Fabulous

Link:

You know, some research says that those who are the most homophobic are the most likely to actually BE homosexuals. So what does that say about President George Bush? Well, we don't know if the Prez might hiding out with the queers in secret, but we do know his daughter isn't shy about hanging out with them in public. Bush's daughter Barbara was spotted recently having a gay old time at a concert by all-gay punk band Pansy Division. Barbara and friends cozied up in the back room drinking, while out front the band screamed their queer hearts out. The band reportedly dedicated their rabid anti-Bush song, Political Asshole, to the first daughter during the show. Daddy's just got to love that.

A Meeting of True Patriots

Where's my invitation?

Opposing a president who locked up people for two years based solely on the word of people who were given a "per head" payment for their information is a true act of patriotism. It can be nothing other than patriotism that motivates people to oppose a president who supported preventing the accused from having due process in our legal system. Bush has betrayed literally everything this country stands for, and we now know that political considerations have delayed the release of the innocent.

Dear Mickey

Hillary Clinton is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which means she "has a central role in the actual decision-making structure."

Love,

Atrios

Innocent

Well, now we know how our Calvinball Justice Department worked in Gitmo. We offered tribal leaders in Afghanistan reward money for handing over bad people. They kidnapped some people, told us they were bad, and we promptly paid them and shipped their kidnap victims off to Gitmo without a trial.

The Founding Fathers were a little concerned with this kind of thing. I believe they were fans of something called "due process."

There are days I'm ashamed of this country. This is one of those days.

Similes for Me and Thee

If Senator Clinton had made a disparaging remark about congress "spending money like a drunken sailor," one can imagine the national furor which would erupt because Hitlery had dared insult our Navy in this time of war...

A Roger Ailes Thanksgiving

Roger Ailes tells us what he did for Thanksgiving.

Neilsy

Is there any doubt that if Neil Bush were the brother of a prominent Democrat it would be a 24/7 story? Chelsea, even when the media was mostly leaving her alone, got more press than Neil is, when she did absolutely nothing wrong.

I mean, Jeebus, the president's brother, who gets paid for no good reason by relatives of top Chinese officials and firms doing business in Iraq, was busted shagging prostitutes in Asia, and is now involved in messy divorce and is being tested for the paternity of the child of another woman?

This is like the mother of all tabloid stories - there's *something for everyone* here.

Ah well.

The Book on Bush

Santa Claus dropped an advance copy of Alterman and Green's forthcoming book on my desk. I've read all of the introduction so far, but it's clear that this is going to be a much different kind of book than the recent pack of liberal books. The Bush Dyslexicon was mostly about how a lot is actually communicated in Bush's verbal gaffes. Alterman's last book specifically addressed the non-existence of the "liberal media." Conason's book was about incorrect stereotypes by the Right of both Right and Left which continue to be perpetuated. Franken's was basically a funny and satrical hybrid of Alterman and Conason. I haven't read Ivins' or Corns', but the former is about the effect of the administration's policies on ordinary people and the latter seems to be more a well-researched laundry list of Bush misrepresentations.

From the introduction, and from glancing through bits of it, the Book on Bush appears to be a more comprehensive analysis of the administration's record and the mismatch between it and their rhetoric. Not simply media criticism or a partisan food fight, it's a post-mortem on (most of) Bush's 1st term - a very detailed one.

Crass Commercialism

I'm playing around with merchandise, mostly for fun. Design isn't exactly my strong point. But, in case anyone is interested...

As for prices, I'm basically just adding a buck or buck-fifty on top of cafe press's "base prices." They get the base price, I get the extra. So, if the prices seem high it isn't really my doing.

Operation Media Fluffing Not Working

Bush poll numbers still suck.

Bush’s overall approval rating in the Ipsos poll is at 50 percent, the lowest rating they’ve recorded for him since 9/11. Even his approval rating on the economy has snapped back to net negative (46 percent approval/51 percent disapproval) after reaching the break-even point in early November. And, for the first time in this poll, the number who would “definitely vote to re-elect Bush as President” is identical with the number who would “definitely vote for someone else” (37 percent to 37 percent). (Another 25 percent say they would “consider voting for someone else”.)

Official Eschaton Endorsement

I, Atrios, officially endorse Blake Ashby as the 2004 Republican Party candidate for president.

Blake Ashby is approaching his bid for the White House with the same build-from-scratch fervor that helped make him a millionaire businessman before he was 40.

As the University City entrepreneur sees it, he's got nothing to lose - and a lot to gain - by taking on President George W. Bush, a fellow Republican whom Ashby voted for in 2000.

Ashby, 39, launched his first political bid this week when he filed against Bush in the Republican presidential primaries in New Hampshire and Missouri. So far, Ashby is the president's only GOP opponent in New Hampshire and among two in Missouri.

More primary filings are in the works, Ashby said Wednesday, adding that he's prepared "to spend whatever is necessary" - including some of his own millions - to promote his message.

Lies and the Lying Liars

Yes, yes, politicians lie. But, for some reason there's something extra despicable about going on national television and flat out lying about a constitutional amendment that you've written.

Small Government

It should be at least a little amusing to note that the apex of the era of small government was right at the end of Clinton's second term.

Too many analyses of the future of our government ignore the point I keep hammering on - that the changing demographics of voters ensure that old people at least will get all the government goodies they want. The one government program which will likely take a hit, both from the feds and state/local, will be public education. Current research demonstrates that while elderly people won't necessarily vote against funding education for other peoples' children, there are two big exceptions to this. The first is that cross-cohort racial heterogeneity has a giant impact on the willingness of old people to fund education. That is, old white people living in communities with young brown people will consistently vote against money for the local schools. The second is when old people migrate -- if they retire and move to new places they aren't into spending money on the natives.

EconSpeak

Lerxst over at Econ4Dean has some comments on recent economic figures.

Martial Law

Kevin Phillips has an interesting Op-Ed about the upcoming political season. At the end he raises the real possibility that during the RNC convention, NYC will likely effectively be operating under martial law. Sad but true. I don't know what to do about it except to implore the media to put the cameras outside as well as inside.

The RNC has already clearly stated that they've learned much from the way they handled the starry-eyed reporters during the Iraq war, and are planning to "embed" them into the convention as well. To do your jobs you need to look not just where they're pointing you, but where they're trying to point you away from.

Anti-War, Anti-Death Penalty

But what's *really* important is being anti-gay.

BS Detector

This story set off my bullshit detector for a variety of reasons. Most likely it was, indeed, bullshit.

CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - One of the most suspenseful moments during President George W. Bush's secret flight to Baghdad, according to the White House, came when a British Airways pilot spotted Air Force One soaring over the Atlantic.

The mid-air encounter, which aides say nearly prompted the president to call off the trip, became an instant news sensation, memorialised by tourist pins which went on sale at a store in Crawford within hours of Bush's return to his Texas ranch.

But two days after the sighting, the identity of the pilot remains a mystery, even to British Airways.

...

An airline spokeswoman said on Saturday that no crew member had come forward to report the unusual encounter, as is standard practice.
In response to press inquiries, British Airways checked with its crews. But so far, no one has come forward.

"It is normal practice for our crews to report anything out of the ordinary," the airline spokeswoman said. "Despite the amount of media coverage, we can't confirm this."

Send Dinh to Gitmo

I never thought I'd applaud Viet Dinh, but I'm glad he's now objecting to the biggest flaw in the "enemy combatant" nonsense - it isn't that some type of alternative system of justice could never be appropriate, it's that there needs to be a coherent and consistent system, and not the kind of Calvinball that Bush is famous for.

Free T-Shirts

Jesse has some idea for bringing high school and college students into politics. I think they're pretty good, and I also think a lot of the things that can be done are really easy and really cheap.

Farce

Josh Marshall has the latest on the unfolding tragedy that is our short-lived imperial adventure.

