Yesterday I meant to link to this diary entry from dmsilev at Daily Kos, which reproduces some of the reactions at Free Republic to a news story about a mostly British group of passengers who refused to board a plane until a couple of "suspicious" men "of Asian or Middle Eastern appearance" were removed. You can go to the Kos link for a large helping of the racist bilge, or go directly to the Free Republic thread for the sewage in its raw form, but here's a sample:

Unpleasant enough to fly with Islamofascists, but what of those who in our dark times keep frightening beards, and yammer away in Arabic? On a plane?

It would take them under one minute to shave their bears. To act live civilized human beings should require no extra burden on their part.

Given our recent history, people everywhere should give extra attention to people who harbor an unusual attraction to goats, or clad their women in army surplus tents.

****

If I'm a Muslim and I insist on wearing a beard and a diaper on my head while I read the Koran out loud, perhaps I shouldn't board an EL AL jet.

Eventually we get to a story from a woman whose husband -- a firefighter of Puerto Rican descent who works in the New York area and volunteered for the World Trade Center cleanup after 9/11 -- is sometimes profiled. Sample response:

This is what people are supposed to do. I am sorry if your husband is harrassed, but these are the times we live in.

And my favorite:

if her husband were to buy a cowboy hat and some boots noone would ever suspect him of being a terrorist ever again.

(Excuse me: If you have a driver's license from somewhere in the New York area and you show up at a New York airport in a cowboy hat and boots, that would make me suspicious of you. Or at least suspicious of your sanity. We don't dress like that up here, folks.)

The Kos diary entry has much more -- but I went to the Freep thread and found one interesting exchange dmsilev didn't quote. A Freeper named livius tells a story of being in Spain in the summer of 2001:

On one occasion, I saw a very diverse group of people board the trains at various stations - one was a semi-military looking light-skinned ME looking man with close-cropped hair, dressed in good business casual (pressed khakis); 2 were ME looking guys who were not as well dressed, and 1 was a black man I assumed to be Senegalese, with a briefcase of the type normally used for selling counterfeit watches.... Later, I discovered that Mohammed Atta had been in that same place, at that same time, and I have always been convinced that the reason none of the investigators have been able to find out where he met his co-conspirators in Spain is because he met them on the train. They assembled one by one or two, discussed their issue for about three stops, and then left one by one.

Atta was in Spain at approximately that time, though whether he was one of the people our Freeper saw is, to say the least, open to debate.

But what I love is the response from a Georgia Freeper named ga medic:

Your story made the hairs on my arm stand up. How creepy that you were possibly that close to such a monster. I always want to think that someone so evil would be obvious, and you would be able to tell right away. I know that it isn't this way in reality. That story will give me nightmares.

This is what gives these people nightmares -- that "evil" people don't have the common decency to give off Evil Cooties.

They're not talking about the anxiety that security screeners can spot, as part of behavioral profiling. They're talking about evil. They "want to think" it's visible.



And yet they also want Muslims to dress "like civilized human beings" -- i.e., like Westerners. But wouldn't that more effectively conceal the Evil Rays?

And what do we do if those sneaky Evil Muslims start hiding their Evil by showing up at airports in boots and cowboy hats?

****

UPDATE: For even more appalling hate, see the fifth comment here.

****

Almost forgot the footnote: Kos link via Booman Tribune.

Well, this is gratifying -- if it's real:

In an election for the United States Senate in Virginia today, 8/21/06, incumbent Republican George Allen edges Democrat challenger James Webb 48% to 45%, according to an exclusive SurveyUSA poll conducted for W*USA-TV in Washington, DC.

Since an identical SurveyUSA poll released 6/28/06, Allen has lost 8 points and Webb has gained 8 points. Allen's lead has shrunk from 19 points to 3 points.

Interviewing for this poll began 8/18/06, one week after Allen singled out a Webb campaign worker at an Allen rally. Allen has lost support across all demographic groups....

Allen, of course, singled out a Webb campaign worker of Indian descent and referred to him using the obscure racial slur "Macaca."

I worry, however, that the polls might be exaggerating the shift in voter opinion somewhat. It seems possible that we may be looking at a variation of this phenomenon:

..."The evidence is that whites who turn down pollsters have less positive views toward minorities. There's the problem," said Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. This would mean folks with more racist views, ergo folks who would be less likely to support a minority candidate, would be harder to enlist in a poll....

