Friedman Finds a Pony!

Whatever the merits of a gas tax, if I were running for Congress I would get down on my knees and pray every night that my opponent proposed or voted to add a buck fifty to the price of a gallon of gas.

My gut told me this was the case, but it's great to see it confirmed by the latest New York Times/CBS News poll: Americans not only know that our oil addiction is really bad for us, but they would be willing to accept a gasoline tax if some leader would just frame the stakes for the country the right way.

I am sure one reason President Bush suddenly chose to build his State of the Union address around ending our oil addiction and moving toward a renewable-energy future was because his private polling told him the same thing. But Mr. Bush simply occupied this ground rhetorically — before Democrats could get there — without actually offering a real solution.

The only real solution is raising our gasoline tax, which is a paltry 18.4 cents a gallon and has not been increased since 1993. Only by bringing the total price of gasoline into the $3.50-to-$4-per-gallon range — and keeping it there — will large numbers of Americans demand plug-in hybrid cars that run on biofuels like ethanol. When large numbers of Americans do that, U.S. automakers will move quickly down the innovation curve.

No matter how "some leader" frames the gas tax issue, that leader's opponent will frame his way right out of office. It'd be much more politically possible to raise CAFE standards, subsidize high MPG cars, tax manufacturers for low MPG cars or at least remove the subsidies, etc...

Check

For a press corps so enamored with itself over what Booby and Bernstein did over 3 decade ago they seem to not be aware that just about all of the "evils" of the Nixon administration have in fact been repeated by the Bush administration.

Feb. 28 - KGO - Did the California National Guard engage in domestic spying? The legislature is investigating, but one lawmaker has already decided what happened and is offering legislation to prevent such spying.

They call themselves the Peninsula chapter of the Raging Grannies, an anti-war group the California National Guard, at one time, seemed interested in.

Gail Sredanovic, Raging Grannies: "It seems that they're using our intelligence energy and funds to spy on peaceful Americans, rather than do things that would really protect us from the threat of terrorism."

Now one state senator wants to ban the National Guard from being able to spy on Californians without permission.

St. Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Garden Grove: "What I simply ask is that before the National Guard goes into activities that are previously unauthorized, they simply seek the appropriate authorization."

It was a Mother's Day rally against the Iraq war at the State Capitol that sparked the proposed ban on domestic spying. The Guard has said its two-person surveillance team was used to monitor news reports of the protest, not to spy. Amid pressure, that unit was disbanded months later and today, a Guard spokesman said the state ban is not necessary.

Col. David Baldwin, California National Guard: "I know the senator has interest in ensuring that no surveillance could be conducted in the future. We stand by the fact that we follow federal law."

The Guard has always been coy about whether it, in fact, spied on Californians.

A hard drive with key information was mysteriously erased. And the boxes and boxes of Guard documents subpoenaed have large sections blacked out because of confidentiality concerns.

Senator Dunn says one file shows at least ten other states engage in domestic spying.

Joe Dunn's a good guy, hopefully a national office slot opens up for him at some point. Helped out at a BBQ for local labor at his house when I lived out there.

Republicans Heart Joe

Feel the Joementum!

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Favorability

Tweety looked like he ate a turd when Newsweek's Richard Wolffe pointed out that in the latest CBS poll Bush's favorability rating is only 29% - even lower than his job approval rating of 34.

Tweety after Wolffe said "People don't think he's a nice guy anymore."

Wait a minute. You just jumped there. Are you sure of that last part. They don't like him anymore? Where do you find that in the numbers?

What was it Tweety said recently?

Everybody sort of likes the president, except for the real whack-jobs.

With Consultants Like These

Who the hell thinks it's a good idea to pay these people.

Republican Spyware

Unbelievable.

What Does John Fund Know?

The thing about declassifying information is that when it's declassified it's, you know, declassified for everyone. There's no "just tell John Fund and nobody else" provision. So, if John Fund is sitting in on "security briefings" hearing things which he's not allowed to tell people then we should perhaps figure out what's going on here. I understand that journalists are told things "on background" at times so this may not be classified information, but Democratic members of Congress especially might want to find out if John Fund gets to know things they don't.

Other Ideas for Discouraging Commuting

Short term, at least, it's true that you're only going to have a lot of luck changing behavior with respect to car usage whene people do have other realistic options. I'm not sure how an urban gas tax makes any sense, as it just seems to punish people who have mostly already reduced their relative car use.

But, there are things which can be done. One is to reduce the subsidization of parking, whether by reducing below market municipal lots or ending the subsidization of employee parking. When companies provide free parking for employees they're giving them something of value which is both free from the perspective of the employee and tax deductible from the perspective of the company. You can improve the incentives a bit by handing every employee the equivalent of the implicit rent on that real estate every month and letting them use that money to either "rent" a parking space or they can pocket it or use it to by a train pass or whatever.

You can do what London has done and have a daily driving fee in the central city. That has actually reduced traffic quite a bit there.

Longer term, aside from improving CAFE standards the real way to reduce gasoline usage is to increase proportion of households for which "one car per driving-age member" is not effectively a requirement.

It'll be interesting to see what happens to Los Angeles. It's really a special case for a variety of reasons, and it actually wouldn't take all that much to reduce the car dependency (though not necessarily the car usage) of a hefty chunk of the population.

The Stupids

One thing that puzzles me about journalists is how clueless they often seem to be about their own profession. Anyone who has spent 5 seconds thinking about these things knows that there is one definition of "journalist," there are simply different models of journalism. We can argue about what should be the predominant model of journalism in our most prominent media oulets.

There's opinion journalism, activist journalism, idelogical journalism, etc. None of these things are intrinsically bad, as long as they're factually and logically sound.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Your Liberal Media

Concern for national security is a right wing value.

I Don't Hate You Ezra

Continuing the gas tax conversation, I think Ezra's basically right. If you put off the table having the gas tax actually raise money AND having it be large enough to actually impact behavior then there's really no point to raising the tax. It's hideously regressive tax which will really hurt the wrong people and I'm pretty sure you'd have to get the total price of gas up to $6 or more before you're really impacting behavior.

So, let's get rid of that stick and consider the carrot. The reason demand for gasoline is so inelastic is that people just don't have other options. If there were other modes of travel for them to switch to that'd be one thing but there just aren't. The real key to affecting gasoline reliance is to reduce automobile reliance. And that involves making different land use choices, increasing the quality of public transit, etc. For significant numbers of people public transit is Just Not An Option either for commuting or for day to day life. And, given the current patterns of suburban development it's very difficult to think about grafting a mass transit system onto it.


The thing is that in much of the country sensible land use violates against zoning codes. I'm sympathetic to the view that lots of people love them their suburbs and you can pry them from their cold dead hands, but that doesn't mean suburban development can't be tweaked a bit to improve things, to provide other options for the people who want them.

Trying To Save Their Souls Tonight

Everybody's fault but theirs.

Gas Tax

Sadly there was a missed opportunity when gas was selling for a buck a gallon a few years ago. At current prices no politician is going to get away with raising it, even with promises of offsetting cuts. In fantasy world where responsible politicians did sensible things in a bipartisan fashion for the good of the country maybe it could happen. And then I'd get a pony!

Wanker of the Day

John Tierney.

Ned Speaks

1000th donation to him via Act Blue.

Boycotting Israel

Such things used to be important.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Whatever

Who knew Richard Cohen was such a fan of unelected hereditary oligarchies who, among other badnesses, refuse to recognize the state of Israel.

The simplest and most obvious lesson I've learned in the past few years is that the American press has an incredible bias in favor of whatever our foreign policy happens to be that day. Whoever the government deems as "friends" are the good guys and whoever they deem as "enemies" are the bad guys. The form of government, freedoms, human rights abuses, suffrage, etc... are entirely irrelevant.

There are plenty of good reasons to be concerned about the UAE port deal. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the failure of the Bush administration to follow the law and conduct the appropriate investigation.

It's not racist to object to us cozying up with truly shitty governments. I imagine the people of the UAE might be fine people. But the people who run the country are just a bunch of shitty human rights abusing suffrage opposing terrorist hanging out with assholes. The relevant question is whether these people should be running significant port operations.

