corrente

The Department of Defense and family members have identified 718 U.S. servicemembers who died supporting U.S.-led operations in Iraq. Of these, 580 died since May 1, when President Bush declared that major combat operations there had ended.
(via AP)

It will be a year on Saturday since Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln beneath a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" and announced that major combat in Iraq had ended.

[Executive] Bush on Friday defended his speech a year ago on the deck of an aircraft carrier proclaiming the end of major combat in Iraq and said "we're making progress, you bet" in bringing stability to the war-torn country.
(via LA Times)

Answering reporters' questions ... Bush said that on the day he spoke aboard an aircraft carrier off San Diego, he also noted that "there was still difficult work ahead."

"A year ago I did give the speech from the carrier saying we had achieved an important objective, accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein," Bush said.

"As a result, there are no longer torture chambers or mass graves or rape rooms in Iraq," the president said
(via LA Times)

Graphic photographs showing the torture and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners in a US-run prison outside Baghdad emerged yesterday from a military inquiry which has left six soldiers facing a possible court martial and a general under investigation.

Colonel Jill Morgenthaler, speaking for central command, told the Guardian: "One contractor was originally included with six soldiers, accused for his treatment of the prisoners, but we had no jurisdiction over him. It was left up to the contractor on how to deal with him."

She did not specify the accusation facing the contractor, but according to several sources with detailed knowledge of the case, he raped an Iraqi inmate in his mid-teens.
(via Guardian)

There are everywhere signs that the United States has embarked on a policy of re-baathification, rehabilitating thousands of ex-Baathists and putting them to work. Fifty former Baath officers met with Minister of Defense Ali Allawi on Thursday, expressing their deep disappointment with the current make-up of the new Iraqi army. The policy has two goals. First, it is aimed at mollifying the Sunni Arabs, who have given the US so much trouble in the past year, and from whom the high-ranking Baathists were largely drawn. Second, it serves as a threat to insurgents and Shiites, that if they continue to make trouble, they will be facing the aides of Chemical Ali.

Whoever made the decision to pull back and try to put an Iraqi face on the confrontation in Fallujah had more good sense than has been demonstrated by American leaders recently in Iraq. A bloody invasion of Fallujah had the potential of greatly deepening Iraqi and Arab hatred for the United States. It remains to see whether the new Iraqi force is up to the task of restoring order and quelling the fighters. The police in Fallujah have so far been ineffective, often admitting that they refuse to fight Iraqis on behalf of the Americans.
(via Informed Comment)

All the information I've been able to get my hands on indicates that the security situation in Iraq is really, really bad. It's not a good sign when, a year into an occupation, the occupying army sends for more tanks. Western civilians have retreated to armed enclaves. U.S. forces are strong enough to defend those enclaves, and probably strong enough to keep essential supplies flowing. But we don't have remotely enough troops to turn the vicious circle around. The Iraqi forces that were supposed to fill the security gap collapsed — or turned against us — at the first sign of trouble.

And all of the proposals one hears for resolving this ugly situation seem to be either impractical or far behind the curve.

Some say we should send more troops. But the U.S. military doesn't have more troops to send, unless it resorts to extreme measures, like withdrawing a large part of the forces currently in South Korea. Did I mention that North Korea is building nuclear weapons, and may already have eight?

Others say we should seek more support from other countries. There may once have been a time — say, last summer — when the U.S. could have struck a deal: by ceding a lot of authority to the U.N., we might have been able to persuade countries with large armies, like India, to contribute large numbers of peacekeeping troops. But it's hard to imagine that anyone will now send significant forces into the Iraqi cauldron.

Some pin their hopes on a political solution: they believe that violence will subside if the U.N. is allowed to appoint a caretaker government that Iraqis don't view as a U.S. puppet.

Let's hope they're right. But bear in mind that right now the U.S. is still planning to hand over "sovereignty" to a body, yet to be named, that will have hardly any power at all. For practical purposes, the U.S. ambassador will be running the country. Americans may believe that everything will change on June 30, but Iraqis are unlikely to be fooled. And by the way, much of the Arab world believes that we've been committing war crimes in Falluja.

I don't have a plan for Iraq. I strongly suspect, however, that all the plans you hear now are irrelevant. If America's leaders hadn't made so many bad decisions, they might have had a chance to shape Iraq to their liking. But that window closed many months ago.
(via The Times)

Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been charging that John Kerry would be a dangerous president because he opposed many key weapons that the military now relies on, himself presided over the biggest cutbacks in defense programs in modern history when he was secretary of defense under the first President Bush.

As Pentagon chief from 1989 to 1993 Cheney canceled or cut back many of the same weapons programs – bombers, fighter planes, battle tanks – that he says Kerry tried to deprive the armed forces of.

The latest Bush-Cheney campaign ad depicts weapons such as the B-2 stealth bomber flying over a battlefield and then disappearing into thin air, attempting to convince voters that if Kerry prevailed back then, U.S. military forces would be underequipped.

Yet Cheney canceled the B-2 bomber program after 20 planes, even though the Air Force insisted it needed 132. He opposed upgrading the M1 Abrams tank, recommended killing the latest model of the F-14 fighter jet and opposed buying more F-15s.

President George Bush told the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks a security memo he got warning of attacks lacked a date or place.

In the closed-door interview alongside Vice President Dick Cheney in the Oval Office Thursday, a commission member who asked not to be identified told the Washington Times Bush was questioned repeatedly about the Aug. 6, 2001, memo titled, "Bin Ladin determined to strike in U.S."
(via Washington Times)

No other details of the three-hour interview were available.

A soldier facing a court-martial for his role in the alleged abuse of Iraqi war prisoners says commanders ignored his requests to set out rules for treating POWs and scolded him for questioning the inmates' harsh treatment.

Army Reserves Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick wfrote that Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad lacked the humane standards of the Virginia state prison where he worked in civilian life, according to a journal he started after military investigators first questioned him in January.

The Iraqi prisoners were sometimes confined naked for three consecutive days without toilets in damp, unventilated cells with floors 3 feet by 3 feet, Frederick wrote in materials obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.

"When I brought this up with the acting BN (battalion) commander, he stated, 'I don't care if he has to sleep standing up.' That's when he told my company commander that he was the BN commander and for me to do as he says," Frederick wrote.

The writings were supplied by Frederick's uncle, William Lawson, who said Frederick wanted to document what was happening to him. Lawson and Martha Frederick, the sergeant's wife, said Frederick was being made a scapegoat for commanders who gave him no guidance on managing hundreds of POWs with just a handful of ill-trained, poorly equipped troops
(via AP)

Dear Billy Graham:

Is it acceptabe in the eyes of the Lord for the US occupation troops to torture Iraqi prisoners?

If not, why are you silent?

Yours in Christ,
56k

- and he stepped into the river and seized up the drowning idiot, snatching it aloft by the heels like a great midwife and slapping it on the back to let the water out. A birth scene or a baptism or some ritual not yet inaugurated into any canon. He twisted the water from its hair and he gathered the naked and sobbing fool into his arms and carried it up into the camp and restored it among its fellows. (Cormac McCarthy, "Blood Meridian")

L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, said in a speech six months before the Sept. 11 attacks that the Bush administration was "paying no attention" to terrorism.

"What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this,'" Bremer said at a McCormick Tribune Foundation conference on terrorism on Feb. 26, 2001.
(via AP)

[The] New York Times [has] some bad polling news for the president.

"Support for the war in Iraq has eroded substantially over the past several months, and Americans are increasingly critical of the way President Bush is handling the conflict, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll," they write.

Bush's approval rating "now stands at 46 percent, the lowest level of his presidency in The Times/CBS News Poll, down from 71 percent last March and a high of 89 percent just after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001."

In fact, Bush's disapproval rating of 47 percent is now higher than his approval rating.

There's lots more numbers and a graphic on the Web site.

But is the Times trying to defuse its own bombshell? An unsigned sidebar explains how its poll compares to other recent ones -- and why. In short: "The New York Times/CBS News Poll's main findings were consistent with trends in some other recent polls but somewhat more negative for Mr. Bush." But "in statistical terms" they're "virtually the same."
(via WaPo)

The pursuit of balance can create imbalance, because sometimes something is true.

[Stephanie Cutter, Kerry's communications director], said Bush strategists often launch attacks against Kerry at the beginning of a week in which they are expecting bad news. This week's schedule includes a Supreme Court hearing on Vice President Cheney's secret energy task force, today's joint appearance by Bush and Cheney before the commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attacks, and the first anniversary of Bush's landing on an aircraft carrier with a "Mission Accomplished" banner.
(via WaPo)

Republicans are raising questions over a Vietnam War protest Kerry participated in 33 years ago, saying he pretended to throw away his medals. Kerry said Monday he threw away his ribbons and the medals of two other veterans, and he rejected the questions as a "phony controversy."(Full story)

After the conclusion of an interview with ABC during which he was grilled on the topic, a clearly frustrated Kerry -- who apparently believed the camera had been turned off -- sputtered into a microphone, "God, they're doing the work of the Republican National Committee."
(via CNN)

Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, has been pegged as a possible leaker of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to a syndicated columnist, according to a new book by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Plame's husband.
(via AP)

The other name "that has most often been repeated to me in connection with the inquiry and disclosure into my background and Valerie's is that of Elliott Abrams, who gained infamy in the Iran-Contra scandal during the first Bush administration." (Abrams, Leiby explains, is on the staff of the National Security Council.)

Another suspect named in Wilson's book: White House chief political adviser Karl Rove. "The workup on me that turned up the information on Valerie was shared with Karl Rove, who then circulated it in administration and neoconservative circles," Wilson writes.

Columnist Robert Novak has said only that "two senior administration officials" were his sources.

Support for War Is Down Sharply, Poll Concludes
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
and JANET ELDER

Support for the war in Iraq has eroded substantially over the past several months, and Americans are increasingly critical of the way President Bush is handling the conflict, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll.

After initially expressing robust backing for the war, the public is now evenly divided over whether the United States military should stay for as long as it takes to stabilize Iraq or pull out as soon as possible, the poll showed.

Asked whether the United States had done the right thing in taking military action against Iraq, 47 percent of respondents said it had, down from 58 percent a month earlier and 63 percent in December, just after American forces captured Saddam Hussein. Forty-six percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, up from 37 percent last month and 31 percent in December.

The diminished public support for the war did not translate into any significant advantage for Mr. Bush's Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. The poll showed the two men remaining in a statistical dead heat, both in a head-to-head matchup and in a three-way race that included Ralph Nader.

Support for Mr. Bush is stronger in other areas vital to his re-election, including his handling of the threat from terrorism, which won the approval of 60 percent of respondents.

Even so, just short of a year after Mr. Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln last May 1 and proclaimed the end to major combat operations under a banner reading "Mission Accomplished," his approval rating has slid from the high levels it reached during the war.

The survey held hints of trouble for Mr. Kerry as he seeks to introduce himself to an electorate that knows relatively little about him. While 55 percent of Mr. Bush's supporters said they strongly favored the president, only 32 percent of Mr. Kerry's supporters strongly favored their candidate.

Sixty-one percent of voters said Mr. Kerry says what he thinks people want to hear, versus 29 percent who said he says what he believes. The Bush campaign has attacked Mr. Kerry for months on that score, portraying him as a flip-flopper with no convictions.

On the same question, 43 percent said Mr. Bush says what people want to hear and 53 percent said he says what he believes

As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to "do what the people want," instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically, Scalia said.

"And so politics has made itself known," Scalia told an audience of the Philadelphia Bar Association.

Good judges are honest lawyers who stick to the letter of the law or the Constitution, whatever their political philosophy, Scalia said.
(via AP)

A senior Defense Department official is under investigation by the Pentagon inspector general for allegations that he attempted to alter a contract proposal in Iraq to benefit a mobile phone consortium that includes friends and colleagues, according to documents obtained by The Times and sources with direct knowledge of the process.

John A. Shaw, 64, the deputy undersecretary for international technology security, sought to transform a relatively minor police and fire communications proposal into a contract allowing the creation of an Iraq-wide commercial cellular network that could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year, the sources said.
(via LA Times)

Shaw's efforts resulted in a dispute at the Coalition Provisional Authority that has delayed the contract, depriving U.S. military officials and Iraqi police officers, firefighters, ambulance drivers and border guards of a joint communications system.

That has angered top U.S. officials and members of the U.S.-led authority governing Iraq, who say the deaths of many Americans and Iraqis might have been prevented with better communications.

CDMA, which was developed by Qualcomm, is used in the United States and some countries in Asia. Its rival, a standard developed by Europeans called GSM, is used in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.

"Hey, we won the war," Shaw said in an interview. "Is it not in our interests to have the most advanced system that we possibly can that can then become the dominant standard in the region?"

Bush insisted "most of Fallujah is returning to normal" despite a massive American bombardment yesterday.
(via UK Mirror)

U.S. warplanes carried out new air strikes and gunfire erupted in parts of this volatile city Thursday night, hours after Marines announced a tentative deal to end a nearly month-long siege that has cost hundreds of lives. Separately, a series of hit-and-run attacks and a car-bomb blast killed 10 U.S. soldiers during the morning, most of them in and around the capital.

A cease-fire agreement -- reached with the assistance of local leaders and signed April 19 -- has largely been ignored by people in the city. Although the deal called for such heavy arms as mortars and rocket-propelled grenades to be surrendered to the Marines, all they have received is a small assortment of rusty, inoperable weapons.

The latest plan emerged from three days of discussions between U.S. commanders and four former Iraqi generals, according to Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, commander of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment in Fallujah.

(via WaPo)

The former vice president pledged to donate $4 million to the Democratic National Committee. The party's Senate and House committees each will get $1 million, and the party from Gore's home state of Tennessee would receive $250,000.

The Democratic Party in Florida, site of the divisive 2000 election recount, will get $240,000 from a separate Gore campaign account. Republican campaign committees still hold a fund-raising advantage over Democrats.

"The outcome of this election is extremely important for the future of our country and for all that America stands for," Gore said. "I want to help John Kerry become president and I want to help Democrats retake control of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives."

He shocked the political community late last year by endorsing then front-runner Dean, whose campaign collapsed several weeks later in Iowa.

Gore narrowly lost Florida and the presidential race after the Supreme Court stopped the disputed recount.

U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott turned a routine recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance into a political flap this week when he omitted the words "under God" while leading the House of Representatives in the pledge.

McDermott, D-Seattle, said he recited the pledge before Tuesday's House session the way he had learned it as a child in Illinois, before the words "under God" were added, and that he meant no offense. When he came to "under God," McDermott paused while the rest of the House said the words and then continued on with the pledge.

"That's how I've always said it," McDermott said yesterday. "I make my pledge to my country and that's the end of it."

(via Seattle Times)

Republicans pounced on the omission. Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, accused McDermott of "embarrassing the House and disparaging the majority of Americans who share the values expressed in the pledge."

Washington State Republican Party chairman Chris Vance echoed the criticism in a statement yesterday: "One more time, Jim McDermott has embarrassed Washington state."

The House's presiding officer Tuesday, Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, said the words "under God" would appear in the Congressional Record of Tuesday's proceedings, regardless of how McDermott had recited the pledge.

McDermott, 67, has been a lightning rod for conservatives since he took a high-profile trip to Iraq in 2002 and told television interviewers President Bush would mislead the public to justify an invasion.

"I was a 6-year-old boy when I gave my heart to Jesus Christ," said McDermott, a member of St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle. "I went to Wheaton College with Billy Graham. But religion shouldn't be worn on your sleeve. I don't wear my religion on my sleeve. I don't think my relationship with God has any place in this."

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you." --Matthew 6:5-6

All tax legislation must originate in the House - that's what's referenced as "revenue bills" in the Constitution. Appropriations bills - spending - originate in both House & Senate.

Who knows what hijinx those loveable twins will get themselves into this fine morning! I hope they wear matching outfits.

Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT): We're not going that far, John, here, but in a sense, what I'm getting at here, it's obvious that this committee is going to confirm your nomination. So, in the traditional sense, the normal question and answer period is not really appropriate here because I don't think anything that you are going to say is going to dissuade any of us that you should not be the choice and get this job done.

SISTER LAETITIA BORDES: Why yes, good morning Amy. As I mentioned yesterday on your program, I had gone to Honduras to meet with then-ambassador John Negroponte to find out what had happened to 32 women from El Salvador, who had taken refuge in Honduras and who disappeared. At that time there was the Battalion 316. The Battalion was another name for the horrible death squad that was operating in Honduras at that time. That was well known to ambassador Negroponte. The reason I say it was very well known to ambassador Negroponte was that General Alvarez Martinez was then chief of the Honduran armed forces, and he was the secret head of battalion 316. Now, Negroponte and Martinez, the people would tell you, it was known that they would wine and dine together, and had ongoing connections. So, it is absurd to think that Mr. Negroponte would say that he did not know what was going in El Salvador at that time. As I found out 13 years later that the women we were looking for had been badly, badly tortured and then put in a helicopter and dropped into the ocean. They used Salvadoran military and helicopters to take these women and drop them over the ocean. Now, Battalion 316 continued to function the whole time that Negroponte was there, and I don't think too many people know that General Gustavo Martinez was kind of, quote, “Beheaded by his own military.” There was kind of a coup, and he took temporary refuge in the United States. When he went back to Honduras, he was assassinated. I don't think many people know about that. It is believed that he was assassinated by members of the military, who were very upset with him because of deals that he had made with the United States while he was the general. What angers me -- angers me very, very much is that there's absolutely no reference being made to the past of Mr. Negroponte in Honduras during these hearings. We just don't hear anything about it. We do not learn from our history. The people of Iraq are those who are going to be the ongoing victims of John Negroponte, who believes that the end justifies the means.