You may remember some of the biracial election survey boo boos of the past: the 1989 mayoral contest between David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani in New York; Douglas Wilder versus Marshall Coleman in the Virginia gubernatorial race that same year; and the grandfather of them all, Tom Bradley's unforeseen loss to George Deukmejian in the 1982 California gubernatorial race.

In each, pre-election polls showed the minority candidate with a bigger lead than eventually materialized when votes were cast. No one really knows exactly why and where polls go wrong in biracial contests....

Perhaps whites, feeling a need to be politically correct, lie to pollsters, saying they will support the minority candidate when they have no intention of doing so....

Now that this is a race partially about race (or at least ethnicity), something along these lines could be happening in the polls -- though I hope not.

PAGING MARGARET ATWOOD AGAIN

Well, at least he didn't say women don't have souls:

Sunday school teacher dumped for being female

WATERTOWN, New York (AP) -- The minister of a church that dismissed a female Sunday School teacher after adopting what it called a literal interpretation of the Bible says a woman can perform any job -- outside of the church.

The First Baptist Church dismissed Mary Lambert on August 9 with a letter explaining that the church had adopted an interpretation that prohibits women from teaching men. She had taught there for 54 years.

The letter quoted the first epistle to Timothy: "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent."

The Rev. Timothy LaBouf, who also serves on the Watertown City Council, issued a statement saying his stance against women teaching men in Sunday school would not affect his decisions as a city leader in Watertown, where all five members of the council are men but the city manager who runs the city's day-to-day operations is a woman.

"I believe that a woman can perform any job and fulfill any responsibility that she desires to" outside of the church, LaBouf wrote Saturday....

The Rev has issued a lengthy statement justifying not only the dismissal but his overall work as pastor:

...As most of you are aware when I arrived at First Baptist Church the congregation was dwindling and the church was headed for eventual closure. In a short period of time we began to see tremendous growth in the church which made me and many others feel thankful and blessed.  In a short period of time classrooms that did not have children in them for a number of years were filling up with children, other parts of the building that had not been used in years were now needing to be utilized as a result of our growth.... The majority of our membership was genuinely excited about the growth and new hope for the future of the church, however, as you recall there were some who were unhappy with new members joining the church, changes that were being made and my performance in general as pastor....
 
Why does this sound so familiar to me? Oh yeah -- it reminds me of what another preacher said last year:

After several days of avoiding media contact, Chan Chandler granted an exclusive interview to Baptist Press Tuesday afternoon, May 10.

Chandler and the church where he is pastor -- East Waynesville Baptist Church, Waynesville, N.C. -- have drawn considerable media attention in recent days as nine members publicly alleged Chandler had them ousted from church membership based on their choice of political parties and candidates....

Chandler admits citing Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's views on abortion and homosexuality in one sermon....

Chandler said the church had undergone several months of disharmony, some of which he speculates was the result of his preaching about Christians' responsibility to be reflective of the Bible in the way that they vote. And more hesitatingly, he also speculated that, since the church had baptized almost 30 people and was growing under his leadership, then those who had been in church leadership positions for years may have felt threatened....

Yeah, it's never really about the preacher going all wingnutty. The problem is always a few disgruntled backstabbers in the congregation who resent the preacher for being so darn successful. And then the press blows it all out of proportion. (Here's an AP story about the Chandler incident.)

And besides, it's none of the public's damn business anyway.

LaBouf:

I was saddened to learn via the Newswatch50 website that once again a private church matter was made public by Ms. Lambert.

Chandler:

Citing verses from 1 Corinthians 6, which he says require the church to keep its disagreements out of the public eye, Chandler is deeply grieved that the rest of the world is now privy to some of the church's behavior.

Yeah, it's all our fault. And if some preacher someday wants to turn the calendar back a couple more centuries and start burning heretics at the stake, well, that's none of our business either, and if we disagree we're just damn nosy liberals.

Does anyone else find the timing of this awfully convenient?

BRIDGEPORT, W.Va., Aug. 20 — A legal battle over a painting of Jesus hanging in a high school here is continuing, even though the painting was stolen last week.

Two civil liberties groups, Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia, filed suit in June to remove the painting, "Head of Christ," saying it sent the message that the public school endorsed Christianity as its official religion.