What Was Supposed to Happen

Juan Cole reminds us what the hawks were saying back in the Spring:

Last spring, before the war, he was told by Ahmad Chalabi via Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, that the Iraqi people would welcome him this November with garlands and dancing in the street. They would regard him as the great liberator, a second Roosevelt or Truman. The US military, having easily defeated the Baath army and wiped up its remnants, would have departed. Only a US division, about 20,000 men, would remain, at a former Baath army base and out of sight of most Iraqis. Engineers and decontamination units, Feith told him, would be busy destroying chemical and biological stockpiles, and dismantling the advanced nuclear weapons program, carefully securing the stockpiles of Niger yellowcake uranium. Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress would be ensconced, running the country and dictating policy to the Baath military (minus its senior officers) and the Baath ministries (minus their ministers and deputy ministers). The educated, secular Iraqi Shiites would be busy stamping out priest-ridden superstition and covertly helping to undermine both the Iranian hardline ayatollahs and the radical Hizbullah militia in South Lebanon. The captured Baath generals would have given up Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, identifying the caves they were hiding in with Iraqi help, in Waziristan. Chalabi would already have recognized Israel and bullied the Palestinians into acquiescing in the loss of the rest of their land, so that Arafat's followers had been reduced to shuffling with their eyes fixed on the ground before their White betters. Air Force One would land in full daylight at Baghdad International Airport. W. would emerge from the plane, waving and smiling, his cowboy boots glinting in the desert sun. He would pass in review of the Iraqi military with its new generals, which might do some goose stepping for him just for show, the now reformed lads smiling warmly under their freshly waxed moustaches. A grateful and obedient country, pacified and acquiescent in Chalabi's presidency for life ("a clear move toward democracy after the brutal dicatatorship of Saddam"), would shout out "Bi'r-ruh, bi'l-dunya, nufdika ya Dubya" (With our spirits and our world, we sacrifice ourselves for you, O W.!).*

CNN Headline

I don't watch the network much, but it seems to be much more critical of the Bush administration than is the main CNN, which never finds fault with Dear Leader.

Odd Indeed

Big Media Matt also brings us this Jim Hoagland column with a rather odd (in these times) final paragraph:

Quitting while ahead does not seem to occur very often to master-class politicians. Without second terms Nixon would not have known the shame of impeachment and resignation, Ronald Reagan would have avoided Iran-contra and Bill Clinton would not have had to fight the Lewinsky scandal in the White House. These are precedents that George W. Bush probably should consider -- and almost certainly won't.

We Wuz Right

In a couple of posts Matthew Yglesias (here and then a followup here) discusses how incompetent the Bush administration is and that anti-war folks who argued against the war on this basis were ultimately correct.

This wasn't my only reason for opposing my war, but it was to me what always should have been reason enough to convince on the fence liberal hawks (which, if I remember correctly, did ultimately sway people like Kevin Drum). Hussein was neither a threat to us or his neighbors. The case that Saddam was a threat required proving the existence of WMDs, or at the very least an active WMD program designed to produce something truly nasty. This case, which we are now supposed to pretend was never made, was clearly fraudulent and dishonest - and this was obvious at the time. If your cause is so just, why be so dishonest about it?

The second reason to invade, for the minty fresh testogel crowd, was to simply show that we could. America's giant penis needed to impress the world with its mighty power by invading a sovereign state, just to prove that we could do it, so a bunch of other sovereign states would fearfully bend to our will. It was going to be quick and easy, and it would prove to the world that we could do it anytime we wanted to, so the axis of countries we didn't like that week would start obeying us. I don't even feel the need to explain why this is a bad idea, though one thing that the testogel crowd should have considered is the effect on the size of our mighty penis if this cunning plan didn't work out so well.

The third reason, trotted out about June or so, was that Saddam was a bad guy and he had rape rooms so the world is better off without him. All true, perhaps, but at what cost? For some reason the cost-benefit analysis crowd, always obsessing about the costs of minor environmental regulations, went AWOL on this one. If I'm of a humanitarian mind, I can quickly come up with many many many better ways to spend 430(and counting) lives and 200 billion or more tax dollars.

For me, the only possible reason to invade, once March rolled around, was reason number 3. And, if this were the reason, for the operation to be a success would require an administration which didn't campaign on an anti-Nation Building platform, and didn't generally express contempt for the values they were embracing.

As for the competence issue, about which Matt writes:

It's been clear for a while that something like this was the story, but I still find it almost literally unbelievable. It's just too crazy that anyone could have believed this. As I watched the administration publicly downplay the difficulty of handling the postwar situation and the scope of the commitment, I just assumed they were just trying to mislead people à la Clinton and Balkans peacekeeping. I wasn't even sure how much I disapproved of this policy of misleading. But it's turned out that they weren't lying at all -- they really believed this bizarre INC fairy tale and didn't do any real backup planning. They fired many of the people who had the situation correctly figured out and ignored the rest. It's shocking. I mean no one who'd looked at it seriously thought this stuff was right. At any rate, go read the whole story about the administration's pathetic Plan A for postwar Iraq. It's just bizarre.

What more evidence of incompetence did we need than this:

In his book It Doesn't Take a Hero, retired U.S. Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf describes the evolution of the plans he and his staff made following Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. As his mission to defend Saudi Arabia quickly grew into an offensive plan to drive Iraqi troops out of everyone's favorite oppressive rococo emirate, Schwarzkopf developed a four-step course of action intended to grind his enemy down into miserable fighting condition before finishing him off with an overwhelming and elaborately staged ground attack. Problem is, all of that grinding and staging took time — and quite a few of the people Schwarzkopf worked for wanted to see the lion eat the fucking gladiator already. Following one White House meeting at which he'd asked for more time and more troops, Stormin' Norman reports, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell called to warn the Desert Storm commander that he was being loudly compared, by a top administration official, to George McClellan. "My God," the official supposedly complained. "He's got all the force he needs. Why won't he just attack?" Schwarzkopf notes that the unnamed official who'd made the comment "was a civilian who knew next to nothing about military affairs, but he'd been watching the Civil War documentary on public television and was now an expert."

And then, twenty pages later, Schwarzkopf casually drops the information that he got an inspirational gift from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney right before the air war finally got under way. Cheney was presenting a gift to a military man, and he chose something with an appropriate theme: "(A) complete set of videotapes of Ken Burns's PBS series, The Civil War."

But that wasn't the only gift that Dick Cheney had for Norman Schwarzkopf. Having figured out that the general was being too cautious with his fourth combat command in three decades of soldiering, Cheney got his staff busy and began presenting Schwarzkopf with his own ideas about how to fight the Iraqis: What if we parachute the 82nd Airborne into the far western part of Iraq, hundreds of miles from Kuwait and totally cut off from any kind of support, and seize a couple of missile sites, then line up along the highway and drive for Baghdad? Schwarzkopf charitably describes the plan as being "as bad as it could possibly be... But despite our criticism, the western excursion wouldn't die: three times in that week alone Powell called with new variations from Cheney's staff. The most bizarre involved capturing a town in western Iraq and offering it to Saddam in exchange for Kuwait." (Throw in a Pete Rose rookie card?) None of this Walter Mitty posturing especially surprised Schwarzkopf, who points out that he'd already known Cheney as "one of the fiercest cold warriors in Congress."

But, if you want more evidence of incompetence... how about their belief that the man who hadn't been in Iraq for 50 years would be welcomed by the people as their new leader? How about Big Don Strangefeld's insistence that this war prove once and for all that our military didn't need any actual soldiers?

The "grownups" in this administration were supposed to be people like Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Perle. Oh Sweet Mother of God Help Us.

Money Supply Dropping?

Nathan Newman points us to this interesting article about the possibility of a falling money supply.

As Newman states, it's too early to make too much of this. But, the fact is that Greenspan doesn't have godlike control over the money supply. While certain monetary aggregates can be essentially directly influenced if the Fed so wishes (and, as the article correctly states, the Fed has focused on influencing the price of money), the other ones really can't be. So, while the measures of the most liquid forms of money - M1 and M2 might be increasing, other measures incorporating more illiquid assets, could be falling.

Quick primer - there are various measures of the amount of "money," as it isn't entirely clear what exactly money is. The lower the number X in the measure MX, the greater the degree of liquidity (speed at which the asset can be converted to cash) of what is being counted. From the Fed:

The money supply measures reflect the different degrees of liquidity -- or spendability - that different types of money have. The narrowest measure, M1, is restricted to the most liquid forms of money; it consists of currency in the hands of the public; travelers checks; demand deposits, and other deposits against which checks can be written. M2 includes M1, plus savings accounts, time deposits of under $100,000, and balances in retail money market mutual funds. M3 includes M2 plus large-denomination ($100,000 or more) time deposits, balances in institutional money funds, repurchase liabilities issued by depository institutions, and Eurodollars held by U.S. residents at foreign branches of U.S. banks and at all banks in the United Kingdom and Canada.

There are also M4, M5, ...

