In a post on Saturday, I said that the number of Americans who actually support the regimes of North Korea and Iraq is tiny. I'm supposed to hang my head in shame because that tiny group apparently includes all or some of the organizers of Saturday's D.C. peace demonstration. Well, fine. Now go do a scientific poll of demonstrators and ask how many of them knew that. Even right-wingers trying to horrify us with the most egregious photos of picket signs they could find from Saturday (Bush compared to Hitler! Good heavens! Conservatives would never do something like that!) show nothing in support of Saddam's regime or Kim's ("God bless Iraq" is not "God bless Saddam" -- the U.S. "has no quarrel with the Iraqi people," remember? -- and a demonstrator who sees a moral equivalence between Bush and Saddam, however simpleminded, presumably doesn't think Bush is a good guy, so he's not praising Saddam, either). The 1963 March on Washington is remembered for the "I Have a Dream" speech, but the point of most demonstrations is whatever the majority of demonstrators think the point is. Eric Alterman says people with dubious politics unfortunately organize left demonstrations the most effectively, and maybe he's right. But such people are utterly inept at getting the weird, fringy part of their message across, even to the people who march in their protests. This demo was about stopping an unnecessary war. It wasn't about the Workers World Party's agenda.

Jennifer Lopez's hit song "Jenny from the Block" was cited again in this week's Sunday New York Times. That makes three Sunday Times citations in two weeks. "Jenny from the Block" is unquestionably the seminal sociological text of our time.

Caryn James said in last Sunday's Times that the song deceives average Americans by suggesting that rich, famous J.Lo is just an ordinary person; James believes this is a bad thing. David Brooks said in last Sunday's Times that the song deceives average Americans by suggesting that rich, famous J.Lo is just an ordinary person; Brooks believes this is a good thing. Rob Walker said in yesterday's Times that the song sends a contradictory message to average Americans by suggesting that J.Lo is both an ordinary person and rich and famous; it's not clear whether Walker believes this is a good or bad thing.

One can only marvel at the textual richness of a song that is able to sustain such a multiplicity of interpretations from America's finest minds.

I realize that many conservatives are frustrated because they can’t amass sufficient evidence to have all liberals rounded up and sent to camps on treason charges. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it’s been a while since a professional conservative writer expressed that frustration by just making stuff up about liberals and accusing us of treason for what he imagines we’re guilty of. But that’s what Richard Brookhiser does in his current New York Observer column. He writes:

How long will it be before American peaceniks arrive in Pyongyang to stand in solidarity with the Dear Leader and the dead Great Leader? We know what the cast of characters will be: Unitarian ministers, Jewish Buddhists, unemployed poets, white-haired hippies from the Green Mountains. We know what they will do: form a human chain, give interviews to CNN, hold up hand-lettered signs ("Give Peace A Chance," "Say NO To Cowboy Bush"). Nominally, they will be there because they don’t want war. Emotionally, they will be there because they admire North Korea. They admire it because it isn’t the United States. We know this will be the scenario, because it’s already happening, with Iraq as the peg for moral superiority.

I’ll say this flat out: I have not heard or read a single word of praise for Kim -- or Saddam or the leaders of al-Qaeda, for that matter -- from any left-wing American. If there is any respect or admiration for these men on the American left, it’s invisible to me. Yes, I imagine there is a sad old-school Marxist contingent or two out there that dutifully praises Kim, but I simply don’t know who these people are. The links at right of this page give, I think, a fairly representative sampling of left thinking right now. Scour them. Scour the links at those links. Find any praise for Kim. Go on, I dare you.

You’ll recall that in the immediate aftermath of September 11, when attacking liberalism was Priority One in the war on terrorism for many on the right, the evidence of fifth-columnism those right-wingers amassed was laughable: an isolated picket sign here, an ill-considered flip remark by a professor there. Well, Brookhiser’s data set is even more pathetic: one item of graffiti.

"Make Love To Iraq" was the slogan I saw stenciled on a mailbox in the East Village. But is Iraq (more precisely, its regime) lovable?

No, it isn’t -- and, schmuck, the graffitist isn’t saying it is. I lived in the East Village for seven years in the 1980s. I know what this graffito is: it’s a little koan of hipster inscrutability. The big, honking hint is the fact that it doesn’t say “Love Saddam.” Clearly it’s not meant to be taken literally -- what it recommends is essentially impossible for anyone who reads it to accomplish. The graffito could well be a sneering allusion to the old slogan “Make Love, Not War,” which would be ancient history for a spray-paint wielder who was probably born in the 1980s. If so, the graffito isn’t even left-wing.

Thanks for playing, Richard. Try again sometime.

VATICAN CITY, Jan 16 - The Vatican told Catholic politicians on Thursday they must oppose laws on abortion, euthanasia and gay marriages and can not accept compromises on Church teachings when formulating policy or legislation....

--Reuters story

And capital punishment, right?

Lots of Catholic politicians support capital punishment, in defiance of the Church, right? Surely, they have to stop doing that, no?

No? That's not on the list?

Whoops! Must be an oversight, right?

"Did I say 58 percent? I'm sorry! I'm really, really sorry! I meant 61 percent! Please don't kill me, Mr. Rove! I swear it will never happen again!"

Something Michael Kinsley just wrote about President Bush reminds me of a famous Hollywood anecdote, an anecdote that I think says a lot about how guys like Bush think. First, here’s Kinsley, wrapping up his recent Slate piece about the Bush economic "plan":

Bush, in a funny way, seems to be a man of ideas. He doesn't have a lot of them himself, but hand him one and he'll run with it, undeterred by opposition, or by subsequent evidence and logic. He has the unreflective person's immunity from irony, that great killer of intellectual passion. Ask him to reconcile his line on Iraq with his line on North Korea and he just gets irritated. Tell him he can't be for tax simplification and offer a Rube Goldberg contraption like this at the same time and he'll say, "Oh, yeah—just watch me."

The anecdote I’m thinking about appeared in Bob Thomas’s biography of Frank Mankiewicz, the screenwriter who wrote Citizen Kane with Orson Welles; Pauline Kael quotes the passage in her essay "Raising Kane":

Cohn began the conversation: "Last night I saw the lousiest picture I’ve seen in years."

He mentioned the title, and one of the more courageous of the producers spoke up: "Why, I saw that picture at the Downtown Paramount, and the audience howled over it. Maybe you should have seen it with an audience."

"That doesn’t make any difference," Cohn replied. "When I’m alone in a projection room, I have a foolproof device for judging whether a picture is good or bad. If my fanny squirms, it’s bad. If my fanny doesn’t squirm, it’s good. It’s as simple as that."

There was a momentary silence, which was filled by Mankiewicz at the end of the table: "Imagine -- the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass!"

Not long ago we heard something similar to this from Bush, as Paul Krugman reminded us earlier this month. In response to a reporter’s question, Bush snapped, "You said we're headed to war in Iraq. I don't know why you say that. I'm the person who gets to decide, not you."

Krugman’s gloss on this statement was: "L'état, c'est moi."

Spend enough years as a member of the managerial class -- specifically, in the highest brackets of that class -- and you may well start thinking and acting and talking this way. You may well assume that no one really has a right to question or challenge anything you do.

And, of course, the whole world -- literally -- is (figuratively) wired to George Bush’s ass. Imagine.

OBSESSED WITH OIL -- WHO, US?

BOGOTA, Colombia - Dozens of U.S. Green Berets flew in to a Colombian war zone this week to train Colombian army troops to protect a key oil pipeline from rebel attacks, a U.S. official said Thursday.

The arrival of the members of the 7th Special Forces Group marks a turning point in U.S. involvement in Colombia's civil war. Previously, U.S. military aid and training was restricted largely to battling cocaine production, which rebels and rival paramilitary gunmen profit from, fueling the war....

The ... U.S. troops, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., are to train two Colombian army brigades that protect an oil pipeline that carries oil for Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum across northern Colombia to a seaside depot....

--AP story at Yahoo News

Today much of the Great Plains is undergoing a catastrophic demographic collapse. Stretching 1,600 miles from central Texas to the Canadian border and 750 miles across at its widest point, and containing all or most of ten states, this region accounts for a fifth of the land area of the United States, but only four percent of the population—about 12 million people. To put this in perspective, the population of the Los Angeles region is now greater than that of the Great Plains, an area five times the size of California.

Sixty percent of the counties in the Great Plains declined in population in the past decade.... Already more and more of what early Americans called "the Great American Desert" fits the nineteenth-century definition of frontier territory: an area with no more than six inhabitants per square mile.