Sister Laetitia Bordes, a Catholic nun with the Society of Helpers, a Catholic community of women. She is talking to us from San Bruno, California. Democracy Now/interview

...who had been trained at the US Army School of the Americas and in Argentina. He believed that Honduras should take the Argentine approach to dealing with dissent, which consisted largely of kidnapping suspects and torturing them to death in secret jails. His fanaticism disturbed some of his comrades, but when American officials decided to use Honduras as a base for the contra war, they found him an eager ally. He was willing not only to turn over parts of Honduran territory to the contras and allow them to function with impunity, but also to tolerate and even direct the "disappearance" of Hondurans who protested.

[...]

During his years in Honduras, Negroponte acquired a reputation, justified or not, as an old-fashioned imperialist. Sending him to the UN serves notice that the Bush administration will not be bound by diplomatic niceties as it conducts its foreign policy. ~ source: "Our Man in Honduras" ~ source: "Our Man in Honduras", By Stephen Kinzer NY Review of Books>, September 20, 2001.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Ct., noted differences that he had with Negroponte when the diplomat was ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s. "Those differences stem largely from a lack of candor about what the U.S. was and wasn't doing in Central America in the conflict at that time," Dodd said. "And although I intend to support and strongly support this nomination when it comes to a vote in this committee, and later on the Senate floor, I want to make one point especially clear: That same issue -- candor -- in my view, is going to be critical with respect to continued support for U.S. policies in Iraq." [excerpt] Source: FoxNews

A Supreme Court plurality, in a Pennsylvania case that may change the political landscape of the United States, said Wednesday that the courts cannot rule on challenges to political gerrymandering.

The decision could affect similar disputes in Texas and elsewhere and is expected to benefit the Republican Party. It could also open the floodgates to politically gerrymandered redistricting wherever one party has firm control of a state legislature.

But a four-justice plurality led by Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that political gerrymandering claims are "non-justiciable" because no standards for judging such claims [of gerrymandering] exist.

"The use of purely political considerations in drawing district boundaries is not a 'necessary evil' that, for lack of judicially manageable standards, the Constitution must tolerate," Breyer said in his dissent. Breyer then proceeded to offer 15 pages illustrating what he said were possible standards.

State Legislatures Magazine reported after the 2002 elections that Republicans had firm control of 21 state legislatures and Democrats firmly controlled 16. Partisan control is divided in 11 legislatures; the remainder are effectively deadlocked.

Political gerrymandering is espoused by such national figures as House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, and it is expected to spread after Wednesday's ruling.
(via UPI)

[T]here is evidence that the idea of volunteering, then not showing up, or showing up and using anti-Republican language has interested many people.

The biggest public proponent of the idea is a 37-year-old computer consultant from Philadelphia, David A. Lynn, who has created a Web site called shadowprotest.org. It is calling on protesters to volunteer at both the Republican convention and the Democratic National Convention, which will be held in Boston earlier in the summer. Mr. Lynn has issued press releases, and tried to sell his idea across the Internet, where it has picked up some momentum.

Boston appears largely immune to the tactic since the host committee there had signed up 12,000 volunteers by the end of March, the host committee said.
(via The Times)

But New York, which has a long way to go to reach its target, has so far registered only about 1,400 potential volunteers. Marilyn Shaw, director of volunteer services for the host committee, said all volunteers would be vetted by law enforcement before they are signed up. She also said volunteers would be expected to attend many meetings before getting their volunteer shirts.

"I'll be honest with you," she said. "We meet and greet them so many times they become our best friends."

Hey! If it works out can we try it here?

[Kerry's aides] offered reporters a provocative [useless! Who cares if it is provocative? Is it true?] four-page handout [document] headlined [titled], "Key Unanswered Questions: Bush's Record in the National Guard."

Mr. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard from 1968 to 1973, but there is some dispute, [a long-running controversy] about how he got a coveted pilot spot, [why he was grounded for missing a medical exam,] [whether he was present for the entire term of his service,] and about missing attendanceservice records, [including the DD214 that would document the grounds for his discharge]. Mr. Cheney received deferments from the draft because he was a student and an expectant father. [Although Senators McCain and Kerry have authorized the unconditional release of all their service records, Mr. Bush has never done so.]

The Kerry handout, reviving questions that swirled around the White House earlier in the year, asked why Mr. Bush missed a medical exam while enrolled in the National Guard in 1972; why he requested not to be sent overseas for duty; how he got in over other applicants despite low scores; and where various records are.
(via NY Times)

• The missing mandatory report on Bush's grounding


• The missing DD214 discharge (that would give the grounds for his discharge)


• The missing accumulation of total retirement points (that would show when he served)

The pursuit of balance can create imbalance, because sometimes something is true.

perhaps we should email the Howler link to the NY Times's largest investor, T Rowe Price and ask them if a newspaper who lied about this can be trusted to tell the truth about its financials

info@troweprice.com

Put NYT/Wilgoren in the subject line

As a Starr deputy, [Appeals Court nominee Brett] Kavanaugh wrote the report to Congress saying that Mr. Clinton's dalliance with a former intern, Monica S. Lewinsky, provided grounds for impeachment.
(via NY Times)

In a closely watched test of the president's right to operate behind closed doors, the Bush administration urged the Supreme Court on Tuesday to preserve the freedom of the executive branch to solicit private outside advice.

Most of the justices signaled that they were prepared to do just that.
(via LA )

Moreover, neither Congress nor the courts may force the president to turn over information through so-called discovery orders, he said. "We are submitting that the discovery itself violates the Constitution," he said.

Arlen SPECTER: 527,365 (51%)

Pat TOOMEY: 510,724 (49%)
(via here)

The daughter of an Army major general, Hughes was born in Paris, France, and lived in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Florida, Kentucky, Canada, Panama and Texas while growing up.

She graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1977 and went to work as a television reporter in Fort Worth. In 1984, she moved from covering politics to playing the game.

Texas press coordinator for the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1984, she later became executive director of the Texas GOP and joined Bush in the early months of his 1994 campaign for governor. LINK

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH REFUSED TO PROVIDE ANY RESPONSES TO CITIZENS ON ISSUES THROUGH THE NATIONAL POLITICAL AWARENESS TEST BUSH

VICE PRESIDENT RICHARD BRUCE CHENEY REFUSED TO PROVIDE ANY RESPONSES TO CITIZENS ON ISSUES THROUGH THE NATIONAL POLITICAL AWARENESS TEST CHENEY

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH REFUSED TO PROVIDE THIS INFORMATION WHEN ASKED TO DO SO ON 23 SEPARATE OCCASIONS BY:

VICE PRESIDENT RICHARD BRUCE CHENEY REFUSED TO PROVIDE THIS INFORMATION WHEN ASKED TO DO SO ON 23 SEPARATE OCCASSIONS BY:

MSNBC
CBS News
Cox Newspapers
Knight Ridder
National Journal
MTV
New Hampshire Public Broadcasting
Tucson Citizen
St. Paul Pioneer Press
Portsmouth Herald
Nashua Telegraph
Iowa Public Radio
Ames Daily Tribune
Cedar Rapids Gazette
Iowa City Press
The State (SC)
WYY Philadelphia
San Jose Mercury News
Geraldine Ferraro, Former Democratic Congresswoman
Michael Dukakis, Fomer Democratic Congressman
Bill Frenzel, Former Republican Congressman
Jim Leach, Republican Congressman
Richard Kimball, Project Vote Smart President

What is the NPAT?
This candidate has responded in a past election to the National Political Awareness Test. As a continued effort to provide the American public with factual information on candidates running for public office, these archived responses are made available.

Sen. John Kerry will speak at the same college where Vice President Dick Cheney delivered a blistering speech about the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, a senior Kerry adviser told CNN.

Cheney's speech Monday at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri draw a rebuke from the school's president who said he was "surprised and disappointed" by what he described as "Kerry-bashing."

College President Fletcher M. Lamkin invited Kerry to speak and Kerry agreed.
(via CNN)

No one at the White House knew about Democratic memos on judicial nominees being taken from Senate computers by GOP Senate aides, one of President Bush's lawyers told the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday.

"I don't know of anyone who was aware of this matter until we heard about it through the media," said Brett Kavanaugh, who serves as Bush's assistant and staff secretary. He was testifying before the committee at his confirmation hearing to be a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
(via AP)

Mr. Bush spoke for 44 minutes to the editors in off-the-cuff remarks that drew on familiar phrases from his speeches of the last two and a half years…Mr. Bush’s substantive remarks were interrupted only once with applause, when he called for the end of the "death tax," or the estate tax.
(via The Daily Howler)

The White House had requested that no stenographer be present during the closed-door session. ... [T]here will not be an official record.
(via AP)

[MCCLELLAN]: "You should not look at this as an adversarial process. We are all working toward the same objective here."

Gonzales is expected to be at Thursday's session, along with perhaps another member of the counsel's office and other White House officials, McClellan said.

Why the White House insisted on Bush and Cheney appearing together. Bush has declined to explain the decision. Some analysts have suggested the dual appearance is intended to prevent any differing accounts from the president and vice president.

Even after a big White House document dump, many questions remained unanswered about Bush's service, including how he got his posting, whether he fulfilled his obligations and why he missed a key physical.
(via WaPo)

The story keeps changing.

And regardless of what the White House says about George W. Bush and his time in the Texas Air National Guard, journalists tend to accept the explanation. I can't. The president of the United States is lying to hide his behavior while he was a young pilot during the Vietnam War, and he has almost taken away reporters' ability to get the whole story. Unfortunately, the national media have other distractions, and they apparently don't think the Guard story is important enough to warrant additional effort. I think they are wrong.

The president's behavior while under oath to serve in the military is an important matter. By George W. Bush's own admission, there were at least eight months in 1972 when he was not performing assigned Guard duty. What if today's Guard members behaved as irresponsibly as Bush did during his hitch?

[1] The mandatory written report about Bush's grounding is mysteriously not in the released file, nor is any other disciplinary evidence. [2] A document showing a "roll-up," or the accumulation of his total retirement points, is also absent, and so are [3] his actual pay stubs. If the president truly wanted to end the conjecture about his time in the Guard, he would allow an examination of his pay stubs and any IRS [4] W-2 forms from his Guard years. These can be pieced together to determine when he was paid and whether he earned enough to have met his sworn obligations.

when the Bush administration provided White House reporters with the "complete" file in the dead-news zone of a Friday night in early February, there were about 400 pages. Two hundred forty pages, unavailable to us during the presidential campaign, had suddenly been discovered. Nonetheless, the most important documents were still missing. Reporters just didn't know what was absent.

A pilot simply did not walk away from all of that training with two years remaining on his tour of duty without a formal explanation as to what happened and why. This narrative report is the document the public has never seen and the Bush White House is unlikely to ever release. Disciplinary action taken against Bush ought to be a part of his personnel record. No such files have ever been disclosed.

According to two separate sources within the Guard who saw the printout and spoke with me, the microfiche was shipped to the office of Maj. Gen. Danny James, commander of the Air National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Va. James' staff printed out all of the documents on the film and then, according to those same sources, James vetted the material. Subsequent to being scrutinized by James (who commanded the Texas Guard and was promoted to Washington by Bush,) the records were then sent to the White House for further scrutiny prior to release to the news media.

James ordered a cleanup of the Bush Guard files in 1997. Burkett said he was waiting outside James' office when he heard a speakerphone conversation between the commander of the Texas Guard and Joe Allbaugh, Bush's chief of staff in Texas. Recounting the conversation, Burkett said he heard Allbaugh tell James to "clean up the governor's files and remove any embarrassments in case he wants to run for reelection or something higher."

"Karen [Hughes] and Danny [Bartlett] are going to be coming out to take a look at this file," Allbaugh said. "They're going to write a book."

If it had been cleaned up, as Burkett alleged, the only place to find the complete file would be on the microfiche [in the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver and the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis]. This is undoubtedly why the president has not simply ordered the entire file printed out and released without restriction to news media outlets. The paper records, which may explain the grounding and prove the president did not serve sufficient time to meet his legal obligation to the Guard, have likely been removed from the Austin files. But the microfiche has the whole truth, and that's why its dissemination is being controlled.

The documents given to Washington reporters [in the 5:00 horror release] were printed from one of those two microfiches.

The stonewalling on this is still succeeding. Reporters calling the National Guard offices in Arlington and the Pentagon are being told the staff is no longer authorized to speak about the president and his time in the Guard. One national reporter, who is still trying to get to the bottom of the controversy, told me the White House said they were not going to talk about the Guard matter any further.

Since the Badr Corps of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq had control of the shrine of Imam Ali before the Sadrist uprising of early April, and since it still is helping patrol Karbala, my own guess is that Badr has deliberately pulled back in hopes that the Mahdi Army and the Americans will weaken each other. The hope that other Najaf forces will take care of Muqtada al-Sadr for the US seems to me forlorn. The Najafis hate Muqtada and his militiamen, who are not from Najaf on the whole. On the other hand, no Shiite clerical figure can possibly want to see the US drag Muqtada away in chains, since that would inevitably weaken the clerical authorities.
(via Informed Comment)

Twenty percent of the U.S. troops killed in Iraq might have lived had there been more armored, heavier vehicles available to them, Newsweek reports Monday.

The Army is racing to send "up-armored" Humvees to Iraq, but remains almost 1,800 vehicles short for its needs.
(via Military.com)

[HUGHES]: The fundamental difference between us and the terror network we fight is that we value every life. I

Sen. Chrisopher J. Dodd, D-Ct., noted differences that he had with Negroponte when the diplomat was ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s.

"Those differences stem largely from a lack of candor about what the U.S. was and wasn't doing in Central America in the conflict at that time," Dodd said. "And although I intend to support and strongly support this nomination when it comes to a vote in this committee, and later on the Senate floor, I want to make one point especially clear: That same issue - candor - in my view, is going to be critical with respect to continued support for U.S. policies in Iraq."
(via AP)

Okrent pointed out that “the pursuit of balance can create imbalance, because sometimes something is true.”
(via AP)

No matter how shitty the product, [themultilevel marketers] want their true believers to each recruit and be responsible for others down-stream. It's a brilliant concept, and one that better be countered, and quickly by the Democrats, because like my mom, the recruited "down-line" voters won't know that they have a basement full of cheap-ass toilet paper until the bills come due after the election. I think my mom is still paying off the toilet paper. We never discuss it anymore, after she lost all her friends trying to get them to become "distributors".
(via Democratic Veteran)

"America knows full well that our men and women are serving and serving brilliantly both in Iraq and around the world. ... America is aware this is a war against terrorism," Bush spokesman Trent Duffy said. But, he said, "The message is, the sensitivity and privacy of families of the fallen must be the first priority."
(via AP)

The Justice Department on Monday asked the new U.S. attorney in New York to investigate how Republicans got access to Democrats' computer memos in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

A report by the Senate sergeant-at-arms earlier this year faulted two of committee chairman Orrin Hatch's former employees for the intrusion into the Democrats' computer documents. It says 4,670 files were found on a GOP aide's computer, "the majority of which appeared to be from folders belonging to Democratic staff."

and the Justice Department on Monday sent the case to David Kelley, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Kelley, a Democrat, took James Comey's position as U.S. attorney after Comey left to become deputy attorney general, the No. 2 job at the Justice Department.

Kelley is "an experienced prosecutor of the highest integrity and independence," said Assistant Attorney General William Moschella in a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. "We are confident the investigation will be handled in a thorough, fair, impartial and professional manner."

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called the appointment "a very good first step" and said Kelley is "independent" and "without conflicts."

"The only thing missing is for (Attorney General) John Ashcroft to recuse himself to avoid any potential conflict of interests," Schumer said.
(via AP)

Ten companies with billions of dollars in U.S. contracts for Iraq reconstruction have paid more than $300 million in penalties since 2000 to resolve allegations of bid rigging, fraud, delivery of faulty military parts and environmental damage.

The United States is paying more than $780 million to one British firm that was convicted of fraud on three federal construction projects and banned from U.S. government work during 2002, according to an Associated Press review of government documents.

A Virginia company convicted of rigging bids for American-funded projects in Egypt also has been awarded Iraq contracts worth hundreds of millions. And a third firm found guilty of environmental violations and bid rigging won U.S. Army approval for a subcontract to clean up an Iraqi harbor.

Seven other companies with Iraq reconstruction contracts have agreed to pay financial penalties without admitting wrongdoing. Together, the 10 companies have paid to resolve 30 alleged violations in the past four years. Six paid penalties more than once. But the companies have been awarded $7 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts.

The contracts are legal because the Bush administration repealed regulations put in place by the Clinton administration that would have allowed officials to bar new government work for companies convicted or penalized during the previous three years.

The two largest government contractors in Iraq, Bechtel Corp. and Halliburton Co., have paid several penalties in the past three years.

Halliburton paid $2 million in 2002 to settle charges it inflated costs on a maintenance contract at now-closed Fort Ord in California. Vice President Dick Cheney's former company did not admit wrongdoing.

Halliburton took in $3.6 billion last year from contracts to serve U.S. troops and rebuild the oil industry in Iraq. Halliburton executives say the company is getting about $1 billion a month for Iraq work this year.

Federal authorities also are investigating whether Halliburton broke the law by using a subsidiary to do business in Iran, whether the company overcharged for work done for the Pentagon in the Balkans and whether it was involved in an alleged $180 million bribery scheme in Nigeria. The company admitted in 2003 that it improperly paid $2.4 million to a Nigerian tax official.

Bechtel paid more than $110,000 to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department in 2000 and 2001 to settle alleged safety and environmental violations. Bechtel has prime construction contracts in Iraq worth more than $2 billion.
(via AP)

Isn't this ad in direct violation of what 527s can and can't do? I thought that 527s couldn't advocate for the election of any given candidate over another one?

The ad is being put out by MoveOnPac, a registered political action committee, not a 527.

We have the same pattern again -- no different. The president wants to challenge John Kerry's military service. So he gets Karen to do it for him. You can get tripped in the chutzpah of this because this not only throws light on an earlier period when the president couldn't fight his own fights, it repeats the pattern.

But here's some free advice for Kerry.