Thank You

Andrew Sullivan 12/14/2003:

You're welcome. And as I read this and other Iraqi blogs written by people who lived under a kind of terror that we in the West have no way to understand or truly empathize with, I feel a lump in my throat. I am so proud of the country I was born in and the country I have made my home. I have never been prouder to be an Anglo-American, to have done in our time what so many before us have done - to broaden the possibilities of liberty, to bring hope, to restrain the violent men and evil ideologies that are each generation's responsibility. The men and women in our armed forces did the hardest work. They deserve our immeasurable thanks. But we all played our part. By facing down the evil, the cowardly and the simply misguided, we have done a great good.

Bush:

The President's directions seem to have been limited to such slogans as "we're not going to fail" and "pace yourself, Jerry." In Bremer's account, the President was seriously interested in one issue: whether the leaders of the government that followed the CPA would publicly thank the United States. But there is no evidence that he cared about the specific questions that counted: Would the new prime minister have a broad base of support? Would he be able to bridge Iraq's ethnic divisions? What political values should he have? Instead, Bush had only one demand: "It's important to have someone who's willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq." According to Bremer, he came back to this single point three times in the same meeting. Similarly, Ghazi al-Yawar, an obscure Sunni Arab businessman, became Bush's candidate for president of Iraq's interim government because, as Bremer reports, Bush had "been favorably impressed with his open thanks to the Coalition."

(sullivan tip thinks to Eli)

Foer In Beinart Out

Despite his recent tendency to take potshots at me (perhaps it was part of the job audition) Foer is certainly an improvement over Beinart. Return to longer form writing? Um, how about, you know, enlisting?

Oy

oy:

BAGHDAD, Feb. 27 -- Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week's bombing of a Shiite shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad's main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.

Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday -- blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound -- and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

More Poll Fun

CBS (pdf):

IS IRAQ WORTH THE COST?
Yes No
The results of the war 29% 63
Removing Saddam Hussein 41% 53

...

HOW ARE THINGS GOING IN IRAQ?
Now 1/2006 5/2004 5/2003
Well 36% 45% 37% 72%
Badly 62 54 60 24

...

And, finally, America wakes up:

BUSH’S HANDLING OF WAR ON TERROR
Now 1/2006 10/2005 2/2005
Approve 43% 52% 47% 61%
Disapprove 50 43 46 33

Nelson vs. Cruella

Went to a small fundraiser for Bill Nelson (D-Fl) at the Law Offices of Kohn, Swift, & Graf., PC this evening.

It was actually quite interesting. Nelson's not one who does of a lot of national media, and the few times I did see him I wasn't quite sure what to think. He's been in the Senate since 2001 is running against Cruella Harris since Rove failed to push her out of the race. Early polls look good for Nelson, but there's plenty of time for Harris to gain some ground. If that happens justice requires doing everything we can from preventing Senator Harris from becoming a reality.

Nelson spoke directly and without condescension to the small audience, which was refreshing. It struck while listening to him that we currently have two main types of Democratic senators. First we have the national Senators. These are people who for the most part have safe seats and don't worry too much about getting re-elected. What they do worry about is pleasing the people who can help raise their stock price nationally, the Beltway Media constituency. In other words, they're the ones who focus on kissing Tim Russert's ass.

Then we have people Nelson who don't play in the national media much but who are intimately aware of the politics of their state. It's easy to forget that these people didn't get to where they are by being idiots, and Nelson has a firm grasp of the issues he discussed as well as the political situation in Florida.

The problem is that neither type of Senator is concerned enough with the national Democratic message. Biden's looking out for Biden, Lieberman's looking out for Lieberman, the state-focused Dems are looking out for their seats. We don't have enough of the third type - the safe seat Democrat who is concerned with helping bring the party along with him/her.

Someone like Nelson has to be focused on local politics. We need more safe seat senators to be focused on the good of the party instead of on getting backslapped by Russert and the gang.

Holden Gets a Pony

CBS:

(CBS) The latest CBS News poll finds President Bush's approval rating has fallen to an all-time low of 34 percent, while pessimism about the Iraq war has risen to a new high.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Murtha on CNN

Now.

Radio Problems

LA Wingnut radio is in trouble. It's important to note that the Limbaugh station can be heard across half the dial in every valley and canyon in Southern California, while the Air America station can barely be heard.

Wanker of the Day

Carol Darr.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

The Note

Move over Fox News and Powerline, there's no way you can out-hack and out-whore ABC's the Note.

Your Liberal Media

Adversarial journalism, 2006 style.

Crunchy Cons

Good for hours of fun if you're so inclined.

Seder in for Franken

Sam Seder's hosting the Franken show all week. ReddHedd will be on later.

Even More Lamont Mania

This guy gets it.

8th Grade Math

10/10 despite doing it rather quickly, which someone with a Ph.D in economics should be able to manage.

It's also the bare minimum level of math that someone with politics/policy column in the Washington Post should be able to handle. I am curious how Richard Cohen would do on such a quiz. I'm curious if his math skills are really that limited or if his "pride in ignorance" was an exaggeration.

Fristed!

From a DSCC press release:

On Saturday, Bill Frist flip-flopped and said that he is now backing the Bush Administration’s controversial Dubai port deal. Democrats said that Frist’s newfound confidence in the port deal follows his pattern of backing down almost immediately on the rare occasion that he actually confronts the White House on an issue.



“Bill Frist was taken to the White House woodshed last week,” DSCC spokesman Phil Singer said. “On the handful of occasions that Frist has shown some backbone and stood up to the White House on an issue, he has backed down and flip-flopped. It’s tough to tell who has more influence with Frist: the Bush White House or the special interests that get him to pass their agenda – although there’s not much of a difference between those two things.”



After saying that he was against the Dubai port deal, Frist told a GOP gathering on Saturday that he now has no problem with Bush’s decision to turn control of American ports over to a foreign country. “We're behind the president 100 percent. We believe the decision in all likelihood is absolutely the right one,” Frist said. Frist’s comments followed his threat to pass legislation to stop the deal last week. [Lexington Herald-Leader, 2/26/06; Frist Release, 2/21/06; CNN, 2/21/06]

Lamont Mania

I've been amazed at the degree to which Ned Lamont has managed to get the press to pay attention to him.

If you're in CT you can check out Lamont at a variety of events.

Every time you support Ned Lamont, the baby Peter Beinart cries.

The War on Birth Control

Nervous pro-choicers always imagine that there's some common ground to be found with pro-life voters. I imagine there is some common ground to be found with voters, but there isn't any common ground to be found with the pro-life movement. It isn't just about abortion, it's about birth control and sex and control.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Octavia Butler, RIP

Sad.

Best Picture

I've seen 4 out of 5 of the Best Picture nominees - Munich the exception - and to me "Good Night and Good Luck" is the superior film.

Linkrot

Is evil.

The End of Bushism

It isn't quite here yet, but at some point fairly soon Republicans will en masse make it clear that their opinion of Bush is only half a notch above their opinion of Nixon. The missing history - and context - in this is that in 2000 John McCain was the neoconservative poster boy. The Weekly Standard Gang was his posse. The owner of the Free Republic at one point purged all of the Bush supporters as he too was a McCainiac. The Bushies then fled to lucianne.com.


Their foreign policy is Bush's post 9/11 foreign policy. McCain may be more competent than Bush - I have no idea - but a McCain presidency probably would've brought us to Iraq sooner, not later.

Once upon a time we all imagined that McCain's presidential aspirations were doomed by age, or illness, or by his unpopularity with the True Believers. I still think it's the case that a decently funded skillfull primary campaign will easily destroy him, but only if such a campaign exists. The Powers That Be may decide he's their only hope and if so they'll line up.

Right now Democrats are lining up to have their pictures taken with McCain instead of understanding that he'd be an even more dangerous president than Bush. They need to start understanding what is at stake.

Castanets

While I'm passing out reviews of things, the recent CD that both Mrs. Atrios and I have liked is First Light's Freeze by Castanets. The description is pretty much gibberish:

With First Light's Freeze, Castanets return with a dark mutant-country sound infused with strands of free-jazz, new wave and a late-seventies Nashville big-radio strut hijacked by post-punk unravelers. The result is a beautiful mix of somber reflection, destination-unknown travelogue, and subversive anti-war boogie. Castanets' unrelenting creative pioneering delightfully befuddles, as they simultaneously flirt and dismantle "New Americana" venture capitalism.