Meanwhile, the coasts are rapidly filling up. Although coastal counties occupy only about 17 percent of the territory of the contiguous United States, they contain about 53 percent of the nation's population.

--Michael Lind in The Atlantic Monthly

So much for the ridiculous 2000 electoral map right-wingers so enjoy waving in our faces to support their dubious claims of a 2000 mandate for Bushism. And if these demographic trends continue -- Lind cites statistics that suggest they probably will -- it's just possible that 2000 will be only the first of several presidential elections in which a Republican rejected by the electorate wins the White House thanks to the utterly outdated Electoral College.

What’s missing in this New York Observer front-page story about Senator Charles Schumer’s fight to block the confirmation of Charles Pickering and other right-wing Bush judges? Well, for one thing, what’s missing is any attempt to ascertain whether Schumer is right -- whether Pickering’s record is so extreme that he is unworthy of confirmation. Do you wonder what Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler howls about, day after day? This is what he howls about. The Observer assigns a two-man team to write a 1,758-word, 26-paragraph, front-page article on this subject, and neither reporter can be bother to look into the facts of the case. Or maybe it’s not laziness -- the Observer traffics in a lite version of 1980s-style, Spy magazine-style cynicism and irony, and perhaps the reporters who wrote this story, and their editors, believe that unearthed truths are of interest only to wimps and wonks and geeks; cool people who eat in tony restaurants care only about who’s up, who’s down, who’s jockeying for position.

So it’s not surprising that another thing missing from the Observer story is any sense whatsoever that Schumer actually thinks what he’s doing is right -- that he actually believes it’s a bad idea to have Pickering and other right-wing ideologues on the bench. He’s doing this to make himself a national figure, he’s doing this to play to his base, he’s doing this because he’s pathologically publicity-hungry, say the Observer’s writers -- it’s just inconceivable to them that Schumer means what he’s saying. (The article is titled “Chuck’s Game.”)

What else is missing? Any mention whatsoever of the fact that Republicans blocked Bill Clinton’s judicial nominees regularly and relentlessly for years, thus creating many of the judicial vacancies Bush wants to fill with conservative ideologues.

Ideologues will dominate the federal bench for decades if the White House gets its way. Schumer is a hero. This article is a disgrace.

Only Four Planes Successfully Hijacked by Suicidal Terrorists in First Two Years of Bush Presidency, GOP Shill Boasts; Total Number of Dead Civilians Fewer Than 3,000

That grunt you heard not long ago was the sound of a million trigger-happy armchair GI Joes experiencing a testosterone frenzy because the inspectors found empty chemical warheads in Iraq. Andrew Sullivan, not surprisingly, let out a subtle war whoop more than an hour ago.

I'd be a sandal-wearing liberal appeaser wimp if I said the discovery of the warheads means the inspection process is, y'know, working, wouldn't I?

Yes, I do favor letting the inspectors continue. No, this doesn't change my mind. The pro-war right-wingers would much rather have war than peaceful disarmament, and they're lying if they piously claim otherwise. Well, I'd rather have peaceful disarmament than war.

Apparently the anti-abortion movement is so desperate for a win in the court of public opinion that it's been reduced to concocting surveys so vague that respondents probably don't even know the questions are about abortion, then trumpeting the results as right-to-life. "Are you in favor of restoring legal protection for unborn children?" What the hell does that mean? If I were cooking dinner and a pollster threw this question at me over the phone, I might think it had to do with custody cases or child support or whether parents-to-be can sue if a miscarriage results from product liability. Only by leaving the word "abortion" out can these people get the results they want. And the amen chorus -- the Moonie Washington Times and the far-right phony feminists of Concerned Women for America -- trumpets this sham poll as the real thing.

Here are some real poll results on the question of abortion. They show support for abortion rights that's solid, although with quite a few caveats -- just as you'd expect.

BUSH: NOT RACIALLY INSENSITIVE ENOUGH?

Many conservatives were elated by Mr. Bush's stance [on the University of Michigan's affirmative action policy]. However, there was still uncertainty among longtime opponents of affirmative action, who worried that his administration's brief might not go far enough.

Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a group that works to end racial preferences, applauded the president's remarks. But she said it would be a disappointment if Mr. Bush left the door open to the slightest possibility that it would be acceptable to consider race in admissions.

"If the court leaves any door open on taking race into account," Ms. Chavez said, "you'll just have more and more creative attempts from university administrators to accomplish what they have been doing for years."

Ms. Chavez said that for the administration to maintain its credibility on the issue with its conservative supporters, it would have to say directly that race may not be taken into account because there is no compelling state interest in promoting diversity.

--front-page story in today's New York Times

"No compelling state interest in promoting diversity"? That's nice, isn't it?

And remember, this woman was almost secretary of labor.

You'll like these graphs of Bush's dropping poll numbers -- the positives have gone down steadily since 9/11/01, while the negatives have gone up. The graphs look like Christmas trees tipped over.

Does "Mandate, my ass" apply in this case? Why, yes, I think it does.

One of the world's largest drugmakers has warned Canadian pharmacies to stop shipping its drugs to U.S. customers or it will cut off their supplies.

The move by pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline was sharply criticized by a Canadian pharmacy group, the Manitoba International Pharmacists Association, who said it would have a "devastating" impact on U.S. customers who buy the company's drugs from Canada for around 50 percent less than what U.S. pharmacies charge....

The company also said that as of Jan. 21, it would refuse to provide drugs to wholesalers or distributors that supply Canadian pharmacies with GlaxoSmithKline drugs for export, Thorkelson added....

A few price comparisons show why so many Americans shop for drugs across the border. The same amount of the breast cancer drug tamoxifen that a major U.S. pharmacy sells for $340 costs only $56 at CanadaPharmacy.com, Catroppa said. The site's price for the cholesterol medication Lipitor, one of the biggest sellers, is 30 percent to 35 percent less than U.S.-based pharmacies, he said

--Yahoo News

If you take a prescription drug made by GlaxoSmithKline, you probably have to keep taking it. But if you’re thinking of buying an over-the-counter GlaxoSmithKline product, maybe you want to consider buying something else instead. If GSK’s hardball tactics piss you off, maybe you just don’t want to buy any of GSK’s over-the-counter products, as conveniently listed at the GSK Web site:

Abreva / Aluna / Balmex / BC Powder / Beano / Citrucel / Contac / Debrox / Ecotrin / Feosol / Geritol / Glyoxide / Goody’s Powder / Natures Remedy / Nicoderm CQ / Nicorette / Nytol / Oscal / Oxy / Phazyme / Polident / Poligrip / Remifenin / Sensodyne / Sominex / Tagamet / Tragon / Tegrin / Tums / Vivarin

Just a thought.

REALITY IS FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN'T HANDLE RIGHT-WING SPIN

"What evidence is there that the U.S. is no longer serious about al Qaeda? Why would it even be in Bush's interest to ignore it? On proliferation, the administration's intent in North Korea (even if one disagrees about methods) couldn't be clearer."

--Andrew Sullivan showing signs of being clinically delusional in his blog, 1:14:18 P.M. today

The indefatigable Atrios is after another of Bush's extremist judicial nominees, Jeffrey Sutton, a former Scalia law clerk. By all means read this angry summary of Sutton's career from WampumBlog; there's also this from Justice For All Alerts.

I will quibble, however, with this bit of speculation from the otherwise fine WampumBlog post: "one has to wonder if the renomination of Charles Pickering was in fact a cynical attempt to distract attention from even more objectionable, due to age and track record for inflicting widespread damage, nominees." That's not how Bush thinks. He wants to win them all.

While you weren’t looking, the Bush administration gave Otto Reich another job last week.

For his last job with the Bush administration, Reich had to get a recess appointment -- a presidential appointment while Congress was not in session -- which meant he wasn’t subject to a Senate confirmation process he wouldn’t have cleared. Reich’s new position doesn’t require Senate approval.

Reich headed the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy during the Reagan years; he was reprimanded in 1987 by the U.S. Comptroller General’s office for "engaging in prohibited, covert propaganda activities." But that’s not the only reason senators (including some Republicans) balked at confirming him as an assistant secretary of state last year. Another reason is the fact that he lobbied -- successfully -- for the release of Orlando Bosch, a fellow Cuban exile who is widely believed to be one of the people responsible for blowing up Cubana flight 455 in 1976. Cubana 455 was a Cuban passenger airliner; this act of terrorism killed seventy-three people.

