If Only There Were a Citgo Station Nearby...And I Had a Car

So now the wingnuts want to boycott Citgo because it's owned by Venezuela. All of the dumbest, meanest, unhingiest, batshit craziest bloggers are on board. They want revenge.

Because Hugo Chavez said mean things about Bush.

Whiny. Ass. Titty. Babies.

Seriously--is there anything more pathetically, childishly insecure than threatening retaliation against some other country because they called your president names?

Of course, this isn't the first time these people have turned to the boycott to avenge some perceived slight against American honor. In the last few years, we've seen the nuttier folks on the right use some supposed insult to push boycotts of France, Germany, and Mexico. They seem extremely worried that the most powerful nation on the planet might just get its feelings hurt.

Just between you and me, I don't think Venezuela has too much to worry about. Last I heard, Germany was still in business.

[Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]

Judge removes Green Party candidate from PA ballot:

Oh, dear! This doesn't bode well for Rick Santorum's re-election bid. Carl Romanelli, the Green Party candidate for Senate, was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Santorum campaign. Republicans solicited petition signatures to get hiim on the ballot. Almost all of his contributions came from Republicans who hoped he would take away votes from Democratic challenger Bob Casey. Casey is leading Santorum in current polls.

Commonwealth Court Judge James R. Kelley ruled that Romanelli, a railroad industry consultant from Wilkes-Barre, was 8,931 signatures shy of 67,070 he needed to qualify as a minor-party candidate.

Clifford Levine, an attorney for the Democrats, said the ruling "allows there to be a head-to-head matchup between Bob Casey and Rick Santorum, which is what obviously, in our view, Sen. Santorum was trying to avoid."

State Democrats had said about three-quarters of the 94,000 signatures Romanelli gathered included fake names, unregistered voters and illegible signatures.

I support third-party ballot access for legitimate candidates, but it's clear that Mr. Romanelli is a plant. He's only in the race because Santorum is desperate enough to do anything it takes to win. It looks like Mr. Family Values isn't too concerned about ethics.

HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY

“Gut alone is crazy. Why do gut when you can go with objective information? Hope is not a strategy. And gut instincts are always less effective than objective analysis.”

Who said it?

A. George W. Bush, President
B. Dick Cheney, Vice President
C. Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State
D. Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense
E. Ken Mehlman, RNC Chairman

Ah, well. Best laid plans and all of that.

It took all of a year to go from Mehlman's formulation of Republicans as “the party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass" to "the party of Katrina and sanctioned torture."

Hope is not a strategy, but strategy may be the Democrats' only hope. Are they up to it?

— skimble

Hi, my name's Phil Nugent, and I own and operate a blog called "The Phil Nugent Experience," because "First Draft Playhouse" and "Run-On Sentences 'R Us" just didn't have that special something. I'd like to thank Steve for the invitation to crash at his site while he's away and wish him safe passage. If he comes home to find the wood floors and copper plumbing stripped and junkies sleeping in the master bedroom, I solemnly vow to blame one of these other guys.

"Abu Ghraib was now a U.S. military prison. Most of the prisoners, however—by the fall there were several thousand, including women and teen-agers—were civilians, many of whom had been picked up in random military sweeps and at highway checkpoints... A lack of proper screening also meant that many innocent Iraqis were wrongly being detained—indefinitely, it seemed, in some cases. The Taguba study noted that more than sixty per cent of the civilian inmates at Abu Ghraib were deemed not to be a threat to society, which should have enabled them to be released." -- Seymour Hersh, "Torture at Abu Ghraib," The New Yorker, May 10, 2004

"It's the worst kind of inhumanity to just go after innocent people who were just going about their daily lives..." -- Condoleezza Rice, "True Believer", segment on "60 Minutes", September 24, 2006

