02 and '04. People's gut sense is that withdrawing from a war -- any war -- is a sign of weakness; they still think the Iraq War is part of the war on terrorism; they think Democrats are visceral peaceniks who hate all use of force; et cetera, et cetera. We are not offering enough rebuttals to these ideas. Until we do -- until the GOP narrative of recent events is being greeted with skepticism by a majority of the public -- Bushism will continue to reign, and congressional Republicans will stick with Bush on nearly every issue. posted by Steve M. | 11:50 AM | Chris Allbritton at Back to Iraq 3.0 responds to the new right-wing talking point -- that the reduction of violence since the Samarra mosque bombing is a sign that there can't possibly be a civil war going on. Allbritton's writing about Ralph Peters, who's been "rolling with" (Peters's words) the 506th Infantry Regiment and other units and writing columns for the New York Post, all of which can be summarized as "Nyah-nyah, I'm not dead, so there's no civil war!": Just because people aren't curled up in the fetal position under their beds all the time doesn't mean there’s not a war on of some kind. In Lebanon, for 15 years, people went to the beach, cafes, bars and, in general, tried to live a normal life. For long stretches, a neighborhood would be calm. And then the shells would come, or a running street battle would break out and civilians would go running inside to hide. The violence would eventually pass, like a breaking wave, and they would come out into the light. That's the way war works, and that's what's happening in Baghdad right now. Go read the whole thing. posted by Steve M. | 7:44 AM | Tuesday, March 07, 2006 Writing for the Southern Baptist Press Web site BP News, Phil Boatwright compares Good Night, and Good Luck to Triumph of the Will. Not since Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” has a film been so unabashedly employed as a tool for indoctrination as Mr. Clooney’s. The story tells of renowned newsman Edward R. Morrow’s televised verbal war with Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Mr. Clooney’s agenda became glaringly apparent as he avoided any commentary other than his own. Yeah it really would have been a much better film if he'd given the pro-witch hunt side equal time.... **** (Boatwright also says that Syriana and Paradise Now "defended terrorism." Did David Horowitz ghost-write this column?) posted by Steve M. | 4:51 PM | The gun obsessives are shouting "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" again, this time in Arizona: The National Rifle Association is pushing a measure at the state Legislature that would keep the governor from confiscating or placing restrictions on firearms and ammunition -- including sales -- during a state of emergency. The bill was approved by the state Senate on Monday and has the backing of some leading Republican lawmakers, including state Senate President Ken Bennett and Senate Majority Leader Tim Bee. The measure prohibits the governor from curtailing the legal use, sale or transfer of firearms and ammo during a state of emergency. The measure now moves to the state House of Representatives. The NRA is pushing similar measures in other states in the wake of Hurricane Katrina when civil disorder and rioting plagued New Orleans and some police officials sought to confiscate firearms and bullets in order to help restore order. Arizona and a number of others states give their governors the ability to invoke emergency powers including additional police powers during natural disasters, riots, times of war and terrorist attacks.... So, if I understand this correctly, under the law (if it's passed) you could theoretically set up an impromptu gun show just at the outskirts of, say, an area where Sydney-style riots were taking place, and just merrily arm both camps -- and already, under Arizona law, it's illegal for a municipality to restrict gun shows within its confines (more NRA-friendly state laws apply) and no background checks are required at gun shows. So it could be a free-for-all -- in the interest of public safety, of course. The NRA is also pushing legislation (for example, in Virginia) to require private businesses to allow guns in locked cars in their parking lots. (Interesting -- the only people in this country who aren't required to loudly proclaim that small businesses and private property are sacrosanct are the gun guys.) And that's just this week. It occurs to me that the NRA has become like a tyrant boss -- the kind of boss who shows up for work every day with a fresh set of unreasonable demands, all of which have to be met immediately. Essentially, the NRA is the Scott Rudin of American political life. posted by Steve M. | 2:15 PM | "When you're forming a government, you can't form it with any kind of sectarian element," said Maj. Gen. J. D. Thurman, commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, charged with controlling Baghdad. --New York Times today Oh, I'm sure George W. Bush, John Ashcroft, Samuel Alito, General Jerry Boykin and Michael Gerson would agree wholeheartedly. posted by Steve M. | 11:02 AM | THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD Here are some fun