LOTR:TT

Finally watched the special edition version that someone was kind enough to purchase for me. I thought it was more of an improvement over the original in some ways and less in other ways compared to the Fellowship special edition. For the first movie, the improvements mostly fleshed the existing narrative out and made for a much better movie over all. Nothing that was put back in was critical to the plot, but made for a movie which didn't feel like, as the theatrical version did, "battle... move... battle... move." The additions improved the pacing of the movie greatly.

The Two Towers special edition, on the other hand, does add back in some things which are rather important to understanding the basic narrative and the motivations of the characters - so in this way it's even more of an improvement over the original. But, I didn't feel that it improved the flow of the movie as was the case for the Fellowship. It didn't detract from it, but it still didn't feel as if the pace of the movie was ever quite right.

Still, definitely better than the theatrical version.

An Act of Supreme Bravery

Count me as one who thinks that Bush's little trip is, on balance, a "good thing." I mean, it's better than him not doing it. But, what's with the press acting like, as Hesiod says, Bush grabbed a machine gun and personally stormed a building filled with armed insurgents?

He didn't meet with any locals. He didn't meet with the governing council. He flew into a heavily fortified military base and then flew out again.


....my bad, he did meet with 4 council members.

Bush in Baghdad

BBC reporting.

... link

BAGHDAD, Iraq - President Bush (news - web sites) made a surprise Thanksgiving visit to American troops in Baghdad Thursday, flying secretly to violence-scarred Iraq (news - web sites) on a trip tense with concerns about his safety.

It was the first trip ever by an American president to Iraq.

Air Force One landed in darkness at Baghdad International Airport. Security fears were heightened by an attack last Saturday in which a missile struck a DHL cargo plane, forcing it to make an emergency landing at the airport with its wing aflame.

Bush was to spend only two hours on the ground, limiting his visit to a dinner at the airport with U.S. forces. The troops had been told that the VIP guests would be L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition forces in Iraq.

Bush's trip — on the large plane he most frequently uses — was a well-guarded secret — announced only after he landed in Baghdad.

In a ruse staged in the name of security, the White House had put out word that Bush would be spending Thanksgiving at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, with his wife, Laura, his parents and other family members. Even the dinner menu was announced.

Instead, Bush slipped away from his home without notice Wednesday evening and flew to Washington to pick up aides and a handful of reporters sworn to secrecy. Plans called for the trip to be abandoned if word had leaked out in advance.

Evil Heathens Growing in Number

Hooray!

Their numbers have more than doubled in a decade, to nearly 30 million. Organized as a religious denomination, they would trail only Catholics and Baptists in members.

They are the "nones," named for their response to a question in public opinion polls: "What is your religion, if any?"

Some nones are atheists, others agnostics, still others self-styled dabblers in a variety of faiths and philosophies. Despite their discomfort with organized religion, many consider themselves quite spiritual.

...

Whatever the reason, nones grew from 8 percent of the U.S. population in 1990 to more than 14 percent in 2001.

That's the conclusion of religion experts who compared results of the National Survey of Religious Identification, conducted in 1990, and the American Religious Identification Survey, which in 2001 sought to update the earlier poll.

"That makes nones the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, if you think about them as a religious group," said Patricia O'Connell Killen, a professor of religious history at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash. "We're just coming to grips with the reality that this group even exists."

Woah

Let me join the chorus of people who approve of this article written for an alternate universe version of the Weekly Standard.

The second thing to remember, for most of the people declaring where they'd rather fight the terrorists, is that they are not personally doing much of the fighting. Who's to say if you were coming up on the 11th month of your deployment in a hostile country where the natives, instead of showing gratitude, showed you the business-end of an RPG-launcher, that you might not enjoy fighting the terrorists in a place where you could claim home-field advantage, have a warm bed, a cold beer, and the occasional conjugal visit from a woman whose name you could pronounce.

For it is the luxury of those who talk about fighting, rather than of those who fight, to dispense smiley faces and silver linings. In the November 24th New Yorker, in a piece entitled "War After the War--What Washington Doesn't See in Iraq," George Packer writes in a painful reminder from Baghdad, "All the soldiers suffer from the stress of heat, long days, lack of sleep, homesickness, the constant threat of attack . . . and the simple fact that there are nowhere near enough of them to do the tasks they've been given."

Not to mention the fact that nearly 200 of them have been killed since major combat operations ended. Fight the terrorists where you will. But it's probably best to avoid diminishing the sacrifice of soldiers, by burying them with respectful silence, rather than with idiotic clichés.

Smallville

Just wanted to put a plug in for the show. It started out as a poor Buffy ripoff, and I stopped watching for awhile, but lately it's differentiated itself and managed to have some good stories and interesting plot arcs. The ending of last week's show, with Luthor in a straitjacket as Johnny Cash's cover of NIN's Hurt played was a powerful bit.

A Marine's Girl Returns

To this new undisclosed location.

Turkey

Jim Henley has a bit of fun with Instahack.

Glenn writes, in his sole reference to Julian's brief item, "It seems, at any rate, a bit simplistic to cast this as a simple press-freedom issue." Maybe it's just me, but what seems simplistic is basing your every reaction to current events on whether or not Bill Clinton got an adequately hard time about something at the close of the last century.

Grey Revolution

Wow. I had no idea this could happen. 15,000 or more AARP members have quit.

Thanksgiving Reading

David Neiwert's essay on the personal and the political.

An Army of Quiet Americans

This Matt Taibbi takedown of Joe Klein's truly bizarre take on how we need to win the war on whomever we're at war with is hilarious. The whole thing is quite frightening, of course.

This one passage of Klein’s says just about everything you need to know about why the war effort in Iraq isn’t "working." Our current pro-war crowd simply doesn’t understand the emotional imperatives required of a conquering military society. You cannot lead people into the breach for the cause of "Freedom…or whatever." Language is more important than a hat. If you want to get people to run through gunfire and sulfur smoke with knives in their teeth, you need appropriate slogans: "Destroy the Seventh Snake!" "Ya Basta!" "Victory or Death!" Klein wants to use the language of a liberal arts college brochure to build a warrior society.

Which brings us to the next problem–the kind of people Klein thinks we need fighting this war. This is his biggest mistake. The last kind of person we need in Iraq is a young, idealistic intellectual. These people make lousy conquerors, as was proven repeatedly in Vietnam. In colonial wars, what you really need to get the job done are efficient professional killers, like the French Foreign Legion or the Korean mercenaries we used in Indochina. People like this, when they go into a "problem" village, they don’t spend a lot of time with the Inspector Closeau search for the hidden insurgents among them. They just chop everyone’s heads off and move on.

Basically, this is Klein playing out a personal fantasy that if only the military had, you know, catered to people like him he would've gone off and done really brave things. When he was younger, of course. He's too old for that now. But, he wouldn't want to deprive a new generation of young, idealistic, liberal arts graduates the opportunity.

Joe Klein embodies the mass psychosis of the baby boom generation. No, not all boomers are nuts, but he just continues to play out his personal demons that certain members of his generation just can't get over.


And, everyone should read Graham Greene's book or at least see the pretty good if somewhat miscast film.

Electric Boogaloo Heating Up

Republicans are panicking over what they might find if the investigation is a broad one.

Happy Thanksgiving

Don't feed the trolls. They can make their own.

Dumbest Cut Ever

One of Arnold's proposed cuts is to California's rather excellent program for in-home services for the elderly and disabled. It's a good program, which basically pays home health care aids, who work at dirt cheap rates, to help these people for a few hours each week to take care of a few things that they can't manage by themselves. It's designed for people who are mostly - but not completely - able to live independently if they just get help for the few things they can't manage. If they get the help - they can stay in their home or apartment and won't need to go to a nursing home, which will go from costing the state a couple hundred bucks per month to Jeebus knows how much...

Feds Keep Lady Liberty Shut

Between this and that cracked bell down the street for me...

Message Discipline

NO LIGHT AT END OF TUNNEL IN IRAQ, FRIST SAYS

JACKSON BAKER

On the same day that President Bush told a Las Vegas audience that things were “getting better” for the United States in Iraq, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist hedged that bet after a Memphis speech Tuesday night, responding, “No, it’s as bad as it looks,” when asked if there was “light at the end of the tunnel” in Iraq.

Norman's Pissed

As he should be:

The Medicare prescription drug vote -- three hours instead of 15 minutes, hours after a clear majority of the House had signaled its will -- was the ugliest and most outrageous breach of standards in the modern history of the House. It was made dramatically worse when the speaker violated the longstanding tradition of the House floor's being off limits to lobbying by outsiders (other than former members) by allowing Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson on the floor during the vote to twist arms -- another shameful first.