... The Christian Freedom Fund raised more than $150,000 for a defense fund, including $6,700 raised by students at the school. The board selected the Alliance Defense Fund, a national legal organization founded in part by the Christian group Focus on the Family, was selected as its lead counsel.

... early Thursday the painting, which had been at Bridgeport High School for 37 years, was stolen from a wall outside the principal's office. The theft was recorded by security cameras, but the thief hid his face....

How amazing -- the big guns of the religious Right get seriously involved, and the forces of Satanic secularism commit their most demonic deed yet at exactly the same moment:

The police are still looking for man who stole that painting Thursday morning. Police released surveillance video on Thursday from inside the high school. Friday, the police have released more video, this time from the middle school....

Meanwhile, at a special meeting Friday morning, the board chose the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund....

What are the odds? Why, you'd almost think someone involved in defending the painting was trying to generate national attention and sympathy (and possibly money) -- if you didn't know that these were God's chosen people.

The cops have surveillance video of the thief and "15 pieces of evidence," including DNA, but the thief carefully conceals himself throughout the tape.

By the way, we all concern ourselves with whether Muslim immigrants are adjusting to our pluralist society, but maybe it's towns like Bridgeport we ought to be worried about:

Tokens of Christianity, including crosses and religious mottos, can be found in schools and government buildings all over Harrison County. The amenities in a women’s restroom at the Board of Education offices include a leatherbound pocket copy of the New Testament, with Psalms and Proverbs.

No surprise there, of course -- in much of this country, we're a hell of a lot closer to Gilead than we are to Americastan.

ON BEDWETTING

It's fun to laugh at right-wingers and accuse them of losing bladder control every time there's a story that suggests a new terrorist attack, especially when one story after another proves to be a false alarm -- but I'm not sure what we're really seeing on the right is fear. At least it's not just fear.

So what else is involved?

Well, think about it: What been getting up right-wingers' noses lately almost more than the Islamofascistoswarthoterrorist threat itself?

If you've been paying attention to the righties this summer, you know the answer: They hate it when a Muslim appears on the scene of carnage in a Muslim neighborhood and draws attention to the fact that there's been carnage -- and they're particularly incensed when there's somewhat of a discrepancy between what's reported and what actually happened. They've spent much of the summer picking away at every photo and video of bombed-out buildings in Lebanon, looking for evidence that every one of them includes exaggeration of the harm done.

Gosh, they couldn't possibly be so angry about exaggeration of threats because they themselves have a tendency to exaggerate a threat, could they? Why, that would be sort of like projection, wouldn't it? Right-wingers couldn't possibly be susceptible to that, could they?

Yep, that's what they're doing -- something very, very similar to what they say has been done in Lebanon. The righties say phony Lebanese corpses are being waved at cameras -- while what the righties wave at their readers is every airliner false alarm and lone-nut incident they can shoehorn into their Vast Islamofascist Conspiracy.

It's not exactly the same, but it's close enough -- grab your audience by the lapels and max out the appeal to anger. Would the righties be so obsessed with this in the Middle East if they weren't trying to make this kind of emotional appeal themselves?

WHY JOHN McCAIN WON'T BE THE GOP PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE IN 2008

From the article in today's New York Times about the GOP's abandonment of the Republican Senate candidate in Connecticut, Alan Schlesinger:

Senator McCain ... was one of the few who has said he would support the Republican nominee in the race....

His nominal support for the party candidate has more to do with wanting to avoid alienating conservatives, one adviser said, than with actually supporting Mr. Schlesinger.

Could he possibly be more oblivious? Could he possibly believe that this is how you please conservative Republicans? Could he possibly not know that they love Lieberman?

He really doesn't know. And that's why he won't get through the primaries in '08 -- he doesn't speak Wingnut.

HOUSEGUEST TIME

I think posting will be light this weekend.

Wow, this really seems to be out of control -- citing a story in the Winninpeg Free Press, a poster at Democratic Underground tells us this:

3 Doctors returning to Winnipeg on a connecting flight from Denver were forced off their flight earlier this week. One was Muslim. All were dark skinned.

A passenger in front of them who was drunk at the time, claimed he heard one of them state "I have control of the aisle now" They were then questioned by the FBI and TSA security let them go shortly after checking things out. However they missed their flight and still had to overnight in Denver because their ordeal with no compensation. These passengers want a full investigation through the government on this....

