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Thursday, August 31, 2006 Shorter Michelle Malkin: I no longer believe that San Francisco hit-and-run driver was a jihadist terrorist, but at least I had the courage to jump to conclusions -- not like those liars in the MSM who got the story right. (Via TBogg.) posted by Steve M. | 10:44 PM | HEADLINES THAT DON'T EXACTLY INSPIRE CONFIDENCE IN OUR SUPER-HIGH-TECH, STATE-OF-THE-ART TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY PENTAGON ARSENAL "Missile-Defense Test Postponed by Fog" In the event of World War III, I guess San Francisco is toast. posted by Steve M. | 6:35 PM | It's not inconceivable that a National Guardsman was "brutally attacked" in Parkland, Washington, by five men in their twenties who called him a "baby-killer," but, er, the alleged ringleader was brandishing a gun and driving a Chevy Suburban. Sound like the typical anti-war lefty to you? The usual keyboarder suspects are in their usual state of self-righteousness, of course. It sounds like a nasty attack, but forgive me if I'm not 100% convinced it happened exactly as described. posted by Steve M. | 5:39 PM | There's one of these in The New York Times every two or three months, it seems -- a reminiscence about an earlier generation that stopped a war, maaaan!, accompanied by the observation that today's young people, alas, don't seem to want to do the same. This article, by Andrew Rosenthal, uses as its jumping-off point a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert: ...when those four men sang their protest songs four decades ago, their lyrics echoed and personified a powerful political movement sweeping America. Now they are entertainment, something to leave behind in the concert hall. ...This, perhaps, is the ultimate difference between the Vietnam generation and the Iraq generation: When you hear Young and Company sing of "four dead in Ohio," their Kent State anthem, it's hard to imagine anyone on today's campuses willing to face armed troops. Is there anything they care about that much? ...There was a brief burst of protest when America first invaded Iraq. But if there is a college movement against the war, it's hiding pretty well.... You want an explanation for this, Andrew? It's not because of lack of courage or the fact that "people find protesters vaguely embarrassing" or any of the other reasons you give. The explanation is that today's war opponents aren't like Bush. Unlike Bush, today's war opponents know it's futile to keep doing exactly the same thing and expect a different result. People all over America -- people all over the world -- marched in the streets to try to prevent this war. It didn't work. And once the war had begun, people marched to try to get the troops home. That didn't work either. No protest will ever work. Everyone with the slightest bit of sense has figured that out. In Iraq, Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld think they can just keep pursuing a strategy that's brought nothing but failure since the fall of Saddam and eventually the laws of the universe will change and it will bring success. War opponents aren't delusional in that way. Protests didn't work, so most people have moved on and are trying instead to change the makeup of the government. That might work. Marching in the street won't -- we have a learning curve, so we know that. posted by Steve M. | 3:23 PM | WHAT PAT BUCHANAN REALLY MEANT "You say '(Islamo-)Fascism' like it's a bad thing!" posted by Steve M. | 2:53 PM | SEPARATED AT BIRTH?   (Bush via American Street.) posted by Steve M. | 2:35 PM | Headline of the week: Feds Capture Aliens Illegally Working in Roswell Oh, lighten up, guys -- extraterrestrials gotta eat, too. posted by Steve M. | 1:09 PM | Investor's Business Daily published an editorial yesterday that listed a number of recent incidents of sudden violence against strangers by people with Muslim backgrounds; the most recent entries are the hit-and-run driver in San Francisco and the Jewish-center shooter in Seattle. I guess it's an impressive list; similar lists have been making their way around Wingnuttia recently. (IBD's editorials are often indistinguishable from wingnut Internet rants.) The editorial uses a term for the perceived phenomenon that I've also seen elsewhere: "freelance terrorism." But here's the thing: Let's say, for the sake of argument, that this is a real phenomenon. Let's say there really are Muslims who are killing and wounding strangers in sudden attacks not because they're dangerous nutcases who've snapped but because ... well, I don't know how to finish that sentence. And that's the problem. What would be the source of this? And therefore, what would you do about it? If there is an actual person or group of persons, or if there are several persons or groups, behind all these "freelance terrorists" -- now, there's a conspiracy theory for you -- then by all means find the perps. If you're sending people out to commit such acts, I want you to be discovered and brought to justice. But if that's not the case -- if there are no "cells" or "cabals" or "conspiracies" of this kind -- then what the hell are we supposed to do? It seems to me me have two choices: (1) Deal with each case as an isolated incident involving only the individual perp, assuming we fail to find any co-conspirators; or (2) Round up all Muslims and put them in camps. I know there's something truly soul-satisfying to wingnuts about the latter notion, but they won't recommend it out loud -- at least not yet. They know it still goes against American values. So they're looking for something between (1) and (2). The problem is, there is nothing between (1) and (2). Either you find a source of this phenomenon -- or it's not a phenomenon. It's just a bunch of nuts. Nuts, perhaps, whose nuttiness in marbled with Islamicist anger (just as the nuttiness of other violent nuts has long been marbled with Christianity-based anger) -- but nuts nonetheless. You can't arrest an ideology. You can't -- except using extreme authoritarianism -- ban an idea. All you can do is pursue individual criminals and criminal groups, while working to counter messages of hate with other messages. **** Of course, the guy in San Francisco hit blacks, whites, and Asians with his car. Funny way to terrorize Jews, if that's what we're supposed to believe he was trying to do. posted by Steve M. | 9:46 AM | Wednesday, August 30, 2006 EVERYONE WE DISLIKE SHOULD BE KILLED The text of Ann Coulter's column about Lincoln Chafee is only mildly repugnant by her usual standards, but here's the title it bears, at least on the Human Events Web site: "They Shot the Wrong Lincoln" Charming. posted by Steve M. | 6:16 PM | The clash of civilizations is our business -- and business is good: Defense Contractor CEOs' Pay Doubles The chief executives of corporations making big profits from the war on terror are enjoying far bigger pay increases than CEOs of nondefense companies, according to a study by two liberal groups. The study, conducted by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, found that, on average, CEOs of corporations with extensive defense contracts are getting paid about double what they made before Sept. 11, 2001. CEOs of other large corporations -- without big stakes in the war -- have averaged pay gains of 6 percent during the same period, the study said.... The study focused on the pay of the CEOs of the 34 publicly traded U.S. corporations that were among the top 100 defense contractors in 2005 and for which defense contracts made up more than 10 percent of revenues.... Between 2001 and 2005, the profits for the 34 companies have climbed 189 percent. Profits for U.S. corporations as a whole rose 76 percent. Stock price gains for defense contractors have averaged 48 percent while the overall stock market has remained flat.... (Via DU.) posted by Steve M. | 3:45 PM | He wants a big transcontinental clash of civilizations -- but the press won't stop asking him about domestic issues. Who knew the Ahmadinejad presidency was so much like the Bush presidency? President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meant to use Tuesday to focus attention on his challenge to the president of the United States.... But at a freewheeling two-hour news conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad also found himself challenged by local reporters who questioned the government's economic program and its tolerance of a critical press. One reporter said the government's decision to spend billions of dollars to subsidize gasoline amounted to welfare for the rich, an assertion the president disputed. Another said that although the president claimed to support the press, his spokesman sought to have the judiciary investigate critical reporters. Well, there's a significant difference: Bush seeks to have the judiciary investigate critical reporters, but he's never claimed to support the press. He climbed up onto a platform and briefly held his right hand over his head in a sort of hero’s greeting to the crowd. Yeah, stuff like that happens here. A reporter for a small newspaper called The Path of the People stood to ask a question and said: "I was hoping when you arrived I would share my pain with you. Now I have no pain in my heart, only happiness." And what do you -- Ahmadinejad even has his own Jeff Gannon! posted by Steve M. | 2:32 PM | CHRISTIANIST TERRORISTS? A man named Omeed Aziz Popal went on a hit-and-run spree in San Francisco yesterday, injuring at least 14 people. Every right-wing blogger in America is demanding that we regard this as an act of Islamicist terrorism. When a person from a Muslim background goes on a homicidal rampage, you see, it has to be part of international geopolitics. There's no other acceptable way of looking at it. OK, so let's take a trip down memory lane: Philip Badowski told police he killed his parents because "God told me to," according to testimony at his preliminary hearing in General Sessions Court Friday morning. The 22-year-old Hixson man calmly told of shooting his parents with a 30-30 Winchester rifle, then dismembering them.... --Chattanoogan, 12/10/04 Benjamin Matthew Williams, the 31-year-old white supremacist accused of murdering a gay couple outside this Northern California town in July, is now admitting that he slipped into the men's home while they were sleeping and shot them to death in their bed. He did it, he said, because they were gay and God told him to. When asked if he had killed the pair, Williams answered, "Absolutely." During his jailhouse confession Thursday, Williams said the only regret he has about the murders is that they didn't inspire others to emulate him. And he insists his actions do not constitute a crime. "I'm not guilty of murder," Williams said. "I'm guilty of obeying the laws of the creator."... --Salon, 11/8/99 A homeless Cuban refugee, chanting and apparently deranged, went on a rampage with a sword aboard a Staten Island ferryboat yesterday and killed two people and wounded nine others before being subdued by a retired police officer at gunpoint.... ''He said God told him to do it,'' Richard Condon, the First Deputy Police Commissioner and Acting Commissioner during Benjamin Ward's vacation this week, said of the attacks.... --New York Times, 7/8/86 On a Thanksgiving Day afternoon in 1980, a black woman driving a 1974 black Lincoln decided to plow into people on the sidewalk on North Virginia Street in Reno, Nev. The woman stared straight ahead as she accelerated, striking several people without stopping. She drove 100 feet down one sidewalk, then over 300 feet down another, and finally drove two blocks down yet another one. She might well have continued, but a witness drove in front of woman's car to force her to a halt. She was then arrested. And she was angry that she'd been stopped.... Under interrogation, the driver told authorities that her name was Priscilla Joyce Ford, Ford, 51, was a former school teacher who moved from New York to Reno. She told authorities that some people called her "Jesus Christ." She also claimed to be Adam, of Adam and Eve, and a prophetess.... --from Court TV's CrimeLibrary.com Beginning in 1975 and ending with his arrest in 1981, Peter Sutcliffe travelled the north of England frequently for work, never stopping in one place for too long. This lifestyle allowed him to evade capture viciously murdering 13 women.... During his years of terror he became known simply as the Yorkshire Ripper. A married man who no one suspected, would go out at night, on what he believed to be a mission from God, seeking out prostitutes to murder.... --crimeandinvestigation.co.uk Harvey Carignan (1972-1975) aka "the Want-Ad Killer" was a 39-year old Army veteran who had actually been kicked out of the Army for a violent sex murder in which he was acquitted on a technicality. His serial killer career began in Seattle where he managed a gas station and beat to death at least 2 young girls who applied for jobs at the gas station. In 1973, he moved to Minneapolis, and committed a string of 4-5 similar murders... When arrested, Harvey politely explained that he was under personal orders from God who commanded attacks on girls who were whores.... Joseph Franklin (1977-1981) was a 37-year old former Klansman and neo-Nazi from Madison, Wisconsin who believed that interracial couples were a sin against God. He also believed that the criminal justice system was too lenient on blacks, and he once targeted a judge he thought was too lenient. He is thought to have bombed a synagogue in Chattanooga and was also a suspect in the shooting of Larry Flynt presumably because interracial couples were featured in Hustler magazine. He was an excellent sniper, and in his travels around the country, he shot 15 people, mostly couples consisting of a black man and a white woman.... --from "Male Serial Killers," posted in conjunction with Dr. Tom O'Connor's Criminal Profiling course at North Carolina Wesleyan College Clearly, none of these people were "lone nuts," as the "MSM" would have you believe. Clearly, all of them were part of an international Christianist terrorist conspiracy. When will we stop being willfully blind and start connecting the dots? posted by Steve M. | 10:42 AM | Tuesday, August 29, 2006 Oh, I love this guy. He wants to stick it to the Islamofascist Man, so he's carved a huge Christian cross and a huge star of David into his land. In Aroostook County, Maine. Yeah, a lot of jihadists are going to see his symbols there, right?  Take that, Abdul! The guy posted the photo at Free Republic, and now I think I understand what the guy at Free Republic's evil twin, Lucianne.com, is trying to do with his rather cryptic "Farm Team Infidel" shirts. I had been thinking that the shirt designer, and the people who've bought his shirts, were into the idea that they were a little cult talking to one another in double-super-secret code. But that's not really it -- what's really going on is that the T-shirt guy and the crop- **** *UPDATE: Descriptions of crop carvings corrected -- thanks, Mike in comments. Apologies for the many screw-ups this week.... posted by Steve M. | 10:59 PM | Oh, perfect: Vice President Dick Cheney is finally getting the book-length biography treatment -- and he's playing along. We hear that the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes is hot on the case and plans to publish a bio titled, naturally enough, Cheney as early as next spring.... we hear Cheney, his staff, and friends are cooperating.... You remember Stephen Hayes -- he's the guy who's written eighty thousand different articles for the Standard (roughly) trying to make the case that Saddam and Osama really, really, really were working together. All this led to a book, The Connection, about which The New York Times said: What Hayes ducks is the $130 billion question that should have been at the core of his book: whether a Hussein-bin Laden alliance was not merely conceivable, but so worrisome as to require a preventive war to stop it. The failure to engage that question demonstrates a sort of prescientific thought process -- one that uses the tools of reason, but only to construct an unfalsifiable case for a foregone conclusion. ... Hayes cannot bear to let his pet theory fall by the wayside, whether it is borne out by the facts or not. This guy and Cheney? It's a match made in heaven. Wingnuts will lap Hayes's book up. Discerning readers may prefer this one instead. posted by Steve M. | 3:54 PM | CLUELESSNESS WATCH ...The median hourly wage for American workers has declined 2 percent since 2003, after factoring in inflation.... As a result, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the government began recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have climbed to their highest share since the 1960's.... --New York Times yesterday In 2005, 46.6 million people were without health insurance coverage, up from 45.3 million people in 2004. The percentage of people without health insurance coverage increased from 15.6 percent in 2004 to 15.9 percent in 2005. --Think Progress post on a new Census Bureau report Republicans, nervous about a political catastrophe for their party this fall, often wonder what accounts for the sour public mood, despite robust economic growth. The answer, at least symbolically, is Katrina. --Rich Lowry at National Review Online (emphasis mine) posted by Steve M. | 3:31 PM | Meanwhile, in the other forgotten war: (8/29/06 - KANDAHAR, Afghanistan) - A suicide bomber in a car struck a NATO-Afghan military convoy Tuesday, killing one civilian and wounding two others, a day after a bomb at a market left 21 civilians dead and 43 wounded, officials said. Another bomb, detonated by remote control, killed two police on patrol in Helmand province, an official said.... Please note: The explosion [Monday] was the second deadliest suicide bombing in southern Afghanistan this year; on Aug. 3, a bomber blew up his car in the bazaar at Panjwai, outside Kandahar, killing 21 people. (When that article appeared, the death toll in the Monday bombing was 17.) This is all being done by desperate dead-enders, I'm sure. posted by Steve M. | 2:47 PM | On September 11, 2001, 2,700 people were brutally murdered in America by terrorists. The Reverend Donald Wildmon's American Family Association now asks the vital question: How will we protect the children from the evildoers -- the cops, firefighters, and others who were in the midst of the devastation and sometimes said, "Oh, shit"? It is time to tell CBS and the other networks that enough is enough!. Not content with all the profanity already on TV, CBS has decided to air the profanity-laden unedited version of "9/11" on Sept. 10. The decision by CBS is a slap in the face to the FCC and Congress, which recently raised indecency fines to $325,000 per incident. "9/11," which will be shown in prime-time, contains a tremendous amount of hardcore profanity. CBS has stated they have not, and will not, make any cuts in the amount and degree of profanity. ... Send an email, asking the FCC to enforce the law. Your email will go not only to the FCC, but also to CBS. Contact your local CBS affiliate and ask them not to air "9/11." ... Please forward this to your friends and family. Share this information with members of your Sunday School class and church, and urge them to get involved.... (Emphasis in original.) You remember this one -- it was made by two French documentarians who were following the career of a rookie firefighter in New York when the planes hit the towers. For heaven's sake, Rod Dreher of National Review called it "astounding." But people say bad words in it, so you and your congregation should do God's work and keep it off the air. (It's still not clear whether the FCC is going to hit CBS and its affiliates with massive fines for broadcasting this again.) **** How absurd is the climate right now? Well, here's a story I missed from earlier in the summer: Chuck Howard, the sports director of WCNC in Charlotte, North Carolina, resigned after eleven years at the station because he let the word "shit" slip -- on a tape that wasn't even supposed to air: ...Howard, 41, WCNC sports director for 11 years, was taping a roundup Wednesday night for the next morning's "6 News Today" when he decided to redo the segment. "Let's retake that," he said, prefacing the statement with the word s---. But when the roundup aired at 5:51 a.m. Thursday, the station showed the aborted segment rather than the one intended for broadcast.... "Chuck has tendered his resignation and we have accepted it," Stuart Powell, president and general manager of the NBC affiliate, said Saturday.... Howard's producer also had to resign. This is Bush's America. This is nuts. posted by Steve M. | 1:04 PM | EEEK! EEEK! Er, I don't know the facts, but I have a hunch that the kid is telling the truth in this Kentucky story: (SEE UPDATE BELOW)* A George Rogers Clark High School junior arrested Tuesday for making terrorist threats told LEX 18 News Thursday that the "writings" that got him arrested are being taken out of context. Winchester police say William Poole, 18, was taken into custody Tuesday morning. Investigators say they discovered materials at Poole's home that outline possible acts of violence aimed at students, teachers, and police. Poole told LEX 18 that the whole incident is a big misunderstanding. He claims that what his grandparents found in his journal and turned into police was a short story he wrote for English class. "My story is based on fiction," said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. "It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies." Even so, police say the nature of the story makes it a felony. "Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky," said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.... Poole is being held at the Clark County Detention Center. Zombies. Up on felony charges. For a story about zombies. (I don't see anything in the story that says the cops found anything resembling a Columbine-style arsenal.) Ah, but maybe I'm just being a liberal. Maybe I don't fully appreciate the true nature of the threat. Maybe the story was about Islamosfascist zombies. From Mexico. That's it --illegal alien zombie Mexoislamofascistos! Yeah, throw the kid in Gitmo. **** *UPDATE: My face is red: This happened in 2005. Details at the link. Thanks to editor_u in comments for sparing me further embarrassment. posted by Steve M. | 8:25 AM | ANOTHER REPUBLICAN TO CAMPAIGN FOR LIEBERMAN Jack Kemp. I think they're saving Giuliani for October. By the way, I'm shocked, shocked to see the 1996 Republican vice presidential candidate rejecting the Republican candidate for Senate in Connecticut. posted by Steve M. | 7:34 AM | Monday, August 28, 2006 THE TIMING "Details Emerge in British Terror Case," in today's New York Times, gathers together a lot of the melodrama-debunking information that's emerged about the terror plot in England -- too late, of course, given the fact that what's being debunked is already burned into our collective unconscious: ... five senior British officials said ... the suspects were not prepared to strike immediately. Instead, the reactions of Britain and the United States in the wake of the arrests of 21 people on Aug. 10 were driven less by information about a specific, imminent attack than fear that other, unknown terrorists might strike. ... British officials said the suspects still had a lot of work to do. Two of the suspects did not have passports, but had applied for expedited approval. One official said the people suspected of leading the plot were still recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. While investigators found evidence on a computer memory stick indicating that one of the men had looked up airline schedules for flights from London to cities in the United States, the suspects had neither made reservations nor purchased plane tickets, a British official said. ... In fact, two and a half weeks since the inquiry became public, British investigators have still not determined whether there was a target date for the attacks or how many planes were to be involved. They say the estimate of 10 planes was speculative and exaggerated. ... officials said they were still unsure of one critical question: whether any of the suspects was technically capable of assembling and detonating liquid explosives while airborne. A chemist involved in that part of the inquiry, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was sworn to confidentiality, said HMTD, which can be prepared by combining hydrogen peroxide with other chemicals, "in theory is dangerous," but whether the suspects "had the brights to pull it off remains to be seen." ..."In retrospect," said Michael A. Sheehan, the former deputy commissioner of counterterrorism in the New York Police Department, "there may have been too much hyperventilating going on." Read the whole article and you'll believe that these people fully intended to do harm -- I have a hard time being as skeptical as Andrew Sullivan and Craig Murray were a couple of weeks ago, when they were arguing that there might be nothing to this but hype and confessions induced under torture in Pakistan. But it's clear now that this wasn't imminent and that there's no evidence that it was going to be a carefully choreographed ten-plane orgy of mass death. And the timing of the arrests? ...British officials said many of the questions about the suspected plot remained unanswered because they were forced to make the arrests before Scotland Yard was ready. The trigger was the arrest in Pakistan of Rashid Rauf, a 25-year-old British citizen with dual Pakistani citizenship, whom Pakistani investigators have described as a "key figure" in the plot. ...Several senior British officials said the Pakistanis arrested Rashid Rauf without informing them first. The arrest surprised and frustrated investigators here who had wanted to monitor the suspects longer, primarily to gather more evidence and to determine whether they had identified all the people involved in the suspected plot. ..."The aim was to keep this operation going for much longer, "said a senior British security official who requested anonymity because of confidentiality rules. "It ended much sooner than we had hoped."