The perfect gift for absolutely nobody on your Christmas list.
Presumably 100% broccoli-free.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
...in the final analysis, no democratic government can tolerate armed parties with one foot in the realm of politics and one foot in the camp of terrorism.
--Condoleezza Rice chastising the Palestinian government in a speech in Jerusalem today
*****
Remember the guy who battled U.S. forces from inside Iraq's holy shrine of Imam Ali last summer? That renegade cleric whose radical anti-American rhetoric stirred violent uprisings around the country last April, who only stood down when an elder cleric pulled rank? Well, he's back.
Moqtada al-Sadr has landed on a slate of Shiite parties that will run together in the December 15 parliamentary elections. He and his followers were allocated a surprisingly large number of seats in the alliance with the two main religious Shiite parties, Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq--large enough to raise some eyebrows in the Bush administration. "We are definitely keeping a close watch on Sadr's reemergence," says one administration official. "His actions will test the theory of whether extremists, when they become part of a political process, necessarily moderate."...
--U.S. News & World Report article about Iraq, 11/14/05 issue
...Several old armed faction commanders, labelled warlords and accused of war crimes by rights groups, also won seats.
Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq, from the Shi'ite Muslim Hazara ethnic minority, won [the] most votes in Kabul province.
Mohaqiq's faction was involved in years of civil war in the 1990s....
Another winner was old faction commander Abdul Rabb Rasoul Sayyaf....
Sayyaf denies accusations of war crimes going back to the civil war years....
Three prominent former Taliban won seats in parliament -- ex-commander Haji Mullah Abdul Salaam Rocketi, ex-provincial governor Mawlavi Islamuddin Mohammadi and a senior former security official, Hanif Shah Al-Hussein....
--article published by Reuters today on the results of recent elections in Afghanistan
--Condoleezza Rice chastising the Palestinian government in a speech in Jerusalem today
*****
Remember the guy who battled U.S. forces from inside Iraq's holy shrine of Imam Ali last summer? That renegade cleric whose radical anti-American rhetoric stirred violent uprisings around the country last April, who only stood down when an elder cleric pulled rank? Well, he's back.
Moqtada al-Sadr has landed on a slate of Shiite parties that will run together in the December 15 parliamentary elections. He and his followers were allocated a surprisingly large number of seats in the alliance with the two main religious Shiite parties, Dawa and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq--large enough to raise some eyebrows in the Bush administration. "We are definitely keeping a close watch on Sadr's reemergence," says one administration official. "His actions will test the theory of whether extremists, when they become part of a political process, necessarily moderate."...
--U.S. News & World Report article about Iraq, 11/14/05 issue
...Several old armed faction commanders, labelled warlords and accused of war crimes by rights groups, also won seats.
Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq, from the Shi'ite Muslim Hazara ethnic minority, won [the] most votes in Kabul province.
Mohaqiq's faction was involved in years of civil war in the 1990s....
Another winner was old faction commander Abdul Rabb Rasoul Sayyaf....
Sayyaf denies accusations of war crimes going back to the civil war years....
Three prominent former Taliban won seats in parliament -- ex-commander Haji Mullah Abdul Salaam Rocketi, ex-provincial governor Mawlavi Islamuddin Mohammadi and a senior former security official, Hanif Shah Al-Hussein....
--article published by Reuters today on the results of recent elections in Afghanistan
I guess someone did rise to the boob bait after all, as Robert Novak is pleased to inform you:
Joseph R. Cerrell, a leading California Democrat and prominent Italian American, has called on Chairman Howard Dean to apologize to Federal Appellate Judge Samuel Alito for Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffers saying the Supreme Court nominee was weak in prosecuting the Mafia. Dean has not replied to Cerrell's Nov. 2 letter.
A DNC press release blasted Alito's record as a federal prosecutor in losing "a key conviction" that resulted in members of the Lucchese crime family being freed. "The staffers and the DNC must apologize to Judge Alito and to all Italian Americans" for "scurrilous tactics," Cerrell's letter said. He contended "this kind of behavior is beneath any standard of the Democratic Party that I have known."
Cerrell, a Los Angeles-based political consultant, is vice chairman of the National Italian American Foundation.
Cerrell seems like a loyal Democrat (and he's been working for the Dems since at least the JFK days), but he was a member of GOP governor Pete Wilson's Italian-American Task Force and he teaches at one of the Republican Party's favorite institutions of higher learning, Pepperdine University.
I'm guessing that Novak was alerted to this by his longtime source Karl Rove, who relishes and cultivates Judas behavior on the part of Democrats (remember, Rove brought you the 2004 GOP convention, with its raw-meat speeches by nominal Democrat Zell Miller and the formerly liberal actor Ron Silver). I wonder if Rove elicited (or even wrote) the denunciation himself.
(Link via Memeorandum.)
Joseph R. Cerrell, a leading California Democrat and prominent Italian American, has called on Chairman Howard Dean to apologize to Federal Appellate Judge Samuel Alito for Democratic National Committee (DNC) staffers saying the Supreme Court nominee was weak in prosecuting the Mafia. Dean has not replied to Cerrell's Nov. 2 letter.
A DNC press release blasted Alito's record as a federal prosecutor in losing "a key conviction" that resulted in members of the Lucchese crime family being freed. "The staffers and the DNC must apologize to Judge Alito and to all Italian Americans" for "scurrilous tactics," Cerrell's letter said. He contended "this kind of behavior is beneath any standard of the Democratic Party that I have known."
Cerrell, a Los Angeles-based political consultant, is vice chairman of the National Italian American Foundation.
Cerrell seems like a loyal Democrat (and he's been working for the Dems since at least the JFK days), but he was a member of GOP governor Pete Wilson's Italian-American Task Force and he teaches at one of the Republican Party's favorite institutions of higher learning, Pepperdine University.
I'm guessing that Novak was alerted to this by his longtime source Karl Rove, who relishes and cultivates Judas behavior on the part of Democrats (remember, Rove brought you the 2004 GOP convention, with its raw-meat speeches by nominal Democrat Zell Miller and the formerly liberal actor Ron Silver). I wonder if Rove elicited (or even wrote) the denunciation himself.
(Link via Memeorandum.)
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Yesterday at the Mahablog, Barbara O'Brien flagged this sentence from a pro-torture op-ed piece by David Gelernter in the Los Angeles Times:
Those who defend McCain's amendment and attack Cheney and Bush feel a nice warm glow, as if they're basking in virtue, as in a hot tub, sipping Cabernet.
Nice gratuitous slap in the face in those last two phrases, David.
You know what? Yes, I oppose torture in the name of the United States of America. And yes, I am a white-collar liberal.
And I am goddamn sick and tired of being told, directly or by implication, that my primary sin is effeteness, by conservatives whose economic and social status puts them in the rank of America's cosseted and privileged.
Yes, I know that David Gelernter was grievously wounded by one of the Unabomber's bombs. But I also know that he holds a professorship at Yale -- a university where the average professor's salary is $145,000 a year. I also know that he is an editor at the National Review and City Journal and an art critic at The Weekly Standard as well as an L.A. Times op-ed writer, and that he is the author of many books for both professionals and the general reading public. David Gelernter, in other words, is a very well remunerated member of the knowledge elite. His yearly income far exceeds that of my (comfortable two-paycheck) household.
David Gelertner, in other words, is not drinking Old Milwaukee from a can and worrying that he just maxed out a high-interest credit card buying off-label toilet paper in bulk at Sam's Club. It is not inconceivable that he, too, has sipped Cabernet -- perhaps in a hot tub. So I don't have to listen to his sneering insinuation that my disgust at the Bush administration's torture policies is synonymous with effeteness.
Those who defend McCain's amendment and attack Cheney and Bush feel a nice warm glow, as if they're basking in virtue, as in a hot tub, sipping Cabernet.
Nice gratuitous slap in the face in those last two phrases, David.
You know what? Yes, I oppose torture in the name of the United States of America. And yes, I am a white-collar liberal.
And I am goddamn sick and tired of being told, directly or by implication, that my primary sin is effeteness, by conservatives whose economic and social status puts them in the rank of America's cosseted and privileged.
Yes, I know that David Gelernter was grievously wounded by one of the Unabomber's bombs. But I also know that he holds a professorship at Yale -- a university where the average professor's salary is $145,000 a year. I also know that he is an editor at the National Review and City Journal and an art critic at The Weekly Standard as well as an L.A. Times op-ed writer, and that he is the author of many books for both professionals and the general reading public. David Gelernter, in other words, is a very well remunerated member of the knowledge elite. His yearly income far exceeds that of my (comfortable two-paycheck) household.
David Gelertner, in other words, is not drinking Old Milwaukee from a can and worrying that he just maxed out a high-interest credit card buying off-label toilet paper in bulk at Sam's Club. It is not inconceivable that he, too, has sipped Cabernet -- perhaps in a hot tub. So I don't have to listen to his sneering insinuation that my disgust at the Bush administration's torture policies is synonymous with effeteness.
Friday, November 11, 2005
If your approval rating is in the toilet, and your opponents' approval rating is also pretty much in the toilet, do you really do yourself any good by saying you didn't actually screw up because your opponents participated in the same screwup?
President George W. Bush disputed allegations by Democrats that the White House twisted or misused prewar intelligence to justify the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how the war began,'' Bush told military families at an Army depot near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania today. "More than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate who had access to the same intelligence voted to remove Saddam Hussein from power.'' ...
This is the political equivalent of saying, "But Ma, Billy was doing it too!" (Needless to say, "Billy was doing it too!" is sometimes literally what Bush and his defenders say.) Here's Bush's message: In Iraq, we didn't do any worse than the Democrats would have done. Wow, that's a winning slogan for 2006 and 2008.
Comparing himself to a party widely believed to have no ideas and no backbone is not how Bush is going to get back above 40%. (And telling us for the 90,000th time that Iraq is "the central front in our war against the terrorists'' and that "as Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down" ain't gonna do it either.)
President George W. Bush disputed allegations by Democrats that the White House twisted or misused prewar intelligence to justify the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how the war began,'' Bush told military families at an Army depot near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania today. "More than 100 Democrats in the House and Senate who had access to the same intelligence voted to remove Saddam Hussein from power.'' ...
This is the political equivalent of saying, "But Ma, Billy was doing it too!" (Needless to say, "Billy was doing it too!" is sometimes literally what Bush and his defenders say.) Here's Bush's message: In Iraq, we didn't do any worse than the Democrats would have done. Wow, that's a winning slogan for 2006 and 2008.
Comparing himself to a party widely believed to have no ideas and no backbone is not how Bush is going to get back above 40%. (And telling us for the 90,000th time that Iraq is "the central front in our war against the terrorists'' and that "as Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down" ain't gonna do it either.)
The government has been yanking Gary Bernsten's chain, so he's going let the public see the results of the chain-yanking. PublishersLunch reports:
In late October (after a second Federal Court filing earlier in the month), former CIA field commander Gary Bernsten and publisher Crown finalized clearances from the CIA's Publications Review Board to issue JAWBREAKER on December 27, two months after originally scheduled.
Crown executive editor Rick Horgan says, "We are going to publish the book with the redactions preserved," with blacked-out text throughout the book where CIA approval was not granted, to make transparent to readers "all of the violence done to the manuscript." (In the interest of readibility, places where multiple pages were redacted by the CIA will be indicated in notes from the author rather than a run of completely black pages.) ...
Bernsten has argued, and Horgan confirms, that "some of the redactions involved deleting material that was already part of the public record." So the author and publisher decided to publish the approvable manuscript rather than continue to submit to the CIA's "shrewd delaying process."...
So what's all the fuss about? Perhaps you recall this Newsweek story from August:
...in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora - intelligence operatives had tracked him - and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."
In his book - titled "Jawbreaker" - the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger....
A July AP story described Berntsen as "a Republican and avid Bush supporter," and "the recipient of two of the CIA's three highest medals, one for preventing Islamic extremists from assassinating the Indian prime minister in 1996." Nevertheless, he's pissed, and his story's coming out.
Here's the Amazon page for Jawbreaker.
In late October (after a second Federal Court filing earlier in the month), former CIA field commander Gary Bernsten and publisher Crown finalized clearances from the CIA's Publications Review Board to issue JAWBREAKER on December 27, two months after originally scheduled.
Crown executive editor Rick Horgan says, "We are going to publish the book with the redactions preserved," with blacked-out text throughout the book where CIA approval was not granted, to make transparent to readers "all of the violence done to the manuscript." (In the interest of readibility, places where multiple pages were redacted by the CIA will be indicated in notes from the author rather than a run of completely black pages.) ...
Bernsten has argued, and Horgan confirms, that "some of the redactions involved deleting material that was already part of the public record." So the author and publisher decided to publish the approvable manuscript rather than continue to submit to the CIA's "shrewd delaying process."...
So what's all the fuss about? Perhaps you recall this Newsweek story from August:
...in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora - intelligence operatives had tracked him - and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."
In his book - titled "Jawbreaker" - the decorated career CIA officer criticizes Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department for not providing enough support to the CIA and the Pentagon's own Special Forces teams in the final hours of Tora Bora, says Berntsen's lawyer, Roy Krieger....
A July AP story described Berntsen as "a Republican and avid Bush supporter," and "the recipient of two of the CIA's three highest medals, one for preventing Islamic extremists from assassinating the Indian prime minister in 1996." Nevertheless, he's pissed, and his story's coming out.
Here's the Amazon page for Jawbreaker.
I wasn't aware until now that Wal-Mart was also under attack from the right -- specifically, from the Christmas-is-under-assault wackos.
Reasonably, given America's diversity, Wal-Mart encourages employees to say "Happy holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas," which makes the wackos livid -- but, beyond that, Wal-Mart has apparently brought further trouble on itself by trying to do things on the cheap.
World Net Daily reports:
...The controversy was sparked when a woman recently complained to Wal-Mart that the store was replacing its "Merry Christmas" greeting with "Happy Holidays."
... the woman received an e-mail response from a customer-service representative named Kirby, reading exactly as follows:
Walmart is a world wide organization and must remain conscious of this. The majority of the world still has different practices other than "christmas" which is an ancient tradition that has its roots in Siberian shamanism. The colors associated with "christmas" red and white are actually a representation of of the aminita mascera mushroom. Santa is also borrowed from the Caucuses, mistletoe from the Celts, yule log from the Goths, the time from the Visigoth and the tree from the worship of Baal. It is a wide wide world.
[Wal-Mart spokesman Dan] Fogleman confirmed the original note was written by a Wal-Mart representative, and explained today:
"We at Wal-Mart believe this e-mail between a temporary associate and one of our valued customers was entirely inappropriate. Its contents in no way represent the policies, practices or views of our company. This associate, who was hired less than three weeks ago, is no longer employed by our company."