The speaker of the House is the first government official mentioned in the Constitution. The speaker is selected by a vote of the whole House and represents the whole House. Hastert is a good and decent man who loves the House. But when the choice has been put to him, he has too often opted to abandon that role for partisan gain.

Democracy is a fragile web of laws, rules and norms. The norms are just as important to the legitimacy of the system as the rules. Blatant violations of them on a regular basis corrode the system. The ugliness of this one will linger.

The writer is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

More Hostages!

Yay! More collective guilt! Any principles we haven't sold out yet?

Some Good News

Big Pensions are just a ticking timebomb, which will be, of course, paid for by the taxpayer when they blow up. So, measures allowing businesses to underfund them even more are just obscene. Measure delayed for the moment.

Bad Writing

I'm trying to keep this a Michael Jackson free zone, but this paragraph over at the NYT is pretty icky:

But according to accounts of his close advisers and industry friends and court records, he is also an extravagant spender whose wealth is being consumed by an appetite for monkeys, Ferris wheels and surgery.

Electric Boogaloo

As Kevin Drum notes, the theft of private files from Democrats is being universally ignored by the SCLM. Of course, literally all of their files could have been compromised by Republican operatives, but this only merits a yawn.

Look! Al Gore grew a beard!

Wow

It's absolutely amazing that the former governor of a small New England state who currently holds no elected office and is a member of the party not currently running the executive or legislative branches of government has such power over the activities of our military.

...JPAC says:

JPAC was created from the merger of the 30 year old U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory, Hawaii, and the 11 year old Joint Task Force - Full Accounting. This 425-person organization, commanded by a flag officer, is committed and dedicated to bringing home the nation’s service members and civilians who made the ultimate sacrifice....

Repatriation ceremonies are conducted to honor the sacrifice made by those individuals whose remains have been recovered. As a sign of respect, the remains are placed into an aluminum transfer case and draped with a U.S. flag. An arrival ceremony is held in Hawaii with a joint service honor guard and senior officers from each service. Veterans, community members and local active-duty military often attend the ceremonies to pay their respects as the remains are transported from a U.S. military plane to JPAC's CIL.

Ah, those Republicans, always pissing on graves for sport.

Stability No More!

Daniel Drezner has a solid post on the death of the EU's Stability and Growth Pact. As he notes, the agreement had put a limit on the deficits of member states, and repeated violations were supposed to trigger harsh fines. It was implemented to get those silly irresponsible countries like Italy, which had serious fiscal problems, to behave. Now that the unsilly and responsible France and Germany are misbehaving, it's time to chuck it out.

The truth is the S&G Pact does need to go, though the proximate cause of its death shouldn't have been this kind of "crisis," but rather a sober reassessment. On one hand, the EU needs something to keep its member states fiscally responsible (oddly, in the US, a wave of balanced budget amendments had states impose it on themselves). On the other hand, unlike the US the EU doesn't have countercyclical federal spending policies which guarantee that, to some degree, states which are performing poorly relative to the average get an infusion of federal dollars. Telling underperforming countries that the central bank isn't going to help with monetary policy, and that expansionary fiscal policy is off the table, may not be the right approach.

And, yes, we're all Keynesians now...

Watergate II: Electric Boogaloo

Link:

Hatch, who had initially ridiculed the allegations, also said a former staffer "may also have been involved," but declined to identify either person by name.

...

Hatch had suggested that the memos had been turned over to the news media by a "conscience-stricken" Democratic staffer.

(title thanks to peskyfly)

...

18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(3):

"Whoever intentionally, without authorization to access any nonpublic computer of a department or agency of the United States, accesses such a computer of that department or agency that is exclusively for the use of the Government of the United States or, in the case of a computer not exclusively for such use, is used by or for the Government of the United States and such conduct affects that use by or for the Government of the United States shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) of this section."

18 U.S.C. 1030(c)(2)(A):

"The punishment for an offense under subsection (a) ... of this section is ... a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, in the case of an offense under subsection ... (a)(3) ... of this section which does not occur after a conviction for another offense under this section, or an attempt to commit an offense punishable under this subparagraph ...."

(thanks to jpn)

UPDATE: reader rl writes in:

I think you're focusing on the wrong part of section 1030. I think it will be difficult to show that the theft of these items "affected" THE USE OF THE COMPUTER by the Government.

However, 18 USC 1030(a)(2) fits this perfectly:

"Whoever . . . intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains . . . information from any department or agency of the United States" commits a crime.

"Department or Agency of the United States" is defined in the statute as including "the legislative . . . branch of government."

The penalty for violating 1030(a)(2) can be five years if "the offense was committed in furtherance of any . . . tortious act in violation of the Constitution or law of the United States or of any State."

More Freedom of the Press

Link:

In another sign of a harder line coming from Baghdad, the Washington-appointed Iraqi Governing Council pulled the plug on the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya satellite television network yesterday, saying it would no longer be allowed to report from Baghdad until it agrees to stop "encouraging terrorism."

Its crime appeared to be airing an audio tape purported to have come from deposed Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. It aired the audio tape, in which a voice calls for a holy war against occupying troops on Nov. 16. The CIA said it could not confirm the voice was, in fact, Saddam's.

"I would like to you know that we are serious in fighting terrorism and the Governing Council will exert more efforts," Jalal Talabani, current head of the council, told reporters in Baghdad. "We will have an active political, media and military role against terrorism."

CNN reported yesterday that it and the BBC had also been warned that they, too, could face sanctions if they did not toe the line.

Imagine if Clinton.... Oh never mind, you can't.

Imagine if...

Roger Clinton had gotten $2 million from well-connected Chi-Coms...

Neil Bush, younger brother of President Bush, detailed lucrative business deals and admitted to engaging in sex romps with women in Asia in a deposition taken in March as part of his divorce from now ex-wife Sharon Bush.

According to legal documents disclosed today, Sharon Bush's lawyers questioned Neil Bush closely about the deals, especially a contract with Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., a firm backed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, that would pay him $2 million in stock over five years.

Marshall Davis Brown, lawyer for Sharon Bush, expressed bewilderment at why Grace would want Bush and at such a high price since he knew little about the semiconductor business.

"You have absolutely no educational background in semiconductors do you?" asked Brown in the March 4 deposition, which was seen by Reuters.

"That's correct," Bush, 48, responded.

"And you have absolutely over the last 10, 15, 20 years not a lot of demonstrable business experience that would bring about a company investing $2 million in you?"

"I personally would object to the assumption that they're investing $2 million in me," said Bush, who went on to explain that he knew a lot about business and had been working in Asia for years.

UPDATE: Here's Bush:

There's another humanitarian crisis spreading, yet hidden from view. Each year, an estimated 800,000 to 900,000 human beings are bought, sold or forced across the world's borders. Among them are hundreds of thousands of teenage girls, and others as young as five, who fall victim to the sex trade. This commerce in human life generates billions of dollars each year -- much of which is used to finance organized crime.

There's a special evil in the abuse and exploitation of the most innocent and vulnerable. The victims of sex trade see little of life before they see the very worst of life -- an underground of brutality and lonely fear. Those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished. Those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery.

And, here's Rich Lowry on "Bush's moral eye."

Memogate

Apparently one of Orrin Hatch's staffers was responsible for stealing the memos from the Judiciary Committee's computers....more when there's a link.

....here it is:

WASHINGTON - Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch said Tuesday he had put one of his staffers on administrative leave for improperly obtaining data from the secure computer networks of two Democratic senators.

Hatch, R-Utah, said preliminary interviews suggested that a former Republican member of the committee staff may have also been involved in penetrating the Democratic computers.

"I was shocked to learn that this may have occurred," Hatch said in a statement. "I am mortified that this improper, unethical and simply unacceptable breach of confidential files may have occurred on my watch."

Hatch launched an investigation after Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., protested what they said was the theft of memos from their servers. The memos, concerning political strategy on blocking confirmation of several of President Bush's judicial nominations, were obtained and reported on by The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Times.

Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle informed Hatch on Monday that the committee's four computer servers had been disconnected and that daily backup tapes had been given to the U.S. Capitol Police for safekeeping. He said an outside expert would conduct a forensic assessment to determine if there had been unauthorized access to files.

Hatch said that, at his direction, two federal prosecutors assigned to the committee had conducted interviews with about 50 people.

He said the interviews revealed that at least one current staff member had improperly accessed at least some of the documents that appeared in the media reports and which have been posted on the Internet. The person has denied leaking the information to the press, he said.