"Among the seventy-three killed aboard the Cubana jet were the twenty prize-winning athletes in their teens and early twenties who made up Cuba's national fencing team, their five coaches, and twenty-five Cubana and government employees," Ann Louise Bardach writes in her 2002 book Cuba Confidential. "There were also five North Korean passengers and eleven residents of Guyana." Bosch, a U.S. resident, was arrested in Venezuela in connection with the attack on the plane.

Bardach quotes one CIA memorandum that summarized an eyewitness account: "Meeting took place when Orlando Bosch and others discussed terrorist acts such as placing bombs on Cuban aircraft." She quotes a memo from Henry Kissinger, who was then secretary of state: "U.S. government had been planning to suggest Bosch deportation before Cubana Airlines crash took place for his suspected involvement in other terrorist acts and violation of his parole. Suspicion that Bosch involved in planning of Cubana Airlines Crash led us to suggest his deportation urgently." (Bosch had earlier been convicted of firing a shot into a Polish freighter that had traveled to Cuba in 1968.)

Orlando Bosch was jailed in Venezuela for eleven years. This is where Otto Reich comes in. He became ambassador to Venezuela in 1986. Bardach writes,

A half dozen State Department cables suggest that Reich used his position to lobby for Orlando Bosch, a man who, the [first] Bush Justice Department had concluded, had participated in more than thirty terrorist actions....

On July 21, six weeks after Otto Reich presented his credentials in Caracas, a Venezuelan judge issued a surprise ruling that Bosch was innocent of the Cubana bombing.... Former Venezuelan President Carlos Andrés Pérez ... went on to claim that "the Bosch file had been tampered with." But Reich ... eagerly cabled Washington to report that Bosch had been "absolved" and queried his superiors about Bosch's eligibility to return to the U.S.

The first President Bush went on to pardon Bosch and grant him U.S. residency -- even though his own attorney general had called Bosch an "unreformed terrorist," and even though Bosch himself, in a jailhouse interview, had told investigators from the House Select Committee on Assassinations, "You have to fight violence with violence. At times you cannot avoid hurting innocent people."

In 2001, The Miami Herald reported that a source had claimed Bosch "sent 'explosive materials' to Cuba before a 1997 Havana hotel bombing." Bosch had rather cheekily denied involvement in the bombing shortly after it happened -- he told the Herald in 1997, "We had nothing to do with those attempts. Besides, even if we had, we would deny it because it's illegal to [direct bombings] from this country.''

Otto Reich, a terrorist’s champion, will soon work for the National Security Council under Condoleezza Rice.

Your tax dollars at work.

"Americans must never again enter any crisis, economic or military, with an excessive dependence on foreign oil and an excessive burden of Federal debt."

--President George H. W. Bush, speaking months before the (first) Gulf War, September 11, 1990, as quoted in John Rudolph's report "War in Our Time: The Economic Cost of Going to War," broadcast on WNYC, New York, 1/14/03

Chortle.

Justice Thomas insisted that the book contract include provisions allowing him to control any promotional appearances, in part, he said, to preserve "the dignity of the court."

He also indicated that he anticipated hostility from certain news organizations and wanted to avoid unsympathetic interviews. He told editors that he would not appear on the television network morning shows, for example, because he feared they might attack him on the air. But he said he was willing to appear on Fox News, which he perceived as more sympathetic to his conservative views. --from yesterday's New York Times

Essentially, what Thomas is saying is that there are two nations, one of which -- the one in which non-conservatives live -- he simply has no need to address. He’s also saying he doesn’t believe an interviewer who is not conservative could possibly conduct an interview with him in good faith. Thomas is operating from the presumption that non-conservatives are categorically incapable of fairness.

Keep in mind that it is entirely possible Thomas will be chosen to be the next Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. If this happens, he should be asked whether his boycott of non-conservative America means he believes right-wingers are better people, better Americans, and more worthy of his attention as a Justice than the rest of us. He should be asked if he thinks liberals are immoral merely by dint of being liberal. He should be asked which nation he serves -- America or right-wing America.

Eight days after the midterm elections, Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler pointed out that anger about the Confederate battle flag had played a part in the defeat of Democratic governors in South Carolina and Georgia (see "Long May She Wave," the second item on the Howler's 11/13/02 page). Somerby wondered aloud why national reporters never mentioned this issue in connection with the two governors' races. His conclusion was that the press preferred the consensus story on the midterm election results -- "Bush Transcendent."

But that doesn't quite explain why the issue wasn't discussed in the national news before the election, or since -- especially in the aftermath of the Trent Lott affair.

Well, now we learn from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that protestors angry at the deemphasis of the Confederate flag on the redesigned Georgia state flag buzzed the inaugural of the state's new (Republican) governor Sonny Perdue, and plan a pro-Stars-and-Bars rally today. They're angry at the governor because during the campaign he promised to allow a referendum on reverting to the old state flag with a greater emphasis on the Stars and Bars, and he's now retreating from that promise.

Angry people, striking visuals -- will it make your nightly news? And if not, why not?

If this story doesn't go national, it's because the national press doesn't want to give offense by telling the uncomfortable truth that there are an awful lot of neo-Confederates and racists out there -- and the major party that gets their votes, the GOP, still won't cut them loose. ("If the governor wants to distance himself from that, I'd like to see him stand up and say this is wrong," an observer of the seg flyover is quoted as saying in the Atlanta Journal article. The neo-Cons may be angry at Perdue now, but he voted for a flag referendum as a state senator before promising a referendum as a gubernatorial candidate.)

The Trent Lott story became permissible for the mainstream press when some GOP-friendly pundits denounced Lott. At that point it became a story about one bad apple, not about a party that has no problem giving a top leadership position to a racist. But notice that the mainstream press won't write about John Ashcroft's ties to neo-Confederates, won't run down Charles Pickering's seg-friendly past in any detail, and hasn't covered the Georgia flag flap. Doing so would convey the message that the GOP has a systemic race problem -- a fact the press would have to tread on powerful toes to tell you.

(Thanks yet again to Atrios for the Atlanta Journal link.)

One fascinating thing we learned from yesterday’s New York Times is that, in the class wars of the Bush era, Jennifer Lopez has apparently become the new Michael Harrington. Books are just so old school; the key text on class in 2003 is one line from J.Lo’s song "Jenny from the Block," which was quoted, in two slightly different forms, repetition and all, by both op-ed contributor David Brooks and film critic Caryn James in yesterday’s Times: "Don't be fooled by the rocks I got, I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the block" (James) / "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got, I'm just, I'm just Jenny from the block" (Brooks).

The James essay kicks the Brooks essay’s butt. James makes the glaringly obvious point that J.Lo is telling us a "fairy tale," both in her song and in her new movie Maid in Manhattan. James also provides hard truths about social mobility that are nowhere to be found in Brooks’s piece:

…new studies show it takes an average of five or six generations to change a family's economic position, and that wealth tends to linger in families.… As [Princeton economist Alan B.] Krueger added in an interview, "Recent trends in income distribution have made upward mobility less likely" than it was even 20 years ago.

Brooks is a smart pop sociologist, but he’s also a lockstep right-wing apparatchik. He seems to accept at face value the assertion that the millionaire actress/singer/diva is still just a regular around-the-way girl from the old 'hood, and he thinks it’s kind of neat that ordinary Americans believe this nonsense, too. He revels in the fact that Americans are utterly delusional about class:

Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them.

It's not hard to see why they think this way. Americans live in a culture of abundance. They have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing. None of us is really poor; we're just pre-rich.

The vast majority of Americans who "have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley," are living in a fantasy world if they think they’ll be able to cash in on those opportunities. To Brooks, that’s OK. People vote in Fantasy Land, and they vote GOP.

The Week in Review section of yesterday’s New York Times introduced something new into mainstream American journalism: postmodernism.

No, David Leonhardt’s lead article isn’t an impenetrable, jargon-riddled verbal rat’s nest, and it has no references to Baudrillard or Foucault. What it does is pose the question Who are the rich? and strongly suggest that the answer is unknowable.

Consider the following excerpt:

Some would include [among "the rich"] any family that makes more than $100,000 a year. Others put the cut-off much higher, noting that a six-figure income alone is not enough to buy many houses in the biggest metropolitan areas. Still others ignore salaries and point out that all of the commonly used words for the well-off — affluent, rich, wealthy — are supposed to describe people's assets rather than their incomes.

Now, you thought being paid gobs of money made a person rich. But merely being paid gobs of money (income) is, apparently, not at all the same as having gobs of money (assets). Apparently, one may receive gobs of money without in fact possessing those gobs of money. Following me so far? Good.