Come on, guys -- you get e-mails on hot-button issues like this and you let temps answer them? Temps with three weeks' experience? Temps who don't respond with boilerplate carefully crafted by a team of lawyers and PR people at company headquarters, but who just write whatever they like?
You really are cheap, aren't you?
(Though the text of the e-mail does give me renewed faith in the heartland.)
Stirring up all the trouble, by the way, is the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, led by William ("Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity") Donohue.
The World Net Daily story, using Donohue's research, makes this additional claim:
To demonstrate an instance of discrimination, Donohue points out, and WND confirmed, that when using the company's online search engine, if the word "Hanukkah" is entered, 200 items for sale are returned. The term "Kwanzaa" yields 77. But when "Christmas" is entered, the message returned says: "We've brought you to our 'Holiday' page based on your search."
I get the same results when I click on the links. But when I go to walmart.com and search for "Christmas," I don't get a redirect at all -- I get 7697 Christmas items.
What the hell did Donohue and Wal-Mart do to get that result? Are they (gasp!) spreading misinformation about hatred of Christmas in America?
Reasonably, given America's diversity, Wal-Mart encourages employees to say "Happy holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas," which makes the wackos livid -- but, beyond that, Wal-Mart has apparently brought further trouble on itself by trying to do things on the cheap.
World Net Daily reports:
...The controversy was sparked when a woman recently complained to Wal-Mart that the store was replacing its "Merry Christmas" greeting with "Happy Holidays."
... the woman received an e-mail response from a customer-service representative named Kirby, reading exactly as follows:
Walmart is a world wide organization and must remain conscious of this. The majority of the world still has different practices other than "christmas" which is an ancient tradition that has its roots in Siberian shamanism. The colors associated with "christmas" red and white are actually a representation of of the aminita mascera mushroom. Santa is also borrowed from the Caucuses, mistletoe from the Celts, yule log from the Goths, the time from the Visigoth and the tree from the worship of Baal. It is a wide wide world.
[Wal-Mart spokesman Dan] Fogleman confirmed the original note was written by a Wal-Mart representative, and explained today:
"We at Wal-Mart believe this e-mail between a temporary associate and one of our valued customers was entirely inappropriate. Its contents in no way represent the policies, practices or views of our company. This associate, who was hired less than three weeks ago, is no longer employed by our company."
Come on, guys -- you get e-mails on hot-button issues like this and you let temps answer them? Temps with three weeks' experience? Temps who don't respond with boilerplate carefully crafted by a team of lawyers and PR people at company headquarters, but who just write whatever they like?
You really are cheap, aren't you?
(Though the text of the e-mail does give me renewed faith in the heartland.)
Stirring up all the trouble, by the way, is the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, led by William ("Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity") Donohue.
The World Net Daily story, using Donohue's research, makes this additional claim:
To demonstrate an instance of discrimination, Donohue points out, and WND confirmed, that when using the company's online search engine, if the word "Hanukkah" is entered, 200 items for sale are returned. The term "Kwanzaa" yields 77. But when "Christmas" is entered, the message returned says: "We've brought you to our 'Holiday' page based on your search."
I get the same results when I click on the links. But when I go to walmart.com and search for "Christmas," I don't get a redirect at all -- I get 7697 Christmas items.
What the hell did Donohue and Wal-Mart do to get that result? Are they (gasp!) spreading misinformation about hatred of Christmas in America?
PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY: OBJECTIVELY PRO-RAPE
The godmother of anti-feminism writes:
...In 2004, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) introduced a bill of over a hundred pages to authorize a high-level Office of the Victim Advocate (OVA) in the Department of Defense; fortunately, it didn't pass. In 2005, congressional feminists sponsored a four-page version of the same bill, which likewise went nowhere.
But the feminists are resourceful. They have persuaded Rumsfeld's Community and Family Policy office to award a contract to Wellesley College Centers for Women to make recommendations about establishing an OVA in the Pentagon.
The recommendations are wholly predictable -- they would be based on Slaughter's failed legislation. They will call for setting up an OVA in Washington to provide feminists who major in Women's Studies with tax-funded jobs from which they can pursue worldwide feminist goals in the Armed Services and destroy the career of any man who stands in a woman's way....
Surely Wellesley will copy portions of the Slaughter bill that authorize feminist pork. The victim is to be provided a victim advocate, a victim counselor and victim support liaison, and lucrative contracts are to be awarded to the domestic-violence service industry to train the Defense Department on how to support self-proclaimed victims....
Yeah, this isn't a real problem is it?
Nearly 12 percent of the women who graduated from the United States Air Force Academy this year [2003] were the victims of rape or attempted rape in their four years at the academy in Colorado Springs, with the vast majority never reporting the incidents to the authorities, according to a survey by the inspector general of the Defense Department.
... Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida, the commandant of the academy, warned the institution's 4,000 cadets that he would not tolerate violations of its honor code, or cadets who looked the other way while the classmates acted in ways that undermined the academy.
"We are warriors," General Weida was reported to have told the cadets today. "If we don't reverse this trend, the very existence of this institution is threatened. Together, we will fix this."
...Of the entire enrollment, 19 percent said they had been the victims of sexual assault and more than 7 percent said that assault took the form of rape or attempted rape. Four out of five women never came forward to report that they had been assaulted, the survey shows....
More statistics here.
Yeah, you're right, Phyllis -- nothing to see here, move along.
The godmother of anti-feminism writes:
...In 2004, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) introduced a bill of over a hundred pages to authorize a high-level Office of the Victim Advocate (OVA) in the Department of Defense; fortunately, it didn't pass. In 2005, congressional feminists sponsored a four-page version of the same bill, which likewise went nowhere.
But the feminists are resourceful. They have persuaded Rumsfeld's Community and Family Policy office to award a contract to Wellesley College Centers for Women to make recommendations about establishing an OVA in the Pentagon.
The recommendations are wholly predictable -- they would be based on Slaughter's failed legislation. They will call for setting up an OVA in Washington to provide feminists who major in Women's Studies with tax-funded jobs from which they can pursue worldwide feminist goals in the Armed Services and destroy the career of any man who stands in a woman's way....
Surely Wellesley will copy portions of the Slaughter bill that authorize feminist pork. The victim is to be provided a victim advocate, a victim counselor and victim support liaison, and lucrative contracts are to be awarded to the domestic-violence service industry to train the Defense Department on how to support self-proclaimed victims....
Yeah, this isn't a real problem is it?
Nearly 12 percent of the women who graduated from the United States Air Force Academy this year [2003] were the victims of rape or attempted rape in their four years at the academy in Colorado Springs, with the vast majority never reporting the incidents to the authorities, according to a survey by the inspector general of the Defense Department.
... Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida, the commandant of the academy, warned the institution's 4,000 cadets that he would not tolerate violations of its honor code, or cadets who looked the other way while the classmates acted in ways that undermined the academy.
"We are warriors," General Weida was reported to have told the cadets today. "If we don't reverse this trend, the very existence of this institution is threatened. Together, we will fix this."
...Of the entire enrollment, 19 percent said they had been the victims of sexual assault and more than 7 percent said that assault took the form of rape or attempted rape. Four out of five women never came forward to report that they had been assaulted, the survey shows....
More statistics here.
Yeah, you're right, Phyllis -- nothing to see here, move along.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
MARRIAGE IS SACRED
[Michigan] Attorney General Mike Cox admitted Wednesday that he had an extra-marital affair several years ago. ...
"A number of years ago, I was unfaithful to my wife," the Republican Attorney General said with his wife Laura beside him. The couple, married for 11 years, had tears in their eyes. "We worked on our marriage day by day, week by week," Mike Cox said.
Cox said he told his wife of the affair on March 22, 2003....
--WXYZ, Detroit
That would be this Mike Cox:
Local governments and the state can't give benefits to employees' same-sex partners now that voters have approved a constitutional ban on gay marriage, the state's attorney general said Wednesday.
In the first legal interpretation of Proposal 2, Attorney General Mike Cox wrote in an opinion that Kalamazoo's policy of offering health and retirement benefits to same-sex partners violates the amendment, which passed in November.....
Proposal 2 said a union between one man and one woman "shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose."
Kalamazoo's policy gives domestic partnerships a "marriage-like" status, Cox said....
Meet a couple of people this might affect:
When Alexandra Stern took a job with the University of Michigan three years ago, a key factor in her decision was the school's domestic partnership policy, which provides health insurance to her partner, Terri Koreck.
Koreck, a cancer survivor, gave up a job and her benefits to move with Stern from California. She went back to school for a nursing degree -- knowing her medical, dental and vision costs would be covered under Stern's plan....
Recent developments in Michigan, however, have put at risk the benefits of Koreck and other gays whose partners work for cities, counties, universities and public schools.
The state attorney general issued a legal opinion last month saying government entities cannot offer same-sex benefits in future contracts because it would violate Michigan's constitutional gay marriage ban known as Proposal 2....
And note that Cox had the gall to issue his ruling despite the fact that, before the election, he wrote this about Proposal 2:
... the spokesman for the Triangle Foundation, Sean Kosofsky, called the proposed amendment "radical" and "militant" - event though it merely proposed to preserve the status quo.
Cox is now outed as a cheater? My heart bleeds. (No, not really.)
(Via DU.)
[Michigan] Attorney General Mike Cox admitted Wednesday that he had an extra-marital affair several years ago. ...
"A number of years ago, I was unfaithful to my wife," the Republican Attorney General said with his wife Laura beside him. The couple, married for 11 years, had tears in their eyes. "We worked on our marriage day by day, week by week," Mike Cox said.
Cox said he told his wife of the affair on March 22, 2003....
--WXYZ, Detroit
That would be this Mike Cox:
Local governments and the state can't give benefits to employees' same-sex partners now that voters have approved a constitutional ban on gay marriage, the state's attorney general said Wednesday.
In the first legal interpretation of Proposal 2, Attorney General Mike Cox wrote in an opinion that Kalamazoo's policy of offering health and retirement benefits to same-sex partners violates the amendment, which passed in November.....
Proposal 2 said a union between one man and one woman "shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose."
Kalamazoo's policy gives domestic partnerships a "marriage-like" status, Cox said....
Meet a couple of people this might affect:
When Alexandra Stern took a job with the University of Michigan three years ago, a key factor in her decision was the school's domestic partnership policy, which provides health insurance to her partner, Terri Koreck.
Koreck, a cancer survivor, gave up a job and her benefits to move with Stern from California. She went back to school for a nursing degree -- knowing her medical, dental and vision costs would be covered under Stern's plan....
Recent developments in Michigan, however, have put at risk the benefits of Koreck and other gays whose partners work for cities, counties, universities and public schools.
The state attorney general issued a legal opinion last month saying government entities cannot offer same-sex benefits in future contracts because it would violate Michigan's constitutional gay marriage ban known as Proposal 2....
And note that Cox had the gall to issue his ruling despite the fact that, before the election, he wrote this about Proposal 2:
... the spokesman for the Triangle Foundation, Sean Kosofsky, called the proposed amendment "radical" and "militant" - event though it merely proposed to preserve the status quo.
Cox is now outed as a cheater? My heart bleeds. (No, not really.)
(Via DU.)
In the comments to an earlier post, Tom at Daai Tou Laam Diary urged me to read this extended Washington Post interview with Judy Miller. Thanks, Tom. The article's fun.
Or at least it is at first:
She answers questions -- or refuses. She turns the tables, asking about her interviewer's life. She takes calls. She grabs the tape recorder. She waxes eloquent, even in anger. At times, tears well up. There's something frantic about her -- not vulnerable, mind you, for that's the last thing she is.
"Oh. I've got to take this." She's reaching for the phone again. "It's my lawyer."
You want to reach through the monitor and hand her a Ritalin.
But Miller is eloquent in her own defense, or at least voluble. And as the interview continues, it's clear we're looking at the groundwork for her possible rehabilitation in the not-too-distant future.
Her style is indeed "pushy," as she herself suggested. But would an aggressive, high-decibel male reporter be embroiled in all the controversy in which Miller finds herself? It is a question that some of her friends raise, for they believe that part of the invective swirling around Miller has to do with gender bias.
"A man is tough and hard-driving and a woman is a bitch," says Patricia Cohen, the Times theater editor (and former Washington Post staffer), who is a friend of Miller's.
Look, I don't know about the newsroom at the Times, but in my world, yes, a tough, hard-driving, toe-trampling woman might be called a bitch. But a tough, hard-driving, toe-trampling man would almost certainly be called an asshole. Separate? Yes, but reasonably close to equal.
Miller's emotional excesses are defended:
[Leslie] Gelb, then a national security writer at the Times, remembers Miller for her "frantic pursuit of stories," he says. "It was kind of endearingly frantic. She was just so driven to go get good stories, and she was working all the time."
(I have to admit that this aspect of the standard critique of Miller, while great fun, does touch on sexist stereotypes; we'd all probably do well to jettison it.)
She denies a damning anecdote from an ex-colleague, firmly if not very convincingly:
Adam Clymer, retired political correspondent for the Times, recalls an episode during the 1988 presidential campaign, when Miller was deputy Washington bureau chief.
Then the political editor based in New York, Clymer was awakened just after midnight one morning by a call from Miller, he says. She was demanding that a story about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis be pulled from the paper.
The story was too soft, she complained -- and said Lee Atwater, the political strategist for Vice President George H.W. Bush, believed it was soft as well. Clymer said he was stunned to realize that Atwater apparently had either seen the story or been told about it before publication. He and Miller argued, he recalls, and he ultimately hung up on her, twice.
To Clymer, it was an indication of what he and others believe is Miller's main problem.
"She had gotten too close to her sources," he says.
But Miller denies the episode happened.
"I doubt I would have said that," she says sardonically, "because it wouldn't have been a winning argument."
By the end we've gotten this message: if her emotional cup sometimes runneth over and if she sometimes gets too close to a story, it may be OK, because as a result she's effective and dogged -- and precisely because of her M.O. she has unique insight into the profound dangers facing the West after 9/11:
...in her reporting, there was something else on which Miller relied as much, if not more: her personal belief in the danger that Saddam Hussein posed to the world.
It was personal, for she had been detained for a day by Hussein's security forces back in the 1980s, she says. And it was personal because, as she writes in her 1996 book on Islam, "God Has Ninety-Nine Names," an Iraqi source once told her "that I was on a very short list of writers who are considered the regime's 'eternal enemies.' "...
And so fighting him, fighting his terror, became a passion. Fighting chemical and biological threats became a passion. Fighting al Qaeda became a passion.
"I hope to God that I'm wrong. I hope to God that not another American ever dies in a terrorist attack. But I would take no comfort. I would be heartsick to have to say I told you so.
"But I will make no apologies for my continuous commitment, my desire to pursue stories about threats to our country," she says emphatically, almost frantically, her crusading eyes brimming with tears.