And I have no idea what any of that means, but I'd be pretty hard pressed to come up with any description of what the CD is like. It doesn't really fit neatly into any genre description, but it also isn't the case that its difference is it's charm. It's just kinda cool.

Meet the Republicans

Arianna's take on Tim Russert's Republican orgy.

Conservagasm

And now we see what they've been hoping for all along.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Ponies!

Reed Hundt talks about what should be done on Iraq. Such discussions are fine as think pieces but they ignore the basic reality: George Bush is president, Republicans in congress have abdicated their power and are merely presidential sycophants and no "responsible Republicans" are going to come forward to save us, George Bush admits no mistakes and thus cannot change course, Donald Rumsfeld is still Secretary of Defense, the Democrats are still frightened of the war as a political issue.


So, we stay the course!

My First President

You just can't make this stuff up.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Hamell

Hamell on Trial put on a great show last night. I learned that the song "Coulter's Snatch" (warning, rude, obviously) was directly inspired by George Lakoff's "Don't Think of An Elephant." I hope Lakoff's proud of that.


What's weird is how it's actually weird when a performer is unapologetically "fuck the administration." If I'd gone to a show in 1997 and the performer said the equivalent of "Fuck Bill Clinton" I wouldn't have thought anything of it. It wouldn't have offended me. It wouldn't have occurred to me to have my political sensibilities offended. Rock music has always been, in part, anti-authority, as has comedy, and in 1997 Bill Clinton was indeed The Man and saying "fuck The Man" is an American tradition. Yet, for some reason it's "controversial" now.

On a related note the drift in shock jock style talk radio has been really striking. It used to also be pretty anti-authority without any sharp political leanings, and now it's much more pro-authority mock the helpless.

Republicans Meet the Press

I know I mentioned it before, but now I'm seeing it in all of its glory. What could possibly justify Meet the Press's decision to have 3 Republicans on and no opposition?

Uh, Inky Editorial Board?

Perhaps it's time to hand over your writing duties to somebody who actually understands the facts and issues. And please God, I beg you, never ever try to be funny again. Ever.

Susie has more.

Not a Serious Effort

Goddamn conservatives.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Wuuuuuuuuuuh?

It's all about the scary vaginas.

"We find an organization that is deeply troubled by bad management, by sex and corruption and by a growing lack of confidence in its ability to carry out missions that are given to them," Bolton told an audience at a Columbia Law School symposium held by the Federalist Society, a conservative law organization.

The Left's Foreign Policy Guru

The problem isn't that Rush Limbaugh thinks it is true, the problem is that it's what official Washington thinks.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Out for the Evening

Off to see Hamell on Trial at Tin Angel. Try not to shoot threadbot, or anyone else, in the face.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Heroic Iraq Movies

I think a Pat Tillman movie is a great idea.

This Rob Reiner movie might be okay and I look forward to the wingnuts going after it and its screenwriter, former Secretary of the Navy and current candidate for Senate James Webb.

Radical Pacifist

YEEEEAAAAARGH

Cornered

Hey, Armando may have found an honest wingnut.

Just a Thought

Why has no one bothered to notice that putting two people in charge (Rice and Hughes) of shaping our image abroad whose entire schtick consists of talking to people as if they're 8 years olds was probably not the best idea.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Wanker of the Day

Michael Cino.

Boycotting SD

I guess I should've used a different word so let me clarify. I have no desire to stage an economic boycott against all things South Dakota to exact economic punishment.


I just have no desire to travel to a state which declares women to be 2nd class citizens and parts of their bodies to be state property. I have no desire to, even temporarily, live under that system of government. I have no desire to be in a place where if my wife has a sudden medical issue Bill Frist and Tom DeLay will be looking over the Ob/Gyn's shoulder.

Presumably this law will fall and the SC won't hear the case so all this will be moot. But if Roe falls and abortion is outlawed in various places in the country I think it's quite rational to want to avoid places where if we suddenly discover, say, an ectopic pregnancy we would be unable to get the necessary treatment to take care of it as my wife's reproductive system and other organs are being destroyed. I don't want to be sitting in a hospital room in South Dakota trying to figure out if we can get a helicopter flight to another state without John Thune finding out.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Hang the Traitor

Bill Buckley.

Hoodlum Vote

Lord knows what was sloshing around her little defective brain.

Profiles in Cowardice

Paul Bremer.

Actually, just about fucking everybody in the media. How much effort has been expended maintaining the polite fictions that everyone knows is bullshit. How many times have critics been shouted down for failing to adhere to the Tinkerbell Strategy.

Pathetic.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

A Night At the Opera

Oy. Went to see Margaret Garner this evening. Was just boring. Boring libretto. Uninteresting score. Uninteresting direction. Good but bland performances. First act showed a bit of promise but then it just settled into lazy dullsville.


Wasted opportunity.

Cylons Among Us

Being a renter I was poking around real estate listings as I occasionally do and I came across this guy and got very scared.

One Day Story

Rodriguez has more cash on hand than Cuellar (well, had at least until recently).

Hurray for special interests!

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Cornered

Podhoretz:

Rasmussen has a new poll up in which -- hold on now -- Democrats in Congress are outpolling President Bush on national security. By a margin of 43 to 41 percent, Americans say they trust Congressional Democrats more than Bush when it comes to protecting our national security. And by a margin of 64-17 percent, they oppose the sale of the ports to Dubai.

The deal is dead. It won't survive after a 45-day extension or a 450-day extension. Congressional Republicans have no choice but to be extremely aggressive and nasty toward the president and the White House, because they will be properly terrified of looking like Bush's lapdogs on a hugely unpopular matter that goes to the heart of the Republican party's political advantage in the United States.

If the White House doesn't handle this well in the next three days, the political consequences could be catastrophic

Lowry:

Emergency, indeed: if Bush loses his edge on national security, he has nothing left.

Joe's Godfather Jumps

The man who helped put Joe Lieberman in the Senate, William F. Buckley, has a rather different view on Iraq than his protege.

......One can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed....

Not Just Fox, Apparently

CNN pundit too.

Weldon Berger Has A Very Bad Idea

Not sure I could handle so much wanking.

Only on Fox

One day I'll stop being surprised.

Don't Worry

I know that after seeing the Meet the Press guest list some of you got a little scared that you wouldn't be able to get your weekly fix of Biden and McCain.

Never fear! McCain on This Weak and Biden on Faux News Sunday.

A Little Late?

They really are operating with an entirely separate set of facts.

This Week on Meet The Press

Rep. Peter King (R-NY), Sen. John Warner (R-VA), and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA)

National Security

Time for a new storyline:

ust 17% of Americans believe Dubai Ports World should be allowed to purchase operating rights to several U.S. ports. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that 64% disagree and believe the sale should not be allowed (see crosstabs).

Just 39% of Americans know that the operating rights are currently owned by a foreign firm. Fifteen percent (15%) believe the operating rights are U.S. owned while 46% are not sure.

From a political perspective, President Bush's national security credentials have clearly been tarnished due to the outcry over this issue. For the first time ever, Americans have a slight preference for Democrats in Congress over the President on national security issues. Forty-three percent (43%) say they trust the Democrats more on this issue today while 41% prefer the President.

Bullshit

What Yglesias says.

(to be clear, I agree with Yglesias and what he's calling bullshit)

Booby

Journalists are wringing their hands a lot these days about the Bush administration's continuing threats to prosecute and/or subpoena them for publishing classified information. Too often they wrongly link this to a false slippery slope from the Fitzgerald investigation, even though they really have nothing to do with each other. Fitzgerald made it very clear that he thought that prosecuting people under the Espionage Act for dealing in classified information was generally [word added on edit] a bad idea and he certainly never made any moves to prosecute journalists over such things.

It's Abu Gonzales and Bush who are in charge of things, and if they start hauling journalists into court over whistleblower issues then blame them, not Fitzgerald who has done no such thing.


Still, when/if the time comes it'll be incumbent on journalists figure out how to respond to such actions by the Bush administration. America's Most Famous Journalist, Bob Woodward, is in a prime position to take the lead. As a recipient of classified information from the top levels of the Bush administration he's the one who is uniquely able to get on TV and call bullshit. Will he?