Don't get mixed up on the details. Take this directly to the president. Tell him to turn over a new leaf in life and stop being a coward. If the president wants to attack or question your war record or what you did after the war, tell him to do it himself. No special deals, no hidden help from family retainers, no hiding behind Karen Hughes. Tell him, for once, to fight his own fights.
(via Talking Points Memo)

As U.S. troops await orders to enter this Islamic holy city, militant Shiite cleric Muqtada Sadr and his militia are strengthening their control here, stockpiling weapons, seizing key religious sites and arresting or detaining those who challenge him.

In the last two weeks, Sadr's followers — many rushing here from Baghdad, Fallouja and other areas of Iraq — have fortified their positions in the city and the neighboring town of Kufa, including at Najaf's gold-domed shrine of Imam Ali, one of the most revered mosques in the world.

Sadr's forces have evicted more than 100 rival Shiite clerics and shrine employees, replacing them with their own armed militiamen, who roam the rooftops and courtyards of the shrine with rifles and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers hung over their shoulders.

Local police officers spoke of their inability to stop the militants, who this month ransacked several police stations, taking guns and vehicles.

"This is all they left us to sit on," said one police officer, sitting on a wobbly, three-legged chair outside the main Najaf police headquarters.

Police officers say they have reached an unspoken agreement with members of the Al Mahdi army, Sadr's militia, to stay out of each other's way.

"We have kept quiet during this crisis," said Fadil Sami, 30, an officer. "With whom are we going to fight? We are all sons of the same society. We don't want any kind of friction with the Al Mahdi army."

"The situation is so bad," said one fabric salesman who also did not want to be identified. "Sadr is following the example of Saddam Hussein. They are two faces of the same coin."
(via LA Times)

Economically, the Iraq war is more like Vietnam: insidiously underestimated, sold to the public and Congress on false premises, improperly budgeted and inadequately taxed. During the Vietnam years, there was also economic growth at first. But then came creeping inflation, followed by worldwide commodity shocks, the oil crisis of 1973, international monetary disorder and a decade of economic troubles.

Could it happen again? Yes, it could.

Did Team Bush think through the economics of a long and costly war? There is no evidence it did. It counted on the war being quick, cheap and self-financing. If it thought about the long-range economics, there seems to have been only one goal: control of oil.

Spain's Philip II believed that control of the gold of Peru and silver of Mexico would guarantee his nation's predominance in Europe. Elizabeth I and Sir Francis Drake disagreed. Louis XIV and Napoleon I trusted in conquest to enrich France. Their ministers — Turgot and Talleyrand — knew better. Winston Churchill vowed not to preside over the end of the British Empire. But his successors gave it up when they couldn't afford it anymore. Luckily, the U.S. was there to take over, and we had the support of the free world. But that was then.

By going into Iraq with few allies, we've assumed the entire economic cost. The home-front damage is small now, but it will build over time. And it will take time and effort to repair. The future American economy will especially need a new energy direction, emphasizing conservation and renewable energy, and concerted investment in the world's next generation of technologies — both to reduce our oil dependence and to help balance our trade deficits.

Let's hope Sen. John F. Kerry makes this point on his manufacturing tour this week.

And let's hope that Americans understand. Real security begins at home.
(via LA Times)

The fundamental problem of Iraq is an absence of Iraqis.

In my view, Iraq is not salvageable as a unitary state. From my experience in the Balkans, I feel strongly that it is impossible to preserve the unity of a democratic state where people in a geographically defined region almost unanimously do not want to be part of that state. I have never met an Iraqi Kurd who preferred membership in Iraq if independence were a realistic possibility.

But the problem of Iraq is that a breakup of the country is not a realistic possibility for the present. Turkey, Iran, and Syria, all of which have substantial Kurdish populations, fear the precedent that would be set if Iraqi Kurdistan became independent. Both Sunni and Shiite Arabs oppose the separation of Kurdistan. The Sunni Arabs do not have the resources to support an independent state of their own. (Iraq's largest oil fields are in the Shiite south or in the disputed territory of Kirkuk.)

The best hope for holding Iraq together—and thereby avoiding civil war—is to let each of its major constituent communities have, to the extent possible, the system each wants. This, too, suggests the only policy that can get American forces out of Iraq.

In the north this means accepting that Kurdistan will continue to govern its own affairs and retain responsibility for its own security.

In the south, Iraq's Shiites want an Islamic state. They are sufficiently confident of public support that they are pushing for early elections. The United States should let them have their elections, and be prepared to accept an Islamic state—but only in the south.

We can hope that if the Sunni Arabs feel more secure about their place in Iraq with respect to the Shiites and the Kurds, they will be relatively more moderate. Autonomy for the Sunni Arab parts of Iraq is a way to provide such security. There is, however, no way to know if it will work.

This model would solve many of the contradictions of modern Iraq. The Shiites could have their Islamic republic, while the Kurds could continue their secular traditions. Alcohol would continue to be a staple of Kurdish picnics while it would be strictly banned in Basra.

The three-state solution would permit the United States to disengage from security duties in most of Iraq. There are today fewer than three hundred coalition troops in Kurdistan, which would, under the proposal being made here, continue to be responsible for its own security.

(via NYRB)

When the war began, only about 2 percent of Army's 110,000 Humvees were armored. Now, of the nearly 15,000 Humvees in Iraq, about 1,500 to 2,000 are armored, according to the Army. The numbers are increasing.

During the war last year, some Humvees were ambushed as swift-moving U.S. troops bypassed pockets of resistance.

But the attacks have mounted as Iraq became what Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. forces, calls "a 360-degree battlefield," with none of safer rear areas of conventional warfare.

"They were not intended to be on the front lines," Dempsey said of the unarmored vehicles. "In a linear battlefield, Humvees always operated behind the front lines - in most cases even out of artillery range. Iraq isn't a linear battlefield. As we find ourselves in a low- to mid-intensity conflict, and we have all these vehicles designed for a linear battlefield, they come up short."
(via AP)

Because of the surging violence, U.S.-financed contractors rebuilding Iraq are spending a quarter of their money to protect workers and insure their projects, according to American officials monitoring the work.
(via AP)

Most workers are doing more in less time and getting paid about the same amount, according to government statistics. Average real income per hour for nonfarm workers, excluding managers and executives, rose 1.2 percent from the first quarter of 2002 to the fourth quarter of last year.

Meanwhile, worker output per hour improved by 7.3 percent.

"Because raises and bonuses have been low for the past few years, the natives are getting restless," said Bill Coleman, senior vice-president of compensation at Salary.com, a Wellesley, Massachusetts-based consultancy.
(via Reuters)

"Soul" is used to translate the Hebrew word nephesh in the Hebrew Bible. Technically, it means "throat" or even trachea. Since human beings breathe through the "throat," it became synecdoche for life itself.

There's not much Greek-style dualism in the Hebrew Bible. You won't find strong distinctions between flesh and spirit or body and mind. There's also very little concern with the survival of a "soul" into eternity. There is an occasional reference to the vague, post-death state of Sheol, but resurrection makes no appearance except in Daniel 12 and perhaps Isaiah 25. (Ezekiel 37 refers to the "resurrection" of a nation, not an individual.) More important is the idea that one "survives" death by having descendants. Otherwise, one seeks a grant of long life and health from God, not a post-death existence that Christians call "eternal life." One has a "soul" in this sense as long as one is alive.

What Lambert seems to be talking about is what might be called a "conscience." The Hebrew sometimes uses lab, the word for "heart," in a way similar to English idiom. God has a "heart" in this sense. David is a man after God's own heart.

But the lab encompasses more than "conscience." It's the seat of emotions, the will and thought. As such, all human beings, created in the "image of God" have a "heart" even if it is corrupt. Again, there is no explicit connection between the lab and post-death existence.

Eternal life and some distinction between the body and "soul" are more common conceptions in the Greek Bible. The famous statement attributed to Jesus about the foolishness of giving up one's "soul" for the world translates the Greek word psyche. The Greek background includes the idea that the psyche separates from the soma, "body," at death and lives on. This "soul" can be "lost" by personal choice, destroyed by God or saved according to the Greek Bible. But psyche can also be used for the Hebrew concept nephesh as in Matthew 10:39.

Related but to be distinguished from the psyche is the pneuma or "spirit." Connected with idea of breath and life in Christian theology, believers have the gift of the "Spirit" that guides, enlightens and encourages them. It is only believers who have the "Spirit" and its fruits according to the Greek Bible. Those who do not believe have a "different spirit."

Finally, there is the Pauline idea of the "mind of Christ"--the nous xristou. Believers have it, according to Paul. This refers to the intellect more than the emotions and is the capacity that believers have to understand spiritual matters.

Does any of this go through Bush's mind when he makes outlandish statements like the one cited by Lambert? I very much doubt it. Dubya picked up some Evangelical jargon in that small group with Don Evans that he throws around carelessly from time to time. But there's precious little theological reflection going on there.

Is the idea that there are human beings without "souls" absurd? Within the context of the Hebrew Bible, it is. Even in the Greek Bible that reflects a more dualist approach to body and soul, I don't find any support for the idea that there are human beings born without "souls." Even though who "lose" their "souls" can be found again and "saved." Only in the eschatological sense are "souls" ever destroyed at the end of time, Last Day, etc.

"We just have to get some people to get more people. We just have to get this pyramid under way.''
(via The Times)"

U.S. troops will likely enter parts of Najaf soon to clamp down on a radical Shiite cleric's rebel militia, but they will stay away from sensitive holy sites in the center of the city to avoid rousing religious outrage, a U.S. general said Sunday.

With the new move, the military seeks to impose a degree of control in Najaf, while hoping a foray limited to the modern parts of the ancient city would not inflame Shiites. Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling did not say when troops would move in, or how many.

"We probably will go into the central part of the city. Will we interfere in the religious institutions? Absolutely not," said Hertling, a deputy commander of the 1st Armored Division.

He did not say when the move would occur, but it appeared unlikely for several days and was aimed at tightening the clampdown on radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his militia.

"It's not going to be large-scale fighting, the likes of other places, but it's going to be critical," he said. "We're going to drive this guy into the dirt."

"Either he tells his militia to put down their arms, form a political party and fight with ideas not guns -- or he's going to find a lot of them killed," he said.
(AP via LA Times)

It's the shape of the aspiration and the extent that it's achieved for which The Times should be held responsible. Readers who expect more will deserve what they get. Ask for the paper of record, and you will end up holding a catalog, a soporific or an apologist. Probably all three, in fact.
(via The World's Greatest Newspaper (not!))

My cellmate [We all feel for well-paid Daniel Okrent!] Arthur Bovino [He's real then, not a bot?], who has at his fingertips data that could make a statistician weep, calculates that in the five months since the office of the public editor opened for business, we've received 589 messages that contain the phrase "paper of record."

"Newspaper of record" did not originate with the editors. ... [T]he meticulous presentation of the acts of officialdom was long one of the ways The Times distinguished itself in an eight-newspaper town. "Long ago," according to Bill Borders, a senior editor who's been with the paper for 43 years, "The Times used to feel an obligation to print lots of things that we knew no one much would read - the new members of the Peruvian cabinet, for example - just to get them on the record. Fortunately those days are over."

[MILLER] y job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal.
back)

The customers are wrong

A spokesman for Boston Archbishop Sean O'Malley says the archbishop "does not hold to the practice of publicly refusing Communion to anyone."
(via AP)

John Shelby Spong
Episcopal Bishop Emeritus of Newark, New Jersey

John Shelby Spong retired as Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, in February 2000. Raised a fundamentalist in North Carolina at a time when the Bible was quoted to justify segregation, Bishop Spong came to believe that insistence on an inerrant, literal view of the Bible obscures truth and destroys faith. His subsequent challenges to the Church's position on human sexuality, the virgin birth, and the physical nature of Christ' resurrection had made him the target of fundamentalist hostility and fear. At the same time, it has offered hope to countless others who yearn to believe in God but reject premodern literalizations masquerading as faith. Spong |Westar Institute

The need for a new theological reformation began when Copernicus and Galileo removed this planet from its previous supposed location at the center of the universe, where human life was thought to bask under the constant attention of a humanly defined parental deity. That revolution in thought produced an angle of vision radically different from the one in which the Bible was written and through which the primary theological tenets of the Christian faith were formed.

[...]

Martin Luther ignited the Reformation of the 16th century by nailing to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517 the 95 Theses that he wished to debate. I will publish this challenge to Christianity in The Voice. I will post my theses on the Internet and send copies with invitations to debate them to the recognized Christian leaders of the world. My theses are far smaller in number than were those of Martin Luther, but they are far more threatening theologically. The issues to which I now call the Christians of the world to debate are these:

1. Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead. So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found.
2.Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3. The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4. The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5. The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6.. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7.. Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8. The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and is therefore not capable of being translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9. There is no external, objective, revealed standard writ in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10. Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11. The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12. All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

So I set these theses today before the Christian world and I stand ready to debate each of them as we prepare to enter the third millennium.

"The vision of the Puritan fathers is not dead, but in our generation has revived and is beginning to spread through our land again," - Steven Wilkins (Pastor, Auburn Avenue Presbyterian Church, Monroe LA) [Intelligence Report, Spring 2004]

'Overthrowing Secularism'
Wilkins and Wilson have together probably done more than any others to construct the theology now animating much of the neo-Confederate movement. But there is more to their ideology than a defense of the South and slavery.

In his voluminous and often tedious writings, Wilson lays out an array of hard-right beliefs, many of them related to family and sexual matters. Overall, he told congregants last year, his goal is "the overthrow of unbelief and secularism."

The world as Wilson sees it is divided not by race but by religion — biblical Christians versus all others. As he says in one of his books, "[I]f neither parent believes in Jesus Christ, then the children are foul — unclean."

"Government schools" are godless propaganda factories teaching secularism, rationalism, and worse. Wilson's congregants are instructed to send their children to private Christian schools (like the one he started) or to home-school them.

Woman "was created to be dependent and responsive to a man," Wilson writes. Feminists seek "to rob women of their beauty in submission." Women should only be allowed to date or "court" with their father's permission — and then, if they are Christian, only with other Christians.

If a woman is raped, the rapist should pay the father a bride price and then, if the father approves, marry his victim.

Homosexuals, Wilson says, are "sodomites," "people with foul sexual habits." But the biblical punishment for homosexuality is not necessarily death, Wilson says in trying to distance himself from Reconstruction. Exile is another possibility.

Cursing one's parents is "deserving of punishment by death," Wilson adds. "Parental failure is not a defense." And Christian parents, by the way, "need not be afraid to lay it on" when spanking, he says.

Indeed, "godly discipline" would include spanking 2-year-old children for such "sins" as whining.

Good Christians, he said, needed to look for "decisive points" in society, places that are both "strategic and feasible" targets to be "taken." New York City, for instance, is strategic but not feasible — too many godless liberals. Other places are feasible but not strategic — unimportant places in the theological wars that Wilson foresees.

"But," Douglas Wilson added in an upbeat note that day, "small towns with major universities (Moscow and Pullman, say) are both."

"Anti-Christian bigots have assumed that they can act with abandon in their efforts to trash the sacred history of Christian America. We're here to say that this anti-Christian bigotry has no place in this great country," - Roberta Combs, Christian Coalition of America [source: Agape Press, Oct. 2003]

Suicide bombers launched three coordinated boat attacks on Iraq's vital southern Basra oil export terminal on Saturday, killing two members of U.S.-led forces.

Officials said there was no damage to the terminal, but Iraq's primary oil outlet -- some 10 km (six miles) offshore -- was closed after the attacks and workers were evacuated. It was not immediately clear how long the closure would last.

Iraq is almost completely dependent on the terminal -- which is in Britain's sector of responsibility in the country -- to export around 1.9 million barrels per day, providing badly needed funding for a country battered by war and violence.
(via Reuters)

The New York Times inadvertently published a photo of Republican Senate candidate Pete Coors above a story about a KKK member who murdered a black sharecropper. The Times published a correction Saturday.

Cinamon Watson, spokeswoman for Coors, said the error was "so outrageous it's kind of funny. It could have been worse. Pete could have been identified as John Kerry."

Coors, head of the Coors brewing empire, is seeking the Republican nomination to fill the seat being vacated by Republican Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who is retiring.
(via AP)

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong---faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to a man in a blind rush until it's too late." --Bene Gesserit proverb

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry still carries a piece of shrapnel in his left thigh from a 1969 Vietnam War wound that led to his second Purple Heart, his doctor said on Friday.
(via Reuters)

In enterprise of martial kind,
When there was any fighting,
He led his regiment from behind
(He found it less exciting).
But when away his regiment ran,
His place was at the fore, O-
That celebrated, Cultivated, Underrated Nobleman,
The Duke of Plaza-Toro!
In the first and foremost flight, ha, ha!
You always found that knight, ha, ha!
That celebrated, Cultivated, Underrated Nobleman,
The Duke of Plaza-Toro!

When, to evade Destruction's hand,
To hide they all proceeded,
No soldier in that gallant band
Hid half as well as he did.
He lay concealed throughout the war,
And so preserved his gore, O!
That unaffected, Undetected, Well connected Warrior,
The Duke of Plaza-Toro!
In every doughty deed, ha, ha!
He always took the lead, ha, ha!
That unaffected, Undetected, Well connected Warrior,
The Duke of Plaza-Toro!

When told that they would all be shot
Unless they left the service,
That hero hesitated not,
So marvellous his nerve is.
He sent his resignation in,
The first of all his corps, O!
That very knowing, Overflowing, Easy-going Paladin,
The Duke of Plaza-Toro!
To men of grosser clay, ha, ha!
He always showed the way, ha, ha!
That very knowing, Overflowing, Easy-going Paladin,
The Duke of Plaza-Toroza-Toro
(Gilbert & Sullivan, The Gondoliers)

Senior officers say the order to attack Najaf will be made "at the very highest levels of the U.S. government," an indication that President Bush may have the final word on whether soldiers here fight, or keep on waiting.
(via AP in Fort Wayne News Sentinel from Juan Cole)

Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson is refusing to make public or give congressional Democrats the Bush administration's estimates of the cost of last year's Medicare legislation.