I'm counting the days until the Right starts mounting a defense of Miller that builds on these arguments. The Right has given her a wide berth up to now, believing, I guess, that everyone who writes for the hated New York Times is evil and that all journalists in the "MSM," not just Miller, belong in prison. Fighting for a shield law probably also persuades rightists that she's a liberal and thus an enemy of decent people everywhere. But she believed Saddam had WMDs and ties to al-Qaeda! And now she's been given the boot by the evil Times! I'll be shocked if that doesn't make her a right-wing hero soon.
Perhaps the faux-feminists of the Independent Women's Forum will declare themselves outraged because she's been accused of sleeping with Scooter Libby -- even though Bill Keller's words to Miller don't say anything about sex. In fact, this is a criticism a lot of us have made regarding the entirety of the mainstream political press -- that reporters get too close to powerful sources, that they'd rather maintain access than uncover the truth, that many of them giggle and blush when Bush gives them nicknames. We may sneeringly accuse this or that (usually male and straight) reporter of a "crush" on Bush or some other powerful figure, but we're not saying, for instance, that the many, many reporters who've portrayed Bush as "likable" since the winter of 1999-2000 have been having sex with the man.
But that'll be ignored, if I'm right about this, and Miller will be defended as a victim of liberals who pretend to be feminists but mount vicious attacks on any woman who challenges what they hold sacrosanct (just like the liberal phonies who abandoned Paula Jones when she threatened Clinton!). Miller's reporting can also be defended by the Right -- the right still insists Saddam had WMDs up to the end, and that the al-Qaeda ties were extensive. And obviously Miller can be portrayed as one more victim of Patrick Fitzgerald's "witch hunt."
Maybe this will never happen, but if it does, remember I told you so.
Or at least it is at first:
She answers questions -- or refuses. She turns the tables, asking about her interviewer's life. She takes calls. She grabs the tape recorder. She waxes eloquent, even in anger. At times, tears well up. There's something frantic about her -- not vulnerable, mind you, for that's the last thing she is.
"Oh. I've got to take this." She's reaching for the phone again. "It's my lawyer."
You want to reach through the monitor and hand her a Ritalin.
But Miller is eloquent in her own defense, or at least voluble. And as the interview continues, it's clear we're looking at the groundwork for her possible rehabilitation in the not-too-distant future.
Her style is indeed "pushy," as she herself suggested. But would an aggressive, high-decibel male reporter be embroiled in all the controversy in which Miller finds herself? It is a question that some of her friends raise, for they believe that part of the invective swirling around Miller has to do with gender bias.
"A man is tough and hard-driving and a woman is a bitch," says Patricia Cohen, the Times theater editor (and former Washington Post staffer), who is a friend of Miller's.
Look, I don't know about the newsroom at the Times, but in my world, yes, a tough, hard-driving, toe-trampling woman might be called a bitch. But a tough, hard-driving, toe-trampling man would almost certainly be called an asshole. Separate? Yes, but reasonably close to equal.
Miller's emotional excesses are defended:
[Leslie] Gelb, then a national security writer at the Times, remembers Miller for her "frantic pursuit of stories," he says. "It was kind of endearingly frantic. She was just so driven to go get good stories, and she was working all the time."
(I have to admit that this aspect of the standard critique of Miller, while great fun, does touch on sexist stereotypes; we'd all probably do well to jettison it.)
She denies a damning anecdote from an ex-colleague, firmly if not very convincingly:
Adam Clymer, retired political correspondent for the Times, recalls an episode during the 1988 presidential campaign, when Miller was deputy Washington bureau chief.
Then the political editor based in New York, Clymer was awakened just after midnight one morning by a call from Miller, he says. She was demanding that a story about Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis be pulled from the paper.
The story was too soft, she complained -- and said Lee Atwater, the political strategist for Vice President George H.W. Bush, believed it was soft as well. Clymer said he was stunned to realize that Atwater apparently had either seen the story or been told about it before publication. He and Miller argued, he recalls, and he ultimately hung up on her, twice.
To Clymer, it was an indication of what he and others believe is Miller's main problem.
"She had gotten too close to her sources," he says.
But Miller denies the episode happened.
"I doubt I would have said that," she says sardonically, "because it wouldn't have been a winning argument."
By the end we've gotten this message: if her emotional cup sometimes runneth over and if she sometimes gets too close to a story, it may be OK, because as a result she's effective and dogged -- and precisely because of her M.O. she has unique insight into the profound dangers facing the West after 9/11:
...in her reporting, there was something else on which Miller relied as much, if not more: her personal belief in the danger that Saddam Hussein posed to the world.
It was personal, for she had been detained for a day by Hussein's security forces back in the 1980s, she says. And it was personal because, as she writes in her 1996 book on Islam, "God Has Ninety-Nine Names," an Iraqi source once told her "that I was on a very short list of writers who are considered the regime's 'eternal enemies.' "...
And so fighting him, fighting his terror, became a passion. Fighting chemical and biological threats became a passion. Fighting al Qaeda became a passion.
"I hope to God that I'm wrong. I hope to God that not another American ever dies in a terrorist attack. But I would take no comfort. I would be heartsick to have to say I told you so.
"But I will make no apologies for my continuous commitment, my desire to pursue stories about threats to our country," she says emphatically, almost frantically, her crusading eyes brimming with tears.
I'm counting the days until the Right starts mounting a defense of Miller that builds on these arguments. The Right has given her a wide berth up to now, believing, I guess, that everyone who writes for the hated New York Times is evil and that all journalists in the "MSM," not just Miller, belong in prison. Fighting for a shield law probably also persuades rightists that she's a liberal and thus an enemy of decent people everywhere. But she believed Saddam had WMDs and ties to al-Qaeda! And now she's been given the boot by the evil Times! I'll be shocked if that doesn't make her a right-wing hero soon.
Perhaps the faux-feminists of the Independent Women's Forum will declare themselves outraged because she's been accused of sleeping with Scooter Libby -- even though Bill Keller's words to Miller don't say anything about sex. In fact, this is a criticism a lot of us have made regarding the entirety of the mainstream political press -- that reporters get too close to powerful sources, that they'd rather maintain access than uncover the truth, that many of them giggle and blush when Bush gives them nicknames. We may sneeringly accuse this or that (usually male and straight) reporter of a "crush" on Bush or some other powerful figure, but we're not saying, for instance, that the many, many reporters who've portrayed Bush as "likable" since the winter of 1999-2000 have been having sex with the man.
But that'll be ignored, if I'm right about this, and Miller will be defended as a victim of liberals who pretend to be feminists but mount vicious attacks on any woman who challenges what they hold sacrosanct (just like the liberal phonies who abandoned Paula Jones when she threatened Clinton!). Miller's reporting can also be defended by the Right -- the right still insists Saddam had WMDs up to the end, and that the al-Qaeda ties were extensive. And obviously Miller can be portrayed as one more victim of Patrick Fitzgerald's "witch hunt."
Maybe this will never happen, but if it does, remember I told you so.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Judy Miller's farewell letter (posted at her new blog) says:
At a commencement speech I delivered at Barnard College in 2003, a year before that note was published, I asked whether the administration’s prewar W.M.D. intelligence was merely wrong, or was it exaggerated or even falsified.
Er, not exactly. Here's what she said:
I think there are other questions, too, that the Bush administration will now have to answer: Will the weapons hunters find the weapons of mass destruction programs that were cited repeatedly as the major justification for the invasion? Could inspectors have uncovered the dual use equipment that was hidden – sometimes in plain sight – throughout the country without a war? Were the concerns about anthrax clouds over our cities exaggerations? Were they justified by what we knew then, as opposed to what we know now? Was the intelligence that produced them politically distorted? Were those who wanted to go to war deceiving themselves about Saddam’s capabilities? Was the war really necessary, not just for Iraq, but to protect American national security?
Now she says that at Barnard she "asked whether the administration’s prewar W.M.D. intelligence was merely wrong, or was it exaggerated or even falsified." I read that as "Clearly the intelligence was wrong -- was that deliberate?" But the Barnard speech makes clear that in May 2003 she still wasn't sure the intelligence was wrong -- WMDs might still be found, material that had been located unquestionably was, in her opinion, dual-use, and anthrax fears might or might not have been well founded. Maybe I'm hairsplitting, but I say she's distorting what she said back then. Not that I'm surprised.
At a commencement speech I delivered at Barnard College in 2003, a year before that note was published, I asked whether the administration’s prewar W.M.D. intelligence was merely wrong, or was it exaggerated or even falsified.
Er, not exactly. Here's what she said:
I think there are other questions, too, that the Bush administration will now have to answer: Will the weapons hunters find the weapons of mass destruction programs that were cited repeatedly as the major justification for the invasion? Could inspectors have uncovered the dual use equipment that was hidden – sometimes in plain sight – throughout the country without a war? Were the concerns about anthrax clouds over our cities exaggerations? Were they justified by what we knew then, as opposed to what we know now? Was the intelligence that produced them politically distorted? Were those who wanted to go to war deceiving themselves about Saddam’s capabilities? Was the war really necessary, not just for Iraq, but to protect American national security?
Now she says that at Barnard she "asked whether the administration’s prewar W.M.D. intelligence was merely wrong, or was it exaggerated or even falsified." I read that as "Clearly the intelligence was wrong -- was that deliberate?" But the Barnard speech makes clear that in May 2003 she still wasn't sure the intelligence was wrong -- WMDs might still be found, material that had been located unquestionably was, in her opinion, dual-use, and anthrax fears might or might not have been well founded. Maybe I'm hairsplitting, but I say she's distorting what she said back then. Not that I'm surprised.
FAIR AND BALANCED
Pro-administration sources quoted in this New York Times story on Ahmed Chalabi's visit to Washington:
* An unidentified administration official.
* Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman.
* Richard Perle, a Chalabi supporter and former head of the Bush administration's Defense Policy Board.
* Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Critics of the administration and/or Chalabi quoted in the same story:
Er, none.
Pro-administration sources quoted in this New York Times story on Ahmed Chalabi's visit to Washington:
* An unidentified administration official.
* Adam Ereli, a State Department spokesman.
* Richard Perle, a Chalabi supporter and former head of the Bush administration's Defense Policy Board.
* Reuel Marc Gerecht, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Critics of the administration and/or Chalabi quoted in the same story:
Er, none.
Well, thank God -- a few days ago, Arianna Huffington had me worried that Judy Miller was never going to leave The New York Times, but now she's gone. Wonder how soon it'll be before her paychecks are signed "Rupert Murdoch." And I wonder how soon she'll start trying to exact revenge against her former employer, a la Dick Morris -- and whose help she'll get when she does.
KURDISTAN® -- ONE OF THE WINGNUTTIA® FAMILY OF COMPANIES
So I didn't realize until I saw this Free Republic thread that the regional Kurdish government has thrown in its lot with American right-wing rabble-rousers.
The thread begins:
Look at the email I just received from Move America Forward... (and please watch the ads!)
Move America Forward? Here's a little background on that group: Its co-chairman is Howard Kaloogian, a former California assemblyman. Kaloogian fought to keep CBS's TV movie about the Reagans off the air and helped lead the recall campaign against Gray Davis. He used MAF to demand that movie theaters not show Fahrenheit 9/11. More recently, he's organized a right-wing talk-radio "Truth Tour" of Iraq (in conjunction with the Department of Defense), a counter-Cindy Sheehan bus tour, and various ad campaigns -- including one titled "U.N. Out of U.S."
Now, back to the Free Republic thread for the text of the MAF e-mail:
Starting Wednesday, a major national television ad campaign will begin that features Iraqi Kurds thanking the United States for liberating them from Saddam Hussein.
This is the message that has not been reported by the old-line media: the people of Iraq are happy that Saddam is gone and they want to say "Thank You" to America....
Please - go watch these ads. The first one, "Thank You America" is the ad you will be seeing beginning on the Fox News Channel (running nationwide). And make sure you show this to everyone you know. Each time I've seen this ad I've been nearly brought to tears, seeing these people survive the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein and showing such warm and sincere appreciation for the United States....
The e-mail directs you to a Web site -- TheOtherIraq.com. You can watch the ads and read the scripts there -- and also go to a link for the Kurdistan Development Corporation, "an initiative established jointly by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and international business to promote, facilitate and establish business and investment opportunities in the Kurdistan region in Iraq."
So why is the e-mail coming from Move America Forward?
Because this group of wingnuts, UN-bashers, and liberal-bashers is the Kurds' PR firm.
Bill Berkowitz explains:
The so-called "war on terrorism" has been good to Russo Marsh & Rogers (RM&R), the Sacramento, California-based conservative lobbying and public relations firm. These days, it has a lot on its plate, including the recently completed "Truth Tour," and a new contract with the Kurdistan Regional Government.
The "Truth Tour" -- a seven-day carefully calibrated trip to Iraq by a group of conservative talk-show hosts -- was intended to spread the "good" news about what is happening on the ground. The tour was organized by Move America Forward (MAF), an organization that, according to the Washington Post, owes much of its existence to the good offices of Russo Marsh & Rogers.
... Joe Wierzbicki, an account executive at Russo Marsh & Rogers, laughingly denied that there was ever any attempt to be secretive about the firm's association with Move America Forward: "There is nothing secret about our relationship with Move America Forward. From the very beginning, it has been Howard [Kaloogian] and Melanie [Morgan's] project and Sal Russo -- a close friend of theirs -- helped set it in motion."
Wierzbicki allowed that Russo Marsh & Rogers has done "all of the [group's] public relations stuff, press releases, and radio and television ads that have been aired to date." He added that Move America Forward "also uses Douglas Lorenz, the webmaster at RM&R as their webmaster." In addition, Wierzbicki pointed out, "RM&R doesn't charge Move America Forward any consulting fees and doesn't receive any retainer from the organization." ...
"Our job" with the Kurds, said Wierzbicki, "is to do a public relations campaign that will essentially thank the American people for supporting the war in Iraq. We will also encourage Americans to visit and invest in the Kurdish region." ...
How amusing -- one of the key groups in our little experiment in democratization is hanging out with this crowd.
So I didn't realize until I saw this Free Republic thread that the regional Kurdish government has thrown in its lot with American right-wing rabble-rousers.
The thread begins:
Look at the email I just received from Move America Forward... (and please watch the ads!)
Move America Forward? Here's a little background on that group: Its co-chairman is Howard Kaloogian, a former California assemblyman. Kaloogian fought to keep CBS's TV movie about the Reagans off the air and helped lead the recall campaign against Gray Davis. He used MAF to demand that movie theaters not show Fahrenheit 9/11. More recently, he's organized a right-wing talk-radio "Truth Tour" of Iraq (in conjunction with the Department of Defense), a counter-Cindy Sheehan bus tour, and various ad campaigns -- including one titled "U.N. Out of U.S."
Now, back to the Free Republic thread for the text of the MAF e-mail:
Starting Wednesday, a major national television ad campaign will begin that features Iraqi Kurds thanking the United States for liberating them from Saddam Hussein.
