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Wednesday, January 31, 2007 R.I.P., Molly Ivins. Gone too damn soon. posted by Steve M. | 7:34 PM | DAMP SQUIB Despite the fact that the author had the opportunity to promote it in virtually every major media outlet in America with the possible exception of Highlights for Children, Dinesh D'Souza's The Enemy at Home failed to make the main New York Times bestseller list in its first week in the bookstores, struggling onto the "expanded" ("also selling") list at #19. Oh -- by contrast, What a Party! by Terry (don't let him become a Knight of Malta!) McAuliffe came onto the list at #5. **** (This list was circulated via e-mail today and will be posted at the Times site over the weekend.) posted by Steve M. | 6:48 PM | I've just been exploring the subconscious mind of Chris Matthews, and I think I need to take a shower: MATTHEWS: How can [Rudy Giuliani] go into a debate with Hillary Clinton and land a punch against a woman? Isn't that going to be tricky for somebody like Rudy, who knows how to land a punch, to go up a woman -- [PAUL] CELLUCCI [FORMER REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS]: Well, you know, I think you -- MATTHEWS: -- up against a woman? CELLUCCI: I ran against Marjorie Clapprood for lieutenant governor back in 1990. I had several debates with her. I didn't approach her any differently.... Getting a little excited thinking about that punch, Chris? Should we run a cold shower for you? Go read the whole linked item (from Media Matters) -- Matthews has a big man-crush on Giuliani ("You know what I like about Rudy Giuliani? He's tough. He's a bit of an SOB"), which doesn't surprise me a bit and is one big reason I think Rudy can win (Matthews influences Beltway groupthink far more than he should, given his TV ratings). **** Oh and don't be fooled by this: MATTHEWS: What would he have done if Hurricane Katrina had hit Louisiana, New Orleans especially, on his watch? What would he have done afterwards? CELLUCCI: Well, I think he would have been there within hours. And I think he would have made sure that all the federal people who had responsibility to deal with that were there as well. I think we can pretty much be assured of that. Yeah, Rudy would have dealt with the crisis somewhat better than Bush. (It's hard to think of any human being on the planet who wouldn't have.) But Rudy -- as every New Yorker knows -- would have spent quite a bit of time wagging his finger and declaring that those who didn't get themselves out of harm's way were shiftless and feckless. How could he have resisted, given the fact that so many of them were poor black people, his favorite targets when he was mayor? It would have been their fault that they didn't have an escape plan, their fault that they needed government assistance, their fault if they were desperately hungry and resorted to looting abandoned stores. He would have especially savored the prospect of criticizing those who didn't want to be rescued if it meant abandoning their pets -- remember his off-his-meds outburst at a radio talk-show caller who was an advocate for ferret owners? And he'd still be lecturing the victims, still blaming them for not turning their lives around instantly. And while he would have moved faster to get the situation under control, I can't guarantee that he wouldn't have ordered heavy-handed police tactics. Looters shot on sight? Maybe. Don't extrapolate from 9/11 to any other crisis in Rudy's case. Rudy identified with the cops and firefighters and white-collar financial-services workers who died in the Towers. Katrina might have been a very different story. posted by Steve M. | 3:46 PM | Hmmm ... maybe Joe Biden was reading Peter Beinart recently -- and not reading him very carefully. Biden on Barack Obama: "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," he said. "I mean, that’s a storybook, man." Beinart in The New Republic (via the CBS News site): In 1994, two sociologists went to Red Hook, Brooklyn, to solve a mystery.... locals -- primarily African Americans -- didn't get hired. Instead, ... jobs went to workers from outside the neighborhood, often Caribbean immigrants. Employers, wrote The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell in summarizing the sociologists' findings, "had developed an elaborate mechanism for distinguishing between those who they felt were 'good' blacks and those they felt were 'bad' blacks." Were the employers racist? Yes and no. They clearly held anti-black stereotypes. And they discriminated against those who conformed to them, even by association. But they discriminated in favor of blacks who defied those stereotypes.... Barack Obama ... surely understands the uncomfortable subtext behind the adoration being showered upon him by white America. Obama ... succeeded at a prestigious white institution: Harvard Law School. He ... is a child of immigration... And he ... doesn't sound or look too black.... In U.S. politics, as in Red Hook, there are no "good" blacks without "bad" blacks.... For many white Americans, it's a twofer. Elect Obama, and you not only dethrone George W. Bush, you dethrone Sharpton, too. We all love to rag on Beinart, but I don't think he's completely off base here -- I'm afraid that some of the recent Obamamania is delight in the fact that Obama differs from white people's stereopypical image of blacks. Beinart's describing that, as a phenomenon that contains at least an element of racism. Biden, on the other hand, is embodying it, and it's painful to witness. It's almost as if Biden read Beinart's article and missed the point. posted by Steve M. | 12:10 PM | Just to follow up on TBogg's post from yesterday: Apparently it's not just Hugh Hewitt who thinks it's a bad idea for former Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe (who's Catholic and pro-choice) to join the Knights of Malta (Hewitt: "Oh, we'd better put out a word.... I've got friends in the Knights of Malta, yeah. You might not come back from your first trip to Rome"). Now "The Washington Prowler" at the blog of The American Spectator, under a big red "BREAKING NEWS" headline, is issuing a call to action: Any Knights of Malta out there want to take a shot at blocking this heathen from membership? Any buffoon who would brag about receiving blessings from the Holy Father while in the state of grave sin due to his support of the murder deserves to be taken down a notch or two. Oooh, tough talk -- talk that's likely to be backed up with, er, a really, really bold headline at the Drudge Report, a handful of Freepers picketing McAuliffe's book signings while wearing cheap Halloween masks, and maybe a tough, hard-hitting story on Sean Hannity's new TV show (if it doesn't get bumped for another story about hookers). I'm hoping this is one more sign that wingnuts are heading in a promising new direction -- toward an obsession with trivia, and thus a slide into complete irrelevance. Recently, for instance, we've had the right obsessing over the number of vowels in the name of a source for an AP story about an atrocity in Iraq (as Iraq suffers dozens of such atrocities a day), and we've watched as the right dispatched a crack team of forensic botanists to do a Zapruder-like frame-by-frame flower analysis of Hillary Clinton's initial campaign Webcast. But McAuliffe's Knights of Malta candidacy is even more peripheral than those wingnut obsessions. And I say: Please, righties -- make a crusade of this! Be my guest! Fixate on the trivial! And leave the rest of us to run the country. posted by Steve M. | 10:32 AM | Tuesday, January 30, 2007 SECOND GRADER IN CHIEF Holly Bailey of Newsweek, reporting on a Bush photo op today: ... "I would suggest moving back," Bush said as he climbed into the cab of a massive D-10 tractor. "I'm about to crank this sucker up." As the engine roared to life, White House staffers tried to steer the press corps to safety, but when the tractor lurched forward, they too were forced to scramble for safety."Get out of the way!" a news photographer yelled. "I think he might run us over!" said another. White House aides tried to herd the reporters the right way without getting run over themselves. Even the Secret Service got involved, as one agent began yelling at reporters to get clear of the tractor. Watching the chaos below, Bush looked out the tractor's window and laughed, steering the massive machine into the spot where most of the press corps had been positioned. The episode lasted about a minute, and Bush was still laughing when he pulled to a stop. He gave reporters a thumbs-up. "If you've never driven a D-10, it's the coolest experience," Bush said afterward.... Here's Bush in the cab. Here's what he was driving. Our president is a sixty-year-old child. **** UPDATE: As longtime readers of this blog know, back in '76 Bush did something somewhat similar (but even more reckless) with a plane. posted by Steve M. | 4:12 PM | Probably in response to this or this, Spencer Ackerman asks: Can someone explain to me why the term "Democrat Party" is a slur? I recognize that it sounds grating, and agree that it's probably intended to be demeaning. But... why should it be? Help. I think part of our hard-wiring for language has to do with understanding the concept of names, feeling ownership of our names, and feeling unsettled if our names are mangled in a way that seems thoughtless or intentional. Someone -- David Halberstam? Robert Caro? -- has written that LBJ, a master political game-player, regularly mangled people's names; surely that threw those people off stride in a way that worked to LBJ's advantage. I think "Democrat Party" taps into the hard-wired response to one's own name. It's our group name, and we know it's being mangled deliberately. It's unsettling on a basic level of language. **** Well, here's NBC's John Chancellor on LBJ: One thing Lyndon Johnson did that I always thought was marvelously colorful was that he would mispronounce people's names deliberately. I've seen him do that, and I've seen him do it to people, to put them off their guard. I've seen him do it to government people. That's the trick. "Democrat Party" is a variation. posted by Steve M. | 2:45 PM | I had a post yesterday about the unexpected laughs at Hillary Clinton's Iowa appearance when she paraphrased an audience member's question about "what in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men." I thought her ability to roll with the surprise laughter came off well (to the surprise, and probably the dismay, of at least one right-wing blogger), and I said something in comments that I should have added to the post: ...eventually right-wingers are going to say Evil Clever Hillary said this deliberately, as a sneaky way to try to put the adultery question behind her. Well, here's Jon Keller, blogging about New Hampshire primary polls for the CBS affiliate in Boston: You don't often find yourself talking about Sen. Clinton and humor in the same sentence. But when you see Hillary bonding with her audience by poking fun at her wayward husband, you know the heavy image-making machinery is already in high gear. "We face a lot of evil men, people like Osama Bin Laden comes to mind. And what in my backgroun equips me to deal with evil and bad men?" joked Clinton. You go, girl! Oh, good grief. Look, I believe that the line reminded the audience members of Bill, and that's why they laughed. And I believe Hillary grasped the unintended meaning of the words. But give me a break -- she clearly didn't invoke Bill deliberately. Oh, what am I talking about? She's the Psycho Lesbian Witch from Hell! Of course she invoked him deliberately! What a sinister, evil genius she is! posted by Steve M. | 1:37 PM | WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING In an interview with NPR's Juan Williams, President Bush was cautious in his reaction to the recent fighting in Najaf -- and then he wasn't so cautious: PRESIDENT BUSH: You know, Juan, I haven't been briefed by the Pentagon yet. One of the things I've learned is not to react to first reports off the battlefield. I will tell you, though, that this fight is an indication of what is taking place, and that is the Iraqis are beginning to take the lead, whether it be this fight that you've just reported on where the Iraqis went in with American help to do in some extremists that were trying to stop the advance of their democracy, or the report that there's militant Shia had been captured or killed. In other words, one of the things that I expect to see is the Iraqis take the lead and show the American people that they're willing to the hard work necessary to secure their democracy, and our job is to help them. So my first reaction on this report from the battlefield is that the Iraqis are beginning to show me something. "The Iraqis are beginning to show me something"? Oops: Iraqi forces were surprised and nearly overwhelmed by the ferocity of an obscure renegade militia in a weekend battle near the holy city of Najaf and needed far more help from American forces than previously disclosed, American and Iraqi officials said Monday. They said American ground troops -- and not just air support as reported Sunday -- were mobilized to help the Iraqi soldiers, who appeared to have dangerously underestimated the strength of the militia, which calls itself the Soldiers of Heaven and had amassed hundreds of heavily armed fighters.... The Iraqis and Americans eventually prevailed in the battle. But the Iraqi security forces' miscalculations about the group's strength and intentions raised troubling questions about their ability to recognize and deal with a threat. Here's my favorite d'oh! moment: ...Among the troubling questions raised is how hundreds of armed men were able to set up such an elaborate encampment, which Iraqi officials said included tunnels, trenches and a series of blockades, only 10 miles northeast of Najaf. After the fight was over, Iraqi officials said they discovered at least two antiaircraft weapons as well as 40 heavy machine guns. The government knew that the Soldiers of Heaven had set up camp in the area, but officials said they thought they were there to worship together. Yeah -- doesn't every mosque have tunnels, trenches, and antiaircraft weapons? Ah, but there are living things that fear the Iraqi troops in Najaf. Remember this from last month? Iraqi soldiers bit the heads off frogs and ate the heart of a rabbit as signs of courage on Wednesday at a ceremony to transfer Najaf province, home to one of Shi'ite Islam's holiest shrines, from U.S. to Iraqi control.... Politicians, tribal and religious leaders and soldiers watched displays of military prowess and one demonstration, hailed as a display of courage, in which five soldiers stopped before the grandstand to bite the heads off frogs. A sixth holding a live rabbit slit open its stomach and ate its heart before tossing the carcass to his comrades to chew on.... Maybe these guys shouldn't quit their day jobs as carnival geeks. posted by Steve M. | 8:05 AM | THE ALL-IMPORTANT FREE REPUBLIC PRIMARY 154 votes cast (as I type this). Votes won by John McCain: zero. I don't believe Free Republic is representative of the GOP as a whole, but I do think it's representative of one big bloc of Republican voters. So, yeah, I think McCain's in trouble. (Though the big winners so far are Newt Gingrich and Duncan Hunter. I think one of those guys could be the "purist" choice in '08 -- analogous to Jerry Brown in '92 or Jesse Jackson in '88 or Ronald Reagan in '76.) **** UPDATE: 525 votes now. McCain has a whopping 4. Well, at least he's on the board. **** UPDATE: And as Tom notes in comments, McCain also did abysmally in a poll of right-wing bloggers conducted by Right Wing News. His support among red-meat Bush Republicans is nonexistent. posted by Steve M. | 7:16 AM | Monday, January 29, 2007 Shorter Hindrocket at Power Line: If you factor out all the people who don't like him, Bush remains an incredibly popular president. And if you factor out all the polls that show his popularity declining and concentrate on the one poll that doesn't show that, it turns out he's as popular as ever. I wish I were exaggerating. **** Incidentally, here's my favorite statistic from the new Newsweek poll: more than half the country (58 percent) say they wish the Bush presidency were simply over Also, The president's approval ratings are at their lowest point in the poll's history -- 30 percent But you shouldn't pay attention to that, because a poll that shows Bush's popularity declining is, by definition, unreliable. **** (It should also be noted that Newsweek's poll shows Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both beating McCain and Giuliani, while John Edwards beats McCain and is statistically even with Rudy.) **** UPDATE: Hindrocket's statistical analysis is demolished here and here. posted by Steve M. | 9:57 PM | WE FIGURED THIS WOULD BE A MORE EFFECTIVE WAY TO COOL THE PLANET THAN HANGING A REALLY, REALLY HUGE CEILING FAN FROM THE MOON Who says the Bush administration favors "junk science"? This is from Saturday's Guardian: The US government wants the world's scientists to develop technology to block sunlight as a last-ditch way to halt global warming, the Guardian has learned. It says research into techniques such as giant mirrors in space or reflective dust pumped into the atmosphere would be "important insurance" against rising emissions, and has lobbied for such a strategy to be recommended by a major UN report on climate change, the first part of which will be published on Friday.... ... Possible techniques include putting a giant screen into orbit, thousands of tiny, shiny balloons, or microscopic sulphate droplets pumped into the high atmosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption. The IPCC draft said such ideas were "speculative, uncosted and with potential unknown side-effects".... Hmmm. Hey, I've got it -- how about a rotating crew of astronauts holding up those reflective screens you put in the windshield of your car on a hot day? I bet that would work. (Via DU.) posted by Steve M. | 3:53 PM | Some people on our side are getting self-righteous about this, but I don't need to believe that Hillary Clinton and her audience were utterly oblivious to the unintended meaning of that moment of laughter yesterday. Here's the New York Post's interpretation: ... The one-liner came in response to a question shouted at the former first lady from the audience asking whether she had the mettle and experience to deal with evil and rotten men -- like terrorist Osama bin Laden and the tyrants of North Korea and Iran. Clinton grabbed the mike and told the audience that the questioner wanted to know "what in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men." She then smiled, raised her eyebrows and nodded knowingly at the questioner. Her nod and the ensuing eruption of laughter had rally-goers convinced she was talking about her husband, whose Oval Office affair with intern Monica Lewinsky exploded into the Sexgate scandal and led to impeachment proceedings. "She was talking about Bill being a bad man. There was no doubt whatsoever," said Tyrone Williams, 55, an engineer from nearby Bettendorf, Iowa. His sentiment was the interpretation echoed by many other attendees interviewed by The Post. "That was good," Williams added with a chuckle.... (The Moderate Voice has the video.) You know what? I want to believe that her audience thought she was referring to Bill -- and that she grasped that and got the joke. Why? Because it gives the lie to the right's intrerpretation of our behavior (and Hillary's) in response to Bill's cheating. The right says that we don't think he did anything wrong, because we essentially have no sense of morals when it comes to sex. Oh, we say it has to be limited to consenting adults, but other than that, anything goes, no matter who gets hurt. Well, this was a crowd of Iowa Democrats. These are people who are open to the idea of voting for a Democrat --possibly Hillary. And yet they laughed at this. This makes no sense to a right-wing ideologue. It makes perfect sense to a normal human being. Bill cheated. He did, a bad, bad thing. It's not Hitler bad or bin Laden bad, but it's bad. (It's a shift in the meaning of the word "bad," but that's how jokes work.) We can acknowledge Bill's behavior as bad while remaining open to the idea of voting for his wife, as he urges us to do. And as for Hillary, what's the right-wing rap on her with regard to Bill as a cheater? That she's a cold-blooded Manchurian Candidate who has calculatingly agreed to tolerate Bill's horndoggery because maintaining her (emotionless) bond with him is necessary to advance her Evil Plan To Take Over The Universe. This is part of a larger critique: that she has no human feelings, therefore she has no sense of humor. Wrong. And wrong. They laughed. She laughed. It became an inadvertent joke. She got it. (Despite her later denial.) She can chuckle now, but yeah, she thought he was bad. By the way, here's Billy Hollis at the righty blog QandO: As a professional speaker, I'm impressed. It's very easy to let yourself get flustered when something like that happens. A key ability for avoiding that problem is to let people laugh a bit at your expense. I didn't think Hillary had it in her, but it seems she does. That's the biggest victory in all this for Hillary -- that she let her guard down in a human way. That's no surprise to me, but it blows the right-wing stereotype of her right out of the water. posted by Steve M. | 1:55 PM | LEAST SURPRISING NEWS, PART 2 So everybody's shocked that Lieberman said on Fox News Sunday that he might support a Republican in '08? I told you he was saying things like that two weeks ago. The appropriate follow-up question is "Given the fact that your litmus test seems to be how close a candidate comes to your position on Iraq, is there any Democrat you could imagine supporting in '08? And if so, who?" I want to hear him answer that. I want names -- or one name, or an admission that he can't provide a name. I want him to either (a) burn his bridges with his GOP fan base by actually singling out a Democrat he could support (highly unlikely) or (b) shock all the stupid, deluded Democrats who supported him in '06 by failing to invoke a single Democrat who isn't already in his Black Book of Pure Islamofascistsymp Evil (infinitely more likely). Alas, his most likely response is, of course, (c): Mumble mumble mumble, I think it's premature to talk about this or that individual, we'll just have to wait and see, hey, that's a great tie. But somebody should try to pin him down on this. The press has never challenged the narrative that he's the victim in this breakup, that we angry hippies threw his belongings out on the front lawn for no good reason and he just wants everything to be the way it was on the honeymoon, the poor guy. The rest of the Democratic Party and the country have come to terms with reality, and he hasn't -- that's the irreconcilable difference. posted by Steve M. | 11:54 AM | Sunday, January 28, 2007 Bad news about Molly Ivins: Nationally syndicated columnist Molly Ivins has been hospitalized in her recurring battle with breast cancer. "I think she's tough as a metal boot," her brother, Andy Ivins, said Friday after a visit with her at Seton Medical Center in Austin. Andy Ivins said his sister was admitted to Seton on Thursday. She spent Friday morning with longtime colleagues and friends, and was "sleeping peacefully" when he arrived later in the day. A self-described leftist agitator, Ivins, 62, completed a round of radiation treatment in August, but the cancer "came back with a vengeance," and has spread through her body, Andy Ivins said.... Keep her in your thoughts. Pray for her if you pray. **** They found out about this at Free Republic on Friday, from an AP story. They responded as they often do when someone on the left is seriously ill: they proclaimed that they wished her well, but only so they could congratulate themselves on their moral superiority to their enemies, and also as cover for nasty remarks: In respect for the old adage that if you can't say something nice about someone it's better to say nothing, I will say nothing. *** Remember, you never know what loving prayer and concern for one's enemies will result in. She might have a change of heart, even now. *** Prayers for her