Makes No Sense

This is one Republican talking point I've never understood.

Rep. Steve Rothman's call Thursday to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq within six months drew a myriad of responses, ranging from applause to derision.

The Fair Lawn Democrat became the first member of New Jersey's congressional delegation to publicly call for an outright withdrawal, although Reps. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson, and Donald Payne, D-Newark, have supported legislation for a redeployment of troops throughout the Middle East.


"This should spur more of our legislators to come out publicly on this," said Madelyn Hoffman, director of NJ Peace Action, which has lobbied members of Congress to push for a withdrawal.

But Rothman's stance was condemned by some Republicans, who said military leaders should determine when troops leave.

We have civilian oversight of the military, as the Commander-in-Chief likes to remind us all the time when he plays dress up. It isn't actually the military's job to determine when troops leave, it's the civilian leadership's job.


Then we have:

Rep. Scott Garrett disagreed. The Wantage Republican said everyone wants to see soldiers return unharmed and as soon as possible. "But, we rely on our military leaders on the ground to inform our decisions and we shouldn't second-guess their experience."

But military leaders on the ground can't publicly disagree with the civilian leadership. They aren't allowed. What they can do is, you know, call up their buddy Jack Murtha and let him speak for them. Which is what they did.

Lazy Bullshit

Indeed.

Mr. Pissy Rolls Back the Clock

I know Bush basically gives the same speech over and over again, dutifully broadcast by CNN each time, but today he really has reverted to about March of 2002, when he felt safe and warm and popular.

Wedge Issues

Contrary to what seems to be received wisdom in Washington, a strong majority opposes overturning Roe v. Wade. Even more than that, lots of people who want abortion to be illegal in some abstract sense are usually rather reticent about saying just who should be punished and what the punishment should be. There's a tendency to equate "make it illegal" with "stopping it" without recognizing that there would actually have to be state-imposed prison terms for the law to have any bite.

So, Oliver is right - there is a simple question which most Democrats should find very easy to answer and most Republicans should find very hard to answer:

Do you support the imprisonment of doctors for up to five years for the alleged “crime” of performing an abortion, as South Dakota’s legislature demands?

The Moustache of Understanding

Tom Friedman today:

As a country, we must not go down this road of global ethnic profiling — looking for Arabs under our beds the way we once looked for commies. If we do — if America, the world's beacon of pluralism and tolerance, goes down that road — we will take the rest of the world with us. We will sow the wind and we will reap the whirlwind.

...

What ranks much higher for me is the terrible trend emerging in the world today: Sunnis attacking Shiite mosques in Iraq, and vice versa. Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, and violent Muslim protests, including Muslims killing Christians in Nigeria and then Christians killing Muslims. And today's Washington Post story about how some overzealous, security-obsessed U.S. consul in India has created a huge diplomatic flap — on the eve of Mr. Bush's first visit to India — by denying one of India's most respected scientists a visa to America on the grounds that his knowledge of chemistry might be a threat. The U.S. embassy in New Delhi has apologized.

My point is simple: the world is drifting dangerously toward a widespread religious and sectarian cleavage — the likes of which we have not seen for a long, long time. The only country with the power to stem this toxic trend is America.

People across the world still look to our example of pluralism, which is like no other. If we go Dark Ages, if we go down the road of pitchfork-wielding xenophobes, then the whole world will go Dark Ages.

There is a poison loose today, and America — America at its best — is the only antidote. That's why it is critical that we stand by our principles of free trade and welcome the world to do business in our land, as long as there is no security threat. If we start exporting fear instead of hope, we are going to import everyone else's fears right back. That is not a world you want for your kids.

Tom Friedman then:

The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after September 11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world.

Afghanistan wasn't enough because a terrorism bubble had built up over there - a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured.

This terrorism bubble said that ramming planes into the World Trade Centre was OK, having Muslim preachers say it was OK was OK, having state-run newspapers call people who did such things "martyrs" was OK, and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such "martyrs" was OK.

Not only was all this seen as OK, there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because America had gone soft and their activists were ready to die.

The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that Americans are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent their open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble.

Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But America hit Saddam Hussein for one simple reason: because it could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world.

And don't believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighbouring government - and 98 per cent of terrorism is about what governments let happen - got the message. If you talk to US soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

The Coward Cuellar

WATB:

Two Democrat candidates for the 28th congressional seat - minus incumbent Henry Cuellar - headlined the League of Women Voters forum Thursday night.

Former U.S. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez, who lost the seat in a bitter primary election to Cuellar two years ago following redistricting, and Victor Morales fielded questions on education, the federal deficit and terrorism. The district stretches from Buda to Laredo on the border and includes parts of San Antonio.

About 200 residents also heard rapid-fire exchanges between the Democrat candidates for 428th district court, county clerk and a justice of the peace precinct that covers San Marcos as well as Republicans running for county judge and criminal district attorney. Early voting runs through March 3 for the March 7 party primary elections.

Rodriguez and Morales took shots at their absent opponent, who some Democrat critics attack for being too close to Republicans. A photograph of President Bush embracing a grinning Cuellar before last month's State of the Union address has become fodder for campaign literature.

Fresh Thread

Try not to shoot anybody in the face.

Bizarre

I wonder if we'll ever really get the full story of why Hitchens still, in his own weird way, defends David Irving. Obligatory disclaimer: I of course think having laws which lock people up for odious speech is a really bad idea.

But there really is no distinction between "Holocaust Denial" and "Holocaust Revisionism," except to the extent that the latter is an attempt to put a legitimate gloss on the former, sort of like the difference between young Earth creationism and creation science.


Salon brings us back:

What Hitchens perhaps did not know in 1996, and seemingly chose not to mention in 2001, are the falsifications in the Goebbels bio that Richard Evans discovered in his examination of Irving's work. An example: In the book, Irving cited a statistic on the number of cases of fraud perpetrated by Jews in 1933 Germany. Irving's rather insalubrious source for this claim was Kurt Daluege, the head of the German Order Police in the early '30s, and later in charge of the extermination of Jews on the Eastern Front. But having decided to quote a Nazi, Irving apparently decided that he himself could do a better job of making the Nazi case. Daluege had claimed that, under the Nazis, the number of fraud cases dropped from 31,000 in 1933, to 18,000, a majority of which he claimed were committed by Jews. In Irving's book these statistics were twisted into the following sentence: "In 1932 [sic] no fewer than thirty thousand cases of fraud, mainly insurance swindles, would be committed by Jews."

Giving Hitchens the benefit of the doubt about the lies of the Goebbels book still does not excuse this claim from his 1996 Vanity Fair article: "And, incidentally, [Irving] has never and not once described the Holocaust as a 'hoax'." Restricting ourselves just to what Hitchens could have known before writing that, we find that, testifying at the 1988 trial of a Canadian Holocaust denier, Irving said, "No documents whatever show that a Holocaust had ever happened." What's the defense of this? That Irving doesn't use the word "hoax"? OK then. How about these?

In a 1991 speech, Irving said, "Until 1988, I believed that there had been something like a Holocaust ... but [in] 1988 ... I met people who knew differently and could prove to me that story was just a legend."

In 1990: "The holocaust of Germans in Dresden really happened. That of the Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz is an invention."

And, again, in 1991: "More women died on the back seat of Senator Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick than died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz."

Remember, Hitchens' defenses of Irving did not appear on, to use his own phrase, "some ghastly Brownshirt Web site," but in Vanity Fair and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Inevitably, in the L.A. Times piece, Hitchens brings up the totem of Irving enablers, "the censorship of Irving." What is he referring to? St. Martin's Press did not censor Irving; it chose not to publish his book because its chairman, Thomas J. McCormack, was sickened by the thought of publishing a book whose subtext, he said, was "the Jews brought this onto themselves." St. Martin's did not prevent the book from appearing elsewhere, and in fact, the Goebbels bio was published in Britain, from where the faithful could order it.

Hitchens has also asserted that "there were no gas chambers or extermination camps on German soil" a factoid which is mostly irrelevant except to the extent that it serves to help puncture the "myth" of the Holocaust [note scare quotes] but which also happens to not be true.

