I was venting semi-coherently last night about the postponement of the recall and my feeling that it might actually help the GOP, and now here's this, in a San Francisco Chronicle story:

In the 48 hours after the ruling by the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to delay the election, Republican sources say more than $2 million poured into the state party from donors outraged at the ruling.

Rescue California, the lead pro-recall committee, sent out an e-mail to 15,000 backers on Monday and had what spokesman Phil Paule called the campaign's "single best day," receiving thousands of dollars in small donations from people furious at the federal court's decision.

"This changes our whole dynamic all of a sudden," said Paule.

And Republicans are spinning this in a way that jibes perfectly with what I was saying last night:

"There are a lot of Republicans who are red-hot mad that liberal judges are thwarting the will of millions of voters," said Sean Walsh, spokesman for the Schwarzenegger campaign.

Others said it is just a matter of time before the focus shifts from the courts to the Democratic establishment they represent, led by Davis. "For those people who believed the political class was out of control, I think it certainly re-emphasizes that," said Wayne Johnson, who was a strategist for Simon's campaign.

"It's a very liberal, partisan court," said [McClintock campaign director John] Feliz. "As a consequence, they can be easily tied to the Democrats."

However, the Chronicle story also has this:

The court's ruling Monday may have revived the candidacy of Republican businessman Bill Simon, who said he might re-enter the replacement race he dropped out of three weeks ago if the election is held in March.

"If it took place in March, I'd look at getting back in," Simon told The Chronicle Tuesday.

And there's also speculation that Schwarzenegger might drop out. (But I don't believe that will happen for a minute -- the "tough scrutiny" he's been subjected to it is rolling off him like water off a duck's butt.)

Stay tuned....

Impeach Cheney now.

And since I left Halliburton to become George Bush’s vice president, I’ve severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interests. I have no financial interest in Halliburton of any kind and haven’t had now for over three years.

--Dick Cheney on Meet the Press, 9/14/03

Senate Democrats challenged Vice President Dick Cheney's recent assertion that he had severed all his ties to his former employer, the Halliburton Company, which has received more than $1 billion in federal contracts to rebuild Iraq's oil fields and provide services to the military. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey said Mr. Cheney's current financial disclosure form showed his holding 433,333 Halliburton stock options and continuing to receive deferred compensation.

...Catherine Martin, Mr. Cheney's spokeswoman, acknowledged that he would receive about $150,000 a year in deferred compensation from Halliburton through 2005 but said the amount was not tied to the company's fortunes in any way. The vice president bought an insurance policy to cover the compensation before he took office, Ms. Martin said, guaranteeing him the full amount even if the company went bankrupt.

--New York Times, 9/17/03

"No financial interest in Halliburton": It's a lie. What else would you call it?

(UPDATE: Sorry, I haven't been keeping up as much as I need to. Obviously there's so much more dishonesty where that came from.)

(FURTHER UPDATE: I love what Billmon says about Cheney's $150,000 in deferred compensation: "Just think of it as Cheney's Iraq War finder's fee.")

So I guess members of the bin Laden family weren't flown out of the country immediately after 9/11, when you and I weren't permitted to fly. In fact, they were flown from Florida to Lexington, Kentucky, by Learjet, with White House approval, on 9/13, when you and I weren't permitted to fly. Then they were spirited out of the country -- a few days later, when air travel began to resume.

Wow, that sure makes me feel better.

(Thanks to Cursor for the link.)

In The Village Voice, Rick Perlstein fantasizes about ads the Democrats could -- should -- run in 2004. Here's one:

I picture zeros filling the screen. George W. Bush's zeros. There are 11 zeros in $500 billion—the current estimate of Bush's budget deficit. There is one more zero in a trillion—the amount the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates the Bush tax cuts for the rather well-off will end up costing. Maybe start off the commercial with six zeros almost filling the screen: the six zeros in 3 million, the number of jobs lost under Bush. Picture them as balloons: six of them, filling with air, crowding the frame. Five more balloons, then six, crowd them further, the narrator explaining how many zeros there are in $1,000,000,000,000. The balloons get too big, the screen is too small, a single TV set proves unable to squeeze them all in. The balloons begin to explode, one by one, until there's only one fat, round one left. Which begins to whinily leak.