... Is this a bit like 2004, when The New Republic was reporting that pressure was being placed on the Pakistan government to make a significant Al Qaeda arrest in time for the Democratic convention -- which happened, of course? You recall that shortly after that, Tom Ridge raised the terror threat level because of a plot reportedly aimed at New York financial institutions -- a plot said to have been discovered as the result of another arrest in Pakistan. The revelation of that arrest by the U.S. actually compromised an ongoing sting operation to track down Al Qaeda operatives -- but who cared? It sure took attention away from John Kerry at a critical point in the election cycle. (The Booman Tribune reviews that history here.) The recent arrest in Pakistan, of course, set in motion a season of air-travel anxiety -- just in time for the fall campaign. **** UPDATE: Link fixed. posted by Steve M. | 11:00 PM | She was an object of great sympathy: a pregnant woman shot at a Seattle Jewish center, apparently by a man named Naveed Haq. But now she's said the wrong thing: A woman wounded in last month's deadly shooting rampage at Seattle's Jewish Federation offices says she hopes the attack helps the public and lawmakers see a need for tighter gun control laws. "How and why the murderer who invaded my workplace a couple of weeks ago was able to legally acquire two semiautomatic weapons in our state is still a very disturbing mystery to me," Dayna Klein, 37, said Thursday, seated next to her husband at a news conference in a downtown hotel.... And so it's open season on her at Free Republic: Perhaps Ms. Klein hasn't heard the news: Hitler was in favor of gun control. It made it so much easier to wipe out the Jews. **** What a stupid liberal twit. **** Another victim displaying her wounds for the world. I guess she is too stupid to realize that guns aren't the problem..... I wonder if she will eventually play the race card.... **** WOW... Liberalism is indeed a Mental Disorder. **** Being defenseless in the face of increasing criminal behavior everywhere sure makes this moonbat's whining persuasive. **** And "when only criminals have guns", Dayna, how will that keep one or more of them from shooting you? I know it takes high octane brain power to work through the previous question, but give it a try. **** When civilized man determines he no longer has a need to fight, he will surely be killed or enslaved by the uncivilized that does.(Same said for the anti-gun pinheads) **** ...Her nervous joking makes me feel that she is growing comfortable with her gun-grabbing celebrity lifestyle.... **** ...This is the same mentality that led to Auschwitz and which would empower Islamofascists to slaughter every Jew on the planet! The one thing you need to know about liberals, is that for them its never about the facts; its all about feelings. **** ... you're a hoplophobic blissninnie...it'd never even occur to you to have a gun, much less use it to defend yourself and those around you. Better to call someone else with a gun to defend you-you hypocrite. ... I'd say that insanity or no, the gunman was correct - Dayna is pretty (expletive) stupid.... Just another day on the Right. posted by Steve M. | 5:12 PM | RHETORICAL QUESTIONS YOU MAY REGRET YOU ASKED John McWhorter in a Washington Post op-ed: Imagine for a moment that [Senator George] Allen actually knew that a "macaque" is a kind of monkey, or that in French the term is sometimes used as an insult for North Africans (Allen denied having known about either). Who, then, believes that Allen would use the slur against an opposition campaigner aiming a camera straight at him? Show of hands? Why, it looks as if everybody has a hand raised. Thank you. ...Campaigning for governor in 1993, he admitted to prominently displaying a Confederate flag in his living room. He said it was part of a flag collection--and had been removed at the start of his gubernatorial bid. When it was learned that he kept a noose hanging on a ficus tree in his law office, he said it was part of a Western memorabilia collection.... In high school [in California], Allen's "Hee Haw" persona made him a polarizing figure. "He rode a little red Mustang around with a Confederate flag plate on the front," says Patrick Campbell, an old classmate.... --Ryan Lizza in The New Republic, 5/8/06 issue Yeah, sounds like a really circumspect guy to me. (Those who need a refresher course on why Allen would use the word "Macaca" should go here and here.) **** By the way, I want to talk about the main thrust of McWhorter's op-ed -- he argues, in all seriousness, that it's unfair to criticize Andrew Young for his recent remarks about Jewish, Arab, and Asian shopkeepers in black neighborhoods because a lot of blacks say the same things: The mainstream media have ignored (or remain unaware of) an interesting point concerning Young's allegedly racist comments: His views are in fact common coin among inner-city black people -- the very people the hate-speech patrol so ardently hopes to protect. Yeah? Well, some white Christians don't like Jews. Does that let Mel Gibson off the hook? It's curious to hear this from McWhorter, a black conservative who's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where William Kristol and Peggy Noonan sit on the board and funding comes from Scaife and other right-wing foundations (and where Charles Murray worked on his breakthrough book, Losing Ground). It's curious because McWhorter usually has nothing but contempt for the continued invocation of racism by mainstream civil-rights leaders: The NAACP is stuck in a mind-set that worked 30 years ago but makes little sense today. Mfume and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond boast that the organization is committed to "speaking truth to power," continuing the whistle-blowing tradition that the organization was founded upon in 1909. This was urgent in an America where lynching was commonplace and segregation was legal. But almost a century later, black America's main problem is neither overt racism nor more subtle "societal" racism. Lifting blacks up is no longer a matter of getting whites off our necks. And language that's "common coin among inner-city black people" doesn't get McWhorter's imprimatur when that language comes with a beat attached: NOT long ago, I was having lunch in a KFC in Harlem, sitting near eight African-American boys, aged about 14. They were extremely loud and unruly, tossing food at one another and leaving it on the floor. What struck me most was how fully the boys' music -- hard-edged rap, preaching bone-deep dislike of authority -- provided them with a continuing soundtrack to their antisocial behavior. So completely was rap ingrained in their consciousness that every so often, one or another of them would break into cocky, expletive-laden rap lyrics, accompanied by the angular, bellicose gestures typical of rap performance. A couple of his buddies would then join him. Rap was a running decoration in their conversation. ... By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly "authentic" response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success. But the case of Andrew Young is different for McWhorter -- though McWhorter doesn't have the intellectual honesty to say why: Andrew Young was speaking on behalf of Wal-Mart, and McWhorter's employer has as its main mission the uplift of private industry. McWhorter seems to be making the defense of Young his life's work at the moment: Last Thursday he published a another op-ed on the subject, this one in The New York Sun. In that one, he actually seemed to be suggesting that Young's background gives him a lifetime exemption from any and all criticism, and that those who think Young was being racist have psychological problems: The insincerity of the "sensitivity" racket is clear in how strained the accusation against Mr.Young is. He marched with Reverend King as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, represented in Congress a Georgia just steps past Jim Crow, and was ambassador to the United Nations. The man is even an ordained minister. Might we entertain that this is one person who has the racism thing covered? Anyone who pretends otherwise is driven by inner demons. I can't even say anything snarky about that. I just find it baffling. An archive of McWhorter's writings is here. It includes such gems as "Why Blacks Should Give Bush a Chance" and "Calm Down: [William] Bennett's Comments on Abortion Have Been Taken Way Out of Context." posted by Steve M. | 10:54 AM | Sunday, August 27, 2006 A T-shirt designed by Lucianne Goldberg's systems administrator is taking the readers of Lucianne.com by storm: Lucianne recently gave the nod on a T-Shirt ... and without fail the LDot family took us by surprise. In 36 hours, we sold all but 12 of our first order of shirts. We are currently taking "backorders" until the next order of 108 shirts arrives.... Wow, must be a really cool shirt! Er, um ... here's what it looks like:  Apart from the obvious (and conceivably actionable) resemblance to the Major League Baseball logo, this shirt raises the question: Hunh? What the hell is a "farm team infidel"? The designer is so happy you asked. (You may need to take notes -- this is complicated.) ...It's simple. Those who walk in harm's way in service to our nation are Major League Infidels. These men (and women) are tactical operators and professional soldiers who have the training and the knowledge to decrease the effectiveness of those who work daily to bring America to its knees. Farm Team Infidels are those who support those in the "big league". Farm Team Infidels also reject the politics of those who hate our military, capitalism and our right to keep and bear arms. Do you: * Believe that America is the strongest yet most generous nation on the planet? * Support our Military and their mission as the most vital fighting force on the planet? * Own a firearm or would like to own a firearm? (Be careful, freedom isn't free, owning firearms is an expensive hobby). * Believe that gun control is a firm grip and perfect sight alignment? * Feel the desire to wear clothing that shows your Infidel pride? If you answer yes to one or more of these questions, then you are a Farm Team Infidel. Thank you for being a productive member of society! Er, yeah ... right. Clear as a bell. So here's what I'm trying to figure out: Did the people who raced to buy this shirt do so because they like the idea that this is a super-secret-triple-acrostic code phrase that only a small, select in-crowd finds comprehensible? Or is it just that you could sell anything to right-wingers -- ferret-vomit sachets, anything -- if the merchandise is accompanied with a sales pitch saying that a purchase will offend America-hating, capitalism-hating liberal scum? Beats me. All I know is that I hope the buyers get their shirts in time for Labor Day barbecues, where they'll wear them just to piss off any liberals who happen to be invited, and the liberals will just say, "What? 'Farm Team Infidel'? Uh, I don't get it." **** UPDATE: In comments, uncle grumpo notes finds the logo for Major League Infidel. The same basic idea, but with a somewhat different design, is here (enlarged view here). As grumpo says: "So this is not even an original thought, it's a fanboy response to an obscure and bizarre, though at least original, piece of wingnuttery. Imagine having to explain that at a barbecue." posted by Steve M. | 11:40 PM | There's an article in today's New York Times about an ethnically and culturally homogeneous group who've set themselves up in an enclave in America -- in America! -- where they have very large families, speak less English than their own language, and proudly proclaim their willingness to double up in apartments if they can't find adequate housing for every family. And yet I don't see a word of outrage at MichelleMalkin.com, even though Michelle's usually all over that kind of thing. There's more: The women don't drive. The community won't even hire female school bus drivers, because it offends them that women might drive their male children. Yet there's nothing but silence at Malkin's other site, HotAir.com. Why? These people are Hasidic Jews. The language they prefer is Yiddish. Their enclave is the town of Kiryas Joel, about 60 miles north of New York City. So much for the abstract principle, expressed by Malkin and so many other right-wingers, that if you don't dress like everyone else in America, talk like everyone else in America, and observe American cultural mores, you're a fifth columnist aimed at the destruction of the United States as we know it. The reason is simple: Mainstream wingnuts, unlike old-school anti-Semites such as Pat Buchanan and David Duke (and Mel Gibson), see Jews, especially culturally conservative Jews, as friends, allies, and fellow members of the Republican coalition -- in reality or at least potentially. So you'll never see the wingnut punditocracy denouncing the lack of assimilation in Kiryas Joel, any more than you'll see a major push from anti-immigrant forces on the right to change the "wet-foot-dry-foot" policy that allows a lot of Cubans into Florida -- in fact, right-wingers think it lets in too few Cubans, even though many of those Cubans speak Spanish in their American homes. This is America -- speak English! (Unless we like you.) posted by Steve M. | 12:59 PM | Saturday, August 26, 2006 I know, I know -- it doesn't really count because he's not supported by angry rabid blogofascist Stalinists like that evil Ned Lamont, but the guy who might be on the verge of beating the incumbent moderate Republican senator from Rhode Island in a primary has a somewhat ugly youthful paper trail: As a student at Bowdoin College a generation ago, Cranston Mayor Stephen P. Laffey wrote humor columns for a campus newspaper that even he now acknowledges could be construed as homophobic. For example, in one column in the Bowdoin Patriot, the paper published by campus Republicans, Laffey wrote, "I have never once seen a happy homosexual. This is not to say there aren't any; I simply haven't seen one in my lifetime. Maybe they are all in the closet. All the homosexuals I've seen are sickly and decrepit, their eyes devoid of life."... "And how about this humanoid (I'd hesitate to say person, and I would never use the word MAN) Boy George," wrote Laffey [in another column]. "It wears girl's clothes and puts on makeup. When I hear it sing, 'Do you really want to hurt me, do you really want to make me cry,' I say to myself, YES, I want to punch your lights out, pal, and break your ribs...." Laffey's reaction, of course, is to describe the use of words he admits he wrote as a "smear." He also describes the columns as "sophomoric political satire." "We thought it was funny," he says -- though I'm searching in vain for anything resembling an actual joke. Here's another sample of Laffey's youthful writing from the Patriot (PDF): ...It is the immoral action of compromise that has led our country into its present condition: a Government that interferes with individual rights, a foreign policy that, until recently, accommodated the spread of communism, and workers who seek the largest salaries for the least amount of work. I will say here and now that I do see things in black and white -- that I do discriminate between moral and immoral actions. The compromises that this country has made to the moral flinchers must be stopped.... Comedy gold! It's the product of his youth, so it's hard to believe this will hurt him electorally. On the other hand, this is a state where the largest city has an openly gay mayor, so in a general election, who knows? (If the first link doesn't work, read the story at, er, Free Republic.) posted by Steve M. | 2:11 PM | I AGREE THAT RUSSELL SHAW IS AN IDIOT -- BUT.... ...not for the reasons all of America's most self-righteous right-wing bloggers (is that redundant?) think he is. At the Huffington Post, Shaw writes that, although "Even one life lost to the violence of terrorism is too much" (emphasis his), there's a possibility of unintended consequences if an attack occurs: What if another terror attack just before this fall's elections could save many thousand-times the lives lost? ...If 5% of the "he's kept us safe" [Bush supporters] revise their thinking enough to vote Democrat, well, then, the Dems could recapture the House and the Senate and be in a position to: Block the next Supreme Court appointment, one which would surely result in the overturning of Roe and the death of hundreds if not thousands of women from abortion-prohibiting states at the hands of back-alley abortionists; Be in a position to elevate the party's chances for a regime change in 2008. A regime change that would: Save hundreds of thousands of American lives by enacting universal health care; Save untold numbers of lives by pushing for cleaner air standards that would greatly reduce heart and lung diseases;... Et cetera, et cetera. Shaw is an idiot because he thinks "he's kept us safe" Bush supporters would react to another 9/11 by abandoning Bush. You mean, just the way they did after the first 9/11? Give me a break. If there were another attack, the switch from "he's kept us safe" to "he's just the man we need in dangerous times" will be like the switch from "two legs bad" to "two legs better" in Animal Farm -- only it will be instantaneous. Shaw is an idiot because Shaw doesn't have the slightest idea how Daddy-craving American voters think. **** Righties will want to know my answer to Shaw's question, so here it is: No, I absolutely would not want a terrorist attack if I knew it would sink the GOP. I lived through 9/11 in Manhattan. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, ever, for any reason. posted by Steve M. | 10:30 AM | Friday, August 25, 2006 A couple of days ago I told you about the religious-right TV documentary that will be broadcast this weekend blaming Charles Darwin for the Holocaust. Well, if you find that offensive, relax -- a rabbi assures us it's just fine. Guess which rabbi. ... Bloggers Internet-wide as well as the Anti-Defamation League launched their criticism in pointed phrases when the airing was announced. But Rabbi Daniel Lapin, founder of Toward Tradition, suggested reining in the words just a little.... "This dazzling production shows how ideas always have consequences, often unintended, and how Darwinism has impacted American culture," Lapin wrote. "It discusses how the philosophy of evolution can dehumanize people and how Adolf Hitler, on his own admission, was influenced by Darwinian thought." ...Rabbi Lapin['s] organization works to advance the nation toward "the traditional Judeo-Christian values that defined America's creation and became the blueprint for her greatness" ... You remember the rabbi's idea of traditional Judeo-Christian values: ...Rabbi Daniel Lapin confirmed Sunday it was his foundation, Toward Tradition, that took $50,000 from two Abramoff clients and, at Abramoff's suggestion, used it to hire the ... wife [of an aide to Congressman Tom DeLay] to organize a conference for the group. Lapin said he and his board had no idea the money was part of Abramoff's vast scheme to influence Congress... The foundation is a conservative Judeo-Christian group where Abramoff once served as chairman of the board. ... Although he has been reported to have been the man to introduce DeLay to Abramoff, Lapin said Sunday he doesn't recall that. ...During Senate hearings last year on the Abramoff scandal, e-mails between Daniel Lapin and Abramoff were read detailing the lobbyist's request that the rabbi help phony-up some awards for him. Abramoff said he wanted something to help burnish his application to join a fancy D.C. club. Lapin responded that he could oblige, saying, "I just need to know what needs to be produced ... letters? plaques? Neither?"... National Public Radio reported in July that Abramoff at least one time listed on his biography awards from Toward Tradition and another Lapin organization — awards the rabbi said were never given.... Is there such a thing as moral de-evolution? posted by Steve M. | 6:28 PM | Sometimes I think most Americans don't think it's appropriate that other countries even exist: LAKEWOOD, Colo. -- A geography teacher has found himself embroiled in controversy after his principal found out he had flags from other countries in his classroom. The Jefferson County School District said Thursday that it has reinstated the teacher who was suspended because he refused to take down foreign flags hung in his classroom. At the time, he was displaying U.N., Mexican and Chinese flags in class. Principal John Schalk asked Hamlin to remove the flags because of his concern that the display violated a Colorado law (C.R.S. 18-11-205), the Jeffco School District said.... Hamlin's statements in his own defense seem perfectly reasonable: Hamlin argued that although his curriculum may not speak specifically about those flags, they are used as reference tools for world geography. "It's much along the lines of a science teacher who puts up a map of the solar system. They may not spend every day and every lesson talking about Mars, but they want the students to see that and to see the patterns of the planets and the order, and the students will observe that and absorb that learning visually," Hamlin said.... But as Denver Post columnist Jim Spencer notes, this is all a bit suspect: ...Jefferson County school bosses deny it, but Hamlin wonders if the foreign flags hung in his Carmody Middle School classroom in Lakewood would have been such a big deal if he had not displayed a Mexican flag, along with Chinese and United Nations flags. "If I had put up a Danish flag instead of a Mexican flag," said Hamlin, "I don't know what would have happened." I bet Hamlin would not have been placed on indefinite paid leave. ... The display of a Mexican flag last year at Denver's North High raised a ruckus because it seemed placed on a par with the American flag. Hamlin insists that's not the case in his class, where an American flag is permanently ensconced.... Hamlin has been reinstated, though he took a sick day today. And he can display his flags -- under strict guidelines: District officials agreed Thursday that Hamlin could keep the flags up for six weeks, then exchange them with other flags from his collection of more than 50. The district said he could keep his next set of flags, 25 of them from Middle Eastern nations, up for 12 weeks. That ought to ensure the continued survival of the United States of America. (Hat tip: Democratic Underground.) posted by Steve M. | 3:06 PM | WE WANT MORE The New York Times reports today: A new poll shows that fewer Americans view the Republican Party as "friendly to religion" than a year ago, with the decline particularly steep among Catholics and white evangelical Protestants -- constituencies at the core of the Republicans' conservative Christian voting bloc. The survey found that the proportion of Americans who say the Republican Party is friendly to religion fell 8 percentage points in the last year, to 47 percent from 55 percent. Among Catholics and white evangelical Protestants, the decline was 14 percentage points. The Democratic Party suffers from the perception of an even more drastic religion deficit, but that is not new. Just 26 percent of poll respondents said the Democratic Party was friendly to religion, down from 29 percent last year.... The number for the Democrats is unsurprising, but what's up with the number for the Republicans? What more do they need to do to satisfy America's deeply religious populace? I can't figure it out. Can you figure it out? (By the way, this poll was conducted in July, long before the approval of over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill, so this doesn't seem to be a news-based dip.) **** I have more to say about this below, but here's something to think about first: If evangelical white Protestants think the GOP is not friendly to religion, and if a great deal of the GOP base is demanding no compromise on illegal immigration, isn't there a very good chance that the '08 GOP presidential nominee could face a third-party challenge from the right? Don't forget who's leading in the polls for that nomination -- McCain and Giuliani, neither of whom is considered compatible with the Bush base on "values" issues or immigration. If one of them gets the nomination, defections are a distinct possibility. We could be looking at a very interesting race. **** OK, so why the religious dissatisfaction? Details on the poll, at the Web site of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, don't offer much by way of explanation. No, it isn't because there's a huge contingent of religious liberals. In fact, one of the poll's few revelations is that people who characterize themselves as part of the "religious left" aren't very