This is the message that has not been reported by the old-line media: the people of Iraq are happy that Saddam is gone and they want to say "Thank You" to America....
Please - go watch these ads. The first one, "Thank You America" is the ad you will be seeing beginning on the Fox News Channel (running nationwide). And make sure you show this to everyone you know. Each time I've seen this ad I've been nearly brought to tears, seeing these people survive the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein and showing such warm and sincere appreciation for the United States....
The e-mail directs you to a Web site -- TheOtherIraq.com. You can watch the ads and read the scripts there -- and also go to a link for the Kurdistan Development Corporation, "an initiative established jointly by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and international business to promote, facilitate and establish business and investment opportunities in the Kurdistan region in Iraq."
So why is the e-mail coming from Move America Forward?
Because this group of wingnuts, UN-bashers, and liberal-bashers is the Kurds' PR firm.
Bill Berkowitz explains:
The so-called "war on terrorism" has been good to Russo Marsh & Rogers (RM&R), the Sacramento, California-based conservative lobbying and public relations firm. These days, it has a lot on its plate, including the recently completed "Truth Tour," and a new contract with the Kurdistan Regional Government.
The "Truth Tour" -- a seven-day carefully calibrated trip to Iraq by a group of conservative talk-show hosts -- was intended to spread the "good" news about what is happening on the ground. The tour was organized by Move America Forward (MAF), an organization that, according to the Washington Post, owes much of its existence to the good offices of Russo Marsh & Rogers.
... Joe Wierzbicki, an account executive at Russo Marsh & Rogers, laughingly denied that there was ever any attempt to be secretive about the firm's association with Move America Forward: "There is nothing secret about our relationship with Move America Forward. From the very beginning, it has been Howard [Kaloogian] and Melanie [Morgan's] project and Sal Russo -- a close friend of theirs -- helped set it in motion."
Wierzbicki allowed that Russo Marsh & Rogers has done "all of the [group's] public relations stuff, press releases, and radio and television ads that have been aired to date." He added that Move America Forward "also uses Douglas Lorenz, the webmaster at RM&R as their webmaster." In addition, Wierzbicki pointed out, "RM&R doesn't charge Move America Forward any consulting fees and doesn't receive any retainer from the organization." ...
"Our job" with the Kurds, said Wierzbicki, "is to do a public relations campaign that will essentially thank the American people for supporting the war in Iraq. We will also encourage Americans to visit and invest in the Kurdish region." ...
How amusing -- one of the key groups in our little experiment in democratization is hanging out with this crowd.
Media Matters catalogs the ongoing campaign by (invariably non-Italian) right-wingers to portray Samuel Alito as a victim of an ethnic slur because some people call him "Scalito." I'm Italian-American and I say this is a crock (the two are ideologically similar, their names sound alike, and one was on the Supreme Court and one has long seemed headed there -- end of story), but the right-wing slanderers persist:
...After fellow Fox News Watch panelist and media writer Neil Gabler responded that [Newsday columnist James] Pinkerton's assertion about the "Scalito" nickname's ethnic bigotry was a "Republican talking point," Pinkerton said, "I think whoever said it first made an ethnic slur ... imagine fusing, say, [Justice Stephen] Breyer and [Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg's names together, or if there had been two black justices -- that people would be screaming anti-Semitism or racism. And I think legitimately. And I think they did that on the Italian thing, and I think it was wrong." ...
Yeah, imagine that. Imagine fusing the names of two other judges, or another judge and a nominee. Just imagine...
Harriet Souter?
--title of a 10/19/05 blog post at Right Wing News
Harriet Souter?
--post at the University of Miami Federalist Society blog, 10/3/05
Harriet "Souter" Miers
--title of a post at the Cosmopoloitan Reactionary blog, 10/3/05
A few weeks ago I wrote "Grab your coon-skin hat, powder and musket and ride to the sound of the guns." Many of us did and now Harriet Souter is back where she belongs and a real conservative like Janice Brown will sit on the SC for decades to come.
--post by jeb2008 at the LionCountry.com message board, 10/27/05
It's a heckuva time to take a break, what with the nomination of Harriet Souter....
--10/3/05 post at the right-wing blog PostWatch by Christopher Fotos of Pajamas Media
Think the two situations aren't comparable? Well, think again. Souter was appointed by President George Bush and Miers was nominated by President George Bush. Souter is an Episcopalian and unmarried, while Miers, prior to joining Valley View Christian Church, was, according to her friend Nathan Hecht, "half Catholic, half Episcopalian," and is unmarried. Souter's marital status has led to smirking speculation about his sexual orientation; same with Miers.
There you go. It's a slur. So when will these right-wing bigots apologize?
...After fellow Fox News Watch panelist and media writer Neil Gabler responded that [Newsday columnist James] Pinkerton's assertion about the "Scalito" nickname's ethnic bigotry was a "Republican talking point," Pinkerton said, "I think whoever said it first made an ethnic slur ... imagine fusing, say, [Justice Stephen] Breyer and [Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg's names together, or if there had been two black justices -- that people would be screaming anti-Semitism or racism. And I think legitimately. And I think they did that on the Italian thing, and I think it was wrong." ...
Yeah, imagine that. Imagine fusing the names of two other judges, or another judge and a nominee. Just imagine...
Harriet Souter?
--title of a 10/19/05 blog post at Right Wing News
Harriet Souter?
--post at the University of Miami Federalist Society blog, 10/3/05
Harriet "Souter" Miers
--title of a post at the Cosmopoloitan Reactionary blog, 10/3/05
A few weeks ago I wrote "Grab your coon-skin hat, powder and musket and ride to the sound of the guns." Many of us did and now Harriet Souter is back where she belongs and a real conservative like Janice Brown will sit on the SC for decades to come.
--post by jeb2008 at the LionCountry.com message board, 10/27/05
It's a heckuva time to take a break, what with the nomination of Harriet Souter....
--10/3/05 post at the right-wing blog PostWatch by Christopher Fotos of Pajamas Media
Think the two situations aren't comparable? Well, think again. Souter was appointed by President George Bush and Miers was nominated by President George Bush. Souter is an Episcopalian and unmarried, while Miers, prior to joining Valley View Christian Church, was, according to her friend Nathan Hecht, "half Catholic, half Episcopalian," and is unmarried. Souter's marital status has led to smirking speculation about his sexual orientation; same with Miers.
There you go. It's a slur. So when will these right-wing bigots apologize?
Yeah, a pretty good Election Day. I'm happy about Virginia and New Jersey. And I'm pleased if California voters think the GOP is the party that's out of touch with ordinary voters:
...Voters overwhelmingly defeated Proposition 76, the governor's centerpiece proposal to slow the growth of state spending. Proposition 77, which would have redrawn legislative and congressional districts, was knocked down by a similar margin.
Failing by slimmer spreads were Proposition 74, a plan to make teachers work longer to achieve tenure, and Proposition 73, which would have restricted political spending by public employee unions.
Poll after poll showed it was an election that Californians didn't want, with a total lineup of eight initiatives that didn't connect with every day issues such as gas prices, housing costs and the war in Iraq....
Tim Wong, 48, an independent from Belmont, called the election "a waste of the meager money we have."...
And, even though I didn't vote for him, I'm not particularly upset at the reelection of Mike Bloomberg in New York -- he's the first mayor in 32 years to win reelection here without resorting to liberal-bashing, union-busting, or the baiting of minorities; he hasn't divided the city with poisonous rhetoric, like the two most recent reelected mayors, Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch (although he was endorsed by both of them).
But the Bloomberg win points out that, even up in the blue Northeast, there's far less Democratic pride than there is Republican pride in the heartland. Here's another troubling sign:
A voter survey in New Jersey found women favored Corzine by more than 20 points while men narrowly preferred Forrester. Two-thirds of Hispanics and nearly all blacks favored the U.S. senator, while whites and wealthier people split their votes between the candidates.
So Bush is below 40% approval, New Jersey is a blue state, and still men there, particularly white men, prefer the GOP. Now, a lot of this relates to factors specific to this race. Still, I'll believe we're looking at a real political shift in this country when Democrats can regularly get white men on board -- at least on the coasts.
...Voters overwhelmingly defeated Proposition 76, the governor's centerpiece proposal to slow the growth of state spending. Proposition 77, which would have redrawn legislative and congressional districts, was knocked down by a similar margin.
Failing by slimmer spreads were Proposition 74, a plan to make teachers work longer to achieve tenure, and Proposition 73, which would have restricted political spending by public employee unions.
Poll after poll showed it was an election that Californians didn't want, with a total lineup of eight initiatives that didn't connect with every day issues such as gas prices, housing costs and the war in Iraq....
Tim Wong, 48, an independent from Belmont, called the election "a waste of the meager money we have."...
And, even though I didn't vote for him, I'm not particularly upset at the reelection of Mike Bloomberg in New York -- he's the first mayor in 32 years to win reelection here without resorting to liberal-bashing, union-busting, or the baiting of minorities; he hasn't divided the city with poisonous rhetoric, like the two most recent reelected mayors, Rudy Giuliani and Ed Koch (although he was endorsed by both of them).
But the Bloomberg win points out that, even up in the blue Northeast, there's far less Democratic pride than there is Republican pride in the heartland. Here's another troubling sign:
A voter survey in New Jersey found women favored Corzine by more than 20 points while men narrowly preferred Forrester. Two-thirds of Hispanics and nearly all blacks favored the U.S. senator, while whites and wealthier people split their votes between the candidates.
So Bush is below 40% approval, New Jersey is a blue state, and still men there, particularly white men, prefer the GOP. Now, a lot of this relates to factors specific to this race. Still, I'll believe we're looking at a real political shift in this country when Democrats can regularly get white men on board -- at least on the coasts.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
All hail Congressman George Miller of California for his House speech on Ahmed Chalabi:
...As the Senate concludes its investigation into the administration's use of false and misleading intelligence to make the case for war, no such inquiry would be complete without Mr. Chalabi's testimony under oath. While he is sashaying around the streets of Washington, D.C., the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee may want to issue a subpoena for his presence. He has offered to testify, but no intelligence agency of the United States has interviewed him, nor has the FBI, as we learned today.
He should be detained in this country until he gives that testimony. I know I speak for all Americans when I say that our idea of democracy is not propping up a bank swindler, kidnapper and extortionist whose lies and deceptions contributed to the 14,000 U.S. soldiers injured and over 2,000 killed in action and is an intractable quagmire with no end in sight. Americans deserve the truth about the Bush administration's manipulation of intelligence to justify this tragic war.
Calling the cops to arrest Mr. Chalabi, while he is here, so he can be interrogated, would be a good beginning to understand how extensive the manipulation, how false the evidence was, that caused the President to take us to war and which was championed by the Vice President and the President and the cabal to try to justify to the American citizens the reason for this war.
Mr. Speaker, call the cops. Mr. Chalabi should not be allowed to run free on the streets of this Nation's capital.
Amen.
(Link via Talking Points Memo.)
Chalabi's sordid history is here, courtesy of Think Progress. And check out the Chalabi links at right (scroll down) for more.
...As the Senate concludes its investigation into the administration's use of false and misleading intelligence to make the case for war, no such inquiry would be complete without Mr. Chalabi's testimony under oath. While he is sashaying around the streets of Washington, D.C., the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee may want to issue a subpoena for his presence. He has offered to testify, but no intelligence agency of the United States has interviewed him, nor has the FBI, as we learned today.
He should be detained in this country until he gives that testimony. I know I speak for all Americans when I say that our idea of democracy is not propping up a bank swindler, kidnapper and extortionist whose lies and deceptions contributed to the 14,000 U.S. soldiers injured and over 2,000 killed in action and is an intractable quagmire with no end in sight. Americans deserve the truth about the Bush administration's manipulation of intelligence to justify this tragic war.
Calling the cops to arrest Mr. Chalabi, while he is here, so he can be interrogated, would be a good beginning to understand how extensive the manipulation, how false the evidence was, that caused the President to take us to war and which was championed by the Vice President and the President and the cabal to try to justify to the American citizens the reason for this war.
Mr. Speaker, call the cops. Mr. Chalabi should not be allowed to run free on the streets of this Nation's capital.
Amen.
(Link via Talking Points Memo.)
Chalabi's sordid history is here, courtesy of Think Progress. And check out the Chalabi links at right (scroll down) for more.
I don't know of anyone who thinks the French authorities are handling the riots well -- here, by the way, is the editorial page of The New York Times taking Chirac, de Villepin, and the rest to task -- but aren't the right-wingers who are braying the loudest about France's clueless, utterly inadequate response to the unrest the same people who've defended the Bush administration's clueless, utterly inadequate response to the Iraqi insurgency?
The only difference, as far as I can see, is that the riots will almost certainly stop by the end of the month, or at least the end of the year (or decade). That's more than I'd be willing to predict about the Iraqi insurgency.
And when I read that France has rejected affirmative action, bans headscarves and other displays of Muslim identity, collects no statistics based on ethnicity, and, because of a lack of affirmative action, has a nearly all-white police force that's regarded by France's unemployed minority youths as abusive, all I can say is: right-wingers are criticizing this? Isn't the right always demanding that America become more like this?
The only difference, as far as I can see, is that the riots will almost certainly stop by the end of the month, or at least the end of the year (or decade). That's more than I'd be willing to predict about the Iraqi insurgency.
And when I read that France has rejected affirmative action, bans headscarves and other displays of Muslim identity, collects no statistics based on ethnicity, and, because of a lack of affirmative action, has a nearly all-white police force that's regarded by France's unemployed minority youths as abusive, all I can say is: right-wingers are criticizing this? Isn't the right always demanding that America become more like this?
SHUT UP AND EAT YOUR GRUEL
Your betters are getting a reward they deserve -- and you don't:
...Bonus season on Wall Street is quickly approaching....
Investment bankers are expected to receive increases of 10 percent to 20 percent in their year-end bonuses from a year ago. For a midlevel managing director in investment banking, that could mean total compensation of roughly $1.2 million to $1.8 million for the year....
Year-end bonuses for prime brokers, who have been buoyed by the boom in hedge funds, are expected to rise 20 percent, according to the survey....
The big winners could be traders involved in commodities and energy, in particular, proprietary traders who deal in those two high-octane growth areas. They could receive pay increases of 40 percent to 50 percent, with some walking away with $15 million to $20 million each....
The third quarter, traditionally Wall Street's weakest, was among the best quarters ever at many firms. Merrill Lynch reported a record $1.4 billion in net earnings, up 49 percent from a year ago, while Lehman Brothers earned $879 million, up 74 percent from a year ago....
Hmmm -- what was I telling you yesterday?
...Average pay rose 8 cents last month to $16.27 an hour, according to a government report Friday. That's not fast enough to counter inflation.
... Wages for the most recent quarter were 2.3 percent lower, after inflation, than workers received a year before....