A single zero. To illustrate the number of net jobs created under every administration led by a man with the last name of Bush.

His other ads are pretty good, too.

So Rumsfeld said flat-out that he knows of no Iraq link to 9/11. Was there a big front-page story in your newspaper? Did the sound bite make your local TV news? Did you hear this on the radio this morning?

No? Same here.

Well, why not? Why wasn't there a huge above-the-fold headline, RUMSFELD: IRAQ NOT LINKED TO 9/11, in, say, this morning's USA Today?

The groupthinkers in the media will say there's nothing new in what Rumsfeld said. They'll say the administration has never claimed a Saddam-Osama link. Which is true -- but the Bushies have implied the link with nods and winks, over and over and over again, and they're still doing it. As the story I linked notes,

Vice President Dick Cheney said on Sunday, for example, that success in stabilizing and democratizing Iraq would strike a major blow at the "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9-11."

And Tuesday, in an interview on ABC's "Nightline," White House national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said that one of the reasons President Bush went to war against Saddam was because he posed a threat in "a region from which the 9-11 threat emerged."

The press is there to inform us. Guess what? We're not adequately informed. More than two-thirds of Americans think this Saddam-Osama link exists, because of a deliberate Bush administration strategy of disinformation-by-implication.

The Beltway media failed to debunk this -- and that failure is ongoing.

Over at Needlenose, Green Boy expresses fear that the postponement of the California recall might actually be good for the Republicans.

I fear that, too.

As GB points out, this setback for the Davis haters could work as a get-out-the-vote tool, a spur to GOP (Schwarzenegger) voters. Also, it's possible that McClintock really would have stuck it out until October 7, splitting the GOP vote, while a postponement makes his departure (presumably under intense pressure) more likely.

What bugs me about this election is the fact that it's not the bizarre, aberrant event everyone says it is -- it's just another damn election, and, moreover, one that fits a right-wing script: GOP hero with ordinary folks' values vs. sneaky, geeky liberals/Democrats.

Now, to arrive at this view of the election, you have to accept as perfectly OK the GOP gaming of the system (Issa trying to buy the governorship by bankrolling signature-collectors in the petition drive) while being outraged at the ACLU's push to win a postponement. But that's exactly how a lot of people feel, many of them the commentators who tell us all what to think. You have to see Gray Davis as part of the elite and Arnold as just a regular guy. But a lot of people really do see the two of them that way. You have to blow a few details of Cruz Bustamante's life out of proportion and conclude that he's a bigot while ignoring the fact that, in terms of respect for women, Schwarzenegger makes Howard Stern look like Alan Alda. But that way of thinking is common, too.

Once again, alas, we've got a charisma deficiency on the Dem side and a full-of-himself -- and thus well-regarded -- Republican. Arnold loves himself, just as George W. loves himself, so the press loves him and the press acts as if all the people love him.

When a gazillion people signed up to run, I thought this might be different. I thought there'd be votes flying every which way and ten or fifteen candidates surfacing in the polls as possible contenders. But we're simple people: an 800-pound gorilla got into the race and became the only person everyone (or at least everyone Anglo) talks about, and now we can grasp the election without thinking very hard and making our heads hurt.

Yeah, I know this is awfully disjointed. Well, I still suspect Arnold will win it. (What, do you think the economy will rebound by March and Davis will survive? With that idiot still in the White House?) I hope I'm wrong.

Interesting news about Bush's partner in war, Tony Blair:

THE jottings of ... Peter Foster and his ex-girlfriend Carole Caplin will soon put besieged British Prime Minister Tony Blair under further pressure.

A newspaper serialisation of Foster's autobiography is set to be published in Britain this week amid reports Ms Caplin, "lifestyle guru" to Tony and Cherie Blair, is also threatening to write her memoirs after being banned from visiting Downing Street.