I can't read the full story -- the firewall for non-subscribers at the Free Press is like the old Berlin Wall -- but a search yields the start of the story:

MDs forced off plane
THREE young Winnipeg doctors -- one a Muslim -- were kicked off a flight home from Denver earlier this week after a passenger falsely identified them as a terrorist threat. Dr. Ahmed Farooq, a fourth-year radiology resident, and two physician friends want an apology from United Airlines and assurances staff will be better trained to identify genuine threats. Winnipeg Centre MP Pat Martin has also asked federal Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day to raise the issue with his counterpart in Washington. "It's the most egregious example of this device of racial profiling I know about among my constituents," said Martin. "These are valuable, upstanding members of our society. Civil rights shouldn't be collateral damage in this whole fight against terrorism." But officials with United Airlines say they are obliged to take any allegations threatening passenger safety seriously, particularly in a period of heightened tension like the one following last week's discovery of a British terrorist plot targeting transatlantic ...

I get that when I search "doctors" and when I search "drunk" -- so I suspect the DU summary is accurate.

If it is, that's just wonderful -- we now take the word of a drunk over the word of three doctors, if one of the doctors is a dirty filthy Mooooslim.

(There's also a brief Toronto Sun story here. The Sun says they were returning from San Francisco, where they'd been taking a course.)

You know what? That plot in England is referred to as a "failed plot," but it's not a "failed plot." Those guys succeeded. They've got us chasing our tails and running around half-crazy. They've got us pissing off law-abiding Muslims like this doctor, which has a ripple effect -- to younger Muslims in Canada and the U.S. and Europe, every story like this is one more sign that we hate all of them. The British plot worked like a charm.

Which is ironic, because, as this grimly funny and wonderfully detailed article makes clear, the plot as we've had it described to us -- a plot to mix TATP in flight -- was virtually impossible to pull off.

Either the plotters had no idea what long odds they faced, which means they're dumber than we realize, or they knew and didn't care, because their real bomb was a fear bomb -- which hit the center of its target.

Or, worse, they really were stupid, and they got us anyway.

****

Right-wingers would surely respond to the above by pointing to this:

Two suitcases containing bottles of gasoline, propane gas and a detonating device that were found abandoned in German regional trains last month were bombs primed to go off and kill a "high number'' of people, police said....

A suitcase found abandoned on a regional train from Aachen to Hamm in western Germany was turned in by the train's conductor in Dortmund. It contained a propane gas bottle, three bottles filled with gasoline and a detonating device, the Federal Prosecutor's Office said Aug. 1. On the same day another piece of luggage was found on another regional train from Moenchengladbach to Koblenz about 75 miles to the South. It too contained a propane gas bottle....

But watching for unattended packages on public transportation is smart. Forcing doctors on their way home from taking a course to deplane on the word of a drunk? Not so smart.

****

UPDATE: Read the full Free Press story in comments. It's as bad as I thought. (Thanks, H.S.)

****

UPDATE: Via slothropia, here's a story on the incident from the CBC (which includes a photo of the decidedly not menacing-looking Dr. Farooq).

Early results of the current "daily poll" at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler, with the first option highlighted (click to enlarge):



This is a JDAM.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know -- it's a joke.

Still, it's nice to see that the Right's eliminationist fantasies don't stop at the water's edge.

ANDREW YOUNG SWITCHES PARTIES

Shilling for Wal-Mart? Bashing immigrants? Qualifying his apology for immigrant-bashing by insisting that he doesn't actually believe what he said, but also that his remarks were accurate?

When did Andy Young become a Republican?

The civil rights leader Andrew Young, who was hired by Wal-Mart to improve its public image, resigned from that post last night after telling an African-American newspaper that Jewish, Arab and Korean shop owners had "ripped off" urban communities for years, "selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables."

In the interview, published yesterday in The Los Angeles Sentinel, a weekly, Mr. Young said that Wal-Mart "should" displace mom-and-pop stores in urban neighborhoods.

"You see those are the people who have been overcharging us," he said of the owners of the small stores, "and they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they've ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it's Arabs."

Mr. Young ... apologized for the comments and retracted them in an interview last night. Less than an hour later, he resigned as chairman of Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group created and financed by the company to trumpet its accomplishments.