I don't know what Katie Couric's political beliefs are, assuming she has any, but her sit-down with Condaleezza Rice had a sisterly feel to it, as if Couric felt that she owed it to Rice, as one lightning-rod to another, to have a chance to take a break from all that heavy, hardball questioning she hasn't been getting and invite the folks at home to feel for her; the poor kid is so busy "waging war and promoting democracy" that she barely has time to fret over her love life. ("How does one go about asking the Secretary of State out on a date?") Rice seemed to want to take advantage of the opportunity, and her politely mirthless fake laugh got a thorough workout, but she was never able to get the message to her eyes, which continued to look as if she were trying to fire laser blasts from her pupils. Is Rice, by default, supposed to be the "cute" member of the Bush circle--his Julie Nixon Eisenhower, his George Stephanopoulos, the one who makes the groundlings think, truly he must be an old softie inside, to inspire the love of such a one? Laura doesn't seem to want the job anymore, and Mother Babs, who had the job and did it well during daddy's administration, would probably love to take it on again but by now has shown enough of her true personality that she's about as squeezeable as Grendel in a pearl necklace. Really, though, "Condi", as Katie likes to call her, isn't much better suited to the role. If I had to pick a Bush cadet to model for plushy toys, I'd probably go with Donald Rumsfeld. I know, he used to be a fearsome beast, and he still tries to keep up appearances, but in the last year or so, I swear that he's been betraying signs that the old arrogance just doesn't come that easy to him anymore. He'll be roaring along as in the days of old and then suddenly his features will slip into the expression of one lamenting the fact that they've moved his water dish again.Go ahead, think me mad, I don't care. I say the man needs a hug.

Anyway, the big news from the Couric interview--aside, of course, from the strong implication that Condi's available, guys! -- was that Rice knows a thing or two about taking terrorism seriously because she remembers racist violence from the desegregation period in the South when she was growing up. Couric asked if she equated suicide bombers in the Mideast with "bigoted bombers in Birmingham," then took a little pause so that everyone at home could have a stab at saying that three times fast. Not too surprisingly, Condi sees a world of similarity there. She may have a point, but I had to wonder: if she made that connection before the invasion of Iraq, couldn't she have drawn from it the lesson that a little post-war planning would be in order? Rice says that the people who suggest that "spreading democracy" may be harder than it looks are basically saying that the people of the Middles East "aren't ready" for democracy, and this reminds her of people doubting that black Americans were ready to stand on their own feet, the meanies. But what about the people, in this equation, who stand in for the white Southerners who were thriving under the racist status quo, or who were simply to unimaginative to deal with the thought of living any other way, and who really didn't appreciate having what some of them saw as a foreign occupying force barging in and telling them how to save their souls? Rice knows that the racist white Southerners who went batshit from culture shock during the Civil Rights years and blew up black churches and schoolbuses were independently motivated and not being guided by the Kremlin, so why is it so hard for her to believe that the mayhem in Iraq is largely being caused by disgruntled Iraqis who, far from being grateful for having been invaded, truly do not want us there? Not for the first time, she seemed to be implying, without realizing it, that the Bushies impute to the Iraqi common man a deep, committed, selfless love of the pure principles of democracy that they assume the common American--that loutish dude who doesn't care if black voters are disenfranchised and the Constitution is in tatters so long as the right badass is in the White House--can happily do without

The most distressing thing about listening to Rice these days may actually be the way she wields her alleged learning--her standing as a "student of history", as the Courics always put it--as an all-purpose cop-out. She seems to agree with her master's famous dictum that the judgement of history is irrelevant because when it comes in, "We'll all be dead." Rice told Couric that she takes pride in her role in transforming the Middle East, even though she knows that she herself will never see the miracle she and the neocons have birthed come to full fruition. Now, Rice is only fifty-one years old; as Couric's video dating profile made clear, she works hard to stay fit, and it seems safe to say that, unless she has some scary X-rays that haven't been declassified, she'll probably be sticking around to delight us on this earthly plain for another twenty, thirty years. Yet she's already given up hope of seeing things turn out well in the Middle East; she just takes comfort in her absolute assurance that, thanks to her "bold" actions, everything will finally turn out peachy keen, once she's no longer here to accept a round of applause for it. In this she, once again, resembles her boss, who lately has taken a page out of Nixon's book and started explaining that he himself must be Lincolnesque, because nobody appreciated Lincoln in his day and age either. Bush and Rice were pretty scary back when they were selling preventive war as a miracle cure-all, but at least back then there was the chance that they might rethink their bluster after the fast results they explicity promised failed to materialize. Now that they've come to the conclusion that, though they're still right about everything, they won't actually be proven right until after their deaths, it's hard to think of anything they're not liable to pull.