left-wing: The survey finds that about a third of all Christians (32%) identify themselves as "liberal" or "progressive" Christians.... On many matters of politics and policy, the views of progressive Christians are not much more liberal than those of the general public.... For example, about half of progressive Christians (52%) oppose gay marriage, compared with 56% of all Americans, and 66% of non-progressive Christians.... Generally, progressive Christians tend to be more moderate than left-of-center politically. Slightly more than one-in-four (27%) report they are politically liberal. Just as many (26%) say they are politically conservative while 45% characterize themselves as moderates.... Here's the key, I think: Since the late 1980s, polls have consistently shown that most Americans think religion's influence on the nation is waning.... Today, roughly six-in-ten (59%) say religion is losing influence on American life, while 34% say it is gaining influence. And, overwhelmingly, Americans favor more, not less, religion in the country. Put that together with the GOP's declining "friendly to religion" numbers and it seems as if Republicans are starting to hurt themselves by constantly spreading the word that religion is under attack in America. The public agrees -- and thinks the GOP isn't mounting enough of a defense. **** The scariest numbers in this poll, if you're a secularist like me, are in this chart. Look at the "18-29" line. Among voters under 30, an astonishing 27% consider themselves members of the "religious left" or "religious right." They're evenly split, but no other age group is as religious. The young aren't rejecting liberalism (or at least moderation) -- but a hell of a lot of them are rejecting secularism. That's a trend that bears watching. (Unless, of course, it's just that secular young people didn't have the patience to sit through the lengthy Pew poll -- which really may be the case.) posted by Steve M. | 12:39 PM | HUNH? James Gerstenzang in the L.A. Times on the Kennebunkport leg of Bush's two-part summer vacation: ...Still, he returned to Walker's Point on Thursday for a four-day visit at his parents' home, drawn by family ties and family events into the web of his often-overlooked New England origins, generations deeper than his nearly six decades in Texas. Although Bush grew up in Texas -- and the twang in his speech suggests generations of Texans behind him -- his family roots are in the Northeast: His grandfather represented Connecticut in the U.S. Senate. His father was born in Massachusetts. His mother was raised in a tony suburb of New York City. He was born in Connecticut.... Who overlooks this? Who doesn't know W. has New England roots? What is Gerstenzang talking about? Is Gerstenzang giving us a glimpse into his own tendency to forget all this, or that of his colleagues in the lapdog White House press corps? Have they been fed the myth of ranch-ridin', brush-clearin' George for so long that they actually believe he had ancestors at the Alamo? posted by Steve M. | 9:46 AM | Thursday, August 24, 2006 Via Shakespeare's Sister, I learn of the enlightened racial views of Republican state senator Chris Buttars of Utah, as revealed in a recent radio interview: …During the radio interview host Tom Grover noted that courts historically have been used by minority groups "to ensure [their] rights are protected." "I don't know of an example where the minority is being jeopardized by legislative action," Buttars replied. Grover then brought up the Kansas desegregation case that resulted in the busing of black students to white schools and vice versa. "I think Brown v. Board of Education is wrong to begin with," Buttars shot back. When Grover attempted to press him on the reply Buttars refused to be more specific, saying only "one day call me again and we'll take a half hour on that one." ... That's remarkable enough, but it gets better: Buttars realized he had to walk back his remarks, and he was doing just fine -- at first: Amid the fray, Buttars emerged to clarify his remarks telling Deborah Bulkeley of the Deseret Morning News, "I think Brown v. Board of Education was a monumental step forward. It took that kind of bullet to break through that segregation wall." But he just couldn't leave it at that: But Buttars said there were drawbacks to desegregation for some children who were taken out of neighborhood schools where they were in the majority, something he says is detailed in the book "Education Myths" by Jay Greene. "He talks about how you had schools in the South that were really geared toward the special needs of minority kids," Buttars said. "Then all of a sudden you bused half those kids to a different school that maybe got more money, but they weren't geared to the needs of those kids." "The special needs of minority kids"? Good grief. **** Buttars is a piece of work. Not only did he once introduce legislation that would have brought intelligent design to Utah schools (the bill was shot down), he calls ID "divine design," apparently having missed the ID movement's carefully crafted talking points, which state that the intelligent designer of the universe doesn't have to be God. Oh, and here's some of his airtight reasoning for why the believers in evolution have it all wrong: Buttars doesn’t disregard evolution completely, rather he believes God is the creator, but His creations have evolved within their own species. "We get different types of dogs and different types of cats, but you have never seen a 'dat,' " he said. Sheer brilliance. Buttars doesn't like "activist judges": Chris Buttars ... now proposes giving him and his Senate colleagues the power to fire judges whose rulings they don't like. The current judicial retention election, in which Utahns vote to keep or get rid of a judge, is inadequate, the West Jordan Republican contends. Every judge "should have to pass a Senate confirmation vote again" when his term comes up, he said. "That is the only way to make the public aware of some of these terrible decisions. ... I don't know where some of these decisions are coming from. Some judges just go in there and wing it," Buttars said.... Oh, and he's not a huge fan of gay people -- he wants to ban gay-straight alliances in Utah schools, and, of course, he has sponsored legislation banning gay marriage in Utah, with his usual gift for words: In putting the bill to a vote, its sponsor, Sen. Chris Buttars (R-West Jordan) said the legislation will protect traditional marriage and denied accusations from gays in the state that he is promoting hate and discrimination. "I want to declare here on the floor that I have homosexual friends," Buttars said. "But I don't accept their behavior any more than I do alcoholics'." A real prince, this guy. posted by Steve M. | 6:24 PM | Why is AP referring to the Connecticut Senate race as "a three-way race"? There are five candidates in the race overall, and only two with significant voter support and the backing of major-party leaders -- Ned Lamont (D) and Joe Lieberman (de facto R). The guy on the Republican line, Alan Schlesinger, is, in effect, a minor-party candidate, just like the Green Party's Ralph Ferrucci, and the Concerned Citizens Party's Timothy Knibbs. So call it "a two-man race" or "a five-man race." Just don't say "three." posted by Steve M. | 4:20 PM | Bob "Remember When Clinton Was President and People Gave a Crap About What I Thought of Him?" Tyrrell commemorates the man who gives him a reason to keep living, in his usual tasteful fashion: Former President Bill Clinton has been celebrating his 60th birthday at breakneck speed and he will be continuing to do so for months to come, according to news reports. Given the many laughs he has afforded me over the years, I hope he will proceed at a more restrained pace. I could not bear to see him make another run to the emergency room. The sudden whitening of his hair since his retirement from the White House and shrinkage of his once fleshy physique should admonish voluptuaries everywhere of the potential health threats from recreational sex.... Whoa, Bob, slow down. Recreational sex causes hair to turn white? Is that what you're telling us? Three words, Bob: John Bolton's mustache. Do you know something we don't know? posted by Steve M. | 3:11 PM | Are there still people in America who think like this? Yup: Black students ordered to give up seats to white children COUSHATTA [Louisiana] -- Nine black children attending Red River Elementary School were directed last week to the back of the school bus by a white driver who designated the front seats for white children.... ...After [parents Iva] Richmond and [Janice] Williams filed complaints with the School Board, Transportation Supervisor Jerry Carlisle asked [bus driver Delores] Davis to make seat assignments for her passengers, Sessoms said. "But she still assigned the black children to the back of the bus," she added. And the nine children had to share only two seats, meaning the older children had to hold the younger ones in their laps.... Interesting what takes place at Free Republic in reaction to this story: The discussion starts with comments such as It's hard to believe the bus driver could be this stupid - not to mention that backwards. But soon enough there's this exchange: Don't you think the sitting assignments could have been made to protect younger white children from older black bullies on the bus? I went to Coushatta Elementary in the early 50's when it was strictly segregated. Today the vast majority of white children in that district attend private school and the public scools are overwhelmingly black. I can see how the few white kids in the public schools could be in a world of trouble with these radicalized blacks. It would not suprise me to see these kids flee to the private school system soon. *** "Radicalized" as in allowed to vote? *** No, radicalized in feeling free to beat up younger white children and to grope white girls at will. There's more along those lines, including the tale of a parent whose "sweet white daughter was constantly groped and grabbed by black thugs at her high school" until she switched to a school where "There were enough Bubba's around to PROTECT the girls!" I'm sure, of course, that all these people are huge fans of Clarence Thomas, Kenneth Blackwell, and Alan Keyes. posted by Steve M. | 11:44 AM |  I hate you. First Andrew Young, now this guy: Democrats are calling on Wal-Mart to repudiate a statement by a talk show host and Wal-Mart proponent likening the party's leading lawmakers to members of a terrorist group, Hezbollah. In a column published Tuesday, the commentator, Herman Cain, repeatedly used the term "Hezbocrats." Mr. Cain defined them as "a roaming band of militant guerrillas seeking their party's 2008 nomination for president" and said they were lobbing "rhetorical bombs at Wal-Mart." Senator Kerry of Massachusetts denounced Mr. Cain, who serves on the Georgia steering committee of a Wal-Mart-funded advocacy group, Working Families for Wal-Mart.... Branded as "Hezbocrats" in the column were Senator Biden of Delaware, Senator Bayh of Indiana, and Senator Clinton, as well as Governor Richardson of New Mexico. Mr. Cain made no reference to Mr. Kerry. (No, but if you read the column, you see that he refers to the entire Democratic Party as "the Hezbocrat Party." He's also so delighted with his own cleverness that he uses the word "Hezbocrat" in the column twelve times.) Wal-Mart couldn't possibly be more abashed: "Herman Cain is not a spokesperson for Wal-Mart," the company said in a statement. "We understand that he has a long-standing column and the views he expresses in that column are his own." A spokesman for Working Families for Wal-Mart, Catherine Smith, noted that Mr. Cain was a volunteer.... Maybe being a volunteer and not, technically, a Wal-Mart spokesman is enough separation forf Ms. Smith, but please note that Cain and Andy Young were part of the same organization. They were both described as volunteers. The New York Times reported that "Wal-Mart executives moved quickly ... to distance themselves from Mr. Young’s remarks" (understandably -- he insulted Jews, Asians, and Arabs). But I guess equating the entire Democratic Party with a terrorist organization is OK. Herman Cain, who sometimes calls himself "the Hermanator," has been the chairman of Godfather's Pizza, the president of the National Restaurant Association, a Fox News commentator and a frequent substitute host on the William Bennett and Neal Boortz radio shows. His most recent book, They Think You're Stupid: Why Democrats Lost Your Vote and What Republicans Must Do to Keep It, has a foreword by Zell Miller. posted by Steve M. | 9:54 AM | Wednesday, August 23, 2006 I LOVE MY LITMUS TESTS, BUT OH YOU KID The anti-abortion folks at LifeNews.com put their spin on a new poll: Pro-abortion former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani leads all potential 2008 Republican presidential candidates in Iowa in a new poll taken by the Des Moines Register despite an overwhelming majority of GOPers saying they are pro-life. The newspaper surveyed likely Republican causucs-goers and found that Giuliani leads with the support of 30 percent of Republicans. The poll found Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who has a fairly pro-life voting record and has visited the state twice in recent months, the choice of 17 percent while Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, who mostly votes pro-life, received 6.5 percent.... Romney, Allen, Pataki, Huckabee, and Brownback are all under 5 percent; 29 percent of those surveyed are undecided. The Register story, which is here, adds this: Giuliani, who has visited Iowa once since 2004, is also viewed as favorable by two-thirds of the poll's respondents, the highest rating among the eight Republicans listed as potential candidates in the survey. The LifeNewsers and most everyone else -- including you, probably -- expect this all to turn around as soon as Republican voters realize Rudy is pro-choice, pro-gay rights, and pro-gun control. As I've said before, I'm not so sure. I keep thinking it's going to be more like the end of Some Like It Hot: Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh... I'm a man. Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect. In other words, Republicans may have already developed a hopeless infatuation with Rudy, based on a hero-myth they've built up in their heads, and that myth may be very, very difficult for litmus-test imposers to dislodge. Democrats will generally vote for someone who just seems to be competent, but Republicans are always desperate for a manly man they believe will lead them out of the wilderness. It doesn't take much to sell them on that myth -- hell, they believe it about Bush -- and they certainly believe it about Giuliani. Many of us Democrats have very mixed feelings about Bill, Hillary, John Kerry, and so on, but Republicans generally decide that someone is "good" or "evil" and stick with that decision come hell or high water. That's why their enthusiasm for Bush is still at the hero-worship stage. Their opinion of Rudy is that he's "good" the way the Clintons are "evil." I don't know if anything can cure them of this crush, but I'm sure it would take a lot more than just facts. posted by Steve M. | 6:56 PM | REFUSING TO SAY THE UNSAYABLE It's a good thing I'm not one to believe in conspiracy theories -- because if I were, I might find it a tad suspicious that a Fox News reporter and cameraman have now been held for nearly two weeks by Palestinian captors, even though an initial AP story about the kidnapping noted that Several foreigners have been kidnapped in Gaza in recent months with their abductors demanding jobs from the Palestinian Authority or the release of people being held in Palestinian jails. All those kidnapped have been released within hours without harm. (Emphasis mine.) And I might also find it odd that the group claiming responsibility for this kidnapping, the "Holy Jihad Brigades," has been completely unknown until now. And I might remark, after watching the video of the two newsmen, that they're by far the most relaxed-looking Western captives of Islamomuslofasconistas I've ever seen. Did I mention that the two newsmen work for Fox? Fortunately, I'm not a conspiracy-theory kind of guy, so I won't remark on the fascinating confluence of events in mid-August -- the Right making a national issue of Joe Lieberman's primary defeat, followed almost immediately by the apparently hastened terror arrests in Britain, and then almost immediately after that by this kidnapping. I'm sure it's all just a coincidence. And I'm sure you'll want to join right-wing pundit Michelle Malkin's "missing Fox News crew blogburst." Surely she's doing this out of the goodness of her heart, not because she has, you know, an agenda. posted by Steve M. | 2:18 PM | Shorter Ann Althouse on the op-ed page of The New York Times: The unsoundness of Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's recent warrantless surveillance ruling is obvious to anyone who's read the text, which I won't quote in any detail, so you'll just have to trust my foot-stamping outrage. posted by Steve M. | 10:51 AM | At precisely the same moment when we were learning that the president loves fart jokes, we were also being told -- by the same magazine, U.S. News -- that he's becoming an intellectual heavyweight, a veritable Olympic athlete of the mind: ... President Bush now wants it known that he is a man of letters. In fact, Bush has entered a book-reading competition with Karl Rove, his political adviser. White House aides say the president has read 60 books so far this year (while the brainy Rove, to Bush's competitive delight, has racked up only 50). The commander in chief delved into three volumes in August alone -- two on Abraham Lincoln and, more surprising for a man of unambiguous convictions, The Stranger, Albert Camus's existential tale of murder and alienation.... More than a book a week? As Steve Benen says, "For a guy who likes to get to bed early, who devotes a couple of hours a day to exercise, and who ostensibly oversees the executive branch of government during a war, let's just say this is more than a little 'ambitious.'" And credulity-straining. So we have this, we have the fart story (which, as I said yesterday, was probably a planned leak from the White House, not an embarrassing revelation), and we have a couple of recent stories arguing that Bush's Crawford vacation was a time of punishing athleticism in 100-degree weather. You know what this reminds me of? The Saddam murals in pre-overthrow Iraq. Think of those murals, each of which focused on a unique aspect of Saddam's alleged greatness: Saddam the giver of life. Saddam the war strategist. Saddam the devout and powerful Muslim leader. Saddam, beloved of the people. Saddam the rifleman in a bowler hat. Saddam the who-the-hell-knows (a gaucho?). Now think about what's being said of our president: that he's an almost supernaturally fit 60-year-old; that he outreads even eggheads; and that, despite all this, he's the most regular of regular guys -- same propaganda technique, same desire to make the Leader larger than life. We just don't use murals. Portraying leaders as larger-than-life athletes is a time-honored GOP propaganda tradition, of course. Recall this from a couple of decades ago: ...In this week's issue of the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade (circ. 24 million), Reagan is both photo subject and author of the 1,800-word cover story, "How to Stay Fit." (The President talked out the basics to a White House speechwriter, then rewrote the article himself.) In the first paragraph he throws down the gauntlet: "So, move over, Jane Fonda, here comes the Ronald Reagan workout plan." ...with its Charles Atlas photos of a fit, firm Reagan, the Parade piece had a clear political payoff: if a President pumps iron, his age seems moot.... That was in December 1983 -- just as the '84 election campaign was about to start. Some things never change. posted by Steve M. | 10:28 AM | Tuesday, August 22, 2006 HEY, WHAT'S ON TV THIS WEEKEND? Oh, the usual -- a religious-right documentary blaming Charles Darwin for the Holocaust: Author and Christian broadcaster Dr. D. James Kennedy connects the dots between Charles Darwin and Adolf Hitler in Darwin's Deadly Legacy, a groundbreaking inquiry into Darwin's chilling social impact. The new television documentary airs nationwide on August 26 and 27 on The Coral Ridge Hour. For station listings, go to www.coralridge.org/darwin. The program features 14 scholars, scientists, and authors who outline the grim consequences of Darwin's theory of evolution and show how his theory fueled Hitler's ovens. "To put it simply, no Darwin, no Hitler," said Dr. Kennedy, the host of Darwin's Deadly Legacy. "Hitler tried to speed up evolution, to help it along, and millions suffered and died in unspeakable ways because of it." ... Complete with expert testimony! Ann Coulter, a bestselling author and popular conservative columnist, said Hitler "was applying Darwinism. He thought the Aryans were the fittest and he was just hurrying natural selection along." ... More from Coulter: I'll let the scientists decide what should be taught in science class, but it seems to me the one thing that shouldn't be taught in science class is a crack pot nineteenth century mystery religion … [public schools are] the left's madrassas and they propagandize to the children six hours a day, 12 years of the child life. See the clip in which Coulter says this at this post from People for the American Way's Right Wing Watch blog (which I'm adding to the blogroll). **** Also from Right Wing Watch, I learn that Alan Keyes appeared in the Limbaugh brothers' hometown, Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and predicted that if embryonic stem-cell research isn't banned, it will lead to the breeding of slave clones: And despite wording in Amendment 2 imposing harsh criminal penalties on anyone attempting to create a living human clone using the stem-cell research techniques, Keyes raised the possibility of an industrial effort to produce clones. The result, he said, would be "new legions of humans to be enslaved and brutalized." My apartment desperately needs painting -- oh, if only... (I'm kidding, Alan!) posted by Steve M. | 6:49 PM | ... we're learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides.... --from the current "Washington Whispers" column in U.S. News Stepping outside the boundaries of strict political and diplomatic protocol gets no more attention than when the president of the United States does it. And President Bush has been doing a lot of it recently. He called Canada's prime minister by his first name, massaged German Chancellor Angela Merkel's shoulders and played tour guide to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi at Graceland, the Memphis home of Elvis Presley. His biggest gaffe was that caught-on-tape moment at the G-8 Summit last month with British Prime Minister Tony Blair the one that featured Bush cursing and talking with his mouth full before a microphone that was supposed to be off. That set off tut-tuts around the globe. While four-letter expletives or a shoulder massage of a co-worker of the opposite sex could raise eyebrows in many office settings, Bush for the most part gets a pass from etiquette experts. "Part of it is he comes from Texas, and they don't stand on a lot of formality in that state," said Letitia Baldrige, who was President Kennedy's social secretary. "I think you get the Eastern kind of aristocrats, like the old days, they're always going to be more formal, they're always going to have a jacket on."