Nero's Fiddle

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2008-05-30T10:57:00.002-04:00

Gas, guns, God and a free oil change

2008-05-27T14:15:00.003-04:00

High gas prices and a collapse in the credit sector have combined to make life miserable for car dealers, particularly those who made their living off of high-margin, low-MPG trucks and SUVs. Now that the gravy train has derailed, exploded and contaminated everything in a 50-mile radius, the uncertainty of the future has brought a tinge of wild-eyed insanity to the ad campaigns of some dealers (which were pretty lunatic even in good times).

Take these guys in California who have decided to turn selling cars into a jihad of sorts:

But did you know that 86% of Americans say they believe in God? Since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians, who believe in God, we at Kieffe & Sons Ford wonder why we don't tell the other 14% to sit down and shut up. I guess I just offended 14% of the people who are listening to this message. Well, if that is the case then I say that's tough, this is America folks, it's called free speech. None of us at Kieffe & Sons Ford is afraid to speak out. Kieffe & Sons Ford on Sierra Highway in Mojave and Rosamond, if we don't see you today, by the grace of God, we'll be here tomorrow.

While Kieffe and Sons is busy depriving the infidels of their ability to move about and undermine the highways of America, another dealership in Missouri is taking a more direct approach to defending our way of life: offering a free handgun with every purchase.

Imagine what these two could do together. They could even go nationwide and cater to the "warrior for Jesus packing heat" demographic. You may want to take that Flying Spaghetti Monster emblem off your car until some of this blows over.

When even Chris Matthews can't abide the stupidity

2008-05-16T09:20:00.004-04:00

When the President not-so-subtly accused Obama of seeking "the false comfort of appeasement," displaying an unsurprising lack of awareness of what "appeasement" actually is, the conservative talking heads (in this case, shouting heads) fell right into line on cable news shows.

Chris Matthews decided to see how deep the argument of one of these third-string Rush wanna-bes actually went. Turned out it was the kiddie pool. Watch below, if you have a strong stomach for seeing annoying blowhards get thoroughly humiliated on national TV:

Of course, Matthews then proceeds to misdate the Cole attack as being during the Bush presidency. This is what passes for "expert opinion" in our media these days.

The Divine Right of Combustion

2008-05-07T14:09:00.002-04:00

If you already believe in the fairy tale that gas will always be $1.50 a gallon forever and ever, then this might seem like a reasonable response to shrinking supply and rising demand:

"Lord, come down in a mighty way and strengthen us so that we can bring down these high gas prices," Twyman said to a chorus of "amens".

"Prayer is the answer to every problem in life... We call on God to intervene in the lives of the selfish, greedy people who are keeping these prices high," Twyman said on the gas station forecourt in a neighborhood of Washington that, like many of its residents, has seen better days.

"Lord, the prices at this pump have gone up since last week. We know that you are able, that you have all the power in the world," he prayed, before former beauty queen Rashida Jolley led the group in a modified version of the spiritual, "We Shall Overcome".

"We'll have lower gas prices, we'll have lower gas prices..." they sang.

Too bad Jesus isn't around to turn water into premium unleaded. (Before long, though, we'll need divine intervention just to get the water.) Such sad days, so lacking in miracles...

The 5% solution (Updated - now 3.75%. Or maybe 0.2%)

2008-04-29T14:37:00.006-04:00

As the grumbling from the SUV-driving masses gets louder, and the media start talking about $10 a gallon gas, President Bush was drug into the Rose Garden this morning to announce his bold plan for averting energy-based economic catastrophe: blame Congress.

Americans are concerned about energy prices, and I can understand why. I think the last time I visited with you it was like -- I said it was like a tax increase on the working people. The past 18 months, gas prices have gone up by $1.40 per gallon. Electricity prices for small business and families are rising, as well.

I've repeatedly submitted proposals to help address these problems. Yet time after time, Congress chose to block them. One of the main reasons for high gas prices is that global oil production is not keeping up with growing demand. Members of Congress have been vocal about foreign governments increasing their oil production; yet Congress has been just as vocal in opposition to efforts to expand our production here at home.

They repeatedly blocked environmentally safe exploration in ANWR. The Department of Energy estimates that ANWR could allow America to produce about a million additional barrels of oil every day, which translates to about 27 millions of gallons of gasoline and diesel every day. That would be about a 20-percent increase of oil -- crude oil production over U.S. levels, and it would likely mean lower gas prices. And yet such efforts to explore in ANWR have been consistently blocked.

A million barrels a day? Whoopee! The US uses about 20 million barrels a day, so ANWR represents a whopping 5% increase in supply (assuming we don't export anything). That'll break the back of the problem, yes sir. We could probably cut consumption by that much if everyone made sure their tires were properly inflated.

And that million barrels assumes you could bribe any of the oil companies to go drill for oil there in the first place. They don't seem particularly interested:

A Bush adviser says the major oil companies have a dimmer view of the refuge's prospects than the administration does. "If the government gave them the leases for free they wouldn't take them," said the adviser, who would speak only anonymously because of his position. "No oil company really cares about ANWR," the adviser said, using an acronym for the refuge, pronounced "an-war."

Wayne Kelley, who worked in Alaska as a petroleum engineer for Halliburton, the oil services corporation, and is now managing director of RSK, an oil consulting company, said the refuge's potential could "only be determined by drilling."

"The enthusiasm of government officials about ANWR exceeds that of industry because oil companies are driven by market forces, investing resources in direct proportion to the economic potential, and the evidence so far about ANWR is not promising," Mr. Kelley said.

But who cares about that? The President has decided that ANWR represents the solution to high gas prices:

And yet this is a litmus test issue for many in Congress. Somehow if you mention ANWR it means you don't care about the environment. Well, I'm hoping now people, when they say "ANWR," means you don't care about the gasoline prices that people are paying.

(At least I think that's what he's saying. Even after eight years, his mangled syntax still flummoxes me.)

An extra million barrels of oil a day (which is an optimistic figure in the first place) isn't going to matter when the world consumes 80 million barrels a day and demand from India and China will drive it to 100 million or more soon. (Assuming the supply is there -- most people who know about these things don't think we'll ever manage to produce even 90 million barrels a day.)

Anyone who claims the solution to high energy prices is to be found in expanding petroleum production isn't being serious. At best, you can maintain the status quo. At worst, you're squandering resources that should be used for developing non-petroleum energy sources.

Telling people that gas prices can be brought back to turn-of-the-century levels is pure and simple negligence of duty. People should get used to the idea that cheap oil is over, and their lives are going to change in ways they're not going to like. The longer we live in denial, the worse the wake-up call will be.

Later edit: It's even dumber than I thought. According to this analysis, even if ANWR had been opened up in 2002, we wouldn't be getting anything out of it until 2011 at the earliest, and even then it would only be a measly 40,000 barrels a day. (Or about 0.2% of current consumption.) By 2020 we'd get a rip-roaring 780,000 barrels a day, only 3.75% of the *current* US consumption of 20 million per day. (This would slash our import dependence from 62% all the way down to 60%.)

That oil will be useless in 2020, for one of two reasons. Either (a) we'll have successfully cut our consumption (either via science or non-catastrophic economic collapse) thus making that trickle of oil unnecessary, or (b) we'll have collapsed so hard under the weight of oil shortages that there's no economy left to fuel, and the additional oil will get exported to the capital in China.

Housekeeping note: Over the next few weeks, I'll be dropping the ISP that provides my current web hosting, so many of the pretty pictures will go away temporarily. I'll move some/most of them to new digs and change the links as I can. I know you read for the articles anyway (at least, that's what everyone says).

Catblogging returns!

2008-03-19T08:32:00.002-04:00

Griz attempted to use the Douglas Adams method for divining the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything. Here's what she came up with. I think she's having us on.

Facts are stupid things

2008-03-17T14:29:00.003-04:00

Reality: 85-year-old financial institutions are being sold for pennies on the dollar, as the Fed bails out lenders who got in over their heads in the subprime morass and frantically cuts rates and pulls out Depression-era tricks to try to minimize the brutality of the recession.

Our President this morning:

[O]ur financial institutions are strong and [...] our capital markets are functioning efficiently and effectively.

Reality: Global trends of supply and demand are triggering a permanent condition of ever-increasing oil prices, which will at the very least significantly impact First World standards of living and at worst set off global economic and military turmoil.

A random American filling up her van last week:

Faith Dansby, who was putting gas in her van at a Shell station on New Circle Road, said she is coping by trying to cut down on trips, such as getting her groceries once a week rather than making multiple runs.

"As Americans, we shouldn't have to go through this," she said.

Reality: The world consists of measurable events about which we can make several useful observations subject to repeated experimentation. These useful observations, sometimes called "math" and "science," can help us solve and avoid crippling problems like the two discussed above. Things like "math" and "science" can be taught to children in "schools," thus equipping them to improve the world in the future.

Government responds to the challenge:

The bill requires public schools to guarantee students the right to express their religious viewpoints in a public forum, in class, in homework and in other ways without being penalized. If a student’s religious beliefs were in conflict with scientific theory, and the student chose to express those beliefs rather than explain the theory in response to an exam question, the student’s incorrect response would be deemed satisfactory, according to this bill.

The school would be required to reward the student with a good grade, or be considered in violation of the law. Even simple, factual information such as the age of the earth (4.65 billion years) would be subject to the student’s belief, and if the student answered 6,000 years based on his or her religious belief, the school would have to credit it as correct.

Christians and Muslims unite against a common enemy

2008-03-14T14:03:00.002-04:00

Amid all the talk of a Clash of Civilizations and all of the heated and outright murderous rhetoric (and actions) being traded between the followers of two slightly different variations on monotheism, it's heartwarming to that there's one thing that can cause Muslims and Christians to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and struggle together for common gain.

Fear of science.

War makes strange bed fellows, especially in Turkey, where a dispute over creationism vs Darwinism has created an unusual alliance between the country's Islamists and conservative Christians in the US.

Darwin's Theory of Evolution, in layman's terms, proposes that life descended from organisms through "survival of the fittest." Creationism holds that life was created by an all-knowing being, that is, God.

Creationism advocates from the US traveled to Istanbul May 2007 to meet with their counterparts, seeking to galvanize their link in the fight to bring creationism to schools and universities in their respective countries. The meeting was endorsed by Istanbul mayor Kadir Topbas, a member of the Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP).

"There are outstanding figures within Islamic theology who have participated in this discussion. There is no reason to be surprised, there is a very rich tradition," David Berlinski, keynote speaker for the meeting and an analyst for the US-based Discovery Institute, an organization that opposes what it terms "neo-Darwinism," told ISN Security Watch.

"This is a hot issue. We are in the midst of a worldwide religious revival. Historians 500 years from now will talk about the religious revival of the late 20th century and early 21st century."

The meeting appeared to be well received by the audience of college and high school students, drawn from the city's elite education institutions.

"Darwinism is, of course, against Muslim belief system as well," Ayse Sayman, a 20-year-old student at Istanbul's Bosphorus University told ISN Security Watch. "That is why it makes sense that it is debated here as well. And counter-arguments should be developed to the theory. That is why I am interested in this."

I've always said that extremist Christians and extremist Muslims are more alike than different. What I'd never considered is that they might figure that out. Shudder.

In case anyone still cares

2008-03-12T15:48:00.002-04:00

Future of America found within

Five years, 4000 American lives, many thousands of Iraqi lives, half a trillion dollars and a still-smashed country later, the US military tells us:

This study found no 'smoking gun' (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda.

At risk of boring you, let's sum up.

- No weapons of mass destruction
- No involvement in 9/11
- No links to al Qaeda
- No region-wide flowering of democracy
- No lessening of the influence of radical movements

The Iraq War represents nothing less than a colossal, criminal failure of policy and morality, a completely indelible stain on American history. Period. Can anyone suggest a single positive outcome of this adventure?

And no, having a gang of Shiite thugs hang Saddam while taunting him does not count. Yes, we ejected Saddam from power, which is in a vacuum not a bad thing. But there is not yet any evidence whatsoever that we have replaced his regime with a superior alternative. In fact, all signs point to a monumentally corrupt fundamentalist Shiite-dominated coalition that is currently being held together with a steady supply of bribes to various Sunni warlords. So deposing Saddam is not yet a positive outcome, because Iraq is not yet better off.

And yet John McCain can point to his support for the war as an asset, not a liability in his campaign. George W. Bush can claim the credibility to decree that the United States should be allowed to torture people, and that claim goes largely unchallenged. (Although torture clearly didn't help us get accurate intelligence on Iraq.) The talking heads on TV can discuss the crippled US economy as though $275 million every day isn't being siphoned into the abyss of Iraq.

In case anyone still cares.

Like punk never happened

2008-03-12T10:30:00.003-04:00

Here's noted right-wing windbag Brent Bozell filling column-inches in the Washington Post:

It is time for McCain to be Reagan.

This is what conservatives call on him to do:

McCain must present a strategy to defeat the threat of radical Islam. He needs to call on the United States to rebuild its military infrastructure, so devastated by the Clinton administration.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. It's still Clinton's fault, despite eight years of GOP rule. (One can only wonder how much "infrastructure rebuilding" could have been done with the military if we hadn't poured $500 billion down the Iraq war black hole.)

And while it's tempting to compare Reagan and McCain strictly on the basis of age (McCain would be two years older than Reagan upon taking office), the comparison falls apart pretty quickly after that. A better comparison would be to Bob Dole -- a grumpy war hero whose main claim to the Oval Office is, "It's my turn, dammit."

Like 1996, one gets the feeling that the GOP is more or less sitting this one out. Unlike 1996, when things were good and Clinton looked unbeatable, in 2008 things are rapidly devolving and I sort of suspect the Republicans would be glad to let Clinton or Obama take the fall for the next four years.

Also in the file of dubious advice from high-profile right-wing babblers, we have this from Bill Kristol in the New York Times:

Perhaps the most obvious way McCain could upend the normal dynamics of this year’s election would be a bold vice presidential choice. He could pick a hawkish and principled Democrat like Joe Lieberman. He could reach beyond the usual bevy of elected officials by tapping either David Petraeus or Raymond Odierno — the two generals who together, in an amazing demonstration of leadership and competence, turned the war in Iraq around last year. He could persuade the most impressive conservative in American public life, Clarence Thomas, to join the ticket. There are other unorthodox possibilities.

Hee hee. Really? Joe Lieberman (who, last I checked, isn't a Democrat, principled or otherwise)? Clarence Thomas?

Amazing.

Looking big by acting small

2008-03-05T15:37:00.002-05:00

That's the photo from the White House web site of Bush's endorsement of John McCain today. As far as I can tell, it's the only photo of the event on the site, therefore it's the alpha and omega of how the Administration wants you to perceive what took place.

Did they make him kiss Bush's ring, too?

AG: Torture, spying legal if POTUS says it is

2008-02-07T14:58:00.000-05:00

Can't have one without the other

OK, Americans, here's the eulogy for your system of government:

The Justice Department will not investigate whether CIA agents engaged in torture by waterboarding detainees, Attorney General Michael Mukasey said earlier.

Ditto goes for the administration's warrantless wiretapping program, Mukasey added later, when asked by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) whether he would appoint a special counsel to investigate.

The question came after Mukasey had baldly asserted that it was not a "practical view" that the president could order someone to act outside the law. Nadler wanted to know if the president hadn't done just that with his warrantless wiretapping program, which had ignored the constraints of FISA.

Well, Mukasey said, the President had ordered that on the advice of the Justice Department that it was lawful. So, just as he will not initiate an investigation of waterboarding since the DoJ had given its OK, he will also not investigate whether the warrantless wiretapping was lawful, since it was legal, because the DoJ said it was ("there are views on both sides of that" he acknowledged).

And there you have it. It is not a "practical view" that the President could ask someone to do something illegal. It is impossible for George W. Bush to break the law. He is the law.

Somewhere out there, one of the Founding Fathers just collected on a bet concerning how long it would take for the system of checks and balances they set up to be dismantled. I guessing Jefferson lost, since I'm sure he thought it would happen sooner.

Romney fights terror by quitting race

2008-02-07T14:49:00.000-05:00

Here's the Mittster announcing that he's failed to purchase the Republican nomination:

If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.

So if a Democratic victory represents a surrender to terror, what are we surrendering to if we elect the GOP?

Fed cuts lending rate by two fishes and a loaf

2008-01-23T12:11:00.000-05:00

Here's Our President announcing the "President's Advisory Council on Financial Literacy":

I have asked people from the business world, the faith world, the non-profit world, to join this council in order to come up with recommendations as to how to better educate people from all walks of life about matters pertaining to their finances and their future.

After eight years of ruinous budgets and regulatory laissez-faire, I suppose that prayer might be the best option for the average citizen.

On the other hand, perhaps this is the closest Bush has yet come to publicly acknowledging the tension between his policies and the reality-based community. Which, in light of his oddly endearing phrase "faith world," we should probably term the "real world."

Huckabee Crazy Watch: Lie Down with Dogs edition

2008-01-18T10:15:00.000-05:00

In what's becoming a series (which I hope will end with his exit from the race, please), here's the latest in radical Christian cleric Mike Huckabee's nutball observations:

Is it your goal to bring the Constitution into strict conformity with the Bible? Some people would consider that a kind of dangerous undertaking, particularly given the variety of biblical interpretations.

Well, I don’t think that’s a radical view to say we’re going to affirm marriage. I think the radical view is to say that we’re going to change the definition of marriage so that it can mean two men, two women, a man and three women, a man and a child, a man and animal. Again, once we change the definition, the door is open to change it again. I think the radical position is to make a change in what’s been historic.

That's right, folks -- according to Mike Huckabee, being in favor of gay marriage means that you also endorse pedophilia and bestiality. According to Mike Huckabee, gays are morally indistinguishable from child molesters.

A win in South Carolina will give this clown far too much clout. If that happens, I can only hope he gets smothered in the big-state primaries on Feb. 5th. He may in fact be the second-most-dangerous man running for the GOP nomination, after Rudy "Bombs Away" Giuliani.

Huckabee wants to amend Constitution to please "living God"

2008-01-15T15:13:00.000-05:00

The crazy keeps on coming from the Huckster:

"[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

I find it fascinating that the only Biblical prohibitions that the fundies seem to care about enshrining in legislation are those that have to do with sex (specifically, sex they don't approve of). Where's the anti-bacon bills? A ban on goatees and tattoos? The regulation of female head covering? How about the death penalty for proselytizing?

One can only conclude that they don't truly care about legislating God's law and are in fact obsessed with sex. Ask Larry Craig about it the next time he's in the next stall over.

6 million Jews died for Bush's foreign policy

2008-01-11T12:31:00.001-05:00

Here's our President, after visiting the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem (I'm assuming he wasn't wearing his gold-embroidered bathrobe at the time):

I would hope as many people in the world would come to this place, it would be a sobering reminder that evil exists and a call that when we find evil we must resist it.

Never mind that it makes no sense grammatically (is that even a surprise at this point?), just soak in the narcissism on display. The lesson of the Holocaust? For George W. Bush, the lesson of the Holocaust is that his preemptive war strategy is correct.

Of course, if Bush had been President in 1938, we'd probably have invaded Spain.

The President gets what he wants

2008-01-08T17:13:00.000-05:00

The Israelis are very good at sucking up:

Lights in the Old City of Jerusalem will be turned off before dawn this week so visiting US President George W. Bush can get a better view of the sun rising over its ancient walls.

Bush, who arrives in the Middle East on Wednesday for a visit lasting more than a week, had made a request to watch the sun rise over the Old City from his suite at the King David Hotel, a municipal spokesman said on Tuesday.

To make the scene more dramatic, the authorities have decided to turn off the lights illuminating the limestone walls before dawn on Thursday and Friday, the spokesman told reporters.

The gesture is just one of several that Bush's Israeli hosts will extend to the president of their main ally during his landmark three-day visit this week -- the first by a sitting US president to Israel and the Palestinian territories in nine years.