"It's against everything I ever thought in my life," Mr. Young said. "It never should have been said. I was speaking in the context of Atlanta, and that does not work in New York or Los Angeles."...

Explaining his comments about Koreans, Jews and Arabs, Mr. Young said he was referring to the history of retail ownership in the neighborhood where he lives in southwestern Atlanta.

"Almost everyone who has come into my community has moved in, made money and moved out and moved up," he said. "That process is still continuing." ...

Wow, it's been a hell of a month for racist speech. Mel Gibson. George Allen. (By the way, the deepest research into Allen's "Macaca" insult is from Jeffrey Feldman at Frameshop; Feldman finds the word at quite a few racist bulletin boards, in reference to people such as Rodney King.) The Weekly Standard cover that depicts Al Sharpton as a chauffeur. Marty Petertz's "Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters have stumped for Mr. Lamont. As I say, we have been here before." And, in case you missed it, there was what Tramm Hudson, a Republican who's running for the House seat being vacated by Katherine Harris. said to a Christian Coalition meeting:

"I grew up in Alabama. I understand, uh, I know from experience, that blacks are not the greatest swimmers or may not even know how to swim."

Where does that come from? That's not just Al Campanis said -- it's an incredibly widespread belief. I don't get it.

INCOHERENT

Bush yesterday:

... I understand the nature of this enemy. This is an enemy that has an ideology. Some people say, well, this may be a law enforcement matter. No, these are people that are politically driven. They've got motives. They do not believe in freedom. They don't believe in freedom of religion; they don't believe in freedom of dissent; they don't believe in women's rights. They have a backward view of the world. And yet, they want to impose their vision on other people. That's what they're trying to do. And the United States of America must never retreat and let them have their way. (Applause.)

What does any of that have to do with whether or not this is a law enforcement matter?

...A different kind of war requires a different kind of approach. It means we better have good intelligence in order to be able to figure out the designs of the enemy before they strike.

The old style of war didn't require good intelligence?

... I know it's hard for Americans to believe this, but the enemy that attacked us before has got people that want to act like them, are maybe taking instruction from -- I can't tell you whether this plot we disrupted was al Qaeda. I'm not going to say that unless I'm certain it was. But it's the kind of activities that al Qaeda has done in the past, and that is to place suiciders on airplanes to destroy innocent life, trying to shake the will of the United States, trying to send a political message....

Is there anyone in America who finds it hard to believe that there are some people in the world who want to commit Al Qaeda-style attacks?

Bonus quote:

You know, when you have resentment and anger, that breeds hatred; that breeds recruiting grounds for people to become a suicider. Imagine the mentality of somebody willing to kill for an ideology that just doesn't -- is not hopeful, and yet I believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that parts of the world breed resentment.

Clear as day.

DON'T READ THIS POST

I know you all hate it when I talk like this, so maybe you should just skip this post. Let me vent, and then we can get back to the stuff we actually agree on.

As I see it, we're dealing with a building collapse -- massive numbers of injuries, a desperate need to treat large numbers of wounded. That building collapse is GOP control of Congress. It's an emergency. It's a crisis. We need all the trauma teams we can possibly muster at the scene.

The problem is, some of our best medical personnel are preoccupied giving Connecticut a boob job.

I'll put the metaphor out of its misery after this, but what's going on in Connecticut was not medically necessary. Joe Lieberman is a Democrat, despite what I said in the last post -- or he would have been, if barely, had this Lamont thing never happened. If he hadn't received a challenge, here's what his reelection campaign would have consisted of: "Hi, I'm Joe Lieberman, and I'm running for reelection." But with Lamont in the race, it's become a crusade. A Republican crusade.

Yes, he'd have been an evil Judas "Fox News Democrat" if he'd been reelected without a challenge. He'd have regularly undermined the party. But while the Republicans have nobody who's both as disloyal and as prominent as Lieberman, they have once-in-a-while gadflies -- Specter, McCain, Hagel, Graham, Grassley, Voinovich, plus the nearly invisible back-bencher Chafee and the polite moderates from Maine -- who collectively do about as much damage to GOP party unity as Lieberman does on his own to the Democrats. And yet the GOP still manages to control the Senate, plus the rest of the federal government.

In other words, we could have decided to endure another Lieberman term while concentrating on picking off Republicans elsewhere. He would have remained technically one of our senators -- ideally, one of our 51-plus senators.