Ungrateful

Raed is showing insufficent gratitude towards Gnat and her great sacrifices in the war on terror.

Freedom of the Press

Speechless:

COLORADO SPRINGS - Before the press was herded into the giant hangar in advance of George W. Bush's pep rally/photo op with the Fort Carson troops, we were given the rules.

No talking to the troops before the rally.

No talking to the troops during the rally.

No talking to the troops after the rally.

Porn of Mass Destruction

This is just unbelievable:

Army Capt. James Yee (search), who worked at the prison camp for terror suspects in eastern Cuba, was released from custody Tuesday after being served with the additional charges, Raul Duany, a spokesman for U.S. Southern Command in Miami, told The Associated Press.

He was arrested earlier this year in Florida and confined to the military brig in Charleston, S.C.

Military officials brought the additional charges after an investigation, Duany said. The charges include storing pornographic images on his computer, having sexual relations outside marriage, disobeying an order and making a false official statement.

Especially, since just yesterday we had:

WASHINGTON - The Army chaplain charged with mishandling classified material at the U.S. prison camp in Cuba says he has been held in harsh conditions, barred from practicing his Islamic faith, and deprived of his legal right to a speedy trial.

Army Capt. James Joseph Yee, a West Point graduate, laid out his complaints in a letter that his attorney sent yesterday to President Bush. Yee was arrested in September.

Hey, a New Book

Triumph O'Reilly

The Hamster has posted a partial transcript of Rober Smigel's recent conversation with Terry Gross, which was clearly inspired by Talk Like Bill O'Reilly Day.

Ha Ha Ha

Doctoring the SOTU address. Shameless, dishonest, and quite possibly illegal.

When President Bush laid out the potential threat that unconventional weapons posed in Saddam Hussein's hands last year in his State of the Union address last year, he became tongue-tied at an inopportune moment.

The line read, "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate, slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known." But Mr. Bush stumbled between the words "one" and "vial." And when at the word vial, he pronounced the "v" as if it were a "w."

Yet in a new Republican commercial that borrows excerpts from that speech, Mr. Bush delivers that line as smoothly as any other in the address, without a pause between "one" and "vial," and the v in "vial" sounds strong and sure.

...

The difference between the speech and excerpt was noticed by strategists for former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont. They saw it as they put together their own advertisement attacking the spot, which presents the Democratic candidates as undermining the fight against terrorism. Word trickled back to Democratic officials, who retrieved the tape and confirmed that there was, indeed, a difference.

The Democrats asked whether the Republican National Committee had gone to the White House with sound equipment to have Mr. Bush recite the line anew for what was the first Republican commercial of the campaign season here. That might have meant that the party was not being truthful when it said it had not coordinated with Mr. Bush when it made the advertisement, a possible violation of law.

(via Hesiod)

Gropenfuhrer

I suppose it depends on the meaning of off the table.

August 20:

SCHWARZENEGGER: Now, does this mean we're going to make cuts? Yes. Does this mean education is on the table? No

Now:

Education would absorb $160 million in cuts this year and next under the proposal Schwarzenegger presented to legislative leaders Monday.

Rogue Cops

Nathan Newman argues that the ends do sometimes justify the means.

PBS is Now Fair and Balanced

Lovely:

When "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" invited author Michael Wolff on the program, his reputation as a scathing media critic was hardly a secret. Wolff, a columnist for New York magazine, was peddling his new book, "Autumn of the Moguls," which describes said moguls in personal and rather unflattering terms.

But the PBS program abruptly killed the taped interview Friday, a week after it was recorded.

"It doesn't make any sense," Wolff said yesterday. "You invite an author on, he's going to give you the view he wrote about." He said that "these guys must be super-sensitive" that his remarks would "annoy" powerful media executives such as Sumner Redstone, Michael Eisner, Barry Diller, Mel Karmazin and Rupert Murdoch.

Les Crystal, the program's executive producer, dismissed Wolff's criticism. "We did the interview, we looked at it and felt it was unbalanced, and decided not to run it," he said.

Crystal acknowledged that other authors have "expressed strong points of view" on the show. But in the case of the Wolff interview, "we didn't think it was fair and balanced."

The interview was conducted by "NewsHour" media correspondent Terence Smith, who called the decision "an internal matter" and referred questions to Crystal.

You know what to do:

PBS
1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, VA 22314
Phone: 703-739-5000
Fax: 703-739-8458

The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: newshour@pbs.org



... here's Wolff's response.

Health Care

I can't find the story anywhere online, but on NPR earlier they noted that a Ford Motor bigwig had come out in favor of the government taking over the responsibility for health insurance, in some form. I expect more big businesses to follow. As Big Media Matt notes, our health care system is just much more expensive than it should be. Some sort of universal payer system will come within the next 10-20 years - the only real question is how much money the insurance/HMO industry can loot before then.

Victories and Failures

We can be glad that the Energy Bill has been at least temporarily put down, even though the crappy Medicare Bill is likely to pass. As for the latter, well, if there's any silver lining it's that it doesn't really start working until 2006. But, look, more importantly, the Democrats need to pick some issues and run with them. They're in the minority in both houses. The only way to mount an offense - and to therefore define themselves as a party - against the highly partisan Republicans is to filibuster things. I don't think they should filibuster everything, but this Medicare Bill was an obvious one.

Idiots.

Marriage

The General explores the sacred institution homosexuals are trying to destroy.

Read Until the End

The thought of the long hard slog through the Quinnster's article prevented me from reading it, but Jerome Doolittle brings out an interesting anecdote nestled within the article:

“Nobody knows how the president will finally come down on Chalabi. Right now Bush reportedly remains unconvinced that Chalabi is the one to lead Iraq into a democratic future. Jordan's King Abdullah didn't help matters: When he met with Bush recently, he is said to have delivered a broadside against his old nemesis, who was convicted of embezzling millions from a Jordanian bank. According to a friend of Abdullah's, the president reacted to the information with outrage at Chalabi.”

So, Bush had previously been unaware of this minor bit of information?

Holiday Shopping

If you plan to do any of your holiday shopping through Amazon, please feel free to do it through this link, or through any of the other Amazon related links cluttering up the sidebars. You pay the same, they get less, I get more. Don't shop there just to do me a favor, but if you are going to anyway....

Piggies

Oink.

Relatively Busy

A situation which will likely be true, on and off, through the holiday weekend.

Oops

KKK initiation ceremony goes bad:

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (AP) - A bullet fired in the air during a Ku Klux Klan initiation ceremony came down and struck a participant in the head, critically injuring him, authorities said.

Gregory Allen Freeman, 45, was charged with aggravated assault and reckless endangerment in the Saturday night incident that wounded Jeffery S. Murr, 24.

About 10 people, including two children, had gathered for the ceremony. The man who was being initiated was blindfolded, tied with a noose to a tree and shot with paintball guns as Freeman fired a pistol in the air to provide the sound of real gunfire, Sheriff Fred Phillips said.

A bullet struck Murr on the top of the head and exited at the bottom of his skull, authorities said.

Let's hope the idiot who fired the gun gets put away from a long time, and that the idiot who got hit begins to rethink his associations.

Uh, Mickey?

It was a joke. Shrill's the word of obsessed Krugman stalkers, so when I use it I'm either making fun of them our using it as a compliment.

But, for the record, the UK cover of the Krugman book is kind of funny in an ironic sort of way, though it would be lost on most people. If I were a tenured Princeton professor of economics it probably wouldn't be the cover I would choose for that book (nor was it the cover that Krugman chose), because, as Krugman said, it's a bit undignified. but, uh, people, it's an Oil Mustache, not a Hitler mustache on Big Time Dick.

(Scroll down)

Somebody Exhumed the Quinnster

The Man Who Would Succeed Saddam
Ahmed Chalabi's First Big Political Test? Surviving Washington.
By Sally Quinn
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 24, 2003; Page C01


Ahmed Chalabi, a leading candidate to head Iraq's new government, is making the rounds on Capitol Hill. He can barely contain his glee. He is doing what he loves most and what he does best -- lobbying the U.S. government for his cause, Iraq. As rotating president of the Iraqi Governing Council this September morning, he is going for grants, not loans. He smiles a knowing smile. He's got this baby in the bag. But then, he always does. That's what makes his detractors crazy -- and his supporters so loyal. Never, they say, underestimate Ahmed Chalabi. It is always a mistake.