Remember: Not helping ordinary Americans helps ordinary Americans. So expect a continuation of not-helping-ordinary Americans economic policies in the future -- it's in ordinary Americans' best interests.
Your betters are getting a reward they deserve -- and you don't:
...Bonus season on Wall Street is quickly approaching....
Investment bankers are expected to receive increases of 10 percent to 20 percent in their year-end bonuses from a year ago. For a midlevel managing director in investment banking, that could mean total compensation of roughly $1.2 million to $1.8 million for the year....
Year-end bonuses for prime brokers, who have been buoyed by the boom in hedge funds, are expected to rise 20 percent, according to the survey....
The big winners could be traders involved in commodities and energy, in particular, proprietary traders who deal in those two high-octane growth areas. They could receive pay increases of 40 percent to 50 percent, with some walking away with $15 million to $20 million each....
The third quarter, traditionally Wall Street's weakest, was among the best quarters ever at many firms. Merrill Lynch reported a record $1.4 billion in net earnings, up 49 percent from a year ago, while Lehman Brothers earned $879 million, up 74 percent from a year ago....
Hmmm -- what was I telling you yesterday?
...Average pay rose 8 cents last month to $16.27 an hour, according to a government report Friday. That's not fast enough to counter inflation.
... Wages for the most recent quarter were 2.3 percent lower, after inflation, than workers received a year before....
Remember: Not helping ordinary Americans helps ordinary Americans. So expect a continuation of not-helping-ordinary Americans economic policies in the future -- it's in ordinary Americans' best interests.
Monday, November 07, 2005
I think I'm starting to understand the reactions of the more overheated right-wingers to the French riots.
Take Kender of the Stop the ACLU blog, for instance. When Kender writes a post titled French Riots, coming soon to Germany, Belgium and a slum near you, that's not a warning -- it's a prayer. Kender is saying this with fingers crossed. He (I'm guessing Kender is a he) wants this to happen.
To some extent, Kender is, like so many France-hating right-wingers, just feeling schadenfreude:
It is my opinion that the French are getting what they deserve here.
"Germany, Belgium and a slum near you" are next, according to Kender, presumably because, like France, all "have embraced a socialist system that is doomed to failure" (and yes, that also applies to the U.S. -- it's a common riff on the right that the half-assed U.S. government safety net is, for the poor, socialism in full flower).
But Kender's getting at something else here: Like a lot of right-wingers, he wants all hell to break loose. He wants the French riots to go global. He'd like a lot more property to be damaged and he might even be pleased if a lot more people died.
What I'm picking up from Kender, and from other right-wingers who see the riots as part of a multinational Muslim uprising, is something similar to what I sense every time an NRA purist talks about the threat of domestic insurrection or an increasingly tyrannical U.S. government: a hope that a purely evil enemy will rise up and provide the opportunity for pure, unbridled and socially sanctioned hatred -- and, ultimately, violent retribution. What bliss!
I don't completely blame the NRA guys. They don't want to just go to work all week and watch football all weekend. They want something more out of life. Who doesn't? But their reaction to the ordinariness of their lives is to imagine that a world-historical Evil will someday rise up from U.S. soil -- an evil only they can conquer. Usually it's a government gone jackbooted; sometimes it's rioters in the streets. And they and their guns will restore order where there was chaos and freedom where there was repression. On one level this is an understandable fantasy. On the other hand, the sensible reaction is: Grow up.
The new right-wing fantasy of metastasizing Muslim anger in Europe, and in America, is similar. These people want figures of pure evil to hate. Their president took the pursuit of the 9/11 murderers off the table, overthrowing Saddam was a huge letdown -- but now ... here come a bunch of Muslim kids with gasoline bombs! Killer ragheads! Life is worth living again! Just when the right thought the best it could do was hating and harassing undocumented dishwashers.
In the comments to Kender's post, someone named "Bic" (er, isn't that a French pen?) imagines how dire things might get:
...I saw a forecast today that France may well be partitioned, the way India was, within the decade, and that such may be the underlying goal of the Islamisists:
http://frontpage.americandaughter.com/?p=85
Could this happen? Or worse, are there any alternatives left?
Kender responds:
The alternatives, Bic, are for the french to admit their failed policies, deport people by the boatloads, loosen restrictions on business and go with a more capitalistic, free market economy, but that will not happen...
Muslims, I am learning, are a danger, refusing to assimilate anywhere they immigrate, and eventually rising up in protest until they get their own lands.
Bic, thanks for the link in the above comment. It opened my eyes a little more to the dangers of Islam, muslims as a whole, and the futility of socialists policies such as france has been following for the last few decades....
There it is in a nutshell. A LARGE SWATH OF THE CIVILIZED WORLD IS DOOMED! And only we understand the problem! Only we have the solution! Declare Muslims unfit to live in civilized society! Begin ethnic cleansing! Let's do this!
Take Kender of the Stop the ACLU blog, for instance. When Kender writes a post titled French Riots, coming soon to Germany, Belgium and a slum near you, that's not a warning -- it's a prayer. Kender is saying this with fingers crossed. He (I'm guessing Kender is a he) wants this to happen.
To some extent, Kender is, like so many France-hating right-wingers, just feeling schadenfreude:
It is my opinion that the French are getting what they deserve here.
"Germany, Belgium and a slum near you" are next, according to Kender, presumably because, like France, all "have embraced a socialist system that is doomed to failure" (and yes, that also applies to the U.S. -- it's a common riff on the right that the half-assed U.S. government safety net is, for the poor, socialism in full flower).
But Kender's getting at something else here: Like a lot of right-wingers, he wants all hell to break loose. He wants the French riots to go global. He'd like a lot more property to be damaged and he might even be pleased if a lot more people died.
What I'm picking up from Kender, and from other right-wingers who see the riots as part of a multinational Muslim uprising, is something similar to what I sense every time an NRA purist talks about the threat of domestic insurrection or an increasingly tyrannical U.S. government: a hope that a purely evil enemy will rise up and provide the opportunity for pure, unbridled and socially sanctioned hatred -- and, ultimately, violent retribution. What bliss!
I don't completely blame the NRA guys. They don't want to just go to work all week and watch football all weekend. They want something more out of life. Who doesn't? But their reaction to the ordinariness of their lives is to imagine that a world-historical Evil will someday rise up from U.S. soil -- an evil only they can conquer. Usually it's a government gone jackbooted; sometimes it's rioters in the streets. And they and their guns will restore order where there was chaos and freedom where there was repression. On one level this is an understandable fantasy. On the other hand, the sensible reaction is: Grow up.
The new right-wing fantasy of metastasizing Muslim anger in Europe, and in America, is similar. These people want figures of pure evil to hate. Their president took the pursuit of the 9/11 murderers off the table, overthrowing Saddam was a huge letdown -- but now ... here come a bunch of Muslim kids with gasoline bombs! Killer ragheads! Life is worth living again! Just when the right thought the best it could do was hating and harassing undocumented dishwashers.
In the comments to Kender's post, someone named "Bic" (er, isn't that a French pen?) imagines how dire things might get:
...I saw a forecast today that France may well be partitioned, the way India was, within the decade, and that such may be the underlying goal of the Islamisists:
http://frontpage.americandaughter.com/?p=85
Could this happen? Or worse, are there any alternatives left?
Kender responds:
The alternatives, Bic, are for the french to admit their failed policies, deport people by the boatloads, loosen restrictions on business and go with a more capitalistic, free market economy, but that will not happen...
Muslims, I am learning, are a danger, refusing to assimilate anywhere they immigrate, and eventually rising up in protest until they get their own lands.
Bic, thanks for the link in the above comment. It opened my eyes a little more to the dangers of Islam, muslims as a whole, and the futility of socialists policies such as france has been following for the last few decades....
There it is in a nutshell. A LARGE SWATH OF THE CIVILIZED WORLD IS DOOMED! And only we understand the problem! Only we have the solution! Declare Muslims unfit to live in civilized society! Begin ethnic cleansing! Let's do this!
PRIORITIES
The folks at Free Republic, who apparently don't approve of paying attention to the number of U.S. deaths in Iraq, are now beside themselves with glee because one of their number is maintaining a running total of burned cars in France.
The folks at Free Republic, who apparently don't approve of paying attention to the number of U.S. deaths in Iraq, are now beside themselves with glee because one of their number is maintaining a running total of burned cars in France.
Remember what you've been told: Progressive taxation is bad. Unions are bad. Raising the minimum wage is bad. Democrats are bad. Tax cuts for the wealthy are good. Globalization is good. Republican policies are good for the economy....
Workers face paycheck pinch
After inflation, American workers earned 2.3 percent less than they did a year ago.
...By one common measure, average pay for an hour's work has less purchasing power than it had four years ago - when the current growth cycle began.
It's a pattern of weak wage growth that's now several years old, but the trend has worsened in recent months. Wages for the most recent quarter were 2.3 percent lower, after inflation, than workers received a year before.
... the impact is hardest on those without college degrees.
"It's two different worlds," skilled and unskilled, says John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C. ...
Well-trained job seekers are in hot demand, he says. But the labor market is weak for those whose education ended in high school.....
In [a Bureau of Labor Statistics] survey, hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers rose by a total of just 4.6 percent during the 24-year period from 1979 to 2003, a recent Labor Department study found.
... on the issue of real pay for an hour's work, none of the government surveys show wages rising by even 1 percent a year between 1979 and 2003....
--Christian Science Monitor
Remember: For seventeen of the past twenty-five years, the president has been Republican. For six of the remaining eight years, the House and Senate were Republican. The entire federal government is Republican now. And the Republican Party claims to be the party of ordinary people.
Workers face paycheck pinch
After inflation, American workers earned 2.3 percent less than they did a year ago.
...By one common measure, average pay for an hour's work has less purchasing power than it had four years ago - when the current growth cycle began.
It's a pattern of weak wage growth that's now several years old, but the trend has worsened in recent months. Wages for the most recent quarter were 2.3 percent lower, after inflation, than workers received a year before.
... the impact is hardest on those without college degrees.
"It's two different worlds," skilled and unskilled, says John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, N.C. ...
Well-trained job seekers are in hot demand, he says. But the labor market is weak for those whose education ended in high school.....
In [a Bureau of Labor Statistics] survey, hourly wages for nonsupervisory workers rose by a total of just 4.6 percent during the 24-year period from 1979 to 2003, a recent Labor Department study found.
... on the issue of real pay for an hour's work, none of the government surveys show wages rising by even 1 percent a year between 1979 and 2003....
--Christian Science Monitor
Remember: For seventeen of the past twenty-five years, the president has been Republican. For six of the remaining eight years, the House and Senate were Republican. The entire federal government is Republican now. And the Republican Party claims to be the party of ordinary people.
Wal-Mart and Walmart.com still won't sell you an unedited CD that has a "Parental Advisory" sticker, or sell downloads from the unedited version of such a CD.
But it seems that Walmart.com will let you download music from the Minuteman Project Band's CD Wake Up America! -- including the song "Pancho Villa Stops Here," which includes these lyrics:
If you hate this country
You're gonna stop right here
We don't need your beans,
we don't need your beer!
Got a problem with that? Maybe you'd like to let Wal-Mart know. I gather the company is very touchy about bad PR these days.
There's much more about this music at Sadly, No!
But it seems that Walmart.com will let you download music from the Minuteman Project Band's CD Wake Up America! -- including the song "Pancho Villa Stops Here," which includes these lyrics:
If you hate this country
You're gonna stop right here
We don't need your beans,
we don't need your beer!
Got a problem with that? Maybe you'd like to let Wal-Mart know. I gather the company is very touchy about bad PR these days.
There's much more about this music at Sadly, No!
Sunday, November 06, 2005
In today's New York Times Book Review, David Brooks writes about The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel. Thinking about college admissions, Brooks wonders if the meritocracy thing is all it's cracked up to be, and suggests that a bit of affirmative action -- for people with old money -- might be a good idea:
... [Karabel] never steps outside the story, the way an essayist might, to measure what was lost and gained with the decline of the chivalric ethos and the rise of the meritocratic one. Those old WASP bluebloods may have been narrow and prejudiced, but they did at least have a formula for building character.
What makes this amusing is that Brooks's review is accompanied by this picture:
You know -- the one that appeared in the Yale yearbook over the caption
George Bush delivers illegal, but gratifying right hook to opposing ball carrier.
Character building? Oh yeah, sure.
... [Karabel] never steps outside the story, the way an essayist might, to measure what was lost and gained with the decline of the chivalric ethos and the rise of the meritocratic one. Those old WASP bluebloods may have been narrow and prejudiced, but they did at least have a formula for building character.
What makes this amusing is that Brooks's review is accompanied by this picture:
You know -- the one that appeared in the Yale yearbook over the caption
George Bush delivers illegal, but gratifying right hook to opposing ball carrier.
Character building? Oh yeah, sure.
Let's see: In recent years we've had concerted efforts to deny communion to pro-choice Catholic politicians, we've had pressure on Catholic colleges not to invite commencement speakers who support abortion rights, gay right, or stem-cell research, we've had a Catholic university rejecting an NAACP campus charter because the NAACP is pro-choice, we've had a Catholic high school canceling an American Girl fund-raiser because American Girl partners with Girls Inc., which supports abortion rights and gay rights....
So it's interesting to see this in a New York Review of Books article about John Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer whose work was central to the administration's pro-torture legal stance:
Since leaving the Justice Department, Yoo has also defended the practice of "extraordinary renditions," in which the United States has kidnapped numerous "suspects" in the war on terror and "rendered" them to third countries with records of torturing detainees.
-- and we learn from a footnote that he makes this case in the following article:
John Yoo, "Transferring Terrorists," Notre Dame Law Review, Vol. 79, No. 4, p. 1183 (2004).
Did I hear a word of protest that this might not be a seemly thing for a Catholic university's law review to publish? Hmm, I don't think so.
So it's interesting to see this in a New York Review of Books article about John Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer whose work was central to the administration's pro-torture legal stance:
Since leaving the Justice Department, Yoo has also defended the practice of "extraordinary renditions," in which the United States has kidnapped numerous "suspects" in the war on terror and "rendered" them to third countries with records of torturing detainees.
-- and we learn from a footnote that he makes this case in the following article:
John Yoo, "Transferring Terrorists," Notre Dame Law Review, Vol. 79, No. 4, p. 1183 (2004).
Did I hear a word of protest that this might not be a seemly thing for a Catholic university's law review to publish? Hmm, I don't think so.
This New York Times story is already on a hundred dufferent blogs, but I want to add my thoughts:
A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.
The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda's work with illicit weapons.
The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Al-Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons....
In commenting on this, I'm supposed to make frequent outraged use of the word "lie."
The problem is, I don't think the administration lied about this. Saying that Cheney and his gang of True Believers lied is like saying that a psychopathic serial killer is lying when he claimed that a victim he's skinned and eaten was really his soul mate. In both cases, what we're dealing with is a sociopath's refusal to take in empirical evidence that threatens a deeply held belief system. It's incredibly dangerous. The authorities need to step in. The monster must be stopped. But the monster, however crazy, isn't lying.