Big Dawg Layeth the Smacketh Down

I don't normally watch the talking head TV pundits on Sunday mornings (or at anytime during the week for that matter). Friends of mine who know my political interests find this unusual. But the answer is very simple, really. The Sunday morning talk shows are a bunch of gibberish, much like the leper messiahs who typically, and perhaps not coincidentally, air at the same time.

But I had a couple of minutes this morning before I had to head out and I flipped on the tube. Somehow I landed on Fox's "news" show with Chris Wallace. I would have kept going but there was my man, William Jefferson Clinton. And he was giving Wallace the what-for. You can read about it here.

Damm. Poor Wallace. He forgot who he was dealing with. Fox and everybody else are so used to the current crop of Dems they can't remember the last time one of them smacked them around and called them on their shit.

And of course why the corporate media (and its administration puppeteers) would want to bring up Osama bin Forgotten again is beyond me. I mean it ain't exactly a badge of honor that this administration hasn't tracked him down or that the same administration that said they'd get him dead or alive and that any nation that refused to play ball would be treated as accessories to the crime, abruptly forgot the whole thing (a) the second they handed the keys over to the warlords in Afghanistan as fast as they could so they could launch their voluntary and catastrophic war in Iraq and (b) they realized OBL was in Pakistan which won't let us in to go after him. Can't very well make threats about "either being with us or against us" if we know where he is and that his new host country won't risk their citizens' wrath by inviting U.S. troops into play seek and destroy. Not that there are sufficient troops available anyway, who aren't already three-toured out of Iraq.

Anyway, thanks, Bill. Give 'em hell.

UPDATE: Besides being a shameless act of chutzpah, it turns out that the whole Somalia-cut-and-run line of blame-gaming also has its facts completely wrong (what a surprise). It wasn't Clinton and 2004 Democratic candidate Kerry who wanted to "cut and run" from Somalia, it was the Republican congress, as Glenn Greenwald documents.

So as Chavezmania is in full swing, and we hear that he is harboring terrorists, building up Venezuela's military, and planning to lob the occasional nuclear missile at us; that he must not be appeased, and might just be the Antichrist; it's helpful to have just the tiniest bit of perspective, which Ezra Klein very helpfully provides:

It's worth noting that the threat Venezuela poses to America is entirely centered on what they can do to our feelings. They will not attack us. They can't attack us. They have neither weaponry, nor terrorist infrastructures. They could theoretically wreck their economy by embargoing us, but fiscal self-immolation in service of slightly higher gas prices for Americans seems...unlikely. So for all the whining and crying and worrying, all Chavez really has is the ability to tell us he does not like America very much at all.

Ooh, scary.

Thank you, Ezra.

They say "National Intelligence Estimate", I say "common sense":

The most recent National Intelligence Estimate indicates that the war in Iraq has worsened the threat of terrorist attacks. Duh.

WASHINGTON, Sept. 23 — A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

An opening section of the report, “Indicators of the Spread of the Global Jihadist Movement,” cites the Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology.

Here's my question: why on earth would anyone be surprised by this conclusion? The US attacked a sovereign nation that posed no real threat to us. Yes, I know Saddam was a bad guy, and he needed to go, but this wasn't the way to get rid of him. Now, instead of a secular state where Sunnis and Shia live in relative peace together, we have all-out sectarian civil war. And who is to blame for that? The answer may be quite complex, but the US is the biggest and most obvious target for those whose lives have been turned upside down by war.

So what does Bush do with this conclusion? He stays the course. And more. Is the next stop Iran?

As reports circulate of a sharp debate within the White House over possible US military action against Iran and its nuclear enrichment facilities, The Nation has learned that the Bush Administration and the Pentagon have moved up the deployment of a major "strike group" of ships, including the nuclear aircraft carrier Eisenhower as well as a cruiser, destroyer, frigate, submarine escort and supply ship, to head for the Persian Gulf, just off Iran's western coast. This information follows a report in the current issue of Time magazine, both online and in print, that a group of ships capable of mining harbors has received orders to be ready to sail for the Persian Gulf by October 1.

Bush seems to think that unprovoked attacks on other nations will help us win the War on Terror^TM. I seem to recall the definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. If this is Karl Rove's "October Surprise", I'd say he can keep it.