At first glance, Chalabi is an unassuming man, 59 years old, slightly overweight, balding, conservatively dressed in a dark suit. But it's his eyes and his eyebrows that draw attention. One eyebrow seems permanently raised, as though he is sharing his secret only with you. A fellow Arab acquaintance describes him as "from the bazaar," and you can envision him, his eyes gleaming, negotiating with you. Partly it is for fun, for love of the game. But the part about the money is deadly serious.

This morning he's already met with 50 Senate Republicans. "They applauded when I came in," he reports proudly. "Senator Santorum said that he had been defending me to the president so much that the president started calling him 'Ahmed.' "

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog

I haven't had a chance to listen yet, but I understand this is Terry Gross's little revenge on O'Lielly.

Filter

Not being near the Canadian border I don't get CBC, but here's the companion website for a 2 hour broadcast they did about what the embeds saw but didn't broadcast.

You know, the schools and hospitals and rose petals.

5 Dead in Africanistan

Or whatever that place is called.

How Ungrateful

This is just horrible, and is not a good sign:

The 101st Airborne Division said its soldiers in Mosul were shot while driving between U.S. garrisons. Several witnesses also said the soldiers were shot during the attack in the Ras al-Jadda district, though earlier reports by witnesses said assailants slit the soldiers' throats.

Bahaa Jassim, a teenager, said the soldiers' vehicle crashed into a wall after the shooting. Several dozen passers-by then descended on the wreckage, looting the car of weapons and the soldiers' backpacks.

After the soldiers' bodies fell into the street, the crowd pummeled them with concrete blocks, Jassim said.

...more:

Witnesses to the Mosul attack said gunmen shot two soldiers driving through the city center, sending their vehicle crashing into a wall. The 101st Airborne Division said the soldiers were driving to another garrison.

About a dozen swarming teenagers dragged the soldiers' bodies out of the wreckage and beat them with concrete blocks, the witnesses said.

"They lifted a block and hit them with it on the face," Younis Mahmoud, 19, said.

Another teenager, Bahaa Jassim, said some looted the vehicle of weapons, CDs and a backpack.

"They remained there for over an hour without the Americans knowing anything about it," he said. "I ... went and told other troops."

Television video showed the soldiers' bodies splayed on the ground as U.S. troops secured the area. One victim's foot appeared to have been severed.

The frenzy recalled the October 1993 scene in Somalia, when locals dragged the bodies of Marines killed in fighting with warlords through the streets.

Ann Coulter, anti-Semite

Lovely:

In addition to having a number of family deaths among them, the Democrats' other big idea – too nuanced for a bumper sticker – is that many of them have Jewish ancestry. There's Joe Lieberman: Always Jewish. Wesley Clark: Found Out His Father Was Jewish in College. John Kerry: Jewish Since He Began Presidential Fund-Raising. Howard Dean: Married to a Jew. Al Sharpton: Circumcised. Even Hillary Clinton claimed to have unearthed some evidence that she was a Jew – along with the long lost evidence that she was a Yankees fan. And that, boys and girls, is how the Jews survived thousands of years of persecution: by being susceptible to pandering."

Defying CW

Majority in Mass. agree with their recent SC decision.

Massachusetts residents, by a solid margin, said they supported the Supreme Judicial Court's landmark decision legalizing gay marriage, according to a Boston Globe/WBZ-TV poll.


The poll of 400 people, the first survey of Bay State residents since the court's historic ruling, indicated that 50 percent agreed with the justices' decision, and 38 percent opposed it. Eleven percent expressed no opinion.

The poll also indicated that a majority opposed efforts by the Legislature, Governor Mitt Romney, and Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly to block same-sex marriages and allow civil unions instead.

A majority, 53 percent, also opposed a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would ban same-sex marriages by defining marriage as an institution between a man and a woman. Thirty-six percent supported the amendment.

Mass., while being a fairly reliable Democratic stronghold, has never been particularly "liberal," at least given contemporary meaning of that term. This is nice to see.

FMA

Jack Balkin notes that the Federal Marriage Amendment does far more than its supporters claim. It explicitly would forbid the conferring of any of the "legal incidences" of marriage on unmarried couples or groups. Forget gay marriage - this is absolutely astounding. It would appear to not just forbid states from enacting sweeping civil unions laws, it could also forbid numerous other things affecting all unmarried couples. Taken to its logical extreme it could really make all single people second class citizens.

Opus Online

Anyone know where the new cartoon is?

Almost There... THERE!

Only 82 more dollars and I can pull down the thermometer.

You can add to a bundled donation by clicking this link or mail one directly to:

Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama
122 Commerce Street
Montgomery, AL 36104

(please let me know if you mail one directly)

More information about the EJI can be found here and here.

....and we've hit $3000!

Thanks to all who contributed. As promised, anything donations to this site that come in through Dec. 10 will be forwarded on, but no more begging.

VRWC

So, a business interest which profits greatly from the war machine is going to help bail out the corrupt steward of a media empire which has been very good about promoting it:

A powerful banking group with close links to the Pentagon, which has also invested money on behalf of the Bin Laden family, is in talks to bail out beleaguered Daily Telegraph owner Conrad Black. The revelation suggests that Britain's bestselling broadsheet - coveted by rival newspaper barons because of its political influence - may not go under the hammer after all, as Lord Black tries to quell a shareholder rebellion in the face of allegations that he and several acolytes pocketed millions of dollars that was not theirs to take.

Daily Express owner Richard Desmond and the Daily Mail & General Trust, which owns the Daily Mail, are keen to buy the Telegraph titles, despite the fact that questions over the concentration of media ownership would be raised.

The Carlyle Group, known as the Ex-Presidents Club because of the number of former world leaders it employs, is considering taking a stake in Hollinger International, which owns the Telegraph titles, the Jerusalem Post and the Chicago Sun-Times, according to those close to the firm.

'It's unusual for a group of assets to come to the market like this. We would look to sell off the Jerusalem Post and Hollinger's stake in the New York Sun. Conrad [Black] would have to step out of management, but that does not mean he would have to let go of his equity stake,' said a Carlyle source. 'Ideally, we would look to take a 25-40 per cent stake. That would allow us to put people on the board,' the source added.

The move would represent a coup for Black, who is desperate not to sell the Telegraph titles, which have given him considerable influence within British politics and earned him a close friendship with Margaret Thatcher.

Oy

Oy.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 23 — Insurgents slit the throats of two U.S. soldiers Sunday as warplanes pounded targets in central Iraq, and at least three people were wounded when mortar shells hit an oil company compound in the northern city of Kirkuk, witnesses and company officials said.

Moon vs. Soros

Here.

How Dare the Left Take Money!

Another breathtaking WaPo editorial.

I wonder if next week they'll opine about the billion dollars spent on the The Washington Times since its inception, the $40 million or so lost by the New York Post every year, the huge amounts of money spent, not just by Scaife, but by theocracy-loving billionaire Howard Ahmanson on a myriad of conservative causes and think thanks.

No I don't.


...Just a thought. I'd need to go back and check to be sure, but I think I've noticed a pattern over at the Post. Some of their nuttier and nastier anti-Dem editorials seem to run on Saturdays. My bet is that's when it's old Chuckles Krauthammer's turn to write them.

Hatchocritical

In the WaPo:

In the recent marathon debate on judicial nominations, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch earnestly expressed the view that the Democrats' filibuster against several of President Bush's nominations was unprecedented and even unconstitutional. This led me to dig up some old Congressional Records from April 1980, when Senate Republicans mounted a filibuster against President Carter's nominee for general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board -- a man who had served as a career attorney at the board for 27 years.

The senator leading the filibuster said it was his "unfortunate duty to challenge the nomination" because, although he "personally liked" the nominee, he was "too pro-labor" and other qualified nominees would be "acceptable to business." After five days of floor debate, the filibuster was broken on the second cloture vote, and the nominee was confirmed for a four-year term.

The reason I remember this episode so well is that the nominee was William A. Lubbers, my father, and the senator leading the filibuster was Orrin G. Hatch.

JEFFREY S. LUBBERS

Fiscal Insanity

This graph from the Economist really lays it out:


The solid line is the baseline projection - it's what happens if all of the tax cuts magically expire on schedule, there's no alternative minimum tax reform, there's no Medicare drug benefit, and discretionary spending growth is limited to 2.7% per year. The most realistic scenario is, frankly, that the tax cuts are made "permanent," there is AMT tax reform, there is a Medicare benefit, and discretionary spending grows much faster than 2.7% to keep up with population growth and to fund the latest war against whoever we're at war with.