... --AP today Don't be fooled -- these aren't embarrassing stories, and it's not a coincidence that they appear almost simultaneously. The White House clearly wants this out right now. Why? I'm not sure. Preemptive counterprogramming to the expected outing of a top White House aide or ally as gay, perhaps? Or maybe just an attempt to motivate the flatulence-lovin' base? Never mind, of course, that all this flatly contradicts what we heard at the dawn of the W. era: ...Mr. Bush, who promised during the election campaign to restore "honour and dignity" to the White House, ... and his lieutenants resent the sloppy informality of Mr. Clinton's blue-jeaned army of youthful assistants, whose attire and attitude they considered disrespectful. From the moment Mr. Bush swore in his staff this week, his deputies made it clear the President expects his staff to dress correctly. No dress code was issued, but there will be no more denim or T-shirts in the Oval Office, where former president Ronald Reagan never even removed his suit jacket. "The days of jeans and no ties at the White House are over," predicted Georgette Mosbacher, a prominent Republican activist.... --Globe & Mail, 1/25/01 A few weeks after I joined the White House, I read a memoir by Clinton's chief speechwriter, Michael Waldman. Waldman described late-night editing sessions in the Roosevelt Room, the big meeting room on the main floor of the West Wing. By midnight, he recalled, the long conference table would be covered with pizza boxes and capsized French fries. Pizza! At midnight! In the Roosevelt Room! In the Bush White House, the idea would have been as incredible as spitting on the carpet. --David Frum, The Right Man, pp. 14-15 ... the Clinton White House [was] a place where opponents' FBI files were read aloud over pizza and foreign contributors with cash invited in the back door. I thought: Something's wrong with these people, they lack thought and dignity. But most of all they seemed to lack respect, a sense of awe.... --Peggy Noonan, 9/14/98, republished 10/5/01 Of course, whichever way the administration plays it, the lapdogs in the White House press corps will lap it up. (First item via Shakespeare's Sister. Last three quotes cribbed from an earlier post about this administration's impeccable breeding.) posted by Steve M. | 4:03 PM | Beliefnet reports that the Vatican has inched a wee bit closer to that long-rumored merger with the First Holiness Storefront Church of the Republican Creator: Pope Replaces Intelligent Design Critic at Observatory Pope Benedict XVI has appointed a new director of the Vatican Observatory, replacing the Rev. George Coyne, a long-serving Jesuit astronomer and a vocal opponent of "intelligent design" theory. It was unclear if the replacement of Coyne, the observatory's director since 1978, reflected a sense of disapproval within the Vatican over his opposition to intelligent design -- the idea that the world is too complex to have been created by natural events alone.... In his staunch defense of evolution, Coyne, 73, has frequently crossed swords with Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, a former protege and close adviser to Benedict whose support of intelligent design has been instrumental in introducing the theory into Catholic discourse.... Although Benedict has referred to the "cosmos" as an "intelligent project," he has yet to explicitly weigh in on the merits of intelligent design, a question that has generated an explosive debate in the United States. In a November interview, Coyne suggested the pope should withhold judgment on the issue, adding that Benedict "doesn't have the slightest idea of what intelligent design means in the U.S." ... Benedict may or may not know about this battle in America, but Schonborn certainly does -- in July 2005 he published this attack on "neo-Darwinian dogma" on the op-ed page of The New York Times; the article, as the Times subsequently noted, was written at the urging of Mark Ryland of the pro-intelligent design Discovery Institute, and "was submitted to The Times by a Virginia public relations firm, Creative Response Concepts, which also represents the Discovery Institute." The op-ed echoed Discovery Institute talking points. The Beliefnet story notes that evolution will soon be discussed at the Vatican: In early September, Benedict will conduct a weekend seminar on the impact Darwin's theory has on the church's teaching of Creation. Schonborn, who has described evolution as "incompatible" with church teachings, will speak at the event, along with evolution advocate Peter Schuster, president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Other speakers at the event include the Rev. Paul Erbrich, emeritus professor of natural philosophy from the University of Munich, who has described evolution as a "fundamentally inadequate" explanation of the origins of life; and Robert Spaemann, a conservative German philosopher who has challenged "evolutionism," or the philosophical applications of Darwin's theory. That panel sounds about as politically balanced as the Fox News prime-time lineup. **** UPDATE: Some related stateside news, from The Chronicle of Higher Education: Like a gap in the fossil record, evolutionary biology is missing from a list of majors that the U.S. Department of Education has deemed eligible for a new federal grant program designed to reward students majoring in engineering, mathematics, science, or certain foreign languages. That absence apparently indicates that students in the evolutionary sciences do not qualify for the grants, and some observers are wondering whether the omission was deliberate.... The awards in question -- known as Smart Grants, for the National Science and Mathematics Access to Retain Talent program -- were created by Congress this year, with strong support from the president. The grants are worth up to $4,000 and are awarded in addition to Pell grants. Recipients must be college juniors or seniors enrolled in one of the technical fields of study that the Department of Education has deemed eligible for funds. Many different topics, as varied as astronomy and Arabic, qualify. But evolutionary biology is absent.... Yikes. (Via Memeorandum.) posted by Steve M. | 12:42 PM | Yesterday I meant to link to this diary entry from dmsilev at Daily Kos, which reproduces some of the reactions at Free Republic to a news story about a mostly British group of passengers who refused to board a plane until a couple of "suspicious" men "of Asian or Middle Eastern appearance" were removed. You can go to the Kos link for a large helping of the racist bilge, or go directly to the Free Republic thread for the sewage in its raw form, but here's a sample: Unpleasant enough to fly with Islamofascists, but what of those who in our dark times keep frightening beards, and yammer away in Arabic? On a plane? It would take them under one minute to shave their bears. To act live civilized human beings should require no extra burden on their part. Given our recent history, people everywhere should give extra attention to people who harbor an unusual attraction to goats, or clad their women in army surplus tents. **** If I'm a Muslim and I insist on wearing a beard and a diaper on my head while I read the Koran out loud, perhaps I shouldn't board an EL AL jet. Eventually we get to a story from a woman whose husband -- a firefighter of Puerto Rican descent who works in the New York area and volunteered for the World Trade Center cleanup after 9/11 -- is sometimes profiled. Sample response: This is what people are supposed to do. I am sorry if your husband is harrassed, but these are the times we live in. And my favorite: if her husband were to buy a cowboy hat and some boots noone would ever suspect him of being a terrorist ever again. (Excuse me: If you have a driver's license from somewhere in the New York area and you show up at a New York airport in a cowboy hat and boots, that would make me suspicious of you. Or at least suspicious of your sanity. We don't dress like that up here, folks.) The Kos diary entry has much more -- but I went to the Freep thread and found one interesting exchange dmsilev didn't quote. A Freeper named livius tells a story of being in Spain in the summer of 2001: On one occasion, I saw a very diverse group of people board the trains at various stations - one was a semi-military looking light-skinned ME looking man with close-cropped hair, dressed in good business casual (pressed khakis); 2 were ME looking guys who were not as well dressed, and 1 was a black man I assumed to be Senegalese, with a briefcase of the type normally used for selling counterfeit watches.... Later, I discovered that Mohammed Atta had been in that same place, at that same time, and I have always been convinced that the reason none of the investigators have been able to find out where he met his co-conspirators in Spain is because he met them on the train. They assembled one by one or two, discussed their issue for about three stops, and then left one by one. Atta was in Spain at approximately that time, though whether he was one of the people our Freeper saw is, to say the least, open to debate. But what I love is the response from a Georgia Freeper named ga medic: Your story made the hairs on my arm stand up. How creepy that you were possibly that close to such a monster. I always want to think that someone so evil would be obvious, and you would be able to tell right away. I know that it isn't this way in reality. That story will give me nightmares. This is what gives these people nightmares -- that "evil" people don't have the common decency to give off Evil Cooties. They're not talking about the anxiety that security screeners can spot, as part of behavioral profiling. They're talking about evil. They "want to think" it's visible.  And yet they also want Muslims to dress "like civilized human beings" -- i.e., like Westerners. But wouldn't that more effectively conceal the Evil Rays? And what do we do if those sneaky Evil Muslims start hiding their Evil by showing up at airports in boots and cowboy hats? **** UPDATE: For even more appalling hate, see the fifth comment here. **** Almost forgot the footnote: Kos link via Booman Tribune. posted by Steve M. | 9:41 AM | Monday, August 21, 2006 Well, this is gratifying -- if it's real: In an election for the United States Senate in Virginia today, 8/21/06, incumbent Republican George Allen edges Democrat challenger James Webb 48% to 45%, according to an exclusive SurveyUSA poll conducted for W*USA-TV in Washington, DC. Since an identical SurveyUSA poll released 6/28/06, Allen has lost 8 points and Webb has gained 8 points. Allen's lead has shrunk from 19 points to 3 points. Interviewing for this poll began 8/18/06, one week after Allen singled out a Webb campaign worker at an Allen rally. Allen has lost support across all demographic groups.... Allen, of course, singled out a Webb campaign worker of Indian descent and referred to him using the obscure racial slur "Macaca." I worry, however, that the polls might be exaggerating the shift in voter opinion somewhat. It seems possible that we may be looking at a variation of this phenomenon: ..."The evidence is that whites who turn down pollsters have less positive views toward minorities. There's the problem," said Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. This would mean folks with more racist views, ergo folks who would be less likely to support a minority candidate, would be harder to enlist in a poll.... You may remember some of the biracial election survey boo boos of the past: the 1989 mayoral contest between David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani in New York; Douglas Wilder versus Marshall Coleman in the Virginia gubernatorial race that same year; and the grandfather of them all, Tom Bradley's unforeseen loss to George Deukmejian in the 1982 California gubernatorial race. In each, pre-election polls showed the minority candidate with a bigger lead than eventually materialized when votes were cast. No one really knows exactly why and where polls go wrong in biracial contests.... Perhaps whites, feeling a need to be politically correct, lie to pollsters, saying they will support the minority candidate when they have no intention of doing so.... Now that this is a race partially about race (or at least ethnicity), something along these lines could be happening in the polls -- though I hope not. posted by Steve M. | 6:55 PM | PAGING MARGARET ATWOOD AGAIN Well, at least he didn't say women don't have souls: Sunday school teacher dumped for being female WATERTOWN, New York (AP) -- The minister of a church that dismissed a female Sunday School teacher after adopting what it called a literal interpretation of the Bible says a woman can perform any job -- outside of the church. The First Baptist Church dismissed Mary Lambert on August 9 with a letter explaining that the church had adopted an interpretation that prohibits women from teaching men. She had taught there for 54 years. The letter quoted the first epistle to Timothy: "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent." The Rev. Timothy LaBouf, who also serves on the Watertown City Council, issued a statement saying his stance against women teaching men in Sunday school would not affect his decisions as a city leader in Watertown, where all five members of the council are men but the city manager who runs the city's day-to-day operations is a woman. "I believe that a woman can perform any job and fulfill any responsibility that she desires to" outside of the church, LaBouf wrote Saturday.... The Rev has issued a lengthy statement justifying not only the dismissal but his overall work as pastor: ...As most of you are aware when I arrived at First Baptist Church the congregation was dwindling and the church was headed for eventual closure. In a short period of time we began to see tremendous growth in the church which made me and many others feel thankful and blessed. In a short period of time classrooms that did not have children in them for a number of years were filling up with children, other parts of the building that had not been used in years were now needing to be utilized as a result of our growth.... The majority of our membership was genuinely excited about the growth and new hope for the future of the church, however, as you recall there were some who were unhappy with new members joining the church, changes that were being made and my performance in general as pastor.... Why does this sound so familiar to me? Oh yeah -- it reminds me of what another preacher said last year: After several days of avoiding media contact, Chan Chandler granted an exclusive interview to Baptist Press Tuesday afternoon, May 10. Chandler and the church where he is pastor -- East Waynesville Baptist Church, Waynesville, N.C. -- have drawn considerable media attention in recent days as nine members publicly alleged Chandler had them ousted from church membership based on their choice of political parties and candidates.... Chandler admits citing Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's views on abortion and homosexuality in one sermon.... Chandler said the church had undergone several months of disharmony, some of which he speculates was the result of his preaching about Christians' responsibility to be reflective of the Bible in the way that they vote. And more hesitatingly, he also speculated that, since the church had baptized almost 30 people and was growing under his leadership, then those who had been in church leadership positions for years may have felt threatened.... Yeah, it's never really about the preacher going all wingnutty. The problem is always a few disgruntled backstabbers in the congregation who resent the preacher for being so darn successful. And then the press blows it all out of proportion. (Here's an AP story about the Chandler incident.) And besides, it's none of the public's damn business anyway. LaBouf: I was saddened to learn via the Newswatch50 website that once again a private church matter was made public by Ms. Lambert. Chandler: Citing verses from 1 Corinthians 6, which he says require the church to keep its disagreements out of the public eye, Chandler is deeply grieved that the rest of the world is now privy to some of the church's behavior. Yeah, it's all our fault. And if some preacher someday wants to turn the calendar back a couple more centuries and start burning heretics at the stake, well, that's none of our business either, and if we disagree we're just damn nosy liberals. posted by Steve M. | 3:05 PM | Does anyone else find the timing of this awfully convenient? BRIDGEPORT, W.Va., Aug. 20 — A legal battle over a painting of Jesus hanging in a high school here is continuing, even though the painting was stolen last week. Two civil liberties groups, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia, filed suit in June to remove the painting, "Head of Christ," saying it sent the message that the public school endorsed Christianity as its official religion. ... The Christian Freedom Fund raised more than $150,000 for a defense fund, including $6,700 raised by students at the school. The board selected the Alliance Defense Fund, a national legal organization founded in part by the Christian group Focus on the Family, was selected as its lead counsel. ... early Thursday the painting, which had been at Bridgeport High School for 37 years, was stolen from a wall outside the principal's office. The theft was recorded by security cameras, but the thief hid his face.... How amazing -- the big guns of the religious Right get seriously involved, and the forces of Satanic secularism commit their most demonic deed yet at exactly the same moment: The police are still looking for man who stole that painting Thursday morning. Police released surveillance video on Thursday from inside the high school. Friday, the police have released more video, this time from the middle school.... Meanwhile, at a special meeting Friday morning, the board chose the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund.... What are the odds? Why, you'd almost think someone involved in defending the painting was trying to generate national attention and sympathy (and possibly money) -- if you didn't know that these were God's chosen people. The cops have surveillance video of the thief and "15 pieces of evidence," including DNA, but the thief carefully conceals himself throughout the tape. By the way, we all concern ourselves with whether Muslim immigrants are adjusting to our pluralist society, but maybe it's towns like Bridgeport we ought to be worried about: Tokens of Christianity, including crosses and religious mottos, can be found in schools and government buildings all over Harrison County. The amenities in a women’s restroom at the Board of Education offices include a leatherbound pocket copy of the New Testament, with Psalms and Proverbs. No surprise there, of course -- in much of this country, we're a hell of a lot closer to Gilead than we are to Americastan. posted by Steve M. | 10:39 AM | Sunday, August 20, 2006 ON BEDWETTING It's fun to laugh at right-wingers and accuse them of losing bladder control every time there's a story that suggests a new terrorist attack, especially when one story after another proves to be a false alarm -- but I'm not sure what we're really seeing on the right is fear. At least it's not just fear. So what else is involved? Well, think about it: What been getting up right-wingers' noses lately almost more than the Islamofascistoswarthoterrorist threat itself? If you've been paying attention to the righties this summer, you know the answer: They hate it when a Muslim appears on the scene of carnage in a Muslim neighborhood and draws attention to the fact that there's been carnage -- and they're particularly incensed when there's somewhat of a discrepancy between what's reported and what actually happened. They've spent much of the summer picking away at every photo and video of bombed-out buildings in Lebanon, looking for evidence that every one of them includes exaggeration of the harm done. Gosh, they couldn't possibly be so angry about exaggeration of threats because they themselves have a tendency to exaggerate a threat, could they? Why, that would be sort of like projection, wouldn't it? Right-wingers couldn't possibly be susceptible to that, could they? Yep, that's what they're doing -- something very, very similar to what they say has been done in Lebanon. The righties say phony Lebanese corpses are being waved at cameras -- while what the righties wave at their readers is every airliner false alarm and lone-nut incident they can shoehorn into their Vast Islamofascist Conspiracy. It's not exactly the same, but it's close enough -- grab your audience by the lapels and max out the appeal to anger. Would the righties be so obsessed with this in the Middle East if they weren't trying to make this kind of emotional appeal themselves? posted by Steve M. | 2:44 PM | Saturday, August 19, 2006 WHY JOHN McCAIN WON'T BE THE GOP PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE IN 2008 From the article in today's New York Times about the GOP's abandonment of the Republican Senate candidate in Connecticut, Alan Schlesinger: Senator McCain ... was one of the few who has said he would support the Republican nominee in the race.... His nominal support for the party candidate has more to do with wanting to avoid alienating conservatives, one adviser said, than with actually supporting Mr. Schlesinger. Could he possibly be more oblivious? Could he possibly believe that this is how you please conservative Republicans? Could he possibly not know that they love Lieberman? He really doesn't know. And that's why he won't get through the primaries in '08 -- he doesn't speak Wingnut. posted by Steve M. | 11:02 AM | Friday, August 18, 2006 HOUSEGUEST TIME I think posting will be light this weekend. posted by Steve M. | 3:19 PM | Wow, this really seems to be out of control -- citing a story in the Winninpeg Free Press, a poster at Democratic Underground tells us this: 3 Doctors returning to Winnipeg on a connecting flight from Denver were forced off their flight earlier this week. One was Muslim. All were dark skinned. A passenger in front of them who was drunk at the time, claimed he heard one of them state "I have control of the aisle now" They were then questioned by the FBI and TSA security let them go shortly after checking things out. However they missed their flight and still had to overnight in Denver because their ordeal with no compensation. These passengers want a full investigation through the government on this.... I can't read the full story -- the firewall for non-subscribers at the Free Press is like the old Berlin Wall -- but a search yields the start of the story: MDs forced off plane THREE young Winnipeg doctors -- one a Muslim -- were kicked off a flight home from Denver earlier this week after a passenger falsely identified them as a terrorist threat. Dr. Ahmed Farooq, a fourth-year radiology resident, and two physician friends want an apology from United Airlines and assurances staff will be better trained to identify genuine threats. Winnipeg Centre MP Pat Martin has also asked federal Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day to raise the issue with his counterpart in Washington. "It's the most egregious example of this device of racial profiling I know about among my constituents," said Martin. "These are valuable, upstanding members of our society. Civil rights shouldn't be collateral damage in this whole fight against terrorism." But officials with United Airlines say they are obliged to take any allegations threatening passenger safety seriously, particularly in a period of heightened tension like the one following last week's discovery of a British terrorist plot targeting transatlantic ... I get that when I search "doctors" and when I search "drunk" -- so I suspect the DU summary is accurate. If it is, that's just wonderful -- we now take the word of a drunk over the word of three doctors, if one of the doctors is a dirty filthy Mooooslim. (There's also a brief Toronto Sun story here. The Sun says they were returning from San Francisco, where they'd been taking a course.) You know what? That plot in England is referred to as a "failed plot," but it's not a "failed plot." Those guys succeeded. They've got us chasing our tails and running around half-crazy. They've got us pissing off law-abiding Muslims like this doctor, which has a ripple effect -- to younger Muslims in Canada and the U.S. and Europe, every story like this is one more sign that we hate all of them. The British plot worked like a charm. Which is ironic, because, as this grimly funny and wonderfully detailed article makes clear, the plot as we've had it described to us -- a plot to mix TATP in flight -- was virtually impossible to pull off. Either the plotters had no idea what long odds they faced, which means they're dumber than we realize, or they knew and didn't care, because their real bomb was a fear bomb -- which hit the center of its target. Or, worse, they really were stupid, and they got us anyway. **** Right-wingers would surely respond to the above by pointing to this: Two suitcases containing bottles of gasoline, propane gas and a detonating device that were found abandoned in German regional trains last month were bombs primed to go off and kill a "high number'' of people, police said.... A suitcase found abandoned on a regional train from Aachen to Hamm in western Germany was turned in by the train's conductor in Dortmund. It contained a propane gas bottle, three bottles filled with gasoline and a detonating device, the Federal Prosecutor's Office said Aug. 1. On the same day another piece of luggage was found on another regional train from Moenchengladbach to Koblenz about 75 miles to the South. It too contained a propane gas bottle.... But watching for unattended packages on public transportation is smart. Forcing doctors on their way home from taking a course to deplane on the word of a drunk? Not so smart. **** UPDATE: Read the full Free Press story in comments. It's as bad as I thought. (Thanks, H.S.) **** UPDATE: Via slothropia, here's a story on the incident from the CBC (which includes a photo of the decidedly not menacing-looking Dr. Farooq). posted by Steve M. | 3:13 PM | Early results of the current "daily poll" at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, with the first option highlighted (click to enlarge):  This is a JDAM. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know -- it's a joke. Still, it's nice to see that the Right's eliminationist fantasies don't stop at the water's edge. posted by Steve M. | 12:03 PM | ANDREW YOUNG SWITCHES PARTIES Shilling for Wal-Mart? Bashing immigrants? Qualifying his apology for immigrant-bashing by insisting that he doesn't actually believe what he said, but also that his remarks were accurate? When did Andy Young become a Republican? The civil rights leader Andrew Young, who was hired by Wal-Mart to improve its public image, resigned from that post last night after telling an African-American newspaper that Jewish, Arab and Korean shop owners had "ripped off" urban communities for years, "selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables." In the interview, published yesterday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Mr. Young said that Wal-Mart "should" displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods. "You see those are the people who have been overcharging us," he said of the owners of the small stores, "and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs." Mr. Young ... apologized for the comments and retracted them in an interview last night. Less than an hour later, he resigned as chairman of Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group created and financed by the company to trumpet its accomplishments. "It's against everything I ever thought in my life," Mr. Young said. "It never should have been said. I was speaking in the context of Atlanta, and that does not work in New York or Los Angeles."