facts I just learned about America yesterday: ...the only college requirements for home-school teachers are in Tennessee, which requires a bachelor's degree to teach high school subjects, and North Dakota, which requires one only if a home-school teacher doesn't want to be monitored for the first two years by a certified teacher. Forty-one states don't specify any educational qualifications to home-school, according to the Home School Legal Defense Association. We really do hate "book-learning" in this country, don't we? **** (Original article is here.) posted by Steve M. | 8:30 AM | Monday, March 06, 2006 HAVEN'T I SEEN THIS MOVIE? England's Telegraph reports that the mad geniuses in Iran have found a way to conceal evidence of their nuclear program that would be fiendishly brilliant if it weren't utterly preposterous: Iran's Revolutionary Guards have taken the extraordinary step of cutting down thousands of trees in Teheran to prevent United Nations inspectors from finding traces of enriched uranium from a top-secret nuclear plant.... According to western intelligence sources, more than 7,000 trees which may have contained incriminating nuclear traces have been lost in a popular parkland area in the city near the Lavizan atomic research centre.... "The destruction of the trees is yet another example of the measures the Iranians are prepared to take to conceal the true nature of the nuclear programme," said a senior western official.... Cue scary music! This story was written by The Telegraph's Con Coughlin -- the same guy who, late in 2003, told us this: Iraq's coalition government claims that it has uncovered documentary proof that Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaeda mastermind of the September 11 attacks against the US, was trained in Baghdad by Abu Nidal, the notorious Palestinian terrorist.... The handwritten memo, a copy of which has been obtained exclusively by the Telegraph, is dated July 1, 2001 and provides a short resume of a three-day "work programme" Atta had undertaken at Abu Nidal's base in Baghdad.... The second part of the memo, which is headed "Niger Shipment", contains a report about an unspecified shipment - believed to be uranium - that it says has been transported to Iraq via Libya and Syria.... D'oh! I believe "Con Coughlin" is the British pronunciation of "Judy Miller." posted by Steve M. | 4:46 PM | Ahmed Chalabi -- even more of a fraud than we realized: EIGHT WEEKS after September 11, ... New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges, who’d just been put on the Al Qaeda beat, and Christopher Buchanan, an associate producer of PBS’s Frontline ... interviewed Jamal al-Ghurairy, an Iraqi lieutenant general who had fled Iraq. Ghurairy claimed to have witnessed foreign Islamic militants training to hijack airplanes at an Iraqi terrorist training camp. ...the story that [subsequently] spun out on the front page of the New York Times was as shocking as it was convincing. Ghurairy claimed that as a senior intelligence official, he had witnessed foreign Arab fighters training to hijack airplanes at the Salman Pak military facility south of Baghdad. About 40 foreign nationals, Ghurairy said, were based there at any given time. “We were training these people to attack installations important to the United States. The Gulf War never ended for Saddam Hussein. He is at war with the United States,” the Times quoted Ghurairy as saying. Ghurairy also claimed a German scientist was working in a section of the base that produced biological agents. ...Unfortunately, the story was an elaborate scam.... What the reporters ... didn’t know, and what has never before been reported, is that it now appears that the man himself was a fake. According to an ex-INC official, the Ghurairy who met with the Times and PBS was actually a former Iraqi sergeant, then living in Turkey and known by the code name Abu Zainab. The real Lt. General Ghurairy, it seems, had never left Iraq.... That's "INC" as in "Iraqi National Congress." This was a Chalabi operation -- and he was paid with American tax dollars to lie to Americans, under the terms of the Iraq Liberation Act. Questions about the general's believability were raised in this 2004 New York Times article, but this takes what we know about the fraud to a new level. In a just world, Ahmed Chalabi would rot in a U.S. prison for the rest of his life. posted by Steve M. | 2:26 PM | Sorry I was gone for a while. There was an outage that made a lot of blogspot.com blogs inaccessible for about five or ten minutes. Mine, however, was out for a couple of hours. I'm not sure why this happened, but it's the second time I've won the extra-long outage lottery, and it's pissing me off. posted by Steve M. | 1:04 PM | Sunday, March 05, 2006 Did Fox News bribe Oscar voters to pick "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" as Best Song? This is going to give O'Reilly and Hannity material for a week. ***** Oops -- yeah, and the Clooney speech, which I missed. But shed a tear for the poor bastards -- Brokeback Mountain didn't win Best Picture and Paradise Now didn't win Best Foreign-Language Picture. How dare the Academy deprive right-wingers of these opportunities to whine? ***** A confession: I hated Crash. I hated it because it tried to say that seeing people of other races as stereotypes is compatible with being good and decent and liberal and broad-minded because, really, who doesn't really see people of other races as stereotypes? It says that the important thing isn't whether you embrace stereotypes, it's whether, in a pinch, you'd rescue someone you think of as a stereotype from a burning car. Sorry, that's setting the bar awfully low. Brokeback Mountain was better, though I don't think it's even Ang Lee's best "gay movie" (The Wedding Banquet is better.) My Best Picture would have been The Squid and the Whale, with Jeff Daniels as Best Actor. Among the political films, I still haven't seen Syriana or Munich. I thought Good Night, and Good Luck was well done but thin; The Constant Gardener was much better -- I loved the look of it (I also loved the look of Fernando Meirelles's previous film, City of God), the story is chewy and suspenseful, and Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz are terrific. (And I was happy to see that the sort-of-political A History of Violence went home empty-handed -- sorry, it was a stick-figure movie, and it didn't have any insight into what violent people are really like.) As I mentioned Friday, I liked Paradise Now, which is not the glorification of terrorism a lot of right-wingers will tell you it is -- though I think my favorite foreign film of the year was the Israeli film Ushpizin. Hey, right-wingers -- you want an entertaining, compelling movie about religious conservatives that doesn't patronize them in the least? This is it, and I know I'm not the only atheist lefty who really enjoyed it, though you would, too. posted by Steve M. | 10:34 PM | So somebody (thank you, whoever you are) nominated this blog for one of those damn Koufax awards a while ago -- Most Deserving of Wider Recognition. Voting has now started. Given the fact that few of you are Republicans, voting for a candidate who's guaranteed to lose should be a familiar experience to most of you, so, hey, go vote for me. (Or don't -- it's up to you.) And vote in the other categories here. posted by Steve M. | 2:25 PM | Remember when the right-wing talking point du jour was that lefties were all wrong about Iraq because Iraqis are really optimistic about the future? Well, now we have this in today's New York Times -- an article by Lydia Polgreen that rebuts that argument, even though it never once mentions Iraq: Misery Loves Optimism in Africa ... One glance at the statistical profile of the continent's 900 million people will tell you that Africans can expect to live the shortest lives, earn the lowest incomes and suffer some of the worst misrule on the planet. They are more likely than anyone on earth to bury their children before the age of 5, to become infected with H.I.V., to die from malaria and tuberculosis, to require food aid. Yet a recent survey by Gallup International Association of 50,000 people across the world found that Africans are the most optimistic people. Asked whether 2006 would be better than 2005, 57 percent said yes. Asked if they would be more prosperous this year than last, 55 percent said yes. These data bear out what I see all the time as I travel across sub-Saharan Africa as a correspondent: that every single day lived here, each birth, wedding, graduation, sunrise and sunset is, in ways large and small, a daily triumph of hope over experience. Hope, it seems, is Africa's most abundant harvest.... In other words, ordinary people's optimism about the future is absolutely no predictor of whether there's a good reason to be optimistic. The Gallup people seem to grasp why this is so: ...Experts at Gallup International have grappled with the meaning of the data, which seem counterintuitive, but turn out to be consistent over time and in many places that have suffered through catastrophe. Places like Kosovo and Bosnia, for example, which have emerged from bloody wars to face an uncertain future, score high on the optimism scale.... Meril James, secretary general of Gallup International, said that Africa's optimism might reflect a reality so grim that nothing could really be worse. "There is a sense that when things can't get worse you've reached rock bottom, so things must improve," Ms. James said.... Obviously, how could you keep going in the midst of disaster unless you could imagine the disaster coming to an end? posted by Steve M. | 11:04 AM | Everybody is, in fact, saying that [Reese] Witherspoon will win [an Oscar] for her yokel turn in "Walk the Line." --from the gossip section of Saturday's New York Post Her what? Her "yokel turn"? Can you imagine if this kind of insult to rural America had appeared in The New York Times? The Internet right and talk radio would be attacking it for days. posted by Steve M. | 12:22 AM | Saturday, March 04, 2006 Greg Gutfeld, who's been an editor at Stuff, Maxim U.K., and Men's Health, wins a round of applause from National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez for his Oscar predictions: ... George Clooney will plant an on-stage kiss on Matt Damon after Matt cites Clooney's "bravery" in "tackling the new McCarthyism" in "Good Night and Good Luck." The