Intelligence

Interesting bit from this Newsmax article.

Franks earned three Purple Hearts for combat wounds and three Bronze Stars for valor. Known as a “soldier’s general,” Franks made his mark as a top commander during the U.S.’s successful Operation Desert Storm, which liberated Kuwait in 1991. He was in charge of CentCom when Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda attacked the United States on Sept. 11.

Franks said that within hours of the attacks, he was given orders to prepare to root out the Taliban in Afghanistan and to capture bin Laden.

They must have figured it all out pretty quickly.

Stop the GOP From Privatizing Medicare

That's the email I just got from the DNC. Look, guys, YOU stop the GOP from passing this Medicare bill. Get your members in line and filibuster the damn thing.

Fiscal Sanity

Brad DeLong responds:

Well, I expect a return to fiscal discipline after 2004. There's a good chance Bush will lose--and that his loss will drag down enough other candidates that the Democrats will have at least one house of congress as well. And even if Bush doesn't lose the 2004 election, there's a good chance that the normal vicious infighting of White House politics will throw up a different group of hands to operate the sock puppet.

Not even eternally optimistic me believes that the Democrats have a reasonable chance of taking back the House or obtaining more than a razor-thin majority in the Senate. I think there's a much greater chance of winning the presidency than getting back either the House or Senate. Under that scenario, the legislative branch is still effectively run by Tom DeLay. DeLay would rather kill his own mother and french kiss Michael Jackson on national television than raise taxes, except possibly some hideously regressive stuff. The problem with the kind of fiscal hole that we're getting into is that you a hit a point at which the remedies are too painful to be politically palatable. In better economic times, the required solution is easy. But if we wait too long, the fiscal mess causes an economic mess, and solving the former requires measures which aren't exactly what you want to do in the middle of a recession. The DeLay solution will, of course, be to cut taxes - it's the solution for every problem.

AARP Push Polling

Here's a description of the poll results Novelli was using to claim that 75% of members supported the legislation:

A look at the AARP survey itself (available in a PDF file) reveals that AARP misrepresented the results in its article. Of the 494 members surveyed in what was touted as a “nationally representative sample, with a margin of error plus or minus 4.4 percentage points,” it becomes clear, contrary to AARP’s claims, that those members surveyed did not conclude and could not have concluded that the new Medicare package would in any way help low-income elderly and those with high prescription drug costs.

The survey simply shows that AARP and its pollster worded the question in such a way that it creates the illusion of support. It brings to mind Karl Rove and his Rovian methodology.

First of all, the members polled could not have concluded that the Bill does in fact “help low-income elderly” because 62% of those polled said they were either completely unfamiliar with the Medicare Bill or were not very familiar with the specifics of the Bill. Only 2% felt they were very familiar with the Bill and 35% reported they were merely “somewhat familiar” and 1% refused to answer the question!

In order to ask a question of a group of people who are overwhelmingly ignorant of the subject, the pollsters had to educate the polled members—in other words, the pollster hand fed the answers they wanted to hear.

So the pollsters proceeded to remind those being polled that Medicare does not presently cover prescription drugs. Then the pollster boiled the complex bill down to three sentences. They tossed in another four sentences describing the benefits to the poor and those with high drug costs. Thus the pollsters created the “knowledge-base” for 97% of those who were polled.

Then the pollster asked the following question:


“Even if this plan won’t affect you personally either way, do you think it should be passed so that people with low-incomes or people with high drug costs can be helped?”

Seventy-five percent answered “Yes.”

AARP Flooded

A reader spent over 4 hours trying to get through to AARP to cancel her membership yesterday, and never managed to get a person on the phone.

Down the Memory Hole

AARP has deleted an article criticzing "Harry and Louise" style issue ads from its website. Here's the Google cache.

Collusion

I really don't understand how the three top supermarket chains in CA can get away with this.

More Krugman

As Lambert notes, I bumped into him there. Krugman mostly gave his standard talk which you would have seen on C-Span, and answered questions.

One interesting point he made has to do with why the markets have yet to go into panic mode. He said he gets various letters from hedge funds, etc..., and all of them contain some version of the line "we expect a return to fiscal discipline after the '04 elections." As Krugman rightly noted, this is just crazy. The Bushies claim that the deficit will be cut in half by 2008 - but even this rosy scenario can happen only if none of what they are continuing to propose to do - namely making all of the various expiring tax cuts "permament." The odds of a return to fiscal discipline - either with a 2nd Bush term, or with a President Democrat and House Majority Leader DeLay are pretty close to 0.

I do wonder what these people are thinking. The baby boomers start hitting retirement age at 2011. Nothing's going to stop them from voting for huge transfers from working age folks for SS, Medicare, and all kinds of yummy new programs. They may be playing the "starve the beast" game to cause a government fiscal crisis - but the real result will be a full economic crisis. Grover may be trying to drown the government, but he'll only succeed if he drowns the country.

Sanity Prevails

Good on the Senate for killing, for the moment, the Energy Bill. I'm surprised more Righties aren't praising the Dems for it. No one should like that stupid Bill, except for the recipients of its riches. Big government intervention at its worst - expensive and pointless.

Wolfowitz Flashback

Copyright 1991 Guardian Newspapers Limited
The Guardian (London)

March 28, 1991

LENGTH: 1101 words

HEADLINE: US fights shy of joining in Iraq civil war: Despite the scenes of horror, the appeals from the Kurdish and Shi'ite rebels will still fall on deaf ears

'No one can read about what's going on there without feeling a great sense of sympathy for what's going on. But that doesn't mean it is in our power to straighten it out. It's a mess that, to be a little harsh about it, is to some extent of their creation, and they are going to have to come up with a solution', the Under-secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, said yesterday.

Gourmet PB&J

Cute:

George W. Bush has allegedly offended Queen Elizabeth II by bringing no fewer than five of his personal chefs to Buckingham Palace.

"Her Majesty greeted the news that Bush was coming with his own chefs in absolute silence," a snitch tells London's Daily Telegraph.

"That's her general way of expressing disapproval. She's not thought to be [thrilled] about the whole visit anyway, but when you consider that she has excellent cooks herself, you can see why this would be taken as a bit of an insult."

The Face of Evil

I just went to see Paul "Vissarionovich" Krugman outline his plans for the neo-Stalinist economic revolution.

Harry and Louise Novelli

AARP President William Novelli is the founder of Porter Novelli.

Harry and Louise

Challenge
Threatened with a measure that would severly impact their industry - what seemed like certain passage of President Clinton's health care proposal in 1994, HIAA hired GCPN to so something notoriously difficult: get the attention of elected officials when there was no election in sight.

Insights
Positioning "Harry and Louise," an average American couple, to speak "for" not "to" the American people, we created a campaign that highlighted the public's concerns about the Clinton plan.

Ideas
Managing the key components of the campaign -- paid media, earned media, grassroots outreach and coalition building -- GCPN worked closely with representatives from HIAA staff and member companies to ensure that the campaign's lobbying effort and media execution were coordinated, complementary and in tune with the campaign's overall plan.

Impact
"Harry and Louise" prompted 500,000 calls to our 800 number, turned 50,000 of those callers into activists and resulted in one-quarter million contacts with members of Congress. The campaign is widely credited as being a key factor in defeating the Clinton plan.

More Gratitude Please

The latest by Reynolds is just lovely. I think it took a lot longer to get to this point during Vietnam.
(edited to say what I actually meant to say)

BC

The BC comic has been a reliable purveyor of religious bigotry over the years. First was his attack on Judaism. Now there's his not very subtle attack on Islam.

The author claims it was just bathroom humor.

uh-huh.

Not a Chickenhawk

Story.

Hail to the Thief

If they hadn't already figured it out from the CD title....

Bush is Now a "Fair Trader"

Fascinating:

Without revealing his intentions, Mr Bush nevertheless sought to emphasise his commitment to free trade and - adopting some Clintonian language - fair trade. Mr Bush also said he would make a decision imminently and was reviewing the status of the industry in the light of its need to restructure.

The War on Analogy Continues

Tristero has a bit of fun with Michael Totten, who informs us that, among other things, Iraq is arid and dry.