Foster, who was at the centre of last year's Cheriegate furore which rocked Downing Street, has reportedly been paid $1.2 million for his memoirs....

The book is claimed to be a "literary weapon of mass destruction" that will further rock the shaky foundations of the Blair Government, reeling over the war on Iraq and the death of weapons adviser David Kelly.

It is said to lift the lid on the Cheriegate scandal, in which Foster secured a discount for Mrs Blair on a real estate deal.

After initially denying her links with Foster, whom she met through her friend Ms Caplin, Mrs Blair made a tearful public admission that Foster had indeed acted on her behalf.

Mr Blair has distanced himself from Foster but his 140,000-word autobiography is said to contain a "smoking gun" with the potential to topple his government....

At the weekend, The Daily Mail reported the Blairs were working on a strategy to end their association with Ms Caplin, 41, a former topless model who has advised them on fashion, diet and fitness for more than a decade.

But friends of Ms Caplin said it was increasingly likely she would spill the beans on her relationship with the Blairs for up to $1 million.

--The Courier-Mail (Queensland, Australia)

Funny, I see no mention of this story here.

(First link via Publishers Lunch.)

If you're going to try to debunk something, it helps if you're right and the debunkee is wrong. Donald Luskin, the National Review Online columnist, is an Ahab with a white whale named Paul Krugman; he has made taking the Times columnist to task his life's work. In this column, he rails against four Krugman "lies." I'll leave it to others to deal with "lies" #2, #3, and #4 and stick with #1. Luskin writes:

 Krugman's first lie about lying is an all-too-familiar sound-byte. In his New York Times column Tuesday, he wrote that "Mr. Bush and his officials portrayed the invasion of Iraq as an urgent response to an imminent threat," and he told Terry Gross [on her NPR show],

... if he says ... that some country is an imminent threat when in fact the evidence points the other way, people in the journalistic profession are very, very reluctant to say, "Hey, he's lying."

Perhaps they are "very, very reluctant" because of the fact that President Bush said exactly the opposite. In his state of the union address this year, Bush was at pains to disclose that the Iraq threat was not imminent, but that a controversial pre-emptive strike was nevertheless justified. Bush said,

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?

Gross didn't correct him.

Where in this passage does Bush argue that the threat from Saddam isn't imminent? I see no sign of that.

Here's the passage with the two sentences that follow:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

Bush says the threat, unannounced now, quite possibly could emerge both "suddenly" and "fully" -- and if it does, it would be "too late" for a response. He's saying action is required now.

So he's not saying the threat isn't imminent -- he's saying it is imminent.

Krugman 1, Luskin 0.

What Crisis?

The stories are legion: pregnant women unable to find doctors to deliver their babies because disgruntled obstetricians have closed their practices or retired in droves; white-coated physicians hitting the picket lines and threatening to shut down emergency rooms; desperate patients forced to travel long distances to find a specialist willing to perform lifesaving surgery.

The culprit, according to the American Medical Association (AMA) and President Bush: multimillion-dollar jury awards in malpractice cases that have resulted in insurance premium increases so huge that they are forcing doctors out of business and jeopardizing patients' access to health care.

But a new study by the General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, has reached a very different conclusion about the effect of rising malpractice premiums on consumers. Investigators who studied nine states found instances of localized but not widespread problems of access to health care mostly in "scattered, often rural, areas" that have long-standing problems attracting doctors.

And many of those highly publicized accounts of doctors who have retired or moved are, according to the GAO, either "not substantiated," temporary or involved only a few physicians....

--Washington Post

The sob stories? Some of them seem to be out-and-out lies:

In Florida, where the state medical society told congressional investigators that all the neurosurgeons in Collier and Lee counties had stopped practicing, the GAO found at least five such specialists at work in each county. Although medical groups have repeatedly warned that doctors are reluctant to come to Florida because of escalating premiums, the GAO found that the number of new medical licenses issued by the state has increased in the past two years.

Limits were put on civil suits in George W. Bush's Texas. He wants the same thing to happen nationwide. He became president and -- what do you know? -- suddenly we started hearing this was a crisis.