entire exchange is about as spontaneous as a shuttle launch. Meanwhile, Theo Van Gogh remains dead. Tim Robbins attempts a witty comment at the expense of the religious right. He remains mum on Muslims and cartoons. Meanwhile, Theo Van Gogh remains dead.... Right-wingers love Theo van Gogh. Right-wingers especially love to use Theo van Gogh's death as a stick to beat the left, particularly the Hollywood left. So how come right-wingers don't make a big effort to spread van Gogh's most controversial work? They describe the "liberal media" as cowardly for not printing the Muhammad cartoons. Then why haven't they put Theo van Gogh's notorious film Submission on U.S. TV? In this year of cartoon riots and multiple Oscar nominations for films that offend right-wingers, why isn't Fox, or Fox News, or the Sinclair group of stations, showing Submission as counterprogramming to the Oscars tomorrow night? I think red-state America would find it rather eye-opening: As she begins to pray, the woman looks heavily veiled, showing her eyes only, but her long black chador turns out to be transparent. Beneath it, painted on her chest and stomach, there are verses from the Koran. More women appear. A bride is dressed in white lace, but her back is naked. The Koranic verse that says a man may take his woman in any manner, time or place ordained by God is written on her skin. The images roll on, now showing a woman lying on the ground, her back and legs marked by red traces of a whip. The Koranic verses on her wounded flesh say that those guilty of adultery or sex outside marriage shall be punished with 100 lashes. There are chilling sounds of a cracking whip; there is the haunting beauty of the Arabic calligraphy and soft music. These are scenes from "Submission" ... Does the movie have too much nudity for Mr. and Mrs. Joe Sixpack? Is it too arty? Or do right-wingers also pull their punches out of fear offending Muslims? Submission strongly suggests that there's a link between Islam and wife-beating; the writing of Koran verses across bare female flesh is regarded as sacrilegious even by non-Islamist Muslims; and, while there isn't full-frontal nudity, bare breasts are seen through see-through chadors. (You can see an excerpt from Submission at IFILM.) But none of that should matter! Come on, Fox -- stand up for free speech! Show us that you embrace what we P.C. Nazis shun! Broadcast Submission in prime time! **** It's also possible that the right doesn't really want us to learn too much about Theo van Gogh himself -- about, say, incidents such as this: When Jewish historian Ms Evelien Gans criticized Van Gogh, he wrote in Folia Civitatis magazine: "I suspect that Ms Gans gets wet dreams about being fucked by Dr Mengele [Nazi doctor at Auschwitz]." He hoped (Volkskrant, February 1995) Ms Gans would sue him: "Because then Ms Gans will have to explain in court that she claims that she does not get wet dreams about Dr Mengele." ... Whoops! There goes the biopic! posted by Steve M. | 12:13 PM | Friday, March 03, 2006 Bad poll numbers? Remember this: Bush is going to end up the most unpopular president in history. --Gore Vidal, April 2002 Almost there.... posted by Steve M. | 4:27 PM | Maybe this is some sort of weird Rovian jujitsu to instill fear in voters, but now we have a general heading out and saying publicly that our terrorism strategy is a failure, while the Reverend Moon's Washington Times covers the speech: Terrorist growth overtakes U.S. efforts Thirty new terrorist organizations have emerged since the September 11, 2001, attacks, outpacing U.S. efforts to crush the threat, said Brig. Gen. Robert L. Caslen, the Pentagon's deputy director for the war on terrorism. "We are not killing them faster than they are being created," Gen. Caslen told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson Center yesterday, warning that the war could take decades to resolve. ...Groups such as al Qaeda ... are constantly trying to increase their capabilities, and in some cases are outstripping the United States, Gen. Caslen said. "We in the Pentagon are behind our adversaries in the use of communications -- either to recruit or train," he said. Compared with historical jihads, or enduring Muslim wars, this one "is accelerated because of its capability in communications." ... What?! All those Karen Hughes photo ops in Muslim countries aren't working? Oh, it gets worse. Apparently, four and a half years after 9/11, the different parts of our government are only about to adopt the same frigging approach to fighting terrorism, whatever the hell it's going to be: ...Gen. Caslen said that two years ago the Department of Defense had not settled on a clear definition of the nature of the war. Moreover, because each government department had its own perspective, "we all had different strategies," he said. ...Gen. Caslen said the government and military are working to integrate their strategies and plans, and that a national strategic presidential directive and homeland security presidential directive are being drafted to face the terrorist threat. Leading the war on terrorism is Special Operations Command based in Tampa, Fla. The command is writing a military global campaign strategy with a