Then there’s this:

One possible reason the class-war criticism has not yet stuck is that defining wealth is more complicated than it once was. Some people have homes that have appreciated enormously in value, but they can't sell them without buying a new, similarly expensive home. High-earners who live in high-cost areas feel stretched. Lower earners who live in less expensive places don't feel poor.

At this point, the article starts to seem as if it were written specifically to be turned into a Tom Tomorrow cartoon, with one of Tom’s average American husbands saying to his wife, "Say, honey, we went to Hawaii last year and our Visa bill is almost paid off -- maybe we’re rich! Maybe Bill Gates isn’t rich! Maybe homeless people are rich and Jack Welch is poor! Maybe money is merely a collective hallucination!"

Yes, the end of the Leonhardt piece does suggest that some people are knowably rich (and that those people have done awfully well over the past twenty years, and may continue to do extremely well if the Bush tax cut passes intact). But this comes only after we’re told that "rich" is a baffling, elusive concept.

Given the fact that pomo theories are usually regarded as commie-liberal, it’s interesting to note that the Week in Review’s postmodernism serves the interests of conservatives quite nicely -- after all, if we can never truly know who is rich, then all those class-warfare whiners are tilting at windmills, fighting a chimera. (The right-wing reaction to that same chimera is to throw lots of money at it, just to be on the safe side, but apparently that's OK.)

There’s an appalling article in today’s New York Times about forced shortening of the school year, firing of key personnel, and other severe cutbacks in some American school districts.

Does it seem counterintuitive that Americans, who regularly tell pollsters that education is their number one political priority, would allow such things to happen? Not really. Americans “know” that school districts don’t really need the funding for which they regularly beg -- they “know” because for more than a generation, at least since the days of Proposition 13 in California, conservatives have been telling them so.

Modern conservatism has poisoned American life in a lot of ways, but one of its most destructive toxins is the notion that all government social programs are so riddled with waste that any call for additional funding is an immoral picking of taxpayers’ pockets. In the case of school funding, this might not be utterly unconscionable if conservatives offered a way out -- if they regularly demonstrated specific ways that school districts claiming to be cash-strapped could finance necessary programs within existing budgets. Conservatives don’t do that. Conservatives merely spread the absolutist notion that no government social program has ever been run well, then sit back and watch schools suffer for lack of funding.

There is no excuse for this: Even if it is true that there is an excess of waste in the typical school district, the conservative message never helps to root it out. In district after district, schools beg for money, and citizens, having heard decades of right-wing propaganda about excessive taxation and government waste, refuse to pony up. If this mysterious waste is actually there, it’s never eliminated. Instead, even in good times, as in the boom years of the 1990s, school budget force parents to hold bake sales if they want arts programs funded, and require teachers to dig into their own pockets for school supplies; in recessions like the current one, school districts eliminate courses, reduce building maintenance, cancel some extracurricular activities. In the case of schools, the government-bashing of conservatives is entirely destructive.

Oh, yes, I know -- conservatives do have a way out: vouchers. Conservatives believe we will save the schools by doing to education what California did to electricity. The vast majority of all new businesses fail, yet conservatives believe the key to improving education is entrepreneurialism. OK, fine. But the idea of “deregulating” schools would be absurd in the typical American suburb -- how would a town in which one high school is sufficient be served by a wide-open free market? Conservatives know that most Americans don’t want vouchers, know that vouchers will never come to the vast majority of the country -- yet they have no other answers.

Are conservatives secretly pleased when public schools decline? You have to wonder. In any event, it’s undeniable that conservative rhetoric does immense damage to American schools.

Relatives of the 9/11 dead understandably want to try to punish those who perpetrated the terrorist acts, and those who helped the perpetrators, particularly the Saudis -- and to that end they have not been averse to using lawsuits. Last month President Bush named Thomas Kean to head the panel that will investigate 9/11, and Trent Lott refused to name the families' choice for the panel, Warren Rudman. Now, I really could be reading too much into this, but is it a coincidence that Kean is a member of the board of Common Good, an organization devoted to "reforming America's lawsuit culture"?

Just asking.

More on Pickering at Media Whores Online.

Read this short letter from the director of Mississippi's Sovereignty Commission to the state's governor and lieutenant governor. Note the pride with which the letter-writer describes the way "agitators" and "native Negroes" were separated at demonstrations -- which made it easier to film the protesting blacks. Note the lieutenant governor's name: Carroll Gartin.

Carroll Gartin was Charles Pickering's law partner.

Last year, Clarence Page pointed out that at his Juidiciary Committee hearing last year "Pickering also denied that former Mississippi Lt. Gov. Carroll Gartin, who was Pickering's law partner from 1961 to 1971, was a segregationist. But Pickering changed that tune when Durbin waved copies of an old campaign ad. It showed Gartin waving a pen with which, he declares in the ad, he 'will veto any effort to weaken our defenses around our Southern way of life.' "

They impeached Clinton because he lied under oath about a couple of blowjobs.

Pickering did take an oath when he told the Judiciary Committee his onetime partner wasn't a seg, didn't he?

(Thanks, yet again, to Atrios for the Clarence Page link.)

WHY ARMAGEDDON HASN'T HAPPENED YET

Bush is reliably said to have believed that Powell was forced on him by Republican transition officials, and there were indications early in the administration that he resented Powell's popularity and independent standing. At one meeting, Powell joked, "After all, Mr. President, you can't fire me." Bush replied tersely, "I know."
--Elizabeth Drew in the 12/5/02 New York Review of Books

I don't know what to make of Drudge's Daily Telegraph story claiming that the Brits are urging Bush to postpone war against Iraq till the fall. But I do know that the Blair government has explicitly now denied the charge. I'm not going to panic any time soon at the various signals that the West is now going wobbly on Iraq.
--Andrew Sullivan today

Don't worry, Andy. There's a name for your condition. It's painful, but it's perfectly harmless.

When people talk about GOP/right-wing "message discipline," this is what they mean. Scary.

The Borg operate under a collective consciousness, whereby the thoughts of each drone are interconnected with all others in what is referred to as the "Hive Mind," eliminating any sense of individuality. --StarTrek.com

That is what was so offensive about that rally: It shamelessly used Wellstone's death for partisan advantage while its organizers cynically accused their opponents of doing precisely that.

--Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online, 10/30/02

Ultimately, it was that hole in the ground [ground zero]—more than the details of City Hall’s bid, or Mr. Bloomberg’s wooing of Republicans with horse-drawn carriage rides—that led the G.O.P. to choose New York [for its 2004 convention], a decision that was announced on Jan. 6. Senior national Republicans say that a convention in New York will remind voters of President Bush’s leadership in the aftermath of the attacks. It also is intended, they said, to position the G.O.P. as the party best suited to lead the nation during its most dangerous moment since the Cold War, injecting a national-security theme into Mr. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.

"People at the White House and the Republican National Committee agree that the image of a city rising from adversity is a great backdrop for the convention," Ron Kaufman, a Republican National Committee member from Massachusetts, told The Observer.

--article in this week's New York Observer


Using tragedy for partisan political gain: It's OK if you're a Republican.

State Representatives Liston Shows, Soso, R. H. Donald, Quitman, and Senator Charles Pickering, are very interested in this matter and requested to be advised of developments in connection with SCEF infiltration of GPA and full background of James Simmons."

That's from page 3 of this document, a January 5, 1972, letter from the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. Emphasis is mine. Senator Charles Pickering, needless to say, is now a Bush judicial nominee.

Joe Conason explains the document:

When George H.W. Bush first named him to the federal bench in 1990 (two years after he chaired the Bush-Quayle campaign in Mississippi), Pickering told the Senate that he'd had no contact with the State Sovereignty Commission, his home state's notorious anti-black secret police apparatus.

"I never had any contact with that agency," he testified. Not quite true, as the since-unsealed records of the Sovereignty Commission reveal. Actually, in January 1972, Pickering apparently asked [see last page of memo] a Commission employee to keep him apprised of its surveillance of an integrated union-organizing campaign among pulpwood workers in his hometown. Later, Pickering claimed that he had been worried about "Klan" infiltration of the pulpwood workers union, but the Commission documents show clearly that it was investigating left-wing integrationists, not the KKK.

Conason also discusses the deep involvement of Pickering's then-law partner, Carroll Gartin, in the Sovereignty Commission.

And Atrios has more information on the Sovereignty Commission.

This is what you won't learn from the carefully calibrated GOP spin machine as this nomination battle plays out.

Party of Lincoln?