Awaiting Bush at his King David suite -- reportedly costing 2,600 dollars a night -- will be a white terry bathrobe embroidered with his name in gold, local media have reported.

Israeli television broadcast footage of the garment throughout the day on Tuesday.

And the main highway leading into Jerusalem from the west -- already plagued by traffic problems -- will be completely closed in one direction for an hour on Wednesday after Bush arrives to allow the unhindered passage of the convoy containing his hundreds-strong entourage.

Opinions differ on the antiHuck

2008-01-08T09:48:00.000-05:00

Here's Josh Marshall's take on who becomes the anti-Huckabee:

Still not looking good for Mitt tomorrow. But the final swing of the pendulum, picked up by various observers like Marc Ambinder and winger reporters like Bob Novak and others is that Romney's regrouped in the final 48 hours and could pull off a surprise by nudging ahead of McCain.

My gut tells me that McCain probably pulls through. But perhaps not.

But let's plot out this map a little further. Let's say McCain takes first tomorrow with Romney a very close second. It's close to fatal for Romney but not quite. What's more, and what you need to look at to game out the significance is what comes next. The next big fight is in South Carolina. And two new polls out today (Rasmussen and SurveyUSA) show Huckabee in a dominant position in the state. So Huckabee looks likely to take Secessionville with either McCain or Romney coming in second.

At that point you'll have to say that Huckabee, who the GOP establishment is roundly against, is the frontrunner in the campaign. And the others are going to coalesce around an anti-Huckabee candidate. It's not clear to me that McCain is a shoe-in for that role.

If the GOP can prop up Romney as the antiHuck, they'd certainly prefer to do so. If he repeatedly loses to McCain, though, it won't be easy. Tonight is vital for Romney. He'd like you to believe that a "close second" is a moral victory, but the fact is that he's assumed victory in NH for a long time and his strategy changes mightily without it. A solid win by McCain would be fatal IMO. A close win by McCain would give Romney a second chance, but there won't be a third. And a Romney win will probably turn this in to Romney vs. Huckabee, in which case the edge would have to go to Romney.

All the tired horses

2008-01-07T12:46:00.000-05:00

After months of running in place, the now-exhausted field of Presidential hopefuls have started moving forward. Here's some quick thoughts on how they're stumbling along.

DEMOCRATS:

The Dems are already winnowed to three, and Obama is looking strong.

HILLARY CLINTON: Third place in Iowa is not what was supposed to happen for Clinton, and the press is writing her off as a result. This is not entirely warranted -- the full weight of the Clinton machine should not be underestimated -- but her campaign appears to be in chaos as they struggle to switch over to underdog mode. A poor showing in NH could be fatal -- not winning in MI or FL definitely would be.

JOHN EDWARDS: Smilin' John is in about the same place he was in '04, with about the same prospects. (In fact, one could say that the whole Dem situation looks a lot like '04 between IA and NH, with Obama playing Kerry, Clinton playing Dean, and Edwards playing himself. Of interest is that the upstart and the establishment candidate have switched places.) He might do well in MI and beat Obama in SC, which would make FL and especially the 2/5 megaprimary vital. The press seems to treat Edwards as yesterday's news, saving most of their ink for the fresh blood.

BARACK OBAMA: Obama has all the momentum on the Dem side, at least if/until Clinton bows out and it becomes Edwards vs. Obama, which could possibly be a slugfest depending on how Edwards does on 2/5. If Obama wins NH convincingly, Clinton is most likely done as without her aura of inevitability she's greatly diminished as a candidate. If Obama then crushes Edwards on 2/5, Obama is the nominee.

As they sing on Gilligan's Island, "and the rest..."

BILL RICHARDSON: He'll hang on until he runs out of money, which should be in a week or two.

DENNIS KUCINICH: Nothing if not stubborn, he'll stick around for the duration and make things a bit more interesting.

MIKE GRAVEL: Dead candidate walking.

CHRIS DODD: My personal favorite has withdrawn after IA.

JOE BIDEN: Bailed after IA.

REPUBLICANS:

This is still very murky.

RUDY GIULIANI: After a spectacular December implosion, former golden boy Rudy is reduced to hoping he doesn't get too embarrassed in NH. (When your biggest PR victory of recent weeks is the revelation that the security detail for your mistress was properly paid for, you're probably not doing too well.) An also-ran until proven otherwise.

MIKE HUCKABEE: His schtick plays in Peoria (or at least next door), but whether it translates to the delegate-rich states is the big question. (I see his win in IA much like Pat Robertson's second there in '88.) Should be a relative non-factor in NH and MI, should do well in SC and FL, then will sink or swim on 2/5. Not especially popular among the GOP establishment, but puts butts in voting booths.

DUNCAN HUNTER: Comedy relief only.

ALAN KEYES: See Duncan Hunter.

JOHN MCCAIN: McCain could actually end up getting the nomination by default as voters become exasperated with the weakness of the field. Third was better than expected in IA, and a win in NH could make him the de facto anti-Huckabee. What makes this interesting is that the Republican establishment hates him (Romney is the choice of the smoke-filled room), while the press loves him. If Romney flops, seeing the GOP elite choose between McCain and Huckabee has high comedy potential.

RON PAUL: Yet another internet phenom gets dashed on the rocks of actual voting.

MITT ROMNEY: A poor showing in NH is the end of Romney. His money-driven ride in the polls is played out, and now he has to stand or fall on comparisons to the other guys. Since Romney possesses no coherent record to compare, he fares badly in that arena. A comeback is unlikely.

FRED THOMPSON: Most of the red-meat faithful who hounded poor ol' Fred to run have flocked to Huckabee, and Fred must be wondering why he bothered in the first place. Without a built-in base, Thompson's prospects are very dim.

So, after all that, it's not at all unlikely that we'll have a McCain-Obama general election, which ought to be a whole heap of fun. Stay tuned.

How crazy is Mike Huckabee?

2007-12-12T14:42:00.000-05:00

This crazy:

The Arkansas Legislature scrambled today to rewrite a bill intended to protect storm victims after Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister, objected to language describing such natural phenomena as tornadoes and floods as ''acts of God.''

Mr. Huckabee said that signing the legislation ''would be violating my own conscience'' inasmuch as it described ''a destructive and deadly force as being 'an act of God.' '' The Governor, a Republican, said the legislation was an otherwise worthy bill with objectives he shared.

Mr. Huckabee did not veto the bill but instead asked that it be recalled by the General Assembly. He suggested that the phrase ''acts of God'' be changed to ''natural disasters.''

The House of Representatives refused today to remove the offending phrase, but added the words, ''or natural disasters'' after the words ''acts of God.''

Mr. Huckabee was away from the capital, but his press secretary, Rex Nelson, said the Governor would not decide whether to accept the amended version until the Senate had considered the language.

The legislation would bar insurance companies from canceling coverage solely on the basis of claims filed after losses from storms. It was introduced before a series of tornados on March 1 killed 26 people and destroyed hundreds of houses and businesses, leaving damage in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

State Representative Dennis R. Young, a Texarkana Democrat who was the bill's sponsor in the House of Representatives, said, ''We've used the term 'act of God' in insurance since there has been insurance -- before there was insurance.''

Governor Huckabee's explained his objections in a letter to the bill's authors, saying: ''I feel that I have indeed witnessed many 'acts of God,' but I see His actions in the miraculous sparing of life, the sacrifice and selfless spirit in which so many responded to the pain of others.''

Because God would never cause a flood. That doesn't sound like something God would do at all.

Romney: Believe or else

2007-12-06T10:36:00.000-05:00

Here's the sound bite from today's big "My weird religion isn't really any weirder than your weird religion" speech from Mitt Romney:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

So this is the message he's carefully crafted for months? "Freedom requires religion?" If you don't "commune with God" you don't deserve basic rights? That sounds like something the Taliban would cook up, or Sudan (where they throw people in jail for naming teddy bears Muhammad).

And what's with the reverse? "Religion requires freedom?" Again, look at the more repressive Muslim nations -- they're religious as can be, but no one can call them "free." You're free to be a rigid follower of Sharia law, I guess, but that's about where it ends.

The rest of the speech is more of the same. Random sample:

Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.

A "believer in religious freedom" seems to be the same thing as someone "who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty." If you've never prayed to the Almighty (or failed to kneel while doing so), then you're on your own in Romney's America.

Yes, I'm exaggerating a little for effect (though Romney's sloppy wording makes it all too easy), and what Romney's spouting is mostly meaningless, of course; it's just meant to reassure the base that he'll take his orders from the voices in his head just like Bush does. (Whether or not this will help him regain the ground he's lost to the anti-evolution Baptist minister Mike Huckabee remains to be seen.) But all kidding aside, it's clear that as far as Romney's concerned, freedom of religion means the freedom to be religious. Non-believers can move to the back of the bus.

A broken clock is wrong almost all the time

2007-12-04T10:01:00.000-05:00

I hope that this time we can figure out that we're being sold a fake war before the carnage starts.

Go read Glenn Greenwald's telling comparison of hype vs. fact in cases of Iraq in 2003 and Iran in 2007.

My favorite bit was John Bolton's dismissal of the IAEA:

BLITZER: In fairness to Mohamed ElBaredei, before the war in Iraq, when Condoleezza Rice and the President were speaking about mushroom clouds of Saddam Hussein and a revived nuclear weapons program that he may be undertaking, [ElBaradei] was saying that there was absolutely no such evidence, he was poo-poo-ing it, saying that the Bush Administration was overly-alarming and there was no nuclear weapons program that Saddam Hussein had revived. He was right on that one?

BOLTON: Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

So ElBaredei was completely right about Iraq, and the war hawks were completely wrong, and we have untold tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars flushed down the toilet of history as a consequence, and Bolton is telling us to ignore ElBaredei on Iran for no reason other than an appeal to Bolton's authority?

If I were Blitzer, I'd have savagely beaten Bolton with a teleprompter after that.

Later Update: Presented without comment from today's Washington Post:

President Bush got the world's attention this fall when he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran might lead to World War III. But his stark warning came at least a month or two after he had first been told about fresh indications that Iran had actually halted its nuclear weapons program.

Even Later Update: Responding to the above report, here's Bush in this morning's hastily arranged press conference:

Q Mr. President, thank you. I'd like to follow on that. When you talked about Iraq, you and others in the administration talked about a mushroom cloud; then there were no WMD in Iraq. When it came to Iran, you said in October, on October 17th, you warned about the prospect of World War III, when months before you made that statement, this intelligence about them suspending their weapons program back in '03 had already come to light to this administration. So can't you be accused of hyping this threat? And don't you worry that that undermines U.S. credibility?

THE PRESIDENT: David, I don't want to contradict an august reporter such as yourself, but I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was Mike McConnell came in and said, we have some new information. He didn't tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze. Why would you take time to analyze new information? One, you want to make sure it's not disinformation. You want to make sure the piece of intelligence you have is real. And secondly, they want to make sure they understand the intelligence they gathered: If they think it's real, then what does it mean? And it wasn't until last week that I was briefed on the NIE that is now public.

Um, wow.

Even if you grant the proposition that Bush is so incurious as to make such a conversation plausible (which, I admit, isn't much of stretch), you're still left with this astonishing calculus:

You have important new intelligence on the threat posed by a volatile state in a volatile region of immense strategic importance. The best thing to do in this situation is ignore the new intelligence while further analysis is done, and not even ask about its general nature. In the meantime, accusing the state of wanting to start World War III is a wise diplomatic move.

Remember, foreign policy is the GOP's strength.

Just passing through

2007-11-28T13:50:00.000-05:00

If any of you out there have been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that as of about six months ago, we had four cats. I'd post pictures of them from time to time like the proud cat dad I am.

Well, that's changed a little.

Back in June, we took one of the four in for a vet visit, and one of the vet assistants showed us what appeared to be a dirty cotton ball. It was, of course, actually a kitten that someone had found, only a few days old, in the parking lot of a Lowe's. The vet assistant had nursed it back to health over the intervening weeks, and was looking for some kind sucker to take her in. We certainly weren't intending to go to the vet with one cat and come back with two (or roughly one and a half, really), but that's what happened.

She arrived with her only possession -- a little red mouse toy she had had practically all her life:

We named her Penelope, which was quickly shortened to Loopy. Penelope is a tremendously affectionate cat who loves to be petted and will crawl not just into your lap but right up your chest and nuzzle your neck with an enthusiastic purr. She's playful in the way only kittens are, and quickly found a place in the house. Griz was not at all happy at first, but after weeks of hissing and yowling and further months of indifference, the two gray tabbys will now romp around the house and play with impressive vigor. The others were largely unimpressed but not particularly bothered by the newcomer.

Which was a bit of a surprise in Athena's case, since we expected she would resent the arrival of yet another distraction from the proper object of attention in the house. In fact, she handled it well. If she had any resentment, she took it out on her usual target of milk jug rings:

Soon enough, we learned why she treated the new arrival with such equanimity -- she may have known we would soon need a lively young kitten in the house to fill an enormous void. For just a week after Penelope came home, the kidney disease Athena had battled with for seven years suddenly gained the upper hand. For months we had been feeding her special food and giving her sub-cutaneous fluids to keep her systems in balance, and as the above photo shows she was still happy and playful (when that particular mood suited her, of course). In late June, though, she suddenly lost interest in everything, including eating and drinking. Her once overwhelming spirit withered and vanished. She wandered the house aimlessly, staring at her water as though she *ought* to know what it was for, dammit, but just couldn't place it. Then she just wandered in circles.

Late on a Saturday, it became clear that whatever time she had left would be filled with misery (or at best frightened confusion). The vet assistant who brought Penelope into our world generously opened the vet clinic to help usher Athena out of it. The cat that throughout her fifteen years until her last days required a small SWAT team to take to the vet, even at her sickest, went along without a struggle or even a cat carrier.

Which reminds me of my favorite Athena story, and how I'm sure she would want to be remembered:

Back when a year-old Athena was our only cat, just before Chloe showed up, we went on a driving vacation out west. Athena was sent to stay at the vet where we found her, and where my mother-in-law took her dogs. A few days into Athena's stay, my mother-in-law got a call from the vet. Athena refused to eat or drink and would violently attack anyone who tried to come near. The vet refused to continue to keep her, and in fact questioned the wisdom of keeping such a brutal animal as a house pet. They demanded she be picked up immediately. When my mother-in-law arrived, a vet worker donned gloves that could be used to train a German Shepherd and wrestled Athena into a box that looked like the one they'd ship the Tasmanian Devil in. She took the box back home and stayed well clear as she opened it.

Athena sauntered out, purred, and nuzzled my mother-in-law's leg. She then ate some food and drank some water and curled up for a nice nap.

Some people thought Athena was a mean cat. She wasn't and was actually quite affectionate in her own eccentric way. She simply knew what she wanted and wasn't terribly interested in alternatives.

Chloe, on the other hand, was always as far from mean as is possible. She and Athena were wildly different -- while Athena was fearsomely smart and assertive, Chloe was a bit dim (and somewhat dotty as she grew older) but the sweetest companion you could hope for. Nothing made her happier than purring in our laps or on our chests as we napped. It was in these moments that she looked serene and fulfilled, rather than her usual aura of mild bewilderment. She could also make sleeping look like art.

One of Chloe's oddest talents (and she had many, including inducing sleep, slaying bugs and talking to socks) was her ability to get sick on national holidays. More than one Christmas, Christmas Eve, and New Year's Eve were spent with Chloe at the emergency vet. So when at Thanksgiving (a month after she passed her annual physical) she suddenly stopped eating, became lethargic and started vomiting, we were concerned but not surprised. This time, however, a shot and some pills would not cure her holiday woes.

Either through cancer or some other necrosis, her pancreas was riddled with growths, which were also appearing in her liver. Her abdomen was full of fluid and further growths. She vomited up dark green bile. There was no more purring, and she walked with great difficulty. There was no hope for recovery, only prolonging things for at best a few months with surgery and frequent treatments which would be painful and stressful. And she was already clearly in pain. So yesterday Chloe left us only a few months after Athena, after the two of them had been with us for nearly fifteen years.

Even with Rosabelle, Griselda and Penelope doing their level best to take up the slack, the house and our hearts feel oddly empty. Time moves on and the pain will of course fade, but we'll always miss them. Rest in peace, kids. And Athena, don't chase Chloe. You know she doesn't like it.

Hold the extras

2007-11-28T13:43:00.000-05:00

Helpful tech hint: lots of USB flash drives these days are coming with what's called U3 software on a separate partition that shows as read-only. It apparently tries to give you familiar menus and settings when you plug your drive into different computers. This stuff automatically installs and runs on whatever PC you plug it into. (Unless you don't use Windows, in which case it just takes up space on the drive.)

Someone out there must like this, but I just want a device to store files on, not some pushy application trying to unify my digital life. Fortunately, you can get a program to reformat your drive as a gloriously empty vessel waiting for you to do as you choose with it:

http://www.u3.com/uninstall/default.aspx

The site will plead amusingly with you not to delete this precious, precious invasionware from your drive, but will eventually relent and let you download the uninstall program.

Fun with numbers

2007-11-18T10:59:00.001-05:00

In other news, polio is down substantially since we ended Prohibition.

Rules for other people

2007-11-08T11:11:00.000-05:00

George W. Bush, President of the United States and Commander in Chief of the U.S. military, had this to say to Pervez Musharraf yesterday:

You can't be the President and the head of the military at the same time.

Obama flunks out

2007-10-26T15:34:00.000-04:00

I mentioned a little bit ago about how Barack Obama apparently was just fine with a homophobic minister (who is interested in "curing" homosexuals and thinks they are "trying to kill our children") speaking at his campaign events. It seems that his campaign has received a few questions concerning this, so they've issued a statement, excerpted below:

A few things are clear.

First, Pastor McClurkin believes and has stated things about sexual orientation that are deeply hurtful and offensive to many Americans, most especially to gay Americans. This cannot and should not be denied.

At the same time, a great many African Americans share Pastor McClurkin's beliefs. This also cannot be ignored.

Finally, we believe that the only way for these two sides to find common ground is to do so together.

Not at arms length. Not in a war of words with press and pundits. Only together.

It is clear that Barack Obama is the only candidate who has made bringing these two often disparate groups together a goal. In gatherings of LGBT Americans and African Americans of faith, Obama has stated that all individuals should be afforded full civil rights regardless of their sexual orientation, and that homophobia must be eradicated in every corner of our nation. If we are to end homophobia and secure full civil rights for gay Americans, then we need an advocate within the Black community like Barack Obama.

At the same time, while Obama has said that he "strongly disagrees" with Pastor McClurkin's comments, he will not exclude from his campaign the many Americans including many in the African American community who believe the same as Pastor McClurkin.

And suddenly the Obama campaign has the same credibility as Fox News and other media outlets who will dredge up any noxious, ignorant viewpoint and present it in the name of "balance." (Cross reference with: "Let's hear from the other side of the evolution debate.") This is pure and naked fear of offending the perceived huge bloc of black voters who hate gays (and isn't that perception itself a problem that needs to be addressed, not embraced?), rather than actually having the political balls to back up his support of gay rights with action.

It's simple: if you really think somebody's wrong about something and that his opinions are "deeply hurtful," you don't give them the microphone and let them speak for your campaign. Would Obama want neo-Nazis and KKK members to speak for him at campaign events, even though he (I assume) disagrees with them, in the name of a "big tent"? Of course not. The only difference is that Obama apparently thinks hating gays isn't as "bad" as hating Jews or blacks. Which means he simply doesn't get it.

"It" being any hope of my support, that is. I doubt that keeps him up at night, but I suspect I'm not alone.

Let's clean out the barn and put on a show!