... Explaining his comments about Koreans, Jews and Arabs, Mr. Young said he was referring to the history of retail ownership in the neighborhood where he lives in southwestern Atlanta. "Almost everyone who has come into my community has moved in, made money and moved out and moved up," he said. "That process is still continuing." ... Wow, it's been a hell of a month for racist speech. Mel Gibson. George Allen. (By the way, the deepest research into Allen's "Macaca" insult is from Jeffrey Feldman at Frameshop; Feldman finds the word at quite a few racist bulletin boards, in reference to people such as Rodney King.) The Weekly Standard cover that depicts Al Sharpton as a chauffeur. Marty Petertz's "Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters have stumped for Mr. Lamont. As I say, we have been here before." And, in case you missed it, there was what Tramm Hudson, a Republican who's running for the House seat being vacated by Katherine Harris. said to a Christian Coalition meeting: "I grew up in Alabama. I understand, uh, I know from experience, that blacks are not the greatest swimmers or may not even know how to swim." Where does that come from? That's not just Al Campanis said -- it's an incredibly widespread belief. I don't get it. posted by Steve M. | 9:28 AM | Thursday, August 17, 2006 INCOHERENT Bush yesterday: ... I understand the nature of this enemy. This is an enemy that has an ideology. Some people say, well, this may be a law enforcement matter. No, these are people that are politically driven. They've got motives. They do not believe in freedom. They don't believe in freedom of religion; they don't believe in freedom of dissent; they don't believe in women's rights. They have a backward view of the world. And yet, they want to impose their vision on other people. That's what they're trying to do. And the United States of America must never retreat and let them have their way. (Applause.) What does any of that have to do with whether or not this is a law enforcement matter? ...A different kind of war requires a different kind of approach. It means we better have good intelligence in order to be able to figure out the designs of the enemy before they strike. The old style of war didn't require good intelligence? ... I know it's hard for Americans to believe this, but the enemy that attacked us before has got people that want to act like them, are maybe taking instruction from -- I can't tell you whether this plot we disrupted was al Qaeda. I'm not going to say that unless I'm certain it was. But it's the kind of activities that al Qaeda has done in the past, and that is to place suiciders on airplanes to destroy innocent life, trying to shake the will of the United States, trying to send a political message.... Is there anyone in America who finds it hard to believe that there are some people in the world who want to commit Al Qaeda-style attacks? Bonus quote: You know, when you have resentment and anger, that breeds hatred; that breeds recruiting grounds for people to become a suicider. Imagine the mentality of somebody willing to kill for an ideology that just doesn't -- is not hopeful, and yet I believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that parts of the world breed resentment. Clear as day. posted by Steve M. | 1:36 PM | DON'T READ THIS POST I know you all hate it when I talk like this, so maybe you should just skip this post. Let me vent, and then we can get back to the stuff we actually agree on. As I see it, we're dealing with a building collapse -- massive numbers of injuries, a desperate need to treat large numbers of wounded. That building collapse is GOP control of Congress. It's an emergency. It's a crisis. We need all the trauma teams we can possibly muster at the scene. The problem is, some of our best medical personnel are preoccupied giving Connecticut a boob job. I'll put the metaphor out of its misery after this, but what's going on in Connecticut was not medically necessary. Joe Lieberman is a Democrat, despite what I said in the last post -- or he would have been, if barely, had this Lamont thing never happened. If he hadn't received a challenge, here's what his reelection campaign would have consisted of: "Hi, I'm Joe Lieberman, and I'm running for reelection." But with Lamont in the race, it's become a crusade. A Republican crusade. Yes, he'd have been an evil Judas "Fox News Democrat" if he'd been reelected without a challenge. He'd have regularly undermined the party. But while the Republicans have nobody who's both as disloyal and as prominent as Lieberman, they have once-in-a-while gadflies -- Specter, McCain, Hagel, Graham, Grassley, Voinovich, plus the nearly invisible back-bencher Chafee and the polite moderates from Maine -- who collectively do about as much damage to GOP party unity as Lieberman does on his own to the Democrats. And yet the GOP still manages to control the Senate, plus the rest of the federal government. In other words, we could have decided to endure another Lieberman term while concentrating on picking off Republicans elsewhere. He would have remained technically one of our senators -- ideally, one of our 51-plus senators. But now we've opened the door for Rove + Co. to deliver a new message: that Lieberman is the co-leader (with Bush) of their party, the Reasonable Party. They're running on his coattails, leveraging his reputation as a moderate. By attacking Lieberman, we've helped rejuvenate Liebermanism. I just hope we haven't rejuvenated the Republican Party in the process. posted by Steve M. | 10:40 AM | Well, there it is: Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, running as an independent, gets 53 percent of likely voters, with 41 percent for Democratic primary winner Ned Lamont and 4 percent for Republican Alan Schlesinger, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today. Among registered voters, Sen. Lieberman gets 49 percent, followed by Lamont with 38 percent and Schlesinger with 4 percent.... At this point I would like to be remembered as the guy who warned you that Lieberman was the likely frontrunner, rather than as the guy who thought the media might be turning on him. Quinnipiac's poll director looks at Lieberman's GOP numbers -- he has 75% of the vote in a three-way race -- and says, Sen. Lieberman's support among Republicans is nothing short of amazing. Duh. What did we all expect? Rove + Co. have made Lieberman the most popular Republican in America. Oh, well -- at least I didn't write this: He probably knows right now that the day will come in late September when he will announce his withdrawal from the race. No one is going to have to talk him into it. By that time, the Democratic Party power structure will be doing its thing for Ned Lamont and Lieberman will be trailing by double digits. It won't be a hard decision for Lieberman. He will drop out to avoid career-ending humiliation. posted by Steve M. | 8:00 AM | Wednesday, August 16, 2006 NICOLE Kidman has made a public stand against terrorism. The actress, joined by 84 other high-profile Hollywood stars, directors, studio bosses and media moguls, has taken out a powerfully-worded full page advertisement in today's Los Angeles Times newspaper. It specifically targets "terrorist organisations" such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.... --Herald Sun (Australia) Right-wing blogger Bruce Kesler has a question: The question is why I have to get this news from an Australian newspaper, when Nicole Kidman and 84 other Hollywood heavyweights take a strong stand against Hezbollah and Hamas? I just checked google news and there isn't another story on this out there. Er, because no intelligent person really gives a crap what these people think? One way or the other? Look, I'm a lefty. I'll admit I've been known to enjoy it when a lefty entertainer makes a political statement I agree with to a big audience. I'm happy if someone writes a really good lefty song. And I certainly understand why political candidates take lefty entertainers' money. But I don't get my opinions from entertainers. I don't take what they say all that seriously. The only people who do are you guys. You actually read Barbra Streisand's semi-literate blog. You care when Sean Penn goes on some embarrassing politicized junket. You still pay attention to Jane Fonda. You're the guys who can't tell the difference between entertainers and politicians. The only actor to be elected president? A Republican. The only actor who's currently a governor? A Republican. NFL football player running for governor? Republican. I could go on. You're stagestruck. You're Hollywood-obsessed. You're jealous. Come on -- admit it. **** UPDATE: Julia (and her readers) list a few GOP entertainers I left out. And one more: the junior senator from Kentucky, who's apparently lost a few miles off his mental fastball. posted by Steve M. | 11:34 PM | THE FIRST MISSION ACCOMPLISHED The number of polio cases in Afghanistan has increased substantially in recent months, health officials said Monday. They attributed the rise to growing violence in the south that has hampered vaccination. Health officials said they had identified at least 25 cases of polio so far this year, compared with 9 in all of 2005; a 26th case is suspected. Dr. Abdullah Fahim, an adviser to the health minister, said inoculation campaigns across the country since 1995 had brought the annual number of cases into the single digits. The inoculations were conducted during the wars of the 1990's and under the Taliban government, which was ousted in late 2001. Officials had seen the reduction as a sign that polio might be eliminated in Afghanistan.... --New York Times yesterday Opium cultivation in Afghanistan has hit record levels -- up by more than 40 percent from 2005 -- despite hundreds of millions in counternarcotics money, Western officials told The Associated Press.... A Western anti-narcotics official in Kabul said about 370,650 acres of opium poppy was cultivated this season -- up from 257,000 acres in 2005 -- citing their preliminary crop projections. The previous record was 323,700 acres in 2004, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.... "It is a significant increase from last year ... unfortunately, it is a record year," said a senior U.S. government official based in Kabul, who like the other Western officials would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive topic.... --AP today posted by Steve M. | 5:50 PM | POSTFEMINISM IS A NIGHTMARE FROM WHICH WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO AWAKEN IF THE NEW REPUBLIC HADN'T SLIPPED US THAT ROHYPNOL I woke up this morning, certain it was 2006, and now I learn that it's the mid-1990s all over again and Camille Paglia is rampant once more, declaring all sorts of people feminist heroes, the only grounds for disqualification being that no one is eligible who's an actual feminist. Only this time it's not Paglia -- it's The New Republic, in the person of a young female journalist named Elspeth Moore, who for six months half a decade ago ago was "the only liberal" working on a red-state assembly line, an experience that now makes her cheer hate speech as long as it's delivered by a gal with sass: I love Ann Coulter because, in her, I see a loudmouth on the assembly line, fighting not to be squished and whittled and boxed into the shape Washington seems to think fits a girl just right. A couple of Coulter lines Ms. Moore regards as empowering: * On the First Amendment: "An excuse for overweight women to dance in pasties and The New York Times to commit treason." ("Just completely terrible, I know. But I have to admit, I giggled.") * "Al Gore? Total fag." ("I admit it, I snickered. What can I say--her timing was great.") And attacking the four 9/11 widows who pushed for the creation of the 9/11 Commission? To die for: It is a little absurd to hold up a person as an expert judge of the 9/11 Commission Report, for example, just because she lost a loved one. Liberals do tend to do that kind of thing, and it makes us look like weenies. I'll let Lance Mannion handle that: Yes, it would be absurd, if those women had not made themselves experts on the 9/11 Commission Report, if they had not in fact been the ones who pushed and pushed and pushed until there was a 9/11 Commission to issue a report, if it had not been the case that if those women hadn't worked as hard and as intelligently and expertly as they did, then George Bush and Company would have gotten their way and there'd have been no Commission, no report, no investigation at all, even the half-baked one that we had. I'll add that the widows in question, far from being tools of the Democratic Party, made themselves into experts on their own, over a long period of time -- here's the story -- and only in 2004 attached themselves to the Kerry campaign. I'll also remind you that the Bush campaign held up a 9/11 victim's teenage daughter as an expert on the effectiveness of George W. Bush's foreign policy, in a campaign ad that ran nearly 30,000 times. That's what I despise about this argument -- the fact that Coulter has given the "moderate" mainstream press mass amnesia with regard to the fact that the GOP is happy to put up "unassailable" spokespeople. People such as Debra Burlingame, the sister of a 9/11 pilot who wrote this anti-Kerry op-ed for The Wall Street Journal and otherwise backed Bush in 2004. Or, earlier, a sister of a Willie Horton victim who campaigned for Bush the Elder in 1988. Moore has half a point about the sexism of some criticism of Coulter -- we ought to be able to do better in critiquing her than crude schoolyard vulgarisms. But is that all it takes to make someone a hero? That people call her bad names? And on that subject, this is just dumb: She makes nice liberals think bad thoughts--particularly about whether they would have sex with her. I can only speak for this not-so-nice liberal, but the only "bad thought" of this kind she inspires in me is that she's trying, desperately, to make me think about whether I'd have sex with her. You know what? It's not working.* (Looking for Coulter-lust? Look no further. Also go here.) Hat tip to Shakespeare's Sister, particularly the commenter who got me past the TNR subscription firewall. **** *JUST TO CLARIFY: She is trying, and sometimes she seems to resent the self-imposed effort. See her recent Jay Leno interview, specifically the part about a third of the way through in which she talks somewhat wearily about "wear[ing] sexy dresses" and growing her hair long. posted by Steve M. | 12:57 PM | What if Republicans win 49 Senate seats -- and Joe Lieberman wins? That's the scenario you have to keep in mind when weighing responses to Lieberman's independent bid -- because under those circumstances, Lieberman is free to declare that he'll caucus with the Republicans, thus allowing them to keep a majority (50 senators plus the constitutionally designated Senate president, VP Cheney, as a tiebreaker). And the Republicans are free to offer him all sorts of juicy entitlements (e.g., choice committee posts, perhaps including a chairmanship) to get him to do just that. And he has every motivation to accept such offers if Democrats follow through on this: ...If he continues to alienate his colleagues, Lieberman could be stripped of his seniority within the Democratic caucus should he defeat Democrat Ned Lamont in the general election this November, according to some senior Democratic aides.... Yes, that article (from The Hill) goes on to note that Lieberman would slot Lieberman to take over as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the panel primarily responsible for investigating the executive branch. That wouldn't be good -- but I'd rather have Lieberman there and Democrats in charge of all the other committees than continued GOP control of all the committees. Don't tell me flatly, "Lamont's gonna win." Not when there's been one poll and Joe leads. And don't tell me he's promised to stick with the Democrats. He'll sell any switch as a "purge." (Maybe he'll even say, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.") Or maybe he'll see no point in taking his Senate seat at all, and take the long-rumored Cabinet position from a grateful Bush administration. (Hugh Hewitt, who might actually reflect administration thinking, proposes Joe for secretary of transportation -- all right-wingers still hate Norman Mineta.* No, Joe won't replace Rumsfeld, who's going to hang on till the bitter end.) And if Lieberman steps down, GOP governor Jodi Rell picks his successor until a special election is held. I want Lieberman to lose, but I want to keep the lines of communication open. Let me invoke LBJ: I'd rather have Lieberman inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. And remember: His treatment at the hands of Democrats will be compared to Arlen Specter's treatment at the hands of the GOP -- and he got to be Judiciary Committee chair. **** *(UPDATE: Yeah, I know -- Mineta's now resigned. But click the Hewitt link -- wingnuts still think of the DoT as polluted by Mineta cooties. See also, e.g., Michelle Malkin.) posted by Steve M. | 8:15 AM | Tuesday, August 15, 2006  President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was ... frustrated that the new Iraqi government -- and the Iraqi people -- had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday.... ..."The president wants the people in Iraq to get more on board to bring success," [said one person who attended the meeting]. ...More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq.... One participant in the lunch, Carole A. O'Leary, a professor at American University who is also doing work in Iraq with a State Department grant, said Mr. Bush expressed the view that "the Shia-led government needs to clearly and publicly express the same appreciation for United States efforts and sacrifices as they do in private." ... --from tomorrow's New York Times Translation: "Listen, you ungrateful bastards, it's time for you to get on the stick and start making me look good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know -- 'We're in a civil war! We have a hundred violent deaths a day!' Well, cry me a river. We have an election coming up in America, and it's a referendum on me, and I'm dying here. So what are you gonna do for me?" (Elsewhere in the Times: "July appears to have been the deadliest month of the war for Iraqi civilians, according to figures from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue.... An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July, according to the figures. The total number of civilian deaths that month, 3,438, is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly double the toll in January.") Two years ago,* Bush at least refrained from making demands on individuals or institutions he himself had personally destroyed (at least to the best of my knowledge). On the other hand, he had the gall to try to strong-arm the Vatican: On his recent trip to Rome, President Bush asked a top Vatican official to push American bishops to speak out more about political issues, including same-sex marriage, according to a report in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper. In a column posted Friday evening on the paper's Web site, John L. Allen Jr., its correspondent in Rome and the dean of Vatican journalists, wrote that Mr. Bush had made the request in a June 4 meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state. Citing an unnamed Vatican official, Mr. Allen wrote: "Bush said, 'Not all the American bishops are with me' on the cultural issues. The implication was that he hoped the Vatican would nudge them toward more explicit activism."... It really is all about him, isn't it? **** Ah, but there's one more lovely detail in the Times article about the meeting: ...Vali R. Nasr, an expert on Shia Islam, said the Pentagon meeting appeared to be an effort to give White House, Pentagon and State Department officials better insight into Iraq's religious and ethnic mix. "They wanted new insight, so they could better understand the arena in which they are making policy," said Mr. Nasr, author of "The Shia Revival." ... They still need insight into Iraq's religious and ethnic mix now? Nearly six years after they started planning for the Iraq invasion? No wonder this war is a quagmire. **** *UPDATE: In case it's not clear, that was two years ago just as the '04 campaign was beginning to heat up. posted by Steve M. | 11:15 PM | SO WHAT DO YOU THINK... Joe Lieberman is going to say in his prime-time speech at the 2008 Republican convention? posted by Steve M. | 4:51 PM | Shorter Christopher Hitchens: In my day, we had good terrorists -- not like these bums today! Hey, you Islamofascists, get off my lawn! posted by Steve M. | 3:52 PM | WORST. JUDGE. OF. CHARACTER. EVER. Douglas Brinkley -- noted historian and the author, most recently, of a highly acclaimed book on Katrina -- is one of the eighteen people New York magazine asked to speculate on the question "What if 9/11 never happened?" His contribution: BUSH WOULD HAVE LAUNCHED A MARSHALL PLAN FOR NEW ORLEANS Without 9/11, it seems certain that the Bush administration would have been shaped by the domestic crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Rather than standing on the rubble at ground zero with his bullhorn, Bush would best be known for standing on some waterlogged roof in the Ninth Ward and setting up a Gulf Coast White House, some federal nerve center to rebuild the whole region, fix the crumbling Lego levees once and for all, and bring attention to infrastructure nationwide -- schools, roads, power grids. Already there would have been the big Northeast blackout of 2003 and now we'd be really devoting ourselves to infrastructure in the face of the blackouts in Queens, in St. Louis, in California. New Orleans itself would be a monumental engineering feat, a Marshall Plan for the Gulf South. A lot more attention would be paid to wetlands, the way we lose two football fields of land a day. Bush would've gotten on the bullhorn in the Ninth Ward and had a moment like Kennedy's moon speech, when he rallied America behind the civic mission of restoring our heritage and rebuilding our country -- instead of watching it fall apart the way we're doing now. Good Lord, did Hunter Thompson slip something in Brinkley's drink a few years ago when the two of them were working together -- something that still hasn't worn off? Nahhh -- I shouldn't blame HST. Brinkley here, in fact, comes off as the anti-Hunter Thompson, a Pollyanna who actually believes that people in politics (and their pals in the business world) are good and thoughtful, and would have risen selflessly to confront infrastructure problems before they reached crisis proportions, with not a scoundrel in the bunch -- if only it hadn't been for that pesky 9/11. (And wetlands! Bush as a friend of wetlands! I get a headache just trying to wrap my mind around that.) What's more, in Brinkley's dream, Karl Rove would have turned Capraesque, relying on unity rather than division to get his boss reelected, rallying the nation after the '03 blackout rather than subjecting the '04 Democratic candidate to the GOP's usual back-alley mugging. (Brinkley does know that in order for Bush to have his Ninth Ward moment of triumph in a 9/11-free world, he would have had to be reelected as a peacetime president ... doesn't he?) In fact, Bush went for a second bullhorn moment. He did promise a massive rebuilding effort. And we know his administration's policy is that deficits don't matter. So what kept this from being his finest hour, except his own fecklessness and his utter lack of interest in anything other than his needs and the needs of the already well remunerated? **** By the way, there's not all that much of value in New York's roundup. I'm grateful to Ron Suskind for suggesting that Bush might have launched an attack on Saddam anyway, and to Dahlia Lithwick for asking whether, in the absence of 9/11, the Bushies might have fought the culture war even harder and sought to curtail civil liberties just as much. Then there's Andrew Sullivan, who gets far more column inches than anyone else and uses them to demonstrate that if he ever decides to give up on this punditry thing, he could make a great second career out of writing overheated near-future dystopic war porn a la Robert Ferrigno. ...October 23, 2006, 12:52 p.m. I don't see any other way to describe what seems to be unfolding but war. The president has issued an emergency freeze on all domestic flights. They've targeted airplanes as well? I guess the [cyanide] gas could work just as well in a 737. Up here in Ptown, people are walking about in a daze -- and the skies are eerily silent, except for a couple of military planes that just flew ominously overhead. Fox News keeps running the London footage. My brother called to say he's okay. A work friend of his is missing. The sight of those piles of limp bodies being pulled out of the bowels of Victoria Station is something I won't easily forget. It's the Blitz in reverse. When Hitler struck, Londoners went into the tubes to escape the carnage. Al Qaeda has turned that refuge into a mass tomb.... I think his publisher would probably recommend not calling the novel Up Here in Ptown. posted by Steve M. | 10:59 AM | Monday, August 14, 2006 YOU AND I, AS ENVISIONED BY WINGNUTS I thought this would be the stupidest thing ever, but when you click "RANT" it actually generates enjoyable imitations of early-twentieth century art manifestos ("I reject slime and occupation!"), which I don't think was the point. Mystifyingly fitful use of all-caps, though. ("Unlike you and CONDOLEEZZA Rice, I am not in love with fur!!!!") (And yes, I guess it's been kicking around for almost two years, but I just discovered it, via these idiots.) posted by Steve M. | 10:11 PM | Atrios has been all over the story of the Jim Webb campaign worker (born in Virginia of Indian descent) who was called "macaca" by Republican incumbent George Allen at a campaign appearance (start here and work back; also see this Washington Post story). Atrios notes that "macaca" is actually an established racial/slur, specifically directed at North Africans. As it turns out, Allen's mother is from North Africa -- Tunisia, to be specific. Does this let him off the hook? Hardly. To the contrary, it tells me that he's a rare American who knows that slur and knows that it is a slur. Go here for more on Allen and race. posted by Steve M. | 6:04 PM | From the bottomless well of stupidity that is FEMA in the Bush years: Same key could open many FEMA trailers FEMA will replace locks on as many as 118,000 trailers used by Gulf Coast hurricane victims after discovering that the same key could open multiple mobile homes, the agency said Monday. Some keys could open as many as 50 different locks -- causing a security risk in heavily populated trailer parks in Louisiana and Mississippi.... The snafu stems from a limited number of lock makers -- three -- that trailer manufacturers use when building mobile homes, FEMA officials said. That increases the likelihood of locks being the same, they said.... It does? Is making locks unique an as-yet-unsolved technical mystery, like curing the common cold? News to me. posted by Steve M. | 4:47 PM | EEK! EEK! WHERE ARE MY SMELLING SALTS? Those savage blogging toughs have sent The New Republic's Michael Crowley into a swoon: In a photoshopped image currently featured on the DailyKos home page, Joe Lieberman is now a stand-in for Saddam Hussein. I don't think you have to be a Joe apologist to find this pretty deplorable. The image is here. It's Lieberman's head on the Saddam statue, as it's being toppled. For the love of God, Michael, get a hold of yourself. David Levine's caricature of Bush as the Saddam statue has run in The New York Review of Books on and off for three years. (Via Ezra Klein.) posted by Steve M. | 11:58 AM | Well, it was silly of me to suspect that the stepped-up terror-arrest timetable that was urged on the British by the U.S. was about the Lamont victory -- or I should say it was silly of me to suspect that it was just about the Lamont victory. More likely, it was about using the Lamont victory to segue into this: Following the foiled United Kingdom bomb plot, the Bush administration is expected to use the terrorist threat to regain the upper hand in congressional debates and push for government action before the November elections. Republicans appear to be circling around a new strategy to advocate stronger counterterrorism laws and expand domestic surveillance, while pushing back against civil libertarians. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff is emerging as a point man in the drive for tougher laws, yesterday noting Britain's ability to hold suspects without publicizing the charges. Appearing on ABC News's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Mr. Chertoff said he would like to see a renewed look at U.S. laws that could give authorities here the flexibility to detain suspects for longer periods of time, noting that the British have such latitude.... Which, of course, will dovetail nicely with this: The UN Security Council would consider sanctions against Iran if it does not halt uranium enrichment by August 31, under a resolution drawn up by the six major powers, diplomats said. ...If Iran continues to pursue uranium enrichment, "the next step will be the consideration of sanctions in the Security Council, and it would be our intention to move forcefully to get those sanctions adopted," Bolton said. The first stage would be political and economic sanctions, diplomats stressed, pointing to a vote within a few days.... All of which will, of course, coincide with the fifth anniversary of you-know-what. Control of the three branches of the U.S. government is the real central front in the Bush-Rove "war on terrorism." posted by Steve M. | 10:46 AM | DEAR LUCIANNE GOLDBERG I don't think this Doug Marlette cartoon means what you think it means. I don't think this prospect fills Doug Marlette with glee. posted by Steve M. | 7:22 AM | Sunday, August 13, 2006 Bizarre: US President George W. Bush quoted French existential writer Albert Camus to European leaders a year and a half ago, and now he's read one of his most famous works: "The Stranger." White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that Bush, here on his Texas ranch enjoying a 10-day vacation from Washington, had made quick work of the Algerian-born writer's 1946 novel -- in English. The US president, often spoofed as an intellectual lightweight, quoted Camus in a February 21, 2005 speech in Brussels praising the US-Europe alliance and urging other nations to help Washington spread democracy in the world. "We know there are many obstacles, and we know the road is long. Albert Camus said that 'freedom is a long-distance race.' We're in that race for the duration," Bush said in those remarks. What's next? Is he going to start smoking Gauloises while leading people on three-mile runs in 100-degree weather? When Bush's speechwriters put the Camus quote in his speech, Ronald Aronson, a professor at Wayne State University and the author of Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It, noted that Bush (and the speechwriters) clearly had no idea what Camus was getting at: The quote, "freedom is a long-distance race," was ripped from its context, one that establishes beyond doubt that Camus' words were not meant straightforwardly. No, a careful reading makes clear they were intended as a spoof of the thought of his former good friend, Jean-Paul Sartre.... The paragraph from which the president quoted begins by having Clamence extolling slavery, as Camus believed Sartre had done by aligning himself with the French Communist Party. Then Camus has Clamence condemn himself of hypocrisy, for which Camus criticized Sartre in his journal, by saying that that he "was always talking of freedom. At breakfast I used to spread it on my toast, I used to chew it all day long, and in company my breath was delightfully redolent of freedom. With that key word I would bludgeon whoever contradicted me; I made it serve my desires and my power." ... Camus' character, while sounding resolute and tireless about pursuing freedom, making it seem daunting and thankless but the mark of a true human being, is really prattling on about freedom. He is intimidating people with it, using it for purposes of self-interest and does not at all believe in it. The grand-sounding phrase about freedom being a "long-distance race" is just another piece of flimflam. Camus, a writer who pondered every phrase, every word, might turn in his grave upon hearing Bush misunderstand his meaning. Also at the time of the speech, Gary Leupp reminded us that the worldview of The Stranger was a tad different from Bush's: The powerful novel The Stranger ends with its hero, convicted of murdering a man in a moment of confusion, a protagonist who throughout the narrative has been thoroughly dispassionate, finally exploding in indignation at the attempt of a priest to comfort him before his execution. "I hurled insults at [the priest]. I told him not to waste his rotten prayers on me; it was better to burn than to disappear. I'd taken him by the neckband of his cassock, and, in a sort of ecstasy of joy and rage, I poured out on him all the thoughts that had been simmering in my brain. He seemed so cocksure, you see. And yet none of his certainties was worth one strand of a woman's hair." In other words, not a guy whose favorite philosopher is Christ. posted by Steve M. | 11:05 PM | Right after the Connecticut primary I said that Lieberman was the odds-on favorite to win the general election. It made sense on paper: He'd won nearly half the Democratic primary vote, and a recent poll showed him with overwhelming support among both independents and Republicans in a three-way race. What I wasn't counting on, though, was a shift in the way the mainstream press would talk about Lieberman and Lamont. Sam Tanenhaus has an assessment of the Lamont campaign in the Week in Review section of today's New York Times; a similar piece by Matt Bai will appear in next week's New York Times Magazine, but is already online. Gone, in both pieces, is the picture of Lamont supporters as angry lunatics. Tanenhaus compares the Lamont Netrooters to the Buckley/National Review crowd of the 1960s: pamphleteers-slash-activists who eventually won the day. Bai's analogy is the Laffer Curve crowd of the late Carter years, who found their figurehead in Ronald Reagan, and also, of course, won the day. Message: Reagan was really a hell of a nice guy, and we all know Buckley is a swell fellow, so maybe these Netsrootsians aren't all that bad. And maybe they're just damn good politicos. I guess nothing succeeds like success. You know what's ironic about this? An article in yesterday's Times (which I also linked in my last post) suggests (admittedly unscientifically) that those who voted for Lieberman in the primary aren't abandoning him. Most of those who are interviewed, including some Democrats opposed to the war, say they're still sticking with Joe. If the general election were held tomorrow, it seems likely that he'd have a very good chance of winning. Yet the press is starting to hint that he's yesterday's man. What this says to me is that if Lieberman loses, he'll be beaten by exactly the sort of political-elite groupthink that kept him aloft this long. He was a hero because Lieberman-as-hero was a story the mainstream press liked. Now he may lose because Kos-as-William-F.-Buckley is now a story the mainstream press likes. I've always thought lefty blogs should work on pushing a Democratic message, and that that was more important than an electoral strategy. But maybe winning elections is what it takes to change the way the mainstream narrative portrays the parties. (Which is a conclusion I guess a lot of you came to a long time ago.) **** (Bai link via Norwegianity.) **** UPDATE: A Rasmussen poll has Lieberman up by 5%. I guess we'll have to wait and see which narrative (Lamont = TATP or Lieberman = Loserman) wins. posted by Steve M. | 11:30 AM | QUESTIONING THE TIMING AGAIN From NBC: NBC News has learned that U.S. and British authorities had a significant disagreement over when to move in on the suspects in the alleged plot to bring down trans-Atlantic airliners bound for the United States. A senior British official knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner.... In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.... Another British official, or maybe the same one, was a bit more direct a couple of days ago: The British security official said reports that the attack was scheduled for Aug. 16 -- next Wednesday -- were "rubbish." Is this just a difference in how the two countries approach investigations? That's what the NBC story says: American security officials have become edgier than the British in such cases because of missed opportunities leading up to 9/11. Ditto this story from The New York Times: The disclosure that British officials conducted months of surveillance before arresting 24 terrorism suspects this week highlighted what many terrorism specialists said was a central difference between American and British law enforcement agencies. The British, they say, are more willing to wait and watch. ...The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have suggested in the past that they would never allow a terrorist plot discovered here to advance to its final stages, for fear that it could not be stopped in time.... Maybe. And maybe it was just a coincidence that arrests this week fit perfectly into Operation Define Ned Lamont and the '06 Field of Democratic Candidates Before They Can Define Themselves. It may actually be working in Connecticut, at least with some voters: Some even said they had flirted with supporting Mr. Lamont after the primary, but decided to back Mr. Lieberman after the news on Thursday that British authorities had foiled a terrorist plot to detonate homemade bombs on planes crossing the Atlantic. "I'm going to vote for Lieberman," said Judi VanStone, an administrative assistant from Waterbury who switched her party affiliation to Democrat before the primary. "Especially after today." And Bush's approval rating on homeland security is up eleven points in a new Newsweek poll. Alas for him and his party, his approval rating is still awful -- 38%. And Fifty-three percent of respondents said they wanted to see the Democrats win enough seats to take over Congress, while 34 percent said they wanted the Republicans to retain control, the poll found. More arrests to come? (Via Memeorandum.) posted by Steve M. | 12:06 AM | Saturday, August 12, 2006 TOO STUPID TO BREATHE Anyone who reacts to the (admittedly rather startling) news that Gunter Grass was in the Waffen-SS at the age of 17 by declaring that this proves Nazis were leftists. Then again, I'm linking to someone who, in describing Grass, shown below --  -- uses the word "doyenne." No, really. **** Via Memeorandum. posted by Steve M. | 2:28 PM | DOES DAVID BROOKS ACTUALLY KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IRAQ AND THE REST OF THE ARAB/MUSLIM WORLD? Brooks talking Wednesday on NPR's All Things Considered about the defeat of Joe Lieberman (audio link): BROOKS: ...It's the product of a series of long trends. The first is the polarization of the parties, which has made it very hard to be in the center, and the second is the war against Ira--, against Islamic extremism, which has exacerbated a lot of those fissures. MICHELE NORRIS, Host: Now, I noticed you almost said "war against," "war against Iraq" and you stopped yourself. BROOKS (nervously): Well, well, uuuh, that is part of the war against Iraq -- Islamic extremism.... (You know, David, it's not a war against Iraq, if by "Iraq" you mean "the government of Iraq," which, officially, we like. But never mind.) Then there's Brooks on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer last night: MARGARET WARNER: Would you put President Bush in the ranks of those who yesterday made political comments? DAVID BROOKS: Well, I actually don't think he did as much. I think the usage of the phrase "Iraqi fascism," which he used... MARGARET WARNER: Islamic fascism. DAVID BROOKS: Islamic -- sorry, Islamic fascism.... There's also this: David Brooks Can't Use the Word "Iraq" In his column yesterday on the Lamont victory in Connecticut, Times columnist David Brooks took up his new cause -- saving the Democratic Party -- and said that Joe Lieberman, and not the "net roots," has the wisdom to see that "The civilized world faces an arc of Islamic extremism that was not caused by American overreaction, and that will only get stronger if America withdraws." Withdraws? From what? The word "Iraq" never appears in Brooks's column.... It's true: It doesn't. That's because, I think, Brooks doesn't know where or what Iraq is. All he knows is that it's some part of the great undifferentiated mass of Islamofascistan. posted by Steve M. | 11:14 AM | Friday, August 11, 2006 CLEAR-EYED, TOUGH-MINDED MEASURES The news of a second, more devastating 9/11-like terror plot uncovered by the British authorities underscores starkly the facile nature of the incessant lambasting of the Bush administration recently for its pursuing clear-eyed, tough-minded measures to protect the United States from just such an attack. --letter in today's New York Times **** Bush staff wanted bomb-detect cash moved While the British terror suspects were hatching their plot, the Bush administration was quietly seeking permission to divert $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new homeland explosives detection technology. Congressional leaders rejected the idea.... The department failed to spend $200 million in research and development money from past years... The administration also was slow to start testing a new liquid explosives detector that the Japanese government provided to the United States earlier this year.... --AP posted by Steve M. | 7:29 PM | Shorter Wall Street Journal editorial page: Just because the U.K. terror plot seems to have been broken up as the result of a tip from a member of the public leading to the use of routine investigative techniques, with no evidence whatsoever that the authorities violated the law, we're 100% certain there's something about it that those dirty, stinking surrender-monkey Democrats would have objected to. Also: George Soros George Soros booga booga. posted by Steve M. | 5:28 PM | JUST WONDERING Does anyone read Barbra Streisand's blog, apart from right-wingers jonesing for a quick self-righteousness fix? posted by Steve M. | 3:21 PM | QUESTIONING THE TIMING Yeah, I suppose one could speculate about this (from The Washington Post): Some U.S. counterterrorism officials said plans originally were to allow the conspiracy to develop even further. But U.S. and British investigators made a sudden decision this week to close down the operation after they became increasingly worried that there were other bombers they had been unable to locate or identify, U.S. officials said. Or made a sudden decision this week to close down the operation because Karl Rove believed that arrests at this time would dovetail perfectly with his campaign to make the entire '06 election a referendum on Ned Lamont and to portray Ned Lamont as terrorism's pal? (The "other bombers" factor being less relevant than the authorities are letting on?) So, OK, I'm a bit slow on the uptake. I still believe this plot was essentially as described (though I take Steve Gilliard's point that these guys couldn't have been all that slick if they allowed their cell to be so thoroughly penetrated by the cops) -- but I'll question the timing. **** Scroll down here for more from Gilliard about what stumblebums these guys were. We may be a lot more afraid of this particular group than we need to be. **** ON THE OTHER HAND: If this Daily Mail story is correct, there was going to be a dry run today and the real thing was supposed to happen next Wednesday. (Though on the other other hand, this is sourced to "One US intelligence official," not to authorities in the U.K. And, of course, saying the arrests happened now because the plot was about to be hatched contradicts what's reported in The Washington Post above, which is that the arrests happened now because the authorities had lost track of some plotters.) Screw it, my head hurts. I'm sorry I even addressed this question. I will point out to right-wingers who are demanding stepped-up racial profiling at airports that one of the plotters was "Don Stewart-Whyte," who "converted to Islam six months ago." He's the gentleman on the left here. He doesn't look like a damn dirty Ay-rab because, well, he isn't one. **** And as I noted in comments, this is not a sign that everything we've heard about the plot is a lie. The security staff at an airport in Heartland America are trying to prevent the possible mixing of chemicals to create an explosion by having everyone who's trying to carry liquids on board pour those liquids into the same big container? That's just standard-issue American duh-I-didn't-think-of-that. **** UPDATE: Or is it even dumb? I overlooked the obvious: Most liquid explosives would require a detonator, but a music player or other hand-held passenger gadget has sufficient electrical energy to do that, experts say. This stuff isn't going to blow up just because it's mixed, right? It has to be detonated. Theoretically, terrorists could call an audible, all line up to pour their chemicals in the same jug, then set it off using a handheld gadget. Conceivable, I guess, but unlikely. **** ONE MORE DAMN UPDATE AND THEN I'M WASHING MY HANDS OF THIS: In comments, Skimble and darms note the instability of this stuff even in the absence of anything to detonate them. But that just makes me want to revert to my major-league-case-of-dumbass theory to explain why the airport would treat the liquids this way. I don't get paid to know this stuff, but doesn't the chief of public safety at Asheville Regional Airport, Jeff Augram? Is he still also doing the morning traffic report at the local right-wing talk radio station? If so, and if we're worried that they're trying to kill us, could we please pay airport security chiefs enough that they don't feel the need to moonlight? And can we hire for brains, or at least common sense? posted by Steve M. | 10:13 AM | Daniel Henninger on the Wall Street Journal editorial page: That was unfortunate timing this week for the Lamont Democrats, declaring themselves officially the antiwar party within 24 hours of the Brits foiling an Islamic terror plot to spread thousands of U.S.