IVF

Jane on the procedure no one wants to talk about honestly.

On Lieberman

Time's Michael Ware:

I and some other journalists had lunch with Senator Joe Lieberman the other day and we listened to him talking about Iraq. Either Senator Lieberman is so divorced from reality that he's completely lost the plot or he knows he's spinning a line. Because one of my colleagues turned to me in the middle of this lunch and said he's not talking about any country I've ever been to and yet he was talking about Iraq, the very country where we were sitting.

Joementum

Some Lieberman highlights. On criticizing the president:

It's time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge he'll be commander-in-chief for three more years. We undermine the president's credibility at our nation's peril.

On Iraq:

Does America have a good plan for doing this, a strategy for victory in Iraq? Yes we do. And it is important to make it clear to the American people that the plan has not remained stubbornly still but has changed over the years. Mistakes, some of them big, were made after Saddam was removed, and no one who supports the war should hesitate to admit that; but we have learned from those mistakes and, in characteristic American fashion, from what has worked and not worked on the ground.

Fresh Thread

Try not to shoot anybody in the face.

Treason

One wonders how many casual accusations of treason Bush administration officials are going to throw around before there's an "at long last" moment in the press.

+15

Democrats in generic congressional ballot. Those are much more meaningless than we'd like them to be, but still...

Amy Goodman, Stephen Colbert, and ... Me?

And tomorrow night Led Zeppelin will be opening up for the New Kids on the Block.

open thread

Silly Ricky

What a wanker.

Then:

A local faith-based abstinence education program is going national.
Thanks to a $700,000 federal grant, the Ohio Township-based Silver Ring Thing will be expanding to 75 other cities, including Boston, Minneapolis, and Columbia, S.C. The organization uses music videos and comedy skits to spread its abstinence message to adolescents.

...
Sen. Rick Santorum said the federal funding, "will assist schools medical facilities and community centers in educating the public on the benefits of sexual abstinence and related topics."

Now:

BOSTON -- The federal government has agreed to stop funding a Pennsylvania-based abstinence-only program for teens that a civil liberties group claimed was using federal dollars for Christian evangelization.

In the settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union, reached today, the Department of Health and Human Services agreed to stop funding the Silver Ring Thing program until it complies with laws forbidding federal dollars from funding religious activities.

The Silver Ring Thing, based in suburban Pittsburgh, is a nationwide program that uses music and comedy skits to promote premarital abstinence. The ACLU claimed in a May lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Boston that the program was crossing the line by using federal grant money to urge teens to commit their lives to Jesus Christ.

(thanks to reader m)

BFF

I did not have relations with that man Jack Abramoff.

Wanker of the Day

Tim Russert.

Saint Rick

heh heh.

Iraq'd

As things go to hell it's worth reminding ourselves what the people Bush sent over there to take care of things were worried about:

The coalition government relied heavily on a revolving door of diplomats and other personnel who would leave just as they had begun to develop local knowledge and ties, and on a large cadre of eager young neophytes whose brashness often gave offense in a very age- and status-conscious society. One young political appointee (a 24-year-old Ivy League graduate) argued that Iraq should not enshrine judicial review in its constitution because it might lead to the legalization of abortion. A much more senior Iraqi interlocutor (a widely experienced Iraqi-American lawyer) became so exasperated with the young man's audacity that he finally challenged him:

``You must have thoroughly studied the history of the British occupation of Iraq.''

``Yes, I did,'' the young American replied proudly.

``I thought so,'' said the Iraqi, ``because you seem determined to repeat every one of their mistakes.''

Jolly Old Pals

From Tom Tomorrow:

For years, Persian Gulf state elites hunted rare birds of prey, houbara bustards, in the bleak hills surrounding Kandahar. In the late 1990s, according to former U.S. and Afghan officials, a number of prominent Persian Gulf state officials and businessmen flew into Kandahar on state and private jets for secret hunting expeditions.

For days at a time, the hunters would roam the hills, releasing falcons trained to catch the bustards. Some satisfied hunters heaped donations on their Taliban hosts, officials said–and on Al Qaeda leaders who occasionally joined them.

Among the reported visitors were high-ranking UAE and Saudi government ministers. According to U.S. and former Afghan civil air officials, the hunters included Prince Turki al Faisal, son of the late Saudi King Faisal. He headed that nation’s intelligence service until late August, maintaining close ties with Bin Laden and the Taliban. Another visitor, officials said, was Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum, the Dubai crown prince and Emirates defense minister.

Joke

Richard Perle last night on CBS:

BORGER: Here's one explanation. The president and his senior staff couldn't brief Congress because they didn't know. That's because the panel that makes these calls, the Committee on Foreign Investments, is not run by the high-level Cabinet members listed on its Web site. Those guys usually rubber-stamp decisions made by staffers. Richard Perle is a Bush ally who sat on the panel during the Reagan years.

Mr. RICHARD PERLE (Former Assistant Secretary of Defense): The committee almost never met. And when it deliberated, which it did from time to time, it was usually at a pretty low bureaucratic level.

BORGER: So, is it a joke?

Mr. PERLE: I think it's a bit of a joke if we were serious about scrutinizing foreign ownership and foreign control, particularly since 9/11.

(thanks to reader b)

Quote of the Day

Bush:

This deal wouldn't go forward if we were concerned about the security for the United States of America.

The Whiny Ass Titty Baby Party

Are there any Republicans who aren't whiny ass titty babies?

Lois Murphy took her congressional campaign to Ursinus College yesterday and announced her plan for ethics and lobbying reform.

Before 25 students in a political science class, Murphy said that if elected, she would accept no travel or gifts from lobbyists, nor would she meet with them in secret.

...

Gerlach campaign spokesman Mark Campbell said that none of Murphy's ideas was original, adding that Gerlach was already working on many of them, although he declined to be specific.

He also called Murphy a "hypocrite," saying she was at one time a lobbyist representing special interests, an accusation that Murphy said was wrong.

"I did work for NARAL Pro-Choice America, but I was an attorney, not a lobbyist," she said. Lobbyists can serve a valuable role in educating legislators about issues, but they need to act ethically when they do it, she said.

National Journal says Gerlach's one of the most vulnerable. Murphy lost 51-49 last time. Consider setting up a recurring donation to help Murphy, maybe $10-20 a month 'till election day.

Accountability

Scott Shields says it clearly:

Essentially, these conditions weren't so much about protecting Americans from potential wrongdoing by a foreign power, but rather protecting a foreign power from accountability to Americans.

South Dakota

South Dakota has passed a clearly unconstitutional abortion ban. Presumably a lawsuit will be filed and a federal court will toss the law out, the only question being whether Roberts and Strip Search Sammy will then decide to hear the case.

I've long thought that if Roe goes then the boycotting of states which ban abortion would be a moral imperative. I see no reason to visit states which claim they own the deed to my wife's uterus.

Recap

This port deal was approved unanimously by a board on which Donald Rumsfeld sits. Rumsfeld claims he was unaware of the deal until after it was approved unanimously.

The administration didn't do the legally mandated 45 day investigation.

Secret terms of the deal include provisions which allow them to escape standard legal scrutiny.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

There's A Secret Deal in Ntodd's Pants

This doesn't add any confidence.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Et Tu, Tom?

I love a good wingnut war.

U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay said Wednesday that President Bush is making a big mistake backing a sale of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports to a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates.

The former Republican majority leader said the administration's approval of the deal is "pretty outrageous." DeLay made the remarks during a campaign event with Houston real estate executives.

Fresh Thread

Try not to shoot anybody in the face.

Ciro on the Radio

Ciro Rodriguez will be on the Majority Report at about 7:45 7:35 this evening....err... now

Little Ricky

Was glad to see the Casey campaign actually saw an opportunity and jumped on it, though I believe the Sandals campaign got there first.

Drop Cuellar Now

Indeed.

O'Reilly Sez Time to Cut and Run From Iraq

Of course, if anyone else would dare suggest a thing...

Wanker of the Day

John Dickerson

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Bunch

Will Bunch will be on Franken's show in the 1 o'clock hour talking about all things Santorum presumably.