So the three Christian terrorists in Indonesia who masterminded the slaughter of 70 Muslims have been executed...and Michelle Malkin isn't happy.

But she doesn't seem all that unhappy about the executions, which merit only a few lines in her post. What's really bothering her (that is, what takes up most of the post) are accusations of hypocrisy based on her suddenconcern about due process for terrorists:

This, my friends, is illuminating. Because I object to conferring the full panoply of constitutional rights on suspected terrorists and enemy combatants captured in battle and because I oppose the law-enforcement approach to waging war and because I favor military tribunals over the civilian court system to adjudicate terror cases, the left-wing mob argues, I can never question the legitimacy of any court system anywhere.

She goes on to quote some irrelevant bafflegab about the laws of war (which it's unlikely she understands in the first place) from Guantanamo apologist Andrew McCarthy; of course, this elides the point that Bush isn't applying due process under military law...which is why so many JAGs are unhappy with his little kangaroo courts.

But the key to Malkin's thinking here (or what passes for thinking is that nowhere does she refer to the Indonesian suspects as 'terrorists'.

Semi-Muslim shoots a handful of people in Seattle: terrorist.

Christians slaughter 70 Muslims in Indonesia: not terrorist.

In her little world, Christians aren't terrorists. Muslims are terrorists. Killing Muslims isn't terrorism (unless they're Muslims we're currently using as props in a certain Potemkin democracy). Killing Christians or Jews is.

That's why, in her mind, there's no inconsistency at all because she simply defines it away. She's always and consistently against due process for terrorists...which is to say, people she happens to be afraid of.

--Tom Hilton

Brendan Nyhan left The American Prospect in a huff when he was (justifiably) criticized for a dumb post attacking liberal bloggers, as well as other posts that took liberals to task. Nyhan is now whining about his fate:

In an email Friday morning, Sam Rosenfeld, the magazine's online editor, asked that I focus my blogging on conservative targets. He specifically objected to two posts criticizing liberals ... that I wrote after the Atrios controversy. I refused and terminated the relationship.

Why was I asked to slant my work to the liberal party line?

Er, because The American Prospect is a liberal magazine? A liberal magazine that attempts to advance the cause of liberalism?

... More fundamentally, while TAP can choose to (almost) exclusively criticize conservatives, isn't open and honest debate a value that liberals prize? Is it appropriate to largely ignore one side while jumping on virtually any misstatement from the other?

Coming next week: Brendan Nyhan gets himself hired as a photographer at Juggs magazine, then whines when the magazine refuses to publish his male-on-male porn photos.

(Via Eric Alterman and Avedon Carol.)

****

(Yeah, I'm still around. I'm trying to get some stuff done so I can get out of town, but I couldn't resist this.)

ROVE'S OCTOBER SURPRISE?

With a week left to go in September, is this the October surprise Rove has been promising his legions?

France probes report of bin Laden's death

Unconfirmed report says Saudi convinced terror chief died in Pakistan

PARIS - The French defense ministry on Saturday called for an internal investigation of the leak of an intelligence document that raises the possibility that Osama bin Laden may have died of typhoid in Pakistan a month ago but said the report of the death remained unverified.

Typhoid? Typhoid?

I'm going to start printing up the t-shirts: We paid $500 billion and all we got was Osama with typhoid.

So much for cowboy justice. If this story turns out to be true — and I doubt it — wouldn't a germ have triumphed where Bush could not?

— skimble

There aren't too many former posts of mine I'd want to reread, much less want anyone else to read, but I penned this on June 30 of this year, and was reminded of it when I visited David Sirota's blog today:

In this clip, CQ’s Craig Crawford has it pegged - there are still too many Democrats in Washington drunk off the “arrogance of power” (although, in reality, it is just the trappings of power, not actual power - in the House Minority, you have no power; you are a glorified lobbyist for your district). Crawford says many Democrats in Congress “still act like they are the majority party.” That is in contrast to conservatives who, as Sid Blumenthal famously noted, “refuse to adopt the psychology of an establishment” even when they control all three branches of government.

Oh sure, people like Emanuel pay lip service to “change” - but what they are really referring to is change for themselves. That is, they want to change their own titles, upgrade their offices and get more trappings of power - and they are happy to use their positions to prevent real change on economic or Iraq war policy in order to achieve those selfish fantasies.