In a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., a senior HHS official writing on Thompson's behalf said Democrats have no right to review administration estimates that the Medicare overhaul would cost substantially more than what President Bush and Thompson disclosed last year. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the letter Friday.
(via AP)

The photo, full of light, movement, and color, is beautiful. In it, a small group of Iraqi children are skipping, laughing, and running toward the camera on a dusty road near Baghdad. At the center, a boy waves a newspaper high above his head. In the low sun of early evening, the children's long shadows fan out in the direction of the person taking the picture. The photographer, a kid himself not all that long ago, is an American soldier.

(edit)

Back in December, a few months after his 20th birthday, he snapped this photo from the back of his Army vehicle the day Saddam Hussein was captured. He used a small digital camera he'd brought with him on his deployment to Baghdad last spring - tucked it into a pocket of his uniform so it wouldn't get bumped by the machine gun it has also been his job to carry.

The Boston Globe has abandoned its quest for the truth about Bush's grounding and AWOL during his National Guard duty, and now is attacking John Kerry's military record. In an open letter to Globe reporter Michael Kranish, Bob Fertik documents Dan Bartlett's latest lies. We demand complete and truthful answers to the 2 questions posed by Walter Robinson of the Globe back on Feb. 14: why Bush went AWOL for many months in 1972-73, and why Bush was grounded.

"I strongly caution reporters who may be contacted by or are interested in Mr. Ted Sampley and the various organizations he claims to represent, and his opinions on the subject of Senator Kerry, or any subject for that matter, to investigate thoroughly Mr. Sampley's background and history of spreading outrageous slander and other disreputable behavior before inadvertently lending him or his allegations any credibility."

"I am well familiar with Mr. Sampley, and I know him to be one of the most despicable people I have ever had the misfortune to encounter. I consider him a fraud who preys on the hopes of family members of missing servicemen for his own profit. He is dishonorable, an enemy of the truth, and despite his claims, he does not speak for or represent the views of all but a few veterans. The many veterans I know would think it a disgrace to be considered a comrade or supporter of Ted Sampley." [source: statement of John McCain]

On Feb. 28, 1969, Kerry's craft and two other boats came under heavy fire from the riverbanks. Kerry ordered his units to turn into the ambush and sent men ashore to charge the enemy. According to the records, an enemy soldier holding a loaded rocket launcher sprang up within 10 feet of Kerry's boat and fled. Kerry leapt ashore, ran down the man and killed him.

Secretive North Korea, in a rare admission of need, called for international assistance on Friday to deal with the huge explosion at a train station in which at least 150 people died.

The New York-based United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said a "formal request in response to the disaster" was received on Friday afternoon.
(via Reuters)

"I know how she felt about it — she's a mother who has lost a kid," [Will] Taylor, [Tami Silicio's son] said from the Everett home he shares with his mother when she is not working abroad. "I don't know if she meant for things to blow up like it has, though."

The picture hasn't dissuaded Taylor from his plan to join the Marines in September.

"I've been planning to go into the Marines for a long time," he said. "I know she (Silicio) will be proud of me for going in."

Tami Silicio's sister Toni Silicio Prebezac, 52, said Tami sometimes sent e-mails about her experiences working in Kuwait.

"(Tami, 50,) said she would say prayers over the coffins. It was like the airplane was a church," said Prebezac, of Edmonds, as she and her family hurriedly prepared to leave for New York. "It was like she was a mom to these fallen boys."
(via Seattle Times)

"Quite frankly, we don't want the remains of our servicemembers who have made the ultimate sacrifice to be the subject of any kind of attention that is unwarranted or undignified," said John Molino, a deputy undersecretary of defense.
(via Seattle Times)

The campaign manager and fund-raising committee for a California Republican have agreed to pay $84,000 in civil penalties for sending out letters pretending to be Democrats during a 1998 congressional campaign, the Federal Election Commission said.
(via AP)

California should ban the use of 15,000 touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems from the Nov. 2 general election, an advisory panel to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley recommended Thursday.

By an 8-0 vote, the state's Voting Systems and Procedures Panel recommended that Shelley cease the use of the machines, saying that Texas-based Diebold has performed poorly in California and its machines malfunctioned in the state's March 2 primary election, turning away many voters in San Diego County.
(via San Diego Union-Tribune from Atrios)

Marion County, [Indiana] election officials met Thursday to discuss allegations that a voting-equipment company used unapproved software to handle votes in last fall's elections and later tried to cover it up.

Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler said she wouldn't have learned of the error if ES&S's local representative, Wendy Orange, hadn't informed her against the company's instructions.

Sadler said county officials may decide to end their contract with ES&S or pursue other action against the company.

"Clearly the uncertified software is illegal," Sadler said Thursday. "It has ramifications long-term for our contract. It is a violation of their contract and in fact is a violation of Indiana law."
Five Indiana counties discovered in the past week that Election Systems & Software, a company contracted by 41 Indiana counties, installed a newer version of voting software that has not yet been approved by the State Election Commission.
(via San Diego Union-Tribune)

A Web site published dozens of photographs of American war dead arriving at the nation's largest military mortuary, prompting the Pentagon to order an information clampdown Thursday.

The photographs were released last week to First Amendment activist Russ Kick, who had filed a Freedom of Information Act request to receive the images. Air Force officials initially denied the request but decided to release the photos after Kick appealed their decision.

After Kick posted more than 350 photographs on his Web site, the Defense Department barred the further release of the photographs to media outlets.
(via AP)

James Watts's bizarre anti-environment crusade of the 1980s made Republicans sound deranged on these issues. Newt Gingrich's bizarre anti-EPA crusade of the 1990s made Republicans sound unhinged on these issues. (Gingrich also bizarrely crusaded against the Clean Water Act; is there one single voter in America who doesn't want clean water?) Tom DeLay's bizarre anti-EPA statements of the present day make Republicans sound possessed on these issues. Bush's 2001 statements dismissing global warming as a concern made him sound callous and poorly informed. Republicans are supposed to be political pros, yet they consistently do a terrible job on environmental communication, almost begging to be denounced by the media and misunderstood by voters.

So happy Earth Day. Except for greenhouse gases, today the environment in the Western nations is in the best condition it's been in since the industrial era began. (The environment of the developing world is a different story.) The Earth is doing just fine. The debate about the Earth, on the other hand, exhibits degradation, depletion, and endangerment.

Alaskans by and large can't abide that they coexist with wild nature more than any other modern Americans, then are lectured by wealthy enviros who live in doorman buildings on the Upper East Side.

The Counter Convention organisers do not tolerate incitements to violence on the site. They are more interested in providing information on coming events and on how to print stickers.

In January, they had a brush with authority that indicates how important the politics of cyberspace have become.

"The secret service rang us up, but we refused to talk to them, except through lawyers, and nothing seems to have come of any investigation," says Etundi.

A day earlier, an unknown blogger had put a posting on their discussion board mentioning the idea of bringing a firearm along to the protest.

The item, along with subsequent posts, such as a "picture of poop", was taken off, but Etundi is convinced that it was the result of a rightwing conspiracy, as an inflammatory article appeared within hours on a Republican-supporting news website.

They now moderate every single post before publication. Emails attacking the site are still sent on a daily basis, he says.

The team has pulled off one significant victory: "Republican convention", or any other close variation, into the Google search box, and they are top of the results list.

It is an uncommon day when the nation's second-largest provider of voting systems concedes that its flagship products in California have significant security flaws and that [Diebold]supplied hundreds of poorly designed electronic-voting devices that disenfranchised voters in the March presidential primary.

Diebold Election Services Inc. president Bob Urosevich admitted this and more, and apologized "for any embarrassment."

"We were caught. We apologize for that," Urosevich said of the mass failures of devices needed to call up digital ballots. Poll-workers in Alameda and San Diego counties hadn't been trained on ways around their failure, and San Diego County chose not to supply polls with backup paper ballots, crippling the largest rollout of e-voting in the nation on March 2. Unknown thousands of voters were turned away at the polls.

"We're sorry for the inconvenience of the voters," Urosevich said.

"Weren't they actually disenfranchised?" asked Tony Miller, chief counsel to the state's elections division.

After a moment, Urosevich agreed: "Yes, sir."

Currently, electronic machines offer no independent vote record to recount, rendering recounts useless.

Weeks after Diebold Election Systems Inc. vowed a "new day" of operating excellence in California, the nation's second largest voting systems firm asked state approval for 10 mostly untested changes to its voting software.

Its latest requests were less than a month before the Super Tuesday presidential primary, prompting state officials to demand a backup voting plan for four counties where Diebold had installed its untested, unapproved TSx voting system, which sold for $40 million the previous summer.

Undersecretary of State Mark Kyle blasted Diebold Elections president Bob Urosevich over Diebold's two-page proposal for more than a million hand-counted paper ballots.

"It is apparent from your responses that no such backup plan has been created and that you continue to 'fly by the seat of your pants,'" Kyle wrote on Feb. 8. "In view of the chaos your company has caused, we expected that your company would 'step up to the plate' with an aggressive backup plan. Your failure to do so raises grave questions about your suitability as a voting systems vendor."

Diebold was not the only vendor to seek last-minute changes to its software. Every vendor selling e-voting systems in the state asked for changes in the two months before the March primary.
(via Tri-Valley Herald

A cargo worker whose photograph of flag-draped coffins bearing the remains of U.S. soldiers was published on a newspaper's front page was fired by the military contractor that employed her.

Tami Silicio, 50, was fired Wednesday by Maytag Aircraft Corp. after military officials raised "very specific concerns" related to the photograph, said William L. Silva, Maytag president. The photo was taken in Kuwait.
(via AP)

Sierra Club leaders have beaten back an effort by anti-immigration forces to gain control of the nation's largest and most influential environmental group.

In elections for the Sierra Club's 15-member board of directors, candidates picked by the leadership won all five open seats in a landslide, according to vote tallies released Wednesday, several hours after voting closed. The bitterly contested election had been conducted by mail and online since March 1.

"It's a stunning rejection of the anti-immigration forces," said Adam Werbach, the club's president from 1996 to 1998. "I think people realized that there's no role for racism or anti-immigrant feelings in the environmental movement."
(via AP)

President Bush on Wednesday rejected international condemnation of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and said world leaders owed him a "thank you" for his plans for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
(via AP)

The House voted unanimously Wednesday to let financially pinched National Guard and Reserve troops tap into retirement savings without penalty, although some Democrats called the effort to support the troops "pathetic" and "rather pitiful."
(via AP)

"I mean all the difference in the world, there were smartly uniformed, well organized policemen directing traffic," he said. "At dinner there were eight different kinds of lamb and five different kinds of scotch."
(via The Standard-Journal)

A powerful explosion hit the southern part of the Iraqi holy city of Najaf near the camp of El Salvador troops, according to reports.

No casualties or damages have been reported so far, ITAR-TASS says.

The news broke as the two-day truce in Naja declared by the rebel Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr on Sunday.
(via Sofia News Agency)

On Capitol Hill, two leading lawmakers urged the Bush administration to present Congress with projected price tag of Iraq operations next year, a politically delicate step the White House has said it does not intend to take in an election year.

"They haven't asked for one single penny for next year for Afghanistan and Iraq," said Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. "Give me a break. Give me a break!"

Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said he smelled election-year politics.

"The administration would be well served here to come forward now, be honest about this, because the continuity and the confidence in this policy is going to be required to sustain it," Hagel said. "And that means be honest with the Congress, be honest with the American people.

"Every ground squirrel in this country knows that it's going to be $50 billion to $75 billion in additional money required to sustain us in Iraq for this year."
(via AP)

Poland's outgoing prime minister said Wednesday that Spain's withdrawal of troops from Iraq could not be ignored, a first hint that Poland may be having doubts about its mission there.

"We cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that Spain and others are leaving Iraq," Prime Minister Leszek Miller told the Polish news agency PAP.

"We will not make any rash gestures," he said. "The final decision about the pullout will be agreed and thought over, but the problem exists."
(via AP)

- Ukraine, a leading contributor of troops in Iraq, said it wants members of the U.S.-led coalition to have more influence in decisions on nonmilitary issues.
(via AP)

The Pentagon deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq.

At issue was a passage in Woodward's "Plan of Attack," an account published this week of Bush's decision making about the war, quoting Rumsfeld as telling Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, in January 2003 that he could "take that to the bank" that the invasion would happen.

The comment came in a key moment in the run-up to the war, when Rumsfeld and other officials were briefing Bandar on a military plan to attack and invade Iraq, and pointing to a top-secret map that showed how the war plan would unfold. The book reports that the meeting with Bandar was held on Jan. 11, 2003, in Vice President Cheney's West Wing office. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also attended.

Pentagon officials omitted the discussion of the meeting from a transcript of the Woodward interview that they posted on the Defense Department's Web site Monday. Rumsfeld told reporters at a briefing yesterday that he may have used the phrase "take that to the bank" but that no final decision had been made to go to war.
(via WaPo)

BASRA, Iraq (AP) - Wednesday's explosions tore into three police stations in Basra and the academy in the suburb of Zubair nearly simultanously after 7 a.m., as many residents were headed to markets, jobs or school. An hour later, another blast targeted the same police academy.

Forty-five people were killed [among them, children] in the station blasts and 10 were killed in the police academy explosions, officials and witnesses said. At least 238 people were wounded.

Meanwhile, an agreement aimed at bringing peace to Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, met troubles only a day after its implementation began. A heavy battle broke out Wednesday morning on the city's north side, where up to 40 insurgents attacked Marine positions, commanders said. Nine insurgents were killed, and three Marines were wounded, a spokesman said.

As of noon, no guerrillas had turned in any heavy weapons, the most crucial tenet of the agreement in U.S. eyes, said Marine Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne. The U.S. military has warned it may resume its assault on Fallujah if the agreement falls through.
(via AP)

I was up the other night painting signs that said "Impeach" to put on the freeways, as is my patriotic duty, when I noticed two of them fallen together to make the word "Chimpeach". After laughing a bit, I wondered if I was the first to come up with it, and if it's promotion would ultimately help or hinder the fight against the Unelected One. Then I thought what the hell, painted it in three foot tall letters and stuck it over the Santa Monica Freeway. You can see it here:

I think we can do better than that. (only two websites) Bumperstickermakers: Go Wild.

Looking Forward to Sweet Victory in November,

An Israeli doctor says "Medicine in my country is so advanced that we can take a kidney out of one man, put it in another, and have him looking for work in six weeks."

A German doctor says "That is nothing, we can take a lung out of one person, put it in another, and have him looking for work in four weeks."

A Russian doctor says "In my country, medicine is so advanced that we can take half a heart out of one person, put it in another, and have them both looking for work in two weeks."

The Texas doctor, not to be outdone, says "You guys are way behind, we recently took a man with no brain out of Texas, put him in the White House, and now half the country is looking for work."

Some object to the Bible because it recounts how that women and innocent children were slaughtered in the wars led by God's chosen leaders, and how can God be a just and loving God and permit such as that? The answer is that the wicked people destroyed in those wars received just punishment for their crimes and the innocent ones who died in the wars were taken home to Heaven and certainly it could be no cruel thing to take a good person or an innocent child to Heaven. It is a certainty that we must all die sometime anyway, and what is wrong in God, Who gave us life, allowing us to die in a conflict such as the cruel wars mentioned in the Bible? ~ Rev. Ben M. Bogard / editor of the Baptist and Commoner, Antioch Baptist Church, Little Rock, Arkansas, circa 1930.

If the worst comes to the worst, we had better let our children suffer from disease and even die from neglect than to instill into their impressionable hearts the idea that the Bible is false.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven… The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste." ~ Mark Twain, The Lowest Animal essay, 1897

[BUSH] We must continue to stay on the offense when it comes to chasing these killers down and bringing them to justice -- and we will. We've got to be strong and resolute and determined. We will never show weakness in the face of these people who have no soul, who have no conscience, who care less about the life of a man or a woman or a child. We've got to do everything we can here at home. And there's no doubt in my mind that, with the Almighty's blessings and hard work, that we will succeed in our mission. [end quote]

"If you don't have the aspirations of the people firmly embedded in your soul, it's hard to take a gamble for peace," Bush said.
(via Reuters)

A judge told Multnomah County to stop issuing gay marriage licenses Tuesday, but he handed gay couples a historic victory by ordering Oregon to recognize the 3,000 licenses already granted in the county.

[Multnomah County Circuit Judge Frank Bearden] told the county to cease issuing same-sex licenses until the Oregon Legislature has a chance to fashion a new law, perhaps allowing Vermont-style civil unions.

He gave the Oregon Legislature 90 days from the start of its next session to come up with the new law. If that doesn't happen, Multnomah County can resume issuing marriage licenses to gays and lesbians.
(via AP)

Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., said in an interview Tuesday that he might support a GOP-written $2.4 trillion budget for next year containing compromise restrictions on future tax cuts. His vote, should he provide it, could be decisive because some moderate Republicans in the narrowly divided Senate are expected to oppose the plan.
(via AP)

OLBERMANN: If you go, by the way, to COUNTDOWN.MSNBC.com, you can read excerpts of Bob Woodward‘s book, “Plan of Attack.”

And this programming note: Chris Matthews, special guest Wednesday night on “HARDBALL”: Bob Woodward. Be there, aloha.

And one more thing before we leave the No. 5 story: Politics and presidents. It‘s all been Mr. Bush so far tonight, to be fair, something about Senator Kerry. If you missed him on “Meet the Press” yesterday, we have boiled down his 60 minutes with Tim Russert to the most important 45 seconds. Well the most important 45 seconds based on the news judgment of a show that‘s obsessed with numbers, like ours.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TIM RUSSERT, “MEET THE PRESS”: Senator Kerry, welcome.

SEN. JOHN KERRY, PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Glad to be here. Thank you, Tim.

First of all, No. 1...No. 2...No. 1...No. 2, then No. 3, we need a president who understands No. 4. Guess what, Tim? Eight million...ten million.

Guess what, Tim? Eleven million.