2007-10-26T15:21:00.000-04:00

This just kind of speaks for itself, so I'll let it stand without comment:

FEMA has truly learned the lessons of Katrina. Even its handling of the media has improved dramatically. For example, as the California wildfires raged Tuesday, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the deputy administrator, had a 1 p.m. news briefing.

Reporters were given only 15 minutes' notice of the briefing, making it unlikely many could show up at FEMA's Southwest D.C. offices.

They were given an 800 number to call in, though it was a "listen only" line, the notice said -- no questions. Parts of the briefing were carried live on Fox News (see the Fox News video of the news conference carried on the Think Progress Web site), MSNBC and other outlets.

Johnson stood behind a lectern and began with an overview before saying he would take a few questions. The first questions were about the "commodities" being shipped to Southern California and how officials are dealing with people who refuse to evacuate. He responded eloquently.

He was apparently quite familiar with the reporters -- in one case, he appears to say "Mike" and points to a reporter -- and was asked an oddly in-house question about "what it means to have an emergency declaration as opposed to a major disaster declaration" signed by the president. He once again explained smoothly.

FEMA press secretary Aaron Walker interrupted at one point to caution he'd allow just "two more questions." Later, he called for a "last question."

"Are you happy with FEMA's response so far?" a reporter asked. Another asked about "lessons learned from Katrina."

"I'm very happy with FEMA's response so far," Johnson said, hailing "a very smoothly, very efficiently performing team."

"And so I think what you're really seeing here is the benefit of experience, the benefit of good leadership and the benefit of good partnership," Johnson said, "none of which were present in Katrina." (Wasn't Michael Chertoff DHS chief then?) Very smooth, very professional. But something didn't seem right. The reporters were lobbing too many softballs. No one asked about trailers with formaldehyde for those made homeless by the fires. And the media seemed to be giving Johnson all day to wax on and on about FEMA's greatness.

Of course, that could be because the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters. We're told the questions were asked by Cindy Taylor, FEMA's deputy director of external affairs, and by "Mike" Widomski, the deputy director of public affairs. Director of External Affairs John "Pat" Philbin asked a question, and another came, we understand, from someone who sounds like press aide Ali Kirin.

Asked about this, Widomski said: "We had been getting mobbed with phone calls from reporters, and this was thrown together at the last minute."

But the staff did not make up the questions, he said, and Johnson did not know what was going to be asked. "We pulled questions from those we had been getting from reporters earlier in the day." Despite the very short notice, "we were expecting the press to come," he said, but they didn't. So the staff played reporters for what on TV looked just like the real thing.

"If the worst thing that happens to me in this disaster is that we had staff in the chairs to ask questions that reporters had been asking all day," Widomski said, "trust me, I'll be happy."

Heck of a job, Harvey.

A little too perfect

2007-10-26T15:13:00.000-04:00

You know, when I talk about how we're sacrificing American principles for the sake of perceived safety from terrorism, I don't usually think of it quite this literally:

State officials have decided not to publicize their list of polling places in Pennsylvania, citing concerns that terrorists could disrupt elections in the commonwealth.

Tortured reasoning

2007-10-26T14:38:00.000-04:00

One of the right's favorite knocks on lefties is their "moral relativism." Liberals, they say, just can't be pinned down on questions of right and wrong. They weasel out of making righteous stands, insisting on looking at high-falutin' stuff like context and background instead of making snap judgments and by-God acting (like by, say, invading a country on a glorified hunch).

This is especially true in the arena of national security, where the left is routinely mocked for letting their refusal to see the world in black and white get in the away of decisive, even radical, action to protect American from the Islamofacsicommunazisocialism threat. So when 9/11 Hero^TM Rudy Giuliani was asked recently his opinion on waterboarding, one would expect clarity and decisiveness. Here's America's Mayor:

Well, I'm not sure [waterboarding] is [torture] either. I'm not sure it is either. It depends on how it's done. It depends on the circumstances. It depends on who does it. I think the way it's been defined in the media, it shouldn’t be done. The way in which they have described it, particularly in the liberal media. So I would say, if that's the description of it, then I can agree, that it shouldn't be done. But I have to see what the real description of it is. Because I've learned something being in public life as long as I have. And I hate to shock anybody with this, but the newspapers don't always describe it accurately.

Boy, there's no "moral relativism" at work there, is there? On one of the most important issues facing our very moral identity as a nation, Rudy thinks it "depends on the circumstances." He doesn't know "what the real description of it is." But he sure doesn't trust the "liberal media."

Then, Rudy loosens up the room with a little "boys will be sadists" humor:

And I see, when the Democrats are talking about torture, they’re not just talking about even this definition of waterboarding, which again, if you look at the liberal media and you look at the way they describe it, you could say it was torture and you shouldn’t do it. But they talk about sleep deprivation. I mean, on that theory, I’m getting tortured running for president of the United States. That’s plain silly. That’s silly.

Har, har! Sleep deprivation! What a joke! Rudy's got it tougher than those pampered detainees! We've obviously lost a great opportunity here -- since Rudy's an expert on sleep deprivation, perhaps he could have advised such respected practitioners as the KGB and Pinochet on how to more effectively administer the technique, and more information could have been extracted from the likes of Menachem Begin.

Unless I'm mistaken, there's only one man running for President that has first-hand experience with torture. Here's his take:

Rudolph W. Giuliani’s statement on Wednesday that he was uncertain whether waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique, was torture drew a sharp rebuke yesterday from Senator John McCain, who said that his failure to call it torture reflected his inexperience.

“All I can say is that it was used in the Spanish Inquisition, it was used in Pol Pot’s genocide in Cambodia, and there are reports that it is being used against Buddhist monks today,” Mr. McCain, who spent more than five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, said in a telephone interview.

Of presidential candidates like Mr. Giuliani, who say that they are unsure whether waterboarding is torture, Mr. McCain said: “They should know what it is. It is not a complicated procedure. It is torture.”

There's some clarity for you.

I knew those half-moon glasses were a little suspicious

2007-10-20T13:31:00.000-04:00

As if the religious right needs another reason to hate the Harry Potter books, J.K. Rowling has revealed that Albus Dumbledore is a Friend of Dorothy:

One fan asked whether Albus Dumbledore, the head of the famed Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, had ever loved anyone. Rowling smiled. "Dumbledore is gay, actually," replied Rowling as the audience erupted in surprise. She added that, in her mind, Dumbledore had an unrequited love affair with Gellert Grindelwald, Voldemort's predecessor who appears in the seventh book. After several minutes of prolonged shouting and clapping from astonished fans, Rowling added. "I would have told you earlier if I knew it would make you so happy."

I'm sure if he were still us, he'd be OK with a quick Slug-Vomiting Charm on the assembled masses at the Value Voters Summit.

The Chosen One

2007-10-20T12:58:00.000-04:00

Image from the Brick Testament

Via Talking Points Memo, it sounds like the actual candidate Fred Thompson is a lot less compelling than the theoretical candidate Fred Thompson.

The loony religious right is currently holding a big "Values Voters Summit" to see which Republican candidates are willing to go farthest in enacting the theocratic fever dreams of our most unhinged and fearful citizens. (With entertainment by Lee Greenwood!)

Thompson didn't do so well.

[Thompson] spoke with his chin often buried in his chest, his voice largely monotone, and he cleared his throat or coughed repeatedly, prompting some to wonder if he might be ill.

He did manage one moment of glory, however.

The activists and evangelical voters appeared to tolerate Fred Thompson's speech this morning, offering polite applause for his pledges to oppose abortion and gay marriage. And then Thompson offered this promise: that in the first hour as president, he would "go into the Oval Office, close the door and pray for the wisdom to do the right thing."

The crowd leapt to their feet, applauding and yelling their approval to a smiling Thompson, who -- it seems -- had finally pushed the right button.

Seeking to usurp Thompson as the evangelical Protestant darling is Mormon Mitt Romney. In a bid to make the faithful faithful forget he ever even lived in Massachusetts, he unleashed a flurry of hardcore theocrat code words and platitudes:

"Parenthood is the ultimate career for which all other careers exist."

"The American family is under stress. Is under attack. Ann and I are going to use the bully pulpit to teach Americans that before they have babies, they should get married."

"As president, I will realign government incentives to encourage marriage."

"A federal amendment is the only way we can protect marriage from liberal, unelected judges."

"I will oppose tax payer funding of abortion, oppose partial birth abortion ... ban cloning ... and raise awareness about embryonic adoption, or snow flake babies."

"It will be one strike and you're ours" for pedophiles on the internet -- "long prison sentences, and if you get out, it means an ankle bracelet for the rest of your life."

"I will ensure that every family has health care -- without new taxes, without Hilarycare, without socialized medicine."

Rumor has it that Mike Huckabee plans to have himself crucified on stage and rise in an ethereal state from the podium. This might sway some "values voters," as long as he doesn't get "soft" on opposing gay rights.

Speaking of which, Barack Obama apparently is OK with letting those who think homosexuality is a disease to be cured by Jesus speak for him. How this represents an alternative to the religious-wacko pandering by the Republicans is not immediately obvious.

Man bites dog

2007-10-18T16:13:00.001-04:00

After a deal was cut yesterday, it seemed inevitable that the Senate would pass legislation giving telecom companies a free pass for voluntarily giving up caller data to illegal administration data harvesting requests (some even prior to 9/11), effectively shutting down any attempts to prosecute these infringements.

But Chris Dodd has stepped forward to throw a monkey wrench in the works. It's a shocking development these days when a politician actually attempts to defend the Constitution (which unless I'm mistaken is still part of that whole pesky "oath of office" thing) instead of pandering to the "save me from the terrorists, Daddy" vote. So big kudos to Dodd.

We put the "family" in family planning

2007-10-17T16:58:00.000-04:00

Following on from my post a few weeks back on Mitt Romney's call to lump birth control pills together with abortion, here's Bush's nominee to head up family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services:

Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.

In a 2001 article in The Washington Post, Orr applauded a Bush proposal to stop requiring all health insurance plans for federal employees to cover a broad range of birth control. "We're quite pleased, because fertility is not a disease," said Orr, then an official with the Family Research Council.

In other news, David Duke is reported to be "tanned, rested and ready" to take on an important civil rights post.

(Via Tbogg.)

Rice enters glass house, throws stones

2007-10-14T14:13:00.000-04:00

I have written at length here before about the truly radical ways our President has attempted (and largely succeeded) in either neutering or ignoring the checks and balances baked into the American government, and pursuing his own agenda free from legislative or judicial interference. I won't recap yet again, but suggesting that the Bush administration isn't in favor of a disproportionately powerful executive branch is akin to suggesting that Willie Nelson isn't in favor of smoking weed.

Which, come to think of it, is the recreational activity Condoleezza Rice must think we've all been indulging in if she thinks this is at all credible:

The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has amassed so much central authority that the power-grab may undermine Moscow's commitment to democracy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday.

"In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development," Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.

"I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma," said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament.

Between this and Bush's "transparency" lecture I discussed a couple weeks ago, I think there's an internal contest going in in depths of the West Wing to see who can get the most ridiculous hypocrisy in the mouth of an administration official. If we see Robert Gates give a speech on the inadvisability of unilateral military strikes based on false premises, we'll know the game is on. (A cookie to anyone who can dig one up. Anything before he became SecDef doesn't count.)

The 9/11 fig leaf shrinks

2007-10-14T10:35:00.000-04:00

There's a fascinating lawsuit currently being pushed through the intestines of the justice system surrounding an NSA call harvesting program that I've talked about before. You may remember (if you're among the minority that pays attention to things like this) that most of the major telcos rolled over and gave the administration whatever they wanted except for Qwest, who thought that giving the government free reign over American's call data without any sort of due process was sort of, you know, unAmerican-ish.

So there's now this suit, brought in 2006 against the telcos that cooperated. As part of that, we're now finding somthing very interesting. If you thought that the civil-liberties-stomping excesses of the Bush White House were inspired and/or enabled by 9/11, then it's time to re-synchronize your watches. (Also see this Washington Post article.)

Startling statements from former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio's defense documents alleging the National Security Agency began building a massive call records database seven months before 9/11 aren't the only accusations that the controversial program predated the attacks of 9/11.

According to court documents unveiled this week, former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio clearly wanted to argue in court that the NSA retaliated against his company after he turned down a NSA request on February 27, 2001 that he thought was illegal. Nacchio's attorney issued a carefully worded statement in 2006, saying that Nacchio had turned down the NSA's repeated requests for customer call records. The statement says that Nacchio was asked for the records in the fall of 2001, but doesn't say he was "first asked" then.

And in May 2006, a lawsuit filed against Verizon for allegedly turning over call records to the NSA alleged that AT&T began building a spying facility for the NSA just days after President Bush was inaugurated. That lawsuit is one of 50 that were consolidated and moved to a San Francisco federal district court, where the suits sit in limbo waiting for the 9th Circuit Appeals court to decide whether the suits can proceed without endangering national security.

So the NSA was actually pursuing unrestrained surveillance of Americans starting when the Bible Bush was inaugurated with hadn't cooled off yet. Which means all this "post-9/11 changed everything" guff from the administration is a wheelbarrow full of bullshit. They were pursuing their police state from the get-go, from a time period when there's plenty of documentation that al-Qaeda wasn't a big concern of the White House.

Which raises two very interesting points.

First, if not terrorists, who was this program intended to keep tabs on?

And second, selling such extralegal domestic spying as necessary to prevent another 9/11 loses a lot of credibility, since this program demonstrably failed to prevent the actual 9/11.

If A=B, then B=A

2007-10-05T12:25:00.000-04:00

I don't like to do too many of these, but this one amused me greatly. Bush speaking Wednesday:

My job is a decision-making job. And as a result, I make a lot of decisions.

And that's from the prepared segment.

Don't worry your pretty little head about it

2007-10-05T11:25:00.000-04:00

As a follow-up to yesterday, here's a bit from the AP, from a story on Bush's damage control effort today:

A White House spokesman, meanwhile, criticized the leak of such information to the news media and questioned the motivations of those who do so.

"It's troubling," Tony Fratto said Friday. "I've had the awful responsibility to have to work with The New York Times and other news organizations on stories that involve the release of classified information. And I can tell you that every time I've dealt with any of these stories, I have felt that we have chipped away at the safety and security of America with the publication of this kind of information."

Sounds transparent to me.

The mainstreaming of torture

2007-10-04T13:10:00.000-04:00

Just in case you may have missed it, the New York Times today published a revealing look at just how enthusiastic the White House has been when it comes to endorsing torture. It's worth a read.

Thanks to this sort of attitude from the top, the culture is now to the point where the Isaiah Washington character on the new "Bionic Woman" remake can do unspeakable (and unshowable) things to obtain information, and it's not at all clear if we're supposed to view his actions with approval or not. (Especially since the torture is portrayed as having produced life-saving, accurate and timely information, which rarely happens outside of prime time television.)

The political implications of fluffy TV shows aside, the activities detailed in the NYT make Bush's boasting of "transparency" laughably untruthful. Here's Bush at a February 2005 joint press conference with Putin:

I live in a transparent country. I live in a country where decisions made by government are wide open, and people are able to call people to -- me to account, which many out here due on a regular basis. Our laws, and the reasons why we have laws on the books, are perfectly explained to people. Every decision we have made is within the Constitution of the United States. We have a Constitution that we uphold. And if there is a question as to whether or not a law meets that Constitution, we have an independent court system, through which that law is reviewed.

So I'm perfectly comfortable in telling you, our country is one that safeguards human rights and human dignity, and we resolve our disputes in a peaceful way.

Compare and contrast that with this from the NYT. Note the date of the first secret Gonzalez pro-torture memo:

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

The classified opinions, never previously disclosed, are a hidden legacy of President Bush’s second term and Mr. Gonzales’s tenure at the Justice Department, where he moved quickly to align it with the White House after a 2004 rebellion by staff lawyers that had thrown policies on surveillance and detention into turmoil.

Congress and the Supreme Court have intervened repeatedly in the last two years to impose limits on interrogations, and the administration has responded as a policy matter by dropping the most extreme techniques. But the 2005 Justice Department opinions remain in effect, and their legal conclusions have been confirmed by several more recent memorandums, officials said. They show how the White House has succeeded in preserving the broadest possible legal latitude for harsh tactics.

Yep. Clear as mud.

Providing the Petard

2007-09-25T10:02:00.000-04:00

It's been amusing, if frustrating, to watch the parade of hand-wringing talking heads proclaiming, "In the name of freedom, we must not allow Ahmadinejad to speak!"

At the risk of stating the obvious, allowing someone to speak simply opens their ideas to scrutiny. A confident and free society will let anyone speak, a fearful and tyrannic society will shut down speech. Columbia University and other organizations had the opportunity to put Iran's president's ideas to the test in a way that would never happen in his own country -- how could anyone interested in objective reality turn that down?

And the result spoke for itself. Dana Milbank in the Washington Post writes:

"For hundreds of years, we've lived in friendship and brotherhood with the people of Iraq," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the National Press Club yesterday.

That's true -- as long as you don't count the little unpleasantness of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, when a million people died, some by poison gas. And you'd also have to overlook 500 years of fighting during the Ottoman Empire.

But never mind that: Ahmadinejad was on a roll.

"Our people are the freest people in the world," said the man whose government executes dissidents, jails academics and stones people to death.

"The freest women in the world are women in Iran," he continued, neglecting to mention that Iranian law treats a woman as half of a man.

"In our country," judged the man who shuts down newspapers and imprisons journalists, "freedom is flowing at its highest level."

And if you believe that, he has a peaceful civilian nuclear program he wants to sell you.

Much of officialdom spent yesterday condemning Columbia University for hosting the Iranian leader while he visits the United Nations this week. There were similar protests outside the National Press Building in Washington, where reporters gathered to question Ahmadinejad in a videoconference. "Don't give him any press!" shouted one woman.

But that objection misses a crucial point: Without listening to Ahmadinejad, how can the world appreciate how truly nutty he is?

"In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country," he informed the Columbia audience.

I'm finding it hard to see how letting Ahmadinejad put his collection of opaque answers, facile taunts and self-evident falsehoods on public display enhanced his stature in any way.

Mutually Assured Hyperbole

2007-09-24T12:56:00.000-04:00

Many months ago, I posted about various television ads that took the truck-as-surrogate-phallus theme to new, um, lengths.

But I hadn't seen anything yet.

While Chevy has stayed mostly on the sidelines with feel-good patriotic treacle, Ford and Toyota have been engaging in a dizzying battle to see who can make the most outlandish and impractical demonstration of how omnipotent and indestructible their big trucks are.

(As an aside, Toyota has been running some amusing ads for their slightly less huge Tacoma trucks that parody this sort of thing, with Tacomas getting hit by meteors and surviving huge robot dinosaur car crushers. So some arms of Toyota's ad agency are getting as exasperated about this as I am.)

Recently, I've been seeing this Ford ad where they stick a Ford pickup truck in a cargo plane, land the plane, and dump the truck out the back tied to a big chain. Then the truck uses its brakes to stop the plane on the runway. Then some guy tells me how great it is to know that your truck could stop a plane with its brakes.

This must be the sort of thing that the people who buy these big trucks worry about. "If I get chained to a runaway cargo plane, will my brakes be up to the job? Or will the guys with F-150s laugh at me as I careen off the end of the runway?"

The Toyota Tundra ads are just as dumb, though not quite as over-the-top ridiculous as this one. Though I imagine they'll have to up the ante to match Ford. I predict an ad where a Tundra prevents the space shuttle from launching with a rope tied around its side mirror while a gravel-voiced narrator says, "Whoa, nellie!" or "Happy birthday!" or something like that.

The punchline is that sectors of the media constantly deride hybrid cars as "marketing hype" and "just about showing off," as if the people buying them are victims of brainwashing. Truly, *any* consumer product can justifiably have this accusation hurled at it, but it seems particularly apt for these overbuilt monuments to four-wheeled excess.