Cheney and the rest believed, and persuaded everyone else in the administration to believe. They didn't have al-Libi tortured to get the truth out of him; they had him tortured to get him to "confirm" what they already "knew." Maybe they didn't even care that experts on torture say a tortured prisoner will make up whatever story he thinks you want to hear; that's precisely what they wanted. To Cheney et al., even if Libi lied about knowing of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, he'd be telling the truth -- the deeper truth, that the Saddam-Osama ties existed, contradictory evidence be damned.
A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.
The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda's work with illicit weapons.
The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi's credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi's information as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Al-Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons....
In commenting on this, I'm supposed to make frequent outraged use of the word "lie."
The problem is, I don't think the administration lied about this. Saying that Cheney and his gang of True Believers lied is like saying that a psychopathic serial killer is lying when he claimed that a victim he's skinned and eaten was really his soul mate. In both cases, what we're dealing with is a sociopath's refusal to take in empirical evidence that threatens a deeply held belief system. It's incredibly dangerous. The authorities need to step in. The monster must be stopped. But the monster, however crazy, isn't lying.
Cheney and the rest believed, and persuaded everyone else in the administration to believe. They didn't have al-Libi tortured to get the truth out of him; they had him tortured to get him to "confirm" what they already "knew." Maybe they didn't even care that experts on torture say a tortured prisoner will make up whatever story he thinks you want to hear; that's precisely what they wanted. To Cheney et al., even if Libi lied about knowing of ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, he'd be telling the truth -- the deeper truth, that the Saddam-Osama ties existed, contradictory evidence be damned.
I'd almost take comfort in the opening paragraphs of this story, if they weren't contradicted elsewhere -- for instance, in the later paragraphs of the same story:
Chalabi, in Tehran, Meets With Iranian President Before Traveling to U.S. Next Week
Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile who has become a deputy prime minister, met with senior Iranian leaders here on Saturday in what appeared to be an effort to distance himself from their Islamist government, just days before he visits Washington.
In a series of closed meetings, including one with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, Mr. Chalabi said he had spoken to the Iranians about Iranian interference in Iraq's domestic politics, a move likely to endear him to the Bush administration.
... "The principal reason is to tell them about our concern about some of the activities in Iraq," Mr. Chalabi said of the Iranians....
Chalabi distancing himself from Iran? Chalabi demanding less Iranian influence on Iraqi affairs? Yeah, right:
In an interview after his meeting with Iranian leaders, Mr. Chalabi said he had secured a promise that they would not oppose him if he made a run at becoming Iraq's prime minister. "Clearly I am not going to be a candidate for prime minister because they tell me to," Mr. Chalabi said of the Iranians. "They certainly expressed support for the idea that if the process is done locally, then they would not oppose it."
It was impossible to verify that assertion, but in an interview, Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran's national security council and one of the senior officials who met with Mr. Chalabi, said Iranian leaders held him in high regard. "He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq," Mr. [Ali] Larijani [of the Iranian National Security Council] said.
For their part, Iranian leaders said that they were indeed a primary force in internal Iraqi politics, and that would continue to be.
... "America should consider this power as legitimate," Mr. Larijani said of his country's role in Iraqi affairs. "They should not fight it."
So Chalabi meets with Iranian leaders, including the guy who said Israel should be wiped off the map, and even though he claims he issued a stern warning about interference in Iraqi affair, everyone's all smiles. Then he's headed to Washington to meet with our secretary of state, national security advisor, and treasury secretary, and again everyone will be all smiles.
Unbelievable.
Chalabi, in Tehran, Meets With Iranian President Before Traveling to U.S. Next Week
Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile who has become a deputy prime minister, met with senior Iranian leaders here on Saturday in what appeared to be an effort to distance himself from their Islamist government, just days before he visits Washington.
In a series of closed meetings, including one with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, Mr. Chalabi said he had spoken to the Iranians about Iranian interference in Iraq's domestic politics, a move likely to endear him to the Bush administration.
... "The principal reason is to tell them about our concern about some of the activities in Iraq," Mr. Chalabi said of the Iranians....
Chalabi distancing himself from Iran? Chalabi demanding less Iranian influence on Iraqi affairs? Yeah, right:
In an interview after his meeting with Iranian leaders, Mr. Chalabi said he had secured a promise that they would not oppose him if he made a run at becoming Iraq's prime minister. "Clearly I am not going to be a candidate for prime minister because they tell me to," Mr. Chalabi said of the Iranians. "They certainly expressed support for the idea that if the process is done locally, then they would not oppose it."
It was impossible to verify that assertion, but in an interview, Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran's national security council and one of the senior officials who met with Mr. Chalabi, said Iranian leaders held him in high regard. "He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq," Mr. [Ali] Larijani [of the Iranian National Security Council] said.
For their part, Iranian leaders said that they were indeed a primary force in internal Iraqi politics, and that would continue to be.
... "America should consider this power as legitimate," Mr. Larijani said of his country's role in Iraqi affairs. "They should not fight it."
So Chalabi meets with Iranian leaders, including the guy who said Israel should be wiped off the map, and even though he claims he issued a stern warning about interference in Iraqi affair, everyone's all smiles. Then he's headed to Washington to meet with our secretary of state, national security advisor, and treasury secretary, and again everyone will be all smiles.
Unbelievable.
Saturday, November 05, 2005
UNHINGED
Hundreds of threatening e-mails have been sent to Sacramento City Council members since Tuesday, when the council passed a highly controversial, anti-war resolution.
...comments that are made in the e-mails include: "you should be hanged" and "hope your children are beheaded."
"They talk about cutting our heads off, my head off. They say some very vile, dirty things," [council member Ray] Tretheway [said].
The e-mails were sparked by a resolution -- passed by the council -- that calls on President George W. Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq....
--KCRA
Hey, Michelle Malkin, any comments?
(Via Democratic Underground.)
Hundreds of threatening e-mails have been sent to Sacramento City Council members since Tuesday, when the council passed a highly controversial, anti-war resolution.
...comments that are made in the e-mails include: "you should be hanged" and "hope your children are beheaded."
"They talk about cutting our heads off, my head off. They say some very vile, dirty things," [council member Ray] Tretheway [said].
The e-mails were sparked by a resolution -- passed by the council -- that calls on President George W. Bush to withdraw troops from Iraq....
--KCRA
Hey, Michelle Malkin, any comments?
(Via Democratic Underground.)
Friday, November 04, 2005
THE WOMB IS HALF FULL
OK, here's an excerpt from a story at the Southern Baptist Conference Web site:
A record high number of 1.5 million babies were born to unwed mothers last year....
While teens accounted for half of all unwed births in 1970, they accounted for but only 24 percent of the total in 2004.
For women ages 20-24, 55 percent of births last year were to unwed mothers, and the figure was almost 28 percent for ages 25-29, the study said.
From 2002 to 2004, births to unwed mothers ages 25-29 jumped more than 14 percent, and for mothers ages 20-24, the number rose 7 percent....
So what's the Baptists' headline for this?
"Leaders say abstinence is key to decline in teen pregnancies"!
Yup -- there's a big overall increase in out-of-wedlock births, led by out-of-wedlock births to young adults, and because it's not led by teens, they claim victory.
"This new report is a composite of both good news and bad news," said Richard Ross, professor of student ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and spokesperson for the international True Love Waits campaign.
"About the best news is that teens who once accounted for 50 percent of unwed births now represent only 24 percent," Ross said. "I am sure the condom crowd will want to take most of the credit for this drop, but the facts argue otherwise."
Actually, no one will want to take credit for this, because if you go here and look at Table 4 (PDF), you'll see that the number of teenage births also went up (from 343,670 to 348,934). They just make up a smaller percentage of the total because adult out-of-wedlock births make up a much larger share of the total.
And by the way, why are there so many out-of-wedlock births among young adults now? Could it be because so many young women had abstinence-only sex education in high school, and it just gets harder and harder to sustain abstinence once the peer pressure wears off (and harder and harder to avoid pregnancy when you've been told that using contraception will certainly lead you to hell and might kill you)?
OK, here's an excerpt from a story at the Southern Baptist Conference Web site:
A record high number of 1.5 million babies were born to unwed mothers last year....
While teens accounted for half of all unwed births in 1970, they accounted for but only 24 percent of the total in 2004.
For women ages 20-24, 55 percent of births last year were to unwed mothers, and the figure was almost 28 percent for ages 25-29, the study said.
From 2002 to 2004, births to unwed mothers ages 25-29 jumped more than 14 percent, and for mothers ages 20-24, the number rose 7 percent....
So what's the Baptists' headline for this?
"Leaders say abstinence is key to decline in teen pregnancies"!
Yup -- there's a big overall increase in out-of-wedlock births, led by out-of-wedlock births to young adults, and because it's not led by teens, they claim victory.
"This new report is a composite of both good news and bad news," said Richard Ross, professor of student ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and spokesperson for the international True Love Waits campaign.
"About the best news is that teens who once accounted for 50 percent of unwed births now represent only 24 percent," Ross said. "I am sure the condom crowd will want to take most of the credit for this drop, but the facts argue otherwise."
Actually, no one will want to take credit for this, because if you go here and look at Table 4 (PDF), you'll see that the number of teenage births also went up (from 343,670 to 348,934). They just make up a smaller percentage of the total because adult out-of-wedlock births make up a much larger share of the total.
And by the way, why are there so many out-of-wedlock births among young adults now? Could it be because so many young women had abstinence-only sex education in high school, and it just gets harder and harder to sustain abstinence once the peer pressure wears off (and harder and harder to avoid pregnancy when you've been told that using contraception will certainly lead you to hell and might kill you)?
It's good to see The New York Times reporting on the forged Niger yellowcake documents (even if the story is buried on page A24 in the print edition):
Italy's spymaster identified an Italian occasional spy named Rocco Martino on Thursday as the disseminator of forged documents that described efforts by Iraq to buy uranium ore from Niger for a nuclear weapons program, three lawmakers said Thursday....
The information about Iraq's desire to acquire the ore, known as yellowcake, was used by the Bush administration to help justify the invasion of Iraq, notably by President Bush in his State of the Union address in January 2003. But the information was later revealed to have been based on forgeries.
...this was the first time his role was formally disclosed by the intelligence agency....
This, of course, is the tall tale Joe Wilson was sent to debunk. It's recently been the subject of a three-part series in Italy's La Repubblica (read translations of the three parts here, here, and here).
I'm intrigued by the non-denial denial near the end of the Times story:
La Repubblica said General Pollari had held a meeting on Sept. 9, 2002, with Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser. Mr. Hadley, now the national security adviser, has said that he met General Pollari on that date, but that they did not discuss the Niger-Iraq issue.
"Nobody participating in that meeting or asked about that meeting has any recollection of a discussion of natural uranium, or any recollection of any documents being passed," Mr. Hadley told a briefing on Wednesday in Washington. "And that's also my recollection."...
Hmmmm. Why does he very carefully say "natural uranium" wasn't discussed? I'm no expert, but I see that this glossary defines "natural uranium" as "Uranium [a]s found in nature, containing [0].7 percent of uranium-235, 99.3 percent of uranium-238, and a trace of uranium-234," while defining "yellowcake" as "A concentrate produced during the milling process that contains 80 percent uranium oxide...." So it may be technically correct to say that "natural uranium" wasn't discussed even if yellowcake was discussed.
(Just as it may be technically correct to say that Bill Clinton never had "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky.)
As for Hadley's claim that no documents were exchanged, Part II of the La Repubblica series suggests that the forged documents had already been shown to the CIA station chief in Rome and (probably more important) to the less skeptical Brits, in the person of Sir Richard Dearlove of MI6. So there might have been no need to take along an extra copy for the Hadley meeting.
(Here's the transcript of Hadley's briefing on Wednesday. The denial is no broader than what's contained in the Times quote of Hadley; he never says outright that "that they did not discuss the Niger-Iraq issue," as the Times claims.)
****
I should also point out that Part III of the La Repubblica series focuses on the Hadley-Pollari meeting and the fact that it took place a day after a Judith Miller story in The New York Times on Iraq's attempt to acquire aluminum tubes allegedly for nuclear purposes. It's possible that this was all that was discussed -- tubes, not yellowcake.
This, by the way, is one of the most interesting parts of the series -- the revelation that Pollari never said he knew precisely what the tubes were for, and it wasn't WMDs:
Pollari keeps his mouth shut. He doesn't reveal what he knows about the aluminum tubes, which are the source of so much concern (or even enthusiasm) within the Bush Administration. The shame is that those 7075-T6 tubes--900 millimeters long, 81 millimeters in diameter, 3.3 millimeters thick--are well-known hardware to the Italian Army. They are 81-mm rocket artillery shells used in the Medusa air-to-ground missile defense system installed on Italian Army and Navy helicopters. In reality, the Iraqis are merely attempting to reproduce weaponry with which they became familiar during the long years of economic, military and nuclear cooperation between Rome and Baghdad. (Iraq's top army and air force officers trained in Italy during the 1980's). Saddam's General Staff needs to duplicate them, so to speak, because their inventory is stockpiled outdoors and is now corroded. That was the reason behind the new anodized aluminum tube purchases.
Why does Pollari not utter a word? If you ask Greg Thielmann, ex-chief of the State Department Intelligence Service, he'll tell you: But seriously, haven't you yet understood why the chief of Italian military intelligence did not provide us with any indication that would have allowed us to definitively discard the notion that the tubes would be used in someone's nuclear program? Well, I have an idea for you. SISMI, like the CIA and the entire Anglo-Saxon intelligence community, is ready and willing to satisfy the hawks in the US Administration.
Italy's spymaster identified an Italian occasional spy named Rocco Martino on Thursday as the disseminator of forged documents that described efforts by Iraq to buy uranium ore from Niger for a nuclear weapons program, three lawmakers said Thursday....
The information about Iraq's desire to acquire the ore, known as yellowcake, was used by the Bush administration to help justify the invasion of Iraq, notably by President Bush in his State of the Union address in January 2003. But the information was later revealed to have been based on forgeries.
...this was the first time his role was formally disclosed by the intelligence agency....
This, of course, is the tall tale Joe Wilson was sent to debunk. It's recently been the subject of a three-part series in Italy's La Repubblica (read translations of the three parts here, here, and here).
I'm intrigued by the non-denial denial near the end of the Times story:
La Repubblica said General Pollari had held a meeting on Sept. 9, 2002, with Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser. Mr. Hadley, now the national security adviser, has said that he met General Pollari on that date, but that they did not discuss the Niger-Iraq issue.
"Nobody participating in that meeting or asked about that meeting has any recollection of a discussion of natural uranium, or any recollection of any documents being passed," Mr. Hadley told a briefing on Wednesday in Washington. "And that's also my recollection."...