Oliver Willis is similarly frustrated:

For the sake of the Democratic party, the party's long-term viability, and America's long term existence I sort of hope the Democrats lose this November. A win this Fall would be an endorsement of the party's ridiculously idiotic posture and would reward its sniveling cowardice with power. A Democratic win would put a rubber stamp on the feckless leadership and push the party to keep it going into 2008, where we would lose yet again for the third time out of the last four elections.

The Democratic Party apparently has no clue. It seems to believe that 1994-present is just a temporal hiccup, and all they have to do is wait for the Republicans to self-destruct and naturally inherit the earth and the congress. The party is like the child who refuses to learn its lesson, even though the results of 2000, 2002, and 2004 show us that simply wishing is not a good enough strategy for winning.

The bottom line is the Democratic Party in Congress still acts as if it is still in power, or when it remembers that it isn't, thinks that its current status is the fault of the media or the economy, or the war, or malevolent Republican mechanizations. There's obviously some truth to the idea that institutional trends and structures are working against Democrats. But Democrats in Congress, particularly, maybe expecially, those who were there before 1994, don't seem to realize that (a) they aren't in power; (b) they are out of power on merit; and that (c) the country is worse off for it.

Anyway, here is what I wrote on June 30:

New Democratic Leadership needed in Congress

Win or lose in the fall, Democrats need new leadership in Congress. Nancy Pelosi has been in Congress for almost 20 years and Steny Hoyer has been in Congress for 26 years.

Both Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader, and Hoyer, the Democratic Whip were members of Congress "back in the day." Back in the day, that is, when Democrats ran the joint. Old hands can be useful in a parliamentary sense, but as the public faces and obstensibly as the policy and political strategists of the party in Congress, Pelosi and Hoyer have been around too long, in Washington, D.C. too long, to give the party the direction and energy it needs.

One of the key motives driving Newt Gringrich and Tom DeLay back in the 1980's and 1990's was the long drought their party had experienced in Congress. The Republican revolutionaries of 1994 were desperate and driven, "hungry" in the parlance of sports teams. Pelosi and Hoyer probably still think either Democrats are a majority in the House or that replacing a Republican Speaker with a Democratic Speaker wouldn't fundamentally change their performance or purposes.

It's been over ten years since the Republicans regained control of Congress for the first time in forty years. While I recognize arbitary-sounding datelines shouldn't necessarily be locked in stone, it's time for Democratic leadership to start passing to those members who've arrived in Washington after 1994, who realize the implications of being the minority party and possess the ideas and energy needed to change the institution and implement new policies.

Thankfully, relatively new members Tim Ryan of Ohio, and Debbie Wasserman-Shultz of Florida have taken assertive speaking and organizational roles in the House. Along with other new and youngish members of Congress, Ryan and Shultz are a part of the Thirty Something Democratic workgroup in the House. Ryan and Shultz in particular often appear on C-Span afterhours, attacking House Republicans for acting as administration "rubber stamps" and for being generally "unable to govern".

Apparently the "Thirty-something" workgroup was a brainchild of Pelosi's and Hoyer has recognized Shultz's abilities by recruiting her as the party's Senior Whip in the House.

But Democrats in the next Congress, win or lose, should act to put the party's best and freshest faces, such as Ryan's, Wasserman Shultz's and Stephanie Hersheth's, forward in leadership positions where they'll have the responsibility and public exposure the party needs to succeed in building a new party with new ideas for a new generation of Americans.

In the meantime, the party should put it's thirty-something members up front, as examples of the type of Democratic leadership voters can expect to see in the next Congress. It goes without saying that Republicans hope to stir up fear, at least among the media elite, of old time members like John Conyers and John Dingell heading committees. Democrats should respond by showcasing it's newest and most articulate members, contrasting them with the corruption-tainted and interest group beholden Republican majority. And when the next Congress opens, showing it's future-oriented approach by elevating its youngest members to important leadership posts.

[Hello all--this is Tom Hilton, from If I Ran the Zoo. Many thanks to Steve for the tremendous honor of guest-blogging here. And what Skimble said--have a safe and pleasant trip!]

Following up on Skimble's post about why Republicans are bad for business, I'll recommend Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article on dependency ratios. (It's not nearly as eye-glazing as it sounds; trust me on this.) The basic premise of it is that any economic system depends on a good ratio of people producing to people being supported. Here, today, that is particularly applicable to health care and pensions.