Why do we ever give credence to any assertion that advances the Bush agenda?

(Thanks to BuzzFlash for the link.)

GEORGE W. BUSH: OBJECTIVELY PRO-MASS MURDER, POLITICAL ASSASSINATION, AND DRUG DEALING

From The New York Times:

President Alvaro Uribe, who enjoys strong public support for vowing to bring order to Colombia, is proposing a law that would effectively grant impunity to right-wing death squads that lay down their arms.

...The proposed law would allow militiamen from the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia to avoid jail for widespread human rights abuses that include the mass killings of thousands of villagers and the assassination of two presidential candidates. The group's leaders, several already convicted in absentia for murder, would instead be compelled to admit their crimes and make symbolic acts of contrition, compensating victims by providing community services, turning in their land and paying fines.

In exchange, the militia — a private, antiguerrilla army financed through cocaine trafficking and donations from wealthy Colombians — would make peace....

The proposed law also appears to contradict American policy in Colombia — the State Department lists the Self-Defense Forces as a terrorist group, and a federal court in Washington last year indicted three leaders for trafficking cocaine.

Western diplomats here and American officials who work on Colombia policy, though, say the United States has not only offered support for Mr. Uribe but also has been consulted as his administration drafted the legislation.

(Emphasis mine.)

Oh, and I love this statement:

"Everybody here understands that you're not going to do a peace process unless you have some sort of arrangement," a Bush administration official who has helped shape policy toward Colombia said by telephone from Washington....

"Arrangement" -- it sounds like something out of Chinatown or L.A. Confidential or some other deeply cynical movie about thugs and corrupt cops: "Well, y'know, we have a sort of...arrangement."

Disgusting.

Does America hate its veterans -- or just the ones who have the nerve to get sick?

The Portland Phoenix reports:

This summer, VA secretary Anthony Principi said during a San Antonio speech that his department was weathering "the perfect storm" of too many veterans enrolling in the VA and not enough money from Congress to take care of them all.

"I think most health-care systems in America would collapse under the burden," he told his audience.

...The VA’s financial woes were compounded in 1996, when Congress mandated that all veterans be allowed to enroll in the VA health-care system, without fully funding the expansion.

"We [the DAV and other veterans organizations] went out on a big recruitment to find those people who may not have been service-connected," says Brodeur, "but they did spend some time in the military and now they may have some health problems, or they lost their job and they’re having a hard time just getting prescriptions.

"And we really went crazy doing that, and we found a lot of people who needed assistance," he says. "And we started flooding the system with them, and we choked it."

So bad did they choke the system, in fact, that incoming veterans now routinely wait six months to a year for their initial VA medical appointments. Meetings with specialists often take just as long....

(Click on the link, by the way, and you can read about the guy who couldn't get the VA to pay for a hearing aid for his stepfather, a World War II vet, because they couldn't provide specific information about the weapons that damaged his hearing: "To go back and ask the day, the time, the type of gun, the commanding officer — I mean, these are things that are 40, 50 years old, and it’s almost impossible, unless you kept a diary, to be able to convey in any kind of manner that can make sense on paper, like they’re trying to produce.")

*******

Meanwhile, USA Today reports this:

Scores of private factories that helped make the nation's first atomic bombs stayed polluted for decades. And thousands of people who later worked in them were exposed to radiation and toxins without knowing it, federal records show.

The government is refusing to compensate workers who say they have illnesses from the latent contamination. It says only those who had jobs while the weapons work was going on are eligible for money.

About 250 chemical plants, steel mills, machine shops and other private factories got classified contracts in the 1940s and '50s to process radioactive and toxic material for atomic bombs for the government. Officials knew contamination at many sites remained above federal safety limits for years after weapons work ended, declassified records on conditions at the factories show. A few stayed polluted into the early '90s.

...Most workers were not told of the contamination or its health risks....

We really hate to admit that there are any negative consequences to our military might, don't we?