Hmmmm. Why does he very carefully say "natural uranium" wasn't discussed? I'm no expert, but I see that this glossary defines "natural uranium" as "Uranium [a]s found in nature, containing [0].7 percent of uranium-235, 99.3 percent of uranium-238, and a trace of uranium-234," while defining "yellowcake" as "A concentrate produced during the milling process that contains 80 percent uranium oxide...." So it may be technically correct to say that "natural uranium" wasn't discussed even if yellowcake was discussed.
(Just as it may be technically correct to say that Bill Clinton never had "sexual relations" with Monica Lewinsky.)
As for Hadley's claim that no documents were exchanged, Part II of the La Repubblica series suggests that the forged documents had already been shown to the CIA station chief in Rome and (probably more important) to the less skeptical Brits, in the person of Sir Richard Dearlove of MI6. So there might have been no need to take along an extra copy for the Hadley meeting.
(Here's the transcript of Hadley's briefing on Wednesday. The denial is no broader than what's contained in the Times quote of Hadley; he never says outright that "that they did not discuss the Niger-Iraq issue," as the Times claims.)
****
I should also point out that Part III of the La Repubblica series focuses on the Hadley-Pollari meeting and the fact that it took place a day after a Judith Miller story in The New York Times on Iraq's attempt to acquire aluminum tubes allegedly for nuclear purposes. It's possible that this was all that was discussed -- tubes, not yellowcake.
This, by the way, is one of the most interesting parts of the series -- the revelation that Pollari never said he knew precisely what the tubes were for, and it wasn't WMDs:
Pollari keeps his mouth shut. He doesn't reveal what he knows about the aluminum tubes, which are the source of so much concern (or even enthusiasm) within the Bush Administration. The shame is that those 7075-T6 tubes--900 millimeters long, 81 millimeters in diameter, 3.3 millimeters thick--are well-known hardware to the Italian Army. They are 81-mm rocket artillery shells used in the Medusa air-to-ground missile defense system installed on Italian Army and Navy helicopters. In reality, the Iraqis are merely attempting to reproduce weaponry with which they became familiar during the long years of economic, military and nuclear cooperation between Rome and Baghdad. (Iraq's top army and air force officers trained in Italy during the 1980's). Saddam's General Staff needs to duplicate them, so to speak, because their inventory is stockpiled outdoors and is now corroded. That was the reason behind the new anodized aluminum tube purchases.
Why does Pollari not utter a word? If you ask Greg Thielmann, ex-chief of the State Department Intelligence Service, he'll tell you: But seriously, haven't you yet understood why the chief of Italian military intelligence did not provide us with any indication that would have allowed us to definitively discard the notion that the tubes would be used in someone's nuclear program? Well, I have an idea for you. SISMI, like the CIA and the entire Anglo-Saxon intelligence community, is ready and willing to satisfy the hawks in the US Administration.
Roadside bombs get Pentagon's attention
--CNN headline
U.S. will train troops against roadside bombs
--Detroit Free Press
This is only happening now?
****
And yes, they're still feeding us what my late uncle used to call "happy horseshit." From a State Department news story:
The only remaining effective tool that the Iraqi insurgency has against coalition forces is the improvised bomb, says Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita.
Once U.S. and coalition forces find a way to eliminate improvised explosive devices (IEDs), "it's over," he told reporters at a November 3 Defense Department briefing.
Good grief.
--CNN headline
U.S. will train troops against roadside bombs
--Detroit Free Press
This is only happening now?
****
And yes, they're still feeding us what my late uncle used to call "happy horseshit." From a State Department news story:
The only remaining effective tool that the Iraqi insurgency has against coalition forces is the improvised bomb, says Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita.
Once U.S. and coalition forces find a way to eliminate improvised explosive devices (IEDs), "it's over," he told reporters at a November 3 Defense Department briefing.
Good grief.
Thursday, November 03, 2005
OK, don't take this too seriously -- I'm not sure I believe it myself. Maybe it's not even theoretically possible. But here goes.
When I read the Washington Post article about Karl Rove this morning, my first thought was: Who benefits from this? Who benefits from telling the Post that there's debate in the White House about whether Rove is a liability? At National Review's Corner, John Podhoretz provided an answer:
...The essence of the story is that Karl Rove needs to go because he's made life difficult for [Scott] McClellan. You have to figure, therefore, that the story was leaked or sanctioned by McClellan, a fact that is telegraphed clumsily by a series of pro-McClellan sentences....
But surely McClellan knows -- hell, thousands of people who don't work in the White House know -- that Bush administration hates damaging leaks. So why would McClellan blab, or urge others to blab, when he could be so easily fingered as the source of the blabbing?
So I'm asking myself, half-seriously: Is Rove behind this story?
Recall this classic dirty trick from one of Rove's early campaigns:
Think back to the eve of the '86 Texas gubernatorial race debates, when Bill Clements was in free fall in the polls against Mark White, and suddenly the media's attention was yanked away from the debate and diverted to news that Clements campaign consultant Rove's office had been bugged. The Houston Post's Glenn Smith immediately smelled a rat and suspected that Rove had bugged his own office and had called in the FBI.... White lost the election.
In that case, Rove committed a transgression against himself and got his nemesis blamed for it. That's what I'm saying might have happened here -- Rove encouraged "mid-level staffers" and others to speak in McClellan's defense and say what a liability Rove is -- knowing what Bush's reaction would be.
As Podhoretz says:
The thing is that Bush hates such things. The other thing is that press secretary Scott McClellan's messy fingerprints are all over the WaPo story, as even Bush will be able to see.
Yup. Bush will blow his stack. Bush will blame Scotty. And Rove's status will improve significantly.
Just a cockamamie theory.
When I read the Washington Post article about Karl Rove this morning, my first thought was: Who benefits from this? Who benefits from telling the Post that there's debate in the White House about whether Rove is a liability? At National Review's Corner, John Podhoretz provided an answer:
...The essence of the story is that Karl Rove needs to go because he's made life difficult for [Scott] McClellan. You have to figure, therefore, that the story was leaked or sanctioned by McClellan, a fact that is telegraphed clumsily by a series of pro-McClellan sentences....
But surely McClellan knows -- hell, thousands of people who don't work in the White House know -- that Bush administration hates damaging leaks. So why would McClellan blab, or urge others to blab, when he could be so easily fingered as the source of the blabbing?
So I'm asking myself, half-seriously: Is Rove behind this story?
Recall this classic dirty trick from one of Rove's early campaigns:
Think back to the eve of the '86 Texas gubernatorial race debates, when Bill Clements was in free fall in the polls against Mark White, and suddenly the media's attention was yanked away from the debate and diverted to news that Clements campaign consultant Rove's office had been bugged. The Houston Post's Glenn Smith immediately smelled a rat and suspected that Rove had bugged his own office and had called in the FBI.... White lost the election.
In that case, Rove committed a transgression against himself and got his nemesis blamed for it. That's what I'm saying might have happened here -- Rove encouraged "mid-level staffers" and others to speak in McClellan's defense and say what a liability Rove is -- knowing what Bush's reaction would be.
As Podhoretz says:
The thing is that Bush hates such things. The other thing is that press secretary Scott McClellan's messy fingerprints are all over the WaPo story, as even Bush will be able to see.
Yup. Bush will blow his stack. Bush will blame Scotty. And Rove's status will improve significantly.
Just a cockamamie theory.
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY: YEAH, BUSH RUNS A GULAG. GOOD FOR HIM.
I guess it's OK now to compare the Bush administration to the worst dictators of modern times, as long as you say that borrowing the tactics those tyrants used is a good thing:
The Good Gulag
We expect our government to go all-out to prevent another 9-11. So the news we're holding dozens of al-Qaida terrorists in secret overseas compounds where they can be interrogated effectively is good indeed....
More than 100 suspected terrorists may be detained in these prisons, including some 30 key al-Qaida inmates confined to isolated conditions. Some of the latter group are housed in a former Soviet-era prison compound in Eastern Europe -- undoubtedly part of the infamous Gulag and the slave-labor camp systems that extended throughout the Soviet Union and into Eastern Europe....
Clearly, it's a wartime innovation for which architects in the Bush administration and the intelligence community are to be commended....
In weeks and months to come, accusations against the White House regarding the supposed unmasking of the CIA's Valerie Plame are going to abound. We'd do well to remember that in the immediate aftermath of a barbaric attack on our homeland, this administration knew the best place to keep rabid terrorists: the Gulag.
Yeah, so what if we can't demonstrate that many of these prisoners are "rabid terrorists," or are terrorists at all? So what if some of them can't be "interrogated effectively" anymore because previous interrogations killed them? Hope those jackboots taste good, fellas.
I guess it's OK now to compare the Bush administration to the worst dictators of modern times, as long as you say that borrowing the tactics those tyrants used is a good thing:
The Good Gulag
We expect our government to go all-out to prevent another 9-11. So the news we're holding dozens of al-Qaida terrorists in secret overseas compounds where they can be interrogated effectively is good indeed....
More than 100 suspected terrorists may be detained in these prisons, including some 30 key al-Qaida inmates confined to isolated conditions. Some of the latter group are housed in a former Soviet-era prison compound in Eastern Europe -- undoubtedly part of the infamous Gulag and the slave-labor camp systems that extended throughout the Soviet Union and into Eastern Europe....
Clearly, it's a wartime innovation for which architects in the Bush administration and the intelligence community are to be commended....
In weeks and months to come, accusations against the White House regarding the supposed unmasking of the CIA's Valerie Plame are going to abound. We'd do well to remember that in the immediate aftermath of a barbaric attack on our homeland, this administration knew the best place to keep rabid terrorists: the Gulag.
Yeah, so what if we can't demonstrate that many of these prisoners are "rabid terrorists," or are terrorists at all? So what if some of them can't be "interrogated effectively" anymore because previous interrogations killed them? Hope those jackboots taste good, fellas.
I can confirm what Atrios posted last night: Al Franken's The Truth (with Jokes) hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list in its first week out; Michelle Malkin's Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild is nowhere to be found. I don't know if she'll still be absent on the next list, but that's the story right now. (The Times will post the new list in the Books section on Sunday night.)
Is a commentator at a right-leaning Web site calling for the murder of Tom DeLay's prosecutor?
You decide:
Ronnie Earle, the district attorney from Travis County in Texas, finally has made his strongest case for removing a political operative from office -- himself.
Yep, time to go, Ronnie.
Mr. Earle's brand of political prosecution makes you want to sing "Goodbye Earl," the Dixie Chicks' tune about abusive men....
Here are some of the lyrics to "Goodbye Earl":
...Well she finally got the nerve to file for divorce
She let the law take it from there
But Earl walked right through that restraining order
And put her in intensive care
Right away Mary Anne flew in from Atlanta
On a red eye midnight flight
She held Wanda's hand as they
Worked out a plan
And it didn't take 'em long to decide
That Earl had to die
Goodbye Earl
Those black-eyed peas
They tasted all right to me Earl
You're feelin' weak
Why don't you lay down
And sleep Earl
Ain't it dark
Wrapped up in that tarp Earl...
So the girls bought some land
And a roadside stand
Out on Highway 109
They sell Tennessee ham
And strawberry jam
And they don't
Lose any sleep at night 'cause
Earl had to die...
Is that what our columnist thinks should happen to Ronnie Earle?
You know, a lot of right-wingers are worked up these days because Steve Gilliard, who's black, depicted a black Republican Senate candidate as Sambo on his blog. Whatever the merits of that, this seems a wee bit worse.
You decide:
Ronnie Earle, the district attorney from Travis County in Texas, finally has made his strongest case for removing a political operative from office -- himself.
Yep, time to go, Ronnie.
Mr. Earle's brand of political prosecution makes you want to sing "Goodbye Earl," the Dixie Chicks' tune about abusive men....
Here are some of the lyrics to "Goodbye Earl":
...Well she finally got the nerve to file for divorce
She let the law take it from there
But Earl walked right through that restraining order
And put her in intensive care
Right away Mary Anne flew in from Atlanta
On a red eye midnight flight
She held Wanda's hand as they
Worked out a plan
And it didn't take 'em long to decide
That Earl had to die
Goodbye Earl
Those black-eyed peas
They tasted all right to me Earl
You're feelin' weak
Why don't you lay down
And sleep Earl
Ain't it dark
Wrapped up in that tarp Earl...
So the girls bought some land
And a roadside stand
Out on Highway 109
They sell Tennessee ham
And strawberry jam
And they don't
Lose any sleep at night 'cause
Earl had to die...
Is that what our columnist thinks should happen to Ronnie Earle?
You know, a lot of right-wingers are worked up these days because Steve Gilliard, who's black, depicted a black Republican Senate candidate as Sambo on his blog. Whatever the merits of that, this seems a wee bit worse.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
OK, ignore my gloom and doom from earlier this week -- if Bush is at 35% in the new CBS/New York Times poll, then the ship is taking on water faster than the Bushies can bail. The poll was conducted Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday -- mostly after Bush moved to change the subject from the Libby indictments -- and I guess it's not working. This is the one thing that still bugs me, though:
COMPARED TO MOST PEOPLE IN PUBLIC LIFE, BUSH & HIS ADMINISTRATION'S HONESTY IS...
Bush Administration
More 20%
About same 35%
Less 31%
George W. Bush
More 39%
About same 27%
Less 29%
Poll respondents don't think his administration is all that honest, but they still think he's a straight shooter. Why does that perception persist?
COMPARED TO MOST PEOPLE IN PUBLIC LIFE, BUSH & HIS ADMINISTRATION'S HONESTY IS...
Bush Administration
More 20%
About same 35%
Less 31%
George W. Bush
More 39%
About same 27%
Less 29%
Poll respondents don't think his administration is all that honest, but they still think he's a straight shooter. Why does that perception persist?
If you read the long Washington Post article about the CIA's secret network of torture prisons, in all likelihood, like Barbara at the Mahablog, you'll be struck by the administration's aura of sadism -- torture is ineffective, but they just seem to like it.
But don't overlook those other hallmarks of the Bush era -- bumbling incompetence, a pathological inability to plan ahead, and a willingness to do anything, however counterproductive, if it pisses off career government employees who actually know what they're talking about:
...the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.
"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy," said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What are we going to do with them afterwards?' "
****
... the CIA began sending suspects it captured in the first month or so after Sept. 11 to its longtime partners, the intelligence services of Egypt and Jordan.
A month later, the CIA found itself with hundreds of prisoners who were captured on battlefields in Afghanistan. A short-term solution was improvised. The agency shoved its highest-value prisoners into metal shipping containers set up on a corner of the Bagram Air Base, which was surrounded with a triple perimeter of concertina-wire fencing. Most prisoners were left in the hands of the Northern Alliance, U.S.-supported opposition forces who were fighting the Taliban.