When pro-life becomes pro-pregnancy

2007-08-22T15:00:00.000-04:00

Via Talking Points Memo, we find this op-ed from the Baltimore Sun.

At National Right to Life's conference this year, Mitt Romney set out to convince anti-abortion leaders he was their candidate. At the podium, he rattled off his qualifications. To a layman's ears, it sounded pretty standard for abortion politics. He wants to overturn Roe v. Wade. He supports teaching only abstinence to teens.

But for those trained to hear the subtleties, Mr. Romney was acknowledging something more. He implied an opposition to the birth control pill and a willingness to join in their efforts to scale back access to contraception. There are code phrases to listen for - and for those keeping score, Mr. Romney nailed each one.

One code phrase is: "I fought to define life as beginning at conception rather than at the time of implantation." The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists defines pregnancy as starting at implantation, the first moment a pregnancy can be known. Anti-abortion advocates want pregnancy to start at the unknown moment sperm and egg meet: fertilization. They'd also like you to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that the birth control pill prevents that fertilized egg from implanting in the womb.

Mr. Romney's code, deciphered, meant, "I, like you, hope to reclassify the most commonly used forms of contraceptives as abortions..."

I have to suspect that, even in a country where at least half the public are creationists, running on a ban-the-Pill platform is probably not a good strategy for capturing the White House. Yet, as the op-ed persuasively points out, this is the position that the so-called "base" of the Republican party has staked out, and so those chasing the nomination must tell the base what they want to hear, while at the same saying it as obliquely as possible to avoid scaring the rest of the country as they slumber through the nomination process.

Is it likely that contraception will vanish from drug stores as soon as Mitt Romney is inaugurated? Of course not. But we've already seen movement toward allowing drug stores to not dispense contraception if the pharmacy tech isn't on board ideologically with the whole idea of family planning. And elected officials with an anti-contraception base to keep happy probably aren't going to go out of their way to protect access.

So it couldn't hurt to pay attention to some of the wacky stuff these guys say in 2007, to get an idea of how they'll get on the ballot in 2008.

Well, the password still works...

2007-08-21T19:54:00.000-04:00

New content coming soon. And a metric ton of updates.

A Modest Proposal

2007-02-07T11:55:00.000-05:00

Yes, I'm still alive. I'm not sure what I want to do with this blog at the moment, since ranting about political issues seems to be becoming less therapeutic and more depressing. Perhaps that means I'm becoming saner. So for all two of you who might be reading this, the Fiddle isn't broken, just off for retuning.

In the meantime, though, I wanted to share this post on Apple's site from Steve Jobs. Longtime readers (all two of you) of the Fiddle know that DRM is one of my hobbyhorses, and Jobs has a refreshing straightforward and pragmatic view on this issue.

It seems like mere common sense, and does have ulterior motives (Apple is currently facing legislative headaches in several European countries over the proprietary DRM in the iTunes store, plus another angle I'll get to in a minute), but it has the advantage of being largely correct.

If I buy a CD, I can play it at home, on my PC, on my laptop, in my car, or on a Discman. Guaranteed. I can rip the songs into an open digital format and store/play them on any portable music player and any cell phones and PDAs that support playing music files. Guaranteed. If the record label goes out of business, the music will still play. If I buy a new CD player or a new portable player, the music will still play. Guaranteed.

Buying a song from the iTunes store, or the Zune store, or any other DRM-encrypted online source, and I have some or none of these guarantees. (Unless the DRM allows me to burn the songs to a CD, in which case the end result is a CD that costs about the same as a pressed CD but with inferior sound quality.) Clearly, taking away DRM is a huge plus for the consumer (and the reason why I only buy music online at emusic, which does not use DRM).

As Jobs points out, it's also a huge plus for him and other online music vendors, as it would get them out of the DRM business, which is expensive, high-risk, and viewed with either apathy or contempt by the customer.

As Jobs also points out, it's a zero-sum proposition for the labels, since DRM-free downloads pose no greater risk of piracy than the CDs that already make up the bulk of the labels' business.

Jobs being Jobs, though, there is a sneaky aspect to this beyond the legal hassles he's looking to circumvent. DRM-free downloads wouldn't work with the "all you can eat" subscription model of many of his competitors (where you can download all the songs you want for a monthly fee, and they stop playing when you stop paying the fee or the technology ceases being supported). It would, of course, have no effect on iTunes' pay-per-song model. So if the labels, in some fantasy universe where decisions are made based on logic, agree to take off DRM, the subscription sites would still have to use it to enforce their terms of service. And iTunes would have a huge competitive advantage.

Tricksy.

Wait a minute, Mr. Postman

2007-01-04T08:41:00.000-05:00

For President Bush, rights are a zero-sum game. He takes them away from the people, and assigns them to himself:

President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the Daily News has learned.

The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it.

So now the administration has decided that phone calls, financial records, internet traffic and postal mail are fair game without any sort of judicial oversight at all. It's just a matter of time before the front door gets added to the list.

Justice, American-style

2007-01-02T09:53:00.000-05:00

Judging from the videos and this NYT article, Saddam was executed by a bunch of guys in leather jackets and ski masks chanting the name of Muqtada al-Sadr. Meanwhile, the Iraqi government seemed mainly interested in how to circumvent existing law in order to speed up the hanging.

Sounds like freedom to me.

Random thoughts after a week in London

2007-01-02T09:29:00.000-05:00

My feet hurt.
The overwhelming impression is one of age. One can tell that the city has been around for many, many centuries simply by walking its streets, which are narrow and chaotic (and utterly ungridlike). If something is labeled as "new," chances are that means it's only a couple hundred years old. For someone from the States, where most development post-dates the automobile, it is more than a little surreal.
Geeky tourist moment: emerging from the Westminister tube station to find ourselves across the street from Big Ben as it chimed the quarter hour.
The British Museum is a stunning repository. While there is certainly plenty of controversy about many of the items it holds and where those items ought to reside, you cannot argue against the impressiveness of the collection.
Our hotel was nearest the Russell Square tube station, so that became our home base for exploring the city. Only at the end of our stay did I realize that it was the epicenter of the 7/7/05 bombings. That fact speaks volumes about the British resolve to not let the fear or terrorism dominate their day-to-day lives.
At American airports, you can have two carry-on bags but have to remove your shoes. At Heathrow, you can have only one carry-on (but you are encouraged by the security workers to put one inside another as a loophole) and only some people have to remove shoes (my wife did, I didn't). This is all a charade, isn't it?
Big thanks to the government for driving our debt out of sight and reducing the dollar to a sad joke. At two dollars per pound, we couldn't afford to stay much longer than a week.
Speaking of cash, the British seem to be increasingly aggressive about getting rid of small-change paper money. The smallest note is five pounds, and apparently no fresh bills of that denomination are being circulated. With the fabulous Oyster card, cash is irrelevant for public transport.
ITV news uses the phrase "Bush regime."

Happy new year, and let's get back to it.

Praise the Lord and pass the BFG

2006-12-13T16:22:00.000-05:00

The perfect gift for the angry end-times obsessive in your life (everyone knows one) is the new Left Behind: Eternal Forces computer game.

As the official web site promises:

LEFT BEHIND: Eternal Forces is a Real Time Strategy game. You, as the player, control your forces from a vantage point high above the action. You do not personally participate in the action; you command your units to perform tasks by giving orders via the game interface. You can order them where to go and what to do whenever you wish.

Lead the Tribulation Force from the book series, including Rayford, Chloe, Buck and Bruce against Nicolae Carpathia - the AntiChrist.
Conduct physical & spiritual warfare : using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world.
Recover ancient scriptures and witness spectacular Angelic and Demonic activity as a direct consequence of your choices.
Command your forces through intense battles across a breathtaking, authentic depiction of New York City.
Control more than 30 units types - from Prayer Warrior and Hellraiser to Spies, Special Forces and Battle Tanks!
Enjoy a robust single player experience across dozens of New York City maps in Story Mode – fighting in China Town , SoHo , Uptown and more!
Play multiplayer games as Tribulation Force or the AntiChrist's Global Community Peacekeepers with up to eight players via LAN or over the internet!

Rather than muse about calling the AntiChrist's forces "Peacekeepers" or engage in facile speculation about which weapons Jesus might select against various targets, I instead pose the following question:

Is there a God Mode? If so, what happens?

Stuck in a pre-9/11 mindset

2006-12-11T22:21:00.000-05:00

"Let me assure you of one thing: the United States under this administration will never -- never -- let terrorism or fear of terrorism determine its foreign policy."

-- George H. W. Bush, 10/27/1984

Put Saddam on work release

2006-11-30T13:18:00.000-05:00

Bill O'Reilly gives his solution to the "thing in Iraq where various groups are blowing the crap out of each other without any clear governmental authority but most definitely isn't a civil war":

If the Bush administration will not consider dividing the country into three autonomous regions, then it must consider allowing the Iraqi military to run the place, much like Musharraf runs Pakistan. Yes, that would be brutal, but clearly, the Iraqi people are not embracing freedom. So imposing order through a military strong man might be the only way.

I hear there's a guy in Iraqi prison right now that has many years of experience in suppressing Iraq's ethnic tensions through the application of brutal repression. As a bonus, he also has extensive experience in fighting a war with Iran, which might come in handy.

He's been sentenced to death, but I'd think that being forced to clean up Iraq at this point would be a far worse fate.

A moment of silence, with video noise

2006-11-21T12:25:00.000-05:00

Variety magazine reports on the death of an old friend.

Great moments in encouraging piracy

2006-11-17T16:38:00.000-05:00

So, in what way do the Weinstein brothers think that not offering their movies to customers of Netflix or any rental outlet other than Blockbuster will reduce the demand for illegal downloads of said films?

Stupid.

The beautiful agony of a failed install

2006-11-15T12:46:00.000-05:00

Having just limped past another birthday this week, I'm clearly too old to understand Microsoft's advertising campaign for the their new Zune media player.

"Welcome to the social?" What does that mean? Are they comparing the experience of using a Zune to an ice cream party for little kids?

And is this really how a Zune user sees themselves?

If that's my "inner DJ," I'll keep that dude locked up, thanks.

But I'm clearly not the target market for this device, so it doesn't matter that I'm befuddled by the slogans. Yet, when your Zune software installation goes belly up (and the early reports I'm reading suggest that the odds of that are pretty good), you'll see this:

Just what exactly is going on here? Is she upset that she's not getting in on the hot make-out action next door? (Much like the user is getting left out of the "social" by the Zune install program blowing up?)

Or is Microsoft suggesting another activity that might ultimately prove more enjoyable than setting up and using a Zune?

Whichever, I'd like to see the look on Dad's face when Junior shows him this: "Uh, Dad? That fake iPod you gave me for Christmas doesn't work. But it's showing me porn. Thanks!"

Analysis Paralysis

2006-11-12T10:48:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted anything in a week because I feel somehow obligated to say something interesting and insightful about the elections. The truth is that I have no piercing insights to share. The Democrats kicked the GOP's ass on Tuesday. The most interesting stat was that at least the last time I checked, the Republicans had gained nothing anywhere. No Democratic House seats, Senate seats or governorships became Republicans, which is nothing short of remarkable. (There was one House race in Georgia that was undecided the last time I checked, and held the potential to be a GOP pickup. The Dem candidate was ahead in the count, though.)

All things are cyclical of course, and it was perhaps inevitable that the blind arrogance of the neocons would eventually deliver diminishing returns. That it would result in a repudiation this complete this soon was surprising. I'd like to think that it represents a desire for a return to checks and balances and a grown-up foreign policy. For some voters, this was probably true, though many others pulling the Dem lever were probably angered by specific scandals or other less ideological motivations.

Appearances to the contrary, I'm not sitting here waving my blue flag and cheering "my side" -- it remains to be seen whether the Democrats can use this victory wisely or fritter it away like the fizzled "Republican revolution" of 1994 (which was a very different beast to the post-9/11 neocon rampage). Unless they find a way to be even more accommodating to the executive branch's desires than the last Congress, though, it can hardly be a step backward. Gridlock would be an upgrade.

The November Surprise

2006-11-03T10:51:00.000-05:00

...because October Surprises are so, you know, pre-"Internet time."

As the administration is well aware that (1) the only thing that will make a lot of American people think good thoughts about the ruling party at the moment is seeing the Bad Guys suffer and (2) any such good thoughts will be fleeting at best, the verdict and sentencing of Saddam Hussein has been scheduled for November 5, two days before the election. Iraq will still be a bloodbath on November 6, just as it will be on November 4, but the Republicans are clearly hoping that the sight of Saddam getting sentenced to death will cause the increasingly negative opinion of the war to backtrack those vital few percentage points, even it's only for 48 hours or so.

I'm sure a division of Diebold is working feverishly this very moment on devoting a corner of the touch-screen voting machines to a live video feed of Saddam hanging from the gallows.

EDIT/UPDATE: As I typed the above, I started with "seeing Muslims suffer" and then changed it to "seeing the Bad Guys suffer." The "Muslim" version didn't work, I thought, because Saddam was/is a genuinely venal bastard, and I didn't want to imply that his faults were only figments of America's Muslim-hating fever dreams. The fact that he was a Muslim, of course, was the key to the White House being able to substitute an invasion of Iraq for action against al-Qaeda, but in the end I felt better about the revised version.

Then I read this.

As Glenn Greenwald points out, this sort of attitude, even if held by a minority, is a prime enabler of our current foreign policy by forming a vital part of the administration's core support. So while I might feel it's unfair to label Saddam as a victim of US anti-Islamic hysteria, that distinction might well be much narrower than I thought.

A plea for mercy

2006-10-31T13:33:00.000-05:00

Dear Major League Baseball, National Football League and General Motors:

As a mere cog in the machine of global capitalism, I cannot presume to understand the decision-making process that goes on in the plush conference rooms deep within your respective global headquarters. However, I am going to make an uneducated guess: you do not want prospective consumers fleeing the room when your broadcasts and commercials air, sticking knitting needles in their ears and cursing your names to the uninterested heavens.

Would that be fair to say?

If so, for the love of all that's good and decent, PLEASE stop running those damn commercials with the John Mellencamp song "Our Country." Seriously. It is currently impossible to watch a football game without hearing that piece of crap at least once every single commercial break. That is cruel and unfair. I realize you own the universe and we merely occupy it, but surely there is a shred of humanity left alive somewhere in your marketing departments that could do us this small act of kindness.

Consider:

1) This song has already been written once. The first time, it was called "This Land Is Your Land" by Woody Guthrie. It was significantly better that time.

2) The first line, which we are often assaulted with before we can dive for the remote in a vain attempt to rescue our last few functioning brain cells, is "I can stand beside ideals I think are right." (At least I think that's what ol' Melonhead is mumbling.) Please don't think too much about how empty and brain-dead this statement is. It hurts. A lot.

3) Later, if the remote is broken and we spend too much time searching the front of the TV for the volume button, we hear: "From the East Coast to the West Coast, down the Dixie Highway back home." In his haste to rewrite Guthrie, Mellencamp is making no sense. Is he invoking the grand sweep of American geography, or giving directions? If we don't live off the Dixie Highway, is it less "our country" than those that do?

4) Of all John "Cougar" Mellencamp's fake heartland anthems, this is certainly the fake-est. It sounds as though it were constructed in a clean room from genetically engineered old-timey instruments and sturdy but empty homilies.

In fairness to Mellencamp, the full-length version of the song contains verses that actually address topics of substance. Of course, you've chosen to include only the verses that are vague and meaningless enough to not cause problems with the right wing. This is as infuriating as it would be if Wrangler picked two lines completely out of context from "Fortunate Son" that made the song (a hundred times better a song than Mellencamp's) sound like a jingoistic feel-good ditty and used it to sell jeans. Oh, wait, they already did that. Never mind.

Obligatory election post

2006-10-31T10:07:00.000-05:00

I received a notice from the Shadowy Left Wing Blogging Conspiracy today that I was contractually obligated to post something on the mid-term election, so here goes.

Even though I believe the Democrats are the most awe-inspiring election-losing machine the world has ever seen (I mean, they're an unstoppable juggernaut of incompetency), I am still going to predict that they'll take the House. Let's go with a margin of seven seats. (The conventional wisdom seems to be 15-20 seats, so I'm taking into account the ability of the Dems to undercut expectations at every turn.)

In the Senate, though, the Republicans are going to hold on. I'll say two seats, or three, depending on how you count Lieberman, who appears headed for victory as the standard-bearer of the Lieberman Party (motto: "My seat in the Senate is too important to leave in the hands of the voters."). It would be agonizingly dramatic if the Dems lost the Senate because of Lieberman, but I don't think it'll be that close.

So, instead of a situation where Congress acts as a rubber-stamp for Bush policies (except when Bush used his one and only veto to protect the innocent stem cells), we'll have a Congress paralyzed into passing hopelessly compromised legislation under duress.

In this scenario, Democrats will be urged to cave to Republican demands in the name of "bipartisanship." (They will do so.) Democrats will make no such demands of Republicans. (Not that the Republicans would do it, anyway.)

Then, in the 2008 election, everything bad will be laid at the feet of the Democratic House.

I suspect I'm going to get another message from the Conspiracy soon.

Saturday Morning Cartoons

2006-10-28T14:32:00.000-04:00

Here's some highlights from Bush's recent chat with right-wing media types, with commentary by Editor and Publisher's Greg Mitchell. The overriding theme seems to be that Bush knows nothing about a lot of subjects, most notably US history and Islam.

Bush on the Iraqi barbarians at the gate:

"If we leave, they will follow us here." Bush then explains that this is what makes the Iraq struggle "really different from other wars we've been in." This completely overlooks the official U.S. line in trying to halt the communists in Vietnam and Korea, not to mention the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II.

Presidents don't swear:

Bush states, "al-Qaeda is lethal as hell," and then instructs, "scratch the 'hell' -- it's lethal."

Bush builds a straw man:

Another revealing moment comes when Bush flatly declares that only "25% or so" of Americans want the U.S. out of Iraq. In fact, a Gallup poll released this week shows that the number is actually 54% who want us out quickly -- within a year at most. Bush also mischaracterizes the war opponents, saying they "just don't believe in war," as if they are all pacifists.

Bush does the thing he says he never does, yet does all the time -- suggests Iraq was behind 9/11:

Then he goes on: "I believe when you get attacked and somebody declares war on you, you fight back. And that's what we're doing." Of course, this ignores the fact that Iraq did not declare war on us -- but it's been so long now, maybe he's just forgotten.

Incurious George:

A critical moment arrives when Bush announces, "And I'm trying to figure out a matrix that says things are getting better. I think that one way to measure is less violence than before, I guess. We'll have to see what happens here after Ramadan. I believe these people -- oh, I was going to tell you Abizaid believes Ramadan, no question, caused them to be more violent because he says there's some kind of reward during Ramadan for violence."

Memo to the president: Ramadan ended three days ago and the number of Americans killed continues to surge, with at least five killed in the past day alone.

That might be my favorite one of the bunch, since it shows that Bush doesn't care a whit about the beliefs and motivations of those funny brown people we're killing. A point driven home by this:

Sometimes the columnists offered Bush suggestions on how to sell the war on terror. This happened after the president described the enemy, bizarrely, in the broadest terms: "We will press and press and press to protect ourselves. And this stuff about how Iraq is causing the enemy -- whatever excuse they need, they have made up their mind to attack, and they grab on to things to kind of justify. But if it's not Iraq, it's Israel. If it's not Israel, it's the Crusades. If it's not the Crusades, it is the cartoon. I'm not kidding you. I'm not kidding you."

This provokes "laughter," according to the transcript. But Bush presses on. "They are cold-blooded killers."

"If it's not the Crusades, it's the cartoon -- that's a good slogan," one of his guests suggests.

Here's a fun exercise: figure out exactly what the President means by "they" in the above quote.