specific plan to deal with each terrorist organization. Gen. Caslen said a governmentwide plan to assign tasks and responsibilities to all U.S. government departments and the military also is being created. Good Lord. Ah, but there is good news: The Defense Department now has defined the nature of the war, he said. The enemy, he said, is "a transnational movement of extremist organizations, networks and individuals that use violence and terrorism as a means to promote their end." Brilliant. Slap a gold star on your foreheads, geniuses. posted by Steve M. | 2:20 PM | PRO-BUSH BLOG QUOTE OF THE DAY From Confederate Yankee: Is this war on terror worth it? Only if you have a conscious. posted by Steve M. | 12:36 PM | Charles Krauthammer begins his current column this way: Nothing tells you more about Hollywood than what it chooses to honor. Nominated for best foreign-language film is "Paradise Now," a sympathetic portrayal of two suicide bombers. I've seen Paradise Now and I'm sick to death of the suggestion that it's pro-terrorism; this notion is being spread on the right, almost certainly by people who've never seen the movie, and you'll hear it even more if Paradise Now wins the Best Foreign Film Oscar. Paradise Now is a ticking-bomb thriller; the two young men at its center are both the bombs and the only ones who can keep them from detonating. Yes, the film says that ordinary people and not necessarily monsters choose to become suicide bombers, but the bombings themselves are still treated as horrors, both morally and politically. I haven't seen Syriana or Munich, the other films Krauthammer denounces, but Paradise Now -- which may have the best chance of winning an Academy Award Sunday night -- absolutely does not belong in a column titled "Oscars for Osama." **** UPDATE: And here's Cal Thomas to tell us that Paradise Now is "well-produced propaganda for the Arab-Muslim-Palestinian side and a justification for people who blow themselves up and take innocent children, women and men with them." Bet he can't produce a ticket stub, either. Thomas willfully ignores the distinction between the real-life suicide bombing that's said to be the basis for this film and the film itself, and writes, "Most people would find such a horrific act beyond the pale of any religion or politics, much less entertainment, but apparently Hollywood thinks it good movie material." Yes, and The Silence of the Lambs portrays a brilliant, charismatic man who eats human flesh, therefore it's pro-cannibalism propaganda. And what's with "Hollywood"? Paradise Now is actually a Palestinian/Dutch/German/French co-production; "Hollywood" had nothing to do with it, apart from the decision by the independent-film division of Warner Bros. to pick it up for distribution in the U.S. posted by Steve M. | 10:38 AM | You may already know that yesterday Peggy Noonan returned to the subject of her unspeakable torture at the airport: I was directed, shoeless, into the little pen with the black plastic swinging door. A stranger approached, a tall woman with burnt-orange hair. She looked in her 40s. She was muscular, her biceps straining against a tight Transportation Security Administration T-shirt. She carried her wand like a billy club. She began her instructions: Face your baggage. Feet in the footmarks. Arms out. Fully out. Legs apart. Apart. I'm patting you down. It was like a 1950s women's prison movie. I got to be the girl from the streets who made a big mistake; she was the guard doing intake. "Name's Veronica, but they call me Ron. Want a smoke?" Beeps and bops, her pointer and middle fingers patting for explosives under the back of my brassiere; the wand on and over my body, more beeps, more pats. The she walked wordlessly away.... Heavens, call Amnesty International! It was all too much for her to bear: I experienced the search not only as an invasion of privacy, which it was, but as a denial or lowering of that delicate thing, dignity. The dignity of a woman, of a lady, of a person with a right not to be manhandled or to be, or to feel, molested. Is this quaint, this claiming of such a right? Is it impossibly old-fashioned? I think it's just basic. This is the same woman who told us on November 2, 2001, It's back to being pioneer women, hoe in hand; back to being ready to shoo the kids into the cellar beneath the floorboards if the war party comes. And pioneer men working the fields side by side, seeing to the horses and the wheels of the wagons. ... We are, all of us and each of us, part of the new U.S. defense system. We are all soldiers now. We have been drafted by history. ... We're at war; think like a warrior and a survivor. And on November 30, 2001, when Noonan had just begun flying again after 9/11, she told us this: I did not experience the level of intrusion a friend of mine who is a reporter has.... Because my friend works in TV her face is well known, and the minute security people see her inching closer to the magnetometer they think: Huh, I bet she's doing an investigative piece on faulty security at airports. She's probably got a gun on her that she's trying to get through. Well, I'll give her a search she won't forget! This poor woman almost gets thrown against the wall and given