Port Security

It's difficult to have grownup conversations about things which actually matter when they involve national security issues, so let's hope that this UAE port deal lets us, briefly at least, have a serious conversation about the very serious issue of port security. It's something Kerry hit on a lot in his campaign, it's something Senator Clinton has really been out in front about for quite some time, and an issue Republicans have been consistently opposing.

Bad

We may have just had our Iraq civil war catalyst.

Daily Ciro

Endorsed by the Austin American-Statesman.

Breaking the Law

Bush administration didn't bother with legally mandated 45 day investigation.

Of course, laws don't actually apply anymore as the Republican congress has decided they're as irrelevant as UAE's Federal National Council. I'm sure this had nothing to do with it:

Washington - The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.

One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose agency heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.

Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.

The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.

Jolly Old Pals

From March, 2004:

The Central Intelligence Agency did not target Al Qaeda chief Osama bin laden once as he had the royal family of the United Arab Emirates with him in Afghanistan, the agency's director, George Tenet, told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States on Thursday.

Had the CIA targeted bin Laden, half the royal family would have been wiped out as well, he said.

I don't see how it's a good idea to hand over ports to Bin Laden's pals.

Again, this is not about an "Arab company," this is a company owned and controlled by the hereditary oligarchy of the UAE, many of whom, apparently, were Bin Laden's jolly old pals.

(thanks to hesiod)

Why It's a Bad Idea

WaPo:

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) said last night that he will convene his panel today for a public briefing to be led by Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmitt and five other administration officials involved in the security review of the deal. Warner was briefed yesterday by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The senator said he was satisfied that proper procedures were followed on the deal.

But he said he would withhold judgment on the deal's national security implications until after today's briefing. The United Arab Emirates provides docking rights for more U.S. Navy ships than any other nation in the region, Warner noted. He added: "If they say they have not been treated fairly in this, we run the risk of them pulling back some of that support at a critical time of the war."

This is precisely the point. State actors have different interests than at least the idealized view of business actors. The latter are pursuing profit, the former are pursuing a variety of interests. While in practice the world is not as neatly divided up like that as it should be, when you completely merge business deals and diplomacy you've got problems, especially when those business deals involve port security issues. Handing the keys of our ports over to a foreign government which is pursuing a variety of interests is not such a good idea, especially when that government is a hereditary oligarchy and not a liberal democracy.

Mistake

How often is the majority opinion ever atually represented by the chatterers? The out of touch people in Washington always like to tell us how out of touch everyone (except themselves) in Washington is. Indeed.

NEW YORK More Americans than nearly ever before now say the war in Iraq is a "mistake" for the United States, according to a new Gallup poll. That figure now stands at 55%, up 4% point since late January. Only once before was the figure higher, at 59%, and that was during the period of overall pessimism right after Hurricane Katrina hit.

Gallup noted that it had asked this question about other wars involving the United States, "and only the Vietnam War engendered more public opposition than the current Iraq War. " The peak opposition to the Vietnam conflict was 61%. That figure for the generally unpopular Korean War was 51%.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Fresh Thread

Try not to shoot anybody in the face.

Endorsing Joe

Lieberman, as he frequently does, put his name down on the cosmetic vote but failed to come through when it could've mattered. Planned Parenthood and NARAL aren't staffed by idiots - they know how these things work - so they'd better not endorse the man who helped lead us to the end of Roe.

They can pick their batttles, but at the very least they can sit this one out.

Go LCV

Throwing some money down for Ciro.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Wanker of the Day

Michael Allan Wolf for this faux populist NPR report in which he claims that all over the country university faculty members are gearing up to devote their existences to making fun of NASCAR.



I can honestly say that in all of my time in academia I doubt I heard a single joke about NASCAR. You actually have to be aware of something to make fun of it. Academics certainly can be elitist in ways both understandable and stupid, but they aren't obsessed with mocking the things they're elitist about. Usually they're obsessed with ignoring them.

Fresh Thread

Try not to shoot anybody in the face.

Cafferty Earlier

Link:

Wolf, this may be the straw that finally breaks the camel's back, this deal to sell control of six US ports to a company controlled by the United Arab Emirates. There are now actually Senators and Congressmen and Governors and Mayors telling the White House "you're not gonna do this." And it's about time. No one has said "no" to this administration on anything that matters in a very long time. Well this matters. It matters a lot. If this deal is allowed to go through, we deserve whatever we get. A country with ties to terrorists will have a presence at six critical doorways to our country. And if anyone thinks that the terrorists, in time, won't figure out how to exploit that, then we're all done. Nothing's happened yet, mind you, but if our elected representatives don't do everything in their power to stop this thing, each of us should vow to work tirelessly to see that they are removed from public office. We're at a crossroads - which way will we choose?
Here's the question: What should be done to stop a deal that would allow an Arab company to run US Ports??

...video here.

A Brief Reminder

Bush does, of course, have inherent authority under Article II to make all decisions relating to national security.

Port Deal

Drudge has:

Bush called reports at about 2.30 aboard Air Force One to issue a very strong defense of port deal... MORE... He said he would veto any legislation to hold up deal and warned the United States was sending 'mixed signals' by going after a company from the Middle East when nothing was said when a British company was in charge... Lawmakers, he said, must 'step up and explain why a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard.' Bush was very forceful when he delivered the statement... 'I don't view it as a political fight,' Bush said.... MORE... MORE...

It isn't a "company from the Middle East." It's a company controlled by a foreign government.

Evidence of Absence

Rumsfeld is on the board which unanimously approved the port deal he'd never heard of.

Operation Shitty Senator

Ricky has even MORE problems:

In 2001, he launched the Operation Good Neighbor Foundation. The charity, which seeks to award money to faith-based groups and other organizations that combat poverty and social ills like teen pregnancy, has a Web page loaded with photos of a smiling Santorum, posing with oversized checks and leaders of community groups. So far, according to the site, the Senator’s charity has doled out $474,000.

But public records show that the group has raised considerably more than that since its inception in 2001.

A review of federal tax returns filed by the foundation for 2001, 2002, and 2003 shows that the charity spent just 35.9 percent of the nearly $1 million raised on its charitable grants, while spending 56.5 percent on expenses like salaries, fund-raising commissions, travel, conference costs, and rent. Charity experts say that charitable groups should spend at least 75 percent of their money on program grants, and that donors should beware of organizations that spend as little as Santorum’s has.

“The majority of organizations are able to meet that 75 percent figure,” says Saundra Miniutti of Charity Navigator, a watchdog group. Without addressing Santorum’s charity specifically, she noted that nonprofits spending in the range of just one-third on programs are “extremely inefficient.”

Moreover, the foundation is not registered with the Pennsylvania Department of State. A spokeswoman for the state agency said that any charity that solicits and raises more than $25,000 in Pennsylvania is required by law to register. Records included on the foundation’s 2002 tax filing list $94,000 in donations from sources in the state. State law says that violators of the registration law run the risk of civil penalties and possible legal action by the state.

The list of 2002 donors -- displayed on a Web page marked “not open to public inspection” -- includes several major donors to Santorum’s political campaign. Most notable is Philadelphia Trust Company, the same private bank that refinanced Santorum’s Virginia home in 2002, which gave $10,000. The CEO of Philadelphia Trust, Michael Crofton, is chairman of the charity’s board of advisers. The foundation also raised $25,000 from the PMA Foundation, the charitable arm of a risk-management firm in suburban Philadelphia; $25,000 from the suburban Philadelphia development firm Preferred Real Estate; and $10,000 from J. Brian O’Neill, the brother of that firm’s founder and himself a developer. The charity also received $10,000 from the Keystone Sanitary Landfill, owned by Louis DeNaples, a controversial Scranton businessman who is fending off published allegations that he associates with organized-crime figures.

Veto

CNN: Bush would veto any legislation to block UAE port deal.

Interesting what he thinks is important. That would, of course, be his first veto.

Bootylicious69

Kieran Healy mentions the other student email issue - their tendency to use rather unprofessional yahoo email accounts.

Not Quite Sure I Agree

I mean, at least this guy didn't shoot anybody in the face.

Drinking Liberally

In case you forgot or never noticed, Drinking Liberally Center City edition happens every Tuesday, 6-?, at Tangier at 18th and Lombard.


A new Fishtown edition happens Mondays at 6 at Johnny Brenda's.