Tristero sums up the Vietnam-Iraq similarities thusly:

The simple fact is that a guerilla war is being fought in Iraq, that the US was misled via an utterly ridiculous ideology and a lack of hard facts into the conflict; that US ignorance of the situation before, during and after our arrival on the scene was and is boundless; and that the US is bogged down in Iraq for as long as anyone can foresee with a steady number of casualties reminding us everday of the quagmire, the avoidable quagmire, that the US government perpetrated both on Iraq, and on its own people.

Indeed.

The odd thing is, most of the "Vietnam" discussion comes from the hawks, not the doves. Methinks they protest too much.

Medicare Drug Plan

Uggabugga has the picture worth a thousand words.

Universal Health Care Cheap

We all knew that as a percentage of GDP (and per capita) we spend more on health care than anyone else in the world, but it's also true that our government spends more (per capita) on health care than many of those other governments which provide universal health care.

I really wish all the UHC opponents would go live in just about any European country for a few years and then tell me how much you hate it. The exception being Britain, where they just don't spend enough money.

Photo-Op in Oz

When flightsuit boy was in Australia, they did a big production number with him doing the honors at a wreath-laying ceremony for a fallen soldier.

They forgot one little detail - to invite the widow.

Wingnuttery

Check out Worldnutdaily's take on the Daschle/Saddam misattribution.

Flypaper

Yet another failed justification strategy.

Broadway Sucks

According to this article. They write the same thing ever year, and it's probably always true.

However, I *would* like to go see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, but the obscene prices may prevent that from happening. If anyone, uh, knows how to score some cheaper seats...

Now This is Shrill!

The UK cover of Krugman's book:

Frog Marching to the Hague

Richard Perle declines to assert his 5th amendment rights:

International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.

But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.

Santorum

Santorum.

Rick Santorum.

Man on Dog.

Senator Santorum.

All Class

Today:

Although it was held in the ornate Banqueting House in Whitehall, under ceilings painted by Rubens, the White House produced its own backdrops, including one behind Mr. Bush with the words "United Kingdom" repeated over and over, as if to remind viewers at home that the president was on a world stage.

Blogospheric Astroturf?

What are the odds Eugene Volokh and K. Lo have the same friend in London who sends them identical emails?

(via Pandagon)

...You know, not many people actually live in Trafalgar square.

...but, yes, as the big protests are planned for tomorrow it's no surprise things are quiet. You can watch right here.

Moonbat Conspiracy Theories

Slacktivist notes that the Weekly Standard is pushing the looniest one of all.

Astroturf

By now you've probably all read Nick Confessore on Techcentralstation. That kind of thing bothers me less than the fake citizens groups that regularly spring up. You know, "Sweet Wonderful Mothers For Iraqi Liberation!" or whatever. They're organizations with 3 members and substantial backing. The scrappy seniors over at the Alliance for Retired Americans bring us this wonderful example:

President Bush Addresses Empty Seats—Phoenix, Nov. 13: About 30 Alliance activists showed up and outnumbered supporters at a sparsely attended event sponsored by Senior Voices for Medicare Choices, a group fronted by insurance companies. The event broadcast President Bush's November 13 remarks from Orlando urging Congress to push through a bill that would privatize Medicare.

Click the link for the picture.

Nightline

TONIGHT'S FOCUS: President Bush is in London, as are tens of thousands of demonstrators. His visit comes on the heels of a major policy change by the White House, and the acceleration of the plan to hand authority in Iraq back to the Iraqis.... And oh yeah, Michael Jackson may be arrested today.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is a day in which the Nightline staff is pretty evenly divided. We have a meeting each morning when we talk out what we are going to do each night. Usually the plan is pretty well set, but not always. Today's meeting was pretty interesting. Our plan is to look at the President's visit to England, and at the plan his administration is putting forward to try to speed up the political process in Iraq that would allow for the withdrawal of at least some American troops. The approaching presidential election is clearly making this more urgent. This is a broadcast we have been planning for a while, and correspondent Deborah Amos will report on the plan for Iraq, and the Iraqi reaction, and Richard Gizbert will report from London.

But what about Michael Jackson? As I'm sure everyone knows by now, law enforcement in California served a criminal search warrant on his ranch out there. He is in Las Vegas right now. There are reports today that an arrest warrant has been drawn up, raising the possibility that he might be arrested today or in the near future. Apparently this investigation centers on allegations from a young boy that he was molested by Jackson. About ten years ago, there was a similar allegation, but it never went to trial. Instead there was apparently a settlement between Jackson and the family involved. Things this time seem to have gone far beyond that.

So if he is arrested, should we cover that tonight on Nightline? The staff is about evenly split. Some think it's a big story that we would have to do, others don't want any part of it. So what will happen? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Leroy Sievers and the Nightline Staff ABCNEWS Washington bureau

And then...

"TONIGHT'S FOCUS HAS CHANGED: The DA and Sheriff from Santa Barbara have just held a press conference, announcing that there is an arrest warrant for Michael Jackson on multiple counts of child molestation, and they are negotiating his surrender with his attorneys. We are going to switch topics to cover this tonight, we'll report on President Bush's visit to Britain and the situation in Iraq tomorrow."

Bernard Goldberg is a Dishonest Hack

My take on Bernie is this - he wrote a stupid book about how Dan Rather was satan. He shopped it around to publishers, all of whom recognized it as a poorly written "disgruntled ex-employee" book. The book eventually landed on Rengery's desk, who told Bernie to do a quick rewrite blaming it all on "the liberal media," which for some reason Dan Rather is synonymous with. Bernie complied, though he messed up in a few places - notably when he blamed the "liberal media" for doing things like catering to a wealthy white audience.

Now he's back with another full of shit book, which our full of shit media will promote. Daily Howler takes a look.

Poodle Pipes Up In Secret

George's good friend Tony:

TONY Blair has attacked President Bush's Republicans for faking "compassionate" politics like Michael Howard's hardline Tories.

The Prime Minister branded George Bush's portrayal of Republicans as caring conservatives as a hollow "illusion".

The revelation is highly embarrassing as it comes at the start of Mr Bush's state visit to Britain. It was in a a meeting with Labour's ruling National Executive Committee that the PM launched a savage attack on the Republican's style of politics.

He compared it to the Tories' attempt to re-fashion themselves as "compassionate conservatives" to shrug off their hardline right-wing image.

A secret record of the last NEC meeting showed Mr Blair saying: "Michael Howard's soft centrist language was an illusion, like the US Republicans' compassionate conservatism."

At the meeting Mr Blair faced criticism from within Labour ranks about the visit and was accused of "endorsing" Mr Bush's re-election.

One NEC member said: "Blair is privately attacking Bush for being a nasty right-winger. But in public he's his best mate. He can't have it both ways and it is creating real divisions in the party."

Okay, it's the Mirror, but it's no less credible than that tabloid with the breasts that Bush gave his exclusive interview to...

Americans Continue to Hate America

Why are so many Americans so unserious about the war on terrorism?

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Support for Washington's handling of Iraq (news - web sites) since President George W. Bush (news - web sites) declared an end to major combat there on May 1 has plummeted, falling to 42 percent from 80 percent in an April 23 poll, according to a new survey.

Fifty-five percent of those polled disapproved of how the United States has handled post-war Iraq, marking the highest negative response to the question since US tanks entered Baghdad in April, USA Today reported.

A majority of Americans still believe the war in Iraq was worth waging, but fewer believe it made the United States safer from terrorist attack, according to the USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll of 1,004 adults, conducted November 14-16.

The survey showed that 56 percent of respondents believed the war was worth it, while only 48 percent believed it made the United States safer, down from 58 percent in the April 23 poll.

Forty-three percent felt the war had actually made the United States less safe from terrorists, up from 33 percent in the April poll.

Don't they understand that September 11th changed everything, particularly for people sitting at their computers thousands of miles away from the attacks?

Kurtz

Man, this one is just hard to believe. My God.

"Howard Dean, speaking with reporters Tuesday afternoon following a campaign appearance in Bedford, N.H., expressed relief that the 30-year wait for answers about what happened to his brother might finally be over. As he has since the disappearance of his brother, Dean was wearing a belt buckle that belonged to Charles Dean as he spoke. "'This has been a long and emotional journey for my mother, Jim, Bill and me,' Dean said. 'We greet this news with mixed emotions but are gratified that we may now be approaching closure to this painful episode in our lives.' "Dean, in a soon-to-be released autobiography, called the capture and death of his brother 'the most traumatic events of my life.'"

I wonder if the remains would have been found if Dean wasn't running for president.

What the fuck is Howie implying?

(from Washing the Blog)
At least Howie, elsewhere in the article, gives some props to Big Media Matt