a full cavity search every time she travels; her bags are searched inch by inch, she is wanded top to bottom, her nail clippers are taken, her jewelry inspected. When she told me about it, we started to laugh. I love that -- it was funny when her friend was searched rudely, but now ... "IT'S HAPPENING TO MOI! MOI!!!" By all means read the current Noonan column. Savor how she segues from her airport experience to a campaign to either mutter or shriek a sort of Franny & Zooey half-mad pseudo-prayer every time something occurs that offends her as a lady. And, for dessert read Roy Edroso's comments at Alicublog. posted by Steve M. | 7:58 AM | Thursday, March 02, 2006 Right-wingers really do hate freedom, don't they? (Almost as much as they hate Muslims.) posted by Steve M. | 5:28 PM | While the planet burns, the only Secretary of State we've got is (a) already running for president, (b) turning into just as much of a jockish twit as her boss, or (c) both: Rice shows off her fitness regime Condoleezza Rice, the nation's top diplomat, is appearing in a three-part TV interview in which she rides a bike, works on her abs, pumps iron and talks about her weight.... The first segment aired Wednesday on Washington's NBC affiliate.... Rice gets up at 4:30 a.m. She exercises every day, no matter where in the world she is. The interview shows her in the State Department gym, sweating in ordinary workout clothes.... At one point, Rice is on a mat, isolating her abdominal muscles, listening as her ex-Marine trainer tells her to find the right balance. Apparently, Rice knows all about that.... I vote for (a). I think this is a trial balloon, done on local TV to see whether it will play nationally -- it's meant to humanize her, to sell her as a you-go-girl candidate to the Oprah crowd and as a two-fisted beauty-and-brains graphic-novel superheroine to the guys (I wish I were joking). If it draws too much Beltway-pundit snark and too many nasty late-night-comic jokes, well, back to square one. Otherwise, expect more and more of this sort of thing. (Via Memeorandum.) **** By the way, if you think it's sexist or otherwise demeaning for the Secretary of State to be on display this way, you're not thinking like a Republican. Back in the '80s, the President of the United States used to get himself photographed lifting weights -- see the picture here, and also, if you suddenly find yourself in a warehouse full of old Sunday supplements, see the cover of the December 4, 1983, issue of Parade magazine, which showed Reagan pumping iron (and was believed to have helped his reelection bid the next year). Alas, I can't find a link to the cover itself, but it's on page 77 of Paul Slansky's book The Clothes Have No Emperor, if you have that on your shelf. posted by Steve M. | 2:18 PM | Via TBogg, I see that legal beagle John Hinderaker has viewed the newly released Katrina video and gives Bush a crafty lawyer's defense over at Power Line: What ... is the AP's basis for saying that "federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees..."? Here is the only support for that claim in the article: The National Hurricane Center's Mayfield told the final briefing before Katrina struck that storm models predicted minimal flooding inside New Orleans during the hurricane but he expressed concerns that counterclockwise winds and storm surges afterward could cause the levees at Lake Pontchartrain to be overrun. "I don't think any model can tell you with any confidence right now whether the levees will be topped or not but that is obviously a very, very grave concern," Mayfield told the briefing. But this has nothing to do with the levees breaching; it has to do with them being overtopped--a much less dangerous threat. Hinderaker complains that "AP didn't release the documents [transcripts of the video briefings] ... so we could draw our own conclusions." But if he'd gone to an obscure Web site called nytimes.com, he'd have found two partial PDF transcripts of briefings -- they're attached as a sidebar to this article. The transcripts are maddeningly incomplete and not well transcribed, but here's Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center on page 6 of the August 29 transcript: ... Louisiana can talk a little bit more about this than I can, but it looks like the Federal levies around the City of New Orleans will not have been (incomprehensible) any breaches to. Bush told us afterward, "I don't think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees" -- but obviously Mayfield did anticipate it as at least a possibility, because he's addressing the question of whether it has already happened. Not to belabor the obvious, but this is the same learning disability we saw with regard to the 9/11 attacks and the rise of the Iraqi insurgency, not to mention the lack of WMDs in Iraq -- the Bushies hear conflicting information and process only the stuff that confirms what they want to hear; they can't (or won't) assimilate bad news. (In the case of WMDs, their absence in Iraq was, for the Bushies, bad news.) No, no one said "The levees are breaching" -- yet it was still an open question. But the preferred answer was "No," so when some reports suggested that that was the correct answer, Bush and Chertoff took their eye off the ball, with disastrous results. **** And, of course, the Times story has this: In the videoconference held at noon on Monday, Aug. 29, Michael D. Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, reported that he had spoken with President Bush twice in the morning and that the president was asking about reports that the levees had been breached. But asked about the levees by Joe Hagin, the White House deputy chief of staff, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana said, "We have not breached the levee at this point in time." She said "that could change" and noted that the floodwaters in some areas in and around New Orleans were 8 to 10 feet deep. Later that night, FEMA notified the White House that the levees had been breached. Odd that Bush would ask about a breach that nobody could have ever anticipated happening, and that Hagin and Blanco would then discuss such an unforeseeable possibility. posted by Steve M. | 10:29 AM | Wednesday, March 01, 2006 AMERICAN TALIBAN A charming story from Maine, about a lingerie shop that sought to attract attention by featuring live models in its window: AUGUSTA -- Phone harassment of a Spellbound lingerie model has led the shop's owner to end live displays and consider relocating. On Thursday, shop owner Felicia Stockford encouraged her six models to end the display after learning one of them, 21-year-old Nikki Hunt, received a series of disturbing calls on her cell phone.... Hunt's first brush with aggressive, personal attacks came the same day a group of about six people calling themselves Christians Lovingly Advocating Decency [CLAD] protested in front of the store during Valentine's Day weekend. That day, an off-duty deputy also reported seeing a man in his early 20s slashing the front tires of Hunt's parked car.... Since then, Hunt ... said she's received at least two violent, sexual threats on her cell phone -- a number that had to have been gained by someone close to her.... Stockford, who opened her Water Street shop last spring, was first chastised for her marketing scheme in December by the Christian Civic League of Maine.... The Maine blog Tor's Rants provides some of the backstory. It seems that Ms. Stockford, who maintains a blog promoting her business, mentioned one day in January that some of her models were having their pictures taken topless at the shop. Michael Hein of the Christian Civic League called the cops (who determined that the photos had been taken well out of sight of passersby on the street before the store opened for business). After this act of harassment, Hein led the CLAD protest a couple of weeks later; in addition, the CCL attacked Stockford and her shop in vile terms in its online newsletter. January 30: It is not at all clear if Stockford is interested more in money, as some suggest, or if she is interested in lewdness for its own sake, which is much more likely the case. January 31: The behavior of the owner Felicia Stockford has gone from disgraceful, to repugnant, and now can only be called abominable, in the true and proper sense of that word. Her online ravings and rantings have long since left the realm of human sexuality, and now are exploring a darker side of mankind better left to priests, well-trained medical professionals, and yes, even exorcists. It is simply impossible to describe her writings here. (On that score, you be the judge.) Then came the harassing phone calls and the tire-slashings and Stockford's decision to end the live modeling and consider selling the Augusta shop. The CCL's Hein now has the unmitigated gall to suggest that the criminal and violent behavior was all her fault: Hein, who is a member of the League's Board of Directors, had forwarded the League emails from former police officers who said it was almost a certainty that the situation at Spellbound would encourage criminal behavior by troubled individuals -- and that is exactly what happened. One of the models received threatening phone calls from an anonymous phone caller. Stockford then correctly concluded that it wasn't safe for the models to be in the window. Some in the press openly encouraged Stockford's behavior, despite the warnings of the dangers involved.... This toxic mix of moralistic self-righteousness, snark, and harassment is a CCL stock-in-trade. Back in 2004 we had this from another CCLer: ... the head of the Christian Civic League of Maine has issued a statement that questions whether Gov. John Baldacci has "one of these imaginary gay genes." The remark was in a news release that Michael Heath put out Wednesday after Baldacci reiterated his intention to submit a gay-rights bill to the Legislature next year. ...Heath made a short-lived attempt in March to solicit tips on the league's Web site about the sexual orientation of state legislators and other Maine officials. That created a bipartisan furor at the State House, prompting Heath to apologize.... Islamicist moral guardians torch liquor stores and harass unveiled women. This is the U.S. version. posted by Steve M. | 11:30 PM | This isn't the New York Times White House correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller is close to signing a deal with Random