RUSSERT: Senator...

KERRY: Let me just finish...think of the year 2000...2004...the year 2020...2029...I think we can do better...2037.

Let me be very clear to you. You and I earn a lot of money.

$6 trillion in the last six-five-four years, that‘s what you said, but that said, No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4...and here‘s the bottom line: No. 1.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: And that‘s 30 for today. Thus the fifth story, Woodward and Bush, Kerry and the COUNTDOWN‘s completed. Yes, we will show that again later in the show.

Q: Please tell me whether the following statement applies to George W. Bush or not: He is honest and trustworthy.
Yes: 55%
No: 44%
Don't Know: 1%

Q:Please tell me whether the following statement applies to George W. Bush or not: He's always truthful in explaining his policies.

Yes: 46%
No: 53%
Don't Know: 2%

BLITZER: How the Clinton the Bush White House handled warnings of al Qaeda activity prior to the 9/11 attacks. How President Bush is doing on the job. These are questions all asked in a brand new CNN/"USA TODAY"/Gallup poll. Here to look at the numbers as he always does, our senior political analyst, Bill Schneider. Take a look at the first number. A head to head match-up between the president and John Kerry look at this, Bush 51 percent, John Kerry 46 percent.

WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: That's remarkable given the fact the last few weeks have been bad weeks for the president. There's been losses in Iraq, 9/11 Commission revelations, gasoline prices, what many regarded as an unconvincing performance in the president's prime time press conference. What Americans seem to be doing is rallying to the president in the time of international crisis. His ratings went up. That lead is a little higher than it was couple of weeks ago, because Americans instinctively support the president. You mention troops in Iraq, support for sending more troops in Iraq has actually gone up.

BLITZER: Clearly this is the first major poll done since his nationally televised news conference. Who is doing a better job, who would do a better job as far as handling Iraq is concerned. Bush 55 percent, Kerry 41 percent. What do you make of this? SCHNEIDER: Despite the losses, what Americans think two words, bush in Iraq, they remember something the United States won. They went in with overwhelming force, they got rid of Saddam Hussein regime and Saddam Hussein is now in captivity. So, the view is if you want someone that can handling a situation like that, a man of strength and decisiveness and resolve, Bush is your man.

BLITZER: Now as far as handling terrorism, similar result, even better for the president. Would do a good job handling terrorism, yes, Bush 64 percent, 43 percent for Kerry. That's more than a 20 point slip.

SCHNEIDER: It's a huge advantage for Bush, and this is the issue he wants to run on. He said this election will be on the following question, which one of us can better win the war on terror?

He said that because it's his strong suit.

BLITZER: All right, there's a weak suit he has as well. That's the economy. Look at this. Would do a good job handling the economy, 49 percent say the president, a 55 percent give a better mark to John Kerry.

SCHNEIDER: This is his weak issue. The Democrats would like to make a referendum on the economy. They are hoping it would be like '92 was for father. Remember the economy (UNINTELLIGIBLE), the referendum no the economy. But there's a difference, the difference is 9/11. And for the reasons we just saw, the president's determined not to let this simply be a referendum on the economy, and the figures show why.

DOBBS: Well, last week, we were able to talk here about how well or not so well the president did in his press conference. We now have that opportunity to discuss Senator Kerry on "Meet the Press." Is "Meet the Press" a forum that is losing its -- well, its attractiveness for candidates? How do you think Senator Kerry did, Roger?

SIMON: I think he had mixed results. I think "Meet the Press" continues to be one of those rites of passage that candidates have to -- candidates and incumbent presidents have to appear on if they want to be elected or reelected.

I thought Kerry did fine when he was attacking George Bush. He's got that down. I think he did less than fine when he was defending his own record. I thought that the clip that Tim Russert showed of Kerry in 1971 talking about how he had committed, sort of, atrocities in Vietnam led to a very poor response by Kerry. He joked about, you know, how he had dark hair back then. And it was also a missed opportunity, as Karen said on the...

DOBBS: I'm sorry to interrupt you, Roger, we got about 15 seconds. Karen.

TUMULTY: Well, I just think he's got to come up with a better explanation on that $87 billion vote that -- the amendment that he voted against.

BROWNSTEIN: Lou, the appearance may have been most valuable as a reminder for the people that John Kerry is running for president, because it's been awful hard to tell that the last few weeks.

DOBBS: OK. Ron, Karen, Roger, thank you very much for being here.

So the thing we should take from these polls isn't a climb for Bush or a drop from Kerry, it's a hardened electorate registering no change. Gallup and Zogby are clearly using sampling/weighting methods leading them to different numbers, one favoring Bush and one favoring Kerry, and since both are respected firms with reasonable track records the only thing to do is look at the trend lines. Of which there aren't any. Which that Bush's press conference did him absolutely no good and the edlectorate is exactly as divided as before it. Shock! Awe! Peculiar!

i believe [there were] something like 30 sales in the city total.

i really think the value of the sales was in having people on the streets talking to their neighbors, passersby, the curious, kids, grandmas, everyone. i really think move on should do this every month from now until november. so should kerry.

Dateline Colorado Springs - From deep in the heart of enemy territory (1 elected Dem in the whole county) we had a great turnout. Plenty of goods, supporters, and money raised. Lots of thumbs up and honks of support. The most heartening, and heartbreaking, thing was the military support: 2 MP's just back from Iraq pledged to continue to support Kerry and helped staff the sale; 1 soldier just back with his wife and 3 young kids - the wife was beside herself with nerves. They hung around the event all day; And one more soldier who is waiting to ship out, and knows it's a "clusterfuck of major proportions."
(his quote)

And this is something the polls can't pick up: the determination of all of us to make a difference, the large number of military and conservatives who are slowly changing their minds, and the weakness of support for Bush. We had 1 person come to our booth claiming to be Republican, and criticizing our effort. HA, I LAUGH IN THEIR FACES!

But according to a closely held Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) memo written in early March, the reality isn't so rosy. Iraq's chances of seeing democracy succeed, according to the memo's author -- a U.S. government official detailed to the CPA, who wrote this summation of observations he'd made in the field for a senior CPA director -- have been severely imperiled by a year's worth of serious errors on the part of the Pentagon and the CPA, the U.S.-led multinational agency administering Iraq. Far from facilitating democracy and security, the memo's author fears, U.S. efforts have created an environment rife with corruption and sectarianism likely to result in civil war.

Signs of the author's continuing support for the U.S. invasion and occupation are all over the memo, which was written to a superior in Baghdad and circulated among other CPA officials.

Yet the memo is gloomy in most other respects, portraying a country mired in dysfunction and corruption, overseen by a CPA that "handle(s) an issue like 6-year-olds play soccer: Someone kicks the ball and 100 people chase after it hoping to be noticed, without a care as to what happens on the field."

In the broadest sense, according to the memo's author, the CPA's bunker-in-Baghdad mentality has contributed to the potential for civil war all over the country. "[CPA Administrator L. Paul] Bremer has encouraged re-centralization in Iraq because it is easier to control a Governing Council less than a kilometer away from the Palace, rather than 18 different provincial councils who would otherwise have budgetary authority," he says. The net effect, the memo's author continues, has been a "desperation to dominate Baghdad, and an absolutism born of regional isolation."

The memo also describes the CPA as "handicapped by [its] security bubble," and derides the U.S. government for spending "millions importing sport utility vehicles which are used exclusively to drive the kilometer and a half" between CPA and Governing Council headquarters when "we would have been much better off with a small fleet of used cars and a bicycle for every Green Zone resident."

The memo also notes that while Iraqi police "remain too fearful to enforce regulations," they are making a pretty penny as small-arms dealers, with the CPA as an unwitting partner. "CPA is ironically driving the weapons market," it reveals. "Iraqi police sell their U.S.-supplied weapons on the black market; they are promptly re-supplied. Interior ministry weapons buy-backs keep the price of arms high."

According to a Washington, DC-based senior military official whose responsibilities include Iraq, CPA now estimates there are at least 30 separate militias active in Iraq,, and "essentially [CPA] doesn't know what to do with regard to them -- which is frightening, because CPA's authority essentially ends on June 30, and any Iraqi incentive to get rid of the militias is likely to go away after that date, as sending U.S. troops around Iraq against Iraqis isn't likely to endear the new Iraqi government to its citizens."

"Baghdadis have an uneasy sense that they are heading towards civil war," it says. "Sunnis, Shias and Kurd professionals say that they themselves, friends and associates are buying weapons fearing for the future."

The memo goes on to argue that "the trigger for a civil war" is not likely to be an isolated incident of violence, but the result of "deeper conflicts that revolve around patronage and absolutism" reaching a flashpoint.

Attorneys for Diebold Election Systems Inc. warned in late November that its use of uncertified vote-counting software in Alameda County violated California election law and broke its $12.7 million contract with Alameda County.

Soon after, a review of internal legal memos obtained by ANG Newspapers shows, Diebold's attorneys at the Los Angeles office of Jones Day realized the McKinney, Texas-based firm also faced a threat of criminal charges and exile from California elections.

Yet despite warnings from the state's chief elections officer, Diebold continued fielding poorly tested, faulty software and hardware in at least two of California's largest urban counties during the Super Tuesday primary, when e-voting temporarily broke down and voters were turned away at the polls.

Other documentation obtained by ANG shows that the latest approved versions of Diebold's vote-counting software in this state cast doubt on the firm's claims elsewhere that it has fixed multiple security vulnerabilities unearthed in the last year.
(via Tri Valley Herald from The Agonist)

The chief executive of Ohio-based Diebold Inc., one of the largest voting machine manufacturers and a top target of security critics, is a top fund-raiser for the Bush campaign. In an August fund-raising letter, Walden O'Dell sought $10,000 donations and declared he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
(via Miami Herald)

Tension has eased in two Iraqi flashpoint cities after a truce held in the Sunni bastion of Falluja and U.S. forces prepared to pull back from a base near Najaf, where a rebel Shi'ite cleric [Sadr] is holed up.

"I am confident that the guerrillas will turn in their heavy weapons as long as the Americans provide the guarantees they promised," said Fawzi Muthin, a 47-year-old engineer who was a member of Falluja's delegation in the talks.

"I just hope we learn from the experience. The Americans have failed in Iraq over the last year. They have to treat us with respect as humans and deliver on the promises they made."
(via Reuters)

U.S. forces also gave Iraqi mediators more time to resolve a standoff with Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mehdi Army militia in the holy city of Najaf, south of the capital.

General Ricardo Sanchez, commanding U.S. forces in Iraq, told soldiers of a 2,500-strong 3rd Brigade Task Force that he was pulling them back to avoid bloodshed in Najaf or damage to shrines sacred to Shi'ites in Iraq and beyond.

Sanchez said there were "a whole bunch of initiatives" to resolve the crisis, but made clear Sadr was still a target. "Wherever we find him on the battlefield we kill him within the constraints that we have applied," he said.

ACT I SCENE III
MACBETH: Why do you dress me in borrow'd robes? [Florida]

ACT V, SCENE II
ANGUS: Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love: now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief. [Florida]

ACT V, SCENE IV
MACBETH: By the worst means, the worst. For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er: ["stay the course"]
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.

In an unusual move for the organization, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN) will release what it promises will be a bombshell article related to the Iraq conflict at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday. It will be made available free of charge for publication on all AAN-member Web sites, as well as for print, and more than 60 members papers have expressed interest in using it, according to Executive Director Richard Karpel.

The 3,000-word story, embargoed until Tuesday but obtained by E&P today, is based on a "closely held" memo purportedly written by a U.S. government official detailed to the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). It was provided to writer Jason Vest by "a Western intelligence official." The memo offers a candid assessment of Iraq's bleak future -- as a country trapped in corruption and dysfunction -- and portrays a CPA cut off from the Iraqi people after a "year's worth of serious errors."

The article is titled, "Fables of Reconstruction," with a subhed, "A Coalition memo reveals that even true believers see the seeds of civil war in the occupation of Iraq."

Karpel commented, "We have no question that the memo is authentic."
(via Editor and Publisher)

The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedients, and by parts.
(via EDMUND BURKE, letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, April 3, 1777)

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites,—in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity,—in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption,—in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.
(via EDMUND BURKE, “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” 1791)

Fraud and prevarication are servile vices. They sometimes grow out of the necessities, always out of the habits, of slavish and degenerate spirits…. It is an erect countenance, it is a firm adherence to principle, it is a power of resisting false shame and frivolous fear, that assert our good faith and honor, and assure to us the confidence of mankind.
(via EDMUND BURKE, “Letters on a Regicide Peace,” letter 3, 1796–1797)

"Silly statement," Kean growled at a news conference the other day. "He should stay out of our business."

Whoa! Tom Kean said that?

About F. James Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee?

Kean -- who, in decades of public life, almost has never shown irritation -- put down Sensenbrenner because the Wisconsin Republican called for the resignation of Jamie Gorelick, a member of the 9/11 commission that Kean heads.

So now President Bush has stepped in and thrown the whole frozen Middle East chessboard up in the air. I don't like his style, but it's done. The status quo was no better.
(via NYT)

A new company said on Monday it can certify that the basic code in the Linux operating software is free of copyright infringement and it will offer standard product liability insurance to developers and users.

"After a rigorous six-month process of examining the individual software files in the Linux kernel and tracing their origins, OSRM [ Open Source Risk Management] found no copyright infringement in kernel versions 2.4 and 2.6," [lawyer and venture capitalist Daniel] Egger, OSRM's chairman, said in an interview. He was referring to the two most commonly used versions of the Linux operating system.

The government has insisted McVeigh drove the truck himself and that it never had any video of the bombing or the scene of the Alfred P. Murrah building in the minutes before the April 19, 1995, explosion.
(via AP)

Several investigators and prosecutors who worked the case told The Associated Press they had never seen video footage like that described in the Secret Service log.

The document, if accurate, is either significant evidence kept secret for nine years or a misconstrued recounting of investigative leads that were often passed by word of mouth during the hectic early days of the case, they said.

"I did not see it," said Danny Defenbaugh, the retired FBI agent who ran the Oklahoma City probe. "If it shows what it says, then it would be significant."

The parties agreed that Coalition Forces do not intend to resume offensive operations if all persons inside the city turn in their heavy weapons. Individual violators will be dealt with on an individual basis.

The parties reaffirmed the absolute need to restore law and order in the city as quickly as possible, to rebuild the judicial system, and to initiate thorough Iraqi investigations into criminal acts committed in the city in this period of instability, which includes the killing and mutilation of the four American contractors and the attack on the Iraqi Police Station in February.
(via AP)

PETER CAVE: I spoke to Ahmed Chalabi from the Governing Council over the weekend and he said that the security arrangements the Americans had made had collapsed. That they'd basically wasted their time for a year and they had to completely rethink, and his point of view, and it was a view I think shared in some ways by the General, was that they've really got to do something about training Iraqi troops to take over because the troops they've trained so far have been a bit of a failure. They've deserted their post, they've joined the enemy, they're under-trained, they're under-equipped and have no morale.

MARK COLVIN: Yeah, that was interesting though coming from Ahmed Chalabi, wasn't it? Because so much reporting of what the US has done there has suggested that Ahmed Chalabi has really been in the ear of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, all those people all the way through. So, to what extent was he just now shifting his own ground, and pretending that it was nothing to do with him?

PETER CAVE: Well perhaps it's slightly cynical, but he's going to be out of a job in a couple of months, when the Interim Governing Council is disbanded in favour of the government to be set up by the United Nations to take them through to elections in January. So I think Mr Chalabi who has been seen right along by a lot of Iraqis as being a little bit too close to the Americans, has been working fairly hard, certainly over the last week or so, to distance himself from them.

"Last night ... it was reported that in the Oval Office discussion around whether to invade Iraq that the president, the vice president (Dick Cheney), the secretary of defense (Donald Rumsfeld) made a deal with Saudi Arabia that would deliver lower gas prices," Kerry told a town hall meeting in Lake Worth.

"But here's the catch," he said. "The American people would have to wait until the election, until November of 2004."
(via Reuters)

Journalist Bob Woodward, author of a new book titled, "Plan of Attack," also said in a CBS' "60 Minutes" interview that Bush gave national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Cheney and Rumsfeld permission to tell Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan of his decision to go to war in Iraq before informing Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"Now, if this sounds wrong to you, that's because it is fundamentally wrong and if what Bob Woodward reports is true -- that gas supplies and prices in America are tied to the American election, then tied to a secret White House deal -- that is outrageous and unacceptable," Kerry said.

I rarely do any volunteering. I made an exception this year and participated in the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program. This amounted to a day and a half of training, and four weekend afternoons of actually preparing taxes for low-income people.

The all-day training was at Georgetown University Law Center. It was a seminar with about 200 attendees. In the afternoon, we were given a sample tax return to prepare. The audience consisted of grad students in law, accounting, retired people, and an assortment of professional types. Not one person did the problem correctly. Not. One.

It happens that the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is a benefit for families with children. Since the EITC is refundable and it's for poor people (those who work, by the way), it raises conservative hackles. So Congress tasks the IRS and GAO to do special studies and scrutiny on EITC people and lo and behold, they have a high "non-compliance" rate. Compared to what, you might ask? Compared to nothing, since comparable data on other tax provisions (offshore accounts, fer instance) are either non-existent or not elevated to the same plain (plane? I said I was busy.) of attention. There is no parallel bureaucratic enforcement and punishment juggarnaut bearing down on people who screw up their claims for exemptions or the Child Tax Credit.

President Bush on Monday will tap John Negroponte, the American ambassador to the United Nations, as his ambassador to Iraq, a Bush administration official said.
(via Reuters)

Jamie Gorelick, a member of the commission investigating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, said Saturday that she received death threats this week after a number of conservatives alleged that her former work in the Justice Department may have contributed to failures leading to the attacks.
(via CNN)

Dan Senor, chief spokesman of the [RNC/CPA], told a news conference that negotiators agreed after three days of talks to work towards a real and lasting ceasefire in Falluja.
(via Reuters)

However, it is not clear how much influence Falluja officials have on the estimated 1,000-2,000 fighters in the city who have battled on despite U.S. Marines being ordered to halt offensive operations 10 days ago.
U.S. officials and civic leaders of Falluja have agreed a plan to bring peace back to the bloodied Iraqi city after two weeks of heavy fighting in which hundreds of Iraqis have died.