But now we've opened the door for Rove + Co. to deliver a new message: that Lieberman is the co-leader (with Bush) of their party, the Reasonable Party. They're running on his coattails, leveraging his reputation as a moderate.

By attacking Lieberman, we've helped rejuvenate Liebermanism. I just hope we haven't rejuvenated the Republican Party in the process.

Well, there it is:

Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, running as an independent, gets 53 percent of likely voters, with 41 percent for Democratic primary winner Ned Lamont and 4 percent for Republican Alan Schlesinger, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

Among registered voters, Sen. Lieberman gets 49 percent, followed by Lamont with 38 percent and Schlesinger with 4 percent....

At this point I would like to be remembered as the guy who warned you that Lieberman was the likely frontrunner, rather than as the guy who thought the media might be turning on him.

Quinnipiac's poll director looks at Lieberman's GOP numbers -- he has 75% of the vote in a three-way race -- and says,

Sen. Lieberman's support among Republicans is nothing short of amazing.

Duh. What did we all expect? Rove + Co. have made Lieberman the most popular Republican in America.

Oh, well -- at least I didn't write this:

He probably knows right now that the day will come in late September when he will announce his withdrawal from the race. No one is going to have to talk him into it. By that time, the Democratic Party power structure will be doing its thing for Ned Lamont and Lieberman will be trailing by double digits.

It won't be a hard decision for Lieberman. He will drop out to avoid career-ending humiliation.

NICOLE Kidman has made a public stand against terrorism.

The actress, joined by 84 other high-profile Hollywood stars, directors, studio bosses and media moguls, has taken out a powerfully-worded full page advertisement in today's Los Angeles Times newspaper.

It specifically targets "terrorist organisations" such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine....

--Herald Sun (Australia)

Right-wing blogger Bruce Kesler has a question:

The question is why I have to get this news from an Australian newspaper, when Nicole Kidman and 84 other Hollywood heavyweights take a strong stand against Hezbollah and Hamas? I just checked google news and there isn't another story on this out there.

Er, because no intelligent person really gives a crap what these people think? One way or the other?

Look, I'm a lefty. I'll admit I've been known to enjoy it when a lefty entertainer makes a political statement I agree with to a big audience. I'm happy if someone writes a really good lefty song. And I certainly understand why political candidates take lefty entertainers' money.

But I don't get my opinions from entertainers. I don't take what they say all that seriously.

The only people who do are you guys.

You actually read Barbra Streisand's semi-literate blog. You care when Sean Penn goes on some embarrassing politicized junket. You still pay attention to Jane Fonda.

You're the guys who can't tell the difference between entertainers and politicians. The only actor to be elected president? A Republican. The only actor who's currently a governor? A Republican. NFL football player running for governor? Republican.

I could go on.

You're stagestruck. You're Hollywood-obsessed. You're jealous. Come on -- admit it.

****

UPDATE: Julia (and her readers) list a few GOP entertainers I left out.

And one more: the junior senator from Kentucky, who's apparently lost a few miles off his mental fastball.

THE FIRST MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

The number of polio cases in Afghanistan has increased substantially in recent months, health officials said Monday. They attributed the rise to growing violence in the south that has hampered vaccination.

Health officials said they had identified at least 25 cases of polio so far this year, compared with 9 in all of 2005; a 26th case is suspected.

Dr. Abdullah Fahim, an adviser to the health minister, said inoculation campaigns across the country since 1995 had brought the annual number of cases into the single digits. The inoculations were conducted during the wars of the 1990's and under the Taliban government, which was ousted in late 2001. Officials had seen the reduction as a sign that polio might be eliminated in Afghanistan....

--New York Times yesterday

Opium cultivation in Afghanistan has hit record levels -- up by more than 40 percent from 2005 -- despite hundreds of millions in counternarcotics money, Western officials told The Associated Press....

A Western anti-narcotics official in Kabul said about 370,650 acres of opium poppy was cultivated this season -- up from 257,000 acres in 2005 -- citing their preliminary crop projections. The previous record was 323,700 acres in 2004, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime....

"It is a significant increase from last year ... unfortunately, it is a record year," said a senior U.S. government official based in Kabul, who like the other Western officials would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive topic....