"I remember asking: What are we going to do with these people?" said a senior CIA officer. "I kept saying, where's the help? We've got to bring in some help. We can't be jailers -- our job is to find Osama."
Then came grisly reports, in the winter of 2001, that prisoners kept by allied Afghan generals in cargo containers had died of asphyxiation....
****
The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But ... the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.
The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. "They've got many, many more who don't reach any threshold," one intelligence official said.
Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach...
There's a little bit of Brownie in whatever they do, even when they're torturing people.
But don't overlook those other hallmarks of the Bush era -- bumbling incompetence, a pathological inability to plan ahead, and a willingness to do anything, however counterproductive, if it pisses off career government employees who actually know what they're talking about:
...the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.
"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy," said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What are we going to do with them afterwards?' "
****
... the CIA began sending suspects it captured in the first month or so after Sept. 11 to its longtime partners, the intelligence services of Egypt and Jordan.
A month later, the CIA found itself with hundreds of prisoners who were captured on battlefields in Afghanistan. A short-term solution was improvised. The agency shoved its highest-value prisoners into metal shipping containers set up on a corner of the Bagram Air Base, which was surrounded with a triple perimeter of concertina-wire fencing. Most prisoners were left in the hands of the Northern Alliance, U.S.-supported opposition forces who were fighting the Taliban.
"I remember asking: What are we going to do with these people?" said a senior CIA officer. "I kept saying, where's the help? We've got to bring in some help. We can't be jailers -- our job is to find Osama."
Then came grisly reports, in the winter of 2001, that prisoners kept by allied Afghan generals in cargo containers had died of asphyxiation....
****
The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But ... the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.
The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. "They've got many, many more who don't reach any threshold," one intelligence official said.
Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach...
There's a little bit of Brownie in whatever they do, even when they're torturing people.
House Republican Vice Chairman Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) distributed a glossy "member profile" of DeLay last week, gushing about DeLay's role in foster parenting, his run-in with an errant quail hunter, his love of jazz and his affections for his bichons fris[é]s , Baily and Taylor, and his miniature dachshund, Scooter.
--Washington Post today
One other thing I probably should tell you, because if I don't they'll probably be saying this about me, too. We did get something, a gift, after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it.
--Vice President Richard M. Nixon, speech to the nation, September 23, 1952
(Via The Plank.)
--Washington Post today
One other thing I probably should tell you, because if I don't they'll probably be saying this about me, too. We did get something, a gift, after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore, saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog, in a crate that he had sent all the way from Texas, black and white, spotted, and our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it.
--Vice President Richard M. Nixon, speech to the nation, September 23, 1952
(Via The Plank.)
HEY, I NOMINATED ONE NON-CRONY -- WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?
The Bush administration on Tuesday named Donald E. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission and a former Texas banker with long ties to President Bush, to coordinate the federal role in rebuilding the parts of the Gulf Coast devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita....
... In the 1990's, as governor of Texas, Mr. Bush named Mr. Powell to be chairman of the Board of Regents at Texas A&M University. Mr. Powell was one of Mr. Bush's leading fund-raisers in the 2000 presidential campaign.
... he has no direct experience overseeing large-scale rebuilding efforts of the sort being undertaken by officials in Louisiana and Mississippi....
--New York Times
Qualifications? We don't need no stinking qualifications.
Powell's FDIC, by the way, made at least one interesting hiring decision itself:
The chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. refused to comment Thursday on the agency's dealings with a former Tyco International official said to have received thousands of dollars in perks from the troubled company.
"We're not going to comment on that," FDIC Chairman Donald Powell said in response to a question from a reporter on Capitol Hill.
Judith Czelusniak, a former public affairs director for Tyco, apparently was hired as the FDIC's new press director earlier this year but has not yet started in the job – which has been vacant since last summer. She has an agency e-mail account, a telephone number, a listing in the personnel directory and a nameplate on the press director's office door, as first reported by Dow Jones Newswires last week....
Tyco's former chief executive, L. Dennis Kozlowski, is on trial on massive theft charges in state court in Manhattan, in one of several high-profile cases stemming from the business scandals of two years ago. He and ex-chief financial officer Mark Swartz are accused of stealing $600 million from the industrial conglomerate.
According to trial testimony by Tyco's former personnel director, Czelusniak was among a group of employees who enjoyed special perks – in her case, $18,500 a month paid by the company for her New York City apartment, as well as hundreds of dollars in monthly parking fees and another $4,815 a month for an apartment in Florida.
Because this story proved so embarrassing, Powell's FDIC announced that Czelusniak would not, in fact, be hired as press director.
...Oh, but she was retained as an FDIC consultant.
Yeah, this hurricane thing ought to work out really well.
The Bush administration on Tuesday named Donald E. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission and a former Texas banker with long ties to President Bush, to coordinate the federal role in rebuilding the parts of the Gulf Coast devastated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita....
... In the 1990's, as governor of Texas, Mr. Bush named Mr. Powell to be chairman of the Board of Regents at Texas A&M University. Mr. Powell was one of Mr. Bush's leading fund-raisers in the 2000 presidential campaign.
... he has no direct experience overseeing large-scale rebuilding efforts of the sort being undertaken by officials in Louisiana and Mississippi....
--New York Times
Qualifications? We don't need no stinking qualifications.
Powell's FDIC, by the way, made at least one interesting hiring decision itself:
The chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. refused to comment Thursday on the agency's dealings with a former Tyco International official said to have received thousands of dollars in perks from the troubled company.
"We're not going to comment on that," FDIC Chairman Donald Powell said in response to a question from a reporter on Capitol Hill.
Judith Czelusniak, a former public affairs director for Tyco, apparently was hired as the FDIC's new press director earlier this year but has not yet started in the job – which has been vacant since last summer. She has an agency e-mail account, a telephone number, a listing in the personnel directory and a nameplate on the press director's office door, as first reported by Dow Jones Newswires last week....
Tyco's former chief executive, L. Dennis Kozlowski, is on trial on massive theft charges in state court in Manhattan, in one of several high-profile cases stemming from the business scandals of two years ago. He and ex-chief financial officer Mark Swartz are accused of stealing $600 million from the industrial conglomerate.
According to trial testimony by Tyco's former personnel director, Czelusniak was among a group of employees who enjoyed special perks – in her case, $18,500 a month paid by the company for her New York City apartment, as well as hundreds of dollars in monthly parking fees and another $4,815 a month for an apartment in Florida.
Because this story proved so embarrassing, Powell's FDIC announced that Czelusniak would not, in fact, be hired as press director.
...Oh, but she was retained as an FDIC consultant.
Yeah, this hurricane thing ought to work out really well.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
For those keeping score at home:
The story about Wal-Mart's new anti-critic "war room" was on the front page of today's New York Times.
The story about Wal-Mart's appalling arrangement with the Labor Department (which agreed to give the company more than two weeks' notice before inspecting any store for child labor law violations) was on page A14.
Oh well, what do I expect? The latter story was about trivial stuff -- you know, illegal and immoral behavior by America's biggest employer. The "war room" story is about what's really important -- big business fighting back!
The story about Wal-Mart's new anti-critic "war room" was on the front page of today's New York Times.
The story about Wal-Mart's appalling arrangement with the Labor Department (which agreed to give the company more than two weeks' notice before inspecting any store for child labor law violations) was on page A14.
Oh well, what do I expect? The latter story was about trivial stuff -- you know, illegal and immoral behavior by America's biggest employer. The "war room" story is about what's really important -- big business fighting back!
I'm usually Mr. Glass Is Half Empty, but I'm thoroughly impressed with Harry Reid's move to force the Senate into a closed-door session or Iraq -- go read AMERICAblog's most recent posts, particularly this one, to which I have nothing to add. Except maybe this: Harry Reid for President?
Ezra Klein bemoans the selection of Samuel Alito, and, in comments, an interesting exchange follows in comments betwen Ezra and a right-winger called Captain Toke:
Toke:
Bush (R) - 59,834,866 votes
Kerry (D) - 56,373,514 votes
The voters already decided which direction the court should go.
Ezra:
Hey Toke -- tell me again what happened to Harriet Miers? Social Security privatization? Bush did win the election, right?
Toke:
Ezra,
I am glad you brought up Harriet Miers. Harriet Miers went against Bush's campaign promise on judges, so she withdrew(under pressure).
We don't blindly follow our leadership....
Ezra:
But..but -- you said this was about Bush's vote totals! And Miers is who he wanted to pick! And oh my god, I'm so confused...
Toke:
Like I said before, conservatives don't blindly follow Republican leaders or ignore their misdeeds "for the good of the party". I know it is foreign to you guys(lack of intellectual honesty), but when Republican leaders make a mistake, we let them know....
Conservatives don't walk in lockstep with the Republican leadership "for the good of the party".
This is precisely what I told you when anger at the Miers pick was beginning to peak:
The mistake Bush made here was thinking that he's the president of the United States. That's not what the base thinks. The base didn't vote for Bush -- the base voted for the conservative movement. To the base, Bush is president only insofar as he embodies the conservative movement.
Toke:
Bush (R) - 59,834,866 votes
Kerry (D) - 56,373,514 votes
The voters already decided which direction the court should go.
Ezra:
Hey Toke -- tell me again what happened to Harriet Miers? Social Security privatization? Bush did win the election, right?
Toke:
Ezra,
I am glad you brought up Harriet Miers. Harriet Miers went against Bush's campaign promise on judges, so she withdrew(under pressure).
We don't blindly follow our leadership....
Ezra:
But..but -- you said this was about Bush's vote totals! And Miers is who he wanted to pick! And oh my god, I'm so confused...
Toke:
Like I said before, conservatives don't blindly follow Republican leaders or ignore their misdeeds "for the good of the party". I know it is foreign to you guys(lack of intellectual honesty), but when Republican leaders make a mistake, we let them know....
Conservatives don't walk in lockstep with the Republican leadership "for the good of the party".
This is precisely what I told you when anger at the Miers pick was beginning to peak:
The mistake Bush made here was thinking that he's the president of the United States. That's not what the base thinks. The base didn't vote for Bush -- the base voted for the conservative movement. To the base, Bush is president only insofar as he embodies the conservative movement.
BOX CUTTERS, PART 2
ABC News reports:
The U.S. military has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on armored vehicles in Iraq, but insurgents are adapting their tactics and using more sophisticated and deadlier devices.
Pentagon documents obtained by ABC News say new "explosively formed projectiles," or shaped charges, pose an "extremely serious threat" to U.S. troops....
The documents show how these particular shaped charges -- which were pioneered by the Lebanese Hezbollah militant group -- are constructed from a six-to-nine-inch steel pipe filled with explosives. One end of the pipe is sealed, and a curved copper or steel plate is fitted to the other end, forming a weapon that amounts to a giant bullet....
The force from the explosives can send the projectile more than a mile per second, penetrating armor up to four inches thick at a range of more than 100 yards....
"Basically you are taking about a molten jet of metal coming in one side of the vehicle, going straight through everything in its path in the vehicle," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.com, a Virginia-based defense, space and intelligence policy group....
So, let's see: While we've been spending $7 or $8 billion a year on a high-tech fantasy called missile defense, in the real world our soldiers are literally being torn limb from limb by explosives jammed into a steel pipe -- and we're saying, "Sorry, this is just too advanced for us to defend against!"
Box-cutters. It's box-cutters all over again. Why can't the clowns running this administration defend Americans from what actually poses a threat? Why did the insurgency in Iraq, and all the tactics insurgency implies, catch these guys flatfooted? Why does it still seem to be catching them flatfooted, after more than two years?
ABC News reports:
The U.S. military has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on armored vehicles in Iraq, but insurgents are adapting their tactics and using more sophisticated and deadlier devices.
Pentagon documents obtained by ABC News say new "explosively formed projectiles," or shaped charges, pose an "extremely serious threat" to U.S. troops....
The documents show how these particular shaped charges -- which were pioneered by the Lebanese Hezbollah militant group -- are constructed from a six-to-nine-inch steel pipe filled with explosives. One end of the pipe is sealed, and a curved copper or steel plate is fitted to the other end, forming a weapon that amounts to a giant bullet....
The force from the explosives can send the projectile more than a mile per second, penetrating armor up to four inches thick at a range of more than 100 yards....
"Basically you are taking about a molten jet of metal coming in one side of the vehicle, going straight through everything in its path in the vehicle," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.com, a Virginia-based defense, space and intelligence policy group....
So, let's see: While we've been spending $7 or $8 billion a year on a high-tech fantasy called missile defense, in the real world our soldiers are literally being torn limb from limb by explosives jammed into a steel pipe -- and we're saying, "Sorry, this is just too advanced for us to defend against!"
Box-cutters. It's box-cutters all over again. Why can't the clowns running this administration defend Americans from what actually poses a threat? Why did the insurgency in Iraq, and all the tactics insurgency implies, catch these guys flatfooted? Why does it still seem to be catching them flatfooted, after more than two years?
From Scotland's Daily Record:
THE son of a 7/7 suicide bomb victim will shun a memorial service today because he blames Tony Blair for his dad's death.
Families of those killed in the London terrorist atrocities will join the Prime Minister, the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury and representatives of the emergency services for the service at St Paul's Cathedral.
Seven-year-old Ruby Gray - whose dad Richard was killed in the Aldgate blast - will present the Queen with a posy.
But her brother Adam, 11, refuses to attend because he thinks Blair made London a terror target by going to war on Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein.
Adam's mum Louise, from Ipswich - who will be at the service - said: "He doesn't want to be part of anything that has Tony Blair there.
"He is very angry with the bombers but he also blames the war and the Government." ...
Let's see: What do you suppose would happen to this kid if he lived in America? Would GOP opposition researchers be digging up details of embarrassing confrontations with bullies in the gym locker room and peddling them to the Drudge Report and talk radio? Would Free Republic and Lucianne.com members be discovering his e-mail and home address and launching a cyberstalking and harassment campaign against him?
THE son of a 7/7 suicide bomb victim will shun a memorial service today because he blames Tony Blair for his dad's death.
Families of those killed in the London terrorist atrocities will join the Prime Minister, the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury and representatives of the emergency services for the service at St Paul's Cathedral.
Seven-year-old Ruby Gray - whose dad Richard was killed in the Aldgate blast - will present the Queen with a posy.
But her brother Adam, 11, refuses to attend because he thinks Blair made London a terror target by going to war on Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein.
Adam's mum Louise, from Ipswich - who will be at the service - said: "He doesn't want to be part of anything that has Tony Blair there.
"He is very angry with the bombers but he also blames the war and the Government." ...
Let's see: What do you suppose would happen to this kid if he lived in America? Would GOP opposition researchers be digging up details of embarrassing confrontations with bullies in the gym locker room and peddling them to the Drudge Report and talk radio? Would Free Republic and Lucianne.com members be discovering his e-mail and home address and launching a cyberstalking and harassment campaign against him?
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