A New Jersey judge has dismissed two lawsuits against the American Boychoir School, where dozens of former students say they were molested as children by the choir director and other employees. The judge ruled that as a nonprofit institution, the school could not be sued for acts that injured children, "no matter how flagrant that conduct may be."

In a decision issued on Monday, Judge Jack Sabatino of New Jersey Superior Court ruled that New Jersey's Charitable Immunity Act prevented victims from suing the Princeton-based boarding school, although they could sue individual employees who abused them or did not try to stop abuse.

Noting that lawmakers and the courts had interpreted the law as granting nonprofit groups broad protections, Judge Sabatino wrote, "This court is constrained to hold that the act insulates charitable organizations from liability for any degree of tortious conduct, no matter how flagrant that conduct may be." He ruled that "contentions that employees and agents of the American Boychoir School acted willfully, wantonly, recklessly, indifferently — even criminally — do not eviscerate the school's legal protection."

The decision affects two suits against the Boychoir School by men who accused Donald Hanson, who ran the school's choir from 1970 to 1982, of molesting them as children.

In one suit, John W. Hardwicke Jr., 45, a White Hall, Md., resident who attended the Boychoir School from 1969 to 1971, said he was molested by Mr. Hanson and three other employees, from a headmaster to a cook. In the other suit, Douglas Palmatier, who started at the Boychoir School at the age of 9 in 1971, said he was raped by Mr. Hanson over the next eight years....

--New York Times

If that strikes you as unjust, you might want to consider e-mailing this guy -- Republican State Senator William L. Gormley, co-chair of the New Jersey State Senate's Judiciary Committee. According to the Times article, he's bottling up legislation that would end charities' immunity from prosecution for employees' sexual abuse on the job, and he's proud of it. His e-mail address is SenGormley@njleg.org.

By the way, according to the Times, "the Catholic Conference has lobbied heavily" to prevent a change in the law.

Earlier today I posted two versions of what Charles Pickering did in that cross-burning case, one from Byron York in National Review and the other from People for the American Way. Here's a third version -- a March 2002 article from Michael Crowley in The New Republic. The New Republic and National Review articles overlap somewhat in their accounts of Pickering's contact with the Justice Department's Frank Hunger, but NR characterizes the contact as legitimate and harmless while TNR describes the same discussions as "a serious no-no, according to several prominent law professors." To NR, Pickering was virtuously trying to correct a sentencing disparity brought about by Justice Department officials who erroneously hyperextended a defendant's sentence; to TNR, Pickering was a zealot, violating judicial ethics to shorten a proper sentence.

I know which version I believe. Still, I wouldn't mind seeing more versions of this story.

Dean Murphy surveys "the national mood" on the Bush economic proposal in today's New York Times. Here's Murphy's complete list of interviewees, in the order in which they're quoted:

* a mother and daughter, both Republicans, shopping in San Francisco in "a gated pedestrian district of boutiques and beauty salons that cater to the well-to-do."

* "a venture capitalist from Cambridge, Mass."

* "a telecommunications company manager in Denver"

* "a venture capitalist with Venrock Associates of New York"

* "the chief executive at an advertising agency in Richmond, Va."

* "a sales manager for a plastics manufacturer in Atlanta with a household income of nearly $200,000"

* a "sausage restaurant owner in Seattle"

* the owner of a used-book store in Seattle

* a "mother of four whose husband owns a surveying business"

* "a mother of three young children" from Addis, Louisiana (quoted last)

An astonishingly broad cross-section, no?

DRUNK ON TAX-CUTTING

President George W. Bush is considering pressing for further reform of the US tax system following this week's proposed abolition of taxation on dividends, the White House's top economic adviser said on Wednesday.

"The president has said that he continues to be interested in tax reform," said Glenn Hubbard, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Mr Hubbard would not be drawn on details of the White House's tax reform ambitions but said the $674bn package announced this week was more about boosting economic growth. "It is not an effort for tax reform. It's an effort for growth insurance that will also improve the long-term situation."

--Financial Times

A potential problem the White House may face in the House is the desire of some Republican leaders to enact more expansive tax cuts than the White House proposed. Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the House Republican leader, said today that he would like to pass an even bigger proposal.

"I look at the Bush plan as a floor," Mr. DeLay said, "not a ceiling."

--New York Times

So who's telling the truth about Charles Pickering's involvement in that cross-burning case, National Review or People for the American Way?

Was Daniel Swan the ringleader of the three cross-burners, or was the unnamed seventeen-year-old? Did the law mandate a seven-and-a-half-year sentence for Swan or didn't it? Were Pickering's attempts to change Swan's sentence legitimate or illegitimate? Was Pickering acting out of frutration with an unresponsive bureaucracy, or was he trying to cut a cross-burner a break? Were the sentencing disparities typical for a case like this or inappropriate?

And will someone get to the bottom of this? Or will the press merely sit this one out and let the side with the better message discipline -- which will almost certainly be the GOP -- win?

Don't assume from the post below that I've gone soft on America's ayatollahs. I see that there are hints that Svengali Rove's buddy Ralph Reed might run for the Georgia Senate seat Zell Miller is vacating -- with White House backing. Reed has been a theocrat and a thug, as well as (thanks to Karl Rove) a highly paid Enron consultant. His ascendancy to the Senate would be a national disgrace.

You know, I think I would have taken the deal offered by the senator on last night’s episode of The West Wing. Throw a little federal money at a study of the healing effects of "remote prayer" in return for a key vote on an important foreign-aid bill? Sorry if this is disappointing, but President Nice Blog probably would have done it. I say this as a lapsed-Catholic atheist and a proud supporter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Of course, the senator on the show was hoping to poke yet another hole in the wall of separation between church and state. But I don’t see this as a wall-of-separation question, strictly speaking.

The point of the study would be to find whether or not the human body is somehow hard-wired to respond to prayer it doesn’t know about from people it’s never met. It’s an absurd idea, but either it’s true or it isn’t, and if it’s true, it’s true whether we discover the truth or not. Now, as long as the government and its surrogates don’t compel or coerce a specific religious response to the results of such a study -- as long as we still have exactly the religious freedom we have now after the results are published, as long as we’re free to act on or ignore the results as we see fit -- the wall of separation isn’t violated.

Of course, that’s true only if studies that test the effect of any religious practice -- or no religious practice -- have an equal chance of being funded. But I say let a hundred flowers bloom -- after the government funds the remote-prayer study, it should probably fund a double-blind study of atheist/agnostic substitutes for prayer (perhaps the healing effects of remote volunteers who sit around reading the Sunday New York Times over brunch?).

In real life, as it turns out, a study of remote healing through prayer did get federal funding -- about a dozen times as much funding as the senator requested on The West Wing. And the bizarre conclusion of the study was that remote healing works.

But, unsurprisingly, there’s a huge catch.

As Po Bronson points out in an article in the December 2002 issue of Wired, the scientists who conducted the study tortured their data until they squeezed out one dubious correlation between remote prayer and healing. (Other data showed that patients who’d been prayed for did worse on many measures of healing.). The scientists went on to unblind and reblind their data to help them find further correlations suggested to them after the fact. The journal that published their article had no idea that such violations of proper research procedure had taken place.

(And in a particularly weird twist, the lead researcher contracted one of the diseases she’d been studying -- a particularly nasty form of brain tumor -- and was herself the recipient of lots and lots of remote prayer. It did her absolutely no good.)

Obviously, the government shouldn’t fund bad science, religious or otherwise -- but even so, the the scientific method, with its emphasis on ongoing critique and openness to attempts at replication, is designed to encourage detection of sloppiness, error, and outright fraud. This experiment got a pretty nasty critique -- a rare debunking in the popular press.

I say it’s OK to throw religion -- and atheism -- into the scientific mix, and it’s OK for government to fund such research, as long as religious and irreligious notions have an equal chance at funding, and as long as government doesn’t try to compel you to pray after one study says it might shrink some stranger’s tumor.

Thank you, thank you, Rittenhouse Review, for adding me to your list of "Better Bloggers." Also, thanks to Calpundit for the acknowledgment, and thanks for links to drat fink and Hong Kong Journal Redux.

(Is China really blocking access to Blogspot sites, as Richard at Hong Kong Journal says? If so, that's a disturbing development.)

BuzzFlash led with this today, but in case you missed it, this is from Forbes:

Bush, Cheney would get tax-cut windfall

U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney each stand to reap thousands of dollars in savings from Bush's proposal on Tuesday to eliminate taxes on stock dividends.

Based on income reported in his tax returns for 2001, Bush would have saved $16,511 on dividend payments of $43,805 if his new proposal had been in effect for the year.