Gladwell tells a heartbreaking story about UAW president Walter Reuther wanting industry-wide pensions for auto workers (to spread the risk as widely as possible), and GM CEO Charlie Wilson--fearing the combined unions' power--instead offering a fairly generous pension to GM workers. That was fine as long as there were lots of workers for every retiree, but increasing life expectancy and productivity innovations meant, respectively, more pensioners and fewer workers supporting them. Perversely, GM's pension burden meant that increasing productivity--making more cars with fewer workers--put it in a worse and worse financial condition.

And the moral of the tale:

Under the circumstances, one of the great mysteries of contemporary American politics is why [current GM CEO] Wagoner isn’t the nation’s leading proponent of universal health care and expanded social welfare. That’s the only way out of G.M.’s dilemma. But, from Wagoner’s reticence on the issue, you’d think that it was still 1950....

...if you pooled the obligations of every employer in the country, no company would go bankrupt just because it happened to employ older people, or it happened to have been around for a while, or it happened to have made the transformation from open-hearth furnaces and ingot-making to basic oxygen furnaces and continuous casting. This is what Walter Reuther and the other union heads understood more than fifty years ago: that in the free-market system it makes little sense for the burdens of insurance to be borne by one company. If the risks of providing for health care and old-age pensions are shared by all of us, then companies can succeed or fail based on what they do and not on the number of their retirees.

That's the bottom line: the current 'system' (or absence thereof), in which each business is wholly responsible for its own healthcare insurance and pension plan, is hurting business.

Skimble notes the beginnings of a shift in business, from reflexively supporting Republicans to supporting the party that is actually good for (most of) their interests. I think we're on the brink of a similar shift, toward embracing benefits systems (like single-payer healthcare) that rationally spread the risk among the largest possible pool; and I think once business is pushing it, that's when we'll finally get healthcare for all Americans.

"More than a few chickpeas shy of a falafel" -- that's how Keith Olbermann described Bill O'Reilly's disclosure that the FBI told him he and others at Faux News are on an al-Qaeda death list. Funny how no one at the FBI or Faux News has heard anything about it. Bill should be so lucky. He's just not that important.

Hi, everyone. This is Kathy from Birmingham Blues. Steve, thanks for the invitation to guest-blog. Have a great trip!

[Hi folks. Senator Bulworth here. Thanks to Steve for inviting me and the rest of us into his pad for the week.]

At the very end of an article with this headline:

White House, Senators Near Pact on Interrogation Rules

there is this conclusion:

Democrats sounded a cautious note about the Republican accord, calling attention to the past Republican division rather than taking a position on the compromise.

"...rather than taking a position..."

This has been a consistent problem in the Democratic caucus rooms of the House and Senate. Now, there are two reasons why we might otherwise excuse Democrats from speaking out about this: Democrats in this parliamentary Congress don't have a say in policy-making and aren't given a place at the negotiating table, so what's there to contribute? The other obstensible reason for not speaking out would be, The Republicans are arguing among themselves and shooting themselves in their collective feet, so why stop them?

Either or both of these apologetics might be reasonable under certain circumstances, but these times are of course not certain circumstances: the timing of the upcoming elections combined with the severeness of the policy implications simply don't permit a hands-off approach.

If Democrats aren't invited to the negotiating table or assumed to be a part of the policy-making process, than there is a legislative tool or tools to deal with that. Reid has already exercised one of them. There are others. Like a filibuster, for instance. If there's an occasion or condition that warrants uninhibited use of the filibuster, it is in cases where the minority party is frozen out of the political process.

Instead, as Sadly No has documented, Democrats in Congress still, Still, seem to have their heads in the sand and want to emphasize economic issues in the upcoming elections and can't be bothered to even attend hearings where the administration's torture and confinement policies are being voted on.

Democratic Congressmen and Congresswomen, if you want the country to respect you (and let me say, we, your Democratic constituents and supporters need you to do be so respected, or at least relevant) than do the right thing. Speak up. Make yours, and our, voices heard. Don't leave the governing, and the spinning, to the GOP. While the media deserves its share of condemnation for ignoring you, your antics and sheepishness, Democrats, haven't earned you much credibility. This is especially the case if you're afraid, or are perceived as being afraid to make an unpopular stand.