And, on a relatively peaceful day on Monday, the commander of 2,500 U.S. troops outside Najaf said he would allow time for talks before any attempt to enter the holy city to seize a rebel cleric -- which could spark a wider and bloodier uprising.

But, with the American military wary of enraging Iraqis by sending troops into one of the most sacred cities in Shi'ite Islam, the U.S. commander said no assault was imminent.

"Because of where negotiations are right now, we can wait," Colonel Dana Pittard said. "We still want Iraqis to solve the problem."

The U.S. army has said it wants to kill or capture Sadr, who is holed up in Najaf, and destroy his militia.

A senior coalition official said it was unclear how far negotiations by various Iraqi intermediaries had progressed.

"It's difficult to get a sense of what's real and what isn't," he said.
The Shi'ite cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr, called for a halt to attacks on Spain's 1,400 troops near Najaf after the new government in Madrid said it was pulling out of the U.S.-led occupying coalition.

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
(via Laura Miller inSalon)

Closer to home, using Paxton's definition, is George W. Bush a fascist? Nah. America in the early 2000s doesn't resemble Germany in the 1930s much at all, really. But that doesn't mean this administration's encroachments on civil liberties, cheap appeals to patriotism in launching an ill-conceived and ineptly executed war in Iraq, or efforts to conduct government business in excessive secrecy aren't extremely disturbing. The comparisons of Bush to Hitler don't shed much light on his policies, but they do show just how much fury he's provoked. Usually, when Americans call a politician they don't like a "fascist" it's not because we know he's got an extra-governmental squad of jackbooted thugs ready to sic on his enemies. It's because it's the worst thing we can think of to call anyone. But you can be a bad leader who does bad things without deserving comparisons to the Nazis and ominous references to the "thin end of the wedge." We've all heard the poem by the German who didn't speak out when they came to get this group and that, but let's face it, it's just not effective political vigilance to cry "Hitler" at every provocation. Because most of the time it's not Hitler, and should the day finally come when it is, we want to make sure people are still listening.

"Addressing Israel's assassination on Saturday of Abdel Aziz Rantisi, the Hamas Islamic militant leader, Ms. Rice said the United States had not approved the attack in advance or known it was going to happen."
via AP

"The President doesn't discuss with the Prime Minister Israeli operations."

[Brigadier General Nick] Carter, of the 20 Armoured Brigade, who has been in Iraq for four months, said British forces would stay in Basra with the consent of local Shia leaders, or not at all.

Last month, 14 British soldiers were injured in Basra, at least three seriously, when they came under attack from demonstrators armed with petrol bombs, rocks and a grenade.

"A crowd of 150,000 people at the gates of this barracks would be the end of this, as far as I'm concerned," Brig Carter said. "There would be absolutely nothing I could do about that."
(via Independent)

During an interview in Basra last week Brig Carter acknowledged that the Coalition's presence in southern Iraq was entirely dependent on the goodwill of the local Shia Muslim leader, Sayid Ali al-Safi al-Musawi. He represents Ayatollah Sistani, Iraq's leading Shia cleric. "The moment that Sayid Ali says, 'We don't want the Coalition here', we might as well go home," Brig Carter said.

"Outrage Fatigues"—for the Urban Exhausted Liberal in your family!

"Faith Based Clothing"—where your beliefs are flapping in the breeze.

"Actionable Springwear"—you can't wear it unless someone instructs you how to specifically put on each item.

"W's Vacation Wear"—walk around the perimeter in pants that are 40% relaxed fit.

"Cheney's Secret Energy Briefs"—you'll never know what's covering what, will you?

"Rummy's Messy Pants"—Accidents do happen!

"Neocon Knickers"—Make everybody wear them!

"Condi's Line of Defense Chastity Belt"—A girl will never have to say 'Yes' wearing one of these!

"End of Lite-Days" panty liners—Waura thinks every girl should should be stain free for the Avenging Lord's Big Finale!

out·ragePronunciation Key (outrj)
n.

1. An act of extreme violence or viciousness.
2. An act grossly offensive to decency, morality, or good taste.
3. A deplorable insult.
4. Resentful anger aroused by a violent or offensive act.


tr.v. out·raged, out·rag·ing, out·rag·es

1. To offend grossly against (standards of decency or morality); commit an outrage on.
2. To produce anger or resentment in: Incompetence outraged him. See Synonyms at offend.


[Middle English, from Old French, from outre, beyond. See outr&ecaute;.]

"I have no war plans on my desk," Bush said at a Berlin news conference during the first stop of his European tour. "We've got to use all means at our disposal to deal with Saddam Hussein." His statement was in answer to a question about U.S. plans regarding Iraq and heightened concerns voiced throughout the world about the war on terror.
(via http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/05/23/gen.war.on.terror/)

"President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, 'What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq?' What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret", says Woodward.
(via CBS)

In the space of two weeks, a fierce insurgency in Iraq has isolated the U.S.-appointed civilian government and stopped the American-financed reconstruction effort, as contractors hunker down against waves of ambushes and kidnappings, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials.
(via WaPo)

"The Fallujah problem and the Sadr problem are having a wider impact than we expected," a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq policy said. In Baghdad and Washington, officials had initially concluded that addressing those problems would not engender much anger among ordinary Iraqis. "Sadr's people and the people of Fallujah were seen as isolated and lacking broad support among Iraqis," the official added.

Instead, the official said, "The effect has been profound."

The violence has brought the U.S.-funded reconstruction of Iraq to a near-halt, according to U.S. officials and private contractors.

The most visible leader of the resistance is Sadr, a firebrand whose appeal long appeared to be limited to the young, unemployed Shiites who made up his militia, the Mahdi Army. However, in a surprising development, his poster began appearing this month at Sunni mosques that previously showed little interest in his activities.

The crises have helped boost the standing of more radical Shiite and Sunni political leaders. "The politicians the Americans wanted to become popular have lost out to the guys the Americans didn't want to become popular," said an Iraqi adviser to the occupation authority. "It was exactly the outcome they did not want."

Investigators from a dozen federal, state and local agencies raided a sprawling warehouse complex near Oakland International Airport on Friday, looking for items that included devices used to launch rockets from vehicles.

The exact nature of the investigation and the evidence being sought at the complex in San Leandro was not known because the federal search warrant used to conduct the raid was filed in U.S. District Court under seal. The search is expected to continue today.
However, U.S. Magistrate Edward Chen, the judge who signed the warrant earlier in the week, told The Chronicle: "The warrant was for a bunch of devices for rockets that could be launched from military vehicles and (for) some M-16s," semiautomatic assault rifles used by the U.S. military. "

Law enforcement agents who raided a sprawling warehouse near Oakland International Airport failed to find the weapons they were looking for, including rocket launchers, officials said Saturday.

After obtaining a warrant to search for rocket launchers and other military weaponry, more than 200 officers from federal, state and local agencies raided the complex early Friday morning, federal officials said.

Federal officials would not reveal the exact nature of the investigation, but said the search was not related to terrorism.
(via AP)

Harold Chapman, 65, the owner of building, said he suspected that a man dating one of his female friends may have called one of the agencies as a prank.

"I think he called the FBI up and said I had a bunch of ground-to-air missiles," Chapman said. "Of course, it's unfounded. I don't have any ground-to-air missiles."

Meanwhile, Bush, in his news conference Tuesday, showed he was ready to raise the level of his play in this arena.

Bush found a way to make not one, not two, but three factual errors in a single 15-word sentence, which must be something of a world indoor record. Bush said it is still possible that inspectors will find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

"They could still be there. They could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm," Bush said, referring to Libya's WMD disclosures last month.

The White House, according to Reuters, said [1] the accurate figure was 23.6 metric tons or 26 tons, not 50. [2] The stuff was found at various locations, not at a turkey farm. And there was [3] no mustard gas on the farm at all, but unfilled chemical munitions.

Other than that, the sentence was spot on.
(via WaPo)

Six Marines were killed and scores of insurgent Iraqis slain in a fierce 14-hour battle Saturday between Marines and mujahedeen fighters who slipped into this town near the Syrian border.
(via Kansas City Star)

The U.S. military closed down two major highways into Baghdad on Saturday in the latest disruption caused by intensified attacks by anti-U.S. insurgents.

Sections of the two highways, north and south of the capital, were closed off to repair damage from a mounting number of roadside bombs. Commanders suggested the routes remained vulnerable to attacks by insurgents who have been targeting U.S. military supply lines.

"We've got to fix those roads, we've also got to protect those roads," Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters in Baghdad.
(via AP in the San Jose Mercury News)

In the south [Najaf], U.S. troops skirmished for a second day with militiamen loyal to radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. His aides said Iraqi-led mediation aimed at resolving a standoff with the Americans had broken down.

A top al-Sadr aide, Jabir al-Khafaji, said mediations by Iraqi politicians had ended because of U.S. conditions that the cleric's al-Mahdi Army milita be disbanded.

U.S. forces at Najaf appear to be holding back their firepower to allow moderate clerics to bring pressure against al-Sadr, avoiding an assault on Najaf.

There is no cure for the Vietnam syndrome. It will only go away when the baby-boom generation does, dying off like the Israelites in the desert, allowing a new generation, cleansed of the memories and the guilt, to look at the world clearly once again.

During our astonishingly fast dash to Baghdad, taking the capital within 21 days, the chorus of naysayers was already calling Iraq a quagmire on Day 8!

Iraq is Vietnam not on the ground, but in our heads. The troubles of the last few weeks were immediately interpreted as a national uprising, Iraq's Tet Offensive, and created a momentary panic. The panic overlooked two facts: First, Tet was infinitely larger and deadlier in effect and in scale. And second, Tet was a devastating military defeat for the Viet Cong. They never recovered. Unfortunately, neither did we, psychologically. Walter Cronkite, speaking for the establishment, declared the war lost. Once said, it was.

It is a noble goal. It would be a great achievement for the Middle East. But it may be a bridge too far. That may happen in the future, when Iraq has had time to develop the habits of democracy and rebuild civil society, razed to the ground by Saddam.

But until then, expecting Iraqis to fight with us on behalf of a new abstract Iraq may be unrealistic. Some Iraqi police and militia did fight with us in the last few weeks. But many did not. That is not hard to understand. There is no de Gaulle. There is no organizing anti-Saddam resistance myth. There is as yet no legitimate Iraqi leadership to fight and die for.

And it dawned on me that had we blown the peace in World War II, that perhaps this conversation would not have been taking place. It also dawned on me then that when we get it right in Iraq, at some point in time an American President will be sitting down with a duly-elected Iraqi leader talking about how to bring security to what has been a troubled part of the world.

The legacy that our troops are going to leave behind is a legacy of lasting importance, as far as I'm concerned. It's a legacy that really is based upon our deep belief that people want to be free and that free societies are peaceful societies.

Some of the debate really center around the fact that people don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing and free. I strongly disagree with that. I reject that, because I believe that freedom is the deepest need of every human soul, and, if given a chance, the Iraqi people will be not only self-governing, but a stable and free society.

What there is to fight and die for is tribe and faith. Which is why we should lower our ambitions and see Iraqi factionalization as a useful tool

(edit)

This is no time for despair. We must put down the two rebellions -- Fallujah's and Sadr's -- to demonstrate our seriousness, then transfer power as quickly as we can to those who will inherit it anyway, the Shiite majority with its long history of religious quietism and wariness of Iran. And antagonism toward their former Sunni oppressors. If the Sunnis continue to resist and carry on a civil war, it will then be up to the Shiites to fight it, not for Americans to do it on their behalf.

Hardly the best of all possible worlds. But it is a world we could live with.

[BSUH]: I'm the commander—see, I don't need to explain—I do not need to explain why I say things," he told Bob Woodward. "That's the interesting thing about being president."
(via Atlantic

On the war's origins, the book describes Bush pulling Rumsfeld into a cubbyhole office adjacent to the Situation Room for that November 2001 meeting and asking him what shape the Iraq war plan was in. When Rumsfeld said it was outdated, Mr. Bush ordered a fresh one.

The book says Mr. Bush told Rumsfeld to keep quiet about their planning and when the defense secretary asked to bring CIA Director George Tenet into it at some point, the president said not to do so yet.

Even Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was apparently not fully briefed. Woodward said Mr. Bush told her that morning he was having Rumsfeld work on Iraq but did not give details.

The book says Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of Central Command, uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.

Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check worth hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the book, but Congress was kept in the dark about it.

About that, Woodward told Mike Wallace in the 60 Minutes interview, "(At) the end of July 2002, they need $700 million, a large amount of money for all these tasks. And the president approves it. But Congress doesn't know and it is done.

"They get the money from a supplemental appropriation for the Afghan War, which Congress has approved. ... Some people are gonna look at a document called the Constitution which says that no money will be drawn from the treasury unless appropriated by Congress. Congress was totally in the dark on this."
(via CBS)

It's one Iraq, two Iraq, three Iraq rock
Four Iraq, five Iraq, six Iraq rock
Seven Iraq, eight Iraq, nine Iraq rock
It's Iraq around the clock tonight...

Tomorrow [Saturday], from Lincoln City, OR to Kent, OH to Peaks Island, ME, MoveOn members will holding over 1,000 bake sales to help raise some dough (sorry) and take our country back. It's a great way to demonstrate the contrast between Bush's millionaire-backed campaign and our grassroots movement.

The creativity and energy folks are putting into their sales is just astounding. Over 11,000 bakers have signed up to help. And just take a look at some of the sales' titles:

Beat Bush Bake Bash in
Mountaineer Bake Sale for Democracy in Charleston, WV
Cheekypotato's Home-made Aussie Cookies, Cakes, Pizzas & Calzones for Democracy in Phoenix, AZ
No CARB (Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Bush) Bake Sale in Seattle, WA
Have Your Cake and Beat Bush II in Storrs, CT
Sweet Eating, Bush Beating in Brooklyn, NY
Hippies against Hoodlums (HAH!) in Boulder, CO
Afternoon Tea for Democracy in Princeton, NJ
Goodies for Good in Davie, FL
. . . and the list goes on.

With over 1,000 bake sales, it’s likely there’s a bake sale you can drop by near you

More than 2500 US troops surround the city, primed for an attack to capture the renegade imam Moqtada al-Sadr. But the spiritual leader of all Iraq's Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has told them he has "drawn a red line" around Najaf.

It is a classic Iraqi power play. Ayatollah Sistani has brought the rambunctious Sadr to heel, so now he will protect him against a US threat to capture or kill the headstrong young imam, who is wanted on murder charges.

The implicit deal Ayatollah Sistani is offering the US is that it should back off in the face of his defusing a Shiite uprising that risked all-out war between the US and the majority Shiites.

There has been an ominous Iraqi silence on a United Nations outline of the structure of a provisional government to run the country between the return of sovereign power by the US on June 30 and elections to be held in January.

The plan calls for the abolition of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and of the US occupation administration, the Coalition Provisional Authority. It calls for the UN to lead a consultative process to appoint officials and a national conference to appoint a national assembly.

But no light has yet been shed on how tense relations between religious, tribal and ethnic groups will be reflected in the structure of the interim government...
(via Sidney Morning Herald)

US forces have detained around 200 Iraqi paramilitary soldiers who refused to take part in a US offensive against the Sunni Muslim city of Fallujah, their former comrades said today.

The US military declined to confirm whether the men were being held.

Senior officers play down the significance of such incidents but, asked about reports of mutiny among Iraqi troops, have acknowledged a "command failure" took place during the Fallujah offensive.

Soldiers from the Baghdad-based 36th Security Brigade, part of the Iraqi Civil Defence Corps (ICDC), said that last week US commanders took them at night to Fallujah, west of the capital, where US forces were massing to crush a growing insurgency.

"They told us to attack the city and we were astonished. How could an Iraqi fight an Iraqi like this? This meant that nothing had changed from the Saddam Hussein days. We refused en masse," said Ali al-Shamari.

Shamari said the brigade members did not know they were heading to Fallujah until they arrived there.

After the brigade refused to fight, he said, soldiers were stripped of their badges and confined to tents in a US base on the outskirts of Fallujah. Their rations were restricted to one meal per day.

"I escaped, but around 200 of our comrades remain there. We demand their release," Shamari said.

Ali Hussein, a Shi'ite private, said the brigade's mission since its formation had been security tasks such as conducting searches and guarding buildings.

"Suddenly, we were asked to take part in a huge offensive," Hussein said, adding that he felt sympathy for Fallujah residents although they were from the Sunni minority who had dominated the Shi'ites for decades.
(via Sidney Morning Herald)

President Bush's top political adviser said this week he regretted the use of a "Mission Accomplished" banner as a backdrop for the president's landing on an aircraft carrier last May to mark the end of major combat operations in Iraq.

"I wish the banner was not up there," said White House political strategist Karl Rove. "I'll acknowledge the fact that it has become one of those convenient symbols."

Last October, Bush said the White House had nothing to do with the banner; a spokesman later clarified that the ship's crew asked for the sign and the White House staff had it made by a private vendor. It wasn't clear who paid for the sign.
(via the LA Times)

Was Vice President Dick Cheney recently treated at Culpeper Regional Hospital?

Some with connections to the hospital say they heard that Cheney was recently treated at and released from the facility.

A spokesman for Cheney declined to comment.

When asked yesterday whether it was true, hospital spokeswoman Lynn Martin said, "We have no record in our system of Mr. Cheney being here."

When further asked if Cheney had been seen by hospital personnel but there was simply no record of the visit, Martin replied, "We have no record in our system of Mr. Cheney being here."

When asked if his office had helped provide security for the reported visit, Culpeper County Sheriff Lee Hart replied: "No. He has his own people."