House to write a biography of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Ms. Bumiller plans to go on a yearlong book leave beginning in June.... I've long assumed that Bumiller's fawning over Bush and company in her Times "White House Letter" is meant to be an audition for the Big Gig -- writing Bush's post-White House memoir. I still think that's the case -- but maybe writing a softball book to help get Condi elected president in '08 is one last hoop she has to jump through to score that plum assignment. posted by Steve M. | 5:51 PM | Perfect. Just perfect: The U.S. State Department is winding down its $20 billion reconstruction program in Iraq and the only new rebuilding money in its latest budget request is for prisons, officials said on Tuesday. State Department Iraq coordinator James Jeffrey told reporters he was asking Congress for $100 million for prisons but no other big building projects were in the pipeline for the department's 2006 supplemental and 2007 budget requests for Iraq, which total just over $4 billion. "This is the one bit of construction we will be doing -- $100 million for additional bed capacity for the Iraqi legal system," he said.... Ah -- the ideal mix of social spending, according to the GOP. I'm sure Republicans dream of the day when budgets here can be similarly utopian. posted by Steve M. | 3:22 PM | A few stories to give you a sense of the glorious new Iraq. First, from The Washington Post, a story you may already have seen: Shiites Told: Leave Home Or Be Killed Salim Rashid, 34, a Shiite laborer in an overwhelmingly Sunni Arab village 20 miles north of Baghdad, received his eviction notice Friday from a man at the door with a rocket launcher. "It's 6 p.m.," Rashid recounted the masked man saying then, as retaliatory violence between Shiites and Sunnis exploded across wide swaths of central Iraq. "We want you out of here by 8 p.m. tomorrow. If we find you here, we will kill you." Walking, hitchhiking and hiring cars, the Rashid clan and many of the 25 other families evicted from the town of Mishada had made their way by Tuesday to a youth center in Baghdad's heavily Shiite neighborhood of Shoula. There, other people forced from their homes were already sharing space on donated mattresses. With sectarian violence rampant since last week's bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra, the families have become symbols of an emerging trend in Iraq: the expulsion of Shiites from Sunni towns.... Meanwhile, in Baghdad, here's how you survive: LOOK in the pockets of Iraqis whose jobs take them around Baghdad every day and you are likely to find a clutch of passes and identity cards, one for every police, military or militia checkpoint they may run into. "“This one is says I'm Badr, this one I show to police, and I have the American press pass and my ordinary ID. I applied for a Mehdi Army pass on Friday but it hasn’t arrived yet," said one Iraqi driver working for a foreign media organisation. "I am Sunni so these passes mean I don't get in trouble with anyone while I’m out and about." The sheer proliferation of armed groups -- some official, some unofficial and some that operate in the murky middle ground -- underscores the lawlessness of Iraq, where neither US forces who invaded in 2003 nor the Iraqi armed forces they trained have been able to impose their authority on the whole country.... And in the south, a bomb killed two British soldiers in Al Amarah. Al Amarah was the setting for a video, shot two years ago and recently released, that showed British soldiers kicking and punching locals. (Other, earlier parts of the video showed the locals hurling homemade bombs at the troops.) But securing Al Amarah -- which even gave Saddam trouble -- has never been an easy job for the Brits: AL AMARAH is a particularly difficult and violent place to police. With an estimated population of about 400,000, it has a history of rule by rival sheikhs, each with their own private armies.... When British troops took over from United States forces at the end of the war, they attempted to work with the sheikhs to establish ground rules for local government. Initial attempts appeared to be successful and it was possible for soldiers to move about the town without helmets or body armour. But the situation quickly deteriorated as old rivalries came to the fore and British attempts to maintain the peace saw them become the target of attack. As in other parts of Iraq, frustrations over unemployment and the failure to restore essential services played a part and, since early 2004, British troops have been involved in heavy fighting in and around the town.... The Black Watch and Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders have also come under sustained attack during their deployments in the town, with supporters of the radical Shia cleric Muqtada al Sadr blamed for instigating much of the violence. Amarah's physical location, close to the Iran border, also complicates the security picture, with British commanders convinced that Iranian forces are actively involved in supporting insurgents. Rose petals. It was all supposed to be rose petals. posted by Steve M. | 1:22 PM | |
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