recovery from cancer and from the liberalism. *** I do hope Ms. Ivin's takes a long break from her writing to focus on recovery. Say 10 to 12 years. *** from cancer and from the liberalism. But then sir, you repeat yourself. *** Yes, but we still need to pray for liberals. They truly are an unhappy bunch. They may not admit it, but their constant anger, depression and lack of hope are eating them as surely as any cancer. Most of them don't even like themselves. *** I hope she recovers OK and the Doctors inadvertently sew her mouth shut before they send her home. *** It's sad that I have to suppress the thoughts I have... *** Her hatred of George Bush and Republicans these past six years probably took a toll on her health. Hating that much can never be good... *** My wife has had a couple of bouts with breast cancer. I've always believed stress was a factor, as she tends to internalize things. I suppose in keeping with that theory, excess vitriolic hatred could probably cause some health issues, too... All of which led to this: Threads like these make me really proud to be a FReeper. We don't wish ill upon our opponents during times of misfortune, unlike the other side. Wishing her a speedy recovery. Yeah, you guys are all heart. (In a later thread, things get really ugly. I'll spare you.) posted by Steve M. | 11:18 PM | As we learn from Richard Wolffe's Newsweek interview of Dick Cheney, being questioned sure is a lot easier when your interviewer saves you the trouble of reciting your own talking points. Three of Wolffe's questions (emphasis mine): There has been little open support from the Republican Party for the president's plan for extra troops in Iraq. Do you worry that the party has lost the stomach for the fight? **** So you don't think Senator Hagel -- I know you dodged completely responding to his comments, but they're not helpful to the cause and to the mission? **** Public opinion has this caricature of you as Darth Vader and various things. Do you think you get a fair crack from the media? Thanks, Richard! Check's in the mail! (Maybe that's harsh -- it's not a bad interview. But the talking points did seep into those questions.) posted by Steve M. | 10:16 PM | I'm back -- thanks for the posts, Tom and Senator B. posted by Steve M. | 10:15 PM | I Feel Good About This, Don't You? As the president and his aides calibrate how directly to confront Iran... posted by Bulworth | 7:32 PM | Saturday, January 27, 2007 Not a Dime's Worth of Difference [Tom Hilton from If I Ran the Zoo, guest-blogging for Steve.] The other day, during debate on the minimum wage increase, some Senate Republicans introduced an amendment that would eliminate the Federal minimum wage. 28 Republican Senators, including John McCain, voted in favor of the amendment. Over the coming years the Democrats in Congress will doubtless make mistakes. They will disappoint and frustrate and anger some of us to the point of wanting to tell them all to go to hell. And the thing we need to keep in mind through it all is this: 100% of the Senate Democrats voted to increase the minimum wage; 57% of the Senate Republicans voted to eliminate it altogether. "Not a dime's worth of difference", my ass. posted by Tom Hilton | 10:53 AM | Friday, January 26, 2007 I'll be away this weekend (no, not in D.C., alas). There'll be guest bloggers. I'll see you Monday (or maybe late Sunday). posted by Steve M. | 11:03 PM | Nibras Kazimi of the New York Sun sees a turnaround in Iraq. Then again, Nibras Kazimi of the New York Sun always sees a turnaround in Iraq. posted by Steve M. | 11:00 PM | Yeah, this makes perfect sense, right? Ford May Resume Its Bonuses to Boost Executive Morale Ford Motor Co. may resume paying executive bonuses to boost the morale of managers battered by three rounds of job cuts and plant closings in the past five years, people familiar with the matter said. The No. 2 U.S. automaker is considering the renewal of bonuses as a way of supporting managers coping with reduced benefits, the elimination of merit raises and the threat of job losses.... The size of the bonuses varies. They can comprise the highest percentage of total income for Ford's most senior executives. For Chief Executive Alan Mulally, who signed his own compensation agreement with Ford when he was hired in September, the targeted bonus opportunity for 2007 equals 175 percent of his base salary of $2 million, according to a regulatory filing.... I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn that this is only happening at the top of the pyramid: The current contract with the UAW and Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford expires Sept. 14. In a Jan. 3 meeting with reporters, Mulally said he plans to ask the union's help in strengthening Ford. He said wages, benefits and flexibility in deploying workers would be issues.... Givebacks, in other words. And obviously that's not surprising. But isn't it odd how the best way to motivate rich people is always to pay them more, and the best way to motivate non-rich people is always to pay them less. (Via Doug Krile and, oddly, PoliPundit.) posted by Steve M. | 4:21 PM | Atrios is (moderately) impressed with what Joe Klein writes here about the Libby trial: I'm beginning to love this trial. I love it because it is firmly establishing this fact: She testified that both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were intensely interested in Ms. Wilson and her husband, Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had been sent to Africa to investigate reports that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from Niger for his nuclear weapons program. Why is that important? Because June 2003, when this obsession took hold, was also the month that the CIA first briefed Bush, Cheney, Rumsfled et al. that they were facing a full-blown guerrilla insurgency in Iraq. Were they obsessed by the fact that there war was changing, that it might be more difficult to prosecute than they're bargained for? No. They were obsessed with sliming Joe Wilson.... Nice of him to make that connection -- but, er, is he just now noticing that bringing the war in Iraq to a successful conclusion was not the top priority of the Bushies? Rove's top priority has always been destroying the Democratic Party. Cheney is obsessed with avenging Nixon by restoring the imperial presidency. Rumsfeld was fixated on Pentagon transformation. All of these things were more important than the Iraq War. And doing the best we could possibly do in Iraq was always subject to restrictions: can't raise taxes (Bush), can't acknowledge that there might be some validity to the Powell Doctrine (Rumsfeld), couldn't hire people who knew what they were doing to help rebuild Iraq after the fall of Saddam -- only loyalists and ideologues need apply. And, of course, actually getting the people responsible for 9/11 was an even lower priority than trying to accomplish the Iraq mission. posted by Steve M. | 2:00 PM | NOT JANET RENO If I correctly understand this little piece of wingnut animation (found here), the thesis is that Webb Hubbell was Chelsea Clinton's father. ... And yeah, I guess this notion has been kicking around since the '90s. (Warning: cheesy music starts up automatically at link.) Pundits talk a lot about voters rejecting Hillary Clinton in '08 because voters won't want unsavory stories "dredged up." The truth is, we're big boys and girls -- we know all the stories and we've moved on. What we might not want "dredged up" is toxic waste like this. This time, though, our side is capable of shining a spotlight on the vermin who spread it; also, the mainstream press knows it can't pretend anymore that political messages spread in a "nontraditional" way are beneath them and thus not worthy of being acknowledged. Still, it's going to be ugly -- and one of the reasons I half-want Hillary to win (despite deep fears that as president she'd regularly capitulate to the right) is that I don't want these people to succeed with a strategy of spreading poison about her and then saying we have to reject her at the polls because she's responsible for the poisonousness of the political atmosphere. posted by Steve M. | 10:22 AM | Canada's National Post tells us about Francois Verschelden, a preacher who's trying to spread the Baptist message in the traditionally Catholic community of Joliette, Quebec. He's detected some wariness on the part of the locals: "In Quebec, if you change religions, they have the impression that you are rejecting the culture, the two are so intertwined," he says. ...So alien is the U.S. version of evangelism to people in this area that the kindly- looking father of two, who became a born-again Christian when he was 19, has been ridiculed, threatened and even had parents warn their children to stay away from him for his proselytizing since returning to his home province. Gosh, why should people be so wary of a guy like this? I'm baffled -- but hey, maybe it's because he represents a church whose online news service links his story with this headline (check the scroll in the upper right corner): Countering Canada's Catholic culture key to capturing Quebec for the King Whew! I guess some Baptists never got that "Catholics are getting more conservative so we like them now" memo. (Oh, and maybe the people of Joliette are wary because, as the National Post story explains, Pastor Verschelden is going to be followed by "six successive waves of Baptist mission teams ... from Texas, Kentucky, the Carolinas and British Columbia," bankrolled by a U.S. megachurch based in a shopping mall, as part of "a worldwide church planting effort" to set up evangelical congregations in "the most un-reached places on Earth." The new Heart of Darkness -- Quebec! Yeah, I might be a bit testy if people were talking about where I live that way.) posted by Steve M. | 8:39 AM | From the Savannah Morning News: ATLANTA - With little fanfare or controversy, the [Georgia] House proclaimed 2007 as the "Year of Lee" in honor of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.... Resolutions saluting people pass the General Assembly almost daily without discussion or much notice, but those recognizing controversial figures usually trigger a debate. For example, last year, a measure commending Oscar-winning actress and Georgia resident Jane Fonda for her contributions to curbing teen pregnancy resulted in national headlines when lawmakers voted it down because of her protests during the Vietnam War. So House Resolution 28 is noteworthy because of how little stir it caused when it passed unanimously Jan. 11.... Hey, how can you compare Jane Fonda and Robert E. Lee? Jane Fonda was a traitor! She was actively at war with this country! Not like Robert E. L... oh, wait, never mind. posted by Steve M. | 6:43 AM | Thursday, January 25, 2007 MAPLE SMELL BACK IN NYC? Sure seems that way to me -- I smelled it on the streets of Midtown as I left work this evening; now I'm uptown and I'm smelling it even indoors. This happened a couple of times back in '05. No one ever knows why it happens, just as no one knew what caused the sulfur smell a couple of weeks ago. But this is pleasant -- I'm not complaining. posted by Steve M. | 9:14 PM | Clinton has a strong edge when the question is which presidential candidate people would most like to have over to their homes for dinner. The former First Lady led the dinner-invitation field with 26%, while Obama and McCain tied for second place at 15%. --Time Hunh? I thought everyone in America regarded Hillary as a vicious, power-mad psycho automaton with no human feelings. That's what the press has told me for fifteen years -- it can't possibly be untrue, can it? posted by Steve M. | 7:33 PM | JOE KLEIN ON CLASS -- AND SEX In a Time magazine blog post last night, Joe Klein praised James Webb -- or perhaps it would more accurate to say that he used his praise of Webb as a stick to beat John Kerry with ("Jim Webb and John Kerry, two Vietnam war heroes, passed each other on the up and down escalators in the past 24 hours--and there is a link between Webb's rise and Kerry's fall.... here, for once was a Democrat who palpably didn't drink chablis.... I can see Jim Webb sitting down the end of the bar, with a shot and a beer...."). Over at Whiskey Fire, Thers is livid ("Is Klein in junior high school? ... Webb's speech was a good speech because he was right: it is immoral to get people killed for nothing... People are dying, and Klein is measuring penises and wondering who he wants to have a beer with"). Webb did have biography and attitude on his side Tuesday night, but Thers has a point -- Webb's speech was impressive because he said the right things, without apology or equivocation. Thers looks at Klein's post and sees phony populism and an effete reporter's idealization of a tough guy. But there's something more going on. Notice what else Klein says: Kerry, whom I've known for many years, was always a different, more awkward guy in public than he was with his Vietnam pals--and, according to one of his closest Vietnam pals, he'd even stopped being loose with them in private in recent years: "We lost him when he married Teresa." ... It showed...all the time. It always looked like he was saying what he'd been told to say. Ah, there it is -- We lost him when he married Teresa. It's the ball and chain's fault! Isn't that always the way? I bet I'm not wrong to think of Klein as just another boomer who grew up on the sexual attitudes of Mailer and Kerouac, and who still thinks of women as imprisoners of men's wild, free souls at best, and as succubi and castrators at worst. If we really want to see what Klein thinks of women and the working class, we need only look at his novel Primary Colors. Here's part of what Don Foster -- the guy who first figured out that Klein was Anonymous -- wrote about Primary Colors in his book Author Unknown: As depicted in Primary Colors, the Clinton/Stanton figure makes you mad. In fact, someone should punch him. Actually, someone does punch him: the Hillary/Susan figure smacks him right in the kisser on page 122. This from a woman who could "come after your scrawny little ding-a-ling with a pair of garden shears." ... The two kinds of females in Primary Colors are bitches and bimbos. Jack Stanton is married to one kind while chasing the other. But here, too, Henry [the novel's narrator] is ambivalent. Apart from his one-night stand with Susan, Henry has only a brief fling with the vaguely asexual Daisy. She pulls off her shirt and asks for sex: "'I'm practically a guy ... up top,' she said. She did have a nice -- pert, sexy in a businesslike way -- bottom. 'Okay,'" says Henry -- though he finds most women unappetizing, or frightening. For example, there's Libby, a 250-pound women's libber, who points guns at men's crotches and threatens to blast away their genitals, just like Hillary/Susan with her garden shears. Though Henry and his creator, Anonymous, both love to use the F-word whenever possible, they both have trouble imagining anyone actually performing it. The sexual liaisons between Henry and Susan and Henry and Daisy are so totally unconvincing that Henry himself can hardly believe they happened. Together with campaign director Richard Jemmons/James Carville (who "looks like he was sired during the love scene from Deliverance"), Henry finds candidate Stanton's weakness for a "hairslut" utterly perplexing. The two men lie on Henry's hotel bed, chuckling over Stanton's weakness for Cashmere McLeod, who looks "hilarious: truck-stop pinups." Stanton's bimbo "had breasts, that was clear enough. But the rest of her body remained a mystery, as did the quality of her mind." While you're shaking your head over the tangled, tortured sex thoughts of this great admirer of manliness, savor those last few details -- thus Joe Klein, champion of the working class. ***** One more quote from Klein's post: For years, Democrats have been having difficulty selling their economic message, in part because the salesmen were so...unlikely. They could promise universal health care, free college, whatever--but it didn't make a difference if they O-Ra-Ted the way John Kerry did. Er, Joe? Ever hear FDR speak? Go here and listen to a few of the Fireside Chats. Then talk to me about working people's disgust at wealthy Democrats with upper-class enunciation. ***** (Whiskey Fire link via Atrios.) posted by Steve M. | 11:56 AM | JUST TO EVEN THE SCORE, THE PRESS OWES US TEN THOUSAND ARTICLES ABOUT RUDY GIULIANI'S COMBOVER Today's New York Sun looks at Hillary Clinton's webcasts and explains to us all what's really important: ...While Mrs. Clinton is well dressed in the video, she needs to work on her posture, according to Ms. von Sperling. By crossing an arm over her body on the sofa, Mrs. Clinton appears defensive, or like she is hiding something. "Its very irresponsible of her publicist or the camera man not to point it out," Ms. von Sperling said.... The red suit jacket sends a confident and fitting message to voters, according to Ms. von Sperling. "Presidents frequently wear dark suits and a red tie for important speeches," she said. She also called slimming the black shirt Mrs. Clinton chose to wear.... Her choice of necklace was a "cunning" and "clever" decision, according to Ms. von Sperling. The ambiguous pendant is difficult to see clearly in the video. It sits on her neck in the style of a Christian cross and is of a similar shape, but upon close examination appears not be a cross at all.... Mercifully, this ends after twelve paragraphs. At least for now. You know there's much more to come, because, as everyone knows, to be a Democrat with a serious shot at the presidency is to be a creature of artifice, while Republicans, needlessly to say, are simple and plain and genuine. posted by Steve M. | 7:10 AM | Wednesday, January 24, 2007 PRINT THE LEGEND Posted at MoJo Blog last night: MSNBC is running (and rerunning and rerunning) a comment on the ticker on the bottom of its screen that says something to the effect of: the working class will be disappointed to learn that Nancy Pelosi's outfit cost more than an average American family's first home. I'd like to see some proof of that. The comment is attributed to Andrew Noyes writing on Chris Matthew's group blog, Hardblogger. Yet, a search of all the posts on Hardblogger tonight turn up nothing. Update: Just saw it again. It's probably run a dozen times by now.... Actually, it's from Mike Barnicle at Hardblogger, and if you're wondering where he got his numbers, the answer, by his own admission, is that he pulled them out of his ass. Math has never been my strong suit. And I have difficulty balancing my check book. But you don't have to be Stephen Hawking to figure out that A. Nancy Pelosi's outfit cost more than the average American paid for their first home and B. there is a pretty high degree of difficulty involved in balancing the federal budget yet the leader of the free world just told us, "We can do so without raising taxes." And half the people in the hall - Bush's half -stood and cheered. Huh? I'm sure the quite wealthy phony-populist Barnicle is pleased with himself for that equal-opportunity outrage on behalf of the little guy. But why was MSNBC running the Pelosi -- and only the Pelosi part -- on the ticker? It was just a quip -- why run it when many idiots might think it's a fact? posted by Steve M. | 3:49 PM | THE WORD "THE" In The Washington Post, Glenn Kessler leads his fact-check of the State of the Union address with an examination of President Bush's use of the expression "the enemy" -- which is a particular pet peeve of mine. Bush referred to "the enemy" and "the terrorists" repeatedly throughout the speech; sometimes the expressions were interchangeable for him. This is the most Orwellian verbal trope in his repertoire -- the way he uses the tiny word "the." It's meant to work subconsciously, using the listener's innate understanding of how the English language works -- "the" means there's no other. Kessler gets into specifics about "the enemy" -- some of the people Bush describes this way are Sunnis, some are Shiites; some are terrorist groups, some are sitting governments; some have a planet-wide focus, others a much narrower one; some utterly reject the West, others trade with Western nations. But the real point, for Bush, is to persuade you that there's only one war -- which means that opposition to any act of warfare by his administration can be defined as opposition to the entire fight against jihadists. Bush used to strongly suggest that Saddam was interchangeable with bin Laden; now, instead of curtailing that tendency, he's expanded it, implying that every olive-skinned person who's ever tried to kill or injure any American anywhere for any reason is part of one big Enemy. The press mostly ignores it, probably assuming it's just more of his macho Texas talk. It isn't. It's a carefully crafted technique of deceptive subliminal persuasion. posted by Steve M. | 1:06 PM | By the way, anyone who tells you that the State of the Union speech had a "conciliatory" tone is obviously working from the prepared text. It's not just that -- as The Wall Street Journal's blog notes -- the prepared text had Bush congratulating "the Democratic majority" but Bush actually congratulated "the Democrat majority." (Referring to the opposition party as "the Democrat Party" has been a wingnut tic for a generation.) It's the fact that he delivered the vast majority of the speech in his now-familiar hectoring, berating tone, implying that we'd damn well better see the world his way and do as he says. He has some nerve doing this, given the fact that he's had way for six years and has run the country into a ditch. Bill Clinton delivered six of these speeches to opposition Congresses, one just after being impeached, and he managed to maintain a "happy warrior" tone throughout, an enthusiasm for the idea of getting things done. Bush -- childish enough to like the idea of undermining the graciousness of what his speech shop wrote for him about Nancy Pelosi with a code-word cheap shot at her party -- rarely if ever seems like a guy who simply wants to succeed (or wants America to succeed); it's always vitally important to him that Democrats either bend to his will or fail. That's why Jim Webb's hard-hitting Democratic response hit the right note. Webb was responding to the actual president we've had for six years: the sullen, stubborn Bush. Democrats now know that there's never any possibility of compromising with Bush, never a chance at dialogue, and Webb is just the guy to deliver that message: Tonight we are calling on this President to take similar action, in both areas. If he does, we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way. This is called "fighting fire with fire." **** ...And no, I'm not saying Webb and Bush are exactly analogous. Webb's has been an honorable life; Bush hasn't done anything right in his life, ever, except win status for himself. And Webb's challenge to Bush genuinely seemed to be uttered in sorrow -- he doesn't seem to savor the prospect of vanquishing his opponent, unlike Bush. posted by Steve M. | 7:11 AM | Tuesday, January 23, 2007 MY STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS, BY GEORGE W. BUSH 1) A couple of minutes of being nice to Nancy Pelosi. 2) A couple of minutes of generally telling everybody what idiots they are if they don't do what I say. 3) A really boring laundry list of domestic issues. 