And finally, Bush offers perhaps the truest expression yet of the Bush Doctrine:

But Bush calls the war "a struggle of good versus evil," adding, "Maybe it's not nuanced enough for some of the thinkers and all that stuff -- that's fine. But that's exactly what a lot of people like me think."

There's a reason why what most of what the administration does stubbornly resists any effort to understand it using our crude tools of logic and analysis -- they don't care about such things. Exercise and maintenance of power is a prime motivator, but so is gratification of base impulses. Bush and his followers like to deride the Sixties counterculture and its "do what feels good" credo, but you only have to look at their policies to see that this might be one of the most indulgent administrations in recent memory. They invaded Iraq, after all, primarily because they simply wanted to.

If cartoons are the metaphors of the day, then Bush must be the King of Id.

Armed with coffee and Cheetos

2006-10-22T10:14:00.000-04:00

Or, The Lapdogs Of War.

The beginning of the end of America

2006-10-19T19:09:00.000-04:00

Though it's often tempting to claim that this country offers only a choice between the right and the center-right, there is a much deeper schism today that has very little to do with the traditional ideas of left and right and Republican and Democrat.

Instead, what we are seeing is a clash between bedrock American principles that until recently both "sides" professed to cherish and a naked appeal to fear in the pursuit of ever-greater power. Bush supporters are cheering his dismantling of due process not because it is a "conservative" idea (which it is as far away from as you can get) but because they support Bush and fear the things he tells them to fear. It is not a political stance but an emotional one. To Bush supporters, the terrorists are so scary that turning America into a police state is an acceptable price for a fleeting sense of safety.

Others try, with increasing frustration and anger that the fearful decry as "unhinged Bush-hatred," to point out that the things we are doing to "save America" are in fact destroying America's most redeeming qualities. This observation is often referred to as "hating America" or "loving terrorists."

Yesterday, the lines were drawn more clearly than ever as Bush signed the Military Commissions Act, which codified some of the administrations more extreme abuses of the justice system. Though most of the media was willing to spin this event as "the President protecting us from evildoers," some voices recognized it for what it was.

Microsoft tightens the noose

2006-10-18T20:20:00.000-04:00

Faced with countless pirated copies of XP roaming the seedier parts of Internetville, the army of lawyers at Microsoft had two choices as it crafted the license terms for Vista. It could encourage legal use by allowing flexible, consumer-friendly usage. Or, it could make the terms to onerous that they'd be ignored and/or flaunted.

Guess which one they chose?

If Redmond is to salvage its reputation as a nickel-and-diming Evil Empire, it could do far worse to start than to make nice with the most enthusiastic PC users, who often build their own boxes from individual components. Rather than an olive branch, Microsoft extends to them a closed fist:

The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the “licensed device.”

So, every other time you build a new machine, or buy a new machine that didn't come with Vista bundled (like, say, a dual-boot-capable Mac), you get to pay for Vista all over again. This makes sense only if you repeatedly bash yourself in the skull with a copy of the Windows Server 2003 Administrator's Companion.

Another thing that geeks like to do is run OSes in virtual machines. For many, running Windows in a VM under a Unix or Mac system is very convenient and powerful. Microsoft has a middle finger ready for them, too. If you somehow resist the allure of Windows Vista Ultimate (which will set you back a cool $399 -- per two machine upgrades) and settle for the more pedestrian Home or Home Premium flavors, you'll be greeted with this thank-you:

USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may not use the software installed on the
licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.

Thank you for paying money for software when you could have easily pirated it. Oh, and screw you.

However, those who pony up for the full Ultimate experience will get this grudging concession from the MS crew:

USE WITH VIRTUALIZATION TECHNOLOGIES. You may use the software installed on the
licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system on the licensed device. If
you do so, you may not play or access content or use applications protected by any Microsoft digital,
information or enterprise rights management technology or other Microsoft rights management
services or use BitLocker. We advise against playing or accessing content or using applications
protected by other digital, information or enterprise rights management technology or other rights
management services or using full volume disk drive encryption.

If you were concerned that Vista might offer something more compelling for XP users than a thick layer of DRM, you can rest easy.

Finally, this might be my favorite, if only for its humor value:

SCOPE OF LICENSE. The software is licensed, not sold. This agreement only gives you some
rights to use the software. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more
rights despite this limitation, you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement.
In doing so, you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use
it in certain ways. For more information, see http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/userights. You
may not work around any technical limitations in the software.

Any bets as to how many Vista upgrades Microsoft will actually sell? Clearly, it will reach critical mass at some point as Dell and HP and everyone else stop shipping XP in favor of the new flesh, but how many real users are actually gung-ho about this thing?

They all look alike to me.

2006-10-18T16:37:00.000-04:00

Via Billmon, here's an enlightening article from the NYT.

The question of the day: what's the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite? When right-wing podium-pounders from the president on down are telling us that bearded Mecca-facing wackos are massing at the borders waiting to eat our ever-more-numerous children, it seems important for us to understand the nature of Islam and the reasons for much of the Middle East's chronic unrest. So surely the people entrusted with keeping an eye on the wackos are up on the most fundamental (no pun intended) aspects of the religion?

First up, the FBI's head of national security, Willie Hulon:

“Yes, sure, it’s right to know the difference,” he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.”

That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. “The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following,” he said. “And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following.”

O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran — Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. “Iran and Hezbollah,” I prompted. “Which are they?”

He took a stab: “Sunni.”

Wrong.

Al Qaeda? “Sunni.”

Right.

OK, so he's just guessing. But he's new on the job, so we'll give him a break. Surely, seven-term Congressman Terry Everett, vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence, could do better:

“Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” I asked him a few weeks ago.

Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: “One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.”

To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”

That's certainly encouraging! And how about Congresswoman Jo An Davis, who is tasked with monitoring the CIA's Islamic intelligence gathering operations?

“Do I?” she asked me. A look of concentration came over her face. “You know, I should.” She took a stab at it: “It’s a difference in their fundamental religious beliefs. The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa. But I think it’s the Sunnis who’re more radical than the Shia.”

Did she know which branch Al Qaeda’s leaders follow?

“Al Qaeda is the one that’s most radical, so I think they’re Sunni,” she replied. “I may be wrong, but I think that’s right.”

Did she think that it was important, I asked, for members of Congress charged with oversight of the intelligence agencies, to know the answer to such questions, so they can cut through officials’ puffery when they came up to the Hill?

“Oh, I think it’s very important,” said Ms. Davis, “because Al Qaeda’s whole reason for being is based on their beliefs. And you’ve got to understand, and to know your enemy.”

Who can argue with that?

Tiring out the stork

2006-10-18T16:12:00.000-04:00

Since American culture has become more and more fixated on the needs of children in recent years, it's perhaps inevitable that people want more and more of the little angels. The recent passing of the 300 million US population mark is perhaps a symptom of this. But in this recent CNN article discussing the trend, this passage in particular stands out:

But a leading expert on family size, Duke University sociologist Philip Morgan, says it makes sense that some well-off couples are opting for more children as concern about global overcrowding eases because of lowering birth rates overall.

"The population explosion -- fears about that are over," he said. "People used to think that having more than two kids was not only expensive but immoral. Now, people say if you can afford three kids, four kids, that's great."

Lowering birth rates overall? No more worries about population explosions? When did this happen? Why didn't any one tell me about these astounding developments?

Let's go to the numbers:

Well, it looks like we're still adding a billion people to the planet every decade or so. So why are these affluent Americans so morally comfy with having enormous broods?

It probably has to do with this:

There's one (or both) of two things happpening here:

Well-off Americans see their own birth rates leveling off, and assume that their breeding happens in a vacuum.
Well-off (and largely white) Americans are frightened by the burgeoning ranks of non-white people, and do their best to keep up.

Perhaps I'm charitably naive, but I think it's probably more the former than the latter, but in an age when Fox News seemingly exists primarily to provide Americans with images of scary foreigners, you never know.

Whatever the motivation, it certainly seems near-sighted, in much the same way as celebrating paying off a credit card by going on a shopping spree. If "fears of a population explosion" are going away, just what do these people think will happen if they all start having big families?

I wonder if people in China can access this story through their national firewall. If so, I'm sure it makes them happy.

"We're bigger than U.S. Steel!"

2006-10-11T14:49:00.000-04:00

Like Hyman Roth carving up a Cuba-shaped birthday cake, it looks like Iraq is determined to dismember itself:

The Shiite-dominated parliament Wednesday passed a law allowing the formation of federal regions in Iraq, despite opposition from Sunni lawmakers and some Shiites who say it will dismember the country and fuel sectarian violence.

[snip]

The federalism law sets up a system for allowing provinces to join together into autonomous regions that would hold considerable self-rule powers, a right given to them under the constitution adopted last year in a national referendum.

Some Shiites want to create an autonomous zone in their heartland in the south, much like the self-ruling Kurdish region in northern Iraq.

But Sunni Arabs deeply oppose the federalism measures, fearing it will divide Iraq into sectarian mini-states, giving Shiite and Kurds control over oil riches in the south and north, and leaving Sunnis in an impoverished central zone without resources. Some Shiite parties - including the faction of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr - also oppose the measures for nationalist reasons.

At this point, it would seem appropriate to ask, "Is this what we had in mind?" However, I'm not at all sure what exactly we did have in mind, aside from deposing Saddam. And neither was anyone in the government apparently.

So now we'll have a Kurdish "state" in the north ready to mix it up with Turkey, a steadfast Shiite ally of Iran down on the border with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and a bunch of embittered, militant Sunnis in the leftovers, ripe for recruitment by al Qaeda.

Sounds like a win for somebody, if not us.

Never mind the Constitution, here's the sex scandal

2006-10-07T12:42:00.000-04:00

I haven't said anything about Foleygate because (1) I'm busy at work this week and (2) I'm rather ambivalent about the whole thing. It's hard to get worked up about a scandal of this nature when just a few days earlier Congress handed fascist authority over to the President, which in any sane society would provoke far greater outrage than uncovering a single representative's desire to boink teenage pages. If this upsets the neocon balance of power, then that's a good thing, but at root it's simply another example of the electorate not caring about anything that goes on in government unless sex, taxes or killing Muslims is involved.

But at the same time, I've been waiting for some lowlife to make the inevitable conflation between the self-described "gay" Foley and every other gay man in the world. Said lowlife turned out to be Bill Kristol:

KRISTOL: Well, Democrats care about the children, Brit, and so I think they should pressure states to raise the age of consent from 16 to 18 so that it's clearly illegal for people like Mark Foley to hit on 17-year- old pages. They pressured states to raise the age of drinking, right? -- from 18 to 21 by threatening to cut off funds. They could do the same thing for age of consent laws in terms of the sexual predators. They could certainly pass a resolution supporting the Boy Scouts in their effort to keep people like Mark Foley from becoming scout masters, I think the Democrats could really do a lot of good for our children.

As everyone knows, the Boy Scouts are fighting legal battles over their desire to keep out gays. And here we have Kristol claiming that such a thing would "keep people like Mark Foley from becoming scout masters." For Kristol, gays are "people like Mark Foley." Translation: All gay men want to have sex with little boys. Everyone knows that, right?

Never mind that the percentage of homosexuals among pedophiles roughly matches the percentage of homosexuals among the general population. (And you could actually have a really good argument over whether or not Foley is a pedophile, but that hardly matters. What he did was both a reprehensible abuse of power and morally bankrupt, whether you can label it with the p-word or not.) For Kristol, the lesson of Foley's unfettered libido is that we need to keep gay men away from children.

By the same token, I suppose that the popularity of "barely legal" heterosexual porn (and the early careers of Britney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, et al) means that we need to keep straight men away from children as well. So, taking Kristol's proposal to its logical extreme, all men must have no contact with children.

Burqas would probably be a good idea, too. Can't be too careful.

Blog on

2006-10-03T09:56:00.000-04:00

Frequent commenter Mike has started a new political blog, since he's tired of being under my tyrannical control. Or something. Maybe I made that part up.

Anyway, go check it out and start marking those books.

Bill Frist throws in the terror towel

2006-10-03T09:32:00.000-04:00

So let me get this straight. We're going to stay in Iraq (a country that didn't attack us on 9/11) no matter how many soldiers and civilians get killed, but fighting the Taliban is just too much trouble:

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said Monday that the Afghan guerrilla war can never be won militarily and called for efforts to bring the Taliban and their supporters into the Afghan government.

The Tennessee Republican said he had learned from briefings that Taliban fighters were too numerous and had too much popular support to be defeated by military means.

"You need to bring them into a more transparent type of government," Frist said during a brief visit to a U.S. and Romanian military base in the southern Taliban stronghold of Qalat. "And if that's accomplished we'll be successful."

If anyone out there has a clue as to what exactly the GOP anti-terror strategy is, let me know. I'm at a loss.

What Frist is proposing may not be an entirely bad idea -- if your goal is stability. But the current regime has not shown an iota of interest in promoting stability to date. The invasion of Iraq and the support of Israel in the Lebanon conflict were both profoundly destabilizing actions, purportedly in the name of taking radical action to undermine terrorist support. (The fact that both accomplished precisely the opposite is immaterial in this discussion.) Bush certainly didn't sound like he wanted to create a US-backed kinder, gentler Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001. He talked about decimating those thugs, and very few had a problem with that.

But now we've come full circle. Iraq was originally a distraction that prevented us from effectively finishing off the Taliban and al Qaeda. Now, it's Afghanistan that the GOP sees as a distraction preventing them from focusing on Iraq and maybe Iran. So they're willing to let the Taliban, the guys who employed al Qaeda as their own personal army, back into the halls of power and use the military for more non-9/11-related adventures in pursuit of the neocon dream of global hegemony.

I still don't buy the "Bush was behind 9/11 to jump-start the PNAC agenda" conspiracy theories, but the neocons are doing precisely nothing to make those theories any less plausible.

UPDATE: Frist claims he was misquoted and only wants to bring in "moderate Islamist" elements of the Taliban.

It'll be interesting to see what the warbloggers make of the notion of a "moderate Islamist."

Iraq war: a done deal in March 2002

2006-10-02T16:04:00.000-04:00

As part of the ongoing Jack Abramoff investigation, a whole ton of e-mails have been released. Buried deep in this pile is yet another stake through the heart of the "we gave diplomacy a chance to work in Iraq" lie.

(This particular e-mail can be found at the "Bates numbers GTG R000847 - 001829" link on the page linked above, on page 26.)

From: Jack Abramoff
To: 'octagon1'
Monday, March 18, 2002 8:31 AM
Subject: RE: Sunday

I was sitting yesterday with Karl Rove, Bush's top advisor, at the NCAA basketball game, discussing Israel when this email came in. I showed it to him. It seems that the President was very sad to have to come out negatively regarding Israel, but that they needed to mollify the Arabs for the upcoming war on Iraq. That did not seem to work anyway. Bush seems to love Sharon and Israel, and thinks Arabfat [sic], is nothing but a liar. I thought I'd pass that on.

Everything in the year leading up to the invasion was just a big show. Nothing was going to stop Bush from starting the war.

I'm a figurehead

2006-10-01T16:31:00.000-04:00

Go down and read the comments to the previous post. They're far more interesting than anything I could come up with at the moment.

Line of succession

2006-10-01T00:37:00.000-04:00

So far, the administration has been following the "Dictatorships for Dummies" playbook with great precision. Taking advantage of a traumatic attack, they have equated dissent with treason, created a climate of perpetual war against a vague enemy, elevated the executive branch over the legislative and judicial branches, and created a police state apparatus.

But there will still be at least the appearance of an election in 2008, unless the transformation into authoritarianism becomes completely overt before then. (Another terror attack would probably do the trick.) Conspicuous by its absence is a clear heir to Bush's throne. This is puzzling. Why go to the trouble of subverting the Constitution, only to voluntarily abandon the supreme executive branch you have so painstakingly created?

Other than periodic rumblings of a run by the stunningly inept Condoleeza Rice, no one within the administration seems poised to front the machine in two years. Cheney doesn't seem to have the appetite (or the ticker) for it. Rove isn't the in-front-of-the-throne type. I'm trying to imagine an insider, and coming up empty.

Congress isn't burping up any likely suspects, either. McCain loathes most of the White House, though he'll play ball as long as it's to his advantage. The once-mighty Santorum doesn't appear likely to even retain his seat this year. Frist is hip-deep in scandal and doesn't play well on the national stage.

Usually by this point the intended successor is clear. That clarity is, so far, lacking. Who do you see as the new face of the regime?

There's always Jeb Bush, I suppose. If you're going to give up the pretense of democracy, you might as well go with the obvious.

Serious foreign policy analysis from the party that knows what it's doing

2006-09-28T22:59:00.000-04:00

Presented without comment:

Lott: Bush barely mentioned Iraq in meeting with Senate Republicans
From CNN's Ted Barrett

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush barely mentioned the war in Iraq when he met with Republican senators behind closed doors in the Capitol Thursday morning and was not asked about the course of the war, Sen. Trent Lott, R-Mississippi, said.

"No, none of that," Lott told reporters after the session when asked if the Iraq war was discussed. "You're the only ones who obsess on that. We don't and the real people out in the real world don't for the most part."

Lott went on to say he has difficulty understanding the motivations behind the violence in Iraq.

"It's hard for Americans, all of us, including me, to understand what's wrong with these people," he said. "Why do they kill people of other religions because of religion? Why do they hate the Israeli's and despise their right to exist? Why do they hate each other? Why do Sunnis kill Shiites? How do they tell the difference? They all look the same to me."

Bush officially named dictator

2006-09-28T12:23:00.000-04:00

Good news, America. Thanks to the bill passed by the House yesterday (and ~~sure to be~~ passed by the Senate and soon to be signed by the President), we now live in a police state. The administration now has the Congressional seal of approval to detain and torture "enemy combatants" (which means anyone the administration says is an "enemy combatant," a classification that includes those giving money to charities deemed to be supporting terrorism), even American citizens, pretty much at will.

In other words, all it took was a single terrorist attack to undo our entire system of due process. Congress meekly lined up and gave Bush total power to shuffle whoever he pleases off to secret torture prisons.

I never thought America was so fearful, so spineless, so completely lacking in confidence in its own ideals, history and purpose as to abandon all pretense to justice so quickly and completely, without significant opposition. I thought enough people -- at all points on the political spectrum -- thought "freedom" was more than a meaningless mantra that they wouldn't throw it away so easily. I thought we were, you know, better than the tinpot Third World juntas and Stalinist megastates.

I thought wrong.

Enjoy your dictatorship, America. You asked for it. Here is how you were sold tyranny:

"The Global War on Terror is different from any war we have ever known. As a country we must understand that adaptation to these new situations is critical in order to achieve victory over those who seek to hurt us as a nation." -- Dennis Hastert

"Let's bring justice before the eyes of the children and widows of Sept. 11." -- James Sensenbrenner, Jr.

"It is outrageous that House Democrats, at the urging of their leaders, continue to oppose giving President Bush the tools he needs to protect our country." -- John A. Boehner

If Bush likes a "compromise," you know it's not a compromise

2006-09-23T14:21:00.000-04:00

I'll let Glenn Greenwald explain why anyone telling you the torture "compromise" is a good thing is a fan of torture.

I'll also echo Glenn's frustration that "Democrats" are so eager to lavish praise on the nominally "independent" Republicans that rolled over on this issue. It's bad enough that the Democrats defer to Republicans to provide meaningful opposition to the White House -- the fact that they don't even notice when the Republican opposition caves is completely pathetic.

From here on out, I think we can refer to the Democrats as the "Democratic wing of the Republican Party."

Ironic Product Names Dept.

2006-09-19T17:41:00.000-04:00

With great fanfare, Microsoft has introduced its "iPod killer" Zune media player. This is an interesting evolution for Microsoft, since to date it has focused on a comprehensive software solution for media content delivery and copy protection rather than hardware. They spearheaded the "PlaysForSure" program as a common umbrella for Windows-based hardware and content vendors to work with, and nearly every media player that isn't an iPod and online content provider that isn't iTunes now use this technology. Now Microsoft leaps into the hardware arena with the Zune player and announces a new software solution to go with it...