Cheney, who had dividends of $278,103 in 2001, would have saved $104,823.

The estimated savings were derived by using a tax-savings calculator on the Internet site of the Heritage Foundation think-tank (www.heritage.org)....

Forbes also has this:

Tax cut just $60 for many in Bush plan - analysts

Taxpayers earning $30,000 or less a year would get an average annual tax cut of just $60 from the Bush economic plan unveiled on Tuesday, while those making more than $200,000 would get a tax break of more than $12,000, according to analysts.

"There's no question it's weighted toward the wealthy," said Max Sawicky, senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington-based think tank....

Nothing surprising here, of course -- pretty much what we expected, right?

A corporate tax cut could hit state, towns

President Bush's proposal to stimulate the economy by eliminating taxes on corporate dividends could end up costing state and local governments -- and ultimately taxpayers -- more money, some financial experts say.

Many investors rely on municipal bonds as a means of minimizing their tax bills because the income they generate is free from federal, and often, state taxes.

But new competition from another investment that provides tax-free income would probably mean that government entities would have to pay higher interest rates when they attempt to float bonds to finance capital improvement projects, some experts say....

--story in today's Newark Star-Ledger

Unintended consequences from the Bushies?

Or intended consequences?

One last nagging thought about Ann Coulter's Christmas-week column: If Ann thinks Kwanzaa is a bad idea because its founder was a collectivist, does that mean she also thinks we should stop reciting the socialist-authored Pledge of Allegiance?

Here's a conventional-wisdom-defying result from a new poll: Nearly two thirds of Americans -- including a whopping 61% of Republicans -- would like the U.S. to avoid using force in Iraq now.

Here's the question and the breakdown of the responses:

"What do you think the United States should now do with respect to Iraq: use military force in some way or try to find a diplomatic solution?"

ALL:

Force 29%

Diplomacy 63%

Both (vol.) 4%

Don't Know 4%
 
 
Republicans:

Force 33%

Diplomacy 61%

Both (vol.) 4%

Don't Know 2%
 

Democrats:

Force 20%

Diplomacy 73%

Both (vol.) 1%

Don't Know 6%
 

Independents:

Force 34%

Diplomacy 57%

Both (vol.) 5%

Don't Know 4%


Note that respondents were first asked, "Do you approve or disapprove of the United States taking military action against Iraq to try to remove Saddam Hussein from power?" -- and 64% said they approved. So these aren't those nasty old decadent appeaser peaceniks. War is OK with these respondents -- but they prefer diplomacy by a wide margin.

This is from a CBS News poll taken January 4-6, as reported at PollingReport.com.

Bush renominates Pickering.

What is my problem? Fool that I am, I thought Bush would probably shelve his plans to put Pickering up again, after the late unpleasantness with Trent Lott. When will I learn that any suggestion that Bush should avoid doing something he really wants to do has the effect on him, as on all spoiled brats, of greatly reinforcing his determination to do precisely what he's been warned against doing?

(Once again, here's the skinny on Pickering. Cue "Dixie.")

Part of the reason for the high price tag is that Bush sought to touch all his political bases — from the conservatives who are calling for across-the-board tax cuts to the broader range of middle-class voters who tend to sway presidential elections and to important constituencies such as senior citizens and small business owners.
--"Bush Presses Congress on Tax-Cutting Plan," AP story posted this afternoon

Sorry, but that's nonsense.

The cost of the Bush plan is projected to be $674 billion over ten years; $364 billion of this is supposed to result from the elimination of dividend taxes. But we also know from yesterday's news that the Bushies originally considered just cutting dividend taxes by 50%.

Wouldn't a 50% dividend tax cut have reached exactly the same people as a 100% dividend tax cut? In other words, wouldn't it have "touched the same bases"?

And wouldn't it have cost $182 billion less?

As Eric Alterman points out, The Washington Post buried the key stats on the Bush economic plan deep in this article:

An analysis by the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center of the effects of eliminating dividend taxation found that the average benefit for those making less than $10,000 would be $6, and the average benefit for those making more than $1 million would be $45,098.

Accelerating the tax cuts slated for 2006, as Bush has proposed, would give 70 percent of the benefit to the top 5 percent of taxpayers, and the lowest 80 percent would receive 6.5 percent of the benefit. His expected proposal to accelerate the 2004 tax cuts would provide 64.4 percent of the benefit to the wealthiest 5 percent and 7.7 percent to the lowest 80 percent.

U.N. Sees 500,000 Iraqi Casualties at Start of War

As many as half a million Iraqis could require medical treatment as a result of serious injuries suffered in the early stages of a war on Iraq, U.N. emergency planners said in a document disclosed Tuesday.

The total includes some 100,000 expected to be injured as a direct result of combat and a further 400,000 wounded as an indirect result of the devastation, according to estimates prepared by the World Health Organization, the document said....

War would also produce a huge refugee problem, driving some 900,000 Iraqis into neighboring countries, with about 100,000 of those requiring immediate assistance as soon as they arrived, according to the U.N. estimate.

Another 2 million could be driven from their homes but remain inside Iraq, where access by relief agencies would be a particular problem due to the fighting, the planners say....

--Reuters story at ABCNEWS.com

Iraq's population is 26.5 million, about a tenth of America's -- so multiply those numbers by ten if you want to try to imagine something comparable here.

The report cited in the story is here, in PDF form.

"Part of the reason that we don't want to get North Korea's problems in front of the Security Council too quickly," one senior [Bush administration] official suggested today, "is that the other Security Council members will be overwhelmed by too many problems at once. And these problems are different enough that you don't want one polluting the other."
--from today's New York Times

See? We're not being hypocritical. We're just being considerate.

The New York Times has some fine coverage of Bush's dividend-tax fiasco -- a stinging lead editorial, another fine Paul Krugman evisceration of Bush economic thinking, and a chart showing just who would really benefit from the proposal and by how much. One tiny problem: The chart's not online. Instead, the Times posts a different chart here,one that doesn't make clear at all how many Americans Bush's plan will affect, and it what way.

Well, our old pal Atrios reproduces the numbers from the good chart here. It's too bad, however, that you can't see the chart as it appears in the paper, with the expected tax breaks (less than $50 in 2003 for the bottom 60% of taxpayers, $13,243 for the top 1%) neatly stacked in a column.

I'm running a cheapo, text-only blog here, and I don't own scanner. If you're not laboring under these handicaps, I urge you to buy today's Times and get scanning.

Atrios and his readers are discussing the question of dividends, based on this CNN.com article and one of its sidebars ("Dividend Tax Cut: Who Will It Help"?).

Anyone who wants to dig a bit deeper can see a fuller set of numbers in Table 1 of this PDF file from IRS.gov (scroll down to page 8 of 11). The PDF provides information on individual income tax returns for 2000; CNN's numbers apparently come from this data set.

Now, I'm not the most nimble calculator jockey, but here's what I get from Table 1:

* Only 14.3% of taxpayers with incomes under $15,000 reported any dividend income whatsoever in 2000.

(It may seem odd that anyone at that income level collects dividends, but as one of Atrios's readers points out, "$25k/year including 1700 in dividend would not be unusual for, say, a 70 year old widow with a modest pension and small nest egg of highly appreciated stock.")

* Only 14.5% of taxpayers with incomes between $15,000 and $30,000 reported dividend income in 2000.

* Only 23.5% of taxpayers with incomes between $30,000 and $50,000 reported dividend income in 2000.

Combine the brackets and only 16.8% of filers with incomes of $50K or less had dividend income -- 83.2% didn't.

And $50K-and-under filers constitute 71.7% of all filers.

Not even a majority of filers in the $50,000 - $100,000 bracket reported dividend income -- only 41.5% of people at this income level had dividends. But dividends were reported by 88.2% of filers with incomes $200,000 and higher.

This is the Bushies' idea of an "across-the-board" tax cut.

If this is accurate, it's pretty damn appalling:

Dow sues penniless Bhopal survivors
 
In a stunning example of corporate insensibility, Dow Chemical, the worlds largest chemical company, and new owners of Union Carbide is to sue survivors of the 1984 Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, India....

On December 2nd a peaceful march of 200 women survivors from Bhopal delivered toxic waste from the abandoned Carbide factory back to Dow's Indian headquarters in Bombay with the demand that Dow take responsibility for the disaster and clean up the site. Dow obviously has other ideas because they are suing survivors for about US$10,000 for "loss of work". That's US$10,000 compensation demanded for a two hour peaceful protest where only one Dow employee briefly ventured out of the Mumbai corporate business park to meet the women protestors....