THE BUSINESS OF BUSINESS IS BUSINESS...

...and increasingly that means business with Democrats (Wall Street Journal, generously quoted because it is subscription only):

Freshman Democratic Rep. Melissa Bean of Illinois is facing the Republican Party machine in her re-election bid. Vice President Dick Cheney and House Speaker Dennis Hastert have headlined money-raising events for her opponent. The National Republican Congressional Committee has budgeted $1.5 million to attack her.

But Ms. Bean has won an unexpected ally with clout to counter the Republican heavyweights: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Usually a stalwart of Republicans, the chamber has run about $700,000 in advertisements defending the Democrat and plans to help get out the pro-business vote for her in the fall.

Ms. Bean is among more than a dozen Democrats in key races across the country that the chamber is backing this year. Half of them also have benefited from the chamber's first-ever television ads for Democrats. Partly, the organization is rewarding these Democrats for votes in favor of free trade and other issues it holds dear. It also is sensing possible Republican defeats in congressional elections on Nov. 7, and is hedging its bets by spreading some of the organization's wealth to the other side of the aisle.

The chamber's move mirrors a subtle but significant shift across the business community, which has begun anticipating that the Republican majorities in Congress could shrink, if not collapse. [...]

The changes also point to an emerging rift between the Republican Party's business and social-conservative constituencies, as their interests clash over some hot-button issues. In Missouri, for example, some Republican businessmen are donating to Democrat Claire McCaskill in her challenge to incumbent Republican Sen. Jim Talent, largely because Mr. Talent opposes embryonic stem-cell research.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the strongest single business voice in Washington, representing thousands of trade associations and three million large and small businesses. It is the top spender on lobbying in Washington and is expected to spend $40 million on state and federal races this year. Employing an army of 36 full-time lobbyists, the chamber often takes the lead on major political issues close to the business community's heart.

The Bush brand of conservatism is anti-tax but also anti-growth, anti-public investment, anti-stock market, anti-labor, anti-environment, anti-science, and, perhaps most profoundly, anti-responsible and anti-accountable fiscally.

Any commercial enterprise not named Halliburton or Bechtel or ExxonMobil, and therefore shut out of the Bush Iraq/DHS crony economy, is suffering and now seeking alternatives. And that can only be good for Democrats and the country as a whole.

(And have a safe trip, Steve.)

— skimble

I'm going to be out of town next week -- but there'll be a fine crew of guest bloggers filling in for me. In fact, some of them could be along any minute.

(Apologies to anyone I overlooked for pinch-hitting duty....)

...I saw water-boarding long ago in Vietnam. A half-naked young man, suspected of being a local Viet Cong guerrilla, was handed over by his American captors to South Vietnamese troops.

Four of them held him down. An old, dirty rag was coiled around his face covering his nose and mouth. A fifth held a five-gallon tin of water slowly pouring it into the coiled rag.

The water took the place of air for that prisoner. His chest heaved violently as he sought the air and took in only water. I turned away before I could see whether he talked or drowned. An American captain shrugged; it was a Vietnamese thing.

There were other field expedient tortures in Vietnam, including the infamous telephone generator, where wires were clamped on genitals and the handle cranked at increasing speeds, and wattage, as the victim screamed and bucked.

Those abominations existed in Vietnam, but they were not carried out by Americans. There was a line that was never to be crossed. It was a line between barbarity and civilization. It was a line between them and us.

...What's the middle ground on torture? No water boarding or work on the fingernails allowed but sleep deprivation and the ice-box and minor beating around the head and ears are just fine?

We once stood for something good in this world. We once took the high moral ground in our struggle with the evil that exists. We once upheld the Geneva Conventions not only because we expected our enemies to apply them in their treatment of American prisoners but because they were the law, and they were right.

Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda boys hiding in their caves in Waziristan are surely laughing over all of this. They have succeeded in dragging us down to their level of barbarity and inhumanity.

--Joe Galloway, "We've Sunk to Osama's Level," at Military.com

The piece, alas, was written before the compromise was reached, and was thus naively optimistic about what the three holdouts were accomplishing.

...General H. Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The finest combat correspondent of our generation -- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."