...that isn't compatible with PlaysForSure.

Oops.

Such is the way DRM works -- you pay money for something that's only a software change away from not playing anymore. Microsoft is furiously spinning this, telling people, "So they're two complementary solutions -- not everyones gonna want Zune and not everyone's gonna want PlaysForSure. They're different paths there, and we're okay with both of them."

Great. So now you're selling two incompatible playback solutions. So, what, if I buy a Sandisk player and my wife gets a Zune, we've got buy everything twice? Of course not. We'll get a CD and not have to worry about it, like every sane consumer. (Assuming we haven't been driven into the embrace of Bittorrent.) Any odds on when "different path" #3 appears?

Meanwhile, in the same interview, Microsoft VP J Allard (is his first name really just "J"?) has a great suggestion on how to get video content into your shiny new Zune player:

We have really pretty strong commitment to being compatible with your existing libraries. We know we're not the first player in this space, and that there's a ton of media out there, and so we put a bunch of codec support in there. [...] Lots of DVD ripping software out there that encodes to those formats, so the most popular formats out there, whether it's MPEG-4 or H.264, we'll support those. So, we really are taking a relatively agnostic approach to different formats.

That's a fantastic idea. Too bad ripping DVDs violates the DMCA.

But there's a silver lining. If Microsoft is saying that it's OK to rip a DVD and strip out its copy protection to load it on your Zune, then it must also be OK to strip the DRM out of PlaysForSure media to load that onto your Zune.

I don't think it would be a good idea to hold your breath waiting for Microsoft to endorse that solution, though.

John Yoo speaks ignorance to the serfs

2006-09-18T12:50:00.000-04:00

One of the primary architect's of the Bush administration's hatred of the Constitution, John Yoo, published an op-ed in the New York Times explaining to us all why we need to redefine the powers of th executive branch in order to protect us from the Islamofascinazicommuextremoevilist hordes. Here's a list of things he finds to praise about the Bush regime:

It has re-classified national security information made public in earlier administrations and declined, citing executive privilege, to disclose information to Congress or the courts about its energy policy task force. The White House has declared that the Constitution allows the president to sidestep laws that invade his executive authority. That is why Mr. Bush has issued hundreds of signing statements -- more than any previous president -- reserving his right not to enforce unconstitutional laws.

Once again -- this is Yoo lauding the administration. He thinks this behavior is good and proper and ideal. Bush breaking laws ("sidestep" sounds so dainty) is just a valid exercise of executive power.

But even more breathtaking than that (and I've got to give Yoo credit for that feat) is this:

The changes of the 1970’s occurred largely because we had no serious national security threats to United States soil, but plenty of paranoia in the wake of Richard Nixon’s use of national security agencies to spy on political opponents.

Wow. Just... wow. Now, I'm not trying to minimize the general nefariousness of the Islamofascinazicommuextremoevilist threat, but I think I'm on pretty safe ground when I say that the absolute worst that al Qaeda could do to "United States soil" would hardly be a mosquito bite compared to the capabilities of the Soviet Union. Yoo is seriously suggesting that the national security situation during the Cold War was casual and carefree, and that's why we picked on poor Richard Nixon. Because we had nothing better to do.

And the result?

The Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act required the government to get a warrant from a special court to conduct wiretapping for national security reasons... [leading to] the wall between intelligence and law enforcement that contributed to our failure to stop the 9/11 attacks.

That's right -- FISA caused 9/11! (Bad FISA!) If only we'd just let Nixon spy on whoever he wanted for political purposes, the World Trade Center would still be standing.

The subtext here is crystal clear. Either we allow Bush to operate independently of the law (since in Yoo's fomulation the correct person to decide what laws the President should follow is the President), or we all die at the hands of the evildoers.

Any similarity of that message to the fundamental tenets of fascism are, I'm sure, purely coincidental.

Glenn Greenwald has a much more thorough examination of Yoo's completely wrongheaded op-ed available here.

GOP: First Amendment protections not worth paying for

2006-09-18T09:04:00.000-04:00

As noted on NPR this morning, but conspicuously absent from mainstream media (a Google News search turned up only press releases from various interest groups), the full House will soon vote on the "Public Expression of Religion Act." Here's the summary of the bill, from the bill itself:

To amend the Revised Statutes of the United States to eliminate the chilling effect on the constitutionally protected expression of religion by State and local officials that results from the threat that potential litigants may seek damages and attorney's fees.

And here's the important part:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a court shall not award reasonable fees and expenses of attorneys to the prevailing party on a claim of injury consisting of the violation of a prohibition in the Constitution against the establishment of religion brought against the United States or any agency or any official of the United States acting in his or her official capacity in any court having jurisdiction over such claim, and the remedies with respect to such a claim shall be limited to injunctive and declaratory relief.

English translation: the theocrats know that they can't win Establishment Clause cases on legal merit, as their track record in court is abysmal. So, they seek to stop lawsuits before they begin by not allowing legal fees to be paid by the defense in the event the plaintiff wins. Which means that you can only bring suit against First Amendment violations if you are able to pay for legal representation out of your own pocket, or if the lawyer is willing to work for free. This leaves aspiring theocrats at all levels of government free to use government money to promote the religion of their choice without the "chilling effect" of being held accountable for their violations of the Constitution.

At this point, it would be easier to discuss what parts of the Consitution *haven't* been subjected to shredding by the current party in power. If they didn't get so much money from the NRA, that list would be even smaller.

Film fest

2006-09-17T13:59:00.000-04:00

I don't make it to the theater much, and am far too disorganized to watch movies as they are released on DVD. So, by the time I see things, no one wants to talk about them any more. Well, too bad. Today, Nero's Fiddle reviews the movies of several months ago.

Crash -- This looks great and boasts some fine performances by the likes of Matt Dillon and the always-impressive Don Cheadle. Unfortunately, all that is in service of a script that reads like a tenth-generation Xerox of Magnolia (which itself was second-hand Robert Altman). Featuring an ensemble cast "connected" in the most hackneyed and belief-beggaring ways imaginable, we are asked to constantly be surprised by the "unexpected" ways these characters behave. After the opening, in which Ludacris complains about being treated as a criminal by whites and then commits a carjacking, we are pummeled senseless by more of the same. Racist people aren't totally evil! Good people can do bad things! Stereotypes are sometimes right! And sometimes wrong! Wow! Crash is a film that shallow people think is deep, which might explain its Best Picture win.

Good Night And Good Luck -- I have to give George Clooney credit for pursuing an artistic vision at the expense of commercial appeal. This black-and-white movie consists almost entirely of pasty white guys smoking and talking. And it's riveting. David Strathairn spookily channels Ed Murrow, while Joseph McCarthy plays himself and ridiculously overacts the part. The filmmakers are guilty of some oversimplification here, making the Murrow/McCarthy feud appear to exist in something of a vacuum, which is perhaps inevitable in reducing such tales to 90 minutes. But the importance of the events depicted can hardly be overstated, which makes the impact of this understated film all the greater.

V For Vendetta -- I have not read Alan Moore's graphic novel, so I cannot accurately judge Moore's complaints about the movie. Moore's beef, in a nutshell, is that his work was specifcally about England, fascism, and anarchy -- and if the Wachowski brothers wanted to make an allegory about America, neo-conservatism and liberalism, they should have made up their own characters and situations with which to tell it. Moore accuses the filmmakers of cowardice in using his work as cover to attack the US government. While he may have a point, the movie is still a hugely entertaining and gripping one on its own merits. Hugo Weaving gives a memorable performance from behind a Guy Fawkes mask, which ought to be an awardable achievement.

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy -- This adaptation gets some things right -- the deisgn (and emphasis on practical vs. CGI effects) is excellent, particularly the inspired Marvin costume, and Bill Nighy is a delight as Slartibartfast. Sadly, it gets more things wrong. Sam Rockwell seems to be under the impression that he was hired to do a half-assed Bush impersonation, portraying Zaphod as a drawling semi-coherent dimwit instead of a jerk whose narcissism overwhelms his brilliance. Its worst offense, though, is treating Douglas Adams' words as secondary. Lines are mumbled and rushed through instead of delivered. Memorable monologues are edited into pale shadows. Gags are started and then abandoned. In all its previous and varied incarnations, Hitchhiker's great strength was Adams' inspired wordplay. For some reason, the makers of this great-looking film decided to go in a different direction, and made a curiously pointless movie.

Stay tuned! I'll soon be analyzing the 2004 elections.

The angry guy in the sky

2006-09-11T15:57:00.000-04:00

The Washington Post has a thought-provoking article up on the difficulties of getting a handle on the "religiosity" of America:

The unaffiliated -- people who check "none" or "no religion" when asked their affiliation -- have been closely eyeballed since 1990, when major surveys showed they doubled, from 7 percent of the U.S. population to 14 percent, reflecting, sociologists say, increasing secularization that is occurring at the same time American society is becoming more religious.

But the Baylor survey, believed to be one of the most detailed ever done about religion in America, found that a tenth of people who picked "no religion" out of 40 possible religious groups did something interesting when asked later where they worship: they wrote down a place.

Which could in fact be a classic case of asking one question and getting an answer to a different question. While the poll-takers assumed an answer of "none"/"no religion" meant "agnostic/atheist", a sizable number of those polled chose "none" were in fact spiritual/theists who didn't claim any of the 40 religions on offer. If "other" was an option, then people weren't completing the survey correctly. If "other" was omitted, then it was a poorly constructed survey. Either way, it seems that pigeon-holing faith is becoming increasingly difficult.

I was more struck, however, by this section later on:

Among the most innovative aspects of the Baylor survey, scholars who know about it say, are questions that probe how Americans describe God's personality. Respondents were offered 26 attributes ranging from "absolute" and "wrathful" to "friendly," and asking if God is directly involved in and angered by their affairs, and worldly affairs.

The researchers separated God's attributes into four categories: angry, judgmental, benevolent or distant. Researchers found that the largest category of people -- 31 percent -- was made up of people who believe God both wrathful and highly involved in human affairs.

People's beliefs about God's personality are powerful predictors, according to the survey. Those who found God engaged and punishing were likely to have lower incomes and education, to come from the South and be white evangelicals or black Protestants. People who believe God is distant and nonjudgmental are more likely to support increased business regulation, environmental protections and the even distribution of wealth.

Sounds like the 31 percent who believe in the "pissed-off hands-on" God prefer to leave the questions of justice to the angry guy in the sky.

Finally, we have this:

The changing demographics of America demand different polls as well, religion pollsters say. For example, approximately 3 percent of Americans come from faith traditions besides Christianity and Judaism. While still small, this group is growing rapidly, and scholars say if current trends continue, that number could reach 10 percent.

According to Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg, who focuses on religion, that is already the figure for Americans under the age of 25. Questions about the frequency of "attending" religious services aren't as relevant to Hindus and Buddhists, who often have worship spaces in their homes. Questions about "weekly" prayer services aren't as relevant to Muslims, who are required to pray five times a day, she said.

"The broader point is that this country that's always been religiously diverse," said Green, "is becoming religiously diverse in a new way."

If I'm interpreting all this correctly, we could be looking at a situation in the foreseeable future where a quarter of the country will identify as non-Judeo-Christian. How Bill O'Reilly will deal with this remains to be seen.

You want to talk about 9/11? Fine.

2006-09-11T09:03:00.000-04:00

Five years ago today, the United States was given an exceedingly rare opportunity. Almost a gift. It seems almost blasphemous to say that, given the monstrous evil carried out that morning. But the hindsight of five years tells us that behind the cliche of a "world-changing" event is the reality that the world will change, and though Osama bin Laden was responsible for the event, the course of the resulting change was up to us.

When al Qaeda slaughtered nearly 3,000 people, a world that had been sensitized to violence and cynical about fighting "evil" was, for a moment, galvanized and shocked. Innocent civilians of all nationalities were burned alive and ground into dust in the name of a wild-eyed interpretation of a volatile religion. Chaos reigned. Stories floated through the news stations and the crippled internet of the State Department in flames, car bombs going off in front of the Capitol. The President of the United States scurried off to a secret location to wait out the crisis, and the rest of us were left to see what would remain intact when the sun set.

(As part of my job, I was surrounded by very rich men that day. They screamed into cell phones and demanded the ability to control the situation. They could not. They were utterly adrift.)

No one knew what would happen next, because, truly, anything could happen next. The reason such moments are important and memorable and marked with an annual orgy of pseudo-reverent news coverage is the inherent split of "before" and "after." We all knew the "after" would be somehow different, everyone had an opinion, but it was unknowable.

Very few could argue against the proposition that the Taliban had to go, and very few did. It was a nearly universally despised regime, and as comedian David Cross memorably observed, even Ralph Nader would have invaded Afghanistan. That move was a given.

After that, the world was ready to stand with us to clean house and reject violent extremism. Those regimes still benefiting from terror were palpably intimidated by the righteous unity and clarity of purpose exhibited by everyone else. For a brief instant, it seemed possible the world could wipe the slate clean, set aside old greivances, use the horrific example Osama bin Laden had given us as a signpost of what to move away from, and find something better to move toward.

And, as 9/11 gave the world the opportunity to move forward, 9/11 gave the Bush administration the opportunity, and the responsibility, to lead that movement. The chance to recognize that our power flowed not from our military but from our ideals. The chance to acknowledge that our attempts to mold the world through force are not without unforeseen consequence, as our backing of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s gave rise to al Qaeda, and our establishment of long term bases in Saudi Arabia during and after the Gulf War gave the fanatics an excuse to project their rage onto us.

Instead, Bush invaded Iraq.

The administration is fond of accusing those who disagree with its policies of having a "pre-9/11 mindset." Yet it's difficult to conceive of an action more representative of a pre-9/11 mindset than the invasion of Iraq. Iraq was the old enemy. Saddam was a secular despot, a Sunni ruling a country of Shiites, a military dictator with a crumbling army that had never recovered from the long war against Iran in which we supported him. Iraq was contained. Iraq was not the problem. But Iraq was an old grudge. Iraq was unfinished business. In the end, Iraq was the free shot we squandered.

America and the world required no intense sales pitch to fight al Qaeda. Their threat could not be questioned. Their intent was unmistakable. The case for action was compelling. The decmiation of al Qaeda would have sent a clear message to Hamas, Hezbollah and their sponsors that terror was no longer tolerated.

Instead, Bush had to invent reasons to attack Iraq. He had to hype already dubious intelligence about weapons of mass destruction into a "grave and gathering threat" that turned out not to exist at all. He had to grasp at tiny straws of unclear evidence to weave a tattered narrative of a collaboration between Iraq and al Qaeda that turned out not to exist, either. He had to pump up minor players like Zarqawi into supervillians with ties to Saddam that... turned out not to exist.

Most of the world didn't buy the initial sales pitch. Of those that joined us in the invasion, most would not stay long, after the justifications for the war fell apart and the rosy predictions of a trouble-free transition to a secular West-friendly democracy proved wrong.

Instead, it seems clear that what we have instead accomplished is presenting Iran with a new ally and al Qaeda with a new base of operations. Instead of making terrorism unacceptable, we have given it new life and vitality. Just as 9/11 was a moment of "before" and "after," so was the invasion of Iraq. What March 20, 2003 turned out to signify was the end of the truly global war on terror and the beginning of the increasing isolation of the United States.

The World Trade Center has been burdened by more symbolism in the last five years than even its 13 million square feet could hold. But I'll still add a little more -- the Twin Towers represent twin tragedies. The horrible, barbaric loss of life that happened five years ago from the from very minutes I type this. And, perhaps equally tragic, the loss of a moment of opportunity that we may never have again.

Following the President's example

2006-09-10T16:39:00.000-04:00

Inspired by the federal executive branch, Ohio is now deciding that things like trials and due process shouldn't hinder their ability to punish people:

A recently enacted law allows county prosecutors, the state attorney general, or, as a last resort, alleged victims to ask judges to civilly declare someone to be a sex offender even when there has been no criminal verdict or successful lawsuit.

The rules spell out how the untried process would work. It would largely treat a person placed on the civil registry the same way a convicted sex offender is treated under Ohio's so-called Megan's Law.

The person's name, address, and photograph would be placed on a new Internet database and the person would be subjected to the same registration and community notification requirements and restrictions on where he could live.

A civilly declared offender, however, could petition the court to have the person's name removed from the new list after six years if there have been no new problems and the judge believes the person is unlikely to abuse again.

I hear this sort of thing is popular in countries that don't believe the Almighty has given them the gift of freedom.

The forgotten attacks

2006-09-10T15:54:00.000-04:00

From Cheney today (when he wasn't calling those who don't think the Iraq war was a great idea terrorist sympathizers or continuing to flatly contradict the CIA on the nature of the relationship between Saddam and Zarqawi):

"I don't know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years . . . of defeating the efforts of al-Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans," Cheney said. "You've got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right."

I don't want to sound like a spoilsport, but I don't understand the national amnesia that leads to the statements of "five years of no attacks."

Someone launched a very well-publicized terror attack shortly after September 11, 2001. The attacker used a substance that President Bush would later classify (while selling the Iraq war) as a biological weapon -- a weapon of mass destruction. This attack killed five people and injured seventeen others. It caused a national panic. Many buildings and facilities were closed for years, and the FBI estimates the total dollar cost of the attacks at $1 billion. Members of Congress were direct targets of this attack, which may have had an effect on the subsequent passage of the Patriot Act.

Yet, this is never mentioned. There are no "five years after" stories. We hear again and again from the administration and its apologists that America has been untroubled by terror since 9/11, as though these attacks never happened. Even worse, the case remains unsolved and no one seems to be much interested in solving it.

Why is this? Did the government not find a connection to Islamic terrorism and so disregard this terrorism (using WMDs!) as not relevant to their "war on terror"? Is five not a large enough body count to get attention? Is it only terrorism if airplanes are involved? Do attacks on Democrats and the media not worry right-wingers? (After all, people like Ann Coulter often publicly fantasize about violent attacks on Democrats and the media.) Do the American people simply not want to remember? Does it simply just not fit into the media's preferred "9/11 happened, then we fought back" narrative?

I don't know. But it's mighty strange.

You go to war with the SecDef you have

2006-09-10T15:05:00.000-04:00

Via Tom Tomorrow's blog, we learn Rummy wasn't particularly interested in the boring stuff that came after "shock and awe":

In 2001, Scheid was a colonel with the Central Command, the unit that oversees U.S. military operations in the Mideast.

On Sept. 10, 2001, he was selected to be the chief of logistics war plans.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he said, "life just went to hell."

That day, Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command, told his planners, including Scheid, to "get ready to go to war."

A day or two later, Rumsfeld was "telling us we were going to war in Afghanistan and to start building the war plan. We were going to go fast.

"Then, just as we were barely into Afghanistan ... Rumsfeld came and told us to get ready for Iraq."

Scheid said he remembers everyone thinking, "My gosh, we're in the middle of Afghanistan, how can we possibly be doing two at one time? How can we pull this off? It's just going to be too much."

Planning was kept very hush-hush in those early days.

"There was only a handful of people, maybe five or six, that were involved with that plan because it had to be kept very, very quiet."

There was already an offensive plan in place for Iraq, Scheid said. And in the beginning, the planners were just expanding on it.

"Whether we were going to execute it, we had no idea," Scheid said.

Eventually other military agencies - like the transportation and Army materiel commands - had to get involved.

They couldn't just "keep planning this in the dark," Scheid said.

Planning continued to be a challenge.

"The secretary of defense continued to push on us ... that everything we write in our plan has to be the idea that we are going to go in, we're going to take out the regime, and then we're going to leave," Scheid said. "We won't stay."