When asked if the Sheriff's Office knew that Cheney was or would be at the hospital, Hart said, "We had some knowledge."

When questioned further, Hart said he could say no more until he made a telephone call. Less than two minutes later the sheriff called back to report, "We had no knowledge of the incident."

The exact date of or reasons for the vice president's reported hospital visit are unclear. It has long been rumored that Cheney, who has a history of heart problems, has occasionally been secreted at some remote Culpeper government facility since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
(via the Fredericksburg Freelance-Star)

Maybe the hospital is keeping Cheney supplied with the blood he needs for nourishment?

Pull the string and I'll wink at you, I'm your puppet
I'll do funny things if you want me to, I'm your puppet

I'll be yours to have and to hold
Darling you've got full control of your puppet

Your every wish is my command
All you gotta do is wiggle your little hand
I'm your puppet, I'm your puppet

I'm just a toy, just a funny boy
That makes you laugh when you're blue
I'll be wonderful, do just what I'm told
I'll do anything for you
I'm your puppet, I'm your puppet
(via here)

Explosions shook a riverbank as U.S. soldiers battled Shiite militiamen outside the southern city of Kufa today. The fighting came as the U.S. military held its first direct negotiations in an attempt to end fighting in Falluja.

The military said U.S. soldiers fought back after they were attacked by supporters of radical cleric near Kufa, which neighbours the holy city of Najaf. Some 2,500 U.S. soldiers are deployed outside Najaf to kill or capture al-Sadr and dismantle his al-Mahdi army militia.

Large explosions were seen by the river in a sparsely populated area on the edge of Kufa. Five civilians caught in the crossfire were killed and 14 wounded, hospital officials said.

In Falluja, west of Baghdad, U.S. military and civilian officials met today with leaders from Falluja, the first known direct negotiations involving Americans since the siege of the city began April 5.

Until now, U.S.-allied Iraqi leaders have been holding talks with city representatives trying to find an end to fighting that has killed dozens of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis.

Both countries want to avoid a U.S. attack on Najaf, site of the holiest Shiite site — the Imam Ali Shrine, near the office where al-Sadr is located, surrounded by armed gunmen.

Shiite Governing Council member Ibrahim al-Jaafari said he saw "flexibility from al-Sadr's side" and urged Americans to show "similar flexibility."

Top U.S. administrator Paul Bremer was involved in "multiple channels" to try to negotiate an end to the standoff in the south and in Falluja, said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But Myers warned there was a limit as to how long the marines can wait. "At some point somebody has to make a decision on what we're going to do, and we certainly can't rule out the use of force there again," he said.

U.S. commanders have vowed to "kill or capture" al-Sadr, but have limited their actions to small skirmishes on the outskirts of the city.

Maj. Neal O'Brien said the units at Najaf "will not complete this operation" and will likely be replaced by other troops — a rotation that suggests that an assault on the city is not imminent.

Negotiations appeared focused on dissolving al-Sadr's al-Mahdi army militia — a demand he has refused — and how to deal with al-Sadr himself. He has been charged with involvement in the assassination last year of a rival Shiite cleric.
(via Toronto Star)

I am often highly impressed with the intelligence and learning of the military officers I meet at security conferences. But I confess myself deeply puzzled as to how, after being in Iraq for over a year, these bright and well-informed persons could have gotten the Sadrist movement so wrong.

1) It is a longstanding social movement, not just a fly by night militia
2) It is not tiny in numbers of adherents, though not all adherents are willing to put themselves out for it at the moment; that could change.
3) It has lots of potential leaders besides Muqtada
4) Its cadres can easily become guerrillas, as the Army of the Mahdi shows.

So you can't wipe it out, and you can't hope that it will just go away, and it is highly unwise to start a decades-long (yes) feud with it.
(via Informed Comment)

Adding to the rough-and-tumble atmosphere has been squabbling over Bush's handling of Iraq and terror threats prior to Sept. 11, 2001 as well as some unrelated investigations.
(via Reuters)

One probe involves possible bribes on the House floor on behalf of an administration-backed prescription drug bill that narrowly won passage late last year.

Authorities are also examining an alleged threat to dismiss a federal actuary if he revealed what the bill might actually cost, drawing fire from some Republicans as well as Democrats.

The Senate's top law enforcement officer found that two Republican aides tapped into Democratic computer files, part of an apparent renegade effort to track opposition to Bush's most contentious judicial nominees.

The GOP, and the conservative movement generally, has been overtaken by people whose chief concerns have little to do with true conservatism and more with the Machivellian acquisition of power by any means. This is not mere opportunism, but a malignant metastasis that not only finds white supremacism an acceptable impulse but one fully consonant with its drive to power.

U.S. industrial production unexpectedly dropped in March while consumer sentiment slipped this month, but economists downplayed the two disappointing reports and said the economy's solid expansion remains on track.

Strong data this week on regional factory output and retail sales have boosted forecasts for overall economic growth in the first half of the year. Some economists are now looking for gross domestic product of about 5 percent, up from the 4.1 percent pace in the fourth-quarter last year.

Yet Federal Reserve officials have sought to play down worries they will be eager to lift official interest rates from 46-year lows in response, even with an surprising jump in consumer price inflation in March.

Richmond Federal Reserve Bank President Alfred Broaddus reinforced that message on Friday, saying the central bank was "some distance" from tightening monetary policy to choke off a future inflation threat. Broaddus also said he wanted "more confirmation" economic growth would be sustained.
(via Reuters)

Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, faced some tough grilling Friday when she met American and South Korean third graders on a tour of a U.S. military base in Seoul.

Among the questions: "Did your husband ever fight in a war?"

Mrs. Cheney stopped in at the Seoul American Elementary School on the sprawling Yongsan Army Garrison in the South Korean capital to give a short history lesson from her 2002 book "America: A Patriotic Primer."

As for her husband's military record, she said: "He was in college, so he did not fight in a war."
(via AP)

Mrs. Cheney, why don't you feel your lesbian romance novel is "your best work"?

President Bush secretly ordered a war plan drawn up against Iraq less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan and was so worried the decision would cause a furor he did not tell everyone on his national security team, says [Woodward's] new book on his Iraq policy.
(via AP)

College students favor Democratic presidential contender Sen. John Kerry over President Bush by a 10-point margin and have become substantially more dissatisfied with Bush over the past six months, according to a poll released Thursday.
(via CNN)

Top administration officials now barely speak to each other

New claims for unemployment benefits increased last week by 30,000, the biggest jump in 16 months. Still, analysts said Thursday they believe the labor market has turned a corner, pointing the way to a sustainable economic recovery.
(AP via Pandagon)

President Bush's embrace yesterday of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to unilaterally disengage from the Palestinians carries potential political benefits for Bush... Bush's strategists believe that even small inroads into the Jewish vote could mean the difference between winning and losing Florida, and several Republicans believe the announcement could further inhibit Kerry's fundraising in the Jewish community.
(via WaPo)

NAJAF Firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr said on Thursday he was prepared to meet an Iranian delegation in Najaf as he embraced mediation efforts to avert a showdown with US troops massed outside the holy city.

Another aide in nearby Kufa, Sheikh Fuad al-Torsi, said Sadr “welcomes the Iranian initiative because it is coming from an Islamic country.” But the contents of any Iranian proposal remained unknown to the Sadr camp and the delegation was tight-lipped about the purpose of its visit.

A senior US official said the delegation was in Iraq at the request of the British government.

What is clear is that Sadr has significantly toned down his rhetoric over the past week as US troops massed near Najaf with the stated mission of killing or capturing him.

On the ground in Najaf, all was quiet Thursday as Iraqi police were seen around the city’s main streets, while Sadr’s black-clad fighters milled around the shrine of Imam Ali, the city’s holiest site.
(via Pakistan Daily Times).

[Brahimi's plan] suggests a handful of top appointments, and wants the United Nations to have a strong hand in making them. But then he also suggests the election of a Consultative Assembly that would be more broadly based and would advise the government during the transition.

The danger in Brahimi's plan for a corrupt Pentagon-supported expat like Chalabi is that Brahimi is saying that the UN doesn't want him in a high appointive post because of all the questions that swirl around him regarding embezzlement and playing fast and loose with other people's money.

Brahimi seems to be saying that the appointed high officials--a president, two vice-presidents, and a prime minister-- should have genuine grass roots in Iraq and be respected as upright. I think Barzani and Talabani among the Kurds fit this bill, and so do Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and Ibrahim Jaafari among the Shiites. I don't know, however, to whom you would turn among the Sunni Arabs for a politician with substantial grass roots.

it seems likely that Chalabi also does want to clear the decks so that he can rule unopposed if he can get into power, without a lot of pesky informed technocrats second-guessing him and even thwarting some of his policies. Since the CPA is a creature of the Neocon-dominated Department of Defense, it may well be that punitive measures against former Baath Party members is designed to punish them for their hostile attitudes to Israel or to ensure that Iraq is able to conclude a Camp David-style peace treaty with Ariel Sharon down the road.
(via Juan Cole)

Some Iraqi nuclear facilities appear to be unguarded, and radioactive materials are being taken out of the country, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency reported after reviewing satellite images and equipment that has turned up in European scrapyards. The International Atomic Energy Agency sent a letter to U.S. officials three weeks ago informing them of the findings. The information was also sent to the U.N. Security Council in a letter from its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, that was circulated Thursday.

The IAEA is waiting for a reply from the United States, which is leading the coalition administering Iraq, officials said.

The United Sattes has virtually cut off information-sharing with the IAEA since invading Iraq in March 2003 on the premise that the country was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

No such weapons have been found, and arms control officials now worry the war and its chaotic aftermath may have increased chances that terrorists could get their hands on materials used for unconventional weapons or that civilians may be unknowingly exposed to radioactive materials.
(via AP)

• Does the "Almighty" (Judeo-Christian variety) really give a shit about freedom?
  
• How does Islam stack up in comparison?

"All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God's name and our teaching may not be slandered. (NIV 1 Timothy 6:1)"

"Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigour. (Leviticus 25:44-46 )

April 15, 2004: A man identifying himself as bin Laden offers a "truce" to European countries that do not attack Muslims, saying it would begin when their soldiers leave Islamic nations. The tape gives the countries three months to start pulling out its troops. It vows revenge against the United States for the Israeli assassination of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin. The CIA is reviewing the tape's authenticity.
(via AP)

The Government of Israel is committed to take additional steps on the West Bank, including progress toward a freeze on settlement activity, removing unauthorized outposts, and improving the humanitarian situation by easing restrictions on the movement of Palestinians not engaged in terrorist activities.

As the Government of Israel has stated, the barrier being erected by Israel should be a security rather than political barrier, should be temporary rather than permanent, and therefore not prejudice any final status issues including final borders, and its route should take into account, consistent with security needs, its impact on Palestinians not engaged in terrorist activities.

There's no question it's been a tough, tough series of weeks for the American people. It's been really tough for the families. I understand that. It's been tough on this administration. But we're doing the right thing. . .. '

"And as to whether or not I make decisions based upon polls, I don't. I just don't make decisions that way. I fully understand the consequences of what we're doing. We're changing the world. And the world will be better off and America will be more secure as a result of the actions we're taking. "

"And you can understand why. This is a guy who was a torturer, a killer, a maimer; there's mass graves. I mean, he was a horrible individual that really shocked the country in many ways, shocked it into a kind of -- a fear of making decisions toward liberty. That's what we've seen recently. Some citizens are fearful of stepping up. And they were happy -- they're not happy they're occupied. I wouldn't be happy if I were occupied either. They do want us there to help with security, and that's why this transfer of sovereignty is an important signal to send, and it's why it's also important for them to hear we will stand with them until they become a free country."

"I feel incredibly grieved when I meet with family members, and I do quite frequently. I grieve for the incredible loss of life that they feel, the emptiness they feel.

There are some things I wish we'd have done when I look back. I mean, hindsight is easy. It's easy for a President to stand up and say, now that I know what happened, it would have been nice if there were certain things in place; for example, a homeland security department. And why I -- I say that because it's -- that provides the ability for our agencies to coordinate better and to work together better than it was before. "

"And the other thing I look back on and realize is that we weren't on a war footing. The country was not on a war footing, and yet the enemy was at war with us. And it's -- it didn't take me long to put us on a war footing. And we've been on war ever since. The lessons of 9/11 that I -- one lesson was, we must deal with gathering threats. And that's part of the reason I dealt with Iraq the way I did.

The other lesson is, is that this country must go on the offense and stay on the offense. In order to secure the country, we must do everything in our power to find these killers and bring them to justice, before they hurt us again. I'm afraid they want to hurt us again. They're still there."

"Q Thank you, Mr. President. Two weeks ago, a former counterterrorism official at the NSC, Richard Clarke, offered an unequivocal apology to the American people for failing them prior to 9/11. Do you believe the American people deserve a similar apology from you, and would you be prepared to give them one?

THE PRESIDENT: Look, I can understand why people in my administration anguished over the fact that people lost their life. I feel the same way. I mean, I'm sick when I think about the death that took place on that day. And as I mentioned, I've met with a lot of family members and I do the best I do to console them about the loss of their loved one. As I mentioned, I oftentimes think about what I could have done differently. I can assure the American people that had we had any inkling that this was going to happen, we would have done everything in our power to stop the attack.

"Here's what I feel about that. The person responsible for the attacks was Osama bin Laden. That's who's responsible for killing Americans. And that's why we will stay on the offense until we bring people to justice"

"I don't plan on losing my job. I plan on telling the American people that I've got a plan to win the war on terror. And I believe they'll stay with me. They understand the stakes. Look, nobody likes to see dead people on their television screens -- I don't. It's a tough time for the American people to see that. It's gut-wrenching. One of my hardest parts of my job is to console the family members who have lost their life. It is a -- it is -- it's a chance to hug and weep and to console and to remind the loved ones that the sacrifice of their loved one was done in the name of security for America and freedom for the world. "

Thomas Hamill was a dairy farmer not long ago. But then he sold his farm and started driving trucks. Living in rural Mississippi, that didn't pay great. Then, of course, his wife had open heart surgery a couple of months back. With debts and a sick wife, he was looking for a better paying job. Kellogg, Brown and Root had one. Great pay, 10K a month, tax free. Benefits. Only one catch. It was in Iraq.

Brookfield - The two sisters of a United States soldier slain in Iraq last week will not have to return to active duty with their units in Baghdad once their emergency leave expires, a spokesperson for the family said on Tuesday.

All three women had enlisted in the Wisconsin National Guard, a part-time citizen soldier's unit, and were deployed to Iraq.

Specialist Michelle Witmer, 20, with the Guard's 32nd Military Police Company, was killed on Friday when her Humvee was ambushed. She was killed just weeks before her unit was expected to go home.

Her grief-stricken parents pleaded for their two remaining daughters - Rachel, 24, and Charity, Michelle's twin - to be allowed to serve out the rest of their tour of duty in the United States.

But the women said on Tuesday that they were deferring the wrenching decision until after their sister's funeral.

"They are focusing their attention on spending time with their family and grieving the loss of Michelle," spokesperson Joan Apt said.

In the same statement, Specialist Rachel Witmer, who is attached to the same unit as Michelle, and Sergeant Charity Witmer, a medic with the Guard, also stationed in the Baghdad area, touched on the dilemma facing them.

The women, tearful and clinging to their parents and brothers, did not speak at the brief press conference at a church in Brookfield.

But they sent a message to their comrades back in the field in a written statement.

"Our thoughts and prayers are with you," they wrote. "Not a minute goes by that we don't think of you. We are conflicted, because we have two families and we can't be with both at the same time."

Iraq Cleric Offers Peace Terms; U.S. Forces Poised

Iraq Shiite radical leader must be brought to justice: top US general

Bush stands firm on Iraq, as Iran says it's been called on to help

Iran Halts Its Work With U.S. on Iraq

The mere fact of having been here before throughout history is not comforting. Post-wars can be lost, just like wars. After the end of the Civil War, violent white resistance in the South rolled back black rights by weakening the North’s willingness to sustain Reconstruction. Robert E. Lee surrendered, but because the Ku Klux Klan did not, President Grant was unable to accomplish what General Grant had. That is why the fighting in Iraq is as important as it is depressing. The die-hards must die hard. But we, the television-watching public, have a task, too—not to be mesmerized into paralysis.

Real wars keep going after they end, by other means or by the same means, as Iraq shows. The Baathists in Fallujah, augmented by foreign predators and the followers of Moqtada Sadr, the ambitious young Shiite politician/cleric, took the fight to the Americans. The Americans obliged.

All postmodern war is mindful of the camera. When did rabble the world over first bring hand-lettered signs in English to their demonstrations? During Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran? A similarly iatrogenic event landed on the front page of the April 10 issue of The New York Times—the grinning Iraqi man, all teeth, displaying a pair of American boots he had looted from an attacked supply convoy. This shot was more badly staged than most. No crowd, not even of idle boys, was gathered for an Adoration of the Boots. The man was, seemingly, all by himself, performing for Your Correspondent. College girls on spring break show their boobs for Girls Gone Wild; this Iraqi showed his boots for Baathists Gone Wild. American men support the strip show with their bottomless appetite for flesh; Americans support the boot show with their appetite for failure.

Hence the need for other voices, other chat rooms

What does Ali hope for? "When this riot will be crushed … all the clerics will no longer seem as strong as they seemed before, and once they see … Sadir [his spelling] in handcuffs, they will think a million times before committing a similar stupidity in the future." Even though we are not clerics, we can offer a prayer: from his lips to God’s ears.

Are they a representative sample? Do I look like a pollster? Do they have their own agendas? No doubt. But their agendas—the desire for liberty, and the determination to secure it—compare favorably with those of the Boot Man, who is at best mischievous, at worst a fanatic too cowardly or incompetent to take up an AK-47, but willing to help the cause of re-enslavement in little ways. The confusion of voices from the ground, on whatever side, is infinitely more interesting than Bob Kerrey’s audition for a Vice Presidential nomination at the hearings of the 9/11 commission. We do have a war on, and mistakes will be made, though none so bad as the mistakes all of us, Republicans and Democrats both, made when we imagined we lived in a world of peace.