4) The same Iraq speech I always give -- but I like it because it really pumps me up to think about how evil The Enemy is and what jerks the Democrats are for not hating The Enemy as much as I do. 5) Introductions of a bunch of people I'd never heard of until a couple of days ago -- I don't know what any of them have to do with the state of the union, but talking about that guy who got run over by a train sure got a lot of people to applaud me. 6) I get the hell out and go to sleep. posted by Steve M. | 10:33 PM | Good thing this didn't happen at any school Barack Obama attended: FORT WORTH, Texas -- A woman who had held a tenure-track position was denied tenure at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2004, according to a Jan. 19 Dallas Morning News story. The professor, Sheri Klouda, was given a tenure-track position to teach Hebrew in Southwestern's school of theology when she received her Ph.D. at the Fort Worth, Texas, campus in 2002, according to the newspaper report.... Van McClain, chairman of Southwestern's board of trustees, told the Dallas Morning News that the seminary has returned to its "traditional, confessional and biblical position" that a woman should not instruct men in theology courses or in biblical languages. ...McClain also told the newspaper, "I do not know of any women teaching in any of the SBC seminaries presently in the area of theology or biblical languages. In my estimation all of the seminaries have sought to be more consistent with most Southern Baptists' understanding of Scripture on the matter." ...The newspaper noted that [President Paige] Patterson's wife Dorothy continues to teach in Southwestern’s school of theology, with McClain explaining that she teaches courses in women's studies that are attended only by women.... An AP story offers a clarification for us heathens: Southwestern is taking the "traditional, confessional and biblical position" that women should not teach men in theology or biblical languages, McClain said. That position is based on a Biblical verse in which the Apostle Paul says, "I permit no woman to teach or have authority over a man." That's 1 Timothy 2:12. In the New International Version it's "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent." Now, given the number of times we've been told recently that Islam is utterly irreconcilable with Western values because of this or that intemperate passage in the Koran -- which we're supposed to assume every Muslim on the planet takes literally -- what are we to conclude from this story? Aren't we forced to conclude that Christianity is hopelessly incompatible with the Western belief in gender equality? posted by Steve M. | 5:09 PM | WE HAVE A WINNER Rudy, John, Newt, you can just dissolve your exploratory committees -- you're toast. The race for 2008 GOP presidential nomination is over. Mitt Romney has secured the critically important Dennis Hastert endorsement. posted by Steve M. | 3:08 PM | THESE PEOPLE ARE INSANE The New York Times has a story about the Hillary Clinton webcast; here's the gloss on that Times story at Lucianne.com: Hillary and her fake movie memory busted right out of the box. Hunh? I go to the revelant Lucianne thread and learn that the alleged debunking is at Hugh Hewitt's blog. Here it is: Asked about her favorite movie, she replied in part: "Probably when I was in college and law school, Casablanca. You know, I watched it, I don't know how many times, and you know it was always so just much fun, and by the time we watched it over and over again we were actually reciting the dialogue" ... Mrs. Clinton graduated from Wellesley in 1969 and Yale Law School in 1973. Perhaps Betamax machines and VCRs made an early appearance at those campuses, or there was a film theater nearby that showed nothing but Casablanca, but the idea that she watched it "over and over again," is one of those "hmmm" moments that catch your attention, like Al Gore's dog's Shiloh's medicine or John Kerry's magic hat. Oh, Jesus. What is wrong with these people? OK, kids, here's a little history lesson from a middle-aged guy. Back in the Jurassic Era, before Netflix and DVDs and VHS and Betamax, there were revival houses -- theaters that screened nothing but old (or relatively old) movies. They tended to thrive in -- duh! -- big cities and college towns. (I believe New Haven would qualify as both. Please fact-check me on this.) Campus organizations also screened classics -- every weekend, as a rule. Usually these were film societies, but sometimes they were just non-film organizations looking to raise money. Oh, and there was a telecommunications medium known as "late night TV," where genuinely old movies showed up on a regular basis. (Back then, virtually every TV channel was Turner Classic Movies after midnight.) When I was a teenager in Boston, shortly after Hillary got her law degree, you really could see classic films like Casablanca every few months. If Hewitt claims not to know this, he's either lying or oblivious -- he's Harvard class of '78; what does he think was going on in the '70s and '60s at theaters like the Orson Welles Cinema and the Brattle? By the way, about the Brattle.... In the 1950s the Brattle Theater was bought by two gentlemen who started programming older films for the Harvard students. They chose 'Casablanca'...which wasn't an obscure film...it had won an Academy Award for Best Picture...but it was about ten years old and they screened it during final exams. Students started coming and then it became a mission among older Harvard students to bring freshmen, dates, and others to the film. Eventually, people started showing up in costumes and began speaking the dialogue and standing up to sing. It was the original "Rocky Horror Picture Show" -- the original audience experience in a movie theater in a way that had never happened before in movie theaters. So -- at least in Cambridge, starting in the 1950s -- people did see Casablanca so often that they could recite the dialogue. Maybe Hugh even knew some of them. So why not Wellesley in the '60s or New Haven in the early '70s? So there's one more phony scandal. I wonder how far up the media food chain this one will go. (Though you have to feel sorry for the wingnuts --they need something now that the Obama's-a-secret-Muslim lie has been thoroughly debunked by CNN.) **** One more thing: In Hillary's webcast, she says her favorite recent movie is Out of Africa. Hewitt's gloss: Finally, the "Out of Africa" reference may lose her the election. Really. That's frightening. Is this supposed to be a joke? And if not, does anybody have the slightest idea what he's talking about? posted by Steve M. | 10:51 AM | PATHETIC Bush's health care plan: The big change in the tax code would encourage an additional 5 million people to buy health insurance, the Treasury Department concluded. But critics say the plan wouldn't help the remaining 42 million Americans who have no health insurance. That's the big Bush breakthrough -- getting a whopping 11% of the uninsured on the insurance rolls, while leaving 89% still uninsured -- according to his administration's own rosy projections. (If this is the administration's boast, imagine what the reality must look like.) And in this AP story, Kate Baicker, a member of the Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, is even less optimistic, talking about "upwards of 3 million or more newly insured people" -- which would leave approximately 94% of the uninsured uninsured. And who pays to insure this tiny fraction of the uninsured? As the AP story notes, About 30 million Americans could face a tax hike under President George W. Bush's plan to expand health insurance coverage and address rising health care costs, the White House said on Monday. Ah, but: Baicker said about 30 million Americans could face higher taxes under the president's plan "if they didn't change their behavior" -- meaning giving up an employer's more generous health plan in favor of a less-costly one. Yeah, blame the ordinary citizens -- white-collar people, union members -- who can manage to get a good health plan. Talk about them the way you talk about drug addicts -- wag your finger and say they need to "change their behavior." That's the way to win the public over. posted by Steve M. | 9:00 AM | Monday, January 22, 2007 Bush falls to 28% approval in the CBS poll. **** Bush is going to end up the most unpopular president in history. Remember, I said that here first. --Gore Vidal in the April 18, 2002, San Francisco Chronicle, when Bush was at 76% in the CBS poll posted by Steve M. | 10:38 PM | PRIORITIES Shorter RedState.com: "The loss of 25 troops in Iraq in one day is bad for America -- but not as bad as the fact that well-crafted documentary films about sexual perverts are allowed to see the light of day." posted by Steve M. | 5:34 PM | "N.M. GOV THROWS SOMBRERO INTO RING" That's the actual New York Post headline for an Associated Press story originally titled (by AP) ""N.M. Governor Enters White House Race." I wonder how long it will be before the headline of a Post story on Obama includes the words "spear" and "chuck." (Via Media Matters.) posted by Steve M. | 3:20 PM | SORRY TO BREAK THIS TO YOU, FRANK, BUT WORDS ACTUALLY MEAN THINGS GOP pollster/strategist Frank Luntz at the Huffington Post: Senator Barbara Boxer can't really believe that a single woman without children is totally incapable of feeling emotional loss just because she hasn't had any children in combat, can she? Yet that's exactly what she said to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Oh, very sly, Frank. You know perfectly well that's not "exactly what she said" -- or meant. Here is "exactly what she said": Now, the issue is who pays the price, who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, within immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families, and I just want to bring us back to that fact. There's nothing in there -- nothing -- about the ability or inability to feel emotional loss. All Boxer said was that Rice isn't among the people who are going to lose close relatives in combat in Iraq -- and neither is Boxer. But you're a Republican, Frank, so of course you're not going to pass up one last opportunity to twist Boxer's words. Adding "exactly" is just a brazen way of trying to conceal your deliberate distortion of the truth. **** (The rest of Luntz's piece is just more in that vein -- feigned shock at the supposed harshness of a few mild utterances by Democrats. In every case, he's reprising a phony squeal of outrage that's already made the rounds of the right-wing media and the Internet right and should have been laid to rest by now.) posted by Steve M. | 2:55 PM | Dinesh D'Souza in a Salon interview to plug his new book: ...take somebody like Ted Kennedy. Go through his speeches over the last three years. Find every speech in which he refers to Saddam Hussein and bin Laden and take all the worst things that he says about them and line them all up, and then take all the things he says about Bush and the right wing, and you line them all up, and you compare them, you'd make an amazing observation, and that is that the condemnations of Saddam Hussein and bin Laden are quite sparse. They do exist, but they are not profuse. I want to flag this, in particular, because I know (from watching the mainstream media's reaction to Ann Coulter's verbal roadside bombs) what's going to be said about D'Souza -- yeah, maybe he goes too far, but isn't he basically right about some of these things? The media accepted Coulter's premise that only on the left did 9/11 survivors take political stands -- ignoring the simple fact that a number of family members of 9/11 survivors lined up in '04 for Bush. What's going to happen with D'Souza is that the Ted Kennedy line is going to be accepted as fact -- because, hey, it's Ted Kennedy, the big fat irresponsible liberal. What Ted Kennedy has actually said, in speech after speech after speech, is: Saddam was a bad guy, but he wasn't affiliated with Al Qaeda and he wasn't on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons or other WMDs -- whereas Al Qaeda is still really, really dangerous. Getting bogged down in Iraq was bad because it made fighting Al Qaeda and other jihadists harder. So when you're watching some cable chat show or the Today show and no one is willing to challenge the premise that Ted Kennedy criticizes Bush more than he criticizes bin Laden, remember, for instance, this Ted Kennedy speech from September 27, 2004: ... Our preoccupation with Iraq has given Al Qaeda more than two full years to regroup and plan murderous new assaults on us. We know that Al Qaeda will try to attack America again and again here at home, if it possibly can. Yet instead of staying focused on the real war on terror, President Bush rushed headlong into an unnecessary war in Iraq.... The Bush administration's focus on Iraq has left us needlessly more vulnerable to an Al Qaeda attack with a nuclear weapon. The greatest threat of all to our homeland is a nuclear attack. A mushroom cloud over any American city is the ultimate nightmare, and the risk is all too real. Usama bin Laden calls the acquisition of a nuclear device a "religious duty." Documents captured from a key Al Qaeda aide three years ago revealed plans even then to smuggle high-grade radioactive materials into the United States in shipping containers. If Al Qaeda can obtain a nuclear weapon, they will certainly use it -- on New York, or Washington, or any of America's other major cities. The greatest danger we face in the days and weeks and months ahead is a nuclear 9/11, and we hope and pray that it is not already too late to prevent. The war in Iraq has made the mushroom cloud more likely, not less likely.... Yeah, Ted Kennedy pounds away at Bush, but he says bin Laden is hell-bent on trying to kill all of us with nuclear weapons. I think that's kinda harsh, even if D'Souza doesn't. And if no at network or cable news can bear to do the extraordinarily difficult work of fact-checking D'Souza on this, my advice is: It's called "Google." Use it. posted by Steve M. | 10:52 AM | Sunday, January 21, 2007 Least believable AP lede ever: Iraq's prime minister has dropped his protection of an anti-American cleric's Shiite militia after U.S. intelligence convinced him the group was infiltrated by death squads, two officials said Sunday. "No! You're shittin' me! Really? Show me the video.... Holy crap, you're right -- they cut all those guys' heads off! Jeez, I am speechless. And they seemed like such swell guys, too! What can I say? This was happening right under my nose and I completely missed it. Thank God you guys had the eagle eye!" posted by Steve M. | 11:12 PM | THEY ALL LOOK ALIKE Ex-Dan Quayle speechwriter Lisa Schiffren, writing at Commentary's new blog about Barack Obama: He's black, but not militant, not Al Sharpton. White mom, absent African dad: almost like Tiger Woods. I love those last six words -- absent African dad: almost like Tiger Woods. Yeah, if by "almost like" you mean "just about exactly the opposite of": Earl [Woods] guided and motivated Tiger in his rise to the top of the golf world.... In an excerpt published in USA WEEKEND, Earl said he had Tiger hearing jazz music when he was 5 days old. As Tiger lay in the crib, Earl would say, "Daddy loves you. I am here for you." By the time Tiger was 2, Earl was drilling him on mental toughness, "an outgrowth of my upbringing and my years as a Green Beret." "I pulled every nasty, dirty, obnoxious trick on him," Earl wrote. He tossed balls in front of Tiger while he putted. He dropped bags of clubs behind Tiger when he hit tee shots. He'd cough during the backswing. "I played with his mind," Earl wrote. Earl cautioned that his approach wasn't for every father and every son but it worked because he and Tiger had a special bond, built from the beginning. "The best thing about those practices was that my father always kept it fun," Tiger wrote. "It's amazing how much you learn when you truly enjoy doing something." ... As Earl's heart disease and other ailments progressed, he attended fewer events, and none since the end of 2004. When Tiger won The Masters in 2005 for the fourth time, he said the victory was "for Pops," his favorite name for his father....  Yeah, that seems "almost like" having an "absent African dad," right? Of course, Earl Woods wasn't African -- he was an American of (mostly) African ancestry. And Tiger's mother isn't white -- she was born in Thailand of (mostly) Asian ancestry. (If you really care, you can get fuller, if contradictory, accounts of the ethnic makeup of Tiger's parents here and here.) But to Schiffren, I guess it's way too much trouble trying to tell all those octoroons and quadroons and macacas and what-have-yous apart. posted by Steve M. | 12:05 PM | Saturday, January 20, 2007 FREDDY TEAMS UP WITH JASON In case it wasn't obvious when Fox News gleefully spread Insight magazine's smear of Barack Obama (secret Muslim!) and Hillary Clinton (gutter-level opposition researcher looking for dirt on Obama!), the Murdoch media crime family is working hand in glove with the Moonie media crime family to damage the two Democratic front-runners simultaneously. Latest evidence: The formerly respectable Times of London, now a Murdoch paper, dresses up this turd for a posh audience: Obama 'was educated in madrassa' * Senator hid time there, says article *Clinton distances herself from claims You know the story by now, so I won't bore you with the main points, but I will note that near the end we get this: Mr Obama, who has spent his adult life in Chicago, calls himself a Christian and says that he believes in God. Yeah -- he says that, but everybody knows you can't trust those Moo-slimes. Oh, and this: A source close to the Clinton campaign told The Times, a day before the Insight article was published, that they do not want to be seen as attacking Mr Obama or digging for dirt, but that they would be happy for another Democrat contender to criticise him. Yeah, that Hitlery -- so sleazy she wants to frame somebody else for the crime. (A bit of projection on your part, Rupe and Reverend Moon?) And I like that "Democrat contender," as in "Democrat Party" -- just in case we weren't sure this was a right-wing hit job. posted by Steve M. | 4:34 PM | HILLARY IN SHOCKING "BLOSSOM-GATE" SCANDAL!!!! Good Lord -- right-wingers will try to turn anything into a scandal. This is from NewsBusters: If the timing came as a bit of surprise, nothing could have been less unexpected than Hillary's "I'm In" announcement of today. But have a look at the video of her announcement. Rather than her "let's chat" rap, please focus on the background. Look out the door. Presumably the announcement was shot in one of Hillary's homes: Chappaqua or Georgetown. Now I know it's been a mild winter, but even so, surely the leaves are gone from the trees and bushes in either spot. And check out the yellow spot in the bushes. At first I thought it was just a warm dapple of sunshine. But freeze the frame when, about 1/4 of the way through, Hillary says "how to end the deficits that threaten Social Security." That's not sunshine -- those are flowers in bloom. ...what's the story? Did Hillary have this video in the can during all those months while she was claiming to be making up her mind? Was it a carefully staged artificial background? .... Yes, wouldn't it be just appalling and sinister and devious if she taped this a while ago? Or taped it recently at the house of a friend or supporter who lives in a warm climate? THAT WOULD BE THE HEIGHT OF DISHONESTY!! SHE MUST BE STOPPED!!!!!! Wait -- I know! She taped it on her secret fact-finding mission to Indonesia to learn about Barack Obama's concealed Muslim past! Yeah, that's it! Indonesia's tropical! There's simply no limit to the depths of her depravity.... posted by Steve M. | 12:15 PM | Friday, January 19, 2007 HITCH'S HEROES This is the flag of Kurdistan in my lapel but my Kurdish comrades say that the--their main responsibility is for the new Iraq now. And they who would have every right to say we want to get out of this prison house of the state are willing to still cooperate to help to emancipate the rest of it. I think that's an extraordinary sacrifice on their part. Deserves more recognition than it's had. --Christopher Hitchens, March 25, 2005 **** ...Kurdish soldiers from northern Iraq, who are mostly Sunnis but not Arabs, are deserting the army to avoid the civil war in Baghdad.... ...[Ameen] Kareem said he knew that deserting was risky, but he said he'd rather be behind bars in Kurdistan than a "soldier in Baghdad's fire." Without the language and with his Kurdish features, he was sure he would stand out, he said. He's a Kurd, he said, and he has no reason to become a target in an Arab war. ...Farman Mohammed, 42, celebrated the Muslim Eid holiday with his family last month and didn't go back when he heard that he might be deployed to Baghdad. Afraid for his life, he found a new job and settled in with his family. "The fanatic Sunnis in Baghdad kill the Shiites, and vice versa. Both of them are outraged against the Kurds. They will not hesitate to kill us and accuse us of being collaborators with the occupiers," he said. "How can we face them alone?" Those who are planning to go to Baghdad said they didn't want to be considered cowards.... --Leila Fadel and Yaseen Taha for McClatchy Newspapers, story published today **** (McClatchy article also available here.) posted by Steve M. | 10:53 PM | Wesley Pruden in today's Washington Times: Mzz Pelosi and her "new Democrats" have just about completed their legislative agenda of "the first 100 hours." By the arithmetic the rest of us learned in grade school, hundreds of hours have elapsed since the clock started ticking with the convening of the 110th Congress on Jan. 4, but Democrats new and old march to a distant drummer, a confusing cadence and a stopped clock. "We're just counting the legislative hours," the speaker's spokesman explains. (Only in Congress is someone employed to speak for a speaker.) By just counting actual working hours and minutes a clever Congress, excuse the oxymoron, might stretch out a hundred hours to cover an entire congressional session.... Congress didn't invent euphemy, the hiding of the evidence of a misdeed behind a perfumed word, but it has perfected the art. Euphemisms can camouflage manifold sins and disguise a mountain as a molehill. Coming up in Mr. Pruden's next column: NBA basketball games -- somebody needs to investigate the fact that they don't take exactly 48 minutes to play! posted by Steve M. | 3:21 PM | Another "Maybe this is the day Daddy will stop drinking" pundit moment, this one courtesy of Peggy Noonan, who's writing today about the upcoming State of the Union address and the Bush years in genedral: It's been an era of soft thinking and hard words.... it's not getting us anywhere. And it's limiting debate. It's making people fearful. It is time for a kind of verbal amnesty in which thoughts are considered before motives are judged. An admission that the White House is as responsible for this situation as everyone else would help clear the air--and just might prompt some soul-searching in members of the audience. An honest plea here could break through the cement that has hardened over the debate. Who could answer harshly when a president who loves his country admitted the problem and pleaded for change? That's what might really hit reset. Why on earth do pundits persist in saying things like this? When will they wake up and realize it's never going to happen? Is it really not going to be until he gets on the helicopter on 1/20/09? Or maybe even later, down the line, when he dies? Can we at least hope that then they'll finally smack their foreheads and say, "Gosh, he was always like that, wasn't he?" **** More from Peggy: Part of the reason the air is so charged now, so highly emotional, is that many of the leaders in the drama seem, lately, to be re-enacting. One senses a number of antiwar politicians are thinking: This is my Bobby Kennedy moment. We are re-enacting 1968. See how I jab the air as I speak against war. On the other side it is 1939, and they are Churchill. The Bushies have been reenacting, all right, but they're just using 1939 and Churchill for sets and art decoration, like a Shakespeare director who retains the original dialogue but sets As You Like It on Muscle Beach in 1964 and decks out the cast in full Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Rove has been reenacting 1988; the war was supposed to be his Willie Horton ad, the one-shot Democrat-killer. Cheney has been reenacting the Watergate years, in the hope that the believers in unchallenged Executive Branch power get to win this time. Bush? He's reenacting some night he came home drunk and was told, "You're never going to amount to anything! Why can't you be like your brother Jeb?" At that moment, I'm not even sure he knew who Churchill was. posted by Steve M. | 12:53 PM | PROTOCOLS OF OBAMA, PART 2 This is very sleazy: the Moonie periodical Insight has posted an article questioning whether Barack Obama is really a secret Muslim -- and is claiming that speculation about Obama's true faith is coming from Hillary Clinton's camp. Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage? This is the question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's camp is asking about Sen. Barack Obama. An investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic Party has discovered that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia. Sources close to the background check, which has not yet been released, said Mr. Obama, 45, spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia. "He was a Muslim, but he concealed it," the source said. "His opponents within the Democrats hope this will become a major issue in the campaign." ... Sources said the background check, conducted by researchers connected to Senator Clinton, disclosed details of Mr. Obama's Muslim past. The sources said the Clinton camp concluded the Illinois Democrat concealed his prior Muslim faith and education.... The article goes on to detail the alleged Obama deception. It's barely distinguishable from the crude e-mail I quoted on Wednesday, which is making the rounds. But ascribing the search for Obama's past to Hillary -- that's clever. Insight gets to palm it off while pretending to be merely an innocent conduit of information; meanwhile, Hillary is portrayed as a sneaky, conniving, vengeful schemer -- just like a woman, just like a Clinton. Maybe this won't go mainstream -- but it's already more than just a cheesy e-mail smear campaign, and we have nearly two years to go before Election Day '08. My guess is that there's going to be a "lite" version of this attack that does reach the mainstream -- namely, that Obama's really an atheist or a believer in religion-as-buffet, and he's lying about his Christianity. Read the Snopes debunking of the Obama's-a-Muslim e-mail; note that Obama talks in his books about his father's atheism, his stepfather's status as a non-practicing Muslim, and his mother's religious eclecticism ("On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites"). The e-mail claims he joined the United Church of Christ because it's "politically expedient"; I can easily imagine cable talk-show hosts, goaded by new-style GOP Swift-boaters, asking whether he might have done this not because he's a Muslim and is lying about it, but because he has no faith, or is (gasp!) open to non-Judeo-Christian religious ideas, and is lying about it. And getting that into the mainstream could drag the whole sleazy slander into the public consciousness. **** And then there's another angle: Thomas Lipson, writing at the American Thinker -- a marginal right-wing site that tries to maintain a phony air of respectability -- describes Obama as a "Muslim forever," according to Islamic law, because he had a Muslim father, then argues that Obama's current Christianity "would seem to make him a potential target for death, according to at least the more militant adherents of Sharia law." Lipson expresses the hope that an enterprising journalist will question Obama about whether or not he feels threatened by his apostasy, and ask him for an outright denunciation of the practice of enforcing the death penalty, and a call for religious freedom in Islamic countries. These people are going to try every way they can to portray Islam as sinister and then hang Islam around Obama's neck. The only question is whether the mainstream press will give them an opening to do so. **** UPDATE: Wow, this made it up the media food chain in a hurry: This morning, Fox News featured a segment highlighting a right-wing report that Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) attended an Islamic "madrassa" school as a 6-year-old child. Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy pointed out that madrassas are "financed by Saudis" and "teach this Wahhabism which pretty much hates us," then declared, "The big question is: was that on the curriculum back then?" Later, a caller to the show questioned whether Obama's schooling means that "maybe he doesn't consider terrorists the enemy." Fox anchor Brian Kilmeade responded, "Well, we'll see about that." The Fox hosts failed to correct the false claim that Obama is Muslim. One caller, referring to Obama, said, "I think a Muslim would be fine in the presidency, better than Hillary. At least you know what the Muslims are up to." Anchor Gretchen Carlson responded, "We want to be clear, too, that this isn't all Muslims, of course, we would only be concerned about the kind that want to blow us up." ... Twenty-one months before the election and we're already in the sewer. Rot in hell, Rupert. posted by Steve M. | 8:07 AM | Thursday, January 18, 2007 Everybody thinks I'm crazy when I say Giuliani can win the GOP nomination, but here he is leading McCain 28%-20% among likely Republican primary voters, according to Rasmussen. This comes at the same time that an American Research Group poll shows McCain's support among New Hampshire independents plummeting, from 49% to 29%. McCain still leads Rudy 29%-25% among likely New Hampshire GOP primary voters, according to ARG, but Giuliani's beating McCain in Iowa and Nevada, while running a strong second in supposedly too-conservative-for-a-guy-who-dressed-in-drag South Carolina (results: McCain 35%, Rudy 28%, Gingrich third with 15%). Oh, and please note that Gingrich is running a strong third in all the ARG state polls I've mentioned, as well as in the Rasmussen poll. Romney and the rest are way back. As things get worse in Iraq, I think GOP voters are going to get more and more desperate for a guy they think is a testosterone-heavy hero on a white horse. I think, as a result, Rudy's numbers among Republicans are going to go up. I think he's their Obama -- not someone they don't know much about, but someone they don't want to know much about. They've heard things they don't like, and they've heard things they love; they're trying to pretend they haven't heard the former, and are hoping that the latter means he'll save the world. posted by Steve M. | 7:18 PM | COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVE Texas governor Rick Perry attended a church service just before Election Day presided over by a minister who believes war with Iran is a fulfillment of biblical prophesy, and who said at the service that non-Christians are "going straight to hell with a non-stop ticket"; asked about the sermon afterward, Perry expressed agreement with it. Now we get more mainstream values from Perry: the featured entertainer at his inaugural ball last night was Ted Nugent, a good friend of the governor's, who wore a Confederate T-shirt and said insulting things about non-English speakers, using machine guns as props. Hmmmm ... what is it that Dinesh D'Souza says about our global struggles? Oh, yes: ...traditional Muslims ... would feel a lot better about America if they could see the "other" America, which is say, Red America, the America they don't see on television, where people go to work and look after their families and subscribe to traditional values and go to church. Bush should project more of this America to the rest of the world, especially to the traditional cultures of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Yeah, maybe he can ask Rick Perry to help him out. **** UPDATE: Nugent has responded at his Web site: for the record, all on tape & film, there was no AK47 or anything resembling 1 & my only immigration statement was that WANGO TANGO was the official immigration themesong. These lefties are terminally inebriated on dishonesty. so be it. The story that said "Machine guns, including an AK-47, were his props" appeared in the San Antonio Express-News, not some paper for latte-swilling coast-dwellers, so I trust the reporter -- and I'm guessing that if something shows up on the inevitable leaked video that looks to the average person like an AK, Nuge, as a gun connoisseur, will say whatever is being brandished doesn't meet his exacting "resemblance" standard. ("Look at that gun sight! It's a 32-P-08! Everyone knows the AK's gunsight is a 32-P-09!")* The "lefties" who are "terminally inebriated on dishonesty" include, according to the Express-News story, Royal Masset, former political director of the Republican Party of Texas, who says of the decision to feature Nugent, "I think it was a horrible choice. I hope nobody approved it." And as for "Wango Tango" being "the official immigration themesong" ... hunh? Why -- because it sounds like some furriner's name? Or because it's about hot sex? (You know that's all those furriners ever think about, apart from sneakin' across the border so they can apply for welfare....) Whatever -- here are the lyrics; here's a video of the Nuge performing the song. Maybe you can figure it out. *This is probably not realistic gun talk at all, but I don't give a rat's ass, Ted. --SM. posted by Steve M. | 12:01 PM | BUSH/KINDLY TV DOCTOR SMACKDOWN! You know Bush is in trouble when even the Kindly Doctor Guy on TV gives him a tongue-lashing. Last night that happened -- first ABC reported this news: The number of deaths from cancer saw the largest drop ever recorded between 2003 and 2004, according to an American Cancer Society (ACS) report released today.... This year's decline is the second consecutive year-by-year drop in the number of deaths caused by cancer.... Anchorman Charles Gibson brought on ABC's medical commentator, Dr. Tim Johnson, for a comment. The exchange isn't online, but here's part of what was said: CHARLES GIBSON: ...The president today was pointing to all the money that the government has put into cancer research. Other people say, "Look, it's earlier diagnosis." Others say better treatment is responsible for these numbers. Some people say better living. So, what is it? DR. TIM JOHNSON: Well, it's a combination of all the above, but when the administration tries to take credit for increased spending per se, I think they're misleading. It is true that the total budget for the National Cancer Institute has gone up by 1.2 billion dollars since 2001, but most of that occurred in those early years under a Clinton initiative. The budget was actually cut last year, and the projected budget for this year is to be cut even further, so I think it's a real tragedy that we are cutting the budget for the National Cancer Institute at a time when we are on the verge of many exciting discoveries. Don't hold back, Dr. Tim. Tell us how you really feel. (Johnson, by the way, doesn't exactly live up to the liberal media stereotype -- he's an assisting minister at West Peabody Community Covenant Church in Massachusetts and the author of a book about his Christian faith.) More on cancer funding here: "I am a member of the National Cancer Advisory Board, and deeply involved in these budget debates. While no final budget is available for 2007, it is likely that there will be no increase. The budget will be flat. The key effects are on funding of grants. The pay line for grants will be at an all-time historic low of 10 percent of grants submitted." — Dr. Bruce Chabner, clinical director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center "To be short and sweet, the pay line for NIH funding is going further down, and the grants that are getting funded are being cut drastically. There simply is not enough money going towards research at a time when progress is so likely. It is a real tragedy, and academic centers must find alternate ways to fund research, and they are not easy to find." — Dr. Len Zwelling, vice president for research administration at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Enjoy those tax cuts! **** UPDATE: Think Progress has the video. posted by Steve M. | 8:02 AM | Wednesday, January 17, 2007 Least surprising news of the day, from a Freeper: Anyone see Joe Lieberman interviewed just moments ago on CNBC? Besides again coming out in strong support of President Bush's Iraq strategy, he suggested that voting for the anti-Bush resolution might cost potential Dem candidates his support in 08. He specifically referred to Hillary and Obama. He emphasized that he was an independent Democrat who would support the candidate in 08 with the strongest commitment to fighting the WOT, whether they be Republican or Independent candidates. I'd be astonished if he backs the Democrat in '08. I bet he's already started writing his '08 Republican convention speech (saved on his computer under the file name ZELL2). The only remaining question is whether he's going to be on the GOP ticket, as McCain's #2. posted by Steve M. | 7:31 PM | PROTOCOLS OF THE JUNIOR SENATOR FROM ILLINOIS The surprising thing about the 2008 presidential campaign is that Hillary Clinton may not be the Democratic candidate most frequently portrayed as a force of Pure Evil. That dubious honor just might go to Barack Obama. Here's an e-mail that's spreading rapidly. This version is from a discussion board I've never heard of -- but it's all over the place: Subject: Fw: Be Careful, voters Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (black muslim) of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya District, Kenya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas. (white atheist ). When Obama was two years old, his parents divorced and his father returned to Kenya. His mother married Lolo Soetoro -- a Muslim -- moving to Jakarta with Obama when he was six years old. Within six months he had learned to speak the Indonesian language Obama spent "two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school" in Jakarta. Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim while admitting that he was once a Muslim, mitigating that damning information by saying that, for two years, he also attended a Catholic school. Obama's father, Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was a radical Muslim who migrated from Kenya to Jakarta, Indonesia. He met Obama's mother, Ann Dunham-a white atheist from Wichita, Kansas-at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Obama, Sr. and Dunham divorced when Barack, Jr. was two. Obama's spinmeisters are now attempting to make it appear that Obama's introduction to Islam came from his father and that influence was temporary at best. In reality, the senior Obama returned to Kenya immediately following the divorce and never again had any direct influence over his son's education. Dunham married another Muslim, Lolo Soetoro who educated his stepson as a good Muslim by enrolling him in one of Jakarta's Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad on the industrialized world. --comments by my friend who forwarded to me. Since it is politically expedient to be a Christian when you are seeking political office in the United States, Obama joined the United Church of Christ to help purge any notion that he is still a Muslim. Yikes. (Snopes has a detailed refutation.) I found versions of this in this Yahoo Answers thread, the comments of this BET forum, a discussion at the Bay Area craigslist, Free Republic, Liberty Post (under the header "Barack Obama's Father Was A Terrorist") ... It gets at least 114 Google hits so far, and the presidential election is almost two years away. If Obama can get himself on the ticket, certain people are going to try their damnedest to raise doubts in the minds of as many Americans as possible about Obama's true religion and true loyalties. The people I'm talking about are powerful Republicans -- too powerful, you'd imagine, to have written something as crude as this. Right? I don't know where this really came from. I don't know who wrote it. I don't know who's posting it. It would be nice if it turned out to be the sleaziest thing that's written about Obama. But I know it won't be. posted by Steve M. | 6:30 PM | DEAR LUCIANNE Lovely little comment at your site today:  Of course, you know perfectly well, Lucianne, that last month one of the on-air personalities on KSFO -- the Disney-owned radio station that regularly features extreme Muslim-bashing and eliminationist fantasies about liberals -- called Obama a "Halfrican." So your rhetorical question is utterly phony -- you know exactly who's saying things like this about Obama. The problem is, not enough people are saying them. So you're doing your bit to spread the meme. Excellent work. If you and your radio allies keep this up, maybe Mark Halperin's next book will include a chapter called "Lucianne.com and KSFO Rule Our World." posted by Steve M. | 2:29 PM | I DO MY PART I am reminded by the good folks at NewsMax that Dinesh D'Souza's book The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 went on sale this week. As NewsMax explains, D'Souza's thesis is that Muslims are not enraged by our political freedom or democracy, but by the left's abuse of that freedom, specifically the excessive sexualization of our society. ... he argues that the growing anti-Americanism abroad is directed ... at the global spread of our debased pop culture and the leftist political ideas that liberals so proudly defend. Family collapse, "gay marriage," licentiousness, pornography, abortion on demand, the war against religion in the public square -- are all threats to traditional values in the West, as well as in the Muslim world.... Radical Muslims are simply fighting back with violence. "Thus without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened..." D'Souza writes.... I've been aware of this book since the hateful James Wolcott denounced it a couple of months ago. Ever since that time, I've asked myself: How am I personally responsible for 9/11? What can I do to prevent an attack like that from happening again? So I began to do what I could. I started attending a right-wing megachurch. I severed all ties with my gay friends. I canceled my subscriptions to The Nation and The New York Times. I deleted all the Prince songs from my iPod. I set the parental controls on my cable box to stun. I had an evangelical porn blocker installed on my computer. But it wasn't enough. I knew it wasn't enough. So I took the only responsible step. I had myself castrated. You may be shocked. But think of the three thousand who died on that horrible day. Could I do any less? Their blood is on my hands -- or on some parts of me, anyway. President Bush has called for "sacrifice" in the War on Terror. Isn't this exactly what he means? (Don't worry, Mr. President -- I haven't stopped shopping!) Terrorists have been able to gain a foothold in the West and cause so much pain. Clearly, my depraved liberal lusts were the reason. Or part of the reason. I say that because you may have depraved liberal lusts as well. Now, maybe you have more willpower than I, but ask yourself: Am I sure I can stop? And if I can't -- if I fail, if I lust liberally again -- who will die as a result? Think about it. And think about the dead on that awful day. If you think about these things, and you read D'Souza's book, I think you'll realize you have only one choice. So do your part. And I mean that literally. posted by Steve M. | 10:51 AM | Tuesday, January 16, 2007 President Bush, in a joint appearance with Tony Blair, December 7, 2006: I do know that we have not succeeded as fast as we wanted to succeed. President Bush on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer today: Look, I had a choice to make, Jim, and that is - one - do what we [we]re doing. And one could define that maybe a slow failure. So there you go. When he hadn't announced the new strategy, he said the old strategy was succeeding -- just not fast enough. Now that he's announced the new strategy, he declares that the old strategy was leading to "slow failure." Translating: Bush may be responsible for some mistakes in the past, but whatever Bush is doing now is working -- according to Bush. posted by Steve M. | 10:58 PM | DEAR CLIFF MAY When you put up a post at National Review's blog called "End of the Jihad in Iraq?," about Sunni insurgents who seem to be splitting off from al-Qaeda, you might want to tell your readers that -- according to the Guardian story you use as your source -- the only reason the insurgents are rejecting the al-Qaeda party line is that it's distracting them from their primary goal of killing as many Shiites as humanly possible. Which is not the same as "We're winning!!!!" (In fact, one of the Sunni insurgents quoted in the Guardian story says, "When the Americans arrive we let them go through, but if they show up with Iraqi troops, then it's a fight." Which would lead a rational person -- i.e., not Cliff May -- to ask: If these insurgents aren't jihadis, and if they target our troops only when they're with the Shiite government's army, then aren't we just, y'know, stuck in the middle of a civil war we ought to get ourselves the hell out of?) posted by Steve M. | 8:15 PM | ANOTHER SURGE? Apparently, according to AP: The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Tuesday he wants to extend the combat tours of 1,200 soldiers amid rising violence, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he was "strongly inclined" to recommend a troop increase to President Bush if commanders believe it is needed.... [Lieutenant General Karl] Eikenberry told reporters he has recommended to the Pentagon that 1,200 soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, 10th Mountain Division -- which is about halfway through a scheduled four-month tour in eastern Afghanistan -- be ordered to stay through the end of the year. That battalion is already scheduled to deploy to Iraq later this year, an illustration of how stretched U.S. forces are by the two wars.... Are we trying to escalate in two countries with the same troops? Certainly something is surging in Iraq: Suicide attacks in 2006 totaled 139, up from 27 in 2005, and the number of attacks with roadside bombs more than doubled, from 783 in 2005 to 1,677 last year. The number of what the military calls "direct attacks," meaning attacks by insurgents using small arms, grenades and other weapons, surged from 1,558 in 2005 to 4,542 last year.... Oh, and: U.S. troops at a nearby post known as Forward Operating Base Tillman contacted the Pakistanis at Red Castle [a Pakistani border post] numerous times to alert them to the Taliban moving on foot and to request they be stopped, but the Pakistanis did not act, two military intelligence officers said.... Wait a minute. Forward Operating Base Tillman? As in Pat Tillman? Yup: On a cold but mostly sunny afternoon, Gates flew by Black Hawk helicopter to the Tillman outpost, named for Pat Tillman, the Army Ranger and former pro football player who was killed by U.S. gunfire in a battle near the outpost in April 2004.... After everything that happened to him and his family, they named a base after him? Whose idea was that -- Karl Rove's? posted by Steve M. | 5:58 PM | NO SHIRT ... NO SHOES ... NO COMPUNCTION ABOUT BUYING THE MERCHANDISE AND USING IT TO KILL THE SELLER ... NO PROBLEM! Gee, maybe Iran doesn't seem worried about a war with the U.S. because the Iranians figure they can always get extra military parts from the Pentagon: The U.S. military has sold forbidden equipment at least a half-dozen times to middlemen for countries -- including Iran and China -- who exploited security flaws in the Defense Department's surplus auctions. The sales include fighter jet parts and missile components. In one case, federal investigators said, the contraband made it to Iran.... In that instance, a Pakistani arms broker convicted of exporting U.S. missile parts to Iran resumed business after his release from prison. He purchased Chinook helicopter engine parts for Iran from a U.S. company that had bought them in a Pentagon surplus sale. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, speaking on condition of anonymity, say those parts made it to Iran. ...Federal investigators are increasingly anxious that Iran is within easy reach of a top priority on its shopping list: parts for the precious fleet of F-14 "Tomcat" fighter jets the United States let Iran buy in the 1970s when it was an ally. In one case, convicted middlemen for Iran bought Tomcat parts from the Defense Department's surplus division. Customs agents confiscated them and returned them to the Pentagon, which sold them again -- customs evidence tags still attached -- to another buyer, a suspected broker for Iran.... Not to worry, though -- the fact that we caught these items being sold to an Iranian front company, then caught them again being sold to a different Iranian front company is proof that the system works: "The fact that those individuals chose to violate the law and the fact that the customs people caught them really indicates that the process is working," said [Fred] Baillie, the Defense Logistics Agency's executive director of distribution. I know I'm relieved. You'd think parts we don't need for F-14 Tomcat fighter jets would simply be destroyed -- the only other country that flies the F-14 is Iran. Nahhh: Asked why the Pentagon would sell any F-14 parts, given their value to Iran, Baillie said: "Our first priority truly is national security, and we take that very seriously. However, we have to balance that with our other requirement to be good stewards of the taxpayers' money." Use it up, wear it out, make it do -- or at least make a buck off it by selling it to people who hate us and would happily use it against us. Incidentally, it appears that the person in charge of security for these items is Officer Wiggum from The Simpsons: The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, found it alarmingly easy to acquire sensitive surplus. Last year, its agents bought $1.1 million worth -- including rocket launchers, body armor and surveillance antennas -- by driving onto a base and posing as defense contractors. "They helped us load our van," Kutz said. Investigators used a fake identity to access a surplus Web site operated by a Pentagon contractor and bought still more, including a dozen microcircuits used on F-14 fighters. The undercover buyers received phone calls from the Defense Department asking why they had no Social Security number or credit history, but they deflected the questions by presenting a phony utility bill and claiming to be an identity theft victim. I'm sure "My dog ate it" would have worked just as well. (Via Memeorandum.) posted by Steve M. | 1:23 PM | THEY HAVE A DREAM I see from a series of posts at The American Spectator's blog that some right-wingers want to move around a couple of our holidays -- for the most high-minded of reasons, of course. John Tabin yesterday: RealClearPolitics reprints the I Have a Dream speech. The speech was given on August 28, which (as Steve Sailer has repeatedly argued) might work better than his January birthday as a date to remember Dr. King. Let's face it, at this point we're all kind of holiday'd out, while in August we haven't had a day off since July 4th. Philip Klein an hour and a half later: But were it on August 28 John, it would be too close to Labor Day. Tabin a few minutes after that: Philip: Sailer has proposed a four-day Labor Day weekend, seeing as no one gets much work done that Friday anyway. Another alternative would be to scrap Labor Day, the only federal holiday established in honor of a special interest group. (Veterans Day started as a WWI Armistice celebration, so it doesn't count.) Isn't that thoughful? We're all "holiday'd out" in January, and the best possible solution really is to eliminate the stand-alone holiday commemorating the life of Dr. King and just shove King's day onto another holiday. Not out of disrepect or anything, of course -- heavens, no! Or perhaps we should just completely get rid of Labor Day, "the only federal holiday established in honor of a special interest group" -- you know, people who have to work for a living. And yes, many of you recognize Steve Sailer as the neo-white supremacist defender of eugenics whose work was cited in David Brooks's notorious "natalism" column a couple of years ago. Here's Sailer's essay on MLK Day -- and his admiration for King really knows no bounds: The truth is that King advocated "compensatory" hiring of blacks. Overall, he was a conventional Sixties Socialist. He subscribed to most of the leftist nostrums that did so much damage to blacks -- above all, boosting welfare payments to single mothers (the black illegitimacy rate is three times worse today than in the mid-1960s) and going soft on crime (despite the Sixties' crime wave and baby boom, the number of inmates fell from 212,000 in 1960 to 196,000 in 1970). Ah, but he was a driving force in bringing about the end of Jim Crow, which, to Sailer, was a fine thing -- not because it was a necessary response to a monstrous injustice, but because it helped boost the economy of the South. That's what really matters, right? posted by Steve M. | 10:27 AM | Monday, January 15, 2007 IN IMITATION OF THE MASTER To judge from an interview he just gave to ABC News, the new top commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ray Odierno, has about as keen a grasp on reality as his boss: ... Odierno said that al-Sadr is not a focal point of the joint Iraqi-American effort to target sectarian extremists. "Bottom line is Moqtada al-Sadr is part of the political process. He is head of a political party." At the same time, Odierno warned that the United States could treat him differently if "he moves away from the political framework and starts participating in extremist activities, then we will deal with him as warranted." Yeah, that's right -- if. In the unlikely event that he, y'know, starts doing bad things, we're not gonna take that crap for a minute. The mind reels. As Steve Coll points out in this week's New Yorker, this isn't the first time Odierno's said such things: ...He also has a record of either misreading the war or glossing over its difficulties. Odierno said in the summer of 2003 that the Sunnis were "not close to guerrilla warfare" and that the enemy had no will to fight. Early in 2004, he declared at a news conference that the insurgents he was facing were a "fractured, sporadic threat" who had been reduced to just a "handful of cells." He said, "We see constant improvement. And so it is getting better." No wonder Bush gave him the gig. posted by Steve M. | 10:33 PM | The "dollar auction" from game theory as a metaphor for what we're doing in Iraq? Sounds about right to me. posted by Steve M. | 6:44 PM | GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE Newsweek recently obtained the key chapter of O.J. Simpson's vile book If I Did It. This is from Newsweek's story: Simpson suggests Nicole all but drove him to kill her. He describes her as the "enemy." The enemy? Isn't that an all-purpose expression used by a certain Commander in Chief to refer to terrorists, insurgents, Shiites, Sunnis, and everyone else who's ever looked at an American crosswise? Our folks are very active in al Anbar and in Baghdad, which is where the enemy is concentrated. --President Bush, 12/13/06 The enemy has got to be right one time, and we've got to be right a hundred percent of the time to do our job to secure this country. --President Bush, 11/6/06 ...we're at war because of what we believe and what the enemy believes. --President Bush, 11/6/06 You see, in this new kind of war we must understand what the enemy is thinking and what they're about to do, in order to protect you. --President Bush, 11/4/06 Let me share some thoughts with you about the enemy. You can't negotiate with them. You can't try to talk sense into them. --President Bush, 11/3/06 Et cetera, et cetera. And as I noted before, "enemy" seems to be the wingnut word of the year.... posted by Steve M. | 1:52 PM | WE HAVE EVERYTHING UNDER CONTROL From the version of this story that appeared in the print edition of this morning's New York Times: A senior American official said over the weekend that two of Saddam Hussein's top associates would not be handed over to Iraqi officials for execution until the Iraqis present detailed plans that satisfied the Americans that there would be no repeat of the abusive treatment Mr. Hussein was exposed to before he was hanged.... The American official said the Americans had asked the Iraqis for details of who would attend the execution, and for assurances that other aspects of the hanging would be carefully regulated.... By delaying the transfer of Mr. Tikriti and Mr. Bandar, American officials appear to be showing the new "get tough" attitude that many have pressed for in dealing with the Maliki government.... Oops: Anger as hanging decapitates Saddam's half-brother Saddam Hussein's half brother and the former head of Iraq's Revolutionary Court were hanged before dawn today.... In confirming the executions, government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the head of one of the accused, Barzan Ibrahim, had been severed during the hanging in what he called "a rare incident." ... Oh, and somebody videotaped the proceedings with a cellphone camera: Iraqi government officials have shown journalists video of the hanging of two of Saddam Hussein's aides, during which one of the men was decapitated.... This footage, the government says, isn't being released to the public. It's silent, though it does show the headless body. We'll see what else comes out. posted by Steve M. | 12:35 PM | A FEW SMALL POCKETS OF DISCONTENT The new Bush strategy in the war seems to be wildly popular in Iraq! Oh, er, except among a few groups. Which groups? Let's see: the Sunnis... President Bush's plan to send 21,500 more troops to Iraq has inflamed passions among the restive Sunni Arab minority, bringing new recruits to insurgent cells and outpourings of popular anger toward the U.S., the spokesman for the country's most hard-line Sunni clerical group declared Sunday. "Iraq is like a fire," said Mohammed Bashar Faidi, spokesman for the Muslim Scholars Assn. "Instead of putting water on the fire, Bush is pouring gasoline." ... Faidi said Bush's calls for increased troops had only roused suspicions of imminent offensives on Sunni districts of Baghdad and Al Anbar province and spurred a sudden "mobilization" among Sunnis, according to clerics and prayer leaders who contacted him by telephone from Iraq.... ...the Shiites... ...First among the American concerns is a Shiite-led government that has been so dogmatic in its attitude that the Americans worry that they will be frustrated in their aim of cracking down equally on Shiite and Sunni extremists, a strategy President Bush has declared central to the plan. "We are implementing a strategy to embolden a government that is actually part of the problem," said an American military official in Baghdad involved in talks over the plan.... The plan gives a central role to the National Police, viewed as widely infiltrated by Shiite militias and, despite an intensive American retraining program, still suspected of a strongly Shiite sectarian bias. One American officer said that the National Police commanders have been "dragging their feet" over their role in the new plan and that they could seriously compromise the operation.... Shiite neighborhoods present special challenges. Tightly woven networks of militias backed by the government, the areas have been largely off-limits to American forces. An early test will be Sadr City, the largest Shiite enclave in the capital, and the main stronghold for the Mahdi Army militia, led by the renegade cleric, Moktada al-Sadr. American officers say it is far from clear that the Maliki government will permit American troops to operate freely in the enclave.... ...and the Kurds: The arrest of the Iranians by U.S. forces at a liaison office in the northern city of Irbil last week exposed a growing rift.... Kurdish legislators condemned the raid as illegal.... Although the Iranians were not accredited diplomats, they worked in a well-known office, approved by the Kurdish regional government, that offers consular services and is on its way to gaining accreditation as a formal consulate.... Kurdish officials said the United States should have contacted the regional government before launching the raid. "I think this is the new policy of the U.S. in Iraq -- in order to be defensive, they are offensive," said Saad Barazanchi, a Kurdish legislator.... Oh, but I'm sure there are plenty of groups that are on our side -- the Zoroastrians? Er, the Scientologists...? posted by Steve M. | 9:16 AM | Sunday, January 14, 2007 RIGHT-WING SHOPPING Always such a charming experience. Yeah, charming. Charming. Charming. Charming. posted by Steve M. | 6:25 PM | CHOKING ON THE WORD Just about every quote in this preview of the Bush interview that will air on 60 Minutes tonight is infuriating, but one line jumps out: Asked if it wasn't his administration that created the instability in Iraq, Bush says, "Our administration took care of a source of instability in Iraq. Envision a world in which Saddam Hussein was rushing for a nuclear weapon to compete against Iran... He was a significant source of instability." "It's much more unstable now, Mr. President," Pelley remarks. "Well, no question, decisions have made things unstable," the president replies. "Decisions"? Whose decisions? "My." My. My. Say it, Mr. President. Say "my decisions." Whose decisions could you be referring to, if not yours? You are, after all, the Decider. Oh, never mind. We know -- you can't bring yourself to say anything like that. You're physically incapable of it. (Bush does go on to say, "I think history is going to look back and see a lot of ways we could have done things better. No question about it." But that's not the same thing. That's saying "There's room for improvement," not "We screwed up royally.") (Via Memeorandum.) posted by Steve M. | 11:42 AM | Saturday, January 13, 2007 ADDING INSULT TO INJURY It's bad enough that National Guard troops are having their tours of duty in Iraq extended, but the damn government can't even officially inform them in a timely fashion: WEST ORANGE, N.J. -- Family members of New Jersey soldiers who will be staying four months longer than expected in Iraq voiced their anger and disappointment to state officials, including Gov. Jon Corzine, who met with them Saturday. The extension, announced Thursday, will affect 159 members of the New Jersey Army National Guard currently in Iraq.... One of the biggest complaints from frustrated relatives during the meeting at the West Orange armory was that soldiers in Iraq learned of the extension either through the media or through family members, who were alerted Thursday. "I spoke to my son this morning and he said, 'Mom, we don't know nothing. These are just rumors. I'm coming home in March,"' said Rosa Rosado, 42, of Newark, whose son Joseph Rosado, 24, is serving in Iraq. "Just to think, he has to go four more months and put his life on the line, and they are not even letting him know." ...The captains for the two guard units listened in to the meeting via a telephone conference call. At one point, Maj. Gen. Glenn Rieth, New Jersey's adjutant general, asked the captains whether the units had received official notification and the reply was negative..... The Bush administration hates the troops even more than we thought. Why? posted by Steve M. | 11:28 PM | WOULDN'T WANT HIM TO BE LEFT HIGH AND DRY WITH NOTHING BUT THE CLOTHES ON HIS BACK AND $250 MILLION IN LIQUID ASSETS The New York Times ran a story yesterday about CEOs' employment contracts and the lavish golden parachutes they provide, often when the CEO is being shown the door for doing a lousy job (example: Robert Nardelli's $210 million exit package, which he received as his reward for lowering the stock price of Home Depot). This paragraph in the Times story jumped out at me, as an explanation for why CEO employment contracts even exist (emphasis added): Executives who are being recruited argue that they need contracts because of the risks involved. Top executive turnover is at record levels: roughly 35 percent of departing chiefs in 2005 were forced out, according to Booz-Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm. Orchestrating a turnaround can take several years to pay off. And the relationship with the board may not work out. "The risks involved"? What risks? The risk that the huge amounts of money these CEOs make while they're employed, the huge amounts they made from previous jobs, and the appreciation on their extensive assets won't provide them enough to make the payments on their third, fourth, and fifth houses if they're suddenly without a job for a few months? Oh, and -- to state the obvious -- doesn't removing all risk give these guys absolutely no motivation to do a good job? And if your heart still bleeds for the poor beleaguered CEO, remember this: In 2005, the average CEO in the United States earned 262 times the pay of the average worker... a CEO earned more in one workday (there are 260 in a year) than an average worker earned in 52 weeks. These guys don't have enough to live on? If you pay 'em for one day's work, they have enough to live on -- for a year. If it's enough for us to live on, it's enough for them. posted by Steve M. | 8:15 AM | Oops: Somalia strike 'missed al-Qaeda targets' The controversial US air strike in southern Somalia missed all three top al-Qaeda members Washington alleges are hiding out in the country, a senior US official said on Thursday. ... Observers say the US strike and the presence of Ethiopian forces in Somalia could increase the unpopularity of the Somali administration and help stoke a potential insurgency.... **** George W. Bush, September 2001: "... I'm not going to fire a $2 million missile at a $10 empty tent and hit a camel in the butt." **** (OK, let's be fair -- the story in the first link, from the Financial Times, does say that a U.S. official claimed eight to ten al-Qaeda terrorists were killed, though it also says that U.S. official "gave no details.") **** (Via Memeorandum.) posted by Steve M. | 7:34 AM | Friday, January 12, 2007 Surely you've seen this by now in the New York Post: Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, an appalling scold from California, wasted no time yesterday in dragging the debate over Iraq about as low as it can go -- attacking Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for being a childless woman.... Rice appeared before the Senate in defense of President Bush's tactical change in Iraq, and quickly encountered Boxer. "Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price," Boxer said. "My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young." Then, to Rice: "You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family." Breathtaking. Simply breathtaking. We scarcely know where to begin. A number of righties have made comparisons like this: I don’t recall the lack of fruit from Janet Reno's womb figuring heavily into scrutiny of Waco or l'affaire Elian, but that was a different time. No, but of course we did have this in 1998: Earlier this month, at a Republican Senate fund-raiser, McCain told a downright nasty joke making fun of Janet Reno, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Chelsea Clinton. ...When McCain subsequently apologized to President Clinton, the Washington Post, in its personality section, noted the apology but said the joke "was too vicious to print." ... this is what he reportedly said: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno." OK, let's compare and contrast. Boxer's remark: uttered by a sitting senator. McCain's remark: uttered by a sitting senator. Boxer's remark: notes the fact that Rice isn't a mother and concludes she isn't a mother. McCain's remark: notes that Reno isn't a mother and concludes that she's a freak of nature. Boxer's remark: on the front page of the New York Post and denounced by the spokesman for the president of the United States. McCain's remark: alluded to in a few back-page print news stories and opinion pieces, many of which fail to tell what the joke was. ***** Oh, and by the way, Reno's childlessness was made an issue during the Elian Gonzalez affair by Elian's cousin Marisleysis. Here she is on CNN just after the raid in which Elian was seized from the Miami relatives: And you know what, Janet Reno? Even though if it would have been three minutes or 30 seconds, it happened. And the harm was done, and it was done to a kid that's been through a lot. And you still don't know what being a mother is. Yeah, Marisleysis and the rest of the Miami relatives were a national joke -- though not among many right-wingers, who rooted for them to get custody of Elian. posted by Steve M. | 5:34 PM | WHEEEEEEE! In Rasmussen's daily poll, Bush's approval rating has dropped nine points in two days. (His approval is now 35%. It was 44% on January 10 -- higher than in most polls at the time, but Bush usually polls better in the Rasmussen poll than in any other. Or perhaps Rasmussen samples more Republicans and Republican-leaners than other polling outfits, and this result means they're fed up, too.) posted by Steve M. | 2:32 PM | Shorter Peggy Noonan: Bush is still screwing up in Iraq, and the speech was awful, but Nancy Pelosi wore a big red shawl on Wednesday, so I still hate the Democrats more. Peggy on Pelosi: She wrapped herself in a rich red shawl. Dick Morris said it looked like a straitjacket. I thought she looked like a particularly colorful mummy. Say, whatever happened to that American remake of Absolutely Fabulous? I think we've found our stars. ***** (I dunno -- I think it looks kind of stylish here. Less so here. Looks warm at least, and it is wintry here in the East, finally.) posted by Steve M. | 2:00 PM | GINGRICH AND GIULIANI: IRAQ IS JUST BROOKLYN WITH IED'S Newt and Rudy have a joint op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal titled "Getting Iraq to Work" (and subtitled "New York City's successes have lessons for Baghdad"). Now, we keep assuming that they broke the mold after they made Dubya and we won't have to suffer through his brand of snarly naivete after 1/20/09, but these two Oval Office aspirants seem to have the snarl and -- especially -- the naivete down cold, so it could be (God help us) a seamless transition: ...The week before Christmas, the Pentagon asked Congress to approve a supplemental $100 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, on top of the estimated $500 billion spent to date. The administration should direct a small percent of that amount to create an Iraqi Citizen Job Corps, along the lines of FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression. The Job Corps can operate under the supervision of our military and with its protection. Yeah, because we have so many excess troops just sitting around in Iraq right now with nothing to do. The Army Corps of Engineers might be particularly helpful in directing this effort. It will place our military in a constructive relationship with the Iraqis.... Yeah -- a "constructive relationship" called "being in the center of the bull's-eye." Today, Iraq has almost 200 state-owned factories that have been abandoned by the governing authorities since the outbreak of war in 2003. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Paul A. Brinkley ... believes that under Department of Defense leadership, at least 10 of these facilities could be re-opened almost immediately, putting more than 10,000 Iraqis to work within weeks.... But as The New York Times pointed out a couple of days ago, we've tried this, with less than smashing results: The focus on jobs and reconstruction is in many ways a return to the earliest days of the occupation, when the top American administrator here, L. Paul Bremer III, pressed the idea that economic initiatives were as important as military action in stabilizing the country and convincing ordinary Iraqis that the invasion would have tangible benefits for them. That philosophy led to a reconstruction program financed by $30 billion in American taxpayer money that had a marginal impact on the quality of life here, attracted ceaseless attacks on rebuilding projects and produced little but derision among Iraqis. In addition, American officials ... have never produced evidence that those enormous expenditures have lessened the attractions of the insurgency. Nor have those officials solved what appears to be a logical flaw in the plan: how does the United States get credit for reconstruction projects when it must keep its participation secret to prevent attacks on those projects? But back to Newt and Rudy: The entire effort ... should be open to all willing Iraqis--Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds--as a means of helping to create a common culture through shared participation in work projects to rebuild and take ownership of their nation. Oh, yes -- the lion will lie down with the lamb. That's likely to happen, isn't it? ...After the program has been started and becomes successful, it can be transferred to a civilian authority within the Iraqi government. I'm sure Moktada would be only too happy to help out. The creation of an Iraqi Citizen Job Corps will help expedite the establishment of a more stable civil society and improve the growing Iraqi economy through the transforming power of an honest day's work. And after that, we go after squeegee men and paintings with elephant dung on them. **** UPDATE: Roy Edroso's take on this is much funnier than mine. posted by Steve M. | 11:42 AM | In the news today: The U.S. Embassy in Athens came under fire early Friday from a rocket that exploded inside the modern glass-front building but caused no casualties in an attack police suspect was the work of Greek leftists.... Greece's Public Order Minister said police were examining the authenticity of anonymous phone calls to a private security company claiming responsibility on behalf of Revolutionary Struggle, a militant left-wing group. "It is very likely that this is the work of a domestic group," Minister Vyron Polydoras said.... Shorter righty blogger Bill Quick: It's just gonna kill me if this isn't the work of dirty filthy Ay-rabs. **** After reading this, this, and this, I have to agree with the Greek public order minister -- it seems quite likely that this was an attack by a violent radical group of Greeks acting in the spirit of violent Greek leftist groups whose roots go back decades. In other words, nobody named Ahmed. Sorry, Bill. **** UPDATE: As you'll see from my comments and his own, Mr. Quick was simply appalled at my use of the phrase "dirty filthy Ay-rabs." Mr. Quick would never use such a phrase -- never! Heaven forfend! His preferred term of art is "Islamic barbarian savages," which, obviously, is much more polite. posted by Steve M. | 7:45 AM | Thursday, January 11, 2007 HMMMM.... The Political Pit Bull and folks at Free Republic and Liberty Post spotted this headline at Drudge -- shortly before it was taken down: SOURCES: NATIONAL RADIO TALK HOST FACES ARREST OVER PROSTITUTE... DEVELOPING... Unfounded rumor? Or maybe a true story that's so embarrassing for the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy at this delicate time that Drudge has been asked to pipe down? Hard to know. Linking to the Political Pit Bull post, Wonkette speculated that the rumor's about Limbaugh. We'll see -- or maybe we won't.... posted by Steve M. | 11:14 PM | The fact that Bush is trying to gin up a war with Iran and/or Syria is now obvious to anyone who's paying any attention at all. I keep groping for a way to understand his mind. He's like a guy so drunk he can't get off his barstool without falling down who decides the only reasonable reaction to this state of affairs is to order a double. He wants to spread the war to other countries a la Vietnam precisely because he's been warned that Iraq is another Vietnam -- it's yet another case of his preadolescent-brat "whatever you warn me not to do is what I really want to do" style of governance. He thinks he's still in the oil bidness, and the only way he can stop losing money is to spend even more, in search of the big strike. He still -- still -- can't let go of the notion that if you just overthrow the right regime, or series of regimes (but no, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan), all the apparent non-state actors who are trying to kill your people will just cease to exist. I dunno. I throw up my hands. posted by Steve M. | 10:42 PM | BUSH ON THE COUCH When we say that Bush's Iraq strategy seems to be "keeping our troops in Iraq long enough to make some other president the loser," do we think he merely wants to forestall an embarrassing defeat so he can avoid taking the blame? Or is it more than that -- does he actually want to watch someone else lose? I thought about that after reading what Phil Nugent wrote before the speech: Who knows what'll happen in two years; we just know that, whenever some future president pulls the plug, Bush will spend the rest of his life telling cheering crowds that he had everything teed up for victory, which would have come two minutes after the wimps gave up. And if that's the case, what script from his family life is he reproducing? Who, in his head, is the person he hopes will be the wimpy fall guy? Is it Jeb? Or is it Poppy? posted by Steve M. | 4:58 PM | RUDY WHISTLING DIXIE? Rudy Giuliani is the leading '08 presidential candidate among GOP voters in North Carolina, according to a survey conducted January 2 by Public Policy Polling of Raleigh. And Newt Gingrich is a close second. Here's the order of finish: Giuliani 30% Gingrich 29% McCain 22% Romney 6% Other 13% Make of this what you will. (Via RealClearPolitics Blog.) posted by Steve M. | 3:13 PM | IOKIYAR From Lucianne.com, in response to this story:  Oh, so I guess flip-flopping is a good thing now. (And this is real flip-flopping, not changing a vote strictly for tactical reasons. You'd think that might be worse, but I guess it's actually better. If you're a Republican.) posted by Steve M. | 12:58 PM | A BELATED RESPONSE ...to this Time blog post by Joe Klein from Monday: ...it's possible to have been against the war and to hope for the best in Iraq. I'd bet that the overwhelming majority of Americans who now oppose the war are praying for a turn for the better in Iraq. Listening to the leftists, though, it's easy to assume that they are rooting for an American failure. And so a challenge.... Can you honestly say the following: Even though I disagree with this escalation, I am hoping that General Petraeus succeeds in calming down Baghdad. Does the thought even cross your mind? ... OK, here's a scenario for you, Joe. A kid, inspired by Superman, throws a bedsheet over his shoulders as an imitation cape, climbs onto the roof of his house, and jumps off. What are you thinking, Joe, as you watch this kid jump? Are you thinking the following? I am hoping the laws of nature are repealed and the kid sprouts wings and begins to fly. No, you aren't. It would be miraculous and wonderful if that happened, but it just isn't possible. So it never even crosses your mind. You're not "rooting for failure." You're just acknowledging reality. So as you watch the kid jump, all you feel is horror. Well, that's how we feel watching Bush conduct Iraq policy. He's like the kid -- he has the same dangerous naivete -- except that the kid's only going to break his own neck (and his parents' hearts). Bush is doing untold damage to America and to global peace and stability. It's not an exact analogy because Bush is not jumping off the roof -- he's pushing people off the roof. Over and over and over again. And nobody can stop him. And you want us to say, "I hope wings sprout"? Sorry, I don't think so. posted by Steve M. | 11:14 AM | Shorter Nightline a couple of hours after the Bush speech: "Ooooh! Ooooh! Why is the president so darn steadfast and decisive?" I'm not joking: The Decider: Bush Sounds Certain on Iraq Path Facing Skeptics Nothing New for a Man Who's Often Proved Them Wrong ...He is so certain. He has always been so certain. Remember "Mission Accomplished" aboard the aircraft carrier in 2003? ... And even as the casualties mounted, no weapons of mass destruction were found and Iraq spiraled into savagery and chaos -- George W. Bush would not admit to the slightest doubt. Just last October, he told a news conference, "Absolutely, we're winning" in Iraq. Where does it come from, this certainty ... ? Here was Nightline's idea of objectivity: balance two old friends, Doug Wead and Donald Evans, with one skeptical reporter, Ron Suskind. Yeah, two to one is almost fifty-fifty, right? Wead: "He absolutely has doubts. Yeah. Oh sure, sure... but, compared to most people I've met, he has fewer given the situation he's in than anybody I know," Wead said. Evans: "I mean I see the same, you know, the same core beliefs, the same courage, the same discipline that I've always seen in him." And even Suskind's skepticism almost echoes the old friends' praise: "He's a guy 40ish, you know his life had more or less gone down the sink hole, not much to show, and he said, 'I'm going to be the governor of Texas.' People said, 'Are you out of your mind?' He says, 'Let me show you.' A show of will, a show of force -- he shut them down. And then the presidency: Show of will, he shuts them down. But that kind of confidence, that will, might work in a political contest in America, but in terms of the complexities of the ship of state and how it sails, of geopolitics, well, it doesn't seem to work." Suskind does accuse Bush's inner circle of not letting him listen to critics. but Evans gets the last word: "This president, I can tell you as somebody that's known him for 31 years well, he doesn't want a bunch of 'yes people' around him," he said. "He wants people that will tell him what he needs to hear and what he needs to hear is whatever the individual's best judgment is as to the facts and best judgment is as to the course of action we should take." Well! That settles that! This is what Nightline gives us -- a Hero Origin Story, and a creaky old one at that (Bush was misunderestimated) -- when a wildly unpopular president, a president abandoned by all but his base, presents a wildly unpopular plan to get even more American killed by compounding the worst foreign-policy blunder in American history. **** And it is a wildly unpopular plan -- check out the results of ABC's own poll taken after the speech: Americans broadly reject President Bush's plan for a surge of U.S. forces into Iraq, with substantial majorities dismissing his arguments that it'll end the war more quickly and increase the odds of victory, an ABC News/Washington Post poll finds. Indeed, rather than Bush bolstering public confidence, the national survey, conducted after his address to the nation on his new Iraq strategy, finds that a new high -- 57 percent -- think the United States is losing the war. Just 29 percent think it's winning. ...While 61 percent of Americans oppose his proposal to send more than 20,000 additional U.S. military forces there, 36 percent support it. And a majority of poll respondents, 53%, think Congress should block the surge (44% say no). Ah, but Bush is so certain. So who cares what we think? posted by Steve M. | 7:15 AM | Wednesday, January 10, 2007 At first glance, this (from Fox News) is rather shocking: Official: Bush to Admit Iraq Mistakes Bush? Admit a mistake? Nahhh, never happen! But read on: President George W. Bush will tell the nation Wednesday night that he should have sent more troops to Iraq to fight the war during the earlier stages of the nearly four-year conflict, a senior administration official revealed. ... Bush will also acknowledge that the rules of engagement were flawed and seek support for a new strategy to win the unpopular war, presidential counselor Dan Bartlett said. OK, let's compare and contrast. That was Bush. Now here's the crazed Freeper whose mock Bush speech I quoted last night: ... I must admit a mistake. I have been fighting the war against Islamo Fascism for the past three years like Bill Clinton. This has been a major blunder on my part.... From this point forward the war against Islamo Fascism no matter if it is in Iraq, Northern Africa, the Phillipines, New York City or Knoxville, Tennessee will be total, no surrender, no political correctness no UN pandering or plunder. Separated at birth? OK, seriously: Bush isn't going to say that he himself made a mistake. He's going to say, in effect, that Rumsfeld made a mistake. Fighting this war with a small force was Rummy's idea, after all. And Bush has now let Rummy go. So Bush is right! Again! (Never mind the fact that we're adding too few troops years too late.) With regard to Rummy, also see this Newsweek story, which notes that one of Rummy's top deputies is leaving and one is apparently about to leave: Gates Cleans House ...Lt. Gen. William Boykin and his boss, soon-to-depart Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Steve Cambone, have guided or taken part in the planning of ... covert operations against Al Qaeda-linked groups in several countries since 9/11.... But Boykin has long been a divisive figure. A devout evangelical Christian, he achieved notoriety in October 2003 when he was videotaped telling a church audience that the god of a Muslim warlord was "an idol" and that "my God was a real God." Boykin and Cambone have also generated controversy by allegedly seeking to wrest control of intelligence-gathering from the CIA. Gates has said he is especially determined to improve cooperation between the Department of Defense and the CIA.... While Cambone's departure has been announced, Boykin's has not. A Defense Department spokesman would not confirm Wednesday that Boykin was planning to retire, but he declined to deny it either.... "If you're getting rid of Cambone, you almost certainly have to get rid of Boykin," says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism official who stays in touch with the community. "They're hand in glove. Gates feels it all went out of control, that they're doing too many things in too many places."... If Bush is letting this happen, it means that maybe his learning curve isn't entirely flat -- maybe he's concluded that Rummy, with his small-force obsession and his endless turf battles, was kind of a problem. And hey, it only took him six years to figure that out! But at least it happened. And now it means Boy Bush can have even more troops to make stuff go boom! posted by Steve M. | 5:06 PM | WINGNUT WORD OF THE YEAR? TBogg made this connection last night: Ex-Senator Rick Santorum is now taking a position at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a right-wing think tank, where he'll head a program called "America's Enemies"; the Santorum announcement comes just days after we learned that Sean Hannity's new weekly Fox News show will regularly highlight an "Enemy of the State." Now today we have Fox's Gretchen Carlson -- an anchor, not even a commentator -- calling Ted Kennedy a "hostile enemy" of the United States. So "enemy" is the new wingnut word, a catch-all for terrorists, insurgents, fighters of the Iraqi civil war ... and Democrats. Wonder how much Frank Luntz or some Luntz wannabe was paid to focus-group that. (And no, I'm not impressed that White House counselor Dan Bartlett said the administration doesn't view Kennedy as a hostile enemy. That's just the Bushies letting other people do their dirty work for them.) posted by Steve M. | 3:02 PM | FIRST SENTENCE OF THE OBITUARY The conventional left-blogosphere wisdom about John McCain and the war is now showing up in the mainstream press. Here's Steve Kornacki in The New York Observer: ...Mr. Popularity's close association with what may be the least popular war in the country's history is a ticking time bomb that threatens to destroy his standing with the broad fall electorate. ... Mr. McCain seemed to have staked out almost enviable '08 turf on the subject in the days immediately following November's Democratic Congressional sweep.... Mr. McCain loudly registered his objections to any withdrawal, instead renewing his call for a massive infusion of more troops. With that stroke, he moved measurably closer to making peace with the hard-line, pro-Bush wing of the G.O.P. that undermined him in 2000. And since it was assumed that his protestations were purely for posterity ... Mr. McCain also seemed to have ably positioned himself to deflect the Iraq issue in the fall of '08.... Then something funny happened: Mr. Bush -- apparently -- decided to take Mr. McCain up on his advice. ...Suddenly, Mr. McCain's 2008 prospects are inextricably tied to the success of this last-ditch surge.... This all seems perfectly logical. And that's the problem. Voters aren't perfectly logical. Do voters vote based on a logical assessment of issues and individuals? Sure -- except when they don't. I'd argue that, in the case of well-known political figures, voters vote based on established, endlessly repeated capsule characterizations -- whatever would wind up in the first sentence of the obituary. Thus, for many voters, nothing John McCain says or does, nothing he advocates, will supplant the image of him as a "straight talker" and a "maverick" -- words that are sure to appear in the first sentence of his obituary. Similarly, the first sentence of Joe Lieberman's obituary will probably include the phrase "with an independent streak" -- and the (delusional) belief that he's admirably independent surely helps explain why he was reelected to the Senate even though he's about as far to the right as it's possible to be on a war that's wildly unpopular in his state. Glenn Greenwald addressed this question recently, in response to something McCain said: "I reject the notion that all Americans, or the majority of Americans just want us out of Iraq. Joe Lieberman would not have been re-elected in a very liberal state if that were the case." Greenwald ticked off the Republican senators who were defeated in states Bush had won twice -- George Allen in Virginia, Conrad Burns in Montana, Jim Talent in Missouri, Mike DeWine in Ohio. He's right, obviously; the war helped defeat these senators. But none of them had a first-obituary-sentence perceived character trait potent enough to overcome voters' anger with the war. I'm not saying that first-obituary-sentence traits (or perceived traits) trump reality altogether. They interact with reality. And new ones can be added. (Allen. "Macaca.") Being perceived as a rock-ribbed conservative was a liability in 2006 -- but being perceived as reasonable and moderate still has great power, even if the perception is utterly at odds with reality. Being perceived as a genuine hero trumps reality, too. McCain (abused POW) and Giuliani ("America's Mayor") have the hero thing going for them. McCain, Lieberman, and -- perhaps most bafflingly -- the quite popular Condi Rice have the perception of reasonableness going for them. If you think about Condi, you realize that even Bush might be able to avoid full blame for the Iraq debacle if his first-obituary-sentence character traits included "uniter, not a divider" rather than "stubborn" and "cowboy." Oh, and there's one other issue here: Political demimondes have their own variants on the first obituary sentence. Right-wingers, in particular, live in their own dreamworld, where Hillary Clinton is a Maoist and McCain isn't really a Republican. These perceptions are also very difficult for reality to wear down. And so, bizarrely -- if I'm right about all this -- we have McCain becoming a hawk's hawk but not losing support among moderates, while he fails to gain support among the war's biggest cheerleaders, who still regard him with skepticism. That makes no sense. But voters' perceptions sometimes don't. **** UPDATE, 1/12: Well, here it is, from a New York Times story on the reaction Bush's surge plan: "It's one thing to be steadfast and another to be stubborn," said Rick Lacey, another Republican at the Legion hall who voted for a Democrat in the last election. "A guy like McCain, I don't agree with him on this troop increase issue, but he is steadfast because he bases his decisions on experience. Our president, he bases it on ideology and being stubborn." Translation: It's OK for McCain to make the same stupid choice as Bush because McCain, unlike Bush, is a war hero. The first sentence.... posted by Steve M. | 10:33 AM | Tuesday, January 09, 2007 I found this at Free Republic today -- and I can't help thinking that, despite all the talk by prominent right-wingers about difficult struggles lasting years or decades, much of Bush's base thinks doesn't really understand why things couldn't go pretty much this way. Or, like the author, they're sure they know why events can't go this way: because of that damn political correctness, which is more powerful than even a straight-shootin' cowboy president backed by a grateful nation. I do think the Bush rank-and-file still can't get their minds around the fact that failure in Iraq is even possible -- we're on God's side, for heaven's sake! And in the movies, when the good guys really decide to kick ass, nothing bad happens to the good guys after that -- only the bad guys suffer kicked asses! So this makes perfect sense: The Speech President Bush Should Give On Wednesday Night About Iraq. My Fellow Americans, I come to you tonight to address the war against Islamo Fascism and the battle of Iraq. But first as Chris Matthews and others on the left have been demanding I must admit a mistake. I have been fighting the war against Islamo Fascism for the past three years like Bill Clinton. This has been a major blunder on my part and I ask your forgiveness and please listen as I outline a plan to correct this problem. Since the defeat of the Taliban and the ouster of the late Saddam Hussein I have fought this war like Dennis Kucinich and not like Ronald Reagan. Tonight begins the course correction so long demanded. From this point forward the war against Islamo Fascism no matter if it is in Iraq, Northern Africa, the Phillipines, New York City or Knoxville, Tennessee will be total, no surrender, no political correctness no UN pandering or plunder. We will use all the forces of the United States of America to destroy the scurge of Islamo Fascism and liberate not only a dying Europe but the Arab people as well. I'm asking not for a 30,000 troop increase in Iraq but a 500,000 man increase in the American military. By the end of April I want another 500,000 men under arms and being trained for deployment where ever the Islamists are. As we have recently done in Somalia we will destroy them with whatever weapons are needed. I'm putting Congressman Rangel in charge of the draft board needed to obtain these forces either through volunteers or draft. We will begin bombing the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan in a carpet bombing manner. I'm giving 24 hour notice for anyone living within fifteen miles of the border on either side to evacuate. Then bombing will begin and anyone in that zone after the bombing stops will be killed. We will seal off the Syrian/Iraq border and the Iran/Iraq border with our troops and again we will bomb the border for three days and anyone in the area after that period will be killed. We will begin to support overtly the opposition to the Islamo Fascists in Iran. We will fund and support by all means possible the student and intellectual opposition to the tenth century thinking mullahs. If Iran launches one test of a nuclear weapon of any kind the President and head Mullah of Iran will be killed. If they are replaced and another test is made those who follow in those offices will be killed. If North Korea launches another nuclear weapon test Kim will be killed and all of his palaces will be destroyed while we begin the dropping of American food in all other parts of the country. In Iraq we will begin the occupation of Baghdad and Anbar Province. Al Sadr's militia has twenty four hours to lay down their weapons and turn over Sadr for trial on murder charges. If not the entire slum of Sadr City will be destroyed. The Sunni Triangle has twenty four hours to turn in all weapons and Al Qaeda operatives or the entire Sunni Triangle region will be destroyed. If you want examples of the type of warfare I'm now talking about look at photos of Germany and Japan circa 1945. We will also withdraw all financial support to the UN until it removes all member nations who support or are lead by dictatorships. We will not be hamstrung any longer by a meeting of thugs and socialists in our own country. More details to come in the days ahead but the above operations will begin immediately. Let's Roll and God Bless America. There ya go -- a cakewalk. It can still happen. (And I love the "Let's Roll" at the end. In Bushworld, it's always spring 2003 or fall 2001.) posted by Steve M. | 11:07 PM | Matthew Yglesias makes a good point here about the most discussed feature of Sean Hannity's new solo TV show -- but I think Matt doesn't quite understand the beliefs of right-wingers: If I may pile on a bit late, the truly odd thing about Sean Hannity's "Enemy of the State" feature is the specific locution -- state -- which is so deeply at odds with the quasi-populist tradition of the American right. Not enemy of the nation, enemy of the country, enemy of the people, enemy of America, but enemy of the state. The particular blend of authoritarianism and anti-statism that's typical of American conservatism from Tailgunner Joe to