He is the coauthor of We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young.

Not sure about what's in the torture deal? ABC's Brian Ross is sure:

CIA Praises Deal; Harsh Techniques Would Continue

The CIA director, General Michael Hayden, praised the deal reached in Congress today that, in effect, would permit CIA interrogators to use harsh techniques critics call torture.

... in questioning certain high-value terror suspects, the CIA has used a series of six increasingly harsh interrogation techniques that begin with a slap to the face and end with a procedure called water boarding, in which a prisoner is made to feel he is drowning....

Today's congressional deal, if signed into law, would allow the CIA to continue the six techniques and to continue to run secret prisons overseas for select terror suspects....

That's it -- no ambiguity.

GENERAL MOTORS THINKS YOU'RE THE EMBODIMENT OF EVIL

Or at least it's happy to establish a working relationship with someone who believes that:

Hannity to Pitch GM Car Give-Away

To stimulate consumer interest in its line of American-built cars, General Motors has turned to radio and Sean Hannity. Beginning Sept. 25, Hannity will serve as the spokesperson for GM’s You’re A Great American Car Give-Away, offering radio listeners the chance to pick and win one of five GM vehicles....

GM’s multiplatform campaign combines Hannity’s syndicated radio show broadcast on more than 500 radio stations, including 50 in the top 50 markets, with his Web site, where listeners will be directed to register their names. During his radio show, Hannity will announce one contestant’s name per hour. Listeners will have until 6 a.m. the next morning to send Hannity an email to confirm they’ve heard their name read on the air. The contest runs for five weeks through Nov. 6, when the final car is given away....



When he's not suggesting that there's a moral equivalence between terrorism, despotism, and liberalism, Hannity, of course, is a professional liar, an enabler of liars, and an enabler to two generations of hatemongering character assassins.

Thanks, GM!

After being told repeatedly by right-wing commentators that I couldn't truly judge the Pope's address at the University of Regensburg without reading it in its entirety, I belatedly and made my way through the full text last night. I'd say the swipe at Islam seems like just as much of a cheap shot as it did before I'd read the whole thing.

Kevin Drum (who also forced himself to read the thing) says,

The reference to Islam near the beginning of the speech was entirely gratuitous and disingenuous, as were Benedict's subsequent crocodile tears over the idea that anyone could have taken offense at his remarks.

I'm not sure "gratuitous" is the right word, though "disingenuous" sounds right. What Benedict says is that Emperor Manuel II Paleologus's contention that every innovation of Muhammad's is "evil and inhuman" is a swell "starting-point" (his word) for a discussion of the relationship between reason and faith. The Pope drops this bomb, then explains why Islam is anti-rational, then drops the subject of Islam for the last half of the speech -- in other words, he wants to be sure to get it all in and then he wants to pretend it's all just throat-clearing, never mind the fact that he gave it such prominence.

One member of the "you have to read the whole thing" crowd, Brett Stephens of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, does a good job of summarizing the speech here -- with, however, a few blind spots:

In fact, Benedict saves his sharpest barbs for non-Muslim targets: Protestantism, which seeks a "primordial" form of faith; liberal theology, which reduces Jesus to "the father of a humanitarian moral message"; scientific rationalism, the ethics of which are "simply inadequate" to answer the "specifically human questions about our origin and destiny"; and what might be called Catholic pluralism, a culturally adaptive notion of the faith that Benedict denounces as "false" and "coarse."

Yeah, all of that's in there -- but it beats the hell out of me how you can say that these are sharper barbs than your Prophet's works are evil and inhuman.

Everything Stephens describes is there, but in polite, scholarly, bloodless language -- a sharp contrast to the quoted denunciation of Islam. Here's an example (and I won't take any points off if this puts you to sleep):

I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favor of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. The fundamental goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ’s divinity and the triune God.

All the "barbs" Stephens cites in his Journal essay are like this. And the Pope barely mentions these targets by name.

Kevin's "nickel version" of the speech is as follows:

Mohammed was a violent man. Violence is unreasonable. God loves reason. Draw your own conclusions.

I'd summarize its message as follows:

We're rational. Huge swaths of the population are irrational -- especially those Muslims. We need to have dialogue -- which requires everyone to change so they're more like us. Draw your own conclusions as to who needs to change the most.