Scheid said the planners continued to try "to write what was called Phase 4," or the piece of the plan that included post-invasion operations like occupation.

Even if the troops didn't stay, "at least we have to plan for it," Scheid said.

"I remember the secretary of defense saying that he would fire the next person that said that," Scheid said. "We would not do planning for Phase 4 operations, which would require all those additional troops that people talk about today.

"He said we will not do that because the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war."

Oops

2006-09-10T10:56:00.000-04:00

While we are being subjected to the mass media orgy of Five Years Of Terra, it's worth noting that the government is finally starting to admit that we spent three and a half of those five years fighting the wrong war:

Saddam Hussein rejected overtures from al-Qaida and believed Islamic extremists were a threat to his regime, a reverse portrait of an Iraq allied with Osama bin Laden painted by the Bush White House, a Senate panel has found.

The administration's version was based in part on intelligence that White House officials knew was flawed, according to Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, citing newly declassified documents released by the panel.

The report, released Friday, discloses for the first time an October 2005 CIA assessment that prior to the war Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaida operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.

As recently as an Aug. 21 news conference, President Bush said people should "imagine a world in which you had Saddam Hussein" with the capacity to make weapons of mass destruction and "who had relations with Zarqawi."

Democrats singled out CIA Director George Tenet, saying that during a private meeting in July Tenet told the panel that the White House pressured him and that he agreed to back up the administration's case for war despite his own agents' doubts about the intelligence it was based on.

'Tenet admitted to the Intelligence Committee that the policymakers wanted him to 'say something about not being inconsistent with what the president had said,'" Intelligence Committee member Carl Levin, D-Mich., told reporters Friday.

Tenet also told the committee that complying had been "the wrong thing to do," according to Levin.

"Well, it was much more than that," Levin said. "It was a shocking abdication of a CIA director's duty not to act as a shill for any administration or its policy."

Leaders of both parties accused each other of seeking political gain on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Republicans said the document contained little new information about prewar intelligence or postwar findings on Iraq's weapons and connection to terrorist groups.

Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., accused Democrats of trying to "use the committee ... insisting that they were deliberately duped into supporting the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime."

"That is simply not true," Roberts added, "and I believe the American people are smart enough to recognize election-year politicking when they see it."

The report speaks for itself, Democrats said.

The administration "exploited the deep sense of insecurity among Americans in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, leading a large majority of Americans to believe -- contrary to the intelligence assessments at the time -- that Iraq had a role in the 9/11 attacks," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee.

Still, Democrats were reluctant to say how the administration officials involved should be called to account.

Asked whether the wrongdoing amounted to criminal conduct, Levin and Rockefeller declined to answer. Rockefeller said later he did not believe Bush should be impeached over the matter.

According to the report, postwar findings indicate that Saddam "was distrustful of al-Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime." It quotes an FBI report from June 2004 in which former Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said in an interview that "Saddam only expressed negative sentiments about bin Laden."

Saddam himself is quoted in an FBI summary as acknowledging that the Iraqi government had met with bin Laden but denying that he had colluded with the al-Qaida leader. Claiming that Iraq opposed only U.S. policies, Saddam said that "if he wanted to cooperate with the enemies of the U.S., he would have allied with North Korea or China," the report quotes the FBI document.

The Democrats said that on Oct. 7, 2002, the day Bush gave a speech speaking of that link, the CIA had sent a declassified letter to the committee saying it would be an "extreme step" for Saddam to assist Islamist terrorists in attacking the United States.

Levin and Rockefeller said Tenet in July acknowledged to the committee that subsequently issuing a statement that there was no inconsistency between the president's speech and the CIA viewpoint had been a mistake.

They also charged Bush with continuing to cite faulty intelligence in his argument for war as recently as last month.

The report said that al-Zarqawi, the al-Qaida leader killed by a U.S. airstrike last June, was in Baghdad from May 2002 until late November 2002. But "postwar information indicates that Saddam Hussein attempted, unsuccessfully, to locate and capture al-Zarqawi and that the regime did not have a relationship with, harbor or turn a blind eye toward Zarqawi."

In June 2004, Bush also defended Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that Saddam had "long-established ties" with al-Qaida. "Zarqawi is the best evidence of connection to al-Qaida affiliates and al-Qaida," the president said.

The report concludes that postwar findings do not support a 2002 intelligence community report that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, possessed biological weapons or ever developed mobile facilities for producing biological warfare agents.

A second part of the report finds that false information from the Iraqi National Congress, an anti-Saddam group led by then-exile Ahmed Chalabi, was used to support key intelligence community assessments on Iraq.

Simple-mindedness

2006-09-07T20:53:00.000-04:00

Let's listen to the sophisticated foreign policy analysis of the President. First, he talks about the Bad Guys:

We face an enemy that has an ideology; they believe things. The best way to describe their ideology is to relate to you the fact that they think the opposite of the way we think. We treasure the freedom to worship. We value the freedom for people to express themselves in the public square. We honor the right for people to be able to raise their children in a peaceful society so they can realize their dreams. The enemy we face doesn't believe in dissent. They don't believe in the freedom to worship. They got a narrow view of freedom. But this enemy is particularly lethal because they're willing to use whatever tactic is necessary to achieve their objective.

Gee whiz. "They think the opposite of the way we think." That is a FACT, according to our elected leader. Among their Bizarro-world beliefs -- "The enemy we face doesn't believe in dissent." As opposed to Americans, who label dissent as treason and threaten to lock up reporters for reporting facts they don't like. "They have a narrow view of freedom... they're willing to use whatever tactic is necessary to achieve their objective." As opposed to Bush, who, as noted in the post below, spoke passionately about the value of secret prisons, torture, and absence of due process as dandy ways to achieve his objectives.

But enough of that. What did Bush have to say about the Good Guys?

The United States of America must understand that freedom is universal, that there is an Almighty, and the great gift of that Almighty to each man and woman in this world is the desire to be free.

So, the man we have entrusted with our freedoms has decided that we, his lowly subjects, "must understand" that "there is an Almighty." So all that talk only three paragraphs ago about the "freedom to worship" means exactly that -- you are free to worship. Not worshipping is apparently forbidden in the land of the free, the country founded by people fleeing religious persecution and, allegedly, currently threatened by those who, according to Bush a few scant paragraphs later, "want to spread their view, their vision." It is the most common of hypocrisies: insisting people believe like you is Spreading the Truth -- someone else insisting you believe like them is a Threat to Civilization.

You have to be simple-minded to so completely contradict yourself while explaining something that should be self-evident: that wacko Islamic terror groups need to be put out of business. (Leaving aside how to do such a thing, which Bush also has a shaky grasp of.) No one with a shred of rhetorical ability or cognitive deftness could possibly mess up making the argument that they're Bad Guys who do Bad Things. But Bush somehow manages to look bad arguing the obvious. And gets applause.

The President makes demands

2006-09-07T17:00:00.000-04:00

The President of the United States is acting like a three-year-old the day after his birthday party, suddenly confronted with a day without presents and constant reinforcement that he's the most important person on earth:

President Bush acknowledged yesterday that he'd authorized a secret CIA detention program and announced plans to bring to trial 14 top terrorist suspects, including some of the alleged architects of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush used the announcement, delivered five days before the fifth anniversary of the 2001 attacks, to challenge Congress to authorize him to wage the war on terrorism on his terms. At stake is defining how the rule of law governs the executive branch as it deals with captives who it suspects are terrorists.

Speaking to a White House audience that included relatives of Sept. 11 victims, Bush demanded that lawmakers revive his plan for military tribunals without key legal safeguards for those on trial, legalize the CIA's detention program and shield U.S. officials from prosecution for possible war crimes.

Translation: "Yes, I have secret CIA torture prisons on foreign soil. Yes, I hold anyone I want captive indefinitely without charges or hearings. Yes, I tap phones and intercept e-mail without a warrant. Yes, I want to have my own kangaroo court where I make the rules. Yes, I want to torture anyone I want. Yes, I consider myself immune from prosecution. Yes, I consider myself a despot. I dare you to do something about it."

Memo to Congressional Democrats and non-insane Republicans: anyone care to step up to the plate?

Get your re-up

2006-09-07T12:39:00.000-04:00

Many years ago, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun named David Simon spent a year with the Baltimore homicide squad, doing what today would be called "embedded" reporting. The result of that work was a book called Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets. Even after it was filed away with the lurid exploitation material in the "True Crime" section, the excellent journalism in the book shone through. Homicide stripped out the cop show cliches and exposed real, grinding, everyday police work in exacting and fascinating detail.

In one of the bigger pop culture ironies in recent history, the book that demolished cop show stereotypes was made into a cop show on NBC, Homicide: Life On The Streets. The surprising aspect of the show was that, especially in its early seasons, it stayed true to the source material and delivered drama that was only heightened by its believability. Plots weren't tidily wrapped up, there were no car chases, and detectives were often not emotionally bound to their cases in predictable ways. (One memorable episode featured a guest-starring Robin Williams as the husband of a murder victim who is shocked to stumble upon the detectives joking about the case.) Add to that a cast of top-shelf talent including Yaphet Kotto, Ned Beatty and the mind-bogglingly good Andre Braugher (indeed, even guest stars like Steve Buscemi and the aforementioned Robin Williams never stole the show), and you have what many (including your humble blogger) believe is the best "cop show" ever made, and a strong contender for the best show on network TV, period.

David Simon was involved to a certain extent with Homicide the TV show, penning a couple of episodes. After the show ended in 2000, Simon went on to work with former detective Ed Burns on a book called The Corner: A Year In The Life Of An Inner-City Neighborhood. Using the same journalistic toolbox that he brought to Homicide, Simon, along with Burns, produced a look at the crumbling neighborhoods of Baltimore and drug trade that dominates them. (The Corner was later made into a miniseries for HBO by Simon and Burns.)

After these two projects, Simon and Burns realized that the cops and drug dealers had more in common than not -- both were part of entrenched bureaucracies that ground down the foot soldiers while pushing the most Machiavellian among them up the chain of command. And they came to an even greater epiphany -- the dysfunction of police departments and drug gangs mirrored the dysfunction in most areas of American urban life, where broken and corrupt institutions of industry, politics and education try to cope with events and circumstances they can barely acknowledge, let alone address.

Clearly, this was a story that needed to be told. The result was the HBO series The Wire. On its surface, it resembles a cop show, but in truth it's perhaps the most amibitous drama ever attempted on US television. In it's first season, it examined a group of Baltimore police and a group of Baltimore drug dealers, and their attempts to outsmart each other while simultaneously struggling with the limitations and frustrations of their own roles. In the second season, the story expanded to include the story of an embattled labor leader on Baltimore's docks and his family as they tried to cope with the slow but steady erosion of the urban working class. The third season looked at the issue of reform within the police department, the government and the drug gangs -- the best intentions of reformers and the way the status quo passively wears them down.

On Sunday, the fourth (and potentially final -- the renewal for season four was a close call) season begins on HBO, with the theme of education and the introduction of new young actors in the roles of inner-city middle school students getting pulled into the various compromises of adulthood.

Education is an apt theme for this show, as for the viewer it's a tough learning curve. At this point, there are enough speaking roles to fill six or seven shows (and the amazing part is that they'd all be shows worth watching). It's not a comforting show, either -- there's not a whole lot in the way of uplifting messages about hope for the future and the dignity of man. The Wire isn't interested in politics (except as a symptom) -- it's instead the best sort of journalism. It does not preach to you, it challenges you to justify to yourself the conditions it shows you. Watching the show can be work. But if you're at all interested in why America looks the way it does and behaves the way it does and treats its citizens the way it does, it is work worth doing. Check it out this weekend, or get your hands on the DVD sets of the first three seasons. (The HBO site I linked above has a good primer to get you up to speed on the cast of thousands.)

At the very least, it's a better way to spend time with your television than ABC's outrageous right-wing propaganda disguised as a documentary.

Please brace for impact

2006-08-29T10:42:00.000-04:00

The data suggest that housing prices may be due for a slight correction.

You might want to buckle your seat belts.

Via Atrios at Eschaton. Big version here.

I got nothin'

2006-08-28T12:38:00.000-04:00

So enjoy this exciting tale of terror in the skies. Another side of the story can be found here. And the official police statement is here.

Just imagine if that poor kid had been brown and/or Muslim.

Real content later if I can come up with something worth your time.

Perfect for hiding under the bed

2006-08-22T10:03:00.000-04:00

You have got to be kidding me.

(As seen on TBogg.)

Cal Thomas declares war

2006-08-21T14:08:00.000-04:00

As discussed below, George Will is of the opinion that US policy has nothing at all to do with the rise of Islamic extremism. Given how hostile US policy has been to so much of the Muslim population of the Middle East (in other words, those who aren't claiming monarchial privileges over a swath of desert with oil under it), the obvious inference is that nothing we do could explain antipathy that spills over into violent hatred.

Encouraged by this, Cal Thomas vomits up yet another love letter to the ultimate right wing wet dream: The Clash Of Civilizations:

During the Cold War, American intelligence loved getting its hands on defectors from communism. The reasoning was that these people had the best information about the plans of the other side, information that would help America defeat them.

In the present war against what President Bush has properly labeled "Islamic fascism," defectors are just as valuable.

The Israel Project, an international nonprofit organization devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel, recently made a former leading imam and radical Islam expert available for media interviews and I had a chance to speak with him. He goes by the name of Sam Soloman because of death threats from those not happy with the information he has about their plans to dominate the world.

So what did this remarkably bias-free expert have to say?

Soloman speaks with knowledge, credibility and conviction. He has memorized large sections of the Koran and tells me, "There's not a single verse in the Koran talking about peace with a non-Muslim, with the Jews and the Christians. Islam means submission. Islam means surrender. It means you surrender and accept Islamic hegemony over yourselves..."

I ask him about the best strategy for fighting it: "It cannot be combated simply by force. It needs to be combated ideologically, spiritually (as well as) through arms."

Soloman says the outlets for Islamic ideology are religious — seminaries, the madrassas (Koranic schools) and especially the mosques. "From the beginning, Mohammed used the mosque to propagate this ideology. It was in the mosque that jihad was declared (and) that troops were sent to conquer the rest of the world. The mosque was the seat of government and Americans are right to be concerned about (their growth)."

Frankly, I don't know where the Islamic world gets the idea that Americans are out to crush them.

Are there real-world examples of how the Muslims are eagerly destroying American society? Of course:

How serious? He says. "They are infiltrating and undermining every part of this society. We are promoting Islamic mortgages, Islamic insurance companies. There are 29 banks in the United States promoting Islamic banking. Since 1999, Dow Jones has launched Dow Jones Islamic Index and has subjected itself to be governed by an international Sharia board." (Sharia is the religious law of Islam outlined in the Koran.)

Horrors. 29 banks who are marketing to Muslims. And there's a Sharia-compliant "Islamic Market Index" that Dow Jones publishes, which of course means that the Wall Street Journal is an al Qaeda mouthpiece. (And the number of spam e-mails I get advertising "Christian" services of one form or another suggest that Islam hasn't cornered the market on religion-specific business.)

After surveying this chilling evidence, Thomas advises us to stop being all tolerant and multicultural and wimpy and instead start kicking some Islamic ass:

Americans must see past their natural reluctance to paint all members of a group with a broad brush and realize our failure to act now against this clear and present danger in the ways Sam Soloman recommends will lead to a disaster for us that is far worse than our Cold War enemies had envisaged.

Apparently, Cal has a following in England, where the citizens, having been whipped into an appropriate state of panic by code-crimson terror alerts, are taking their safety into their own hands:

British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny - refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed.

The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic.

Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action. Some stormed off the Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 minutes before it was due to leave the Costa del Sol at 3am. Others waiting for Flight ZB 613 in the departure lounge refused to board it.

[...]

The Tories said the Government's failure to reassure travellers had led the Malaga passengers to 'behave irrationally' and 'hand a victory to terrorists'.

Websites used by pilots and cabin crew were yesterday reporting further incidents. In one, two British women with young children on another flight from Spain complained about flying with a bearded Muslim even though he had been security-checked twice before boarding.

The trouble in Malaga flared last Wednesday as two British citizens in their 20s waited in the departure lounge to board the pre-dawn flight and were heard talking what passengers took to be Arabic. Worries spread after a female passenger said she had heard something that alarmed her.

Passengers noticed that, despite the heat, the pair were wearing leather jackets and thick jumpers and were regularly checking their watches.

Initially, six passengers refused to board the flight. On board the aircraft, word reached one family. To the astonishment of cabin crew, they stood up and walked off, followed quickly by others.

The Monarch pilot - a highly experienced captain - accompanied by armed Civil Guard police and airport security staff, approached the two men and took their passports.

Half an hour later, police returned and escorted the two Asian passengers off the jet.

Soon afterwards, the aircraft was cleared while police did a thorough security sweep. Nothing was found and the plane took off - three hours late and without the two men on board.

Monarch arranged for them to spend the rest of the night in an airport hotel and flew them back to Manchester later on Wednesday.

College lecturer Jo Schofield, her husband Heath and daughters Emily, 15, and Isabel, 12, were caught up in the passenger mutiny.

Mrs Schofield, 38, said: "The plane was not yet full and it became apparent that people were refusing to board. In the gate waiting area, people had been talking about these two, who looked really suspicious with their heavy clothing, scruffy, rough, appearance and long hair.

"Some of the older children, who had seen the terror alert on television, were starting to mutter things like, 'Those two look like they're bombers.'

"Then a family stood up and walked off the aircraft. They were joined by others, about eight in all. We learned later that six or seven people had refused to get on the plane.

"There was no fuss or panic. People just calmly and quietly got off the plane. There were no racist taunts or any remarks directed at the men.

"It was an eerie scene, very quiet. The children were starting to ask what was going on. We tried to play it down."

Mr Schofield, 40, an area sales manager, said: "When the men were taken off they didn't argue or say a word. They just picked up their coats and obeyed the police. They seemed resigned to the fact they were under suspicion.

"The captain and crew were very apologetic when we were asked to evacuate the plane for the security search. But there was no dissent.

"While we were waiting, everyone agreed the men looked dodgy. Some passengers were very panicky and in tears. There was a lot of talking about terrorists."

Patrick Mercer, the Tory Homeland Security spokesman, said last night: "This is a victory for terrorists. These people on the flight have been terrorised into behaving irrationally.

"For those unfortunate two men to be victimised because of the colour of their skin is just nonsense."

Monarch said last night: "The captain was concerned about the security surrounding the two gentlemen on the aircraft and the decision was taken to remove them from the flight for further security checks.

"The two passengers offloaded from the flight were later cleared by airport security and rebooked to travel back to Manchester on a later flight."

A spokesman for the Civil Guard in Malaga said: "These men had aroused suspicion because of their appearance and the fact that they were speaking in a foreign language thought to be an Arabic language, and the pilot was refusing to take off until they were escorted off the plane."

Hooray for those brave Brits! Let those dirty, leather-wearing, Arabicish-talking brown people fly on some other plane. This one's for white people!

Somewhat more seriously, the Muslims certainly seem to have the spotlight in international terrorism these days. But twenty or thirty years ago, The Red Brigades and the IRA were hogging the headlines, yet I don't remember calls for mass action against Italians or the Irish. And even in more recent times, no one wanted to talk about the 2001 anthrax mailer once it seemed likely that he/she wasn't a Muslim. And Tim McVeigh? The right have convinced themselves that he was working for Saddam.

The more reasonable explanations are those that are less satisying for the rabidly xenophobic and paranoid -- the prevalance of Islamic terrorism says more about the conditions of much of the Islamic world than about the essential humanity of the 1.3 billion Muslims on the planet. Millions of Muslims are poor and desperate, and poor and desperate people are comparatively likely to do extreme things. Plus, Islam seems to especially emphasize obedience to clerical orders (like Catholicism at various points), so those looking to make a name for themselves could do worse than to whip their followers into a state of violence. (And, for the record, I'm not sure how anyone who claims to care about individual rights can be much of a fan of the ugly social regressiveness of nations under Sharia law. All to say, fundamentalist Islam is not something to be cheered by fans of human rights.)