The damages demanded by Dow will amount to about 10 years income for the survivors charged but is less than one days sales revenue for Dow....

I don't know where Peggy Noonan is going with this column, in which she tries to explain why we all like W. so gosh-darn much.

She starts out by doing what you'd expect her to do: She grades Bush on the GOP curve, giving him an A+ not only for the 9/14/01 "I can hear you" moment but also for such forgettable damp squibs as "his Oval Office interview a few days after the attack when he said, 'I am a loving man, but I have a job to do'" and "his spectacular live question-and-answer session with children when Vladimir Putin was meeting with him in Texas, in which both took questions from kids and Mr. Bush's humanity shined through."

She ends with her usual high-toned know-nothingism, misinterpreting liberals' perfectly reasonable disdain for leaders who embrace simplemindedness and preference for leaders who can actually see gray areas in life:

Liberals like their leaders interesting. I always think this may be because some of them have not been able to fully engage the idea of a God, and tend to fill that hole in themselves with politics and its concerns. If the world of government and politics becomes your god, and yields a supergod called a president, you want that god to be interesting.

Conservatives, on the other hand, don't look for god in government, for part of being a conservative is holding the conviction that there is no god in government. They like complicated personalities in their TV shows and from actors and opera singers, but they want steadiness and a vision they can agree with from their presidents. Actually I think conservatives want their presidents the way they want their art: somewhere in the normal range.

But in between, she goes off on a truly bizarre riff about Bush and his family:

Everyone can see he's close to his family, and people like that too...

Everyone? Really?

it's what they all hope they have or could have, though many do not. But a close family is the American ideal, and people unconsciously feel greater respect for those lucky enough, blessed enough, to have it.

Now here's where it gets weird:

Mr. Bush also seems slightly afraid of his children. I don't know why exactly I say that; I've never seen them together in person and can't back it up ...

OK, let's see if I'm taking all this in: He's close to his family, yet you, Peggy Noonan, a Beltway insider of two decades' standing, have never seen him with his family, although presumably you see him in person on a fairly regular basis. I guess it all depends on what the definition of "close" is. (Me, I can't recall even seeing Bush with his kids on TV since the Inaugural. And I used to see Bill and Hillary with Chelsea all the time.) But what gives Noonan the sense that he's "slightly afraid" of the twins? And, more important, why would a family-values conservative like Noonan say it's OK for a family-values conservative like Bush to fear his own kids?

... and yet I sense it's true. One feels the presence of love, perplexity, guilt and hope there, and the slight detachment those heavy emotions can bring. If I'm right this would be in line with Mr. Bush's long years of heavy drinking, and the damage that can occur in families with an alcoholic in charge. I have a hunch the American people sense what I sense, and that it may bond them closer to Mr. Bush, too.

Just what exactly is she alluding to here?

Is she helping the Bushes prepare the ground for the announcement of something a wee bit problematic in the House of Shrub? Something the ideal traditionalist Dad might have been expected to head off before it blossomed into a crisis? Something, in other words, that conservatives are going to have to explain away because it doesn't jibe with the hero-on-a-steed image of Bush they're so desperate to concoct?

...We all have our troubles; we've all messed up; we're all trying...

And that's OK. As long as you're not a Democrat who gets adulterous blowjobs.

...and a lot of us, maybe most of us, have effortful relationships with our kids.

OK, I hear you, Peggy.

I think something is up.

I suspect some Bush family embarrassment may be announced quietly late on the first Friday afternoon after we start bombing Baghdad.

Catching up with Ann Coulter....

This is from her December 26 column:

Indeed, the seven "principles" of Kwanzaa praise collectivism in every possible arena of life – economics, work, personality, even litter removal. ("Kuumba: Everyone should strive to improve the community and make it more beautiful.")

Oh, so striving to improve one's community and make it more beautiful is a bad idea, Ann? And people shouldn't try? Or some people shouldn't try? And if everyone in a community does try, that means they're all commies?

Thanks for links to Mudshark, Mo2k, The Facts Machine, and Idiot’s Delight, as well as (Yahoo/Google found these, though I can't seem to) Grafyte, BILL!’s LiveJournal, and organica. (Note to Grafyte: Er, I'm not Karl Rove -- Karl Rove is this nasty piece of work. But thanks nonetheless.)

Even mortally wounded, Trent Lott last month was a reprehensible son of a bitch: On December 16, he spit in the faces of families of 9/11 victims, who wanted him to appoint former senator Warren Rudman to the commission investigating the terrorist attacks, choosing former Navy secretary John Lehman instead. Now we learn from this Bergen Record op-ed piece that Lehman covered up a Navy pedophile scandal in the early 1980s. Thanks, Trent. (Link courtesy of Interesting Times.)

Economics, Republican style: the national GOP giveth and the state GOPs taketh away.

In the Week in Review section of today’s New York Times, Kevin Baker, the author of Paradise, a novel set in the nineteenth-century slums of lower Manhattan, has an amusing article on the history of trash in New York City. Did you know that during the Civil War draft riots, striking sanitation workers smashed street-cleaning machines, shouting “Death to the labor-saving devices!”? Me either.

It’s nice that Martin Scorsese’s movie Gangs of New York has focused attention on the horrors of life in New York’s nineteenth-century slums and inspired the mainstream media to revisit that history -- but the renewal of interest is at least a decade too late.

In 1990, Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book The Gangs of New York was reissued; Luc Sante’s Low Life, which cover a lot of the same ground, was published in 1991. It was obvious to anyone who read those books at the time that drug-drenched, hopeless slums were not a new phenomenon in America, that the crack-trade Uzi murders that regularly led the news back then were exactly analogous to the crimes of lower Manhattan’s past, crimes that took place in slums full of shivs and brickbats and opium and “blind pig” saloons.

Most of the members of lower Manhattan’s criminal underclass were white. This is important. The Bell Curve, notoriously, was published in 1994, but what that book asserted outright had already been hinted at, in code words, by far too many “thoughtful” people in the 1980s and early 1990s: namely, the notion that blacks and Hispanics were simply unsuited, possibly because of their genes, to full participation in civilized society.

The Gangs of New York and Low Life sold tens of thousands of copies -- they were successful books by the standards of the publishing industry -- but the mainstream media rarely if ever alluded to the Five Points when discussing the South Bronx or Compton. So most Americans never grasped the obvious: If many of the slum-dwelling thugs of America’s past were of Irish and English and German descent -- members of ethnic groups now entirely assimilated into our society -- then why were so many people suggesting that contemporary ghetto dwellers and their descendants might be marginalized forever?

The Rodney King riots took place in 1992. We were regularly told that these riots were the worst American riots of the century; the mainstream media, however, never told us why it was necessary to add that qualification “of the century” -- we were never told about the Civil War draft riots, which, just like the L.A. riots, began as a political response to an apparent racial outrage and descended into anarchy and race murder, but with the races reversed.

White rioters in 1863 hung blacks from lampposts and burned a black orphanage. Anyone who thought that the L.A. riots demonstrated a unique black/Hispanic depravity should have learned about this strikingly analogous white riot.

Our press was lazy, so most people never did.

I see heartening signs of a fairly substantial improvement in America’s racial attitudes over the past decade or so. I hope it’s a permanent change -- though I worry that the crummy economy of the Bush years will eventually lead some white Americans to start looking for scapegoats again. If we’re finally coming together, maybe it’s irrelevant now that we missed an opportunity a decade ago to learn something from history. The mainstream media failed to give us some perspective when we could have used it -- and that’s a major failure.

If you take the Delta Shuttle, as I did over the holidays, one of the fine periodicals you get to read free is NewsMax.com, the print version of the simpleminded kneejerk right-wing Web site with which it shares a name. They say we are known by the company we keep; here are some of the fine advertisers who share the pages of the current (December '02/January '03) issue of NewsMax.com with its writers, who include not only prominent conservative pundits such as Bill O'Reilly, Thomas Sowell and Michelle Malkin but also a rising GOP star, Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania:

* Crystal Clear of Westbrookville, New York, which sells a "patented electron water/air machine" that purports to break down the "extremely tight" hydrogen bonds in water to produce a fluid in which "all the properties are completely different!" ("100 years from now," a "UCLA prof" testifies, "scientists will still be able to identify my water and that's why as a senior citizen I am stronger now than when I ranked #1 in the world in discus!").

* The makers of the Photon Sound Beam, "Ed Skillings original 21st Century Electro-Medicine Technology," which offers "Advanced Noble Gas Lymph Technology With Radiowave Sound Probe" to restore cells to health using "The Full Harmonics of Life Force Energy And Photonics Nutrition."