When it comes to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory there is no more successful collaborator than the media.
As desperate terrorist insurgents in Iraq pour gasoline on embers to attract journalists like moths to a flame it should be noted that the bad guys are ‘using’ the media as a tactical resource.

They know there is "no way nohow" they can defeat the American coalition forces militarily. However, they also know that IF they can manipulate the media to bludgeon the American homeland with images and stories of outrageous atrocities, there is a distinct possibility the American people will compel the administration to leave.

It worked in Vietnam.
It worked in Somalia.
I seriously doubt it will work in Iraq.

In the south, 2,500 U.S. troops were digging in outside the Shiite holy city of Najaf, preparing for a possible assault against radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. An attack on the city would likely outrage Iraq's Shiite majority, a community that - aside from al-Sadr's militia - has so far shunned anti-U.S. violence.

Iraqi clerics and politicians have launched negotiations with al-Sadr, trying to get him to back down sufficiently to avert a U.S. attack. But al-Sadr appeared to take a tough stance, demanding U.S. troops withdraw from all Iraqi cities.
(via AP)

Watch what is happening with al-Sadr in an-Najaf. This is a critical incident writ large of the type my colleagues and I have advised about, studied, and written about over a period of eight years. I am hypothesizing that we risk making the same mistake at an-Najaf with al-Sadr

I have written and spoken many times about how a religiously motivated critical incident, or standoff, differs qualitatively and markedly from a criminally-motivated hostage standoff. The latter is the model for defusing critical incidents among law enforcement and [coutner-terrorism] specialists. They remain uninformed and skeptical about these important differences to this day.

What is not known about Waco is that the final assault plan was amended on the ground by the tactical field commanders on the very day of the assault. That alteration had been discussed and rejected by the FBI brass over several weeks. Nonetheless, the FBI HRT commander, Richard Rogers implemented the rejected plan via a loophole signed by Janet Reno the morning of the final assault on April 19. That alteration was identical to the gassing and demolition plan that two Delta Force advisors seconded to the Justice Dept. in a principals meeting of April 14. Those two advisors supported the rejected plan that was later implemented "hypothetically" in order to conform to the letter of Posse Comitatus law. I also have published a peer-reviewed article with this finding. It is based on government documents--all open source. The rejected plan supported by Jeff Jamar, Richard Rogers, and the two Delta Force officers resulted in a disaster that did not have to happen. It was an ill-advised tactical approach to a religious community that feared that Satan was attacking them.

Those two Delta Force officers were Peter J. Schoomaker and "Jerry" Boykin, now both top officials in the US Army in charge of military planning for the war on terrorism.

I believe [Republican operative Dan] Senor's approach is similar to the tactical one taken at Waco against another "messiah." It resulted in many deaths and a legacy that led us to the "commemoration" atrocity in Oklahoma City.

[And Orcinus adds: It is worth observing, of course, that (as Atrios notes) the coalition appears determined to make this mistake, since its official stance is that "The mission of U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moqtada al-Sadr."
(via Orcinus)

Bush similarly struggled, a few minutes earlier, to cite the single biggest mistake of his presidency. He looked baffled and incredulous. "I'm sure something will pop into my head here," he said, noting the intense "pressure" of holding a news conference on TV. Of course people watching throughout the country expect a president to be able to handle that kind of pressure without blinking, based on the assumption that this is one of the milder forms of pressure that come with the office.
(via WaPo)

Pressure Drop
It is you (oh yeah)
It is you, you (oh yeah)
It is you (oh yeah)

Cause a pressure drop, oh pressure
Oh yeah pressure drop a drop on you
I say a pressure drop, oh pressure
Oh yeah pressure drop a drop on you

I say when it drops, oh you gonna feel it
Know that you were doing wrong.

MR. GORTON Did you make any changes reflecting that millennium after-action review [recommendations to disrupt the Qaeda network after a bomb plot] in your time as attorney general before 9/11?

A. [ASHCROFT]: This is a report which was not briefed to me or briefed to other individuals. It was a report which is a classified report.

Q. So you didn't know of its existence?

A. No. ... We — and these are the kinds of recommendations that were involved in the report, which was simply not made available —— ... The SEIB [Senior Executive Intelligence Briefing] available to me.

Q. On Aug. 7, 2001, a SEIB that reflected much of — although it was not identical to — much of the content of the Aug. 6 Presidential Daily Brief — came out. And I would like to ask you if you remember seeing a document headed Terrorism bin Laden Determined to Strike In The United States in the SEIB.

A. I do not remember seeing that. I was in, I believe I was in Chicago speaking at the American Bar Association meeting, I believe, at the time. So I do not have a recollection of seeing that.

Q. Did your staff regularly brief you on the intelligence when you returned?

A. I was briefed, and items of interest were noted for me from time to time by my staff.

Q. Would something like this, which is a memorandum that is going out to your colleagues — hundreds of your colleagues in the government — saying that bin Laden is determined to strike in the United States — been an item of significance that you would think would have been briefed to you?

A. These items had been briefed to me. They had been briefed to me by the F.B.I. They had been briefed to me by the C.I.A. The administration asked me to get briefings when appropriate in regard to these measures. I remember Ms. Rice, for example, early in July during the threat period and the heightened and elevated threat, asking me if I would receive a briefing from the C.I.A. because she thought it important. It's that kind of briefing that I received early. The C.I.A. — we have reconstructed it from the slides they used — talked a lot about the threat overseas. And we obviously were aware of the historical information that Osama bin Laden had issued statements years before, much of which is in the SEIB and was in the Aug. 6 P.D.B., which I have now read.

And but [sic] we inquired of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. are there domestic threats that require — is there any evidence of domestic, of threat? And they both said no.
(via NY Times)

BUSH: I was satisfied that some matters were being looked into.
(back)

With sporadic fighting in Falluja and US forces moving into position outside Najaf, the Arab press is pointing to similarities between US military operations in Iraq and the tactics Israeli forces employ in the West Bank and Gaza.

Such similarities are not coincidental.

While many of Israel's methods are controversial it has, in purely military terms, developed highly effective tactics for offensive operations in urban areas along with a range of specialised equipment which, for example, can help troops to breach walls, gather intelligence, and locate snipers.

And senior US commanders have visited Israel specifically to discuss what the Pentagon jargon calls "Military Operations on Urban Terrain".
(via BBC)

President Bush, fulfilling a 15-month-old promise, scheduled a jog around the South Lawn Wednesday with a soldier badly wounded in Afghanistan.
(via AP)

His review showed, [Ashcroft] testified, that there was "no covert action program to kill bin Laden."

But several commissioners disagreed. They cited the 1998 "memorandum of notification" signed by Clinton, which was found among the documents that the Bush White House originally refused to turn over to the commission.

Despite its unprecedented fundraising success, President Bush's reelection team is scaling back its massive level of television advertising, according to senior Republicans familiar with the campaign's planning.

In the next few weeks, viewers in the 18 states where the ads have aired since early March will see about 30% fewer a week, one ranking GOP strategist said.

Anthony Corrado, an expert on campaign finance at Colby College in Maine, said that since March 4 — just after Kerry in effect wrapped up his party's nomination — Bush has bought about as much television advertising as past presidential candidates purchased for the entire general election campaign.

"And frankly," Corrado said, the president's campaign "didn't move the [poll] numbers that much."

He added: "The Bush campaign came out heavy, both in terms of volume and with some of their strongest attacks, and they didn't get a knockout."
(via LA Times)

BUSH: This has been tough weeks in that country.

QUESTION: Mr. President, why are you and the vice president insisting on appearing together before the 9-11 commission? And, Mr. President, who will we be handing the Iraqi government over to on June 30th?

BUSH: We'll find that out soon. That's what Mr. Brahimi is doing. He's figuring out the nature of the entity we'll be handing sovereignty over.

And, secondly, because the 9-11 commission wants to ask us questions, that's why we're meeting. And I look forward to meeting with them and answering their questions.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE) I was asking why you're appearing together, rather than separately, which was their request.

BUSH: Because it's a good chance for both of us to answer questions that the 9-11 commission is looking forward to asking us. And I'm looking forward to answering them.
(via AP)

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.

BUSH: I've got some must-calls. I'm sorry.
(via AP)

[Re:] "must-calls." Every president since Reagan has come to each press conference with a list of the first 8-12 reporters to call on, to make sure all the wire service and network and major newspaper reporters get their turn. Until at least last time, they didn't have to submit the questions in advance, but the order for the first several questions has been pre-determined for about 20 years.

It's only after those reporters have had their shot that the President starts taking questions from the floor, and that's when he snapped tonight about not calling on anyone who shouted. He probably also had a list of other suggested questioners, or at least a seating chart with names and affiliations. That's how he knew to call on Don Gonyer of NPR, whom he admitted he'd never called on before.

BUSH: By the way, they found [in Libya], I think, 50 tons of mustard gas, I believe it was, in a turkey farm, only because he was willing to disclose where the mustard gas was. But that made the world safer.
(via AP)

BUSH: One of my hardest parts of my job is to console the family members, who've lost their life. It's a chance to hug and weep and to console, and to remind the loved ones that the sacrifice of their loved one was done in the name of security for America and freedom for the world.
(via AP)

BUSH: One of the things that's very important, Judy, at least as far as I'm concerned, is to never allow our youngsters to die in vain. And I made that pledge to their parents. Withdrawing from the battlefield of Iraq would be just that, and it's not going to happen under my watch.
(via AP)

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.

In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you'd made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa.

You've looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?

BUSH: I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it.

BUSH: John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could've done it better this way or that way. You know, I just - I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn't yet.

I would've gone into Afghanistan the way we went into Afghanistan. Even knowing what I know today about the stockpiles of weapons, I still would've called upon the world to deal with Saddam Hussein.

BUSH: See, I'm of the belief that we'll find out the truth on the weapons. That's why we sent up the independent commission.

BUSH: I look forward to hearing the truth as to exactly where they are. They could still be there. They could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm.

BUSH: One of the things that Charlie Duelfer talked about was that he was surprised of the level of intimidation he found amongst people who should know about weapons and their fear of talking about them because they don't want to be killed.

You know, there's this kind of - there's a terror still in the soul of some of the people in Iraq.
(via AP)

BUSH: Let's see. Last question here. Hold on for a second. Those who yell will not be ask - I tell you a guy who I have never heard from.

[mush deleted]

BUSH: One thing is for certain, though, about me, and the world has learned this: When I say something, I mean it.
(via AP)

John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who played a central role in trying to win support for war with Iraq, is emerging as the leading candidate for the sensitive job of ambassador to Baghdad.

Negroponte, 64, is a career foreign service officer whom President Bush recruited from the corporate world to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

There, he helped win approval of a resolution to expand the mandate of an international security force in Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban government.

Negroponte's nomination for the U.N. post was confirmed by the Senate in September 2001 after a half-year delay caused mostly by criticism of his record as the U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985.

There he played a prominent role in assisting the Contras in Nicaragua in their war with the left-wing Sandinista government, which was aligned with Cuba and the Soviet Union.

For weeks before his Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Negroponte was questioned by staff members on whether he had acquiesced to human rights abuses by a Honduran death squad funded and partly trained by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Negroponte testified that he did not believe the abuses were part of a deliberate Honduran government policy. "To this day," he said, "I do not believe that death squads were operating in Honduras."
(via AP)

The lopsided battle 35 miles to the west [in Fallujah] -- where 2,500 Marines have been deployed -- has had a profound impact here, redefining for many in Baghdad the nature of the campaign against U.S. troops.

Intense, sympathetic and often startlingly graphic coverage on Arab channels has deepened a vein of nationalism, stirred in part by still unconfirmed reports of high civilian casualties. Over the weekend, in the living room of a decidedly secular family, a woman wept over the images on a screen she finally leaned forward and kissed.

Headlines in Iraq's newly free press reinforce the video images: "Fallujah Wakes to a Grave Massacre" read the banner in Monday's edition of the daily Azzaman. Fresh graffiti sprayed in sweeping Arabic letters is turning up across the city. On one wall in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Jihad, the messages were spaced 10 yards apart: "Long live Fallujah's heroes." "Down with America and long live the Mahdi Army," a Shiite militia. Then: "Long live the resistance in Fallujah." And finally, "Long live the resistance."

The popular response -- of Shiite and Sunni giving aid, shelter to refugees and even volunteers to the fight -- has pushed fears of an Iraqi civil war to the background. The fighters in Fallujah are said to include Mahdi Army militiamen loyal to the radical cleric Moqtada Sadr. A housewife in Baghdad's Salaam neighborhood told of a passionate argument with her husband, a Shiite who insisted on joining friends volunteering to fight in Fallujah.

"This is jihad," she quoted him as saying. She added: "It was the first time he ever slapped me."

Some here are already speaking with the sense of history -- that powerful, deeply symbolic myths are being created.

"What is striking is how much has changed in a week -- a week," said Wamid Nadhmi, a political science professor at Baghdad University. "No one can talk about the Sunni Triangle anymore. No one can seriously talk about Sunni-Shiite fragmentation or civil war. The occupation cannot talk about small bands of resistance. Now it is a popular rebellion and it has spread."

"I think it will be bigger than Karameh," he added.
(via WaPo)

On Monday at a press conference with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Bush said the FBI's 70 on-going investigations in 2001 on al Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden gave him comfort.

Bush said, "It meant the FBI was doing its job. The FBI was running down any lead. And, I will tell you this, if they had found something they would have reported back to me. That's the way the system works."
(via CBN)

WASHINGTON - U.S. President Al Gore was impeached by the House of Representatives but not convicted by the Senate, thanks only to the vote of Senator Jim Jeffords (R, VT) who was the only Republican to vote against Gore's removal from office. The historic vote ended a three-year fight by the Republican party to repudiate what Rep. Tom Delay called Gore's "reckless, evil and unnecessary" response to the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001.
(via Oliver Willis: Read the whole thing)

The problem with this approach is that the Sadrists are a widespread social movement whose history goes back over a decade, and killing Muqtada [Sadr] will not end the movement. There are lots of potential successors to Muqtada [Sadr]. The chief characteristic of the Sadrists is their cheekiness. They were cheeky to Saddam, and they will be cheeky to Gen. Abizaid. They are desperately poor ghetto dwellers, they don't like The Man, and they think they have nothing to lose in taking Him on. If the US military thinks this is a military problem with a military solution, they are just clueless. Someone on a discussion list said that Iraq is not Vietnam because this time the generals are in charge, and they know what they are doing. The US officers in Iraq are bright, dedicated persons, but they don't know squat about Iraq (even Abizaid, a Lebanese Christian, is hardly an Iraq expert), and it also isn't at all clear that they are setting the agenda. Going after Muqtada [Sadr], for instance, almost certainly was the idea of the civilian politicians in the CPA and the Department of Defense.
(via Informed Comment)

When will we learn that we're not going to end the mess in Iraq by getting bad guys? There are always new bad guys to take their place. And let's can the rhetoric about staying the course. In fact, we desperately need a change in course.

The best we can realistically hope for now is to turn power over to relatively moderate Iraqis with a real base of popular support. Yes, that mainly means Islamic clerics. The architects of the war will complain bitterly, and claim that we could have achieved far more. But they've been wrong about everything so far — and if we keep following their advice, Iraq really will turn into another Vietnam.
(via The Times)

[BUSH]: "We stand for a culture of responsibility in America. We're changing the culture of this country from one that has said, if it feels good, do it, and if you got a problem, blame somebody else, to a culture in which each of us are responsible for the decisions we make in life."
(via EJ Dionne in WaPo)

I was satisfied that some matters were being looked into.
(Ibid.)

Here are the reasons Iraq is not Vietnam: It is a desert, not a jungle. The enemy is not protected and supplied by major powers such as the Soviet Union or China, not to mention a formidable front-line state such as North Vietnam. The Iraqis are not, like the Vietnamese, a single culture fighting a long-term war of liberation from colonial masters. They are fragmented by religion and language, and they have been independent ever since the British left lo these many years ago. In almost every way but one, Iraq is not Vietnam. Here's the one: We don't know what the hell we're doing.
(via WaPo)

Even with our eyes open, we were blind as a bat.

It is the same in Iraq. We went to war for the wrong reasons, and with too few troops and too few allies. Just about every expectation turned out to be misplaced. The occupation has not been financed by oil revenue, as we were assured. The Iraqi army and police are not, as promised, up to the task of maintaining order. Americans were often greeted as liberators, but also as conquerors. The United States did not commit enough troops to intimidate looters and the civilian leaders we backed turned out to have larger followings in Georgetown than in Baghdad. Victory remains possible, but first we'll have to figure out what victory is.

The lesson of Vietnam is that once you make the initial mistake, little you do afterward is right.

U.S. military helicopter crashed outside Fallujah on Tuesday, but there was no indication anyone in the crew was killed or injured, a Marine commander said.

U.S. troops blew up the downed craft to keep it from being looted, he said. Insurgents said they shot it down with a rocket-propelled grenade.
(via The Globe, AP)

"It's ... very clear that we've got to get more senior Iraqis involved - former military types involved in the security forces," [Gen. John Abizaid] said. "In the next couple of days you'll see a large number of senior officers being appointed to key positions in the ministry of defense and the Iraqi joint staff and in Iraqi field commands."
(via AP)

More than 600 Iraqis have been killed in Fallujah since the siege began on April 5, said the head of the city hospital, Rafie al-Issawi. Most of the dead registered at hospitals and clinics were women, children and elderly, he said.
(via AP)

The day before the Sept. 11 attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft rejected an FBI appeal for an extra infusion of money for counterterrorism, according to a Sept. 11 commission staff statement released Tuesday.

The commission staff statement quotes a former FBI counterterrorism chief, Dale Watson, as saying he "almost fell out of his chair" when he saw a May 10 budget memo from Ashcroft listing seven priorities, including illegal drugs and gun violence, but not terrorism.
(via AP)