Atrios thinks the momentum in the California recall election is going "our way," as does Tarek at Liquid List. I wouldn't be so sure. Yes, opposition to the recall is 47%, according to this AP story, while support for the recall is at 50%. But that's among "likely voters" -- which probably means people who vote regularly. Arnold Schwarzenegger, if the Jesse Ventura campaign is any indication, will win (if he does win) on the strength of votes from unlikely voters -- young white males who usually don't give a damn about politics.

AP notes that Bustamante is down 5 percentage points since August, while Schwarzie is up 3. That's certainly not good news. A bright spot is that the hard-right-purist candidate, Tom McClintock, is up 6 points -- but if his momentum keeps up, you can bet he'll soon find a horse's head in his bed and drop out of the race.

So maybe it's good that an appeals court has ruled that the recall should be delayed -- assuming the ruling stands.

OPRAH -- THANKS FOR THE HUGE NON-MONETARY CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION! LOVE, ARNOLD + MARIA

Story here.

(For coverage from Oprah's own Web site, go here and -- in case you think Oprah could be objective in this situation -- here.)

Yeah, I suppose there's a chance she'll do the same thing for Cruz Bustamante. I also suppose pigs might fly in my lifetime.

BUSH REVEALS FOREIGN POLICY WAS STUNT FOR MTV’S “JACKASS”

In a nationally televised address on Sunday, President George W. Bush revealed that his foreign policy has been an elaborate stunt for the popular MTV series "Jackass."

Mr. Bush told the nation that he had been a fan of the prank-based television program "for some time" and had been actively searching for a stunt worthy of the show.

The President said he was first inspired to emulate a "Jackass" stunt in which a prankster poured scalding water on a sleeping friend, but when he sought to play the same prank on Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Cheney was "nowhere to be found."

Instead, Mr. Bush said, he decided to concoct a "Jackass"-style foreign policy, diverting resources away from the search for Osama bin Laden and towards the invasion of Iraq.

While Mr. Bush said his stunt had been a success, he warned viewers, "Do not – I repeat – do not try this at home."...

--Andy Borowitz

(Thanks to Billmon for the link.)

Richard N. Smith, a Republican political historian and director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, said of the Bush administration: "My sense is that they may be paying a price, short term or not, about not being more explicit about the possible costs and long-term commitments that, quote, rebuilding, unquote, Iraq would necessarily require. They needed to do a much better job of explaining what the $87 billion is for. I think it shocked people."

--New York Times

Sure, Bush wasn't explicit, but if this shocked people, why did it shock them? Did they really believe a war could be fought and a country could be occupied at essentially no cost?

Is this what happens when virtually every member of one political party, and virtually all the commentators sympathetic to that party, tell people over and over again for twenty-five years that all tax money is poured down a rathole, and imply that all government services just appear by magic, as if they're provided by elves and fairies, so we can cut taxes whenever we want to by as much as we'd like?

From Paul Krugman's article "The Tax-Cut Con":

...the estate tax is a tax on the very, very well off. Yet advocates of repeal began portraying it as a terrible burden on the little guy. They renamed it the ''death tax'' and put out reports decrying its impact on struggling farmers and businessmen -- reports that never provided real-world examples because actual cases of family farms or small businesses broken up to pay estate taxes are almost impossible to find. This campaign succeeded in creating a public perception that the estate tax falls broadly on the population. Earlier this year, a poll found that 49 percent of Americans believed that most families had to pay the estate tax, while only 33 percent gave the right answer that only a few families had to pay.

So "Saddam = Osama" isn't the only lie the GOP Big Liars have persuaded Americans to believe.

There was general gratitude in the Nice Blog household today for Paul Krugman’s New York Times Magazine article “The Tax-Cut Con.” But as we were passing the article back and forth, an objection was raised: Isn’t Krugman a bit too quick to dismiss the complaints of middle-class people that their taxes have increased over the years? Isn’t the problem not merely that the rich have received tax cuts, but that the non-rich really have been squeezed?

Krugman can’t seem to find the data to justify this dismissal, which seems odd, given that he’s an Ivy League economics professor. He writes:

On average, families in the middle of the income distribution find themselves paying about 26 percent of their income in taxes today. This number hasn't changed significantly since 1989, and though hard data are lacking, it probably hasn't changed much since 1970.