But that's far different from claiming that Islam is an inherently violent religion. Christianity has plenty of blood on its hands (much of it Muslim blood), and plenty of Muslim and Christian residents of Beirut can attest that Jews are not pacifist. Christianity can easily spawn terrorism among the frightened and dispossessed (as seen in recent times by the Klan, the Christian Identity movement, Eric Rudolph, various neo-Nazi groups, and so on). India is well-acquainted with acts of terror from the Sikhs.

But none of this matters to those seeking to make the "war on terror" more about blowing up foreign people and foreign religions than about addressing larger questions about the sort of conditions that exist in Muslim countries and what priorities the US uses when responding to those conditions. It's far easier to dismiss a group as irredeemably violent (or, in Thomas' words, "see past [one's] natural reluctance to paint all members of a group with a broad brush") than to consider the context of the violence.

Even more telling, anyone advocating any response short of genocide is invariably derided as being "on the side of the terrorists." One doesn't have to support the views of Islam to recognize that terrorism is not a problem that can be solved by the application of ever-larger hammers. American bombs will not drive people into the arms of America -- they will drive people into the arms of whoever advocates the most violence against Americans. That seems self-evident, but also seems to sit in opposition to what we've seen happening in Iraq and Lebanon.

At least in Lebanon, Israel was using those American bombs to pummel a country with some relation to the terrorist threat they were facing. The same cannot be said of Iraq, as even President Bush acknowledged today:

BUSH: The terrorists attacked us and killed 3,000 of our citizens before we started the freedom agenda in the Middle East.

QUESTION: What did Iraq have to do with it?

BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

QUESTION: The attack on the World Trade Center.

BUSH: Nothing. Except it’s part of — and nobody has suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a — Iraq — the lesson of September 11th is take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody’s ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.

And yet, of course, it's been shown time and time again that the US accepted the Iraq invasion largely on the false assumption that they were in some way responsible for 9/11, an assumption that was was easy to encourage by conflating Saddam and bin Laden as Muslims of a feather, or, in other words, "seeing past [one's] natural reluctance to paint all members of a group with a broad brush."

The question of whether Bush could have sold an invasion of a non-Muslim country in the aftermath of 9/11 was, as always, left unasked.

George Bush and the three bears

2006-08-15T15:38:00.000-04:00

George Will wanders off the reservation again:

The London plot against civil aviation confirmed a theme of an illuminating new book, Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11." The theme is that better law enforcement, which probably could have prevented Sept. 11, is central to combating terrorism. F-16s are not useful tools against terrorism that issues from places such as Hamburg (where Mohamed Atta lived before dying in the North Tower of the World Trade Center) and High Wycombe, England.

Cooperation between Pakistani and British law enforcement (the British draw upon useful experience combating IRA terrorism) has validated John Kerry's belief (as paraphrased by the New York Times Magazine of Oct. 10, 2004) that "many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror." In a candidates' debate in South Carolina (Jan. 29, 2004), Kerry said that although the war on terror will be "occasionally military," it is "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world."

Immediately after the London plot was disrupted, a "senior administration official," insisting on anonymity for his or her splenetic words, denied the obvious, that Kerry had a point. The official told The Weekly Standard:

"The idea that the jihadists would all be peaceful, warm, lovable, God-fearing people if it weren't for U.S. policies strikes me as not a valid idea. [Democrats] do not have the understanding or the commitment to take on these forces. It's like John Kerry. The law enforcement approach doesn't work."

This farrago of caricature and non sequitur makes the administration seem eager to repel all but the delusional. But perhaps such rhetoric reflects the intellectual contortions required to sustain the illusion that the war in Iraq is central to the war on terrorism, and that the war, unlike "the law enforcement approach," does "work."

The official is correct that it is wrong "to think that somehow we are responsible -- that the actions of the jihadists are justified by U.S. policies." But few outside the fog of paranoia that is the blogosphere think like that. It is more dismaying that someone at the center of government considers it clever to talk like that. It is the language of foreign policy -- and domestic politics -- unrealism.

Foreign policy "realists" considered Middle East stability the goal. The realists' critics, who regard realism as reprehensibly unambitious, considered stability the problem. That problem has been solved.

I'll quibble with his assertion about the culpability of US policy -- while nothing can *justify* the actions of al Qaeda, one must recognize that our policies have at least played a part in the existence of al Qaeda. But it seems that the paleocons are fed up with the White House. The 30-odd percent base is all that's left, which is accurately reflected in Bush's approval ratings.

The real question at this stage is whether Bush himself will be blamed for this, or whether the neocon agenda will be blamed. It's entirely possible, maybe even likely, that the conventional wisdom will become that Bush had the right idea with War Without End and only lacked the guts to carry it out with sufficient vigor.

Think I'm kidding?

Bush turned out to be singularly ill-equipped for this task, both by skill and by temperament. His public relations management was curiously hesitant and badly timed, and, of course, his inabilty to speak effectively in public was a gigantic handicap. His temperament, it eventually became clear, was hesitant, overly calculating, timid, and "compassionate." Compassion has its place, but not in warfighting. The Bush we know would not have pulled the trigger on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He abdicated the hard decisions in favor of political maneuvering and meaningless gestures.

[snip]

The first administration of the first century of the American Third Millennium will, in my estimation, be remembered as one of the biggest failures of that century. Bush's great failure was, not invading Iraq, but not weathering the adversity that followed through acts of real leadership, and then pressing on with the necessary military destruction of the other regimes he, himself, named as most dangerous five years ago.

I'm hoping we can get through the next two years without any major disasters, and then I'm looking to elect a real war leader to the White House - somebody with a warrior's temperament and a leader's skills. George Bush has neither. He is a dangerous failure, and America will be well rid of him.

Poor Dubya can't catch a break. Some of the right is saying he started too much war, much of the rest think he didn't start enough! Is there anyone out there who thinks he waged just the right amount of war?

Dimly aware

2006-08-10T10:28:00.000-04:00

Exhibit A:

Some 30 percent of Americans cannot say in what year the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York's World Trade Center and the
Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published in the Washington Post newspaper.

While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and shocked the world, 95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks, according to Wednesday's edition of the newspaper.

But when asked what year, 30 percent could not give a correct answer.

Of that group, six percent gave an earlier year, eight percent gave a later year, and 16 percent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.

Exhibit B:

The reality [...] is that after a 16-month investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents -- up from 36 percent last year -- said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack that aimed to eliminate supposed WMD.

"I'm flabbergasted," said Michael Massing, a media critic. "This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence."

Exhibit C:

Although a majority (70%) of Americans recall without prompting that freedom of speech is one of the rights contained in the First Amendment, recall of the other freedoms drops off very quickly from there.

Only one-fourth mentioned freedom of religion, and one in ten mentioned freedom of the press or freedom of assembly. Freedom to petition the government over grievances was mentioned by just 1 percent.
Although 72% were able to name at least one of these rights correctly, this fell to only 28% who could name two or more, only 8% who could name three or more, only 2 percent who could name four or five. Remarkably, only one person of the 1,000 interviewed was able to correctly name all five freedoms.
Given a list of freedoms Americans enjoy, most were able to recognize freedom of religion and freedom to criticize the government as First Amendment rights.
About one in ten incorrectly mentioned the right to bear arms as a First Amendment Freedom. In actuality, this right is protected by the Second Amendment.
A majority also incorrectly said the right to vote and the right to trial by jury were guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Other rights that more than one-third believes come from the First Amendment include right to own a gun, the right to an attorney, the right against self incrimination, the right of women to vote and the right to a public education.
About one in five say the right to own and raise pets and the right to drive a car are First Amendment rights as well.
Although unaided recall of the five First Amendment freedoms drops off quickly after freedom of speech, this is not the case for some aspects of popular culture. The TV cartoon show “The Simpsons” has five main characters that Americans remember much more readily. While only one in a thousand were able to name all five freedoms contained in the First Amendment, one out of five Americans can name all five of the Simpson characters.
More than half (52%) of Americans can name at least two characters from “The Simpsons,” while only about half that number (28%) can think of two or more First Amendment freedoms.
Americans are also more likely to remember which ad slogan belongs to which brand. When read five popular ad slogans, three-fourths (74%) of Americans were able to correctly recall the brands connected with at least two of these, compared to 28% who could name two or more freedoms. One-fourth of Americans could identify the brand of four or more of these slogans, compared to only 1% who could name at least four of the five freedoms.
Americans are also much more likely to be able to name the three judges on the popular TV program “American Idol” than First Amendment freedoms. Although almost half could name none, a majority (54%) could name at least one, 41% could name two, and one-fourth could name all three.

And finally, the end result: Exhibit D.

The Devil Made Me Do It

2006-08-09T03:13:00.000-04:00

For those of you convinced that Bush's ascendancy to the throne was due to right wing/neocon nefariousness, think again. Kierkegaard via Norman Mailer channeling David Frum by way of Digby's Hullabaloo all lead us to a quite different conclusion:

David Frum, who was a speechwriter for Bush (he coined the phrase "axis of evil"), recounts in The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush what happened at a meeting in the Oval Office last September [2002]. The President, when talking to a group of reverends from the major denominations, told them,

You know, I had a drinking problem. Right now, I should be in a bar in Texas, not the Oval Office. There is only one reason that I am in the Oval Office and not in a bar: I found faith. I found God. I am here because of the power of prayer.

That is a dangerous remark. As Kierkegaard was the first to suggest, we can never know where our prayers are likely to go nor from whom the answers will come. When we think we are nearest to God, we could be assisting the Devil.

Dick Cheney. Karl Rove. Both His servants to be sure. But the seed, the inception of all our current misery? George Bush quit drinking and there's been hell to pay since then.

Paleotech

2006-08-08T18:44:00.000-04:00

While reviewing the latest version of the Ted Stevens Internet Truck/Telecom Welfare Bill, I couldn't help but notice the following at the top of each page:

S:\WPSHR\LEGCNSL\XYWRITE\2DCOM06\HR5252.RS

XyWrite? XyWrite? XYWRITE?

For the life of me, I can't decide whether the fact that legislation affecting the future of the internet is being written on an 80s-vintage word processor is charming or terrifying. XyWrite was excellent at what it did and I'm sure it's well-suited to the process of spitting out the bizarrely-formatted Congressional documents, but... still...

I'll bet they paid $5000 a copy through a military procurement contract back in 1987 and are going to use it until the sun turns cold.

Ride the Beast

2006-08-08T10:52:00.000-04:00

Soon, you'll be able to pack up the kids in the Hummer and head off to Warwithoutendland:

Army officials say they are considering allowing a private developer to build a 125-acre entertainment, hotel and conference center complex next to a national Army museum at Fort Belvoir that could draw more than 1 million people a year to traffic-choked southern Fairfax County.

The possibility of adding what county officials call a military theme park arises as about 22,000 employees prepare to be transferred to Fort Belvoir in the next five years because of the federal base realignment and closure recommendations, designed to save $49 billion nationwide.

[snip]

A Florida developer has submitted an unsolicited proposal for a military theme park that would include the "Chateau Belvoir" hotel and an entertainment district with bars like the "1st Division Lounge" and several "4D" rides.

"You can command the latest M-1 tank, feel the rush of a paratrooper freefall, fly a Cobra Gunship or defend your B-17 as a waist gunner," according to the proposal by Universal City Property Management III of Orlando.

I'm looking forward to the "Turning The Corner In Iraq" roller coaster. What are your ideas for attractions at Rummyworld?

Iraq: Framing the Issue

2006-08-07T09:13:00.000-04:00

Swopa over at Needlenose sums up very neatly various attempts to frame the Iraq mess [including a spot-on NYT editorial], concluding that Democrats should appeal to voters as the party of common sense:

. . . the choice really isn't over what to do about Iraq so much as how we will decide. . . . Democrats . . . will try to assess the facts and use common sense to actually solve the problem.

So that's the choice I'd put before the voters. Not which party is tougher, or which one has the awesomest, most brilliantly detailed plan for Iraq.

The question I'd ask is, Which do you think is more likely to send the president a message and bring common sense to our Iraq policy -- another Republican Congress, or a Democratic one? Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Question: Other than lefty bloggers, what percentage of the American electorate actually responds to common sense? For another, as the divisions among Democrats re Iraq are very real, what policy proposal could they possibly be expected to come up with, common sensical or otherwise?

Framing aside, however, it might be helpful to look at what's best for both Iraq and America. What's best for Iraq seems simple enough: doubling [tripling? quadrupling?] "coalition" troop strength in a humanitarian effort to prevent any escalation of the current bloodbath. What's best for America in the short term is to bring the troops home so as to prevent further American casualties--after all, we're currently merely running in place to no one's advantage. In the long term, however, so as to prevent a "Shia Crescent," troop strength will have to be significantly increased so as to [ahem] allow for an Iraqi government comprised of Shi'a, Sunni and Kurds. So common sense, as it applies to both Iraqi and long-term American interests, would dictate increasing coalition forces in other than token numbers. Can this be sold to the American public? Are there troops available in sufficient numbers? Is it too late to call the UN? Will common sense enable Democrats to retake the House?

Alert

2006-08-05T11:35:00.000-04:00

No, there's nothing out there.

The definition of insanity

2006-08-04T16:09:00.000-04:00

Warner Brothers tries the same thing again and expects a different result:

The music industry has for years struggled to develop a new physical format that could spark increased sales by replacing the CD. Now Warner Music Group Corp. is planning an aggressive attempt to address the issue by pushing consumers to buy their music on specially outfitted DVDs.

Warner, the world's fourth-largest music company, is in the final stages of securing technical licenses that will enable it to sell a bundle of music and extra features on a single DVD, according to people familiar with the matter. The DVD would include a music album that plays in both stereo and surround-sound on a standard DVD player -- plus video footage that plays on a DVD player or a computer. There will also be song remixes, ring tones, photos and other digital extras that can be accessed on a computer.

The company plans to make the new format available to its subsidiary record labels for product-planning purposes as early as next week and to introduce the discs to consumers with a handful of titles in October. A full-blown launch is planned for early next year. The hope is to fuel increased sales of both new product and catalog titles, in the process lifting the industry just as the 1982 introduction of the CD boosted sales as consumers replaced cassettes and vinyl albums.

It didn't work when they called it DVD-Audio and it didn't work when they called it DualDisc, so why should it work now?

The DVD album would include "preripped" digital tracks of the entire album, ready to be copied onto a user's computer -- a totally separate set of data from the higher-quality, DVD-audio sound that users hear when they slip the DVD in a player. The lower-quality, "preripped" tracks could be copied to a CD.

Oh, boy. So I can pay more and get a lower-quality version for my iPod than if I'd bought a CD and ripped it myself using my preferred codec and settings? What a deal!

I'd listen to some music, but suddenly have a headache.

Castles and kings

2006-08-04T14:46:00.000-04:00

Although the concept of justified self-defense has a long-standing place in American law, the NRA still has a budget to meet. So the organization created a burning issue where none had been before: the "castle doctrine." Apparently, the idea is to grant automatic immunity to anyone who uses deadly force to defend themselves against an attacker in their home.

As with most knee-jerk reactions against manufactured problems, this one didn't turn out exactly as planned, as we see from one case settled yesterday in Lexington, Kentucky:

James Adam Clem pleaded guilty yesterday to second-degree manslaughter for fatally beating a Lexington man, a day after confusion over Kentucky's new "home intruder" law during his murder trial led prosecutors to extend a last-minute plea offer.

Prosecutors recommended a 10-year sentence for manslaughter and 12 months for attempted tampering with evidence, and they said they will oppose probation. Clem, 27, could be eligible for parole in a few months. He has spent most of the last two years in the Fayette County Detention Center.

A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Sept. 1.

Clem claims that he killed Keith Newberg, 25, in self-defense after Newberg allegedly attacked him upon entering Clem's Belleau Wood apartment on Aug. 9, 2004. Clem admitted to police that he let Newberg in so Clem could repay a drug debt, but his attorneys argued the new law applied once Newberg allegedly attacked Clem.

Prosecutors say Clem was probably the one who started the fight.

Newberg's relatives called the plea deal an injustice and a gift to Clem. They were also not pleased that prosecutors did not consult them before making the offer.

Father Kenneth Newberg was so angry he did not even go to Fayette Circuit Court to watch Clem plead guilty.

"Why let them slap me in the face, adding insult to injury?" Kenneth Newberg said.

He said he's lost faith in the criminal justice system, which he thinks treats criminals better than victims. It took two years for Clem to go to trial. Clem's case was delayed after his previous lawyer was disbarred.

Kenneth Newberg said prosecutors got cold feet. He thought there was little chance a jury would find Clem not guilty, even with the new law.

"I think they give the jury little credit," Kenneth Newberg said. "The people of Kentucky are not idiots; they are not backwoods idiots. It does not take a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon to understand that law. I did my own research on it. It was very plain and clear to me after I absorbed it."

Commonwealth's Attorney Ray Larson disagreed. He said the facts of the case -- there were no eye witnesses -- and the new law gave Clem a real chance of being acquitted. It was not a risk he was willing to take.

"Nobody is happy with this," Larson said. "We're not happy with this. The family is not happy with this. We're sorry we had to do it."

Defense attorney Russell Baldani said the plea deal is in everyone's best interest. The case would have dragged through the appeals courts for years because of the vagaries of the new law, he said.

"There's not any gifts," Baldani said. "There is not any winners in this. He accepted responsibility for what he did."

The home-intruder law, also known as the castle doctrine, grants immunity to people who use deadly force to defend themselves against a robber or attacker in their home. Immunity prevents police from even arresting such a person.

The law also applies to anybody in a place where they "have a right to be."

It overwhelmingly passed the General Assembly this spring after lobbying by the National Rifle Association. It took effect last month.

Sister Kara Newberg, 21, said she doubts Clem was defending himself -- her brother's injuries were too severe. Newberg was bashed in the head five times with a lamp.

She said the legislature should "have thought things through."

"It basically says if anyone comes into your home, and if you have a grudge against them or anything, you can do this and get away with it," Kara Newberg said.

On Tuesday, prosecutors, defense attorneys and a circuit judge struggled to craft instructions to explain the law to jurors.

"One of our concerns was, if we couldn't understand it ourselves, how are we going to get a jury to understand it?" Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Kimberly Henderson Baird said in an interview yesterday.

One problem, Circuit Judge Sheila Isaac said, is the law provides no guidance for what happens once a case reaches the courts.

It is so poorly written and confusing that it leaves unanswered questions about how the burden of proof shifts and what standard of proof applies, the judge, some prosecutors and defense attorneys have said.

Larson said the law needs revision.

"It has created some problems," Larson said. "This case is a prime example."

So we have the NRA defending the right of people to bash someone in the head with a lamp during a drug deal gone bad as long as you do it in your home, or anywhere you "have a right to be." All you have to do is claim the other guy started it, and you get automatic immunity (or, if the facts are in doubt, get a reduced sentence and a quick parole).

(And if you don't have a lamp handy, there are always other alternatives.)

I'm fairly ambivalent on the issue of gun rights. The gun ownership and crime rates in America don't suggest that a well-armed society is a safer one. At the same time, well-regulated gun sales are preferable to limiting gun sales to the underground. And government bans of things with broad-based demand rarely work out well.

But all that aside, it does appear that the NRA is morphing from a pro-gun organization into a pro-violence organization. Which makes sense, I suppose. For many years, they've argued that guns were not inherently more dangerous than anything else wielded with murderous intent. With innovative legislation like the castle doctrine, those who wish to bludgeon people with any household object can now enjoy the same rights the NRA has long been protecting for gun owners.

Exciting times, indeed.