Liberality for All is incoherent, but at least it gives crypto-fascists the comfort of staying crypto. But, see, it's only incoherent if you think the state has any power. Right-wingers don't -- or at least they don't when they control the state. Here's a Dennis Prager column from 2003: Conservatives have talk radio, liberals have everything else ... That Democrats chafe at conservative dominance in talk radio is almost incredible – because liberals dominate everything else. Liberals dominate television: Aside from some Fox News shows (remember the conservative Sean Hannity is paired with the liberal Alan Colmes), the liberals dominate everything on television (with the exception of John Stossel's specials on ABC). They dominate CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC and CNN news broadcasts, and they dominate all television entertainment. Liberals dominate the education of our young: The ratio of Democrats to Republicans among liberal arts professors at universities is routinely 20 to one. And the deans, the presidents, the curricula, the speech codes and the campus newspapers are all liberal. Liberals also run the schools of education, the law schools, the high schools and the elementary schools. Liberals dominate Hollywood.... Liberals dominate the public airwaves: National Public Radio has been dubbed National Palestinian Radio for good reason.... Liberals dominate the biggest foundations, such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. Liberals dominate almost every major newspaper both in news coverage and editorial page positions.... Liberals dominate virtually every professional organization.... Liberals dominate much of organized religion.... Liberals dominate activist groups.... So, see, it doesn't matter if you control all three branches of government and are about to start a huge war (as was the case for conservative Republicans in early 2003, when that Prager column was published) -- you still have no power if you're a conservative. Therefore, "Enemy of the State" doesn't mean "Enemy of the Powerful" -- it means the exact opposite. If you were right-wing, this would make perfect sense. posted by Steve M. | 3:42 PM | THE FORMER POTHOLDER CALLS THE KETTLE BLACK From a bitchy National Review Online column written by Lisa Schiffren after she attended a gala last week for then-incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (whom she calls a "very minor demon queen"): And here, patient reader, we stop to marvel at the mediocrity of this woman: she has a BA from a fourth-rate college and no professional experience to speak of (though she did raise five children, for which she deserves full credit); she did high-level volunteer work in San Francisco and across the state for the party; she has been in Congress 20 years, where she failed to distinguish herself on any particular policy issue; she raised a lot of money and was elected minority leader. For a host of reasons NRO readers are all too familiar with, her party took the House. There is a great deal of dumb luck in that story -- and not enough merit. For that reason Mrs. Pelosi might consider showing a little more humility and a little less strutting. … Who was it who said that "real equality is when a mediocre woman can go as far as a mediocre man"? Looks like we're there. All of which might hold a tad more weight if the high point of Lisa Schiffren's professional career weren't writing speeches for Dan Quayle. posted by Steve M. | 2:33 PM | INCHING EVER CLOSER TO THE MOMENT WHEN ONLY LAURA AND BARNEY AGREE WITH BUSH When it comes to Iraq, I get the feeling that Tony Blair's heart just isn't in it anymore: Dummies 'guard' Iraq garrison British troops are manning watchtowers with dummies at the Army's main garrison in southern Iraq, it was disclosed last night. They have used mannequins to take the place of real soldiers during darkness in up to eight of the 16 watchtowers at the Shaibah Logistics Base, west of Basra. The Grenadier Guards came up with the tactic after being sent out for a six-month tour 47 men short, The Sun reported.... And: Blair refuses to match US troop 'surge' in Iraq Tony Blair will make clear this week that Britain is not going to send more troops to Iraq even if the US pushes ahead with a "surge" of 20,000 extra soldiers. The Prime Minister will insist that the UK will stick to its own strategy of gradually handing over to the Iraqi army, as it has been doing with success in Basra and the south.... Sorry, George -- I know you want to order another round, but, um, they're putting the chairs on the tables and I gotta get to work in the morning. (Both via DU.) posted by Steve M. | 7:45 AM | Monday, January 08, 2007 EEEK! EEEK! SOMEBODY ATTACHED SOMETHING TO AN AMERICAN FLAG WITH SCOTCH TAPE! Not something ... something unspeakable....  The logo in the upper left corner reads "Crescent Cluster Networks." The symbols are crescent moons. Someone found this sign in New England and sent it to Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch blog. ARGH!!! NEW ENGLAND IS BECOMING ISLAMOMUSLOFASCISTAN!!! ...Or perhaps not. Crescent Cluster Networks appears to be the company name for an auto shop in Manchester, New Hampshire; the shop does business under the trade name "7 Seas Auto." How scary is 7 Seas Auto? This scary: Good quality for the price Ask for Alex he is quite nice and committed to reliability. Another garage asked for $745 for a job Seven Seas did it for $300. Unbeatable. Those Muslim fiends with their deceitfully first-rate service at reasonable prices! The commenters at Jihad Watch are responding with ... well, restraint wouldn't be the right word: This is a flag I wouldn't mind burning. **** Ladies and Gentlemen, That is not our flag. As a matter of fact any flay of ours not carried by loyal Americans is a prop. They will know our flag when we plant it in their chests. **** Outlaw Islam in the USA. Thanks. **** Typing in my zipcode, I found several businesses (including an "Indian" restaurant and a smog check) that I used to frequent that are owned and operated by Muslims. I will be adjusting my shopping habits accordingly. There is no law, or ethical more, that dictates where I must choose to spend my own money. At least there's not until sharia is enacted. I think this flag alteration was just not meant all that seriously. And hey, it could be seen as nation-of-immigrants patriotic -- sort of like this:  But what do I know? I'm just a naive, deluded liberal. posted by Steve M. | 11:31 PM | PUSH-POLLING HATE FOR JESUS The right's outrage over Keith Ellison's use of the Koran in his congressional swearing-in ceremony has died down, but Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, which used Dennis Prager's column about Ellison to raise money, now leads its Web site with this:  Gay-bashing has been AFA's stock in trade in recent years, but that seems played out, doesn't it? Muslim-bashing contradicts the Bush administration's embrace of noble purple-fingered Iraqis, but that's a hard sell in these days of civil war. Expect more pure Muslim-hate than ever from ther right in the near future. And if you feel you must, you can take the AFA poll here. posted by Steve M. | 4:16 PM | WHAT ARE RIGHT-WING BLOGGERS FREAKING OUT ABOUT NOW? The Drudge Report has a link to this Dallas Morning News story: Dallas-based food chain to accept Mexican pesos Starting Monday, patrons of the Dallas-based Pizza Patron chain, which caters heavily to Latinos, will be able to purchase American pizzas with Mexican pesos. Restaurant experts and economists said they knew of no other food chain with locations so far from the Mexican border offering such a service. "We're trying to reach out to our core customer," Antonio Swad, president of Pizza Patron Inc., said Friday. "We know they come back [from Mexico] and have pesos left over. We want to be a convenient place for them to spend their pesos." ... David at My Point: I am almost had it. Almost fed up enough to scream! Now comes a story of an American resturant located in an American City, now will accept Pesos from MEXICO, a foriegn country as currency to pay for goods in America. Stop the freaking madness. Take back America! This is ridiculas as....illigels getting Social Security that I have to add too each pay period to give to illgels aliens of my country. Thsi is not Europe a shithole. AMERICA... DOLLARS!!! The blog of the St. Louis Metropolitan Area Council of Conservative Citizens: Full Reconquista Ahead Independent Conservative: What Will We Get for Illegals Overrunning America? Pesos. I Mean Literally, Pesos! Jammed Gun: Accepting Pesos at Pizzerias in DALLAS -- This Should NOT Be Legal! ... Pizza Patron is -- in my view -- owned by (to invoke radio talk-show host Michael Savagesque terminology) greedy, unpatriotic, subversive, pigs. Townhall blog Conservative Thoughts: As the battle for securing the Nation's border with Mexico begins to heat up again in 2007, we need to look no further than Dallas, TX to see how far down a slippery slope we have fallen. A restaurant chain in the Lone Star state's shining star city has decided to accept Mexican pesos in payment. It makes one wonder; today Dallas, tomorrow New York?! Er... There's another country on our border. It's called Canada. It has a currency -- the Canadian dollar -- and plenty of U.S. businesses take it. In fact, some take it at par, one Canadian dollar as the equivalent of one U.S. dollar, even though it's not worth a full U.S. dollar. Here's a Web site dedicated to helping Canadian golfers find New York State golf courses that take Canadian dollars at par. At this site, Canadians learn about Disney World travel packages that allow Canadians to use Canadian dollars at par. Many Vermont travel destinations take Canadian dollars at par. The Cedar Point amusement park takes Canadian money (at discount). This bar in Maine takes Canadian money at par (but only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Houghton College in Houghton, New York, takes Canadian money at par. The toll plazas at Niagara Falls bridges take Canadian money. I could go on and on. IT'S A CANADIAN RECONQUISTA!!!! Eh? posted by Steve M. | 7:55 AM | Sunday, January 07, 2007 The lead story in the Week in Review section of today's New York Times is about so-called Macho Dems -- James Webb, Jon Tester, Heath Shuler; the piece is by Ryan Lizza and it's called "The Invasion of the Alpha Male Democrat." Am I wrong to be offended at this sentence? The members of this new faction, which helped the Democrats expand into majority status, stand out not for their ideology or racial background but for their carefully cultivated masculinity. Is that what Lizza means? Literally? That Webb, Tester, and other "members of this new faction" have "carefully cultivated" their "masculinity"? Let's see: When farm boy Jon Tester was nine years old, he lost three fingers in a meat grinder. Was he carefully cultivating his masculinity in anticipation of a career in politics? Or take James Webb: He followed in the footsteps of his father, a career Air Force officer, as well as generations of his family on both sides, and pursued a military career; he graduated from Annapolis and the Marine Corps' Officer's Basic School in Quantico, and was a platoon and company commander in Vietnam, winning the Navy Cross, the Silver Star Medal, two Bronze Star Medals, and two Purple Hearts. Just cagily getting his ticket punched so he could someday be a macho Senate Democrat? The thesis of Lizza's article is that two clever pols from rough-and-tumble cities, New York's Chuck Schumer and Chicago's Rahm Emmanuel, set out to recruit macho candidates for '06; that's probably what Lizza means by "carefully cultivated" -- though the sentence I quoted doesn't say that. But even that way, the message is that there's something phony about the Democratic Party's new machismo. Lizza's saying that it doesn't matter if you escaped death in war or were grievously injured by farm equipment before your voice changed -- if you're a Democrat, you're part of something fake, because (choose one) you've "carefully cultivated" your macho or you were carefully culled by cynical ward heelers. Can Democrats ever win with the pundits? posted by Steve M. | 9:29 PM | Without a surge, Mr. McCain and Mr. Lieberman warn, the war will be lost. This is a serious argument, and the two senators have been principled and even courageous in making it. --Washington Post editorial today You know what? A guy jumped on a subway track this week in front of a moving train to save a total stranger's life. After that, I don't ever want to hear the word "courageous" used as it usually is in the political press -- as a euphemism for "to the right of American popular opinion (but precisely in sync with the GOP voter base and/or the Washington Post editorial page)." posted by Steve M. | 6:06 PM | ANYTHING TO KNOCK NANCY PELOSI OFF THE FRONT PAGE Well, we all knew the Bush administration wanted this, but I didn't foresee that the idea would be floated again to coincide precisely with the start of business in the new Congress: ISRAEL has drawn up secret plans to destroy Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities with tactical nuclear weapons. Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear "bunker-busters", according to several Israeli military sources. The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb. Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open "tunnels" into the targets. "Mini-nukes" would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout. "As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished," said one of the sources.... This is clearly a Bushie leak -- the story appears in Rupert Murdoch's Times of London and is plugged by freelance Murdoch/Bush publicist Matt Drudge; elsewhere in Murdoch Land, Ralph Peters picks precisely this moment to suggest that a Navy admiral has been picked to head CentCom because the Navy will have the most critical job (protecting oil facilities) in the event of an attack on Iran; and, moreover, the rollout is precisely now, when Bush wants to show he's the political alpha dog -- so why does the Times insult our intelligence with nonsense like this? Sources close to the Pentagon said the United States was highly unlikely to give approval for tactical nuclear weapons to be used. One source said Israel would have to seek approval "after the event", as it did when it crippled Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak with airstrikes in 1981. Oh, yeah, right -- the administration will be appalled. This isn't just a matter of Bush trying to remain the center of attention, of course. Except for the Rummy part, Seymour Hersh was right last summer: My friends increasingly see [Bush] as messianic, in terms of his desire, at some point, to do something about Iran. And if you ask me what I really think, the time to be frightened is when he's a lame duck after the November elections, whether the Democrats grab the House or Senate or not. I think this president, with two years to go and the end of his presidency coming up, and Cheney still around and Rumsfeld still around, will be a really most interesting figure. But the timing is just too perfect. And in case you don't think being the center of attention is a huge motivating factor for Bush, there's this additional reminder from Frank Rich today: ...President Bush, who once hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill interfering in Terri Schiavo's medical treatment, remained at his ranch last weekend rather than join Betty Ford and Dick Cheney for the state ceremony in the Capitol rotunda. He would have been the second most respectied person in the room. And I guess he just couldn't bear that. **** UPDATE: In case I didn't make myself clear, this is Bush (rather than Olmert) trying to be the center of attention because it's obviously his plan, being leaked on his timetable. It's being described as Israel's plan, but nobody believes that. **** FURTHER UPDATE: If what I'm saying still isn't clear, let me add what I just posted in comments: The point is not that this plan is new or surprising; the point is that it's being announced now. Not only are the Israelis our possible surrogates in the war on Iran, they're now Bush's surrogates in the war on Democrats. posted by Steve M. | 11:50 AM | Saturday, January 06, 2007 Notice anything missing in this sentence from David Brooks's latest column? For [the] surge to succeed now, it would have to accomplish the following tasks: compel the Maliki government to deliver public services in a nonsectarian way; convert the Shiite theocrats who now dominate the Iraqi government into ecumenical multiculturalists; persuade the rabid Sunni leaders to accept a dependent role in the new Iraq; induce the traumatized Iraqi people to hang together as the blood flows; sustain, over 18 months, American political support for an arduous policy that begins with a 17 percent approval rating. What's missing? Oh, how about "stop Shiite death squads from using electric drills on Sunnis' faces before beheading them and leaving them in ditches"? (Or is "deliver public services in a nonsectarian way" a discreet, preppy, understated euphemism for "refrain from torturing people of different religious sects with electric drills"?) A couple of paragraphs later, Brooks talks about "the genocidal Sunni leaders" -- but he never so much as acknowledges that there's unspeakable brutality on the Shiites' part. Bizarre. **** (UPDATE: Read the damn thing here for free.) posted by Steve M. | 11:20 PM | I have to head out for most of the day today, so I'll just say: Read this. It's important. Then go here and listen to the audio clips. Download them. Post them if you can. YouTube them. Spread them around however you can. And let's vow to make 2007 the year when we get everyone in America to understand the meaning of the word "eliminationist," and we make all eliminationists national pariahs. posted by Steve M. | 10:15 AM | MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY After reading this report at Corrente and this one at MSNBC about the jolly joint appearance of Joe Lieberman and John McCain at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday (in which the two expressed their support for "victory" in Iraq and seemed to support an even bigger, longer-lived "surge" than the president is planning), I really believe that McCain might pick Holy Joe as his running mate if he manages to get the GOP nomination. (MSNBC: "From their camaraderie at Friday's AEI event, McCain seemed to have at least one vote for 2008: Lieberman.") I don't know what voters would think of a McCain/Lieberman ticket, but I warn you: If it happens, the response in the political press will be like the restaurant scene in When Harry Met Sally -- except the reporters won't be faking. (Corrente link via Attaturk, guest-blogging for Atrios.) posted by Steve M. | 9:22 AM | Friday, January 05, 2007 Although Juan Cole sees reason for optimism in recent Bush appointments, I have my doubts. Cole says: The professionals take charge. Bush is bringing in Ryan Crocker, a distinguished career foreign service officer, as the new US ambassador to Iraq. And Gen. David Petraeus will replace Gen. Casey as top ground commander in Iraq. Zalmay Khalilzad, the outgoing ambassador to Iraq, will go as ambassador to the United Nations, replacing the lying blowhard John Bolton. ...These are competent professionals who know what they are doing. [Robert] Gates is clear-sighted enough to tell Congress that the US is not winning in Iraq, unlike his smooth-talking, arrogant and flighty predecessor. Petraeus is among the real experts on counter-insurgency, and did a fine job of making friends and mending fences when he was in charge of Mosul. Crocker has been ambassador to Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon and Pakistan, and knows the region intimately (as does Khalilzad).... this team is the farthest from Neoconservative desires that you could possibly get. Er ... maybe. I operate on the assumption that Bush appointees fall into two categories: (1) utterly incompetent loyalists who do exactly what the Boy King wants and (2) non-ideologues with some sense of honor and integrity, who sign on in the naive belief that their judgment will be respected even when it contradicts preordained Bushite wisdom, and who are inevitably reduced to potted-plant status within the administration, while their job responsibilities migrate to a loyalist's (frequently Dick Cheney's) office. If there's a flurry of seemingly competent appointees coming down the pipeline these days, I assume it's because the Bushies are finding it harder and harder to locate incompetent loyalists who'd take an administration position. People whose principal (or only) job skill is loyalty may not know how to get any work done properly, but they tend to have the kind of low cunning that tells them who's a loser and should be avoided. They can see they're not going to get anything positive for themselves out of signing on with the Bush team. That leaves the sort of people who are willing to make some sacrifice in order to serve their country -- or, as the Bushies refer to them, "suckers." All of the aforementioned people may be competent. None of it will make a damn bit of difference. They think they'll be allowed to challenge Bush dogma; they won't. The ship will continue to be steered as Bush commands -- in the direction of the rocks. posted by Steve M. | 2:28 PM | ANTI-CHRISTS -- THEY'RE EVERYWHERE! So, who's acting as an agent of satanic liberalism now? * The Weather Channel. * Al Roker. You probably can't imagine Al Roker and the Weather Channel as sinister tools of the Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, but that's because you're blind to the true depths of liberal depravity. First, Melanie Morgan at World Net Daily alerts us to the fact that the Weather Channel is engaging in "sensationalized leftist political advocacy": The Weather Channel is launching a new website and broadband channel dedicated solely to global warming called "One Degree" and has a weekly program called "The Climate Code," devoted almost entirely to liberal advocacy on climate matters.... The chief martyr for the new "emotional" approach to broadcasting at The Weather Channel is Dr. Heidi Cullen, who serves as the network's cheerleader for global warming hysteria. Cullen's supposed expertise on climatology includes, among other things, earning a bachelor's degree in Near Eastern religions and history from Juniata College. For now, we'll overlook the fact that Melanie Morgan apparently doesn't know what the word "martyr" means. Let's just note that her account of Dr. Cullen's CV is -- how to put this? -- rather selective: Heidi finished her assignment as a postdoctoral research scientist on a NOAA Climate and Global Change Fellowship at the International Research Institute for Climate Prediction in New York, comes to NCAR with expertise in two distinct areas: history and climate variability. She earned a bachelor's degree in Near Eastern religions and history from Juniata College before going to Columbia University for a bachelor's in engineering and operations research and a Ph.D. in climate variability. Combining her interests, Heidi has studied historic drought and climate variability in the Middle East as well as the application of forecasts to water resource management in the La Plata Basin of South America. Her doctoral research at Columbia focused in part on the dynamics of the North Atlantic Oscillation as well as its impact on freshwater supplies in the Middle East. In ESIG and CGD, she tests whether the use of climate models can improve water resource management at the world's largest hydroelectric plant: the Itaipu Binacional hydropower facility, which provides power to Brazil and Paraguay. The challenge is to prevent flooding without unnecessarily curbing energy generation. Yup, Dr. Cullen sounds like a real lightweight, doesn't she? Ah, but she does bear the Mark of Satan with regard to global climate change: She thinks it exists, and she thinks people have something to do with it. Get thee behind me, Weather Witch! Meanwhile, NewsBusters denounces the Today show weatherman: At the "Today" show, it's not enough anymore to be subjected to the liberal preaching of Vieira, Lauer and Curry. Now weatherman Al Roker wants to harangue us, too. Roker had been off for a few days, and this morning we found out why: "We were in South Africa at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy. Life changing. Good for her. She's done such an amazing job." Wonderful. Good. Glad to hear it. But Al didn't stop there. "And to the people who are castigating her: boo on you. If you've done as much as she's done, very nice. But if you didn't: shut up." ...My goodness. You'd think Oprah was a horribly maligned and vilified figure; an object of pity. Last time I looked she was one of the most adored, popular, influential people in America. Oh, and a billionaire to boot. But Al would place her off limits for criticism unless we're a walking combination of Mother Teresa and the Gates Foundation? Now, I haven't paid much attention to the story of Oprah's South African school, but I assume anyone who's criticizing her is doing so because they think she's a dilettante celebrity -- not because they think she's a liberal. But what do I know? The slogan of NewsBusters is "Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias," and NewsBusters assures us that Roker's spirited defense of Oprah is of a piece with "the liberal preaching of Vieira, Lauer and Curry," so I guess Satan is, in fact, involved, on the side of liberals, as always. posted by Steve M. | 12:31 PM | MOMMY, MOMMY! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! Hmmm, let's see: The congressional Democrats' "first 100 hours" will begin Tuesday -- and what do you know? The president is tentatively scheduled to give his Big Iraq Speech on Wednesday, just as the Dems are getting under way. And yesterday -- the day the Democrats took control of Congress -- just so happened to be the day when we learned about the upcoming nomination of Zalmay Khalilzad as America's new UN ambassador, the appointment of Mike McConnell to replace outgoing Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte (whose move to the State Department had just been announced), the resignation of Harriet Miers as White House counsel, and the replacement of the top military commander in Iraq and the head of CentCom. All this just had to happen right now -- not, say, in the period between the November elections and January, when personnel transitions traditionally happen. Oh, and there was a little execution in Iraq last week, as a table-setter for Bush's Big Speech. Bush just can't stand it when other people take center stage. Remember this, from the summer of 2003, when Bush was just starting to lose his post-9/11, post-fall-of-Baghdad glow and a genuine movie star was running for governor of California? President Bush is used to being America's most important politician and the center of attention wherever he goes. So today, when a reporter told Mr. Bush that the California governor's race was "the biggest political story in the country," the president got cranky. "Oh, I think there's maybe other political stories," Mr. Bush said at his ranch here. "Isn't there, like, a presidential race coming up?" He added that calling the California race the biggest story "speaks volumes, if you know what I mean." The California election was a couple of months away. The presidential election was more than a year away. But Bush was being upstaged. And he was peeved. He stamped his foot. He said, "Look at me, Mommy!" It's happening again. posted by Steve M. | 7:52 AM | Thursday, January 04, 2007 From the Inland Daily Bulletin, Ontario, California:  (Click on the picture for a larger version.) I feel as if I need to take a shower every time I'm exposed to the sexual psyche of a Republican. ***** And from the Beltway press, there's this: ...Interviewing veteran Dem congressman John Dingell of Michigan, [NBC's Andrea] Mitchell asked: "Are you happy with this big celebration that Nancy Pelosi has planned for herself? Is it a bit unseemly to have Stevie Wonder and Tony Bennett and the dinners and the lunches and the brunches and the trip to Baltimore to rename the street in honor of her. Isn't this a little bit too imperial?" Flash back to January 4, 1995: ...The formal swearing-in ceremony, after a night of festivities, began at high noon. After the oath, [Newt Gingrich] gave an inaugural address designed to reach out to all Americans, to rally the nation to work together for a great common future. The network anchors broadcast live from Washington, and the new leader was photographed gazing at the Washington Monument.... ... Gingrich brought two gavels with him that day. The first ... had belonged to Joseph Martin of Massachusetts, the last Republican Speaker, who relinquished it to the Democrats 40 years ago. The other, a jumbo mallet suggestive of Gingrich's power and willingness to use it, was donated by a fan. On opening day he favored the big one. ...[There was] a real fervor to the Republican side of the House on their marathon opening day. "Newt, Newt, Newt!" they chanted. "It's a whole Newt world!"... Nope -- nothing imperial about that. posted by Steve M. | 2:44 PM | The recent negative articles about Rudy Giuliani don't tell me much about Rudy himself, but they do tell me he's not going to be a media darling in the '08 campaign -- and he may not have seen that coming. First the purloined strategy notebook becomes a multi-day story -- see today's coverage in The New York Times. Now Newsweek runs "What the Rudy Memo Missed: The Giuliani Leak May Be the Least of His Problems." It's really an absurd article -- its list of alleged Giuliani vulnerabilities includes his poor image among blacks (because, of course, Republicans always depend so much on the African-American vote to get elected) and his high earnings since leaving the mayor's office (because, of course, America would never elect a rich Republican as president). Even the suggestion that Rudy's vulnerable because he's too much of a Bush cheerleader is silly -- John McCain literally embraced Bush during the '04 campaign, and who could be closer to Bush than the most popular non-candidate, Condi Rice? The Bush administration is becoming more and more despised, but -- alas -- those associated with it still aren't irreversibly tainted. Saint McCain isn't getting this kind of mainstream press coverage; I'm not sure even the loss of a strategy book by his campaign would have been treated as a blunder (he might have been portrayed as the victim of a dirty trick). Rudy intimidated the press in New York while he was mayor, and many journalists, including quite a few self-styled liberals, fell for the line that he invented crime reduction (which, of course, happened nationwide in the Clinton years). There was some negative coverage, but much less than he had a right to expect. And then 9/11 happened. I think Rudy expected the national media to be his lapdog -- I did too -- and it's not happening. It remains to be seen whether he'll adjust. posted by Steve M. | 12:20 PM | HAL TURNER AND SEAN HANNITY If you've read the recent Firedoglake post about Hal Turner, the radio talk-show host who talks about assassinating Democratic members of Congress, you might also want to read this post of mine from last month, which talks, among other things, about Turner's long friendship with Sean Hannity, who helped make him what he is today. posted by Steve M. | 8:01 AM | Democrat-bashing radio talk-show host and columnist Howie Carr, writing about the incoming Democratic governor of Massachusetts in the Boston Herald on December 15: So now there is proof of what we have long suspected: Deval Patrick and his crew of moonbats don't have sense enough to come in out of the cold. What a marvelous idea. Let's have the governor's inauguration outside. In the first week of January! The climate’s always so accommodating... Weather forecast for today's inaugural: Partly cloudy, with a high near 56. West wind between 9 and 13 mph. Maybe there is a God, and He/She/It isn't a Republican after all. posted by Steve M. | 7:49 AM | Wednesday, January 03, 2007 LIKE ATTRACTS LIKE You may know about this embodiment of the term "upward failure": Home Depot Inc. Chief Executive Officer Robert Nardelli's $210 million severance package drew criticism as an "outrage" and threatened to escalate the debate over whether U.S. executive pay is excessive. Nardelli, 58, was ousted after Atlanta-based Home Depot's shares dropped 7.9 percent and the company lost market share to Lowe's Cos. during a six-year reign in which he earned $225 million. Nardelli's exit pay includes $20 million in cash and compensation earned and not yet received.... Nardelli's separation package, called for in his contract with the company, also includes a $9 million payment for long-term incentive awards, $44 million in previously earned and vested deferred shares, $32 million in retirement benefits and $18 million in other compensation.... It probably won't surprise you that he's a big fan of another embodiment of the term "upward failure": ...So far this year [2003], Home Depot employees and the company political action committee have contributed $31,000 to the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. ... Robert Nardelli ... who took control of Home Depot in 2000, has made at least three trips to the White House during the Bush administration. Most recently, Nardelli was recognized at a November ceremony honoring eight companies for supporting workers who had been deployed in Iraq. In December 2002, Nardelli accompanied NASCAR champion Tony Stewart -- who drives a car sponsored by Home Depot -- to the Oval Office. A few months earlier, Nardelli attended a White House conference on volunteerism, an event that led to his appointment to Bush's Council on Service and Civic Participation.... More, from 2004: ...Tonight, Bush headlined a fund-raiser at the Atlanta home of Robert Nardelli, chief executive officer of Home Depot Inc., the world's largest home-improvement chain. The $3.2 million raised will go to the Republican National Committee, Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said. Nardelli gave $25,000 to the Republican National Committee and $2,000 to the Bush campaign in the past year. The Home Depot political action committee, to which Nardelli contributed $5,000 last year, gave 78 percent of its donations to Republicans, according to the nonpartisan tracking group PoliticalMoneyLine. Four of Nardelli's family members in Atlanta have given a combined $8,000 to Bush, according to Federal Election Commission records. Last Dec. 5, Nardelli closed a Home Depot store to the public in suburban Baltimore for a few hours so Bush could visit the store and tout his $1.7 trillion tax cuts. Well, they should be a mutual admiration society -- they've both got theirs, and that's all they care about. Competence is for suckers. posted by Steve M. | 11:46 PM | Is Keith Ellison's decision to take the oath office not just with a Koran, but with Thomas Jefferson's copy of the Koran, a brilliant move? Yes. If Virgil Goode had any sense, would he drop the subject now? Yes. Will he? No. Virgil Goode is a Republican. Republicans don't admit error or defeat. Goode will press on. He'll call Jefferson an atheist, and point out that he was a slaveholder. (Republicans, even the racist ones, love to act as if they have a monopoly on anti-racism.) And he'll reserve the right to question Ellison's loyalty any time Ellison votes in a way Goode thinks is "disloyal" or "un-American." And maybe that's good -- maybe they should keep sparring. If Ellison is as smart as he looks right now, he might get a chance to trump Goode's ace every couple of weeks or so. **** UPDATE: Goode hasn't invoked Jefferson's slaveholding so far, and maybe (as Cautious Man notes in comments) he simply can't, given Jefferson's hero status in Virginia, but I see that one of the Goode's ideological soul mates in the right blogosphere has played the slave card for him. posted by Steve M. | 2:50 PM | THE GIULIANI CAMP CONVICTS WITHOUT TRIAL I didn't bother posting anything about the Rudy Giuliani story that appeared in yesterday's New York Daily News because, like a lot of other people, I didn't see what the big deal was -- the Double Super Secret information in the dossier the News had obtained told us nothing we didn't already know about Rudy (he's trying to raise a lot of money; he wants to hire seasoned GOP campaign veterans; he'll need to overcome questions about his stands on social issues, his personal life, and Bernie Kerik). But now there's this in the New York Post: Suspicion ran high yesterday that Rudy Giuliani's lost White House campaign playbook was swiped by aides to Florida's new governor - while the ex-mayor was helping him win election, sources told The Post. Giuliani's aides were tightlipped about how it disappeared, but said it happened during a private plane ride on the campaign trail for 2006 candidates. They included Florida Gov. Charles Crist. "During one leg of his campaign travel, all luggage was removed from a private plane and later put back on," said Giuliani's spokeswoman, Sunny Mindel. "However, one staffer's bag was not returned. After repeated requests over the course of a few days, the bag was finally returned with the document inside. "Because our staffer had custody of this document at all times except for this one occasion, it is clear that the document was removed from the luggage and photocopied," she added, stopping short of saying it was stolen.... Patrick Hynes at Ankle Biting Pundits is right about this: Yeah, yeah, I work for McCain's PAC, but ... I must say that I don't think Giuliani is helping himself here.... I think after making an accusation like that, Team Rudy had better have some evidence against the private airline that Giuliani ... hired to cart him to and fro.... Yeah -- and against Crist. This, not a messy divorce or appearances in drag, is what might keep Rudy from the White House. This is Angry, Paranoid Rudy, so well described by Cintra Wilson in Salon a month ago: Before the planes hit, when he had too much power and not enough to do, Giuliani, like an old soldier who comes home and starts abusing his family in lieu of a real enemy, was pulling a Great Santini on New York, rooting around in our sock drawers with a Maglite, looking for vices to confiscate and sins to punish. ...Rudy sought to remake New York in his own image and likeness, by interpreting things that personally annoyed him as actual crimes. It's not a question of whether Rudy can control his tendency to lash out at people. He can't. The question is, can he limit his outbursts to people who "deserve" it (Muslims, liberals)? He can go all the way if he's a paranoid, hate-filled guy with a messiah complex and bad behavior in his past -- that would just make him a combination of Bush and Cheney. But if he freaks out at the wrong person -- an important Republican or someone the voting public genuinely likes -- he's going down. posted by Steve M. | 12:52 PM | FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR FEAR Remember this, from just before Christmas? Hmmm -- I guess it never happened: British intelligence and law enforcement officials have passed on a grim assessment to their U.S. counterparts, "It will be a miracle if there isn't a terror attack over the holidays in London," a senior American law enforcement official tells ABCNews.com. ..."It is not a matter of if there will be an attack, but how bad the attack will be," an intelligence official told ABCNews.com. ...A report by "Newsweek" says that American al Qaeda figure Adam Gadahn has served as a translator of a 12-member team of Western recruits, the "English brothers," said to be preparing an attack that would be much bigger than last year's attack on the London subway system. ...British Home Minister John Reid recently told reporters that it was "highly likely" that terrorists would attempt an attack before the first of the year. I can understand wanting to say "We know you're out there!" to any plotters of terrorist attacks who might be counting on the element of surprise. I can't think of any good reason for a public official to say "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!" except a desire to engage in fearmongering. And, of course, John Reid and the Labour government were accused of just that by the opposition: Conservative homeland security spokesman Patrick Mercer said: "If the Government wants to make things more difficult for the terrorists, they have to involve the public in a constructive way. Otherwise warnings like this are nothing but hollow rhetoric. "Where are the efforts to advise people on what to do in the event of an attack, or what to look out for to help prevent one? "Where are the instruction posters on the Tube in London? Where are the new radios to allow the emergency services to communicate underground? "Knowledge dispels fear, but John Reid is giving us fear with no knowledge." Mr Mercer also voiced concerns that ministers are using repeated warnings of impending attacks partly to 'soften up' public opinion for the introduction of more sweeping counter-terrorism powers, including another attempt to introduce 90-day detention without charge for suspects in terrorist cases. Scaring the hell out of people in order to ease the way for an erosion of civil liberties, while failing to take practical steps? Gosh, where have I seen that before? posted by Steve M. | 8:58 AM | Tuesday, January 02, 2007 There aren't many things I'd want to do less than sleep on the street all night so I can watch the freakin' Rose Parade. But if I ever decide to do anything that dumb, I hope I at least won't get converted to Christianity by a mime troupe made up of homeschooled teenagers in white gloves and whiteface performing to Christian music. Please, strike me blind on the road to Damascus. If I'm going to be converted, at least don't let me do it like a total dork. posted by Steve M. | 11:32 PM | HE WAS A BIGOTED NATIVIST JERK BEFORE BEING A BIGOTED NATIVIST JERK WAS COOL Unless I'm still jet-lagged, today is not April Fool's Day and this is not a joke: Former Major League Baseball pitcher John Rocker is starting a campaign to encourage English-speaking Americans to start demanding respect from legal and illegal immigrants who do not speak English. Rocker is also pushing for immigrants to respect the customs, heritage and culture of the United States. In a news release, Rocker said the "'Speak English' campaign is to encourage people to promote and support the sustainment of the American heritage and the American culture. This campaign is in no way intended to degrade or demean the cultures or heritages of others' nationalities or races, but instead to bolster American nationalism and promote pride in the American culture." To further his cause, Rocker is selling "Speak English" T-shirts on his Web site.... Which is true.  (Mr. Rocker is accompanied by that noted immigration expert Alicia Marie -- "fitness athlete, freelance writer, and Ms. Bikini Universe 2004.") In the past, Rocker has been called a racist and anti-homosexual for comments made during interviews and drawn heavy fire from New York Mets fans after comments about the city of New York.... Which is also true. Here's the legendary Sports Illustrated article from 1999 in which Rocker demonstrated convincingly that he in no way intends to degrade or demean the cultures or heritages of others' nationalities or races: "So many dumb asses don't know how to drive in this town," he says, Billy Joel's New York State of Mind humming softly from the radio. "They turn from the wrong lane. They go 20 miles per hour. It makes me want -- Look! Look at this idiot! I guarantee you she's a Japanese woman." A beige Toyota is jerking from lane to lane. The woman at the wheel is white. "How bad are Asian women at driving?" ... * On ever playing for a New York team: "I would retire first. It's the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the [Number] 7 train to the ballpark, looking like you're [riding through] Beirut next to some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It's depressing." * On New York City itself: "The biggest thing I don't like about New York are the foreigners. I'm not a very big fan of foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?" ... My favorite line from his Speak English Campaign Mission Statement: In my own personal experiences, I have lived abroad for over a year of my life, three different times in Puerto Rico and once in Venezuela. Puerto Rico is "abroad." This guy is so ignorant it's a wonder he doesn't have his own show on CNN. ***** ***** By the way, Rocker has apparently been conducting this campaign for a couple of months, according to his publicist's blog. posted by Steve M. | 4:39 PM | VIRGIL GOODE: HIS BOSSES DON'T THINK HE'S IN A HOLE AND HE'S GOING TO KEEP DIGGING Both Steve Benen at the Carpetbagger Report and David Weigel at Hit & Run invoke the old saw about the futility of digging when you're in a hole in reaction to an editorial in this morning's USA Today, entitled "Save Judeo-Christian Values," by GOP House member Virgil Goode. In the op-ed, Goode defends the letter he wrote to constituents a couple of weeks ago linking the election to Congress of Keith Ellison, a Detroit-born Muslim, to illegal immigration. The fact that Goode doesn't back down an inch, and -- especially -- the fact that the op-ed appears in the largest-circulation newspaper in America on January 2, not during the dead-zone week between Christmas and New Year's, tells me that the Republican Party doesn't see any reason whatsoever to pressure Goode to tone it down. I'll say again what I said before Christmas: The GOP doesn't mind a bit that Goode is rallying the haters in the party's base. It's the same old Republican strategy: paint Democrats as utterly beyond the pale, as a way to make sure that some voters, at least, never, ever consider voting Democratic. It may be the wrong strategy these days, but nobody in the party believes that yet -- or, at least, nobody in the party believes it enough to tell Goode he needs to shut the hell up. posted by Steve M. | 3:04 PM | I HATE THESE PEOPLE From Lucianne.com this morning, in response to this New York Times article:  Isn't that swell. It's not enough to have absolutely no sense of responsibility for the mess that's been created by policies you've advocated and cheered on for years -- Lady of the Manor Lucianne has the gall to shake her walking stick at the filthy wogs because they beg to set foot on her estate. And I don't know which comment from her peanut gallery disgusts me most -- is it the one that accuses Iraqis of "hyperventilating about what will happen when our military leaves"? Or is it this one? If iraqis are leaving America, it is because there is so much new hope in their country. They want to live at home, and not in America; it was their haven until saddam was gone. Ignorant scum. And as for the literal truth of "There's no room," I spent most of the past week in New Mexico, a state the size of Italy that has fewer people than Brooklyn, and it's far from the only sparsely populated state in this country. Gee, Lucianne, I know you're my neighbor, but I thought it was liberals who confuse the Upper West Side with America. posted by Steve M. | 10:33 AM | Monday, January 01, 2007  During a layover this afternoon at the George [H.W.] Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, I saw a Starbucks barista singing along to the falsetto part of the Smiths' "William, It Was Really Nothing." He was not attacked angry mobs and strung up. (Nobody noticed him but his co-workers and me.) Also, the bookshop next door had books by John Edwards and Paula Poundstone on the front table, and several travel guides to Cuba in stock in the back. So much for my worst cultural stereotypes. Anyway, I'm back. Thank you, guest bloggers, and Happy New Year, everyone. (Photo above can be found here. And yes, it's as weird in real life as it looks here.) **** Oh, and if you're as big a fan of the ridiculous items in the SkyMall catalog as I am, let me assure you that one of the dumbest items available, the personalized branding iron for your barbecued meats, is still on offer -- and please note the initials in the catalog photo:  I gather that item first showed up in the catalog a couple of years ago. I'm sure the initials seemed like a swell idea at the time. posted by Steve M. | 11:08 PM | |
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