-bound bodies across the North Atlantic, or perhaps across New York, Boston and Washington as the planes descended. Yes, we know; they support the war on terror but are merely against George Bush's war in Iraq. How does that work? ...it is becoming increasingly fantastic to argue that Iraq, with its apparently limitless supply of suicide bombers, hasn't much to do with the terror threats manifest elsewhere. Because, you see, after they blow themselves up in Iraq, they get reincarnated as the British children of Pakistani immigrants and plot to blow themselves up again! And Ned Lamont won't connect the dots! Can America afford to elect such a dangerously naive man to the Senate? I think not. **** I'm sorry, I missed Henninger's explanation: Commencing a phased withdrawal from Iraq, as [anti-war Democrats] suggest, with the mission unfinished, in my view will cause suicide-bomber recruitment to skyrocket in a delirium of victory over the American infidels. Oh, of course: that's what most inspires suicide bombers to want to kill Americans -- the absence of American troops on their soil. Everybody knows that, right? (I'm being sarcastic, folks. Robert Pape wept.) posted by Steve M. | 7:42 AM | Thursday, August 10, 2006 OK -- you want me to endorse a conspiracy theory regarding the U.K. terror plot? Here's one conspiracy theory I could imagine being true, based on this: [White House spokesman Tony] Snow said Bush first learned in detail about the plot on Friday, and received two detailed briefings on it on Saturday and Sunday, as well as had two conversations about it with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Here's the theory: If the Bushies had wanted Joe Lieberman to win, they'd have pressured Tony Blair to act before Tuesday (just as they pressured Blair to fire Jack Straw a few months ago). Maybe they'd have even leaked word of the plot themselves before Tuesday. Would ratcheting up the fear have helped Lieberman beat Lamont? Doesn't matter. Surely the Bushies think it would have; surely they think there are Scoop Jackson Democrats in Connecticut who would have been inspired to vote for Lieberman if the fear factor had been increased by Election Day. They held off -- because they think Joe is worth more to them as an alleged victim of weak-on-defense liberalism than as a guy who beat back an anti-war challenger. That's it.... posted by Steve M. | 5:26 PM | ...British authorities said the threat involved terrorists who aimed to smuggle liquid explosive material aboard airplanes in hand baggage, as well as timers and detonators that could be assembled in flight. British Home Secretary John Reid said the operation was aimed at bringing down "a number of aircraft" -- reportedly as many as 10 -- "through mid-flight explosions, causing a considerable loss of life.".... The plotters intended to target flights to the Washington, D.C., area, New York and California operated by American Airlines, Continental Airlines and United Airlines, a U.S. official said.... --Washington Post D.C., New York, and California? What -- not Louisville, Atlanta, and Omaha? ...Or charter flights to the Old McDonald Petting Zoo in Woodville, Alabama? posted by Steve M. | 1:40 PM | An early reaction from the right blogosphere to today's news: There's nothing to see here folks. Please don't connect any dots from Dearborn to Cairo and Montana, to London and Birmingham. You'll find nothing in common among those who "intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale." ... Please connect no dots. You might find yourself called bad names; on the other hand, you just might find yourself alive.... What's wrong with this rant? Oh, just this: Every link points to a story of the authorities pusuing and detaining people suspected of being tied to Islamicist terrorism. Obviously, the authorities are looking for jihadists -- obviously, in other words, they are "connecting the dots" this blogger wants them to connect. Ah, but here's what they aren't doing: We hope the authorities entertain us this morning, as they have in most of the instances above, by resolutely failing to say a word about Islamic terrorism, and by calling the latest round of misguided ones "youths" and such.... A sentiment echoed by this right-wing blogger: I am sick to death of tiptoeing around this issue of the true nature of our enemies. ... the time has come to put away childish things and grow up. Our enemies will not give us much leeway to indulge us our puerile need to universalize this threat lest we offend someone. They have no such problem in identifying who they see as the enemy. Why should we? So the problem isn't that those suspected of waging jihad aren't being pursued and captured. It's that when they're pursued and captured, the authorities fail to say, "Taken into custody today were a number of MOOOOOSLIMS!!! DIRTY FILTHY EVIL GOAT-BUGGERING MOOOOOSLIMS!!!" People who race-bait and do nothing else to stop terrorism are whining about people who are working hard to stop terrorism but don't race-bait. I know whose side I'm on. posted by Steve M. | 1:12 PM | MASSIVE TERRORIST PLOT REPORTEDLY FOILED IN ENGLAND I figure it's going take about an hour, tops, before someone on the right says the plot would have succeeded if Ned Lamont were in the Senate. **** Incidentally, I've long been on record as being objectively pro-law enforcement breaking up terrorist plots to murder civilians. This is uncontroversial on the left -- we want the authorities to stop these people -- but in the debased political culture the Right has foisted on America, we actually have to say this. I know there's a freaking war on, you idiots. Toppling Saddam wasn't part of it. Breaking up this plot is. (The New Yorker article cited in the link actually is online, contrary to what I say there; it's here, and I recommend it.) **** UPDATE: Whoops, I missed this from Dick Cheney: ...The thing that's partly disturbing about it is the fact that, the standpoint of our adversaries, if you will, in this conflict, and the al Qaeda types, they clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task. And when we see the Democratic Party reject one of its own, a man they selected to be their vice presidential nominee just a few short years ago, it would seem to say a lot about the state the party is in today if that's becoming the dominant view of the Democratic Party, the basic, fundamental notion that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home, which clearly we know we won't -- we can't be.... So I guess the headline today is: TERRORIST SUSPECTS ARRESTED DESPITE LIEBERMAN DEFEAT IN PRIMARY. **** UPDATE: Steve Benen at the Carpetbagger Report links right-wing blogs that tie the terror plot to the Lamont win -- and he also notes that a certain presidential candidate in 2004 praised law enforcement as a weapon against terrorism, while another one mocked it. **** UPDATE: In the race to the gutter, Lucianne Goldberg always gives 110%:  **** UPDATE: I guess we don't need to wander to the seedy side of town where the right-wing bloggers live when we can go visit that nice Joe Lieberman himself and learn from him that a Lamont victory means terrorists will blow up airplanes. posted by Steve M. | 7:25 AM | Wednesday, August 09, 2006 HOW DUMB ARE YOUR FELLOW AMERICANS? This dumb. And this dumb. **** (First link via MoJoBlog.) posted by Steve M. | 11:32 PM | DEAR LANNY DAVIS If we're now judging entire groups on the basis of isolated discussion-thread comments by members of those groups, I think I get to judge the entire Republican Right on the basis of this Free Republic caption-contest entry:  In fact, it's not representative of the entire Right, or even of all Freepers -- the caption is criticized in the thread, and the majority of the other responses are race-neutral. But Lanny Davis is far more responsible than I, a lefty blogger, could possibly be, so I do want to hew to his standard. Therefore, I have to say that this damns every right-wing Republican in America. posted by Steve M. | 2:45 PM | BARNICLE SPEAKS FROM EXPERIENCE Ned Lamont, scion of the Eastern Establishment, rolled up staggering margins in those places most likely to include his fellow anti-war WASPs. Joe Lieberman, son of a Stamford liquor store owner, won the workaday towns most likely to include other ethnic voters less motivated by opposition to Iraq.... ... it was, as Mike Barnicle put it on Hardball, a battle between Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks.... --Hotline Understand this: despite his pose as a working-class hero from Fitchburg, Barnicle and his wife, a top Fleet bank executive, live among the rich in the super-exclusive suburb of Lincoln, summer with the Hyannis Port social set, and hobnob with the political and business elite of Boston and Cambridge. --Dan Kennedy in The Boston Phoenix, 8/13-20/98 posted by Steve M. | 1:48 PM | WELCOME TO THE GARDEN PARTY. MY NAME IS STEVE, AND I'LL BE YOUR SKUNK. I don't feel any better about the Connecticut situation than I did last night. Of course Lieberman's running as an independent -- why wouldn't he? He's the odds-on favorite. We all know about the Quinnipiac poll that showed Lamont (temporarily) with a double-digit lead over Lieberman, but let's look back at a Quinnipiac poll from two weeks earlier. That poll showed Lamont beating Lieberman 51%-47% -- almost exactly where the election wound up. And what did that poll say about a three-way general election? Lieberman 51%, Lamont 27%, Schlesinger 9%. You'd run under those circumstances, too. In that poll, by the way, Lieberman beat Republican candidate Alan Schlesinger among Republicans, 58%-24%, with Lamont getting 7%. He beat Lamont among independents, 54%-22%, with Schlesinger getting 7%. And that was before much of the pro-Lieberman national media was fully engaged. As I said last night, the good guys won the primary but lost control of the message. Lamont and his campaign are on the verge of becoming the new Howard Dean -- shorthand for everything that's evil and dangerous about us wild-eye angry hippie America-haters. And liberals have never countered that message, at least not with any success. And believe me, the haters have barely begun attacking Lamont -- go ask Michael Dukakis or John Kerry how that's likely to go. And now Lamont's running not just against Lieberman, but against all of Wingnuttia and against the centrist commentariat. We liberals have fallen into a trap, like Bush and Rumsfeld fighting in Iraq and not seeing the insurgency coming. We didn't see the wingnuts and pundits coming. Good luck, Ned -- but I'd like to focus a bit more on people who are running to defeat Republicans, and who have a real chance of winning. **** UPDATE: I said above that "Lamont and his campaign are on the verge of becoming the new Howard Dean -- shorthand for everything that's evil and dangerous about us wild-eye angry hippie America-haters." Well, here ya go: Mehlman: Sherrod Brown Is Ohio's Ned Lamont In a speech today in Cleveland, RNC chairman Ken Mehlman calls Ohio's Democratic Senate candidate, Sherrod Brown, "Ohio's answer to Ned Lamont" and that Lamont's victory "reflects an unfortunate embrace of isolationism, defeatism, and a ‘blame America first’ attitude by national Democratic leaders at a time when retreating from the world is particularly dangerous."... A footnote: the RNC research department sent out a document entitled "FROM FDR TO NED LAMONT: THE DEMOCRAT PARTY'S TRANSFORMATION FROM STRENGTH TO WEAKNESS" They're framing him. They're demonizing him. Did any Lamont supporter ever even think about whether we needed to try to devise a way of framing his candidacy? posted by Steve M. | 8:40 AM | Tuesday, August 08, 2006 Least surprising news of the evening: GOPers Thinking Of Lieberman Support Following up: A senior Republican official in Washington confirms that the party might encourage Republicans and others to support Sen. Lieberman if he runs as an independent. There's no sense, just yet, about what those signs and signals might look like. Says the GOP official: "I just think there will be folks who want to support -- regardless of what we think. And, we don't think that's a bad thing." And Kevin F. Rennie reports that some GOPers in CT are thinking about ways to financially support Lieberman's independent bid.... --Hotline Atrios has long said that the GOP will take advantage of a three-way race and try hard to snatch the seat away. I've never believed that and I don't believe it now. Why bother? That would require fielding a candidate who'll hit Lieberman hard, which is the last thing the GOP wants to do. Lieberman is now the GOP's poster child, a walking, breathing bloody shirt, a man who took a bullet for Bushism. Of course prominent Republicans will campaign for him. No, not, say, Tom DeLay or Rick Santorum. But Rudy Giuliani's practically going to be married to Lieberman between now and November. And watch for McCain, too. **** UPDATE: Did I say "a walking, breathing bloody shirt"? War fan Michael Goodwin puts in this way in a New York Daily News column: "Lieberman is the first casualty of the war against the war on terror." They really are going to portray Joe as a wounded veteran of the War on Terror. posted by Steve M. | 11:13 PM | As I speak, Joe Lieberman is giving the most graceless (semi-)concession speech I've ever heard. **** UPDATE: A partial transcript. posted by Steve M. | 11:10 PM | Lamont is winning (UPDATE: if barely), but he's being delegitimized and his success is being tainted before the votes are even counted. In other words: The bad guys are losing the election but seizing control of the narrative. It's like a mini-version of the Clinton years. Forgive me if I'm not happier. I've been wary of the netroots-take-back-the Democratic-Party strategy because I don't think any real change can happen until we can compete with the right-wing noise machine. Now, if Lamont is really winning, it looks as if the netroots strategy was right -- but here's Lamont being painted as the candidate of anti-Semites and Web site vandals; these slanders are national news, the rebuttals barely audible. And the general election campaign hasn't even begun. I've watched the right turn Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry into dangerous freaks in the public mind. They're going to do the same thing to Ned Lamont if he wins. Then they'll make him every other Democrat's running mate. Or they'll just make some anonymous anti-Semite comment poster in a random Huffington Post thread into every Democrats' running mate. I'd really like to know what the netroot strategy is for combating that. **** And I'm not the first person to say this, but, yeah, this does remind me of Karl Rove bugging his own campaign office and blaming it on the opposition candidate. posted by Steve M. | 9:28 PM | PATHETIC The Republican-leaning PR firm Russo Marsh + Rogers is now actually boasting about being mocked by Jon Stewart for mounting a slick PR campaign on behalf of Iraqi Kurdistan -- and it appears that RMR has proudly posted Stewart's mockery of its efforts on YouTube. (Now, perhaps I'm jumping to conclusions. The username of the person who posted the video isn't Russo Marsh + Rogers, but, rather, TheOtherIraq -- which is also the name of the PR campaign. TheOtherIraq -- the YouTube user, not the PR campaign -- gives his/her/its age as 24. Oh, those twentysomethings and their wacky viral videos!) As SourceWatch notes, Russo Marsh + Rogers is the company behind Move America Forward, which has sponsored a campaign to keep Fahrenheit 9/11 out of movie theaters, a campaign to censure Jimmy Carter, a right-wing talk-radio "truth tour" of Iraq, and other projects. (You may also recall that MAF founder Howard Kaloogian, in his recent unsuccessful campaign for Congress, included a Web site posting of a photo that was described as a peaceful street in Baghdad and was actually a photo taken in a suburb of Istanbul.) By the way, I don't think this is going to help the Kurd PR campaign much: The Turkish military has opened fire on a Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) camp in northern Iraq, according to reports by the Peyamner News Agency (PNA).... Local villages quoted by PNA described the artillery fire coming from the Turkish side of the border as “heavy.” Turkey threatened to carry out cross-border operations against PKK terrorists hiding in northern Iraq if the US forces in Iraq and the central Iraqi government fail to remove the PKK from Iraq.... Speaking on Monday evening, Turkish government spokesman and justice minister Cemil Cicek announced that the steps being taken by the US and Iraqi authorities to deal with the PKK presence in north Iraq have not met Turkey's expectations. And was anyone else surprised to learn from this New York Times op-ed a couple of weeks ago that the Iraqi flag is banned in the Kurdish region of Iraq? Another victory for nation-building Bush style..... posted by Steve M. | 4:24 PM | Shorter Christopher Hitchens: I know Fidel handed over control of the Cuban government to his handpicked successor/brother, but it's an utter disgrace that the press won't write about this as if the military had seized power, killed Fidel, and hung him naked from a balcony. posted by Steve M. | 2:14 PM | Shorter Lanny Davis on the Wall Street Journal editorial page: I know you think "McCarthyism" refers to the misuse of institutional power against ordinary people, but it actually means the exact opposite. In fact, if there had been blogs with comments sections in the 1950s and people who'd been blacklisted had gone to them and called Joe McCarthy "a dirty mick," that would have been McCarthyism. **** UPDATE: Shorter Mark Levin at National Review Online: Does Lanny Davis really believe a handful of lefty blog comment posters are as bad as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter? That's nuts! They're much worse than Rush and Ann! posted by Steve M. | 12:35 PM | RESPECTED IN THE WORLD What you say about a car in South Africa if you want people to buy it:  (Click on the picture for a larger version.) Thank you, Detroit, for the last thirty years of incompetence. And thank you, Bush administration, for making America-bashing one of the planet's two favorite sports. (Oh, yeah, I forgot -- reducing the world's respect for America is something Republicans used to accuse Democrats of doing until it became clear that no one could top Republicans at it, and now, like running up huge deficits, it's actually considered a good thing on the right.) **** (Image courtesy of this guy at Free Republic; the billboard is featured in the September issue of Car and Driver.) posted by Steve M. | 10:07 AM | Monday, August 07, 2006 GOATS NPR's John Henren reports from Baghdad on the wonderful new country that's emerged on our watch (audio link): This is how staggeringly pointless the killing in Iraq is getting: Shepherds in the rural western Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliyah have recently been murdered, according to locals, for failing to diaper their goats. Apparently the sexual tension is so high in regions where sheikhs take a draconian view of sharia law that they feel the sight of naked goats poses an unacceptable temptation. They blame the goats. I've spent nearly a year here, on more than a dozen visits, since the early days of the war, and that seemed about as preposterous as Iraq could get -- until I heard about the grocery store in east Baghdad. The grocer and three others were shot to death and the store was firebombed because he suggestively arranged his vegetables. I didn't believe it at first. Firebombings of liquor stores are common, and I figured there must have been one next door. But an Iraqi colleague explained matter-of-factly that Shiite clerics had recently distributed a flier directing grocers how to display their food. Standing up a celery stalk near a couple tomatoes in a way that might -- to the profoundly repressed -- suggest an aroused male is now a capital offense.... **** This Week, ABC, August 6, 2006: GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You said in the debate that Iraq is better now than a year ago. Do you still believe that? JOE LIEBERMAN: It is better now…it, it, it’s better and worse if you’ll allow me to put it that way.... Well, it's certainly worse if you own an undiapered goat. posted by Steve M. | 10:20 PM | MARTY PERETZ ON NED LAMONT'S BLOOD GUILT The New Republic's Peretz, writing for The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, has a laundry list of reasons why a Lamont victory would be The End Of Civilization As We Know It, but, yes, his first one is blood guilt: We have been here before. Left-wing Democrats are once again fielding single-issue "peace candidates," and the one in Connecticut, like several in the 1970s, is a middle-aged patrician, seeking office de haut en bas, and almost entirely because he can. It's really quite remarkable how someone like Ned Lamont, from the stock of Morgan partner Thomas Lamont and that most high-born American Stalinist, Corliss Lamont, still sends a chill of "having arrived" up the spines of his suburban supporters simply by asking them to support him.... There's also this about Lamont: He was a cable television entrepreneur, a run-of-the-mill contemporary commercant with unusually easy access to capital. "Unusually easy access to capital"? This is the International WASP as a crypto-International Jew, a rootless cosmpolitan with a skill for accumulating cash that's in the blood. Peretz should be ashamed of himself for sinking this low. posted by Steve M. | 11:18 AM | I think I get at least partial credit for this. Me last Wednesday: Well, if this [a Lieberman mea culpa on Iraq] really happens, I don't know how Lieberman's people will play it, but I know how the Right will play it: as the kind of recantation that would have resulted from a Stalinist show trial, or "reeducation" in the Cultural Revolution. Alternately, they'll call it a confession extracted by means of torture. Trust me, if Joe tacks to the left on Iraq, you will hear one of these metaphors used -- not just by right-wing bloggers, but by mainstream pundits. Robert Kagan in yesterday's Washington Post: ...Lieberman stands condemned today because he didn't recant. He didn't say he was wrong. He didn't turn on his former allies and condemn them. He didn't claim to be the victim of a hoax. He didn't try to pretend that he never supported the war in the first place. He didn't claim to be led into support for the war by a group of writers and intellectuals whom he can now denounce. He didn't go through a public show of agonizing and phony soul-baring and apologizing in the hopes of resuscitating his reputation, as have some noted "public intellectuals." These have been the chosen tactics of self-preservation ever since events in Iraq started to go badly and the war became unpopular. Prominent intellectuals, both liberal and conservative, have turned on their friends and allies in an effort to avoid opprobrium for a war they publicly supported. Journalists have turned on their fellow journalists in an effort to make them scapegoats for the whole profession. Politicians have twisted themselves into pretzels to explain away their support for the war or, better still, to blame someone else for persuading them to support it. Al Gore, the one-time Clinton administration hawk, airbrushed that history from his record. He turned on all those with whom he once agreed about Iraq and about many other foreign policy questions. And for this astonishing reversal he has been applauded by his fellow Democrats and may even get the party's nomination.... Kagan won't take that last baby step over the line and overtly compare Lieberman to the victims of Stalin or the Red Guards, but every image in the passage above ("turn[ing] on friends and allies," "airbrush[ing] ... history") is meant to remind you of those horrors. And the moral equivalence between those crimes and your support for a guy running a primary. posted by Steve M. | 10:29 AM | Sporty notes that The Wall Street Journal has exposed a YouTube video that mocks Al Gore's movie as almostly certainly the work of a GOP lobbying and PR firm, rather than a 29-year-old named "Toutsmith" (read the WSJ article free here): Everyone knows Al Gore stars in the global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." But who created "Al Gore's Penguin Army," a two-minute video now playing on YouTube.com? In the video, Mr. Gore appears as a sinister figure who brainwashes penguins and bores movie audiences by blaming the Mideast crisis and starlet Lindsay Lohan's shrinking waist size on global warming. Like other videos on the popular YouTube site, it has a home-made, humorous quality. The video's maker is listed as "Toutsmith," a 29-year-old who identifies himself as being from Beverly Hills in an Internet profile. In an email exchange with The Wall Street Journal, Toutsmith didn't answer when asked who he was or why he made the video, which has just over 59,000 views on YouTube. However, computer routing information contained in an email sent from Toutsmith's Yahoo account indicate it didn't come from an amateur working out of his basement. Instead, the email originated from a computer registered to DCI Group, a Washington, D.C., public relations and lobbying firm whose clients include oil company Exxon Mobil Corp..... "Like other videos on the popular YouTube site, it has a home-made, humorous quality." Well, perhaps it has a humorous quality, but it's not funny. Or clever. Or genuinely amateur-looking. It's phony and it's confusing And it makes no sense -- I didn't realize it was possible to have multiple plot holes in a movie that lasts two minutes. Gore is Evil Dangerous Sinister Guy, yet he can't get anyone to like his movie, including the penguins. He hypnotizes the penguins, and you expect they'll do his evil bidding, but all they do is fall asleep at the movie theater. And they're called his "penguin army" -- why? Not even don't they do his bidding, what is it they're supposed to do that they fail to do? I'm baffled. Yeah, I get the part about X-Men 3 being more fun than Gore's movie, but everything to do with the penguins is incomprehensible. Then again, this is how the Right regularly demonizes Democrats. Democrats are portrayed (a) as evil brainiacs who have the power to destroy the world with dangerous crackpot Ivy League notions and (b) as pathetic geeks who are weak, ineffectual and impotent. Somehow you're supposed to fear all the horrible things Democrats will do when they gain power even though you're also supposed to believe that Democrats can't really manage to do anything ever. The Democrat is Evil Hapless Omnipotent Geek Guy. Kerry was Evil Hapless Omnipotent Geek Guy. Gore was and is Evil Hapless Omnipotent Geek Guy. Dukakis was Evil Hapless Omnipotent Geek Guy. The lawyers and other civilians who dared to challenge Ollie North in the Iran-contra hearings were Evil Hapless Omnipotent Geek Guys. So, to a hardcore Republican, this video makes sense -- the Democrat is impotent and also omnipotent. And, alas, this video makes sense to far too many voters outside the GOP hard core. (Any resemblance between this and anti-Semitic propaganda -- the powerful evil Jew who's also pathetic -- is not a coincidence.)* Sourcewatch has more on DCI. **** *UPDATE: I need to qualify this. We're not in or on the verge of anything resembling the Nazi era; Democrats aren't subject to genuine repression or violent attacks. But even under the present circumstances, similar techniques can be used to turn a group into "the Other." posted by Steve M. | 8:14 AM | Sunday, August 06, 2006 Even more of a Bush bootlicker than Joe Lieberman: Tony Blair. Dramatic new evidence that Cabinet rebel Jack Straw was sacked as Foreign Secretary as a result of pressure from George W. Bush has been revealed. Senior sources close to the US Government told The Mail on Sunday that Mr Straw's outspoken opposition to America's policies on the Middle East was discussed by White House aides weeks before his shock dismissal by Tony Blair in May. ... it gives further credence to claims that he was fired because of his refusal to back America's all-out support for Israel.... A US source told The Mail on Sunday: "Mr Straw's views did not find favour in the White House and its concerns were passed on to the British Government."