We wondered if there was anything about this in the books those old-school liberals Donald Barlett and James Steele wrote back in the 1990s. Sure enough, there is. In their 1992 bestseller, America: What Went Wrong?, they cite statistics that perfectly fit the hole in Krugman’s data:

In 1970, a Philadelphia family with an income of $9,000 to $10,000 -- median family income that year was $9,867 -- paid a total of $1,689 in combined local, state and federal income and Social Security taxes.

In 1989, a Philadelphia family with an income of $30,000 to $40,000 -- the median family income that year was $34,213 -- paid $8,491 in combined local, state and federal income and Social Security taxes. Thus, while these taxes consumed 17.8 percent of a middle-class family’s earnings in 1970, by 1989 they took 24.3 percent of the family’s income.

(Emphasis mine.)

A partial explanation for this is found in their 1994 follow-up, America: Who Really Pays the Taxes?:

From 1977 to 1990, the Social Security tax rate was raised nine times on Middle America. It went from 5.85 percent to 7.65 percent ... an increase of 31 percent.

(High earners, of course, pay this tax on only a fraction of their income, while middle-class earners pay it on every dime they make -- this year the tax is paid on the first $87,000 of a person’s income.)

If the Barlett and Steele numbers are right, middle-class taxes are noticeably higher than they were in 1970. Why shrug that off?

Don’t say I didn’t warn you about David Brooks. A few weeks ago, when it was announced that he’d be writing a regular New York Times column, I wrote:

he sees a world out of balance, a world in which flabby, effete coastal moral relativists lord it over upright real Americans with a clear, God-given sense of right and wrong. In other words, he holds a lot of us in utter contempt -- and he’ll be using The New York Times to tell the world why.

In his second column, published today, he’s starting to do just that. Sure, he praises Howard Dean -- but he does so bizarrely, by describing Dean and George W. Bush as representatives of a sort of Master Race, easily distinguished from their inferiors:

Both were inculcated with something else, a sense of chivalry. Unlike today's top schools, which are often factories for producing Résumé Gods, the WASP prep schools were built to take the sons of privilege and toughen them into paragons of manly virtue. Rich boys were sent away from their families and shoved into a harsh environment that put tremendous emphasis on athletic competition, social competition and character building.

For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that "manly virtue" and “chivalry” and “character” are the last two words any rational person would associate with Bush, a man who’ll go to his grave never once having accepted responsibility for a mistake. Let’s think about what Brooks is doing in this paragraph: He’s saying, yet again, that white-collar Americans who went to “today’s top schools” utterly lack a value system and a moral compass. (And I think it’s safe to say that he assumes most of these characterless go-getters are blue-state Democrats.)

Here’s the end of his column:

The Protestant Establishment is dead, and nobody wants it back. But that culture, which George Bush and Howard Dean were born into, did have a formula for producing leaders. Our culture, which is freer and fairer, does not.

About that “nobody wants it back”: Don’t believe it for a second. David Brooks wants it back. He’d be pleased at any development that diminished the influence of people with high SAT scores who’ve eaten Ben & Jerry’s.

Yes, by the way, I'm an Ivy Leaguer, though my father drove trucks for a living and I haven't parlayed my sheepskin to a particularly high notch on the career ladder. What Brooks says, or implies, these days sticks in my craw. I keep waiting for him to start complaining about "rootless cosmopolitans."

Look at this shit-eating grin. Iraq is a quagmire where U.S. soldiers are still being wounded and killed, Afghanistan is a mess, the second anniversary of 9/11 just passed, and Bush is the happiest man on the planet.

Remember this picture (which, incidentally, took up most of the top half of the front page in today's print New York Times) the next time Bush solemnly declares that the U.S. fought in Iraq "reluctantly."

Remember those long-ago promises that Republicans could "run government more like a business"? Kirk Anderson remembers -- and now he's wondering about one particular employee....

(Thanks to Susan for this one.)