* Carotec, which sells "Trace Sea Minerals in the form of Phytomicrosphere® developed in France"; the company, vrtuously, has "flatly refused to sell colloidal minerals," insisting that its substitute product "captures the promise of colloidal minerals ... in a proven, effective, elegant way."

* Unrestricted Warfare: China's Master Plan to Destroy America, a book sold by NewsMax itself; described as a translation of a Chinese military manual, Unrestricted Warfare is said to show "that the People's Republic of China is preparing to confront the United States and our allies by conducting 'asymmetrical' or multidimensional attacks on almost every aspect of our social, economic and political life," including a 9/11-style attack on the World Trade Center (a possibility allegedly alluded to three years before the attack actually happened).

* The authors of an online article that claims, according to the NewsMax.com ad, that "[t]here are new ICBM's in Cuba. They are new-age Inter-Continental Bird Missiles ... millions of secret, quiet launches ... small, quiet, flapping wings, have beating hearts ... carry living biological warheads ... Castro's perfect weapon" (all ellipses in the original); the "weapon" in question, say the authors, is West Nile virus, sent by Castro to "completely destroy the USA."

These aren't tiny ads tucked in the back of the magazine among the classifieds; each is a full-page ad, with the exception of the ad for Unrestricted Warfare, which takes up two pages. All quotations are verbatim, from the print ads in the magazine.

These are your friends, Senator Santorum. And you, too, O'Reilly.

You know times are changing when the White House feels it's best to leak news of an expansion of tax cuts late on a Friday. Gone are the days of jolly old Santa Reagan, beaming as he dispenses goodies from his bag of supply-side stimuli; gone, too, apparently, is the Bush of 2000, self-righteously proclaiming, "It's your money!" Bush and his people know that we know they've pissed away our money already and are working on our grandchildren's; they know we know we'll get little or nothing out of this ("Citing calculations by the Tax Policy Center, Mr. Daschle said that a person making more than $1 million a year would save $24,000 in taxes under Mr. Bush's plan while a person earning from $40,000 to $50,000 a year would save only $76").

Not that this is going to stop them, of course.

Sometimes I hate being rational. Sometimes I just want to cut loose and wallow in a big, fat, juicy conspiracy theory or two, particularly when there are news events that seem -- how can I put this? -- unusually well timed for the purposes of Bush and Rove.

Take the West Virginia doctors’ strike. Surgeons and others in that state are going on leaves of absence to protest high malpractice-insurance costs. By a remarkable coincidence, at just this moment the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress are planning to press for a "tort reform" bill that would limit malpractice awards for "pain and suffering" to $250,000.

Now, no one thinks you’re a nut if you suspect CIA involvement in, say, the goings-on in Venezuela. But it would be downright irrational to believe that the Bushies would try to import this tactic stateside and foment a strike here -- involving doctors, no less --just to serve their domestic political ends.

Wouldn’t it?

The other recent news event for which a dark conspiracy would be a highly satisfying explantion is Dr. Bill Frist’s timely roadside assistance at the scene of a Florida traffic accident on New Year’s Day in which passengers were ejected from their vehicle.

If I were a hardcore, tinfoil-wrapped conspiratorialist, I could blithely, satisfyingly imagine a Bush operative -- or a President himself -- so evil that he would sabotage a family’s SUV, killing a little girl and injuring five others, just so the White House’s handpicked congressional factotum could ring in the new year with an act of heroism. At the very least, I could imagine a lesser conspiracy -- say, the delivery of a police scanner to the Florida home of the good doctor/senator, sent there from a D.C. address by a man with the initials "K.R.," accompanied by a note reading, "Use this wisely." Frist does fly to Africa on a regular basis to perform surgery, so is it unimaginable that he might spend an evening or two monitoring the law-enforcement frequencies, car keys I hand, intending to hop in the car and "happen" upon some folks in distress, mere days before his debut as majority leader?

Naw -- I don’t believe any of this nonsense.

And I hope you don’t, either. So don’t go spreading this around as rumors, OK? I’m just goofing off here.

In a list of forthcoming books, the e-mail newsletter PublishersLunch includes this one, slated to be published by Scribner (a division of Viacom's publishing arm, Simon & Schuster) "in time for the 2004 election":

Craig Unger's TWO DYNASTIES: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE BUSH FAMILY AND THE HOUSE OF SAUD, about the "elaborate and secret liaison between two of the most important and influential families in the East and in the West" dating back to the seventies and claiming that "America's most powerful political family and its allies [was] gradually seduced by its Saudi counterparts," and promising "new ground in telling the real story behind allegations that George W. Bush engaged in insider trading at Harken Energy in the Eighties" and revelations about "Republican and Saudi disinformation efforts to discredit Clinton's attack on al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden" ...

Interesting.

Last month, Joe Conason posted a link to an Editor & Publisher survey that showed a 2-1 preference for George W. Bush in 2000 among newspaper editors and publishers who expressed a preference. This, of course, flies in the face of what every right-winger "knows" -- namely, that the press is lousy with liberals and thus lousy with liberalism.

Please note that this survey took place just before the last presidential election, unlike the dated, cobwebbed surveys that figure prominently in the typical right-wing article that "proves" liberal media bias. Oh, and did I mention that the 2000 preference among publishers alone was three to one?

Alas, almost as soon as Conason posted the link, it became impossible to access. Well, it's fine now. Here it is; it's also perma-linked at right.

Memorize it. Forward it to friends. Fling it in Limbaughnistas' faces.

By the way, you may have thought 2002 was a lousy year economically, but you were wrong -- it was actually a pretty swell year economically, according to Thursday's USA Today, if you were a managed care insurer:

In 2002, most health insurers were able to boost profits by raising premiums higher than the rate of medical inflation for the third year in a row. Some also cut money-losing business and saw a drop in enrollment as a result.

With the exception of Cigna, third-quarter earnings were up 47% on average for 11 major insurers, according to a report by Merrill Lynch analyst Roberta Goodman. Good fourth-quarter results are also expected....

...consumers should expect continued premium hikes as managed care firms pass along rising spending for hospital care, drugs and other medical services.

Premiums are expected to rise an average of 15.4% this year, while underlying health costs to insurers are expected to grow 12%, allowing insurers to add the difference to the bottom line....

And this is before Dr. Frist and the GOP take over the Senate.

Happy New Year, folks. Savor the peace; the war starts in a month.

**********

Iraq is a crisis. North Korea is a crisis. But according to the Bush administration Iraq is a bigger crisis, because we can’t let Iraq become another North Korea.

Well, why not? Wouldn’t it be better if Iraq became another North Korea?

After all, we’re told Iraq may require a full-scale war involving 250,000 troops, of whom 60,000 are already deployed. Billions of dollars may have to be spent on this war, and thousands of lives could be lost, many of them in a chemical weapons attack; peacekeeping and nation-building after the war could go on for years.

North Korea? Hey, we can just talk it out. Diplomacy is the best solution. The President says so.

So wouldn’t it be a good thing if Iraq became another North Korea?

*****

In this morning's issue, USA Today describes two threats. One of these threats is much, much more important than the other, so much so that it requires full-scale war really, really soon. One doesn’t. Can you guess which is which?

North Korea probably has one or two nuclear weapons. Iraq very likely does not....

North Korea's military is nearly three times larger than Iraq's, and it is concentrated in a much smaller area....

North Korea poses a greater threat to launch a surprise attack on a key U.S. ally than Iraq does. U.S. spy satellites would detect Iraqi preparations for an attack on Kuwait or Saudi Arabia well in advance, as they did in the mid-1990s. North Korea's deployment at the DMZ, its mountainous terrain and a network of caves that can conceal its forces increase the danger of surprise.

Military experts say a U.S. invasion of Iraq would be swift and victorious. War on the Korean peninsula, because of the more difficult terrain and the larger size of North Korea's military, could be more protracted and devastating to both sides.

U.S. war plans for Iraq call for deployment of no more than 250,000 troops. The Pentagon's plan for war in Korea would involve a force of nearly 700,000 troops beyond the 37,000 permanently stationed in South Korea.

U.S. intelligence considers both North Korea and Iraq likely to use chemical weapons in the face of war against the United States....

...North Korea has been pouring its limited resources into maintaining a huge military force. An invasion of South Korea would probably involve the use of commando forces, chemical weapons and massed, mobile artillery fire....

Iraq, a Muslim country about the size of California, is in no position to invade its neighbors....