Or, for those not local find a chapter near you...

Kaput

Daryn and Rush no longer sitting in a tree:

GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS First the bad news: I hear that right-wing radio guy Rush Limbaugh and CNN daytime anchor Daryn Kagan — who've been dating for nearly two years — are finally kaput. The good news, of course, is that the fabulous Kagan is back on the market.

Email

Early in my teaching career email was a great way for students to communicate with you. Though as email usage became more and more commonplace it did indeed become downright bizarre what students felt free to express in emails, as did the frequent demand for immediate responses.


Note to all college students: I certainly never expected my ass to be kissed as a professor, and in fact was quite happy for students to not give me great deference, but you win nothing by being an asshole.

Memories of Mahatir

Always project. Always.

Your Bush Era

Congratulations, Republicans. If you or your wives are going to be permanently and seriously disabled due to pregnancy complications there will soon be nothing your doctor can do about it.

Lies and the Lying Liars

Orrin Hatch edition.

States' Rights

Any conservative principles left?

Sometimes it’s the small abuses scurrying below radar that reveal how profoundly the Bush administration has changed America in the name of national security. Buried within the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 is a regulation that bars most public access to birth and death certificates for 70 to 100 years. In much of the country, these records have long been invaluable tools for activists, lawyers, and reporters to uncover patterns of illness and pollution that officials miss or ignore.

In These Times has obtained a draft of the proposed regulations now causing widespread concern among state officials. It reveals plans to create a vast database of vital records to be centralized in Washington, and details measures that states must implement–and pay millions for—before next year’s scheduled implementation.

The draft lays out how some 60,000 already strapped town and county offices must keep the birth and death records under lock and key and report all document requests to Washington. Individuals who show up in person will still be able to obtain their own birth certificates, and in some cases, the birth and death records of an immediate relative; and “legitimate” research institutions may be able to access files. But reporters and activists won’t be allowed to fish through records; many family members looking for genetic clues will be out of luck; and people wanting to trace adoptions will dead-end. If you are homeless and need your own birth certificate, forget it: no address, no service.

On the Take

Yglesias explains Heritage's evolution.

Pretty Cover

Two main isses in the Santorum story. The first is the clearly shady mortgage he got. The second is the fact that he uses his leadership PAC to subsidize his life with pretty dubious expenditures. Both are likely quite legal, but both are quite shady.

..and the People Paper too:

Heritage and the anti-Semite

So why's the Heritage Foundation interested in having a famous anti-Semitic leader meet with and influence Bush?

Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Monday that disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff was paid $1.2 million to organize his 2002 meeting with President Bush, but denied the money came from the Malaysian government.

Mahathir told reporters he was aware a payment was made to Abramoff, but he didn't know who made it. He said he had been persuaded by the U.S. think tank Heritage Foundation to meet with Bush at the time.

"It is true that somebody paid but it was not the (Malaysian) government," Mahathir said. "I understood some people paid a sum of money to lobbyists in America but I do not know who these people were and it was not the Malaysian government."

Mahathir said the Heritage Foundation believed he could help "influence (Bush) in some way regarding U.S. policies."

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

The Torturers Win

And liberal democracy dies.

They Hate You

It's long been a mystery to me why journalists internalize right wing criticisms of them and ignore left wing ones. As an example, about every time I go and give some good panel in front of a crowd containing journalist types I get the standard "do you think bloggers are going to replace reporters?" question. Only the Pajamline wankers and their fellow travelers believe that shit. But for some reason that's what journalists hear - that bloggers are going to revolutionize reporting! Take their jobs! Report the GOOD NEWS from Iraq!

Reporters really need to adjust their criticism filters. Stoller explains that the Right hates you for not being the propagandists they want you to be.

Shorter Nick Kristof

I'm even more clueless than Tom Friedman.

The make no mistakes administration is not going to start implicitly admitting mistakes now.

Yes, behind Times Select wall, but you aren't missing anything. Kristof just says it'd be great if a bunch of people resigned and Bush began again with an exciting new bipartisan administration! Oh, and unicorns!

With a Little Help From His Friends

The sordid tale of Ricky Santorum.

It is here, some 43 miles by car and a world away from Capitol Hill, that Pennsylvania’s junior U.S. senator, Rick Santorum, and his wife, Karen, bought a home on November 14, 2001, for $643,361 (now assessed by Loudoun County at $757,000). It is here that the most outspoken social conservative in the Senate is raising his six children in the manner he described in his book last year, which caused so much controversy back in the state where he is seeking a third term this fall. And it is here that Santorum departs most mornings for his newest mission: crafting a package of Senate ethics reforms aimed at removing the stain of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal.

The Santorums bought their oversized Shenstone “estate” even though his financial disclosure forms since 2001 have shown little family income beyond his Senate salary, now $162,100, and he admits that life hasn’t been financially easy. The senator made a startling remark to The New York Times Magazine last spring: “We live paycheck to paycheck, absolutely.” But he explained that his parents help out. “They’re by no means wealthy -- they’re two retired VA [Veterans Administration] employees -- but they’ll send a check every now and then,” he said.

The Prospect decided to heed Santorum’s advice by taking “an honest look at the family budget” -- his family budget. What we found is that Santorum’s exurban lifestyle is financed in ways that aren’t available to the average voter back home in Pennsylvania -- namely a political action committee that lists payments for such unorthodox items as dozens of trips to the Starbucks in Leesburg, a number of stops at fast-food joints, and purchases at Target, Wal-Mart, and a Giant supermarket in northern Virginia. Although a Santorum aide defends those charges as legitimate political costs, good-government experts say the expenditures are at best unconventional, and at worst a possible violation of Senate rules, and the purchases appear to be unorthodox when compared with other senators’ filings. Santorum’s PAC -- a “leadership PAC,” whose purpose is to dispense money to other Republican candidates -- used just 18.1 percent of its money to that end over a recent five-year period, a lower number than other leadership PACs of top senators from both parties.

These facts may well raise questions in Pennsylvanians’ minds about how the senator is conducting their business in Washington. But it is Santorum’s Virginia home that raises the hardest questions for the third-ranking Senate Republican.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Little Ricky Has Some Ethics Problems

Hoo boy.

Santorum and his wife received a $500,000, five-year mortgage for their Leesburg, Va., home (pictured at top) from a small Philadelphia private bank run by a major campaign donor — even though its stated policy is to make loans only to its “affluent” investors, which the senator is not.

I Know Nothing About David Hume

But I always enjoy a little New Republic bashing.

(via delong)

What Have We Learned

Matt Stoller on Beltway thinking.

When the Club for Growth pushed Toomey over Specter in the Pennsylvania primary I don't remember anyone treating them as naive outsiders. Sure there was talk that Toomey would have a harder time winning the primary, but there wasn't this tut-tutting of their stupidity. A lot of money was spent, both by Specter (especially) and Toomey, and Toomey almost won.

Fresh Thread

I got nothing, but I can promise you that I'm not going to shoot anybody in the face today.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Six Months From Now

If the Kitty Kevorkian thinks that six months from now seniors are going to really love them some Bush/DeLay Medicare Drug scam then he's an even bigger idiot than I thought. Starting in a few months more and more seniors are going to enter donut hole territory, where they have to pay full price for their expensive meds.

Going to be a lot of angry seniors.

Local Blogs

Kos is exactly right here:

A thought -- "acting locally" includes blogging your local races. I will be depending on local bloggers (like Say No To Pombo) to keep me informed of some of the hottest races. I'm not interested in doing candidate interviews, but I'll link to such interviews in local blogs. Every congressional candidate, in their press page, should include a healthy dose of blogger articles on their races. Not only does it help us national bloggers when researching a candidate, but it also demonstrates to the local press that the candidate is generating a lot of local buzz. And while us bloggers are (relatively) poor at generating money, we are great at generating buzz.

I know this will take a few cycles to change, but campaigns are still too reliant on the local newspaper article to get their word out when there should be many local activists, on their blogs, willing and able to spread the word and help bypass the media filters that shut out many challengers. Is it a guaranteed path to true legitimate contender status? Nope. That still takes a lot of other things (like money). But it's going to be an increasingly integral part of any campaign's arsenal.