--AP today

POSTFEMINISM IS A NIGHTMARE FROM WHICH WE MIGHT BE ABLE TO AWAKEN IF THE NEW REPUBLIC HADN'T SLIPPED US THAT ROHYPNOL

I woke up this morning, certain it was 2006, and now I learn that it's the mid-1990s all over again and Camille Paglia is rampant once more, declaring all sorts of people feminist heroes, the only grounds for disqualification being that no one is eligible who's an actual feminist.

Only this time it's not Paglia -- it's The New Republic, in the person of a young female journalist named Elspeth Moore, who for six months half a decade ago ago was "the only liberal" working on a red-state assembly line, an experience that now makes her cheer hate speech as long as it's delivered by a gal with sass:

I love Ann Coulter because, in her, I see a loudmouth on the assembly line, fighting not to be squished and whittled and boxed into the shape Washington seems to think fits a girl just right.

A couple of Coulter lines Ms. Moore regards as empowering:

* On the First Amendment: "An excuse for overweight women to dance in pasties and The New York Times to commit treason." ("Just completely terrible, I know. But I have to admit, I giggled.")

* "Al Gore? Total fag." ("I admit it, I snickered. What can I say--her timing was great.")

And attacking the four 9/11 widows who pushed for the creation of the 9/11 Commission? To die for:

It is a little absurd to hold up a person as an expert judge of the 9/11 Commission Report, for example, just because she lost a loved one. Liberals do tend to do that kind of thing, and it makes us look like weenies.

I'll let Lance Mannion handle that:

Yes, it would be absurd, if those women had not made themselves experts on the 9/11 Commission Report, if they had not in fact been the ones who pushed and pushed and pushed until there was a 9/11 Commission to issue a report, if it had not been the case that if those women hadn't worked as hard and as intelligently and expertly as they did, then George Bush and Company would have gotten their way and there'd have been no Commission, no report, no investigation at all, even the half-baked one that we had.

I'll add that the widows in question, far from being tools of the Democratic Party, made themselves into experts on their own, over a long period of time -- here's the story -- and only in 2004 attached themselves to the Kerry campaign.

I'll also remind you that the Bush campaign held up a 9/11 victim's teenage daughter as an expert on the effectiveness of George W. Bush's foreign policy, in a campaign ad that ran nearly 30,000 times.

That's what I despise about this argument -- the fact that Coulter has given the "moderate" mainstream press mass amnesia with regard to the fact that the GOP is happy to put up "unassailable" spokespeople. People such as Debra Burlingame, the sister of a 9/11 pilot who wrote this anti-Kerry op-ed for The Wall Street Journal and otherwise backed Bush in 2004. Or, earlier, a sister of a Willie Horton victim who campaigned for Bush the Elder in 1988.

Moore has half a point about the sexism of some criticism of Coulter -- we ought to be able to do better in critiquing her than crude schoolyard vulgarisms. But is that all it takes to make someone a hero? That people call her bad names?

And on that subject, this is just dumb:

She makes nice liberals think bad thoughts--particularly about whether they would have sex with her.

I can only speak for this not-so-nice liberal, but the only "bad thought" of this kind she inspires in me is that she's trying, desperately, to make me think about whether I'd have sex with her. You know what? It's not working.*

(Looking for Coulter-lust? Look no further. Also go here.)

Hat tip to Shakespeare's Sister, particularly the commenter who got me past the TNR subscription firewall.

****

*JUST TO CLARIFY: She is trying, and sometimes she seems to resent the self-imposed effort. See her recent Jay Leno interview, specifically the part about a third of the way through in which she talks somewhat wearily about "wear[ing] sexy dresses" and growing her hair long.

What if Republicans win 49 Senate seats -- and Joe Lieberman wins?

That's the scenario you have to keep in mind when weighing responses to Lieberman's independent bid -- because under those circumstances, Lieberman is free to declare that he'll caucus with the Republicans, thus allowing them to keep a majority (50 senators plus the constitutionally designated Senate president, VP Cheney, as a tiebreaker).

And the Republicans are free to offer him all sorts of juicy entitlements (e.g., choice committee posts, perhaps including a chairmanship) to get him to do just that.

And he has every motivation to accept such offers if Democrats follow through on this:

...If he continues to alienate his colleagues, Lieberman could be stripped of his seniority within the Democratic caucus should he defeat Democrat Ned Lamont in the general election this November, according to some senior Democratic aides....