... Diplomats say the claims about Mr Straw's removal from the Foreign Office have further relevance in the light of reports that the British and American governments knew in advance about Israel's plan to attack Hezbollah. Some Foreign Office insiders say it could be part of an American plan to pave the way for an attack on Iran next year.... More from William Rees-Mogg in The Times of London: ...I made inquiries in Washington and was told that Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, had taken exception to Mr Straw's statement that it would be "nuts" to bomb Iran. The United States, it was said, had put pressure on Tony Blair to change his Foreign Secretary. Mr Straw had been fired at the request of the Bush Administration, particularly at the Pentagon. Shortly before he was dismissed, Mr Straw went on his charming tour with Condoleezza Rice, in which they visited his Blackburn constituency. This had been given two explanations. One was that the US Secretary of State was hoping to protect Mr Straw, as a fellow foreign minister, against the undiplomatic attack from the Pentagon. She wanted to keep Mr Rumsfeld's tanks off her turf. She had found Mr Straw competent and effective. If that were so, Dr Rice lost that battle in the Washington turf war. The alternative explanation was more recently given by Irwin Stelzer in The Spectator; he has remarkably good Washington contacts and is probably right. His account is that Mr Straw was indeed dismissed because of American anxieties, but that Dr Rice herself had become worried, on her visit to Blackburn, by Mr Straw's dependence on Muslim votes. About 20 per cent of the voters in Blackburn are Islamic; Mr Straw was dismissed only four weeks after Dr Rice's visit to his constituency. It may be that both explanations are correct.... Just make the U.K. the 51st state and get it over with, Tony. Or better yet: a colony. If the U.K. were a state, its members of Congress might get uppity and challenge Bush, and you can't have that, can you? (Oh -- and I guess it's time for this again.) posted by Steve M. | 11:15 PM | Friday, August 04, 2006 Well, I'm sorry I'm going to miss any additional fun -- I'll be away from the blog until Sunday night -- but I think my good pal Randy at RightWinged.com may have gotten nearly all of his poorly managed rage out of his system, after multiple virtually identical outraged comments here and here, and this neck-vein-straining post at his own blog. (If you don't feel like reading them all, I'll summarize: You liberal You liberal! You liberal! All you liberals are liars! You liberals! You liberals! You liberals! You liberals! Lying liberals! Lying liberals! Lying liberals! Lying liberals!) And all because I had the nerve -- the nerve! to suggest that this Photoshopped Hillary Clinton he once posted is a tad racially charged:  But I'll let Randy have the last word: My image has nothing to do with "black people". Whatever you say, Randy. See the rest of you Sunday. Oh, and over in the Roger Ailes comment thread, in addition to all the other fine people who have my back (thanks!), Zudz unloads some very funny snark, round about comment #21. posted by Steve M. | 11:52 PM | The Bushies and Chalabi spread the falsehoods that have killed nearly 3,000 American troops. Now a bit of truth could emerge: ...[Yesterday] The Senate Intelligence Committee approved two of the reports in its oft-delayed, much-maligned investigation into whether the Bush administration misused intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq, committee chairman Pat Roberts of Kansas said. One report focuses on former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's connections to terrorism and his alleged weapons of mass destruction program, and how they compare with pre-war intelligence assessments. The other assesses the intelligence agencies' use of information, much of which was later discredited, from the Iraqi National Congress, an influential exile group opposed to Saddam.... Now, if only we get to read them -- especially the report on Chalabi: The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee lashed out at the White House on Thursday, criticizing attempts by the Bush administration to keep secret parts of a report on the role Iraqi exiles played in building the case for war against Iraq. The chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, ... chastised the White House for efforts to classify most of the part that examines intelligence provided to the Bush administration by the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group. "I have been disappointed by this administration's unwillingness to declassify material contained in these reports, material which I believe better informs the public, but that does not -- I repeat, does not -- jeopardize intelligence operations, sources and methods," Mr. Roberts said in a statement issued Thursday.... Ah, but it does jeopardize the administration's ongoing campaign to persuade Americans that the case for war was kinda-sorta the truth -- a campaign that's been rather successful lately. It jeropardizes the Bushies' argument that in the rush to war they were not (a) liars or (b) chumps. Once again, I urge you -- read this and this and this. Chalabi wanted our troops to die in his country, so he just lied and lied. There isn't a circle in hell low enough for him. Or for the people who knew he was lying, or should have known, and enabled him nonetheless. (First link via War and Piece.) posted by Steve M. | 2:22 PM | I didn't like Jane Hamsher's blackface Lieberman, but does anyone recall a similar reaction when RightWinged.com, a favorite of the conservative blogosphere, ran this? *crickets*, as I recall. (That was in reaction to Hillary's comment that the GOP-controlled House of Representatives "has been run like a plantation.") And if Wizbang's Kevin Aylward found the Lieberman picture so appalling, er, why did he run a black John Kerry Photoshop contest back in '04? Apparently, the only on-topic entry was this, but here are a few other items found elsewhere: From Baltimore right-wing talk-show hosts Sean and Frank (via StrangeCosmos.com). From basscartoons.com. From pete-online.us. Also from pete-online. Reactions from the right? Especially from, say, Michelle Malkin, who's been known to scour the Net looking for the most obscure "unhinged" anti-GOP products imaginable? Again, *crickets*. (X-posted.) **** UPDATE: In comments over at Roger's blog, Randy from RightWinged says of his masterwork, There's nothing racially charged about this on my end. Good Lord, these people are shameless. **** UPDATE: Randy, you tried to pull the picture so I couldn't link it, but it's back in a non-hotlinked version. You created this. You should be proud of it. Grow up. posted by Steve M. | 11:28 AM | Tee-hee: Former Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik is under federal investigation for possible financial improprieties unrelated to the crimes he pleaded guilty to last month in state court.... The federal investigation began about a year ago and has focused on a foundation affiliated with the city’s Department of Correction during Mr. Kerik’s tenure as its commissioner, from 1998 to 2000... Last month, Mr. Kerik pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors in State Supreme Court in the Bronx. Under an agreement that allowed him to avoid jail time and a felony conviction, he admitted accepting $165,000 in apartment renovations from a company accused of having ties to organized crime; he agreed to pay $221,000 in fines. The foundation at the [new] center of the federal inquiry first came under scrutiny in early 2003.... In July of that year, a former high-ranking Correction Department official was arrested and later pleaded guilty to mail fraud charges, admitting that he stole more than $137,000 from the fund. But hundreds of thousands of dollars of the foundation's money, which came from rebates on cigarettes purchased for inmates, was apparently never accounted for.... And yes, this does involve the guy from NYC who's already measuring the drapes in the Oval Office: ...The sole signatory on the foundation's accounts was Frederick J. Patrick, who pleaded guilty in 2003 to looting the nonprofit corporation. Its stated purpose was to finance programs and activities to strengthen the department. Mr. Patrick held high-level posts in the department from 1994 until 1998, during the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. Mayor Giuliani went on to name him to a series of higher level posts, including commissioner of juvenile justice and deputy commissioner of community affairs in the Police Department. Mr. Patrick, who spent the stolen money on collect calls he accepted from inmates in city jails and state prisons, some of which officials have said involved phone sex, was sentenced in June 2004 to a year and day in federal prison. He was released in July 2005.... I had a conversation last night with someone who believes the theory that the Bushies appointed Kerik to embarrass Giuliani and slow Rudy's political progress. I don't see it -- if the Bush people wanted to do that, why would they need to hang him around their boss's neck? Why not just launch a federal investigation and bump it up the news food chain via friendly journalists? No, this was frat-boy Bush digging a guy who seems as tough as W. thinks he is himself; this was just more of the same fine judgment and devotion to detail we've come to know and love from Team Bush. Besides, the Bushies love Giuliani -- Rove wants Rudy on the '08 ticket. And he's certainly kissing everything he's asked to kiss in the wingnut fraternity hazing process (hello, Ralph Reed....) posted by Steve M. | 8:15 AM | Thursday, August 03, 2006 I'm male and straight but I've never been much of a "guy," so I appreciate this Barbara Ehrenreich essay at the Huffington Post; I think she's on to something. She's read that fewer young men than young women are attending college, and that women are trying harder: ...The trend has occasioned some predictions of a coming matriarchy in which high-achieving women will rule over a nation of slacker guys.... But it may be that the boys still know what they're doing. Among other things that have changed since the '60s is the corporate culture, which once valued literacy, numeracy, high GPAs and the ability to construct a simple sentence. No doubt there are still workplaces where such achievements are valued, but when I set out as an undercover journalist seeking a white-collar corporate job for my book Bait and Switch, I was shocked to find the emphasis entirely on such elusive qualities as "personality," "attitude" and "likeability." Play down the smarts, the career coaches and self-help books advised, cull the experience and exude a "positive attitude." ...So the best preparation for that all-important personality test may well be a college career spent playing poker and doing tequila shots.... In addition to (perhaps) your own workplace, does this remind you of anything? Another workplace, possibly -- in Washington, D.C.? Where there's a lot of turnover at the top (once every four or eight years), but no one can ever become boss who isn't at least somewhat like this? posted by Steve M. | 11:35 PM | THE HOMOPHOBIC ROOSTER TAKES CREDIT FOR THE SUNRISE The Reverend Donald Wildmon's American Family Association launched a Boycott Ford campaign more than a year ago in response to the Ford Motor Company's support for "the homosexual agenda." Recently the AFA made this announcement: Ford Motor Company has announced they posted an unexpected second-quarter loss of $123 million. And drew this conclusion: While the boycott of Ford was not the sole cause of the loss, it no doubt has affected the sales. "Not the sole cause of its loss." Wow, that's self-effacing. I'm sure the AFA really thinks its boycott was the tipping point. And that second-quarter loss suffered by General Motors, a fellow purveyor of gas-guzzling SUVs that's gone unboycotted? (How much did GM lose -- $3.2 billion, or, no, check that, $3.4 billion?) I'm sure that was just an astonishing coincidence. posted by Steve M. | 3:08 PM | BREAKING NEWS! BUSH LIES! From Oak Leaf at the right-wing blog PoliPundit: Tuesday, August 01st, 2006 National Guard Border Numbers Are A Carnival Shell Game, It’s That Bad Today is the "deadline" for "troops to the border" and I am extremely sad to write that sending the National Guard to the “Southern Border” is turning out to be an embarrassing failure.... ... in order to find the proverbial “ball under the shell” we first need to go back to the Presidents Address to the Nation on May 15, 2006 to determine the deployment standard: "... in coordination with governors, up to 6,000 Guard members will be deployed to our southern border...." Yesterday, Col. Mark Allen, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau said that "2,000 to 3,000 were on the border, most searching for illegal activity” ... ...So, just what are these troops doing ...[?]: "California has assigned more than 1,200 troops, Guard spokesman Maj. Dan Markert said Monday. About half will be at the border looking for illegal activity; the other half will be in support roles ranging from plumbers to office workers." ... What?! Do you mean to tell me that Bush will promise anything to get critics off his back, then turn around and do whatever the hell he wants, and when you look back at his original statement you realize he was using weasel-words all along? I am shocked. Shocked! posted by Steve M. | 1:33 PM | We're all talking about whether or not the Lieberman-in-blackface graphic was justifiable, but I'd like to know what the hell it meant. When I see an old (or not-so-old) photo of a white man in blackface, I read the white person behind the burnt cork as the one wielding power over the race he's embodying. Is that how we're supposed to read Lieberman? We're Democrats/blacks and he's the white man/Republican pretending to be one of us so he can mock us? In that case, then what's Clinton's role as the white man not in blackface with an arm around Joe's shoulder? Does he represent the true face of the GOP? Hunh? Or are we supposed to read "black Joe" as really black -- a foolishly loyal slave/servant? If so, again, what is Clinton? His massa? Again, hunh? And would massa be so familiar with the colored help? Joe's head on a poodle's body -- that I would get. Or Bush as ventriloquist and Joe as dummy. Or Joe as Judy Garland singing "Dear Mr. Flightsuit" -- sure. But this? It was an image that posed a real risk to Ned Lamont, and to all of us as Internet liberals, and did it even make sense? **** UPDATE: Well, I'm a few beats behind -- via Shakespeare's Sister, I've now had a look at the race-card-playing Lieberman flier that inspired the blackface image. OK, it's more coherent than I thought (Lieberman is a phony friend of blacks) -- but the image invokes not a phony friend of blacks but a mocker of blacks. To me it's still garbled. And what's the point of giving Clinton sunglasses? Lieberman is Zip Coon and Clinton is a Blues Brother? One more time: hunh? posted by Steve M. | 11:50 AM | Wednesday, August 02, 2006 A man accused in the shooting rampage at Seattle's Jewish Federation office last week was charged Wednesday with nine felony counts, including aggravated first-degree murder and violation of the state's hate-crime law. "Make no mistake, this was a hate crime," King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng told a news conference. "The attack on these women was an attack on the Jewish community, not only in Seattle but throughout our nation and the world." ... --KIRO-TV (Seattle)/AP So I guess this means we'll get a correction from the American Thinker, where Christopher Chantrill assured us that those disgusting PC Seattle authorities wouldn't charge Haq with a hate crime? And I assume Chantrill will post a correction to his blog, where he also posted his Haq article? And I assume that any right-wing bloggers who repeated Chantrill's erroneous assertion will issue corrections? Naah -- what am I thinking? posted by Steve M. | 11:00 PM | Christy at Firedoglake: Rumor has it that Joe Lieberman may be cancelling some events today ... to film a new campaign ad -- which is said to be a mea culpa on his support for George Bush and the Iraq War. So much for this gem: It is time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be Commander-in-Chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war, we undermine Presidential credibility at our nation's peril.... Atrios: I'd love to see how they play this one..... Well, if this really happens, I don't know how Lieberman's people will play it, but I know how the Right will play it: as the kind of recantation that would have resulted from a Stalinist show trial, or "reeducation" in the Cultural Revolution. Alternately, they'll call it a confession extracted by means of torture. Trust me, if Joe tacks to the left on Iraq, you will hear one of these metaphors used -- not just by right-wing bloggers, but by mainstream pundits. **** By the way, I really, really don't want to have to defend this graphic.* (UPDATE: This is the image; it's been removed from the post now.) For crissakes, people, can we stop doing this? Can we please operate under a new corollary to Godwin's Law and recognize that any use of blackface, like any use of the word "Nazi," automatically makes further reasoned discussion impossible? posted by Steve M. | 2:34 PM | WHAT ARE FREEPERS WHINING ABOUT NOW? Today some of them are focused on this blog post from Paul Belien at Brussels Journal: Manchester Provides Homes with Loos for Muslims Until recently I did not know that Muslims are not allowed to face Mecca (nor turn their back to it) when sitting on the loo. I heard about it last April when the British press reported that Brixton Prison near London is rebuilding toilets so Muslim inmates can defecate in the right direction. First I thought it was a joke. This week, however, the BBC website has a story on a housing estate in North England. The homes, with wind turbines and solar panels on the roofs, have up to seven bedrooms, kitchens that comply with halal cuisine and "bathrooms that face away from Mecca." The estate, developed by Manchester Methodist Housing Association, has been built exclusively for Muslims because, as one of the residents says, "We're all Muslims here so yes, it is important [to live exclusively among Muslims]. For myself I'm not really too bothered but to a lot of the Muslim people, yes it is important to them and yes it is a very good idea." ... In fact, Belien's completely garbled the BBC story he's citing: ... some have bathrooms that face away from Mecca and the kitchens also comply with halal cuisine. They were designed in consultation with the local community in Coppice, which is 60% Asian.... Rejia Bibi is moving with her husband and five children into one of the new properties, from her home in the Werneth area of Oldham.... "We're all Muslims here so yes, it is important," she said of the homes' design. "For myself I'm not really too bothered but to a lot of the Muslim people, yes it is important to them and yes it is a very good idea." ...All of the 18 homes occupied by Asian families were made available to the wider community. (Emphasis mine.) One Freeper (Canard, in response 8) actually went to the BBC article and figured out that Belien misrepresents it. (Canard's objection is utterly ignored in the thread.) Apart from that, we get the Freepers' usual charming embrace of cultural differences: Come to think of it, we have two toilets in our house and they both face east. I love it. It will make going to the bathroom more enjoyable. **** If the bathroom faces away from Mecca does that mean their butt faces Mecca? Thats sound the way it should be. I wouldnt mind mooning Mecca. Or do they have to stand so their butt faces away from Mecca, and they are pointing their Penis at Mecca, and urinating in that direction. That isnt so bad either. I wouldnt mind peeing on Mecca either. Sounds like Win-Win to me. **** I personally think the whole world would be better off if Mecca was erased from the map of the earth, its nothing but a shrine for a piece of meteorite these loonies worship. **** Well...they don't use toilet paper so at least they got that right! There are also the usual dire warnings about the perils of accommodating people who aren't like yourself: The British people really need to stand up to this sort of malignant nonsense before they lose themselves completely.... The British gov't has gone mad with this PC BS and the people better put them straight before it is too late. **** This is only the beginning my FRiend. Gradually you are going to find out what else offends the Muslims, little by little until the end when you find out that your very existence offends them. Oddly, no one at Free Republic seems to have had a similar reaction to this recent New York Times article, which notes that it's perfectly legal for a co-op building here to designate a Sabbath elevator (or Shabbat elevator) -- one that stops automatically on every floor on Friday night and Saturday so observant Jews can avoid the proscription against operating such devices on the Sabbath. (Well, of course the Freepers don't care about that -- they see Jews as their partners, at least for now, in the march toward a right-wing Christian Islamofascism-free global utopia with low taxes and no gun control laws.) I imagine a Shabbat elevator would be somewhat inconvenient for me as a non-Jew (though I live on the first floor, so I don't have a dog in this hunt) -- but I don't think switching an elevator that way is a big jackbooted PC outrage. (Interestingly, some of the people discussing the Times article at the blog Orthomom, including Orthomom herself, think it's a worse idea than I do.) But as for halal kitchens, well, I'm not much of a cook, but if this description of what makes a kitchen halal is any indication, what could a non-halal person object to? There's no inconvenience whatsoever, from what I can see. And I am as much of an expert on using toilets as anyone else, and I'm reasonably certain that I, as a non-Muslim, can use a toilet whichever way it's facing. So I guess my outrage level will never match a Freeper's. posted by Steve M. | 11:23 AM | Tuesday, August 01, 2006 One of these things is not like the other, according to Michelle Malkin:  Filthy, disgusting Hispanics rallying around a foreign flag. In America!  Filthy, disgusting Hispanics rallying around a foreign flag. In America!  Admirable, saintly Hispanics rallying around a foreign flag. In America, baby! Dual loyalties? To right-wingers like Malkin, IOKIYACANAM.* (*It's OK if you're a Cuban and not a Mexican.) **** (Now X-posted.) posted by Steve M. | 11:04 PM | In a bit of throat-clearing before launching into a much-praised blame-the-liberals screed at The American Thinker yesterday, Christopher Chantrill said this about Naveed Haq, who's charged with shooting up a Jewish center in Seattle: Although Seattle is the very enemy of "hate," Haq will not be prosecuted for a hate crime, according to Seattle Times reporters. He will be prosecuted under state murder laws. Chantrill added sarcastically: That's as it should be. The hate crime laws were designed with right-wing militias and gay-bashers in mind. They were never intended to be used against Muslim hatemongers and Jew-baiters. Alas for Chantrill, he doesn't have the slightest idea what the hate-crime laws "were designed for," as The Seattle Times makes clear today while explaining why the application of these statutes to this shooting isn't the no-brainer it might seem to be: ...Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike Lang ... and Assistant U.S. Attorney Bruce Miyake, who handles civil-rights and hate-crime prosecutions for the office, said proving a hate crime under federal law might be more difficult than it would seem, regardless of Haq's reported statements. "Hate by itself is not enough," Miyake said. "It's sort of hate-'plus.' " The "plus," Miyake explained, requires the government to prove that more than race, religious preference or national origin was a factor in the crime. "You also have to be able to show that the individual was interfering with a federally protected right," such as voting, using interstate commerce or attempting to use a public facility. That's because the law harkens to the civil-rights struggle of the early 1960s, when blacks were assaulted for attempting to eat at segregated lunch counters or to register to vote. Still, there may be a section of the statute under which Haq could be prosecuted in federal court, Miyake and Lang said. For example, one of the federally protected rights cited by the law is "applying for or enjoying employment." "The mere fact that they were in the act of working may be enough," Lang said.... Which brings up another point Chantrill failed to grasp: The decision to apply hate-crime laws hasn't actually been made yet. ...King County prosecutors are moving toward filing aggravated-murder and attempted-murder charges against Haq, perhaps as early as Wednesday, said Dan Donohoe, a spokesman for the King County Prosecutor's Office. Also at the state's disposal is a malicious-harassment charge -- the state's version of a hate-crime law -- that could add up to five years to any sentence if Haq is convicted. Donohoe, however, said no final decision has been made as to what charges will be filed. ...A conviction on state murder charges would not require the state to prove that hate was a motive for the crime. Nor would it prohibit the federal government from pursuing its own hate-crime charges. ... (Emphasis mine.) Sorry if none of this fits your conspiracy theory, Christopher. posted by Steve M. | 2:14 PM | Didja know that Rush calls Hezbollah "Hezbos"? He does. --Digby Yup, and at Free Republic they call all Muslims, with saracastic sympathy, "Poor Muzzies." Buncha Oscar freakin' Wildes, these people are. posted by Steve M. | 10:20 AM | Little was known of Fidel Castro's condition Tuesday after he underwent an operation and temporarily turned over the Cuban presidency to his brother Raul.... --AP today But ... but Castro died last month! And in March! Seriously, someday reports of Castro's death will be more than just masturbatory fantasies on right-wing blogs. My question is: How will the Bushies screw up the aftermath? We know they will, but how exactly? Any thoughts? posted by Steve M. | 7:20 AM | |
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