I realize that most districts probably don't have aggressive bloggers writing about their local political scene. But that's something campaigns can help jump start. They should encourage local activists to head over to Blogspot and set up their free site and start writing about the race. I'm not saying create astroturf sites, I'm saying let people know what this blogging thing is and encourage them to start their own sites.

Primary Hell

I really am dreading the coming presidential primary season, even aside from the fact that it ushers in the the Extreme Silly Season in American journalism. While in 2003-4 various competing online camps managed (barely) to avoid all out nuclear war with each other over who should win I don't expect that to happen next time. Everyone knows their favorite candidate is the only one who can win, everyone knows their candidate is the one true future of the nation. I see how people are tearing at each other over a Senate primary in Ohio and really don't look forward to what is next...

Dick Cheney Might Shoot Them All In The Face

Glenn Greenwald runs down the latest on the domestic spying scandal. I think last week we got an attempted Rove gambit, aided by a gullible press. You know, Rove's usual "declare victory and go home" attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It doesn't quite appear to be working. We'll see...

Lamont

The CT edition of the New York Times did a piece on Ned Lamont. He's a pretty interesting guy.

In any case, if Lamont manages to take the right steps to make clear he's running a real campaign early enough my guess is he'll be able to raise a million online between now and August when the primary is.

Tristero

Sadly I didn't have a chance to see the performance when it came to town as I was on a plane to Europe that evening, but "Tristero's" Voices of Light is quite good. I don't really have an expert ear for choral music, so don't consider my opinion informed, but still I know what I likes.

Teh Stupid

NBC:

Fans immediately began putting copies of the video online. On one free video-sharing site, YouTube (www.youtube.com), it was watched a total of five million times . NBC soon made the video available as a free download from the Apple iTunes Music Store.

Julie Supan, senior director of marketing for YouTube, said she contacted NBC Universal about working out a deal to feature NBC clips, including "Lazy Sunday," on the site. NBC Universal responded early this month with a notice asking YouTube to remove about 500 clips of NBC material from its site or face legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. YouTube complied last week. "Lazy Sunday" is still available for free viewing on NBC's Web site, and costs $1.99 on iTunes.

Julie Summersgill, a spokeswoman for NBC Universal, said the company meant no ill will toward fan sites but wanted to protect its copyrights. "We're taking a long and careful look at how to protect our content," she said.

YouTube and others in the new wave of video-sharing sites have so far managed to avoid major legal problems even though they often carry copyrighted material without permission.

NBC's almost certainly right on their rights under copyright law as I understand it and purely from that perspective what they're doing makes sense. But it reminds me of back in the good old days of the internet when entertainment companies thought they could make money by offering exclusive content deals to the dinosaur "walled gardens" like AOL and MSN and then started going after amateur fan sites for putting up a .jpg of Jean-Luc Picard. Again, within their rights, but going after your fans never seems like an especially good idea especially when they're essentially offering free marketing for your product, the kind of "free marketing" these companies spend lots of money getting advertising consultants to tell them how to get.

Obviously this is a somewhat different situation. Sites like youtube try to get money from advertising revenue and as such are, technically, earning revenue from NBC's product. Still it's hard to see how this is a sensible business decision. Unlike trademark, copyright doesn't have to be aggressively defended in order to maintain it. A company can approach these things on a case by case basis and it's pretty hard to see how imagined lost revenue for NBC isn't outweighed by the marketing benefit for SNL.

As with file sharing the right business question isn't "is someone getting music for free" the right business question is "does this really cause us to, in the net, lose revenue if we adapt our business model to the new reality." Free songs, free videos, they're all marketing techniques. Of course, giving out free songs and videos isn't exactly a new idea, it's what radio and MTV (when it still played videos) have been doing for quite some time...

On Tolerance

From Jane Smiley.

Preserving Liberty

Not exactly job 1.

WASHINGTON — For Americans troubled by the prospect of federal agents eavesdropping on their phone conversations or combing through their Internet records, there is good news: A little-known board exists in the White House whose purpose is to ensure that privacy and civil liberties are protected in the fight against terrorism.

Someday, it might actually meet.

Initially proposed by the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board was created by the intelligence overhaul that President Bush signed into law in December 2004.

More than a year later, it exists only on paper.

The president has the right to spy on whoever he wants whenever he wants and if you disagree Dick Cheney might shoot you in the face.

Olympics

I know everyone will say something along these lines, but every time they're on they seem to cover less of the actual sports and more chit chat about the "human drama" or some such nonsense. Especially since the olympics largely involves sports people mostly don't watch at other times, over time that erodes interest in the actual, you know sport, and fewer people bother to watch the next time around.


Maybe it's just a faulty memory but as a kid I remember sitting there watching things like endless downhill ski runs as they ran a lot of live coverage.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Local Notes

Saw the play Opus, by Michael Hollinger, at the Arden Theatre this evening. Simply put it's a play about a string quartet. It isn't genius, but it's a well-crafted, entertaining, and very well-acted play. Definitely recommended if the basic subject is of interest. Somewhat topical given the recent stories about the tribulations of the Audubon Quartet.

Biden Talks Tough

Good for him, I guess.

Fresh Thread

Try not to shoot anybody in the face.

Matalin Horror Show

Arianna.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Open Thread

Yeah, yeah, another stupid open thread.

Liars

When people lie to you that obviously and blatantly you stop having them on. Matalin doesn't even have an official position in the Bush administration so there's literally no excuse.

It's Russerts show. As someone who fancies himself a journalist he's responsible for what happens there. If he thinks his viewers beneft from having liars on he should explain why, perhaps at the next blogger ethics conference.

Fetish Projection

Too many conservatives oddly believe that since they have a fetishistic attachment to the idea of "small government" that liberals have a similar fetishistic attachment to "big government." Consider Andrew Sullivan:

My prediction: we will see huge tax increases soon after Bush leaves the scene. He will insist they are a betrayal of his legacy. They will, in fact, be the logical consequence of everything he has said and done. Once they get past their loathing, big government liberals may well look back on the Bush years and wonder at the miracle of how he did what they spent two generations failing to do.

I don't know any "big government liberals" in the sense that Andy means. I don't know anybody who gets a stiffy at the thought of raising taxes and increasing government spending as a share of GDP just for the hell of it. Liberals I know tend to think there are things government should do and we should, roughly, figure out how to pay for those things, though we're not entirely allergic to deficit spending. When taxes have to go up to cover interest and debt repayment costs no liberals I know are going to go "YAY! HIGHER TAXES! WOO HOOO!"

For a long time the Left was tarred as idealistic utopians, addicted to ways of doing things no matter what the consequences. I have no real opinion on whether that criticism was ever true, but in any case it's something which has been embraced wholesale by the Right. They have a small government fetish, and that fetish is linked almost entirely to the top marginal federal income tax rate. Liberals have no such corresponding fetish for "big government" even if they tend to be fans of some government programs conservatives like to demonize as being "big government liberalism." No one's going to enjoy sweeping up after Bush's fiscal train wreck.

I wonder if people like Sullivan truly don't understand this, if they're unable to see beyond their own silly worldview, or if they're just full of it.

Howell

Jane on the new Power Tool.

Campaign Fun

I'll stick up a couple exciting pictures later if they're worth looking at, but i just walked out of Lois Murphy's kickoff event. Various state legislature members were there, as did congressional candidates Lois Murphy and Joe Sestak, who currently has the oddest campaign URL which I hope will be fixed. Sestak is a retired Vice Admiral who kinda pushed Bryan Lentz out of the race when he decided to run. I was a bit worried this was just a matter of Admiral trumping Major as I quite liked Lentz, but Sestak actually seemed like he might be a quality candidate to get rid of Crazy Curt Weldon.

Rendell also spoke. He mostly avoided his annoying tendency to place himself above the partisan fray. He did momentarily slip into annoying process talk about religion/values, but he came back from that rather nicely by making the stunning (for a major politician) admission that he isn't an "overly religious person" and then stating that while that was the case he was rather familiar with the Old and New Testaments (contary to popular belief Rendell is not Italian but Jewish) and there wasn't too much about gay marriage and abortion in there. So, instead of whining about how we need to hate abortion and the gay more than we do he said we needed to stop letting them define what values are. Not bad, overall.