Yes, that article (from The Hill) goes on to note that Lieberman

would slot Lieberman to take over as chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the panel primarily responsible for investigating the executive branch.

That wouldn't be good -- but I'd rather have Lieberman there and Democrats in charge of all the other committees than continued GOP control of all the committees.

Don't tell me flatly, "Lamont's gonna win." Not when there's been one poll and Joe leads. And don't tell me he's promised to stick with the Democrats. He'll sell any switch as a "purge." (Maybe he'll even say, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left me.")

Or maybe he'll see no point in taking his Senate seat at all, and take the long-rumored Cabinet position from a grateful Bush administration. (Hugh Hewitt, who might actually reflect administration thinking, proposes Joe for secretary of transportation -- all right-wingers still hate Norman Mineta.* No, Joe won't replace Rumsfeld, who's going to hang on till the bitter end.) And if Lieberman steps down, GOP governor Jodi Rell picks his successor until a special election is held.

I want Lieberman to lose, but I want to keep the lines of communication open. Let me invoke LBJ: I'd rather have Lieberman inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.

And remember: His treatment at the hands of Democrats will be compared to Arlen Specter's treatment at the hands of the GOP -- and he got to be Judiciary Committee chair.

****

*(UPDATE: Yeah, I know -- Mineta's now resigned. But click the Hewitt link -- wingnuts still think of the DoT as polluted by Mineta cooties. See also, e.g., Michelle Malkin.)

President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was ... frustrated that the new Iraqi government -- and the Iraqi people -- had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday....

..."The president wants the people in Iraq to get more on board to bring success," [said one person who attended the meeting].

...More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq....

One participant in the lunch, Carole A. O'Leary, a professor at American University who is also doing work in Iraq with a State Department grant, said Mr. Bush expressed the view that "the Shia-led government needs to clearly and publicly express the same appreciation for United States efforts and sacrifices as they do in private." ...

--from tomorrow's New York Times

Translation: "Listen, you ungrateful bastards, it's time for you to get on the stick and start making me look good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know -- 'We're in a civil war! We have a hundred violent deaths a day!' Well, cry me a river. We have an election coming up in America, and it's a referendum on me, and I'm dying here. So what are you gonna do for me?"

(Elsewhere in the Times: "July appears to have been the deadliest month of the war for Iraqi civilians, according to figures from the Health Ministry and the Baghdad morgue.... An average of more than 110 Iraqis were killed each day in July, according to the figures. The total number of civilian deaths that month, 3,438, is a 9 percent increase over the tally in June and nearly double the toll in January.")

Two years ago,* Bush at least refrained from making demands on individuals or institutions he himself had personally destroyed (at least to the best of my knowledge). On the other hand, he had the gall to try to strong-arm the Vatican:

On his recent trip to Rome, President Bush asked a top Vatican official to push American bishops to speak out more about political issues, including same-sex marriage, according to a report in the National Catholic Reporter, an independent newspaper.

In a column posted Friday evening on the paper's Web site, John L. Allen Jr., its correspondent in Rome and the dean of Vatican journalists, wrote that Mr. Bush had made the request in a June 4 meeting with Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state. Citing an unnamed Vatican official, Mr. Allen wrote: "Bush said, 'Not all the American bishops are with me' on the cultural issues. The implication was that he hoped the Vatican would nudge them toward more explicit activism."...

It really is all about him, isn't it?

****

Ah, but there's one more lovely detail in the Times article about the meeting:

...Vali R. Nasr, an expert on Shia Islam, said the Pentagon meeting appeared to be an effort to give White House, Pentagon and State Department officials better insight into Iraq's religious and ethnic mix.

"They wanted new insight, so they could better understand the arena in which they are making policy," said Mr. Nasr, author of "The Shia Revival." ...

They still need insight into Iraq's religious and ethnic mix now? Nearly six years after they started planning for the Iraq invasion? No wonder this war is a quagmire.

****

*UPDATE: In case it's not clear, that was two years ago just as the '04 campaign was beginning to heat up.

SO WHAT DO YOU THINK...

Joe Lieberman is going to say in his prime-time speech at the 2008 Republican convention?

Shorter Christopher Hitchens:

In my day, we had good terrorists -- not like these bums today! Hey, you Islamofascists, get off my lawn!